ouroboros

Sunday NYT ad 06.06.10

Seven on Seven

W+K is collaborating with Rhizome.org and the New Museum on the upcoming Seven on Seven event -

"Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new --be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine-- over the course of a single day. The seven teams will unveil their ideas at a one-day event at the New Museum on April 17th."

Who's in?

On the "technology" team

• David Karp
• Jeff Hammerbacher
• Andrew Kortina
• Hilary Mason
• Joshua Schachter
• Ayah Bdeir
• Matt Mullenweg

And on the "artists" side of the floor:

• Ryan Trecartin
• Aaron Koblin
• Kristin Lucas
• Marc Andre Robinson
• Monica Narula
• Tauba Auerbach
• Evan Roth

Why is W+K there?  Because the future of storytelling, narrative and human experience lie at the crossroads of art and technology.

Seven teams of two will offer you a glimpse of the future.  And they'll make it real in twenty-four hours.

And then they serve cocktails.

Sweeeet.

Brilliant 4square 'locations'

'Sitting on a Plane Going Nowhere' - @RSW

Best? Check in netted '+2 travel bonus points'

As 4square evolves from 'GPS check in' basis to networked locative meditations, one wonders how superusers with edit priviledges will feel about inevitable narrative creep...it feels natural that eventually we'll see 4sq 'history' and 'conversation' tabs for the discussions around the true meaning of individual places - physical, temporal, psychological?

Note: explore rev potential for Bachelard 4square app...

Running on lily pads

My tweetdeck was an audio machine gun of alert bleeps and blorps when a co-worker stuck their head in and asked "how can you get any work down with that thing distracting you all the time?"

And I would have answered, but another alert went off about @marshallk blogging that he was "Sitting at the bar & talking to random people about ppl getting out of prison".

It was a random tweet from my self-inflicted data firehose, but in spite of having partially proved my co-worker's point, it reinforced mine as well.

We are only as good as our networks.  

While Kurzweil predicts humanity's obsolescence at the hands of the Singularity, I see people connecting faster to each other than ever before, becoming a world-spanning ultra-connected network of emotion, inspiration, and stupid cat tricks.

Sure @marshallk is at the bar, but we are available to each other.  Human potential that can be unlocked by technology-enabled contact.

The quantity of skype, twitter, and FB links are not overwhelming - they make me better at my job. 

You run on lily pads because if you stop, you sink.

Your network is your bridge over troubled water.  And no one can afford to be a rock/or an island.

What else do you need?

Sent from a damn fine Nokia device

All Currency is Social. So what's in YOUR wallet?

I was looking up the definition of currency on Wikipedia, when I came across this line: "modern currency...is intrinsically worthless".  I'm no economist, but the info there indicated that the dollar, euro and other currencies have no value beyond the government declaring them to have value, and markets effectively betting on their future value.

So it's kind of funny that there is a distinction between hard currency (cash) and social currency (as in "net promoter value", WOM recco, blog readership or twitter followers, etc.).  Because both are effectively social constructs (for the cash, at least, since the 'Nixon Shock' ended convertibility of US dollars for gold).

But faith in institutions, like faith in people, can be fragile. 

What the hell does that have to do with marketing?

Well...

I'll go out on a limb here.  The era of the one stop shop, or agency network, or do it alone communications company - or brand, for that matter, is dead.

No brand is an island.  No agency a one-stop shop.

Brands ask for multi-year communications plans in 2010, when in 22 months between February 2005 and November 2006, YouTube went from startup to $1.65 Billion Google acquisition.  One thing you can count on is guessing wrong on the right tactics to employ in three years' time. Many of them simply don't exist yet.

So here's where the currency/social currency comes in:

Agency and brand "currency" will be a reflection of their social portfolio strategy. 

The most successful brands and agencies will be driven by a net value comprised of actual sales of goods and services + the "stored value" of their social currency (in the form of their networks of collaborators).

The key will be how quickly and effectively they can convert stored value to real value, by unlocking the power of their collaborators to achieve mutual goals. 

