i [love] marketing.

not sure about Hunch

Well, Hunch got me confused. I usually don't have a problem forming an opinion, and quickly, in that (um). Not this time. I signed up for this new Caterina Fake's service, and just about when I was around 489th question (the system first needs to learn about you), I started thinking what is this good for?

At first, I was like, "do we ever listen to other people's advice anyway?", because - if my own behavior is any indicator (and others may also agree) - I ask others about the advices ALL THE TIME but I NEVER EVER follow them. Which made me think that we seek advice not so we can actually make a better decision, but to test-out how others will react once the decision is made. Something like this: we in fact ask others 'how would you feel if I did this?' instead of 'what do you think about this?'

If this line of reasoning is continued, then Hunch would be a great opinion-meter on how majority of others feel about the situation you are currently in, and deciding about. But then I saw kinds of questions people ask, like the above "which classical piano piece should I play?" or "what's the best sleep aid for me?" AND best yet, "which open source license should I choose?", my theory kinda got busted. Aside of the fact that these are the most boring questions ever, I realized that on Hunch people obviously wanted a more practical, everyday advice (I was personally hoping that Hunch can give me answers to more ephemeral questions, you know, the real useful stuff :). That is, they want something that Google can't give them - informative, yet personally relevant, and collaborative filtering-based answers. So I started liking Hunch again.

But then it slightly creeped me out because of its predictability; the whole experience was a bit too much machine-like; and answers are a little bit mainstream to (my suggested vacation destination is Cyprus which I happen really not to like because it is too touristy.) If that's the answer, I would rather do vacation research myself or ask my friends. I just guess that the end of the day, nothing can replace input from people who really know us beyond the answers that we feed to the Hunch system. Which brings me back to my "feelings" argument. Also, I have yet to be convinced that people will use this on an everyday basis, like "um, I am not sure about this one, let me ask Hunch!"

p.s. I just went to "For You" section, and the question for me was "Which console game is right for me?". I don't even play video games :( Seems like Hunch has some more hunching to do.

ser·en·dip·i·ty*

*The act of finding something valuable or delightful when you are not looking for it. The image above is a print called "The Dream of Sleep", that I accidentally found while browsing the web. I liked it, and I posted it on my Facebook profile. Some time later, my ex-coworker John Antoniello IM-ed me "you must think that I am crazy, but I just bought that print! I was staring at it for 15 minutes, it is so beautiful. How did you find it on Etsy?? I can never find anything there."

Well, I was not looking for it on Etsy; and moreover, I was not looking for it at all. I was browsing through some design and art blogs, and even I did not go there on purpose -- I kind of just came across them. But if we forget about this for a moment, and look at this situation from John's perspective, this thing completely randomly got into his Facebook feed, and then, completely unexpectedly, it was super-relevant for him: he loved it the instant it saw it although he did not know it existed. (and this is the question from my last post). Pure serendipity.

This made me remember a quote I read somewhere, saying something like 'don't look for art in a museum, look for it at the street, railway station, market ..." Meaning, I guess, in order to find something, you need to be looking for something else. Or somewhere else. Or not looking for anything at all.

So now, there's ton of stuff on the web, and then, there are social networks which connect all that stuff and people with each other. And, potentially, there's enough visibility of this data so we may actually use it for something, well, useful. For example, to increase random and unexpected, yet thoroughly delightful discoveries. Which made me think what kind of network conditions there have to be to allow this kind of serendipity.

Obviously, the network should have a some sort of scale. While it can be argued that the scale of your own network in itself is not a critical condition (it's more what's the size of your friends' networks that counts, in fact), it does help if your network is made up of more people with large networks.

Then, there should be some sort of diversity. The more diverse friends there are in your network, the bigger the chances that you will come across something that you haven't thought before (this one is kinda obvious, too - being among like-minded people makes you, um, like-minded. the same mechanism explains why tastes tend to converge after a while and why popular stuff, are um, popular).

