Just Wavin' My Arms

I know this one might be a bit esoteric, but here goes anyway.

Today, I was walking across Fountain Square on my way back to the office from a trip to Jos. A. Bank to look for a new suit. There was a band playing on the square and there was this guy standing in the audience playing "air drums" with great abandon.

Now, I don't know what this guy's story, but as I watched, I realized he pretty much thought he was in the band, he had great rhythm and he worked very hard. But even though he didn't realize it, everything he was doing meant nothing. It was all a lot of activity, with no meaning. After the song was finished, he was just as tired as the real drummer, he was sweating as much as the real drummer and tomorrow, his arms will be as fatigued as the real drummer.

I wonder (it's what we do at WonderGroup,) are there things we do, that makes us look really busy, makes us go home tired but has little effect on our clients marketing effectiveness?

What's often missing is what I've been calling The Buyer's Voice. The chart below shows some of the directions from which you can capture The Buyer's Voice. BTW, there are other places to capture The Buyer's Voice, but with the online opportunities we have today there's no excuse for not doing it.



Unless we do the work of capturing The Buyer's Voice we might just be flapping our arms for no good reason.

ComicVine

Because Jeff has been out-geeking me, I would like to point out that were I a dude looking for a superhero femme, I'd be a good match for X-Men's Kitty Pryde.

An Unscientific Survey

I love one of the new DirectTV spots where they discuss statistics. I've embedded it below:



I will try to avoid that approach to statistics as I talk about a very unscientific survey I just did around our office.

Recently, I became curious about the online lives of our staff. We've been growing like crazy and I just wanted to get a sense of how "connected" our crew has become, since the interactive discipline at the agency has experienced explosive growth.

Here's what I learned:



What you see in this chart is that of those who responded to the survey, the majority are involved in 1 to 5 social environments, such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc. Those who are not involved in any social environments are in the minority. And people like me, who are involved in at least 11 social environments are in the minority as well.

The top thirteen social networks ranked from most popular were:

1. LinkedIn
   
2. FaceBook
   
3. Flickr
   
4. MySpace
   
5. Pandora
   
6. NetFlix
   
7. StumbleUpon
   
8. Digg
   
9. Del.icio.us
   
10. Hulu
    
11. Last.fm
    
12. Twitter
    
13. Joost
    

Here's the bottom line: In just a few years our staff has become extremely connected. I accept that we are not a pure sample, since we are heavily involved in building social environments and interactive advertising, however, it's clear that the movement to connectedness is excellerating at a blinding speed. Get on board or get out of the way.

2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky

I just watched this speech. Very interesting and thought provoking. Take a look and enjoy.

Dethroned

...What?! After a fifteen month hiatus, Spidey has swooped in to steal back the blogging throne?! How can this be?

But despite dear Spidey's fairweather blogging, he makes some good points. He even touched on Twitter, which I've been getting a lot of questions about lately. But first to defend my throne:

6 Reasons I'm a Better Tweeter than Spidey!

1. Dude, I said "tweeter." That's ten points right there.

2. I posted it first.

3. I would never liveblog Lost. ...I'd go for Hell's Kitchen.
(OMG no he didn't just kick that trash can 12 minutes ago from web)

4. I have 56 followers. Take that Jeff, with your close-knit circle of 3 people you actually know! (That's the nature of Twitter, isn't it? I have no idea how/why these people have added me.)

5. I also make keep an eye on Twitter peripherals, which can be pretty fun (if not "useful"). Check out Twist, which uses Twitter to show you trends in what people are tweeting about. Or use Tweetclouds! You know what? Just check out this list of 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe and be done with it.

6. While I'm not a Twitterholic, I can use words like "Twictionary" without batting an eye.

Alright, all joking aside, there are a few things about Twitter that I'd like to tack on to Jeff's points.

First off, to me, Twitter is about immediacy. Things that would make a frivolous blog post are what tweeting was made for. Jeff mentioned that it's about making your voice heard, but I'd add that it's about being heard now.

Secondly, since I last posted about Twitter over a year ago, it has borne a new functionality for me: quick, relevant news. My two most solid examples would be this winter's writers' strike and the upcoming presidential election. By subscribing to relevant Twitter feeds, I keep as on-top of what's happening as if I were constantly reading the scrolling text on the bottom of a TV news show. Especially with the writers' strike, each little bit of information helped build a larger picture--it acted like a tiny RSS feed.


That all being said, if you were to still tell me that Twitter seems useless I would not disagree with you. I would say that tweeting has as much merit as blogging, posting on message boards or engaging with any social networking at all-- same food, different portions.


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Now playing: The Shins - Mine's Not A High Horse
via FoxyTunes

Lost in Geekdom

Just when I think there's no way I could ever be any more of a geek than I am, something happens that makes me realize, I have only begun to plum the depths of my nerdtastic, geekiness.

Last night, I twittered ABC's hit show Lost. Now I take it to a whole new level, by blogging about it. Pass the Vulcan ears. Hand me the 12 sided dice and steal my lunch money. There's no hope for me.