DARPA's "Network Challenge" was just such a test to see test the value of networks in real world problem solving.  An MIT team used a tech-fueled "inverse pyramid" scheme to solve in nine hours a problem DARPA assumed would take significantly longer.

The trick is identifyng mutual goals.  Creating a shared vision - and shared risk.  Opportunity - and accountability.

As an agency, it's a good idea to treat partners well, and treat everyone you meet as a future collaborator.  If entire alliances are forming because you are ridiculously awful to work with, you have a serious problem.

And collaboration prevents legacy investments (or entire company acquisitions) from dictating your solutions - a dev shop full of C sharpies not so useful for your Ruby project.  A search shop with an a state-of-the-art proprietary tool yields decreasing returns once that tool gets dumped onto an overall dev list across an agency holding company.  Flash devs on iPhone/iPad?  waaa waaaa.  Or in our case, it helped to have access to the right folks when we wanted to build a robot.

Victor & Spoils promised crowdsourcing as a creative model.  Meh.  What they have done is built a seriously impressive network of freelancers.  The danger is that that network is built on unstable bonds -  bonds that consist of the promise of hard currency.  Hard currency buys you loyalty with an expiration date (the better offer). 

And while money can't buy you love, earned social currency just might.

The agencies and brands that win will build networks of shared inspiration and mutual goals.  Bonds of social currency.

Because an inspired network, a network built on passion and trust, not submission forms and "friend requests", has the power to move mountains.

Innovation will be free

In "Google Takes on China", Jonathan Zittrain writes on his blog:

"What next?  My hope, and expectation, is that Google engineers who might have been a bit halfhearted about implementing censorship mandates in google.cn could be full-throttle in coming up with ways for Google to be viewed despite any network interruptions between site and user.  There are lots of unexplored options here.  They’re unexplored not because they’re infeasible, but because most sites would rather not provoke a government that filters.  So they don’t undertake to get information out in ways that might evade blockages.  Here, Google would have nothing more to lose, so could pioneer some new approaches."

Eric Pfanner, in the 01.18.10 NYT, quotes Zittrain, but then ends his piece "In War Against the Internet, China is just a skirmish", with this:

"But even Google, which has benefited more than any other company from the flourishing of content online, might be unable to fight the momentum of government restrictions, despite its move in China."

Pfanner is wrong.  Flat out wrong. 

Governments will fight the internet and what it represents and enables, for the same reason many companies did at the beginning of this messy techno-cultural-societal Gotterdammerung: they are wedded to legacy systems of command and control, and believe that they are financially incented to remain that way.

But the companies that will survive and prosper recognize that rejecting the technosphere or attempting to dam it will simply reroute its flow to more viable channels - and their only chance to lead is having those channels pumping through their doors.  I suspect governmental structures will be similarly stressed taxed and broken/rebuilt.  For instance:  when Obama can raise millions in one day online, and when the Red Cross can generate over a hundred million dollars for Haiti through text messages, we have to rethink financial controls and monitoring.

Innovation and capital will go where opportunity exists. 

I was at the Seattle "Museum of Flight", and a particular plaque caught my attention in the 'space' display wing.  In the 'history of rocketry' section, a note mentioned that two thirds of Nazi Germany's physicists and half its physical chemists fled the Nazi's ethnic and political policies - fueling Western leaps that resulted in the Atom bomb and (eventually, once the Peenemunde scientists were added to the mix) space travel.  They played to a legacy, and sacrificed their future.

Government restriction will drive innovation - at home, to circumvent such restriction, and abroad through migration of human capital and resources.

Survival is based on the answer to a simple question: do you drive innovation, or do you drive it away?

Brain Belches and Sentience

Somewhere this past year, I effectively traded blogging for brain belches.  Blog posts gave way to tweets, FB status updates and foursquare check-ins. "@"replies and retweets replaced blog comments as my virtual crack.

