Rebranding Playboy

When design student Alex Cornell was given the assignment to reinvigorate a dying brand, he first thought of a clothing line from his middle school years. And then a spark. Why not reboot Playboy, once the pulse of American maleness?

The joke, you see, is some people claim to read Playboy for the articles, which no one today believes ... but back in the 1960s it was true. Alex writes, "Playboy was once regarded as a sophisticated and classy magazine for the modern gentleman. It attracted all of the best writers and was a beacon of style and culture ... I imagined a Playboy comprised solely of articles, devoid of nudity (or images of any kind) — something that people would have no choice but to read."

Alex's blog post provides a brilliant narration of his thought process, at first a fox eating the classic Playboy bunny, then deemed too violent, the fox becomes an iconic replacement to bunny ears and bow tie. His most interesting analysis is how the audience moved on, awash in a world filled with laddie magazines and Internet porn ... and how some brands like Playboy must thus move themselves if they don't want to drown in a competitive tide. As Dirk Singer at London's Cow notes, will someone now please give Alex a job?

The allure of recency

With three days left in 2009, we're preparing for the rush of news accounts recalling the top stories of the decade. Which makes us wonder -- why are news and ads and gossip so much more compelling if they happened recently, rather than, say, 50 years ago?

History is history, yet humans are preconditioned to believe things that happened recently are more important. This of course is nonsense -- your position in time is random, you could just as easily be living in 10,000 B.C., well, except for your distribution in today's population spike which makes it more likely you're living near the peak of human civilization, but we digress -- but if it happened yesterday, it's big news. Here's a test: If we handed you last month's newspaper, would you want to read it? Why not?

Emotional information

Neurobiologists suggest that novelty excites the brain. It seems deep in your skull you have a "novelty center" hardwired to both your hippocampus, the part of your mind that helps you learn, and your amygdala, the area that manages emotional information. The amygdala is why you get hot or bothered when you see attractive members of the opposite sex, or when an angry driver in traffic flips you the bird. The combination of the two -- learning plus emotion -- makes us keenly attuned. Novelty spins the mind in a manner that makes us aroused.

This can lead to trouble. Psychologists note the "recency effect" often clouds our judgments, because we give more credence to events that happened most recently. Think of a gambler betting big because he just won the last few hands -- logic would decree there is no hot streak, but he thinks there is -- and you get the idea. It seems our minds have difficulty moving things to long-term memory, we recall events most clearly that are at the ends of lists because they're still floating around short term, and so what happened in the near past becomes our irrational compass for the next action we take. Worth remembering next time you feel cocky after having some good luck.

For communicators, this poses an interesting dilemma. If you seek to manipulate an audience, novelty can give them things more likely to be recalled. But chasing new-ness means you must keep providing it. It's all worth a thought as you consider how long your current ad campaign message should last, and how often the mime you're spreading within the public needs to be refreshed. Until you figure it out, enjoy the 2000s' Aughties news retrospectives. Those things happened recently, so they must be very important.

Image: ToniVC

Merry Christmas and all that

About two weeks ago we started getting holiday notes from friends and colleagues, and many shared a common theme: Photos of the actual families they love. A hip client posed on train tracks holding an ornament with his girlfriend/wife. An ad agency chief sent a beautiful image of his kids via email. We toyed with responding, and yes, have a photo of our own two boys in red jackets in the snow in front of a wreath, but somehow this image above, shot last summer, of them posing tough by an old New England prison wall seems more in keeping with the real spirit of youth. (Truth is, Christmas cards are a social virus gone bad, but we digress.)