In a way, you've got to fight against diverselessness by purposefully introducing diversity in your network (or in your browsing behavior). Which is where the above quote about searching for art comes in, and also how I tend to behave online. I am a digital strategist but I mostly stay clear from other strategists' blogs (paul, noah, amber, and johanna being exceptions - but then again, none of them really writes strictly about digital marketing), and tend to read stuff on design, art, sociology, of whatever else. Then, I tend to look at stuff that people in my FB network who are designers, art directors, or creative directors post. This is an almost sure guarantee that I will come across something unexpected that I will like. It's like steering off the beaten path.

So then, there are two things (scale+diversity) in combination that may help serendipity. But then comes the question of filtering: if both scale and diversity become too big they by default become counter-productive. Simply, there's going to be too much noise, and also we can't see/read/listen to everything, no matter how interesting. The world is infinitely complex, and there's a ton of stuff going on. We need some sort of filter.

And there's a twist. Scale/diversity combo obviously is not the solution in itself. That is, it's not a solution if we think about it only in social networking terms. It has very limited benefits there (yes, John may have found something he liked in his feed, but how much information he gets there on a daily basis that he does not like?). There needs to be some relation to content; and here's where Facebook Connect comes in. But don't be fooled; the word "connect" in Facebook Connect in fact means "filtering" :) At least, it should be understood like that. Fun stuff can happen.

It works both ways: a) you can start from content: for example, you are somewhere and you see who else's there (those people can be your friends or not), and then you can look up what other stuff they are interested in (this both filters stuff and increases serendipity). Or, b) you can start from people: you choose to see stuff that only certain of your friends are seeing/liked/bookmarked/etc (also filters stuff and increases serendipity). Anyway, it's all about using social connections outside the walled garden of a social network. I think.

filtering out.

This is Rick Webb's status update that made me laugh so hard at the time that I remembered it and dug it out now as quite appropriate as an illustration of the stuff that I've been thinking about for some time. Which is the problem of filtering information once the adoption of a social networking platform reaches such a number of people that there is all of the sudden more noise than signal(s). Or, the costs of using the platform become higher than its benefits. Or, network effects turn into negative externalities.

We've seen it happening with Facebook, and we've seen it happening with Twitter. When *everyone* started using these platforms, the issue moved from "being there" to how the hell do i "filter stuff out". It's like these platforms stopped being services in themselves and instead became a resource upon which a new, cooler, more useful, and more fun service has to be built.

Here comes the question what do you do with all that data, information, and connections that exist on these social platforms? Some people experiment with services like Qapture, which wants to filter Twitterers by popularity. Needless to say, the list is full of usual suspects in all three categories. I know what those people are saying even without going over to Qapture. So this made me think that popularity is really not a good filtering mechanism. It's nice to be in the loop, but I can do that just by relying on the local knowledge of people in my immediate proximity (in network terms), but that's something that Hayek discovered like 100 years ago. I just need to link to the nearest hub (a person with large number of connections), and puff, I learn about everything everyone is talking about. Something like turning the TV on.

So now, why would I want to do that on the web? There's actually data that is visible and that can allow me a much smarter and more interesting filtering mechanism: the one that introduces a high level of randomness in my network. Or, in other words, that feeds stuff that I like but would never know that I like until I came across them.

Filtering mechanism like that would be a great discovery tool (the one that allows for accidental discoveries), and it would also at the same time weed out all the information that I find uninteresting, irrelevant, or simply a noise. So the problem, how I see it, is not to fight this noise by amplifying the already strongest signals; it's by amplifying the relevant ones.

But how do I know what I will find relevant before I see it? Um. That's part of my thinking about serendipity so will write about it there :) In a bit.

i feel like this today.

this is just a random observation.

Turns out, there is no need [to follow you into the dark]. And by this "following", I have in mind Twitter and something that i noticed. The number of people I follow is terrifyingly low (12. and even out of those 12, two have become incredibly annoying so i put them under consideration. some de-friending may ensue). Anyway, it turns out, that's quite enough. Why? Well, I noticed a pattern of who those people regularly RT, mention in some other way, or link to (because, just as me, they limited the number of conversations they have with the people they really like. eh, whatcha gonna do). So I actually don't need to follow that second 'tier' of people; I just need to follow the first and will get all the info that everyone else is currently talking about. Which explains how to keep myself in the loop, but certainly does not explain how do I discover new things. And this is what I really care about. Bummer.

