The Toad Stool by Alan Wolk

The VOD Wars

2012-01-27T11:28:00.000-05:00

While social TV seems to be garnering the bulk of the buzz these days, the real action is happening in Video on Demand or VOD.

VOD was once treated as the ugly stepsister of the industry, with most operators regarding it as a promotional vehicle (hence the proliferation of 5-minute “Making of X” videos on most On Demand channels.)

Purchasing broadcast rights from the studios was costly, VOD technology was very unstable and prone to mid-broadcast meltdowns, and, with the ubiquity of DVD rental services, there was very little demand for On Demand.

Until, of course, there was.

Reed Hasting and his board seem just as stunned as the rest of the industry by the rapid growth of Netflix streaming video. The fact that consumers, a notoriously technophobic lot, would actually figure out how to hook up a third-party device (laptops, PlayStations, Roku boxes and the like) and use them to stream movies over WiFi to their television sets was not something anyone could have predicted. Especially given how thin the Netflix streaming catalog was at first. And the completely unsocial nature of the site. (You cannot, for instance, message another Netflix user to recommend a movie to them. In fact, if you try and post a movie to Facebook or Twitter from the web application, all that’s displayed is the sign-up page.)

Which makes Netflix growth all the more astounding. In 2011, Netflix accounted for 32% of peak time bandwidth use in the US. Netflix users watched 2 billion hours of video 2011. And they did all that with only 20 million customers. (That’s less than 7% of the total US population.)

Those figures were not lost on any number of other companies, all of whom are now jumping full force into VOD. The field is getting crowded and the players are coming from all sides.

Pay TV Providers

First up are the various pay TV providers, the companies who blew off VOD to begin with. In the US, the major players are all beefing up their catalogs, Verizon FIOS in particular. FIOS currently has over 2,000 available titles and is rapidly growing that number. They have even introduced an iOS app that allows non-subscribers to download rental movies. And FIOS, along with Comcast and others, is giving users access to its streaming VOD catalog via XBox, PlayStation and other gaming devices.

Tech Companies

Apple and Google have been getting into the act too, via their proxies iTunes and YouTube. Both have been in busy buying up movie rights. iTunes, which was once a strictly download service, will soon offer streaming options as well. (Even with a high-speed connection, a movie can take a good 20 minutes to download, unacceptable when instant streaming lets you watch right away.)

Google, for its part, is planning to launch VOD channels on YouTube for movies and TV shows. Details are still sketchy, but Apple and Google both have very deep pockets.

Retailers

Amazon has launched a VOD rental service called Amazon Instant Video that operates on an a la carte, pay-as-you-go system with the option of getting most rentals for free by paying $79/year to join Amazon Prime (which also gets you free shipping on Amazon retails orders - a benefit of being a retailer in this market.) Amazon Instant plays on browsers and via Roku, Kindle Fire and similar devices, but there is no iOS app and the format is unsupported by iOS browsers. Amazon has been investing heavily in its catalog and there are recurring rumors that the entire Instant Video operation will be spun off into its own unique entity that will go head-to-head with Netflix.

At the same time, discount retailer WalMart has been building up Vudu, its own streaming video service. Vudu claims to have the largest selection of HD movies and is often able to release new movies long before Netflix. Vudu, which is available via Play Station, Xbox and iPad (but only as a browser app,) positions itself as a discount service, but in truth, new releases are priced competitively with Amazon, iTunes and other streaming VOD services.

Hollywood

The major Hollywood studios make a lot of money on DVD sales, but they're savvy enough to realize that the DVD is about to go the way of the dinosaur. In order to save that revenue stream, a consortium of studios (e.g. all the big players except for Disney) came together to create UltraViolet, a product that forces users to buy the actual DVD in order to get a code that provides entree to a cloud-based “digital locker” where they can download the movie to any connected device. UltraViolet has been poorly received: the technology is both glitchy and confusing and there has been much infighting among the studios as to who is to blame.

Which is not to say they have given up on it: a deal with Amazon was announced during CES (details to follow, though industry scuttlebutt has Amazon partnering with Warner Brothers.) And with a few substantial tweaks, the technology should work more easily and consistently. UltraViolet may ultimately prove to be a better tool for retailers than consumers, but either way, it will give movie studios a strong presence in the streaming VOD market.

Cinema Chains

While the major US cinema chains (Regal, Cinemark and AMC) are not getting into the streaming VOD game (yet), they are in many ways the 800-pound elephant in the room. As pressure grows to shorten the window from theatrical release to VOD release, the theater chains are pushing back. Hard.

This past fall, Comcast and its new subsidiary Universal Studios announced a deal whereby Comcast would release the new Eddie Murphy/Ben Stiller movie “Tower Heist” two weeks after its theatrical debut. The release would be limited to two test markets (Portland and Atlanta) and the film would rent for a whopping $60.

Despite these preconditions, theater chain owners blew a gasket and many, including the 4,000-screen Cinemark chain, threatened to boycott the movie unless Universal and Comcast reneged on their deal. Anxious not to lose the income (and inherent buzz) from a theatrical release, Universal and Comcast quickly retreated. But this is just the first skirmish in a longer battle: the larger the VOD industry gets, the more pressure there will be from consumers to shorten the VOD window.

What’s Next?

While Netflix has a clear early mover advantage, it does not have the deep pockets most of its new competitors do. (And though Facebook is currently content to record its users viewing habits on their Timelines, that may change if the rumored IPO happens this spring.) Those deep pockets should allow Google, Apple, Amazon et. al. to amass a catalog that outshines Netflix.

This will ultimately benefit consumers, who will have a broader range of options, both what to watch and where to watch it. Pay TV providers will likely begin providing direct access to third party streaming video services sometime in 2012, and the service that negotiates the best deals will come out ahead. (Americans are still by and large technophobes, and a solution that involves a “cable guy” coming in to swap out one set top box for another should prove very appealing.) The streaming VOD market will continue to grow rapidly in 2012, with bandwidth caps the only thing that could conceivably slow it down.

Conceivably, but not likely, as the people in position to impose those bandwidth caps are the same pay TV providers who also provide us with broadband... and their own proprietary streaming VOD offerings.

The Social EPG is the Social TV of Tomorrow

2012-01-24T12:46:00.002-05:00

While social TV apps continue to crop up like proverbial weeds, the future of the social TV app will likely be a proprietary social EPG (electronic program guide) provided by the same company that supplies your pay TV service. It will likely come with a companion tablet device too, one your pay TV provider gives you for a low monthly fee, much in the same way they now provide set top boxes. Multiple tablets will mean multiple fees, but most households will want at least one for every adult or teenage member.

This model is the obvious next step for an industry that’s waiting and watching as the current wave of app developers figure out the rules of the game. They’re helping to figure out the ideal user experience and which behaviors (e.g. check-in, chat, recommendations) viewers are most interested in. And they’re doing it all on their VC’s dime as the big industry players just sit back and take notes.

Currently, most social TV apps lack two very basic but very crucial functions: the ability to use the app to change the channel and to record a show for future viewing. For either of these functions to work, the app must be tied in with the viewer’s set top box. Since most are not, the social TV user experience often feels rather stilted and incomplete: I still need to go back to my remote control to tune in to shows, and with over 1,000 channels on most line-ups, that’s easier said than done.

Now I did say “most” not “all”: there are some pay TV providers who are currently testing out the better social TV apps.

Sort of.

They have integrated the apps with their set top boxes, but the apps all still operate in their own private Idahos (e.g. they are not integrated with each other) and the functionality is dictated by the developers, not the providers. That may not seem like a big deal: a lot of developers have an excellent handle on what features will be popular, it’s just that leaving product development in the hands of a third party is never a very good idea. Ultimately you lose control and things like integration never work quite as smoothly as you’d like.

Which is why I see the bigger pay TV providers eventually licensing some of the technology they’ve been playing around with from social TV app makers and bundling it up with proprietary systems they’ve created on their own. (Pulling in a show’s Twitter feed is not brain surgery and Facebook already has solutions in place for providers like Netflix and Hulu.)

The resulting white label app will emphasize the user experience, creating a design scheme that can work on a TV screen, a tablet and a smart phone. The app won’t need to look identical on all three screens, but it will need to be familiar enough so that users don’t have to relearn it as they move from device to device. It will be branded and the experience for each specific provider will be unique: you’ll immediately know whether you are using the Comcast or TimeWarner social EPG.

These unique social experiences will constantly evolve along with technology: voice recognition, virtual keyboards and the like are rapidly approaching a level where they work seamlessly enough to allow for mass adoption-- but the key to success at all stages will be creating a social TV experience simple enough that your grandmother will feel comfortable using it.

It’s a tough problem to solve, but there will be much glory (not to mention profit) for whoever cracks it.

An Apple TV Will Be Just Like An iPhone Because...

2012-01-10T01:20:00.001-05:00

It will be sold to you at a heavily subsidized price from a service provider looking to lock you in to a multi-year contract.

Because Apple can't build their own pay TV service. Nor can they launch an internet only service. Just like the iPhone, someone else owns the pipes: in this case it is likely to be the same company that provides pay TV service.

And if you own the pipes, you can make using lots of bandwidth to watch someone else's pay TV service really expensive and inconvenient.

If you are Apple, going through a specific pay TV provider allows you to have all the control you had over the iPhone. You can design the interface and do all the branding you want. Because if anything goes wrong, consumers will blame the pay TV provider. Not Apple.

It's a business model that will turn the TV industry on it head. And likely be very good for consumers.

Televisions used to be the sort of device you kept for ten or fifteen years. But with all the innovation going on from the manufacturers, you'll want to upgrade your television about as often as you upgrade your... iPhone.

Changing Behavior Around TV

2011-12-19T17:51:00.001-05:00

As the convergence of the TV and Interwebs moves ahead, there are still a number of behaviors the industry must figure out how to change, solve for or live with. To wit:

TV Is Not A Solitary Activity: whether it’s a group of college roommates or the more traditional family unit, few people have their own personal TVs. That makes recommendation engines a bigger challenge than the kool-aid drinkers let on. Figuring out an easy way for the system to understand who is in the room is going to be one of the biggest UX challenges of our time.

Because it’s not just knowing that Dad is in the room and showing him shows he might want to watch. It’s knowing that dad and 8-year old Betty are in the room and figuring out which shows the two of them might want to watch. Or knowing that Betty is the one actually watching TV and Dad is just there keeping her company while he tries to make his way through his email.

Or Is It?: One of the things that a TV Everywhere system may enable is more private viewing of programs. (Think of what the Walkman and the iPod did for music, which was once an unavoidably group activity.) The ability to pick up a show or movie on a smartphone from just about anywhere with a signal and watch with headphones on would seem to indicate that we’re on the road to more individualized viewing experiences and perhaps the lessening of the TV’s role as the electronic fireplace. If everyone is watching their own programming, the need for online social activity becomes at once more and less inmportant.

Surfing: Twenty years ago, Bruce Springsteen sang about “57 channels and nothing on” and now that we’re up 2,000 channel, it still feels like there’s nothing on. That’s why channel surfing is such an ingrained American habit. We turn on the TV and flip through to see what we can find. A lot of the time, we’re not looking for anything specific as much as a way to kill 20 minutes before the program we want to watch comes on.

But in order for social TV to really work, Americans have got to stop surfing or randomly flipping channels and start exploring shows that are recommended for them. Or at least looking at those recommendations before they begin flipping.

Movies vs Televison: One of the reasons it’s so hard to break the surfing habit is that we don’t make a whole lot of distinction between various TV shows: they’re seen as fairly disposable and outside of shows on obscure channels, we’re generally aware of them: the TV networks spend a whole lot of money on advertising. So the odds of our friends or a smart recommendation engine introducing us to a show we’ve never considered before aren’t all that high.

Movies, on the other hand, are exactly the sort of thing we’d want a recommendation engine for. First off, given the rights issues around many movies, we’ll want to know which ones are actually available to us right now, and then we’ll want to know which ones our friends (or the critics) liked to help narrow down our choices.

TV Is For Couch Potatoes: Americans tend to regard TV the way they regard chocolate cake: it’s good in small doses, but you wouldn’t want to eat too much of it, much less publicly profess your love. The conventional wisdom in the US right now is still that TV is essentially bad for us, that it turns us into fat, lazy couch potatoes who while the day away watching mindless game shows and soap operas while filling up on transfat-laden foods. It’s okay to like a particular show or two, but TV as a category is just unhealthy.

We have to get people over that hang-up if they’re going to actively participate in any sort of social TV. The way I see it, movies may be the gateway drug here: according to the conventional wisdom, it’s okay to like movies. We even have a flattering word for people who really like movies: cinemaphiles. So if it’s okay to like movies, then it’s okay to talk about them on your social networks, recommend them, even announce that you are watching them. And once it’s okay to obsess over movies, sharing all your TV watching habits will will lose its stigma too.

Are there other behaviors a more interactive and social TV experience will have to acknowledge, solve for or change? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Why A Suggestion Engine Is Different Than A Recommendation Engine

2011-12-17T15:42:00.000-05:00

While the terms “Suggestion Engine” and “Recommendation Engine” are used interchangeably, they actually refer to two very different behaviors and desired outcomes.

A “suggestion engine” is for those times when we have a fairly specific idea of what we want and are in active search mode.

A “recommendation engine” is for those times when we are already doing something (shopping, watching, listening, reading) and basically says “here are some things you might enjoy the next time you decide to shop/watch/listen/read.”

That distinction shows that the suggestion engine is far more valuable, because it comes into play in response to an active request on the part of the user. A recommendation engine is far more passive: the user is not actively looking for any additional input: if the engine shows them something that they wind up being interested in, that’s just a lucky strike extra.

To put a real world face on these terms, Jinni is a good example of a suggestion engine: you give it input (e.g. “I’m looking for a comedy set in England in the 1960s”) and it will come back at you with a list of movies that meet that criteria that you can access immediately. If you’ve included social graph data, it can indicate which of those movies your friends have watched and what they thought of them. There’s an expectation from both the user and the software that the suggestion will be acted on immediately.

Amazon’s various “you might also like” engines are a good example of recommendation engines: while you may be on the site to buy a teapot for your great-aunt, it’s possible you might also see a book in the recommendation list that intrigues you. It’s also possible you’ll go straight for the teapot: there’s no expectation from either party that the recommendation will be acted on.

A subtle distinction, but an important one.

Why We Won't Have A Virtual MSO in 2012

2011-12-12T07:32:00.001-05:00

There’s been a lot of noise this week around an article (registration required) by noted analyst Rich Greenfield claiming that 2012 will see the launch of an internet-based MSO (multi-system operator, e.g. a large pay TV provider like Comcast or Time-Warner.)

It’s an interesting argument, one that all but guarantees a lot of buzz since so many would like to see it happen, but I’m just not seeing it.

Greenfield’s argument is that virtual MSOs will be considerably cheaper and more user friendly:

(V)irtual MSO pricing to the consumer will be substantially lower, subscribers will receive a significantly better user-interface/navigation across a wide-array of IP-enabled devices in the home and service will be accessible anywhere in the US, rather than being stuck in a certain region.

I’ll buy the user interface argument… maybe-- existing pay TV operators are putting a lot of time and effort into improving that experience precisely because they know it’s an area they are weak on.

But price? That’s where I have trouble with his logic.

You see most people in the U.S. have their broadband and television service from the same provider (looking at Comcast’s subscriber figures, it seems that somewhere around 70% of its TV customers also get their internet from Comcast.) The advantage to this is that the providers discount the cost if you choose both services, with an even deeper discount if you get phone service thrown in (the “Triple Play” deal.)

So for Greenfield’s virtual MSO to work, I’d have to drop the TV part of my bundle, which automatically raises my monthly cost for my newly unbundled internet. At which point I am at the mercy of my internet provider, who, in the face of heavy amounts of streaming by TV viewers, will likely institute bandwidth usage caps and charge me every time I go over my limit. Which, if I’m a fairly heavy TV viewer, or part of a family, is a likely option. (Pay TV operators like Time Warner and Verizon are not going to give up the money they make on TV subscriptions without figuring out a way to get it back on internet fees.)

So there go all my savings.

In return, I may get a nicer interface, but I lose out on picture quality and on the number of channels I’m getting – the virtual MSO is likely to start out with a very scaled-down package and may not get ESPN or other sports networks to sign up. (Live sports being a common reason people have for not giving up their pay TV subscriptions.) In addition, I have a new stressor each month: am I going over my allotted bandwidth amount

If you're a single person who doesn't watch a lot of TV, this new set-up will be perfect for you and may indeed allow you to send a message to Big Cable.. But for a family, where each member has a completely different set of channels they watch, sending that message is going to prove to costly and inconvenient.

There's also the technophobe factor: for a lot of people installing something like a Roku box and having that be the sole source of a TV signal is a serious source of anxiety. Having an actual "cable guy" come in, install the set top box, explain how the remote works and how to program the DVR is a real source of comfort to many and one of the existing pay TV provider's big advantages.

What we are likely to see is a scaled-down, internet-only subscription service from one (if not all) the major pay TV providers, a service that is heavy on the VOD content and is delivered via Xbox, PS3, Roku, Boxee and similar devices.

It will basically serve as an option for cord-cutters who don’t want to totally abandon live TV while allowing pay TV operators to sell their newly expanded VOD offerings to people outside their current geographic zone. And maybe take a bite out of Netflix while they're at it.

Verizon has already started down this path: anyone with a valid credit card can buy or rent their FlexView movies via Xbox or via their iPad app. So it's only a matter of time before everyone else gets on board.

These new services may well prove popular with consumers who don’t watch a whole lot of broadcast television but still want to be able to see the local news. They’ll compete with Netflix and Amazon and other movie providers (or they may be Netflix or Amazon) rather than Comcast and DirectTV– either way though, calling them “virtual MSOs” is quite a stretch.

Though it does make for good headlines.

2011: The Year That Was

2011-12-05T09:02:00.001-05:00

The ersatz Chinese proverb "May you live in interesting times" comes to mind when trying to find a way to sum up the wild ride that social media and social television have taken us on this year. The entire industry seemed to be in constant motion and keeping up with the multitude of peaks and valleys has become a full time job-- mine.

So after eleven plus months of watching all this very very closely, here’s my take on where we are, early December 2011.

Twitter: What's The Next Act?
Twitter seems to be in the least secure position of any of the major platforms. On a macro level, it’s never been able to move beyond being a 140 character broadcast medium. It’s incredibly polarizing: people seem to either love it or hate it in a way you don’t see with other social networks.

Twitter’s popularity also creates problems: the more people tweeting, the less likely it is that you’ll see any one particular tweet. That’s an issue for brands in particular, whose social media marketing plans rely on people seeing their tweets. Which makes it a problem for Twitter.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, the platform is becoming as well known for celebrity mistweets as it is for enabling Arab Spring.Whether APlusK’s departure is permanent and if it will be looked at as the moment Twitter jumped the shark remains to be seen. But it’s definitely not a good sign, as Kutscher was one of the few celebrity users who generally had something intelligent to say.

Twitter’s other issue is that there have been no real innovations to speak of over the past few years. Yes, they’ve given you the ability to see who retweeted your retweet, but something like the ability to send tweets to a specific group of people or a “reply all” feature would be the sort of noticeable change that would prevent the platform from going stale.

That’s why I don’t feel as sure about Twitter’s future as I do about other social platforms. When the social web was first starting, it was a great tool to find other like-minded people, blogs, and articles. It still serves that purpose to some degree, but the mainstream has yet to find a real use for it beyond analyzing celebrity tweets, playing hashtag games and fomenting revolutions. Unless Twitter makes some very significant changes to the platform, I can see it slowly fading away, MySpace style.

Facebook's Chameleon Act
Facebook, on the other hand, has done anything but stagnate. They’re constantly shaking things up, much to the consternation of their 800 million or so users. While it hasn’t been rolled out nationally yet, the new Timeline feature is going to rock a lot of worlds. Ditto the smart lists.

I do wonder, though, why Facebook seems to do everything in a way that feels so Microsoft, you know that “the hell with the user” mindset. Take their recent introduction of Smart Lists, their answer to Google Plus’ Circles. It’s a great idea and it definitely makes Facebook much more useful: I can post work-related articles to a Work list and none of my friends will ever have to see an article about IPTV again.

Which is great, only I have to create the Work list myself. That’s because Facebook automatically creates a separate Friend List for every entry in your employment history. A list you cannot delete. Ever. (You can rename it and even delete everyone on it, but it stays there. And Facebook-created lists always show up before user-created lists.)

Point being, they took something that should have been a really user-friendly enhancement and made it into a hassle. The whole notion of not giving users the ability to delete or hide an unwanted feature is just so typically Facebook. Ditto not realizing that the “Public” option is sort of worthless in creating a Twitter-style feed if you can’t alter it to say “Public + Work Friend” or “Public + Fellow Giants Fans” - someway to combine the people who are asynchronously following you with the people you are actually friends with who might be interested in the topic.

Facebook’s Microsoft-like tendencies notwithstanding, there’s a lot they’re doing right. Platforms that stand still risk being seen as dated, no matter how popular the current iteration might be. So while users may go kicking and screaming into the new Timeline feature, Facebook will not run the risk of being seen as staid.

The other brilliant thing Facebook has done is “frictionless sharing” via the ticker so that every Spotify song you listen to, every Washington Post article you read, is entered into their magic database. Now eventually we’ll get sick of this, the way we got sick of seeing FourSquare checkins anywhere other than FourSquare (and similarly, that will go in waves - first early adopters, then the mainstream, etc.)

What it does though is change our definition of privacy and make yet more actions public, actions that don’t initially seem like that big a deal, but taken en masse, add up. To wit, I don’t really care that anyone knows what songs I’m listening to on Spotify: my taste is not that radical and oftentimes the phone rings, I put down the headphones and an hour later Spotify has me listening to the same 3 songs 15 times over. (e.g. it’s not always the most accurate gauge.)

The flip of that, of course, is that the complete list of everything we listen to, read or watch is not the stuff of everyday conversation and can start to feel very Big Brotherish. But it seems to have gone down pretty smoothly with most users, in part, I suspect, because what you watch/read/or listen to all has some sort of cool factor we don’t mind sharing. So at worst, all frictionless sharing is doing is making us a little more self-conscious about our selections.

