i [love] marketing.

nothing better than a helpful site.

These are search results for "dry cleaners in Brooklyn". Awesome. Apparently, the nearest dry cleaning service in Brooklyn is, in fact, located in Walton = a mere 12 miles away. No idea how I even came across this site. Real helpful.

is bike without the wheels and the seat still a bike?

NYC subway is a place of many unexpected encounters (I've seen an elf on F train once). Last night I have seen a man carrying a bike without the wheels or a seat. I swear I can imagine him still riding it.

i don't like circles.

I came across this thing a few days ago. I normally would not pay attention, but it was the "math" part that totally amused me. For some reason, a lot of people use circles when talking about social influence on the web. Circles are simple, easy to understand, and um, totally wrong.

There's a plain reason for it: the image above make us think that interpersonal influence is no different from mass media influence. We "broadcast" to our "followers". The fun part? Graphs like this are used by social media experts, who like to sometimes claim that mass media are dead. And then they go and draw concentric circles to describe the "new" influence of social media.

Aside of the fact that this kind of thinking is oversimplified and wrong for the obvious reason (a person who's a flickr follower is also a twitter follower is also a facebook friend, so these circles are hardly ever concentric), there is a more important one. Interpersonal influence is not broadcast. Simply put: how influential you are going to be does not only depend on you, it depends on how influential your friends are. That is, your influence is the outcome of their network even more so than yours. That applies to plain scale (how many people are in their network), but also on scope (who they are). So, hard as it may be on the ego, you are not at the center.

A real world example: I have started this blog in September 2008, less than 6 months ago. It was pretty much silence all around until Brian linked to a post he liked in his Twitter update (Brian currently has near to 5,000 followers on Twitter, at that point a mere 3,000). The traffic spiked. Then, there was a little but nevertheless totally endearing spat with Josh Spear here, which created traffic, too. And then, some time later Noah liked something on my blog, linked to it on his blog and on the Barbarian Group's blog and the traffic spiked again. More people started coming. Then Michael accidentally discovered my blog in his Google alert (this is why it helps linking to other people), really liked it, and started regularly linking back to it. At this point, I started having a steady stream of traffic. None of it because of my own (rather limited) networks of influence (FB = 204 friends; Twitter = 57 followers (someone left today); Flickr = don't have an account). It is because of the size of their networks and the influence they already have (which they probably earned in the similar fashion at some time in the past). Simply said, my influence is the function of their networks.

If it were up to my poor network only, I would have to rely on the randomness of Google (not that anything is wrong w google -- it's the best serendipity machine ever & the largest possible network). But the best thing ever is the web is kinda random network (with a group structure ;). No more circles, please.

Waiting Lines

As everyone who ever shopped at Trader Joe's knows, there's a minimum of 10 minute wait in the line at registers that is included in the price of everything. Something like this: the total price of Trader Joe's experience = saving money minus losing time. Never ever I did not wait at the Trader Joe's. Many many times I returned what I wanted to buy at the sight of the waiting line.

Aside of many insights that can be made about irrationality of human behavior, and aside of the question of how people calculate value (for some it's totally worth it to wait in line for a $2 dollar discount on salad), I thought about something else. That is, while waiting in line and having nothing else to think about but the act of waiting itself. It's worth mentioning here that I have already repeatedly, and without much success, thought about  the cause of the lines at Trader Joe's that often go through the whole store and end up at the flowers section, which is usually the one at the entrance. Haven't figured it out. I mean, with CVS and Duane Reade is easy = there's always 1 person working at the registers (yes, they have multiple registers, but for some reason they love to use only one). Thinking about lines in Whole Foods is also easy = too many people. Airport security & passport control = the process requires thoroughness & full attention for each person. Banks = tellers are clueless so everything takes slightly longer. Starbucks = a person who ordered double chai latte with skim milk, sugar free syrup, and a shot of espresso. But Trader Joe's? Beats me.

