Alone – Together

Photo courtesy CarbonNYC

As someone who’s been working from home, alone, for the past six months I was interested to see this article on The Rise of the New Groupthink in Sunday’s Times discussing how people working in solitude were more creative than those working in large open offices or teams.  I was hoping that it would add another silver lining to my not being in a traditional office space, but in some ways it left me confused.

Lately it feels like theories of creativity and work effectiveness are about as common as fad diets, and just as bewildering.  So much of what I’ve read, and experienced, on effective creative processes has been about random collisions, collaboration and getting people to interact. The idea of the lone genius has been pretty much tossed out by smart folks like Jonah Lehrer and Steven Johnson, and now here’s an article quoting some smart psychologist sand neuroscientist telling me that I would do a better job staying alone.  Somehow I’m beginning to wonder if this whole field hasn’t reached a point of oversaturation.

Where the article really makes more sense to me, and perhaps its real target, is when it criticizes the falsely energized “team-player” mentality created to fulfill a promise of inclusion which ends up shutting out its most creative members and producing little of value. Except for maybe a feeling of false togetherness.

In the final analysis its probably all about all things in moderation and striking a balance between individual time to think alone and the ability and willingness to interact. I did very much like the point the article made about brainstorms being the “worst possible ways to stimulate creativity”. It points out what we already all know about the lack of value of focus groups. What WAS interesting was the discussion about the effectiveness of  “electronic brainstorming” where asynchronous discussion and the lack of face-to-face group dynamics made for better group creativity. Maybe this is a signpost for all of us who work alone, but should look at making better use of our connected infrastructure to build on our lonely creative potential.

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by on January 17, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted by Dan on January 17, 2012

http://www.danweingrod.com/2012/01/alone-together/

Networks

Network

Thinking about the reaction to Google’s Search Plus Your World (SPYW?), (how about Search+), has got me thinking about networks. Reading Danny Sullivan’s interview with Eric Schmidt the night of the Search+ launch it became pretty clear that what Search+ is about is establishing Google+’s position as a bona fide social media network. No more questions about how many are really using Google+, if you look at the torrent of reactions to Search+ its clear that no-one is going to say that Google+ is irrelevant. It’s now really one of the Big Three social networks.

But when I think about “Big Three” I can’t help but thinking about another Big Three, the Big Three television networks, and how in their pre-cable heyday they captured the bulk of the TV audience and the ad revenues that went with it. What Google is doing with Search+ is trying to ensure its position as one of the parallel Big Three social networks along with the advertising revenues that are already following.

But there’s a problem with this analogy that has to do with abundance. The old Big Three got you to watch their content, and ads, because of scarcity.  They had exclusive content and if you wanted to watch it you also had to endure the ads.  Social networks operate in a world of abundance of bth content and access. The scarcity they have to deal with is the time we can devote to each or any of them. Each of the Big Three, Facebook, twitter and Google+, (sorry LinkedIn but, well…), require an investment of time and effort in order to maintain “viewership”.  They each make efforts to build loyalty and mass following, but compelling exclusivity or scarcity? There’s not much to speak of, I mean, is Timeline a reason to spend MORE  time on Facebook?

The only real scarcity that social networks command is the scarcity of their members. But that isn’t enough to command loyalty. I go to Facebook primarily to catch up with local and ex-work acquaintances and to spy on my, (adult), kids, but there is little else compelling to make me want to stay there exclusively. I go to twitter because its where I fine like-minded professionals, (that’s a whole other problem), and I go to Google+ because, well…it has these cool hangouts, I can write more than 140 characters and I have just enough time to do that.

But unlike the old Big Three, the new Big Three are trying to achieve what feels like an all or nothing kind of world. They wall their gardens because they fear that if they don’t have all the users all the time they will lose command of the airwaves internet. The funny thing is that in the days of the old Big Three, total network domination wasn’t as much of an issue. The networks competed, but the assumption was that viewers would move between shows and that no-one could have an absolute lock on all eyeballs.  Sure, some shows dominated and lineups were created to try and get you to spend an evening without making the huge effort of clicking a remote, but that was about as far as it went and generally with poor results.

