Chris Writes.

Floyd Landis is innocent. The case against him is flawed, inconclusive, and incredibly difficult to comprehend if you’re expecting that the trial process should be fair, transparent, and ethical. It seems to be none of these, and I sincerely hope that the efforts of the Floyd Fairness Fund can help to alleviate these systemic faults.

Following up on a recent post, I’m going to try to create a brief synopsis of the case against Floyd, based on the presentation I was able to see in Long Beach following the final stage of the `07 Tour of California. This is intentionally brief. I don’t say anything that can’t be substantiated, if you dig into the available documentation. I also might unintentionally leave some holes in this, please feel free to comment if you see flaws and I’ll do my best to address them as best I can.

Situation:

Floyd Landis won the 2006 Tour de France.

Complication:

Information leaked to the media saying that Floyd’s ‘A sample’ tested positive for testosterone. This should not have happened until the ‘B sample’ was tested and the doping charge was confirmed to be valid; there are rules designed to protect anonymity and neutrality during the testing process. Regardless of this, upon further inspection it was revealed that the entire testing process was flawed substantially. This claim is based upon standards documented by the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA). This is a standards system supported by the governing body of cycling, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), and the International Olympic Committee (IOC)

Main question:

Did the testing prove Floyd cheated?

Answer:

No, for four reasons:

1. Laboratory errors abound, including mislabeled samples that make it impossible to guarantee that the samples tested belonged to Floyd

2. The urine sample provided was considered “contaminated” based on WADA technical standards for sample purity

3. The testing methods were unreliable, based on improper following of standard procedures

4. The criteria to conclude a positive test were not met

Further explanations and facts behind these four reasons

Reason 1: Lab errors

The serial numbers for a urine sample, like all good serial numbers, should remain constant. Floyd’s test relies on samples that feature serial numbers 994474, 995474 (Floyd’s actual sample serial number), and 995475. Additionally, the transport manifest does not list 995474 at all. In one instance, the number 995474 clearly appears to have been altered, and the “5” is overwriting another number (possibly a 4). No initials or date are listed by this correction, as WADA standards dictate must be present.

Reason 2: Contamination

WADA technical documentation says that “the concentration of free testosterone and/or epitestosterone in the specimen is not to exceed 5% of the respective glucuroconjugates.” In Floyd’s sample, the percentage of epitestosterone to conjugates was 7.7%. By WADA rules, the test should not have continued.

Reason 3: Methodology

Their testing methods were basically useless, if you’re into ‘science’ and ‘accuracy’.  To this end, a great analogy was made during the discussion: if you weigh yourself, and one day you’re 160lbs, the next day you’re 161.5 lbs, the next 159, and the next 162, that’s pretty normal. If, however, your weight varies between 160 and 580 from day to day, you’d likely get a new scale. In tests of the same sample from Floyd, the lab results varied by 181% in their testosterone results (acceptable range is 20%) and varied by 238% in their epitestosterone levels (acceptable range is 30%). If your scale varied by 238% from day to day, would you keep it?

Additionally, there is a rule that the ‘A sample’ and ‘B sample’ must be handled by completely different sets of technicians, so that no one person has access to both samples. In Floyd’s case, this was not followed: technician #18 was involved with both A and B samples.

Reason 4: Failure Criteria

There are 4 tests to determine doping, based on examining 4 different testosterone breakdown products. If you have the test done at UCLA, or in Australia, all four must fail to produce a positive result. The French lab in question, LNDD, claimed a positive result with one out of four being out of the ‘normal’ range. In fact, by this standard, many tests from doping control groups would be considered “positive”.

There are other reasons that this whole process was riddled with further flaws, apparently 61 violations of codes and standards in total. The people at the Floyd Fairness Fund have further found evidence of wrongdoing (and admission of guilt and retraction of accusations) for other athletes that have been tested by this particular laboratory.