The brilliance however, is not in making us embarrassed to listen to Katie Perry, but rather making that information available to our social graph as a recommendation engine. So if we’re looking for a movie to watch and 8 of our friends have recommended “Inflection”, 4 of whom we tend to trust, that creates a whole new method of finding content. Online peer-based recommendation engines have always suffered from a lack of data (it’s hard to gauge a restaurant based on 2 reviews.) Frictionless sharing’s brilliance is that it finally gives these engines enough data to be useful. And if sites give them to tools, users will eventually figure out how to turn off the stream when they’re just browsing, so the content that’s associated with their names is something they would actually recommend or at least not actively dismiss.

My final thought on Facebook is that it’s not going away anytime soon. People often make the analogy to AOL, but there’s a big difference: AOL helped people navigate the web when it was still uncharted territory. They also charged for it. AOL was brought down by Netscape, Yahoo! and a host of low-price ISPs who allowed people to have a better experience for a lot less money.

Facebook has no similar issues: it’s free and people don’t seem to want to have to deal with multiple specialized social platforms. So Facebook’s size doesn’t seem to be working against it. And while it’s fashionable to complain about people you haven’t heard from in 20 years tracking you down on Facebook, there’s also something very comforting about having the same people who wished you Happy Birthday when you were 9 back to wish you Happy Birthday again. Even if that’s the only real contact you have with them all year. Oh, and did I mention Facebook was free?

Google Plus: Oh Right, We Built A Social Netwok!
Facebook’s only possible competition comes from someone doing the exact same thing, only better. Which is what Google Plus hopes to be. Like so many Google projects, it reminds me of nothing more than a five year-old’s sand castle: started in a flurry of activity and all but abandoned when something more interesting came along.

Google Plus started out brilliantly. The whole exclusivity, “we’re only opening this up to a few select people” was genius. People were clamoring for invites. I actually heard someone refer to the first wave as the “June invitees” as if they were the latest branch of the Mayflower Society.

Google Plus had a lot of smart ideas too, mainly the ability to group friends into Circles so that your work friends wouldn’t have to read about your high school football team and your high school friends wouldn’t be forced to read stories about changes in the tax code.

There was also the well-done video chat feature called “Hangouts” and group text messaging capability called “Huddle.”

At the same time though, they introduced Twitter-like asynchronous following, which was (a) confusing and (b) counterintuitive. (If the point was to make the experience more personalized, why launch with something that simultaneously makes it less personalized.)

In that vein, they forgot to let you silence people in your default feed. (Even Facebook had a “Hide” button). So despite neatly organizing everyone into circles, your home page felt like a more cleanly designed version of the chaos that was FriendFeed.

Two more bobbles: they limited the initial roll-out to the tech/media crowd. That meant my Circles essentially boiled down to “People I Know Through Work And Am Friends With,” “I Know Through Work Who I Sometimes See At Conferences” and “People I Know Through Work But Have Never Actually Met In Real Life.” So the Circle thing was sort of meaningless: wherever you went, there you were: the same conversation and the same self-promotion.

Google also didn’t allow brand pages. So if you weren’t interested in the latest Mashable story on Chrome extensions for Instagram, you really had no reason to be there.

And then Google did the sandcastle thing: they seemingly forgot about Google Plus for a couple of months, till a goodly number of people had stopped checking it or posting to it, and then they suddenly remembered it was there and introduced brand pages and a few other significant changes. (Games was another sandcastle move: they introduced a Game section shortly after launch, but never expanded beyond a dozen or so basic ones.)

Only by that time, it may have been too late. Anecdotally, people I know who are not in the tech/media world are unaware of GooglePlus (at best they think it’s some sort of pumped up Gmail program.) And even the people in the tech media world are kind of ambivalent about it. What’s worse, Robert Scoble, the man who declared FriendFeed to be the second coming, recently anointed Google Plus. Which is about as close to the kiss of death as you can get with a tech platform.

It’s too bad though: Google Plus had some real potential and a lot of well thought out features. And it’s always nice to have some options: it keeps everyone on their toes and it prevents companies from acting in the imperious way monopolies often do.

At this point, Google will need to come up with a real Hail Mary play to revive Google Plus. Which I’m thinking hinges on them getting Prom King Brands to be major players: sports teams, rock bands, TV shows - the sorts of things people who aren’t in the tech/media world like to talk about and then build out from there.

That’s it for Part 1. Next out is a look at what’s been going on in the world of Social Television and how that’s affecting social media and technology in general.

As I Suspected...

2011-12-01T00:09:00.001-05:00

Remember back in September I was wondering if FIOS was going after Netflix and Hulu?

Seems they are indeed. (Just found this on Facebook.)

"Social TV" Isn't Necessarily Social

2011-11-15T10:48:00.001-05:00

The term "social TV" has been thrown around a lot these days to describe any and all second screen experiences created around television shows.

But it's well worth noting that many of these apps and features have nothing inherently "social" about them: they are information sources that viewers may choose to share on social networks, but that is not the primary function.

I'm talking about apps that provide statistics during football games or episode guides during dramas and cast bios during reality shows.

That type of functionality is going to be more valuable to many viewers than something that allows them to have conversations during the show. It's well suited for family viewing-- only 31% of Americans watch TV alone -- where we are more likely to share whatever we've learned with the other people in the room (as opposed to say, the entire Twitterverse.)

It is also key insofar as creating any kind of buzz: the more content you give to people to help expand their knowledge of the program, the more likely they are to share that information at some point, both online and off.

That's why the quality of the second screen content and how much buzz it helps create is going to factor in to how successful a show is. Content that adds to the viewer's experience is far more valuable than a few random pictures of cast members or even the ability to read a Twitter feed.

Video from Digday Panel on Social TV

2011-11-11T11:06:00.001-05:00

Complete video from one of the most interesting panels I've been on in a while, about the future of Social TV. Hosted by Digiday reporter Jack Marshall, my fellow panelists were Sabrina Caluori, VP of Social Media & Marketing at HBO and Cinemax and Kimber Myers, Director of Partnerships at GetGlue.

The Yin and Yang of TV Today

2011-11-08T21:53:00.000-05:00

As we move towards the TV/Internet convergence, the industry seems to be moving along two different paths for every issue that arises.

This presentation attempts to shed some light on where things are headed and what the likely outcomes might be.

The Ying and Yang of TV Today

View more presentations from Alan Wolk

The Battle Of The Century?

2011-11-03T23:09:00.001-04:00

Fall 2011: TV manufacturers are busy rolling out “smart” TVs that connect directly to the Internet. Apple, Google, Roku, Boxee have brought the price of a connected box down to the $99 mark. Meanwhile, both networks and web based services are launching apps on PlayStation, Wii and Game Boy.

So which technology is going to win out?

None of them.

It's not really a difficult question. The pay TV providers - Comcast, DirectTV, FIOS et al are going to win. Just like they won the battle of the DVR. Only this time the battle will be even easier.

Their "killer app" is convenience. The last thing the average user wants to do is buy yet another device they have to figure out how to install and maintain and eventually upgrade. They are much happier to let someone else do all the work for them.

And it's fairly easy for all the pay TV providers, be they cable, IPTV or satellite to add access to both the internet and internet-based content providers like Netflix and Hulu. The winning solution doesn't have to be anywhere near as elegant as some of the current interfaces: it just has to be considerably less of a hassle.

That's what took TiVo from a verb to "are they still in business?" The DVR/cable box combos of the late 90s/early 00s were pretty clunky. But they were practically free, didn't take up any extra space and were installed, activated and fixed by your local cable guy.

The other killer app here is that the pay TV services own the internet pipes. Something like 90% of Uverse and FIOS customers get their internet and TV service from the same provider and the numbers for the cable services are not far behind.

That means there's not a whole lot that Apple or Google can do: unless they somehow manage to wire the entire US over the next few years (or buy one of the companies that has) they are at the mercy of whoever is bringing the high-speed broadband connection into the house.

Now for the good news: your cable TV provider owning access to all the new internet-based TV services may actually be a good thing for you.

Here's why: Broader access means bigger viewership numbers for all those internet-based content providers. And smaller numbers for the existing broadcast TV networks. Your service provider should be able to use that to push down the exorbitant fees they've been paying the broadcast networks all these years.

Which, if you're lucky, should get passed on to you in the form of a lower monthly cable bill.

Which is something no one would object to.

UPDATE (11.4.11) Today brings news that Google may be stepping up their game: they have been using Kansas City as a test market, and there are reports that they are looking to roll out a full-on Triple Play service there to compete with telcos and cable companies. If it's successful, the question remains as to how quickly they'd be able to roll something like that out nationally.

Final Episode of Social TV Series now up on Digiday

2011-10-27T14:19:00.000-04:00

This part looks at the process by which we publicly rate and review shows and how that then triggers our friends decision-making process.

You can read it here

Part 2 of DigiDay SocialTV series: When 30-Second Spots Morph into ‘Social Intermissions’

2011-10-20T08:38:00.000-04:00

Part 1 made it onto their list of Most Popular Stories, here's hoping Part 2 will do the same.

Please leave comments, etc. over at DigiDay. Thanks.

The Thing About Siri

2011-10-18T09:52:00.001-04:00

When I first played around with Siri a year or so ago, back when it was still an iPhone app, my initial reaction was "Wow. This is the Jetsons. Now."

The only problem was, it didn't really work. It made a lot of mistakes and eventually it started to feel like using AOL to check the weather circa 1993 - I could run upstairs, find a Zagat's and look up a restaurant in less time. (Not to mention clicking on over to Yelp.)

Still, the idea itself was pretty seriously breakthrough and I wasn't surprised to read that Apple had snatched it up.

The Siri that Apple released with the iPhone 4S is a huge step forward from where they were last year, but it's still not there yet.

And that's a problem, because aside from Apple fanboys and tech bloggers, voice recognition is the sort of thing that doesn't get a second chance.

People will play with Siri for a while - there's a meme floating around the internet about Siri suggesting escort services when someone complained about being horny- no doubt to be followed by similar memes-- but the third time your average user says "sushi" and Siri shows them "slushy," it's going to be relegated to the Fun Toys category rather than Useful Tools.

Voice recognition is one of those categories where we've been disappointed for so long by products that make things more, rather than less, complicated, or that need "training" we're unlikely to give them a second chance.

That said, I'm still very intrigued by the possibilities of Siri and similar technology. But only when they finally get the whole voice recognition thing right.

Three Stages of Social TV, Part 1, now up on DigiDay Daily

2011-10-12T11:31:00.002-04:00

A revised version of the Three Stages of Social TV post is up on DigiDay Daily today, check it out here

You can also see me at DCM East in New York, tomorrow, October 13th at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, where I’ll be acting as emcee and leading the afternoon panels on Monetizing Social Media and Creating An Online Community

The Next Big Battle: Media Buying

2011-10-06T12:23:00.001-04:00

As TV and the web finally come crashing together-- what with Cablevision announcing that they'll offer Netflix and Hulu via their set top boxes, and Netflix looking to revive Arrested Development-- the next big battle between the analog and digital worlds looms: who is going to serve up the advertising in this new era?

In one corner, you have the traditional TV buying giants, companies like MediaVest. who are tied into the ad agencies via their common holding companies. And in the other corner, you have the big web-ad buying services like Double-Click, who also have cozy relationships with ad agencies.

I'm not placing any bets here, as the new market has yet to fully develop. But at some point we're going to get to a place where 30 second commercials are being served up during a program being streamed from a website somewhere and both sides are going to think they should, by rights, be the one serving it up.

As the convergence happens, the level of data available to media buyers will greatly improve. They'll know your previous viewing patters, what times and shows commercials for a specific brand are likely to be watched or ignored, whether a show has High Social or Low Social content, even how often your IP address has been served a specific commercial.

Now which side is best positioned to take advantage of this new data is not clear. Which makes this one to watch.

The Obligatory Post-F8 Post: They Did It For The Kids

2011-09-23T18:17:00.000-04:00

WHAT’S IMPORTANT: The new features are too advanced to be readily adopted by the Boomer demographic that dominates Facebook. But they're innovative enough to make Facebook relevant again for their kids.

FEATURE-BY-FEATURE:

Music Sharing: Not as seamless as you might think: Facebook’s pitch to Spotify, Rdio et al is that they’ll get them more paid subscribers (for which they will likely get some sort of commission.) That means that users actually have to download the app their friend is listening to and have it open. While Facebook prompts for this, it’s a hassle, and the whole notion of synchronized listening that Zuck was going on about in his keynote is bunk: songs start playing at the beginning, not at the point where your friend is. Or was, as the case may be, since if you can find it on someone’s news feed, you can listen to it.

Nonetheless, this is going to be a very appealing feature for high school and college students, who are (a) much more likely to share musical tastes with their friends. (b) far more experimental with their musical preferences and (c) often likely to define themselves by their taste in music. Boomers will likely find the handful of friends with similar tastes and glean from each other.

The key here, as on all the auto-sharing services, is going to be how much control you have over whose log-ins are being aggregated and what the cut-off number is before Facebook thinks you should take notice. These are adjustments you’ll need to make unless you don’t mind the safest, most mainstream content making its way to your News Feed. (The odds that at least three of your 500 friends will listen to a Lady GaGa song is far greater than the odds that three of them will listen to something from say, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.)

Video Sharing: This is a lot more integrated than music sharing. The Hulu app, anyway, since Netflix won’t be available in the US for a while. You don’t need to leave your browser (or Facebook) to watch, and Hulu Labs has created a great collection of social tools.

My one caveat here is that there’s no bookmarking feature, which is important because long form content is rarely a spur-of-the-moment decision. At some point there will be enough mass to use Facebook as your go-to recommendation engine, but for now, the likely MO will be to go to Hulu and see what new shows your friends have been watching. There are plenty of apps (Clicker) already that do that with a range of OTT video options, but only around shows and movies people have actually bothered to “like” or check in to. Which brings me to:

The Verb Thing: While Facebook may see a clear distinction between “is watching” and “likes” I’m not sure the average user will. The new “frictionless sharing” functionality takes away any incentive to “like” or “recommend” something on one of the Instant Sharing sites, unless the site adjusts its UI to accommodate it. This, along with auto-sharing may may a lot of sharing useless, particularly if it seems that most of what’s showing up there is random, e.g. people leaving Spotify on all day at work, forgetting it’s on and playing the same list over and over. Facebook also records sampling, so if I watch the first two minutes of a 3 hour movie, my friends see the same listing as if I’d watched the entire movie.

Timelines: As a friend (somewhat) jokingly noted, Timelines are a huge boon to Facebook stalkers. Since the vast majority of Facebook’s users have been on the site for less than three years, filling in the Timeline is going to be a long-term project akin to scrapbooking.

Younger users will have the wonderful scrapbook-of-my-life that Zuckerberg was kvelling about, but it’s unlikely most Boomers will try and fill in those 40 some odd pre-Facebook years. Facebook seems to acknowledge that, since many of the pre-sets on their timeline app are on the order of “got my license.”

And no matter how old you are, Timeline is still essentially a really nicely designed old photo album, the sort of thing it’s fun to look at a couple of times a year, max. So the key here is going to be the above-the-fold functionality: the ability to see which songs and movies and articles you’ve spent the most time with recently, where you’ve been checking in, etc.

Facebook has pages for things like music and video too, so you can see what you and your friends have been up to, nicely laid out as a series of charts. It’s a great feature, but ultimately confusing: Facebook had conditioned users to go to the News Feed: your profile was where you went to make sure the post with all the typos really did get deleted. But now Timeline is suddenly very functional and it’s unclear whether the preferred experience is going to be: there or on the News Feed? And then there’s the:

Ticker: This is the third place I might actually find my preferred experience and it’s going to make get people to waste a whole lot more time on Facebook. At least initially. I can see a lot of people deciding to hide it after a month or two. The problem right now is there’s no easy way to edit what shows up there and from who. Besides which, unless your friends are particularly active and/or numerous, your News Feed stories are going to be pretty similar to your Ticker stories. Which could be remedied if Facebook had done a better job with:

Friend Lists: The problems with this are so typical of Facebook’s IT-Department-Circa-2003 mentality: they will do everything for you, their way, and only after a lot of people complain do you actually get the ability to make adjustments. Here, their magic list-making machine often creates a bunch of empty, duplicate and/or useless lists and there’s no way to delete them. (You can hide them, but that’s going to be beyond a lot of users’ skill set.) Besides which, it only serves to obfuscate the fact that there are just two lists that matter: Close Friends and Acquaintances. Putting someone in either list alters the frequency with which they appear in your news feed, and there’s even an option in the privacy settings for “Friends except for Acquaintances” making it an great place to plop all those people whose updates you used to hide.

Frictionless Sharing: George Orwell would be proud of the double plus good phrasing here to describe letting Facebook grab all your activities without getting your permission. (Actually, you give them permission the first time, after that it’s blue ocean.) This is already freaking out the privacy advocates (you can just see the conspiracy theory posts already) and it’s going to take the Boomers a good long time to feel comfortable about automatically sharing things. Their kids may be more open to it, but not a whole lot of high schoolers are going to be sharing what they read on the Washington Post site. As the function expands into things like sports and celebrity news, we’ll see a lot of younger people taking advantage of it, whereas their parents (if they’re lured in at all) will likely start sharing around sites they feel some connection to (sports, politics, hobbies) and want to bring some real world friends into the experience.

BOTTOM LINE: The people who make lunch plans in the comment section of each other’s vacation photos aren’t going to like the new features, but that’s okay: they’re not going to use them. At least not for a while. Facebook hasn’t radically changed the experience for anyone who doesn’t buy into the new philosophy and their Boomer audience isn’t going anywhere.

Younger users however, are going to be pretty stoked over things like music sharing and Timelines and instant Hulu. There are enough bright shiny toys here to keep them in Uncle Zuck’s house for a while, and stop them from going to hang with Uncle Sergey and the Plus Gang down the street.

Is FIOS Making A Netflix Play?

2011-09-21T14:40:00.002-04:00

More than a year after announcing that an iOS app was "coming soon," Verizon FIOS finally rolled one out last week.

Four things about the product immediately struck me as rather curious:

There was no PR around the launch. Or else I'm using Google incorrectly. But the sort of sites that are normally all over stories like this (Engadget, Fierce IPTV) only picked up the story yesterday or today, about a week after iTunes indicates the app was first available. And they seem to have figured it out via someone accidentally stumbling on it at the iTunes store - there are no references to any sort of press release or official statement.

The app is incomplete: while there are two tabs, one for Movies and one for TV Shows, the TV part is not live yet: all you get is a pop-up message stating that "TV Episodes are coming soon for iPad." It's unclear whether this is a rights issue, a functionality issue or something else. But still curious.

This is strictly a VOD play based off their FlexView platform: you can rent or buy movies (you have to go online to the FlexView site to actually complete the purchase) at which point you can download the movie and watch it on any of your devices: iPad, iPhone, computer or television. There is no free content and no tie-in to Verizon's FIOS TV service other than the ability to watch the movie on your TV via your FIOS set top box.

You don't need to be a Verizon subscriber to rent movies. Although I am currently a FIOS subscriber, I was able to use this link to go to my computer, create a non-user account, enter my credit card information and then purchase a movie that I downloaded and watched* on my iPad

What's most interesting (beyond giving non-subscribers access to the VOD catalog) is that while most other players in the field view TV Everywhere as a Hulu-like play, Verizon seems to want to go head-to-head with Netflix.

There are a couple of reasons this may may a whole lot of sense:

Netflix just lost Starz and along with that goes many of their more popular movies

The whole Qwikster/DVD unbundling thing has made for a lot of unhappy Netflix users, particularly that huge segment who have no idea how to set up a Roku box or laptop to play movies on their TV.

Convenience: Bear in mind that this is how TiVo went from a verb to "are they still around?" - the cable companies provided built-in DVRs to people who did not want to deal with the hassle of buying and installing one themselves. And even though the cable company DVRs were vastly inferior to TiVo, they were easy and that trumped elegance. If FIOS lets its customers rent movies off their set top box and pick them up on their iPads or laptops, they may have a wining proposition for the tech-unsavvy crowd.

Movie studios, seeing reduced revenues from DVD sales, may be more willing to make deals with providers like Verizon. And according to Variety, Verizon is aggressively moving to expand its movie catalog.

Expanding inventory, especially of popular movies, is critical, as VOD has been around for quite a while, but has been hampered by high prices, short rental periods and less-than-stellar movie options.

FIOS is said to be looking at creating an Xbox app to make its content available to non-subscribers. And Xbox users will know how to watch it on their TV screens. This is one area where FIOS and ATT's Uverse service have an advantage over their competitors as they are pure IPTV plays, and the availability of Netflix via the Xbox and Wii certainly helped their streaming service take off.

FIOS movies are downloaded to your iPad, not streamed. This may not seem like a huge distinction, but while TV may be everywhere, WiFi is not: you can't play streaming video on trains, planes and automobiles (not to mention most hotel rooms) and this may be a huge advantage to people who want something to watch for their commute or business trip.

On the other hand, it may well backfire, since, as my colleague Jon McKinney points out "users don’t want opportunities to pay-- that reduces transactions and consumption."

This is especially true since the model FIOS rolled out is pure pay only (e.g. strictly a la carte, while Netflix and Hulu Plus offer the all-you-can-eat buffet.)

At $5.99 for an HD rental of a recent release, price may make the FlexView product a non-starter. Users who want to download movies to their iDevice have no reason to switch over from iTunes, which allows in-app purchasing and better integration with the device.

It will be interesting to see what the reaction is to FIOS' decision to introduce a VOD-only app first and to learn why they have been keeping quiet about it

Is there a more robust update in the works, one with more Hulu-like functionality and free content, perhaps to coincide with the arrival of the iPhone 5 and iOS5?

Thoughts?

