Apple escaped 'lock-in.' Can you?

Lost in all the buzz about the iPad saving publishing is the fact the tablet thing works as a real computer, too. Fast-forward the video above to 1:40 and you'll see Apple SVP Phil Schiller demonstrate how to edit spreadsheets on a glass screen with finger motions. Our "ah-ha" came when we noticed that the iPad's virtual keyboard changes based on user modality (3:04). If you're working with formulas or numbers or dollars or text, the input fields adjust. The obvious question is whether Apple's $500 iPad will cannibalize its $2,000 computer sales, or the sales of the broader PC industry whose Excel, PowerPoint and Word programs will run inside the iPad's iWork suite.

Avoiding path dependence

But the deeper issue is whether Apple's emergent design will break the lock-in endemic in laptops and PCs. Lock-in has several definitions: In technology, it's the dynamic where one design is followed by so many subsequent designs dependent upon it that it becomes nearly impossible to change the original arrangement. Examples include U.S. automobiles with steering wheels placed on the left side, keyboards with a QWERTY layout, and Microsoft Word with "Toolbars" mysteriously nestled in the "View" drop-down menu instead of the "Tools" drop-down list where you'd expect it -- all designed systems that are now nearly impossible to change because traffic patterns, hardware designs and millions of documents are locked in to the original concepts. But lock-in can also refer to mindsets, such as the escalating commitment of decision-makers to a bad course of action. Conservatives could point to a jumbled U.S. healthcare reform law; liberals could point to U.S. leaping into war in Iraq -- all are outcomes of processes involving path dependence, where the options for decisions at any point grow more limited based on the commitments of the past.

You know. It's too late to stop now.

Mitch Joel suggests that smartphones in the U.S. will grow to about 33% market share by the end of 2010, creating a plethora of new gadgets that could challenge the interfaces of the computers we've been stuck using for the past 25 years. Imagine that: the world of technology is going through a rare shift in which past lock-in is being broken, where radical new device usability could emerge, where "toolbars" might be located under "tools" where they belong. We all suffer from lock-in: The religious and political points of view our parents ingrained in us, the business committees pushing investments that follow other sunk costs, the temptation to follow a fad because our ecosystem of friends or colleagues have all jumped aboard and we can't pan out to the worldview around it. The question is: should you evaluate your own life for paths you've gotten locked into that might need shifting?

Content is not a gadget

Powered's Greg Verdino posted some intriguing slides on "What is Content?" We responded with this:

I've been wondering why so many define content in terms of the tool that transports it. Print publishers defend paper. Mobile marketers promote visuals on cell screens. Web designers push the web, saying printed paper is dead. Social media gurus push chat inside social media tools, saying the :30 second spot on TV is dead. Depending on which box you make a living from, you promote your box and denigrate all other boxes.

Which is silly, isn't it? Content is one of only three things that flow in our economy -- to wit, (1) content or information, (2) good or services, and (3) financial value. It's part of the bloodstream of society. Who cares what box it fits in, or more important, why do we have to define it in the constraining definition of a box?

I'm in the middle of reading Jaron Lanier's brilliant "You Are Not a Gadget." Content is not a gadget, either.

Image: Clio20

How Apple could destroy publishing in 5 easy steps

Publishers such as Condé Nast, masters of our beloved Wired magazine, are so hopeful the iPad and the tablets chasing it will revive their economic health: you know, more readers will pay for subscriptions; no paper means lower operating costs; advertisers will suddenly yearn for higher CPMs to get aboard such gorgeous, interactive content ...

Yet perhaps Apple has deeper motives for the iPad, say, moving the margins of the book and magazine industries directly into its own pockets. (See: iTunes, the No. 1 music vendor in the United States.) Here's how Apple could destroy publishing in five easy steps:

1. Launch the iPad, then gradually reduce price points while adding features (webcams, backside video cams, slimmer bezels, 3-D) until ramping gadget sales achieve lock-in for Apple as the de facto tablet-cum-publishing store in the world.

2. Upgrade the Apple word processing program Pages to include simple templates for books, novels, pamphlets, and magazines, all publishable electronically as gorgeous interactive PDFs. And just as an iTunes software version exists for Windows, promote a version of Pages to work in Microsoft environments as well.

