Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Great Use Of Social Media - Adventurecub.com

Published
by
Karl
on October 16, 2007
in Co-Creation
. 1 Comment

A friend of mine, Paul Whitaker from Nokia is currently flying a 1940 Piper cub from Paris Texas to San Francisco and he’s making a tremendous use of social media to document his adventure. His plane can only travel about 150 miles at a time at 70 miles an hour, which means he has to make 24 hops, going from small local airfield to local airfield. He has a blog obviously at adventurecub.com, and he also has a flickr map mashup documenting his route, all the photos being taken on his N95, automatically geotagged, and uploaded to Flickr via Shozu, an amazing little media sharing tool.

flickr map

Not to be too much of a Nokia fan boy it is pretty damn cool to be able to take pictures from the plane as your flying and upload them to flickr :-) It’s almost the equivilent of visual tweeting, I wonder when twitter will allow picture uploads like this, or even photos that are tagged with certain information. I hope I can do the same thing when I’m in Vietnam this Chrismas, although i’m not sure what the cell phone coverage will be there.

piper

Interactive Agency Blogs and “the long and the short of it” Podcast

Published
by
Karl
on October 15, 2007
in Marketing
. 13 Comments

At the Forrester Consumer forum David Armano successfully goaded me into doing a podcast, with his promise of creating a logo for me, and the condition that he can be my first guest i acquiesce. His suggestion was to call it “The long and the short of it”, which I kind of like, it plays nicely off my last name, and seems like an appropriate homage to one of my favorite podcasts, American Copywriter. The connection is of course the infamous American Copywriter drinking game which is you take a drink any time someone says “The long and the short of it” amongst other things.

The topic of my first podcast will be interactive agency blogs. I chose this because it was really apparent at the Forrrester Consumer forum that the big agencies have really woken up to the power and importance of social media and all seem to be jumping in with both feet. It seems to me they have been a little slow, certainly lagging PR and marketing consultancies, so I thought it would be an appropriate time to see how they are doing. Here are a couple of notes which I plan to elaborate more on in the podcast, but it looks like a pretty rich source of conversation. Basically these are the headlines from me doing a search on the agency name and blog in google.

Searching for Agency.com and blog produces a slideshow suggesting agency.com should start a blog :-) But no sign of the Agency.com blog yet (any agency.com’ers blogging let me know).

A search on google for “Digitas blog” uncovers two bloggers David Armano and Greg Verdino who have both left Digitas. This is especially unfortunate because Digitas has done a good job of encouraging blogging. Is this a case of blogger brain drain or is there a better way?

Avenue A/Razorfish reveals a couple of blogs, one by Shiv Sing called theworkplaceblog.com and the digitaldesignblog.com. Razorfish is certainly trying to avoid the kind of brain drain that Digitas experienced, but in having “official blogs” they have lost some of the personality, “rough edges” and conversational nature of more personal career blogs like Armano’s and Verdino’s.

The Organic Three Minds Blog is one of the more mature interactive agency blogs and they do a pretty good job of talking about new and interesting things that are happening in interactive design. It is the agencies blog but it balances the personality of the people writing it (real names), talking about design, and you don’t feel like it’s a big pitch for them.

A search for Sapient blogs produces an unfortunate quote from their CTO in 2005 which characterizes blogs as the equivalent of the Pet Rock:

Ben Gaucherin, the CTO in question, says blogs “are a fad fueled by pop culture’s desperate search for the next big thing.” When I spoke with Gaucherin he was even more emphatic than he was in his news alert. He told me that blogs are the digital equivalent of the pet rock.

