I get bullied a lot

Occasionally amid all the nastiness on the news and internet, and all the staged buzz in mass media, something real happens that rises above the rest.

$4.19 gas, or why Apple will design your next car

$4.19 a gallon. Today, in central Connecticut. We actually turned our SUV around, pulled over, snapped this photo -- and realized, like that little corn we ignored on a foot until it struck a deep nerve, man, we have a problem.

You see, we Americans are an insular lot. Most of us couldn't name four countries in Africa if you paid us (Egypt is in Africa, true or false?), yet the news rumblings are starting to get through. Costco is rationing rice; James Kunstler predicts peak oil will end suburban sprawl; The Economist says another 100 million people will tip into absolute poverty due to food shortages this year. When the price of bread and milk and, yes, gasoline goes through the roof, we get it.

And that means design will change.

Not design in a trivial sense; not layouts or brands or women's clothing. We mean the design of how people live. Kunstler explains better than us that as oil supplies are tapped out, all the cheap habits based on petroleum will be squeezed away -- long commutes, big-box stores filled with oranges from California, even the plastics that create the keypad on the computer in front of you.

Which means people will need new designs to structure how they live. Some marketers are ahead of the curve on this. BP rebranded beautifully a few years back as "Beyond Petroleum." Honda has launched a hydrogen-powered car prototype that could be fueled from a home power station, circumventing the need for hydrogen gas stations on every city corner.

If your business isn't thinking 10 years out on the designs that people will clamor for in a world of diminished energy, you are going to miss the boat.

It all reminds us of a trip to Italy years ago. We, as Americans, couldn't believe how small the cars seemed, how elegant the shoes and phones and food; heck, ice cream had less sugar and pasta less salt. We eventually acclimated to the lean culture only to return to the States and be stunned again by the apparent bloat of American consumers -- walking around in sweat pants and sneakers, drinking from oversized coffee sippy cups. For two days it was like being at recess.

But American habits are changing. The iPhone is an elegant handheld computer. The Mini Cooper has won raves for its sporty handling. People are investing in home theaters instead of going out, learning how to cook again in remodeled kitchens. McDonald's and cinemas have responded by adding wood paneling, to say, look, we can be streamlined, too.

When gasoline hits $5 and then $6, lean will be the aesthetic of choice. The designers, like Honda, who have proven they can think ahead in new markets will be the first to capture emerging demand.

So look at new markets. Start designing lean things. Watch out for outsiders with brains who are evaluating your own industry. Because our bet is Apple will not only do music and video; soon they will be rethinking your car.

Don Imus ratings down. Don Imus ratings up.

Consumer shifts in media usage have every outlet scrambling to redefine how they are measured. Now, the measurement baloney over in print is starting to seep into radio.

Take Don Imus. Crain's NY Biz reports that the WABC-AM Imus In the Morning show has a 1.5 audience share among adults 25-54, down 17% from last year. At first glance, this is bad news for the once-Nappy morning jock, putting Imus into 18th place. Boomer & Carton, a new show on WFAN, has surged ahead to 5th place.

But among adults 35-64, Imus' share is 3.1 and up 24% over last year. And a VP for WABC's parent claims new Portable People Meters — hard-wired survey devices that replace today's current paper diary surveys and pick up inaudible signals from the radio to measure every second of listening — show Imus also beats WFAN in the A25-54 category.

So whom do you believe? Well, no one. Media planning requires forecasting, and such ratings can give you direction on which outlets to build into the plan. But the only way to measure results is to measure results; use 800 tracking numbers or unique URLs or calls to action on the radio that push the consumer to Google trackable keywords.

With all the ruckus on the radio, you need more than forecasts; you need measurement.

The Keebler cookie upsell moment

The photo above presents one of the most amazing packaging achievements in the history of marketing. It's the "Keebler cookie upsell moment."

You know. You pull the cookie tray out to get just one cookie, and then ... you can't jam the plastic tray back into the outer sheath. The clear plastic tray starts to buckle, the cookies bulge out. Yep. Forced to eat an ENTIRE row.

Which reminds us that most marketers fail to structure their own upsell moments. Every time a customer uses your product, you have an opportunity to get them to use more. We recently spoke with a gift company and suggested they send direct mail to new customers about two weeks after receiving the gift by mail, when the customer was still high on the product experience. Would everyone buy more? No. But the response rates should be double that of people who never tried the product.

So thank you, Keebler, for the inspiration. We're sure this little package moment accelerates the repurchase pattern and drives up your revenue and profits. Now will someone please stop us.

Will the web in your pocket replace your PC?

Our column for BusinessWeek on how advertisers may be squeezed by new mobile devices stumped some readers. Many commented that people just won't put up with ads on cell phones; others said mobile ads will have higher response rates; still others suggested that cell phone use will be additive to web use, so really there will be no reduction in overall ad inventory.

Shelly T said the entire column was surprisingly thin, uninteresting, and poorly thought out. Yikes!

But when we see new mobile concepts like this BenQ Siemens Black Box, where the very interface layout changes depending on the function you are using, we can't help but believe mobile devices will replace some old-school PCs.

One way to think of mobile replacing PCs is it is not an either-or proposition. Even if time spent on Google and content web sites diminishes 10% or 20% due to people spending hours on iPhones, that will create huge cascades across web business models.

All content media is supported by advertising; and advertisers invest their dollars like you invest in a portfolio of stock funds. For example, look at the current death spiral in newsprint. As readers abort print for online news, response rates from newsprint ads decline. A marketer with $1 million to spend looks at the $350,000 allocated to newsprint and thinks: Hmm. I better trim that to $250,000 next year, and invest the $100,000 remaining in my internet ads, which are pulling better responses.

Slight shifts in media performance create a migration pattern among marketers, and suddenly the cash flow of one medium is threatened. Have you ever wondered why it takes three page views to navigate on a weather site to find a five-day forecast? Because each page has 15 slots for ads, so three views equals 45 ad placements. When people use iPhones to get weather in one click, all that ad inventory -- and cash for the web site, and results for marketers -- will go away.

Mobile is coming. Get ready. That BenQ phone is looking mighty fine.

Free your mind. Forget the RFP.

It's hard to say no to RFPs. If you work in a large organization, Requests For Proposals are as standard as planning committees, timesheets and tall bosses with executive-style hair parted just so at the side. It just feels right, if you're about to invest a million dollars of budget, to use a hefty form to start the search.

Until you realize: That form is dulling your mind.

