i [love] marketing.

one of my favorite movies of all times ...

... The City of Lost Children. Can't wait to go see it again at Landmark Sunshine in 2 weeks!!

a series of totally random, and possibly extremely useless, discoveries

I have just realized that when I type letter "t" in my browser there is a whole bunch of (to me previously unknown) Twitter services. I have been freelancing at some agency last week, and was looking for some twitter data, and came across all this stuff. While I am not very quick to confirm if those things actually make any sense and/or are useful, I thought I should post them here nevertheless and let people decide for themselves. So ... there's TweetRush (really, no idea who would find this interesting & why). Then, there's Twitrratr which claims it allows you to discover "what people are really saying on twitter" (um, as opposed to ... what?). The service then divides the updates in categories "positive", "negative", and "neutral" (according to some content analysis which I sincerely hope is a major duty of some poor intern) and gives the REAL opinion on your brand, product, or personality. But since the numbers rarely reach 4 figures, I am not quite sure why would anyone care. Twistori also found its way in my browser last week, and that's the one I actually always liked. Next is Twitterholic which calculates the number of followers (wrongly correlated with popularity). When I used it for my Twitter screen name, I have also gotten a list of "similar people based on location and/or description." One of them lives in "candy land". Totally makes sense. Anyway, there is also TweeterLocal, which uses the same Adobe Air platform as Tweetdeck but filters all tweeter feeds by location. Does that even make sense? (I guess the answer is yes if you are somewhere like sxsw, i.e. temporary at some location together with a number of people you know). There is Twitpic which is alright, and TweetDeck which some people use and some don't, depending on their emotional - and otherwise - investment in Twitter. Finally, there's Qapture, which i am not going to say anything bad about because a) it's just been released and i am not yet tired of it; b)  it is time-based; and 3) it is a possibly useful filtering tool for those who are into it. But mostly it's an accumulation of people with the biggest followings in a certain category, and basically amplifies their influence. The raw number of followers is only an indirect indicator of influence b/c it talks only about the size of your network and not about its dynamics (how info spreads there, who pays attention and who doesn't, who RT your stuff, etc). But whatever. Numbers are again so low that I am not sure if any brand should care (e.g. most clicked to content has 233 clicks. I think that may be even worse than banner ads' click-through rates).

p.s. the image above is of Follow Cost, and after initial, very short lived excitement, I discarded idea as pretty dumb, because, when you really think about it, the number you get as an output means NOTHING. And this makes it a great illustration of what you get from most of Twitter services. :)

how things work when you are a nerd.

Couple of weeks ago I had dinner with my friend Duncan, and the photo above is the result of our conversation while we were waiting to get our credit cards back. (I most certainly did not draw this). X axis is "Difficulty" and Y axis is "Appreciation". And the lines are how those two things intersect.

It all started quite simply, with my observation what kind of stuff people like to read, and that they prefer something that's easy to understand. This comment was related to my thinking about my preferred audience for my dissertation: academic or professional. My complaining went like this: if I go professional, my advisers will never let me graduate. If I go too academic, then I can kiss goodbye anyone else. This is also precisely why academic papers fare so poorly in the real world, and at the same time, why Malcom Gladwell is the best-selling author. While it is always a great read to have something complex explained simply, the problem arises when something simple (and often terribly un-insightful and yes, dumb) is um, written simply (but mostly because there is no other way).

Duncan, always a smart ass, then drew the three graphs above on our dinner receipt. Then he discredited the first one as impossible, and the third one as the most likely. As you can see, the intersection of these two lines is a winner: something that is insightful enough but also easy to read by the greatest number of people. But the operative part of the sentence here is "the greatest number of people", and mostly because it sounds too much like the lowest common denominator thing that lowered our film and television industries output to an impressive amount of plain dumb content. Is something like this happening in the sphere of digital marketing blogs? Or, better yet, conference presentations? Do we write stuff in a way that the greatest number of people are going to be able to understand, and consequently, be interested in?

As the top point on the right shows, the most difficult content is appreciated by the very small number of people. I was asked if I would rather be Chuck Tilly, a recently deceased Columbia professor who published one book a year for 50 years = 50 books (and whom obviously no one else but his loyal academic readers ever heard of) or Malcom Gladwell, who is not even allowed to be cited in academia as a relevant source of information, but who published his 3 books in millions copies and who is known by almost everyone? (I was not quite able to respond that I aspire to be like Chuck Tilly without lying.) At the same time, appreciation is at its highest  when difficulty is minimal, and in this case, too many examples to list come to my mind.

