Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Only 3% of the population defines themselves as classical music lovers, for the rest we are either tolerant or just "don't get it". While some people concentrate their energies on trying to raise that 3% to a 4%, Benjamin Zander believes beyond any reason of a doubt that EVERYONE is a classical music lover, they just don't know it yet.

Zander boldly commits to not playing his musical piece until everyone in the audience realizes their love for classical music. He uses pure emotion and storytelling, as he breaks down a piece bit by bit. He finds commonalities with the audience so that he is connecting on their level. He gets them interested and engaged. And only then does he play the piece, and everyone in the audience "gets it".

Zander's statistic about classical music reminded me of another statistic I saw recently... 58% of people have no idea what social networking is (eMarketer). But I don't really believe that. What I believe is that everyone wants to use social media to enrich their lives and strengthen their relationships, they just don't know how to get started. What I believe is that every company wants to connect with their customers and build a loyal community, they just don't know where to begin.

I used to be content with my peer-appointed title of "social media expert". People will ask you questions when they need to and it makes you feel smart and helpful. But as my love for social media grew and grew, that was when I realized it wasn't enough to just be an expert and wait to be asked... I wanted to be a Social Media Evangelist. I spread my dreams for a socially connected world whenever I get the opportunity. I'm no longer telling people what to do, I'm telling them what is possible...

But maybe, that's not enough either. I want to be like Benjamin Zander. I want to be a conductor. A conductor's power is to make other people powerful, and to awaken them to the possibilities. It's showing, not telling. It's leading, not preaching.

So from now on, I want to be Marta Strickland, Social Media Conductor.

What are you a Conductor of?

(thanks to Jim Bachalo for the link)

Scott E. Fahlman, a notable computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, is credited with creating the first emoticons 26 years ago today: the :-) and the :-( symbols.

Frustrated with the misinterpretation of tone and intention on online bulletin boards (sound familiar? It's still a headache today), he attempted to combat that by getting people to put the smiley emoticon after a post intended to be lighthearted, and the frownie emoticon after content intended to be serious (although today we view it as a mark of displeasure, frustration, or anger.)

That was September 19, 1982. Fahlman's original post was lost for a couple of decades and believed gone for good. In 2001-2002 Mike Jones of Microsoft sponsored a more serious "archeological dig" through the backup tapes soliciting the help of Jeff Baird and the CMU CS facilities staff to find the http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm">original thread.

Disputes still arise as to whether or not he is the true inventor. However, I think that in 1982 the whole yellow smiley face phenomenon was in full swing and is likely an obvious influence.

Emoticons Today...

We still use these emoticons--and infinite variations--today whether you like them or not. In his account, Fahlman introduces thought-provokers such as have Microsoft and AOL ruined their whimsy by intercepting the ASCII and turning them into pictures? Does using them spoil the joke? Do they degrade our written word by allowing us to rely on them to convey our messages rather than using prose? It's up to you to decide, but I'm a writer and I use them--in moderation. ;-)

Heather Murray

The ideas are out there... waiting to be harnessed. We just have to make the time to brainstorm, to talk, to have dinner, and in the process, to capture all those ideas we generate but usually disregard for whatever reason.

This article made me think about how I always come up with various random ideas, and a year or so later, someone else comes up with the same idea and does something with it (think about it...how many people wished for seat warmers in their cars before someone just sat down and decided to make it happen?!). Some ideas are just sitting there waiting for someone to call them out and make them real... at least, that's what Malcolm Gladwell is implying in his latest article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell

How many dinosaur bones are we all walking over without seeing them?

Tracy Cote

Mike Brooks just e-mailed the office to share a fascinating site:

My buddy's wife is in labor right now and he's blogging about it. I don't know what else to say other than this is amazing and engaging content. Check it out, the baby hasn't come yet. He even just did a post about the site's statistics.

Anyone can check out the Dredge Family birth in real-time at http://www.dredgefamily.com/wp/.

But the Dredge Family isn't the only one doing this. It seems to be a growing meme this month, as live births have been broadcast via uStream.TV and Twitter.

Will the old-fashion cigar give way to the superpoke?

Marta Strickland

As some readers of this blog know, I am stepping down as Editor-in-Chief of ThreeMinds.  Today is my last day at Organic.

It's been a great five year run.  In many ways my career here took off as I became more involved with ThreeMinds.  There are amazing synergies between coalescing my random thoughts into cogent posts and bringing a strong point of view on digital marketing to clients.

Marta Strickland, a senior strategist in our Detroit office, will be stepping in as the new Editor.  In addition to being a prolific author on this blog and Recently Consumed, Marta is a forward-thinking technologist with a keen interest in social media and the semantic web.  With your help, she and the rest of the team will taking ThreeMinds to the next level.

I want to thank everyone for their readership and their participation in ThreeMinds. It's been a very rewarding process for me and I have learned a great deal from all of you.  I first worked here as an MBA intern more than eight years ago, and Organic and ThreeMinds will always have a place in my heart.

The next step for me is to work on the broader challenge of experience design.  I will be building the Strategy practice at Method, a design studio that focuses on bringing innovative products and services to market.  You'll be seeing more of my thoughts on design, digital marketing, and the customer experience there.

Misha Cornes

 
I have been looking forward to the release of Rob Walker's new book for months.  Walker writes the Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine and is one of the few journalists to write critically about popular culture and consumer trends rather than simply chronicling the ad industry as a business. And unlike your typical marketing guru, he isn't hawking consulting services, his company, or his other books.