Eric Karjaluoto wrote brilliantly last fall that RFPs should die, noting they are bad for the business managers who rely on them. Why? Because if you define exactly what you want, you are not getting a new idea. The process of discovery, Eric wrote, often guides the solution.

RFPs are most distasteful when used to bid for marketing, advertising, or design services. You know: "I'd like to take 25 ads, please, and make them as cheap as possible." Wrong-o. Effective marketing planning is a bit like family therapy. You enlist an outside expert to understand the issues, explore the problems, and work jointly on solutions. You don't get good counseling, or marketing, or branding, or creative design, by ordering it like paper from the Staples catalog.

Our own agency just got an RFP today from a large government entity with a huge budget, and we have three specific ideas on media planning that we're certain would give them a 30% lift in performance. Hint: These guys aren't doing anything on the internet, and we know how to make that work.

And so ... we're not going to bid. Sorry, gov't sirs, your RFP asked for cheap advertising — lowest-cost quote wins — and our ideas on getting you results just won't fit inside your RFP box.

(Photo: Freg. Inspiration: Darryl Ohrt.)

Google to consumers: Please don't shut the window

The sky isn't falling on advertising. At least, not yet.

But as our piece today in BusinessWeek points out, there are serious challenges ahead for Google, internet advertisers, and anyone really who is trying to market in this world of changing media. The challenges come down to three:

1. Accelerated channel fragmentation. A lot has been written about this, ever since Al Ries and Jack Trout mentioned in the 1981 book Positioning that someday there might be scores of TV channels. Every forecaster has gotten it wrong; the trend has constantly moved faster than expected until Chris Anderson simply called it the Long Tail -- where millions of niche content-sharing nodes replace traditional mass media. And that makes reaching the masses with advertising very difficult.

2. Changing customer modality. Teens and young adults are morphing from passive content recipients into active creators -- writing blogs, texting on Twitter, uploading photos, socializing on Facebook. Every hour spent immersed in socialization and content sharing is time spent in a "new mode" that shuts advertisers out. This trend is important for marketers to watch, because people take their media habits with them as they age. Senior citizens are heavy TV viewers, because TV was the medium of choice in the 1960s and 1970s. The average age of video gamers is now in the low 30s, because this demo learned to love video games back in the late 1980s when they were teens. Today, 35% of all teen girls blog and 54% have posted photos online. As today's emerging generation learns to create, and not just watch, media, advertisers will face continued difficulty in getting their attention.

3. A reduction in visual inventory. Simply put, cell phone screens are smaller than PC screens -- and consumer adoption of mobile technology is about to tip big in the United States. Because tiny screens greatly reduce the "visual inventory" of ad space, tightened supply will create lower response rates for anyone who advertises online. This threatens the very nature of advertising itself, since most media has made money on the implicit bargain that we'll give you content for almost free in exchange for you putting up with interruptive ads. What happens to magazines, newspapers, TV, radio and even major web sites if the preferred mode of receiving text and video becomes sexy glass screens only 2 inches wide? What happens to Google if it can only fit 2 ads, and not 10, on a search results page? In the curving universe of supply and demand, shrinking ad space means the costs of marketing will go up.

That's the doom and gloom. Stay tuned in coming posts for steps we think advertisers should take today to get out of tomorrow's shrinking ad box.

Radiohead, we vote for this guy

To call Robert Hodgin an animation guy is a bit like calling Steve Jobs a programmer. Anyway, Robert has a new processing-animation piece as part of a video contest for Radiohead. Robert does this with Processing, an open-source programming tool that combines software with visualization. Or something. It's MIT stuff that makes beauty out of code, and code out of sound, and sound out of beauty.

To really bend your mind and see the future of animation, check out all Radiohead entries here.

What to do with that dying newspaper

Last night we were playing brain-puzzlers with the boys at the dinner table, a little game where we tell stories and everyone has to guess the answer. Stumped when our turn came up, we offered an old chestnut.

"What's black and white and read all over?"

Big pause.

"A newspaper."

Another big pause.

"Dad," one of the boys said, "newspapers are color. And we don't read them."

Hmm. In case you missed it, The New Yorker profiled the impending death of newspapers in its March 31 issue. The facts: Newspaper stocks are down 42% in the past three years. Newspapers have lost one out of four jobs in the past 18 years. The rice bowl of newspaper revenue, classified ads, is disappearing into Craigslist. The Washington Post, in one sign of desperation, has rebranded itself as an education and news company — and its teaching division Kaplan now brings in half the financial bacon.

The New Yorker summed up:

"The dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising."

For marketers, this should be an A-HA moment. The trend has been coming for a decade, but only really took off in the past four years, and many advertising clients are reporting lower responses from print ads with surprise. What happened, they ask, with a sniff of hurt in their voice? Well, what's going on is readers are bailing from smudgy newsprint as fast as you can say Huffington Post. And fewer readers mean fewer responses.

There are three solutions to making newsprint work in a declining market:

1. First, see if print is a viable vehicle for your audience and your product. Mediamark Research, a database of 26,000 U.S. consumers, their product usage, and their media consumption habits can provide forecasting on whether your target demographic reads newsprint. Selling plumbing repair to older homeowners? Great. Selling MP3 players to teenagers? Hmm. Try again.

2. Second, newsprint should be evaluated for true CPM in reaching your target — by factoring out geographic waste, and by estimating what the real circulation is that only reaches your target audience. Copies outside your zone, or free handouts in hotel rooms, don't count. And for Pete's sake, if a newspaper sales rep mentions "readership" instead of "circulation," please laugh loudly into the telephone.

3. Third, you have to measure. It's easy now to buy a block of 800 phone numbers, redirect to your main line, put a number in each ad, and get a read on the true cost per inquiry from each single component of your print campaign. If you aren't measuring every aspect of the print portfolio, you won't know which parts are working and which are not.

One thing is for certain — you don't want to have your advertising strategy stand still as the newspaper industry begins to fold.

(Photo: Alex Clark)

Advertising IQ wrap-up

Mental findings of the week:

1. Language influences thought. Students were shown a series of clay-model aliens and then asked to group them into friendly and unfriendly categories. If the students were told two types of names for the aliens, they were able to sort them much faster. The simple process of naming, the researchers found, helps people make decisions faster. The implication is brand names can guide behavior.

