The Secret to Mastering Social Marketing
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.
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 it dawns on them that the bad guys only had partial information.
"They're digging in the wrong place!"
AdBlock Works Like Magic, Ad Agencies Collectively Wet Selves
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.
Steve Jobs
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.
It's a great read. If you're a bit stunned at the loss of Steve Jobs you will appreciate it as I did.
I never met Steve. I always thought I would some day, egoist I am.
Rhapsody Acquires Napster, Apple Terrified
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."
INTERACTIVE AXIOM #4: Usability's Equivalent Exchange
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.
INTERACTIVE AXIOM #3 : Embrace The Limitations
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.
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:
Hey Adobe, Flash is about to get Hyped
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.
No Animated Gifs? You Must Be Lame... Again
f 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.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…
Why Teenage Users Do Not Indicate Your Technical Future
So I had to sit through yet another meeting today where some breathless 30-something expert urgently asserted that email is 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, that naturally means email 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.
If There Were A Marketing God
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…
Gap is the Biggest Wussy on Earth
So we all saw the new Gap logo. It looked weird. It looked wrong. It looked like all sorts of other unbecoming words that were broadcast over Twitter and Facebook within hours of its unveiling.
Then, in what is going to be (or should be) remembered as the biggest corporate branding fail of the last decade, Gap caved in to all the little whiny Tweeters and defensively pulled its shiny, new logo.
Anyone who thinks that move was rational - that pulling the new logo was the best thing Gap could have done in the situation - is somewhere between equally ball-less and an idiot.
No, it was the worst thing Gap could have done in the situation.
Confessions of an Apple Freemason
I love Apple products. But something has been troubling me...
People have been calling me and my kind Apple Fanboys for many years. Before that term was trendy they called us Apple fanatics. I used to resist these labels since from my point of view I was just reporting the obviousness between Macs and PCs. It wasn't my fault Apple products were superior.
Anyway this isn't about who's better or who's right . That's old news. Apple is kicking butt these days and most of the anti-Apple people I've known have finally let go of their irrational embrace of a Windows PC-only paradigm, bought iPhones, iPods, iPads and iMacs and we can finally move on.
And my story starts there.
Because as any true Apple Fanboy will tell you, it feels oddly disorienting to see Apple kicking butt . Yeah, it's what we fought for over the last quarter century, and yet now that we have arrived, the universe is out of balance, only perhaps not in the way you might expect...
Going Social On Your Ass
Three years ago some ad agency dweeb leaned into my office and smirked "Dude, our campaign just went social".
And I think, after a brief pause, my immediate reaction was to throw up in my mouth. I silently hoped I would never hear that stupid little term again. That something "went social".
The Best Thing On The Internet Right Now
So after a particularly frustrating day of having Flash-based content crash my browser, I finally buckled under and succumbed to the recommendation of my old business partner Tim Smith and downloaded a little, free Mac Safari plugin called "ClickToFlash".
Ba Da Bing!
It's cold in hell today. Well, in my private corner of it anyway.
That's because my default home page - across all my browsers - was just changed to Microsoft's Bing.com.
In my world - that's really big news. I have friends who have responded with utter disbelief.
How the Apple Dress Code Undermined the iPhone
I can't be the only one. The only lifelong Apple fan boy who wears shirts with collars on occasion. Am I?
I ask because if there were others, if maybe even one of us worked for Apple on the iPhone team, the iPhone headphones would be designed differently. It's a fact - no two ways about it. That somehow this critical design flaw should never have survived the Apple design process, unless of course, they really all do wear t-shirts - exclusively.
Hey Apple, The 90s Called and Wants It's White iPhone Back
When Apple started using the color white as it's industrial design foundation back in the late 90s - it evoked all the coolest parts of Star Wars' Storm Troopers, 2001: A Space Odyssey - and bathroom fixtures all at once. It was a powerful design conceit that differentiated the company assertively for a decade - and big-banged out trends that are still rippling their way down the lower design food-chain today.
Then, with the advent of multicolored aluminum iPods, Black MacBooks and silver iMacs, Airs and Mac Pros, it looked as though His whiteness was finally, at long gasping last, bowing out. And none too soon.
The fact is, the whole white consumer technology thing has been done to death. There is all manner of non-Apple, white and plastic-chrome "iWhatevers" on the market. So ubiquitous is the white and "chromed" plastic look that anything done that way today usually has "made in taiwan" embossed on the side or comes from a gum ball machine.And then
Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G.
When I saw the white and chrome iPhone 3G - an exclusive color way for the premium 16GB model - I remember mildly deflating and uttering, "...really...?" And then I think I just squinted at it - waiting for the coolness to kick in. A reality distortion field. A different angle. Anything.
Why Do Music Ringtones Suck So Bad?
Sorry for the belligerent title. But you know it, I know it, and everyone you know knows it, except maybe those 11-year-old-girls at the mall who smell like strawberry lip-smacker and buy Live Strong-knock-off rubber bracelets that say "I'm Rad" at Wet Seal, that music-based ringtones are so very lame.
The Myth of Viral Marketing And The Rise Of Status
"Viral Marketing" is a myth. Always has been. It never existed. And as you'll see, even if it had, you would want nothing to do with it. "Word of Mouth"? Less toxic, but critically, equally incomplete. Social Network Marketing? Swarm Marketing? Mobile Marketing? Just more opaque containers. In a revealing display of the industry's ongoing struggle with interactive, none of the terms in use today comes close to illuminating how an advertiser can approach inspiring that Holy Grail of interactive marketing, a User-distributive spread... Until now.
INTERACTIVE AXIOM #2: The Interactive Trade Agreement
EVERY INTERACTIVE CONSTRUCT MUST PROVIDE REIMBURSEMENT OF VALUE EQUAL TO, OR IN EXCESS OF, THE USER’S SELF-APPRAISED INVESTMENT OF TIME, ATTENTION AND EFFORT OF ACTION.
All the rules of economics apply to this system- though nothing physical is exchanged. In this economic exchange the User must perceive being the inordinate beneficiary, where time, attention and action are His currency. Whereas, promise and (not "or") payoff of value are the currency of the Interactive content creator.
Ultimately value - and not the communication of value - is the light that attracts the moths in this system.