Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

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I love the thought of saving money of landing a huge bargain. And I was about to brave the crowds on Black Friday to grab some of those advertised deals for myself and those on my holiday gift list. But I was stuck at my in-laws without a car.

Then I remembered Cyber Monday, an online trend that started five years ago when retailers began wooing shoppers with special online deals the Monday after Thanksgiving. Shopping online is easier anyway.

I started getting emails on Saturday and saving them in my "coupons" folder especially for Monday night. I would camp out on my sofa with my laptop and snacks for some prime time deal surfing.

With my mental list, I began opening windows to dozens of online stores. About half had the expected sales -- free shipping, percentages off, Christmas items on sale. The rest, it was business as usual, with maybe a small promotion like free shipping when you spend $75 or more.

I looked. And looked. None of the gifts I set out to buy for others were to be found for a bargain. Where are all these sales the media was touting?

Wait. I found one. Yes, ONE. I was bad. I bought only one item. And it was for me. Well, I can pawn it off as a gift for the house. (It was an organic cotton blanket that I'd been eying since the cold weather blew away my warmth.) But, I'm sure I'm the only one who'll use it hog it.

According to the National Retail Federation, Cyber Monday sales were "softer-than-expected" during lunch, but quickly beat projections after the evening tally. Seems there's been a shift from consumers shopping during their lunch hour at the office to browsing at home at night.

Shop.org reported that "nearly nine in ten (87.1%) retailers offered a special promotion for Cyber Monday," up from last year. I must have been shopping on the wrong sites.

Looks like Verizon went all out to push the new Motorola Droid. As this article points out, the company must have spent a pretty penny on Facebook ads to attract a huge amount of fans. The reward? Fans got a deal on Verizon's FiOS broadband/TV/phone package and exclusive Green Day concert footage.

So I put the question to Organics. Another colleague said she couldn't find anything she wanted or needed for that can't miss price either. She bought, but not because of the price.

Another colleague made his Black Friday trip a success by NOT buying an item his wife was eying in the store. He used his ebay app on his  iPhone to find it for $100 cheaper! Now that's what I call cyber success.

How have your Holiday shopping habits changed with technology? How are you finding your bargains this season?

Sarah Jo Sautter

How do you engage an audience that is barraged with marketing messages and are not interested in hearing about your brand?

The answer used to be disruptive experiences which often led to more annoying and shocking ads in more places (see above).

Thankfully marketers are moving away from disruption and toward adding value as the means to engage a potential customer. Now the question becomes:  What can you do to add value and how do you successfully integrate this with your brand or product?

One answer is to add elements of play to your marketing, or more appropriately, adding elements of marketing to a fun customer experience.

At a recent conference I attended I had the pleasure of hearing Ken Eklund speak on "The Seriousness of Play".  The talk underscored what I experience firsthand in playing games with my kids: play is a great enabler of creative thought, social interaction, memory and learning.  "Gaming is common ground, it allows marketers to engage with customers and change their relationship with them.  Think about the Olympics impact on foreign relations." says Mr. Eklund.

To give you a sense of what I am talking about below are a few examples of using games to engage an audience: 

Jyri Engeström, Product Manager at Google who found his way there by co-developing the microblogging service Jaiku and selling it to the search engine giant in 2007, says that without a hands on approach to its business on all levels of management, the company will lose its touch with the reality.

Sounds rather obvious, doesn't it? But Engeström claims [in Finnish] that the world's biggest cell phone maker Nokia may have lost the crucial connection between what happens in the field and what happens in the managers' world. Where at Google, says Engeström, even the most top level managers are still contributing to the code themselves and monitoring the development of their products first hand, at Nokia the bosses are lost in their own chambers. At Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have even given up their personal assistants because they didn't want to get estranged from their workers and the people who use their products.

A recent post in the Harvard Business Blog talks about the change we're witnessing in the organizations around us due to the development of networking tools such as Twitter. The writer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, recalls how America in the 20th century was called a "society of organizations." Formal hierarchies with clear reporting relationships gave people their position and their power.

In the 21st century, however, the world is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within companies and other organizations. People with power and influence derive that power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.

I bet that Nokia isn't alone with its problem. In fact, I think that most companies around the world that were born in the industrial era are struggling to change to become more like Google, a company mostly developed in the networking era of the 21st century, where a less hierarchical model of connecting and sharing ideas comes more natural.