While I would certainly prefer to be at the intersection of the lines, I could not help but noticing that this point is still pretty low on the Y axis. If I move it further up, I will lose a lot of readers. But anyway, the thing that really escapes me is that people - especially online - seem not to want to put a lot of effort in things that can't be grasped in 30 seconds or less. That sounds like if someone taking a college course said, you know, this material requires too much work to understand, I don't like it. Not good.

the emperor is naked

In the past months or so, I have been seeing a lot of talking about the digital brand and digital branding, what it is, and how to do it. Everyone's either looking for, or offering, an advice, an insight, a purple cow, a golden rule, and/or a must-have formula. Well, the truth is, there is none. There is no answer to digital brand question. In fact, I am pretty convinced that the very question itself is wrong. 

This whole situation around the digital brand reminds of of a multi-million dollar weight-loss industry. There are thousands of manuals, celebrity endorsements, personal stories, thousand of "how-to" advices, and more rules and 10-step-programs that you can remember. Do they work? Well, sometimes. And for some people. The point is that sitting and READING ABOUT weight loss is not going to MAKE YOU lose weight. Similarly, thinking about digital brand is not going to miraculously create one.  In order for that to happen, well, you need to do something yourself. That is, you need to do the hard work. You need to first see what works for you - what worked for Oprah (well, at least for a while) does not mean it will work for you (a.k.a. there are no universal rules). To figure out what works for you, you need to try out different things, test-and-learn, take stuff that works and discard stuff that doesn't, and then combine best practices. Then you need really to stick to it on a daily basis, and measure progress, and incorporate feedback, and all that stuff. And then you connect with others who are doing the same thing, and see what works for them. And then you have to see how that regimen fits into your already existing activities and daily routines, so everything goes easier. It's all in the execution. 

So maybe it's time to stop asking questions about what digital brand is, and get to work. Digital brand is whatever you make it to be. 

p.s. the image above was found here, via DesignNotes.

the only rule in digital is that there are no rules

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.

wow, barbie!!

I've gotten again some unexpected mail. Barbie catalog which wants to "celebrate barbie and her 50th birthday! Go to barbiecollector.com all year long for deals on anniversary products and special barbie events!"  I can't wait to go to a special Barbie event. Do I need to dress like a this? Ok, so now I was thinking: a) I am obviously too old to be into Barbies, b) I am too young to be celebrating Barbie's 50th birthday because you know I would expect that she wants to have people of her generation there, and c) I am not a crazy doll lady and have never been into it (and, in case you wonder, I find doll ladies even creepier than cat ladies). So why was I sent this? I am just really curious behind the media planning for this direct mail campaign. The only thing this catalog did was, in fact, to make me sad that I am not excited anymore about Barbies. I flipped through the catalog and there was no "I must have this immediately or I am going to die" feeling that consumerism revolves around. I felt nothing :( 

this is not you digital brand personality ...

... this is just an ad. And yea, Apple does ads, and a lot of them. I've heard enough times "brand personality" in combination with thinking about some actual person, and then with a question mark when it comes to translating the idea in the digital space. For me, this is the worst case of anthropomorphism, something like those visions of "the future" of home appliances from the 70's where fridge says "good morning, dear, it's sunny outside." What you really want from your fridge is to be super-functional, and useful, and to be nicely designed, and just to be easy & pleasant to use in those short moments before it fades back in the background of your attention.

So I guess this is my thinking against taking the idea of brand personality too literally. Because if you do so, then there's nothing else but to buy banners (and a lot of them), or build a minisite featuring someone saying something (hey, it worked for ShaveEverywhere, but that was million years ago, and also online video was "the next big thing" back then). 

But, when you don't take it literally, but just as a tool for thinking that should help you in selecting features&functionalities to include on the site, which look and feel to choose, which content, and how to promote it. So basically, talking about brand personality is talking about your audience: what will resonate with them & still reflect your brand. 

