Social Marketing is huge.  It’s everywhere.  If you work in advertising today, you’re going to be asked how your clients can take advantage of it, how they can manage and control it.   There are now books, sites, departments, conferences, even companies devoted to Social Marketing.

The Secret to Mastering Social Marketing

Through these venues you’ll encounter a billion strategies and tactics for taking control of the Social Marketing maelstrom.  Some simple – some stupidly convoluted.

And yet through all of that there is really only one idea that you need to embrace.  One idea that rises above all the others.  One idea that trumps any social marketing tactic anyone has ever thought of ever.

It’s like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark  when Indy is in Cairo meeting with that old dude who is translating the ancient language on the jeweled headpiece that would show exactly where to dig.  And suddenly is dawns on them that the bad guys only had partial information.

“They’re digging in the wrong place!”

Well if you are focused on social marketing strategies and tactics – you’re digging in the wrong place.

You don’t control social marketing.  You don’t manage it.  You are the subject of it.

The secret to mastering social marketing is this:

Make the best product, and provide the best customer service.

Do this, and social marketing will happen.  Like magic.  That’s it.

Make the best product, and provide the best customer service.

There is no social marketing strategy that can turn a bad product or service into a good one.  No button, no tweet, no viral video campaign, no Facebook like-count, that will produce better social marketing results than simply offering the best product and customer service in your category.

And if this whole outlook deflates the hopes you had when you began reading this, you are probably among those searching for some easy, external way of wielding new tools and associated interactions in order to manipulate potential customers.  Of gaming the system.  Sorry.   You’re digging in the wrong place.

Social marketing is just the truth.  Or rather it needs to be.   And any effort you put into manipulating that truth will undermine your credibility when it’s revealed – because it will be.  In fact, with rare exception, your mere intervention in the social exchange will be, and should be, regarded with suspicion.

Like when the other guy’s lawyer tells you it’s a really good deal – just sign here.  O..kay…

Take the recent case of Virgin Media.  Reported to have some of the worst customer service satisfaction in the industry.  Something I can personally attest to.

It took me three months, eight take-the-entire-day-off-work-and-wait-around-for-them-to-show-up-at-an-undisclosed-time appointments (three of which were no-shows) and countless interminable phone calls to their based-on-current-call-volume-it-could-take-over-an-hour-for-an-operator automated answering system, to install one internet connection.  It then took an additional seven months (not exaggerating) to activate cable TV in my home (all the while paying for it monthly no less). But what makes this relevant was that after all the scheduling, rescheduling, no-shows, begging, re-rescheduling, being insulted, ignored and generally treated like a complete waste of the company’s effort, the day I Tweeted that “Virgin Media Sucks!”, I got an immediate response – in that public forum, not privately – feigning sincere interest in helping me.

Alas the superficial social marketing tactic was in utter conflict with the truth.  And so here I am, throwing Virgin Media under the train as a poster-child of disingenuous social marketing strategies, dutifully reporting how utterly crappy and self-centered the company is, making sure that many more people know that Virgin’s voice in the social scene is a complete sham and should  be regarded with extreme suspicion… because their customer service indeed sucks complete ass.

Conversely, had Virgin Media put effort into helping me when I needed them to – this post would be a lot shorter.  Hell I might even have tweeted that Virgin Media is insanely great and the leader to go with.

Anyone who indeed manages to trick a portion of this population – this internet-connected population – will eventually see it blow up and that will be far more damaging than if they’d left well enough alone.  You can’t lie in the age of full exposure.

Just create the best product or service in your category.  And then serve your customers and the inquiring public better than anyone else using whatever communication tools are available at the given moment in time.

Because you don’t master social marketing, you simply serve your King.

The poor ad industry. It just keeps getting its ass handed to it.

Well here we go again.

For years I have wished there was a magic button I could push that would eliminate all ads from any web page. A friend responded by suggesting that that’s stupid, and you shouldn’t have to push a button, it should just happen automatically. Well, right. Duh.

I was then introduced to AdBlock for Chrome and Safari.

Install one of these browser extensions and like magic you will instantly and miraculously be browsing an ad-free internet. It is the Internet you always imagined but cynically never thought you would see.

Literally, no ads – anywhere. No popups, no overlays, no banners, no stupid, hyperactive, take-over-your-screen “cool, immersive experiences” designed to earn some half-rate art director a Clio at your preciously timed expense. Nope – all gone. Cleaned up. Nothing but pure, clean, content. Exactly what you always wished the internet was.

So I spent a day browsing the net – ad-free – and thoroughly happy about it.  But I began to wonder what all the poor agency people were going to do. Surely they are aware of these, right? I mean AdBlocks developer, this one dude, has 2 million customers, and the number is growing.

Hey, Agencies, are you getting this? …Yet? Not only do consumers routinely wish they wouldn’t happen by the product of your full effort, they are now able to affect the medium to destroy you. Or rather, destroy your ancient, irrelevant tactics.