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter let me explain. Twitter is a micro-blogging environment. It allows members to post what they are doing right now. You can post online, but the real power comes when you have a lot of people following your posts, which by the way, I don't. The first question everyone asks is, "What's the point?" I keep asking that same question myself.

However, I did learn something from my experience last night. People, including geeks, want to have their voice heard. Even though virtually no one follows my "tweets" on Twitter, once I started posting my reactions to the plot twists, I just couldn't stop. It's like the episode of Family Guy where Peter narrates his own life for two weeks. That is the Twitter effect. We are narrating our own lives, because we want to be heard.

Therein lies the opportunity for marketers. Are you listening to the voice of the consumer? And, more importantly, are you facilitating your consumer having a voice. All of these trends move from geek to mainstream at the speed of light. It's not wise to ignore them.

Follow my tweets, if you are as geeky as me.

Lifeline

A couple of weeks ago we were in Little Rock, AK for a series of meetings with a client. About half way through the day sirens began to sound and we had to head to a furnace room for safety. A tornado was on its way.

As everyone scrambled and headed out of the conference room door the last thing they would make sure they had was their cell phones. To be honest, at first, I was a little cynical. I mean, come on, there's a tornado coming, can you not live without technology for just a moment. Then, as I sat in the furnace room and watched the people around me, I realized, they weren't grabbing technology, they were grabbing their lifeline to the people they care about.

They called family, friends and loved ones. They texted their kids. They checked the weather radar in areas where their homes were or where their children went to school.

People have an innate desire to be connected. We at WonderGroup often call this The Village. Recognizing The Village exists and that it is a powerful force when communicating with consumers is critical. We'll research and examine every form of demographic but we often forget to ask, what "Village" does the consumer belong to?

Facilitating communication within The Village can energize marketing and have a great impact on the your relationship with your consumer.

Band, I mean Brand Recognition...

I was driving to work this morning, the deep blue sky lifting my spirits as the road rolled under my wheels. It was the perfect day for listening to some good music. So, I plugged in my iPod and started listening to a playlist made up of two of my newest albums. I had a great time, then I started thinking about how I found out about these bands.

Pinback and Rilo Kiley were discovered on a trip back from Battle Creek Michigan. We often drive to Battle Creek, since flying would take almost as long and driving gives us more control of our schedule. So, after we solved the puzzle of the missing iPod interface in our rental car, Red plugged in her iPod and played the roll of DJ as we rolled through the barren land between Van Wert and Anna, Ohio. Red kept saying, "Oh, you'll love this" and I did. It's really no surprise. Red is one of my NetFlix friends and we we both follow each other's del.icio.us feeds. The truth is, we are connected at the net.

Later that night I get a text message from Red with a list of the bands I liked most. Ten minutes later, I've bought their latest albums through my favorite online store and I'm rocking to music that is far more hip than I am.

Imagine how quickly this all happened. We at WonderGroup talk about the Actualized Brand Model. That is moving from a brand being recognized to understanding the brand's relevance to realizing some psychological reward to having an ongoing relationship with the brand. All of this happened in just a few hours on this trip. Red introducted me to a brand (the bands), I liked them, I felt good that I was listening to "new" music and I bought the albums and I'm telling everyone about it.

I tell this story to say this; Red was able to predict my response to a particular band because she thoroughly knows my taste. She's aware of how I have rated hundreds of movies and she knows what sites on the web have connected with me.

If you think about a band as a brand you've got to admit, the first step in developing a fully actualized brand has changed drastically. I did not need a critic telling me what music was good. I did not need to wait for a radio station to spin a disk. I had an advocate, that understood me, based on online activity, recommending something I would like.

As we move though Web 2.0 into Web 3.0 we as marketers must aggressively look for opportunities to deliver content based what the consumer's online actions have told us they like. In other words the brilliance of Netflix, StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us should be applied where ever possible.

Business Cyborgs, a Star Trek Prediction

Being a confirmed geek, I'm not afraid to admit that I have and always will watch Star Trek. I can't explain it. Some people are attracted to the future and some to the past. Some people read historical novels and some read science fiction. It's just the way things are.

So, being an avid trekker, I'm often amazed by the predictions the writers of the show have gotten right. Admittedly, I have never danced with a green woman or had fur balls multiply so fast it overwhelmed me. However, when I walk the halls of airports across this country and I see guys in suits with blue flashing devices stuck in their ears as they update someone on the meeting they just left. I realize how trekian the image is. I mean who could forget the beautiful Uhura, with a device stuck in her ear that allowed her to both hear and speak on the communication system of the future.

This was really brought home to me recently when my daughter handed me a small Jabber bluetooth earpiece that she had received for free when she upgraded her wireless phone to a better model. Imagine the Star Trek writers trying to predict the most amazing thing they can think of in the area of communications, they conclude it would be a small, wireless earpiece. They are ridiculed. People ask "what the heck is that baby bottle stuck in her ear?" They stick to their prediction, and here we are, 40 years later and their prediction, which was supposed to happen in the year 2266 or 2267, has not only come true but the device they presented is now a free promotion, to get you to sign a 2 year contract for cell phone service.