Which makes us wonder: Why do humans hide their most personal relationships from the majority of people they see each day? We spend more time with co-workers than family; we love our families; and yet rarely do we let the two worlds entwine. The much-bandied social media has extended our Dunbar number of relationships, but it really is just outgrowth of the quasi-personal friendships we build outside bedrooms and living rooms. Twitter looks forward to new relationships; Facebook looks back to classmates of years past; but all the connections are tenuous, people whom you rarely invite inside your home. Do we fear the loss of love if we share our closest lives with others? Do we all on some level build false faces to the globe outside that don't fit inside our families? Or, perhaps, are all people really fragmented by dissociative identity disorder, with multiple external and internal personas that, like matter and antimatter, react violently if allowed to touch the antipodal other?

Don't know. But it is true that only at seasonal times of reflection do most of us let our shields down to show the world the people closest to our souls.

Alter egos

Strange, that humans have two levels of communication, and that we seem to fear sharing our clan with our professional colleagues. So to all of you who opened up a little with us, thank you. We loved the peek inside. In return, here are the Kunz brothers above, usually smiling, but apparently headed for the solemn thoughts of teendom. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, share your hearts, don't grow up too fast and all that. We'll see you again truly next year.

Newsday's pay wall crumbles

Newsday is the United States' eighth-largest newspaper, so when it set up a "pay wall" at its web site in November, media circles buzzed. Could Newsday prove that forcing people to pay to read online newspaper content is a viable business model? Could Newsday, an example of a large local paper with a lock on a region's news, use its unique editorial to build subscriptions online?

Early indications are -- nope. Quantcast data shows monthly U.S. traffic, which had hovered for years in the 1.3 to 2.5 million person range, suddenly fell off a cliff to just over 600,000 individual people. Newsday may be hamstrung by the fact its web site is incredibly confusing to navigate for nonsubscribers -- quick, click to Newsday.com and try to determine in 5 seconds how to sign up. But this failing experiment can't make print publishers happy as they reconsider making readers pay for online content. The buzz is new tablet devices may give subscriptions a boost. Be careful, publishers. The long tail of substitutes is just a click away.

Yo CMO

If your boss still don't get Twitter then show him this little initiative cooked up by John Winsor, former creative chief at Crispin Porter + Bogusky. (We think it was him. This is Twitter. Things evolve here.) Toss a comment on Twitter with the hashtag #yocmo and your thought will pop up in a stream of comments telling chief marketing officers exactly what they should do with their business.

Will CMOs listen? To the top complaints or concepts, yes. Ideas that resonate get retweeted, passed along by others, scaling until potentially tens of thousands of people are telling Netflix they want to move past DVDs to a web-streaming service that actually works. It's an instant inbox. A crowdsourced product lab. A complaint discovery database. And chances are good that if you strike a chord, the CMO in question will write you back.

Tell your Twitter-skeptical boss to pull that off with an email.

When email spam doesn't lie

Would you believe an email offering you $10,000? Um, maybe you should. Leave it to the agency Mother London to make us all feel good ... and thereby turn its annual holiday gift budget into a massive viral promotion.

Dedicated to Bill Green of Make the Logo Bigger, who we heard recently got mugged in London.

The forces driving The Economist to Facebook

Word came across the pond today that stiff-upper-lipped Economist.com plans to acquire half a million Facebook fans in the next six months. Publisher Ben Edwards told The Financial Times that making The Economist more social is "the core of our strategy." What gives?

Let's view the world of publishing competition as a play in three acts. Act 1 began 100 years ago with Michael Porter's classic five forces model. (If you haven't read Porter, the genius who coined the phrase "competitive advantage," all you need to know is five things act on any organization -- suppliers upstream, customers downstream, competitors in your space, and potential substitutes or entrants. This works in marriages, too, but we digress.)


Publishing thrived in this model nicely, with the nuance that it really served two sets of customers, the audience who watched TV or read the magazines and the advertisers who in turn chased that audience. Since advertisers fund 90% of any publishing venture (subscription fees are but a pittance), the size of the audience was paramount.

And then, in the late 1990s, the Internet and Google reared their heads ... and audiences began to move south.