I'm not proud of it, and I will  rectify that this year (resolution #3, just after #2's "ripped abs")

In Katie Hafner's NYT piece "Driven to Distraction, Some Unfriend Facebook" (a piece dealing with kids attempts to self-regulate their Facebook addictions) she quotes Michael Diamonti, head of school at SF University High School:

"[I support] these kids recognizing that they need to exercise some control over their use of Facebook, that not only is it tremendously time-consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling."

Hafner goes on to quote Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, who writes of an 18 year old male who quit FB while working on his college application:

"Facebook wasn't merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was."

Jonathan Harris, in his recent piece on World Building, writes

"Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.

We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril."

There is something beautiful, terrifying and powerful about the rise of ambient intimacy, and our willing adoption of the latest and greatest tools to feed it.  We feed it with our hearts and souls like a confessional booth after a Las Vegas bender, but occasionally forget that every wry observation and catty tweet is now searchable, indexable and forever. 

But seeing is not knowing.  Telling alone does not create understanding. And the fact I can't actually deal with the immediacy of a restaurant until I've "checked in" in pursuit of my "Crunked' badge is...well, a little sad.

Sad, but I believe it will evolve into something beautiful.  This stuff would not survive, we would not be obsessed by it, if it did not meet a fundamental human need.  Our job is to understand that need and work to meet it with technology that enhances our humanity, and deepens our connections, rather than reduces our rich world of experience to 140 character bleats.

But it does make you think - children learn interaction by observing our emotional states.  How much of our hearts and souls can we pour into the technosphere before it develops its own api to tap our raw data, and begin to react?

It feels inevitable that a status update will someday generate a reaction - "feeling blue" may generate a skype call from an unknown (but somehow familiar soothing) voice, suggesting you "look on the bright side - you've got that Mexico trip coming up!  You'll be tan and happy, and you'll probably hook up!" - and when the line goes dead, you'll feel great, and maybe slightly, momentarily unsettled.  But you shouldn't be - you put the trip into dopplr, booked it through Expedia, and you've got a profile that matches someone else who did the same (and is single)...weather.com predicts sun for the 10-day forecast, and the tweets you posted from Tulum the last time were, algorithmically speaking, the happiest of your 8,956 posts. 

You can't miss!

30 Hr Workday hits hour 6

Sent from a damn fine Nokia device

Thom yorke and me.

Thom yorke and me.
Originally uploaded by rennygleeson

This Google data visualization becomes something very different when its a physical touch interface. From V&A's Digital Decode Show.

Toilet Paper Users and Facebook Users

We social media wanks often earn our fear money through hyperbolic/histrionic presentations laden with "you're business model is f***ed" slides, typically including a gasp-inducing image that compares the population of users of Facebook to the population of actual countries.

But Facebook isn't really a country.  Individual users of Facebook have as much in common with each other as individual users of toilet paper. 

And come to think of it, there may be more TP than FB users for a little while yet.

(FB heatmap when they were limping along with 200MM users back on april 8th,2009, stolen from Dave Know's HardKnox life blog...and interesting to note that if in April they were "admitting" 200MM, and in December Zuckerberg claims 350MM, HOLY HOCKEYSTICK, batman.)

If FB were a country, it would be an interesting one - a preselected technological "upper" class who have sufficient material resources to at least guarantee access, so they probably aren't hurting for basic needs - food, shelter, etc. 

They'd be the world's third most populous country - 350MM+ people, all a few rungs up Maslow's ladder.

And in spite of various valuation discussions, this "country" of tech "haves" wouldn't be a G-7 or G-20 candidate.  Various estimates peg the FB "GDP" at about a billion for 2009 - with about half that coming from ad revenue, the other half from monetization of the FB platform via third party developers.  that puts them at #169 for global GDP, a few steps behind St. Lucia, and just edging out Dijibouti.

The smartest, wealthiest, tech saavy folks in the world, 350MM strong, barely edging out a win on Dijibouti?  Golly.

