February 2012
2 posts
4 tags
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...
5 tags
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...
January 2012
12 posts
4 tags
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...
7 tags
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’...
Make a professional small business website |... →
This is a great example of what the future of the web is like. Simple, tool-based solutions that don’t ask you to be a mechanic, when all you want to do is drive a car.
6 tags
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...
4 tags
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...
4 tags
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Just because it's online, doesn't make it tech.
Us internet folk have a small problem. We keep forgetting that technology doesn’t always matter. In many cases, it’s an executional side-effect of what a company or person actually does.
You wouldn’t say Fed-Ex is a Car company, or a Plane company. But you could find an army of people who would tell you Amazon is a tech business. And I’ve never really understood that,...
5 tags
The Problem with Dreams.
I’ve heard, and seen, many people justify a series of less than brilliant decisions with the argument that they’re ‘following their dreams’.
First: Grow the hell up.
Second: Chasing a dream isn’t the same as having a plan, or doing what you love. Chasing a dream is completely detaching your objectives from reality, and buying into the myth of north america; the idea...
3 tags
“So, no, most of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook....”
– Nobody Goes to Facebook Anymore, it’s too Crowded - UnCrunched
Michael Arrington proves, once again, that he has no idea what the average or common user experience is when it comes to social media. At all.
The average user doesn’t have ‘thousands’ of friends tied to their...
5 tags
Data Invisibility, Cost vs Benefit
A few years ago, I had a conversation with a good friend about someone we had both gone to school with, about a decade ago. They had just kind of dropped off the radar, and neither of us had heard anything. We didn’t think too much of it, but it became a sporadic topic of conversation, almost a game: why can’t we find any trace of this person online, anywhere?
Over the years I checked...
6 tags
Creation vs. Curation / Remix vs. Reblog
This is an old topic, but it’s one I’ve been thinking about recently, especially in reference to a recent quote from Drake in an interview with Billboard:
“I’m really scared for my generation, you know. The thing that scares me most is Tumblr. I hate what Tumblr has become. […] Instead of kids going out and making their own moments, they’re just taking these...
4 tags
30 seconds on McLuhan
‘The Medium is the Message’ pull quote does not discount the importance or impact of content.
It merely posits that methods of delivering information or content are what creates game changing impact. The message delivered is still essential, but dies without a medium. The message is shaped, empowered, and made real in a different way with each medium used.
You can have the best...
December 2011
6 posts
4 tags
Watchfrom Hungry Academy
I love this idea because it admits one core fact which is still shaping the way businesses that operate online function - there isn’t really an ideal schooling path for this, in my opinion.
While doing this for an engineering team is a start, I’d love to see a Hungry Academy-style approach to building other teams and skillsets within a start-up environment. Almost...
7 tags
The core node.
The core node of the internet changes, over time.
It used to be a specific machine, a specific email address, a specific website, a specific profile.
Lately, the core node online is a person. And the tools that tie other outposts, other data, to the idea of a core, identity-based node, are the ones that are winning.
Which is why I don’t feel like many deeply interesting things emerging...
4 tags
Admit when things don't make sense.
The simplest rule I know of is to just admit when something doesn’t make sense.
And yet, this seems to be the hardest rule to get people to follow, because we’re trained from an early age, to give people what they want.
Humans are irrational creatures. We want things because we don’t have them, because others do, because we see success as related to those things, or status, or...
8 tags
What 'New Twitter' is.
It isn’t an attack on power users, the same way Final Cut Pro X wasn’t a slap in the face to power users.
This is evidence of a core truth: no one changes the game focusing only on what power users want.
I don’t mean this as an extension of the ‘faster horses’ problem. I mean, simply, that your baseline experience shouldn’t be focused on what gets the power...
6 tags
Lessons from PayPal's Fiasco
PayPal made a very big mistake.
Paypal realized this, and fixed it.
But there’s a lot to learn from what happened, and it’s not just about the error made, and not just about the response.
Digital / Social needs to own customer service. This is plenty counter intuitive, but it’s the logical move. When something goes wrong in customer service, very wrong, it will almost...
5 tags
Virality and Teasing the Fat Kids.
One of the biggest dreams of the average brand is still going viral. This isn’t new, but it is getting more irritating.
We could blame Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, and the man responsible for the word Meme entering public consciousness - this is the genesis of the concept of the ‘viral idea’, a self propagating memetic life form that everyone seems to think is...
November 2011
8 posts
Voice & Tone →
MailChimp hits it out of the park, creating something that is a valuable resource as well as a great marketing tool for their service, without sacrificing one for the other.
I’m impressed.