Luckily Melissa, a Sapient employee dropped me a note to point me to the Sapient CMO’s blog at CMORants.com. My first impressions are that this succeeds in balancing corporate branding, personality and a little edge. (Melissa also points out that Ben is no longer at Sapient)

Critical Mass has a blog called Experience Matters. Yes David Armano is involved in this as is vetran blogger of the Experience Planner Scott Weisbrod. These guys are doing a great job of balancing the personality and while still being a clearly branded Critical Mass “joint”. All the authors are identified, author headshots on every post, down to earth writing style and you don’t feel like your being pitched every other post. (full disclosure, I’m probably biased as i know David and Scott through blogging, but i’m sure their experience has helped them guide the direction of this essentially corporate blog).

Molecular has a blog called Molecular Voices that combines some perspectives on experience design, technology and marketing. Great start but eems like they could have several blogs on those various topics rather than trying to fit them under just one blog. As I read through the topics swung wildly from deep ajax, Java to viral marketing to business strategy. I guess the question is here “who is the audience”.


RGA, AKQA, Whitman Hart, Blast Radius are all big interactive agencies that seem to be MIA in the blogosphere.

And what about the smaller interactive agenices? They seem to have been active from the beginning, Adaptive Path (sort of an interactive agency, no?), Jeffery Zeldman’s The Happy Cog, Coudal Partners, others?

Anyway, no schedule on the podcast yet, but i’ll probably just be hosting it here, and attaching it to posts at ExperiencecCurve, cheers.

Potential questions that arise from this:

  • Do big interactive agencies need blogs?
  • What are the benefits?
  • How do you balance personality and corporate brand?

David Armano Chats With Ze Frank

Published
by
Karl
on October 13, 2007
in Co-Creation and Fun Stuff
. 2 Comments

Link to the video of David interviewing Ze (I took the embed out because it kept playing automatically, very annoying)

David Armano did a hell of a job at the Forrester Consumer forum, running round with a laptop streaming the whole conference to the Critical Mass media mashup at alwaysinbeta.criticalmass.com, including their twitter feed, chatroom, and ustream video feed.

alwaysinbeta

One of the high points of the conference for me was hanging out and chatting with Ze Frank and David did an impromptu video with him via Ustream. Ze is apparently not thrilled with most of the interviews he does, and I can imagine he gets asked the same crap over and over again. Armano did a good job of just having a conversation with him and it’s interesting stuff. I find that Ze has an outsiders perspective and helps deflate mental models that business people have quickly built to navigate the tumultuous changes in the business environment. Some might call Ze’s approach common sense, but you know what they say about common sense, it’s not too common.

Best panel at the Forrester Consumer Forum Ze, Pud, and Jeremy Allaire

Published
by
Karl
on October 12, 2007
in Marketing
. 0 Comments

This panel at the Forrester Consumer forum is a lot of fun, with Ze Frank, Philip Kaplin (Pud of F’d Company fame), and Jeremy Allaire of Brightcove (cold fusion anyone)

Random comments: Networks are irrelevant.

People are their own networks

no one cares if it’s on fox

if it’s on the web it’s everywhere and people discover things through what their friends are sending them

Philip Kaplin (Pud): “There is a 50 to 100 times difference in CPM (cost per thousand) between advertising on ESPN than advertising on joes super football blog” (great quote)

Ze Frank: huge problem when marketing people use “interactive” to include massive multiplayer games and setting up a messageboard

Ze: Greatest source of consumer generated content is classified ads and people have been doing it for years

Ze: Simple interactions around your product

Ze: Doing innovative stuff like setting up in secondLife, don’t underestimate the value of stories about stories

Q: This conversation about social media seems very optimistic, what is the potential darkside

Ze: Optimism and pessimism shouldn’t enter this conversation, lets talk about reality. If you wake up in the morning and think about what might happen in your day you may just stay in bed.

Pud: the biggest risk in social media is if your product sucks, it will get out

Q: Why should companies get involved in social media now, is there a risk to waiting.

Pud: Media companies have to innovate or disappear. Imagine Bill Gates waking up one morning after dominating the operating system for 20 years have to start competing against free email, online spreadsheets etc. They’re now a media company, making video game consoles and creating competing products to the ipod.