Search+ carried to the extreme is Google’s effort to achieve dominance by using its search position. That’s one reason for the big outcry. But the problem is that, just like the old Big Three, there’s no reason for any social network to be “dominant” because, frankly, have nothing really unique or scarce to offer except for their members. On the other hand if you look at Search+ as a dare by Google to force the other networks to open up and share in, albeit Google’s, level playing field maybe there’s a chance this will force the Big Three to become like their elders and get better at creating deeper value through scarcity.

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by on January 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Facebook, Social Media
Posted by Dan on January 13, 2012

http://www.danweingrod.com/2012/01/networks/

Social Cyber Monday

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thunderchild5/

I was talking to Amanda this morning about the role social media might have played in the growth of Cyber Monday traffic this year. There’s plenty of questions about what kind of role, if any, social media has in driving to purchase, but a couple of posts I happened to see begin to point to how social media is becoming a growing force in retail, as well as some potential pitfalls.

The first was this update on the PayPal blog:

“As of 11 a.m. PST, PayPal is already seeing a six-fold (514%) increase in more mobile payment volume on Cyber Monday 2011 compared to the same time period on Cyber Monday 2010.”

When I see mobile growth like this I have to believe that there is a strong social element involved. Mobile is an accelerant, and an especially powerful accelerant for social. The ease of getting a tweet from brand a friend and then acting on it is all about how mobile can accelerate the decision process.

Which brings up the role of Social Proof which was covered very nicely in this post by Aileen Lee. What’s particularly relevant here for Cyber Monday is Lee’s postscript mention of Fear of Missing Out or FOMO. FOMO is really what Cyber Monday is all about. The fear of missing out on a great deal, (even when studies are showing that these deals may not be the best), incents shoppers to follow brands and more importantly incents them to tweet out their deals to their friends so that they can generously make sure that they won’t miss out either. Its easy to imagine how the immediacy of mobile combined with FOMO converted many hesitant Cyber Monday shoppers.

With all this potential the real problem brands face is how to convert today’s frantic Cyber Monday social shoppers into sustainable, loyal year round social media consumers. Today’s McKinsey Quarterly sheds some light on this challenge by pointing out that of  the marketers it surveyed “few are taking the structural steps required to benefit from selling online or engaging consumers through new technologies such as social media.” And while they may understand the potential of mobile and social tools, most of them only plan to deploy them in the next 2-4 years. Part of this gets into everything I hate about Black Friday and Cyber Monday; the fact that they are just celebrations of rampant materialism. But if marketers and brands can learn how to take the mad, social rush for deals and turn it into a beneficial social relationship between themselves and consumers then maybe we’ll have inched forward just a bit.

1 Comment
by on November 29, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Social Media
Posted by Dan on November 29, 2011

http://www.danweingrod.com/2011/11/social-cyber-monday/

Macs I Have Known

http://www.computerhistory.org/

Up until a few years ago I had a big, garish yellow squarish carrying case that we kept in our attic. I must have gotten it from someone in the late 80’s. Heavily padded around the insides, it was a Mac bag that would help you make an early Mac, (pre-SE I think), a portable computer. We all laughed at that idea at the time, even though the bag included a brochure with photos of handsome executives lugging this bag around with smiles on their faces. It was never quite a laptop although the aspiration was always there.

The first real Apple computer was a Mac IIx. With a laser printer and monitor it cost my first business around $20,000. I still manage to impress a few people in the “can you believe how much my first computer cost” discussions when I mention this. I remember jumping on it the moment we set it up and getting into my first, pre-internet, timeless reverie of playing, gaming and worrying about how to turn it off, only ended by realizing that suddenly it was 11 PM. I’d been on the computer for 5 hours and hadn’t really done anything. Some things never change.

I also remember the instruction manual, which for all of its brilliance and user friendliness pointed out that if we had a problem we couldn’t figure out we should “ask other Mac users if they’d experienced the same thing”. The idea that maybe somehow we could figure it together smacked of some sort of corporate irresponsibility to me then, but is almost second nature today.

