attention industry

Timehop, and Unintended Consequences

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:19:11 -0500

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

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:46:00 -0500

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.

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:18:00 -0500

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.

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:20:52 -0500

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.

Make a professional small business website | Onepager

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:38:51 -0500

Make a professional small business website | Onepager:

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.

Protest, Fixed.

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 11:29:01 -0500

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.

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:13:34 -0500

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.

Really proud of NOTCOT.org, one of my favourite websites, for...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:21:39 -0500

Really proud of NOTCOT.org, one of my favourite websites, for taking a stand on PIPA/SOPA today that stays true to the design, doesn’t cripple functionality, and informs without frustrating.

Bravo.

Just because it's online, doesn't make it tech.

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:40:35 -0500

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, except as a barrier to keep people from thinking they can understand, or contribute to something.

This came to my attention when I was discussing Wikipedia on twitter, with Spencer Saunders. We were talking about open source projects, and Wikipedia came up… But I think you can argue that Wikipedia is far more of a crowdsourcing success, than a technological one. The fact that a wiki is the backbone is less important than the fact that volunteer collaborators filled it with content.

Similarly, the fact that Amazon has a massive technological back end laser focused to optimize experience, is less important than the fact that they’re a massive retailer with the best catalogue ever.

It’s easy to see the overlap, but I think it’s important. We can’t keep pretending that everything online needs to be tech first, and something else second. There are ALWAYS going to be interesting technical problems and challenges to solve in the online space.

But this technology, for the most part, is soon going to be invisible, the same way a telephone is, or a cash register is, or a car is. Things on the web are already becoming black boxes that just DO what they are supposed to DO.

And I get that this scares people. I get that some deeply brilliant people, like Cory Doctorow, for example, will feel like a closed, Apple style product future for the web is terrible. I see his point. But what he’s forgetting is that EVERY CONSUMER PRODUCT IN HISTORY has undergone this transition.

You used to make your own clothes at home. Now you buy them in a store, and probably can’t fix them if they break. You used to build your own home. Now contractors do it, and allow you to have more complexity and range than you otherwise could have.

You used to need to know how to maintain a car, to drive a car. Now you need a mechanic.

This isn’t downgrading or denigrating any of the skills mentioned. But it is making a very clear point - that expertise narrows over time for a reason. The average person can only master so many complex skills. And insisting everyone needs to know how to code to understand the online world is akin to insisting that someone needs to know how to repair an internal combustion engine to be able to commute.

I’m a digital person. I wouldn’t call myself a technical person, because frankly, I think we’re already starting to set the bar too low for that.

But I think it’s very important that we stop creating the impression that everything new, vibrant, and important online is really just for the internet people.

We need to worry more about making the technology invisible, for more than just the very lowest experience level of user.

The Problem with Dreams.

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:48:35 -0500

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 that hard work, and dedication, can make anything happen.

It’s a beautiful myth. A necessary one, too. But it’s a myth all the same. Because hard work and dedication are important, but more often than not, it’s the stuff that you can’t really teach or learn, like talent, style, intellect or intuition, that take someone to the highest levels of something.

The important thing to note here, is that everyone needs to work hard and be dedicated to succeed. But the people who aren’t naturally good at something start at a terrible, and often insurmountable disadvantage, when it comes to getting to the top.

Here’s how someone’s career is likely to go, if they follow their ability and passion, rather than a specific dream:

They finish school, and look for a job where they can learn something, and get closer to getting paid to do what they love to do. That job helps them realize two things: that getting paid to do something you love is totally awesome, and that it’s even more fun when you’re good at it. So they begin to specialize, to chase the intersection of what they are interested in, and what they are good at.

If they continue chasing this intersection, they’ll likely ending up working in a bunch of different roles in the same industry, learning a ton, and most importantly, moving in the direction of not just getting better, but also picking what they are better at - as you progress in a field you are passionate about, you can learn what direction suits your natural talents and interests, and challenge yourself to grow in that direction.

[In my personal example, my interest in communication theory and copyright in online spaces took me from PR to design / production work, to internal client-side digital marketing, to digital and social strategy.]

Dreams don’t work like that.

If you have a dream to be a rock star, you work toward that one specific goal. You save up and get a guitar, you learn to play, you start a band, and you do other things to support yourself while you try to make it work. You continue working hard, being dedicated, and chasing your dream.

But you don’t really divert, from a dream. I find it’s rare that people who dedicate their lives to chasing a dream really shift their expectations. You don’t dedicate your life to an end goal, and work toward that end goal for years, only to end up somewhere else and consider it a success.

