Is Mark Kingdon "the one"?

One day before Linden Lab announced that Mark Kingdon is Linden Lab's new CEO, Mitch Wagner of Information Week had the following to say on Metanomics:

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Mitch...You had indicated that you see Second Life as being in not such a great place right now and that their future rests on the choice of the CEO, which we are all waiting to hear, and that Linden Lab needs to,your term was, to “reinvent itself.” Can you elaborate a little on why you’re concerned about Second Life and Linden Lab?

MITCH WAGNER: Sure. I mean look at all the problems that Second Life has been having over the course of the past six or eight or nine months or so. You can start out the most important problem it has is that signups are flattening, and the number of engaged users is remaining pretty flat between five and six hundred thousand for the past several months. They have difficulty deploying stable software, or perhaps I should say waiting until software is stable until it’s deployed. The platform is still very insular. As we know here, it takes some clever hacks even to just get streaming video in and out. Additionally, they have ongoing communications problems. The latest issue with trademark enforcement is only the latest example of the fact that, when it comes to communications, they seem to shoot themselves in the foot and then reload and shoot themselves in the other foot. A lot of these things are just basic business things.

It’s fairly ironic that these guys have just done some amazing, amazing, amazing innovation. They were among the inventors of user generated content on the web, coming into the World about the same time as YouTube and the big blogging platforms did. They have realized that you don’t need to wait until you can jack your brain into the web to have this kind of immersive virtual reality experience. So they can do these amazing innovations really well, but they just seem to trip over their own feet and fall flat when they do basic business things. That’s why I’m hoping that a new CEO would be able to come in and be someone who understands how a company should do these basics.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: You don’t have to name names of people you think would be appropriate, but what would you see as being the profile?

MITCH WAGNER: It needs to be someone with experience running, hopefully, a large business unit of an existing thriving Web 2.0 company. And someone who’s very familiar with platform. It needs to be someone like, you know, when Google was experiencing growing pains, they brought in Eric Schmidt who had experience running high level at Sun and also running Novell and turning that company around before coming to Google. Way back in the early days of the web and the internet, eBay brought in a CEO who had a lot of business experience and shared in the vision. They need to do those two things. They need to have the solid basic business experience of running any company, and they also need to share in the vision. Because what you don’t want to have happen is have somebody like John Scully or the other successor CEOs of Apple, who didn’t understand the business model and just kind of blundered from one thing to another.

So, is Mark the right choice? ClickZ has a page devoted to some of Mark's writings. I found this one particularly on point, about how Facebook had to deal with their own very active customer base, when they added a live news feed that displays changes and activity on your friend's pages. This fired up the blogosphere that flamed with comments like:

The problem is that facebook assumed that the privacy settings as they are would be sufficient to deal with any concerns that would arise from the new interface. However, this interface REQUIRES much more granularity in the privacy settings than is currently provided. For instance, just because I want people to be able to find my relationship status profile doesn't mean I want to everyone to be notified if I break up with Linda. What I want to make available is not necessarily the same as what I want to notify others about. Also, what if I want people to be notified about changes to my notes but not my wall? There's no way to pick and choose what classes of data are to be fed. What if I only want to get wall feeds? What if I only want total feeds from five people? The default is basically all or none, and in the face of that people are scrambling towards none.

Boy, if that doesn't sound like Second Life, what does? Mark's take is this:

By Thursday, Facebook made it clear it would put this new feature under individuals' control so they could determine what changes others would see. The members prevailed. How? And why? Members used this powerful medium to connect, assemble, and make their voice heard. Fortunately, Facebook listened and responded.

The takeaways for marketers:

* Listen carefully. If you target connected customers, have a mechanism in place to collect feedback before taking major actions (product changes, new product launches, etc.). Don't act in a vacuum. Use social media to engage customers and solicit their feedback. Then, make their input an important part of your strategy.

* Be ready to act. Social networks and many Web 2.0 tools make it very easy for people to assemble around a cause. Major brands should have a rapid action plan in place to identify and address these situations before they get out of hand. In the old world, this was called public relations or crisis communications. In a new, networked world, it's good community relations.

* Respect the community. What I wrote in an earlier column about five best practices for marketers who venture into social networking still applies: "Respect the Community. It's a club and you don't really belong. Most social networks aren't about advertising or commerce per se... As an advertiser you're a guest in the club. Understand the environment and respect the unwritten rules: don't intrude on conversations or connections in a way that irritates members; don't divert users from the network to other sites; and don't disguise yourself in a dishonest way."

There is obviously a lot I don't know about Mark Kingdon--of course, if he comes on Metanomics sometime soon I will learn a lot more (hint, hint). But it seems to me that he does demonstrate with this article that he is sensitive to one of the more unusual aspects of running a virtual world with such an active resident community.

So I would call myself 'cautiously optimistic' (remember, I am an accountant, so I am going to wait until I see more data).