3. Give consumers new incentives to publish books or magazines themselves by including interactive ads that fit in the margins of their self-published PDFs. You'll get paid for every thousand eyeballs reading your stuff, and advertisers will compete for this new form of contextual advertising tied to GPS location systems built into the iPad.

4. With a click, allow these aspiring authors to upload their now-beautiful, already monetized book layouts to the iBookstore.

5. Build in social media features to help you promote your own book to your network of followers on Twitter and Facebook, and pray that they scale it to their friends.

You may not sell a million books or a best-selling magazine, but you'll no longer need all that thorny pitching, rejection, approval, editing, and self-whoring that comes from working with big publishing houses. Don't look at us. Chris Anderson called his own book "Free."

Podcast: Riffs on the Last Advertising Agency on Earth

(Play me.)

Last night we were lucky to debate the future of advertising, iPad vs. the TV, and whether you still want to shop at Circuit City with Christian Borges of Deep Focus, Bill Green of Make the Logo Bigger, Åsk Wäppling of Adland.tv, and the melodious Bob Knorpp. To listen in, click the play button above. If you don't listen to The BeanCast every week, you're missing the best marketing podcast out there.

The failure of self-centered social networks

Many of today's marketing gurus promise that social media will change the world, so we wonder: why haven't these tools been used to do more than promote selfish interests?

This is not a judgment call, just an observation. Brands leap into social media trying to build "communities" between their products and potential audiences, resulting in networks of, say, bloggers driving across country to promote a Ford automobile. Individuals join Facebook or Twitter to build "friends" and "followers" around themselves. What is common is the ego, or more accurately the Id, is at the center of every micro-network. The motive for all is to promote oneself. (Want proof? If we asked you, dear reader, how many followers you have on Twitter, we bet you could answer accurately plus or minus 10 without peeking.) It's no mistake that the central mechanism for organizations to build networks on Facebook is called a Fan Page.

Trouble is, all these micro-social networks compete with each other leaving little meaningful development beyond the individual hubs. If you had asked an oracle of the Torah or Old Testament or Renaissance what would happen if humans could communicate instantly and seamlessly around the globe, he or she might have suggested we'd build new peace organizations, refine religions, launch political parties, even build global democracies that cut through the old models of entrenched statecraft and corporate defenses. Sure, what Robert Scoble calls malleable social graphs or mini mobs may form based on an individual or group's modality -- think ad colleagues grouping at SXSW in Austin or a pulse of humanitarian interest gathering funds after a Haitian earthquake. But even those more useful efforts still revolve around a selfish idea -- meet up with me, or give money to my cause. Broader networks are not arising to move collective minds into a higher category of group actualization.

In simplest terms, we have incredibly efficient markets for moving goods and money; but no similar network has been built to shift ideas and the social good.

Perhaps that is why: Money flows better because it is the root of all gains. The selfishness of finance creates efficient investments, but it also leads to fragmented, disaggregated, disparate resources that do not work together for common interests. The deep issues of our day -- poverty, hunger, unchecked growth that will eventually (if not already) tax our ecosystem, disease, droughts, hostilities that lead to wars -- are not being touched by the new communication tools the technology prophets say are changing the world.

The gravity well of social media is centered around you. That's a useful construct for pulling small groups into your orbit, but perhaps a poor solution for networking to build collective solutions. Perhaps no tool can do it if the wielder has only self-interest at heart.

Image: Spaceanimations.org

Earth Emergency Procedures Safety Card

Want to promote your next book? Try gut-wrenching fear.

Author Eli Kintisch is about to release Hack the Planet, which proposes that our human desire to control things could get us into trouble as we try to solve big problems. Take global warming: Sure, you may not buy it if you watch Fox News, but imagine what would happen if a rogue nation decided to try and fix the atmosphere by flying a few planes around seeding chemicals for geoengineering ... and got the formula wrong? Kintisch is promoting his upcoming missive with a blog and juicy interactive Earth Emergency Procedures Safety Card, you know, if the planet melts, please head for the nearest exit.

This is really not news. Our Planet Earth, a strapping young adult about 4 billion years through our sun's 10 billion-year lifespan, has gone through five major extinction events in which almost all life died. Yup; not only the dinosaurs, they were just the last to get hit. Today, scientists warn we could be approaching another extinction whack -- not just a random asteroid (like the one that punched a 180-kilometer crater in the Yucatan Peninsula) or global warming, but massive methane leaks from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, nuclear holocaust (we're still pointing bombs at each other), robotic advances that might replace people, or nanotechnology that if unleashed without care could turn our planet into mush.