But there is something much more interesting and a little sad going on here.  A real country has many things that make for an engaged citizenry.  The two I think are relevant here are

1. economic/social/emotional barriers to leaving, and
2. a national mythology/narrative

Friendster, MySpace and Facebook are cheap, easy, and addictive, but their glue is driven by the critical mass of friends (network effect) and the difficulty of porting your entire life onto the NEXT BIG PLATFORM.  Facebook Connect is a brilliant way to deflect the need to re-port, but at the end of the day, FB loyalty will be proportional to its perceived utility.  Like toilet paper.  If there is a softer better cheaper toilet paper, I'll use it.

(stolen from extremefunnyhumor.com)

But none of these social nets has an embedded narrative or mythology.  they have a perceived "cool" factor, or not, but they are social tools, little more.  FB is doing its best to become the Leatherman of social nets, with a tool, port or app for every need, but I question the loyalty of its users and the longevity of its position.  Because they have no narrative.  The US Army/Marine Corps CounterInsurgency Manual (available as a pdf here - Download COIN-FM3-24) defines a "narrative" as:

"a story recounted in the form of a causally linked series of events that explains an event in the group's history and expresses the values, characters, or self-identity of the group.  Narratives are means through which ideologies are expressed and absorbed by members of a society."

There is no common purpose to FB, no shared mission, no shared narrative. 

Like Toilet Paper. 

We flush (TP) and upload (FB) our crap every day.

When will a virtual social net nourish our souls?

Jean Pierre Raynaud, spacepot, 2008

Sent from a damn fine Nokia device

What's more fun than answers? QUESTIONS!

I was asked to identify the typical questions an interactive strategist seeks to address when grappling with how to solve a particular client's business problem.  These were the ones that came immediately to mind:

(1) What is the consumer journey through the idea and how does that experience evolve over time?

(2) Vis-a-vis social media, how is my brand ALREADY ENGAGED in this space (twitter feeds, websites, CRM efforts, social media outreach)?  What permissions do we have, and how can we leverage existing social capital?

(3) What are the CURRENT conversations around my brand/objectives (e.g., on user-powered customer service sites, via google/baidu results, on social nets, etc.) my campaign will be wading into?  Are their clear issues that need to be tackled/addressed, or opportunities to meaningfully participate?

(4) What are the conversations I want to have (or hope to inspire) and where will they be most effective? 

(5) Traditional planning sets a goal of defining a brand's 'voice', but generally it's applied to mass communications.  Interactive planning asks "what is the brand's voice when it speaks one-on-one?"

(6) How do we dynamically engage in conversations with consumers (e.g., will the brand reply directly to queries and posts?  Will an agency partner? What is the approval time for replies? etc.),

(7) What is the technographic profile of my target (what devices do they use, how do they use them, how do those devices/experiences mesh/complement with real world activity, etc.)?

(8) What does success look like (e.g., traffic, leads, buzz, conversation density, buzz, etc.) and how will it be measured?  Has the client bought the RIGHT success metrics?

(9) What is the "value" the brand provides the end user in return for their attention/engagement (e.g., social/economic/entertainment)?

(10) How are we facilitating peoples' ability to SHARE their brand experiences with friends?

(11) How am I "findable" (e.g., what links to me? How are we playing SEO to optimize visibility? What will people looking for us type into Google? etc.),

(12) How is the idea participatory?

--- not an exhaustive list, but does this adequately cover the big points?  Please let me know your thoughts...

GoogleWave meets Pulp Fiction

'oregon journal'/jelly generation

Sent from a damn fine Nokia device

'oregon journal'/jelly generation

Sent from a damn fine Nokia device

W+K+Schmidt+Birkett+N900+OneDotZero = fun

As part of our effort on behalf of the Nokia N900, W+K London partnered with computational designer  Karsten  Schmidt and software architect Gary Birkett in conjunction with OneDotZero to demonstrate what happens when

per Birkett:

“we are using a 3 inch display to try to control a 70 foot display”. Based on the N900’s accelerometer, the software uses an interface that takes movement data from the handset and sends it to the projection app, created by Schmidt."