*Actually, I didn't get to watch it. That's a bigger problem FIOS needs to fix right away. Thus far, I've rented 3 movies, 2 on my FIOS account and one on my non-subscriber account. Only one movie actually downloaded correctly and played. The other two open up, show time code and control buttons, but the screen is black. I spent some time on the phone last night with customer service and they had no idea which unit - wireless or residential - was handling the new iPad service. In fact, they seemed unaware it even existed. So caveat emptor.

UPDATE: Still not sure what's going on. The app has 50+ one and two star reviews in the App Store and comments are uniformly negative. What's more, the one movie that did successfully download expired before I finished watching it. When I tried to re-rent, the app told me that "the right to this title are not available any longer. The title will be removed from My Purchases after the full 30-day rental period has elapsed, as which time you can acquire it again." Having to real idea what that meant, I went over to iTunes, spent another three bucks, and watched the end of the movie.

The Value of a Check-In

2011-09-20T14:45:00.001-04:00

The other day I went into Modell's, a local sporting goods chain, and saved myself $10 because I'd checked-in on FourSquare.

It's a great deal (you save $10 on any purchase over $40) that I've already taken advantage of several times. And while I don't mind letting people know I'm at Modell's, I would never have bothered to check-in without the discount.

Because even if I was hyper-competitive about the gaming aspects of FourSquare, I'm never going to be mayor of a store I visit about four or five times a year.

So what's in it for me? Ten bucks.

I got to wondering at what price point I would have decided that checking-in wasn't worth the hassle. (And it's still a hassle: GPS isn't all that fine-tuned in places like New York, where any given block may have 30 different places to check-in, and it's a crap shoot whether the place you're at shows up at the top of the list.)

So what's my limit? One dollar - probably not worth it. Five? Maybe.

And that's a question every business and broadcaster needs to be asking themselves: what's your customer's breaking point?

I say broadcaster because checking-in to TV shows has become the meme-du-jour. And right now other than cute little badges, there's usually not a whole lot in it for the viewer. (This deal between a local Atlanta TV station and GetGlue, being a good example thereof.)

Broadcasters can't really issue their own coupons, but there's nothing to stop them from setting up a deal with a sponsor: check-in to The Office on NBC and unlock a $2 coupon from McDonald's. Details can even be appended to McDonald's on-air TV commercial, and the user's social network friends can see that they checked into The Office and got a $2 coupon courtesy of McDonald's.

Another option, something that can happen on the second screen, is to use the check-in to unlock exclusive content: outtakes, interviews, previews. That's a tougher sell than a two-dollar coupon, as it will only appeal to the show's most ardent fans. But there are times you want to reward your most ardent fans.

Contests and promotions are another option: check-in to our show and you're entered into a contest to win a Hawaiian vacation. The more you check-in, the more chances you have to win. Tried and true and not overly inspired, but it works. People like entering contests.

Those are a few ways broadcasters can help the audience make the leap from physical check-ins to media-based check-ins, especially once the novelty wear off.

It's all about remembering to answer "what's in it for me?"

Getting It Right

2011-09-09T16:13:00.000-04:00

This week's antics at Yahoo! got me thinking about how being the best at something isn't really a guarantee of success. Yahoo Sports gets more traffic than ESPN, and that fact that most people (myself included) are surprised by that, tells you everything you need to know about what went wrong.

Marketing seems obvious and unimportant, and there's a whole school of thought that says you should just let consumers create your marketing message for you, but let's take a look at TiVo.

TiVo had just about everything going for it. First mover advantage, to the point that people initially referred to recording something on a DVR as "Tivo-ing" it. TiVo has a beautiful interface and consistently innovates.

So what went wrong?

While I'm not privy to their marketing data, my hunch is that is began with their pricing model.

TiVo initially charged a monthly fee for their service with the option of paying a one-time "lifetime fee." They were the only game in town, so if you wanted a DVR, they were it. That said, the cost seemed pretty steep.

Even more so when cable companies introduced their own DVRs that were integrated with their Set Top Boxes. The cable company DVRs generally had awful interfaces, but they were able to push them pretty aggressively, and though they charged a monthly fee for them, they were able to bury it in the overall bill-- to most consumers it was just a cable box that recorded things.

TiVo still had a superior product, with a better interface, better features and more storage capacity. But they stuck to their old pricing model. Most consumers did the math and concluded that TiVo's features weren't $15 a month better, particularly since the cable company was giving them the box for free and replacing it if something went wrong.

So TiVo became the domain of videophiles, a point of pride for those who took their TV seriously. and everyone else used their cable provider's DVR and stopped referring to recording as "TiVo-ing."

And TiVo still didn't change their pricing model.

Which is where it remains today: $20/month or $499 for a lifetime contract (a fairly absurd number for a new user to commit to.)

The boxes themselves are reasonably priced (anywhere from $100 - $300) and are still vastly superior to anything out there: they now connect with Netflix, Hulu and Amazon in a Roku-esque manner, the interface is ever more beautiful and intuitive, they have a nicely done iPad app and if you use the AOL.TV app, you can even save shows from the app, regardless of your cable provider.

The one thing they don't have is a lot of customers. Something I suspect could be remedied by charging a little more for the box, killing the monthly fee, and figuring out some sort of cable card installation deal with the likes of BestBuy. (The FCC commanded the cable companies to offer something called a Cable Card, that, among other things, essentially lets you turn your TiVo into a combo cable box/DVR for a much smaller monthly fee than you're paying now.)

This would make the product far more attractive to the average consumer, who might well plunk down $200 for something that would save them a couple of dollars a month off their cable bill and provide an experience worthy of their 55-inch 3D HDTV

The other plan would be to work harder on deals with cable companies that would allow them to market a co-branded device, something their website indicates they've done in the past and have an interest in doing again.

Circling back to the initial idea here, had they reacted differently and marketed themselves differently when the cable companies started to introduce their own boxes, we might well still call it "Tivo-ing"

Taking Control: Miramax Shakes Up Social TV

2011-08-31T12:12:00.001-04:00

One of the most revolutionary-- and terrifying if you’re a cable operator-- developments in Social TV was announced just last week: Miramax Studios launched its own Facebook/iPad/GoogleTV app.

The app gives you access to some of Miramax’s greatest hits - Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting - on your TV, PC and iPad. And while payment is currently only via Facebook credits, that’s likely to change soon.

The app is still in beta, but if it succeeds, it may well change the way video content is distributed, making it more like print media, where the content creator is also the content distributor. (e.g. The New York Times creates content and then sells it directly to consumers in both digital and analog form.)

In many ways, this feels like a return to TV’s roots: TV was originally free, supported by advertisers, and for the price of a rabbit ear antenna you could watch all the broadcast networks in your area. The networks created their own entertainment, news and sports content, which was delivered directly to consumers, with no middleman involved.

The advent of cable TV in the late 70s and early 80s brought in the concept of a middleman: you got vastly improved reception and a wider variety of stations, but you had to pay the cable operator to watch what had previously been free.

The difference in quality between cable and over-the-air broadcasts was vast enough that most Americans gladly parted with the $300 - 600 a year the cable operators charged them.

While broadband video content has been available since the early days of the internet, it’s only been in the past year or so that the quality of internet-based TV (IPTV and OTT) has improved to the point where the difference between broadband and cable is negligible, particularly around long-form, high production value content. So why not sell your own programming directly to consumers again?

There are a number of reasons, actually, the main one being the cost of driving consumers to your site if you lack the name recognition of a Miramax and their first-mover advantage.

But the point is you can. And that vastly changes the relationship between the middleman and the content provider, giving the latter much more leverage over the relationship.

Next up, we’ll look at why content creators may want to create bespoke second screen experiences for their fans, something that either sits on top of the EPG or exists as its own separate entity.

Simplicity Is A Blessing

2011-08-16T23:23:00.002-04:00

The other day, I was talking with some friends who also work in digital media. We were all admitting, sheepishly at first, they we had absolutely no idea what the point of Gowalla was, why we had spent a few months last year collecting Chinese lanterns and boots and whatnot, but we'd all figured that everyone else knew and so we didn't want to say anything, lest we sound like even bigger fools.

The conversation was in the context of Empire Avenue, another hot web-based game that no one really seems quite sure how it works. I mean I know your "stock" rises the more tweeting and Facebooking you do, and that there's something called "eaves" that sounds a lot like "linden dollars" and you know, I'm too busy to actually figure it all out.

Quora too. I was down with the idea, but every time I asked what I thought was a simple question, it got all mad at me and started telling me I needed to ask the question in a better way, to be more concise or more specific and then it would never really let me search for things (it was easier to go out to Google and search Quora there) and since most questions are answered somewhere on the internet already, I didn't really get what I was doing there if all they were doing was saying "No!" to me.

Ommwriter was another one: it had all sorts of beautifully designed icons in the set-up, but when I asked if there was a guide somewhere to figure out what they all meant (because, Dude! Words would have like, ruined the whole Zen-ness of the design!) they said, no, we're too cool for that and I figured the hell with that, I'm even cooler, because if I want to listen to massage room music while I write, I've got Spotify and if I want to block the rest of the computer screen, I've got Lion and Pages and the black background is a lot more focusing than that faux Ansel Adams photo with the two little trees in the snow.

FourSquare, on the other hand, has always been pretty intuitive. I checked in. If I checked in more than twice and no one else had, I got to be be Mayor. Sometimes that got me a discount. Most of the time it got me a post on Facebook with a cool little crown icon on it. There was no Governor or County Commissioner or Baron level. Just Mayor and Not-Mayor. I could cheat if I wanted to and check into places on my way home or if I'd forgotten about it and wanted to say something nice about them.

And that, my friends, is a really long way to get to the point: I was very impressed today when LinkedIn launched a brand new mobile app that simplified the experience down to four basic steps, four simple things that I am actually likely to do on a tiny iPhone screen because it's easier, as opposed to my previous reason for using LinedIn on the iPhone which was that my computer was out of battery power.

I wanted to put this out there because "gamification" has become such an easy buzzword these days, one of those words like "storytelling" and "authenticity" that everyone has their own personal definition of and so no one disagrees with it, even if they're actually thinking of two radically different things.

So keep it simple. You can always make it more complicated and add rules and variations as the game goes on. But we're all pretty busy and we don't have time to figure out all the precious little quirks you want us to.

Angry Birds: 5 different birds, each moves a certain way, pull the rubber band and use them to try and kill the pigs. Boom. Done.

Think about how rich those guys are now and then go design your "gamification" play

The Three Stages of Social TV

2011-08-11T15:11:00.005-04:00

click to expand

In his 1980s masterpiece The Art of Fiction, the late John Gardner said that a great novel should be like "a vivid and continuous dream" one that even the author's own voice should not be capable of interrupting.

Gardner certainly hadn't contemplated the conundrum posed by Social Television where everyone is looking for the magic formula to break us out of the vivid and continuous dreams on the screen and pay attention to each other in a way that's easily controlled and easily monetized.

But a closer look at a term like "social television" shows us that there are three distinct stages of the TV watching experience: Decision Making, Watching and Reviewing, and they all feed on each other in a circular rather than linear patter.

Stage 1: Decision Making

The first question is always going to be "what should we (I) watch?" And the first place we generally turn for that is the Program Guide on the cable box.

Which makes it the perfect opportunity for a Social TV play.

The viewer is actively taking part in a “lean-in” activity. They have not engaged with the programming yet. They are looking for advice, and a large part of what’s made the current crop of social media favorites so successful, is that they help us in the decision-making process. Facebook and Twitter help us decide what to read, what YouTube videos to watch, what news stories to follow. Yelp helps us decide what restaurants to go to, FourSquare helps us determine which bars are hopping.

The ability to gather information from the social web will be a huge boon to the Decision Maker. What shows are my friends watching now? What have they watched, recorded and/or downloaded recently? What are most people in my town watching? What about most people my age?

Let’s look at how that might play out in real life, in America, circa 2011.

Your cable TV provider (e.g. FIOS, Time-Warner, Cablevision) would provide a Program Guide app that worked on your tablet or smartphone. It would immediately let you customize the default view to something more manageable than all 1598 channels on offer. It would allow you to see, in real time, what shows were getting the most social activity. (You could customize the inputs there too, so you’d know that “4 of your friends recorded American Idol this week.") You’d then be able to see what people were actually saying, tapping into Twitter and Facebook feeds that showed real time conversation. You’d even be able to respond to and share those comments without leaving the app.

You’d be able to save a show to your DVR with just one click. Rent VOD movies with one click. Even get in touch with customer service, if that’s what you needed.

Each show would have its own robust page, with preview video, photos and bios of cast members, and stats (e.g. 4th most recorded show in Chicagoland area.) You’d also be able to see reviews and ratings from your friends or from the greater community.

There will also be ample opportunity for targeted advertising.

And since all this activity happens before we actually start watching, before the “lean back experience” starts, we’re not going to mind it. It will feel like research, not like an interruption. Particularly if we look at where the experience happens. Sometimes it’s in the den, with everyone sitting around waiting for a decision. But just as often it happens long before the actual viewing: at the office, over dinner, on the ride home.

All of which are places we’re quite happy to be social.

Yap.tv has an interesting version of a social program guide app available now. But it’s not tied to any particular cable provider. Imagine how much more useful it would be if it was though, and you could download and rent and buy and get customer service questions answered and give input to the cable company, all from the same app.

One other thing that’s notable about Yap is that it showcases the huge volume of chatter that is currently going on around TV shows. It’s a pretty constant flow and we’re not aware of it because it comes from a different demographic: teens and tweens, for the most part, and a far more diverse group than the tech/media crowd we often associate with Twitter.

And so here’s another reason for embedding Social TV in the Decision Making process: the behavior is already there. People are already commenting about television shows in large numbers. A Social TV app would simply harness that behavior and make the data around it useful to other viewers.

Stage 2: Watching

So once we’ve actually made the decision, it’s time to watch. This is where social gets sticky.

Because watching is a “lean back” experience. And how much we want to lean back depends on our relationship to the content.

Sports programming, particularly baseball, football and basketball have lots of timeouts and other breaks in the action, which gives us ample opportunity to lean in and start talking with our peers, both online and off.

But take a new episode of a crime drama. For many people, this will demand their full concentration. They may want to discuss it at some point, but not while the plot is unfolding.

Which brings up another option: the use of commercials as “Social Intermissions.”

Since we watch TV at home, we have gotten in the habit of taking regular breaks. But with DVRs and VOD, those breaks no longer exist and so we turn to the “pause” button. Scheduled commercial breaks, euphemistically called “Social Intermissions” may be welcome by consumers and rather than blaring out jingles, brands could use this time to engage viewers around the content they’re watching, or at the very least around some sort of social action they can take on the iPad (a poll, a game)

This may also ameliorate the effects of something I identified years ago: Social Media Is Only “Social” If You’re Alone. If you’re sitting with friends watching a TV show, you’re going to be sharing your comments with them. Not with random strangers on the interwebs. A planned break that encourages you to go online and engage in something social may make that sort of activity more palatable.

This is not to say that we need to give up on Social TV interactions during the Watching stage. Just that we need to make distinctions based on the type of content.

Dramas and action shows are Low Social programming: we’re engrossed in the show and don’t want to talk to anyone while it’s on. The action is continuous and there are no logical places to take a break and start talking.

Comedies are Mid Social. It’s fun to share the jokes and most comedies don’t demand your full attention. But there aren’t clearly delineated breaks either, just ebbs and flows in the plot line.

Reality Dramas, shows like Jersey Shore are also Mid Social. The combination of slow-paced scenes and “I can’t believe this!” moments makes conversation easier, but we’re always watching for the unexpected left hook or vomit shot , so there’s a pull on our attention.

Reality Game Shows (Amazing Race, American Idol, etc.) and Sports are both High Social. There are plenty of clearly defined breaks and the winner/loser dynamic both make for easy conversation - both at home and online.

This chart helps break it out:

click to expand

The biggest challenge of the Watching stage is not that people don’t like to chat during CSI Miami. It’s that asynchronous viewing patterns mean they rarely watch it at the same time.

The trend towards on-demand viewing, whether through DVR, VOD or services like Netflix, is growing exponentially. We cannot expect that Program Guide app users will all be watching shows at the same time. Which is why the one-click recording and inclusion of shows currently on their DVRs will both be important.

One click recording allows me to catch up with what my friends are watching or a show that seems to be getting a lot of social activity. Including my recordings in my current listings allows me to see the full range of possibilities available to me as well as any activity around them, which may well have increased since I first recorded the show.

In terms of asynchronous sharing, technology exists that allows me to insert comments that are attached to specific time codes on the recording. That way a friend can watch along an see comments seemingly in real time. This can even be a group experience, where each new user adds comments or “likes” someone else’s comment.

Stage 3: Reviewing

Once we’ve watched a show, we’re far more likely to review it. A well-designed Social TV app can prompt that behavior too - either by asking you to rate a show as it’s ending or creating a points and levels system that rewards users for leaving ratings and reviews.

In addition to “official” on-site reviews, the app can aggregate opinions and comments left on the social web, adding yet another metric for users to refer to in the Decision Making stage.

There’s a use for the time code technology discussed earlier here too: users can be given the option to “Re-watch and Comment” on a show, so that they can go back and insert their comments (at appropriate times) now that they’ve seen how the show (or game) ends.

Which loops us back around to the Decision Making process. More than encouraging reviews, a well designed Social TV app will provide other users with data around those reviews. Sliced and diced by age, location, gender and other identifiers. A key data point will be activity from our own social graphs.

When I open my Time Warner Program Guide app, I want to see what shows people are talking about. But mostly I want to see what shows my friends are planning to watch and which shows they felt strongly enough about to comment on, so that I can talk to them about it. In real life or online, it’s going to make TV a lot more social.

So to wrap this all up, if I was a cable or IPTV operator, I’d be looking to develop apps that took advantage of Stage 1 and Stage 3, the lean-in experiences, where we already have the means and behavior necessary to create useful social applications. And while I was doing that, I’d keep my eyes on the lean back experience and see what develops as TV viewing becomes more social and more asynchronous.

(NB: We'll be taking a deeper look at some of these trends and stages in future posts. Think of this as a high level overview.)

What Is Social TV?

2011-08-09T10:36:00.003-04:00

Social TV is threatening to become everyone's favorite new buzzword. The name itself invokes both old and new media channels and manages to sound both revolutionary and consumer friendly.

But what exactly is Social TV? What does it look like and how do we use it?

That's the issue: no one really knows yet. And if they tell you they do, they're lying.

Social TV is an amorphous thing that's very much in the early stages of being defined. There are hundreds of different ways the hows, wheres and whys may play out; dozens of options we can't even begin to predict yet.

We can start with a very broad definition: the ability to use digital technology to interact with another person around a television show. But how and when and where that interaction takes place are still very much unknowns.

While there are many models (and more on the way) for what a social television experience may look like, there are just as many questions as to what will feel right. Everyone seems to agree that the ultimate goal is to create an experience that equals or surpasses the real life experience of watching TV with other people and the social inteactions around that.

That's a pretty broad target, one that means different things to different people, with a whole lot of extra variables thrown in.

Over the next week or two I'll be taking a look at all these different variables and how Social TV solutions might address them.

Everything from the different ways we watch different types of programming-- a college football game versus a crime drama-- to the effects of asynchronous viewing patterns in an on-demand world, to who we want to share our experience with, to the use of commercial breaks as social intermissions. to the degree which sharing a viewing experience changes our reaction to it. (Think of watching a comedy in a crowded theater versus alone at home.)

I'm hoping to get a lot of feedback-- there are no right answers-- so don't be shy.

CHECK OUT "THE THREE STAGES OF SOCIAL TV"

On The Radio

2011-08-05T18:33:00.004-04:00

If you want to hear what I sound like in person, tune in tomorrow (Saturday, August 6th) at 10 AM Central when I'll be on CNN's Everything Internet radio show along with Jason Falls.

You can see details and get download info (it's released as a podcast on iTunes afterwards) here.

UPDATE: The iTunes link is live

I Have Seen The Future And It Is Called BetterFacebook

2011-08-04T10:21:00.003-04:00

BetterFacebook is an extension for Chrome and Safari that does a number of things, most notably add the Circle functionality of GooglePlus to Facebook.

So every post, photo, link, etc., comes with the easily accessible choice of which Friend Lists to publish it to.

Now granted it is a bit of a hassle to go back through your contacts and assign them all to different lists, but my immediate impression was surprise at how many more circles I had on Facebook. Which isn't all that surprising: the only people on G+ now are people I know through work, so the circles I've created basically rely on how well I know them.

With Facebook, I've got a much broader range of circles since my "friend" list on there includes family members, childhood, college and neighborhood friends, etc.

Having set this up, it's easy to see the huge functionality gains inherent in being able to address distinct groups. For instance, this morning New Jersey Transit was having another of its frequent delays. I could have sent out a check-in from the station to my "local friends" circle - people who would actually be interested in knowing the trains were running behind schedule.

It's easy to see two things happening as a result:

1. I rely less on specialized platforms - if I can target all my activity to the people who might care about that information, I have less need for specialized check in services around things like food, television, etc. I also wind up posting more, since I don't have to wrestle with those "does everyone on Facebook really need to know this?" thoughts. (Clearly there are many people who don't wrestle with these thoughts, but I suspect they are often victims of the "Hide" button.)

2. Brands gain the ability to really "slice and dice" their messaging by putting their fans into groups based on previous behavior, location and/or opt-in preferences. This makes their messaging feel a lot less generic and a lot less like spam. (For the most part... let's be real: lots of lazy brands will still spam their fans)

These behaviors may happen on Google Plus or on Facebook or both. But check out BetterFacebook if you want to see what the future could look like.

You can always uninstall it.

Repeating the Mistakes of the Past

2011-08-01T09:33:00.004-04:00

> A Few Reflections on Month One of GooglePlus:

• It took Facebook years to even become a blip on MySpace's radar, but too many already seem to want instant results- from G+, as if 100 million people should have already dropped one for the other.