Our shop was a Mac shop and in a bizarre twist I became the de facto network administrator. AppleTalk was so simple and intuitive at the time that it was second nature to dive right in, figure out the problem and look real smart in front of whomever I’d just solved the problem for. It was pretty much the same for everything within that early Mac ecosystem. It was simple and approachable. It made me into a techie without even trying.

At the same time, early 90’s, we couldn’t afford a new home computer so we bought an Apple IIe for next to nothing through my father-in-law. I remember buying floppy disks via mail order and reading the prophetic advice in the user manual that someday computers would include something called a hard drive which might possibly, some day, hold as much as 5 Megabytes of information!!

I discovered the Web and moved to PC’s at the same time. PC’s weren’t my choice, it was mandated by my jobs. Windows 3.1 shocked me with its DOS prompts, but I got used to it. But Mac’s were for the creatives now; I was working more with words, spreadsheets and PowerPoint (though I did really miss Persuasion). At the same time I found that my facility with computers stayed and grew mainly because of the fact that my Mac experience was like my first language. Macs created the syntax and the grammar that informed my computing experience. I judged everything else based on that experience and that experience made everything else more readily approachable.

One of the first things I did after leaving my job was go to the Apple store and buy a new MacBook Pro. I’d been on PC’s for over 15 years and it seemed to me that this would be a perfect, symbolic break from the world that I was leaving into a world where I would be back to defining my own path. There were other reasons too. I was already totally invested in other parts of the Apple world: iPhone, iPad and even a Nano on a watchband. Using it for the first time and hearing the clunky startup bong felt like a welcome back. As I’ve used it more and more I’ve found plenty of reasons to fall in love again. I happen to love the OSX swipes, the plug and play ease is still there, and the design keeps delighting me. At the same time I’m disappointed in the Apple closed system mentality, especially around images, and I just can’t get around under the hood like I used to.

Macs were my introduction to the world of computing, but more to the idea that I could extend my mind, my fingers and eyes into possibilities I hadn’t really imagined. In a way the Web was just a natural extension of that experience. Macs gave me the initial boost and head start into this world. They weren’t perfect. They were high priced, elitist and headstrong, just like one of their inventors. At the same time their elegance, delight, simplicity and hardheaded persistence of vision, just like their founder, has been grateful company for me.

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by on October 6, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Apple
Posted by Dan on October 6, 2011

http://www.danweingrod.com/2011/10/macs-i-have-known/

What if Voltaire had Klout?

I saw this video yesterday as part of a great Brain Pickings post about “vintage versions of social media”. It contains two things that I really love: Data Viz and a parallel look at how social media ideas of influence and connectivity have actually  been with us since the dawn of time.

The video is from a Stanford project which has been tracking the “Republic of Letters”, the correspondence between the European intellectual community between 1500 – 1800. As part of the project the team mapped the correspondence between some of the great minds of the 18th century such as Locke and Voltaire and overlaid them on a map of Europe based on connection and frequency.

The information that was exchanged was vast and built multiple connections and influence across geographies. Much like social media today, the Republic of Letters was a complex social network that allowed for discovery, serendipity, growth and creativity. There were even early mashups, like the astronomical observations made in the Americas ended up in Newton’s Principia. All in all a distant window that demonstrates that things weren’t so different back then in terms of discovery and information exchange.

But at 1:08 of the video there’s an interesting note. Viewing the map of Voltaire’s connections, the researcher points out that he had almost no correspondence with England, something that apparently wasn’t appreciated until this correspondence was mapped out in this fashion. Now I’m hardly a Voltaire expert, but a quick peek at Wikipedia shows that he actually lived in England for three years and had great respect for the British political system, (at least compared to the French monarchy).

All of which makes me wonder, what if Voltaire had had access to an 18th century version of Klout? Could this have helped? Would an 18th century ranking of influencers have helped him connect to with high scoring British philosophers? Would his ideas have improved with feedback from Locke? Would philosophy and the march of ideas have been moved forward hundreds of years? Or would the dissemination of ideas through high scoring sources have disrupted the flow of information for the worse?