Good promotion. Sweet dreams.

SXSW interview: Pepsi's social media move explained

Our Humongo partner Darryl Ohrt sat down with PepsiCo's Bonin Bough, global director of digital and social media, and Josh Karpf, digital media manager, to ask what was up with this giant brand dissing the Super Bowl. Turns out the world is moving from impressions to connections, but one doesn't necessarily replace the other: Like stocking both Gatorade and Tropicana in your fridge, there's more than one way to refresh a brand.

SXSW interview: Crowdsourcing Rebel-in-Chief

Some of our favorite things in life have been crowdsourced: The Kama Sutra. The English language. Urban design. Dogs as pets. Wikipedia. Hm. Did we mention the Kama Sutra?

Ross Kimbarovsky moved crowdsourcing into the advertising arena with his CrowdSpring platform that allows small businesses to hold competitions for logos, web sites, or product designs, often for as little as a few hundred dollars. What started with a small-business focus has been moving upstream: this year uperhip ad shop Crispin Porter + Bogusky tested the waters for a motorcycle brand, and mobile player LG offered prizes for a new cell phone design. We chatted with Ross at SXSW on whether he really is a dastardly destroyer of agency margins or a noble forerunner of collective innovation. We like to think the latter.

Goodbye, gadgets

Around 1998 or so a funny thing happened to personal computers: they all started to look alike. Same plasticky keyboards, same ashen boxy monitors, and Dells and HPs all began to blend. Gateway resorted to opening retail stores with farm themes and shipping packages splotched with cow designs. PCs were slapped with stickers touting -- wait for it -- Intel chip speed to stand apart. But then flatpanels came along, and then Apple tweaked first colors and then glass-like translucent shells and then carved aluminum, the same cheap material you wrap leftover fish in -- but, today if you peer above Engadget for a moment, you might see it.

Once again, gadgets are all starting to look alike.

They're becoming frames. Just screen casings. Droid phones and iPhones and, yes, the best current example, the Apple iPad, just shells for digital content. (That's right, you're considering dropping five Benjamins for a black electronic frame.) Which makes us wonder, as we approach the singularity of device transparency, when the iGenie gadget of 2020 morphs from handset to laptop to big screen to projection on the wall of your bedroom, cradling content like a slender, almost invisible mother, will hardware designs even matter? Ludicrous to suggest, perhaps, as we still battle over cell phones with sliding keyboards or Kindleish left-right e-reader buttons. But the singularity is coming. How will device manufacturers compete when the view inside the window becomes more important than the border around it?

Image: Gizmodo via Photo Giddy.

SXSW interview: Edward Boches on creativity

More than 40 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook and 24 hours of user-generated content are pushed to YouTube every minute. So how can marketers manage "creative" for branding and advertising in a world where everyone is creating? We asked Edward Boches, chief creative officer of Mullen, at SXSW to share solutions.

No, your video won't go viral

Web Video Thunderdome - SXSW 2010

Mike Arauz and Bud Caddell spoke at SXSW on why most online videos fail to scale, and engaged their audience in a "Web Video Thunderdome" to debate why. They suggest: Be brief. Be odd. Be funny. Be random. Try repeatedly. And recognize that even if you get all that right, in the online sea of wavering interest, you'll still likely get only 100 hits.

Via Marci Ikeler.

SXSW interview: How to cut through the hype

We were fortunate to interview a few bright minds at SXSW Interactive this year. Brian Morrissey is one such light, who as digital editor of Adweek has to sort through claims to seek the truth in emerging technologies. So we asked Brian: "Dude. How do you cut through all the hype?"

Stay tuned for more SXSW interviews this week with myself and Humongo hipster Darryl Ohrt. Vids will be cross posted at Brandflakes for Breakfast.

Nestle's Facebook meltdown

Oops. Nestle, or whoever runs their Facebook fan page, stepped on a social media landmine this weekend with this update:

Nestle: To repeat: we welcome your comments, but please don't post using an altered version of any of our logos as your profile pic - they will be deleted. Fri at 2:26am

Nestle received 190 complaints within 24 hours on Facebook, and thousands of tweets reaching hundreds of thousands of consumers. You see, the surest way to tick off users of social media is to delete their comments. Yes, by the old standards of 20th century law, brands have a right to protect their intellectual property. But social media comprises fluid networks of users sharing and retweeting and mashing up material. Brands no longer command media channels or the spread of memes; if you want to win, you have to give users room to play.