• The exclusivity behind the initial launch was genius, especially for the tech/media crowd it was aimed at. Not only did it factor in connectedness, but also gave them a new hip club to hang at, now that the whole B&T crowd had overtaken Facebook and high school buddies didn't care about the latest release from Zynga

•Like Twitter circa 2007, it's easy to forget there are people on who do have lives outside of work. Hence, every time I see a kid or pet photo or restaurant tip on G+, they seemed to go unnoticed, while a new Chrome extension... Wow

•Speaking of Chrome, if you weren't using it before, you probably are now. Big winner from the G+ buzz

•The twittererti don't seem to get why they're still having the same issues now that they've become Pluserati, e.g., the inability to have conversations, the inability to manage their streams, the inability to take a 15 minute break between public posts, etc.

•They are still trying to sound surprised they have so many followers, with classic posts asking people why they were following them, as if the fans were a rowdy bunch of paparazzi who kept trying to photograph them while they were eating lunch.

• Its fascinating to watch the platform develop as users settle in. Sort of like a prairie town or new suburban subdivision (The Willows at GooglePlus), they're developing their own unwritten laws about use, etiquette, and interactions. (And when the non-tech/media crowds come on, those rules will change once again.)

•Google seems to be listening, or at least they say they are, which is worlds away from the paternalistic tone of the other platform.

• The spammers found their way on pretty quickly and it seems there are already sites promising to add thousands of people to your circles everyday!! along with Em-El-Em schemes to make you rich QUICK!

• And once all that happens, make way for Justin Bieber...

You can view/comment on the original version of this at Google+

The Bright Lights of Google, Trapping Us Like Fireflies

2011-07-15T09:21:00.004-04:00

Why is GooglePlus so much fun right now?

The answer’s a lot simpler than the ex-Twitterati would have you believe

It's the old rats and the water bottle in the cage trick: every time we leave it alone for an hour or two, we come back and it's got that red notification light blinking. Holy cow, someone wants to circle me. Someone commented on my post. Someone else commented on my friend's post. Someone found a Twttter/Facebook add-on for Chrome that really works.

And it's all there brothers and sisters, if you keep the faith and push the little red button. That's how Twitter first became addictive.

And so it was with Facebook too. Used to be every time we logged in there was some new piece of news that greeted us. "Fire up those endorphins captain, there's another @ message coming in! And look! Carl from middle school wants to be friends again!"

Right now those places are a little too overrun with strangers and random friends respectively. That takes much of the fun out of the experiences and creates the perfect storm for imaginary Seinfeldian dramas, the kind that convince you not to post that you accidentally closed the door on the cat and how funny his reaction was lest you become a lightening rod for outraged animal lovers who don't find it, or your reaction, the least bit humorous.

Or worse, you start to post pictures to Facebook about the rocking time you're having at the ball game, and stop because you're pretty sure that the guy down the street, whose wife is Facebook friends with your wife, had tried to pass off opera tickets on you for tonight and you can't really remember what sort of excuse you gave him.

GooglePlus will face those kinds of issues soon enough. But not yet. Right now it's just an amusement park full of shiny red lights, rolling circles and ever increasing numbers, so we're all busy coming back to see just what we've won today.

The Feel-Good Social Web

2011-07-12T22:51:00.001-04:00

Like many women of her generation, my grandmother was a good cook. She mostly prepared the recipes her Hungarian mother had passed down to her, but the food was good enough that I was soon bugging her to teach me how to prepare it.

Like most home cooks, she never actually measured anything. You put in “enough water to cover it”, “a couple of pinches” of salt or paprika and it wasn’t unusual to rely on some pre-made American staple (breadcrumbs comes to mind) as a base.

And so I learned to cook. I mostly created my own recipes based on what I liked to eat. There were never any exact measurements and I usually based whatever I made on whatever I happened to have in the house. My friends seemed to like what I made them, and, more importantly, I enjoyed doing it.

Then, about fifteen years ago, I started to run into people who called themselves “foodies.” They’d ask me questions I didn’t have the answers to, like what farm the cheese I used was from or did I know what type of mushrooms I had in the salad. They had “celebrity” chefs they followed and seemed to make frequent use of their catchphrases.

They made cooking seem a whole lot less fun.

I bring this up, not to slam pretentious foodies (although that’s certainly apt) but because it feels a lot like the current state of the social web. Where lots of self-appointed authorities are telling people the “right” and “wrong” ways to use the new GooglePlus platform and getting all in a huff if they don’t listen.

They make GooglePlus seem like a whole lot less fun.

One of the best things about social networks is that I can make groups/lists/circles of just about anything I want and no one will be any the wiser. So I can have a circle of “People With Funny Looking Noses” or “People With Red Hair” and amuse myself by trying to find patterns in their conversations. It’s completely pointless, but that’s one of the great joys of life: the ability to do something pointless just because it’s fun. And there are plenty of other ways to do that on GooglePlus or any other social network. It's one of the reasons they're so addictive.

As for GooglePlus, the platform is still a work-in-progress, they've announced they're weeks if not months away from introducing a platform for brands, but that hasn’t stopped the flow of SEO-friendly blog posts on “10 Best Practices for Brands on Google Plus!!!”

A curious statement to make, but one that the ecosystem seems to support. (They wouldn't be writing them if other people weren't reading them.)

What's most fascinating to me about GooglePlus is something wisely noted by Frederic Lardinois, writing on SiliconFilter: GooglePlus is a planned platform - it’s supposed to be a global social network

That's something YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were not.

But human behavior is not all that easily planned and if previous social networks are any indicator, users quickly adopt behavior that’s markedly different than what the platform's builders had planned. Then mainstream users come along and start using the platform is ways that are markedly different than the early adopter crowd. (e.g. why your mom and her friends make lunch plans by posting on each other’s Facebook walls.)

What’s needed now is a lot less prognostication and a lot more observation. Let people figure out their own best way to use the platform. Before anyone starts telling them they’re doing it the wrong way.

Google Plus: The Anti Twitter

2011-06-29T09:53:00.001-04:00

Privacy advocates have gotten Facebook users attuned to the idea that not everything should be shared with everyone. So many, if not most, Facebookers have changed their default settings to ensure that their birthday party photos are shared with their friend list rather than the (default) entire world and some have even gone the extra step of creating distinct groups of work contacts, family members and the like.

It is this desire to only share certain things with certain people appears to be one of the main drivers behind the new Google Plus

Which makes it not the anti-Facebook, but the anti-Twitter.

Because Twitter is all about sharing everything with everyone. Particularly people who don’t know you. At all. Which is one of the things that causes certain people to have such a visceral reaction to Twitter: this notion that someone would give up all notions of privacy willingly, rather than because of an easily-corrected flaw in the technology.

Now the good news for Google and Twitter is that there is likely room for both. Right now use of the various platforms is largely based on one’s degree of tech savviness and willingness to be an early adopter. But as these social platforms become even more ubiquitous, I think we’re going to start selecting them based on what fits with our own personalities.

This often overlooked fact - that we are unique beings who feel more comfortable in some situations than others - is going to be a big factor in the future of social platforms. People will start to spend more and more time on the platform that best conforms with their sense of how much a person should share with the outside world. And it seems as if there will be a continuum, with Twitter and Google Plus each grabbing one side of the privacy line and Facebook in the middle.

I’m not seeing an either/or situation: plenty of people will be active on all three. But like the old chocolate, vanilla or strawberry ice cream dilemma, they’ll always have a favorite among the three.

A Few Words From Our Sponsor

2011-06-24T18:44:00.001-04:00

Tell most brands that their users are looking for "content" and their eyes light up at the prospect of being able to once again send out "push" messages, because to them "content" clearly means "all that stuff we want to tell consumers but can't because we're supposed to be having 'conversations' with them." (Today's euphemism for that is "storytelling" as in "we've got a story we want to tell you... regardless of whether you actually want to hear it.")

The savvy strategist will guide them past this momentary lapse and explain that by "content" they mean something the consumer can actually make use of, something that their broader audience is actually interested in learning about, often in a PBS/Bravo kind of way.

At which point the brand will inevitably turn to Senior Vice President X, who was part of the team that invented the nuclear widget, the greatest advance in widgetology since 1983.

Which is, in and of itself, not a bad idea, since people really do want to hear from Ms. X. The problem though, is the Ms. X is a brilliant engineer and a horrible writer.

As are most business executives. This is not intended as a slam on executives, but snazzy, journalistic style writing is no more a trait needed for success in business than the ability to run triathlons.

So what to do?

The obvious answer is one too many brands miss out on, primarily because it involves spending money (and everyone knows that social media is free!) And that answer is to hire a journalist - there are certainly a multitude of out-of-work ones-- and have said journalist put Vice President X's words into sparkling prose.

Now this is something that PR agencies often claim to be able to do, but they have self-interest - they're an outside vendor, and the journalist should ideally be working directly for the brand, interviewing staffers, becoming intimately familiar with the industry and, above all, creating "content" - stories and videos - that are (at minimum) as good as what's being put out by the industry trade magazines.

But that's not the hard part: brands have been hiring out of work journalists for decades. The trick is to take those articles and videos and put them out there in a way that gets the broader community talking about them. They should be conversation starters, not conversation hoggers. Get people talking about a topic, but give the community members, the people who really care about the topic, a forum to express their views and opinions.

Because Senior Vice President X, she's already famous. She's not looking to make her mark on the world. But all all those people who spend an hour or so a day on the message boards? They're still looking for a way in. And if you give them something to talk about, something that lets them show off their ideas and thinking, you've done a whole lot of storytelling.

It's their story, of course, not yours, but I don't think that's really a problem.

Try it.

The Lemmings Are Back! (And This Time They've Got QR Codes With Them!)

2011-05-26T10:36:00.001-04:00

Marketers and Bright Shiny Objects. You’d think at some point the attraction would fade. But it only seems to intensify over time. Having just abandoned their domain sites for Facebook, marketers are busy slapping QR codes on every square inch of white space in their offline arsenal – print, outdoor, DM, in-store handouts, kiosk screens-- you name it, it's got a QR code on it.

And once again, we are all left wondering just WTF they are thinking.

I have yet to see anyone “in the wild” actually using a QR code, and a quick (and decidedly unscientific) polling of Twitter reveals I am not alone. It’s not too hard to figure out why: it’s not an easy thing to do.

To begin with, you need a QR code reader app on your smartphone. Lots of people still don’t have smartphones. And of the people who do, I’d venture to say the majority have never heard of a QR reader or know that it’s needed to read that funny hieroglyphic thing in the ad.

But let’s take the small subset of people who actually do know that QR readers exist and the even smaller subset of people who have actually bothered to download one.

The apps are not particularly intuitive. And snapping the photo is not all that easy. QR codes are sort of square, smartphone screens are pretty rectangular. So there’s a whole lot of adjusting to do to make sure you have the hieroglyph properly in view and once you’ve nailed that part, you still have to make sure you’re holding the phone steady enough to snap a clear picture and that there aren’t shadows from the overhead lights or anything mucking it up.

Let’s just say you’ve managed to figure all that out and have the actual QR code on your phone. And that you have a working 3G or WiFi connection. And that you actually get to where the QR code is going to take you.

Cool! It’s the brand website! And you can watch their TV commercial on it! At full 3G download speed! Then you can download a PDF of their latest brochure and figure out what program on your phone you can open it with! Fun!

So there you have it: a whole lot of work for a seriously disappointing payoff.

And the ability to say “Yeah, we tested using QR codes back in ’11. They don’t work.” without ever questioning why.

NB: I get that QR codes have the potential to be a very successful tactic, and that there are already case studies on how well they’ve worked. It’s the “we need one of these QR things now” way they’re being implemented, without thinking through any of the implications, that’s the problem.

Media Blitz Continues: DigiDay Daily

2011-05-25T17:01:00.000-04:00

A Word In Defense Of Social Media Gurus

Last week, I stumbled upon the latest blog post urging right-minded people to take up cudgels against the evil caste of "social media gurus" infecting the land. The ironic part is these posts are often written by people whose main expertise lies in social media. This is more of a sales pitch than argument: hire the author and you too can be saved.

But to paraphrase the old Garrett Morris skit, “Where are these social media gurus? I want some names! I want some phone numbers!” I’ve never actually met one. That is kind of odd, given that my job is to provide strategic advice to companies that are purchasing one of the social media or social video solutions my company sells. We’re primarily a software company. I generally get to meet everyone involved in the decision making process, either before, during or after the decision is actually made.

Most of the people I meet with are either in marketing or at the C-level. They generally have an idea that they should be doing more with social media than they currently are and some may even have a plan in mind. Sometimes the plan makes sense, other times it’s overly ambitious. But the problem, if there is one, has never involved a Rasputin-like “social media guru” bewitching the company into spending their entire marketing budget on tweeting recycled press releases. (It does make for some pretty funny material for an XtraNormal video.)

The problem, rather, is exactly what you’d think it’d be: Companies want a social media presence. They just don’t want to incur the costs and make the necessary infrastructure changes. Call it fear of commitment.

We also forget just how many companies are locked inside an IT version of North Korea. They don’t have Windows or Mac, they have a “packaged proprietary interface” that gives them a choice between icons marked “email” “word processing” and “calendar.” If they actually do get an “Internet” icon to click, it’s a strictly moderated version of IE6 that allows users to visit a handful of (mostly work-related) sites.

READ THE REST ON DIGIDAY.COM

BeanCast Again: Harder Drugs Like Facebook

2011-05-23T15:26:00.001-04:00

The title of this episode comes from my reference to LinkedIn as the "gateway drug of social media" during a discussion of their recent IPO.

For that and more, listen to the most recent episode of the always excellent BeanCast podcast, with host Bob Knorpp, me, Joe Jaffe, Bill Green and Matt McDermott.

LINKS BELOW:

LISTEN TO THE SHOW NOW OR SUBSCRIBE FOR AUTODOWNLOADING

GUESTS

Bill Green. Creative Strategist, BFG Communications (Read MTLB and listen to AdVerve)

Joseph Jaffe, Author/Speaker/Entrepreneur (Find out more at JaffeJuice and listen to Joe with Mitch Joel)

Matt McDermott, Copywriter, ADG Creative

Alan Wolk, Managing Director of Social Media Strategy, KickApps

TOPICS

The LinkedIn IPO

Netflix Traffic Volume

Washington Post Reports

Facebook Phototagging For Brands

Fast Company Reports

Tablets Beating Phones for e-Commerce

Mobile Commerce Daily Reports

The Call to Kill Ronald

Chicago Tribune Reports on the Legal Moves

STORIES TO WATCH

Apple's Enterprise Penetration
The Upfronts
What Happens Next With Oprah
Viacom vs. Time Warner
Bing Adding Facebook Recommendations

Dotting the I's and Crossing the T's

2011-04-25T10:36:00.005-04:00

So last week I took the kids to the American Museum of Natural History and was happy to find a link on their website to their new iPhone app.

I downloaded it and was impressed by how well-designed it was and the functionality it offered: it would locate exactly where you were in the museum and take you on a guided tour or give you step-by-step instructions on how to get to a particular exhibit. (For those who haven't been, the Museum of Natural History is extremely labyrinthine.)

One problem though: While we were at the museum, I opened the app about 8 different times from 8 different locations within the museum. It did not once register where we were or even attempt a guess - it just told me it could not locate me.

As frequent readers know, apps that count on the fairly unreliable GPS systems of American smartphones are one of my shibboleths.

So why didn't the Museum of Natural History think to test this out?

Did they consider installing WiFi of some sort in the museum so people could actually use the app? If it had worked once, I'd have given them a pass and figured there was just a lot of traffic in the museum that day. And it did prove very useful when I asked for directions from the main entrance to the Easter Island statue-- I've been to the museum enough times that I had a good idea of where I was in relation to the main entrance-- and it provided excellent step-by-step directions. So I couldn't help but think how great the app would be once the GPS tracking actually worked.

Everything is great until it isn't. Products need to work in reality, not just in theory. And OPT (other people's technology) is one of the things you always need to factor in the equation.

(NB: FWIW, I have a Verizon iPhone 4 - in the inner depths of the thick-walled museum, I was getting one or two bars at most.)

UPDATE: One of my co-workers told me that he had a similar experience with the app, only to discover the museum's free WiFi network by happenstance and that the app worked perfectly once he'd logged in. BUT: There are no signs at the museum informing you that there is a free WiFi network and the app, the most logical place to let users know about it, is similarly mum.

How To Present Just About Anything, Part 1/2

2011-04-21T07:22:00.001-04:00

This is part one of two of a presentation I gave internally called "How To Present Just About Anything" - it's the first time I've tried recording myself during a presentation. (Tech Note: While recording on Keynote works very well, the resulting file is huge.)

The presentation is basically a compilation of everything I've learned from having to do dozens of live presentations every year. The flow is pretty straightforward: The Basics -> Tips & Tricks -> What To Do When Disaster Strikes.

First video is 25 minutes, the second is 15, so be forewarned.

How To Present Just About Anything, Part 1/2

View more videos from Alan Wolk.

Everything Is Great Until It Isn't

2011-04-11T16:44:00.000-04:00

The $41 million Color fiasco only served to point out how unreliable location still is on smart phones. Not to mention a hassle.

That in turn has turned the spotlight on companies who are seeking to remedy this through something called “persistent location” which broadcasts your whereabouts whether or not you have the apps on your phone open. The advantage is that it can track you as you move about your day, so you don’t have the lag time of the smart phone figuring out that you’re 10 miles from where you last checked in every time you open the app.

That’s also the disadvantage: the companies building this technology are also billing it as a way to push coupons at consumers when they are in range of your business. So if you are, say, around the corner from Starbucks, you’ll get a message inviting you to have a latte for 25 cents off.

It’s all opt-in and above board and, as of now, pretty novel. Until of course, it’s not. I have visions of walking down the street and getting assaulted by offers from dozens of companies. I mean I get that everything would be opt-in, but so is email, and think of how often you find yourself searching for that “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email. And how many times unsubscribing involves entering some long-forgotten user name and password to “modify your account’s notification settings.”

What’s more, getting a 25 cent coupon every time I walk past Starbucks may seem like a great idea if I’ve got a several-times-a-day Starbucks habit. But checking to see what’s making that buzzing noise on my phone, especially if I pass by Starbucks several times a day is going to get old fast.

Push coupons also seem to fall into the same category as internet banners: they’re asking you to stop doing something time sensitive (looking up your flight reservation, walking to a lunch meeting) to pay attention to their product. Location is particularly sensitive in this area: outside of vacation trips, how often do we find ourselves wandering the streets without a specific destination in mind.

Persistent location may someday prove useful, perhaps in conjunction with other data. (Imagine an app that tracked your location and cross-referenced it with periods of high or low productivity. That’s data you might be able to make use of.)

But pushing coupons at you as you walk down the street? That sounds like nothing more than the electronic version of a Middle Eastern bazaar.

Paying For The Internet

2011-04-08T00:06:00.001-04:00

This started out as a comment on the newly revitalized DigidayDaily, but evolved into its own blog post.

I'm not sure what I'm about to propose is technologically possible, if it's been thought up before and dismissed, but it seems to make a lot of sense, so here goes:

Right now publishers can't find anyone who is willing to pay for their content. When they try and put up a paywall (e.g. The New York Times) they create a whole lot of ill will. What's more, there are still plenty of people happily giving it away for free (Huffington Post.)

At the same time, many of us are paying somewhere in the range of $100/month for cable television service. We're even happily shelling out an extra $15-25 a month for "premium" channels, be they HBO, NFL Red Zone or Showtime. And I'm thinking that we don't seem to mind it because (a) since we're not paying directly for the shows, but rather for some level of cable service, it somehow seems like a utility, in the same class as our water and electric bills, and (b) because FIOS or Comcast has bundled up everything into nicely productized packages, we feel comfortable knowing that we're getting the Basic model or the Deluxe or the SuperPremium: these are terms we know from countless other industries and they carry a meaning and cachet that goes beyond the actual product.

So what if the internet was packaged up the same way?

We're already heading down the path towards convergence, when all our TV channels will be available over the internet, on demand, whenever we want. So what if our Deluxe package also gave us access to "premium" websites, like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal?

We could choose the "Celebrity Package" and get access to Us, People, TMZ, PerezHilton and the like, bundled together with HBO and Showtime. An ESPN package would give access to the network's video content, including live broadcasts, along with everything currently on the website.

You get the picture.

What I'm proposing is basically a reverse image of today's internet where everything is free until someone makes you pay extra for it. In this new world, sites would be closed unless you paid to have them open to you. Most sites would fall under a "basic cable" type umbrella and be included for free in whatever package you bought. It's the premium content sites that would charge extra, and the cable providers would split the revenue with them, much as they currently do with the premium cable networks. Sites like the New York Times would advertise to get people to subscribe via their cable provider, much like HBO does now. Because I'm thinking we'd have a lot easier time psychologically paying an extra $10/month to TimeWarner than we would paying it directly to nytimes.com

Agree?

PS: Of course there'd be a whole lot of pirating, but we have that now with TV shows and live sporting events and the number of people getting their content the Bit Torrent way seems to be holding steady. Just another number to factor in when setting the price.

Ending the Ghettoization of Community Sites

2011-04-03T17:28:00.003-04:00

The other day I was on a panel when one of my fellow panelists opined that “Google is the homepage for a brand's community site.” And while he was pretty much on target, it irked me that few people seemed to get why that was a really bad thing.

Community sites were traditionally built as bolt-ons to existing sites back in the very early 2.0 days. No one was sure what people were going to do or say on these forums (and they were always message board style forums) so the fact that they were hard to find and hidden in the navigation was actually quite reassuring.

And so, hidden from view, many of these community sites blossomed and grew. People who really cared about the brand (e.g. the evangelists) flocked to the forums, forming friendships and helping out the occasional newbie or “how do I do X?” poster that stumbled onto the boards.

As the social web grew, many brands added blogs to the mix. The quality of the blogs varied wildly, from well-thought out magazine style sites that were featured on the homepage to “the marketing department made us do this” sites that were updated once every few months with some orphaned press release. After an initial burst of “visit our blog” messaging, those blog sites were also shunted off to the “community” section and/or abandoned.