In his book “Where Good Ideas Come From” Steven Johnson talks about the concept of the “adjacent possible”, how creativity can spring from ideas and objects that are available within one’s immediate reach or environment. For us this environment includes the overwhelming flow of links, articles and random thoughts we confront every day across social platforms. While tools like Klout can measure and rank focal points of social connectivity, they can’t tell us if these focal points are relevant adjacencies or just a rush of information running through a very fat pipe. So I’d guess that Voltaire probably had enough adjacent possible in France for his needs and if a connection could have arisen in Britain it would likely have been through direct, relevant contact instead of an 18th century compendium of top letter writers.

It’s pretty much the same feeling I have today for tools like Klout and Empire Avenue. Their goal seems to be to try and make social media into mass media channels, but the result feels like it moves us further away from what brought us to social media in the first place, the delight, serendipity and discovery of the adjacent possible.

 

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by on September 26, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Creative, Social Media
Posted by Dan on September 26, 2011

http://www.danweingrod.com/2011/09/what-if-voltaire-had-klout/

Bubble

Photo Asgeirk

About 12 years ago I sat in a big hotel meeting room in Hartford and listened to an investment banker tell the CEO of the online pharmacy I was working on that it was worth was many, many times more than its existing brick and mortar operations.  An older, lawyer-type turned to me with a what’s-this-world-coming-to look and said, “I can’t believe this, it makes absolutely no sense, it’s a total fantasy”. I chuckled and thought: “You just don’t get it, everything’s changing and you’ve either got to get on board or get left behind.”

Now that I’m a lot closer to his age I realize that we were both right. He was right because it was a fantasy. The online pharmacy still exists, but at nowhere near the valuation it was pegged at back then. I was right because everything did change in, and in ways that we couldn’t imagine at the time. But I was also wrong: no-one was really left behind, unless of course, it was those who made some bad investment decisions. In one way or another we all moved forward.

So when I hear all the bubble talk going on now I end up thinking more about the benefits that came out of the last bubble along with the benefits that might come of the coming one. Take one of my favorite flops of 1999, Boo.com. A high-end online fashion site, it featured a multi-lingual avatar named Miss Boo, who would function as your guide to the world of fashion. At the time I’d never seen anything as daring and audacious. I’d also never seen anything as slow and ponderous as it tried to serve up interactivity to 56k and slower modems. It soon became one of the many stock jokes around the office about sites that reached too far, exceeded their business models or just didn’t weren’t ready for where the world and culture was at. Or, consider the startup I worked with who had the idea of creating a portal that listed out-the-beaten-path resorts with details updated via user comments, ratings and a direct reservation service that if I recall worked via fax (fax? really?).

There’s a lot to hate about bubbles, the complete irrationality of the boom/bust cycle, the enormous financial benefits that go to a chosen worthy, and unworthy, few and the blood on the streets mentality of the marketplace. But bubbles can also be powerful incubators that surface and test ideas that may be ahead of their time. Ideas that in their own time may lack proper technological or cultural underpinning, but once technology and culture catch up, sometimes end up being the answer to questions that we hadn’t thought of yet.

This bubble will be no different. (And yes, it’s a bubble. Face it, if everyone is arguing about whether it’s a bubble of not, then it’s a bubble), (Update: Steve Blank has a great post on this question here). I don’t think it will end in as explosive a decompression as the last one, especially as the global economy is in much worse shape than in 2000. I do think that this bubble is less about a technology disconnect and more about a cultural disconnect than the last one. We’ve got the bandwidth and infrastructure to support much of the startup ideas. The bigger questions that have come up have been around the implications of these ideas around societal and cultural issues such as privacy. And then there’s the business model question. Already we see the cracks in Groupon’s business model, ponder the slowing Facebook’s adoption rate, and wonder how soon Zynga will run out of “’villes” that it can gamify.

What is true is that these companies and others crowding around the IPO feeding trough have pushed innovation that we’ll be working through in the years to come. While I hate the growing drumbeat of “hype finance” I just hope that when the bubble pops it does so as gently as possible, so that when I find myself using the same arguments I did 12 years ago I can at least pretend that I might be half right.