This second act of the publishing era gave us the Andersonian Long Tail, or what we call "The Era of Search Substitutes": readers rushing from paid subscriptions to millions of free web sites, anything you desire found via Google.com. Because audiences were so vital, publishers gave away a portion of their wares online for free in hopes of luring readers back, opening a Pandora's box of declining print circulation and ad revenue.


And then in the past two years, audiences moved again -- to Act 3, "The Era of Social Entrants." What at first seemed online games for flirting teenagers became tools attracting millions of users, who could follow breaking news inside Twitter faster than CNN and network professionally with thousands of new contacts without the onerous ping-pong of email. The iPhone, the first portable device with easy Internet access, pushed the trend, and next year both Apple and Dell are set to release larger-screen mobile tablets that will take portable interactivity further.

Can publishers rebuild subscriptions in a new sharing world?

Once again, publishers face a threat, but there is also hope of more control ... since marquee brands can sound their own voices in social media forums. Tablets are being eyed especially closely, since they provide a narrow window for publishers to improve their content in exchange for new paying subscribers. (See this Sports Illustrated tablet demo for a sneak preview at their tempting tablet layouts.) The trick will be to move beyond gimmicks to give users some skin in the game; The Economist, for instance, will encourage commenting inside Facebook and Twitter by building a new Economist.com "reputation system," similar to the rank-scoring mechanisms of "follower counts" that make Twitter so popular.

Since social propagation can't be controlled and requires constant experimentation -- there is a Talebesque randomness to the fads that "go viral" -- The Economist is making managing its social media presence a full-time job. Major retailers are moving this way, too: Pepsi just announced it is skipping SuperBowl advertising in 2010 to instead drop $20 million on social media experiments, and Amazon.com now provides widgets helping bloggers link its online products for a cut of the sale.

The Financial Times notes "broadcasters ... are finding that mingling with the huge audiences gathering on Twitter and Facebook can be a source of traffic to rival that of search engines." Perhaps this is a wake-up call for your business, if you're still focused solely on your advertising, web site, or search presence. What are you doing to attract the rising crowds in the social entrant space?

Economist photo: Suttonhoo

2010: Year of the oh-so-sexy tablet

We wrote recently that Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner has determined the Apple tablet is coming this spring. Magazine publishers are preparing to use the new platform as a savior for their ailing subscriptions and ad revenues -- this time, by creating something radically new, editorial content and magazine glossiness plus swipes of video, web interactivity and social media.

Sports Illustrated has unveiled one swanky prototype. Here's another, by Sara Öhrval of Bonnier, publisher of Saveur and Ski Magazine. Add a webcam to the device and you could even insert yourself, perhaps creating an ego-fueled magazine-publishing-newscast in which you, iReporters, become stars. Sounds far-fetched, but who knew typing in 140 characters would be a fad, too?

The apples don't exist

This bit works on several levels. First, it's a dramatic ad pointing out New York City residents waste 270,000 pounds of food each day while others go hungry. Second, it was shot on an iPhone (backstory here). Which third, means that soon special effects will be as simple as the Lego brickfilms now being made by your 9-year-old. Which, of course, fourth, means the visual representation of reality will soon be so hard to judge that we won't know what is real and what is not. But fifth, our view of reality has always been artificial -- money itself is an elaborate fiction of ones and zeros on computer systems -- so why not view the world as we want?

The challenge for Comcast's web TV = ads

One gigantic fear within the cable industry is the migration of consumers to watching television on the web -- via services such as Hulu -- will undermine their lucrative subscription model. After all, why pay $150 a month for cable if you get shows for free online? So the obvious defense is to entangle cable subscribers to watch their cable TV on the web as well. The cable industry is hyping this with a so-called TV Everywhere movement.

Comcast is the latest cable provider rolling out a national web TV service, called Fancast XFINITY TV. The service will give free Comcast cable content on the web to any authenticated cable subscriber (at first to only subscribers of both Comcast cable and Internet service, and in about 6 months opening up to any Comcast cable users).

But the ads, dear, are heavy.