The last year or so has witnessed the flowering of brand Twitter and Facebook sites. Here again, quality (or more accurately, commitment) varies wildly, but the Facebook and Twitter feeds are usually featured on the homepage as a sort of “we get it kids, see, we get it” type attempt at establishing the brand’s “currency.” (“Currency” being the term-du-jour for “hipness” or “coolness.")

So that’s your typical brand website, circa April 2011: a homepage featuring some sort of e-commerce function or current promotion along with prominently displayed links to the brand’s Twitter and Facebook pages. The community boards, dismissed as hopelessly 1998, are buried somewhere in one of the sub-nav bars.

That’s just plain wrong.

The external social web, the Facebooks, Twitters, FourSquares and the like are great ways to establish a low-barrier exchange with the brand. They’re the equivalent of a window display that gets customers to stop and take note of the store and what it’s selling. The most interested users, those closest to conversion and/or evangelism, need to be funneled over to the brand’s own website where they can bond with like-minded souls.

Unfortunately, today’s average website doesn’t allow them to do so.

Consider instead, a site that bubbles up user content – comments, photos, videos, blog posts—to the home page where it sits alongside similar editorial content. We currently have the technology to do that: to take a piece from the brand about how green the new Kitchen Sponge line is and combine that with user input around environmental issues in housecleaning, going “green” and kitchen sponges.

Basically you are turning the entire domain site into a community site, giving easy access to everything from message boards to product ratings to Twitter comments and giving users a prominent voice on the site. (A prominent voice, not the main one: user content should be visible but should not overwhelm the site nor should it interfere with the site's user exprience by making it more difficult for users to accomplish the things they've come to the site to do.)

The benefits are pretty wide-ranging: for interested users, your future brand evangelists, it allows them to easily connect with both the brand and with other people who feel the same love for it as they do. It lets them know they are welcome and that their input is valued. It encourages them to set up their own profile and become active users of the site, the message boards in particular.

For casual users, an integrated site tells them that the brand actually does care about its customers and values what they have to say. (And if there’s anything consumers want, it’s for brands to listen to them.) So even if I have no interest in joining the brand community because it’s a low interest category for me, I’m bound to be impressed by the enthusiasm of the people who do care about the brand. In most cases, I’m going to be impressed by the fact that they even exist.

That's a great strategy for creating a useful and appealing domain site in today's social-heavy landscape. It’s also a lot more effective than crossing your fingers and counting on Google.

A Plea To Conference Organizers

2011-03-31T22:19:00.002-04:00

As most readers of this blog know, I do a lot of speaking at conferences around the globe. While all of them are in some way social media or internet-related, most all of them have something else in common: really bad WiFi service.

I don't really get why: I mean it's not that difficult to figure out that everyone at one of these conferences is going to need more than the average amount of bandwidth. That they're going to be tweeting, facebooking, foursquaring, groupmeing, emailing and browsing non-stop. And if you don't have adequate WiFi, they're all going to take to the interwebs to bitch about it.

The solution is pretty easy: install a couple of extra WiFi connections. They're not that expensive (especially if we're talking about one of those $1,000+ conferences. And both they and the free ones can likely find some company willing to sponsor the extra WiFi in return for a few free passes.)

That way the chatter is going to be all about what's going on at your conference. Not about how they can't log into their email.

It's a pretty minor upgrade, but I promise you it'll pay off in spades.

Social Media World Forum

2011-03-29T08:29:00.000-04:00

If you are in London today (Tuesday, 29 March) or tomorrow, stop by the Social Media World Forum at Olympia Hall in West Kensington.

KickApps has a networking bar with lots of free recharging stations and I have plenty of free drink tickets for coffee and other delightful beverages.

In addition to maning the booth, I'll be expounding on how to build a community site during a panel on Wednesday at 11:50 AM

Stop by and say hey if you're around.

Color Me Skeptical

2011-03-24T11:49:00.000-04:00

So the Color iPhone app launched today to much buzz and (more importantly) $41 million in funding already in the bank.

What it does, best as I can tell, is allow you to take and share photos with people who are nearby. So that if you are at a party, you can see pictures that other partygoers have taken . It also has a feature that lets you rate those photos (thumbs up or down) and see your own personal timeline. You can also see all the pictures that were taken at a particular location in chronological order, so over time, a popular restaurant would likely have hundreds of pictures of people celebrating a birthday or anniversary.

Now before we get into the issue of “why would I want to do this?” the overarching theory behind this is that of the flexible social graph based on a community of interest around a particular event or preference. This exists today at some level on Amazon, where they show you the books that other people who’ve bought the book you’re looking at have also read. It’s a useful tool and I’ve often discovered new books that way.

It’s also anonymous: I don’t know who any of those people are, just that they bought The Three Little Pigs too and here’s what’s most popular with people in that segment of the Amazon universe.

Which is fine with me. I don’t need to know anything about these people other than that they share my taste in literature. I’ve found it’s rare that any two people have the exact same taste in anything subjective (food, literature, film, etc.) so I don’t have any need to follow or friend them.

Back to Color though. In addition to not really getting why I’d want to see the iPhone photos of people at the same party (other than the novelty act aspect) I have real concerns over the problems created by the inaccuracy of most smart phones GPS. I mean seriously, when was the last time FourSquare or Twitter or any other apps got your location exactly right.

And Color would seem to need that sort of accuracy. Because what’s the fun of seeing pictures of a party two blocks over or photos from a restaurant that’s across the street?

I like the idea of fungible social graphs built around a single scenario. It’s just that Color doesn’t seem like the answer as much as it sounds like a one trick pony.

PS: Check out this very funny spoof of their pitch deck.

History In The Making

2011-03-22T15:41:00.001-04:00

For years we’ve been talking about “convergence” as if it were some sort of holy prophesy that would change the world if and when it finally came to pass.

And now it’s happened. Netflix, who already eats up as much as 30% of network bandwidth in the US by streaming movies to our TV sets, is going to produce an original series. Or more accurately, a remake of an original series, House of Cards, that was quite popular in the UK. They’ve lined up Kevin Spacey to star and David “The Social Network” Fincher to direct. And they’re going to be streaming it over the internet.

Specific details have yet to be announced, but make no mistake: this is the Convergence. It’s TV over the internet, when and where you want it – everywhere from your iPhone to your 55 inch HDTV.

In terms of details, I’ll take the leap and posit that the show will be available at a set time each week, with viewers then having the ability to stream it at any time they want. I’ll go one step farther and guess that Netflix will also ignore the time zone issue, so that if the show first debuts at 9 PM EST, people in LA are going be be able to see it at 6 PM, PST. So the first thing to watch will be the impact of that sort of time-shifting on ratings and tune-in.

It will also be interesting to see how Netflix promotes House of Cards. Will it be an online promotion only, with banners on Netflix and other sites or will they run promos on traditional broadcast networks along with outdoor, radio and print?

The other interesting thing to watch is tune-in time: what percentage of viewers will watch the show at the exact moment of release, how many will tune in within the first hour and how many will tune in days later and/or watch several episodes at once.

One thing seems pretty certain though: whether the series succeeds or flops, it won’t be the last time we'll be seeing something like this.

Just Ignore Them

2011-03-20T18:57:00.001-04:00

Lot of bitching and moaning about the number of corporate sponsors at SXSW this year. I'm not sure why though: most everyone I know seemed to more or less ignore them. (Or at least the ones that weren't their clients.)

None of them provided anything I really needed or wanted. (Okay, I did use the very clean bathroom at some brands "party space" but the "space"-- a parking lot covered with AstroTurf- had club-level house music blasting, along with some picnic tables and chairs, and I could not for the life of me figure out why I'd want to stay there once I was done. Nor do I remember the brand.)

But back to the original topic: most people seemed to be blowing by the big brand-sponsored booths on their way to someplace more relevant. The GE Solar Carousel was cool to look at when I walked past it, but that was all they got from me: "cool merry-go-round, guys."

The lesson seems to be you can't graft something artificial onto something whose salient feature is authenticity. Both the purpose of the conference itself, and the food, bars and overall scene of the city of Austin.

Let them come. If they were smart, they'd pay for a speaker or two instead of setting up what are essentially giant trade show booths in the conference center.

Without the pens or free t-shirts

The Myth of Sentiment Analysis

2011-03-18T13:18:00.003-04:00

One of the holy grails of marketing is figuring out a way to provide fully automated sentiment analysis, that magic algorithm that would give brands a way to instantly interpret the things users are saying about them online and make breakthrough business decisions based on the data.

But I’m not sure that’s happening any time soon.

To begin with, I’m suspicious of reading anything more into sentiment analysis than the broad stoke trends we already know how to find: does it matter if 74% of users don’t like your new product versus 86%? Not really. Either way, you need to fix the product. Sentiment analysis can show a trend—are a lot of people suddenly liking or disliking something? Is there any demographic pattern to who is liking or disliking most intensely?

But beyond that, I think we are fooling ourselves. To begin with, people posting online are arguably not a good sample of the population at large. It takes a certain personality type (call them “online extroverts”) to publicly post their opinion of anything. It’s less an age or culture thing as psychological: there are lots of people who are loathe to offer public opinions of anything in real life, let alone online.

“Public” is the key word here: among close friends, these same people will open up, the same way they do in what they perceive to be a “safe” (e.g. closed) social environment. And right now, the sentiment analysis scrapers can’t peer that far behind Mr. Zuckerberg’s magic curtain.

Sentiment analysis is also not sophisticated enough to pick up on cultural mores: expressing unfavorable opinions is looked on as bad manners in many cultures. (My wife is from Tennessee, and Southerners tend to favor the “damn with faint praise” approach. So if you hated “Black Swan” you’d say something like “that Natalie Portman has the most beautiful skin” or something equally benign. That’s not the sort of clue an algorithm is going to pick up on.)

Finally, there’s value in checking sentiment by hand. You can pick out things people are saying about your brand that you hadn’t even thought to have a program check. Plus you get a feel for the type of people who are talking about you.

But in the end, it’s all about the broad strokes: people rarely know why they really like or dislike something, they just know that they do.

The "Respirator Idea"

2011-02-17T20:07:00.006-05:00

One of the more frustrating things I’ve witnessed in my ad career (and one that I see repeated time and again from both agencies and brands) is what I call the “Respirator Idea.” It’s an idea that should have died because it no longer works in its current version, but it’s kept alive by people who have a vested interested in seeing something/anything get produced.

“Respirator Ideas” run the gamut from TV spots to websites to social media promotions and the one thing they all have in common is that you can tell that at some point they actually were good ideas.

But then the punch line got cut because it might have been offensive. The prize went from a two week Hawaiian vacation to two nights at the EconoLodge in Utica. Usability went from a site that did everything for you to “well, I’m sure they’ll be able to figure it out for themselves.”

It’s an unfortunate aspect of business in general: people rarely know when to pull the plug on something that was once a good idea. But it’s perhaps the most important skill anyone in marketing can have. Because someone’s got to be “the one.”

The one who says “No one is going to laugh at this.”

The one who says “No one is going to want to do this.”

The one who says “No one needs a site like this.”

The one who says “No one will post this to their Facebook page.”

And then actually step in and kill the project.

It rarely happens because of all the politics involved. All the small cuts along the way didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. And a very influential group of people are still in denial about what the “Respirator Idea” has become. In their minds eye, they see the original idea, not the corpse it’s become.

And so it’s risky to stand up to them and say “the Emperor has no clothes.” You’ll be accused of being a negativist. A bad team player. An obstacle. You’ll make people look foolish and they won’t like that.

But someone must stand up. Someone who is going to look foolish no matter which way the decision is made. Because if you make the decision to cut the cord, you’ll also look brave, not cowardly.

And in today’s business environment, that’s no small thing.

KickApps Social Strategy Offering

2011-02-14T11:22:00.003-05:00

If you've ever wondered just what it is I do for a living over at KickApps, this slideshow offers a pretty good overview of all the different things the KickApps social strategy team can do for your brand.

If there's anything you think we're missing or that we should develop some expertise in, I'd love to hear from you.

And the more you can share this with your Twitter & Facebook friends, the happier I'll be.

KickApps Social Strategy Offering

View more presentations from Alan Wolk.

Social Selling by KickApps - New on Slideshare

2011-01-30T13:49:00.001-05:00

We've been talking a lot about all the things brands have gotten good at on the social web. They're listening, participating and all that... but they're not selling. It's a simple thing, but brands are forgetting that they are in the business of making money and their social media efforts need to support that business.

The slide share presentation lays out some easy-to-implement ways brands can bring selling back into the social web without sounding like a used car salesman.

Social Selling by KickApps

View more presentations from Alan Wolk.

Webinar Tomorrow: Social Media Integration

2011-01-25T13:17:00.006-05:00

I'll be running an hour-long FREE webinar tomorrow here at KickApps called "No Social Site is an Island: The Key to Social Media Integration." Justin Chase, the other part of our strategy team will be joining me.

We'll be discussing the advantages of an integrated social media strategy, one that includes your brand's domain site along with your social sites.

Registration details are here.

Goats Are The New Monkeys (This Week's BeanCast)

2011-01-25T12:32:00.004-05:00

Once again I join Bob Knorpp over at the BeanCast, my favorite marketing podcast, for the show with possibly the best BeanCast title ever "Goats Are The New Monkeys."

Also appearing are Rupal Parekh from Ad Age, Dirk Singer from the Rabbit Agency (UK) and Bill Green from Make The Logo Bigger

To quote Mr. K's write-up:

This group was feisty and ready for a debate!

Everybody came to the table with an opinion and no one was afraid to challenge what anyone else said. Which always makes for a great show in my book. We kept getting to unintended insights that would stop me in my tracks and force a whole new line of questions. Just awesome!

You can download the episode here

The End Of An Era

2011-01-19T22:42:00.000-05:00

It's a given that the ad business has dropped in stature since the golden days of the 1960s. But that may have less to do with the vast array of scapegoats, everything from holding companies to banner ads, than it does with the products being advertised themselves.

The mid-twentieth century was all about creating unique images for fairly identical products. The post-war boom had left the US economy awash in new consumer goods and it was the ad agencies job to help consumers differentiate one brand of soap from another. Since most of the brands were fairly identical and equally useful, an effective ad campaign really could make or break a product. Thus the frequent use of humor and jingles, two memorable devices that helped drive home a brand’s key selling points.

And while CPG advertising is still alive and well, what’s really turning heads and shaking up markets these days are innovative new products that have no competitors. They’re often too complex to adequately explain in an ad: you need to actually experience the product—or the retail experience-- to understand the zeitgeist.

Take the iPad, for instance. You can read and watch all you want, but the key to the purchase cycle is actually touching and playing with one. What drives that is not advertising, but word-of-mouth: people spontaneously talking to their friends about how much they love their iPads. The guy on a train asking a stranger how she finds typing on it. It's not a product, it's a conversation piece and that's not something you could say about most mid-century packaged goods.

And so maybe that’s just it: advertising, the funny, entertaining, pop culture phenomenon that defined the 1960s, 70s and 80s, was a product of its times. It helped us make sense of a confusing array of new mass produced products and became redundant as media splintered and new products were more often iterations of old ones (e.g. Bud Light Lime) than entirely new categories. Add to that the spurt of innovative businesses – everything from Starbucks to WholeFoods to Amazon— whose unique end-to-end experiences helped differentiate them from their competitors, and you have the end of an era.

What follows, a world where consumer-generated messages and brand messages are integrated in a seamless loop, may not be nearly as sexy. But it may just prove more useful.

"Suck Less" Works Too

2010-12-15T19:10:00.000-05:00

Engineers and techies hate Verizon. They’ve got a list of complaints a mile long about the cell carrier, ranging from its insistence on filling phones with useless branded applications that duplicate superior third-party ones to the overall inferiority of its product line.

Marketing pros marvel at what I’ve heard described as Verizon’s “death wish” – the fact that the carrier has passed on opportunities that many have felt would have put its rivals out of business. (The iPhone, for example.)

Consumers, on the other hand, don’t seem to mind. They’ve focused on the fact that a Verizon phone generally does what a phone is supposed to do: make and receive telephone calls, far more reliably than any of its competitors. (This is especially true in major cities like New York and San Francisco.) For many people, that’s proven to be a far more important factor than the model of their phone or the clunkiness of its apps.

It’s an interesting paradigm: in an industry where consumers have little love for any of the major players, the company that’s focused on the basics has proven to be the gold standard.

That “best of the worst” theory doesn’t make for a sexy marketing strategy, but by actually doing the groundwork, Verizon has established enough word-of-mouth buzz to overcome its rivals marketing-based efforts at stealing the “best coverage” crown. And while no company should strive to be the least lousy player in the market, there’s a lesson in there about sticking to the basics.

Do Location Based Check-Ins Have To Be Real Time?

2010-12-09T14:25:00.001-05:00

One of the biggest hassles of location based services like FourSquare is the actual process of checking in. You arrive at the restaurant, your friends are already waiting at the table and there’s not really a socially acceptable way to whip out your phone and begin the 5 minute ignore-everyone-at-the-table-and-stare-at-your-phone process that a check-in often entails.

But what if check-ins weren’t real time? The original reason for making them real time was so that your friends could find you if you were out in a nearby bar. (It also played into the whole badge/mayor game thing.) Which is one reason to use an LBS, but far from the only one: more often than not we’re checking in from our office or the supermarket or a client lunch and no one’s really looking for us at those places.

What if location based services evolved into recommendation engines: here’s where I was today, I ate at Elm Street Café and recommend the artichoke soup. I bought a Calvin Klein sweater at Macy’s. They’re on sale this week.

Most of the time when I check in to FourSquare (or Gowalla, or Facebook Places) the results I’m seeing from my friends are several hours old anyway. So at lunchtime, I’m finding out where they had breakfast or drinks the night before.

A location-based service that was not real time would seem to have a number of benefits:

Ease of Use: I’m thinking most people would be more prone to “check-in” at the end of the day or whenever they had a spare 5 minutes alone and could input the highlights of their day rather than the random stops that comprise most people’s LBS check-in log. It also stops checking-in from interrupting a fun experience and forcing us out of participant mode and into reporter mode (e.g. the restaurant scene I laid out earlier.)
Deeper Engagement: Rather than just a rushed click to let the world know “Hey! I’m at the dry cleaners!” someone doing an end-of-day check-in is more likely to add tips and recommendations too, especially given that they’ve had some time to reflect on the day’s experiences.
Increased Loyalty: If I’m bothering to check in at Elm Street Café after the fact, chances are I’m a fan of the place. And if they were to send me a coupon for a free artichoke soup, chances are I’d use it next time I went. That’s a lot more appealing than getting hit with random coupons from a store I’m already in, particularly if I’m checking in as I’m waiting on line to pay. (Which is often where I find myself pulling out my phone - not, as many have postulated, upon entering.)
More Valuable Information: When checking in becomes thoughtful rather than random, informed rather than scattered, marketers (and other users) are provided with more useful information: did Bob check in from the dry cleaners because there was someone in front of him on line and he was bored, or did he check in to give them props for the way they iron his shirts? That sort of information is much more likely to be offered during a non-spontaneous check-in.

There are still plenty of situations (concerts, conferences. etc/) where real-time check-in can be a valuable tool and I’m not proposing that sites eliminate it. I’d also think these sites would want to set some sort of limit (24 hours?) on how much time passed between visit and check-in.

I think eliminating the requirement that all check-ins be real-time would greatly enhance both the appeal and the value of location-based services.

If nothing else, it would make the process a whole lot easier.

How Many Friends Have I Really Got?

2010-11-28T22:17:00.004-05:00

Facebook recently introduced their version of email, pointedly called "not-email" which is intended to let users talk with their friends in real time via email, text, IM and messaging.

A noble attempt, but one i suspect is doomed to fail. That's because it's all but impossible to separate out our "friends" from the rest of the people we know. This is not a technology issue, it's a psychology issue: people we consider friends may only consider us acquaintances and vice versa. And once we open up that can of worms, we're talking about a group much larger than our actual friends.

Remember Plaxo? It was a LinkedIn style platform that tried to get us to segregate our friends into three seemingly easy groupings: Friends, Work and Family. Only it wasn't so easy. One day you got an invitation from Bob, who you considered a casual work acquaintance, asking you to connect as a friend. Fair enough. You were likely flattered that Bob considered you a friend. But if Bob was listed as a friend, then Arun, Maria, Dave and Kevin, all of whom you had listed as work connections, needed to be made "friends" since you were certainly closer to them than you were to Bob, and it wouldn't make sense to have him as a Friend and them as mere co-workers.

And that's the problem: friendship is never as simple as a math equation. The people most of us consider friends rarely have us on an equivalent plane of friendship. So the potential for hurt feelings is quite high. And the second I give my Facebook email to an acquaintance is the second its value as a communication device with my inner circle diminishes in value 100%.

It's human nature and I'm not sure if technology can fix it. The best bet seems to be to maintain various levels of communication and allow water (or friendship) to seek its own level. That way we're not forced to declare our level of friendship with someone based on our communication vehicle.

A bit more complicated, no doubt, but ultimately less stressful.

Missed Opportunity For Yelp

2010-11-23T11:59:00.002-05:00

Yelp just announced that it was giving restaurant owners the opportunity to “incentivize repeat checkins and reward patrons with three different offer types: percent off, free or fixed price offers.” (emphasis added)

It’s the “repeat” part I have a problem with: Yelp is blowing a prime opportunity by putting the emphasis on repeat check-ins rather than first-time check-ins.

I’m guessing that most Yelp mobile users are somewhere away from their home base: either in another part of town or out of town all together. If they are using the mobile service as a way to find a local restaurant, an offer of 10% off, a free soda or prix fixe dinner may well sway them towards one of two or three equally acceptable (albeit unknown) options.

They’re unlikely to use the mobile app to check-in to a restaurant they frequent because there’s no reason for them to be on the mobile app: they already know where the restaurant is and aren't likely to use the mobile app to look up new reviews. If the restaurant pushes the offer (via in-store signage or something on the menu) repeat customers might take advantage of it and check-in, but that sort of activity does nothing to help sell-in Yelp’s main advantage, which is as a restaurant review site. (A free restaurant review site, at that, which showcases the tastes of twenty-somethings versus the paid Zagat sites whose audience skews older.)