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by on June 22, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Finance, Social Media, Uncategorized
Tagged ,
Posted by Dan on June 22, 2011

http://www.danweingrod.com/2011/06/bubble/

What I Heard at CreateTech

I was fortunate to be at the 4A’s first CreateTech conference last Friday. Not just to have a chance to see the 4A’s make a major commitment towards what I believe is a critical agency role, but also to see how the elusive Creative Technologist is being defined and the issues around that definition. Below are some of the quotes and takeaways that resonated for me from the presentations:

 

“The household is no longer physical”

JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com seemed like an odd choice for the opener. A technologist yes, but seemingly more representative of the client side, nevertheless his discussion of social objects and what Salesforce is doing in helping to build the social enterprise helped focus a the kind of strategic opportunity and big idea vision that CT’s might bring to the table.  The quote about the household goes to the role that interactivity, location and context is playing and will continue to play across communities and social objects of interest. It also goes to the, at times a bit creepy, role that data mining by Salesforce, (and us marketers), will play in it.

 

“Ads used to be the be all and end all of campaigns, now they are terrific drivers to other experiences”

Trevor O’Brien and Glenn Fellman of McKinney showed that there are agencies who are really getting it about integrating technology into their process…and they’re getting results. In their tandem presentation they gave structure and life to a CT’s role within a more traditional agency. There was lots to like in their new approach: No Ganntt charts, really embracing transparency across the creative organization, using planning poker and especially their encouragement to “Bogart the good stuff”; Keeping the really challenging and interesting work internally so you can attract and retain the best talent.

They also talked about how McKinney is encouraging innovation by creating a Google like 10% innovation time. What was interesting here was the process, or rather “non-process” of forming innovation teams at McKinney. Instead of creating a mandated team of “one part creative, one part copywriter and one part developer”, teams came together around shared interests and ideas. Proving that maybe culture, as well as process, needs to be changed in order to bring value to the CT role.

 

“The advertising industry model of the creative black box is going away, if we have an idea we’ll go and white board it with the client”

When Scott Roen of American Express and Brian Skahan of CP+B started to present Amex’s Open platform it felt ominously like a promotional presentation, but when the discussion moved to platform, process and the agency/client relationship things got much more interesting. Amex and CP+B have moved past the traditional linear, (and by association waterfall), process and have replaced it with a more circular, flexible Agile process based on regular release cycles and sprints. The benefit and relevance for the CT is that everyone sits together in a team that includes art director, coywriter, technologist and experience designer. The benefit for the agency/client relationship was that the client was very much part of the team. On both the creative and the development side there seemed to be a client willingness to be involved and readiness to accept the inconsistencies, pivots and launch delays of a tech based creative project.

 

 

Andy Hood of AQKA was the first presenter to really take up the thorny question of the definition of a CT. He started by putting up a number of quotes from the “introduce yourself” thread on the LinkedIn CT group. The self-definitions were entertainingly different, but then he polled the audience to see how many were coders and how many were still coding, (60% and 40% respectively). So does a CT need to know how to code? Based on this straw poll the answer seems to be yes, but the challenge still remains as to how the CT can take this capability and express it across an agency.

Hood’s perspective of going from Cobol programmer to leading CT at a top digital agency brought a great deal of depth and possibility to this question. What interested me was how he and his team found themselves more engaged with strategists and user experience types than the usual suspects of creative and copywriter. This was interestingly at odds with a conversation I had during a break about how developers, presumably working in more traditional agencies, felt that strategists were among the biggest roadblocks for digital ideas. Perhaps the challenge for more traditional agencies looking to build a CT role is to adopt a culture closer to that of digital agencies. Hood, based on the quote above, might agree.

 

“The smaller the budget the greater the chance an agency will be creative”

This came out of a panel discussion featuring Marcel Kornblum, Stuart Eccles, Scott Prindle and Saneel Radia. But before we got there an interesting moment appeared  when the panel veered into a discussion of sequential liability, (huh?), a topic I didn’t even know existed, but one that seems appears to becoming critically important . If I got it right, Sequential Liability sits on very slippery borderline of IP ownership where opensource code, code reuse and custom coding live in an uncomfortable truce. The crux of the issue seems to be that if you are committed to the opensource community, how can you grant full ownership rights of code to a client? If you are interested in this topic, and I’m sure I’m missing something, the 4A’s has actually published a point of view here .