The fact is – interruptive ads should disappear – not because we’ve all installed adblockers, but because banners, popups and other interruptive tactics are patently inauthentic in an interactive environment and the ad industry should have understood this fact a decade ago and spent the last 10 years developing authentic models for advocating a client’s brand.

There are ways to do it – but it means ad agencies will have to reorganize and fundamentally change their skill sets. It means they’ll have to hire entrepreneurial creative teams who understand business processes and manufacturing and fulfillment systems.

Hear this, ad agencies: the simple fact is, your interruptive advertising tactics are fundamentally, critically flawed.  Someday you will indeed have to adapt by developing valuable offerings, well above the slightly amusing ad content you produce today.

In the meantime, it’s lucky for you there are a lot of users who don’t think to go looking for a magical ad blocker. At least not until they hear about it.

But don’t worry, I won’t say anything.

Years ago my business partner at Red Sky, CEO Tim Smith, used to tell a story about having met Steve Jobs in a most unusual, almost comic, situation. Tim has, after all these years, felt the pull to write it for posterity, or therapy maybe.

My favorite picture of Jobs and Woz. It reminds me that you can achieve anything, from any starting point. Here, juvenile and awesome, Jobs inspects a home-made "Blue Box" which would allow them to hack the Bell System touch-tone telephone system and place long-distance calls from pay phones. My kind of guys.

Read Tim’s story here.

I never met Steve. I always thought I would some day, egoist I am.  The man shaped the lives and careers of so many of us, and we (I) invested so much of who we are in him.  He played such a central role in our days.

But as I sit here and write this I feel a tugging that I recall having only once before.  And although it was understandably quite a lot stronger and more personal then, I recognize the feeling.  It happened on the morning my grandmother, my father’s mother, passed away.

I drove to be with my grandfather and we spent the day together alone in their house.  It was an emotional day, her presence was everywhere.  But the most poignant moment came when the two of us sat down and, in thick silence, ate a slice of fresh pie that my grandmother had made only the day before.  Her fingerprints were in the crust.

Nothing had been said before, or subsequently, that was ultimately more emotionally meaningful to me than that moment. The feeling washed over  me as I realized simultaneously – that she was gone forever, but how fresh and delicious the pie was.

It was a strange, ghostly feeling – both utterly empty and yet full of meaning.

I guess sitting here, writing this now, I feel something similar that must be playing out in so many ways all over the world tonight.

I usually delete the following… but not today.

Sent from my iPad.

This week on: Battle of the Forgotten Media-Player All-Stars!

Wow, maybe doctors could deliver this news to test your yawn reflex.

It’s rare that something is so unbelievably boring that it transcends being ignorable and actually makes me want to write something about it, but man, did the folks at Rhapsody pull it off.  Now that I think about it – I never thought of Rhapsody as having “folks at” before now.

Both music service-cum-companies have hovered so far down the food-chain of cultural relevance that I’m sure those of you who are old enough shared my first thought which was – “Wait, there is still a Rhapsody AND a Napster?”

The whole thing is so low-rent, it smacks of having happened on EBay.   ”In your cart: (1) Napster – size: small, and (3) Pair Mens Socks – Black.”

Like those Batman sequels with the nipple-suits where they started pulling in 3rd tier villains like Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze, you wondered who the bozos were that went for that.

I mean, once it went “legit” who the hell kept using Napster anyway?  BestBuy – of all companies – bought Napster.  Someone at BestBuy must have thought that was a big idea.  ”Gentlemen, my kids seem to know all about this ‘Napster’.  Can you imagine if we had  the Napster?  Why, we could appeal to ‘generation x’ and bring our brand into the new millennium using the world wide web.”

And then there’s Rhapsody.  That was RealNetworks big entry into digital music services so many years back.  I imagine through some crap,-how-can-we-get-something-out-of-this-before-it-tanks deal, Rhapsody was spun out of RealNetworks just last year.

RealNetworks was a big thing back in the 90s.  But you never hear about them anymore.  What happened?  Ah, the legend of Real Networks.

RealNetworks had the de facto cross-platform online media player, RealPlayer.  But they were also the guys who would stop at almost nothing to hijack and infest your computer, your browser, your system preferences, your subscription settings and anything else they could get their stealthy little hands on.  After installing the Real Player app or plugin you’d open a file and suddenly realize that all your preferred offline applications had also been usurped by Real Player.  It was your responsibility to locate and uncheck various territorial features that Real brazenly snagged without your consent.  You were consistently inundated with ads and offers and reminders to upgrade (and pay) or make Real the default for this or that.  You would have to research methods in your OS for wresting control back to the default apps that you wanted default.  They pioneered the method of designing web pages that appeared as though you were downloading a free version of the app – only to realize that the free version was almost outright hidden and you’d downloaded the for-pay subscription version instead.  Upon launching, you’d wonder why it was asking for a credit card for a 30-day free trial when you could have sworn the download button you clicked was for a “Free Version”.  Real seemed to stop at almost nothing to unwittingly force you to use their app.  To out-smart you.  To trick you.  To intentionally exploit a population of computer noobs who were themselves not expert users.  Which was most of the general population at the time.

