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What Is Hip?

By Walt Carvalho

Since this is the season of sharing, I thought I would share a story with you.

It’s about being ahead of the curve, as well as providing great value. It’s the ability of a group of musicians to provide excellence over many years, in a very unique way. It’s the story of a track record of success.

Tower of Power is an American soul and funk band originally from Oakland, California.
The bands roots are traced back forty years to the late sixties, where they also developed their unique rhythm and blues sound. They provided their listeners with a new and dynamic horn section (second to none), a funky driven rhythm duo on electric base and drums and soulful lead vocals.

In 1970 Tower of Power recorded their first album. They were then picked up by a major recording label.

In 1973 their continued success led them to produce their third of many albums. One of the hits on that album titled “Tower of Power” was the song titled “What Is Hip?”. I titled this article not only after the name of this song, but also because of what the title means to me.

It’s ironic that one of their hit songs is based on something short-lived. When you think of terms like; “hip”, “cool”, “tight” and “sick” you think of the era the label is attached to. You think of the time-link in our society.

“Hip” for this band became timeless. I always found it amazing to see them perform while watching along side people in the audience of all ages and musical genres. It was common to see people from the full spectrum of musical tastes and interests enjoying the experience of seeing these musicians perform in person.

It’s always been a treat for me to hear the ‘wall of sound’ Tower of Power’s horn section produced, to feel that funky rhythm of the base and drums, the instrumental layering of the guitar and keyboard, along with the soulful vocals of their lead singer. I guess what makes them “hip” today is the value and energy they bring to every single show.

To leave a show and hear the people of all ages and genres saying: Wow! That was great! Those guys are awesome! That is the creation of value. Value, which has led to long-term success.

Where is value on your priority list?

So thanks to social media, I would like to share one of those performances with you. Here are the sights and sounds of “Tower of Power” performing “What Is Hip?”. Who knows this might be the stepping-stone for you seeing them live on stage one day as well.

Enjoy!

Are there Craters on your Social Landscape?

By: Walt Carvalho

As the night appears with it’s stars set so far in the distance, we see the moon, flat and round. To our eyes the lunar landscape appears as a white circle, with its seas represented as gray shadowy images. We gaze, not truly seeing the roundness or the detail.

Now, if we were to use the proper tool, such as a telescope, we would be able to see it’s true overall shape and the countless craters making up its surface. Looking through the lens we would get a very different view. The natural beauty of the moon’s extraordinary craters and vast flat lands would mesmerize us. We would be able to experience the moon in a much better way. Our concept of the moon would become more defined. That is what a telescope can do.

Now, the question is; is your business being seen as that flat white image or is it seen as being well defined? There are tools for defining who and what you are and what you do.
You become out of the public focus if you are not taking advantage of the tools available today in the social marketplace. Social platforms with the skills and strategies to optimize them can give your brand clarity and focus., This comes from people spreading your word for you.

Think about that the next time you see that white circle in sky.

image: sacredmtn.com

The why imperative

by Seth Godin

Successful organizations spend a lot of time saying, "that's not what we do."

It's a requirement, because if you do everything, in every way, you're sunk. You got to where you are by standing for something, by approaching markets and situations in a certain way. Sure, Nike could make money in the short run by licensing their name to a line of wines and spirits, but that's not what they do.

"That's not what we do," is the backbone of strategy, it determines who you are and where you're going.

Except in times of change. Except when opportunities come along. Except when people in the organization forget to ask, "why?"

If the only reason you don't do something is because you never did, that's not a good reason. If the environment has changed dramatically and you are feeling pain because of it, this is a great reason to question yourself, to ask why.

The why factor is really clear online. Simon and Schuster or the Encyclopedia Britannica could have become Google (organizing the world's information) but they didn't build a search engine because that's not what they do. Struggling newspapers could have become thriving networks of long tail content, but they chose not to, because that's not what they do.

Why?

That's the key question, one that organizations large and small need to ask a lot more often now that the economy is officially playing by new rules.


Posted by Seth Godin on November 10, 2009
http://sethgodin.typepad.com

The Red Balloon

By Walt Carvalho
There are many business owners who insist that the best way to promote their business is through the process of “word of mouth”. In many ways I would say that I would agree. There is no better way to promote you than through the words of someone else.

Let’s take a look at this great system of business growth:

Lisa buys a red balloon at the market for her sister, Kate. It’s an awesome balloon. It had a very remarkable shape of a heart with many smaller hearts attached to the outside of the larger one. It was the design of a master, who could create such an illusion and still be able to fill it full of helium.

Kate loves her new balloon. She decides that she is going to tie the string, which is connected to the balloon, around her wrist and have it float above her everywhere she goes. She takes it to the dinner table for supper. She has it with her as she does her homework. Kate even has it when she watches a movie before going to bed. She had never seen a balloon as beautiful or intriguing as this one. Finally Kate ties the balloon to her bedpost. Staring at her prized possession above her, she drifts off to sleep.

The first thing that Kate sees as she awakes is the sight of that beautiful red balloon as it hovers above. She ties the string once more around her wrist, as she gets ready for school.

Kate’s mind wanders as she says good-bye to her sister Lisa at the door. She knew that her friends at school would love her balloon and would probably each want one for themselves as well.
Just then, Lisa shouted out, “Kate look up”! Kate quickly looked up in front of her house into the sky to see her magnificent red balloon floating up toward the clouds.

“I thought I tied it good enough” she whispered, as she began to cry.
Lisa, seeing this, quickly put her little sister in her car and drove to the market where she had originally bought the balloon. “Excuse me sir". Lisa says,"I can’t seem to find another balloon like the one I had bought here yesterday. Do you know where I can find another one just like it”?

“No, I’m sorry Miss". The store owner replied."That was all I had in stock". "I don’t even know the name of the balloon manufacturer who made it”.

Lisa then sadly dropped Kate off at school, as her red balloon was now completely out of sight.

What a sad story for Kate, Lisa and that balloon manufacturer. Kate could have had her balloon replaced while all of her classmates could have bought some for themselves (if they knew who manufactured it). Kate's classmates friends and families could have seen or read about these great red balloons online and so and so on.

Instead of that happening, the chain was easily broken by a simple mishap and a company not being properly connected to people

If the balloon manufacturer was connected with the proper social media tools, all of Kate’s friends could have seen the balloon online, Lisa could have easily ordered another balloon for her sister and all of them could have seen the entire collection of all the other products this manufacturer provided.

If social media tools were involved, this process could multiply quickly, but instead, this entire process came to a screeching halt.

The moral to this story is: If you are not properly connected to your customer base today with the new marketing tools that are now available, you must ask yourself one simple question: Why not?

Photo Sunny Marry

Surface Thinking

By Walt Carvalho

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it”.
Thomas Alva Edison

A great analogy you’ve probably heard of is the story of the duck on water. It goes like this: When you see a duck gliding on the surface of a pond, you think of the calm and tranquil way in which they move. If you were to see the same duck from under the surface you would see it’s webbed feet kicking like there is no tomorrow! Oh, the different ways of looking at things.

Now, there is no doubt that we are subjected to surface thoughts daily. It’s in the newspaper. It’s on the radio. It’s on the internet. It’s definitely on television. They come to us as little bits of information, delivered in tidy neat packages, which are labeled “This is all you need to know. There is no need to learn more”. Wow, how comforting is that? Since they just gave me “all I need to know” I guess I can now move on to the next item on their list!