There's a tiny problem -- analysts don't know if users will accept the "full advertising load" of cable programming in an online format. Hulu.com, for instance, has compressed ads to 15-second formats and shows only 2 minutes of commercials per 30 minutes of programming vs. the 8 minutes typically shown on a TV set. With online users able to immediately click away at the first sign of boredom, Comcast and other cable giants have two huge hurdles: first, get users to their online TV portals, and second, hope the commercial load of old TV models doesn't make web users touch that dial. Nielsen has reported that consumers' "concurrent media use" spikes when spots air on traditional live television; good luck avoiding such switches online when they have a mouse in hand.

In a way, cable companies and broadcasters are to blame for this dilemma. The load of commercials has been increasing ever since Bulova ran the world's first TV spot, a 10-second ad, in 1941. An average hour of U.S. television now includes only 42 minutes of real programming, down from 51 minutes in the 1960s -- meaning that any reruns from that period must be cut by 9 minutes. Television commercials now take up twice the time they once did. If consumers rebel online, perhaps it's because commercials have gone too far.

Image: Spoon

NewsCorp stock likes its new Avatar

Wow. We've heard of hype machines, but buzz is so strong over the new James Cameron "Avatar" film that Pali Capital analyst Rich Greenfield upgraded NewsCorp stock from "sell" to "neutral." If you can get past the use of "game changer" in the clip, Greenfield's enthusiasm does make you wonder if 3-D is finally here. Sigourney Weaver has been quoted as saying "Avatar" may have the impact on 2-D film that "Wizard of Oz" did on black and white. Sure, she's an actress promoting her flick, but if live-action 3-D brings crowds back to big screens, Sigourney may be right.

Next up, 3-D in your bedroom.

The question is whether 3-D will be a sustainable competitive advantage for movie theaters, which have been nervously watching the rise of large flat-panels in consumers' basements. Television manufacturers are racing to build 3-D sets that work in your home -- JVC, Mitsubishi, Panasonic and Sony all have three-dimensional toys on deck. Like flat panels, if the sets really work, a groundswell of consumers will rush to buy in. Still, some analysts say the home 3-D technology is nowhere near the clarity of the big screen -- Shane Sturgeon, publisher of HDTV Magazine, said the home stuff gave him a headache. Programming has to catch up, and the gigantic swaths of bandwidth required for 3-D data transmission all put the home adoption curve off a few years.

For now: Sigourney, here we come.

Archeologists find Friendster

Don't think you're living amid a bubble? Well, Twitter and Facebook users, watch this.

Via Danah Boyd.

When public and private screens fail

We joked this morning on Twitter that this buzzing Windows display at JFK Airport made a cool new ad for Apple. But perhaps it's a deeper signal -- that the proliferation of new video screens means all marketers face similar risks of consumer disengagement.

To understand why, let's visit a ratings service. This past spring, Nielsen trumpeted its $3.5 million Video Consumer Mapping Study, which observed 376 U.S. consumers in 10-second intervals as they walked about their lives for two full days. The results: U.S. residents watch more than 8 hours of "screens" each day, with a full 5 hours and 9 minutes in front of live television. This would seem good news for general broadcasters ... until you look more closely:

1. Young demos were observed by Nielsen spending the majority of screen time away from televisions, with about 50% of screen viewing for adults 18-44 coming from DVR playback, web sites, email, mobile, and GPS navigation.

2. "Concurrent media use" skyrockets when ads come on traditional television, meaning viewers move their eyes away from the tube and toward cell phones or laptops during commercial breaks.

This is rough news for the entire broadcast and publishing industries, which are still tied to the 20th century model of third-party advertising driving almost all revenue. The proliferation of screen devices means consumers have more options than ever before to control what they consume, and it's getting easier to click away: both Apple and Dell may release new wireless touchscreen tablet devices in 2010. More choices mean marketers must get their message and media right, or they'll fail like a buzzing digital sign at JFK Airport.

