wow, there's a lot of suckage out there

Having just got back from a week of lacking civilized things like Twitter, Chatroulette and the Slap Chop, it's literally overwhelming how much content is being hurled at the folks who reside in civilization every moment.

I've returned to the inevitable 300 new emails (a low total due to the out of office notification) and out of habit threw the TV on. The lack of importance, relevance or, well, meaning in what I saw was astonishing. Assorted teen stupidity, assorted housewife stupidity, assorted stupidity from cultures all over the world, interrupted by infomercials for pointless kitchen products and get-rich-quick schemes. It really struck me that there's a lot of things being put on air just to fill up time, or to aid in the marketing of other things. And that's just not good programming. (Or smart marketing.)

The repetition of all this crap is depressing. As the number of channels grows, the number of content providers seems to shrink, as do the budgets for producing shows. So the same homogenized content shows up across several apparently unrelated channels. And every network operates the same way.

And given that we caught a lot of radio on the way home, it's depressing that radio, with its far lower operating budgets, also finds the need to repeat playlists and on-air talent from station to station, and community to community.

The internet (for now) offers us more voices, more independence of thought. As traditional media cower from unique voices and do anything to maximize dollars, we readers and citizens and consumers must turn to the only medium that offers insight, and allow us a measure of control.

commenting on commenting

This Boston Globe article about commenting on blogs and forums doesn't seem to be news, covering as it does the almost inevitable vitriol and idiocy of this particular form of free expression.

Almost but not quite inevitable. And that's what's interesting to me.

As the writer points out, and as various bloggers as disparate as Joe Clark and Glenn Reynolds seem to have  found, there is a certain (and growing it seems) level of sense in rejecting the open forum that was one of the bases of what we used to call Web 2.0. Some people are opting out of the so-called democratic discourse, because of what often results: name calling, schoolyard taunting, obscenity, bickering and even personal threats. It's pointless, difficult to read and turns off readers.

When you go to general interest sites like newspapers you quickly see this happen – no shared viewpoint, no shared assumption of courtesy, and no shared respect. Bush was a Fascist. Stephen Harper is a Fascist. Obama is a Muslim-Commie-Fascist. (Surely he's won the trifecta.) You're a Fascist. And so on. The list is endless, and tedious no matter where on the spectrum you're coming from.

What's interesting in the Globe article is that none of their more vicious anonymous commenters would talk about their motivations. Maybe they're embarrassed. Maybe they reject the idea that they have any need to explain the nature of their freedom.

Anonymity may have other purposes online, but for commenting it seems to only encourage the most childish and stupid behaviour.

And in focusing on that, the Globe writer almost but not quite hits the point. It seems to me that what really encourages people to be civil – or restrains them from being name-calling idiots – is the very idea of community; that they are in a place that they get some benefit from, and want to return to. Just as in your bricks and mortar neighbourhood, you wouldn't start screaming at your neighbours at the drop of a hat; life afterward would get pretty grim, and chances are you'd feel pressure (either internally or externally) to move out. Commenting works where there is community.

So when you go to Batters Box, say, there is a real neighbourhood feel to the place. I love the wildly informed and respectful conversations there; they rarely devolve into out and out insults, and it's not just the admins who point out breaches of etiquette. Ken Levine regularly encourages commenters to leave their names, and won't deal with those who don't. Even some political bloggers, like Matt Yglesias, seem to get a relatively evolved and literate species of troll, let alone a community of commenters who don't always agree but who are engaged. And that's only three fast examples that live in my bookmarks.

I don't know if losing the ability to comment anonymously is going to somehow magically solve Our Global Digital Civilty Crisis. But I do know that finding and fostering community is a hell of a lot more rewarding than ranting.

Of course, your comments are appreciated.

every new iPhone user leaves someone else farther behind

I know people are salivating about today's iPhone 4 announcement, and that's great for those who see technology as fashion; people who are burning to trade up to the latest and greatest. A lot of people in our business would claim membership in this club, and this is probably a good thing professionally.

But it's also slightly misleading.

Because there are a lot of people around like the senior communications professional who was leading a team getting ready for a presentation, in the potential client's building. When there was a problem getting a wireless connection – vital because much of the deck contained links – this senior person asked, "Do the windows in here open?"

The minions were nonplussed at this non sequitur, but one of them dignified it with, "I don't know, why?"

"Well," he replied, "then we could hold the cables out the window to get better wireless reception."

There are early adopters who are passionate and knowledgeable about technology; we work with them, and we may in fact be them. But don't confuse them with your consumer (or your co-workers or bosses) unless that info is specifically in the brief.