And these tactics partly worked for a while because at the time there was no overt, popularly accepted etiquette for this kind of interaction.  I think it’s fair to say, in fact, that along side malware, Real Networks played a pivotal role in shaping the intuitive distrust in downloading and installing that many users have today and more so, the related etiquette that companies who offer downloads, newsletter subscriptions, messaging options, installers and uninstallers exhibit today.

Ultimately – it was Real’s surreptitious disrespect for users’ true control (breaking the 1st Interactive Axiom) that undid them as a standard.   If only Real Networks had focused their effort on continually improving their product in line with users’ best interest and respectfully trusting that users would gravitate to the best solution, they might be a, uh-hem real player today.

Well Real learned the hard way what happens when you disregard the 1st Interactive Axiom.  As their big lead began to tip downward, they moved too slow to strip themselves of the aggressive methods and then did what they could during the last decade-plus to keep up with Apple’s iTunes, having acquired Listen.com and founding Real Rhapsody.  But like so many others, the reliance on multiple 3rd parties to assemble a user experience ecosystem (media player software, content, and portable hardware) was an utterly doomed strategy.  They all tanked-  Real Networks, Yahoo with Yahoo Music, AOL, E-Music, etc. under inconsistent quality and confusing user experience which lacked anything resembling simplicity.

Now Rhapsody, has what’s left of Napster’s user-base.

…and I’m wondering if there’s any peanut butter in the kitchen…?

Oh sorry guys – um, that was the end.  Cool?  I promise next time I will have some actual news.

THE EASIER YOU WISH TO MAKE IT FOR YOUR USER, THE HARDER (AND MORE EXPENSIVE) IT WILL BE FOR YOU TO CREATE.

This is a natural law in Interactive development; an equivalent exchange.  And there is a point in the development of every project I have ever engaged in that this axiom hits the table.

It’s ironic on some level that you, the developer and client, have to endure quite a lot of complexity, difficulty and cost – more than beginners initially expect –  to make the user’s experience conversely simpler and more effortless.  But it’s a fact.

That’s because interactivity is not about a single path or way of doing things (though many clients walk in thinking it is).  It’s about potentials and variables.  You are creating an environment where the User should have the freedom to move where he wishes.  This naturally imposes development of varied and redundant pathways and functions.  And the more options the User has, the more rigorous I.A. (information architecture) and U.I./U.X. (user interface/experience design) must become.

There are an infinite number of possible user behaviors – and the ideal interactive experience is going to adapt to each of these users uniquely.  But since such a thing is not possible, we must group users into psychographic buckets and design for these subsets of users in hopes that the rest of them will “figure it out”.  And it is in this stage of development, when use-cases are being grouped, and project plans are being assembled, that this axiom is most relevant.

At least initially, interactive developers almost always overtly target “user friendliness”; I’ve never met a client or developer who doesn’t pay lip service to this ideal.  In fact it is so much a basic part of interactive development that there isn’t a participant in the development process, from client to end user, who hasn’t heard the industry term “user-friendly”.  But despite the terms ubiquity, actual follow-through on this ideal is often compromised when cost and timing are factored in.

This axiom dominoes into the 1st axiom all the time.  This is when, at the start of a project, there are big claims about how “easy we want this function to be” for the user, only to choke at the numbers when the cost and schedule are realized.  More often than not, in an effort to reduce development difficulty and cost, smart use-case solutions are cut.

For example, users of shopping sites fall into some well-known groups (and some not so well-known) that shop differently.  Some users know what they want, others browse (in numerous preferred ways), others still like to customize, and so on.  Building a system that will allow each of these customers to self-select and follow their preferred path effortlessly often results in multiple ways of accessing the same information.  And as I say, this is where the bean counting takes a toll.  Faced with building what seems to be costly redundancy, many clients and developers will rather shoehorn some of those users into a single path – rather than incur the cost of true “user friendliness”.

Look, I’m not totally idealistic, projects have to be profitable – so tough decisions have to be made.

This axiom is more about avoiding the shock of it.  It’s about setting expectations – with yourself, your CFO, or your client.  Just don’t be surprised, when you’ve stressed user-friendliness (and you should!), that your experienced agency shows you a budget that is higher, and a schedule that is longer, than you’d hoped.

It really does take longer and cost more.

EMBRACE THE LIMITATIONS OF THE TECHNOLOGY

Arguably more commandment than axiom, I believe my old creative staff would concur that this was, and still is, the most often repeated, most useful, and most practical axiom to come out of our years in interactive development.

Following this axiom became a mission at Red Sky Interactive.  It was one of the key reasons Red Sky’s work seemed more polished and advanced, why at times it seemed to be magic, and why (when one can still view it) some of Red Sky’s 15-year-old work appears more advanced than much of the work produced today.

Embracing the limitations of the technology will make your work look, behave, and function better than the vast majority of the world’s web sites, apps and other digital executions.  There is simply no way around it.