In the advertising world, there is the debate about traditional vs. digital, and how to combine the things we have learned from both thus far to drive the future. The world we work in, in (digital) advertising, is going through constant change at a seemingly increasing speed with every new tool, piece of code, site and platform that becomes somehow meaningful.

Maintaining a good connection to what happens on the ground is a challenge, but it's easier for those who actively network and participate in the discussion, and who are willing to let go of the old hierarchical model of management. It doesn't mean that everybody needs to be a coder, a director, a designer and a hyperactive, visionary Twitter user all at the same time, but it helps to have done a bit of it all to have experienced it first hand, and maintain that connection to the ground through all the cycles of change.

As you grow, how do you maintain a good understanding of where you've been and how that may have changed?

Karri Ojanen

Some of our favorite iPhone apps this year recently made it's way to Adweek's list.

Virgin Atlantic Flying Without Fear
Virgin's $4.99 app is targeted towards fearful fliers. The content comes from a course Virgin has taught for years. It answers common questions like, "What is that noise?" and includes relaxation exercises. Released in early November, Flying Without Fear is Virgin's first stab at a mobile app. The app may have a high download fee, but it got Virgin coverage in dozens of blogs and news outlets. It ranks No. 27 in the App Store paid apps travel category.


Pizza Hut
The fast-food restaurant bills its effort "a killer app for your appetite." That might be going too far, but it does point the way towards the possibilities of mobile ordering. The app uses entertainment -- users shake the phone to add sauce to wings, for instance -- to make ordering a fun experience. While not without its detractors, the app boasts hard-core fans and has generated over $1 million in sales for Pizza Hut. It ranks No. 17 in the App Store's lifestyle category.

Domino's gave it a shot with their Pizza Tracker app as we reported back in July.

Pandora Radio
The ad-supported music business is seemingly imploding, but live-streaming service Pandora might have hit on a workable formula with its wildly popular iPhone app. It ports over online preferences to do exactly what it promises: create a personalized radio station. Its ads aren't alienating users -- yet. But this isn't surprising since the value it brings is worth the price of some ad messages, including mobile campaigns for brands like Dockers. It's the No. 1 music app in the App Store.

Other Noteworthy Apps from this Year
• Starbucks launched two.
• Volkswagen made a bold move with their GTI app.
• Yelp uses Augmented Reality (AR).
• USAA Bank allowed customers to deposit a check by taking a picture on their iPhone.

If you've downloaded any on the list, tell us about your experience. Or have another favorite?

Editor's note: Thanks to Marita Scarfi and other Organics for sending your favorites.

A recent article by Jon Kolko, ACD at frog design, hits on some interesting commentary about designers' reach in the culture. However, these ideas are not new, and as mentioned in some of the comments, the idea of giving up control or the idea of building frameworks isn't new either. I also agree with some of the comments that point out the hollow portrayal of UX designers' motivations. That said I do commend the urgency to change how experience is perceived.

What Guides Design Conscience?
In this perfect world where a designer's reach is recognized and understood to be global, and the results of their decisions eternally impactful on the culture, what truly guides the conscience of the marketer or designer? Not to devolve into a commentary on capitalism alone, because that would be long and boring. And the emerging consensus seems to support the idea of profitability and responsibility being inevitably linked, as we literally run out of chances to make irresponsible choices with product design and marketing.

The Ethics of It All
However, responsibility is most commonly understood today today as a holistic understanding of the product lifecycle, true costs, environmental impact, sensitivity to cultural issues, compassion, honesty and dialogue with the consumer. What doesn't get touched on as often is the ethical significance of the reach itself.  The author states: "Both the bad and good are our ongoing fault and responsibility." Consider a responsible design with a wide and echoing reach, with "no beginning and end." What are the criteria for it being responsible? As the author states, the lasting effects of this design aren't finite or known, each experience is unique. Can reach itself be irresponsible?

During a conversation on this topic a friend said, "Don't go all Prime Directive on me." (I needed my memory refreshed that this was a Star Trek reference to observation without interference.) So in the case of a responsible product...say a lifesaving product, or even a planet-saving product, most would argue that to observe such a directive would be directly irresponsible. But what about the majority of products and experiences? Will all of the "bad" products be Naturally Selected out? What about the consumer's responsibility to avoid perpetuating "bad" products and experiences? Should we only hold the designers and marketers accountable?