I hope one day someone will create an application that introduces randomness in my twitter feed, so every morning I can see stuff that I have never know existed but are exactly what I am interested in :) And while I have an idea how that tool should work on a filtering level I am totally clueless how to do any successful programming. Oh well.

wires should not behave like humans.

After I wrote this post yesterday, I had to go out among humans, so didn't have time to put in a few thoughts that occurred to me only later. Then Matt Daniels left a comment there, and I thought it's a good opportunity to respond to him and add the stuff that I figured out later.

The fact that humans often behave like certified psychos when interacting with websites only means that we should not try to make websites human-like, but quite the opposite: we need to design them in such a way to prevent obnoxious human behavior. That is, we need to design against all those opportunities that make people pissed off. Pretty simple.

And that's a purely experience design matter. It really goes against the ton of conversation going on right now around how to "humanize", "personalize", and "socialize" a brand website. And how brands online need to behave like persons, need to be nice, and conversational, and pleasant, and sociable, and resourceful, and whatever else crosses your mind if you are a [bad] digital strategist. I am just not sure that it really helps. Like, who cares if you imagined that your brand should be a "real nice person" if there's a damn stupid mistake in navigation, or the page takes forever to load, or if there's really nothing much to do on the site, or if the experience design sucks. Maybe we don't want our websites to be like humans in the first place - maybe we just want them to be what they are - interfaces - and to work damn well, in that.

So here's the answer to Matt's two observations: a) our behavior will not necessarily turn more impersonal and socially awkward as long as we don't imagine that we are interacting with humans and that it replaces human interaction; and b) I think that we need exactly the opposite of Turing's test for our websites, we need a "machine test". Is this machine working well? Can you design it flexibly for a range of uses, and also predict dead-ends and kind of drive people away from them? At the end of the day, we don't want our websites to be "personalities", we want to have an uninterrupted interaction that lets complete some task, communicate, connect with others, or just plain hang out online without being frustrated while trying to do so. Real simple.

And the less "is it a human, or is it a machine?" confusion, the better.

humans & wires

Some time ago, I read a great Newyorker article by Atul Gawande, where he talks about the impact of solitary confinement on humans. Part of his story is description of experiments on monkeys, done by psychologist Harry Harlow, where newborn monkeys were taken from their mothers and put in 'company' of surrogate mothers, made of wire (photo above). Monkeys were provided with everything they needed for survival, like food and warmth. That didn't help them to later become a functional members of monkey society. Namely, what they lacked was a stimulation - contact or, interaction - necessary for turning them into sociable beings. They remained weird throughout their lives (and Dr. Harlow was seriously reprimanded for his experiments).

While this story is interesting in its own right, it got me to think about something completely (?) different. I started thinking about human-computer interaction, and how most of us spend most of our time with grid-like interfaces not unlike the above, and how we conduct a lot of our social interaction with a machine. And that's all totally fine, of course, because we were not brought up by the internet, but (hopefully) by flash-and-blood mothers. Still, those who spend way too much time with the webz or video games or programming are deemed to be "nerds", and as such, almost by default, slightly "socially awkward."

Which leads me to the conversation that I had with my friend Michal (who is, besides being a great Experience Designer and one of the smartest people I know, also a very nice person). I have asked her how she, as an UX, thinks about the problem of designing for the continuous interaction on the website - i.e. how she prevents user drop-off points (ensuring that people spend more time on the site, click more, and return later). That's, in a way, a relationship-building. There's quite a few of design tactics to prevent user drop off, like "we don't have what you are searching for, but here's our most popular topics" for example, or narrowing down search categories so users don't cut themselves off, or some navigational stuff to prevent dead-ends. And then, of course, there's always a BACK button. (which makes me think how awesome it would be to have back button sometimes in human conversations, like ooops ... back!) In interpersonal conversations, instead, people go through a sequence of gestures, and when we talk to other people we are careful to sustain the conversation. When someone says something stupid, we tend to look another way, as in pretend that we didn't hear it, or try to smooth it out by saying something else.