And in digital, you have all possible existent and yet-to-be-discovered tools to use for building your brand. Good example is that when you go to Apple.com you can expect to see Google maps (and then you do see them), because at the core of this brand are the best practices from the web (and everywhere else). On the other hand, when you go to Citibank.com site and try to find a branch, you get to the map which is of course in a pop-up window (preventing all other site info integration/brand promotion. For comparison, see Apple's solution, which never misses the opportunity to promote its brand/products). Then - and should it be a surprise - the map is a moderately interactive Microsoft MapPoint that you can't zoom enough to useful or get directions and all. It came straight from 2002. This is of course terribly suitable, because Microsoft is about as stale in terms of real innovation as the banking sector.

These details tell us a lot about the brand, and about the category of banking online in general. What it communicates is: "I don't really know how you use web, and I don't really care. I am making banking difficult everywhere else, so why would I make finding a branch easy for you?". And then you think, oh this sucks, and Citibank sucks, and there's where the loyalty goes away.

Citibank's "personality" is expressed in that tiny little detail much more than it is in that "thank you" (whatever) message on their ATMs (once you actually manage to locate them). The map is something that I would actually frequently need, and frequently use, and regard it as helpful and relevant for your banking and hence your relationship with Citibank. So next time you think about "brand personality", think tangible details = think tools and features, think navigation, think design, and what are those going to make people think about the brand, and more importantly, are those details going to make people WANT TO INTERACT with your brand ...?

read, borrow ... steal?

Last week I wrote about "the tragedy of the commons", and there I say how digital has ultimately a value system based on borrowing and sharing of common good, rather than it being exploited in self-interested manner. Maybe I made my conclusion too soon. A couple a days ago,  I came across some stuff that someone wrote that was awfully  similar to something I have already seen a little while before, somewhere else, by someone else. So now, while we all use each others' online thinking & writing for inspiration, information, and ideas, rarely it happens that resemblances are um, not accidental.

Which made me think a bit about the fine line between inspiration and plain "borrowing without returning" [a.k.a stealing]. While I don't believe in traditional copyright and completely agree with Lessig's argument that it hampers creativity, for some reason I believe that originator of an idea should be acknowledged. Simply put, of course that ideas are meant to be spread, but it is a fair game to say where you heard it from. Something like "fair use" all around. And fair use is not for your own economic/promotional benefit.

And I have always thought that people on the web have been really really good about it. Which led me to thinking about how this alternative economy online in fact functions pretty well: there are really fragile rules, but somehow people respect them (well, most people). By alternative economy I mean knowledge economy, where everyone voluntarily invests their time & mental resources to think about challenges, solve problems, add their opinion, and contribute to the overall human body of knowledge. So individual investment with the expected, but not necessarily an immediate & tangible ROI, is one part. Then the other part is the exchange that is not unlike the barter: this is expressed recognizing each other's contributions, linking to each other blogs, quoting each other, and talking with and about each other. Then there is a distribution part, where some people are really really good at aggregating things around the web, and curating them, and basically helping us find things and maybe discover new things. This is also super important, and it's based on free sharing.

But nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in this little system does it say take someone's idea and present it as your own. Why? Because ultimately, the whole thing will crumble. Actually, it may not crumble, but it will dramatically change its "market" structure: it would become fiercely competitive market where everyone would go to the great lengths to protect their ideas and to relentlessly promote themselves for their own benefit (the above mention tragedy of the commons). We've already seen how that works, and um, it doesn't.

Last week, I accidentally came across the article "Games of Trust and Betrayal" from Harvard Magazine, which somehow lead me to the NYT article,  "An Economy of Faith and Trust". Maybe worth having a look.

Global Swarming*

* Term by Andy Clark, from his book "Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence". Andy Clark is great, and I strongly recommend his books (esp. "Being There") to whomever is interested in distributed cognition, biology, and information, all combined.

So, he uses the idea of "global swarming" to draw an analogy between information traces that we leave online and the information traces that snails leave in their mucus as they move (that shiny thingy left behind). Apparently, while it looks just gross to most of us, this slimy matter if full of information that is useful to other snails. Now, I read this a while ago so the only thing I remember is that he connected this with Amazon's recommendation system (yep, a while ago). But anyway. The real culprit for this post is in fact Johanna, or to be more specific, an email exchange that we had. It made me remember the snails and information trails and how we can now see the connections between our trails. 

