Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

I just wanted to shamelessly promote my Dad (Bob Long) who just released an album of traditional blues and seems to be working on a second career as a musician. Now what is a middle aged, fairly well off, white, Englishman doing singing the blues? Well he’s been singing and playing since he was a teenager in the 60’s, and he is a fanatic. I’ve always suggested that growing up listening to “electric chair blues” and “st jameses infirmary blues” had an effect on me.

The album consists mostly of covers of pre-war country blues, “the old stuff” as they call it, and is very different from the electric blues in the mainstream. Anyway the entire album is online in a high quality mp4 format, and he has also written a bit about each track and what it means to him on the site, so check it out.

Bob Long’s Album - All By Myself

here’s a track list:
1. Dead Shrimp Blues (Robert Johnson)
2. All By Myself (Big Bill Broonzy)
3. Banty Rooster (Charley Patton)
4. Digging My Potatoes (Washboard Sam)
5. Travelling Riverside Blues (Robert Johnson)
6. Downhearted Blues (A Hunter L Austin)
7. Sugar Mama (John Lee Hooker)
8. Just A Dream (Big Bill Broonzy)
9. They’re Red Hot (Robert Johnson)
10. Hoodoo Lady (Memphis Minnie)
11. Little Queen Of Spades (Robert Johnson)
12. Little Red Rooster (Willie Dixon)
13. Screaming And Hollering The Blues (Charley Patton)
14. Crawlin’ Kingsnake (John Lee Hooker)

In the last couple of years my Dad has made various pilgrimages to the Delta, and has even played three songs on the longest running blues radio show in the US, the King Biscuit Time Flour Hour. He also played at last years Clarksdale Juke Joint Festival, and has been invited back again this year. Last year I had the pleasure to tour the Delta with him as we searched out old grave sites of musicians such as Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, and Sonny Boy Williamson.
The “Long” Trek Through the Delta - photo’s on flickr

I don’t have the album cover but here’s a photo of my Dad looking at the painting that will be the album cover:

The painting was done my Sister, Fiona Long, you can see the rest of here paintings here http://fionalongart.co.uk

Many conversations about interactive products and services come to the point of asking the question “but what if everyone uses that”, ususally reffering to the “free” aspect of a service, or the general priceing, or features etc.

Google - We could give away 1 gig of web space, eeek, but what if everyone uses that? We’ll go out of business

Flickr - We could give away a free account and let anyone upload 100 megs of photos a month, ahhh, but what if everyone uses that? We’ll go out of business

The better question is “what if no one uses it”, which is why snapfish, kodak, shutterfly etc. are all dying in the wake of flickr, because they focused on printing.

Mobhappy points to an interesting flickr fact, out of the 10 Million flickr users 80 people have ordered prints. So the better question is “but what if no one uses that”

On first blush the idea of “paypal mobile” brings to mind paypal on your phone, ok, big woop. Well if that were true I wouldn’t be writing this post right now, because PayPal leapfrogged the common “mobile” route of “it’s the same only smaller and harder to read” and went for what i’ll term the low-tech route for enabling ecommerce on your phone. Now, let me give you the headline before I go on about this:

Text To Buy

See what I mean about low-tech, they’ve totally blow past all the “localzed commerce” ideas of bluetooth billboards, and “location aware offers”, their just offering a way for you to get “geo-targeted” content the old fashioned way, by reading a magazine, and being able to instantly order the new thing you see in GQ or outdoors or wired.

In the grand eBay tradition of bringing ecommerce to the masses PayPal Mobile very much brings ecommerce to the cell phone in a very non-technical, accessible way. Let me put it this way, the public are already trained in this area, look at American Idol, everyone that’s voted on that show has figured out how to “text”… talk about enabling the mass market. Anyway, my head is spinning, this is really awesome.

Huge hat tip to Russle Beatie for highlighting the important thing about this, he thinks its pretty important to.

and let me include a little contextual ad for PayPal, i’ve been using them for years and now I do most of my business billing through them as well (they’ve probably got some of the best money market rates around, almost 5%):

The Indie Virus is another social experiment in the blogosphere that is squarely aimed at those of us bloggers who inhabit the world outside the fame and stardom of the A list. “The Indie Virus” is essentially designed to link create some links between some lesser known blogs and serve to create some additional exposure, it is a meme similar to the “4 things” or the scobles successful “brrrreport”

I was very happy to get The Indie Virus from Susan at Customer Experience Crossroads, not quite sure of the etiquette but I certainly appreciate the mention. As for some people to send The Indie Virus, to read about Austin, Python, Programming Nokia Phones and Auto Geekery. Also, if you like food check out The Indie Virus it is a social site for foodies. And finally The Indie Virus is sent to Bill Rattner, on how Art and Science sometimes play well together.

When I lived in NY in the mid 90’s a friend of mine worked for an interactive company who’s primary audience was kids, and because of this he was always interested in kids tv, games and things marketed to kids. That was his excuse anyway, and the reason he played an N64 as opposed to the playstation. One of the marketing innovations that he talked about that stuck in my head was Pokemon, he was absolutely enamored with what they had done and loved to talk about why Pokemon worked and why it was genius. Now apart from the obvious fact that Pokemon had a thinly disguised 30 minute infomercial that was designed to drive kids to “catch ‘em all”, my friend highlighted two aspects that were critical to Pokemons success: Collecting and Competition. It’s funny how those things showed up when I was at school, conkers anyone? Marbles?