2. Outside outweighs inside. Too many marketers tell stories from the inside out, focused on product attributes, vs. the outside in, focused on the key customer need. Brandflakes uses Quiznos as a case study in how honesty -- about what your customers want -- is stronger messaging than focusing on your internal product parts. Note to hospitals: This is why billboards showing photos of doctors are boring.

3. The last touch didn't cause the action. Rival clans in New Guinea kill each other based on histories of their fathers' deaths. This points out that every action is precipitated by a long chain of prior influences; a good reminder for marketers that measuring cost per inquiry by media channel may be flawed logic. Customer action is the culmination of multiple prior contacts.

4. No sometimes means maybe. Copyranter, the hyperpopular sex-in-advertising blogger, shut down for good last Friday only to report back for duty after finding a way to get paid. From the buzz on blogs, you would have thought someone had threatened to turn off the internet. Next time a supplier or customer walks away, play nice, because they may soon be back.

Photo: Hologram of human brain by Mararie.

Prison rodeo smackdown

One way that social media has turned traditional communications upside down is that individual people, not media properties, have become the "brands" for news dissemination. Vincent Maling gives us a Hemingway-esque report on human rights abuses at prison rodeos:

"The bull effortlessly throws most of them over its shoulders, goring the unlucky ones in the process. In the end, it's a more direct approach that wins the day: one inmate manages to snatch the chit after leaping onto the bull's head. He's jettisoned into the air, but that's a small price to pay for the "glory" that is his victory.

The whole thing feels like an inbred, country-fried version of Spartacus. The winner of the final game even tosses his hard-earned chit up to the prison warden, who sits in a special box overlooking the whole violent spectacle alongside his wife and daughter."

When you find a good blog, such as Michelle Mart's Media Artist where Vincent guest-wrote the rodeo post, you return again and again to see what you will find. Rodeo abuse is a topic we never would have dreamed of, and perhaps never found given the "objectivity" of traditional media, without the opinions and personal news accounts of blogging.

Drinking in the stimulus response

What prior experiences were Nestea and Coke referring to in these ads?

B.F. Skinner wrote that motivation has three requirements: A preceding thing or event that will provoke a reaction; the reaction itself; and a reinforcing or punishing consequence. People's likelihood to respond is tied to a formula that includes the magnitude of the stimulus -- say, someone waves chocolate in front of your nose -- the context of the stimulus -- say, are you really hungry? -- and the rate of prior reinforcement -- say, you've eaten chocolate before and you LOVE it. Because people, like dogs, associate the stimulus with the prior pleasure they received from a similar, earlier interaction, we salivate when we smell food.

This is important for marketers, because consumers have stimuli other than your own message. You can't just build a concept by looking internally; you have to consider the exterior factors hitting your prospects as well. For example, a gasoline station with great customer service could focus ads on friendly staff, but consumers facing $4.00-a-gallon gas today just may not care. You provide service; they're worried about price. Understanding all stimuli can help you refine the message.

In advertising, messages that reinforce prior rewards and mitigate past pain are most likely to stimulate response.

Photo via New Shelton.

Take a closer look at customer value

What type of customer is your advertising attracting?

Different customers have different values. This basic thought was driven home yesterday when we met with a leading businessman, who posited that of course he was interested in sophisticated media planning to hit sales goals -- but would the campaign attract the right type of customer?

For example, imagine you needed to acquire 1,000 cameras for a large photography school. You wouldn't rush out and buy 1,000 cameras and say, great, we're hitting our numbers. Cameras have wildly different attributes and values. You would want to make certain you brought in exactly the right types of photography equipment to meet the business need.

Yet many marketers are like that, focused on simple acquisition targets, and not the composition of the customers within it. Will your new customers be profitable? Loyal? Make future purchases? Attract others? Imagine if you could choose between these two new customers for your business:

Customer A. Spends $50 in the first year, then leaves and never returns.
Customer B. Spends $300 in the first year, and $300 annually for the next 10 years, plus tells all of her friends how great your product is.

Obviously you want more Customer Bs. So your offer, messaging, media mix, and measurement need to manage your ad system to bring them aboard.

It's nice that you have an ad schedule filled with CPMs and GRPs. Are you forecasting customer value, too?

Jared Goralnick deserves to be popular

Occasionally we read something so brilliant we have to digest it twice. Jared over at Technotherapy just dissected the current ratings arm race that pits bloggers and web sites against each other. His point, to do it severe injustice, is that using social media to chase numbers -- a Top 150 Ad Blog ranking, or massive site traffic -- is the wrong objective.

Perhaps it's more important to connect with people in meaningful ways. We mean, just think of the irony; we all now have amazing tools to text thoughts, share photos, post comments, author essays, and send video ... and yet many internet users are so obsessed with fame that they spend more time trying to game the system to be perceived as popular than they do actually connecting socially with other minds.

The current ratings race also creates huge problems for marketers. It's a bit of the tragedy of the commons; if your web site isn't frantically trying to game the system with SEO content stuffing and link farming, you better believe your competitors are. This eats into the common good of quality sites, as consumers have more difficulty finding relevant content -- and your poor brand gets lost in all the clutter.

The best solution we've seen, and frankly try to practice, is to set up a blog or two related to your brand category -- but to make the content truly meaningful. Rather than tout your services, analyze trends in your industry. Provide helpful tips. Readership and interest will build more slowly, but in social media, it's not about hunting, it's about helping. Right, Jared?

Lawsuit: Google bids to take more of your ad budget

Yikes. A new lawsuit claims that Google is misleading advertisers by making its second-tier ad program, the content network, an "opt out." The suit suggests this allows Google to suck up your remaining ad budget, if not enough web searchers click on your ads.

The tricky part, according to the suit, is some advertisers don't realize Google runs two types of ad programs. The one most people recognize, Google AdWords, has paid text ads, or "sponsored links," that appear after a computer user searches for a phrase at www.google.com. But Google also runs these same text ads on a vast AdSense "content network" of web sites if they have articles with vaguely related content.

So if you sell shoes, your ad for shoes might
1. appear in front of consumers actively searching and shopping for shoes at www.google.com, or
2. appear next to a fashion article and draw a few errant clicks.

How do you now opt out of this second "content network" program? The lawsuit contends Google requires advertisers to type a zero into a certain field, rather than just leaving it blank, and if the advertiser is not hip to this requirement they're automatically enrolled in the second-tier content network program.

Look, we're sure we have this wrong. Google wouldn't obscure its advertising registration process to try to lure advertisers into a lackluster ad program just to boost revenues.

Right, Google?