It requires that you follow these basic steps:

a.  Set the Bar High

Before you even begin approaching development, you must first prepare to judge your eventual work, your project, with a high, medium-agnostic, qualitative bias.  You must demand and expect intentional grace, beauty, and perfection in the work that manifests through it, regardless of the medium it exists in.

You must never, NEVER, offer up the technology as an excuse for less than intended perfection.  I often hear my contemporaries saying “Check it out, that’s pretty good for the web!”  Such a forgiving qualifier as “…good for the web” was never tolerated by Red Sky creative directors.  Either it was excellent, relative to the best work anyone could find in any medium, or it was bad.  The medium’s unique weaknesses had to be irrelevant when judging a project’s quality.  If the work didn’t present itself with medium agnostic perfection, it was considered flawed.  That’s a damn high bar today.  And I can tell you it was a damned higher bar in the 90s.  I still encourage my creative teams to work in other mediums every chance they get.  Among other things, it keeps you objective.  Keeps you from falling into the excuse trap.

b.  Identify the Limitations

As project concepting is about to begin, you must first fully understand, internalize and accept the technology’s strengths and weaknesses.  And don’t be fooled, identifying technical strengths Vs. weaknesses is a tricky art-form itself.  One must go to great effort to distinguish between mere capabilities and strengths.  Often the developers of a new technology will be quite excited by aspects of their new updates and tools. And if you are correctly approaching this evaluation with your medium-agnostic glasses on, you will – rather often – not be as excited by it yourself.  Creators of the new tool will hyperventilate that it does X, Y and Z.  But you then must decide that it does X well, but actually does Y and Z rather poorly.  This is a difficult discipline to learn.  It’s so easy to get caught up in the hype and novelty of some new function or feature.  Weak creative teams jump on these new updates and technologies because it seems novel, exciting and fresh.  But this is a junior mistake.  Your concept must be exciting and fresh, and technology is irrelevant there.  (Related Axiom: Don’t mistake technical advancement for creative solutions)

To facilitate this step at Red Sky the creatives and engineers (teams that critically shared a common language, having worked together on many projects previously – this is key) would often sit down before project work was to begin, solely to explore the technical landscape in detail.  These were a dialogue between the creatives and the engineers that would typically start with the engineers showing freshly researched tools and features that they thought were exciting and relevant, and the creatives asking a lot of questions aimed at finding the stress points.  These questions would usually result in the engineers having to do some digging – some testing of the tools – to find where the tools would choke.  Naturally this is how we identified the current state of LIMITATION relative to our creative process.  As a result of these regular sessions Red Sky’s creatives typically had a better grasp of the technology than their creative contemporaries.  Where some perhaps didn’t code, they at least had a solid gut understanding of the tech that made them easy for engineers to work with at this stage.

Incidentally these in-house sessions were one of the reasons Red Sky utterly ate the lunch of ad agencies who ventured into interactive advertising at the time.  Big Ad Agencies were (and most still are!) loathe to hire significant teams of broadly skilled engineers – engineers who don’t just work in Flash, say.  This aversion to investment in ongoing in-house technical research and development is really the worst position one can take where the technology – the very medium – is a constantly flowing river of “change”.  Preferring to outsource development, the big ad agencies rarely manage to embrace the limitations effectively, because they don’t live with them.  They don’t understand them.  They aren’t current.

c.  Develop A Concept That Behaves The Way The Technology Does

With the limitations of the technology solidly identified and internalized, you can begin concepting.  Every creative has an internal set of filters that tells him/her whether an idea is a good one or not.  Now knowledge of those technical limitations and strengths must layer onto the creative’s filter stack.  If in concepting, the creative team utilizes this knowledge, the final piece will be gorgeous.  It’s almost impossible for it not to be.

More often, in teams where this process is not practiced (and sadly, that is most of what’s out there), you will see oh so common markings.  You will see the clear effect of technology that is working too hard to do things it doesn’t do well.  Long load times, jerky animation, slow frame-rates, ambitious gymnastic interfaces that don’t behave well, items that stutter and pop on screen in unintended ways, laggy response to interaction, generally poor behavior.

Embracing the limitations of the technology means that none of this will happen (except through anomaly).  The piece will move smoothly, gracefully, and it will be responsive.  Frame rates will never be an issue, they will run at appropriate speeds and the effect will be smooth.  Any weaknesses in the technology will not reveal themselves.

Here is a very simplistic, literal example.

Let’s compare two different solutions where dynamic text is in motion.

The junior creative imagines some sophisticated, full screen motion graphic – like something you’d see on TV.  Sounds exciting and cool.  The concept art looks killer, it’s beautiful. In production, each discrete frame looks lovely.  The engineers and production artists optimize as much as they can, but there is only so much they can do. The concept demands the movement of a lot of pixels.  And then it gets implemented.  The piece loads slowly.  The motion is broad and complicated, and it’s running in a browser so it quickly chokes the standard PC system resulting in a frame rate of maybe 10 or 12 frames per second (FPS).  The animation therefor appears jittery and staccato – common for the web, but not the smooth, graceful effect the creative had designed.  If this animation instance was airing on TV you would assume it was animated by someone with limited skill.

