The tsunami of dread

We wrote this about a year ago. Today, watching a tsunami bear down on Hawaii, it still fits:

We came across a debate on Twitter recently where Amanda Chapel, the faux persona charged with poking fun at social media thought leaders, referred to Søren Kierkegaard's existential theories that people hide the meaninglessness of life by drowning themselves in diversions. (In case you miss the Amanda Chapel arguments, she's a mask, she's brilliant, she's caustic, and she thinks the social media craze is overblown -- which is right, of course.) So we read up on Existentialism and came to the concept of dread.

Dread. You know, that itching feeling that something bad is about to happen. Existentialists use the common experience of hiking to the edge of a cliff, seeing the abyss and getting a wave of confusion as you ponder your own ability to throw yourself off. This nasty little buzz is the human mind recognizing that nothing is really in control in your life, disaster could happen, and you might even bring it upon yourself.

Newscasters love dread; the weather forecasts are filled with it. In the days before Hurricane Ike slammed Texas, CNN, Fox News and the other broadcast outlets were salivating at the thought that cities could be decimated, Galveston drowned, ships sunk at sea. "CERTAIN DEATH!" cried the headline at CNN.com.

We're going to start searching for examples of advertisers who play this same game. It is a powerful emotion, at least as riveting as sex or death or chocolate, and when the wave of dread surges, we want to watch it come, hoping in some secret part of our souls that the worst will happen. If we see it, at least we'll be in control.

5 reasons why you're reading this

We've been laughing about modern bloggers' and tweeters' obsession with numbers in headlines (and have been guilty of it ourself). Thanks to Nate Davis for explaining why.

Network neighbors: Targeting the soul, not vinyl siding

The real value of social networks may not be advertising, or listening to sentiment, but instead in profiling customers who previously were hidden from view simply by looking at their network neighbors.

For a vivid example, visit Slate's new "News Dots." Slate has taken homophily analysis -- the concept that birds of a feather flock together -- into reporting by looking at connections between topics in the news. Its method is simple: software reviews 500 news articles from major publications daily; if a major term such as "health care" or "Obama" is mentioned at least twice, it gets a tag; the software then draws correlations between other keywords. And voilà -- a visual map of connections between the day's most urgent news stories.

Network analysis works for consumers as well -- and can be critically important to marketers who can't see inside homes of customers, because traditional demographic tagging has wild assumptions. PRIZM data, for instance, says you may be a "Beltway Boomer" if you live in the suburbs because your group of neighbors on average has certain characteristics, such as wealth, intellectual reading of pubs such as Architectural Digest, and shopping at upscale stores like Talbots -- but what if you're a former hippy now wearing hipster sneakers breaking out of the mold? What if, God forbid, you're unique?

Behind your new detailed Twitter profile

Instead of looking at your house location or credit card habits to define you (PRIZM, for instance, stuffs you into 1 of 66 segments), network analysis would parse the connections you make in your personal life -- the core logic being people tend to be drawn to other people with similar personas. The hipster breaking away from his neighbors likely shops, talks and works with other avant-garde types, even if the people just over the backyard fence are staid lawyers and doctors. So it's no mistake social networks such as Twitter are asking users to complete more personal information. It's a treasure trove for marketers, revealing what each consumer is like by the peer group she builds around herself. Studies by AT&T, for instance, have found that people who communicate with each other frequently by telephone ("telephone network neighbors") are 3x to 5x more likely to respond to the same marketing offer.

So if you work in marketing, instead of putting up a Twitter feed or silly Facebook widget, perhaps you should have your social media agency start talking to the data guys who build models for your mailing lists. You have an opportunity to move targeting beyond the house to the people who actually live inside.

