ouroboros

NIN Rules

Yes, I know.  Fanboy.  Still willing to thrash to vertebral incapacity to 'Head Like a Hole'.  Mobile 'phon-tography' and 'Qik'-ing my way through 'Lights in the Sky'.  Fine.

Harbringers of 'MP3 sales cannibalizing album sales' doom:  Ghosts I-IV, available through '08 as a free download was also the year's best selling album.

The 'Music Industry' got kneecapped, outflanked, outfoxed, outdistributed.  But Musicians may well be back. 

Hell - I'm going to have to add NIN as a tag on this site, the way Reznor keeps racking up the firsts.

[Nod to Chris Anderson via Phillip Torrone]

Cybergeddon reaches #3, after Nukes and WMD

[via Yahoo]

Sebastian Smith wrote today for the AFP on the possibility of a "Cybergeddon" like assault on the US tech infrastructure (e.g. the alleged Russian vs. Estonia and Georgia hackfests gone super-size) as a clear and present danger to the nation.

Interesting quote from Donald Codling, the FBI's cyber unit liaison with the Department of Homeland Security:

"What the Internet has allowed you to do is make all the human frailities like greed, avarice and all those lovely things much more efficient."

The Conundrum of Scaleable Intimacy and Interactive Presentations

For years, shops have used a variety of techniques to share interactive work (internal and external) to their collective organizations. 

But those all-agency email link fests get understandably deleted (no one was sitting around waiting for your funny link to a video of a german headbanger smashing watermelons with his skull), and "agency reels" cheating interactive work via a big screen experience of highly produced, specially-rendered, HD graphics, with a pulse-pounding soundtrack misses the point. 

Entirely.

This shit is intimate.

My best presentation came when the video jack failed and I presented off my laptop to a tight semicircle of smart folks literally breathing over my shoulder.  Why?  Because in that setting, at that time, I was able to scale intimacy to a group.

What techniques have you best found to share the intimacy of interactivity at scale?

Had to go there.

I look forward to display ads on my profile pages with as much relish as I'd greet a sweaty used car salesman in a terry-cloth bathrobe squatting there at log-in.  Though I guess FB and MySpace need to justify their valuation and acquisition prices, respectively.

[NBC-10 brings you the intimacy of social media]

Hardware = Hygiene, Software = Love?

Interesting pop from the gang @ Pacific Crest Securities who give Apple an "outperform" nod for '09 handset sales with this quote:  "Apple will benefit as the main differentiation between high-end phones moves from hardware to software, which is one of Apple’s core competencies."

I'm expecting the ongoing and accelerating proliferation of Apple/Symbian/Android Applications - still a toss-up as to whether to refer to it as an "App-alanche" or "App-ocalypse" - to level the playfields and annoint new leadership in the battle for hearts and minds...

Nokia: World's Largest Computer Manufacturer

According to Softpedia today,

"as soon as smartphones have been included in the total number of computers sold in 2008, Nokia has received the title of the world's largest computer maker in the world...at 13.8% of the market, [including smartphones but NOT mobile phones or internet tablets]...the world's largest computer makers list starts with Nokia, followed by HP, Dell, Apple, Acer, Lenovo, RIM, and Toshiba. The count is stated to have included all PC sales, stand-alone the PDA and smartphone ones over four quarters, starting from October 2007 to September 2008."

Add that to MP3 players and digital cameras.  Intense.

No more interactive creds presentations

why?  3 audience types predominate:

• A ragtag rebel fleet of folks who "get it", with whom you can talk passionately about brand strategy and idea propagation frameworks in the context of micro-blogging, Symbian/Apple/Android Apps and FB Connect while the rest of the room imagines driving over you in the parking lot (twice) or alternately, teleporting themselves to a happy place far away,
• A bigger group of folks looking to least painfully check the digital innovation box on their annual review form or, alternately, back this "interactive stuff" into a GRP-equivalency and be done with it. 
• A gaggle of folks who came because they know they are supposed to, but really for the free food, which sounded good til they sat down. 

Once the presentation is dispatched with and the dispirited flee, the true believers are left to try to figure out how to get any of the stuff you've talked about to "the right people in the organization".

Follow up meetings are dutifully scheduled with all the people who can say no.

Rome burns.

Which meeting does this most remind you of?

thanks to Mark Frauenfelder, via twitter

SocMed Koan

Will we ever get a social media tool created by someone who COULD get a date in high school?

Bit More

"The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith ìn the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo." - Eric Hoffer, "The True Believer"

You believe, or you don't.

Either 'Interactivity will change everything', or it may be 'another channel through which to distribute more ads once we've nailed a GRP equivalency'.

Buckle up. It's 2009. And love is, as it's always been, the answer.

Bitty-bit more

John Berger writes of 'publicity images' (or 'ads') in "Ways of Seeing":

"Publicity [insert 'advertising' here] is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others."

Would Berger consider 'Social Media' a realtime social currency 'futures and derivatives' trading floor where we carefully tend our tweets and status updates to fine-tune our perceived enviability?

Next Bit

Neat bit in Dawn Nafus and Karina Tracey's 'Mobile phone consumption and concepts of personhood'. During research on 'the social construction of individuality through mobile phone consumption', Nafus and Tracey found their English interview sample to "strongly associate the mobile with the perpetual reinvention of the individual." One seductive proposition of technology (mobile and otherwise) is exactly that: personal reinvention, free of local (social, professional, familial, etc.) limitations, and the plethora of parlayable possibilities presented...brands miss many opportunities trying to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again when they could be making a killing on omelettes.

Salk Institute, San Diego

What Brand are you a fan of?

Rob Walker, in his 12.28.08 NYT 'Consumed' piece, wrote that Henry Jenkins "summarized the Facebook/YouTube era as 'fandom without stigma'...It takes all the things that fans have been doing throughout the 20th century and makes them public, mainstream, commercial...the mechanisms that fans were early pioneers of have become absolutely widespread in our society, whether we're talking about early communities or social networks or participatory culture."

A key element of the fan activity Jenkins has studied is "to speak from a position of collective identity."

I'd argue the same holds true for the interactive-fueled new landscape of brand activity.

Those brands that inspire and enable self-expression, while allowing fans "to speak from a position of collective identity", will win.

'Premium' brands fast-innovating will continue to earn fans and cortical shelfspace - rational and emotional. Everyone else plays the bad ad, pricing and POS game.

What brands are you a fan of? and how do you 'live' that fandom? How do brands find their inner Star Treks, and empower their own Joan Winstons?

[per Walker, Joan W. organized the first Trek convention, in 1972. I'll drop in some hot links soon...]

Game on, Jim.

Bit, the 3rd

From the 'HoL-meistering' section of the 'HoL' core rules book: "A. Ignore any rule any time you think it will f--k up the game. 2. Ignore anything you don't like."

and more succinctly, "f--k rules. the play's the thing."

Two Bits

Technology is well on its way to eliminating the barriers of time, language and distance. What emerges from the coming social 'singularity'? Dynamic selfhood? Luddite fundamentalism? Peer pressure goes multi-culti mass-surveillance global TIPS?

Bits

(R)emergent selfhood/Tech-fueled self(re)definition? 'Perpetual Contact' is the sea lapping at the shore of our collective (re)individuation, eroding and reshaping our realities, dreams and souls.

Multimedia message

MobFac SocMed Conversational Network Test Shot