It comes down to whether you consider your career, and your life, to be about a destination, or a journey.

Journey people admit they don’t know where to end up. Ideally, they chase passion and talent, and see where the best next step there is for them to take will lead them.

Destination people focus more on what and who they WANT to be, than what or who they would be GREAT at being.

Dreams can be motivational, inspirational, and solve a hell of a lot of problems. But they aren’t anything near a plan, or even an optimization of circumstance.

"So, no, most of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us..."

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 09:35:08 -0500

“So, no, most of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us are using new social networks, like Path (we’re an investor) and the upcoming Just.Me (we’re also investors, guess how much we like this space) to start fresh. Facebook is for thousands of people you don’t know. The start fresh new services can be finely crafted from the start to include only your actual friends.”

- 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 account. According to Facebook, the average user has about 130. You cannot be a focus group of one, when you do not have a remotely standard experience.

Data Invisibility, Cost vs Benefit

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:01:00 -0500

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 social networks, googled a few dozen things a few dozen times, scrolled through photos and status updates of people who I knew used to be close to them, and still never really heard anything.

Understand, this wasn’t a serious investigation. I just found it odd that someone had remained so offline, and when their name arose again in conversation, I’d spend ten or twenty minutes seeing if I could track them down, this time. It was weird to lose track of a person to completely, in this day and age.

We used to throw theories back and forth; was this person dead? Moved to a country with less infrastructure? Changed their name, entered witness protection, joined an Amish community?

I found out not that long ago that essentially, to drop off the grid, it takes removal from mainstream society - the person in question had spent a period of time homeless. I only found this out when they appeared on (obviously) facebook, in conversation with someone else.

The reason I’m bringing all of this up, is that this is the reality of ‘total privacy’. Our online and offline societies are becoming so intertwined that you would need to withdraw from one, to withdraw from the other. The assumption that not using social media, or not owning a computer or smartphone, would keep you offline, is absurd. No one would argue that by not owning a camera, you can avoid having your picture taken. No one would suggest that you could avoid being written about by not keeping a diary.

The options for someone with severe fears about privacy, in a networked, social media driven society, are not exactly pleasant: you can participate actively despite your fears, you can passively be made a participant by those around you, or you can exile yourself from participation in mainstream society.

In a world where you need to accept that you can’t be invisible, the next best thing is camouflage.

And that’s why identity online is interesting as social media behaviours develop in the mainstream. You likely won’t be able to avoid having your legal name be searchable in a way that is connected to you. But you can establish a persona that you are comfortable with others seeing, a selective layer of your life that you’ve made peace with sharing with others, with the world.

Despite current, justifiable, fears related to privacy, the price of being invisible is too high. Instead, you need to focus on how you’re seen, and by whom.

Creation vs. Curation / Remix vs. Reblog

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:38:28 -0500

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 images and living vicariously through other people’s moments. It just kills me. Then you’ll meet them and they’re just the biggest turkey in the world. They don’t actually embody any of those things.”

This isn’t to say I agree with the argument at all, but I do find it interesting, suggesting that curation is both 1) inherently an attempt to express actual identify rather than affinity, and 2) that curation isn’t a creative skill. I feel like these positions are incompatible, when you dig into them.

Curation is becoming essential, especially for brands operating online - not just on Tumblr, but on Facebook pages, twitter feeds, etc. Finding enough stuff to talk about, or the Blank Box Problem, as the brains behind Percolate have dubbed it, is a lot of hard work, albeit a completely different type of hard work than creating something yourself.

I personally consider curation a low-order creative skill, because it does require some talent to do well (an eye or POV that is distinctive and developed), as well as dedication. But it’s not (to lapse into copyright lingo) transformative - and there’s a reason gallery curators are not generally considered artists in their own right. But this leads us to a solid point - curation is at core a developed form of appreciation, not one of creation. Building a collection isn’t about expressing what your life is, but instead about expressing your taste.

And doing so online means that it can be an order of magnitude removed from what you live, or could possible achieve.

Creation is an utterly different thing. When you create, you express some aspect of yourself, whether it be talent or intellect or perception. And the biggest issue that curation faces, as what is now the leading participatory activity online by my estimate, is that comparison with creation, with the generation of original work.

Because people are adding commentary, because they’re hitting a publish button, it’s easy to, without thinking, lump these two actions into each other. We use the same function on tumblr or facebook or twitter to share a meme we found amusing, as we do to share a carefully composed photograph we’ve taken with a new DSLR.

What we can’t continue to do, is pretend these are similar activities. Sharing is a class of action, but there are significant differences between the subcategories - debate and wordless screaming are both technically elements of vocalization, but we don’t insist that one has to be interpreted by the lens of the other.