Lust in the bag

Advertising observer Angela Natividad hints she wants this duffel. We responded with this:

Yes, entire libraries have been written about the psychology of consumer desire, but it's still amazing how some objects incite such lust. You can keep the bag; for me it's leather jackets or the sheet metal of certain cars. My first such memory is from about age 17, when I worked at a country inn in Vermont and saw a red Porsche in a cottage driveway. The car had fenders jutting over the wheels, glowing cherry paint, and say your Freudian-cigar-or-mother's-milk whatever I admit being struck with a sharp pain in my chest. I had a crush on a piece of steel. I have no answer as to why some objects make us want them so badly (with the irony being it is the longing we cherish, because once we buy leather coats they end up in the closet cause they're rather heavy and uncomfortable). Evolutionary psychology blames it on our need for shelter; Geoffrey Miller says we do it to signal to others. Dunno. Maybe we don't desire objects; we instead desire *desire,* because longing for that which we can't have validates the truth of the emptiness inside us.

Or, it could just be a damn fine bag.

The manification of Toyota

It's a shame Toyota is getting drawn and quartered over its stuck-pedals-or-sliding-brakes complaints because we've been admiring its new campaign for the revised Sienna minivan. Minivans, as you know, are the Great Compromise of automobile purchases, the harbinger of mid-life crises, the acknowledgement that a man has moved beyond the age of hot dating to P-whipped marriage to schlepping children with sippy cups to the local park and you better stop fighting in the back seat or no TV for a week! dialogue. You don't have to put on the red dress tonight, Roxanne, because you won't be caught dead with a guy in an egg-shaped hunk of sheet metal.

Toyota's redrawn 2010 Sienna steps away from prior feminine-hygiene-packaging allusions. Sure, it is nowhere near as manly as Ford's Flex -- which hides its vanness with a Mini-on-steroids facade and a grill fresh off a Mach 3 razorblade -- but from ads to brochures, Toyota is crowing this is a minivan that dads can drive. The Sienna's top designer allegedly loves sports cars; the SE model option includes a dropped suspension and aggressive tuning; the dashboard has a Nike-inspired swoosh inlay either in wood or some fake form of carbon fiber (the swoop is actually a psychological device to give both front-seat passengers the illusion that they own 60% of the forward visual space). And banner ads online, which retarget you aggressively if you visit Toyota.com, proclaim "Daddy Likes."

It's a clever combination of product design and ad communications to appeal to two demos at the same time, men and women -- and in a recession, both males and females in a household have to agree before shelling out $30k for a family bus. Toyota is obviously pushing the van because it is one of the few models not involved in its current massive recalls. If Toyota can put the brakes on consumers' safety concerns, sales may suddenly accelerate.

Rebooting the FCC: When gov't needs your help

When the Federal Communications Commission was founded way back in 1934 as a replacement for an earlier government radio panel, no one thought 75 years later it might spend half a billion dollars annually regulating airwaves that bring consumers radio, TV signals, computer and mobile wireless data. Alas, in 2010 the proliferation of media makes governing the electromagnetic spectrum a billion times more difficult than solving, say, how to expand healthcare to Americans.

So now the FCC has basically said screw it. Rather that impose specific suggestions, it has launched a "Rebooting the FCC" web site asking you, dear Americans, to write in with your own answers. So go ahead!

1. Should Internet providers be charged with "network neutrality" and give everyone equal access to the Internet (feels good, right?), or make heavy users like the brat next door downloading movies on your shared cable tether sucking up bandwidth pay more (um, that feels good, too...)?

2. Should big companies be allowed to continue closed standards to maintain market share (sure), or does that stop free-market competition (um, no, that sounds better)?

3. Should the FCC step in to help save ailing mainstream media (yes!), to keep dying journalists from passing away leaving us nothing but blogs, or would that be government putting its thumb on history's scale of content evolution (um, big government)?

On one hand we admire the FCC's openness in seeking feedback. On the other, it feels a bit like seeking help from a counselor who says only, "sorry you're upset, it's OK to feel that way." To ask a populous that fights over fictional death panels to make decisions about complex wireless technological enablers leading to game-theory conflicts in business seems a stretch. The FCC's site proclaims: "The starting point for this effort, of course, is the First Amendment." Great, FCC. Can't wait to hear the solutions.