Some time ago I read Don Norman's article called "Download Norman The Psychology of Waiting Lines" and alto it's considerably zzzzzz, and I am not sure about the exact insights it conveys, I was glad that at least someone tackled the subject. Altho this is not included in the article, I started thinking about when waiting lines are beneficia = when they add value to experience, rather than subtract it. Velvet ropes are obvious examples, but so is waiting for a site to get out of "beta version" (that only a selected few can see). I guess the latter makes sense only if you are in line for site's services. Some people hate when things come too easy for them, so sometimes creating an artificial cue (for anything) can be a good promo tactic. But only, Norman says, if you pay attention to them while they are waiting. That's why they put all those magazines and chocolate bars and other stuff to distract you while you wait. John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, figured out this tiny thingy some 70 years ago. Not much happened since. Anyway, I think that waiting lines are a lovely unexplored area of human behavior.

Bonus trivia: when I moved to NYC, I had to learn not to cut lines and ignore others. Where I come from, it's part of the culture. If you wait patiently, you are regarded as a total loser. And pitied a little bit.

What is this??

This morning when I typed in "Facebook" in my browser, i got these 2 sites first. Um. (They are by the same company, and the second followed the first when I tried to exit). Now, I may be completely uninformed and oblivious to this kind of spam (advertising?) but my first thought was "whoa, interstitials!" Definition of interstitial for those who are blessed not to know anything about them (by CNET Networks): "The Prestitial appears to all users accessing the site from the front door" (ha, didn't know that the web has "doors"). So this thingy above kinda falls under the category. Weirdness settled in, however, because after all this is Facebook we are talking about. In my mind, this kinds of advertising was reserved for the free-falling magazine industry. Apparently not. But hey, as long as the unmistakable FB targeting works ... :)

i love you. no, really.

I discovered this blog today, and just looking at the photos there makes me smile. It's a compilation of  love pics from around the web ... and some of them are pretty awesome. "Date night" and "You Are All I Need" are my favs thus far.

how campaigns work. beats me.

I've read Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" a few years back, and while his writing style left me unimpressed (this always happens when academics are trying too hard to sound street), I thought the analysis was fine enough.  For some reason, I got reminded of this book some weeks ago in relation to marketing campaigns. The main rationale for my thinking was that it's no wonder that so much campaigns fail when people suffer from such a giant fallacy in predicting the future. And campaigns are - in most cases - predicting what's going to work (and then wishing that that prediction was correct). Even the most experienced of agencies and professionals can't really tell for sure what's going to become a success, because, as it turns out, "we cook the facts".

That is, these professionals remember what worked in the past, and then use that information to predict the future. And as Gilbert elaborates, we remember the past selectively. Furthermore, we then use our own imagination to relate this past to the future, and make yet again wrong predictions. Under these circumstances, it's really amazing how anything works out at the end. The effect of the fallacy of predictions is then multiplied by interpersonal influence, as this paper on Google Prediction Markets I 've recently come across claims. The researchers, who experimented with prediction markets at Google in order to track how an organization processes information, discovered a ton of biases - and most notably an optimistic bias (what a surprise). These biases were the strongest among employees who sit within a few feet from one another and employees with social or work relationships. All of these is not terribly new in organizational research, but I found it strangely amusing when thinking about marketing agencies. We usually work in teams on campaigns and spend ton of time in close social and physical proximity with them while doing so. Also, different teams sit together, which can account for often strong organizational friction between interaction designers, visual designers, technology, planners, etc. But fun part here is that  1) we tend to think alike as people we are physically/socially close to; 2) that there's a strong optimistic bias; 3) optimistic bias comes from imagining what is going to make us and the client happy in the future; 4) those predictions are, as Gilbert claims, regularly wrong.

In this awesome sequence of events, I would say that even 50% of advertising working is a real stretch. But, what is more interesting, and actually pretty true, is that different agencies are often going to deliver solutions that are consistent with solutions they delivered in the past (also called organizational inertia). For example, Razorfish is never going to deliver anything newsworthy, and Anomaly is never going to fail to surprise. Crispin's campaigns are always going to create buzz in the industry (good or bad), and R/GA is probably going to go for "design a system" solution. That is, no matter what the client's challenge is, these agencies are going to stay consistent to themselves. After all, they have their own memories and their own (limited) imagination.