As a result of all of this, 2 outcomes would be ideal and justified:

1. 1. LNDD should be sanctioned by WADA, and have their accreditation revoked
2. 2. Dick Pound, chairman of WADA, should be dismissed as chairman for allowing, and encouraging, these faulty procedures against Floyd Landis.

What you can do: visit the Floyd Fairness Fund website, and see how you can get involved. Write to your member of Congress, make a donation, or write to The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Further details on how you can get involved can be found here.

The Tour of California has concluded in grand fashion, with Levi Leipheimer winning the overall GC and 1661 miles of driving now behind me and my fine feathered friend. Many of my exploits can be followed on the Tour of CA posts I wrote on the Riders Club site, along with pictures.

The parts I didn’t write about there:

First, I met and/or caught up with some great people. Bike races are good for that. Some even had some Canadian ties, from academia to knowledge of bag milk (that’s damn near worth a passport).

Second, I learned a lot about the Floyd Landis doping trial, how absolutely flawed his TDF tests were, and I’m now inspired to find out why/how fellow Canadian Dick Pound could be in such a position of power in the world of global sport, and yet be so arrogantly callous and horrifically injudicious in his remarks and opinions (perhaps most notably in regard to Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong, but the list is far longer). I absolutely agree with the underlying principle he claims to pursue – that athletes should not take performance-enhancing drugs, and those that do should be disciplined – but his methodology leaves much to be desired. So too with witch-hunters in the middle ages. I’m ashamed he’s Canadian. I thought we were supposed to be better at this sort of thing.

Third, this was a really great race. The organizers, volunteers, and anyone else even remotely involved should be very proud of their accomplishments.

More to follow on the Floyd topic – while I learned a great deal, I still need to research further. To see the PDF presentation that summarizes the faults with Floyd’s testing, click here.

And lastly, if you want to see my flock of photos from the 8-day event, click here

Joshua Hoover wrote a pretty well scripted slam directed towards me, and most of the rest of the bike world in response to a recent post I wrote about, among other things, Trek’s recent email to their subscriber list. Some of his points are great, some I think I would take up in a debate. But I applaud his enthusiasm. And his main point is pretty much on the money: the bike industry, as a whole, doesn’t market to the masses very well. Or at all. We speak in funny cryptic languages, we wear funny clothes, and we then often try to ride on the roads inhabited by big SUV’s that wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a cyclist and a speedbump.
Things he says that I agree with:

- We do live in our own little world. (but as worlds go, it’s pretty fun. Please visit!)

- Relying on independent dealers can be dangerous, in this industry and others (but our dealer education programs are, I am confident to say, the industry’s best, and they’re pretty damn good by any standard. See www.sbcuonline.com for more)

- we don’t market to the masses at all. That’s true. Competing with Wal Mart has never been a winning strategy. Partnering with Wal Mart is often even worse.

But to say that the Riders Club appeals to bike geeks and bike geeks only, I have to disagree. It’s brand new, but already counts thousands of members among its ranks, and they are predominantly new cyclists and recreational cyclists – the people who actually want to ride their bikes more often, and don’t have easy outlets to find other rides, or other riders. Cycling is intimidating. So is every other sport, except perhaps bowling and a few other standouts. Building a community that is made up of the people who are *actually interested* in the sport and are tied together by the brand one way to reduce that intimidation.
Josh also makes some great points about the current design of our website, and I won’t disagree with him. Websites are never good enough. There are always new ways to improve, and new MS updates to screw things up again, and new browsers that hack everything up.

Lastly, as for Josh’s request that I write a post about great HTML email authoring tips, I’d be happy to. But my rules aren’t really all that technical. First, have a reason to write. This is the biggest, baddest, most crucial thing. Second, make it easy for someone to understand why you wrote. This is like the first thing, but slightly different: first is having a reason, second is making it easy for others to understand what that reason is. Third, make it look like what people expect from your brand. If you sell pretty things, fun things, hip things, or sexy things, people will be surprised when they see something that isn’t. This one is the hardest, technically.