And as to that other quote above. That was Marcel Kornblum responding to Stuart Eccles successful attempts to stir up the pot. The comment brought up some interesting, and slightly cynical, discussion in the room and on twitter. My take is that while no one is really out there hunting for small budgets, big budget projects, overloaded with multiple requirements and locked-down briefs, can often become the proverbial battleship that agile and creative thinking may not be able to turn around. When you consider the movement towards minimal project thinking found in the Lean startup movement and books such as “Little Bets” it seems that perhaps working at a smaller, more rapid scope, (and smaller budget), within the context of a bigger idea may be the more creative and effective approach.

 

“What is Open?”

Gary Koelling, Director of Emerging Platforms at Best Buy, took things in an unexpected direction by challenging the whole notion of the name Creative Technologist. He illustrated this by talking about Edward Jenner, the physician who discovered the discoverer of the smallpox vaccine and essential founder of immunology. Jenner used intelligent and creative insight combined with openly available tools to pursue a hunch he had about smallpox. He didn’t pay a license and shared his learning openly. It was impressive and encouraging to hear this discussion of Open coming from someone working within creative and tech in corporate America. As pointed out above it seems like there are some stirrings on the client side to think ahead of or at least in parallel with the agency side of things. A good sign or a warning? I’m not sure, but something worth preparing for. As an example Koelling closed with this video, made internally by one of his Best Buy team members.

 

“It’s your privilege, honor and responsibility as a maker to find out how people are using your systems in real life”

I was expecting that Kati London would be talking about her work at Zynga, but instead, and to my delight, she covered her work with Area/Code (which recently became Zynga New York). The work included some familiar faves like Drop7 and Discovery Channel’s Sharkhunt, but of greater interest were some of Area/Code’s latest real-world community based games.

Macon Money uses the concept of mix and match “bonds” to help disparate communities in the same city meet and interact. Battlestorm is a game that combines physical sport, reality shows and online interaction to build hurricane preparedness, its first iteration occurred this past weekend. Aside from the social relevance of these games, it was also great to see the positive way they both bridged the gap between the virtual and physical world, something we don’t see much these days where everything seems to be all too easily “gamified”. I liked the fact that there was a commitment to portability and especially learning, nicely summarized in the quote above, which extended beyond the initial game experience and into further learning and iteration.

 

“I think they just backed up a Kinect truck and poured it into the exhibition hall”

I’m not sure I have this quote right, it was getting late, but the spirit makes sense. It was from the final, very high energy, panel of the day that included Matt Powell, Eddie Smith, Shailesh Rao, Adam Petrick, and Mike Dory. The panel was ostensibly about “Commercializing Innovation”, but it more or less morphed into a discussion of the ease and delight with which new digital applications are being produced, tested, adjusted and optimized in a culture, (or is it a bubble?) that continues to be open and receptive to it. The quote above was in reference to the latest ITP show where all sorts of Kinect projects seemed to dominate the room. Kinect seems to be one of the best symbols of the energy of a quick hack culture that has sprung up.  Warning signs appeared when the panel discussed tempering client enthusiasm to “do everything”, but overall the energy of this discussion could have had me listening for even another hour.

Takeaways:

  1. I’m still not sure that there’s a working definition of what a Creative Technologist is, (and I’m not sure it really matters any more). Much of the definition will likely depend on agency culture, but it does seem clear that a CT needs to at least know how to code, if not be coding regularly.
  2. Clients seem to be getting it. Maybe this was a crazy random sampling, but the clients who presented as well as the CT’s within client organizations demonstrated a dedication and understanding of the issues and opportunities of working with technology. This could ultimately be the biggest reason why agencies should embrace and create viable roles for CT’s.
  3. Biased here, but agile and iterative processes are likely to be the tools that help create the kind of culture that will allow CT’s, and digital, to thrive within agencies.

I’m sure I missed or likely misrepresented some things. If you were there, what did you hear? If not, what do you think?