Danah Boyd and transparent light

If you don't follow the mind of Danah Boyd, Google her and get on with it. She's the leading ethnographic researcher on social media. Here, in an excerpt from her recent dual speeches at Supernova and Le Web, she explores a gaping void in how we use social media to listen:

"The public and networked nature of the Internet creates the potential for visibility. We have the ability to see into the lives of so many people who are different than us. But only when we choose to look. So who is looking? Why are they looking? And in what context are they interpreting what they see?

"By and large, those who are looking are those who hold power over the person being observed. Parents look. Teachers look. Employers look. Governments look. Corporations look. These people are often looking to judge or manipulate. Given the powerful position they are in, those doing the looking often think that they have the right to look. The excuse is simple: "it's public." But do they have the right to judge? The right to manipulate? This, of course, is the essence of conversations about surveillance. And so we argue and argue and argue about the right to privacy in public spaces.

"But privacy is a complex topic. We used to argue for a right to privacy to justify what happens in the domestic sphere, including domestic violence. The idea that domestic violence was once acceptable is hard to imagine today, in this world, but not that long ago, the logic used to go: 'she's my wife, it's my home, I can do whatever I want to her.' We cannot use privacy to justify the right to abuse people in private. But we also can't use privacy to justify not looking when people are hurting or when they're crying out for help. We need to find a balance that allow us to have control over our information, but also be heard when we are in need of help and support.

"So I want to twist this around for a moment. When should we be looking? Not looking to judge or manipulate, but looking to learn, support, or evolve? Shouldn't we be looking for the at-risk kids who are in trouble? Shouldn't we be willing to see their stories, their pain, their hurt? So that we can help them? Shouldn't we be looking to see the world more broadly? Shouldn't we be willing to see in order to learn and transform the society we live in? This is the essence of what Jane Jacobs called 'eyes on the street'.

"It breaks my heart that there are youth out there, crying out for help. And no one is listening."

Danah's complete speech is here. Image: Gabriela Camerotti.

J.S. Bach, backward time and brand history

One of the puzzles of physics is there is no mathematical reason why time flows forward and not backward as well -- all the theories that explain the electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear forces work equally well in either direction. (All right, entropy gives time a push, but we digress.) There is a universe in which you are still a baby, so why aren't you headed back to mommy now?

Humans are myopic and we tend to focus on today and tomorrow, explaining wars and politics and the corporate obsession with quarterly results (see our debate with @swoodruff and @obilon). Marketers fall into this immediacy trap often, thinking up the latest campaign to give their product sales a lift ... without examining the context of their customers' history. U.S. automakers fell into this boat in 2009, approaching bankruptcy as it dawned on them a vast swath of Americans still doesn't want to buy their cars (trucks and SUVs, yes, but for smaller U.S. vehicles memories persist of the junky tin rigs sold in the 1970s).

If we are connected to our history, any communication must examine that context. You can't repaint a brand today without understanding what it was yesterday. All perceptions of value are connected, and sometimes they form loops -- like this beautiful riff by J.S. Bach.

Animation by Jos Leys. Via Andy Jukes at Million Monkeys.

When video goes postal: Apple shifting society

One hundred years ago the automobile transformed the world. People could drive long distances; Bonnie and Clyde held up remote banks thanks to speedy getaways on city-connecting roads; homes spread into the suburbs, long-haul trucks replaced trains, and now we have 40-mile commutes.

Could pocket video do the same thing? This thought was sparked by USPS's funny new microsite in which a letter carrier chats amiably about how to hit your Christmas or Hanukkah shipping deadlines. Not novel, but the fact a staid government agency is toying with online video shows how prolific it's become.