Today, we're all plagiarists

There is a legend in marketing circles that those little circular pull-tab pouring spouts at the top of your orange juice carton were invented by a chemical engineer seeking to sell millions of pounds of plastic. We didn't really need a new way to pour juice, but an extra ornamentation drew attention to the package, and the plastic product, thus boosting sales.

This reminds us of plagiarism. Plagiarius was the Latin word for "kidnapping," and while the snatching of others' ideas for use as your own is still frowned upon in academia and will get you fired in journalism, our world has become awash in it as we all seek new ways to sell our personas. Blog posts that shallowly recast ideas from The New York Times or Wired; videos or music you don't own that you pass to others; even the epidemic "retweeting" on Twitter in which you pass someone else's cleverness along with your own name tagged for credit -- all could be considered forms of plagiarism. Idea kidnapping really has two components: the false assumption of authorship, definitely a no-no, and the misrepresentation of an idea as one's own. While most of us know better than to fake authorship, social media provides huge temptations to allude we helped create a concept.

Are we taking too much credit?

In blogs, for instance, there is a culture of covertly demanding "link love" for finding an idea. Say we discover a brilliant new crowdsourcing platform for customer service and mention it in this blog; we might expect others who write about it downstream to link to our blog, even though we did not write the original story or ideate the business model. Curious -- because why in the world should we get any credit for being observers of an observer of an idea, three steps removed? This also occurs in Twitter, where people who retweet a find then expect their names to be mentioned in future retweets. This is not necessarily bad -- as Danah Boyd has noted, "retweeting brings new people into a particular thread, inviting them to engage without directly addressing them" -- but the lust for mention really is a misrepresentation that you had something to do with starting the idea.

Social sharing tools allow concepts to be passed like footballs tossed for amusement among a stadium crowd. We live in an age where our masses of contacts can help us discover brilliant new ideas, jokes, threats, news or amusement. That's all cool. The only catch is we all want a little juice from the credit.

Beyond sentiment analysis

Most social media monitoring tools track mentions of your brand and then score whether the sentiment is positive or negative. But how do people position your product in their minds? What connections do they make? And how should you respond in ad messaging?

Data visualization guru Jeff Clark has created four tools that give new insights, including the Twitter StreamGraph shown above. StreamGraph shows the last 1,000 tweets about a term with the other words most closely associated with it, with waves denoting the frequency of each mention. Kleenex brand managers, for instance, obviously know their product goes with colds and noses, but the concurrent waves of "movies" and "men" might give them new ideas for ad messaging.

Scott Berinato at HBR notes that such data visualization tools are still in their infancy. Or maybe not. We have to wonder what the boys behind the Facebook curtain are doing with all our pokes and Farmville messages.

GE's 'Beautiful' idea vs. your stupid agency structure

We cried watching this ad. But before we explain why, if you don't work with people in black T-shirts you may have missed the Big Debate About Ad Agency Structure, a navel-gazing exercise that occurs every six years or so during cyclical let's-cut-marketing recessions in which advertising brass reassess how to structure their agencies.

This debate is Very Important because the future of America hinges upon the answer. Does the creative side rule? as former Adweek editor Andrew Jaffe suggests. Is media planning and measurement most important? as we might counter. Or Edward Boches' creativity tailored for social media? Or Joseph Jaffe's balance between idea "generators" and "integrators"? Or crowdsourcing? Or maybe the future doesn't need advertising agencies at all?

And just when we thought we'd figured it, along comes BBDO New York with a new foray for the GE Healthymagination campaign that took our breath away. Shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, the brilliant Mexican cinematographer behind films such as Y Tu Mamá También and Children of Men, the spot conveys in a few images something we may always remember. Sometimes, perhaps, the idea rules after all.