Whoever Josh is, he’s probably far more tech savvy than I am. I know there are flocks of techical reasons why we can’t do this or that. Google’s gmail throws everything into 12-point fonts. Some people still use AOL 5.0 (lord knows why) so they need a text version of what you’re saying. The new Outlook 2007 uses Word as the default HTML editor (still not sure why they did that). Spam will only get worse, and navigating around Spam filters will only get harder. It’s all a bunch of tough noogies for email marketers. But it’s no reason to accept mediocrity. It just makes it tougher to do a good job, from a technical standpoint. But there are people out there that can do these things. Our recent emails to club members have photos, links, and a visual design that resembles the club site. They’ve been getting opened and read at record levels. And so far, no technical complaints.

But seriously, no matter how good one is at navigating the technical stuff, the message needs to be relevant, and when a member of your community reads it, they should like you better than they did before they got it. Kinda like a love note.

Full Disclosure: in this post, I make fun of others. By “others” I mean Trek Bicycles, a company that competes with my employer, Specialized Bicycles. Kindly draw your own conclusions, and feel free to subject my opinions to additional scrutiny if you feel some moral obligation to do so. As with all other opinions here, they’re purely my own.

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There is truly something special in just how awful this is. But mostly, it makes me sad. This is a screen capture of the email that was sent today by Trek, to it’s list of 200,000 email subscribers. It’s the first one in quite some time, since Zap left them and returned to the publishing world. I hear he’s happier.

(click for larger)

Let’s run through the list of problems here:

Sure, it suffers from lots of classic problems. Ugly. Default font. Terrible image (and there’s only one). Lack of links to further (and relevant) information. No contextualized messaging of any kind. No call to action. Nothing to care about, to talk about. Nothing worth sharing with close friends. Nothing time-bounded. Nothing at all, really.

But the other more subtle issues make it more nefarious, more sinister. It starts off by proudly trumpeting that you’re reading a “Trek Advertisement”. They might as well shout “hey, we’re here trying to get your money!”. Gee, way to make your readers get that warm & fuzzy feeling. Nice one. For those “clients” who chose to continue, it then says, basically: “Sorry we haven’t written. We’ve been busy (ignoring you) making our bikes better.” As if we’re to believe that the marketing department is also responsible for product development.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the value of communities that form around brands, and this goes against everything that helps to create and foster that community. It alienates. It speaks but does not listen. It does not seek feedback. And it fails absolutely in its ability to rekindle the spark that brought the community together in the first place. Whatever it was that brought 200,000 people to Trek’s mailing list, it sure as hell wasn’t this. Or anything like it.

Yesterday made my brain full. I spent the day at CommunityNext, a conference that promised “the present and future of online communities”. Amid much repetition, there were a great deal of well-worded, well-thought-out discussions that leveraged a great deal of actual, real-life experience. So for whatever it may have lacked in prophecy, it made up for in practical relevance (despite the fact that this is all still very bleeding edge). All my notes are packaged up here below. They were presented in order (Topic #1 was early AM, topic 7 was in the afternoon….but it doesn’t much matter, it was all fantastic! Props to all who had anything to do with organizing this!

This one surprised me. We were treated to a trio of Ted Rheingold, John Vars, Steven Reading, the folks behind Dogster and Catster.

I am not really a dog person. I am certainly not a cat person. I don’t understand the “thing” that got Dogster and Catster to 300,000 members. But I’ve seen Best in Show. So I guess that makes sense, in a very, very weird way.

The best thing they did was to use technology to find ways to amplify their audience’s passion! You can make the community sound far more excited than they might sound themselves in casual dinner party conversation, and often, this is how they *wish* they could talk about their passions, but for typical social stigma reasons, they tend to be more quiet. Yes, technology can level the playing field: everyone can be a crazy cat lady, or a crazy dog lover.

These were the first people to discuss “Community Guidelines” – specifically, that they’re useful, and you should have them. By developing participation guidelines, you create something that will help you be consistent and fair. And seen that way. If you want them to be used and read, don’t make it all legal jargon, either. Make it simple, fun, and human. And get community involvement in the creation and revisions to the guidelines. Then consistently enforce them. This became a “to do” item in my own agenda.