On the other hand, the team that understands the limitations came upon a concept that requires text to be displayed as though it was a neon sign.  This art too is beautiful.  It’s also full-screen.  It’s photo-real, and once animated the neon pops on and off in a choreographed sequence. One of the letters is even “damaged” and realistically flickers as the neon goes through its cycle.  In this case the frame rate selected was 8 frames per second, but you had no idea.  Neon behaves naturally at 8 FPS.  The team chose that frame rate, but could have chosen a faster one.  They just didn’t need to because the concept worked hand-in-hand with the limitations.

Basically the weakness in the technology is invisible because it doesn’t show through the content.

Don’t let this simple example deceive you.  This axiom works – no matter how sophisticated and powerful your tools are.

You may have realized as I did, that really, it’s not so much about merely embracing limitations – only the negative – as it is embracing the full, true condition.  Strengths as well as weaknesses.  But I have found that developers have very little trouble embracing technical strengths.  That all too often we do that to a fault as we will embrace all advertised features, strong or weak, as strengths.  When that happens we are rather embracing the promise of the tool – as opposed to it’s actual state.  So I have found that focusing this axiom on the limitations ultimately results in better work.

Lastly – this axiom is unique among my other axioms in that it can be applied to virtually all aspects of development. And maybe I’m taking it too far – but “Embrace the Limitations” can even be applied to any aspect of one’s life and work.  I have no doubt there is some Zen teaching that puts this axiom to shame where living one’s life is concerned – but it continues to inspire me to problem solve in all aspects of my life none-the-less.

No, no, not the way it sounds, but I do love the irony.

I’ll admit it.  I hate Flash.  I’ve hated it for years.  I hated it when it replaced Shockwave with a time-line based interface that bore every resemblance to every other time-line based interface, except that it didn’t behave like any other time-line based interface.  And not in a “wow, welcome to the future!” way either.  No more of a “uh… why doesn’t that just work intuitively?” way.  So we all had to start over and learn to fiddle with Adobe’s cryptic tool so we could create interactive pieces that were lighter than a .dcr.  Learning Flash was a pain.  You were especially challenged if you were already fluent with Director and After Effects – Flash looked like these apps but good luck finding any other similarity.   It was some screwed up parallel dimension.

So flash forward 12 years to iOS and the beginning of the end for Flash.  Career Flash developers understandably get their panties all bunched up about it, but those of us old enough to have been through this before knew Flash’s demise was inevitable. They all go poof eventually.  Naturally a suite of standardized, plug-in-free options arrived on the scene to replace the bulk of Flash’s output quite handily.  There is a delta of features still in Flash’s domain, but apart from the contentious promise of exporting iOS apps, they aren’t all that commonly required.

(Interactive Axiom #11: Never depend on a sole technology as the interface for your labor and source of your livelihood.)

The problem with the arrival of the new formats however, is that they are, well, still rather new.  There have been no development tools that allow us to create all the promised non-Flash interactive experiences without getting our hands all dirty with code.  That has limited development of rich HTML5 executions to only those which front-end developers are willing to bite off.

Enter Hype.  A frigging brilliant new tool that launched just last month from a fresh little start up called Tumult, Inc.

Hype is a no-coding-required GUI interface that allows you to create animated interactive experiences that may be saved as HTML5 web content (with CSS3 and Javascript) that will run not only on desktops, but smartphones (including Android and iPhone) and iPads too.  What’s more, the experiences take multiple browser conditions into account and gracefully adapt to the supported technologies.

Hype is a mere $29.99 in the Mac App Store (how much is Flash again?  Oh yeah, $699.00!)  And folks, it’s insanely easy.

After downloading Hype, naturally I did what I always do – I opened the app, didn’t read a word of the documentation, and started poking around.  In 3 minutes, by following intuition alone, I created graceful, looping animations that further changed based on mouse states.  I mean – literally in 3 minutes – a new user to the app.  Compare that to Flash – an opaque, lead-weight that a new user will beat his forehead flat with before he’ll get any intentional result on screen.

Honestly I’m humbled by what a great job the Tumult founders did with V1 of this app.  It is a well-thought out tool, the interfaces make sense, its features are richer than I have the patience to itemize here – but you can read about it on their site.

Ex-Flash developers may argue that Hype is light on extended features, but I think they will agree, based on the fit and finish of V1, that a year or two of further development will likely take care of that.

Yes, the near future of interactive web development just popped on the scene folks.  It’s called Hype, and in this case it’s a whole lot more than its name.

Check it out.

If you have a computer machine that’s connected to the interweb this week you have probably been sent a few messages from excited web enthusiasts containing links to compilations of subtly animated gifs. Some of them are very nicely done. Some less so. They generally involve pseudo-cinematic scenes looping at, gasp, reasonable frame-rates. The art in this approach to gif-crafting is in carefully compositing the discrete object in motion, and returning it to its start position gracefully such that the loop can repeat near seamlessly.