The Apple tablet will tip the video tide

Portable video -- the capture, sharing and watching of moving images -- is relatively new to society. Before this year, we always had to sit still. In 2009 Apple became the tipping point; it began adding videocams to tiny iPods and iPhones, and teens can now watch films on gumstick-size screens. (God forbid the action going on in college dorm rooms.) Now news emerged today that Yair Reiner, an analyst at Oppenheimer, has dug through the Apple production pipeline and found evidence the mythical Apple tablet will hit the streets in March or April of next year. Sure, Dell will launch an Android Tablet in 2010, too -- but Apple will make it cool.

This story goes beyond gadget features, although we're certain the Apple device will be sexy. Laura DiDio, top analyst at the Information Technology Industry Council, predicts the Apple tablet will have a large screen (the size of a sheet of paper), a crisper resolution than the iPhone, web access and a built-in web cam. Basically a glass pad that does everything.

So what happens to society?

1. Magazines and newspapers might be saved. They will begin to include video and interactivity, like this prototype from Sports Illustrated. The ailing publishing world will gain subscribers as it improves the quality of its content.
2. Television ratings will continue to fall, as fragmentation of viewing approaches infinity and print publishers get into the video game. We see hints of this with Nielsen recutting its panel ratings to include online video.
3. Augmented-reality views of the world may increase, like this stunning app for finding New York City subways.
4. The proliferation of two-way video could finally push down communication fees. AT&T and the like have been worried about Skype; when free international video calls are as easy as touching a pad in your pocket, consumers will lose patience for monthly $200 phone bills.
5. The convergence of the above -- falling video costs, ease of image access, and augmented visual clarity -- will finally shift society.

It's a serious thought. Most human communication is nonverbal. If we depend upon our eyes to understand the world, when we can finally get visuals from anywhere with a portable screen, our growth becomes untethered from our physical reality. Telecommuting, a logical idea that has never scaled due to the human need to lock eyes and grip hands, could finally emerge as videoconferencing approaches the clarity of reality. Remote education, now available online in various college portals, could expand university enrollments (while threatening fees). Even the institution of human love, already migrating to online flirtations in Twitter and Facebook, could blossom into far-flung relationships in which you can do everything but touch your lover.

The only real puzzle is what Apple will call the tablet device. We bet "iPad" because it's alliterative with iPod and iPhone, and Apple is too hip to do the "tablet" we expect. Too bad it isn't on sale now; we'd ask the USPS to ship us one for Christmas.

The day Twitter broke down (failure of the hive mind)

Legend has it that Dorothy Parker of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table was asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence. Without missing a beat she responded, "you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think."

Sharp wit requires fast response, and yesterday Twitter failed miserably at that task. It all began when Edward Boches, creative chief of the ad agency Mullen, suggested four of us test the limits of Twitter as a debate forum. The structure was simple: We'd wrestle with Edward, John Winsor (formerly of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, now head of Victors & Spoils) and Ben Malbon (of BBH Labs) for 24 minutes on four topics (Twitter as a connector, content-finder, marketing tool and crowdsourcing application). We were to launch at 4 p.m. Monday, mark tweets with #tw24 to track the discussion, and see who else jumped in.

Chaos reigned. Delays in input and responses caused Twitter threads to overlap, split, and suddenly five or six topics were being chased concurrently. Observers chimed in with questions and thoughts, but most often puzzled critiques. It looked like four ad guys had suddenly gone mad on Twitter. After an exhausting hour of trying to catch up with each other, we stopped and admitted we need a better tool such as Google Wave or Jordan Kretchmer's new LiveFyre.

Your missing channel: Collaborative communication

What did we learn from this failed test? Twitter, like almost every other communication tool, still is primarily a one-way messaging service similar to physical postal mail. Users, including us, tend to be egocentric. We send out our updates or links to share what we are thinking, and hope others will respond directly to us. Yes, we hope some messages will spread virally -- retweeted for a modicum of personal fame, or for a business, marketing meme dissemination -- but those are also one-way vectors out into the masses.