7 tags
4 tags
physical vs digital shopping
I’m in New York for the week, and the determining factor of my trip thus far has been my luggage getting stolen somewhere on the way from Toronto to Penn Station.
I’m not writing to complain about that. But I am writing because the act of replacing so many possessions in a short timeframe has me thinking a lot about the realities of shopping for physical goods and digital goods, and...
4 tags
Minimum Effective Dose
The only thing that stuck with me, from the 3/4 of The Four Hour Body that I read (other than the knowledge that beans and lentils are actually kinda awesome) was the concept of the minimum effective dose.
Rather than looking at this as a medical or physical term, I’ve been thinking about it in all aspects of my life. As in: what’s the minimum effective dose for communication between...
I'm going to be in NYC for a week, starting...
joncrowley:
So, you know, it would be cool to see people. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to grab a coffee.
This includes people who only want to talk shop, and have no substantial interest in talking with me outside of digital comms topics.
3 tags
A conversation about what digital strategy IS, and...
Me: There are people who like to collaborate, and people who THINK they like to collaborate, but really they want a team to collaborate to execute their vision. Which isn't a bad quality. But I'm a specialist.
Randeep: Which means what?
Me: By specialist I mean, I want to do one specific thing.
Randeep: Like lead a team or be part of one doing one task?
Me: Analyze the data and behaviour patterns, and look for the point of intersection between what the company wants users to do, and what users do naturally. From there, I work with other teams, but I don't consider myself the core creative idea dude. Or the guy who needs to own execution. Lots of people say they're a digital strategist, and what they mean is 'I'm the digital / social guy for my agency'
Me: When I say that, I mean 'I'm a strategic planner, who has an expertise in user behaviours and technologies related to digital media'
Randeep: As opposed to just 'I do social media for this company'
Me: Exactly.
5 tags
October 2011
2 posts
5 tags
The Presentist Manifesto.
The secret to understanding things is not in the future. It is in different elements of the present. Given the rising respect and reach of ‘futurism’ as an approach, and futurist as a title, I felt it was necessary to point out my general approach. To paraphrase William Gibson: the future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed. As such, my standard approach to predictive thinking and...
5 tags
internet privilege.
[I’m always uncomfortable writing about privilege as a concept, in large part because I’m a straight, middle class male, and therefore likely have a blind spot to some of the role privilege plays in my own life. But, I do feel that this needs to be said.]
I’ve been getting angry as I listen to the debate about anonymity, pseudonyms, and multiple identities online.
One of the...
September 2011
3 posts
4 tags
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Facebook is getting smarter.
And I’m not talking about Timeline, even though I will personally co-sign any feature launch that points directly to the genius of Feltron’s Annual Reports as inspiration.
Facebook has essentially declared battle on two fronts, now, and no one seems to realize it.
The number one reason I hear (anecdotally) for remaining a user of Facebook, even when the person in question actively...
6 tags
Interface Bilinguality
I’ve been using an iPhone nearly exclusively for 3 years, first a 3G, then an iPhone 4. I own an iPad, and a MacBook for my home computing.
After losing my iPhone and needing to replace it, I realized I was becoming interface monolingual, and it was probably hurting my thinking.
One of my biggest regrets is that I don’t speak anything other than english - I’m convinced this...
August 2011
6 posts
The Speed of Viral
spiegelman:
We learned the speed of viral this week. This happened, people in New York read about the earthquake on Twitter before they felt it.
Seismic waves travel somewhere between 1.2 miles and 5 miles per second. New York is 204 miles from the District of Columbia. That means it took between 45 seconds and 2 minutes 45 seconds for the seismic wave to travel from DC to NYC. The tweets got...
4 tags
Possibly the dumbest thing I will read today.
“As part of an experiment for my forthcoming book Brandwashed, I lined up 20 babies between the ages of 14 and 20 months. I then handed each one a BlackBerry. No sooner had their soft chubby fists reached out to take the phone from me than they touched the screen expecting it to light up. When nothing happened, a few stuck it in their mouths whilst others moved on to something more...
Asking nicely for you to vote for my SXSW panel... →
Watch friends Jeremy Wright and Dave Fleet discuss what they look for when hiring community managers (with yours truly moderating).
Yes, this is a shameless plea for votes.
4 tags
Obama, and the danger of fighting the wrong battle →
joncrowley:
I’m not one of those people who thinks Barack Obama is doing a terrible job as President of the United States.
I just think he needed to pick one of two critical battles for the future of his country, and he may have chosen the wrong one.
In my mind, two major things are wrong with politics in…
A mostly-not-marketing-related post from my other blog.