Obama product placement

Steve Hall over at AdRants notes the odds are zero that three people standing behind Barack Obama during a high-profile primary concession speech would all be wearing Abercrombie & Fitch. Damn. Wish we had thought of that.

James Surowiecki and the selective slaughter of social media

We were just reading a book — you know, that handy, high-resolution content-sharing device with unlimited battery life — and found an answer to all the hyperbole today over new communications tools.

If you look at the histories of most new industries in America, from the railroads to television to personal computers to, most recently, the Internet, you'll see a similar pattern. In all these cases, the early days of the business are characterized by a profusion of alternatives, many of them dramatically different from each other in design and technology.

As time passes, the market winnows out the winners and losers, effectively choosing which technologies will flourish and which will disappear. Most of the companies fail, going bankrupt or getting acquired by other firms. At the end of the day, a few players are left standing and in control of most of the market.

That's James Surowiecki, the brilliant business commentator for The New Yorker, recounting the standardization of automobile design from the many early choices of gas and steam and electric. But he could have meant today's selection of silly social media: Badoo, Bebo, Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Flixster, Mixx, MySpace, Nexopia (see, Canada, we're paying attention!), Orkut, Plaxo, Pownce, Reddit, Twitter, Vox, Xanga and YouTube. We get a call a week from some new social site/email/video thing launching and often can't understand the basic business plan. We sent a friend an email inside Facebook tonight and thought, wow, this is as easy to use as email.

Today's minor e-revolutions boil down to text and pictures, audio and video. Eventually one or two formats will win. If you don't believe us, go into your living room and look at all the books.

(Photo by Gualtiero.)

How MySpace smacked News Corp. stock

Bad social media. Bad.

Bloomberg reports that MySpace is turning parent News Corp. into a toxic stock, after the MySpace division said it would miss revenue targets and Wall Street analysts, in technical terms, immediately threw up. Bernstein quants downgraded News Corp. price targets 13% last week, sending a shiver through Rupert Murdoch.

Why? Bloomberg blames advertisers worried about brand control. The theory goes that advertisers fret their brand may appear on MySpace next to crazed user-generated content (drunken college students, racist language, photos of cats), which creates a horrible cascade of advertisers shying away, declining revenue, and investors who avoid the stock.

But we think the real reason is social media ads don't work.

This isn't rocket science, folks. Internet advertisers track results at incredible detail -- and what really grates on advertisers is when ads fail to perform. Social media ads, such as vertical banners on Facebook, have notoriously low click-through rates -- lower than the U.S. average response on banner ads of 0.14%, and much lower than the 0.75%+ click-through rates advertisers get on ad networks and behavioral targeting. Ad responses are lower because the consumers using social media are busy chatting, typing, uploading videos, and playing games with each other. You don't respond to an ad if you're playing with your profile.

Advertisers need to watch and understand this trend because U.S. consumers are rapidly migrating to social media sites. In September 2006, 30% of U.S. internet users had created a profile on a social media page such as MySpace or Facebook. Last month, that number was up to 60%. With 24 hours in the day, every hour on social media is an hour not spent clicking on Google results or traditional banner ads.

The solution? We don't have one. We think Americans are dramatically changing their internet behavior from "hunting" to "doing," and that will put a squeeze on the entire ad industry. Watch BusinessWeek in the next few days for our take.

(Photo credit Simply Milo.)

Happy Earth Day

Cleaner form of energy. Cleaner form of Newt.

The Alliance for Climate Protection shakes up viewers with a new TV spot showing Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, side by side, asking you to do something about climate change. Sometimes an unexpected spokesperson is all it takes to grab attention.

If your readers fell in a forest, would you hear it?

WSJ.com proves that affluent readers continue to move online. In March unique visitors at the site were up 175% to 15 million, despite the fact that WSJ.com continues to charge for much of its content.

Meanwhile, traditional paper-based news magazines are tipping over. Newsweek's circulation is down 16%; Time has plummeted 19%; and U.S. News & World Report announced last week it would cut its rate base a whooping 500,000 to 1.5 million -- and print only 36 issues a year instead of the former 46.

These numbers mean that anyone advertising in traditional print may be seeing declining inquiries and rising customer acquisition costs. If you have been reluctant to explore web display advertising, it's time to start that engine. (Photo by Cicada.)

RushmoreDrive: Now a search engine for blacks

About a year ago IAC human resources chief Johnny Taylor thought to form a web business for African Americans. Like any good planner, he began with research -- and was surprised when focus groups showed the No. 1 activity of blacks online was searching for information, followed by job hunting and reading news.

His findings emerged last week in the form of RushmoreDrive.com, the first web search engine designed specifically for the black community. The site uses a unique search algorithm to combine top search results with black-specific information. Job listings and news are prominently featured, and the news section includes forums where readers can discuss events.

It's an intriguing idea -- that different demographic groups want different search results. Given the massive fragmentation of media content and niche publishing, it's actually surprising that no one has thought of this before.

40 hours, trapped in an elevator

This is the scariest video we've ever seen -- not from gore, but tension. What would you do? Apparently the trauma nearly destroyed Nicholas White's life.

It's a little case study in what happens to businesses when their processes break down, and they no longer listen. Do you have any customers out there, shouting, trapped in locked elevators? New Yorker story here.

10kthings plays manhunt

Tag, you're it.

10kthings, a strategic online branding firm, has turned modern technology into a game of manhunt in a blatant self-promotion that we just can't resist. Ryan Kuder alerts us that 10kthings is offering the guy in the photo above $100. The trick is 10kthings isn't telling anyone the man's name, and isn't searching for this guy directly -- and instead has created a social media experiment to see if bloggers posting the dude's photo all over the internet will eventually cross his path.

If the man sees the promotion, he just has to friend Dave Winget on Facebook to collect 100 bucks.

We could go on about how this message cleverly taps into the root desire of most intellectual bloggers for connectivity, mirroring our deep psychological need to be searched for ourselves, but ... hey, that's getting personal. Get details on the YouTube video here and the 10kthings site here.

A photo experiment

We just realized that we, like you, are surrounded by more wonderful photo equipment than any generation ever before in the history of humanity, yet we've done almost nothing with it. You know. Maybe we snap shots for the Facebook page, or the dogs and kids in the backyard.

So this weekend we're going to experiment. Get close to people we know. Try to capture emotion, not smiles. Wonder what will happen.

Photo via Dear-God.

Think you're funnier than Scott Adams?

Now Dilbert fans can write their own punchlines.