Well, we don't behave like that when we interact with a website. Even despite the UX design efforts like the above, we just leave, or get angry, or laugh at it, and sometimes even yell. We lose patience in a mili-second. We don't have time for that crap. Sometimes we even conduct some irrational behavior when we don't get to see or do what we want, like repeatedly hit our keyboard, abruptly turn the computer off, or walk away and to punch the wall (i made this last one up). In short, we behave like psychopaths. I can only imagine how would that behavior fare in a live, human-to-human interaction. Someone does not respond quickly enough, and we hit them. Fun times.

So now, Michal knows a lot about user behavior, and she claims that because they are interacting with a computer, users are going to be a hell lot less tolerant and patient than when they are interacting with another human being. If we interact with a teller in a bank, we are - and have to be - more patient; when we interact with a site, well, much less so. Then she said something very true: "the social pressure is on the website." What a truly awesome reversal of roles.

happiness.

I was thinking about this a bit. Every time I randomly asked someone "when and where have you been the happiest?" that person, almost by default, names some travel experience: "when i was backpacking through Southern Asia"; "when I was traveling though Italy and Spain"; "on Greek Islands". Only my brother said that he is happy every day when he wakes up (i think he was just making fun of my question).

So I started wondering why travel? Is it easier to remember those extraordinary circumstances when our routines are temporarily broken up and we live in a special time? (and which, by the very fact that is temporary and thus limited, is something special). But then again, there are some not very memorable travails, and then some plain awful trips. So maybe it's not about traveling-as-special-time in itself. But then again, I have never heard anyone say "I was the happiest between October 2006 to June 2007." Obviously, it's not time or place that makes us happy; it's the experience. I am, however, sure that there are a lot of extraordinary experiences at home (some awesome night out; good conversation; a beautiful day; great food; going out with someone you really really like; happiness after the job that is well done, accomplishment of something we wanted, etc. not to mention wedding day, childbirth, etc. but just for now, let's stick to the age demo which is unwed and sans kids). So why those "local" awesome experiences often fade away from memory? I think it may be because they seem repeatable to us. On the other hand, going away somewhere, while it can probably be done again, still requires a lot of planning & a number of circumstances to come together (sufficient time, money, relationships, etc). That is, it requires some effort [and we tend to value more things that we need to work hard for]. And then, I think that when we travel we may be more open and more actively seeking experiences = it's a state of constant, undivided, attention towards our surroundings and/or to the experience itself. As such, it's more memorable afterwards. And then also there is this thing that we would rather have an idea of what makes us happy ("Stumbling on Happiness" details about this) than actually make ourselves aware what really makes us happy every day, on a regular basis.

Or maybe just a beautiful scenery on the road makes us happy. People love beauty.

Not sure if any of this is a good explanation. But would definitely like to know more about this. And I am really really curious what the breakdown of the experiences that make us happy might be.

p.s. the image above is from Santorini. That was the happiest time of my life thus far :) Just remembering it overwhelms me with nostalgia.

favorite movies.

You can tell a lot about a person from his/her favorite movies. I have been thinking lately about which ones are mine, and although I am pretty sure this is not a definite list (and that I also forgot some), here's what I came up with. They are listed in no particular order. I love them all equally & can watch them repeatedly.

1. Night on Earth (Jim Jarmush, 1991)
2. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
3. The City of Lost Children (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1995)
4. Mystery Train (Jim Jarmush, 1989)
5. Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, 1996)
6. Live Flesh (Pedro Almodovar, 1997)
7. Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)
8. Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996)
9. A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)
10. Kikujiro (Takeshi Kitano, 1999)
11. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977)
12. Chunking Express (Wong Kar Wai, 1994)

Also favorite [just slightly less so]:

13. Amelie (Jean-Piere Jeunet, 2001)
14. Once (John Carney, 2007)
15. Swimming Pool (Francois Ozon, 2003)
16. The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
17. Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965).
18. Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)
19. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)
20. The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)
21. The Phantom of Libery (Luis Bunuel, 1974)
22. Lisbon Story (Wim Wenders, 1994)

Now I wonder what this information can be useful for. Like, what if there were a tool that let me see Twitter updates of only people who have 18 out 20 same titles as I do? (Wonder if that would lead to some relevant discoveries). Or if I knew others who have the exact same list. Would that mean that we have other interests in common? Would be really great if we could use a more random stuff like this to filter information on the webz. Because, while some of these choices are pretty mainstream (and probably a lot of people of my generation/gender would list similar choices; but some are probably more idiosyncratic, so it's the combo of the two that actually is informative. I think.)

psycho-bunny.

this one has some crazy eyes.

the newness of new technology

Every time I hear an argument that claims that something is  ... "new", "revolutionary", "first", "unprecedented", my first thought is that it probably isn't. 