An Exercise For Thought
While the author points out the fallacy of a finite experience, it seems to me it might be an interesting exercise for designers to try and design experiences that truly do have a beginning and end. Or perhaps a reductive exercise where we subtract the experience or product from the culture, or even actively prevent it from reaching the market. Is there a value to limiting our reach? Is it even possible? With the advent of seamless branded entertainment and lifestyle experiences, expansive offerings from the brilliant mind of Ashton Kutcher... I truly wonder if branded literature is next. (Or is it here already?) Is it possible that giving up control, working toward transparency and creating frameworks is simply the same old brand of consumerism, albeit a more stealthy and powerful means to the same end?

Thanks to Karri Ojanen for the link and discussion starter.

Nick Sternberg

Many news sources are reporting that Apple has purchased music streaming service Lala. I'm a big music fan and subscribe to Rhapsody, but had never used Lala. I definitely remembered that in the past, some of its services raised the ire of the record labels, and visiting the site's current incarnation, I'm somewhat surprised that it still hasn't run afoul.

Everyone is speculating on exactly why Apple is making the purchase, and as is typical, Apple is smartly mum. What's perhaps more interesting is what precisely is being purchased, as the New York Times reports that the record labels have the equivalent of an out clause, which means that the licenses aren't transferable to an acquirer. So what's the deal, literally and figuratively?

Here's what I think is happening:

Apple has basically cornered the market on MP3 digital downloads, podcasts, etc., but as it surveys consumer behavior and the competitive marketplace, it is recognizing that the upside potential of digital downloads will begin to level. Finally, at long last, and despite Steve Jobs' arguments to the contrary, consumers are starting to show a penchant for access over ownership...at least with regards to music and video media. Music-wise, this is manifest in the continued growth -- at least in usage -- of companies like Pandora, Slacker, et al. With the competitive specter (and great pumpkin) of Spotify on the horizon, Apple sees this acquisition as a way to purchase intellectual expertise (people) and property (IP) as well as some infrastructure (IT) to jump into this marketplace.

One could conceivably ask why Apple would want to fortify a business that in and of itself is not particularly profitable. I think the answer is as simple as the business rationale for the continued investment in iTunes; it helps sell hardware: iPods, iPhones, Macs and hopefully Apple TVs and iTablets, and that is a very good business for Apple, which rakes in a lion's share of profits from higher end consumer electronics and computers.

What does this mean?

I think it's a great time to be a gadget-crazy, music loving consumer. The world's entire music collection -- from the hits to the obscurities -- will finally be at our fingertips, literally. It might also be a good time to be a record label after 10 very difficult years.

What's your take?

Jonathan Cohen

Alvar Aalto, the father of Modernism, once said that nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems.

This is something that we often struggle with in our work in digital advertising. Much as a result of the waterfall model and the general legacy of the industrial era production line mentality, we tend to separate the problems in creative design, user experience, strategy, and technology. And we separate the people who look for solutions to those problems. The technology team gets to step in only when the strategist and the creative director have finished their work. They come together somewhere in the middle to discuss solutions in check-in meetings, over a couple wireframes and comps, before heading back to their own chambers.

The Audience Doesn't See Pieces
The problems that arise from this separation are most pressing in -- to go back to Alvar Aalto with a modern twist -- information architecture and user experience design. The danger is that we separate ourselves from our audience. Because when the audience looks at the campaign we've built, the process we've engineered on a website or in a mobile app, or the social networking components we've brought into a digital billboard ad, the audience doesn't consume the pieces of the design and the functionality separately. They get the total experience: the sum of all the choices we've made in strategy, in tactics, in visual design, copy and code.

The Difficulty of Dealing in Limitless Space
Realizing this has been somewhat easier in actual software development than in the world of advertising. Where in the past, advertisers were limited to a one-way message that could fit on a billboard, in a TV commercial or a print brochure, the Web has brought a library framework combined with a software application platform to the people who used to focus just on getting the customer's attention and selling an idea in the limited space and time without instant interaction with the target audience. Like Erica DeJoannis points out in her excellent article about UXD in the world of marketing, marketers and UX designers approach online marketing in two fundamentally different ways. Marketers are focused on selling and messaging, while UX designers are focused on designing products.

Work in Tandem
To help UX designers and marketers work together more efficiently as well as to help high level strategy connect with the low level tactics more effectively, we need to get out of our silos. When the architect is sketching the blueprints, the builder aka the technical developer needs to be as close as the visual designer and the strategist. The solution to a strategic or architectural problem may well come from the mouth of a programmer, and we all contribute to the same product together.