Scott Adams tells NYT I'm surrendering myself to the realities of the Internet and will allow fans to tweak his art with their own copy. Just go to Dilbert.com, and you can modify the last panel of Dilbert strips, email them to friends, or repost them on your web site. In a bold move, the United Media syndicate is relaxing copyright locks and even posting -- for free -- every historical Dilbert strip on the site.

Apparently Adams and the syndicate believe open access will increase Dilbert's popularity, and ultimately lead to more readers and book sales.

We're just stoked we can use Dilbert to illustrate this blog.

Good-bye Edward Lorenz, father of chaos

Ever hear the phrase, does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? That's chaos theory. That phrase was the title of a speech Edward Lorenz gave back in 1972, after he discovered that tiny changes in wind could create huge swings in the weather.

To understand the "butterfly effect," consider the path you take to work each day. Your morning drive, or walk to the train and office, probably takes you past 1,000 different decision points -- left, right, forward, back. If you take a left instead of a right, and then made every other turn the same, you'd probably end up in another state. Lorenz noticed this in 1961 when he ran computer models trying to predict weather outcomes. When he made one slight rounding error, turning the number 0.310625 into 0.311, his weather projection had a wildly different outcome.

As we all race to try to improve forecasting and measurement of ad campaigns, it's worth noting the world is pretty random. Next time your results are up, don't take full credit. And if results go down, well, it may just be a bit of chaos.

Edward Lorenz passed on April 16. He was 90.

Spirit Airlines may like your mother, too

Spirit Airlines is a Fort Lauderdale-based "ultra low cost carrier" offering plane tickets to the Caribbean for as little as $34. This should appeal to the younger demos ... especially guys who like M.I.L.F.s.

Google, au contraire

Yes, Google beat Wall Street's hopes today with a 42% surge in revenue. Some of this is driven by growth abroad; the UK Times notes that for the first time ever, overseas business garnered more revenue than U.S. operations.

But the real story may be Google has figured out how to raise its advertising prices. Here's the story of sticker shock in 3 easy steps.

1. Competition to place ads on Google is now fierce.

2. Increased competition has driven up bids, or the cost, to place ads for popular search terms.

3. Ah, and for all those obscure phrases that few of your competitors think to bid on ... these once were a bargain, but Google is now using a "quality score" evaluation of your web site to determine whether it should block you from bidding on these ads.

Hmm. Increased prices for popular ads; a way to block you from buying cheap ads. No wonder revenues are up. Dear advertiser, Google has just optimized you.

Good Sony. Bad Sony.

We're really not digging the Sony Foam City ad. We won't show it here, because it's boring, and will just summarize that there is lots of gray gooey foam floating around streets until finally the camera cuts to Sony products. Yeah.

Instead, let's rewind three years to review the sheer-genius original Sony spot by Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig, in which he bounced 250,000 tiny colored balls down the streets of San Francisco. That Sony spot won universal praise due to the incredible imagery and slow build. It feels like you're watching a child being born.

At 16 seconds, we see more than one ball bouncing. At 1:21 the growing tide strands a dog; at 1:41 a frog leaps for his life, and by 2 minutes the colors merge into a perfect metaphor for modern TV. The music by José González didn't hurt, either.

The foam ad, by comparison, gives the story away in 5 seconds, and then bores us with more foam, floating, floating, for 55 seconds more.

It's the difference between tickling and snoring. Good Sony. Bad Sony.

(Fallon London, the agency behind both spots, did pull off another nice version with stop-motion plasticine bunnies in NYC last year. Can't wait to see what they do with Gummi bears.)

The artful suspense of Gillette's kiss

Sure, it may look like sex in advertising when Gillette promotes razors by showing a curvaceous British woman in an unbuttoned blouse and exposed bra talking about how to kiss.

But look again. This is really a case study in suspense.

In an age of ADHD, where consumers quickly scan content before clicking away, Gillette's new microsite uses tension to keep viewers aboard -- and to make an enduring impression. Tension, or suspense, is the communicative act of making the reader want more. Tension is why Stephen King novels are so readable, and why those first Sony Bravia TV colored-balls ads worked (and why the new foam spots don't). In your own advertising, ask yourself -- what are we doing (beyond sex, of course) to make viewers stay tuned? What could we do to tease and entice and make our brand imprint sink in?

Young men in their 20s and 30s may hope for more to be revealed in Gillette's web tease. Stick around, guys, but only if you shave.

Barney Beagle marketing

Meet Bruce. Bruce is a gigantic dog, and we apologize for the camera shake but when you get close for a photo snap, his fangs look enormous.

Meet Evan. He looks like Bruce. It's eerie, really, how both are tall, white with dark markings, somewhat handsome, and have women who take them outside for walks.

Advertising clients and marketing directors can be like this. They often want ad media that "looks" like them, meaning if they listen to talk radio, they want ads on talk radio.

We call this the Barney Beagle theory. People pick dogs, and marketing programs, that reflect themselves. Back in 1962 the little children's book told the story of how a beagle sat in a store window and watched other dogs get taken home. Each dog was picked up by a kid who looked just like the dog. Until finally a little boy came who looked like Barney Beagle.

The trouble with this is customers are often very different from the (yes) older men in suits who run many companies. If you are a marketing director, your personal preferences can easily lead you down the wrong path. Senior citizens watch a lot of TV. Business travelers use the internet heavily and browse in-flight airline catalogs. Women with children are heavy readers of magazines. Teens spend time inside Facebook. Is your advertising schedule really reflecting your audience, or just your own biases?

When planning media, only use Evan if your customer looks like Bruce.

It's official. Google is now mapping your office plants.

We love Google Earth, a free program that lets you zoom down onto Mount Everest or the White House and see 3-D maps of the world. But Google's latest update is freaky. Now, you get photo-realistic illustrations of buildings in major cities and set the angle of sunlight just so.

Pretty soon, you'll peer inside a window and see yourself peering back out.

Downloadable here.

Teen intimacy across space

Maybe love leads technology.

As we watch mobile internet devices sweep into the United States, their adoption is led by teens, young adults, Hispanics and blacks. 60% of young adults age 18-29 use text messaging vs. only 14% of their parents. We've pondered why some groups adopt handset devices so quickly. Is it simply default, that teens and some minorities may not have access to PCs in offices so use cell phones instead? Or is there something deeper for demos outside the mainstream that makes mobile devices attractive?