The problem with all of these tools is one-way transmission makes for lousy collaboration networks. Think of your own office and the crazy email streams that begin when one person asks a question, then more people answer, and suddenly you have 35 emails marked "Who Wants to Play Secret Santa at the Holiday Party" cluttering your in box. The old dynamics of one-way mail don't work for rapid consensus building. Now, think of the best collaborations you've had, perhaps over Thanksgiving dinner, where trains of thought bounce seamlessly around the table building momentum of ideas, wit, and solution. Communication at its best becomes unhinged from one individual into a form of hive mind, an evolving intelligence based on the contributions of the whole tribe. (We've argued before that artificial intelligence may not come from computers, but rather markets of humans in the aggregate that form hive minds of higher, even predictive, insight).

This is hard to do among humans, who have yet to learn to cooperate like bees, and even more difficult online, where typing and transmission and refresh rates create barriers in communication. Google has seen a market opportunity here and is pushing Google Wave as a new collaboration platform (think a constantly evolving Wikipedia-style rich-media page for any email conversation, and you get the idea). LiveFyre, the brainchild of Jordan Kretchmer of Twitter RFP fame, hopes to build yet another collaboration portal (it's still in beta, but we have high hopes).

It's ironic that in this age when we all must check voicemail, email, physical mail, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and Google chat for messaging inputs that we still crave one more way to communicate with others. But we do. The selfish, ego-at-the-center one-way vectors of messaging past won't get us to the future we need ... one where we give up some control in exchange for collaborative input from others. Sorry, Dorothy Parker. We're not with you yet.

Social media snake oil: All rattle and no bite

Back in September leading social media strategist David Armano wrote a post called "How to Spot Social Media Snake Oil." BusinessWeek picked up the angle last week by pointing out the lack of ROI results; BW author Stephen Baker went further on his blog skewering one consultant in particular. Armano responded saying it's a natural evolution no different than the e-commerce hype of the late 1990s leading to concrete web strategy today.

Fun stuff. We commented with this:

David, this is very eloquent -- but I do see a major difference. In the 1990s' web bubble, the core underlying metric was *response*. Today the metric is *buzz*. And that's why this second fad will fall with more agony, because the foundation of the hype is shakier.

The first problem with social media is buzz is further up the marketing funnel than response. If you wanted to sell dog food directly to consumers via the web in 1998, you had a shot at real revenue -- response could get you there; if you want to get people chatting about dog food on Twitter today, dollars are less likely to follow. Influencing buzz is more difficult than response, harder to measure, and has a more uncertain impact on real sales (and thus business results). This is why ROI case studies with real data are comically hard to find.

The second problem is the barrier to entry as a supposed expert is minimal. While web designers in the 1990s needed to understand complex technology, and actually produce something tangible, now anyone can jump in with a blog. The oversupply of consultants and falling demand driven by skepticism are devaluing the entire social media product, if you will.

I think these two factors are why there is so much chatter about social media snake oil, and defensiveness among the consultants who often point fingers and say "they are fakes, but not me." Certain aspects of social media strategy will stick, but frankly it's more a consumer modality change, and less a concrete business tool. In the aggregate, Facebook-fed relational data sets could be a wonderful new Experian list, but at the business level it will evolve into just another channel for customer service.

For this reason I think the coming shakeout will be harder. Hope this take doesn't burst anyone's bubble ;)

DARPA crowdsources red balloons

To mark the 40th birthday of the Web, DARPA came up with mission impossible. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. Launched in 1958 after the U.S. got scared by Sputnik, it helped fund a little thing called computer networking that led to the Internet.

So on Oct. 29 DARPA created a test to see if groups of Internet users could solve thorny puzzles. It moored 10 red weather balloons across the continental U.S. -- visible from roads, but enigmatic to anyone who didn't know why -- and offered a $40,000 prize to the first team to pinpoint all the balloons' locations. DARPA said the competition "will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems."

Sounds impossible. The United States' landmass is 9.1 million square kilometers. Solving it would require harnessing huge crowds of observers with little incentive to share information and no clear way to reach them.