How do you facilitate inter-disciplinary work?

Karri Ojanen

The last century has seen a rapid urbanization of the world's population. In 1900 only 13%, but now more than half of all people live in urban areas. Cities are facing dramatic changes in how they adapt to their rising populations and effectively provide services for the people and businesses that they need to feed their economic growth. Cities are also hubs for much of today's innovation, and the future success of cities is in the hands of those who plan, design and manage the public spaces and functions of the city.

The World Design Capital is a biennial city promotion project by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) to highlight the accomplishments of cities that leverage design as a tool to improve the social, cultural and economic life in the city. In 2008, Turin, Italy was chosen to be the first ever World Design Capital, and next year it's Seoul, South Korea, who get to throw a yearlong program of design-related events.

And at the end of last month in its meeting in Singapore, ICSID announced that the next Design Capital, in 2012, is Helsinki, Finland. In total, there were 46 cities from 27 countries that applied for the designation. With a long history and culture of elegant design and strong public funding for high-tech infrastructure, Helsinki has for decades been using design as "a pivotal enabler to building an open city", according to the ICSID press release. Despite the country's small population, Finland and Helsinki as its capital have established an impressive line of well-known global brands, such as Nokia, Kone and Marimekko, architects and designers such as Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto, and highly acclaimed education and research institutions. The city says its main goal for 2012 is to embed good design in the life of every resident by inviting all citizens, enterprises and organizations in Helsinki, as well as visiting design professionals and enthusiasts, to participate in the preparations and the events.

VIDEO: Open Helsinki - Embedding Design in Life

What would be your own Design Capital of the World, and why? Do you have examples of cities around the world that have successfully enhanced the lives of their residents through effective urban planning and everyday design?

Karri Ojanen

Google recently released Goggles which is arguably the broadest reaching AR program available to date. If you are not familiar, it allows you to do two things:

1. Snap a photo of anything and automatically search for results based on images and text within the photo
2. See location and direction specific google maps results by pointing your camera in any direction

The potential of this tool is that of most augmented reality: quick, easy and highly relevant information. This is also another avenue (along with voice recognition software) for mobile devices without a keypad to access search functionality. To see Google's description of benefits check out the video here.

From my tests the text processing works well so things like book covers, business card, and anything with a URL on it return useful results. Goggles was able to identify flat logos but had much more trouble with 3D object logos, for example it immediately identified a Dodge logo on a sticker, but was not able to identify the Dodge logo on the grill of a Nitro.

While many augmented reality apps have been released recently, Goggles is the strongest indication that augmented reality is coming to the masses quickly. If using the camera on you mobile device to gather information and navigate on foot becomes a commonly adopted behavior this has significant implications to marketers.

How Google Goggles Could Impact Marketing
Many things can be done (or not done) with regard to products and storefronts to provide more value to customers and make shopping easier. An analogy is the way natural search, paid search, and search engine optimization work in concert. Users will see naturally occurring results regardless of where they are.

At some point in the future those results could have paid listing next to them or could be enhanced in some way. For example if a person is walking down the street looking for a place to get a coffee they see a Starbucks .25 miles away and next to that appears an ad for Mom and Pop Coffee Shop .5 miles away. So the person is made aware of a local option just a little further away.

Finally products and store fronts will be able to be optimized to better market themselves. For example logos could be optimized to be easily photographable (make them 2D not 3D). Search results could be specific to a model number to provide end users the most important information. For example if I were in market for a new car and saw one that I liked on the street photographing the trim level/logo could return results of fast it accelerates, the mpg and the cost if search results were properly optimized.

My guess is that Layers on Google maps will offer a lot of opportunities for augmented reality marketing through Goggles. Definitely a product to watch over the next year.

Russ Hopkinson
@rhops

Tobi.com -- one of my favorite online retailers, originally set apart from the pack with its "Chat 1-to-1 With a Stylist" feature -- recently rolled out an augmented reality (AR) dressing room experience in which shoppers can virtually "try on" items using their webcams and share snapshots with friends on Facebook for feedback.  It's only available for a selection of women's clothing right now, but their blog hints at eventual expansion.  

I've been a critic of many companies' AR offerings, which often seem to be created just to get on the AR bandwagon, but this is one example of AR adding a level of utility to the overall experience.  

