I answer questions about the Internet.

Archive for the ‘Digital’ Category

Happy Whatever Day!

Father’s Day is approaching (June 16, to be exact) and that means social media brand managers will have tweets queued up on their content calendars scripted something like this:

Brand: Happy #FathersDay to all the dads out there! What are you doing to celebrate the day?

Of all the various manifestations of marketing that exist (97.8% of which are awful to begin with) this is absolutely the most awful and it needs to stop.

Here’s why.

It’s lazy. Marketers are now drunk on the fact that they can inject themselves into the broader conversation du jour on Twitter with bland holiday-related statements like the one above, then check the social media box for the day. Done! Social media strategy achieved.

It’s formulaic. This follows a classic social media content formula that is already overused: make a statement then ask for engagement. Formulas are easily detected by human B.S. radars and they will be ignored.

It’s not connected to any business goal.  If a form of marketing doesn’t align with a specific business goal or opportunity, then what’s the point of doing it? Especially on a platform where posts have a shelf life of only a few hours. With no strategic direction behind them, these tweets are a waste of time, a waste of data, and can easily be filed away in the happy horse shit, sunshine and lollipops folder. “Joining the conversation” isn’t a strategy.

I’m asking marketers to do better. Below is a fantastic example from State Farm that mentions Veterans Day but does so much more.

State Farm Veterans Day post

It connects Veterans Day back to a core piece of the State Farm brand: Their agents. It supplements the post with rich media, in this case a video of an agent describing how his military service impacts his leadership style. By doing this, they’ve created timely, relevant content that perfectly aligns with broader communication goals.

Now go celebrate Father’s Day. But give your audience something extra before you post about it.

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Business, Digital

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Digital Platitudes

Marketing and communication professionals aren’t trained to be silent.

Today’s mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, is proof of why they need to learn restraint. Here we have yet another horrific event that prompted legions of brand managers to chime in with offers of condolences through their company-sanctioned Twitter accounts.

The sentiment behind tweeting condolences is kind and decent. It’s the rubber stamp, check-the-box application that bothers me.

In 2001, I was working as a web designer at an advertising agency. After September 11th, dozens of clients emailed me requests to add tiny animated GIFs of the American flag to their website as a show of support for the victims. I couldn’t turn down any of these requests and hope to keep my job, but each time I received one, I cringed. Not because I hate Americans and support terrorism, but because I knew these animated GIFs were lazy, half-assed attempts at sympathy that accomplished nothing long-term. The GIFs were non-tangible, noticed by no one, and unceremoniously washed away six months later during the next design refresh.

Tweeted condolences fall into that same category. Digital platitudes. Going through the motions in 140 characters or less.

Lisa Grimm has a smart, prescriptive post up today about how brands should behave on social media during a tragedy. Going silent, she notes, is an acceptable and effective option.

I would also challenge companies to answer two questions before punching lukewarm sentiment into the Twitter Machine: Is the company/brand connected to the community affected by tragedy? Has the company donated money, services, food, supplies, or supported the victims in any way? If the answer is yes to either (or both) of the above, then there’s a story worth sharing.

If the answer is no to both, then your tweet becomes generic white noise and data waste. I recommend embracing silence as a show of respect. Your messaging, in this moment, is irrelevant.

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Business, Digital

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Blowing up IT

Bodiam Castle south west corner

Corporate IT needs to be torn apart, blown up, re-imagined and rebuilt from scratch.

Today’s information technology departments are obsessed with restricting access to technology and telling you “don’t touch that.” They won’t let you access Google Docs, even though working on a centralized, collaborative document will make your team more efficient. They won’t let you transfer a large file via SendSpace, so you’ll need to burn that to a disc and spend at least $20.00 to overnight it via FedEx. They force thousands upon thousands of employees to muddle through what is certainly one of the inner rings of Hell: Internet Explorer 7. Simply put, IT has become ineffective, burdensome and downright crippling to corporations.

It’s not their fault. They were built this way. In the 90s, employees everywhere started becoming hyper-connected to the outside world via the Internet. This was deemed a risk. Solution: Build a department devoted to keeping viruses, evil-doers and digital riff-raff out.

IT became the corporate moat.

Tomorrow’s information technology departments will have a simple charter: Get the best technology into the hands of employees so they can do their jobs better. Instead of lurking in basements with no natural light and responding to support tickets, they’ll be proactive. They’ll train senior executives on the latest technology trends. They’ll ask team members what their needs are and respond quickly. They will be obsessed with keeping the corporation digitally fit and competent.

I completely understand the need for security, risk management and business continuity. But these can no longer be the responsibility of the IT department. Firing the detonation charges will take significant culture and personnel changes, but it can be done.