Let’s take a look at some surface talk in action.

“That noisy, smelly contraption well never replace my reliable horse and buggy”- the automobile

“If man was meant to fly, he would have been born with wings”. – the airplane

“No one will pay to go to a professional football game when we have college games already”. – the launch of Pro Football

“All they do on it is tell each other what they had for lunch” - Twitter

Get the Picture?

Photo Mike Moreno

Inside or Outside the Box

By Walt Carvalho

Thinking “outside the box” is one term which has gone through many of staff meetings recently. It is referring to the ability to conceive and create beyond the realm of ordinary thought. Hmmm, interesting!

Well, lets’ take a look at “Inside the box” thinking. To think entirely in the box you must remain in the world of the known, using the systems and approaches of the past. Unfortunately, in doing so you usually do what has been done before. It is the substitution of innovation for the safety of experience. You remain in the common marketplace as a common thinker. You feel very safe in being ordinary but in realty you are constantly falling behind.

Creativity and innovation are the benchmarks of success in this new economy!

The social media landscape enables new creative ways to reach markets through exciting strategic approaches. Unlike the broadcast media’s television, radio, newspaper and magazine outlets, the new availability of social marketing tools have allowed communities to expand brand awareness with the power of digital word of mouth. In this process the receiver of the message also becomes the communicator.

It is through these properly planned strategies that social tools come to life as a viable marketing asset.

Is your view of the box from the inside looking out or the outside looking ahead?

Photo Gneborg

Action Through Inspiration

By Walt Carvalho

Inspiration is one of the ingredients that all great accomplishments seem to have in common.
Michelangelo was inspired to produce so many exquisite paintings and sculptures throughout his life. Although much of his work was contracted, he seemed to always exceed expectations with his burning desire to reach further in his quest of perfection.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were inspired to be the first to create a flying machine. They had competition, as other people around the world tested their own ideas in ways to make men fly. The Wright Brothers flew as some said it was impossible, it could not be done. The great invention of human flight came to us from two inspired brothers in a bicycle repair shop!

Tiger Woods has been inspired almost his entire life to be much better on a daily basis. He never seems to settle for reaching a destination in golf. Tiger Woods is always taking steps toward his next summit. He is inspired by the love and guidance of his parents and his personal drive in the process of improvement.

What inspires you in today’s marketplace? Are you simply satisfied with what you’ve done or are you like Michelangelo, always looking to exceed expectations?

The Wright Brothers had a bicycle repair shop. You have your office. The Wright Brothers had wrenches, pliers and screws. You have so many social media tools available today to help your business grow and prosper, so why not take advantage of them and create your own flying machine?

Are you content with status quo or are you like Tiger Woods, never settling, always reaching for that next level?

Merriam-Webster defines inspiration as: “the action or power of moving the intellect or emotions”. Your tools are ready and in place. All that is needed is your action.

Cultivating Creativity Through Imagination

By Walt Carvalho

I enjoy reading. I always have. While growing up I would be involved in the regular activities along with the other kids but I also always looked forward to the trip we would make to the local library.

Through the years I’ve read many books. I can remember reading about sports legends, famous people, mystical distant lands, just to name a few. It always presented worlds to me through the power of the written word.

As I got older the reading became more serious. It gave me more information on topics of interest. It gave me opportunities of growth and understanding. It helped me build as well as repair. It gave me tools.

The online social environment we share today, that is accessible through digital platforms, provides us with great amounts of content. There are new authors sprouting up every minute with stories to tell and experiences to share. It’s nice to find an author, either in book or online form, who is able to spark ones imagination.

Through the practice of imagining we cultivate creativity. As we cultivate creativity we begin to open the door of fresh ideas and having the power to bring to life things that are new. Give your imagination a workout everyday. Find whatever it is that makes it come to life. Use it as a great gift.

There are many social tools available online for us today. The magic really happens when those tools are mixed with creativity and imagination.

The Circa 1992 Phone Tree

By Walt Carvalho

Chris the local little league coach has just gotten a call from the league president. Apparently a tree had fallen because of high winds the night before. The sixty two foot sycamore was lying across Chris’s opponents baseball field. It is now 8:22am. Chris now has a problem. He is scheduled to meet his team for their playoff game fifty two miles from home at 10:00am to meet and warm-up. The first pitch is scheduled for 10:45am.

Now Chris is realizing that the clock is ticking. To make a growing problem even worse the president notifies him that due to schedule restraints the game time cannot change. The final piece to this puzzle is a new game location. It is a ballpark Chris has never been to before, twelve miles further than the original field and it’s in a different town.

Special problems require special solutions! He needed to notify his entire team quickly before they left home. Chris goes quickly to his handy notebook and retrieves the home phone number for his team mom Sarah. She is the leader of The Phone Tree! The phone tree system was used mainly to reduce the time of one person on the phone calling everyone. Instead, it was created like a chain. The first person (Sarah) would call two people and they would call their two people and so on, till everyone got the message. Good in theory, not always in practice.

You see, not everyone had cell phones in 1992. Phone calls were generally made on landlines. If someone on the chain was not home to answer the call they were generally left uninformed. It still created time-consuming work to confirm who got the message and who didn’t. Communication without a cell phone was then lost once they left home. Is there any doubt as to the problems that could come out of such an antiquated system? As the number of participants grew in this format the problems increased.

So the question today is; Why then is it that with all that is available to us in the form of communication, many of us still think of things with a phone tree mentality? Why don’t some of us begin taking advantage of all the possibilities to not only link better to each other, but to also share and grow? Today Coach Chris and Team Mom Sarah could have done a lot more in a lot less time.

What are you missing by living with a phone tree mentality?

Social Media: Breaking the Sleep Cycle

By Walt Carvalho

Let’s talk habits. Good habits. Bad habits. We all have them, some more than others.

Habits are protected and maintained. I’m sure you heard this or something similar:
“I always eat dinner at 6pm sharp!” or “It’s Happy Hour!” or “I need that cup of coffee first thing in the morning!”

Maybe you or someone you know will do the following: Get to work and find many parking spaces available but will still park in the same one you have every day for the last seven years!

It’s time for dinner and you sit in the same chair at your dining room table as you’ve done for countless dinners before!

You are free to go for a walk anywhere you wish but you choose the same route you have walked many times before. Yes my friends that is us being habitual.

We even repeat greetings and responses such as “Hi. How are you?” Answer: “I am fine, and you?”
Household chores have become no different “I always cut the front lawn before I cut the back!”
The lists go on and on and on. Filling our precious life with habits.

We all have habits. They are the places we can go to sleep. It’s where we can turn our minds off for a little while and just cruise on autopilot. It’s where creativity, zest and growth momentarily stop. It’s a place of in-between. It’s a place that protects us from change. It is that place where repetition is our master.

Our social media landscape has developed, through recent years, as a source of creative thinking and exchange. Many of the old habits of doing business are finding it harder and harder to continue on its same road. Decisions to grow are being made by some, while the rejection of letting go to old habits is the plan for others. Awakening from sleep and the ability to grow is what matters most in these times.

Those who are awake will go out and harvest while the others sleep.

Social Media vs. The Television Time-Out

By Walt Carvalho

Is it my imagination or is there disconnect between posted air times and posted recording times in the television world today?