Allowing restaurants to lure in first time users would not only solidify Yelp’s reputation, but would also possibly give more gravitas to the check-ins if they are pushed out to other social media sites: a user has no incentive to say something positive about a restaurant they are eating at for the first time, particularly once they’ve received their free root beer.

The missed opportunity here is yet another example of brands jumping on the bright shiny object bandwagon and letting the cart drive the horse rather than thinking about what their ultimate value proposition is to the consumer and how to use social media tools to support that proposition.

RockMelt: Initial Impressions

2010-11-10T14:34:00.004-05:00

Like all the rest of the usual suspects, I was able to get my hands on the new RockMelt browser the other day in its pre-release beta version. (Thanks to Bill Green of MTLB for that one.

THE GOOD

It imported all my info from Safari pretty seamlessly (though passwords and permissions don’t automatically install.)

It’s fairly simple to set up. But you do need to set it up for it to be useful. That means deciding which of your friends/family members get the 14 coveted widget slots on the left side of the browser, and which sites with RSS feeds you’re going to select as widgets on the right.

The widgets all appear as pop-up windows over the browser (though you can change that in the settings) and you can even detach them and drag them to a far corner of your browser.

One cool feature of the widgets is that they are outlined in blue when one of your friends or websites has new activity so you don’t have to keep checking.

When you Google something from the toolbar, the results shows up as a separate widget-like. ad-free, pop-over window. That way you get to check out the suggested sites without having to leave the results list. I’m still not 100% sure this is more efficient than opening up every link that looks like it might be relevant in a separate tab and rifling through them, but I’m willing to give it a shot.

THE BAD

You can @reply and retweet from the Twitter widget. Even share to Facebook. But if you want to write your own original tweet, you need to open up twitter.com. That’s not overly efficient. (UPDATE: Seems you can post to Twitter or update Facebook by clicking on your profile pic in the upper right. Though that still takes you away from the Twitter app, so my original comment holds. Sort of.)

The Friend widgets are ultimately not all that useful: the Chat function is Facebook chat. Which lots of people don’t use (or have permanently hidden) because unlike AIM or Skype, Facebook chat can be highly interruptive, especially if you’ve just jumped on for a quick Bejeweled Blitz break.

My other options with the Friend widget are sending Facebook messages or writing on their Wall. Which some people will no doubt find useful, but since I rarely use either feature, it renders the widgets sort of pointless.

THE VERDICT

RockMelt works well as a social browser. There are some features that need to be ironed out, but the basic idea is solid and it functions well as an actual browser.

The problem is that all the social stuff is very distracting when you’re trying to actually do work. I mean if you can always shut down your Twitter app and navigating to Facebook is a conscious decision. The little side widgets very quickly start to make you feel like your friends are standing outside the house waiting for you to finish your homework so you can come out and play. That’s not all that conducive to getting work done.

Off-hours, it’s not a bad toy. RockMelt definitely helps keep the social experience front and center and the “share” button on the browser makes it easy to post whatever it is you’re looking at to either Facebook or Twitter.

But ultimately, it’s not that special. There are plenty of plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome if I want to access Facebook all day long. Plenty of people download them. I never have. I use TBuzz or Amplify to share links straight from Safari.

Widgets and widget like objects are great for quick updates, but they pale beside the actual website. So when I realized I’d been spending much of my time on RockMelt on Facebook.com, I knew what my verdict was going to be.

The Value of Integration

2010-11-01T09:45:00.005-04:00

So the 800 number at the bottom of the ad was replaced by the website address, which in turn was replaced by the ubiquitous Facebook URL. And brands are investing heavily in their Facebook pages, giving users the chance to do everything from having “conversations” with the brand to ordering pizzas and airline tickets to entering contests and games.

Which makes sense at first blush: you want to be where your users are and Facebook’s got 500 million some odd users.

But... (and there’s always a but)

All that data about all those users is going straight to Mr. Zuckerberg’s servers. Not yours.

You can make assumptions based on what you can find out about your “fans” from looking at those parts of their profiles they’ve elected to make public, but that’s about it.

What’s more, you’ve got a website somewhere that’s going underutilized, a site where you can actually collect user data and control content, plus customize the look and feel to your heart’s content.

Plus you’ve got more and more users who primarily interact with you on their mobile devices where they can’t really do a whole lot with your cool new Facebook tab.

Which is why brands need to look at ways to integrate all their various and sundry touchpoints. That doesn’t mean that they all need to look identical, but rather, that all your content needs to live on a single platform based around your brand site where it can be ported out to social media’s walled gardens and open APIs (and vice versa) without your brand losing control over user data.

And while your immediate goals may not call for any sort of social CMS, there’s a good chance that as social media becomes more ubiquitous, more like Charlene Li’s famous analogy “like air” there’s going to be a lot of value in knowing who your “fans” and "followers" are and how and where you can reach them. (Facebook and Twitter are great, low-barrier ways to initially attract users, who can then be funneled over to your site for deeper engagement. But funneling them is a whole lot easier when you already know who they are.)

An integrated approach has other benefits as well. Various social media will come and go. At some point Facebook will become AOL. (It wasn't all that long ago that ads ended with "AOL Keyword: Compaq") Mobile apps may give way to some other platform. But your brand’s URL is a constant. It’s the one place consumers will always be able to find you, the one place you own.

Now of course creating a platform with the ability to host all your content, and making your brand site the nexus of your digital presence is exactly what my current employer, KickApps does. But that’s precisely why they are my current employer: we share a vision of the web where user data is paramount and brands act like brands, not buddies. (aka “Your Brand Is Not My Friend.”)

As the social web becomes just “the web,” the ability to quickly share and control content will become more and more important. Which is why having a single, integrated platform makes so much sense.

To me, anyway.

Kindle vs iBooks: User Experience Comparison

2010-10-13T11:37:00.000-04:00

I would have bet a three figure sum of money that I would not wind up being a fan of e-books. An avid reader with fairly quirky tastes, I really liked the feel of the pages, the sense of getting to the end of a book, etc.

Or so I thought.

I got my first e-book as a freebie - it was something I'd planned on buying anyway, so I figured nothing ventured, nothing lost.

I was hooked. The advantage of being able to read anytime, anyplace (I was using Kindle on my iPhone) trumped the small pages and lack of physical product. Plus the whole opening-the-book-up-to-where-you-left-off thing was a huge plus to an inveterate bookmark loser like myself.

Having recently had the chance to experience Apple's iBook service (on both an iPad and iPhone) I'm finding myself partial to the Kindle, with one major reservation.

The Kindle does synching much, much better, especially between the iPhone and iPad. iBooks was always messing up or not synching at all, which is a huge hassle since you can't really thumb through an ebook. Not sure what "Whispersync" (Kindle's name for its service) is supposed to refer to -- is synching particularly noisy?-- but it works.

As does Kindle's tap'n'turn functionality. The iBook's page turn thing is visually great, but it's sort of a pain in the butt after a while - pages don't turn immediately on the iPhone and even on the iPad it's too easy to move ahead an extra page or two by accident.

Kindle recently introduced two column reading on the iPad, so when you have it sideways it looks like an open book (a feature iBooks already had) and that's a big plus - it's easier to prop the iPad case open on my lap sideways and it makes me feel like I'm making more progress;)

The one area where iBooks is way ahead though is the in-app screen dimming feature. When I read at night, I keep the lights off so as not to wake up my wife, but in order to do so, I keep the screen dimmed as far as it will go. (It also makes reading in the dark easier-- a bright screen is really bright in a dark room.)

iBooks have a button that lets you dim the screen right from the app and only for the app. With Kindle, I have to open up the iPad or iPhone Settings and manually adjust the brightness (and then re-adjust it in the AM) which is definitely a bother.

That said, Kindle's superior synching ability is putting it ahead for me right now. The interface may not be as cute as iBooks, with its page turns and bookshelf, but for now, I'll take being on the right page.

Creating A Two-Tier System of Customer Service

2010-10-03T20:50:00.007-04:00

One of the things that often gets overlooked in the debate over whether companies should use Twitter for customer service and whether it’s just catering to the loudest whiners, is the difference between the types of people likely to be manning the corporate Twitter accounts and the corporate phone banks

The former are likely to be college graduates with an interest in marketing and social media who have a direct line to the powers that be. DItto the people tweeting them: they are likely to be more educated, more prominent and more savvy than your average consumer.

So is it fair to compare the relative value of the two until they’re more balanced? Right now, Twitter is a toy that marketers get to play with. Complaints that come in through Twitter are infrequent enough that the clever marketer makes a big deal about them, playing up what a great job they’re doing with customer service via Twitter, while ignoring the other 99% of their complainants, who are being sent to a call center in Bangalore.

It’s not a foolish move short-term: the company gets a lot of buzz for their excellent and caring responsiveness, people are impressed with their web-savvy, and points are scored all around.

The problem is when there’s no action taken as a result of the Twitter-based customer service. When what happens on the web turns out to be a Potemkin village, and the average customer is still treated to an inferior experience with no attempt made to improve it. That’s admittedly a cynical view of how many companies are using Twitter, but it’s likely an accurate one: too many companies are too busy listening to the people telling them to use Twitter and other social media to “listen” to their customers, but they are too busy or too distracted to actually take any action about what they're hearing

And that’s the thing: all the well-intentioned listening in the world won’t make a difference unless you fundamentally change the way your company does business and start respecting your customers and giving all of them a voice and a chance at a satisfactory experience. Creating a two-tier system, wherein well-connected social media mavens have their complaints treated by well-trained representatives with the power to take concrete action, while the hoi polloi deal with unempowered overseas phone voices with the power to do nothing more than apologize profusely is not the best way to take advantage of this new medium.

Credit Where It's Due

2010-09-24T15:10:00.001-04:00

We spend a lot of time pointing out what brands are doing wrong, so it's nice to be able to point out something they're doing right.

Maui Jim sunglasses, whose corporate address is a sunny 1 Aloha Drive, despite being located in Peoria, Illinois, is the perpetrator of a recent random act of corporate kindness.

A few weeks back, I accidentally broke a pair of glasses I had (sat on them and snapped the armpiece.)

I called, and they said for $10, they could replace it. I filled out the online form, headed down to Mailboxes, Etc., and sent it off.

Not a whole lot of time went by. I wasn't at the point where I was wondering if they were lost. But I came home to find a box with my (repaired) glasses, a brand new case, and a note apologizing for having taken so much time to do the repair, so much time, in fact, that they were going to waive the fee.

So there you have it. A delay that couldn't have amounted to more than a day or two, and Maui Jim fixed my two year old sunglasses for free. And they included a nice, personalized ("Dear Alan...") note as well.

You can bet I'm going to get my next pair of sunglasses from them. Well done.

First Post on iMediaConnection

2010-09-22T20:41:00.000-04:00

Building on my iStrategy presentation "Why Your App Will Fail" is this piece in iMediaConnection with the more workaday title "Best and Worst Practices For Building Branded Apps."

Same general premise, but in article form. You can check it out at iMediaConnection.

iStrategy Today

2010-09-16T08:11:00.002-04:00

I've been in Chicago the past few days, meeting with agencies and socializing/networking at the iStrategy conference. Met a lot of great people and was forced to up my knowledge of KickApps and what it is we actually do ;)

Today I am on stage to give a talk on "Why Your App Will Fail."

The answer is all the usual reasons, beginning with the most basic one of never asking "why?" As always, my goal is to make it light and interesting and let the audience have some fun. Thanks to the folks at Euro for sitting through a dry run of it yesterday, as a preamble to my "Why KickApps" pitch.

10:55 AM CDT at the Allegro Hotel in Chicago.

New, from the Rutger's Center for Management Development Blog

2010-09-12T12:40:00.001-04:00

This fall, I am going to be joining a number of well-known bloggers and other digital media types are going to be teaching the Social Media track at the Rutgers Center for Management Development, an innovative "mini-MBA" program that's been getting a lot of press.

Among the names you might know who'll be joining me are Christina "CK" Kerley, David Berkowitz, Ian Schafer, Dr. Augustine Fou, David Polinchok, Beth Harte and Mark Schaefer (among others.)

The center has gotten permission to start a blog for the faculty and you can find my first post, "TV is Social? Or is it?" up right now along with some other thought provoking posts.

Definitely worth bookmarking the site and adding it to you RSS feed.

The Sweet By Design Experiment

2010-08-30T22:06:00.003-04:00

Author and Euro CCO Steffan Postaer is trying an interesting experiment with his latest book, "Sweet By Design."

He's posting chapters online, inviting comments and also allowing anyone who is so inspired to post their shot at the book's cover.

Postaer reports that the experiment has succeeded beyond his expectations, drawing over 10,000 in 25 days. Pretty impressive, given that only the first quarter of the book is available and the book cover submissions are (by and large) polished and professional looking. (The prize for the winning book cover is an iPad... and the chance to get published. That sort of crowdsourcing has drawn much debate, but Postaer does not seem to be hurting for submissions.)

As for the amount of traffic: this is not Postaer's first published novel, and fans of his previous work may account for some of the traffic, but as the author himself notes, it's still pretty remarkable. On the other hand, Dickens published his books in installments in magazines (which likely upped the anticipation level) so perhaps Postaer is on to something.

You can check it all out here.

The Value of Entertainment Value

2010-08-30T08:53:00.007-04:00

One of the most notable things about television advertising over the past several years is how bad it had become.

From a pure entertainment perspective, anyway.

Whether it was fear from clients, a lack of effort from agencies or just a general mood that precluded creativity, most of what was on the air was something of a wasteland. Yes, the usual suspects had the usual clever spots, but most of the time we seemed to be fast-forwarded through pods of pharma commercials with attractive 50something women doing tai chi.

So it's with great pleasure that I am sharing two spots that have made me laugh over repeating viewings and--- in a feat that's not all that easy to accomplish-- seem to appeal to the whole family. (e.g. it's not the sort of hipster humor that wins ad awards but leaves Grandma scratching her head.) And that, I'd have to say, is the real achievement here: two clever spots that can pretty much run on anything from ESPN to Disney Channel to Lifetime without skipping a beat. That's a huge accomplishment. And, I'm hoping, a signal to brands that this sort of across-the-board humor is indeed possible.

The first is from the long-running Geico campaign, but this is definitely one of the best. The casting and script are just brilliant.

The next is from a new campaign for Chef Boyardee, a childhood favorite that's gets pushed to the wayside as kids hit their tweens and teens. What's nice about this spot is that you can sort of see the brief (if you work in the business, anyway) but the spot is just so clever, you don't mind.

Enjoy.

Living In Twitter

2010-08-25T10:47:00.001-04:00

There was an article in the Times magazine a few weeks back on how much the notion of "living in public" affects our lives even when we're off line. The author was recounting how she found herself ruining a sweet moment with her daughter reading books out on the lawn by thinking how she would phrase the tweet... or if she even should tweet about it.

I've noticed myself doing this in a number of situations ever since and I suspect many of you have as well.

It's the downside to living a web-enabled social life and I do wonder how the experience eventually affects everything we do if, after a while, no one sounds truly authentic, but rather like a self-conscious public version of authentic.

Particularly because so many people don't do self-conscious very well. At least not yet. All too often there's some cringe-inducing verbiage signaling the speaker wants to remind us that they're a truly deep thinker. The underwhelmed endorsement of something the endorser suspects they should be heartily endorsing. Or the blatant attempt at currying favor with someone whom the supplicant thinks will make them seem hipper or at the very least smarter.

And these are people, not brands.

What do brands get to sound like, especially because they do need to be eternally self-conscious?

For many brands, spontaneity is not an issue. They are in more or less perma-response mode, answering questions/dealing with problem from their audience and providing a "helpful" response. We have zero expectation of spontaneity or authenticity from brands online, though there are admittedly times when we'd like to see someone do a Steven Slater and tell a difficult customer where to go.

But since that's not happening, all we're left with is the nearly identical voice of brands all trying to be cheerful and helpful and likable leavened by the occasional rogue CEO (think Gary Vaynerchuk or Mark Cuban) who've made themselves the brand.

I'd argue that's still a big improvement: I'll take the uniformly perky voice brands adopt online today over the deafening silence of the last hundred years.

As for people... it may all go back to the "village" theory, which basically says that for thousands of years we all lived in little villages where everyone knew everyone else's business 24/7/365 and that it was only the brief period following the Industrial Revolution where that rhythm got disrupted and that our current American lives, filled with anonymity and reinvention are not that healthy and actually somewhat deviant.

And so it may just take us some time before we get used to living in "village" mode again and not caring that everyone is going to know what we're up to before we regain our ability to live unselfconsciously, albeit publicly.

Why Doesn't This TV Have A Pause Button?

2010-08-20T11:22:00.007-04:00

The NY Times Sunday Magazine is running yet another story about those Wacky Millennials and how darn ornery they are.

Though at least this time the author has the common sense to admit that (a) similar stories citing fairly identical attributes have been written about every single group of twentysomethings since World War II and (b) all these stories tend to focus on upper middle class kids, since they’re the ones with the financial resources to take their time settling down and starting their adult lives.

(Sidenote: given Google, you'd think the people who write the myriad "millennials are changing the workplace/world" articles would do their homework and reference the identical articles that were written about Xers and Boomers back in the 60s, 70s and 80s.)

From where I’m standing though, the biggest shift in the white collar workforce happened sometime in the mid-late 1980s or thereabouts, when PCs were introduced as standard equipment. Suddenly, no matter what industry you were in, you had people who could compose directly on the computer and print out their own documents. (Prior to this, you were either composing with a pad and pen or you were dictating. If you’ve ever tried to dictate a letter, it’s definitely a lost art and not an easy skill to learn.) This meant an end to mad typing skills, and, ultimately, the “typing pool” -- a room many larger organizations had where the fifth iteration of a document was retyped quickly and flawlessly.

But corporate structure aside, the ability to conceptualize on a computer screen, even a black one with amber or green type, was a huge shift in the way people worked with and thought about media in general - screens had previously been a place where we watched video as part of a shared experience, so reading and writing on them was a huge leap. Trite as it now sounds, word processing in many ways set the stage for our comfort with the internet, another place where we interacted with type on a screen.

The next paradigm shift in media is likely to come from the generation that’s currently in elementary and preschool, kids born after the year 2000. Many of whom (the upper middle class American ones, anyway) don’t remember a world without 3G internet connectivity from mom or dad’s smart phone, which means that for them, the internet truly is “like air” and they see it the way the rest of us see electricity or running water. That means everything lives in the cloud for them, nothing is locked into a time-based schedule and that’s got to signal a shift in how they experience the media they're consuming.

That shift, what it means and how we can start preparing for it, is the topic of my proposed SXSW panel this year, entitled “Why Doesn’t This TV Have A Pause Button?” You can see all the details around it and vote for it here (voting counts for 30% of the decision.)

Thanks.

The Next Part of the Journey

2010-08-10T09:46:00.000-04:00

It was three years ago that I first wrote a blog post entitled “Your Brand Is Not My Friend” that proved to be the launching pad for my career as a strategist.

The premise behind it was that people primarily use social media sites like Facebook for socializing and don’t want to hear brand messages when they’re on there. (There are exceptions for “Prom King Brands” - brands with a cool factor - and for brands that have managed, a la Old Spice, to provide something uniquely entertaining.)

So it’s with that thought in mind, that I’m announcing the next step in my career. I am now the Managing Director of Social Media Strategy for KickApps, helping to start up their strategy consulting practice.

KickApps, for those of you unfamiliar with the company, lets brands build, maintain and manage custom social media solutions. That means everything from Facebook integration to video to comments to community, all of them residing right on the brand’s own website. My charge is to add strategy to the mix, to help KickApps’ clients figure out the “why” in addition to the “what” and “how.” In that endeavor, I’ll be joined by the very able Justin Chase, a Digitas veteran who tweets as @JC6451 (in case you wanted to start following him or something.)

I’ve known the team at KickApps for some time now and have spoken at a number of their events (along with the likes of Charlene Li, Mario Armstrong and Sandy Carter.) So I’m excited to be starting up a strategy consulting arm for them, as in many ways this a logical next step for me, particularly because their focus on letting brands own their own social media data is something I really do feel strongly about.

On the off chance you were worried, I will not be abandoning this blog (if anything, I’ll be posting more frequently) and I wanted to thank all of you for your support over the years: the readers, the retweeters and above all, the commenters. You’ve been what's kept me going and what makes writing this blog so much fun.

I hope you’ll stick around for the next part of the journey.

PS: You can find the full press release here, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

The Overthinking Trap

2010-08-03T12:43:00.002-04:00

One of the more notable things about the Old Spice social media videos is the speed at which they were produced.

This is a credit to everyone involved: the actor, director, agency team, even the client, because pulling off something that good under such a tight deadline is no mean feat. That said, I'm sure there are dozens of things the agency creatives would have changed if they'd been given an extra 24 hours.

There are always are. It's in the nature of creativity to never be satisfied with the final product.

Which is why one of the more radical changes wrought by digital culture is the notion of the acceptability of the imperfect, the idea that being first is better than being flawless, because flawless is nothing but an unobtainable ideal. It's why the thirty-third iteration of a script or headline rarely looks any better than the sixth. Different, maybe, but rarely better.

Which is not to say that anyone should be embracing mediocrity. Just that in a medium like advertising where every impression is purposely fleeting and impermanent, the notion that we are looking at version 2.1.4 of a video campaign should not seem any odder than looking at version 2.1.4 of a mobile app.

It will be interesting to see if this is a trend or an anomaly: video is notoriously expensive to produce, so I wonder how many marketers will feel comfortable giving up their traditionally lengthy production cycles.

Old Spice: Who’s Buying It?

2010-07-16T09:46:00.002-04:00

While like most readers of this blog, I am thrilled, delighted and more than a bit jealous of the brilliance behind the new Old Spice campaign (the social media portion in particular), a couple of business stories I’ve seen have raised the question of who the campaign is actually targeted to and whether, say, followers of Guy Kawasaki would actually ever buy something from a brand that seems mostly geared towards younger teenage boys and older men.