Being inclined to think that we live in the time that is like no other before it is a recognizable human tendency that probably marked all earlier epoques of history as well (it's just that we don't know, or think about it). We like to think that there's no time like present = we exhibit "present0centrism". 

Then, there is a major fallacy in logic that assumes that human history is a linear endeavor, where things go from a less developed state to a more developed state. That is, that there is always some form of progress. From this fallacy then stems another one, and that one is that progress happens suddenly, as a revolution, and that one set of relations is replaced quickly and swiftly with another, completely different set of relations. No wonder then that we think that present is always "new".

I found a great example of this kind of logically flawed thinking in the [unfortunately] widely accepted idea that the audience has a "newly active role" in its own consumption of entertainment. Well, maybe. Aside of the fact that statements like this present a pretty boring simplifications of people's behavior, they are also pretty wrong. (And while I understand that it's easy to say something like this cliche because it "makes sense" and clients and the industry will quickly agree, I also think that saying things that we can immediately understand on a superficial level without really thinking about them really hampers more creative and ultimately more interesting thinking. I guess I am just bored of things that are "common sense" because they represent nothing but an agreement of something by a large number of people).

So anyway. First, audience has never really not been active, it's just that this activity was invisible. There was no technology for this activism to achieve a. visibility and b. scale. 

Second, and to me more interestingly, the era of audience allegedly "not being active" spans to a mere 60 years of the mass media. That's a terribly short time. And, honestly, before that time, audience never-ever shut up. It was laud, interactive, and it had an enormous say in any show. The early cinema was like that; in fact the first 15-20 years after film was invented it was always part of vaudeville acts - one among many of them. Audience shouted and expressed its liking or disliking of whatever was happening on the stage -- in short, the audience itself was part of the show. But then, while looking for something else yesterday, I came across an article from NewYorker from a while ago that I saved because I found the analysis interesting. The article is about the format of the concert performance, and just have a look at this:

(about audience in the Paris Opera in the 18th century): "While most were in their places by the end of the first act, the continuous movement and low din of conversation never really stopped. ... In other words, the opera served mainly as a playground for the aristocracy. The nobles refrained from paying overt attention to what the musicians are doing. Indeed, silent listening in the modern sense was deemed declasse. ... Public concerts well into 19th century took the form of miscellaneous - eclectic affairs at which all kinds of music were played before audiences that seldom sat still or quieted down. ... Piano recitals were completely nuts. They resembled "The Ed Sullivan Show" more than the hushed recital of today. In one favorite routine, Liszt brought onstage a large urn into which his listeners had dropped slips of paper, each one inscribed with a suggestion for a tune on which he might improvise. The audience sometimes participated without any prompting from the stage. Once, when Liszt was beginning a performance of the "Kreutzer" Sonata, listeners begun calling out "Robert le Diable!" - meaning that they wished to hear instead Liszt's fantasy on themes from the Meyerbeer opera."

Sounds terribly familiar.

built to last

In the past 7 days, these two things showed up. The first one is a campaign for ALL detergent, done by Razorfish. The second one is a campaign for GE, done by The Barbarian Group. [Disclaimer: before I go on to butcher the campaign #1, I want to say that, while I have no respect for RF's current work, I do have respect for people who work at this company, and especially for people who created this campaign, as I know them and I assume they worked very hard on this]. Ok, free to carry on.

I don't want to focus here on the advertising quality of the effort #1, or if this campaign resonated with the target, or if the videos are funny (you be the judge). What I want to focus on is if this kind of advertising makes any sense. So, here comes the GE Adventure, as a PERFECT example of what I think the web is good not only for brands but as an marketing approach that makes much more sense.