Click on the "try it on!" banner on the right side of the homepage to check it out, or read more about it on their blog. Then, let us know what you think.

Which online retailers would you like to see implement something like this?

Stephen Thomas

I hate holiday shopping just as much as the next shopper, but it's inevitable. This year, I'm doing all of my holiday shopping online. There once was a time when making a purchase online felt scary and insecure, but with the increased sophistication of e-commerce and social media, shopping online has become the ideal way to shop.

With the rise of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and the popularity of product reviews on blogs, there has been an immense increase in knowledge sharing and an expanding set of online tools and services to make it easier to interpret this data. What this means for you, as a consumer, is that you can use the tools created for shopping to find the best products for the best price.

Here is a guide of online tools and tips for you to get the most out of your online holiday shopping:

1. Decide what you want to purchase, if you're not sure get gift ideas

2. Utilize user reviews to figure out if what you're buying is a quality product

3. Search for the product to find the best deal

4. Check for a coupon code for the online store that I found the best deal to make it even better

5. Purchase with a cash back card - Cash back debit/credit cards give cash back at the end of the billing period for an added after shopping bonus

Image Credit: estacey [Flickr]
Maybe you won't have time to read this entire post.

Once you christen something as a "movement," somehow it's more legitimate. It instantly becomes something that can be debated, passed along, and adopted. For me in the case of Slow Media, this was a particularly exciting addition to an already crowded Slow movement.

Most sources point to the Slow movement starting with a protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Rome in 1986, and the founding of the Slow Food organization as a result. Soon added to the club were Design, Cities, Schools, Money, Travel, and the list goes on. So when looking at all things Slow, it starts to feel like the idea is quite simply "Slow World." While the educational value and cultural shifts are already apparent, the larger the Slow concept becomes, the less it feels like an activated movement for change.

That's why I like Slow Media. The naming of these ideas consolidates a wide swath of technological, cultural, philosophical and spiritual debates into a more digestible concept that is expressly personal to a large amount of people living in the first world, and more importantly it speaks directly to the creators and purveyors of the content and channels we experience every day.

The stated goal of the Slow movement in general is "to address the issue of 'time poverty' through making connections," which for Slow Media is a perfect fit.

Slow media is largely about technology, encompassing arguments that have mostly been classified as nostalgic, such as vinyl vs. digital audio. But it's not just about mediums; it's about response time in communication, such as writing letters on paper vs. email. The speed of access to information changes the standard for knowledge, and leads to a culture that feels an obligation to expertise. We are teaching people to be shy about asking verbal questions in the age of Google. The traditional academic culture finds itself questioning its relevance. Expectations change, the basest kinds of cognition change. Social skills and the oldest of social contracts change, everything changes. Sigh.

So what's the problem? Just "roll with it," right? Most of this could be cast as a much-needed overhaul of the way we think and interact. The positive impacts of technology can be weighed against the negative, but the idea of Slow Media isn't really a global condemnation of technology, as much as it is a long overdue exploration of the human consequences. And in an era where the response seems to be that nothing can be done to change the way we communicate and ingest media, you'd assume the technology is predestined to accelerate the culture, with results that are out of our control. Transhumanists please forgive me, but there's another way.

So many of the specific human consequences of Fast Media are fairly well known, with much being written and researched in the context of social skills, mental health, global culture. And it's an ongoing debate that reaches all aspect of politics and culture from genetic ethics to prison reform. What isn't talked about as often are the "X factors" of human development, the unseen neural pathways and vestigial functions of human consciousness. The reason we don't talk about it is that much of it remains theoretical, and it's difficult to pin down a cause to an effect.

One interesting way to think about Slow Media is to ask the question "How much of what we've lost can be replaced?" how many of the systems we've developed over a 5 million year development cycle were working in concert with the world we experienced before technology? Is there a reason that some of us are finding it hard to live simple and full lives in the new framework, or is it simply a trait which leads to an inability to adapt, which some would argue sets us up to be selected out? We are not Luddites, we are not techno-terrorists. We simply want to be happy. Maybe we do need to be selected out (of the culture). But that doesn't mean we won't reproduce...

Forget big, intimidating problems of global responsibility and think of it as a personal health crisis. And then, if you will, think of how a health crisis can be monetized. Picture entire Slow communities, safe zones, sub-networks that practice the idea of Slow in general. Picture the brands that see experience through this lens. How can they use Slow Media to sell you a paradigm shift? Will your phone really always be the first thing you see in the morning, that last thing you see at night? It helps you remember, and it helps you forget? It's the thing you depend on most? Seriously? How true is this right now? More importantly, do you want it to be true?