They also made an interesting point about something they termed “Impact Horizon”: as a community is getting underway, make sure decisions you make have a fast, near immediate impact. Longer term thinking can apply later. Early on in the development, whatever you’re doing had better have fast results.

Then they offered, as a suggested component to passion-centric web communities, the following brilliant meme that I hope becomes disastrously famous: Make “Digital Doritos” – little things you can’t stop clicking. Be Entertaining!

Heather Luttrell, President of IndieClick, and EVP of 3jane, spoke for a while about the “myths and misconceptions” of making money from a community by placing banner ads within it. Her discussion wasn’t exactly getting me fired up, but it did get me thinking.

I see two things here:

1. A site like myspace, with a gazillion pre-pubescent pairs of virgin-ish eyeballs, will have ads. It’s not much different from TV anymore: time wasting drivel, mostly. And we’ve already shown that, in a drivelish environment (TV, Freeways, Radio), we expect ads. And advertisers will happily make ads that will appeal to those people. So, back to Jake McKee’s comment from earlier: “everyone goes home happy.”

2. A site that is trying to launch a community around a niche *is advertising*, especially if it’s sponsored or even enabled by the company or industry that community is tied to. This needs banner ads because….um…..why exactly?

Following this thought, I wonder if there is an inverse relationship between the acceptance of advertising, and the amount of niche-ness in a community. The more specific the audience, the more they will resist the presence of ads (because they probably don’t need to be told about the foundations of the community they’re *already in*, and the community will probably be discussing new things well ahead of when you could get a banner ad created, approved, and placed.)

There was also some rather predictable discussion around disabling banner ads for premium users. That, to me, screams an admission that banner ads are something the community shouldn’t want. So you put them there because….um…why exactly?

What if instead there were banner ads, with really relevant (and discounted or exclusive) offers that could only be seen by premium members? Doesn’t this seem more in keeping with the honesty, relevance, and authenticity that we’ve been hearing from everyone here today?

Ugh. At least I don’t sell banner advertising. That there is one ugly business.

From his days as community manager at Lego, Jake McKee put a lot of weight into a relatively simple slogan: “We need to make sure everyone goes home happy.” He pointed out that the company wants something from the relationship, and so does the customer. So, if you’re building a community, have you identified these, and are you making sure both parties are going home happy?

Jake’s Six Lego Blocks to Build Success

1. Redefine Success. Typically, the metric is seen to be membership numbers. But the goal is almost never to “gather a large number of names on a list”. It’s a bigger, loftier goal, but it takes a longer term view to see it.

2. Share. A lot. Be comfortable with sharing.

3. Constantly adjust. Realize that no matter how much you provide the community with new stuff, they’ll want more tomorrow. And they deserve it, dammit!

4. Skip the NDA. All an NDA does is undercut the discussion within a community, and they’re usually tied to the people who have the most to say. They might be fine for engineers or product developers, but not for people within an active community.

5. Set & maintain expectations. If you give something to the community, expect that they will want it again, and will probably also want more. If you sponsor an event, they’ll expect that support in perpetuity.

6. Train your colleagues. Nobody understand it the way you do. They need to continue to hear the phrase “everyone goes home happy” often.

Jake spent his time, quite appropriately, talking about the things that get people excited, and how often these things are tied to human relationships. We’re really trying to improve and increase interactions between real live people, in the real world. Doesn’t that seem bigger than what we typically call “marketing”?

Next up: Jake Nickell and Jeffery Kalmikoff, the SkinnyCorp guys behind Threadless - with a presentation titled, aptly, “creating online awesomeness!”

Jake started by recalling that “when I was 11, I started skateboarding because it was awesome. I didn’t do it because I thought it had a good potential success rate. It just ruled. That is all.”