Creative sharing involves originality, development of the content, and distribution. Curative sharing involves discovery, distribution, and possibly commentary. These are not comparable activities, and yet online we seem to insist they are.

If we don’t begin to draw the line between remix and reblog, in other words, we’re going to continue in the flawed assumption that we can learn the same things about a person, a brand, or a collective by looking at what they create, and what they curate.

30 seconds on McLuhan

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 10:28:00 -0500

‘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 medicine in the world, but if it doesn’t have a delivery system, you still die.

Thank you.

(This is merely my interpretation. Feel free to disagree, if you have justification for doing so.)

EDIT: mostly written in response to this piece by Om Malik

from Hungry Academy I love this idea because it admits one core...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:59:23 -0500

from 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 like a career incubator rather than a start-up incubator.

At the end of the day, I love any idea that aims to solve a complex problem. Finding the right fit of skills, drive and culture is definitely a problem that hasn’t been definitively solved yet, anywhere.

The core node.

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:44:41 -0500

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 online will last. Not because they are broken, or inaccurate, but because they’re using the wrong anchor point.

The story is the root element of human differentiation. The ability to create, share, embellish and pass on stories is the root of our myriad cultures. But I don’t believe the story will ever be the core node online, because every story has perspective, and that perspective is inherently glued to the core node - a story from the Guardian has a different perspective than one on the same subject from the New York Times. A story from me has different meaning than the same one from you.

When I see people trying to avoid the core node question, or tie it to something ephemeral and open to broad interpretation, I wonder how their ideas will grow and survive.

People interact using their identity as the core node that ties everything else together. This is true online or offline. And I don’t think this is a step on the path to something else, I think it’s an inherent element of how our species works.

Admit when things don't make sense.

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:04:46 -0500

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 power.

In my personal experience, having a passionate community is one of those things that most people want, and many people don’t have a logical foundation for.

But you won’t get a brief from a client asking if you THINK they should start a Facebook page, or hire a community manager, or develop a social strategy. You will be asked to do one of these things. And you likely won’t be given much of an opportunity to ask why.

But I don’t care. Push back. Admit when a request, or even a demand, makes no sense.

Because the true meaning of integrated isn’t “we did EVERYTHING” but “we did what made sense, where it made sense, in a cohesive manner. There’s a massive difference between building a touchpoint everywhere you CAN, and building a touchpoint everywhere that makes sense.

You might not need a mobile app. Facebook might not make sense for you. People might not respond to an email newsletter about your service. There’s a good chance you can’t ‘gamify’ your brand site.

And that’s okay. Despite what requests, briefs, and recommendations you’ve seen try to suggest, you can’t have something that is both innovative, and comes with best practice examples of how it has worked before. You can’t be game changing by copying the other guys.

You don’t win by doing things that don’t make sense. You win by doing logical, rational things that aren’t covered by (the current, accepted definition of) common sense.

And you win by doing them extraordinarily.

What 'New Twitter' is.

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 11:26:00 -0500

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 user excited. You don’t want to alienate them, but, let’s be honest, the intense power users weren’t using Twitter.com, or the Twitter iPhone / Android app anyway. So mostly, people are complaining that they aren’t the core target anymore.

New Twitter (or #newnewtwitter, depending on who you ask) is about redefining the experience to better align with the value proposition Twitter has been claiming for several years; that the service is about Discovery, or Serendipity, or Breaking News. And if you want to be the internet’s early warning system for everything, then yes, private message functions are going to be de-emphasized. Especially when you’ve had a little voice in your head forever saying ‘I have half a dozen apps that do the same thing, and given our deep integration into iOS, competing with iMessage seems dumb’.

But most important is the Discover (or #discover) tab. This is the first thing Twitter has launched that feels NEW in a long time. Breaking the massive firehose of data into Stories (organized by both hashtag and topic), Activity (adding even more of a social layer to the platform), Categories (aiding user discovery, which has always been an issue on Twitter) and even trends (which you can continue to totally ignore unless you’re involved in a current trending topic) is turning this churning mass of data with potential value, into a discernible discovery engine.

The Discover tab is Twitter becoming a relevant capital N news source, rather than a way of discovering what people you know, or know of, find relevant. This doesn’t replace any of what Twitter is and was, but it extends it. Twitter as news magazine also offers an important differentiator in terms of ways to access the platform - possibly enough of one that Twitter can own the access point again, and use that as a starting point for new revenue generators.