*For an interesting take on this subject and the Western worldview, check out The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram.

Nick Sternberg

A few things (freeways, car seat and a toddler) make it tough for me to commute to work via my road bike. But I could see The Copenhagen Wheel becoming a huge success in cities where biking is already the norm.

This innovative e-bike uses your smart phone to do some pretty cool things beginning with helping prevent theft. Yeah, you can use your phone to lock and unlock this bike!

And the best part, The Copenhagen Wheel captures your energy while pedaling and braking and stores it for when you need that extra boost. Your phone is also your gear shifter. So you can downshift on those hills just as you might your regular road bike.

Your phone will also help you plan the best routes and I'm not just talking mileage.
It'll track road conditions, noise, air pollution and other environmental factors to help you gauge just how healthy your route is. Then, share this info with friends or your city in hopes that the more people who notice a pollution problem, the more likely it is to change. The project hopes that it might influence city decisions such as allocating resources, responding to conditions and implementing new policies. Plus, if more people trade their gas-driven vehicles for The Copenhagen Wheel, we just might see a natural shift in these conditions.

The project was unveiled at the United Nations Climate Conference this week, but I'd love to see it in stores here in the states.

And I agree with one colleague that they should make it in pink.

Thanks to Fang-Yu Lin for the link and Sandy Marsh for her thoughts on this as well.

Sarah Jo Sautter

Editor's Note: Congratulations to Jonathan Cohen on the birth of his daughter

In the past few years, numerous businesses have popped up offering innumerable products and services for the Internet catering to the business traveling set. As a pretty frequent business traveler, I have benefited from services like GoGo inflight wireless as well as Wi-Fi from a variety of providers inside airports. I can buy books via wireless, check my Facebook profile, send emails and even watch videos on YouTube via my iPhone. And I do, frequently!

The problem is such constant Internet connection inevitably leads to the need for electricty, and as most computer and wireless device users know, there's never enough. You might be able to access Wi-Fi on Virgin America, Delta or American (not everywhere), but you'll probably have a great challenge with a drained battery.

In fairness, Virgin offers 110V outlets - 2 per row of 3 seats - but if you're last to break out your device, you have to delicately ask to "power share". At most airports, it's often a struggle to find power (though I must give kudos to US Air at LaGuardia, which has power stations at each bank of seats); in other airports, I've seen countless travelers sitting on the ground, connected to an outlet most likely placed to power cleaning machinery. This is not particularly convenient, even if you're fortunate enough to spot a free one.

Having spent 3 days at the hospital after my daughter was born, I was struck by how such a great hospital (NYU - amazing doctors and nurses!) lacked outlets in patient recovery rooms. I have been in ICU units where the use of wireless devices are prohibited, but not in a maternity ward, where moms and dads are constantly connected via mobile phones and email devices. I was able to find an outlet next to the area which piped oxygen to patients in need. [Again, I know this is low priority to having the best in healthcare.]

There are other examples where access to power is lacking and definitely more in demand: restaurants, coffee shops, etc. where one might want to connect.

Nice observation, strategy guy. So now what?

I think that there is an as-yet unmet opportunity for individual businesses, electricity utility companies and maybe these Wi-Fi businesses to partner to develop an offering that will undoubtedly be an ever-increasing consumer need. The demand for broadband access might be unquenchable, but knowing that devices will have finite power and require an electric umbilical cord, I believe there is an amazing opportunity to develop an offering. I'd first work on business travelers whose livelihoods often depend on connectivity while on the road.

Jonathan Cohen

So I get this email in my Gmail account, from some guy saying he's looking forward to meeting me tomorrow, and that he has included some details on this brand new proprietary manufacturing process they're developing, with an attached PPT file.

Obviously, spam, with a virus in the PPT right?

In fact, I was originally going to comment on what a fine piece of spam it was, as it was addressed to me, Elliott, in the body, plus it was quite well written and plus it had all the "this is really REVOLUTIONARY" and "we have to move first on this" style content that would tempt any curious person open the attachment in spite of their misgivings.

But before deleting, I looked up the name and the URL (noting it wasn't from Hotmail etc) and lo and behold, the sender really is an accomplished entrepreneur with his own agency who has even been featured on CNN Money. Go figure.