Have you noticed a recent trend of posting the programs start time and ending to television programming? It seems, for some unexplainable reason that if you record a show or game lately the very end of the program is never recorded. Hmmm. Interesting isn’t it? Could it be that it is our punishment for not sitting through the entire process live and in HD? Could it be that television is starting to feel the impact of the social media experiences in all of our lives? Can it be that the television broadcast foundation is being diminished?

Someone should let our broadcast friends know that you can’t grow an audience with punishment and take-aways.

You grow an audience with value and trust. We now speak to each other in our world today. There are fewer people today who want to be just talked at!

The Next 60 Years in Advertising

Another great presentation from Paul Isakson

Social Media: It's Not What You Say That Matters

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

http://wearesocial.net/blog/2009/09/matters/

Here We Go Again!

By Walt Carvalho

You know, in taking the time (which is always a pleasure) to talk with people, some very interesting patterns have begun to surface. There seems to be a well-defined line being drawn in the sand today, a very clear launching point, a new beginning.

There are those who look at what there is to lose, while there are others who see the opportunities laid before them and reach yet further to attain their goals. There are those who seem to rise in times like this and those that run for cover. There are companies, which thrive in these conditions, which we all face. For instance does a company like Nike only ask; how much will it cost? Or do they also ask; what can it do for us? We are talking vision! Does a business like Apple ask; how much should we cut back? Or do they ask; what is our next great creation? We are talking innovation! The list goes on and on of companies like these two examples, pushing forward while others hold back and wait!

So what is the pattern here? Well I guess that line in the sand is like dividing two runners. One runs to, while the other runs from.

So here we go again!
Yes there was a time even tougher than today. The Great Depression was the hardest of times for many. As we step back to view this catastrophe, we come to realize one extraordinary fact. The years following till now were some of the most remarkable years ever! The years following the Depression were filled with innovation beyond people’s wildest dreams. We had amazing discoveries in medicine, science and engineering. We traveled through space and even landed men on the moon. We explored the depths of our oceans, while flight took us around the world.

Things came and went. It seems like over time everything got smaller yet was able to accomplish the same task if not even better than it did before. We have witnessed an amazing transformation since the Depression.

So now, as we look at the changes to our landscape in how we live, work and communicate we find information is everywhere. We have discovered the most powerful communication structure ever! Our media is no longer having us only talked at. It is now a time we all talk to each other as well.

So here we go again!
It’s time for innovation, discovery and the creation of many new and exciting new ways of doing things. It’s time to be that runner that runs towards his dreams not the runner who runs in fear!

Standing Out

Seth Godin

Filmed Feb. 2003; Posted Apr. 2007

Crisis creates opportunity

Fortune's Geoff Colvin says economic downturns shake up the competitive order.

Social Media Revolution

by Robin Grant

"Is Social Media a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?"

The Scientific Method

In most interactions, we take a defensive posture. We try to defend the brand, or our turf or our job. The problem with defense is that it's static. The best way to get smarter, to embrace and to cause change and to triumph in times of market turmoil is to adopt the scientific method.

Ask yourself, "what do I believe that's wrong? How can I change the way I do things? What works? What doesn't?"

If you enter a conversation looking for something to test, measure and ultimately change, it's likely you'll find it. That change makes you more competitive, and you continue to cycle past your competitors. On the other hand, if you enter a conversation concerned about maintaining the status quo, it's likely that this is exactly what you're going to do.

Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward.


Posted by Seth Godin on August 11, 2009

The Ethics Imperative in Social Media

by Chris Brogan

Ethics in the World of Social Media and New Marketing

First, my simple measure of what is ethical and what is not, as told to me by a professor in the late 1990s: “If you don’t want to talk about it with your family at the dinner table, and you don’t want to read about it on the front page of the Boston Globe, it’s not ethical.” Seems easy to me. (Essentially, ethics are our guideline of what we consider right and wrong.)

In public relations and marketing, the primary goal is that those acting as an agent for an organization, their professional communicators, move the needle in some way. In PR, that might be press mentions, or blog posts, or publicity through speaking at conferences. In marketing, the projects can be more complex, or more indirect, but all relate to getting some other lever or number somewhere to move. There are nuanced and personable ways to do this, and then there are heavy-handed, let’s just call them SPAMMY, ways to do this.

You could do that. You could spam 10,000 people to get 100 positive results to show your client. But, as Todd Defren pointed out in the class, in the old days, those people used to have no voice, no real recourse that mattered or could be seen. Today? Everyone can blog. Everyone can put the word out that your organization is spamming them. Not only would it be less ethical to attempt to gain customers this way; it would be bad business.

Here’s the thing: Google remembers everything. And by “Google,” technically I mean the web at large (by which, I still mean Google, don’t I?). So, by extension, pretty much ALL business you do in social media can be “remembered” by anyone interested in what you’re doing, and where you’ve been, and what comes next. This, by the way, features heavily in Trust Agents, my forthcoming book with Julien Smith, but that’s a tangent for another time.

In a world where the entire space around you “remembers” your choices and your actions, do you have much in the way of an alternative but to operate ethically?

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-ethics-imperative-in-social-media/

Social Media Does Increase Revenues $$

So, here’s the big one, does spending on social media really pay back? A fresh MBA graduate from MIT, Niki Gomez, passing through London and We Are Social on her way to Mumbai, gives her views.

At last, a study quantifies what many of us felt must be true, that social media does translate into increased sales. As Violette mentioned last week, a study by Wetpaint and Charlene Li’s Altimeter Group shows an extremely strong correlation between engaging in different social media and earning higher revenues. The study looks at the engagement of top 100 brands from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands report and ranks them from 1 to 127, based on how they use social media channels. It finds that the top brands with their rankings in brackets are:

Starbucks (127)
Dell (123)
eBay (115)
Google (105)
Microsoft (103)
Thomson Reuters (101)
Nike (100)
Amazon (88)
SAP (86)
Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)
The most engaged brands experienced revenue growth in 2008 of 18% whilst the least engaged brands experienced losses of negative 6% over the same period.

Also interesting is that only arguably half of these are internet companies. The study categorizes the brands, a la Malcolm Gladwell, into mavens, those heavily engaging in 7 or more channels, such as Starbucks and Dell; butterflies, such as American Express and Hyundai who engage with seven channels but with less engagement; selectives who engage in six or less but do some on a deep level such as H&M and Philips; wallflowers like BP and McDonalds who engage with six or less but with a light touch. My question was whether social media pays off because of lower marketing spend, as there is a shift from spending on more traditional channels. However it seems, revenues, actual sales are up on previous years, even boom times!

Their findings conclude that it is not how many social media channels you use, but how deep that engagement is: so being social pays, but it’s the quality rather than quantity of these conversations that seems to triumph yet again. So, please think before you tweet… a good piece of advice for brands and individuals alike.

http://wearesocial.net/

Death spiral!

Posted by Seth Godin on July 22, 2009

You've probably seen it. The fish monger sees a decline in business, so they have less money to spend on upkeep and inventory, so they keep the fish a bit longer and don't clean up as often, so of course, business declines and then they have even less money... Eventually, you have an empty, smelly fish store that's out of business.

The doctor has fewer patients so he doesn't invest as much in training or staff and so some other patients choose to leave which means that there are even fewer patients...

The newspaper has fewer advertisers, so they can't invest as much in running stories, so people stop reading it, which means advertisers have less reason to advertise which leaves less money for stories...

As Tom Peters says, "You can't shrink your way to greatness," and yet that's what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don't. This isn't a dip, it's a cul de sac. It's over.