Here are highlights from how it played out:

Paul Griffin: Not sure you're going to win friends in the social media space with this sort of dogmatic approach. I understand that you're on your back-foot due to various issues not excluding Palm Oil but Social Media is about embracing your market, engaging and having a conversation rather than preaching! Read www.cluetrain.com and rethink! Fri at 2:51am

Nestle: Thanks for the lesson in manners. Consider yourself embraced. But it's our page, we set the rules, it was ever thus. Fri at 2:53am

Paul Griffin: Your page, your rules, true, and you just lost a customer, won the battle and lost the war! Happy? Fri at 2:56am

Nestle: Oh please .. it's like we're censoring everything to allow only positive comments. Fri at 2:58am

Darren Smith: Honey you need new PR Fri at 3:20am

Jagos Golubovic: I was a big fan of your products, but now, when I saw what you guys wrote, I think I'm gonna stop buying them. Fri at 3:55am

Helen Constable: I'd like to know if the person writing the comments for Nestle, actually has the backing from Nestle? I doubt it. Even a dumb ass company like them would get such an idiot to be their public voice. Fri at 4:10am

Nestle: I think you missed out the 'not' there, Helen Fri at 4:12am

Hyra Zaka: is a nestle rep running this page????? Fri at 4:39am

Nestle: We welcome debate, @Hyra - from any opinion. It helps us to know what people think and feel. Fri at 4:44am

ymann Lee: WFT !!!! This firm is a ugly creep !! trafficking and now censorship of my personal life. it seems pretty nazi !! Fri at 5:19am

Fernanda Shirakawa: I'm not using your logo... Fri at 5:55am

Fernanda Shirakawa: You deleted my comment anyway... Fri at 5:57am

Damien DeBarra: What a total train wreck. Sorry Nestle, but you really don't seem to get it do you? Social media provides you with an opportunity to engage with your customers - to listen to them, to show that you actually care about ethical issues in business. Sadly it seems you have precisely the opposite attitude and seem determined to be as aggressive, patronising and corporatist as you can. And practically guaranteed that folks will now start shunning your products. Fri at 8:00am

Mark Watts-Jones: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Case study in how not to engage with your customers. We'll await the inevitable apology and climb down. Fri at 11:06am

Nestle: This (deleting logos) was one in a series of mistakes for which I would like to apologise. And for being rude. We've stopped deleting posts, and I have stopped being rude. Fri at 1:29pm

(Update: The prelude to all this was a coordinated Greenpeace attack on Nestle's Facebook page, which helps explain why the FB community manager was defensive; Jeremiah Owyang has a summary here.)

Bicycle unbranded

So this sharp blogger named Dave Wilkie, who has self-branded as Jetpacks, has always hated those plastic license-plate frames dealers stick on the back of cars cheesily advertising their dealership, so yanks them off, and suddenly realized his beloved bicycle was also covered with logos. Trek. Bontrager. Shimano. Even emblems for the local bike dealer. So he painted over them all.

The resulting image creates a surreal branding negative space. Our reaction, upon seeing the stripped bike photo, was it looked like an unbike. Is it worth anything? Hard to judge. If you're not into cycling components, brand logos help you ascertain whether there is expense here or not. Now we're befuddled. Maybe it's just a bike -- a form of transport from A to B?

Fire and fertility

Which brings up the value of brands anyway. We've written before brands are a helpful mental shortcut in a world filled with too much information; illusory, perhaps, but also a quick scoring mechanism to tell you whether a thing has value. Branding focuses communication and can sway minds. Consider the "estate tax" vs. the "death tax" -- same deal, but when conservatives began calling the former the latter, public opinion tipped away from such an evil thing. Liberals call conservatives they don't like "tea baggers." Conservatives call liberals they don't like members of the "democrat party." Names and icons have power, because our cave ancestors had to make quick decisions to survive, and rather than logically weigh the merits of every choice, they learned to follow brand images. Red = fire = danger = today's stop signs. Green = fertility = happiness = today's go signs. Brands are everywhere.