It turned out that we know a few people in common, most of whom I have never met but know from the Internetz. Johanna included. I knew that Michael linked to her blog recently, and that I came across her blog maybe through Faris' blog, or who knows how. (At the end of the day, it does not really matter). 

More important is that what made our paths finally cross is what both of her and me regarded as a series of coincidences. Now, some people say that coincidences are actually stuff made visible, and that we are all connected anyway. Regardless of your view is on the subject, this was super interesting because both of us could actually trace the line that made our paths cross. The interesting part is, it would probably take many many more months, and many many more coincidences for this to happen in the world without digital media. Which is I guess why people were obsessing about the importance of "informal social networks" and "social networks in organizations" for so long in the past.

Now it is all done in "3 steps or less" (actually, in 6 :). This is interesting in itself, but I made me think about something else. Which is, if now we can know stuff that other people make and do and how they think, do we need really a centralized measure that is a resume (and what I am talking about here hopefully will bear no relation to the recent POKE's solicitation of prospective interns' videos. Changing the communication channel really does not make the format that different). My point is, similarly like Download The Use of Knowledge in Society of price as the main coordinating market mechanism in the world where everyone has only local information but no one has all available information, that there is the world of "accumulated accomplishments" (resume) that used to be (and still is) the main coordinating mechanism of the job market. Which was indeed very useful at the times where people had only local information.

Now, there's a suitable metaphor, "this all looks great on paper", and it is exactly what I am talking about. From the conversation with Johanna, and Amber and Leila before her, I learned more about them and about the company they both work for, Naked, that I would have learned on this company's website; they may have learned more about me than if they just came across my resume. If someone really wants to be competitive in the digital marketing job market, they need to be on the web doing something, making something, or saying something. Building a street cred. (btw, this is not new. Apple founder, Microsoft founder, Twitter founder, etc. left their formal education to make stuff). This situation tells a lot not only about the set of skills needed for working on/with the web, but ultimately (and now read between the lines) about the marketing & branding in the digital.

p.s. the image above is part of the 100m long photo exhibit called "We are all going to die - 100 meters of existence". It's pretty great, you can see it here. 

what i really do in my spare time...

No, not that, unfortunately (the image found here). I think about the digital brand. First, because I am interested in it, and second, because I am writing a dissertation about it. So here are some stuff from my road in figuring things out (with help of all smart people from the industry who agreed to talk to me + thanks to the very smart crowd of Columbia Sociology Ph.D. students who criticized it. In a nice way).

So first I make an introduction on what I am going to talk about, which is "Problem With the Brand and Rise of the Digital Brand". This part really asks why is this a problem? (also known as the "so what?" question). Like, yea, times are changing and all of that, but so what? So I had to put here that brand power, loyalty, and brand associations of traditional brands are declining a.k.a. your brand is losing money (Yes, there's data on it, together with the question if the methodology of measuring market power is still really relevant). At the same time, digital brands are rising, judged by their market share. Then, there's the question of brand associations. They were supposed to manage brand communication (through promotions and ads), and consumers' calculation of products (how they decide between different products). But now communication & calculation happen simultaneously online, and everyone can make their brand associations known. Which is really not the problem in itself, but points to another problem, which is that of brand causality (can some happy brand image really still make you buy those crappy brand products) and of brand loyalty (how/why people come back. because today they often don't). Of course, none of this is terribly new and people are already talking a lot about it, and this is why this is just an introduction :)

I talk then a bit about digital marketing firms. This is where the real action is, because I don't want just to think about the digital brand, but actually see for myself where the brands today are made (successfully and unsuccessfully). Most importantly, I wanted to see how people in agencies think about the digital brand. Because talking about the digital brand does not take place in some abstract space, or in a vacuum, but is done by industry people who have certain information, ideas, and tools available, so it totally contextual. If I have done this 10 years ago, the outcomes would have been different. As well as they would have been different if I decided to do this 10 years from now. There is no ultimate truth about the digital brand, you got to see what works today and what doesn't. Whoever claims to have "figured digital branding out" is probably wrong, (me included). Just something to keep in mind.