Right this minute, you still have some cash, some customers, some momentum... Instead of squandering it in a long, slow, death spiral, do something else. Buy a new platform. Move. Find new products for the customers that still trust you.

Change is a bear, but it's better than death.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Communications Catalyst

David Mullen on PR, Integrated Communications and Social Media

Are you using social media to expand your network and connect with new people? Maybe you’d like to increase the opportunities for your company to interact with customers. If you’re looking for ways to build your presence or your company’s presence online, keep reading.

The idea for this post came from my new friend Arik Hanson, who I’ve been getting to know recently. Arik asked me what I’ve done to start building a broader network of contacts and relationships with some incredibly smart, amazingly talented marketing/PR/social media folks.

So here’s what I did to get immersed in social media tools and build what Arik at least thinks is the start of a decent online presence. These tips can be used for individuals like yourself or for brands like your employer. I’m not claiming they are groundbreaking, but this is what I’ve found helpful.

1. Be Human - For the love of all that’s good, be yourself. People don’t want to engage with robots. They want to connect with other humans. Toss some [appropriate] personal stuff in your interactions to complement all the professional talk. On one of my first blog posts, Chris Brogan wisely commented, “I’m still a person when I’m at work.” In other words, don’t check your personality at the door.

2. Add Value - There are lots of ways to provide value to your online connections. Share great industry news stories and funny videos. Point them to other smart people with whom you think they should connect. Have a point of view on issues or trends and let them know about it. If you work for Kraft, share a great recipe daily or links to nutrition news.

3. It’s Not About You. Seriously, it’s not about you or your personal brand. It’s about everyone else. Shine the spotlight on others. Celebrate their successes. Brag about them to your connections. Use social media networks to engage your customers in ways that make them feel like the most important people on the planet. When you are a champion for others, an interesting thing happens. Others become a champion for you.

4. Engage and Interact. If you write a blog, follow up with readers by commenting on their comments. Email those who comment and thank them for their time and insights. If you’re on a social media platform, reach out and strike up conversations with people. If you’re a business, start conversations with your customers. Ask them what you could do better. Thank them for their business.

5. Don’t Broadcast. Shannon Paul would say “don’t be THAT guy.” If you or your company sets up social media outposts to broadcast messages, you won’t have much success. Your corporate blog should NOT be chock full of posts about new products and company news. You shouldn’t set up automatic direct messages on Twitter that basically say, “hey! click my junk and subscribe to everything I’m doing!” That turns people off immediately.

6. Participate Consistently. I believe consistency is key. Let’s take Arik for example. While we started chatting through Twitter only about a month ago, I not only know his name, but I also can spell it despite its unique spelling. That’s because he takes time to participate consistently and engage me regularly. The result is that he was top-of-mind for me when I wanted to point my Twitter connections to a great new person to follow. The same holds true for employees who participate in social media for their brands. Participating consistently builds a stronger online reputation for your company and boosts your presence within social media circles.

7. Don’t Focus on A-Listers. You should learn from the A-Listers by reading their blogs and following them on Twitter or YouTube. But I didn’t and still don’t spend a lot of time or effort trying to engage them online. If we’re ever in the same room, you can bet I will introduce myself. But these folks have so many people vying for their attention that they can be spread a bit too thin. I focused on creating relationships with people who were up-and-comers. Your company may want to target the biggest mom blogs on the Web. That’s fine. But I’d recommend also targeting middle-of-the-pack and new bloggers who are creating great content. It’s easier to engage them and there’s a good chance their readership will grow if they’re producing good stuff.

8. Don’t Sweat the Numbers. Spend your time focused on the content you’re producing, not the number of blog visitors or Twitter followers you have today. By participating consistently and adding value, more people will find you and begin connecting with you. The numbers will come if you’re doing the other stuff well.

9. It’s a Small World. Remember that when you’re about to write a nasty comment or blog post or Tweet or Facebook status update. Your reputation on your blog will follow you to Twitter and wherever else you hang your online hat. Not to mention the fact that Google’s spiders will index that moment of rudeness and, with your luck, it will probably be on the first page of results from a Google search of your name. As my three-year-old daughter would say, “that’s nawt good!”

10. Experiment. When you do share links to your latest blog posts on Twitter, alternate the times of day you tweet it and note which times you received the most traffic. That may give you some insight into when the majority of your followers are online and shape what time you send future tweets on behalf of yourself or your company. Use the Questions & Answers section of LinkedIn to extend the conversation of your latest blog post and see if it drives any traffic to your blog. I love experimenting in these ways and I use what I learn for both myself and my clients.

What is missing? What have you done that’s really helped build your online presence or that of your clients? Please share them with the rest of us in the comments.

http://www.davidwmullen.com/2009/01/07/10-tips-to-build-a-solid-online-presence/

Let the audience talk to each other

We are social



In a world where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap. In a world of media where the former audience are now increasingly full participants. In that world, media is less and less often about crafting a single message to be consumed by individuals and is more and more often a way of creating an environment for convening and supporting groups. And the choice we face, and I mean anybody who has a message they want to have heard anywhere in the world, isn’t whether that’s the media environment we want to operate in - that’s the media environment we’ve got. The question we all face now is how do we make the best use of this medium, even though it means changing the way we’ve always done it.

http://www.ted.com/
http://wearesocial.net/

Malcolm is wrong

By Seth Godin

I've never written those three words before, but he's never disagreed with Chris Anderson before, so there you go.

Free is the name of Chris's new book, and it's going to be wildly misunderstood and widely argued about.

The first argument that makes no sense is, "should we want free to be the future?"

Who cares if we want it? It is.

The second argument that makes no sense is, "how will this new business model support the world as we know it today?"

Who cares if it does? It is. It's happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I'm sorry if that's inconvenient, but it's true.

As I see 'free', there are two forces at work:

In an attention economy (like this one), marketers struggle for attention and if you don't have it, you lose. Free is a relatively cheap way to get attention (both at the start and then through viral techniques).

Second, in a digital economy with lots of players and lower barriers to entry, it's quite natural that the price will be lowered until it meets the incremental cost of making one more unit. If a brand can gain share by charging less, a rational player will.

Conde Nast (publisher of the Wired (Chris's magazine) and yes, the New Yorker (Malcolm's magazine)), is going to go out of business long before you get sick, never mind die. So will newspapers printed on paper. They're going to disappear before you do. I'm not wishing for this to happen, but by refusing to build new digital assets that matter, traditional publishers are forfeiting their future.

Magazines and newspapers were perfect businesses for a moment of time, but they wouldn't have worked in 1784, and they're not going to work very soon in the future either.

We're always going to need writers, but the business model of their platform is going to change.

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can't get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. We'll always be willing to pay for souvenirs of news, as well, things to go on a shelf or badges of honor to share.

People will not pay for by-the-book rewrites of news that belongs to all of us. People will not pay for yesterday's news, driven to our house, delivered a day late, static, without connection or comments or relevance. Why should we? A good book review on Amazon is more reliable and easier to find than a paid-for professional review that used to run in your local newspaper, isn't it?

Like all dying industries, the old perfect businesses will whine, criticize, demonize and most of all, lobby for relief. It won't work. The big reason is simple:

In a world of free, everyone can play.

This is huge. When there are thousands of people writing about something, many will be willing to do it for free (like poets) and some of them might even be really good (like some poets). There is no poetry shortage.