The guys at SkinnyCorp have a cool motto. They do “online projects” that live and thrive off the phrase “wouldn’t it be awesome if…” For example, they made this: www.Iparklikeanidiot.com …Isn’t that AWESOME!? What I like about this is the fact that there is instantly something to rally behind – they start there. They don’t start by asking “how are we going to pay the bills this month?”.

The two then discussed their biggest project, Threadless.com – a wicked-cool community that lets members submit t-shirt designs, vote on them, and then they produce and sell the most popular ones (while rewarding the designers with $2000!)

They astutely pointed out one common problem within communities: the community can change so much that eventually, it ceases to look like it’s chasing the original value and goals that it began with. A rotating cast of characters within a company can cause this if you’re not careful. So, as always, make sure the people involved are the right people.

Other fun projects these guys are working on:

Naked & Angry (user submitted tiling patterns, applied to ties and wallpaper…so far)

Extra Tasty (drink recipes, with top-ranked drinks getting commodified into shot glasses

Ruling Motto for all projects: “Your project is not good enough”. If you do something people like, someone else will do it. So you better be focused on being better than you already are, because that’s what other people are already trying to do. I love this. Nice and simple concept: the successful are always being hunted.

SkinnyCorp on “How to make money with the internets” (sic):

Way 1: The awesome way

Using technology to create something innovative that people want and will use, and will make your life easier by using it. And then make it FUN! Make little funny things. Be whimsical within the context of the community. Have icons that explode, or error messages that say something human.

Good anti-example: Linkedin is like the yellow pages. Usability, design, scalability are all awesome, but it is not “Fun”. Making things on your site that make it seem fun help people want to be there.

Way 2: The not-so-awesome ways: identity theft, phishing, and making money from ads

The Four Commandments:

1. Allow the content to be created by the community
2. Put your project in the hands of its community. Be responsive. Stay involved.
3. Let your community grow itself. If the system is designed to encourage offline discussions, that will nurture growth. The community creates the growth, not you.
4. Reward the community that makes your project possible. (A winning design on threadless gets $2000)

The third discussion was a panel, comprised of the following smartypantses: Joe Hurd (videoegg), Matt Roche (offermatica), Mike Jones (Userplane), Hiten Shah (Crazy Egg)

These guys are all hyper smart, and this seemed to be the “wisdom section” of the day. The general launch pad for discussion: “What are the tools that can help a community add to their community experience?”

Some of the things that were said that resonated with me, particularly in light of the Riders Club project:

JH: Users need many tools to express themselves. And people would rather get content from other users within the community they’re already in, rather than going to the original source – they trust people in the community. So give them the tools to share information that might be also available elsewhere. This might be the only reason they read it.

MR: Democratize marketing. You can’t be authentic if everything is filtered. Be willing to let the community rule some of the decisions you will make, and then be ready to follow through on that promise when you make it.

MJ: Adding a bunch of widgety tools doesn’t make a site relevant to the users. Authenticity is the only source of relevance.

MJ: “Viral Marketing and Monetization” has become “spamming users and placing banner ads”. Try everything else, but dear lord, don’t resort to this. If you’re spamming users and placing banner ads, you lost your community long ago. (this comment received a great deal of applause and support from the audience – perhaps the most of any comment during the entire day)

JH: Be clear about why you’re adding new things. Are your users actually asking for things you’re adding, or are they just things you think you need to add? (Of course, this doesn’t account for users that aren’t tech savvy enough to know what to ask for. Bicycle folks might not think about wanting video, but might love it when it happens. There must be some value in surprise.)

MR: The challenge now is to find people who aren’t inclined to already be part of an online community. So get out there and find a group of people that isn’t on myspace, flickr, and facebook. (hehe – check!)

MR: You will never suffer by making new features simple. And features designed specifically for super users can create a “Shiny object problem” - they will get bored with it after a short time, so unless you keep hitting them with new shiny objects, they will get bored and stop using it. And the masses won’t use it. (And then you’ll have a dusty object problem!)