The IT staff of the future will be educators, enthusiasts and helpers. Not hall monitors and security guards.

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Business, Digital

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Airtiming

Airtime launched today, so I immediately jumped in and starting connecting with other Airtimers. Here’s an actual transcript from encounter #2:

CONNECTING…

Other guy: You’re friends with Brian Shaler!
Me: We both know Brian Shaler! Does he still have that mustache?
Other guy: Yep, it’s really creepy.
Me: The last time I saw Brian Shaler was in Austin, Texas on 6th Street. He was wearing full body pajamas.
Other guy: Was he jumping?
Me: No, but he was handing out gas masks to strangers.
Other guy: So, I’m disappointed that you’re not Mark Zuckerberg. I’m moving on.
Me: Good bye!

DISCONNECTING…

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Digital

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Don’t die at SXSW


Photo credit: Lelya Kuhn

This will be my seventh straight year attending South by Southwest Interactive. It’s important to stay alive mentally and physically during the conference. Here are a few ways to do that, based on what I’ve learned over the years.

Wear comfortable walking shoes

You’re going to walk everywhere: to hotels, parties, restaurants, and at least 163 loops through the Austin Convention Center, which is the size of a small city. Be good to your feet. I’m a fan of Sauconys.

Avoid your hometown crew

You’ll likely feel the urge to pal around with people you already know from back home. Resist this. Meet hundreds of new people instead. Divide, conquer, and report back to them later. You’ll see your local friends when you’re back home.

Don’t cave to elitism

Like every industry, the tech world has its share of pseudo-celebrities, primadonnas and toolbags with an inflated sense of worth. Don’t play their game. Don’t fawn over them. Don’t worry about what parties they’re at. If the line to a venue is too long, ditch it and find another one.

Replace one meal each day with a CLIF bar

I eat one of these each day for breakfast at SXSW. CLIF bars are packed with protein and will hold you over until lunch. Food expenses add up fast, and you can save $100-$120 by eating these instead.

Charge your immune system

You’re going to shake a lot of hands, swap a lot of germs, drink a lot of free drinks and ultimately get very little sleep. This is a recipe for an immune system crash on your way home (known as “South by Scurvy“.) Start boosting your immune system early and sustain it throughout the trip. Vitamin C has always worked well for me.

Prepare for phone death

Your smartphone battery will die quicker that you think. To keep it alive, invest in an external battery pack or snap-on case. I just picked up a Mophie Juice Pack Air for my iPhone.

Don’t live-tweet everything

Resist the urge to live-tweet every sentence from every panel and keynote. This will kill your phone (and you). Broadcast a few choice nuggets here and there, plus your own perspective. That’s enough.

Stay flexible

There are an infinite number of parties and panels to attend. Unless you’ve figured out how to clone yourself, there’s no way you can take it all in. RSVP to as many parties as you want, triple-book your panels at austin2012.sched.org, then decide what you want to do at the last minute.

Don’t listen to “veterans” like myself

Find your own fun. Make your own path. Most of all, have a blast.

P.S. … Here are a few more tips for first-timers at sxsw.com/first_time

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Business, Digital, Geekery

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Time Hoppin’

A few days ago I discovered this nifty little service called TimeHop. It’s good at doing one thing really well – reminding you what you were up to exactly one year ago today.

How does it work? You set up an account, connect it to your social networks of choice (currently Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram are the only options) and each day you receive an email that summarizes your one-year-ago activity.

Why is this interesting to a human being? The only word to describe what I feel when I receive my daily TimeHop is delight. It’s an uncomfortable word for me, so I use it sparingly. I’m delighted by very few things, mostly pictures of Corgis dressed as lobsters. My first TimeHop reminder told me I was at Bruegger’s on Ingersoll a year ago. I’ve only been there once, and it was the day I picked up bagels for an 8:00 am client meeting with Kemin Personal Care. This one detail triggered a series of other memories about that same day, which I’d completely forgotten about. Conversations I had. People I ran into. Other things that were happening in the world.

TimeHop is helping me build and extend my offboard brain. I’ll have you know that I’ve actually been working on my offboard brain for years. Every email I’ve sent or received since 2006 is stored in my Gmail account. That sounds insane, but all of those conversations are searchable, which reduces my need to actually remember the full context of most things. This frees up my physical brain to concentrate on more important tasks, like stressing out over whether the Megatron and Galvatron Wikipedia entries should be merged or not.

In all seriousness, we humans leave a lot of ephemeral data behind on social networks, wrapped around activities that may seem mundane at the time. (Warren Ellis called this landfill of ones and zeroes the “data shadow” back in 2006.) Tweeting that you ate a sandwich – when combined with location data and the context of everything else your experienced that day – suddenly becomes more interesting. It’s interesting because human brains didn’t evolve to catalog every single detail of our lives, and now we can start unlocking some of that.