Conference Call Creep

Two people talking.  Then five people talking.  Two in the room + one on polycom + one on speakerphone + one on skype.  Favorite?  When the virtual people accreted gradually via technology battle lag to be understood.

Mobile Weapon?

Connectivity: harbinger of a Tech-enabled Utopia?  Pain in the ass?

A connected world, the thinking goes, is an empowered, informed and an enlightened one. 

Of course, we've had a few World Wars since the telegraph and telephones were invented, so jury's out.

But fine, if connectivity is good, well then, mobile connectivity, is, well...it's like Utopia plus. 

Because while connectivity gives us show times on Fandango, mobile connectivity will both save the world and level it.

"The World is Flat"-ter Thomas Friedman's OpEd piece "The Land of No Service" in the 16 August 09 NYT describes a trip to the Okavango Delta in Africa, where there is little wireless connectivity.  He writes: 

"like it or not, coming here forces you to think about the blessings and curses of “connectivity.” “No Service” is something travelers from the developed world now pay for in order to escape modernity, with its ball and chain of e-mail. For much of Africa, though, “No Service” is a curse — because without more connectivity, its people can’t escape poverty."

And he may be right.

Because if you want to get out of poverty, you need to be able to save money.  And on a continent (!) where less than 20% of the aggregate population even has access to a bank account, that's a challenge.

According to the World Bank, 90% of Kenyans, 85% of Liberians and 95% of Tanzanians operate without access to banking services.  Enter services like M-PESA and Wizzit, providing the ability to "bank" and micro-transact remotely.

Each market is unique - M-PESA started in Kenya, Wizzit is operating in South Africa - and M-PESA Kenya has seen substantially higher adoption than Tanzania's M-PESA (read here for a CGAP paper on just this topic). 

But despite scale, replicability and market variations including "country demographics and cultures, market structures, business models, and strategic implementations", these experiments are being carefully monitored.  Mary Kimani, in "A Bank in Every African Pocket" writes about Wizzit’s South African mobile banking pilot operation, and quotes Mohsen Khalil, the World Bank’s director of global ICT:

"If this model works in South Africa...the World Bank will help the company expand coverage within and beyond the country. We may be looking here at . . . the most effective way to provide social and economic services to the poor.”

Hopalong Selebalo - an intern for ISS in the Organized Crime and Money Laundering Programme - quotes Brian Richardson,  Wizzit's CEO and MD, on the advantages of mobile banking in an ISS paper entitled 7 May 2009: Mobile Phone Banking in the South African Economy.  The key positives:

• the safety of not having to carry cash around
• the absence of risk of account closure for inactivity, which enables people that do not have a regular income to do banking
• lower costs, partly because there are no transaction-by-transaction fees
• saving of time by avoiding long distance travel for banking
• flexibility, in that users can change markets by making small business-to-business transactions immediately and reliably, and
• facilitating popular participation in the economy, which ultimately is positive for the national Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

Selebalo, despite the risk of abuse and money laundering via mobile, posits that "mobile banking could increase national rates of saving, increase incomes and boost the resilience of the economy. At a broader level, it could improve taxation, and encourage reinvestment of money that is currently not in effective circulation."

OK.  OK.

But can it help us win the "information war" going on in Afghanistan right now?

Maybe. Thom Shanker, in his 08.16.09 NYT piece "U.S. Plans a Mission against Taliban Propaganda", begins with a note that the Obama adminsitration acknowledges that they are "engaging more fully than ever in a war of words and ideas" in rural Afghanistan. 

And the proposed solution involves both (a) FM stations to combat pirate stations the Taliban has been operating - in some cases off the back of roving donkey carts - and importantly, (b) providing cellphone service.

How can cell coverage turn the tide?

“The ability to communicate empowers a population,”  said Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, NATO’s director of communication in Kabul. “That is a very important principle of counterinsurgency and counterpropaganda.”

Giving folks cellphone coverage gives them access to independent (read: non-Taliban) information sources.