Most people use the Internet like they use cars or microwaves – they know just enough about the technology to do the stuff they need, and no more. Because, basically, most people just don't give a shit about technology. They have better things to do with their lives.

actually, Steve, maybe you should reconsider the whole "never give up for dead" thing

Steven Case spoke at the D8 conference today – here's a rough sense of the conversation.

The best part is that he still thinks AOL can come back as a consumer brand:

Obviously it’s not what it was 10 years ago, which is disappointing to see. But still a lot of revenue, cash flow, visitors. A lot of assets for somebody to take forward.

And the reason he thinks this is because Apple did "the same thing" and came back from the dead.

Case seems to be saying that the reason he doesn't have to be worried is because, well, the Red Sox came back from being down 3 games to the Yankees in 2004.

Yeah, it's not impossible. But it took a miraculous set of circumstances to make that happen. (Like Curt Schilling's pitching on a torn tendon in Game Six. Yeah, that's what the picture is.) And as for Steve Jobs, well, he's got a unique sense of how consumers and technology can come together. Not a lot of people like him.

I mean, just look at AOL these days. It's a shockingly generic content portal – some news, some sports, some weather, no compelling reason to be there, or go back.

With a subscriber base that's been shrinking since 2002 and a product offering that still includes dial-up as a central component, I don't think anyone is actively thinking about how to make a miracle happen right now with AOL.

content is a bad word

This post at SVN got a lot of feedback, some positive, some startingly negative.

If I understand David's intent, I wholeheartedly agree with him – there are a lot of people talking about content as a solution, a strategy or a job in digital. Marketers are especially prone to this habit; we'll just get some content onto our site or Facebook page or Twitter feed, they say, and people will click on it like horny rabbits. Problem solved, now let's collect our cheques and awards, okay?

As commenter Robert Moss says:

Many publishers treat content as a supply chain management issue instead of an act of creativity. They figure more content (good, bad, ugly or indifferent) plus more links equals more people on their sites.

No matter how strategic-sounding the title of the person, it's a very executional attitude toward the word; like a bad art director or developer building a page on his/her own and expecting someone else to make up some "content" for him/her to drop in.

Beyond being a mere generic description of the stuff that consumers actually interact with and care about and return to, what's worse for me, as you can figure out, is that it's disconnected from the real purpose of what you're doing. Using the word content like this means that you've washed your hands of icky details, like thinking about the consumer.

A word like "content" has technical utility – when you're trying to find a category descriptor for the text, images, video and sound that live on a page. But that's about it.

Please – don't use it to describe your purpose or strategy, or worse, in the guise of "content producer," your job; be a storyteller, create experiences, engage people.

Anyone who describes themselves as a "content producer" is, I suspect, creating just that. Generic filler that takes up space and makes you feel like you're "on the web" but which in fact repels real consumers, real reader, real people.

The folks I work with understand that. Make sure the folks you work with understand that, too.

what's *really* on your client's mind these days?

John Keats was the "live fast, die young" poet of the early nineteenth century.

Okay, that's a lie – Byron and Shelley are far more qualified for that title. But he was a brilliant and unique voice who evolved quickly in the very few years he spent on the planet. And one of the things that enabled him to bloom in this way was what he called "negative capability" – the ability to put himself inside someone else, feel what they were feeling, and see the world as they saw it.

It's a profound idea, one that has always stuck with me. And even though it's a bastardization of what Keats was up to, I think that trying to feel what someone else is feeling is a pretty valuable ability in marketing.

I've been noodling what marketing entails for clients these days, from their point of view. And it's not pretty, but not because of the transition from a mass message culture to truly individual communications.

It's ugly because there hasn't been a transition of marketing cultures – there's been a massive expansion of marketing cultures.

Mass TV, radio and print advertising haven't gone away. Mass may not be the culturally sexy beast it was in the 1970s, but there continues to be a market and need for mass awareness messages. Same with direct marketing; I wouldn't be surprised if there's just as much DRTV on air now as 10 years ago. There's not as much direct mail, granted, but there continues to be a solid need for being in someone's mailbox with relevant and actionable messages. Out of home and point of sale? Still absolutely necessary. And promotions haven't gone away either; quite the opposite in fact, since digital has enabled not just contest entry but cool interaction and engagement.

It took most clients I know five to ten years to wrap their heads around the Internet – how to do emails and banners that consumers would actually engage with, how to build sites they'd come to, and how they all related to each other.

And then social media and mobile fucked it all up. No longer did you simply worry about driving traffic to your site, you had to be concerned with engaging people on whatever platform they were on, wherever they were, and being part of their community: MySpace, Blackberries, Facebook, iPhones, Twitter, LinkedIn, Android...