Backstory on the GE spots can be found here.

Sometimes it makes sense to ignore your customers

Social media gurus suggest listening to customers is everything. We say it's not.

If you pan out and look at the five real forces that drive competition, customers are only one -- and the way they feel about you at any time is often not the most important factor guiding your future decisions. Yes, user-content platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and YouTube provide marketers a chance to eavesdrop on conversations; add listening tools such as Brands Eye, Radian6, ScoutLabs, TruCast, or Umbria and you can watch the "sentiment" or vibe about your brand rise and fall like a weather report. Of course you should listen for flare-ups, and if sentiment falls suddenly and sustainably, you have a structural problem in your business that must be addressed.

But consider the things consumer sentiment could not have predicted:

1. The near-death of Detroit. As late as 2005 and 2006, Americans were still in love with SUVs and big trucks. Spiking oil prices and Wall Street-fed recessions were just about to strike, but an automotive planner of the time, if given the chance to listen to consumer needs, would have designed flashy huge new trucks. GM failed because it did what customers wanted in 2005, and its business ecosystem shifted two years later.

2. Cameras on cell phones. When these first popped up, people laughed. The New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a guy complaining he had just taken a photograph of his ear. But the version creep expanded and built the platform for today's iPhone-app-styled smartphones which do almost anything.

3. Employer-provided health insurance. David Goldhill noted last fall in The Atlantic that our modern U.S. healthcare system in which most Americans are covered by insurance from their employers was an accident of law. In 1954 Congress passed legislation making employer contributions to your health coverage tax-deductible, meaning it was cheaper for your boss to pay you in health benefits than to pay you with a wage. The incentive of a tax benefit led to today's insurance culture, which most people like ... yet no poll or "listening in" of consumers in the 1950s could have predicted this sea change in an industry.

4. Airline baggage fees. Perhaps the best current example of something consumers say they hate but love to buy is airline tickets. Supposedly add-on surcharges for blankets and baggage are despised by today's consumers. A simpleton could fire up Radian6, hear the complaints, and change the pricing strategy. Yet that would wreck an airline business -- because the reality is consumers shop for tickets using online aggregation services such as Travelocity that compare ticket price points as commodities, and choose the cheapest fares they can find for Hawaii. By leaving some costs elsewhere, an airline makes its ticket price on the web comparison sites look more attractive. If any airline removed surcharges, it would have to add perhaps $100 to each ticket price, and that uncompetitive price point on Expedia would crush its sales.

People talk, but talking isn't the same thing as what drives their action.

Yes, consumers are smart. Yes, your business should to listen to them. But raves and sighs about satisfaction today are just a small drumbeat in the competitive forces that shape your industry. Social-media monitoring is a powerful addition to your toolset, but beware any consultant who tells you that listening to your customers' whims today gives you all the answers you will need for tomorrow.

Want to connect with John Mayer? Twiangulate.

Say you dig musician John Mayer and want to chat, perhaps to find out why he said some strange things about dating in a recent Playboy interview. Good luck, of course: John's famous, you don't have his phone number, and if you try Twitter, well, you'll join a throng of 3,052,153 people who follow him -- of whom John only follows 80 back.

So ping Tom Lee instead.

Tom Lee, you see, is one of the least-well known people John Mayer follows on Twitter, and there's a good chance Tom would connect with you, respond to your tweets or even take a call. Get to know Tom, you might get to know John. Such "social graph analysis" is part of a growing trend supported by free tools such as Twiangulate and HiveMind. ReadWriteWeb has a terrific overview of the services, which can lead to freaky-cool findings. Twiangulate, for instance, allows you to compare the online networks of up to three people and then sort them by "smallest tweep," so a reporter trying to chase down Al Gore for an oil energy story could compare who he follows on Twitter vs. friends of Exxon's top brass. That common person probably has a few good stories about Al Gore and energy giants. Or you could find an unfamous person followed by both John Mayer and his ex-flame Jessica Simpson and take him out to lunch. Maybe with Jessica.