The result is a refreshingly jargon-free analysis of the interplay between brands and consumers.  Walker has an omnivorous intellect and he moves effortlessly through a range of topics including the history of advertising, world of mouth, the rise of hip-hop, and role of academic psychology in shaping marketing.

His central thesis is that all the talk about a new era of consumer control is wrong.  While the orthodoxy is that consumers are tuning out advertising and demanding authenticity, it's equally true that brands have more allure for consumers than ever.  And that allure doesn't just mean active consumer collaboration - reworking and remixing a brand.  He gives numerous examples of consumers adopting products whole as the key expression of their identity.

With Timberland boots, for example, you had a new segment of the population- inner city African Americans- adopting a no-nonsense 50's-era shoe originally designed for rural, blue collar New Englanders.  The hip-hop segment ultimately became more profitable and more influential to Timberland's future, essentially forcing this conservative company to update its style to include, for example, a florescent pink model.  On the flip-side, you have brands like American Apparel or Pabst Blue Ribbon that both represent and define a lifestyle for their audience.

Walker calls this blurring of the relationship between brand and brand consumer "murketing" - which began as a joke at the expense of buzzword-loving marketers but seems to have stuck (Walker's site is www.murketing.com)

If I have any complaints about Buying In, it's that it lacks a central framework that ties the argument together.  No matter what the (fascinating) anecdote, the conclusion is little more than  "yep, that's murketing too".   Maybe this is the downside to Walker's chops as a magazine journalist.  It felt like each chapter makes a very compelling essay, but altogether it falls just short of being a seminal book.  Recommended reading.

Misha Cornes

Information geeks and semantic web watchers have been tracking the progress of Twine since the fall of last year, and I just received an invitation to their Beta test.

It's hard to define what Twine does without diving deep into Web 3.0 jargon, but here goes.  It's a knowledge-sharing platform that attempts to organize streams of information found on the web- pages, images, emails, videos, etc. - into clusters that the company calls Twines.  Unlike a wiki or a shared extranet like BaseCamp, Twine uses the intelligence hidden in way the content is tagged to infer relationships between different pieces of information, similar to del.icio.us. Users who upload information can also define relationships between different pieces of data themselves.

Twine also weaves together a number of Web 2.0 capabilities into one package: 
Like social networks, you can hobnob with other people who share your interests
Like newgroups, you can subscribe to feeds on topics that interest you that are being assembled by the community.
Like an improved StumbleUpon, Twine will suggest different articles and pieces of content based on your information streams and your relationships with others.

It's always tricky to review a new service after only a couple of days of use.  It's a very ambitious undertaking that has the Web geek community buzzing (see reviews from ReadWriteWeb and WebWare).  But as it's currently organized, Twine really does make the Semantic Web concept seem...dull.  Like Wikipedia, the success of the project is entirely dependent on a large, active user base and the power of the network effect.  And that user base currently consists of uber-geeks.  No surprise that #1 topic on this Semantic Web is...the Semantic Web. 

I would love to see Twine remade (ie remarketed) for a more mainstream audience.  Think what plugged-in tween girls could do with a product like this. Forget a Zac Efron fansite- this could be the hub for all things High School Musical, all things Hannah Montana, all things Gossip Girl.  I think acquiring a mass audience is the only way that this product will come to cover the entire Web, which must be the ultimate promise of a Semantic Web application.

http://www.twine.com 

Misha Cornes

Webster's just added a slew of new words to the dictionary. For fellow lyric-maker-uppers, be sure to check out "mondegreen", if you haven't heard of it before.

It seems someone can just make up a word, work it into everyday language and wait a few years. Eventually, it may end up in the  big book of words.

What words will you coin?

I'm working on my personal favorites:
1. Confuser - a confused user of the internet
2. Modifly - modify on the fly; make a change during an existing process or operation

...both of which were born from usability testing :)

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080707/new_dictionary_words.html

Sandy Marsh

As we all know in interactive, data is everywhere - everything we do is or can be tracked. The question is are we looking in the right place.

This is a very interesting visualization of information from a somewhat different angle.  This organic visualization, "code swarm" by Michael Ogawa from UC Davis is history of commits to a software project (a commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository). However, instead of focusing on the actual code, the focus is on the relationships between developers and their code.

Other than this being a great way to look at a universe of information based on relationships, time and events, I think there could be a real opportunity for us as digital marketers to use models like this from an analytics perspective to find new ways of targeting messages to customers.

Imagine doing a similar exercise for a client. Would there be patterns that we have not seen before and how could we leverage those patterns from a marketing and experience perspective?

See more videos at

http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/

Baron Conway

A little-noticed story from Anheuser-Busch last week given the focus on the presumptive InBev takeover: last week A-B announced that it will stop selling alcoholic energy drinks. 

Relenting to pressure from anti-underage drinking activists and state attorneys general, they are pulling the plug on the tiny Bud Extra and Tilt brands (shortly after I got married, I used to see this ad every day on my commute).  Several brewers are accused of designing and marketing "alcopops" specifically for the under-21 market, and ultimately it seems A-B has decided that the controversy was not worth the minimal gains.

While it will have little effect on A-B's business, it's a big deal for category leader Miller and their Sparks brand.  I've tried Sparks and last year I reviewed Sparks.com, which seemed to give an insight into their product strategy:

"Navigating the site definitely feels like stepping into the mind of a teenage boy - air guitar contests, skateboards, doodles - but in a bold move, no shots of attractive girls.  Is it specifically targeted at underage drinkers?"

If the Center for Science in the Public Interest and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's case against SAB Miller goes forward, we will soon have our answer.

Misha Cornes