DISQUS

Yes.

You brilliantly point out the problem with many so-called social media or viral "campaigns" -- there is no repetition after a brief burst of interest, and the buzz falls to zero. Remember Skittles? At the height of its web-Twitter-design stunt, it accounted for 1% of all Tweets. Now, a few weeks later, Twitter mentions of Skittles have fallen to zero.

The challenge for marketers is social media is a round hole that the square peg called Campaign can't be pounded into. Campaigns have start-and-end dates. Conversations require a mutual relationship, a give-and-take that while may have pauses, goes on for a long time.

Building a business model to influence masses (the role of marketing) by creating sustained conversation (the role of social media) is going to take some thinking. Paid posts or one-off viral stunts ain't going to cut it. Proof? Just check the stats one month after any SM campaign launch, and tell me if anything is being repeated.

Repetition is the heart of a relationship. How do you buy that?

Chris, thanks for your eloquent response. Since ethics like politics cannot be solved with one "right" point of view, perhaps the solution for bloggers is to use a simple economic trade-off. (1) How much will they earn this year from writing posts for hire? (2) Will doing so reduce their future value to employers or clients, hurting future fame/income/success?

I've made many mistakes in my career. Last year, I did one thing right: A CEO client called and asked me point blank, "Do you think the next wave of our ad campaign will work?" The campaign had been restructured several times and honestly I questioned it. Before I could think, I said, "No. The focus is wrong," and explained why. So he killed it. We waiting months before the campaign was revised, our agency missed out on a boatload of revenue in the meantime ... but now I have a very loyal client. He now trusts my opinion. He has since relaunched the campaign, and I think I'll be working with that client for many years to come.

Giving up something in the short term to build authenticity in the long-term is a difficult choice. It's one worth thinking about.

PS Yes, I dug your GM car visit.

Chris, you are extremely talented and yet you know I strongly disagree with the ethics of paid posts, also known as paid opinions. I'll break it down for your readers.

1. Disclosure is not enough. You or I could disclose to our wives that we slept with a prostitute. Full disclosure. That doesn't change the ethics of what we did. Saying "disclosure" makes paid posts OK is a logical fallacy since the ethics of the *action* have nothing to do with the *description* of what happened. Simple. If you question this, trying going home tonight and disclosing, "Hey, honey, I just slept with a hooker..."

2. Blogs are opinions. See your post above, and every comment that followed. Opinions. This is an important distinction, because paying someone to write an opinion is very different than paying someone to stick a block of ad copy on the page. If you disagree, please point me to a blog with entries of more than 10 words that doesn't contain opinions.

3. "Paid posts" are thus "paid opinions." You are buying the voice of someone's mind.

4. Paying for an opinion creates a conflict of interest. The pay giver is seeking elevation of a topic and influence over a positive review (if not, why would they pay?). The pay recipient is compromised and influenced to write favorably over the product or perk given. If you disagree, please point me to 2 paid posts sharply critical of the product being paid for.

5. Conflicts of interest reduce credibility. This is why marketing executives in charge of million-dollar budgets don't accept gifts more than $20 -- because even the appearance of impropriety opens the door to complaints of favoritism or impropriety in future business dealings.

6. Reduction of credibility is not helpful to anyone's career.

At the end, bloggers have a choice. Paid posts are not "wrong"; they are a PR vehicle that create a conflict of interest that may reduce the blogger's credibility. Bloggers of course are welcome to walk that road if they choose. You can tweet about how much you like a GPS system given to you on loan, and many of us will digest that for the questionable transmission that it is.

But let's be clear -- paid posts are not sticking content on a page, like advertising or even advertorial. They are buying the opinions coming from people's minds.

Take good care of your mind, Chris. You only have one.

Ben Kunz
c 203 506 7269

Alan, first, I'm glad to see in the comments that you live in Millburn because I was quite stunned at the amazing analysis you did of this local community and couldn't figure out how you researched it so fast. Anyway, nicely done!

This entire NYT launch highlights the problems with large centralized organizations trying to be hyperlocal. NYT has started with only a few communities and has already run into problems of irrelevance or misfires, by not understanding the local nuances.

A few years ago I worked with a large utility that hired McKinsey for one of those future-of-our-business consulting deals and decided to centralize operations -- which previously had been run out of field offices in local communities across 9 states. On paper, the idea was grand, profits would soar ... but when the concept was executed over several years, moving everything to centralized call centers and dispatch offices and sales ops, everything fell apart. It turned out the nuances of sending utility workers into homes required immense knowledge of local markets -- from directions to customer service to just the brand perception that the guy walking into your house lived nearby. Customer churn spiked, and the company eventually (and wisely) returned to a local service model, which rapidly stabilized the ship.

