attention industry

It’s the little details.

My iOS compatible headphones have controls that work perfectly on my macbook air, on my iphone, and on my ipad.

This means three things:

1. I never feel like I need to buy another pair of headphones for each device
2. I can let certain behaviours (changing the volume, pausing, etc) remain automatic, as they are the same on every device I use
3. I both consciously and subconsciously consider every non-apple device as having a ton of associated costs, because my peripherals will not be directly optimized

Attention to detail is a wonderful thing, and it pays off for users and companies alike.

Timehop, and Unintended Consequences

Timehop is, at first glance, about nostalgia. It’s about looking back and seeing the actions of a year ago.

The first order side effect of this is adding retroactive value to your social media interactions from a year ago - you’re no longer just checking in at places for today; you’re building a social history that you can explore, tapping into the same desire for narrative that makes Facebook Timeline so emotionally attractive.

But timehop has another side effect that’s been catching my attention, lately.

I want to do more stuff online every day, to make my timehop emails more interesting.

This sounds silly, and probably is, but it’s the absolute truth. I look at a day’s particularly slim email and think ‘really, that’s all I did on this day, last year? Check in at work, and then again at home?’

I signed up because I love the idea of having a trackable ‘datashadow’ as part of my life. An automatically generated biography. But instead I’m seeing that this level of detail is making me dissatisfied with keeping so incomplete a record.

The same way Timeline made a lot of people feel like Facebook was reducing their life to:
Born: 1984 / Joined Facebook: 2006 / Went to Parties: 2006 - Infinity, Timehop has me thinking that my datashadow could use a little beefing up.

This could probably be the business model for Timehop, if they find a good way to quantify it - build a massive feedback loop for social platforms, and sell them inclusion in the day by day journal they send out to users, reminding them that their actions on the platform in question have value and context.

Pre-Customer Service

It’s one thing to take care of a customer. It’s a very different thing to take care of someone who might become one.  It makes me wonder if this might be a potential growth area for many businesses, when it comes to customer acquisition.

[There is a significant disclosure made at the bottom of this post, FYI]

Recently, I made a mistake that is unique to our era – I left my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S2) in a cab, accidentally.  To make matters worse, I don’t know which cab company is responsible for the cab I left it in, despite swearing up and down to six different representatives that I was SURE it was their fleet.

This presented a couple of problems for me. One: I was less than a week away from the end of my previous job, which meant I was less than a week away from the end of my corporate cell plan – I was also up in the air about what my options were going to be in the near future, and was kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place; it’s difficult to be a digital strategist, let alone an urbanite in his late 20s, without a mobile.

I did what I usually do, when I’m running out of options… I asked the internet, by which I mean Twitter.

There were a few people who I was hoping to come to my rescue, but I definitely wasn’t expecting @RogersMelanie to reach out, for a couple of reasons. For one, I wasn’t a Rogers customer – my cell provider at the time was Bell. For another reason, I wasn’t even using any of the other services provided by Rogers – my internet access is via 3web, I prefer Netflix over cable, and I don’t have a home phone.

But Melanie reached out, and we exchanged a few DMs.  When she realized I was still looking at my options for mobile providers, she asked me if I’d be interested in trying out a Rogers LTE device, and seeing if the service was what I was looking for. There was no hard sell, no expectation of any kind in return, and without extracting any kind of promise that I would sign up.

To be blunt, this is the kind of customer service that got me raving about how great being an Apple customer was; with the crucial difference that I hadn’t spent an extra $300 on a warranty.

I completely understand that it’s beneficial to reach out to influencers (and I hesitate to label myself one), but this wasn’t part of any outreach campaign that I’m aware of. This was an attempt to build a connection by helping me out when I really needed the assist. 

And while I know there are probably a lot of people in my life who’ve given Rogers a hard time at one point or another regarding their Mobile business, I’ve been impressed by the experience. If someone were to ask me which provider they should go with at this exact moment, I’d ask them a dozen questions about what device they want, what their needs are regarding their plan, and what offers they’ve gotten via phone, and in person, through representatives.

But then I’d tell them that I’d recently had a great customer service experience with Rogers, without being a customer. 

[DISCLOSURE: At the time this occurred, I had no connection to Rogers whatsoever. However, earlier this week, I found out that my new employer counts Rogers as a client, and I will likely be doing at least some work on some of their initiatives in the future. I can guarantee that neither myself, nor the Rogers representatives I spoke to, were aware of this when any of the events above occurred, but to avoid any impropriety, I wanted to call this out explicitly.]