Jetpacks, we admire your cleanliness, but man, your bike is confusing.

Face time

Technology has a way of surprising us with simplicity. In the 1950s we thought by 2010 humanity would be flying around in rocket cars; instead, we've turned telephones into tiny typewriters. (We're still a bit disappointed, really.) Augmented reality is getting hyperbole today, but one of the best uses of overlaying the Internet on objects may just be recognizing things -- like people.

Darryl Ohrt points us to Recognizr, a mobile app that lets you look up people by snapping photos of their faces. Incredibly useful for business meetings, conferences, or reminding yourself of who that dude is at your high school reunion.

Danah Boyd and social network freakouts

Marketers are hungry to mine new social-network data: not just what you say, but whom you're saying it with. There's a homophily concept, you see, that birds of a feather buy together. A classic 2004 study by AT&T Labs Research found that people who chat frequently on the telephone are three to five times more likely to respond to the same marketing pitch. Twitter today has 75.2 million monthly users, and while 93% of them have sent fewer than 100 tweets, that leaves a population of about 5 million frequently updating their likes about brands, products and services, with visible connections.

Danah Boyd, in her SXSW keynote address, pointed out a nuance in networks, though, that should warn marketers to be careful before they toss offers based on sheer data. The concept goes like this: Imagine you know X people in the world and interact with all of them in some manner. Your behavioral network is everyone you touch somehow, which could be observed from the outside. Yet within this you may have a smaller group that you say you know -- by pinning their names inside Microsoft Outlook, or Facebook, or your cell phone contacts -- which is your articulated network. And within this, there is an even smaller group who are your personal network -- family, true friends, or perhaps enemies, the intimates who touch your inner mind. These are not mutually exclusive categories; an intimate friend may not be someone you log in to an address book; but you treat them as three discrete concepts in your head.

Google's Buzzworthy failure

Buzz was an attempt by Google to build a new social network; to scale it rapidly, Google decided to tie the on ramp to its Gmail. Gmail users who opened their web mail in February were greeted with a message touting how Buzz would share updates with their friends easily! Trouble was, the default setting in Google Buzz was public disclosure of the names of your Gmail contacts you communicate with most frequently. Want to catch a whiff of a competitor's business development strategy? Hook in with Buzz and see who they're emailing. Users could disable the feature, but it was complicated, an opt-out, and made some worry they might cancel their entire Gmail account by doing so.

Danah summed up Google's mistake:

"Google collapsed behavioral and articulated social networks and presented them in a way that indicated that they might be one's personal network. And for many users, this wasn't quite right. You may talk to your ex-husband frequently via email, but that doesn't mean that you want to follow him on Buzz."


Metcalfe wants more

Technology companies are doing such things not to be evil, but to build networks with more utility that can be monetized at greater value in the future. It's no mistake Facebook removed privacy settings by default in December, opening your updates to everyone (with the option to go back); the greater the nodes in the network, the higher the value to potential advertisers. This week Twitter announced a new @anywhere initiative that basically allows you to click on links in news articles to follow or retweet authors, publishers or brands -- another way to expand its network nodes. Such pushes may indicate social networks are cresting in adoption; Twitter, for instance, should be concerned that 57% of its users have only 1-10 followers and 24% have no followers at all. If you run the network, you want it to grow and to be as open as possible -- because that unlocks all doors to value.

But Google, Facebook and other companies that tap networks too hard without weighing the nuances of privacy are met with a fierce backlash. For marketers about to wade into the social streams, it's worth considering more than the sentiment and volume of tweets about your brand, the connections between users that indicate their responsiveness, and the tactics you can deploy to get them leaning toward your message. You might also consider if your observant intrusion is going to freak anyone out.

The motives of futurism

Our friend Max Zeledon, likely annoyed by tweets from SXSW, grew sharp tonight. "I'm increasingly becoming bored with tech pundits," he wrote, "who continue to overreach when it comes to the future, pretending to know what the next 'big' thing is when in fact nobody can predict the future." We reflected:

We're all guilty of this to a degree. Since we all write or speak differently, perhaps it comes down to motive. Some (I like to think myself) write about future trends because we're curious, we're challenged, we're puzzled, we have questions and we're trying to sort it all out. Others may do so for more purely self-promotional motives, riding the Gartner hype cycle to draw attention to their speaking or book deals. The problem is there is huge demand for this type of bullshit. Humans, business people in particular, are exposed to massive amounts of data and have a hard time ingesting it; we long for frameworks to help us understand the world; when someone gives us a new model to screen the noise of data coming in from the future, we latch on. It could be a survival instinct, a weather forecast for winter storms ahead, but there's deep hunger for future predictions. The demand may come from fear we'll fail, or hope we'll win, so we buy into Who Moved My Cheese silliness to guide our next decision. I hope I'm not the guy feeding this to make money or to build a modicum of fame. I hope I just write because I'm trying to solve the puzzle in my own head. But thanks for the warning.