So I sent him an email pointing out that he had the wrong Elliott Smith, and he replied almost immediately and apologized for the inconvenience.

I'm still amazed that in this day and age otherwise intelligent people would send highly confidential business materials out onto the Internet to a Gmail account. And given that nearly every business scandal seems to involve highly accomplished executives who are incriminated because of their using email to discuss sensitive issues (see: Conrad Black, the Genuity Financial guys), it makes me wonder:

What is it about email that these people don't understand?

Elliott Smith

The Digital Campaign of the Decade isn't an ad campaign - it's a self-sustaining platform - and that's what's so great about it. As a runner, and a former Nike Plus user myself, I must say, however, that there is so much more they could do with it.

1. Use it to fuel offline campaigns. Contests, more events... Bring the people, the real Nike+ users, from the online service to the print and TV: pose them as the real Nike Just Do Its in select campaigns, and show total stats (total miles run, total calories burned, total energy saved, etc) in the ads. It's authentic content that's coming in from the users, for free, without Nike having to write it. Now use it!

2. Connect to social. They were incredibly slow in adding social connectivity to Nike+, even just in the form of simple sharing to Twitter and Facebook. It's been up there now for a little while, but services like dailymile.com beat them to it.
  
3. Implement SMS notifications. many bigger running events across NA offer participants the chance to sign up for an SMS service that sends messages to up to five friends' phones when ever the runner passes an official timing spot, e.g. time for 10k, 20k, etc at marathon events. Now that Nike+ works with the iPhone, it shouldn't be hard to add this same functionality to the Nike+ app, allowing people to send running stats to their friends not just from official events but when they're jogging around the park. Friends could also reply to the messages.

4. Besides running stats, track photos, video along the course. The Nokia Sportstracker allows people to also take photos and video on the run and put them on the map (it's GPS-based). I don't see a reason why similar functionality couldn't be added to Nike+ on the iPhone, allowing runners to share photos from their runs, even though it's not GPS-based and thus the photos couldn't be automatically placed on the map.
  
5. Host offline events. The Human Race is great, but again, like with social connections, I wonder why they didn't start it sooner. Connect the online to the offline more, not just with big coordinated events, but local groups, local "activists"/ambassadors, etc.

6. Offer better hardware. One of the greatest things about the Nike+ for the average runner is its simplicity: its based on RFID and a small accelerometer. That makes it cheap to buy. But the flipside of that is that it's unreliable. The battery runs out eventually, and it can't be easily replaced by the consumer, and the stats aren't accurate. Because of the inaccuracy, I switched my Nike+ to a way more accurate GPS-based system a while ago. Nike could solve this by beginning to offer different versions of the hardware for different types of runners: the current, simple and affordable solution for more casual runners, and a more accurate, robust GPS-based solution for the more serious.

If you've used NIke+, what did you think of it? How would you like to see Nike extend this platform?

Karri Ojanen

image credit: smcgee [Flickr]

Five minutes after my daughter was born, I was running around the delivery room to grab my Canon 40D and iPhone to take pictures. A minute later, I was uploading my iPhone 3G photos to Facebook. Within five minutes, I had shared this moment - these near term "memories" - with over 600 Facebook friends, but that wasn't enough. I needed to use my Flip to take some video, which I'd upload to Flickr for my mom and dad, who live in California.

As my wife and I wheeled towards to maternity ward, I felt an impulse to capture all of these moments and reach out to my friends via email and Facebook -- not to brag, but just to share in the thrill of it all.

When I settled down to sleep that night, I took stock of my incredible day, without question the best of my life, but I wondered to myself: to what degree did I live the day to the fullest versus trying to capture it via a viewfinder? I remembered two months earlier attending my second cousin's 1st birthday. It too was a joyous, great event, but I smiled to myself as I saw all the parents scrambling to capture the perfect shots, for a single photo might have missed something. At the time, I thought they had "missed" something - the event itself and perhaps participating in it in real time, choosing to use the latest technology to be able to appreciate it later.

It could just be me believing that with my unswerving faith in progress and technology - with the endless possibility of capturing (photo, video, text, image, etc.) and sharing (via blog, Tweet, Facebook status update) - that I am capturing and sharing more than I am living and enjoying the moment.

As I watched the recent Paul McCartney DVD of his performances at CitiField, with the audience aglow in digital cameras, it became somewhat clear that I'm not alone.