The reason that we needed paid contributors before was that there was only economic room for a few magazines, a few TV channels, a few pottery stores, a few of everything. In world where there is room for anyone to present their work, anyone will present their work. Editors become ever more powerful and valued, while the need for attention grows so acute that free may even be considered expensive.

Of course, it's ironic that sometimes people pay money for my books (I view them as souvenirs of content you could get less conveniently and less organized for free online if you chose to). And it's ironic that I read Malcolm's review for free. And ironic that you can read Chris's arguments the most cogently by paying for them. [Update: you can chime in here and see what's being said around the web as well.]

Neatness is for historians. For a long time, all the markets for attention-based goods are going to be messy, which means that there are going to be huge opportunities for people (like you?) able to get that most precisous asset (our attention) for free. At least for a while.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/malcolm-is-wrong.html

Getting social: Four easy tips

So you want your employees to be your social-media advocates?
It's surprising more companies don't do this, noted Josh Bernoff, co-author of Groundswell and senior VP-idea development at Forrester Research, in an e-mail interview. "Employees speak for the company often at conferences, on sales calls and the like," he said. "Companies need to extend their policies to social media, but the principles are the same."

Whether you have a structured program like Smokey Bones or are just facing the reality that your employees are out there -- and talking about you -- here are a few pointers.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW. This is a tip cribbed from Intel's employee social-media guidelines. The company encourages full-timers and contractors to have a social-media presence but urges them to "stick to your area of expertise and provide unique, individual perspectives on what's going on at Intel and in the world."

BE HUMAN. If a big reason for social communication is to "humanize" a brand, for goodness sakes don't babble on in marketing speak and inside lingo. Encourage employees to speak in first person and be real.



KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRANSPARENCY AND ANGST. Everything an employee says could be heard by a customer, including the last one. So remember, being transparent and authentic doesn't mean they have to say everything on their mind. It's the difference between 'It's so hot outside," or "Do you think we should paint?" and "I hated those guys who just ordered lemonade," said Terry Dry, president of Fanscape, a Los Angeles-based digital word-of-mouth marketing agency.

BUILD AN ARMY. Make it part of people's jobs, said Forrester's Mr. Bernoff. "It's great for somebody to have a job as a tweeter. [It's] much better if tweeting, Facebook, blogging, etc. is part of lots of employees' jobs."

-- Emily York and Abbey Klaassen

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=137595

photo/ gageyoung.com

Simple Truth

by Robin Grant

If we actually stopped and listened to what consumers were saying instead of just muscling our way into the conversation, we would find that the vast majority of people promote brands to each other based on simple, rational, tangible truths about the product or service. This isn’t surprising, people find big abstract brand ideas almost impossible to articulate and, even if they could, would never admit to their peers that that were the reason they made a purchase.

Now, it is proven beyond reasonable doubt that emotion plays a huge role in individual brand decisions. But this is not the way people talk to each other about brands and if this is what we’re trying to unlock, we have to recognise this.

http://wearesocial.net/

The paradox of the middle of the market

By Seth Godin

The middle of the market is the juicy part, where profit meets scale.

The paradox is that it's almost impossible to make a product or service for this segment, because they want the tried, the true and the boring.

A friend writes a blog and books for this market. They need his writing. He delivers a lot of value. And yet, it's going to take years (if ever) before he reaches them. That's because this market doesn't seek out new ideas, doesn't leave comments on blogs, doesn't spend a lot of time urging others to check out this new thing. He's spending all his focus on this market, and they're not repaying his focus with their attention.

The middle of the market is the home of Sinatra, Diamond, and Streisand. There's an endless list of others that would like to break in, but it rarely happens. The leading edge of the market is a lot smaller, but far easier to cater to, because those folks are looking and listening and talking. The middle will catch up, eventually, but that doesn't mean you have to bet on them.

In my post yesterday, I talked about the temptation to merely pander to the geeks. It's not that difficult to write a blog, for example, that repeatedly shows up on Digg or Reddit. The thing is, this audience is fickle and they don't often convert into paying customers or long-term fans. It's not that difficult to be haute couture, to be fashionable, cutting edge or fickle. What's difficult is figuring out how to make it pay.

I'm not talking about compromising or dumbing down your product. A very hot hot sauce is remarkable. A sort of hot one is boring, and no one, not even the geeks will talk about it. I'm talking about designing products that are simultaneously remarkable and palatable to people in the middle of the market.

The middle of the market is a paradox because of the inherent contradiction between the ease of reaching the nerds and the geeks and the need to reach the middle. The solution, if there is one, is to enter a market to the enthusiastic cheers of those in search of the new, but to build a product/service that appeals to those in the middle. After the initial wave of enthusiasm, you hunker down and ignore those that first embraced you, obsessing instead on the needs and networks of the middle. It's a difficult balancing act, but it's the only one that works.

Ultimately, you end up disappointing the hard core that first found you, but because of their initial enthusiasm (and more important, because you designed your work for the masses in the first place), your product crosses the chasm and reaches a larger group. The formula starts with a service or product that's purple enough to spread, but not so hyper-fashionable that it merely entertains the insiders.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/the-paradox-of-the-middle-of-the-market.html

Ya Gotta Have (Real) Friends

By TONY WOODLIEF

My 4-year-old son, Isaac, is in his bedroom, putting on a shirt. He talks to himself as he harasses the buttons into their holes. "Everybody loves me," he says. "I love me. I don't know who doesn't love me. Nobody doesn't love me." My little aspiring pop star/cult leader comes to his logical conclusion: "All love me."

Being loved by everyone sounds wonderful, and perhaps it's possible when one's universe of friends is as small as Isaac's. I once heard him run down the list, naming his brothers, his parents, his friends. This seemed to give him a particular form of pleasure, to say a name and announce that he is loved by that person. What Isaac hasn't learned is that there are gradations of friends, and different kinds of love, and cycles to life. I don't know many adults who can, like Isaac, list without hesitation or doubt the people who genuinely love them.

It's a tempting exercise in narcissism nonetheless, and suitable for our day. Now may be a better time than ever to think about friendship, because we can maintain some semblance of it with more people than ever before. Isaac is far more likeable than I, yet on paper I dominate -- he can go through his entire friend list before his Cheerios get soggy, while I have 298 friends on Facebook alone. But while Isaac can say with confidence that everyone in his little circle loves him, I'm not sure if everyone in my huge circle even likes me. What's worse, I don't know if I care. Two-hundred ninety-eight genuine friendships sounds exhausting.

Friendship seems to be the key, however, to a longer, happier life. Recently The Atlantic published a fascinating story by Joshua Wolf Shenk about Harvard's Grant Study, which in 1937 began following 268 undergraduates through the intimate details of their lives. Some of the men drank themselves to death and others became prosperous and powerful. Some had loving marriages, others made multiple women unhappy. While no formula seems to emerge from these accounts, the study's longtime head, George Vaillant, claims love is the most essential ingredient. David Brooks at the New York Times gives it a more clinical-sounding summation: "Relationships are the key to happiness."
Of course it's not the quantity of relationships that matters, or else Isaac and I would find our outlooks reversed. There's the quality of friendship to be considered, something social network sites neglect. In fact, maybe a high number of relationships indicates shallow friendships. Think about it: We acquire friends through our experiences -- where we live, go to school and work. We have more opportunities to make friends the broader these experiences. But the more far-flung our adventures, the less time we have to grow roots in one place and develop intimate bonds.