Red Sky Interactive: Animated Gif, circa 1997

It’s an old trick. And yet I have just received a dozen of these messages.

Anecdotally, it would appear that animated gifs are weirdly blipping the viral radar this week. At least for certain web developers eager to do something “cool”. Most of the messages I received included suggestions that it would be so cool to “add this to our site(s)!”

Whoa whoa whoa. Guys, I can’t be the only one in the room old enough to remember the last time people hyperventilated up the animated gif flagpole, am I? It was around 1997, and your messages were worded exactly the same way. “We should totally do this on our site – it’s so cool.” Only back then you were talking about jerky rotating logos and offers that blinked. Now you’re talking about hair blowing in the wind, and with all due respect – it’s the same thing.

News flash: we could do every bit of this subtle gif animation back in the 90s. And some did. Technical limitations considered. But like so many excellent pieces of work in the 90s, they fell largely lost against a tidal wave of random newness and novelty that made qualitative distinction a coarse affair. The medium was indeed new at the time, and amidst an overwhelming surge of changing data points, users (and most developers) simply didn’t have enough solid ground – consistency – a base-line – with which to develop a collective discriminating palette.

In many ways this condition undermined some of the most impressive, visionary work that was produced before the bubble burst. Creative threads were invented then which would still utterly challenge the state of the art today – if only they hadn’t been lost to the collective aesthetic dimwittery. And ultimately that work vanished into the Digital Dark Ages. Once the economic bubble burst, anything that wasn’t profitable was immediately marginalized and disregarded, despite the fact that there was indeed a strong body of interactive inventions available then, creative solutions, which would have illustrated the true future of the medium as we experience it today. You won’t ever get to see most of those now.

And that’s why – only now – 15 years later – subtle animated gifs seem novel. We finally have a collective qualitative base-line. It’s nothing earth-shattering – but we have one.

Now that we do – don’t make the same mistake you made in the 90s.

Don’t mistake technical advancement or an advancement in sheer craft, for a creative concept. The novelty of some new functionality or effect should not pre-empt leading site development with a creative concept, an idea. As we saw the first time, novelty wears off. And pretty damn fast too.  Maybe before your development cycle completes.

Start with a concept. A story you want to tell. And if executing that concept happens to require a woman whose hair is subtly blowing in the wind, well psych! You can now debate the numerous support tools with which you could achieve that same effect gracefully.

Because for 15 years, an animated gif has been one of them.

So I had to sit through yet another meeting today where some breathless 30-something expert urgently asserted that email and blogs are going away because, as we all know, “teens” signal what’s coming in the future.  And since teens use Facebook and Twitter and SMS, and don’t use email or create blogs, that naturally means email and blogs will soon go away for all of us.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg earlier defended this idea, employing a recent PEW report that only 11% of teens email daily (a significant generational drop).  Then she said:

“If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today.”

You’ve heard this elsewhere right?  A bunch of times probably.

And it makes a terrific little sound bite, and feels all edgy and smart and progressive.

And it would be – except for the fact that it’s completely dumb and wrong.  Maybe even backwards.

Theoretical beneficiaries like Sandberg’s Facebook, but also countless other less-well-positioned wannabe visionaries, parrot this meme because they love the idea that this mystical teenage behavior might be a reliable predictor of our future.

Depending on who you ask, the logic behind this theoried prediction tool follows one or both of the following threads:

a) Digital-immigrants that they are, those poor professional adults are so out of touch, so weakened by requirement for metaphor and instruction, and mystified by digital tools in general, that their use-case must naturally be antiquated and waning.  Whereas those brilliant little digital-native rag-a-muffins just seem like they can pick up any interface or game and play without instruction, so they must be the only ones who genuinely understand the true-use of digital media.

And/or,

b) Teens current technical preferences will inexorably follow them as they age and enter the workforce, ushering in sweeping infrastructural changes that will impact us all.

“So,” the expert goes, “uber-smart companies will prepare for that change, not get caught scrambling when it’s too late.  We should be progressive and develop new corporate communication policies that minimize reliance on email and involve the preferred tools of our upcoming workforce: Facebook and Twitter and SMS.”

OK, look people– the reason teens appear to inordinately prefer Twitter and Facebook and SMS over email is so simple –  they’re just talking.  Got it?  Chit-chatting.  Socializing.  Partying, labeling, posturing.  It’s what their life-phase destines them to do.  And like verbal communication, there is a high value on short response-time and convenience.  Conversely there’s not much use for persistence and record-keeping. So  Twitter/Facebook/SMS make perfect sense – they are arguably the right tools for the requirement.

Now let’s project ahead to the forewarned, paradigm-shifted time when these teens enter the workforce.  What is often ignored in the analysis is that those previously myopically social teens will suddenly be saddled with something completely new, something they did not carry as teens; suddenly they will have responsibility.  It’s a new life-phase and a related set of new needs will enter their use-case – the need to communicate officially and discretely, to record and execute plans, to manage interaction across teams, most importantly in all of these is the need to keep a persistent paper-trail, a record of their work and communication.