Q: What is the backlash against companies advertising their products with viral videos

Ze: viral doesn’t have to be secret or insidious, there is something wonderful in being self depreciating. The mentos video blog of their intern everyday was wonderful, quirky, and fun

Cool, Ze mentions Nokia :-)

Other bloggers writing about this:
Jeremiah Owyang
Chris Thilk
Jeremy Pepper

On my way to Forrester Consumer Forum

Published
by
Karl
on October 11, 2007
in Fun Stuff
. 2 Comments

Well i’m sitting in the airport at SFO, had to get up at 4.30am, on my way to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum. I was asked by Peter Kim to speak on a panel on brand monitoring in social media (well the whole conference seems to have a social media focus), so i’m really looking forward to that. I’m also looking forward to meeting David Armano for the first time, even though we’ve been blogging buddies for well over a year now. David was recently hired by Critical Mass a User Experience design consultancy and they are taking a very active role in this conference. They are covering it six ways to sunday on their “always beta” blog/microblog/videoblog thing here. It’ll also be great to catch up with Jeremiah Owyang, a web strategy blogger who was recently snatched up by Forrester, I was on a panel with Jeremiah last year at AdTech SF which was very fun and interesting.

Some other bloggers of note in the social media space will be there as well who I hope I get to meet such as:
Deborah Shultz
Marianne Richmond
Peter Kim
Charlene Li + Josh Bernoff
Bruce Temkin
Uwe Hook

PS Peter Kim also created the M20, the top 20 marketer bloggers which he has moved to it’s own domain at marketer20.com

Blog Authority Waining but should I really care?

Published
by
Karl
on October 10, 2007
in Co-Creation
. 7 Comments

I have mixed emotions about my recent authority ranking on technorati, i’ve recently dropped from 427 to 402 and that sucks. It sucks because my motivation to blog ebbs and flows a lot and I actually find that measures of popularity like technorati, although not really meaningful (really), they do help motivate me, and believe me if you want to blog for 4 or 5 years on a regular basis motivation is key. In the last week or so i’ve worked particularly hard on creating some meaningful posts and have got some great comments and links which also contribute to my motivation, but that has coincided with this drop in rank on technorati. I don’t want to care, I really don’t, but something inside of me does. So again, technorati, a service that I have really rallied for is actually succeeding in contributing to demotivation. This strikes me in many ways the hight of irony and possibly at the core of technorati’s continuing trials and missteps.

IMHO any service like technorati that actually helps motivate bloggers and make them feel like they are contributing to a greater good (assuming they actually are of course, sploggers and theiving auto bloggers should be damned to hell), would be wildly successful.

Businesses in general should take note of this, make your customers feel great about what they do, make them feel like they are part of a greater good and you will also be wildly successful, just like companies like Flickr, Patagonia, Etsy, Yelp, youtube, Ebay etc.

I guess at some point Technorati stopped looking at bloggers as their customers and that’s when it went pair shaped.

As for anyone that reads my humble blog, you really are my main motivation, and I don’t say it often enough, thanks for reading, commenting and linking :-)

Radiohead sez set your own price for their digital download

Published
by
Karl
on October 9, 2007
in Customer-Experience, Marketing and Viral-Persuasion
. 1 Comment

radiohead breaks the mold here entirely with a “set your own price” of their digital download, but the lesson here is if your going to do something entirely groundbreaking for customers you have to explain it very clearly.