Big Changes.

2 years ago, I took a big risk.  I left a job I’d only started 6 months before, because a friend was willing to take a bit of a chance on me, and hire me to work with him to build the digital team at an agency best known for print, direct mail, and in-store work.

Needless to say, it paid off. The last 2 years have been an amazing learning experience, and I’ll spend the rest of my life being grateful to the team at OSL for what we accomplished together, and how I’ve grown with the influence, help, and support of so many individuals there.

But the times, they are a-changing.

On Monday, I’ll be joining the strategy team at Klick, and starting in an industry that’s new to be as well, working primarily in the health space.

It’s not just new challenges and new opportunities that motivated me to make the switch.  I’m excited to work with the people, and the culture that I’ve been introduced to in interviews and conversations with the Klick team.

So, starting on Monday, I’ll be working downtown again. Which I’m hoping means I’m going to be a little more available than I’ve been in the past couple years, given the lack of commute.

I’m really, very, incredibly (possibly unreasonably) excited. Change is the one constant in life, and this feels like a very good one.

Things I’ve learned as an Android user.

You can talk about freedom, or openness all you want, but it doesn’t really matter.

Innovation for the user isn’t happening on Android devices.

Moving from iOS to Android was an experiment to teach me something about other interfaces, to make me more well rounded as a strategist, and to challenge some of my assumptions about the ‘right’ or in some cases ‘only’ way of doing things.

All of that has happened.

But the primary feeling of owning an Android device is the feeling of being 6 months behind.

I bought a top of the line Galaxy SII in August. I’ve been using it as my primary phone since then, so for about 5 months total. In that time frame, I’ve waited for updates (none of which have ever come), waited for new and old apps to be ported to the platform (I’m still living sans-Instagram and Pinterest), and putting up with features of great apps that don’t work (I can’t record video on Path, or edit posts on Tumblr).

This isn’t really a complaint about Android. It’s a complaint about systems that are fragmented, both by OS and by hardware. And it’s a hint of ‘broken window’ theory, as well - if Google doesn’t care about this platform working well, why should developers.

I can completely understand the appeal of control, that Android devices promise. I was thrilled by it, for the first month or so I owned the phone. But that thrill of control fades, when you realize it can just as accurately be called management or maintenance, and it’s far from optional.

Assuming standard use, with minimal ‘management’ or ‘maintenance’, my experience on Android has been one of terrible battery life, intermittent crashing, software conflicts, and frustrating hardware issues (such as the infuriatingly loud buzzing noise the phone makes when vibrating, akin to a subwoofer rattling in a trunk). 

At this point, people will point out that 1) I’m not running Ice Cream Sandwich, 2) I should get a Nexus branded phone, rather than something running Samsung’s TouchWiz UI, and 3) I should root the phone, and just run Cyanogen, or something similar.

1) I can’t run ICS, Samsung hasn’t updated the phone.
2) That’s not an argument, it’s a suggestion that Android is a failed experiment, and that ‘open’ means failure unless you leave it unedited.
3) I don’t WANT to root my phone. I shouldn’t have to. If I need to make an unstable phone LESS STABLE to make it usable, it is a poorly designed and manufactured phone.

I’m not writing this as an Apple fanboy. I’m not writing this as someone who has no idea what he’s talking about, and hasn’t devoted time to trying to understand this platform.

I’m a reasonably experienced user, of a recent flagship device, of the most successful manufacturer of Android smartphones.

And I’m telling you, it’s not good enough.

There’s a reason a single manufacturer, with a line that has never exceeded the 3 phones it currently sells, makes the majority of profits in the smartphone industry (as of Q3 2011 numbers). \

It’s because, at core, they don’t really have any competition.

Protest, Fixed.

I spend a significant amount of my time in university feeling like protest, as a concept, was severely broken. To the point where I blogged about it a few times, completed a project under the name ‘ground war’ for a communication theory seminar, and basically attended a few protests in Nathan Phillip’s square just to get a bigger feel for what the issues were, for why protest didn’t seem to work.

Shortly after I started getting more personally and academically involved in the social web, I started wondering if there was any way that could help with protest. Poking around, seeing communities, discussions, flashmobs, etc. I came to the conclusion that no, it couldn’t. The gap between badging oneself as an activist online, and actually doing something about it, fell apart.

This year, it was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was wrong.