That's an appealing theory, but we all know of people who defy it. In "The Girls From Ames," for example, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow offers a heart-lifting account of 11 women who became friends as children in Ames, Iowa, and have remained close even as their lives carry them through marriages, divorces, business success, unemployment, childrearing, illnesses and the deaths of loved ones -- all of it spread across multiple cities. Mr. Zaslow's exploration of research into friendship indicates that women are more likely than men to sustain such intimacy. "Women talk," writes Mr. Zaslow. "Men do things together." With modern communication devices women can do more talking than ever, no matter where they live or how busy their lives become. When male friends move away or start a family, however, the opportunities for doing things together -- the dominant expression of their friendship -- diminish.

Given the research indicating how important friendships are to health (Mr. Zaslow cites one study where women with the most friends lived 22% longer than those with the fewest number), perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that women tend to outlast men. And if Digby Anderson, author of "Losing Friends," is to be believed, we'll need medical improvements to carry a greater burden, because friendship and its social benefits are on the wane, done in partly by a left-wing emphasis on egalitarianism over loyalty, and a right-wing elevation of the nuclear family. Valuable same-sex friendship institutions (Elks clubs and the like) and norms have deteriorated, he argues, especially among men. While men are hard-wired to live out friendship through shared activities, legal and social pressures render them less able to do so.

We needn't rely on the research; we can surmise that friendship is essential to life by the myriad ways we tailor the word friend to our individual wants: work friend, church friend, drinking friend, workout friend, friend with benefits. We are less than we were meant to be, it seems, without friends. Wendell Berry captures this idea: "By ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity." In "Friendship: An Exposé," Joseph Epstein is more blunt: "Friends can be an immense complication, a huge burden, a royal pain in the arse. . . ." Yet, he writes, "without friendship, make no mistake about it, we are all lost."

We assemble relationships because we need them, but many of us -- particularly men -- shrink from intimacy, generating the modern dilemma of dense social networks afflicted with loneliness. Allan Bloom indicates this in "Love and Friendship": "Isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our time." He decried the word "relationship" as "pallid" and "pseudoscientific," itself an obstacle to genuine intimacy.

My 298 Facebook friends aren't the ones who remember our dead daughter's birthday or leave flowers at her grave. Nor among them is the pastor who baptized each of our children and waged a personal holy war to keep our marriage from crumbling years ago. We have these deeper friendships because we've tried to build a life in one place. They sprang up because the stuff of life happened to this cluster of us living near one another, and much of it was too joyous or heartbreaking not to share with someone. If friendship is the key to happiness, then maybe this is the key to friendship, to be enmeshed -- not just tangentially or voyeuristically, but physically -- in the lives of others. That can be hard to swallow in a culture that prizes individualism, mobility and privacy.

And perhaps that is why Isaac is so confident in his affections, because the boy isn't self-absorbed enough yet to value individualism as an end. His idea of mobility is to ride his bike without training wheels, and he hasn't -- trust me on this -- the first inkling of what privacy means. He doesn't have a great many friends, this child. But he loves everyone he knows, and I'm pretty sure they love him. Would that we were all so lucky.

Mr. Woodlief's memoir, "Somewhere More Holy," will be published by Zondervan in 2010.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W13

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124476939261008701.html

Behance Gives Creatives a New Approach to Business

The Behance Research Team is led by Scott Belsky, founder of Behance LLC in New York City. Scott and the Behance crew have been studying exceptionally productive people and teams working in the creative fields. Behance has been documenting the methods and resources that productive creative professionals use to make ideas happen.

Behance's blog has been humming since January of 2007, and has been busy around the blogosphere. They've been featured on MSNBC, Sirius Radio, and blogs including LifeDev, LifeHacker, CoolHunting, Daily Candy, and many others.

As if doing some exceptional blogging wasn't enough, Behance has also launched a product line that is featured in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art stores.

The Behance team is made up of designers, developers, product designers, and researchers. Scott Belsky, Behance's founder, previously worked in Goldman Sachs' Pine Street team, an initiative for leadership development and organizational improvement. Scott has spent almost five years studying the creative professional community. He graduated Cornell University and holds 50% of an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Here's a fun little fact: The languages spoken natively in the Behance office include Spanish, French, English, and PHP.


http://liferemix.net/blogs/behance

It was a simple proposition: Get a job at Best Buy.

A few months ago at the 4A’s, Tom Carroll challenged planners to get out there and get their hands dirty. Just recently, Scott Stanner from TBWA\Chiat\Day in LA did just that for our Pioneer client.

He became a part-time employee at the infamous American electronic superstore, Best Buy.

He tells us his story:

It was a simple proposition: Get a job at Best Buy.


The objective was to give the Pioneer team insight into the culture surrounding the Brand’s largest sales channel. Scott called it: Project Blue Shirt (because all Best Buy employees must wear blue shirts). Here’s what he focused on:

- How Pioneer was perceived in the retail environment and how their products were sold on the floor
- Ways Pioneer could influence the retail environment
- The lifestyles and behaviors of flat panel shoppers
- The lifestyles and behaviors of Best Buy sales associates
- The typical consumer mindset at purchase

We needed to know more about what really goes on in the retail environment. Conventional account planning would consist
of interviewing Best Buy sales associates, perhaps chatting with consumers as they enter, or conducting focus groups.
All of that can be incredibly tedious and monotonous. So, Scott decided to work in the home theater department at Best Buy
for a month and document the experience. This wasn’t "work in Taco Bell for a day," it was palpable and concrete. Scott
got to witness the sights, sounds and smells of the Best Buy floor over an extended period of time. Here is what Scott said about his experience: “From the first orientation/team meeting I was called in at 7:30 a.m. on a Sunday, I knew I was in for a one-of-a-kind experience. After some initial hazing – including being called up in front of the entire store to act out the song 'YMCA' by the Village People – I was able to settle in and get a deep look inside the culture of the employees and the typical consumer moods and anxiety levels as they shopped for a flat panel TV.

"As the job progressed, I injected myself into the employee culture and cultivated relationships with the managers, fellow sales associates, warehouse workers and security guards. The internal culture was well defined and vibrant. Employees buy into the Best Buy brand – a positive atmosphere where employees are friends, you can let your personality hang out, and you’re recognized for your enthusiasm. Individual store pride is almost collegiate in its intensity.

"The impact of Best Buy on American culture is pretty remarkable. From the 40-Year-Old Virgin to the wealth of videos on YouTube, Best Buy represents a unique gathering place that can bring out the best and worst in people. I was exposed to the full gamut: harsh, frustrated and exasperated people as well as genuinely nice, patient shoppers. "But this is only a snippet of the experience. I also suffered a bit of identity loss, an increase in alcohol intake and a permanent aversion to the Village People. But I’d do it again."

Thank you, Scott, for sharing this story.
All too often we get stuck in our own world, never finding time to discover anyone else’s – most importantly, our audience's.

http://www.tbwa.com/content/pdf_store/7/TBWA__Thursday_by_JMD_1969_344.pdf

Information is Currency

New Wealth
May 14th, 2009 by mikekarnj

According to Wikipedia, “wealth is an abundance of valuable material possessions or resources. ‘Wealth’ refers to some accumulation of resources, whether abundant or not. ‘Richness’ refers to an abundance of such resources. A wealthy (or rich) individual, community, or nation thus has more resources than a poor one. Richness can also refer to at least basic needs being met with abundance widely shared.”