SXSW ideation: Ending hunger

The great irony of SXSW Interactive is most of its panels are one-way affairs with gurus broadcasting their business acumen at the audience. Which is why we found Scott Henderson's We Can End This workshop on hunger relief fascinating. He asked his audience to roll up their sleeves and brainstorm ideas.

We sat through Hendo's morning session with social strategist Geoff Livingston, Humongo agency's Darryl Ohrt, Kyla Fullenwider of sponsor PepsiCo, product strategist Anne Mai Bertelsen, and others. Some, like Livingston, suggested using new social media tools to connect donators with food banks in local communities. We suggested another path -- decrease the waste in our food system to fund hunger relief.

Billions of dollars now going in the trash

The United States, you see, tosses out 40-50% of food ready for harvest, and of the food we buy, half of that comes from restaurants outside the home. Americans spend $149 billion annually on casual dining and coffeeshops; increasing the efficiency of that market even slightly would free up billions to fill empty stomachs. To connect these dots, we'd simply (a) reduce restaurant food waste and use the economic savings to (b) fund hunger relief. The program could work like emissions trading for air pollution abatement:

1. Create a cap-and-trade system for food waste. A central body (government or national food association) would set total target limits on food waste, and issue credits allowing companies a certain level.
2. Measure food waste in restaurants -- packaging, portions, food not consumed.
3. Restaurants that cannot reduce food waste would trade (buy) allowances.
4. Restaurants that do reduce waste would trade (sell) allowances.
5. This economic system would provide strong incentives for restaurants to reduce food waste -- spurring marketing innovations such as menu items with smaller portions, similar to today's "heart healthy" choices.
6. A commission structure could be set on market trading -- a “tax” on each trade -- to be used to fund hunger relief programs.
7. The high visibility of national restaurant chains promoting reduced waste/hunger relief would build consumer awareness as well -- perhaps making the cause as popular as recycling, which has become the standard human behavior to reduce trash.

It's just one idea, inspired by a truly interactive SXSW panel. SXSW organizers, we'd like to see more such real engagement next year. Learn more at We Can End This or submit your ideas at Goodzuma with the user name and password "SXSW." And Scotty: Nicely done.

Image: Guuleed

Augmenting too far

We're packing for SXSW Interactive in Texas, a conference dedicated to online evolution, so leave you with this: Is all this virtual stuff dangerous? Over at Slate, William Saletan brilliantly recounts the sad story of a young South Korean couple who spent 12 hours a day in an Internet cafe, caring for a virtual baby in an online game ... until their real baby at home died allegedly from malnutrition and dehydration.

"Maybe this is just a weird story about a sick couple on the other side of the planet. But look in the mirror. Every time you answer your cell phone in traffic, squander your work day on YouTube, text a colleague during dinner, or turn on the TV to escape your kids, you're leaving this world. You're neglecting the people around you, sometimes at the risk of killing them.

"The problem isn't that you're a bad or weak person. It's worse than that. The problem is that all of us are susceptible to being drawn into other worlds, and other worlds are becoming ever more compelling. In the old days, imaginary friends had to be imagined. Now you can see and interact with them. In cyberspace, they exist. They're more alluring and less flawed than your friends in the physical world. And thanks to artificial intelligence and three-dimensional graphics, they're becoming quite lifelike."

Whoa. Time to catch some sunshine.

Chevy vs. pollution in the stream

Very few people who work in the ad industry have the balls to question the ethics of a campaign -- ethics, in advertising? -- because doing so could burn a bridge from a potential client. But what the hell -- we're not here to play nice, we're here to advise our clients about what works, and that includes not making mistakes that damage their future reputation.