So the new Radiohead album In Rainbows will be available tomorrow as a DRM free digital download, that’s awesome in its own right, but they are going to let you, the buyer set the price (you can get an awesome disk set for 40 quid which comes with the download for free). Here’s a screenshot of the shopping cart where you can fill in your own price.

set ur own price

You mean it’s up to me?

pricing

That doesn’t sound right.

really

As Joseph Jaffe said in his best Keanu Reeves impression, Whoa. Agreed, whoa, that was my reaction when I was trying to buy the album a couple of days ago. Funnily enough though I never completed the transaction because I didn’t really get it, and radiohead didn’t implement it very well. What I mean by that is they didn’t explain it was the honor system, but they just left the price blank, and also stated that a transaction fee would be added. Unfortunately even after adding the electronic download to the shopping cart it still wasn’t clear how much I was going to be charged. So what did I do, same thing all consumers do when they are not sure what is happening, they bail out :-) Great idea, poor execution. If your going to do something that breaks the mold completely, you should probably make an effort to explain exactly what you’re doing.

After bailing out the first time and getting the courage to approach this new shopping experience again, I went through the process again. I paid 5 pounds which is probably the equivalent of $10.

Picture 103

Dove Campaign for Real Beauty FTW

Published
by
Karl
on October 9, 2007
in Advertising and Co-Creation
. 4 Comments

Dove’s campaign for real beauty is getting more subversive, more shocking, and more touching with it’s recent edition of this video “Onslaught“. This ad goes much further IMHO than their previous commercial “evolution” which showed how photoshop can transform an average looking girl into, as the huffington post calls it a “glamazon”. Onslaught provides a montage of the impossibly beautiful and sexy, clips of the overused superlatives in womens advertising, coupled with the graphic extreme measures that some will take to get there from surgery to bulimia.

What Dove succeeds at here is creating something sharable, meaningful, and conversational, it’s something worth talking about. Sure they are trying to sell soap, but they are also trying to bring some attention to the undesirable effect of the objectification of people and more specifically in this case women. I don’t unnecessarily think Dove or Unilever is altruistic, but it’s often just good business to stand apart from the competition, especially for something that a large portion of the thinking population can actually buy into, that’s what Patagonia did.

Some say Dove is having a polarizing effect on the industry being called everything from pretentious, manipulative, self-serving, and hypocritical. Amy Jussel at the Shaping Youth blog has a pretty comprehensive wrap up that’s worth a look. My experience in the blogosphere so far has been pretty positive although some of the comments on those blog posts are more vitriolic. Joseph Jaffe has a good post on it here.

Adaptive Path Wants Experience Designers

Published
by
Karl
on October 8, 2007
in Branding
. 1 Comment

I just noticed this post from Adaptive Path and i tell you what, this would be one kick ass job for the right person. I’ve visited their offices and they have a great space, they do amazing work, and despite their rather intimidating resumes and bios they are a really bunch of people.

Adaptive Path is seeking Experience Designers who support our cause of delivering great experiences that improve people’s lives.

Our consulting work enables us to fundamentally affect how firms, ranging from Fortune 100 to bleeding-edge startups, engage their customers with multi-channel experiences, including web, mobile, software, and more. Our public events provide opportunities for teaching, directly imparting skills and concepts. Our blog, essays, and reports allow us to spread the word far and wide, because we believe that by sharing what we know, we make the world a better place for everyone.

We’re looking for people who mix the left-brain and right-brain. Who can break it down analytically and can craft an inspiring vision. Who love user research, and drawing valuable insights from what’s observed. But what we’re really looking is for people who make. People who write scenarios, sketch storyboards, draw wireframes, and build prototypes. People with an urge to create things that will delight and empower others.

We also love people who can get their geek on, with a passion for metadata, vocabulary control, and who think infrastructure is sexy. People who will speak up about why this stuff matters and how it enables other cool things to happen. Passion, not just for design, but for the impact that design can have on people, is a must.

At Adaptive Path, we promote a live/work balance including five weeks of vacation per year.

Please email experiencedesigner AT adaptivepath DOT com if you are interested in this position with a resume, pointer to an online portfolio, and thoughts on working with us.

Beyond Viral: 3 ideas for Co-Creative Marketing

Published
by
Karl
on October 8, 2007
in Co-Creation, Marketing and Viral-Persuasion
. 8 Comments

So this is some early experimental thinking here so feel free to poke holes, call bullshit, or add your own take in the comments.