So anyway, part of my dissertation talks about digital agencies a bit, and diversity of stuff they do, what skills they have, and what disciplines they think it's important to invest in, how they promote themselves, what they claim they can do and what they can really do, how they collect information about users' behavior, and how they interpret it. Basically, this is the mirror of the NYC digital industry today. Only if I know how these people live & breathe I can really make sense of what they do. A bonus insight: while most of the NYC agencies have one or more of the pieces (skills, capabilities, process) necessary for the continuous & repeated generation of the digital brand, not a single one of them has all the pieces under one roof. Most agencies are still somewhere half-way between digital branding and traditional branding. But that's just my observation.

Then I describe what I have found in digital marketing firms, i.e. what those people are really doing daily (aside of IM-ing, and reading blogs, and playing Wii). Well, ideally they take information about users, and they take information about products and then they try to assemble it together. I say ideally, because very often, instead of doing it, they think only about the brand "image" and brand "personality" and how to communicate it on the web. So no, making a digital brand should not involve brainstorming in the closed room about what brand impressions to create and what images people may want to see or even interact with online. As Marchall McLuhan said: "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." No points of view please, because it is not the best but the the loudest one that usually wins.

Back to thinking about the digital brand: making it would ideally involve an attempt to create a tangible relationship online between consumers and products that did not exist there before. That's a website, or a marketing campaign, or whatever, and the real important part is "tangible". This does not mean a communication plan. It means what features, functionalities, personality, look&feel you select, and which is going to connect users with brand's products (or not).

This is kinda important because it kills the idea of the brand as something intangible that is made visible only through brand image which is communicated through ads. Turns out, the brand really really need to exists as some material relationship, and that means basically that it is what you make your website experience to be. Or what you make your marketing campaign to be, but the operative word here is "make". You build it upon tangible stuff that's already on the web. In this scenario, you never think about your target audience demo without thinking about what they DO on the web, and you never think about a product/service without thinking how it may fit in that. This sounds totally obvious, but only a few people/agencies right now really think about it and do it right.  Others, well, they make this and this and this.

The real fun for me starts when I start talking putting all of this info together. First, it seems that you need to think about the brand as a relationship between consumers and products/services. Then, it becomes all about how you design this relationship. That is, how you make it into somehow tangible.

And digital tech actually made it real easy to think about relationships, because everything is visible now: what people say + what people do. But while it's super-important to know what people are saying & doing online, you can't really stop with i, because then you will never ever create anything new. You have to go further, and the digital brand is about building upon all of this = making these visible relationships better, faster, easier, more useful, more fun. You are not only looking at people's paths online, you are making those paths better. Sometimes you design new paths, sometimes you are improving the already existing ones. Smart people built their brands around the focus on the relationship, and not just on people or on products. Dopplr did it (travel), Nike pretends to do it (running), Google does it (organization of world's information), etc. The only reason I am putting these examples here is to say that stuff like this exists. But really, anyone can do this with their brands. It's just that they need to ask the question "what kind of relationship is my brand about?" (and not the question "how do i promote my brand?" nor even "how do I make people talk about my brand?" They'll talk about it if it becomes part of their life, so you got to chill.) And then I prove why I think this makes sense, and I would love to put this here, but can't just yet.

So for now, my main take-away is that there's really no mystification about what the digital brand, and there is really no one way to do it, and no secret formula, you just work with all the information you have, draw it all together, and try to keep it simple. How do you do that? You test and iterate, and measure. You don't know what works until you put it in front of people. Then you look how they play with it, and then you make it better, and let them play with it again. And I know that people don't want to hear this, and that they would rather have some "how-to" manual on the digital brand, but I have none and have not seen that anyone does (all claims to the contrary). So that's it.

drawing things together

Last Sunday I read some paper on design and altho the second part is heavy-duty sociology, the beginning is real interesting. It made me think about stuff that's applicable to the digital brand.  Then I started scrambling to think of some brand that does the stuff that can be linked to what this author, a contemporary sociologist, talks about. I wanted to avoid Nike+ because the example is honestly old & tired and because I don't agree completely with what it does. So anyway, I decided on Dopplr. In part because Matt gave this great talk.

1. The first thing that I liked is the meaning of "design" in French which is to "relook" = to give a new and better look or shape to something ["...that would otherwise remain too clumsy, too severe or too bared if were left only to its naked function"]. This is great also if applied to intangible things, like activities (e.g. travel). Then it means making some activity better, more enjoyable & with less noise (of all kinds). So the first question for brands would be, which action/relations are you trying to capture?