TimeHop aligns well with another trend I’m seeing, which is our need to back-fill our Facebook Timelines. We’re fascinated by our past because we barrel through life taking so many experiences and moments for granted. Now we have the tools to start organizing, beyond a dusty box of old photos.

(Oh yeah, The Des Moines Register’s Sarah Day Owen posted about TimeHop today too!)

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Digital

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5 bad social media habits

Menace From The Land Before Color

1.) Stop using automated story aggregators like Paper.li

If you feel the urge to share an interesting blog post or news article with your Twitter audience, simply retweet or post a few choice links here and there. I’m all for individuals curating news, but Paper.li isn’t curation – it’s vomiting everything you’ve read onto the Internet. I’m not interested in everything you read. Use your filters. Know your audience and their expectations. Look up the meaning of “curate.” Stop contributing to data waste.

2.) Stop auto-posting between Twitter and Facebook

Think of these two networks as completely different worlds, with different populations and societal norms. You might think you’ve achieved maximum efficiency by writing a Facebook post and hooking up some application that auto-broadcasts that post to your Twitter account, but what you’ve really done is create a tweet that is ugly, off-putting, and typically broken off in mid-sentence. (Remember, Facebook allows more characters than Twitter’s 140 limit.) On that same note, your Facebook audience doesn’t want to see posts with @tags and #hashtags in them. They simply don’t function in that platform, and they lack context. By auto-posting between networks, you might save a few seconds in your day, but you’re also making yourself / your brand easier to ignore and unfollow.

3.) Stop scheduling your tweets

I believe that scheduled tweets are OK in moderation, but don’t ever schedule them for more than 24 hours out. You don’t want to be that guy who scheduled a promotional marketing message one week in advance, only to see it broadcast right in the middle of some huge disaster gripping the world’s attention. Like, Los Angeles collapses into the ocean after an earthquake, and you’re auto-tweeting about your next webinar. Also, if you feel victorious and productive by scheduling a week’s worth of tweets on Monday morning, your company should take the social media keys away from you immediately. It proves that you aren’t a fan of the platform. Find a team member who is.

(Do you see a theme emerging here? Automation is lazy.)

4.) Stop obsessing over your Klout score

Klout might become an interesting measure of “influence” in the future, but currently it’s all over the board. Scores vary wildly from day to day, so don’t declare a victory when you reach a 62. (You might be back to 30 tomorrow.) It’s meaningless, and so is your Twitter follower amount. Do good work and earn respect in your business community instead.

5.) Stop using social media to talk about social media

You’re a well-rounded human being, right? You have other interests and obsessions. Share those, too. Look at your feed – if 100% of it is the latest Seth Godin posts and poorly-researched Mashable articles, you need to diversify. Imagine if you picked up a telephone, called your friends and just talked about telephones. They’d hang up.

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Digital

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Data waste

Drought

What would you do if data storage ran out?

Imagine a future where storage capacity becomes a precious resource. Just like we’ll eventually run out of land to live on, or fossil fuels to consume.

Data barons would stake claim over all the available capacity and charge a premium to license their “land.” Maintaining your own underground servers and remote hard drives would be a criminal offense. You’d be charged money for pushing larger amounts of data to someone else’s servers (ie. lots of Facebook posts). You get the idea.

So what would you do differently, if you had to preserve every last gigabyte?

1.) You’d stop sending emails with these goofy disclaimers.

Each time an email is sent with one of these, it becomes data on a server. A few insignificant ones and zeros at first. Then it’s forwarded. And replied to. Think of the extreme data waste when you multiply that a thousand, a million, a trillion times. Not a problem today, but if you were conserving, you’d stop.

2.) You’d stop sending context-less “shouts” to Twitter.

During a crunch, you’d really start to think a lot about context. Is the tweet you’re generating adding to the common good of mankind, delivering new information, helping friends, making someone laugh, or benefiting you in some way? If not, you’d disable automatic shouts across a lot of platforms and apps.

3.) You’d send very brief emails.

Suddenly, you’ll thank Twitter for forcing you to think about communicating in 140 characters or less. Because you’ll be charged a tax on every email longer than three sentences by the data barons.

4.) You’d spend less time creating useless documents and spreadsheets.

That meeting recap as a Word document, then exported as a PDF? Is it really necessary? And did the meeting agenda PDF need to exist in the first place? That data has to sit on a server somewhere, and it’s going to cost you money.

Now, spend an entire work day pretending that this shortage exists, and see how your behavior changes. Then, instill this into your workplace culture. When you stop contributing to data waste and Internet white noise, I predict you’ll get a lot more efficient and a lot more done, and so will your team members.