Danah Boyd writes that young Palestinian women often receive cell phones from boyfriends so they can have private communications, in a society where such talk may be taboo. The girls hide the phones under clothing and charge them late at night, when parents can't see the power cords. For teens, the mobile phone is a key device for negotiating intimate relations throughout the world, she writes.

So maybe it isn't bandwidth, the gadget, or the interface. Maybe humans, especially those forming or protecting their identities, hunger to connect privately in a very public world.

Photo/self-portrait by imanifest. Pew studies on mobile technology trends here.

How Microsoft motivates its sales department

Remember the first business job you had where you put on a tie and walked into the office and felt like a total geek except you realized the entire culture you were joining, this Corporate America thing, was filled with geeks and it was OK if your shirt collar chafed and the suit pants stuck to your legs because you were making money and whatever the product was or even if the product sucked it was all kinda cool so what the hell let's high-five everybody?

Yeaaaah.

Via Rob.

Outdoor: Be direct or be nothing

We're constantly amazed at how horrible most billboards look. You know, 25 syllables, 7 fonts, 3 response mechanisms, artwork that doesn't pop. So sad, since out-of-home advertising is the second-fastest-growing media in the United States (and your commute home is not getting any shorter).

Which is why we love this Bridgestone tire ad. Crisp. Clear. Direct. You get it in a heartbeat. The ad could be written in Italian and it would still make sense.

For inspiration, visit the OAAA association case studies.

As TV ratings lie, Kimmel goes live

These new television C3 ratings are BS. Really. Let's think about this -- more people are using DVRs to record TV and skip commercials, and yet the networks have found a way to measure DVR use so the ratings go up.

Here's the story. Today about 1 in 4 U.S. households has a cool black box called a Digital Video Recorder, such as TiVo, so you can record TV programs in advance and zoom past commercials. This is the second big smack in the face for television advertising, the first being the rapid migration of TV viewers to other media, such as the internet and YouTube, for video viewing.

Fewer viewers + viewers skipping commercials = TV advertising crisis.

Obviously, no one can sell ads on TV unless you can estimate the impact. So a battle formed. Ad agencies sought to get more accurate measurement, by tracking impressions of individual spots within a commercial pod (and not the overall program rating). Television networks tried to get more vague, by measuring live impressions (when the spot actually airs) plus a 7-day window of repeat viewing for all the DVR users who "watch" the commercials in the following week.

This is where the story starts to smell bad.

A great compromise emerged called C3 ratings -- "live" ratings of the ad at the time it actually airs plus a 3-day window of later viewing. Networks would still love the "plus 7" window to count a full week of follow-up impressions. Rino Scanzoni, chief investment officer of GroupM, told Media Planner Buyer last fall, If you look at the program ratings for the five broadcast networks this season, you’re seeing 11 percent to 12 percent erosion. When you factor in live plus 7, it’s closer to 2 percent ...

Did you catch that? Ratings were down, but now magically they are back up.

Thank goodness Jimmy Kimmel has decided to try live commercial skits to keep viewers tuned in. As the baloney sandwich of new advertising metrics starts to stink, trying something new in the creative may be a good defense. Or if you really want to get crazy, just measure your sales results.

One reason Google search results are slipping

Look, we keep explaining it. There are only so many hours in the day.

(Via Herd, orginally from eMarketer.)

Make Leica green with envy

If you are a designer (and in your heart you know you are) don't miss compfight.com. It's a new search engine that sorts through the millions of photos on Flickr by topic. Be gentle with the rights management issues, folks, but man, if you seek beauty, here ye shall find.

Tx Make the Logo.

Not tonight, honey, I have an alternative social media

Michelle Marts, a gifted writer and media director out of Florida, noted recently that social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are

"embraced by teens - those that are in the identity formation stage of life. It offers them a unique opportunity to present different aspects of their personality and choose which they like the best without having to commit."

Which made us realize, there may be a reason why we're now stuck with so many social communication tools.

It's pretty obvious that Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, Outlook, Digg and YouTube all do about the same thing -- transmit text, voice or video, period. Most complain that this is driven by technology startups. As every new company tries to build traffic, chasing their own profit motive, we end up with multiple, nonsynchronized ways to present ourselves to the world. If Charles Darwin awoke from the dead, he'd laugh that we now type at each other like a million monkeys.

A few modern observers, like Charlene Li over at Forrester, suggest that eventually all these disparate tools will converge. But -- maybe fragmented, multifaceted, multimodal communication is a core aspect of human behavior. Maybe we really want different ways to talk to different people.

The brilliant social media scientist Danah Boyd noted something in this vein, when asked to consult for a university:

"Consider a call that I received from an admissions officer at a prestigious college. The admissions committee had planned to admit a young black man from a very poor urban community until they found his MySpace. They were horrified to find that his profile was full of hip-hop imagery, urban ghetto slang, and hints of gang participation. This completely contradicted the essay they had received from him about the problems with gangs in his community, and they were at a loss.

Did he lie in his application? ... I offered the admissions officer an alternative explanation. Perhaps he needed to acquiesce to the norms of the gangs while living in his neighborhood, in order to survive and make it through high school to apply to college?"

People seek different filters to reach different circles of influence. Sum it up, and our human minds are a bit like Microsoft Vista: an open operating system with many windows, many plug-ins, many commands ... that occasionally crashes into itself.

(Footnote: Spannerworks has a fantastic e-book on social media categories, if you want a refresher.)

How to sell a vibrating structure gyroscope

Segway stumbled a bit after it launched in 2001 despite the glowing predictions about how the two-wheeled self-balancing scooter would redesign entire cities. We thought the Jetsons had finally arrived, and then a few towns worried that rolling commuters might plow over small children, so banned the devices.

But Dean Kamen's idea was audacious genius, akin to inventing the wheel, so today we're digging Segway's move into the green zone -- with fat-tired versions for golfing and the new Segway Social microsite by design shop Plaid. To be honest, we were pitched this site launch by Plaid, and find that PR behavior despicable, except for (a) Plaid does genius work and (b) the site is really cool.

Yeah, yeah, the site has social media angles, like joining an X2 Roaders group to go through dirt trails in New Hampshire. But the coolest bits are the pricing models. As our economy enters a recessionary black hole, it's gonna take some motivation to get us to shell out big bucks for a discretionary roller-thingy.

Consider how these clever Segway savings models might help reframe product prices at your business:

1. A daily coffee habit estimator, which shows you how much cash you'd free up if you stopped drinking fancy caffeine.
2. A cheerful gas cost/mileage/commute device, where we learned we spend $19.58 on fuel and emit 91.33 pounds in carbon every day.