Hmm. The idea of someone being able to sift through your own network may seem Orwellian, but then, you knew information wants to be free, didn't you?

Out of context: Google's new ad retargeting

Google has launched advertising retargeting. So what does it mean?

The new ad program, like most Google innovations, is deceivingly simple. Now when you search for a term at Google.com, say "golf equipment," you'll not only see text ads for golf stuff next to your immediate Google search results, but hours later Google will continue to serve you golf-related ads when you surf over to news sites far from the Google search window.

The path of consumers responding to ads is very fragmented, and Google appears to realize it's often more than search-click-buy. While Google is best known for its AdWords "sponsored link" ads that drive billions in revenue by popping up next to search results, it also runs an AdSense program that places similar text ads on web sites based on the editorial material in the copy. AdSense is a way for web publishers to make a little money, but has always been the ugly stepchild next to AdWords, largely because contextual placement is difficult for any computer algorithm to get right. An article on "raging fires sweep through California" could attract context ads for "hot hotel deals in Los Angeles." Contextual advertising often misfires so badly that some bloggers call it madness.

But by tapping data from the user's recent searches, Google can make contextual ads far more relevant. Now, it doesn't matter as much what material is inside the article; what counts is your recent interest in a specific series of products. A cynic might say this is Google's way of admitting contextual ads don't work. Marketers may rejoice as these ads start getting better results. Either way, be careful what you search for ... because Google is watching and will remember.

Image: Gin Able

Tis the season to advertise, or maybe not

Would you launch a Valentine's Day promotion in September? Of course not. But it's an interesting strategic question if you ask your business peers "is our advertising campaign in line with the peak periods of our customers' demand?" Every product has seasonal cycles of consumer interest (pop over to Google Insights for Search for a peek at yours), yet oftentimes marketing budgets are driven by corporate requirements to hit certain sales targets each month.

It's tricky. If you have $1 million to spend on advertising over 12 months, you'd want to deploy it at the periods of heightened interest that will pull the most sales per dollar spent. But if you're running a real business, you may need to push harder in fallow periods to keep your staff or supplies moving. The only way to solve the puzzle is to build response models that compare the potential upside of pulsing advertising with high demand vs. the cost downside of a business operation sitting idle in the off months.

The real question: Is anyone at your advertising agency asking this question?

When we have telepathy, who will own your mind?

Who owns your social graph? According to Super Bowl fans, anyone can. According to Forrester Research, only your employer -- or at least your boss owns a big chunk of your personal human network.

We'll start with football. On Sunday ad shop Mullen and social-tracking service Radian6 captured up to 0.7% of all tweets with their clever BrandBowl 2010 advertising portal. The site, if you missed it, used Radian6 monitoring to rate chatter about Super Bowl ads. But beyond buzz, BrandBowl also illustrated an agency and software firm co-opting the Super Bowl social experience.

What did Mullen and R6 really do? They didn't take over the sports brand. And this wasn't about content. They borrowed someone else's audience. And if you think about it, far more than a brand or product, an audience is the most valuable thing anyone can create, because only your customers are a source of inflowing value.

Social networking has destabilized customer bases because now anyone can find a way to pull an audience to their own hub. In the past, the only way to watch a national football game was to dial in to the correct TV channel; today, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, LiveFyre, and soon Google Social Gmail create fluid hubs that carry conversations elsewhere. A smart marketer has an opportunity to build an axis that spins another brand's existing audience. Or, in financial parlance, it is now possible to steal someone else's customer stock portfolio.

Forrester says, no way

Many businesses with customer equity, such as Forrester, aren't keen about this. When the superbly talented Jeremiah Owyang left Forrester last year to move on to a consulting role, Forrester asked his replacement, Augie Ray, to shut down his prior marketing blog and only post comments related to marketing on the official Forrester sites. It's hard to peek behind Forrester's curtain but outside data shows traffic to its main web site down about 50% from summer 2009, so we understand why Forrester is building a wall. Augie appears happy to do so and has defended Forrester's policy as a basic intellectual property agreement.