So let's take a look at, oh, perhaps Chevy's current SXSW campaign. Say hypothetically you're a car company trying to boost sales among a younger demographic, and the MRI data shows these people are avoiding TV and spending more time in social media listening to peers. It's really hard to buy advertising against that demo. And then your agency guru walks in wearing a black T-shirt talking about SIM scores suggesting there's a way to "earn media" -- and NOT pay for it -- by letting a handful of young people borrow cars and drive to an uberhip conference, say SXSW Interactive in Texas, and broadcast their Chevy adventures along the way. And they'll use a "hashtag," something like #chevysxsw, that appears at the end of every tweet. A handful of cars, a dozen people times their few thousand followers, and suddenly you have an organic loudspeaker spraying Chevy messages to hundreds of thousands of people inside Twitter every day ... for almost no marketing budget.

Is this a good idea? Does it help the Chevy brand? Do the thousands of people exposed to non sequitur messaging and strange #chevyreadthis symbols like the promotions creeping into their communication stream, and then think, heck, it's high time to test drive a Chevy? And what about the broader ecosystem issues of what happens if such campaigns take off, and one day every other tweet from your own personal online community has a #brandmention attached because someone is getting a little free gift from a car or stereo or condom company? What happens to the value of the network then?

Is anyone thinking about the adverse impact of the people annoyed by messaging vs. the people who respond?

We've seen this before in the 1990s with telemarketing. For you young readers out there, telesales actually used to be a part of most business operations and worked well ... until the aggregate calls got to be too much. Do Not Call lists were created, most Americans signed up, the government imposed heavy fines for any marketer who didn't avoid calling DNC homes, and suddenly shilling via phone did not work anymore. You'll still get calls from politicians or nonprofits who are exempt from DNC (love that, don't you?), but even they have challenges making telemarketing work, because the only people who respond tend to be the less educated, less wealthy, less desirable consumers who haven't figured out how to sign up for DNC.

The Scobleizer's take on ethics

About a year ago we had the fortune to interview Robert Scoble for a BusinessWeek column, and he said something very smart. We paraphrase: Rules in business about conflicts of interest or partitioning advertising, he said, were not invented because businesses are run by altruists. The rules evolved because businesses screwed up, overstepped their bounds, lost customers, and realized they needed rules to keep operations in order. Advertising works best when it is kept in its box and labeled as such, because people know where it is coming from. Letting it creep into the stream makes the source hazy, adds a layer of confusion, and diminishes the value of the network.

So, dear #chevytweeters on Twitter and the ad agencies who promote such hoopla. We hope your campaign is a rousing success. We're sure your social-media sentiment score will click up this week, and the metrics will look great in PowerPoint. But are you really thinking about the direction your car is headed?

Chevy campaign details here.

Confusion as a design feature

Ever wonder why Facebook redesigns its interface every six months, often adding more complexity?

Deliberate confusion can be a positive design strategy. We've been thinking of this for several years now, tipped off by the annoyingly elaborate user interfaces at weather web sites (where you must click through three pages of busy links to find a simple forecast). Today's most promising portals often require users to work hard to understand how to use them. Twitter? Yes, it's only 140 characters, but try explaining retweets and @'s and DM's and search and lists to a new user, and you realize the microblogging service has cleverly ensnared you in a complex learning curve. Facebook is even more confusing, yet consumers have responded in droves. The SharesPost marketplace, which places valuations on startup firms, recently suggested ubersillynetwork Facebook is now worth $11.5 billion due to its vast lattice of people poking and tossing Farmville updates at each other.

Part of this is psychological -- humans feel rewarded when they solve puzzles or score points (um, Twitter follower counts anyone?) -- and so complexity in design can make each experience feel novel again; the charm of Facebook, after all, is never knowing exactly what the hell you'll find when you show up. Another rationale for complex designs is business strategy; if you force a user to spend more time on pages solving the puzzling interface, like on a weather site, you can sell more ad inventory. But the deepest driver of design confusion is human desire to make anything complex. We want more information built into human conversations or our physical space, which is why when you log in to work on a Monday morning you must now check work email, voicemail, Gmail, Google chat, cell phone messages, Facebook, Twitter, the physical mail and the fax just to make sure you didn't miss anything.

Confusing interfaces might drive the great visual thinker Edward Tufte nuts (he called superfluous design "chart junk"). Yet as the world of knowledge evolves, we hunger for more nuance to allow us to dive deeper into information. It will only get worse as data begins flowing into the real view of the surroundings around us. See the video above, a graduate thesis project by Julia Yu Tsao at Art Center College of Design.