2. Then, there's this thing of design as moving away from the "naked function". Here's the quote: " even if design could be greatly admired, it was always taken as one branch of an alternative: look not only at the function, but also at the design." It is true that, for many years now, in digital media there was created a divide of building sites that are functional vs. building online brand campaigns that are (supposed to) be fun. This is a divide between website development & digital marketing. Altho the two are def not the same, when brands are concerned, this divide is artificial, as site experience = the brand.

3. I also find some stuff there that reminded me of the question of "making" vs. "communicating". Like, there is a material space and then there is a symbolic space. Well, the news is they are colliding. The brand had never been thought of as something material, that can be touched and interacted with. The situation is something like this: you interact with products/services and then, you see/talk about the brand. So the question of the brand was always a matter of communication: what is the brand image, personality, logo ... blah ... and how to communicate it. The thing is that what you build - make - online is the brand experience, and that personality comes through the interaction. (and yep, logo doesn't mean a thing online. It may mean something to the company, but it doesn't mean a lot to consumer. Would you care if Google's logo were different? Or Zipcar's?).

4. Then, there's the idea that you never ever start building your brand online from zero. (Even when you are creating a new brand). I liked this: "The word "design" (in addition to its modesty, its attention to detail and the semiotic skills it always carries with it), it that it is never a process that begins from scratch: to design is always to redesign. The most intelligent designers never start from a tabula rasa. Designing is the antidote to colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past. It is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures." (this is one of the reasons I really don't like labeling anything digital as "revolutionary". Everything always builds on something else). So does the brand. You never bring something "new" online, you always should build upon what's already there, mostly on what people are already doing and what they care about. Just look at Dopplr: it builds upon best online practices in terms of features + helps people do better stuff that they are already doing + offers information that people are already looking for + makes visible stuff that people already care about (like CO2 footprint of your travels) + it's fun to use = builds on how you already like to use web + weeds out the noise.

Now, I am not saying that all brands should become services, but it would be nice if they cared about some of the above listed things. Most importantly, really try to extend how people already use the web.

I also like this idea of redesigning b/c we are at the moment where a lot of elements of the economic, political, and social system are obviously faulty and thus those systems need to be remade, upgraded, or redesigned. More interesting tho, is that for this to happen the approach to "building something new" today may in fact be to fix something. (In contrast, all big systems of the past - communism, fascism, even capitalism, always tried to create a clean break from "what was before" and to establish a completely new set of relations).

5. Agendaaaa. Finally, something there also reminded me of the problem I have with Nike+, also known as "your brand is, um, not yours" dilemma (hardly a dilemma for Nike, tho). Meaning that to me Nike+ is just a smart promotion disguised as service. But anyway, this is the point: when you create a digital brand, it has to combine business goals and people's behavior. What people want and what the brand wants regularly not aligned and in fact often contradictory. Simply put, Nike+ lacks complexity. Not a literal complexity of the website (it is complex well enough), but the complexity of different stakeholders' viewpoints. Something that Twitter or FB have in abundance (and yes, i do know that they don't make any money). But complexity is a good thing when it accommodates the ultimate diversity of those for whom the brand is meant to matter. And you can't know what that diversity is going to be if you don't allow for collaborative design, even if, in some cases the collaborators are not always welcome.  Those who criticize you may actually bring issues to table that can make your brand better. The simple benefit of allowing contradictions is that you may end up having more customers than you have originally foreseen. 

the notificator = vintage twitter

This is the sheer proof that there's nothing new under the sun. And the reason why I slightly cringe every time I hear "revolutionary", "technology", and "present" in the same sentence. "The Notificator", year = 1935, was installed  in "streets, stores, railroad stations or other public places where individuals may leave messages for friends" in order to "inform friends of their whereabouts". Add 140 characters to this, and the whole thing sounds awfully familiar. Found here.

if america is j.crew, than eastern europe is a toothless dude

Stereotypes are awesome. This is an image of a typical Eastern European (at least, according to Economist and to CP&B). Bad teeth, Rasputin-style clothing, and crazy eyes. Total cluelessness to anything Western (democracy, dental hygiene, Whopper). I accidentally came across this letter to the Economist somewhere, where a person wrote an op-ed poking fun at the Easter European stereotypes, and although I suspect the note would be interesting only to Eastern Europeans, I am still linking to it :) For those interested, scroll down to "a picture worth 163 words" letter. It made me think of all these images of other nations that I see and that are frequently used to simplify our understanding of the world. Wonder if they still make sense.

blasphemy.