Screenwriter William Goldman has a great quote, almost a rule, about Hollywood:

"Nobody knows anything."

And that's how marketing feels these days. Everyone has to be concerned with what's new and coming next, because Twitter and Facebook come almost out of nowhere for a lot of marketers, and then suddenly they were behind. But at the same time, all the old methods are still necessary too, and more than that, actually viable. (Remember, for all its new media buzz, most of Obama's fundraising in 2008 came through old school DM and emails.) Marketing teams have had to get bigger, or at least add a pantload of expertise, or simply do more in an economic environment that's been very resistant to new hiring. This while boards of directors and CEOs were all constantly talking about "getting out there" on social media, while still insisting on driving numbers.

And no client's confident that they've got a good strategic overview of all those efforts, because even if you find a mix that works, with the pace of change being what it is, there's a good chance it won't work a year from now.

Goldman has another great line about other folks who are in a very similar situation:

“Studio executives are intelligent, brutally overworked men and women who share one thing in common with baseball managers: they wake up every morning of the world with the knowledge that sooner or later they're going to get fired.”

Live fast and die young? Not quite. But add marketers to that last quote, and you have some sense of what's going on behind the scenes at your next client meeting. That's really what's on your client's mind.

why Facebook makes this marketer a little queasy

Over at the Twist Image blog Six Pixels of Separation, they've been having an interesting debate about Facebook and consumer expectations of privacy. It's worth a read.

As a marketer, it is of course obvious that Facebook will find ways to monetize the insane amounts of dedicated, even obsessive usage they get. It's not a public service after all; it's a business, and it costs money to handle that traffic.

One of the main ways they're monetizing is to sell advertising, or to put it another way, to sell advertisers information about the people who use Facebook. This is after all how newspapers, magazines, radio stations and TV networks have been making money for decades.

I also know that Facebook didn't start out with a clear business model, and is still (last I can find) "moving toward profitability." So I get that they're being aggressive in looking for new revenue streams and evolving their business model, as they say.

Yeah, but...

After the recent hubbub regarding changes to Facebook, like several of the people in the Six Pixels debate I was pretty sanguine about the changes. I vaguely remembered a message from them late last year about privacy settings, and like a lot of people I'd accepted their recommendation without a lot of thought. It's a social media site, and social means public. Nothing you put up there is private.

But I had restricted pictures of my family and some other info to be viewed by friends only. Only as I now went back through my privacy settings (which I explored pretty fully when I first posted the shots) I realized that the new reco had included a host of new options and settings, and the default to all of them was not just that everybody on Facebook could see them, but that everybody (and Google) could see them. WTF?

I quickly changed all the settings I could find, looking hard for new, unexpected or hidden permissions and options.

Needless to say, I wasn't pleased that I had to go searching for all this; Facebook is noted for making account management painfully difficult.

Now, I'm late to the game on this. And as several commenters note, I have no expectation of privacy on Facebook or anywhere else on the web. But Facebook themselves have given me reason to believe that I am in control of who on Facebook I share things with. And they have led me to believe that the only person who can change those settings is me.

Covenant might be a strong word, but I would call it an unwritten contract. And they broke that contract by misleading me about the changes they made to my privacy settings. This kind of "don't bother reading the fine print" attitude wouldn't survive examination by any consumer protection watchdog.

And I know what Facebook's vision is, of a personalized web where Facebook and your FB friends go with you everywhere you go; shopping, reading, watching, everyone linking to and feeding everyone else all the time. As a marketer, I know it's a boon for marketing.

What's galling is that, while I'm not a web monkey or early adopter, I'm reasonably clued in to technology thanks to my job. And I'm at least a little curious about how things work. But as I recently wrote, there are lots of people who aren't clued in or curious. They've never stood in line to buy an iPhone or iPad, let alone changed the default settings on their email app. They type URLs into search bars. They probably don't know which browsers they're using.

They just use technology, they don't think about it, or obsess over it, or write about it. They have better things to do.

People like this, i.e., most Canadians, have absolutely no idea about the degree to which Facebook is using their "private" information to monetize their business, or that they are integrating it all with the wider web. And Facebook needs to think about them, talk to them, be responsible to them – not to those of us who are mired in marketing deep enough to have this debate.

If Facebook doesn't start being a lot more transparent about this vision and what it really means for the average user, the recent uprising may only be the beginning of some very bad times for them.

Update on Monday, May 24, 2010 at 9:33PM by Scott

CBC Radio's Spark catches up with me. (Small joke; I kid because I love.)

Update on Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 8:14PM by Scott

Mea culpa? We'll see.

so how would it be if we gave consumers something they *don't* want?