It’s a valid question: while the Old Spice campaign has been frequently compared to “Subservient Chicken” one could make the argument that just about everyone eats at Burger King (whether they admit to it or not.) Old Spice, however, is a fairly unique market.

The counter-argument to all that chatter though, is that Old Spice is not some hipster upstart, but rather an established P&G brand, and that P&G always does things for a reason, with numbers and research behind the reason, so clearly they have something in mind with the way they are running this campaign. Overall awareness for a brand that’s mostly slipped off the radar is one possible theory. So is seeding the ground for line extensions that would be aimed at more upscale consumers or even women. And the final argument is that not everyone using social media is a Silicon Valley professional, and that social media's reach (YouTube in particular) is much broader than we realize. (Then there's the final, final reason: seeing this campaign actually boost sales would make my life much easier, especially in the “convincing clients this stuff actually works” department.)

So I’m curious what you all think: would you ever consider buying an Old Spice product? Does anyone you know currently use the brand? Would you be open to a more upscale line extension?

While I realize my readers do not a valid scientific sample make, I'm curious as to your thoughts and experiences. And if anyone has a link to sales stats, that would be awesome: are they up? down? Or is P&G not saying?

Have A Little Faith

2010-07-01T12:47:00.001-04:00

I admit I rarely watch commercial television. Most of what I watch on TV is either on demand or DVR’d. The rest is mostly live sporting events, primarily basketball.
The NBA mostly attracts beer advertisers (plus T-Mobile’s “Fave 5” campaign featuring an array of NBA stars.) And beer advertisers can’t say all that much so they can’t really lie to you. It’s all about how refreshing the beer is, or, if it’s an import, how cool you’ll be if you drink it.

Relatively harmless stuff and beer is, for all intents and purposes, a refreshing beverage and many people drink imported beer for the cool factor.

But the other day I wound up watching a couple of hours of actual commercial TV. And the one thing that struck me was how much of what I saw left me with the impression that someone was trying to trick me. Or at least had a very dim view of my intelligence.

There was an ad for one of the telcos that was all about their revolutionary new voice-activated search feature. Which, if you’ve picked up a smart phone lately, you know is (a) fairly ubiquitous and far from revolutionary and (b) still in its infancy and overwhelmingly inaccurate to the point where using it is more of a hassle than it’s worth. But the commercial was portraying it as a feature the entire family easily used and all I could think of was what would happen if someone googled the feature. (That’s the whole theory behind The Real Digital Revolution – consumers can fact-check ads.)

In addition to the voice recognition ad (which really jumped out at me as pretty much not true) there were a slew of ads for household products which also seemed chock full of overpromise. Stains don’t come out instantly. Mopping isn’t fun. Kids just don’t get that excited over cereal.

I mean I realize packaged goods advertising is challenging and that it’s not easy creating excitement over a small improvement, but I wish so many of the ads didn’t sound like someone was trying to snow me over.

Having been distanced from that sort of advertising for a while, it’s striking how little faith so many advertisers have in both their own products and in their consumers. It makes it very clear why brands that do have faith are so successful: consumers tend to draw a straight line from the way a brand treats them in its advertising to the quality of the product.

That’s as true online as it is on TV: brands that use the social web as yet another place to push “here’s what we want to say” messaging at consumers (versus giving consumers the information they want to hear and/or starting a conversation) create a negative image for their product. Because what they’re really saying is “it’s all about us, not you.”

And that doesn’t work in any medium.

Maybe It's Me

2010-06-28T09:43:00.001-04:00

Just read another article with yet more gushing about people "sharing" things that I'm not so sure I want to share.

This time it's books and how people will soon be sharing their favorite passages and notes and cutting and pasting the good parts and all that.

Not so fast.

If I'm reading a good book, particularly fiction, part of what makes it good is that I'm inside the world of that novel. It's what the late John Gardner (with whom I had the honor of studying in college) called "a vivid and continuous dream."

So why would I want to pull out of the vivid and continuous dream I get while reading an incredible novel by stopping to check which paragraphs John Szalewski from Toledo, Ohio (Handle: JohnnySzal345) thought was awesome? Particularly if I don't know John. (Or even if I did.)

No matter what the medium is: video, audio, print, or digital, a story well told is not something anyone wants interrupted. . You may want to discuss it afterward, but if it's that good, you won't have time or inclination during.

Now there are many instances when we do want to interact and share. When we're watching the Super Bowl, for instance, or the Oscars: two events with numerous pauses and opportunities for discussion. Ditto reference books or certain types of non-fiction. What all those events have in common is a disjointed narrative, where a certain number of interruptions and pauses are expected and considered to be part of the experience.

Confusing the two is wrong and incorrectly assumes that we experience all types of stories the same way. But Gardner's vivid and continuous dream lives on, despite the world of interruptions at our fingertips, precisely because a really well-told story is just that good.

It doesn't mean we won't share it: literary criticism predates the internet, as do highlighters and notes scribbled in the margins of library books. But there's a big difference between "during" and "after."

(Stepping down from the soapbox.)

The Benefits of Real Time Search

2010-06-24T10:24:00.001-04:00

I've admittedly always been a skeptic as to the value of real time search, e.g. including Twitter and (public) Facebook updates in Google and Bing results. My thought was always that if I wanted to search out what was happening in regards to a major news event, I'd do a full-on Twitter search from Twitter.com, rather than relying on a handful of results on Google.

But a recent event made me rethink that.

I had started to download the new iPhone OS4 to my 3G iPhone. As the hour-long back-up was starting, I had a vague recollection of reading that not all the new features would be available for 3G phones and decided to Google it to see what the story was.

Good thing I did.

The search results page showed a number of people retweeting an Engadget story warning of problems with the iOS4 upgrade on the 3G, along with an @ message from someone agreeing with their friend that their 3G phone now ran much slower.

Thus alerted, I did a full Twitter search, found that problems seemed to be the rule rather than the exception and aborted the upgrade (for now), thus saving me a considerable amount of hassle.

And proving the value of real-time search.

What You've Been Missing

2010-06-22T21:40:00.007-04:00

Ka sf

A few weeks back I spoke at KickApps SME2010 in San Francisco. You can see the video and SlideShare above. (In case you've ever wondered what I sound like in person.)

This was one of the best seminars I've been part of and KickApps managed to capture everything on video. (Big hat tip to Stan Adams, who coordinated the whole thing.)

Go to http://kickapps.com/engage to see the other speakers: KickApps CEO Alex Blum, Dell's Heather Burnett, IBM's Errol Denger and author and Altimeter founder Charlene Li

UPDATE, JULY 6: The slideshare has almost 4,000 views thanks to a number of key people posting and tweeting about it, most notably, Faris Yakob of MDC Partners.

In Defense of Experts

2010-06-20T23:36:00.001-04:00

The other day, I read an article from a well-known tech blogger who was positively gushing over the notion that he’d soon be able to use location-based services to narrow down travel reviewers to those who’d say, been to Sonoma six times, and who, he felt, would be the best source of reviews on Sonoma restaurants and wineries.

And it made sense for a minute or two until I thought of all those people who’ve been to New York City a dozen or more times who’l tell you that Carmines is the best Italian restaurant in town and how it’s so convenient to have a Friday’s right there in Times Square.

Which is why the wisdom of experts is sometimes preferable to the wisdom of crowds.

More often than not, I want to hear from people who know more than I do, who present well thought out reasons for their opinions and who’ve managed to put out reviews I agree with more often than not.

The larger my social graph is, the less likely I am to trust it. I know what kind of food my very close friends like and I’m pretty up on their tastes in books, music and travel. But that’s maybe a half dozen people. The hundreds of others I know via Twitter and Facebook may have some smart things to say about marketing, but I have zero knowledge if their taste in film matches mine. Which is why I’m more prone to trust a reviewer I know than a few hundred of my closest Twitter followers.

To be fair, there is one place that crowdsourced reviewing has proved enormously useful: range. Before sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor (or even Zagat, which was pre-internet) there was slim likelihood you’d find any sort of reviews or info about local diners or pizza places or out of the way hotels and resorts. In that way, the wisdom of crowds has been a valuable tool and helps us to feel more in control of our choices: even if we’re not 100% sure we trust the review, at least we’ve got something to go on rather than absolute silence.

But that’s about as far as it goes for me: if all I wanted to read were NY Times Best Sellers, if all I wanted to see at the movies were that week’s top-grossing pictures then I’d be happy relying on crowds. But I want book reviewers who feel their job is to ferret out the rare gems. Restaurant reviewers who aren’t fooled by the trend-of-the-month. And movie reviewers who aren’t put off by subtitles.

I’m not getting that from my social graph. Except maybe as a retweet.

OMMA Social Panel: Using Paid Media to Drive Earned Media

2010-06-16T00:48:00.001-04:00

I'll be hosting a panel at OMMA Social tomorrow (Thursday, 6.17) called Using Paid Media to Drive Earned Media: The Latest Tips, Tricks and Tools

Here's the description from the OMMA website:

It’s now commonly accepted that in order to be successful at earned media – giving people the kinds of brand experiences that they willingly share – marketers need to invest in paid media too. As the social media world keeps evolving, though, the strategies for investing in the right paid media have to evolve as well. Is it still wise to buy portals, or does buying inventory on an ad exchange at niche targets provide better ROI? How has the practice of seeding changed with the explosion in new platforms, from Twitter to mobile? A look at how to convert dollars into social media-generated distribution.

Panelists are:
Richard Jalichandra, President & CEO, Technorati, Inc.
Kristine Shine, VP, PopSugar Media
Tom Troja, Founder, Social Symphony
Josh Warner, President, Feed Company

If the pre-panel discussion is any indication, things should get pretty lively- it's a fascinating topic and I suspect five people with strong opinions could talk about it for hours.

Any input or suggestions from the peanut gallery is warmly welcome - shoot me a tweet, an email or just leave a comment down below.

We're on at 9:45 AM at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, 145 W. 44th, in the heart of Times Square.

Bonin Bough from Pepsi is the keynote and other familiar faces on stage include Cathy Taylor, David Berkowitz, Ian Schafer, Max Kalehoff and Mike Germano.

Cool Doesn't Work Anymore

2010-06-04T16:44:00.002-04:00

It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who’s convinced that they’re much cooler than you are.

But that’s exactly what I see far too many brands attempting to do on a daily basis.

Call it Award Show fever, NASCAR Blindness, or just plain hubris, but too many brands are speaking to their consumers in a voice that drips of upscale, urban, 30something hipster rather than the voice of the brand’s decidedly less hip consumers themselves.

And that Nike World Cup video (above) is not going to help.

With its millions of viral views, brand managers and creative directors worldwide are going to be viewing it as the gold standard.

Which is a huge mistake.

You see Nike is a Prom King brand. A brand people like because Nike’s discovered the secret sauce that makes people view them as “cool.” So they’ll want to pass around a Nike video because they get some sort of cool points for doing so.

Add the World Cup to that equation. Another Prom King brand, and, for anyone who remotely likes soccer, another source of cool. Factor in too the fact that the young male demo likes to share video, particularly video from brands that have a strong cool factor and you’ve got the perfect storm.

Which is not to take anything away from the actual video, which was exceedingly well done, but reality check: even a really bad Nike World Cup video would have gotten millions of hits. Having a really well done one probably doubled or even tripled what was destined to be a very large number.

The bigger problem, as I stated earlier, is that brands are going to start wanting “something like that Nike World Cup video... you know, the one with Homer Simpson in it.... it got 90 million viral hits.”

It’s the same speech an earlier generation of marketing and ad people got about the Apple 1984 spot.

But if you’re advertising corn chips or diapers or a cellphone service, you’re never going to get a Nike World Cup video. You’re just not cool enough. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The people who’ll pass along a Nike video are probably not as engaged or loyal as the people who’ll pass along a diaper video. Ditto joining a diaper brand Facebook page or or Twitter feed. Not that it’s hard, mind you; it’s just requires a little more courage than signing on with the World Cup and Nike

Now the easiest way to get someone feeling brave enough to pass on a diaper video or join a corn chip Facebook group is to speak to them in their own language, and show them the sorts of things they find amusing or clever.

While that should be glaringly obvious, it always amazes me how often it’s not: charged with coming up with “the next Nike World Cup” video, both agencies and marketers will roll out content that has the same sensibility and vibe as a video that successfully targeted young men and sports fans. Even if their target is old ladies who love gardening. (It doesn’t hurt that award shows tend to favor anything with this hipster sensibility.)

But that’s where the social web is different. Because unlike traditional push media, no one has to watch a video, let alone share it or post it to their Facebook wall. They have to want to do so and brands have to see it as a way to initiate a conversation. Not a literal “hi, how are you?” conversation (people get hung up on that) but a “you liked our funny video, maybe you’d like to vote on what our next flavor corn chip should be” conversation.

If you’ve been talking to the consumer in a voice that sounds like your brand, there’s a good chance they’ll say “why yes, thank you.” But if you’ve been talking to them in a voice that sounds like Nike World Cup soccer, they’re not sticking around long enough to even hear the question.

Getting The Right Hands On The Spigot

2010-06-03T09:20:00.000-04:00

One of the biggest challenges of the next few years is going to be finding a way to take all the data we are collecting on people-- both wittingly and unwittingly-- and do something with it that won’t make us feel like we’ve walked onto the set of a latter-day 1984. (The Orwell novel, not the Apple ad.)

Many of the scenarios I’ve seen laid out are sort of creepy and user-unfriendly. Stores that text us to ask how we liked those jeans we bought a few months back the second we walk into the store. Restaurants we've eaten at that try and lure us in with lunchtime discounts sent via text message just because it’s 12:30 and we happen to be nearby.

What’s scary isn’t so much that these scenarios are being put out there; it’s that they’re more than likely, given the overzealous nature of many marketers and their strong desire to push a controlled, pre-scripted message to consumers (albeit in the guise of a conversation.)

The push-pull here (both literally and figuratively) is going to be who is in control of when and why the information gets delivered. If it’s lunchtime and I am looking for a place to eat or if I’d like to see which of my favorite restaurants has a deal for me, then I want to be able to push the “lunch deals” app on my phone and see what’s available. (I’d even be open to an exchange where, say, I posted a message to one of my social networks in exchange for a 10% discount. Particularly if I really liked the restaurant.)

What I do not want are random assaults. I don’t mind seeing advertising messages when I am actively looking for something. But often as not, I know exactly what I am in the mood for at lunchtime. And I’ll gladly pay the extra fifty cents that undiscounted slice of pizza will cost me and have zero interest in receiving a stream of ads all touting their amazing discounts shouting at me like some digital carnival barkers.

Same way when I walk into the Gap, I’m either there for a reason or I’m killing time. If I’m looking for suggestions or directions, I’ll ask. But a database is never going to feel like a person. A person can usually read my body language and know that I am not in the mood to chat or receive follow-up questions or upsell attempts. But the hypothetical database John Battelle suggested in a recent post is a regular Chatty Cathy, bugging me to buy a sweater for my kids, pointing out items on sale and otherwise making a nuisance of itself.

The key to success on the semantic web is going to be finding a way to be unobtrusive. To let customers call the shots and tell you just how much input they want-- to let them have their hand on the virtual spigot so they can increase or decrease the flow of information from brands-- even brands they like-- because people rarely want an unimpeded flow of commercial messaging.

Or, to put it more succinctly: we want to hear from brands when we want to hear from them. Not whenever they feel like chatting.

Sort of the same reason there’s caller ID.

Words Matter

2010-05-26T09:43:00.004-04:00

One of the more remarkable things about the whole Facebook/privacy debate is how few people (and journalists) seem to have an understanding of exactly what information is being shared and why it's now out there for public consumption.

Yes, people are pissed that, as my friend Rob Saker tweeted "My profile info was captured by X firm because FB privacy is weak." But many of them, as Danah Boyd pointed out in her keynote at SXSW this year, have no idea that things they're posting are available for public consumption, especially since they'd actually gone through the trouble of adjusting their privacy settings.

Or so they thought.

My instincts tell me that much of the noise around this is the result of how annoyed people are with Facebook's baffling user interface and how embarrassing it is to think that you've set your privacy settings correctly only to find out otherwise.

Which brings us to semantics: it seems that one of the major culprits here is people's interpretation of the word "everyone." To Facebook, that means "everyone on the internet." To many (most?) users, it means "everyone I am Facebook friends with."

Big, big difference.

Now of course there are more fundamental issues, primarily around what the default privacy setting should be. (e.g. should you have to turn privacy settings on or off.) But to the many users who thought they correctly protected themselves only to find out they'd chosen a far more inclusive "everyone" -- and that the Gap now knows they love the color red-- semantics are the crux of the issue.

We often dismiss simple word choices like that as a "six of one, half a dozen of another" type decision. But where half a billion people are involved, it becomes way more than that. Because I'm guessing if the option was "everyone with an internet connection" versus just "everyone" the amount of personal information being shared would be considerably smaller.

Words matter.

San Francisco Seminar, Thursday May 27th

2010-05-20T22:53:00.000-04:00

I'll be speaking at the KickApps/Akamai seminar on Thursday, May 27th along with Alitmeter's Charlene Li, Dell's Heather Burnett and IBM's Errol Denger.

It's at the Hotel Vitale, 8 Mission Street. The session runs from 12 - 5PM, I go on at 1:30.

Register here.

The Case For Amplify

2010-05-17T12:54:00.003-04:00

I’ve become a big fan of Amplify, a new service that sits somewhere between a blog and Twitter. It’s just to the right of the space that Posterous and Tumblr own, but is focused more on words and ideas than on photos.

The set-up is pretty straightforward: you set up your own Amp Blog to which you can post either an entire URL or relevant clips of an article. The site allows you to simultaneously post to Twitter or Facebook, but the link goes back to your Amp Blog.

So why not just post directly to Twitter? Because Amplify lets you comment on the article you’ve just posted. In as many characters as you’d like. And it lets your friends provide threaded commentary as well. (Think del.icio.us with threaded commentary.) That’s a huge plus in terms of certain types of articles—Amplify is very big in the political community, so much of what gets posted and debated on there is actually fairly substantial (e.g. a far cry from “10 Ways To Use Location Based Services”) and the ability to share thoughts about things that don’t necessarily have to do with social media or marketing is a huge plus.

For me, Amplify has become the third place – not pertinent enough to the Toad Stool to devote an entire blog post to, but interesting enough to be worthy of more than 140 characters worth of debate. (You can, for the record, use Amplify to write posts from scratch and even microblog. But most users seem to use it to post and comment on existing articles.)

You can check out my AmpBlog at http://wolk.amplify.com/

PS: Sorry for the long delay between posts. A lot going on, but I have vowed to be more consistent moving forward.

New BeanCast Podcast: The One About "Likeability"

2010-04-26T17:17:00.001-04:00

I'm on the Hive Award-winning BeanCast podcast this week, discussing Facebook's new "like" button with host Bob Knorpp, Joe Jaffe, Darryl Ohrt and John Wall.

It's a good listen, but if you are not so inclined, my take is that it's a smart business move on FB's part, because they will be setting a standard and gathering lots of (valuable) information.

My only question is that I wonder how many people outside "The Bubble" will want to actually "like" things. Particularly because most of the time there's nothing in it for them. (Yes, Pandora can set their playlists more accurately, but not sure that's going to change the behavior of millions.)

And it all goes back to my theory in the previous post that there are many people who are just not hard-wired to share any sort of information on their likes and dislikes in a public or semi-public or even private setting.

This isn't really a huge problem for Facebook-- even if they get 15% of people using the "like" button off-site, that's huge. It's more a question about our assumptions that everyone is a participant, whereas, as one of the other guests (I think it was Mr. Knorpp) pointed out, the 90/10 split you find on YouTube is a more likely scenario. (90% of YT users are consumers, 10% are creators.)

DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST HERE

Is Twitter Over?

2010-04-13T13:51:00.007-04:00

While today’s New York Times describes Twitter’s growth chart as looking “like a hockey stick” I'm starting to wonder if we aren’t at the end of the line in terms of Twitter’s growth. Because four years into it, I can’t but think that the appeal of Twitter is largely based on personality and that the extroverts (and their fans) have already been converted.

Facebook, which in some ways is Twitter’s main competitor, is a lot less immediate and public than Twitter. Meaning that if I am an introvert, I can still put up pictures of my family, get back in touch with old friends, fan my kids school and play Scramble™ without feeling like I am “putting myself out there.” I don’t need to ever update my status, thus avoiding the question of “why would anyone care what I have to say and what do I care what they’re eating for breakfast?” (You can argue all you want about “useful information” and “fascinating feedback” but that is exactly how most unbelievers view Twittter.)

I would also not discount the rear guard action from location based services like FourSquare or Gowalla, which provide a more socially acceptable way of telling people where you are and what you’re doing.

Follow me on this one: with Twitter, you have to actively type in “Having coffee at Westville Mall Starbucks with @SocialBob and @JaneDoe” which, outside of The Bubble, sounds a whole lot like either bragging or oversharing. But if you check in with Foursquare or Gowalla then the apps themselves are doing the bragging for you - you’re just playing along and, if we buy into the hype, allowing friends of yours who are also at the Westville Mall to find you.

So it becomes a more socially acceptable way of announcing where you are and what you are doing-- particularly since the revenue model on LBS seems to be heading towards some sort of monetary reward for checking in (e.g. coupons) and you can’t fault people for wanting to save money. Additionally, people seem to be following a much tighter circle on the location based services due to privacy concerns, and so the assertion that the check-in is aimed at your actual real life friends actually has some validity.

Circling back to Facebook, I’ve started to see something interesting going on there too: people who do not use Twitter putting up status updates that resemble tweets in both their frequency, brevity and currency, but for the fact that they have nothing to do with anything work related. They’re all about movies, politics, restaurants, weather, kids, sports... all the stuff people outside The Bubble talk about. (As opposed to say, the Apple vs Google showdown.) What’s more, they’re getting a lot more feedback (in a threaded and easy-to-follow format) from people they actually know and whose opinions they tend to care about.

And people like Facebook. Or at least they don't hate it the way so many seem to hate Twitter and everything it stands for. It's a puzzling reaction to a fairly innocuous platform, but it's out there.