"In southern Afghanistan, insurgents threaten commercial cellphone providers with attack if they do not switch off service early each night.

That prevents villagers from calling security forces if they see militants on the move or planting roadside bombs; the lack of cellphone service at night also hobbles the police and nongovernmental development agencies.

And the kicker?  Despite the fact that mobile-enabled transaction will inevitably help finance terrorism (and probably already have), according to Shanker:

"Expanding and securing cellphone service has the additional benefit of assisting economic development, officials said, as it could provide wireless access to banking systems for those who now must travel long distances for financial services."

But back to Utopia.  Or at least Wikipedia's definition of Utopia:

"a compound of the syllable ou-, meaning "no", and topos, meaning place. But the homonymous prefix eu-, meaning "good," also resonates in the word, with the implication that the perfectly "good place" is really "no place." 

Hmmm.  Given how effectively mobility has enabled us to "be" anyplace and noplace, connected to the big world and disconnected from the immediate, maybe Utopia IS the right analogy.

Weapon and Savior?

A "good place" that's "no place"? 

Mobility is transforming both society and culture.

And...oh wait - hold on.  I need to talk this call.

Lego Bricks It

NYT's Andrew Newman reported today that Lego prohibited the makers of the Spinal Tap "Unwigged and Unplugged" tour DVD from using a two-year-old stop-motion animation video of "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You" (below) created by Coleman Hickey that they had been using on their tour.

And why was this piece of content disallowed?

"We love that our fans are so passionate and so creative with our products,” said Julie Stern, a spokeswoman for Lego Systems, the United States division of the Lego Group, a Danish company founded in the 1930s. “But it had some inappropriate language, and the tone wasn’t appropriate for our target audience of kids 6 to 12."

Cluephone, Julie - 6 to 12 year olds aren't the only ones who love Lego products.  Nor are they the ones, typically who BUY it.  Their parents do.  The same parents, probably dads, who love Spinal Tap.  And loved Lego.  And would have loved to see this little mashup - maybe as much as the Spinal Tap guys themselves, who worked it into their stage show for their recent tour.

Lego is making a classic error.  They don't own their brand anymore.  More than anyone, they should know that - they've been giving their brand to their fans to play with for years, in the shapes of those little bricks and every other shape they make.  And we have played with them - making things Lego never dreamed up, including an entire genre on YouTube of stop motion animation.

Which is of course where my five-year old got his first intro to animation.  through legos.  on YouTube.  Unfortunately it was watching this classic:

When other brands would KILL to get the kind of mashup Lego was just handed (Lego + stop motion + YouTube + SpinalTap Tour + DVD) rolled into a compilation DVD as a free ad for their product to adoring fans, why did Lego kill the fun?

“YouTube is a less commercial use,” Ms. Stern said. “But when you get into a more commercial use, that’s when we have to look into the fact that we are a trademarked brand, and we really have to control the use of our brand, and our brand values.”

Darn, Julie. 

You can't control your brand anymore. 

You can choose who to spotlight though - and Coleman Hickey LOVED you. 

Loved you enough to take the time to build a movie using your product.  So what did the now sixteen-year-old Mr. Hickey have to say about the silliness?

“In a way I’m disappointed that it won’t be forever memorialized in a DVD.  It’s not like I was going to get any money for it, but it’s too bad. Lego has the right to do that, but it’s unfortunate that they don’t have a little more of a sense of humor.”

You nailed it, Coleman.

Fresh PIE

I'm excited about PIE.  Who doesn’t love a good pie?

[PIE's first pie - - sweet, delicious, local Marionberry.  Mmmmm.  Damn fine PIE.]

 

Pie is delicious.  And you get out what you put in.  To a Pie, that is.

Bear with me.

And I believe if you put fun interesting driven people with varied backgrounds, skills and interests into an enclosed location, unexpected things will happen.  So we are doing an experiment in the un-rented retail space inside the W+K building in Portland. 

Portland Incubator Experiment, or PIE for short.  It's called an experiment, because we have no clue  how this thing will net out.

