roundup: 2012 predictions, adaptive businesses, and candy corn

11 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • No comments

I write these roundups as emails for my company from time to time, and I thought I’d share one with you. Let me know if you’d want to see these on a more regular basis.

Welcome to 2012. We now have jet-packs, augmented reality contact lenses, and time cloaking, though sadly still no hoverboards. Still, the future is pretty awesome. And you might as well be hopeful, only neutrinos (maybe) get to move backward in time, the rest of us are stuck moving forward.

First off, I thought I’d wrangle together the usual suspects of 2012 predictions and 2011 best-of’s for your perusal.

• Seems appropriately meta to start the list with a list of lists of expert predictions
• JWT’s 100 Things to Watch in 2012
• Frog’s 2012 Tech Trend Predictions
• AdAge guesses what social media will look like in 2012
• 30 Social Media Predictions
• Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2011
• The Top 21 Albums of 2011, culled from 120 top 10 lists

In other news, if you want to get a whiff of what happens when you combine business intelligence with real-time adaptation (where all businesses are headed), Wired’s exploration of Zynga and its competitor, Wooga, is a must read.

College Humor used to say that one of the easiest ways to make content that people share is to put candy corn in it. Not the actual treat – something mildly nostalgic and curious. The Restart Page is a great example of nerd candy corn.

A 20-hour work week could save the global economy. It would be extremely difficult, but I think I could sacrifice some of my time in the office for the good of the world. Just sayin’.

Go forth, and be awesome.

what’s my book about again?

05 Jan, 2012 • posts i've written • 2 comments

Strategy as we know it should become an emergent phenomenon of a lean organization co-evolving with its environment, seeking to map its internal and external networks, gain nodes, create shared value, and cope with unintended consequences.

Yep. In a nutshell. It’s ok if that just sparked more questions than it answered. That’s why it’s a book.

For a world that’s more connected, and inherently more complex, I think we need to question our old assumptions about strategy and organizational management.

Sign-up here to get updates as it progresses.

With a new year comes a strong re-commitment to this project. I appreciate everyone’s patience. My life has been a bit more chaotic than I would have liked and progress hasn’t come as quickly as I want, either.

Writing has been an adventure – one I’m incredibly fortunate to be afforded by very kind, supportive, folks.

how big is it?

19 Dec, 2011 • posts i've written • 1 comment

I feel like something becomes blog post worthy fodder when I’ve heard or thought about it for the 100th time.

In a meeting last week I was talking about an opportunity with a new start-up to a CPG client and they asked, “Well, how big is it?” and some bell went off in my head signaling that sentiment’s 100th utterance.

Brands like to buy big audiences. Buying big audiences is just easier to manage than courting lots of small groups, especially for a brand team member that’s probably juggling more responsibilities than they reasonably should. It’s also easier to expand the top of the funnel (by buying mass awareness) than it is to make the product better.

Louder advertising is easier to buy than better marketing. We have to change that.

Clients should be courting smaller communities, crowds, and audiences on the web. With smaller groups you get exponentially greater intimacy. You can negotiate truly bespoke partnerships. And you can even garner some free PR just for doing something novel. Creatively, you get to experiment with the brand in a new way. And you gain access to influential early adopters (the kind of people that glom on to new start-ups) who are about a thousand times more likely to talk about your brand’s partnership than the light web user who just ignored your banner ad on espn.com.

The opportunities most often outweigh any risks – but they rarely outweigh the cognitive and administrative costs.

That’s why agencies have to step up and become the connective tissue between the brand and the emerging tech scene. Some are definitely already doing this and pretty soon it will just be a parity product for any digital team worth a damn.

Moreover, we have to become masters of small. Bets, projects, audiences, and communities. We have to become better at tracking small before it becomes big, better at getting to small (projects) faster, and better at spinning smaller plates concurrently. We have to because our clients won’t or don’t have the authority to refocus.

Clients can call up a media department and ask for 5 million eyeballs like it’s a Happy Meal. Most of the time the buy is produced a bit like the meat in a Happy Meal, too.

We have to make small that easy.

Bonus points: work for clients that actually spend time checking out new stuff on the web, educate your clients about emerging tools, create a measurement system that rewards more than box filling, take partnerships out of media’s realm and make it a creative assignment, be good enough, and persistent enough, to influence product not just ads.

what is a digital strategy?

01 Dec, 2011 • posts i've written • 15 comments

I was flipping through Ana’s new deck on digital strategy, re-stumbled onto Mike’s Tenets of Digital Strategy and decided to take a crack at defining digital strategy, as pithily as possible, for myself.

Here goes …

Thoughts?

It’s funny how I’ve been doing this for at least the last six years and I’ve never tried to define it.

help create the definitive inspiration engine for the creative community

23 Nov, 2011 • posts i've written • 5 comments

I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking around improving this site and what my readers (that’s you!) actually need from a site like this. The document above goes into depth about my ideas. I’ve taken inspiration from sites like PSFK and Buzzfeed, and from people like Noah Brier.

I’d love to hear reactions and suggestions. Moreover, I’m interested in finding people that want to bring this to life with me. Editors, writers, and developers that want to own part of this and dedicate their time. My time is very limited, especially now that I’m back writing on the book, so in order to move forward I have to find a group of passionate people that want to build this together from scratch.

Behind the ideas are some trends or concerns I have about the state of publishing:

• RSS is the new QR Code – With Google Reader killing the community aspect of their product, I worry that the super user group inside Reader is scrambling like I am to find a new way to source content, new ways that involve algorithms like Percolate that sort content and not RSS readers that merely present it. Also, my site has taken a traffic hit since Reader lost its community. I see RSS still being functionally very useful, but less and less of a consumer facing technology.
• We’re Building Tools of Distraction – Flow content, the rush of ephemera on sites like Buzzfeed, is more and more the norm across the web for brands and publishers. We’re reinforcing a shallow attention span and we’re not innovating on long-form pieces with the same creative effort.
• Archives are Graveyards – When I consulted for CNN, I was interested in making their archive of content more useful to readers and the content more valuable to the brand. Think about it, in the way most sites work (in reverse chronological order), content has a shelf life of a few minutes. The efforts of editors and writers are worth more than that and every publisher should be experimenting with making their archives more useful and valuable. I’m calling my idea the Inspiration Board, but it’s just one possible outcome for content.

In essence, I’m proposing a massively collaborative project, powered by a small community. Are you interested in joining our little cabal of editors, writers, designers, and developers? If so, hit me with a comment or shoot me an email.