So, in the old economy, wealth was determined by how much money you have, your family name, your school, etc. Most of the things you’ve seen in high society or the upper class. The problem with this definition of wealth is that it’s purely destructive. When a person is motivated by the pursuit of profit, he or she will start making decisions outside the normal realm of morals and ethics.

If you’ve seen the film, The Corporation, they reveal that “a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.” Symptoms include the “callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.” Pretty scary huh? Enron, Worldcom, sweatshops, and Madoff are great examples of this psychopath behavior and the consequences that result from it.



What I’ve noticed is this notion and concept of “new wealth.” Within our generation, it doesn’t matter how much money you make or how “wealthy” you are through monetary means. With the collapse of the financial system (from psychopathic investment bankers) to the numerous corporations filing for bankruptcy, we’ve seen what “business and wealth” will cause individuals to do.

The currency around “new wealth” revolves around your creativity, innovation, cross-displinary networks, and what you’ve actually done to make this world a better place. These are the people that are “rich” in my books. Not the investment bankers on wall street leveraging more buyouts with inflated money that doesn’t actually exist to make an extra buck.

As we move into this conceptual age, the new currency should revolve around creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and not on making billions at the expense of others. I’m just glad that the majority of investment bankers have finally moved out of Manhattan because the “wealthy” creative folks are finally moving back in.

—–
Michael is the Co-Founder of All Day Buffet. You can follow his updates by following him on Twitter.

http://www.alldaybuffet.org/2009/05/14/new-wealth/#more-2258

How might we design a participatory system?

Those who have stuck with me all week, know that I believe that participation is key to the next big wave of innovation in business and society. Whether it is in the fundamentals of how we think about wealth or the economy, how we parse the minutiae of individual transactions, or how we evolve our most important social systems such as health care, I believe that the interconnectedness of our information society makes this shift inevitable and highly desirable.

The question that I inevitably ask as a designer is how we design these kinds of participatory systems?

The first and most obvious response to this question is that it really is all about we, not I. In other words, corporations and their designers cannot presume to conceive of, design and engineer complete systems and role them out to the enthusiastic applause of the masses. The best examples of current participatory systems included a significant amount of “user” participation in the design process itself. Whether it is Facebook or Apple, the richness and variety of their offerings are created by untold developers, not employed by the host brand, who have created solutions never imagined by the original architects of the platform.

But there are other design principles that must be considered here. First, and foremost, these systems need to be human-centered. Nobody will participate in a system that does not serve his or her needs, and hence those involved in design, whether inside or outside conventional organizations, must master the skills of human centered design thinking.

Additionally, these systems should be fractal. By this I mean they must work at both the small and large scale. Industrial production and consumerism relied on mass scale to operate. Millions of products were made at a low cost and distributed to millions of consumers; in those systems, individuals and small organizations typically could not compete with large-scale industrial corporations. Participative systems must be as relevant to a market of one as to a market of millions. Digital technology offers the flexibility to operate at very different scales. Any participatory offering must make effective use of the Internet.

As I discussed earlier in my post, :”Why We Need Economic Dashboards“, we have to design interactions that are profitable for all participants. And that profit must be measurable on one or more of the dimensions of the participation economy, even if they have associated costs on other dimensions. This way every interaction becomes a productive investment, not an act of consumption. This means we must design in the information feedback loops that make measurement of the various forms of participatory value easy. Robert Wright proposed a related idea in his book Non-Zero. My interpretation of his thesis is that good participatory systems will not rely on zero-sum trading of finite resources but will instead allow everyone to make a profit.

Earlier, I also mentioned information transparency. Figuring out how to make information transparent, and understandable, will unlock unanticipated forms of value and help create the “multiplier effects” recently explained by President Obama in his defense of the bank bailout.

It’s likely that the best ideas that emerge from our networks will not be those decreed from on high by senior executives or government officials. Hence we also need to design processes that allow us to spot new patterns, encourage the evolution of new ideas, and help new ideas scale to the point where they have impact. This is a different approach to innovation and management than the one we have been reliant upon for the last hundred years. It will take some getting used to. Gary Hamel has lots to say about this in his book The Future of Management.

Rapid prototyping and “learning by making” is already an accepted strategy for effective innovation. For participatory systems, this is even more important because the complexity of the interactions cannot possibly be anticipated by even the smartest of plans. The reality is that these prototypes cannot live in the lab; they have to be let out into the wild. So, we need to start getting comfortable with letting others participate in our innovation activities. Of course this means that many of our accepted notions of IP and trade secrets go out of the window. This is very scary for the lawyers.

Over the coming months I am hoping to build a clearer and more precise set of design principles for participatory systems and I would welcome your ideas for new principles. I’d also appreciate your thoughts on whether this thesis makes any sense at all!

originally posted at Fast Company.
http://designthinking.ideo.com/?p=301/#content

Businesses Need to be Social

Digital Agencies: Drag your clients into the Social Media age

May 12, 2009 by neilpotter


I read a great article by Social Media Consultant, Joanne Jacobs, the other afternoon on Selling Social Media. It really got me thinking about the significance of not only educating, but forcing our clients into building their digital marketing strategy around the web 2.0 phenomenon that is changing the way we are communicating.

Social media is not just a group of new technologies. It’s not just a Facebook fan page or sticking some social networking bookmarks at the end of a blog post. It’s a completely new way of thinking… and it’s our job to make sure our clients ‘get it’? – No one said this was going to be easy.

Taking Twitter as an example – you’d be forgiven for thinking that is just a new way of shouting messages to the customer base like an RSS news feed. It’s not. It’s a robust tool to listen, engage and connect on a personal level with the ‘real’ people who are buying your product or service. It’s all about conversation. But getting your client to really understand this is an art form in itself.

Adopting a social media strategy is a huge learning curve. It takes time and patience to get it right and will provide even the most open-minded PR manager a migraine. But ignoring it and hoping it goes away just isn’t going to happen. We need to drag our clients into the social media age – but more than that, we need them to embrace it with both arms open – not just dip their toes in the water.

We’re here to aid our clients in the creation of conversation through social media, digest everything and provide them with statistics to show them exactly what’s going on out there.

Hardcore social media heads are getting worried about monetising social media and weakening its power. They’re insisting it’s not a ‘sellable product’ – but in Joanne’s words – “Try staying in business for the next five years without it.”

Every type of digital agency needs to take note as social media changes the digital landscape – Design & Build agencies at the flexibility and customisation options of new platforms, Media agencies at new ways of advertising and so on. The quicker we are in convincing our clients that Social media is here to stay, the better.

http://digitalagencyblog.wordpress.com/

Web Design is 95% Typography

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

Information design is typography
Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites:

Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him.
With some imagination (replace print with online) this sounds like the job description of an information designer. It is the information designer’s task “to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him”.

Macro-typography (overall text-structure) in contrast to micro typography (detailed aspects of type and spacing) covers many aspects of what we nowadays call “information design”. So to speak, information designers nowadays do the job that typographers did 30 years ago:

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. A printed work which cannot be read becomes a product without purpose.
Optimizing typography is optimizing readability, accessibility, usability(!), overall graphic balance. Organizing blocks of text and combining them with pictures, isn’t that what graphic designers, usability specialists, information architects do? So why is it such a neglected topic?

Too few fonts? Resolution too low?
The main—usually whiny—argument against typographical discipline online is that there are only few fonts available. The second argument is that the screen resolution is too low, which makes it hard to read pixelated or anti-aliased fonts in the first place.