I’m not going to say the new Twitter layout is anywhere near perfect. In fact, I expect a large number of tweaks will be made, and soon. But I do think it actually offers a direction for the future of Twitter. Which, despite buzz, despite early adopter cred, and despite my power-user status (27,650 tweets and counting), isn’t actually about how me, and those like me, use the service.

Lessons from PayPal's Fiasco

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:44:17 -0500

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 inevitably become a social media issue. When the team in charge of social doesn’t have this information from the get go, they are unprepared and scrambling to find out what happened, and what the truth is. More important that that, customer service, in my experience, is run with the wrong objective: getting people off the phone, and making complaining more work than it’s worth. Social media, on the other hand, is run with a focus on optics, community building, and the long term effects of each interaction. Every time something gets migrated between a customer service team and a social media team, or vice versa, information and context is lost. There is no ‘private resolution’, anymore. Customer service is a glass house, and the problem isn’t thrown stones, it’s peeping toms.
It’s better to be 80% right in 2 hours, than 100% right in 8. A DAY flipped over between Regretsy posting it’s account of what happened, and PayPal correcting and apologizing. It went from December 5th, to December 6th. I don’t have a measurement in hours, but I can tell you it was too many. Even if the account isn’t 100% accurate, it’s obvious enough that this is an issue worthy of quick resolution. I can understand the need for review, revision, getting internal and external alignment, etc, but that’s less important than a response of some kind, admitting fault, and explaining you’re going to fix it. If something public saying ‘This isn’t acceptable, and we’re on it’ had appeared on multiple PayPal owned properties, immediately, this likely would have been less of a disaster. Speed matters, and everyone watching this would do well to try their best and shorten their response timelines for these issues.
Terms of Service, User Agreements, etc, need to be written in Plain English. Natural language is key. I understand the value of ambiguity, but this write up of the situation clearly points out that this was not beneficial. If your rules and regulations can’t be written clearly enough to be followed by either your users, or your staff, issues are on you. I understand the value of legal text, and I understand (to an extent) why it is written how it is, but this is wrong, for society as much as for companies and users. Why can’t we enact a simple natural language rule? Creating a series of legal agreements that can only be understood with professional help pretty much guarantees that people will either ignore, or accidentally violate, the rules.

This will happen again, in a few months, as it always does. I will note it, talk about it, and use it to remind myself that things need to change. But in the end, until we start treating every client-facing position as a media-facing position, this stuff will keep happening.

People are media outlets, now. Outsourcing contact with your customers, or lax training of customer service reps, is equivalent to letting interns run your PR department without supervision.

Virality and Teasing the Fat Kids.

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:52:48 -0500

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 the key to making any brand relevant.

There’s a key issue with this, and I think it’s best clarified by getting people to actually look at the most prevalent type of meme online - the ‘image macro’ format first popularized by lolcats. The example I’m going to use, though, was created by an acquaintance of mine; it’s called Watch The Cradle.

And seriously, you should check it out.

This is the holy grail of memes, as far as I’m concerned. A quick rundown of why this works:

1) It’s instantly recognizable. The image macro format is prevalent enough that nearly anyone who would find it amusing has encountered it online already.
2) Getting it comes with a certain amount of cachet. To understand Watch the Cradle, you need to be familiar with internet jokes, and familiar enough with a popular hip hop record to know the lyrics being referenced.
3) It’s cute. There are babies, which make everything more pleasant, and changes the context pretty effectively.
4) It’s accessibly participatory. You don’t need to be particularly creative to participate, you just need to be familiar with the format, the music, and google image search.
5) You can share it with everyone around you, pointing out how clever you are, whether for finding / getting it, or for contributing.

In my mind, these five points are the big ones to hit to cross over into virality, with the big missing one being the intangible (that is to say, being so undeniably awesome that people NEED to share or participate).

The problem I mentioned earlier? The problem is that we can use these same points to explain why the fat kids get teased in grade school.

Everyone gets the joke. You getting to laugh means your aren’t one of the people who is the butt of the joke. It’s funny, even though you shouldn’t be laughing. Anyone can join in, and in fact, you gain respect and power by joining. It happens in public, not in isolation.

What I’m trying to say is, brands need to aim higher. None of the attributes I’ve mentioned build positive associations about the subject matter.

You don’t want to be viral. You want to be the thing that is so culturally relevant, it inspires this low impact participation. That doesn’t happen by trying to go viral.

Awesome though it is, you don’t want to be the image macro that made me laugh so hard I spit coffee on my keyboard. You want to be the amazing record by two titans of the form.

Your objective should be to inspire participatory culture, and to exist in a form that facilitates it. Brands that mean something don’t create movements. They inspire them.