It started with conversations years ago, chance and intentional encounters and a lot of “wow, wouldn’t it be cool if…” rap sessions with people I care about and respect, inside and outside W+K.

And now it’s happening.  And I don’t think anyone involved can really believe it did.  But we’re pretty psyched.

So why hasn’t W+K made a lot of noise about it?  That’s my fault.  Believe it or not, I’d rather talk about what comes out of the space than what MIGHT come out of the space. I am sick of bombastic claims of the “new better different” bilge that agencies crap out regularly.  Show me, I say.  Don’t talk – demonstrate.  

For another thing, it’s not owned by W+K –  PIE is a collaborative that everyone inside will participate in.  Hopefully it will foster interconnections between previously disparate groups and corresponding quantum leaps in thinking.  At very least, it may generate some delicious slices of pie.  Like the Marionberry one we had today. 

And the folks in the space are kicking ass on a shoestring – everything is recycled and easy to break down.  Our partners bring their own mobile devices and computers.  What you do see, if you walk or stop by, we built cheap in under 30 days. 

So no, there hasn’t been an official press release, and no I haven’t dropped hints in my twitter stream or blog.  Because until people were inside, there wasn’t anything but a neat idea.  Most importantly, the folks behind this and I have also been VERY concerned that people in the space retain their intellectual property.  So I’ve been working with lawyers and management and the folks inside to ensure that no-one loses what they have by participating.

And I’ve always wanted this to be about the people inside and what they do.   Sure, W+K  is involved – I work for them, after all – and yes, I’ve been spearheading it from our side.  But it’s our work that will speak for us, one way or the other.

What’s in it for W+K?  The chance to learn.  An opportunity to help our clients make leaps.  The chance to make participatory digital culture.  And if something really blows up big, we’ll all be happy.

But even if it doesn’t, that’s ok, too.

Because this is about learning.  About failing forward fast with people who understand that in digital culture, you innovate or die.

We have hopes, but no preconceptions. 

And who the heck doesn't love a good PIE?

This is so cool, it must be 37 degrees

OK - so that's a reference to the "perfect pour" temperature of Coke - 37 degrees Fahrenheit - that optimizes the drinking experience to the point you have to sit down to drink it or your brain will explode with pleasure.  And frankly, that'd be a mess, what with the bubbles and all.

I know that because (disclaimer) I have the pleasure to work with Coke.

Read about Coke's "interactive fountain" in Fast Company today.  Touch screen + 46-ounce concentrated flavor cartridge = your perfect Coke.  That in and of itself is pretty neat.

But I like it for two reasons - one that was stated in the article, one that wasn't:

(1) According to the article, "Another perk is the business data the dispenser sends back to Coke's headquarters in Atlanta. The machines upload data about beverage consumption, peak times, and popular locations. Coke can also talk back to the machine, letting it know if a particular flavor needs to be discontinued or recalled and causing it to stop serving the drink immediately."  This is FANTASTIC.  The machines become real-time focus groups and interactive sales terminals.  As long as the info generated isn't left in the hands of the inventory department but rather feeds the broader marketing organization, this has significant implications.

(2) This machine will feed a fundamental behavior intrinsic to Coke's target audience - sharing.  you can't create a witch's brew flavor without the friend next to you asking for "just a sip" to compare to their concoction - and you'll probably see an uptick in sales as people 'experiment' with different flavors.  Expect different flavor combinations (the more esoteric the better) to form fan groups and passion communities online.  Expect #Coke flavored hashtags cropping up on Twitter, etc. etc. etc.

The machines don't just mix flavors, they start conversations.  probably not unlike the ones that mmay have happened at soda fountains.  Even better?  Good-natured arguments.  And THAT is cool.

"My Diet Vanilla Black Cherry Bomb is tastier than Biff's Crap-tastic mix..."

Kudos to Coke for harnessing a technology that speaks to both their heritage (the soda fountain) and their future.  And for turning their product into a participatory experience. 

Win.