Found in my mailbox today.

At first, I was not sure what this thing is (a pamphlet? a tourist guide?) and then my false-patriotic feelings (I still belong to a different nation, after all) got quickly replaced by: a) wonder why, for the love of god, J.Crew is sending me their catalog when I have never ever laid a foot in their store; and, more importantly, b) what's up with this imagery?

This weirdness actually makes sense, for the very obvious reasons. (but they do not make it any more appealing, tho). Tough times not only evoke social cohesion, but also crave for the sense of a higher purpose. This is a nice reminder of both (just in case J.Crew shoppers forgot what the name of the country they live in is, and how great it is). Then also, shopping for patriotic reasons HAS TO make sense. The reasoning goes like this: you feel part of something bigger, you shop in the name of nation, and you benefit America.

Um, no. You shop those damn preppy overpriced clothes at J.Crew and you benefit J.Crew. The bigger problem that I have is that J.Crew seems to equal its "look" with America. If it uses America as inspiration, how about some diversity in those button-down shirts? Second, how ridiculous would this look if the name of some other nation were on the cover (Germany? Serbia?) Nationalistic claims aside, I see zero correlation between J.Crew and America. And I hope it stays that way.

web analytics may be good for you

This afternoon I came across the article "the road to finding is paved with data" and although this is not the first time that someone talks about it (see here and here), I thought that due attention must be paid to any article that contains the sentence "user experience, meet web analytics". Truth to be told, web analytics was here since forever but it was mostly labeled as stuff related closely to media (add impressions) and/or "boring stuff". I had opportunity to work on a project where I had to use Omniture, and the best part is that the whole thing starts to be interesting once you get to play with it. When you start to look closer, you realize the awesome amount of super-valuable insights about users' behavior.

And this last thing has always been regarded as a domain of User Experience. Usability testing, task-based listening labs, rapid iteration prototyping, etc. are all meant to provide qualitative data on user behavior (personazzz) which then gets translated in the website design. When the digital brand is concerned,  this is one of the most important parts of the designing process, as online brand experience = user experience. So now the question: why relying only on qualitative stuff, when you can have real-world, real-time behavioral data? That is, you can think and imagine what kinds of behaviors users might exhibit, or take advantage of real behavioral data and know what kinds of behaviors the DO exhibit.

It's like having a continuous feedback on your site's performance. It doesn't get any better than that. Which reminds me  of a strategist I interviewed for my dissertation. He said: "when we do path analysis we look where user goes, and what are the friction points. If the percentage of users drops, say 20% for each consecutive page, and then there is a 40% drop from one page to another, then we know there's a problem on that page. So we look what's there, we look at design of applications or at features on the page and try to fix them." This of course requires that interaction designers, visual designers, and web analytics people work together (yea, i know). But how else are you going to know what is going on with what you designed?

But the problem is that a lot of agencies love to make sites that are um, a little flashy. There basically you can see what people clicked on, just like in banner-ads. But all the great user paths data kinda remains hidden. Mostly because there are no paths, people just stare at the site for a bit and then leave.

Sure thing, it's still more fun to brainstorm campaign concepts, come up with promo ideas, and create a website that looks great (and does something, too). But where real results of your brainstorm efforts reside is the data: what do people do on your site? which tasks they complete (successfully & unsuccessfully)? do they stay on the optimal path? how do you cluster user paths? which are users' most frequent tasks? what are their drop-off points? Where they go after? And also: you can then segment people by any or all of this information, and this turned out to be way more informative for online bizz than most of plain old demographic stuff.

And this is kinda important. Brand relationships online are formed in the smallest moments and details within each and every interaction. Paying attention to these details can build (or not) the digital brand. Accountability of the designs is super-important as it contributes to digital brand's business objectives. How people interact with your brand is your business. Simply put, you don't connect your business objectives with some advertising thingy, you connect them with the UX. And then you measure it. Clients love that.

i should keep this in mind at all times.