Yesterday, a team from MIT found all the locations.

Via @jowyang.

Square Up: Now, credit cards on your cell phone

Brand hipster Darryl Ohrt notes Square Up, the brainchild of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is almost open for business. The device is a tiny white square that plugs into a cell phone's audio jack, and allows a business to accept credit card payments from the handset. Coffee? Or marketing consulting on the beach? Just swipe away, and suddenly your small business is untethered from the brick office.

Darryl suggests this could give any business a chance to provide Apple retail store-style experiences, with helpful people walking the aisles bringing payment options to shoppers, avoiding long lines. It also could free up the 29 million small businesses in the United States tied to retail locations or homes often out of sync with changing customer populations.

Electronic gimmick, or savior of the economy?

The device has several features that should ease adoption (cause, face it, the world resists new technology hardware formats which is why you don't own an internet refrigerator). Businesses can swipe cards, pay no set up or monthly fees, check cardholder photos for verification, and email receipts. And if a customer loses a receipt, she can visit SquareUp.com and punch in her mobile number for an instant copy.

The market potential is huge. Small businesses make up 99.7% of all firms, and half are based out of homes. About 21 million people in the U.S. work for firms with fewer than 20 employees, and it's tough getting those babies off the ground. 627,000 firms started up in 2008, of which 595,000 shut down. Expediting cash flow could be just the juice to survive.

So: Will coffee shops deliver to your doorstep on Saturday mornings? Will eBay lose resellers of antiques who instead pitch copper weathervanes from credit-enabled pickup trucks? Will police give out more speeding tickets since charging your card at the pullover will be super fast?

Don't ask us: We'll have to go sell ad campaigns on the street during lunch.

Sports Illustrated and the future of print

Is this a real demo or fake? Who cares? There will be a market for this type of video-magazine hybrid, whether or not Mashable's sneak peek is actually coming. Given the effort Sports Illustrated put into it, we bet it's here soon.

Rumors abound that Apple will soon launch a Kindle-killing newspaper-saving iTablet; while this may be good news for print, it could further erode the ratings of television and cable as consumers flock to more videos in their laps. It also creates a challenge for old-school print publishers, and your business as well, as we all have to get comfortable creating and sharing video formats. Forget PR copy or insightful white papers; you'll need to look good under bright lights.

Via Tim Otis.

Facebook takes down the walled gardens

When is more privacy less privacy? When you're using Facebook -- which tonight abolished regional networks.

Let us explain. Advertisers love social media because it gives them hope of "going viral." You know, becoming the next Razor Scooter or Subservient Chicken. A small investment, an idea takes off, and everyone passes it to everyone else for free! Trouble is, social media has never been a fully open network that allows scalable messaging. People tend to shutter themselves off in little groups, and little groups mean your message will eventually hit a wall. Facebook, for instance, has empowered such islands since its inception by walling off "networks," or regional clusters ... say a college, so that the only people who could see your photos must belong to the same college as you.

Facebook wants to make money from advertisers. Advertisers want to go viral. Network subsets prevent that from happening. Are you with us yet?

So tonight, no surprise, Mark Zuckerberg posted a note saying that all of Facebook's regional networks will be abolished. Poof. Gone. In exchange are supposed enhancements to your Facebook privacy settings so you can decide whether to share news with just friends, or friends of friends, or everyone. Sounds good. But we think Facebook just took down millions of walls, knowing full well that most people won't bother to tweak privacy settings to re-wall their messages off. Instead of making privacy opt-out, Facebook just made it opt-in ... meaning millions will now open up their updates to the world. It's a welcome move for advertisers who wish their memes to go viral, since all those barriers to passage are now removed. But let's call it what it is, people: Facebook just took the privacy walls down, hoping most people won't notice.

As Mark said in his post, "almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us." Yes, Mark, but with regional groups now gone, it no longer is.

Image: Ian Boyd