Finally, a few days back I came across Mike Arauz great post, which I somehow found related to my thinking above. He says that "... we convince ourselves that our own ideas about the way things should be are beyond question. We fall into the trap of believing that our theories, for some reason, no longer warrant proof." Mostly because there's really no one near us to question them, stress them out, prove them wrong, and as a consequence, make them more robust than they are now. Or, make them more hypotheses, less imagination.

brands + social media **[disclaimer]: the most boring post ever

I didn't have time to write this note about this while it was happening, but I haven't forgotten :) While I am completely over-bored with the same stuff about how brands should behave on the web, i came across an interesting example first hand. And I am writing it here ONLY because i think it is important that brands' micro-neglect stuff like this become visible.

Time Warner Cable guy, Jeff Simmermon, is on Twitter, and all those unfortunate people allocated to do "digital communication" in conglomerates like TWC, he is paid to stare at the screen and wait for someone to say on Twitter "Time Warner" (usually in combination with "SUCKS") so they can start following them. Then they repeatedly poke disillusioned customers with the same question "is there something i can help you with?". At first I thought that it was a good brand move (micro-interactions are real important, after all) and that behind it is a genuine concern. The guy even showed some traces of humor.

But then, here on my blog, the old thing got confirmed: it's not enough for brands to just be there in the social media, they've got to behave like their customers. Social media is not just another channel of communication for brands. It is an entirely new set of relations, and it often requires building the brand from scratch there. So, as Faris repeatedly points out, be nice or leave.

There is a larger point here, however. Your communication is not your brand, your service is your brand. Until your service is great, your brand is going to suck. If you are nice in social media, you may mend that relationship a bit, but only to the extent that customers  may be willing to put up with your crappy service because you are nice (think Frank at Comcast). But the sad truth is, no matter how nice you are, there's no real loyalty there. Only awesome service builds real brand loyalty.

Anyway, back to the story. Namely, the dude responded to my suggestion that his company better offer some good service instead of just using Twitter with the following: "Thanks for the tip -- we should have something ready for your approval shortly after lunchtime :)"

Lovely & totally endearing.

invisible links a.k.a meaning is in the eye of the beholder

Yesterday I finally went to see Vik Muniz' thing at MOMA. He selected works from the museum's permanent collection to create an exhibition. The title ("rebus") is the result of the fact that visitors need to figure out how different pieces are connected. Altho some associations were pretty literal, the idea is awesome. Audience,  which usually passively observes, had to engage in interaction with the exhibition. Second - and more interesting - is that what was exhibited in fact were not the art pieces themselves but the relationship between them. The link between the works IS the exhibition. Highly recommended.

p.s. i've seen "Weird Beauty: Fashion Photography Now" afterwards at ICP but it was blah.

is there something i can help you with?

Time Warner guy on Twitter. His updates are strangely repetitive. I wonder why ...

distributed cognition

I did not have the (regular) Internet since Wednesday because my cable was down. All delights of interaction with Time Warner customer service aside, this mild annoyance made me realize something else. The fact that I could not have the access to new information was in fact less important than the fact that my brain did not work as it usually does. Significant parts of my cognition, attention, and perception went off together with the cable access. Being online is the intrinsic part of my thought process, turns out. My thinking is distributed between my brain and technology = tools & material devices that I use in my thought process. I am not really that psyched to admit that I am, in fact, a cyborg, but it seems that way. Which reminded me of Andy Clark and his idea of extended mind. I read Clark's book "Natural Born Cyborgs" some years back, and this situation reminded me of his idea of dynamic loops between our brains, bodies, and environments (there is ton of awesome examples of this dynamic loop in his book. highly recommended). But the idea of distributed cognition actually belongs to cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, who studied how pilots operate in cockpits (and how, for the love of god, can they keep track of all these simultaneously operating instruments).

In any event, I think that my poor state of temporary cognitive darkness also can refer to distributed attention. What people today in fact might be experiencing is not an attention deficit, but its distribution across many different information streams. Which is not necessarily a bad thing because our brain becomes much much bigger than it would ever be able to fit in our scull. Unless ... um, it doesn't matter. If writing helps us think and communicate more clearly then Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Google Reader, blogs, etc. help us perceive more, think better, solve more complex problems, and get more refined feedback to our actions. But we don't really just "use" those tools, neither they are just our "extensions". They are materialization of our thoughts, and it's not easy to tell when we end and technology starts. (Creepy). But without these tools, we are really condemned to our own [limited] cognitive devices. I love being a cyborg. :)