I think this is very true. It's from Dan Saffer's book, "Designing for Interaction" (although he talks about brands only occasionally, there's actually a lot to learn about what the digital brand is & how to go about designing one online from this book). The quote is actually by Larry Tesler and it's on what makes a good interaction designer, but it actually can apply to rest of us, too. More quotes here.

the tragedy of the commons

 

(Advisory: this photo is unrelated to the post). As it regularly happens, I was looking for something else online (i think it was "diner's dilemma"), and I came across "the tragedy of the commons" article published in Science Magazine 40 years ago. Here's it's Wikipedia version. I know the term well from all those b-school and economic sociology classes, and was actually happy to be reminded of it. Because my first thought was "does that really still apply today??", having in mind how people use common web resources & share them & collaborate. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that they really don't have the concept of "scarcity" and "limited resources" in the same way that any previous generation did. This is not a trivial thing. It really defines not only the obvious question of how you market to these people, but a more general question of how they behave & relate to the world. If the brand's values are built around scarcity then you are going to promote and advertise your brand accordingly and will never ever understand why people don't react in the way you thought they would.

Here I mainly have in mind how people on the web not only not step over each other but actually help each other to build upon what's already there. They are making things together (think all these additions to Twitter: tweetdrop, tweetdeck, tweetthistext that were built upon the basic service. this last one even lets you write stuff longer than 140 characters). In these cases, market externalities of using the same resource are positive, and not negative, as the tragedy of commons says. The more you use something, the more useful it becomes.

So now back to the article: it describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even where it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen. This sounds awfully familiar (think Black Friday and environment before anything else). Now think brands: they come to the web to colonize it: to "use" social media and "tap into" conversations. To describe this kind of behavior, the "tragedy of the commons" uses a metaphor of herders sharing a common parcel of land (the commons). They are all entitled to let their cows graze. It is in each herder's interest to put as many cows as possible onto the land, even if the commons is damaged as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from the additional cows, while the damage to the commons is shared by the entire group. No wonder then that people online often kick-out this herder-asshole AND all of his cows.

the error in communication. reboot.

Last Thursday, Noah invited me to the panel "Reboot: A Digital Conversation", organized by Hall & Partners here in NYC. I was happy to attend. I am less happy to report now that, aside of what Noah was saying, I have a very dim recollection of what others wanted to communicate. Simply put, I had no idea what they were talking about. Sure thing, they were discussing very specific  questions, like "what is web doing for my brand?", but my main takeaway was the one of the major confusion on what digital communication is, what it should be, what does have to do with brands. While Noah was trying to (correctly) observe that web is about just playing with things, testing them out, creating something and then seeing if it works in a trial and error mode, others seemed dead-set on discovering the secret essence of digital communication a.k.a. the ever evasive question of "what works?"

This event would be quite a forgettable one, but for some reason it made me think about the idea of "communicating" vs. "making". Those two are in fact inherently different approaches to the web that people in digital firms have compared to those who spent most of their professional life in traditional branding and started working in digital only later. Altho they may call the web a "platform" in reality they still view it as another communication channel. That is, there is still a prevalent belief that you can "go" to the web with your brand and try to colonize it. It means  coming in with a specific idea or a campaign and then try to carefully control what happens (yes, a lot of people still want do that). Leila of the Naked Communications had a really good comment:  she said that the more you do stuff online the less you are defined by one particular thing. Her analogy with a person wearing the same clothes over and over again (and thus being defined by that single outfit) was a great one - but unfortunately gravely misunderstood by most of the panelists. Her point was that you don't come in with a strong, solid, and ONE thing as a brand -- you have to try things out, recombine them (the clothes you have, to follow through on her example), take feedback (see what works) and continue doing so indefinitely. But these people were so obsessed on figuring out "the big idea" and thinking how to get things right the first time than they were missing out on everything else. Too bad.

p.s. for Matt Daniels: here's the paragraph that I deleted. On the web, you don't "promote" brands, you can only make things - and you never ever make them from scratch, you use what's already there. You connect things, amplify conversations, make something better/easier, and build upon stuff that people are already doing and that they care about. And you will not know what that is until you start doing it yourself.