 

2 Comments
by on May 25, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Advertising, Agile
Posted by Dan on May 25, 2011

http://www.danweingrod.com/2011/05/what-i-heard-at-createtech/

So: Are We Ruining Photography Now?

Last September on a panel we were on together , resident media provocateur Ben Kunz pointed out that, “advertising has pretty much ruined the telephone”. With do-not-call lists and caller id the phone is rapidly becoming an intruder for privacy and an enemy of conversation.

I thought about this when I saw this article about Stipple, a platform that will allow photographers, publishers and brands to create product related tags on images. It’s really a brilliant idea. It flows directly out of the success the InStyle magazine “I want what she’s wearing” philosophy of celebrity merchandising, blended with the undeniable fact that uploading and tagging of photos has become probably the most popular activity on Facebook. Great media idea, but at what cost?

If you know me, you know that I’m a huge fan of Instagram, the social/mobile photo sharing app. It’s changed the way I’ve approached photography and I believe is part of shaping a whole new approach for imagery in the future, (more on this in a later post). But when I read about great ideas like Stipple I wonder if we’re off to ruin another media again.

What works for me about Instagram is the way it’s helped me form a community around the daily life of friends, acquaintances and pure strangers that I’ve met based on imagery alone. It’s about what they notice and what delights us on a very direct, almost instinctive basis. Sure, there’s all the usual social capital of making sure to like friends’ photos and hoping they’ll like yours, but at the heart of it it’s about bringing a new dimension of non-verbal information and a new presence into your friends’ life. If you happen to like the image of a building, food or even an item clothing you might comment, “cool hat, where’d you get it?”and you might even get a reply and recommendation, or maybe not.

So in steps Stipple with the unacknowledged, (but we know it’ll happen), potential of having everyone tag any photo with branded, ecommerce links and helping us all become a walking affiliate marketers. I can imagine photo decisions being overtaken by thoughts of product placement and gaining likes likes in the hopes of gaining cash along with potential social prestige. That will be followed by photo-spamming, do-not-send-photo lists and…we know where this all could go. Add to this the whole raft of in-image advertising networks coming our way and it’s hard to imagine shared environments like Instagram staying above the fray.

I know that this feels like railing against the inevitable. It’s just too hard for advertising to resist a new media channel ripe for monetization, (another word I’d dearly love to find a replacement for). One potential hope, if we’re lucky, is that the inevitable might become something like Twitter’s failed dickbar experience. In which case it will become part of an additional lesson from the aforementioned Ben Kunz’s. His second mistake of online advertising in his latest Digiday column: “Never try to disguise your message by blending it with editorial”. If community generated content such as Instagram can be seen as producing its own, semi-private “editorial content”, it may be possible that the inevitability of commercialization may not happen.

A deeper issue with platforms like Stipple is brought up in Rick Webb’s provocative On the Bubble post, where he points out that too many startups and developers make the assumption that their latest cool app or platform will be adopted by advertisers looking for a new channel. When I think potential for intrusion by Stipple and other like platfoms into the nice, quiet Instagram environment I wonder if maybe its time to stop this consistent forcing of new media channels for brands and maybe just develop new experiences that do a better job of entertaining, informing and enriching our lives.

 

2 Comments
by on May 8, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Instagram, Media, Social Media
Tagged , ,
Posted by Dan on May 8, 2011

http://www.danweingrod.com/2011/05/are-we-ruining-photography/

Facebook, Photos, Tornadoes

A few years ago I was sitting discussing Facebook with the CFO of a major restaurant chain. To test his belief that Facebook couldn’t possibly be relevant to anyone other than teens he asked a passing assistant manager if he was on Facebook. The manager, without missing a beat replied, “Sure, we do our schedules on Facebook”.

I thought about this when I read an article about “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes” a Facebook page that was created last week to unite people with images and documents lost during last week’s tornadoes in the South.  What struck me again was almost a final and unavoidable conclusion of Facebook’s power as a ubiquitous and easily adaptable platform for expression. Think about it, a woman walks out into her yard and discovers photographs and personal debris left by the passing storm. A few years ago all a good Samaritan might be able to do would be to sent the photos to a local newspaper or a sheriff’s office in the affected town. And the results would probably have been as effective as sending a letter to Santa Claus. Instead she created the Facebook page, photographed the images she found and uploaded them with the hope that they would somehow reach their owners. Soon people were arriving at the page and claiming photos and soon after uploading found photos of their own. The result is a page with over 83,000 followers, over 1,600 photos and ongoing uploads seemingly every 3 or 4 minutes. There are even posts on the page from photographers who will help restore images and others who will volunteer to take new family photos.