What I learned from that is certain products require extreme local relevance.

People love their local communities. Buying a home is perhaps one of the most personal things you'll ever do, other than getting married. And even in this day when most of us commute miles away to work, we'll immediately pick up if local news is not really local.

I'm wondering if a smart, massive organization like NYT can really pull this off, or if dispersed, chaotic, fragmented, single news sites and blogs are more likely to succeed. It will be interesting to watch this unfold.

Twitter captures real emotions and behaviors and silly updates of what people are doing in everyday life, and truth is everyday life is pretty good for people who can afford cell phones and computers. We're in the top 10% of the world in income, tend to live in developed nations with clean water and good plumbing, and while we fret about 401ks still can't drop 10 pounds because we have too much food all around us. People are starving elsewhere and we get upset if some peanuts end up with a milligram of rodent fuzz.

So maybe Twitter just captures the reality better than we do ourselves, when we try to write too deeply about it.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still freakin out ;)

@benkunz

I like this return to raw honesty. At least it is authentic. If you go back to the early days of print, when Jonathan Swift made points about the Irish by suggesting the English eat their babies, the world was a pretty tough place and writers reflected that. Journalism was a fist; in the late 20th century it seemed more like a constipated belly.

Trouble is the new (2000s) journalism and old (late 1900s) journalism are colliding: Adrants just got sued for making a tongue-in-cheek point about a fake Virgin America ad. Will be interesting few years as this blog-as-news thing sorts itself out.

I like this return to raw honesty. At least it is authentic. If you go back to the early days of print, when Jonathan Swift made points about the Irish by suggesting the English eat their babies, the world was a pretty tough place and writers reflected that. Journalism was a fist; in the late 20th century it seemed more like a constipated belly.

Trouble is the new (2000s) journalism and old (late 1900s) journalism are colliding: Adrants just got sued for making a tongue-in-cheek point about a fake Virgin America ad. Will be interesting few years as this blog-as-news thing sorts itself out.

Provoking. I would suggest if we seek relevance first, lack of evil and good salaries will follow. And I think relevance is based on authenticity.

I'm just now reading Danah Boyd's doctoral thesis and she has a strong line that social media and new technology create a fundamental attack on *authenticity.* It has become so easy to create content, reproduce it, scale it and manipulate it that recipients have a hard time determining what is real.

There will always be a market for authentic ideas, points of view, and thought leadership. The first step to regaining relevance is to focus on being authentic. You'll become in demand, and a lot of the ad industry pitfalls will fall behind.

Now enough, let's get ready for football, chili, stupid ad jokes and beer!

I work in the ad industry so have a bias, of course, but I have been wondering about this very question. Should marketers retrench now in a time when consumer demand is lower (and thus the return on advertising would be lower, too?). Or should marketers look at this as a time to grab market share when competitors are reeling?

$500,000 spend on advertising now will generate less sales than it did a year ago -- but also might grab share that leads to a longer-term competitive advantage.

Interesting puzzle.

Alan, you raise yet another excellent point. For Facebook to be truly useful as a social media tool it will need network segmentation so we can divide our contacts up into friends vs. family vs. business colleagues.

However, this design aspect is at odds with Facebook wanting to monetize its entire network. Part of the charm, or illusion, of Facebook to marketers is that a message embedding in the network has potential to scale virally. That won't happen if users begin partitioning off their social networks.

So -- Facebook would be more *useful* if we had microbubbles of contacts but this makes it *less appealing* to advertisers trying to run within the entire network. Will be intriguing to see how future FB designs play this out.

Funny, I have the opposite view, which shows how subjective design is. But I think the real story is Twitter and Facebook will both evolve and survive -- as the mobile replacement to Microsoft and Google. Twitter will become the go-to email app, and Facebook the cluttered (but more usable than Windows) mobile operating system.

First, the rant: Facebook is getting so cluttered it approaches the role of a bloated Windows Vista operating system for social media. Admit it: 1980s high school yearbooks had better layout. Its recent "tabbed" redesign was a simple ploy to add more page views and thus *more inventory* for ad space -- and let's not forget the juvenile communication accoutrements: I now have 31 "requests" waiting for me for green badges, holiday pranks, and some form of kidnapping. Yeah. Again, all subjective, but the retweets jamming up Twitter are no more obtrusive than the silly Facebook pokes.