Now, I very rarely, if ever, get excited about online campaigns or use the word "perfect" in caps when talking about something an agency had done. (I get more excited about stuff that people do & make online).  But when I saw the GE Adventure blog, the idea got me all worked up [in a good way]. First, I thought it was an incredibly smart branding effort. It made us think that some brand I never think about is a real company with the real scientists thinking about solving people's real problems and being a real, helpful part of their lives [just reading that blog made me think how we in fact need GE for all their scientific work. totally crazy - i would never ever have had that thought if i watched a GE commercial]. It actually reminds us that companies are much more than their marketing. Then, it exposed stuff about the brand that we would never be able to see and that is honestly much more interesting to see than any advertising. And, finally, it promotes transparency on both ends (agency's and brand's). Also, and this is not trivial, it looks like a ton of fun to do (and agency who is truly excited about their client's work is going to make great stuff with that client).

So now, I am not saying that building a blog like this is a solution for all agencies and all brands (I somehow feel that Nike would be way less exited to open the doors of their factories ... you know, lots of kiddies running around.) What I am saying is that there is an essentially different kind of thinking behind these two campaigns. One is built to last and another is built to disappear. So, now, in this economic climate which I hope will teach us how to build things that will last, how to be sustainable, and how to use available resources without destroying them, I wonder is spending millions of dollars on Joan Rivers and Laundry Fairy makes ANY SENSE?? How is this economically and socially responsible? How is this representing thinking about a sustainable future? And what exactly does it do for the ALL brand? As any advertising campaign, it will have its spike this week (it launched on Sunday), go on for a few more weeks (if lucky) and then end up in the advertising graveyard, together with J.C.Penney's Doghouse (yea, no one remembers that one, either). Yes, maybe passing along videos donates money to charity (one of those "feel good fast" things), but how about not spending so much money on a mere ad campaign on the first place? And all of that for a short-term sales lift. It almost makes me annoyed how little long-term, sustainable, thinking went into conceiving and planning of this campaign. There is a good reason that advertising model of the past does not work so well anymore. It is not coincidental that the web is one of the reasons for it not working as it used to. And this is not because web is a new channel of communication, but it is because the web is a system that is built to last.

With that, back to GE Adventure. First, not only it does more for GE brand long-term (and I am not talking only about SEO and traffic measures, blog mentions, video views, etc, but also about a possibility of influencing perception of GE brand), than any Laundry Fairy video, minisite, or celebrity apprentice, did for ALL. I am rarely certain about things (and I also dislike predictions) but I am 100% certain about this. Second, the GE Adventure content is really interesting, exclusive, reality-show & behind-the-scenes- like. It is very well written. To compare, "Guess That Stain" video had 614 views as of this moment; I think that my blog had more views in the same period of time. Third, the GE Adventure execution is right on. Why? Online,  it is THE IDEA that counts, execution should always be cheap. Again, why? Because in digital you build upon what is already there. Whatever you do needs to reflect the values and behavior of people on the web. And we all build upon each others' contributions. So, you either use software that already exists (in this case maybe Typepad? Cost: $49.99 per year for basic service);  resources that you already have (Noah and Benjamin); and/or content that someone else has already made and that you can make it cheaply yourself (e.g. photos and videos).

The bigger point here is that online, you don't need a giant budget to build something that will have a lasting effect - or any effect for that matter. In fact, you are really a dumb ass if you choose to spend money to produce something completely new from scratch, with all those free available resources in front of your nose. The very fact that you build upon those resources is the sure guarantor that whatever you create will last longer.

If I were an agency, before I start thinking about any campaign, I would ask myself: how am I going to make this thing last? How am I not going to waste anyone's time and money, but contribute to it? How am I going to use what is already out there?

There are fundamentally different questions than those we are used to ask ourselves at the beginning of our campaigns, and as long as Benjamin Palmer does not wander into some GE nuclear reactor and press the big red button, thinking "it's gonna be awesome", we are all safe to maybe think about them.

brooklyn wilderness

A man carrying a mummified tiger. Spotted from my window.

i love quotes.

Some more great UX qoutes here.

All knowledge is connected to all other knowledge. The fun is in making the connections.*

 
*Arthur Aufderheide. Mr. Aufderheide is a paleopathologist who studies mummies to learn about ancient diseases. So I guess he should be trusted.

When I recently came across this quote, it made me very happy. It made me think about all amazing things that people do and write and think about online, and about all the stuff that we read and hear and learn, and how putting things together in a new way leads to even more great things. Mostly, it made me think about this great feeling that comes when a new connection feels just right.