Twitter::blogging as USA Today::Monocle

For the long silence. 

For anyone still reading here (Hi, Mom!), I've been having a bit of an internal debate on the value of blogging.  It's resulted in my near complete migration to twitter for sharing insights and info. 

And questioning why one would post thoughts to a blog, or provide links to cool stuff via one, when it's so damn much easier to 'bit.ly' great stuff, punch it out in 140 characters or less and move on, and get the 'social credit' for having done so via the twitter community.

Twitter has become a great medium for the zingy barb aimed at a Retweet.  Many of my friends play Twitter like a game, with RT's and @replies as their scorecard.  And I'll admit - it's pretty satisfying to get a reply or RT.  Human beings want to interact. And a comment-less blog post isn't a conversation.  An RT or an @reply feels more like one.  And so the draw.

HBS tells us less the median for tweets is 1.  Yep, one and done.  Back in 2008, Technorati told us 95% of blogs hadn't been updated in 4 months.  Remember Second Life?  I still think 90% of their registrations were from ad agency jackasses trying to figure it out to sell tot heir clients.  But people want feedback.  They need feedback.  We are hardwired to seek it out.

A draft White Paper entitled "Tweet Tweet Retweet" (Download TweetTweetRetweet) by Danah Boyd, Scott Golder and Gilad Lotanon even names the phenomenon of "Ego Retweeting".  Some of the data cited (and yes, the paper leads with a 'do not cite' header):

"Based on 720,000 tweets captured at 5-minute intervals from 437,708 unique users, they found that: 

• 22% of tweets include a URL (‘http:’)
• 36% of tweets mention a user in the form ‘@user’; 86% of tweets with @user begin with @user and are presumably a directed @reply
• 5% of tweets contain a hashtag (#) with 41% of these also containing a URL
• 3% of tweets are likely to be retweets in that they contain ‘RT’, ‘retweet’ or ‘via’ (88% include ‘RT’, 11% include ‘via’ and 5% include ‘retweet’

Based on 203,371 retweets captured from 107,116 unique users, they found that:

• 52% of retweets contain a URL
• 18% of retweets contain a hashtag
• 11% of retweets contain an encapsulated retweet (RT @user1 RT @user2 ...message..)
• 9% of retweets contain an @reply that refers to the person retweeting the post

It doesn't take much thought to zing off 140 characters of self-indulgent crap (exactly the reason many dismissed Twitter in the first place), but it does take time to compose something meaningful. 

We need more ways not just to connect, but to connect with each other.

And we'll migrate to the tools that do it best.

**UPDATE**

Oh thank god there's an ironic T that summarizes this whole damn post.

******

Doing what I can to stay true to the text.

this one's for you, Chris.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson

Jeff Goldblum, Harrison Ford and the web nearly die.

"Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We've never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth."

"It could go down as the biggest mobile event in history...people wanted to keep tabs on this story, but if you're an accountant you're supposed to be working on your spreadsheet. So they were using their personal cell phones to do so,"

CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke...Twitter crashed as users saw multiple "fail whales"...Google Trends rated the...story as "volcanic."

Neda?  Iran?  Iraq?  Sanford?  Korea?

MJ.

But in the midst of the MJ tsunami that crippled the web last week, a fake story about the death of actor Jeff Goldblum (and Harrison Ford) starting making the rounds, requiring public debunking.  It was this site that generated the spoof celebrity death stories - the Goldblum and Ford riffs were spread through social nets, twitter, etc, and became "trending topics" - a near-guarantor of exponential meme proliferation.

Generating templated fictional stories that then index well on search engines and proliferate through social media (impacting organic and paid search results) was the strategy behind W+K's 2009 Silver Cyber Lion-winning "Swaggerize Me" effort for P&G's Old Spice.

As Linnie Rawlinson and Nick Hunt reported for CNN in regards to the fast spread of fake news:  "The Web can disseminate news -- but like any form of communication it can also help us create what we expect to see next."  Or - don't believe what they tell you about Mark Hamill.