This is normal, though. Humans love to add complexity to simple designs. The same force that takes religious leaders such as Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, who start as simple individuals with simple messages and converts them to temples and cathedrals and annual calendars of ritual is also at work shifting modern communication tools. Twitter began life as a 140-character text service and now we can embed web links and photos and forward messages and segment users with outside apps, all adding complexity to what was clean. To argue against this spiraling complexity is tempting, but humans seem to need more buttons to push to want to continue to use anything -- whether that be spiritual beliefs, government policy, automotive controls or social media tools.

But this is all OK, because Twitter and Facebook are filling two different roles in the new mobile space. Let's think about the year 2020, when the majority of consumers will use cell phones instead of computers to get online.

- Mobile screens are 90% smaller than laptops or desktops -- creating a huge shift in how operating systems work and how advertisers can squeeze in
- Mobile communication OS must be simpler -- creating a problem for Microsoft, noted for bloated complexity
- The common web browser will no longer be the single platform for getting online -- creating a huge threat to Google

See it? Twitter and Facebook could replace Google and Windows. To date, Windows sucks on mobile. Google is so worried about consumers walking around its browser front door with mobile phones that it jumped into the mobile OS design business. But I don't need either to do what I want on a cell phone -- Twitter lets me email, and Facebook lets me connect more broadly online. Facebook is becoming a nice operating system that lets you manage photos, video, and documents. Add a good spreadsheet program and who needs Office?

So the long view is both Twitter and Facebook have a wonderful opportunity to become the baseline ecosystems for mobile communications. They'll get more complex along the way, but that's to be expected.

Now let me go retweet your blog post ;)

I'm speechless.

Provoking post. I suspect your book-loving friends may sometimes be adversarial because it feels like the old industry is under threat ... which really is furthest from the truth.

One thing that book-lovers should celebrate is that people are *writing* again. It's hard to remember today, but back in the 1980s and early 1990s educators were very upset that children, teens and young adults were spending 8 or 12 or 16 hours a day in front of the television. Then video games came ... and the world of reading and writing seemed about to wither and die.

So it's sweet that today there are 100 million blogs and the craze is to create writing, even if on Twitter in 140 characters or less.

The writing on blogs and tweets and text messages may be sometimes sloppy, or ill-reported, or use different spellings ... but language always evolves, which is why we and the Brits speak with different accents after only 250 years of separation.

I love books, and I love blogs, too. My own blog is a bit of a scratch-pad and when I write for "real" publication, I labor much more intensely. But I find the freedom of expression that digital typography has offered has freed my mind.

Here's to more people writing loosely electronically. If they practice hard enough, they may even make it inside a book.

Provoking post. I suspect your book-loving friends may sometimes be adversarial because it feels like the old industry is under threat ... which really is furthest from the truth.

One thing that book-lovers should celebrate is that people are *writing* again. It's hard to remember today, but back in the 1980s and early 1990s educators were very upset that children, teens and young adults were spending 8 or 12 or 16 hours a day in front of the television. Then video games came ... and the world of reading and writing seemed about to wither and die.

So it's sweet that today there are 100 million blogs and the craze is to create writing, even if on Twitter in 140 characters or less.

The writing on blogs and tweets and text messages may be sometimes sloppy, or ill-reported, or use different spellings ... but language always evolves, which is why we and the Brits speak with different accents after only 250 years of separation.

I love books, and I love blogs, too. My own blog is a bit of a scratch-pad and when I write for "real" publication, I labor much more intensely. But I find the freedom of expression that digital typography has offered has freed my mind.

Here's to more people writing loosely electronically. If they practice hard enough, they may even make it inside a book.

You know, the lengths people go to to try and game the network continue to astound me. I'm curious as a non-coder sort as to how linking to an image -- which appears on your site anyway but may not be hosted there -- protects a user from an IP theft claim any more than posted the image and linking to one's own server.

Ah, but I digress. The real issue I see is people not being real -- by either presenting ideas that are not their own (see recent pay-per-post debates re Kmart) or presenting linking structures that are not valid (see all the SEO and PPP gambits to try to make a topic look more relevant than it is). Everyone is so hung up on mirrored faces or mirrored links that they are missing the real value of the new social media -- a forum to build and exchange real ideas.

Sorry for the soapbox mate. Hey, at less their manipulation is giving your images a higher page rank.

You know, the lengths people go to to try and game the network continue to astound me. I'm curious as a non-coder sort as to how linking to an image -- which appears on your site anyway but may not be hosted there -- protects a user from an IP theft claim any more than posted the image and linking to one's own server.

Ah, but I digress. The real issue I see is people not being real -- by either presenting ideas that are not their own (see recent pay-per-post debates re Kmart) or presenting linking structures that are not valid (see all the SEO and PPP gambits to try to make a topic look more relevant than it is). Everyone is so hung up on mirrored faces or mirrored links that they are missing the real value of the new social media -- a forum to build and exchange real ideas.