Consequently, I think I'm going to start trying to "carpe diem" instead of "capture diem"... that is right after I post this blog post, so everyone can know what I'm thinking.

Jonathan Cohen

Since the OS 3.0 release for iPhone last September, the number of available mobile augmented reality (AR) apps has grown quite a bit.
 
We've talked about a few of them on threeminds throughout the year:
• Yelp's app 
• Nokia's Point and Find 
• Virtual Tennis 

AR is a new type of UI (and user experience), so bugs and features are changing rapidly -- similar to web browsing back in 1994. Remember that?

One cool piece is that Layar's AR app now supports third party 3-D objects. That means that technologists can now build in overlays. And users get new controls that allow them to select multiple layers and control the radius better -- all in a new, less-cluttered interface.
 
It will be interesting to see how these types of interfaces (Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Twitter 360, etc.) are refined and expanded in the future.

Still, there are a few things that might make these interfaces really take off.

1. An aggregator.  A service that aggregates (and filters) content from multiple providers would allow AR to take off - as a publishing platform (similar to the ease of access and standards for Google Maps).

2. Standards.  APIs that make it easy to create AR content, as well as standards for AR interfaces will make AR more of a must have app versus a novelty. A good example is the horizontal gridline seen when using the UrbanSpoon app's AR feature. Instead of AR content moving up and down in the frame as you change the angle of your mobile device (being handheld, sensitive mobile devices will translate all movement into the UI), all content snaps to that horizontal line. 

3. Accessiblity.  AR doesn't necessarily require a visual interface - applications like HearMe are audio-based A' and could work very well for visually-impaired users, as long as the menu systems to get to the AR feature are very easy to use or voice-based.  Conversely, AR content rendered visually could be very empowering to hearing-impaired users looking for information about their immediate surroundings.

What would you like to see?

Jay Bain

A few weeks ago, I noticed on the right rail of my Facebook newsfeed that two of my friends had become fans of the Greek-style yogurt Fage (pronounced 'Fa-yeh', which I think is pronounced like a street version of 'Fire' as in the Springsteen tune). It was pretty interesting, because over the past year, I've become a big consumer - well, eater - of Greek yogurt, which is really high in protein and in its low and nonfat versions, low in calories. This is not a paid endorsement, but I have to hand it to Fage, it's a pretty great food...though I often buy the Trader Joe's version at half the cost.

Nevertheless, I wondered if my enjoyment of Fage qualified me as a fan, and if so, should I become a Facebook fan. What would be the advantage? How would I benefit? Would I be able to better commune with all the other 'Fage Flies'?

I checked out the Fage fan page and saw that it had almost 37,000, not as big as many of large consumer brands, but hey, enough to fill Madison Square Garden. It appeared that about five fans posted a day, usually extolling their favorite way of eating the 'gurt', often with honey or some such. There are some recipes, a photo album and well, that's about it, considering I would probably not be following the Fi-yeh Away 2009 bus tour, which was giving away free samples.

I decided against becoming a fan, even though I eat the product at least once a day. For me, becoming a Facebook fan of a brand requires identifying with that brand's ethos - its lifestyle. I suppose Fage's ethos is one of healthy eating and living, which I subscribe to about a third of the time when I'm not eating salad slathered in blue cheese and bacon, burger and fries and washing it down with a craft IPA. If I became a fan, I suspect many of my Facebook friends who know me better might think that I'm eating out of both sides of my mouth, and that my friendship, like my fanship, is a bit dishonest and inauthentic.

Ultimately, the risk is low for a brand like Fage. At best, I could have been reminded of Fage from a respected source in my life, and that I should consider buying it. At worst, I could have called into question the legitimacy of what I perceived to not be a lifestyle brand clumsily 'bandwagoning' itself into social spaces, and been turned off.

But the whole experience has left me wondering... Has Facebook fandom really amounted to little more than a lifestyle badge? Are there any brands you follow that truly provide you with valuable content or community?

Jonathan Cohen

(drawing via designofsites.com)

Here's a discussion of page folds in Web design and user experience. And we're presenting it as it happened because we are cutting edge. Feel free to pipe in, take issue, make a point, agree, disagree or even compliment anywhere you feel like it.

--Ed.

----Original Message-----
 From: Craig Ritchie
 Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 10:55 AM
 Subject: [ee] There Is No Page Fold. http://www.thereisnopagefold.com/

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