I have always believed that there's nothing new under the sun, and that instead of constantly pursuing something completely "new" we should maybe stop for a second and look around and learn about things that we did not know before. This makes me think about the web and how much knowledge there is, and how it is indeed possible to trace the connections and learn from connections and then make some connections that were not there before. Because all knowledge is indeed connected to all other knowledge, it is just that we don't see this. Unless we really want to look.

It also made me think how often people don't really want to look, and they prefer to invest a lot of money and time and thinking into creating something "new", that they think no one has seen ever before.  (this is how advertising campaigns fail). This then makes me think how that is very vain in fact, because this means that those people don't really listen, and even don't maybe care about everything that already exists, because they want to colonize it with their "new" thing and because they think it is "better" than what already exists. There is this misconception that new always means better. And it is sad. I would like to learn nothing new today but to learn a lot about how to connect better what I already know. Sounds like fun :)

p.s. The image above is LEGO-ized Twitter Fail Whale, found here.

i felt like this ...

... so am going out to play!

sunday + the internet

This made me smile. (And wonder how come that this was not done before. Seems like an obvious combo :)

i am bored with marketing ...

... or, to be more precise, with its outcomes. (otherwise, I would need to change the title of this blog). I realized that I can't remember when was the last time I saw something smart and interesting and made me think in this space. Ok, aside of today: this GE Adventure idea is pretty cool, mostly because we can see stuff usually on display in the History of Science Museum (or on the Discovery Channel :). Anyway, I have always thought that marketing - and digital marketing in particular - is this fascinating space that combines all the most interesting stuff from sociology, psychology & cognitive science, media studies, design, and economics. Rarely there is a discipline that can claim to combine and use so many areas of other disciplines. Because, when you think about it on the most general level, marketing resides in between people and the world around them. So it is kind of concerned with everything that happens in this "in between". To make all of this a little bit more specific, I figured I should write here about things from the areas I mentioned just now that I think are super-important to digital marketing (and that would make it incomparably more interesting). 

To start from sociology, there are:
1. Organizational studies that deal with: technologies and organizational forms; dynamics of knowledge sharing in organizations; communities of practice, project teams, and collaboration; and innovation.
2. social networks that deal with everything from how information spreads, who spreads it, what is the best network structure and dynamics of information spread, through studies of social influence, contagion, and social imitation, to interpersonal and mass media communication + how to build models to study all of this. You can read Barry Wellman who is basically a founder of social network analysis, Duncan Watts, and also anyone from the Collective Dynamics Group.
3. Symbolic interactionism = study of cultural rituals and social roles, most famously (and most fun to read) described by Goffman (you can start from "The Goffman Reader", but also "Interaction Ritual", "Frame Analysis", and his most famous, "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life"). This is all about fragile & often invisible sequences of interactions that make every and any social encounter; the roles we play every day in our lives and how with different people we have different roles; and how people's social roles (e.g. "hipster" hehe) are established (or sometimes questioned) in interactions. This part of sociology also says what rituals, dramas, and games shape our everyday lives: how we eat, how we sleep, how we celebrate, when we play and why ... etc. Also what are functions of games and rituals for society (social cohesion, social reproduction, etc.). You can put also ethnographic study here because that's basically how you find out what people do, by observing them and looking at where they live, work, what they carry around, etc.
4. Studies of science and technology. This is relatively new field, from the '80, and I like it the most, because it focuses specifically on relationships between people & technologies & objects and its mission is to make all these relations visible so we don't need any abstract explanations anymore. I mostly use stuff from Bruno Latour and Antoine Henion and David Stark, but very interesting are also John Law and Nigel Thrift. From this school comes the sentence "technology is society made visible" meaning that in the traces left from interactions between technology and people you can figure out everything that is going on [what people do, how they use stuff, what they like, etc].