So. The pro is we now know we're environmental pigs, feel extremely guilty, and would consider buying a Segway if it could handle our 40-mile daily commute with a good heater for winter. The con is now we know we spend $1,733.75 for coffee each year -- so we can't really afford to go anywhere.

Solutions that are out of order

Today the landlord of our office building hired a door guy to install new locks on the bathrooms. The new doors work brilliantly, except for one thing. The public bathrooms didn't have locks on them before.

Now, no one in the building really knows what to do -- it's as if the English invaded and suddenly forced us all to drive on the left side of the road. Our building is secure, and in the past going to the bathroom meant knocking on the door, opening if no one was inside, and locking the door behind you. Suddenly, people have to ask for a key at the front desk. We have to worry that some stranger might use the key and lose it. Someone suggested we tie a big broken engine part to the keychain, like at gas stations, so the key won't walk off.

Anyway, landlord, thanks for the solution. Which reminds us: Next time anyone dreams up a business solution, make sure you are solving a real problem. (Photo via Cardboard Monocle.)

Competing when the economy throws cold water

Ever wonder why official statistics on inflation are so low, about 4%, while your actual cost of living seems to go up much faster each year? Harper's Magazine casts a little cold water on reality this month by exposing the fact that official U.S. government statistics on inflation and unemployment have been toyed with for years.

We thought of this this morning driving past a diesel pump in Danbury, Conn., where some poor soul had just poured $100 of fuel into her tank at $4.50 a gallon. U.S. "core inflation" stats do not include energy costs, housing, or food -- you know, the major categories that eat up most of your monthly paycheck. If your outlay for home heating oil or air conditioning or groceries jumps to $1,500 a month, it won't count in how the Feds follow inflation.

John Williams, an economist over at ShadowStats.com, watches these numbers games carefully and notes the real annual inflation rate is about 11%, if you toss in the cost of your mortgage, bread and milk. Unfortunately, there really is no way out of our math fakery, because a lot of things we consumers want -- loans, jobs, low taxes -- are tied to phony numbers. If federal stats say inflation is low, banks can lend money at lower interest rates, and your boss can hire more people because she doesn't have to boost salaries as much every year. If unemployment rates are low, the cost of labor seems cheap, thus buoying stocks on Wall Street.

Your job and 401k depend on the fact that official economic stats are an illusion.

Marketers need to take heed, now, because even with fuzzy math inflation is edging up. High energy costs will eventually impact the prices of your goods (like farmers facing reduced demand for dairy due to $4 a gallon milk). One basic strategy is to decommoditize your offering. Rather than focus on price claims, rethink how you present value.

When customers get squeezed, they will make choices based on what provides the most return for their limited purchasing resources. You can't control their resources, and you can't stop the rising tide of out-of-whack prices -- but you can increase your perceived value.

Update: Pallavi Gogoi at BusinessWeek gives scary examples of price creep in food, where American consumers spend one-seventh of their incomes. The cost of eggs is up 38% year over year. Flour +26%. Fryer chicken +23%. Cheddar cheese +27%. White bread +19%.

What story will you leave behind?

Of all the ways that people use social media — personal or promotional, cool-hunting or celebrity stalking — it strikes us that few consider to use it as narrative. This thought came to us early this morning, after we watched Into the Wild the night before and dreamed images of a beautiful American landscape in which we, like the film's protagonist, died.

Twitter, for example, is perhaps the most wonderful tool ever created for writing the novel of your own life. There is no barrier to entry, no writer's block or trip back to the home office. You're never out of paper. You can input a line from the heat of the moment. Sure, there are 142 different ways to interact with Twitter. But what story is emerging from your messages into the matrix?

A random scan of our Twitter connections shows national magazine writers complaining about work, leading bloggers flying airplanes, designers finding new font trends. This fragmented noise is intriguing, but it feels like there should be a theme emerging here, somewhere.

Which points out a fatal flaw of social media. It's immediate and personal, but like writing in the sand, the messages fade away. Don't kid yourself that your blog posts last forever on the web; no one is going to scan through your archives, and those who seek to stay on top of social media rankings write tirelessly, risking heart attacks. The pulse of the future is addictive. But wouldn't it be cool to try to do something bigger with social communications, and paint a lasting mosaic of your past?

Dear God: A peek inside the readers' souls

There's a scene in Bruce Almighty where Jim Carrey, empowered like God and thus buried in prayers, tries to forward them all through email and immediately jams up his Inbox. That reminds us of Twitter, where we really want to listen, but how many mental feeds can we really take?

Now Dear God offers a solution — a blog where readers the world over can email a prayer in to God, have it posted for all to see, and receive comments from those who wish to help (or not). It provides the emotional appeal of Twitter without the logical overload.

Dear God, my best friend killed himself on January 15th 2008 ... everything I know about my faith says he’s burning in hell right now. You wouldn’t do that to such a good guy who happened to mess up one time, would you?

— Brandon, Indiana/USA

At first this seems a bit distasteful, a Christvertising-type attempt to grab buzz at the expense of religious sincerity — but as Herd notes, once you view the site you are moved. 

Dear God ... I am so obsessed about being skinny but I can’t stop eating. Please help me to stop one day at a time. P.S. I just want to be skinny like the Olsen twins.

— Mandy Rogers, London

After thousands of years of people believing, now social media has let God in. Wonder what happens when He responds. 

Site by Cool Hunter; backstory here.

The trouble with authenticity

The trouble with authenticity is it exposes your soul.

Anyone who has started a blog pauses and stumbles initially, trying to find the right voice, because really -- inside each of us -- we are all multitudes of people. Which inner secrets are you presenting? You have a different mode when you send an intimate text message to your spouse than you do when emailing your boss. Blogs and Twitter and Facebook all create opportunities to present different faces to the world.

People are trained by society to pull filters on and off like masks, but something about the solitude-yet-connected dissonance of social media makes it very hard to maintain these illusions. The real inner being peeks out, and the best material emerges when you finally say, well, what the hell, let's take all the masks off.

The most interesting bloggers have a consistent, firm grip on their self-presentation, and they often expose things about themselves that are startlingly real. Andy, Bill, Chris, Danah, Darryl, Darwin, David, Michelle, Robert, Ryan, Seth, and whatever mad geniuses are behind the New Shelton all pull off authenticity. The worst blogs, which we won't mention, are those with agendas so focused on selling their wares that they neglect to learn the lesson from Gary, which is to give more than you take. Which is OK ... because time and again, the real givers, not takers, are the ones who rise within the social media world.