Sorry for the soapbox mate. Hey, at less their manipulation is giving your images a higher page rank.

Logically you are spot on.

I do wonder, though, if most people will make this logic connection. People tend to define themselves by the products they buy, and the fast visual "vibe" of the new PC spots does makes you feel that you want to be hip of this cool, fun, smart crowd. Advertising is designed to get a response, which is often emotional and illogical -- which is why sex and violence work so well in advertising; logically people wouldn't respond to such superficial stimuli, but emotionally we do.

Great analysis... but I bet the PC ads will work because of the simplistic reading, not the deeper logical rationale.

Logically you are spot on.

I do wonder, though, if most people will make this logic connection. People tend to define themselves by the products they buy, and the fast visual "vibe" of the new PC spots does makes you feel that you want to be hip of this cool, fun, smart crowd. Advertising is designed to get a response, which is often emotional and illogical -- which is why sex and violence work so well in advertising; logically people wouldn't respond to such superficial stimuli, but emotionally we do.

Great analysis... but I bet the PC ads will work because of the simplistic reading, not the deeper logical rationale.

Whoa. Sounds pretty meta.

:)

Whoa. Sounds pretty meta.

:)

Wow. I've never given the design of interactive banners that much thought; instead simplistically viewed them as an escalating tease to try to get a user to click.

Do you think your castle/invest-time-first thesis holds for all types of online offers? Or are there products where a more direct approach makes sense? I would think consumers have different levels of interest for different products, creating multiple strategies for stimulating response.

Wow. I've never given the design of interactive banners that much thought; instead simplistically viewed them as an escalating tease to try to get a user to click.

Do you think your castle/invest-time-first thesis holds for all types of online offers? Or are there products where a more direct approach makes sense? I would think consumers have different levels of interest for different products, creating multiple strategies for stimulating response.

Great thought-starter. I personally believe that Apple -- of course -- has a 10-year product pipeline plan and that everything from GUI to design to batteries to new features to price framing is staged to

a. drive current demand
b. and build in product obsolescence
c. to set the stage for future sales.

The new 3G iPhone, for example, has a battery that is so problematic Apple has set up a web page to explain how to extend the battery life -- by turning off all the cool features you got the new 3G model for. Hmm. Upgraded battery in 2009?

And then, there is the camera, still substandard. And the potential addition of video capture. And, of course, since you want to look at whom you're talking to, you'll need a second video camera on the interface side so you could chat with me and we'd both see each other without turning the phone around.

The iPhone may turn into the first true convergence device ... and that will take many years, many carefully staged upgrades, and may additional sales to get there. And along the way, the second growth channel will be the interface updates you mentioned -- to sell the Library of Congress, the world's music, and Lucasfilms.

Hey, it's working. And it is brilliant. You're one year in and already thinking of upgrading to a new phone!

Great thought-starter. I personally believe that Apple -- of course -- has a 10-year product pipeline plan and that everything from GUI to design to batteries to new features to price framing is staged to

a. drive current demand
b. and build in product obsolescence
c. to set the stage for future sales.

The new 3G iPhone, for example, has a battery that is so problematic Apple has set up a web page to explain how to extend the battery life -- by turning off all the cool features you got the new 3G model for. Hmm. Upgraded battery in 2009?

And then, there is the camera, still substandard. And the potential addition of video capture. And, of course, since you want to look at whom you're talking to, you'll need a second video camera on the interface side so you could chat with me and we'd both see each other without turning the phone around.

The iPhone may turn into the first true convergence device ... and that will take many years, many carefully staged upgrades, and may additional sales to get there. And along the way, the second growth channel will be the interface updates you mentioned -- to sell the Library of Congress, the world's music, and Lucasfilms.

Hey, it's working. And it is brilliant. You're one year in and already thinking of upgrading to a new phone!

Breaking rules *also* is effective in communication and building consensus. Think of the norms we follow in business meetings, in clean shirts being polite listening to PowerPoint, and how little often gets done. Think of how polite we are in responding to unwanted sales calls or emails. In our heads, we know what we want to say, but we keep it inside. Decorum breeds dishonesty, which stalls progress or constructive decisions.

Sean Howard has a great post about shaking up a board room by giving execs crayons and blank paper. http://www.seanhoward.ca/2008/06/the-role-of-se... He broke a few unwritten laws that day, but moved a team through paralysis to new insights.

So here's to breaking chains. I'm gonna speed on the way home.