5 tags
Exclusionary Definition and Actual Personality.
In my last post, I mentioned that I feel too many brands act like pick up artists when it comes to social media.
My suggestion is a solution that eschews an algorithmic approach - my stance is generally that algorithmic approaches don’t do a good enough job when it comes to emulating or replicating something that’s based on complex human behaviour.
(n.b. - when I say complex, I...
5 tags
Social Media Marketing and Pick Up Artists.
I realized this morning that about 50% of the brands I follow online are essentially characters from The Game.
To explain better, sketchy social marketing follows the same process that pick up artists do:
find a complex process that some people are naturally good at (in this case, both variations on the human function of socialization).
research successful variations of this process ‘in...
July 2011
10 posts
6 tags
The complexity of explaining the intuitive.
I’d like you to conduct a little thought experiment with me.
Assume you and I are standing 10 feet apart, and I’m holding a soft NERF ball, approximately 25 cm in diameter.
I toss the ball to you, underhand, in a soft, lazy arc.
You have two options: You can either eyeball it, and catch the thing; or you can attempt to calculate the speed, angle, impact of wind, and...
6 tags
A Tentative Google+ Use Case
Since joining Google+, I’ve learned the three things that seemingly everyone on there is learning:
The number one topic on Google+, is Google+
Despite the service’s focus on relevance and modeling actual human social grouping, there are still people who think of social connections as ‘points’, and aim for a high score
Very few people really know where it fits in, in...
6 tags
Collapsing Experience Layers.
Using a personal computer is, in a way, akin to having intercourse in a hazmat suit.
For nearly a year after I bought my iPad, I essentially ignored my (now 4.5 year old) macbook.
When I needed to write, or assemble a .ppt, etc, I reached for the laptop, but passive consumption was generally handled with the iPad, or iPhone. Having thought about it at length, there where three main reasons this...
3 tags
Casey Anthony defense team tweaked tactics in... →
mandalay:
A consultant for Casey Anthony’s attorneys analyzed more than 40,000 highly-charged opinions — negative and positive — on social media sites and blogs, and used them to help the defense craft their trial strategy.
Whether it worked or not is difficult to gauge, but a jury last week found Casey Anthony not guilty of murdering her 2-year-old daughter Caylee Marie.
Although a defense...
8 tags
Google+ and thoughts on the future of social.
You don’t want to be a service, or a destination. You want to be a protocol.
Google+ has been incredibly valuable, mostly due to forcing us to reconsider the value of social networking, without the benefit of newness or an established personal / impersonal network of connections. And it has led me to a simple conclusion.
Facebook is a destination, and a platform. They tie a pile of...
5 tags
my problem with offices.
When people talk about coffee shops these days, the phrase ‘third space’ comes up. A third space, in these situations, means a place outside of work and home, where people feel comfortable spending some of the time in-between that makes up their lives.
An office, on the other hand, is a half-space. Let me explain.
Work, in my mind, comes down to two situations, cycling forever -...
4 tags
A common misunderstanding.
You don’t hate email. Even MG Siegler doesn’t hate it, even though he thinks he does.
You hate communicating with people unproductively. We can pretend it’s the fault of email, but it isn’t.
If you didn’t have email, you’d hate voicemail. Or twitter. Or faxes.
What you hate, and what we all hate, is the undisputable need to respond to people who are asking...
1 tag
Eric Portelance: Social Media Monitoring: Finding... →
eportelance:
I’m really excited that, after months of work, we’ve finally launched a new whitepaper on measuring relationships of value to a brand in social media.
We began with the hypothesis that relationships with a brand can be found online and that finding these relationships would be critical to…
Great post and methodology from my friend Eric Portelance and the team at Thornley...
5 tags
Freemium / Free to Play / Crack Pricing.
We can talk about conversion rates all day. We can talk about growth curves, cost per user, etc, but it comes down to one specific thing, addiction.
Standard pricing structures seek to monetize access. This works well when value is clearly explained and understood. It is also inherently a model that attracts piracy, and attempts to ‘sample’ without payment. Ethics aside, this is what...
June 2011
8 posts
gladlybeyond asked: I don't intend this to be a flame if it comes off that way; your last post just had me thinking a little bit.
Wouldn't the democratization of publication and journalism and so-forth risk the splintering of a diverse, though (barely) cohesive democratic union? With so many narratives, would they not appeal to smaller sects of people, who could in turn create myriad and...
Wouldn't the democratization of publication and journalism and so-forth risk the splintering of a diverse, though (barely) cohesive democratic union? With so many narratives, would they not appeal to smaller sects of people, who could in turn create myriad and...