According to 20th century business logic, Forrester is absolutely right. IP produced by employees, or even the client roster an employee builds while working there, should belong to Forrester. But the real question of Forrester's wall is not who owns content or IP, but who controls an audience. Augie's past blog, according to Quantcast, reached about 1,200-2,400 users per month -- not a large crowd, but likely highly influential in the marketing industry. The real risk for Forrester is Augie becomes the next go-to social media star like Jeremiah and then leaves, taking his fans with him.

So who is right? If the issue is not your product (services, methodology, thoughts, blog writing) and really your audience network, should a brand be able to own that as well? What if the audience is following your persona as the center more than the illusory corporate brand?

It's a serious issue because as networking technology improves, you, dear individual, will become the center of everything. Another Forrester ex-strategist, Charlene Li, has proposed social media will soon "become like air". Imagine Facebook in the year 2030 when a chip in your ear and webcam on your wrist allow you to post videos of your every thought to everyone in the world, and social media approaches telepathy.

Who owns your mind and its human connections then? And can you take your own brain with you when you change jobs?

It's been said open systems flourish and closed systems stagnate. Social media systems, on the other hand, simply rewrite the rules of business.

Retargeting Crazy Heart

Two days ago we clicked on a New York Times review for Crazy Heart, the Jeff Bridges film gaining huge Oscar buzz. Soon banner ads for Crazy Heart started following us everywhere. It's possible that Fox Searchlight Pictures has launched a massive online media buy, so everyone is seeing lots of banners, but far more likely we're being retargeted.

Retargeting is a simple online trick in which banner ads are served to users who are previously identified as interested in a product. You can launch them in several ways: (1) if someone visits a web site, you cookie their computer; (2) or, more interesting, if someone only sees a banner ad -- and doesn't even click on it -- the banner can still tag that user's computer so that he or she gets served additional banners elsewhere. The second approach is called "media retargeting" and is a bit surreal for the user experience; after all, you don't even have to touch the original banner ad to be tagged and chased with followup messaging. So in this case, we suspect:

- Fox Searchlight bought banners to be placed next to the online New York Times' film review.
- Fox Searchlight then included an invisible pixel in the animated banner that tagged our computer when we read the review.
- Now knowing that we have interest in the film, Fox Searchlight serves us additional banners when we enter other web sites such as Salon.com by buying into an ad network (ad inventory on a vast collection of other web sites).

Retargeting risk vs. reward

Retargeting is clever (and honestly, we've recommended retargeting for our own clients using ad networks such as Value Click and Fetchback). It essentially lowers online ad costs by 50% or more, because the cost of subsequent impressions is much less than the original expensive media buy on a top site that kicks off the sequence.

But retargeting also carries risks. If rules are not set up to limit the number of impressions given to the user, the vibe becomes one of stalking -- OMG, that product is following us everywhere! The second risk is it's still easy to chase the wrong computers. A year ago we researched nursing homes for an aging relative and began receiving ads for Viagra and wrinkle cream, and laughed 'cause we're not there yet. The third risk is for publishers, who may lose their value as online marketers learn how to "steal" their audiences for future ad impressions on other web properties; after all, why spend big bucks to advertise on a marquee site such as NYTimes.com if you can serve the same ad to the same audience later, via retargeting, on a less-expensive site?

As online media and Internet gadgets continue to fragment, we expect to see such individual targeting continue. Just be careful not to stalk customers too far; if they pick up they're being watched, they could go crazy.