Psychology & cognitive science:
1. Social psychology. It starts from dynamics of small groups (diads and triads) and talks about why we reason that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", and ends with giant social formations like herds and masses and explains dynamics of collective behavior [riots, for example]. Here's where "broken window" idea comes from and also why we look up when there are three people looking up on a street, but we don't when there's one. Here are also ton of experiments on social conformity and on social biases on our cognition and perception, most famous by Milgram, Ash, Levin, and Heider.
2. Now, I am not sure if this is sociology or psychology or cognitive science, but there is a whole field of "distributed cognition" studies which look at devices we use to extend our brains. Edwin Hutchins and Andy Clark are the most interesting in this area, and they combine biology, technology, and cognition.
3. Cognitive psychology that studies semantic memory, thinking, perception, decision-making, and how we calculate, make predictions, avoid risks, etc. This is super-interesting field of experiments and overlaps a lot with part of economics which tries to figure out how people choose and decide. There is a lot of really new stuff on all of this that most people already know about (Sheena Iyengar, Jonah Lehrer, Dan Arielly, Jonathan Levav) but there's also some older stuff that's still interesting (especially experiments by Kahneman and Tversky, Richard Thaler, and Barry Schwartz).  There is also a ton of academic journals, like Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of Decision Making, Journal of Cognition and Culture, Journal of Behavioral Finance, Journal of Behavioral Economics, etc. All of this is super-relevant for thinking about specific implementation of your marketing campaigns, web design, and user experience. And it also may explain why brands matter :)

Media Studies:
1. Media theory: Well, now it is expected to start from McLuhan here, but actually he is not the first to say [some of the] stuff he said, and a lot of people don't know this, but he was actually influenced by Lewis Mumford who wrote some fascinating stuff back in the first half of XX century. For those interested, have a look at Mumford's book "Technics and Civilization".
2. Then, there is area where people obsessed about orality and literacy and the qualities of vision or touch of modern media. Especially Walter Ong ("Orality and Literacy") and Martin Jay ("Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century"), and all of this is actually pretty relevant for digital media.
2. Media space:  these 2 things I remember as interesting "Remediation" by Bolter and Grushin and "Media Manifestos" by Regis Debray. Maybe also "The Imagined Community" by Benedict Anderson, that talks about shared sense of national community that print created, but that actually can be applied to basically any virtual/cultural community that's created on the web just by sharing stuff. I also loved stuff on early cinema by Miriam Hansen ("Babel and Babylon") which reminds me totally of the web, where audience participated in the show, interacted with each other and with "current attractions" on the stage, and it was all one big interactive mess [this is yet another proof that things are never really that new]. There's also "Media Events" and "Claims to Fame" and "No Sense of Place" that all deal with different types of spaces that different media create.
3. Structuralism & Semiotics, especially Roland Barthes, Pierce, and crazy Jean Baudriallard (I used to like him when I didn't know better ;). I was never very much into this stuff, but for those interested here's Semiotics for Beginners.

Design:
I found that those guys are actually the smartest of all, because they always have been integrating their insights from psychology and sociology and media into stuff they create. A very good experience designer on the web does the same, and this is why I like to think of experience design as a total ethnographers: they know how people behave, what they pay attention to, how they decide, how they like to communicate and collaborate with others, and then they incorporate all this insight into their experience designs. I also found that reading books on design provides me with ton more insight than reading any book on marketing or advertising. I have a lot of design books listed here on my blog, and really recommend "The Laws of Simplicity" by John Maeda, "Designing for Interaction" by Dan Saffer, "Emotional Design" by Don Norman, and "The Culture of Design" by Guy Julier.

Ok, so now, I am not saying we should all go and read all of this stuff. What I am aiming here is to say that our job is much more fun if we think about client's challenges as one of the problems above and not within the very narrow field of advertising, or promotion, or marketing. Once you do that, you don't really need BORING terms like "engagement" or  "immersion" and/or lame statements "it's not medium, it's platform". Social world is amazing and interesting and awesome discoveries accidentally happen every day. And all of this can be (and honestly, should be) applied to how we do digital marketing. There is too much interesting stuff going on that is real bummer not to use them ... to make digital marketing more interesting :)

p.s. I put the image above so you can see how whoever wrote that in Wikipedia defines digital marketing. I fell asleep halfway through it, or to be precise, just right about "Digital Marketing Terms" which started with the "banner ad".

giant red heart-shaped balloons ...

... attacked Columbia campus today. It was like Valentine's day except that it was not.