The other day I have seen this Faris' article in AdAge, and then I saw quite a few people RT it on Twitter as "wise words". It seems to me that I am the only one who thought that there is nothing new, and much less wise, in that article. It's an arbitrary list of 9 "golden rules for the web" which are supposed to do .... exactly what? I mean, nice descriptions and observations are always welcome, but I would prefer if people were talking more about "HOW", that is about specific case studies and tactics and all hard thinking and testing that went into it. And no, I don't mean mere examples of campaigns, I mean real data which yield real insights about real challenges = data that can be analyzed, repeated, and improved.
Simply put, I have two main objections about this kind of insight-delivery: First, thinking about the rules is always contextual, and bound to how we think about web right now, in 2009. When I was interviewing people from the industry in 2006 for my dissertation, everyone from Tribal to R/GA and Organic were talking about "online video". The future of digital is online video. Why? Because it was summer of 2006, when YouTube's usage rocketed and online video was a big next thing. It was for a while, indeed, and then, well, it then become one of the things that you can do in digital space. So, I learned there and then, all rules are fads, and claiming that something applies for the whole year, and for the whole web, is um, a stretch. Second, "rules" like this are terribly terribly general and vague, so they can apply to everything and anything. Which is exactly their point: you can't prove them wrong. And if you can't prove them wrong, you can't prove them right either. They may work, but they also may not work. These are not rules, these are nothing more than interesting observations. If observations are treated as rules in this industry, then here's another one: no way anyone will ever figure anything out if it takes them seriously.