Trim, cut and edit. And if you add anything, add value.

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Digital

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An escape to Path

I’m intrigued by the new social network Path, but I don’t know why.

First, let me explain a few things. I’m a joiner. I join new socnets every day. It’s my job to understand them. Typically, I forget about them five minutes later and only get reminded when the network sends me an email prompting me to sign back in. This results in conversations with myself that go something like: “Huh? When did I sign up for Glass? And what the hell is Glass?”

My point is that there’s a new one each day, and it’s tough to make noise in a world dominated by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. (Although 2011 was definitely the Year of the Pin.) So why do I keep checking in on Path?

I’m having trouble articulating it, so I thought I’d turn to the Twitter Machine. Mike Gerholdt talks about “sharing little moments”:

One unique thing about Path is that you indicate when you’ve gone to sleep, and when you wake up. At face value this may seem like useless information, but we’re entering an age where our devices will learn more and more about our bodies and physical activity through accelerometers. We’ll be able to do really interesting things with this data, long-term. (See Fitbit and Nike+ if you don’t believe me.)

Mike also mentions that the experience is uncluttered. Despite all of Facebook’s filters and management tools, the majority of us still experience the bloat of game updates, auto-posts from apps, drama, and friends we should have never friended. Travis seems to agree:

So is Path a miniature oasis? Facebook is our necessary day job and Path is a much-needed vacation? Last March I noticed a shift to more controlled, private online spaces – ie. teenagers drifting to locked-down Twitter accounts and early tech adopters jumping into group messaging apps.

Path is intriguing because it might be the first network to step up and fill this need.

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Digital

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The Netflix Fast-Forward

Netflix

This morning Netflix announced that its DVD-by-mail business would remain under the Netflix umbrella, instead of the Qwikster “brand” – a brand that was enthusiastically embraced by everyone on the Internet. (End sarcasm.)

The company’s reversal queued up Round Three of junior marketing professionals armchair-quarterback-tweeting CEO Reed Hastings‘ decisions, latching onto the #FAIL hashtag and calling for his dismissal. The majority of these people have never started a company or managed a large brand, and as soon as the Mashable/TechCrunch headline and retweet churn quieted down, they all immediately went back to tweeting about the Kardashians.

Reed Hastings is not an idiot, nor is he out to personally inconvenience your ability to watch movies.

It’s worth examining some of his recent decisions, though – and why he made them.

Why split Netflix in two? Understand that first and foremost Netflix is a content delivery company, not a plastic disc in your mailbox company. When the split was first announced, it actually made sense to me – at least in terms of operations and logistics. DVDs require warehouses and postage. Content streaming requires web servers. This was clearly a move to go “all in” toward a Utopian future where 100% of all content from all time is available for streaming on-demand.

Our telecommunications infrastructure doesn’t support that yet, and entertainment studios are totally uncomfortable with it, but that is the future Reed Hastings is banking on. It’s a future that absolutely will happen. The split was a bold move to speed all of this up (something Steve Jobs was really good at).

Qwikster

We can put Qwikster in the Museum of Internet Oddities along with Kozmo and Flooz.

A couple of problems arose with the proposed split. Many took issue with the Qwikster name. It did seem a bit odd to me, but I just filed it away as a minor annoyance. Others were upset about having to log in to two separate websites and enter billing information twice.

My main concern was the fact that my Entertainment DNA might get ripped in half. Here’s what I mean: Pandora is built upon the Music Genome concept, meaning that various musical attributes (vocals, lyrics, harmony, etc.) are “genes” that form a large genome. As users of the service, our individual taste in music influences the genome, and it in turn influences us. Amazon.com does the same thing with e-commerce and our buying history. Netflix lets us rate what we’ve watched to make the system smarter about what it suggests we watch next.

You like Mad Men? You might also like Boardwalk Empire! That’s your Entertainment DNA talking. If it gets things wrong, you tweak it. You invest time in it. You nurture it. You expect it to always remain intact.

I want to rate Shark Attack 3: Megalodon as a one-star pile of shit once, not twice. My hope was that, at the very least, the Netflix and Qwikster services would be able to talk to each other and share my viewing data through some sort of centralized account. Even though I choose to watch certain content via DVD and other content via streaming, in theory those preferences should still influence one another.

A statement by Reed Hastings appeared coded: “There is a difference between moving quickly—which Netflix has done very well for years—and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case.”

Translation: “We tried to fast-forward to a future where 100% of everything is available online, and Netflix was poised to bring that that to you. Many of you freaked out. You’ll still have your red envelopes for now, but we’re quietly preparing for that future.”

Above photo: _tar0_ via flickr

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Business, Digital

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