Mullen tells you which Super Bowl ads work

If you want to learn if a $3 million pop on a :30 second spot while overweight men wrestle in spandex is worth it, social media can explain the reaction. Last year, for instance, Teleflora won the Super Bowl. The flower delivery service had a 14-fold lift in online mentions on Twitter after its ads ran during the big game, while chatter about many other brands that advertised went down.

This weekend, ad shop Mullen and social media monitoring service Radian6 will expose buzz to the world with a web site tracking which brands get the most chatter after their Super Bowl ads run. Mullen creative chief Edward Boches explains it wasn't easy:

"We’ve studied lists of spots and scoured the web for any information that would help – celebrities appearing in spots for example – and then created combinations of words to increase the likelihood we don’t grab anything that isn’t a comment about a commercial. In addition we’ll monitor the game throughout, modifying keywords based on the storylines in the commercials."

There are now scores of services that watch social media buzz, usually focused on quantity of chatter and "sentiment," or whether the talk skews toward love or hate. On the plus side, it's cheap consumer research; on the down, it remains to be seen if short spikes in consumer interest -- such as the waves of response in social media that typically crest and fade within two weeks -- really influence sales. Ken Burbary, digital strategist at Ernst & Young, has compiled a comprehensive list here, and many of the tools are free. It may be worth seeing how your brand scores among the public, too.

What are brands?

From our comment inspired by Jim Mitchem at Obsessed with Conformity.

Like fish that can't feel water, it's hard for consumers to notice brands. But they are everywhere.

America is a brand. The Tea Party. Fox News. The Yankees. Your religion. Your family. Chris Brogan and David Armano. Hell, the very concept of "social media," really bullshit -- it's just another type of media, people -- is a "brand" with somehow special meaning.

Brands are artificial constructs we use to understand a complex world. Our environment is too nuanced for us to spend an hour judging the logical merits, pros and cons of every decision in our minds, so we resort to archetypes to quickly form, file away, and recall our opinions. Saber-toothed tiger, bad, ooga, run. Hot member of opposite sex in leopard skin, good, ooga, mate. So we rebel at "death panels" supposedly lurking in complex health bills, too long to read or understand, because someone has branded them for us.

Branding is a mental shortcut we need to survive because there is too much information to process. Branding exists because we need simple compartments to file our judgments in.

Branding will always be with us because the world is too complex to manage without it. Technology won't change it. And for those in social media who believe their fad is the new thing that makes branding obsolete, why, they're just promoting their own brand.

Image: Gradient Photo

The end of typing

IQ test: Can you connect these dots to predict the future of computing?

1. Apple has launched its iPad.
2. Google has responded with its own tablet design (shown above).
3. Apple's iPad includes a hidden frame that has room for a future webcam, useful for video broadcasting.
4. Pew says teens and young adults are doing less writing online and more wireless with graphics and video.
5. The hottest communication trends are Twitter (140 character updates) and Facebook.
6. Mary Meeker, the Wall Street analyst who foresaw the impact of the Internet on business in the 1990s, says soon we'll live in world of 10 times as many Internet devices -- and most won't be computers.

Pencils down.

Typing is dying. The QWERTY keyboard you pound emails at is really an anachronism, an interface designed to slow your keystrokes so the mechanical levers of a typewriter (which no longer exist) won't jam. Typing has never been very popular; the vast majority of the world does not have college degrees, works outdoors and is more mobile than sedentary, and has no need to write missives back and forth because they know how to talk to each other. Yes, the Internet has created renewed interest in reading, but only a tiny fraction of the educated public creates such materials, and video is now emergent -- YouTube video searches, for instance, now account for one-fourth of searches in Google. The history of humanity is tens of thousands of years of communicating via face time, with verbal grunts and waving hand gestures which explain why today plane tickets to meet far-flung business partners in person are still required.

