Archive for March 2009
At Issue } essential reading
The High Road and The Low Road
Why spend $10,000 to do a photo shoot for a magazine? After all, all your profit is in the ads. Sometimes it seems like people who build websites and magazines that take the high road aren't paying any attention at all to conversion and revenue and manipulation.
Micro Disruption Theory and The Social Effect
Relationships are so much more than the mere act of following or friending someone on Twitter or any social network for that matter. It's the balladry of transcending online connections into real world relationships. It's the cadence of interaction and the poetry of conversations that empower the human network and the escalation of the Social Economy.
How To Be More Human
Right now the biggest challenge to being successful on the social web is through high quality micro-interactions with high quality human beings. But organizations will find this difficult to embrace. The industrial revolution has taught us to mass produce and move away from human dependency. Here's a few ways to be "more human".
From Awareness to Extended Action
We’re all fighting against attention clutter. Our email inboxes are creaking. Our media consumption habits (from newspaper to magazines to TV to radio) are all sporadic and random and very hard to track. It takes more and more for someone to capture our attention and convince us to change our course of action. Let’s consider this to be the continuum: awareness, attention, engagement, execution, extension. I’ll explain all five, and thread into them how social tools can help.
Government Agencies Make Friends With New Media
Web 2.0, meet dot-gov. Dot-gov, this is Web 2.0. Or at least that's the plan, now that the Government Services Administration inked landmark agreements with several new media companies that clear up legal issues surrounding liability and government sunshine rules — thus easing their use by government agencies' websites.
Wanted: Financially Viable Social Networks
The social-networking phenomenon is running rings around media and advertising companies scrambling to monetize consumers' obsessions. The chasm between where the media establishment is and needs to be comes from its inability to understand and mine evolving interactive social dynamics. Digital consumers are vibrantly making it up as they go; the media status quo is barely connected.
While Others Paint the Trim
I don’t have much use for case studies. Or rather, I collect them, but mostly to show other people. It’s not that they’re not useful. Instead, I just find that lots of people use case studies as excuses or defense to show the boss instead of as learning tools to better align their strategy. You might use yours just right. I use mine as springboards to build and plan.
No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook
When you listen to your users, you get vanilla. feature creep. boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device. So I’m surprised that Facebook, which has stared down its users so many times in the past, is folding on the most recent redesign flareup and reverting back to some old features. Just because, oh, a million people demanded it.
The Right Size
I've been thinking a lot about issues of scale and units of measure. Many businesses that are in trouble are in trouble for a simple reason: they're the wrong size.
A Control Freak’s Guide to Social Media Influence
Losing control is a primary reason stated by brands who are unwilling to open themselves up to the conversation - and a major reason why most continue to use social media as little more than a brochure on the web. And yet the illusion of control is just that – an illusion. By not involving yourself you actually do more to remove control than if you did.