I’m not talking about the Arab Spring. While that was definitively a massive success of protest, I don’t see it as a massive success of digital protest. What got change to happen, frankly, was things getting bad enough that people were willing to risk everything to fight for change. While the internet was massively beneficial for organization, and sharing information, the actual fight happened in the streets, and it was quite literally a revolution, in most cases.

It wasn’t a facebook revolution, or a twitter revolution. These tools facilitated the flow of information, and were integral to changing worldwide opinion, and connecting individuals. But it was the people putting life, limb and livelihood on the line, in person, who made a difference.

No, I’m talking about the anti SOPA / PIPA protests that occurred recently online, and what made them different, in my mind.

Tumblr, Wikipedia and Reddit were standouts, but more than 75,000 sites did something that made a bigger difference than any online protest I had seen previously.

They generated personal, self-interested outrage, and then directed it meaningfully.

Step one was simple. Rather than saying ‘this ill-defined, unclear bad thing will happen to the future, they just DID it. They either blacked out, or pretended to black out, the content users were expecting, and SHOWED them, in no uncertain terms, what the worst case scenario of letting this bill pass was.

Crucially, they weren’t fair or balanced about it. That’s not how you drive people to action. The same ‘boston strangler’ language the content industries have been using for almost half a century is what gets a gut response. That’s how you drive action. You make it real, make it personal, and make it clear.

Wikipedia being dead? That is hard to ignore.

Step two was even better, and I think it was best handled by Tumblr. Rather than saying ‘This bad thing will happen if you don’t stop it’, they automated the next step – protest as flowchart.

Providing clear names, phone numbers, auto-populated email messages, and suggested scripts, the companies that drove this protest simplified politics, actually making sure the individual people who could have an impact understood the issue well enough to be heard.

This is something that is patently not a part of mainstream political action. It’s not about understanding complex issues of law and politics as a badge of your greatness. It’s about getting shit done, and the way to do that is to inform people.

By the end, the numbers I’ve seen suggest that almost 88,000 calls to congress were generated by the Tumblr community. Other protests generated nearly 3 million emails.

Outrage was generated, and then translated into a language government understands – personal appeals from angry, concerned, or scared constituents.

And, crucially, things didn’t need to get so bad that there were riots in the streets. This was a functional, organized, peaceful protest, and it was more powerful than one of the biggest lobbying engines in the world. This time.

So I can’t help but imagine what the semi-unified internet community could do, if it wanted to. This amount of action and outrage, spread globally, could make a sizeable dent in patent reform, or international aid, or pretty much anything.

I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix protest, but it seems to have been figured out. Maybe we should spend some time thinking about how to apply it.

Stop doing the same presentation.

Social media has built a cottage industry of self promoting pseudo experts. We all hate them. We all hate them to the point where, each one of you is thinking of a specific person who you think I’m talking about. That person? They hate social media douchebag guru ninjas, too.

So, it’s a problem, yes?

I’ve found a simple identifier: if you can hear someone giving the same presentation, the same advice, and the same examples, more than 6 months apart, they are likely terrible at what they do.

They need to stop giving the same presentation.

They are teaching you social media 101, using last year’s assistant profs notes, and a photocopied version of an out of date textbook.

This is a changing space. Rapidly changing. Massively changing.

And while I would never suggest everything new is relevant, even if google shoehorns it into search results at a baffling level, it is usually worth understanding.

Someone who is still stopping at “listen before you talk”, or “it’s about brand love” is still talking about 3 or 4 years ago. When this was still new enough that there wasn’t data. When this was still new enough that you had to convince clients it was important, rather than convincing them that they need more of a strategy than “we need to be on social media”.

The dummies books have been written. Repeatedly. You don’t have to keep preaching the gospel of “I understood twitter in 2008”.

Instead, a few polite suggestions:

Get some f**king data, to back up your assertions.

Stop pretending it’s simple. It’s only simple if you aren’t optimizing it. Expertise isn’t about stopping at simple.

Things are (always) different. Examples more than 6 months old are likely no longer representative of the current platform and community dynamics.

“Entry level” changes. If you’re giving the same ‘how to get started in social’ advice today, that you were giving even a year ago, you’re a fraud. Pick a new scam, please.

You can’t be a revolutionary after the war is won. You’ve either decided to become a productive member of post war society, or you’ve ended up unable to let go of the fight.

So either grow up with the rest of us, or pick a new fight.