Xbox live, as implemented on the new xbox 360 has has got some incredibly interesting concepts built into it and built into the new games that build upon the same basic concepts of conkers, marbles and Pokemon. One of the foundations of this “collection and competition” metaphor is the “achievements that are built into every xbox 360 game. Essentially “achievements” a point of comparison across games, achievements can be from finishing a level, or hitting a certain high score, or finding a secret.

Conspicuous Consumption - The gamer card

The gamer card is a signature that xbox live creates for you that helps share your gaming experience. It shows a cumulative point score from all your game achievements and your most recently played games. Sure it’s a community tool, but this is equivalent to the big bag of marbles you would carry around in school.

From the gamer card it is possible to click and dig deeper into a persons gaming experience, and if you are also a member of xbox live it enables you to compare your marbles with the other person using the “compare games” function. This can allow players to compare the total of games played, and also clicking down one level compare the achievements for an individual game.

Playability and Re-playability

Xbox live extended the life of video games beyond the couple of weeks it usually takes to beat a game. By playing online against humans makes a game a lot more enjoyable and challenging, lets say the AI is just better Take Halo 2 for instance, 2 years on and xbox live is still full of people playing it today when there are plenty more sophisticated games to play. With the addition of gamer cards, and achievements Microsoft has found another way to extend the life of games, now players are going through many games more than once to get all the “achievements” or to beat friends achievements.

Scratching the Surface of the Network

Microsoft has done many things right on Xbox Live, but they have a lot of room to grow if they really want to take advantage of this network.

Here’s some ideas for them:

• 100 friends isn’t enough - Xbox live caps your friends list at 100 for some reason
• Marketplace content should be “viral - there is a tonne of content “hidden” in the Xboxlive marketplace, and yet if you find something interesting there is no way to forward it or let your friends list know about it

(please forgive me for any crazy errors that are in this as i’m proofing it at 5am with too little sleep)

My friend and colleague Bill Rattner writes an interesting post about the potential paradox of the UXMag tagline “We cover common sense” juxtaposed with their navigation “Design, Tech, and Strategy.”

UXMag: Design/Tech/Strategy at Zeke Sneaker - Art and Science Sometimes Play Well Together

The “brands” of startups are often the result of a brain-wave of the founder, crafted on the back of a napkin, inspired by the initial business concept. This often works out well, but sometimes the company looks so different 6 months or a year into it suddenly the name and the logo don’t seem to fit the business, or resonate with clients. Big companies spend millions on “re-branding”, the amount AT&T has spent over the last 10 years is probably equivalent to the GDP of a small country. Now, of that enormous budget only a small percentage goes into actually creating the “brand”, and the rest goes into “communication”, PR, advertising, broadcast saturation. So what does a small company do or for that matter a big company that has an ounce of sense? Get creative! secondsite.biz shows a great example here where they have literally murdered their brand, go to brandmurder.com and check out a murder mystery blog/podcast.

Great idea guys! Maybe an example of micro-unbranding

Originally Published: CustomersOnFire.com - microbrands & micromarketing

I sadly lost my trusty bluetooth headset yesterday, and I am absolutely baffled as to where I lost it, but it’s gone. I couldn’t even find it via it’s weak bluetooth distress signal (my computer should pick it up within 30′).

Anyway, I “need” a bluetooth headset in the biggest way for two reasons:

1. It connects to my laptop, making skype a much more familiar, phone like experience
2. More mundanely it connects to my cell phone when I’m driving

Now i’ve had a trusty Jabra headset that was an adequate performer for about a year, and bluetooth headsets are such a crapshoot it was quite likely i was just going to find another Jabra headset of the same form-factor (it’s the behind the ear style like they use on Alias, see cnets article Phones for spies: gadgets as seen on TV’s Alias).

That was until I found a “feature” that made me jump ship to a different brand, and nothing else mattered, not even Sydney. What was that “feature”, well they called it “multipoint technology”, and the upshot is that the headset can be paired with “two” different devices at the same time and switch between them seamlessly. The idea for me being, that the headset will be ready to talk on whether my cell phone rings or if my skype phone rings.

Plantronics 510

Anyone who has gone through the crazy voodoo processes to “pair” a headset with a device knows the pain trying to “unpair” and connect to another device, and try doing that when a phone starts ringing. It’s difficult enough to get the headset in your ear, let alone switch devices.

What is interesting about this is that so few companies have caught on to the fact that a bluetooth headset should be more of a polygamist and should be married to several devices at the same time. My office phone, my cell phone, my laptop should all be ready to ring through to my headset.

This is a prime example of how some of the techniques in the realm of “experience design” or User Experience could have helped design a better product that more fully met the needs of the customers.

What can companies that design products and services learn from this:

“don’t listen to your customers”

Customers adapt to product shortcomings and will rarely verbalize problems that they don’t see solutions to:

Case in point - i didn’t know bluetooth could pair with multiple devices, so I would have talked about voice quality and a earpiece that doesn’t fall out of my ear while i’m driving.

Now watching what customers do is certainly part of the “user experience” design toolbox, but in this specific example an ethnographer would also have to be a detective, why, because I had already adapted to the product shortcoming. I had essentially given up using my headset with my cellphone because the “pairing” process was cumbersome and unreliable, so the observed behavior would have been me “only” using my bluetooth headset with my laptop. It would take a curious ethnographer to ask the question; “why don’t you use the headset with your phone?”

Shameless plug - multipoint technology but you won’t look like Sydney on Alias

Or Jabra’s latest innovation - colors:

(hey no hard feelings Jabra, I really did love the 250