And all of a sudden email looks a whole lot less lame.  In fact – it looks indispensable.

Skype (or something like it) – not even on the panicky email-is-going-awayers’ list of tools for consideration – can do some of this and is way better suited to carry the torch, assuming it undergoes some significant design changes.  But email remains the best tool for that ubiquitous work-place requirement.

Will email go away?  The specific technical approach will.  Someday.  But not because teens don’t use it today.

Whatever as yet unnamed tool eventually rises to replace email – you can be sure that it will behave quite a lot like email.  Rather, it will essentially be email – only maybe faster with a lot more features.  But it won’t be Twitter, or Facebook, unless they reinvent themselves to be, well, emaily.

Blogs are another story.  Why don’t teens keep blogs?  They sort of did in the 90′s, what happened?  Well everyone did stupid things in the 90s.  But the truth is teens had no more reason to keep blogs in the 90s than they do now.  They just didn’t know any better then.  None of us did.  But again the lovers of those meddling teens predictive abilities don’t seem to recognize the fundamental difference in use-case between Facebook, Twitter, SMS and a Blog.

Blogs serve a very different purpose.  Most bloggers have reached a phase in their lives where they feel they have something to share with the world.  They have lived a certain amount of life, and or have acquired unique experiences they deem worth sharing. This can happen early for some, later for others.   As such, you might argue that blogging is a “mentor’s” life-phase tool.

And with all due respect to teens –  they are still experiencing the world.  By-in-large they are not yet the mentors/experts/teachers.  They are still filling their lives with experiences and knowledge that – someday – they will feel a strong desire to pass on.

And when they do enter that phase of their lives, they will look for a tool that does something a lot like a blog does.  Or they will write a book, or maybe start a company.

Teens are not tapped into some sort of advanced, predictive, knowledge-base.  There is no magic here.  Yes, they are “digital natives” and as such can learn to operate some technologies somewhat faster on average than “digital immigrants”. About the scan of an instruction manual faster, if I’m being generous.  But the frequency with which they use a technology once they’ve learned it, is no indication of changes to come for anyone but teens right then.

Most technologies will fall in and out of relevance over the phases of a user’s life and career, because as you age and advance, your needs change.  Adoption of one tool as a teen user, may or may not have any meaning as that user ages and gains responsibility into adult-hood and a career.

In short, teenagers will only dictate what technologies they themselves use.  And as they enter the next phase of their lives, don’t be surprised when it ends up looking quite a lot like what the rest of us are already using today.

If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look for solutions that improve your life today.

And then maybe tell a teenager about it – because they’ll probably have to learn to do whatever it is when they get older.

Sometimes I like to imagine what ads would be like if there were an omnipresent Marketing God.  Some supreme, completely honest marketing voice that knew all.  All about the products and companies that we have access to.

In order to draw fair and complete comparisons between complicated products and conditions you have to think that ads created by the Lord our Marketer, would be pretty wordy, but because the Marketing God really wants to make sure I know the truth, and knows I am lazy, all the words would go into my head in the form of a native thought.  Pop!  Full understanding.

Like an ad for a pen might go:

“My Son‚ ” My marketing God always starts his advertising copy that way.

“My Son, on the one hand at 50% off, Writemate’s New Gel Premium Grip pen is well worth its monetary price, costing you $0.02 less than the cost of materials, production, packaging and distribution.  On the other, I beg that you weigheth the claim of “disposable”.  Alas, it is not disposable in a compositional sense, excepting that once it runs out of ink you will simply wish to discard it.    In fact, if you buy now, the specific pen you are holding will persist intact for 357 years at which time it will be mistaken for a silverfish and swallowed by an as-yet un-evolved Sea Lion species near South American shores.  That will be on a Sunday.  It will puncture her esophagus which will make the sea lion deceased by the following thursday and will further render the unborn cub of the sea lion stillborn.  The remnants of the pen will then degrade over the following 1,263 years.  And anyway the ink will leaketh onto thine new, white Zara shirt next wednesday on a flight to Tampa due to low air pressure.  So you will have to keep your suit jacket buttoned, enduring scorching Florida heat to avoid embarrassment at the board meeting.  Also – some of the ink will get on the skin of your abdomen.  There is a new nano-particle in the ink that BioCenterLabs managed to get approved for commercial use without enough long-term testing to record its full impact on an entire human life span.  The chemical can pass through your skin; it enters the blood stream and eventually is filtered by your liver.  Unfortunately it will stay in your liver and will be a .082 percent contributing factor to your fatal organ failure at the age of 87.  That might sound old to you now – but actually people who avoid that chemical (and a couple others we need to talk about, my Son) will be living to 102 years on average by then.  Even so, if you do decide to purchase it, you will be able to use this pen to jimmy your backdoor open when you get locked out on Monday morning – so it’s your call.”