I’m using the term co-creative marketing here as I think it’s a better more holistic term than “viral”. I still think viral is a totally valid tactic, but I don’t think it’s a strategy. Viral in most cases is not much better than a 30 second spot except it’s distribution is cheaper, I guess that’s why marketers and advertisers are so generally comfortable with the concept.

For me the concept of co-creative marketing is something that should, at it’s best, be built into the DNA of your products and services. Something that builds tremendous value for you over time, something that ends up building “social equity“.

My working definition of social equity for the moment is: “social equity is built by aggregating, connecting, reflecting and amplifying the all the small user contributions over time so the whole is worth much more than the sum of its parts.” Sort of like network effects, the more people using it and participating the more valuable your product or service.

Anyway, I was thinking about what the necessary components were for co-creative marketing and came up with Shareable, Mashable, and Hackable which i’ll elaborate on a bit here. I think I have a much better idea of what makes something sharable and some nascent ideas on mashable and hackable.

Shareable

Shareable may seem self explanatory, but sometimes it takes effort to create elements of your product or service that are shareable. Easy to share, right size, right format, WORTH SHARING. YouTube is probably the poster child of “shareble” content with their embedable video player, that is what made their business.

Once you have content or items worth sharing it’s important to measure and track how people are using and sharing it. Measurement can help you track where things start, who are the influencers, and what the response is.

Of course the big rhino in the room is why would someone want to share your stuff with other people. Most companies seem to think putting an “email to a friend” link on their mundane web site is enough to get people frothing at the mouth to tell their friends. Unfortunately that is not enough, the act of sharing something requires not only effort but generally involves someone putting their reputation on the line. If someone is sharing something of yours be it a video, image, coupon etc. they are endorsing you and you had better make them look good.

You might even try and cultivate sharers and influencers, some people like to be firestarters, they like to be the first to know, and they like to be the first to tell their friends about it. Take a look at Jeremiah’s concept of early adopters/influencers or David Armano’s Influence Rippples Diagram for more on this.

Ripples 2 2

One thing I wonder about this is how much more shareble are real world products, or at least information about real world products will become as the mobile evernet becomes more pervasive? Think how text message short codes could be used on real world products, or on environmental media.

Mashable

Mashable means can someone build something new and interesting information you provide? Is there any base of machine readable structured data that you can give access to your customers, programmers, kids with too much time on their hands? RSS, XML, or even proper API’s. Think google maps, craigs list, RSS feeds, Geocoded information etc.

Texasholdem 01Think about what information is created just through the use of your product or service, and how can that make your product more attractive. A brilliant example of this comes from Facebook, when you see the underlying data of how your friends are using certain applications or games, you can see how much more attractive these products become. Take the Texas Holdem application for instance which has presence information, leader-board information etc.

Hackable

Hacking of course has some pretty scary connotations, but hackability is essentially the secret behind a lot of the buzz created by products like the Roomba, Lego Mind Storms, and maybe even Harley Davidsons and Mini Coopers. How can customers make your product their own which can be as simple as customization, and how can they make it do things that you didn’t even intend :-)

So how can you make it hackable? distribute source code, create api’s, create easter eggs, create competitions, put frameworks in place. Even some of these consumer generated commercials where a company might provide different video assets and soundtracks to enable customers to create their own commercials is hackability in a way. putting a framework in place for people to be creative.

These are just some rough ideas of what can contribute to the co-creative marketing of a product. I have one more aspect which I have not quite figured out where it fits and how to describe it, but it’s at the heart of what makes products and services co-creative. It’s where customers contribute to the primary value of a product or service, think ebay, threadless, yelp, flickr, Etsy, ThisNext, Delicious. They all have aspects that are shareable, mashable, and hackable, but the primary value they create is co-creative. So what is that? Contributable? Crowdsourced?