You'd think that the proposition of giving consumers things they want, and communicating with them in ways they prefer, wouldn't be problematic in this thing of ours, this marketing circus we all work in. It's so straightforward as to be unarguable. Talk to a small business owner who's been around more than a couple of years, or a juggler busking on the street or, hell, even a fisherman, and you'll get general agreement on the principle that if you're trying to get something, you need to go where that thing is in order to get it.

Except...

In our business, it seems to happen. Marketers will do completely illogical things in order to lure consumers to them, like look for them in the wrong place, or bait their hooks with socks instead of worms.

I'm not sure why.

One marketer I pitched for did a whole bunch of focus groups about his target consumer, which happened to be 13-year-old kids. Needless to say, the focus groups all indicated that this audience was very into social media; it was their primary source of information and communication and entertainment. Other stuff on the web was fine, too, as long as it offered content that they enjoyed and used. One thing that they did not do is watch TV.

Okay, we thought. Let's run with that. We presented some really strategic digital campaigns – they used Facebook as their core, but also branched out into other social media sites, as well as guerilla outdoor. Everything we did was tightly tied into the target audience, what they wanted and how they lived. It was one of the better presentations we've ever done, and the initial reaction was extremely positive – we talked about all the possibilities of the work for another half hour past the scheduled end of the meeting.

This was followed by weeks of unnerving silence.

Turns out another agency went in with a 30 second TV spot.

Guess who won?

Now, their TV campaign didn't fail, exactly. Sales didn't drop; they actually grew some. But to me it was a huge wasted opportunity, and basically inexplicable.

Or there's the marketer I know of who insisted on doing a mobile campaign, even though his target audience was over 50, and was quite likely to have no idea what texting or SMS was. Mobile was so cool, so topical, that to him it was still worth doing.

(If we'd been living in Europe, Japan or Korea, it would've made sense. But for mobile, we're still years behind Europe, and even farther behind Japan and Korea.)

Maybe all this new technology has people screwed up. They can't trust logic, they can't trust what's worked in the past, and everything that's new seems cool – but it's scary as hell. There are no formulas any more, and no one has any answers. But based purely on looking at the respective target audiences, I definitely know two things.

To the first marketer I say, just because it's scary and cool, doesn't mean it's wrong.

To the second marketer I say, just because it's scary and cool, doesn't mean it's right.

"the new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN."

We overestimate people all the time. Not their intelligence necessarily, or their common sense, but their familiarity with what some of us consider to be basic rules and tools for living.

We expect that they won't simultaneously eat, brush their hair and talk on the phone while driving a car, and yet, every few weeks, someone gets pulled over by the cops for doing something pretty much like that.

I know a marketing person who, when first confronted with a mouse for her computer, pointed it at her screen, expecting it to do something. (This was well after the introduction of Windows 3 in our office.)

The Internet is no different, as we all know. People still respond to emails from Nigerian princes looking for a little help moving their riches. Reasonably intelligent people – people who hold down steady jobs, who have post-secondary degrees and who vote – are at this moment typing URLs into Google instead of into the convenient address bar at the top of their browser window.

In marketing we have to remember that these people are usually a big chunk of our target audience. Even when they're sitting at a shiny new Macbook Pro, working in the latest version of Firefox or Safari, they don't necessarily know what we exepct them to know. And I believe as marketers that it's just smart for us to recognize that.

But this is unbelievable.

And yet, it happened.

People will not pay attention to even the most obvious signs that they are not on the site they think they've clicked on. They will try to enter their log-in and password in fields that look nothing like log-ins, in order to make a site that is not Facebook become Facebook and work like Facebook.

Um, let's not make assumptions about things being "obvious" in our work.

"if it's something my tailor does, why is it such a big deal for my site?"

Measurement is one of those things that everyone thinks they know and do, but few people actually seem to understand or succeed at.

I once sat in a room with a really smart client who actually said, "I can measure my TV ads in GRPs. I don't see any way I can measure any of this digital stuff."

Everyone's jaws dropped. We'd just spent an hour taking him through his brand's digital ecosystem, thinking he at least got the basics. After hearing that we quickly went back to square one. Again.

It's appalling to me that today every organization doesn't know exactly what users on their sites and other digital properties are doing. It's imperative from a response point of view. You have to know what helps, what hurts, and what's extraneous – in order to gain any efficiencies, and in order to get better against the competition. It's a basic of how smart people do their business well, from Lester Wunderman to the 37 Signals guys, in DM and in building digital apps. Know the data, test, learn from the new data, test again, learn again. And technically, you build everything from your tracking needs outward.

If your number one priority isn't wanting to know exactly what your consumer is doing when they engage with you, I suspect you're not going to last long in the business of this century.