Perhaps this is ultimately the best contribution of new social media formats to society: not information, not networks, not speed, but simply the gravitational pull of our peers helping us all return to honesty.

We're still working on finding our own authenticity. So today, we changed our blog's font.

(Image courtesy Buffalo Fine Arts Academy; the painting, Half the Time, is a single uninterrupted brush stroke by James Nares that simply blows us away.)

Twitter: How deep is your love?

How many people do you need to touch?

This is the key question about Twitter. The little texting engine gives you the simplest possible on-ramp into social media, reaching as many or few people as you like, and that means you really need to decide -- what do you want out of a human network, anyway? The most brilliant minds we know can't figure out how to use it. Seth Godin avoids it entirely. Darryl Ohrt promotes tracking hundreds. Robert Scoble follows the entire planet.

None are right or wrong, but we see five simple approaches for using Twitter:

1. Personal -- some use Twitter to follow, and share news, with just 10 or 20 people. As in, "Team, I'm running late for the game."

2. Promotional -- Ryan Kuder of Yahoo fame laments that some simply game the Twitter system to spray the masses with links, hoping to attract a few "nibbles" to their sites or press releases. We've been guilty of this. "Hey, check out my great post!"

3. Celebrity hunting -- you can "follow" William Shatner and Robert Scoble and others, for a brush with bigger brains or whiter teeth. Occasionally Captain Kirk will write you back.

4. Cool-hunting -- many bloggers are using Twitter to toss the latest trends and finds from the web back and forth like footballs, with compressed TinyURL links saying, "Hey, check this out!" Closely related to No. 2 above.

5. Mass friggin' madness -- the only term we can think of to describe the people who follow 20,000 others ... which turns your cell phone into a ticker tape of human attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

So which do we choose? We want to be personal, we want to expand our networks, we want to learn from others, and we all want a bit of self-promotion. And at different times, we want different things.

Hey Twitter: how about including a volume dial?

Space junk: Time for Earth to clear out the attic

We're seeing promotions for the environment everywhere, as Al Gore's missive and childhood asthma and melting ice seem to be sinking in. The real futurists have looked to space as an exit, in case we burn out our planet (like dusty Mars) and have to move somewhere else (hey, Venus is cooling down).

But now, the European Space Agency notes the Earth is getting ringed in junk -- all those little rockets we've put up that burn and fragment and float around at millions of miles an hour. By 2112, ESA says the 6,000+ satellites we've launched in orbit since the 1950s should continue to collide with each other to create a haze of debri like the ring above. Anyone trying to get through may blow up as whizzing space metal punctures the rocket life support systems.

Whoops. Don't you hate it when you paint yourself into a corner?

(Via Gizmodo.)

Johnny Lee and the viral petri dish

It's amazing to think that one researcher, working alone in a lab, can have an idea and reach millions of people in just a few weeks. The brilliant Johnny Lee did this with his Wii video game remote hacks, in which he creates a stunning interactive whiteboard and 3-D system for less than the cost of two movie tickets and a large popcorn. Not only is Johnny brilliant, but he posts his software for free on his web site for the world to download.

It's a nice two-step case study in viral marketing, where the idea is extraordinarily catchy ("researcher creates revolution in video games with parts from RadioShack") and the distribution network amplifies it ("YouTube users go nuts, viewing original video 4.5 million times"). Social media has creating a toasty-warm petri dish for viral communications.

It's also a nice touch of humility to see Johnny trembling a bit on the TED conference stage, perhaps awestruck at the fandom he has created so fast with a little help from YouTube. The guy just gave the 2.7 million teachers needed in the United States a presentation tool they never could have afforded before. Johnny, it is we who should be trembling to accept such grace from you.

Speech tip via Boing.

(Correction: It has come to the editors' attention that petri dishes are used primarily for growing bacteria, which are very small cellular creatures, but not as small as viruses, which are sub-microscopic agents that grow and reproduce inside host cells. Thus the metaphor of this headline, "viral petri dish," makes no sense biologically, and may not be a metaphor at all but instead an aphorism, since it hints at a concise statement of scientific principle, except that the statement is false. We sincerely regret the false aphoristic metaphoric viral petri dish error.)

Nike's poor taste: Kobe Bryant leaps over speeding car

Nike attempt to go viral? Or sports celebrity not paying attention to his contract, which clearly states, "don't kill yourself"? We smell viral, but worry this may encourage young kids to try the same thing.

Update: Blogger for LA Lakers reports on-the-ground chatter that this video is pure special effects. Nice work, Nike. Hope 200 kids don't kill themselves this weekend.

Alone in the dark, with thousands breathing nearby

Social media maestro Danah Boyd posted some musings about why people in the suburbs don't talk to their neighbors. We responded on her blog late last night, and share with you with our self-critique.

[To Danah] Your observation about suburban solitude is accurate, yet I think there are two simple answers.

1. As living spaces become more crowded, humans tend to protect their privacy by *not* getting to know the neighbors encroaching on their yard. It's easier to maintain the illusion that we have control over our personal space if we ignore the 40something guy grilling on the deck next door. This is why people buy tall shrubs or put up fences, except we now fence others off in our minds.

I've seen this dynamic in my own Connecticut community (and fall victim to it myself). In four years, I've made many close friends in my town -- but all are a modest car ride away, and the neighbors next to me are people whom I speak with three times a year, usually in stumbling upon them. The neighbors are too close to be comfortable.

Lest urbanites find this amusing, think of how comfortable you are with striking up conversations with strangers on the subway. The woman sitting next to you could be a potential friend, but neither of you want to bridge that close privacy wall to find out. In fact, trying would be a breach of social etiquette.

2. The *other* possibility is that adults in suburbia connect with others primarily via phone, internet or car. Very few people walk anywhere anymore. So if the next "node" in our physical-world network is a car ride away, it is much easier to make friends at the soccer field or the church -- one car leap -- than in the house next door. In this sense, we suburbanites are connecting to others who are close by in our network. It's just that the lines within our networks skip the nuanced, below-the-radar particles of neighbors next door.

In the rulers of our lives, we either skip over people between the tick-marks, or prefer not to think that those tiny tick-marks exist. It's simply easier to connect with those at the end of a car ride, and to envision our home really isn't surrounded by thousands of other humans, breathing in the dark so close nearby.