So if Apple and Google are investing their billions in a future of computers that is sans keyboard -- smaller, more mobile devices that are merely glass screens with user interfaces that morph based on how and what you look at -- then the keyboard, even the shiny aluminum one on a beautiful Apple MacBook, may soon become irrelevant. Computers should be simple after all, because they are frames designed to get information quickly, and the newest models require only touching a picture to get what you want. When every appliance hooks into the Internet with a touch screen and we can pull or push data with an intuitive tap, control-alt-delete will be remembered fondly for what it was: an archaic system that allowed programmers and business bean counters to toy with devices too complex to be used by the real masses.

(Google demo via ad guru Angela Natividad. Inspired by Bob Knorpp, who taught us in the past year that voices can be more provoking than written words.)

What social media gurus miss: Forecasting

MIT anthropologist Grant McCracken has published a book arguing firms need Chief Culture Officers. His view is social media tools alone won't cut it; society is now changing so fast that companies that don't track and predict trends risk disaster. Case study: Levi Strauss missed a billion dollars in the mid-1990s when it failed to see the urban baggy-pants craze coming.

What we like about this is Grant talks about watching society, not technology. Companies enarmored with Facebook and Twitter might rethink their approach: Are they focused on gimmicky channels that build revenue for their ad agencies, or are they deploying strategies to see what people will be talking about tomorrow?

It's the future, not today, stupid.

Social media gurus always talk about listening, but rarely about trend forecasting. Which is silly, when you consider most corporations need a year or two to put any new products or services into the pipeline. Most social media buzz metrics track conversations of the moment, but the horizon is woefully short -- even when messages go viral, the downside of the bell curve of interest is just as sharp as the spike upward. Here's a look at this summer's balloon boy interest within Twitter, a meme that shook the nation and was just as quickly forgotten. If you don't really listen to society and then build coherent forecasts, your 2010 social media tools may be akin to a bad 1999 web site: all digitized up and nowhere to go.

(Via Charlie Quirk.)

Now, radio ads that mirror what you want

Broadcast giant Clear Channel has launched "contextual advertising," a method of placing radio spots against news, songs, or other ads that might spur interest in a product. GEICO, for instance, tested the service by running its :15 second spots for vehicle insurance directly after radio ads for other vehicles -- the idea being that listeners who perk up at the promo for the new Ford Flex might then be more attuned to an ad for car insurance. If people only listen to what they want, why not place ads that mirror that content?

Contextual advertising has a range of performance. With Google pay-per-click Adwords, placement next to search results works brilliantly. With Google Adsense, which chases themes in written content, not so much, and online banners are often so problematic that ad blogger Bill Green has a list of placement offenses he calls contextual madness. We also wonder how chasing microcosms of content might limit inventory, and thus lead to radio schedules without appropriate frequency (repeat impressions) to build awareness. Still -- ad relevance tied to content. Good for you, radio; why should the Internet have all the fun?

Image: Bitzcelt

Why Apple doesn't listen

Web strategist Thierry de Baillon suggests Apple's continued ability to surprise the world with simple products -- often without the complex add-ons that tech enthusiasts hunger for -- is because it focuses on what people do and not what they want. We responded with this:

In terms of strategy, Apple reminds me of Michael Treacy’s “Discipline of Market Leaders,” in which Treacy proposed there are three basic focal points for business: product innovation, customer service, or operations/low cost. Companies in the same industry can take different positions; IBM, for instance, in the 1970s was customer service-focused, trying to be all things to all people (Dell has taken the customer position since the 1990s with customizable computers and products aligned with consumer segmentation). Apple is all about product innovation — and to hell with focus groups. This is not right or wrong, smart or stupid; it’s merely a focused company strategy that helps Apple lead in a certain area.

Apple leads because it really is not a technology, software or computer company — it’s a design company. It makes tech products pure enough that people lust for them, and for that Apple can charge a premium. A lot of people whined that the tablet missed features (webcams etc.) and cost too much. Of course. Apple will gradually reduce the price while adding feature upgrades as it pushes that device into the broader market masses.

For Apple, innovative design wins. It’s not for everybody, but it certainly is a focused market position.