It’s easy enough to simply attribute this success to “Cognitive Surplus”, but its really much more than that. It’s a statement of the arrival of a platform that has become simultaneously malleable and ubiquitous enough that its users have begun to invent and bend it to new purposes. Photography is often at the core of this. Facebook is now the largest repository of photographs online, with over 200 million uploaded daily. But its the Facebook workflow and use case for imagery, employing  posting and tagging within albums that has made it instinctively a place people would go to find images, especially those that connect with individuals.  You wouldn’t necessarily go to flickr to find a family birthday album. At the same time the meteoric rise of mobile photography, (the iPhone 4 has overtaken regular “cameras” even on Flickr), makes it simple to upload and share just about anything, even if it’s a picture of a picture that you found in your front yard and you think someone might be missing. So when you consider it, it’s hard to imagine that faced with a similar situation, you would NOT to use Facebook. It’s simply the easiest, most accessible and logical choice.

Of course this isn’t the first or most famous use of Facebook for grass-roots mass communication. The Spring Revolution in Egypt is a much more profound example of how Facebook is reshaping the world on a larger scale through imagery and the simplicity of its platform. The difference here is that in the developing world with its harsh censorship policies the need for and result of open discussion can become much more vital and enabling (and with much larger consequences). Conversely in our developed world of abundant open communication these types of mass events seem rarer because its not often that we can find the wedge where a broad platform can fill a need that media, government or marketing hasn’t already filled. Google has done admirable work in this area with their Person Finder tool used following the Japan tsunami, and the Haiti Earthquake. The big difference here is that the Pictures page is a homegrown solution. No developers were called in, no programming was necessary and no requirements were gathered. Instead it’s a continuing example of ubiquitous and easy to use platforms and technologies are maturing and inspiring people to possibilities where none existed before.

 

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by on May 2, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Facebook, Social Media
Posted by Dan on May 2, 2011

http://www.danweingrod.com/2011/05/facebook-photos-tornadoes/

31 days of 3six5

 

Something was missing this morning. I got up, made coffee, checked email and realized I didn’t have to send an email out to let someone know that their day and mine were intersecting.

I just completed my stint as March editor of the 3six5, the long running, crowdsourced, daily Posterous blog now in its second year. I volunteered for the editor role last year when the call went out and when choosing the month I decided to try for something sooner rather than later. I got March, which may have not been my first choice, and definitely became scary when I realized I’d be editing while I was at SXSW.

It turned out that March was even more tumultuous than I had thought it would be. There was turmoil at work, changes at home, heading to the Austin Convention Center promptly at 6 pm to make sure I had a good wifi connection and other sundry issues of life and connections.

Yet oddly enough, or maybe not so oddly, the 3six5 ended up being the rock that helped anchor me throughout the month. I loved the extra routine that it brought to my day, the sense of responsibility and belonging to something bigger than myself for a while. Even more I loved the utter surprise and serendipity of the daily connections I helped make into people’s worlds. (And I especially loved it when those people were in Europe because they got their posts to me EARLY).

The authors were great, gracious and generous in their praise for my role. Which surprised me, because from my point of view they were the ones doing all the hard work. (The hardest thing was actually getting used to quickly typing the number 3, the word six and the number 5, try it if you don’t believe me).

I enjoyed the surprise of suddenly jumping from authors in Kuala Lumpur and Australia to authors in Kansas and Minneapolis. Most of all, I enjoyed the writing. Often full of passion and spirit, it especially moved me when authors took the time to define unique small moments of their day that ended up enriching my own.

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by on April 1, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized
Posted by Dan on April 1, 2011

http://www.danweingrod.com/2011/04/31-days-of-3six5/

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