The argument that we do not have enough fonts at our disposition is as good as irrelevant: During the Italian renaissance the typographer had one font to work with, and yet this period produced some of the most beautiful typographical work:

The typographer shouldn’t care too much what kind of fonts he has at his disposal. Actually the choice of fonts shouldn’t be his major concern. He should use what is available at the time and use it the best he can.

Choosing a typeface is not typography
The second argument is not much better. In the beginning of printing the quality of printed letters was way worse than what we see on the screen nowadays. More importantly, if handled professionally, screen fonts are pretty well readable.

Information design is not about the use of good typefaces, it is about the use of good typography. Which is a huge difference. Anyone can use typefaces, some can choose good typefaces, but only few master typography.

Treat text as a user interface
Yes, it is annoying how different browsers and platforms render fonts, and yes, the resolution issue makes it hard to stay focused for more than five minutes. But, well, it is part of a web designer’s job to make sure that texts are easy and nice to read on all major browsers and platforms. Correct leading, word and letter spacing, active white space, and dosed use of color help readability. But that’s not quite it. A great web designer knows how to work with text not just as content, he treats “text as a user interface”. Have a look at Khoi Vinh’s website, and you’ll probably understand what that means:

Slightly more famous examples of unornamental websites that treat text as interface are: google, ebay, craigslist, youtube, flickr, Digg, reddit, delicious. Being a hard to dispute necessity, treating text as a user interface is the only parameter for success. Successful websites manage to create a simple interface AND a strong identity at the same time. But that’s another subject.

UPDATE: As it raised so many eyebrows, hands and questions I decided to write a follow up to this article.

Where to start: Resources

On the Web
Web typography In order to “allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web”, he has “structured his website to step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS”.
Five simple steps to better typography The kind of typography he is talking about “is not your typical ‘What font should I use’ typography.” A good read for those who believe websites are usable when leaving font size and line spacing to default while letting the text width expand to wherever.
Khoi Vinh Co-founder of behaviordesign. Currently design director at NYTimes.com. Extremely talented man.
Rod Graves Communication designer. Sublime work: “Typography is a definite focus for me. Typographic grids and hierarchies usually form the foundation of the visual languages I develop.”
A List Apart Communicating via typefaces. Fonts and layout. Designing for readers. Legibility. Typefaces, graphic design. Problems of typography on the web. Controlling web typography: size, font, color. CSS methods, browser problems, user problems, and workarounds. Make sure you read this article as well.
Association Typographique Internationale ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) is the premier worldwide organisation dedicated to type and typography. Founded in 1957, ATypI provides the structure for communication, information and action amongst the international type community.
Thinking with Type The on-line companion to the book Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
Typetester Compare screen type
Typophile Typophile is a member and sponsor-supported community. Since 2000 Typophile has been guided by open collaboration and the idea that we’re all always learning. We they serve 3+ million pages monthly.
Typohile Wiki A user-created encyclopedia of all things type and design-related. Users create and edit Wiki entries with the aim of becoming a collaborative, useful, balanced and relevant resource.
The Next Big Thing in Online Type Bill Gates wants computer users, well, Microsoft users, to have a more enjoyable on-screen reading experience — so much so that he made improving reading on the screen one of his top five priorities.
Books
Emil Ruder, Typographie Emil Ruder’s Typography is the timeless textbook from which generations of typographer and graphic designers have learned their fundamentals. Ruder, one of the great twentieth-century typographers was a pioneer who abandoned the conventional rules of his discipline and replaced them with new rules that satisfied the requirements of his new typography.
Kimberly Elam, Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type Although grid systems are the foundation for almost all typographic design, they are often associated with rigid, formulaic solutions. However, the belief that all great design is nonetheless based on grid systems (even if only subverted ones) suggests that few designers truly understand the complexities and potential riches of grid composition.
Muller-Brockman, Grid Systems: A visual communication manual for graphic designers, typographers and three dimensional designers. From a professional for professionals, here is the definitive word on using grid systems in graphic design. Though Muller-Brockman first presented hi interpretation of grid in 1961, this text is still useful today for anyone working in the latest computer-assisted design.

http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period/

New organizations and leadership through Participatory Design

I define consciousness in a very profound way as our ability to exercise a reflective awareness for ourselves in our own contexts. Generally spoken, I see two major approaches to consciousness in organizations today: they are either based on roles, hierarchies, authoritative direction, and linear planning (e.g. many companies, public authorities and political institutions) or by values, equality, and joint decision making (e.g. many civil society institutions, social and ecological enterprises and small company networks). Both approaches meet certain economic, social and ecological requirements and both have their crucial drawbacks. I consider both of them insufficient to meet the challenges of the 21st century. This is why my work focuses on the development of a third approach which is based on participatory design and collaborative co-creation with the aim to foster individual and collective potential in order to create emergent solutions.

I have worked with participatory design processes over the last 9 years in landscape architecture, businesses, civil society and ecological organizations. At the core of participatory design lies the understanding that sustainable solutions have to be found on the basis of context, environment and process and not on the basis of predetermined goals. They are based in local practice and shaped by the interconnectedness with given social, ecological and economical frameworks rather than single ideas rolled out globally. It is also acknowledged that participatory design incorporates the designers in the design: while we change the world around us, we change ourselves as well. Personal, local and global change are interlinked. Participatory design thus becomes a co-creative and generative process which is alive in itself. It creates emergence, produces contextual awareness, new ideas, collective intelligence and often unexpected solutions.

The idea that change is a transitional phase between two stable states is ridiculed by everyday experiences in our globalized world. Constant change is the actual state of our living world. We should seek to comprehend, incorporate and develop that which makes life worth living through change, not against it. One way of doing this is by participatory design. Participatory design will change the way we think about leadership and organizational structures and is based on certain attitudes and methodological approaches which in part we already know and in part we still have to develop. The results of participatory design are not set products or structures but living processes in themselves and therefore represent sustainable change.

In my work for various organizations, networks and businesses promoting social and ecological change, I see the main obstacle to our aspirations not in the fields of resources or information, though these too need careful consideration. I see the main obstacle in the design of our organizational structures and in the way we act individually and collectively within them. Our own consciousness lies at the core of developing new habits, attitudes, methods, processes, actions and organizational designs.

So how do we turn into organizations which employ the third approach?

1. We have to create diverse face-to-face opportunities to experience and reflect upon local participatory design processes so that individual and collective consciousness towards these processes can develop. This can be done through programs in education, business and civil society. For those programs to succeed it will be important that methodologies can be devised in accordance with the respective local context and that results are judged on the basis of the process rather than on initial goals or requirements.

2. We have to encourage self-empowerment, exploration of individual and collective potential and truthful, conscious leadership, the willingness to thoroughly engage with the topics at hand so that personal processes become intertwined with the design process and the willingness to see crises and challenges as opportunities to transcend old agendas and behavioral patterns. This is fostered by participatory design process which are lead by professional and experienced facilitators.

3. We have to exchange personal and local experiences at a global level, so as not to copy solutions into alien contexts but to understand the patterns of change, creation and the emergence of collective intelligence globally. This can be achieved with the aid of new collaboration technologies which are already under development and testing.

Through these measures we will dive into a global participatory design process which will lead to a succession towards new organizational structures and a new understanding of leadership as a service to our collective potential and consciousness.

http://spacecollective.org/jascharohr
http://sacredmtn.com