It was the middle of the night. Donald and Jack were upstairs asleep. Maura typed feverishly on her iMac, relishing the large screen and bright keyboard, the peace of an office setting, surrounded by dark. She kept the lights low. She could see herself from 10 feet away, sweat pants and T-shirt, mussed hair, an odd blue bath of computer light in the darkness, the woman, the screen, the keyboard. She had a sense of time being stolen, she should be asleep, Jack would be awake, she’d be tired tomorrow – but she fought that, pushed it away. Damn, she had anger, Donald, intractable Donald, his face like an iron mask, his bizarre cold determination locked inside of it … she pushed that away, like the worry, like the vision of herself, and consciously refocused, dived into the computer. The problem at hand.
It was this focus on the problem at hand, and particularly the problem in the computer, that kept Maura whole. She’d been able to do it throughout her life. In fact, she loved it. From sounding out those letters for words, to math, science, eventually physics and literature at the same time, medals, awards, all those accolades. It was always just the sheer pleasure of losing herself in the problem, forgetting everything else. She’d sailed through childhood, sailed through school, glided over milestones achieved one by one, all according to her plan, a vision of dreams she’d adopted from her wildly emotional, funny, charismatic Mexican mom and her thoroughly American, leftist, intellectual, software-driving, quiet, loving dad. Who loved each other intensely most of the time (broken by dramatic, disturbing fights at irregular intervals, which Maura eventually wrote off as part of real relationships) and her, Maura, all the time. She grew up as the youngest of three, 1o years younger than her brother and 12 years younger than her older sister, the one who did everything right and happily kept her parents company as her older sibs grew up and left home for college and the rest of life. Maura was her dad’s treasure as a little girl, programming her own website in Cold Fusion, joining him Saturday mornings for treasure hunts to the local computer superstore, where, every Saturday, he would buy her another game to get her out of the store. She was only nine when her website won a national award. She and her dad watched every episode of West Wing. Then as she became a teenager the computer stores with her dad gave way to Old Navy and Forever 21 with her mom. And at night, after homework of course, the three of them would all watch whatever recorded television she wanted to watch. She’d been a very happy girl, techie to the ultimate, but happy to grow up gorgeous and indulge her mother in stores. Sad to leave home for Stanford, but so excited to move up, to meet other Stanford people, so excited with the campus, and the classes, and all of it, that she really never had time for sad. She sailed through Stanford as she had through childhood. Phi Beta Kappa even.
All went according to plan, almost exactly, until, after marrying Donald, she discovered, to her total shock, Donald. He’d been her dream date when they were dating, clearly brilliant, articulate, developer of deep system software, successful entrepreneur … somebody Maura could respect, and even – she thought – look up to. She took his physical shyness as endearing, a sign of the uncool nerd, making him one of her people. Or so she thought all through dating, courtship, the fiancé period, and marriage.
Maura had nestled herself in the uncool in high school, not going through the effort of dating, not even fully bothering with high school friends. She had a nice group of girls she liked, and they were friends; but she was always a bit apart, like joining the sleepovers (which were as likely to be about studying for AP physics or watching an extra credit movie for history as for normal sleepovers with MTV and such) but quietly conspiring with her dad to have him call her at 10:30 and announce a reason to take her back home.
“When you call, I’ll argue,” she said, the first few times. “And I’ll complain. But don’t listen to me. Tell me you’re sorry but you have to pick me up.” She and her dad wondered together, later, whether her high school girl friends ever caught on.
Not that she didn’t grow out of that shell at Stanford. She did. She dated, even had a couple flings, and lived briefly with a boy friend a few weeks after graduation. She made life long friends. She grew up. But still, when Donald came along, she hadn’t had the life experience to anticipate who he really was. Her mom and dad had always loved each other. For the rest of her life she’d wonder whether she’d been caught in the web of Donald because her father was also long on intellect but a bit clumsy socially, awkwardly sincere at times. Her father, she worried, was tragically similar to the fictional character that Donald played, and caught her with, before they were married.
That night she focused in on a computer problem in part to not think about Donald, her marriage, her son, and what to do about it. Computer problems were one place in which she felt comfortable.
The problem at hand – the computer problem, rooted in blogging and social media – didn’t just come up that one otherwise unpleasant night. It was one she’d been working on for months. She had been watching, in fact, for years as the web begat a new kind of marketing based on what they called content – blog posts and web articles, essentially, spiced with the occasional webinar, slide show, and white paper. Content was basically information. Beginning in the late 1990s, and on through the first decade of the 2000s, experts churned out information offerings that made people know them, like them, and trust them. As advertising began to lose its impact – marketing expert Seth Godin likened advertising to “shouting” and content to “conversation” and “engagement” – the web cut through the traditional system of editors and event managers as gatekeepers. Experts could find audiences on their own, on the web, on their own blogs and websites. As companies realized the flow of change, experts became for big-company marketing like the gunslingers of the old west, available to the highest bidder. And then, halfway through the decade of the ought’s, Facebook took off, LinkedIn suddenly discovered what it was intended to be, and then came Twitter, and the trends that freed up the experts suddenly made everybody experts, with social media, and something like amplified word of mouth, or word of mouth on steroids. With the onslaught of social media, marketing became something like crowd control, a giant worldwide cocktail party, in which the collective ruled. Marketers surrounded the ultimate power of the last word to their customers, a collective, the composite voice of everybody. Homemade videos or blog posts would go viral, and spread over the web from a few to millions, like wildfire. United Airlines suffered a painful black eye when somebody posted a video of how they broke his guitar, and it went viral. [clothing company] suffered a huge black eye when he posted “they are excited about our new spring line” on a picture of riots in Egypt. The power of social media leaders grew. The danger of social media mistakes grew with it.
By 2008, as Maura sat that night at her computer, her idea was close to obvious. It was simply a solution to a problem. She had come across the problem over time as part of her job with Donald’s company. How to know, in advance, who’s who in this new bewildering world of chaotic new networks of unpredictable new connections? She wanted to reach the people who other people would watch, read, and listen to, but finding them in social media.
As of that point, it was a task that could be done manually only. If you wanted to find who’s who in small business networking, you’d go painstakingly through web searches, with keywords, finding, one by one, people blogging. Then you’d sort through their connections, their content, for compatibility or lack of it. You’d evaluate the quality of their opinions. You’d look for comments below, and – in Maura’s case at least – literally write down the names of authors and commenters, looking for patters. Then you’d go into Facebook, and search keywords again, search the names of those authors and commenters, to evaluate their participation, their connections, and their followings. Then repeat the process in LinkedIn and Twitter. Maura would end up with a list of people who had influence in the small business networking market, with names, emails, Facebook identities, LinkedIn profiles, and Twitter handles. It was a long painful process.
She’d been dealing with that problem off and on for years. What made that night in 2010 special was that night, at that moment, was the first time she articulated for herself the significance of that problem in business terms. There could be a way to automate those searches, with collection of keywords and names, using software process to find matches between topics and people, crawling through web, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, to generate actionable compiled lists of what marketers called influencers.
That moment, that night, sparked Syfon. She knew at that moment that she was going to create Syfon. She’d had a horrible night, again, with Donald and his obsession with controlling and possessing her and Jack. She knew she was going to have to end it, leave, and that Donald would fight it. And she knew she wanted to do Syfon next, separate from Donald, outside of WordPower.
Sprippets 