It's the ultimate expression of commodization and serves as a warning to all marketers, especially those who ply their trade online. That which is amazing and new today, can be a free give-away tomorrow.

What's next, a free transporter, when you open a bank account?

Tags: You're It

I’ve been having quite a few conversations lately about social media—especially things like tagging your photographs and favorite websites. There seem to be two polarized schools of thought on the subject:

1. Tagging, ranking, etc is a pointless waste of time, i.e. “I don’t get it,” or
2. Tagging, ranking, etc is the freakin’ future. (Guess which school I belong to!)

In light of the fact that I haven’t posted anything of substance for months, I thought I’d sound off on the tagging topic for a bit.

Alright. As a democracy, we talk about voting as not only a right, but a responsibility. It’s up to you as a responsible American citizen to be heard. It’s your job to represent your party, your age, your gender, your lifestyle, your religion…

I am only barely exaggerating when I say that I see tagging in the same way. I believe that as people who use services such as Flickr, it is a social responsibility to “give back” by feeding the Web 2.0 Machine.

Let me give you an example: The Commons. Flickr has partnered with the Library of Congress (that’s right—the government gets it) to tag an inspiring collection of their photography. In Flickr's own words the project has two purposes... first, to show off the collections to a wider audience, and secondly, "to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search."

That is tagging. User input that makes the web smarter, faster, more searchable, richer, more intuitive.

Take this example from The Commons: a woman working on a B-25 bomber. At first glance it seems like every semantically-related tag has been added: wartime, military, women at war. But what you can also see is that other languages are starting to seep into the tags. Why shouldn't a Spanish speaker be just as able to access our awesome Library of Congress collections?

But that's the catch: it takes a tag-happy Spanish speaker to get the job done. Preferably, more than one. And it's like that with all walks of life: more taggers = more races, languages, beliefs, backgrounds = more semantic goodness. The web does not get smarter on its own, though it often seems that way.

Let me give you a few more instances of useful or interesting tagging. First, a new way at browsing Flickr. Here's a visualization using geotagging, which deserves its own post here some day.
View Larger Map

Another: Last.fm. You see those related artists in the left-hand column? Those don't just appear there, nor is there a dedicated keyboard-monkey typing creating the necessary data; those related artists are all based on the tags and input from Last.fm users. (The information about the bands are also user generated, wiki-style.) For another visualization based on metatags try TuneGlue, which I have blogged before.

Another (I could do this all day): del.icio.us. I am crazy about this site, which takes the bookmarking concept and makes it social. Tagging your favorite websites helps the web "understand" how to classify those sites. StumbleUpon is similar, recommending other sites you might like based on tagging and ranking systems.

Alright, blah blah blah, you've seen these sites before. Back to my point: these tagging and ranking systems do not happen on their own, and one of their purposes is to fuel the move into semantic web, also sometimes referred to as Web 3.0. This is when the web moves beyond a labeling system and begins "thinking," almost.

Consider when you go to Google Maps and type in just a zip code. Google Maps knows it's a zip code, and can anticipate what you want to do with it. Think back to your early MapQuest days, when you had to correctly fill out forms or else receive error messages. The data was just data... streets in the street box, cities in the city box. Five numbers meant nothing to the program. A zip code is our own semantic construction... we know what we want, and the internet is just beginning to think like us.

Teaching the internet isn't all in the hands of programmers and software engineers. In order for it to think like you, to anticipate you and understand your requests, it is your social responsibility to tell the web how you think.

So go vote!

The Ol' Blogger Cop-Out

There's always time for linking. ...Well, there clearly hasn't been for over a month, but dangit I will make time for linking. In no particular order, here we go:

--> 25 Incredibly Artistic Websites

--> Disney Dads — a special group of Disney employees busy creating magic at work and at home. Let them take some of the guesswork out of choosing the right film for your family with their thoughtful suggestions made with parents in mind.

--> Down to Earth blog: created to "help separate fact from fiction about food production."

--> The Cool Mom Picks Mother's Day Guide 2008: I discovered this through ParentHacks and thought it was incredibly insightful and not condescending-- great gift ideas for moms who don't fit the stereotypes they are often stuffed into.

--> Ten Thousand Cents: a collaborative project, where no one knew they were reconstructing the $100 bill. Each was paid one cent, natch.

--> From Natural Disaster to Green Revolution: in the aftermath of tornadoes, a Kansas town is taking the opportunity to rebuild in greener ways. (Why am I getting this news from the UK?)

--> Songkick's Battle of the Bands: make your favorite bands fight! ...Kinda. A great way to promote/support their real business: concerts & tours.

--> Best Game Ever: another batch of heart-warming fantastics from Improv Everywhere. (Thanks Kris.)

That's enough for now, isn't it? If you're lucky, I'll be back soon with a post of substance!

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Now playing: Al Hirt - Green Hornet
via FoxyTunes