Chart junk, we may hate you, but you are here to stay.

Inspired by Len Kendall.

Wow, old people use smart phones, too

London-based data junkie Dirk Singer notes the 35-54 age demo is now the most active group using mobile social networks -- those Twitter and Facebook apps on your cell phone. We chatted up this issue recently with mobile reps from Jagtag and Impact Mobile, who both agreed that mobile usage is "proving more elastic" among demographics than previously thought (that's marketingspeak for yes, old people use smart phones too).

Jagtag, for instance, provides a QR Code response system in which a consumer can snap a photo of a bar code image, email or tweet it in using her phone, and get a video or slide show back on her handset -- a useful way to bookmark information on a cell in case you don't want to dial in to a call center just yet. Jagtag told us that it recently ran a campaign for a large biotech firm in which posters at a state fair promoted "take a picture of this code for more information on soybean yields" -- and 14% of visitors at the fair did exactly that.

If soybeans work, could your product?

The distinction here is Jagtag gave staid consumers a clever way to respond to a message -- it did not push a banner ad onto their cell phones, but instead offered a more convenient way to get information if they opt in. That's an important point, because many marketers are rushing to push ads through mobile handsets, and frankly we're not sure outbound messaging will be welcomed in such an intimate space. Consumers certainly are not responding to the outbound equation; mobile ad spending forecasts have been missed for the past decade. The use of mobile as a new response doorway has more promise. Marketers, we all have phones in our pockets. Help us tap our way to you.

Skinput: The body as your keyboard

Chris Harrison, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, has built a device that recognizes taps and flexes on your arm to turn your body into a computer input. The basic idea is you could dial a phone number or adjust an iPod with simple body movements. It's a rudimentary but intriguing continuation of our human convergence with technology. Don't think you're part machine already? Then put down your glasses, take out your dental fillings, and remove the leather shoes that cushion your feet.

Via Bill Green.

If media is dying, why do you want a bigger TV?

(Play me.)

One of the great myths of our advertising generation is that traditional media is dying. Never mind that 30% of U.S. homes own four or more TV sets, or that the very bloggers who proclaim 30-second spots are dead also promote Panasonic high-definition televisions. Media is certainly shifting, but it's an additive landscape -- because new communication tools are overlaying old media, not replacing it.

Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff said this week that social media may be boosting television ratings, as consumers find new impetus to tune in to community events. Ratings are up in 2010 for the Grammys (26 million viewers this year vs. 19 million last), the Golden Globes (up 14%), and the Super Bowl (at 106 million viewers on CBS in January, it was the most-watched TV event of all time). Media is additive because consumers are learning to do two things at once; Nielsen reports that 13% of viewers of the Olympics' opening ceremonies were also online typing away on Twitter or Facebook.

There is no question that the currency of advertising impressions is becoming devalued, and thus marketing is more challenging, but it's a reset -- not a vaporization. This week we discussed where all media is going with the verbally elegant Angela Natividad and ideation guru Bill Green on the AdVerve podcast.

Closer, closer: Twitter's tantric ad model

So at long last and after much lustful speculation, Twitter is set to launch an ad platform. Trick is, Twitter advertising won't appear in your tweet stream -- the paid messages will only pop up when you go over to search.twitter.com to see what the world is talking about (or search inside Twitter via various other doorways).

This shows remarkable restraint, perhaps signaling Twitter realizes ads -- even if clearly marked with something such as IZEA's sponsored tweet #ad hashtag -- annoy the devil out of people when they're chatting inside social media. So rather than risk upsetting the masses, which could drive away the audience that MySpace and Friendster found so fickle, Twitter will keep interruptions away from your clever 140-character missives unless someone else is specifically hunting for your topic.

What could it mean?

1. Twitter could be using the search ecosystem as a test, to see how people respond, before expanding the ads into the main chat streams.
2. Twitter may bet its search functionality will scale and someday rival Google (although only 429,500 U.S. people visit its search page per month as of now).
3. Or perhaps Twitter is simply acknowledging that ads work best when a consumer is in a search modality instead of a social mode.

We're betting test; in marketing, as in love, it's hard to make restraint last forever.

Image: H. Koppdelaney