Now I am in no way claiming Twitter is kaput or that’s going to implode. Just that it’s reached the natural point where it’s got to mutate significantly if it’s going to appeal to a broader group of users.

I can see Twitter easily becoming an indispensable adjunct to other types of web use, rather than its own unique platform. The ability to harness real-time search is pretty powerful, especially if you combine it with the new ad system Twitter is unveiling this week. Together they make it possible for me to see both the latest news about and offer from Starbucks. Which is useful and all, but not really a reason to get someone who’s resisted Twitter thus far to get out and start tweeting.

That’s why Twitter’s future seems to be as a platform where the many consume the output of the few. And while there will continue to be numerous subgroups who use the platform to network and connect with outsiders, the core proposition-- meet interesting strangers by putting your own thoughts. pictures and discoveries out there for others to find-- seems to have run its course. The extroverts are all signed up and the introverts.... well, they're just not interested.

Consumption vs Creation: The iPad Dilemma

2010-04-03T17:29:00.004-04:00

Upon further reflection (and a number of reviews that circle the idea without ever hitting on it directly) it seems that with the introduction of the iPad, Apple is asking consumers to buy into the notion that there are now two types of devices: one for consuming and one for creating. It’s at once extremely logical and extremely radical and it’s definitely something of a gamble.

It’s logical because if you were to start out now, in 2010, with computing being what it is, you would not likely come to the conclusion that the machine you created complex spreadsheets on was also an ideal place to watch movies or read books. And so you’d come up with something just like an iPad to consume media and something like a netbook to create it.

But it’s radical because that sort of set-up is exactly what we’ve become accustomed to and once these patterns are established, it’s hard to break people of their habits.

So the question I have is, what’s Apple’s follow-up act? Is it a netbook type device that runs iWork (and Microsoft Office) and email? That would help people to wrap their heads around the bifurcation and give them a reason to have two distinct and separate devices. Though it would diminish the laptop market and leave these high-profit-margin devices as the province of the tech-focused power user.

Time will tell.

Why You Probably Don't Need A Social Media Department

2010-03-31T16:56:00.004-04:00

This started out as a reply to a post on AgencySpy about what ad agencies need to look for as they staff up their nascent social media departments and turned into a full-fledged blog post.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but my fear with creating a department specifically to oversee social media (rather than making social media a part of the overall marketing scheme) is that it then becomes yet another piece of what Brian Morrissey aptly calls the "matching luggage" and a passel of social media ideas get trotted out at every meeting alongside the TV spots and the print ads and the banners and the microsites and the iPhone apps whether the client needs them or not.

Smart agencies get that many clients don't need any kind of social media ideas. Their products just aren't interesting enough to generate a whole lot of buzz and/or they don't have the budget or inclination to create any kind of buzz.

Many brands don't have the resources (e.g. time and money) necessary to properly maintain so much as a Facebook page (let alone an entire social media program) and you don't need to be a "guru" to know that having a Facebook page that gets updated once every three months is a lot worse than not having one at all.

But once you add a "social media department" to an agency’s roster, it becomes too easy for the agency to fall into the trap of expecting their new social media department to contribute something to every pitch or client presentation, even when it makes no sense.

Because otherwise what exactly are they paying them for, right?

Even worse will be those rare times when a heavy social media plan makes a lot of sense - brands for whom social media should be the bulk of their marketing effort - and the agency can't let that happen because that would be giving the social media department too much power and influence and so the politically expedient move is to trot out the matching luggage yet again.

Social media works when the client gets why they’re doing it and has practices and structures to support it. That’s a really important distinction that gets lost in the shuffle: Zappos (to use an easy example) is “good” at social media because they have really amazing customer service. Not the other way around. That’s why people talk about them-- because they’re impressed with the customer service, not because Zappos has a cool page with all their Twitter streams.

Hiring people to force clients who don’t get what’s needed to be successful in social media (better business practices, better products) to adopt social media programs that are doomed from inception is in no one’s best interest.

New Look

2010-03-27T23:04:00.003-04:00

Trying out one of the new Blogger templates - just getting bored of the old one.
A little scare with comments getting lost at first, but now all seems well.

Just wanted reader to realize that they were in the right place ;)

Reality Check

2010-03-27T12:09:00.004-04:00

So I've been managing my son's Little League team this year and decided that I'd take advantage of some simple 2.0 tools to make everyone's life easier:

A very basic Google Blogger blog where I could put up practice schedules, rules, game notes, etc. and where, by dint of tagging the post with their team name, other managers in the chain could also post updates.
Invites off Google Calendar for practices. (The chain is using Google Calendar to manage scheduling for seven teams, so we don't all wind up on the same field at once.) And I'm talking literally just sending invites via email off the Google Calendar app once I'd scheduled a practice so that parents could enter it into their calendars with just one click.

I am 0 for 2.

The blog, which uses one of Blogger's attractive new templates, has been complimented for being nicely designed, but I'm not sure any of the parents use it and certainly none of the other 6 managers have even touched it. (This despite my sending out fairly explicit illustrated instructions on how to post, which, if you've ever used Google Blogger, is remarkably simple.)

The emails sent from the Google calendar, are getting caught in spam filters, by AOL in particular (a number of families still use AOL as their main email address) and so it's decidedly not the effective "you can put it on your calendar straight from the email and Alan can keep track of who's not going to be able to make practice" tool I had hoped.

Now here's why this is important: The parents in question here are all highly educated, affluent C-level types in their 30s and 40s: exactly the sort of people you'd expect to be familiar with and/or open to these kinds of tools. But they're not: it's just not all that important to them right now and they're not feeling like they're missing anything by opting for a simple group e-mail as their preferred method of notification/communication.

We tend to get all hopped up about the new tools available to us, and since most of us spend our days surrounded by people with similar priorities and web use habits, it's important to remember just how far ahead of the curve we really are.

Which is not to say the rest of the world won't eventually catch up, but it's not happening as quickly as the conventional wisdom inside the bubble says it is.

What Location Based Services Need To Do Next

2010-03-19T17:39:00.004-04:00

While location based services like FourSquare and Gowalla have been all the buzz this past year, their continued success is likely going to depend on how easy they make it for consumers to “check in” and interact with their service.

Checking in with your LBS of choice (or, for many, your LBS’s of choice) is currently a somewhat onerous act: you need to pull out your phone, find and open the app, find the check-in tab, wait till the app loads the geolocator, find your location from a list of nearby locations, figure out if your current location is in there or if the geolocator has messed up (again!), select your location, decide whether to write something for twitter and hit enter.

Which is all well and good if you’re alone, but if you’re with people, it’s pretty awkward.

LBS’ are great for conferences and large events like SXSWi, where everyone has a vested interest in finding each other, which is why those events are many people’s first encounter with LBS apps. Upon returning home, however, they quickly discover that it’s both inconvenient and socially awkward to whip out the phone and check in everywhere they go. And features which may seem useful down in Austin don’t really translate to the daily grind back home.

But all is not lost.

As the FourSquares and Gowallas grow, they’ll need to figure out ways to make it easier to check in. That can be anything from auto-check in alerts you set yourself (e.g. “You are at Starbucks again? Do you want to check in?” to sponsored auto-check in alerts (e.g. “You are at Starbucks again. Do you want to check in and save 50 cents?”)

Accuracy is another issue: GPS is still really awful in many parts of the country and it’s not clear how long these services can keep relying on their users to make up for that. (Or not: one of Gowalla’s big downfalls is that unlike the scrappy FourSquare, it relies exclusively on GPS and so winds up stopping people from checking in at home or at work because the GPS insists that they’re at some place a quarter mile away.)

But GPS is only going to improve and in the interim, the services may consider making broader use of maps, the way Minnesota-based upstart Toodalu has done or increasing the radius of the check-in as my friend C.C. Chapman has suggested.

And of course, LBS’s value as a teenager-tracking device for parents have yet to be fully appreciated.

Circling back though, it’s the ease of use thing that the people who make the apps are going to need to figure out. Make it as close to one-touch as possible, and you’ll get all the people outside the tech/media world, people who are more likely to be at the supermarket on a Sunday afternoon than at some trendy restaurant enjoying brunch.

And give them a reason to want to check in that goes beyond "because it shows I'm social media savvy" and/or the whole mayor/gameplaying thing (it's going to be next-to-impossible to steal the mayorship away from early adopters, or collect more Chinese lanterns, given that many of them have a year or two's head start.)

Otherwise, it’ll just be one more toy no one’s really sure what to do with.

UPDATE, AUGUST 2010: Thanks to an app called Future Checkin, FourSquare users will indeed be able to check in automatically. TechCrunch gives the details here.

Sarah Palin Is Your Social Media Role Model: What We Learned

2010-03-15T21:42:00.006-04:00

This past Sunday, I co-hosted a panel at SXSW Interactive with Brian Cain of Campfire (and Blair Witch Project fame) on Sarah Palin’s successful use of social media. For whether you agree with her or not, the fact that she can post something on Facebook and get 3,000 comments in 3 hours is pretty remarkable.

We opened it up to the audience as a conversation and let everyone weigh in. We had an incredible range of opinion (and a Texas-sized hat tip to Rory Cooper of the Heritage Foundation for weighing in with the conservative POV.)

What we all managed to agree on (more or less) was that Palin’s social media strength had three components:

A) A Consistent Message: She does an excellent job of staying on point on not straying from her core message and storyline.

B) A Strong POV: Palin does not try and please everyone. She does not worry about what people outside her core constituency think and has very definite opinions on things that she is not afraid to both express and defend.

C) A Feeling Of Familiarity: Palin’s supporters often view her as “my friend Sarah, the politician.” You can see this in the very personal tone of many of the Facebook comments, which are written as if the poster was speaking to an old friend. (NB: This is a not uncommon scenario with celebrities of all stripes in social media, where the intimacy of the medium creates a false sense of connection between the celebrity and their audience.)

We then turned the question over to the audience: what would it be like if brands with loyal fan bases took a strong POV on issues, rather than trying to please all constituents. We wondered what the fallout would have been if, say, Southwest Airlines told Kevin Smith that he was welcome to fly Delta from now on, because they had their policies in place for a reason, that it wasn’t fair to the other passengers to have someone that large impinging on their space, and while they were sorry he was embarrassed, he knew their policy going in, thank you and good luck.

It’s an interesting exercise and no one was quite sure what the response would have been. Curious what you think would have happened: can brands take the sort of strong stands politicians do?

Note: I am not suggesting that this is what Southwest should have done or that it would have been a good idea. The exercise is merely to ponder “what if brands took strong stands like some politicians do?” And while you may be thinking “it’s pretty obvious you're not advocating that Alan”... well, you’d be surprised.

SXSW Panel today: Sarah Palin Is Your Media Role Model

2010-03-14T14:38:00.003-04:00

If you are in Austin, check it out in room 19B at 3:30 PM Sunday, March 14th.
Here's the link

I'll be doing the panel with Brian Cain from Campfire and will definitely bring up NASCAR Blindness.

RSVP Site for Hive Awards

2010-03-04T19:36:00.003-05:00

Just a note for Toad Stool readers, to let you know that if you're planning to be in Austin at SXSW for the Hive Awards for the Unsung Heroes of the Internet, you can sign up at the official RSVP site hosted by KickApps and make sure you're not shut out.

Hope to see many of you there.

Possibly Addictive, But Worth It: If I Can Dream

2010-03-02T21:42:00.002-05:00

I'll start this by admitting that I'm good friends with the partners at Poke and that I do a lot of work with them. But I had nothing to do with their latest project, If I Can Dream, and it's well worth checking out, for the breakthrough factor, if nothing else.

If I Can Dream is an online reality TV show that tracks 5 hopefuls: a musician, two actresses, an actor and model -- who live together in a Hollywood Hills mansion and watches as they try to break into show business.

Produced by American Idol creator Simon Fuller, the catch here is that the reality is online at all times: you can see in every room of the house and follow the actors around from room to room 24/7. You can also spin the camera to look at virtual versions of their rooms, where the Pokesters have created digital versions of the actual furniture on the other side of the camera complete with photo albums.

And since it's 2010, you can also connect with the characters on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Fuller and 19 Entertainment have a history of tapping into the popular zeitgeist, and they've put a lot of time and effort into this.

Curious to hear what you all think.

Interaction Burnout

2010-02-10T22:21:00.007-05:00

It’s hard to believe it was only around two years ago that Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh started following and (more importantly talking to) people who mentioned Zappos on Twitter. This was more or less around the same time that Frank Eliason started tweeting for Comcast, talking up-- and calming down-- people who were having trouble with their service installers.

What followed was a mad rush to social media, where the goal was to obtain the level of seemingly effortless one-on-one interaction, brand love (and glowing press) Hsieh and Eliason were able to create for their respective brands.

And despite the fact that most brands are still in the consideration stage when it comes to social media, the brands that have dipped their toes into the water are already driving us towards something I’ll call “interaction burnout.”

To put that in human terms, imagine needing to have a full on conversation with everyone you met over the course of your day. Not just a “nice morning” or “looks like rain” exchange, but a full-on conversation with the gas station attendant, the dry cleaner, the security guard, the guy in the next cube.

Now imagine that almost every one of these conversations feels forced and stilted.

Because that’s what it feels like with so many brands. They all want to talk to you. Show you some pictures. Get you to play a game with them. And you know, we’re all pretty busy and there are only so many unnatural conversations we can have during the day. And so suddenly we’re wishing they’d just run a banner ad or a TV commercial and be done with it. Anything that we could just read or look at without having to stop to talk to them.

Much of this unnecessary patter is due to the unrealistic expectations brands (and the agencies and consultants that enable them) have for social media. Where, in a misguided quest for easily understood metrics, success has come to mean x number of Twitter followers or y number of Facebook Fan Page updates each month

Period.

Which basically recreates the old push media model, only with different media vehicles and ignores the presence (or lack thereof) of any actual interactions.

But there’s another side to all this I keep thinking about too. Which is that the early social media success stories happened because they were both unexpected and real. I mean most people were pretty shocked that the person tweeting as “Zappos CEO Tony” really was the actual CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh and not some behind-the-scenes PR person. The fact that Hsieh was actually funny and had real personality only added to the mystique.

And that’s the thing: most companies don’t have a cool, funny CEO. Or one who is as comfortable being out there as Hsieh is. Brands, especially bigger ones, don’t really know how to have actual conversations (or their legal departments won't let them) so they resort to the sort of fake party banter (“Great! See you there!”) or plastic sales pitches (“Check out our new spring line!”) that only serve to make interaction painful.

We also expect them now. We’re not all that shocked when a brand follows us and then tweets offers at us. Or has a fun-filled Facebook page waiting for us to fan it. It’s kind of old hat and much as we like wasting time on Facebook, we don’t have time to interact with every single brand we like, especially if we’re mainly there to interact with our friends.

And, as we all know, Your Brand Is Not My Friend™.

So what to do?

Well, social media, to repeat one of my favorite mantras, is not a series of websites with no discernable revenue streams. It’s a behavior: the ability to interact with a site or application and have that interaction recorded, publicly, online.

And that behavior is not going away.

But rather than force consumers into awkward conversations or pseudo conversations, thus guaranteeing that they’ll do their best to avoid you, maybe the thing to do is just listen. To respond when appropriate and not try and butt into the conversation every four hours because it’s an easy way to justify a community manager’s salary or because you're paying your agency based on the number of tweets they issue.

We also need to realize that the same way most people don’t become the life of the party, not every brand is going to be a wiz at charming customers. And the solution to that isn’t to try and force them to be, but rather to accept that either:

You’re going to need to change and that means everyone in the company, not just the intern you hired to run the Twitter feed.
You need to find one particular area of social media you feel comfortable with - which might just be a blog or a YouTube channel -- and concentrate on being really, really good at that, especially if it makes sense in terms of who your customers are.
You may decide it’s not for you and stick to a 100% traditional paid push media plan. That’s not a great long-term strategy, but it’s a lot better than keeping up a really awkward and uninteresting social media program, thus contributing to interaction burnout.

I’ll leave you with this quote from a smart young guy named Matt Daniels “Marketing has a bell curve–most companies create average marketing and achieve average results.”

Why did we think social media was going to be any different?

What 'Thug Life' Can Teach Us About Twitter (new Ad Age column)

2010-02-09T15:18:00.006-05:00

This ought to stir the pot up a little:

This Ignored Demographic Shows What You Can Learn When You Look Beyond Social-Media Elites

While most in the social media bubble would have you believe that Twitter's output consists solely of links to "relevant articles," "breaking news stories," "unique insights" or retweets of all three (along with the occasional "what I'm having for dinner" tweet from the latest Asian-Fusion-locavore bistro) a look at Twitter's Trending Topics reveals otherwise.

While the aforementioned geek patter is certainly in there, it's generally dwarfed on the trending topics list by tweets about Disney Channel stars the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus (put out, one can safely assume, by middle-school-aged females) and tweets from another demographic, twenty-something African-Americans tweeting in what can best be described as ghetto slang. (READ THE REST OVER AT AD AGE)

UPDATE, 2.10.10: The article got picked up by Gawker, where it sits amidst snarky posts on American Idol and Gossip Girl. (All press is good press though, right?)

Super Bowl Ad Viewer

2010-02-06T14:44:00.004-05:00

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My friend Ian Schafer turned me on to this Super Bowl ad viewer, courtesy of Forbes magazine. Given how much people like to talk about these commercials, I thought it would be a good idea to add it here.

I'll throw out an initial thought: how many of you, having spent the past year pretty much avoiding commercials of any sort (by using DVR, iTunes, Hulu, etc.) are actually kind of psyched to watch this year's crop since you rarely get to see :30 or :60 TV spots anymore? (And yes, I realize that readers of this blog are way ahead of the curve in terms of media usage.)

The iPhone, The Kindle App & Me

2010-01-30T10:43:00.005-05:00

In the swirl of debate around the iPad, one of the things I kept reading from iPaddies was that it was "impossible to read books on an iPhone."

And so I feel compelled to point out that's just not true.

I've been reading books on my iPhone for the past six months, using the Kindle app and it's been a very positive experience. I'm reading a lot more in total, able to read in a lot more situations and I'm reading things I might not have tackled previously due to their sheer volume. That's 32 books in total, ranging from history books like Harrison Salisbury's 900 Days, The Siege of Leningrad to business books like Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It! to novels like the (excellent) City of Thieves by David Benioff and Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese. (And yes, reading City of Thieves did indeed lead me to the Salisbury book.)

I did not expect to like reading books on an iPhone. In fact, I'd probably have bet a four-figure sum of money that I'd hate it. But Random House was giving away some books for free, one of which was Whiskey Rebels by David Liss, a book I'd been meaning to read anyway, so I figured I'd give it a try.

I was hooked. Here's why

I always have my book with me. No more realizing I left it on the nightstand or on my desk.
It's easy to take it out in situations where a full-on book would be unwieldy- e.g. standing on line in a store.
It's one less thing to have to carry around
I can read at night without having to keep a lamp on and waking up my wife.
The app always opens up to the exact page I was at - no forgetting the bookmark and trying to remember what page I was on.
The only negative - frequent page turning - is not so negative when you read in small chunks of time - I actually feel like I'm making progress, even if all I've read are four iPhone sized pages. And even when I do read for an hour or two, it's not really bothersome and most times I'm not aware of it.
Finding my place again if I skip forward or backward is a bit tricky, but mostly involves remembering what # on the slider bar I was at. More cumbersome than sticking my finger on the page in an actual book, but a minor hassle nonetheless.
Kindle samples. Amazon often gives you the first chapter or so to read as a "sample." At which point you can decide if you want to continue and buy the book or just move on.

But of all the above, I'd have to say that the two key pluses were "one less thing to carry around" and "it's always with me."

PS: Whispersync is one of the sillier tech names out there - it's not like syncing is particularly noisy or anything.

If you're blogger or podcaster, you can enter the Hive Awards for just $29!!

Final deadline has been extended to February 15th and the show will be at SXSWi in Austin! ENTER HERE

The Obligatory iPad Post

2010-01-27T19:25:00.004-05:00

I’ll keep this short and sweet.

Yeah, it’s cool and it’d be fun to have one.

Sort of the way it’d be fun to have a Lamborghini or some other essentially useless Italian sportscar.

For most of the trumpeted uses of the iPad, it all comes down to one basic question: why would I want to do that on a really great small(ish) screen (that doesn't fit into my pocket the way my iPhone can) when I can do it on a really great big screen?

Seriously.

Keynote is trying enough on my 13-inch MacBook screen (compared to the usual 24 inch monitor I use) why would I want to work with it on a smaller screen?

Video? Have you ever tried to watch anything longer than a YouTube clip on a hand-held device? Can you say “neck pain” or “hand cramp”?

Photos. If I’m serious about them, I’ll want a big screen to do graphics. And if I’m showing someone my vacation photos, the iPhone is just fine.

Newspapers and magazines will look better on the iPad, but I’m not sure that usage alone will convince most of us to part with $500-800.

Ditto iBooks. I have been reading books on my iPhone for the past 6 months and I’m very happy with the experience (though I didn’t initially think I would be.) What’s more, I actually find I’m reading a whole lot more. Mostly because the iPhone is always with me. Whereas the iPad is just one more device to schlep around.

There’s nothing wrong with the iPad - I’m sure each and every experience on there is well-designed and delightful to use. It’s just that it doesn’t fulfill a need the way the iPod and iPhone did. Both those devices did things that were instantly recognizable as “Yes! I’ve been wishing I could do that for the longest time!” moments.

The iPad is cool, but Jobs did not offer up that “ah-hah” moment today, the one that lets people say “of course I need this.”

Maybe they will in time, but not yet. Which is not to say I won’t be keeping my eye on how iPad usage develops as people actually begin to play with it, but for right now, I’m choosing to be a not-so-early adopter.

PS: Am I the only one who thought it was weird that Jobs' spreadsheet example involved someone obsessively keeping stats on an 8 year old soccer team? I coach youth sports teams enough to know that's sort of creepy.

PPS: Don't forget to enter the Hive Awards for the Unsung Heroes of the Internet