And he puts the whole thing into a little yellow starburst in the corner of the package.  Somehow it’s magically and instantly legible.  And there isn’t a picture of some hot chick using the Pen either.  It’s a picture of me, jimmying my back door in my boxers next to a choking sea lion.

My marketing Lord’s ad messages are often inconclusive. Loaded with trade-offs and complexities.  He says that’s life. Things are always more complicated than one might wish.

That said, He IS pretty conclusive with spam.  The last spam message I got from Him read:

“My Son, these Male Enhancement Pills will NOT increaseth the size of your penis.  Not in the slightest.  They will however give you a stomach ache.  I could go on about where your money will go, and what the herbs will do in your body – and the fact that some of them come from a company that employs little kids the same age as your son.  But anyway – your penis is bigger than that annoying guy at your office whom you disliketh, so feel good about that and don’t bother with this product.”

I was at the Super Market yesterday and so overwhelmed was He that my Marketing Lord had to stop to rest part way through.  I was at the dairy section when I saw an ad on a carton of Milk:

“My Son, Have you seen this Child?  Last seen voluntarily leaving his mother’s house gleefully hugging and kissing his estranged father who loved the little boy more deeply than life itself.  The clinically neurotic, smoking, self-centered mother, had unfairly acquired custody of the boy when said father failed to show up at the custody court hearing.  He was at the time sitting by his son’s side at the hospital as the boy recovered from injuries having suffered a fall in the mother’s backyard while she ignored him the day prior watching Jerry Springer lounging slothfully next to her ashtray.  Of course this fact was not mentioned at the hearing.  So don’t call the number below if you have information.  The kid is now happy and well care for.”

No not that ad – I meant the one on the other side of the carton:

“Got Milk, My Son?  You might ask why you should.  For that matter, consider why you think of it as “milk” at all, and not, say, “fluid secreted from several mildly-tortured animal’s teats?”  Or at least “Cow milk?”  My Son, human breast milk is required by human infants to start life healthily.  That is the only type of milk the human body ever requires in its lifetime. As such it should logically be what you think of when you hear the generic use of the word “milk”.  But the Dairy Board has issued some very effective, multifaceted marketing strategies since well before you were born to compel your parents, and now you, to think of cow milk as some sort of wholesome, important, even mandatory part of an adult’s diet.  In reality, after 2 or 3 years of age the average human body stops producing the enzymes required to digest milk.  Any milk – including this carton of cow milk.  Weened humans do not need milk.  At all, unless of course one were in an utter vacuum of other more healthy food sources.  Further consider the fact that the milk secreted from cows’ udders rather specifically occurs to add an incredible 700 pounds of body weight to a comparatively dumb animal infant over only 9 months – this is far from the kind of nutrition a small, intelligent human requires.  And you have wondered why dairy is so fattening?  Anyway, whatever worthwhile nutrients one might find in cow milk can be all obtained via other easily available sources, in healthier forms.  If you’re still not sure, take this test my Son: ask yourself if you would drink a tall, cool glass of homogenized rat milk.  Be honest.  Or dog milk.  Now, aside from availability issues there is no meaningful, health-based difference between these and cow milk.  Now, what about a glass of human breast milk?  My Son, it is more fit for you than cow milk, and your grimace at that thought is cause enough for you to reflect seriously on your reflexive acceptance of swallowing cow secretions.  With my deepest respect my Son, you are merely non-critically used to it.  Cow milk is simply abundant.  That is the only reason it was adopted by agribusiness.  I could go on about the rough treatment and generally miserable lives of these animals, and the hormones and drugs that are used to keep these cows in a state of pseudo-pregnancy – producing unnaturally large quantities of milk so as to feed a country’s population, and how these drugs and hormones not only negatively affect the animal’s health but yours too.  And that contrary to human marketing, osteoporosis is literally worsened by the ongoing consumption of large amounts of cow milk after puberty, not improved.  Instead my Son, I would simply turn your attention to the Rice Milk over there, some nuts and collard greens.”

Pop!  All understood in an instant.  And there isn’t a cute cartoon of a cow on the box either, no, it’s a color photo of a fleshy, slightly milking-sleeve-infected cow teat dripping a squirt of delicious wholesome yellowy-white fluid.

Total honestly.  Full disclosure.

There are several aisles in my super market where my Marketing God simply screams really loud and panicky, and stutters things like “M..M..Monsanto..!” and “… CLONED BEEF!”, and I have learned not to go down those aisles at all.

I wish.

Unfortunately, I don’t really have a supreme Marketing God.  I’m bombarded by the sometimes overt, and sometimes surreptitious, marketing tactics of companies that operate under a type of self-preservation, survival motivation of their own with messages that are usually intentionally incomplete- lacking sincere and helpful full-disclosure at best, and often misleading, dishonest or dangerous at worst.  My only tools are books, the Internet, common sense, my wife (the previous two are interchangeable), and a willingness to question the basic status quo of every single purchase decision I encounter.

That’s hard work.  The system isn’t designed to support access to the truth.

It is designed and maintained to compel you to purchase and consume without such a critical thought.