End of Summer Brain Purge

September 3, 2010

I came across a bunch of notes I made this summer. Some I thought were the beginnings of lengthier posts. Others were obviously just passing notions. With the summer winding down and brains beginning to check out for the Labor Day weekend, I thought I’d publish these tidbits and unburden my own cerebrum a little.

Slow Down. While the world speeds up, science seems to be saying its in our best interest to slow down. From stress management and health-related consequences, to the Outlier’s notion of needing 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery, to the myth of multitasking, to The Shallows indictment of the skimming nature of the Internet Mind and the havoc it wreaks on our ability to learn – it seems to me sometimes we’re taking one step forward and two steps back. Does anyone feel like they’re at their best when they’re rushing? Why then does it seem so much of life moves at that pace? And as importantly, are the quality of our work and our lives benefitting?

Pre-customer Service. My college mentor once said, “Advertising should function as pre-customer service.” Rather than selling, advertisers (and by this he included marketers) need to think about making their products more easily ‘buyable’. Given the shift in media control from publisher to consumer in the 15 odd years since he coined the term, his idea seems ever more sensible. Until consumers look toward marketers with gratitude because they’ve made making choices easier I think the industry will continue to struggle.

Invention to Convention. Consider the QWERTY keyboard. It was developed to intentionally slow typing down so the mechanics of a typewriter could handle the outlay of characters without jamming the ribbon and wasting ink. It caught on as typing in general did. This was during a major technological shift that impacts a huge proportion of mankind. Decades later, and despite many better options and innovations having come along since, QWERTY still rules the roost. QWERTY, due to its good fortune of being made available as the typeing concept in general enjoyed broad acceptance became a convention. Conventions are very hard to displace once they’ve established themselves.

Related, the keyboard and mouse combo are a computing convention going on forty years old that made its debut right around the time computers began to go mainstream. Today touch-sensitive glass is novel and is finding traction, especially on small devices where keyboards are impractical. Will touch screens displace the keyboard and mouse as the dominant interaction device for our computers? How long will that take? There’s a relevant irony to the fact that the iPad for all its innovation has a QWERTY keyboard built into its system. Inventions come and go. Conventions stay for the long run. The jury is still out on what really needs to happen for an invention to survive long enough to become a convention. Personally I find this pretty fascinating.

Corporate Values. When we ask firms about their values, we’re often given lists that include ‘we’re ethical’ ‘we’re innovative’ ‘we’re customer centric’. These are not in and of themselves differentiating values. In most competitive environments they’re table stakes. What business doesn’t want to be ethical, innovative or customer-centric?

My co-worker realized something: differentiating values are something a company can expend resources on. This is not only in the boolean sense of can you invest in it or not. After all anyone can invest in innovation and most companies do invest in product development.

Rather a differentiating value is established by both the necessity of investing it in and  by the fact that the definition of the value itself guides how the investment is made. Investing in ‘being innovative’ offers no guideance. Investing in ‘simple usability’ absolutely does. The same goes for ‘customer-centricity’ (generic table stakes) vs. ‘simple, convenient, and satisfying customer interactions’ (invest in good training for the customer service people, get them off the computer-prompt system and empower them to make decisions).

Social Media Class of 1988. Does anyone else find it ironic that conversations and theory around social media usually originates from people who have traditionally been identified as socially marginal ‘computer geeks’? Theoretically speaking, it would seem more likely that when one cracks open their high school yearbook they would discover that the most social people of their graduating class – the heart throb jock, the class President, the captain of the cheerleading squad – were the ones who went on to become experts in ‘social media’. Instead social media if often defined the kids who wheeled the AV cart down the hall trying to avoid wedgies. In fact, the jargon-laden nature of social media, with its ‘user interactions’ and ‘aggregate digital experiences’ sounds exactly like geeks talking to computers and not human beings talking to each other.

Funny how socially awkward the lexicon of social media is.

In my mind this is just more anecdotal evidence that the entire ‘social media space’ is a lot more about the media (technology) than the social. To establish the proper balance the geeks need to recruit some jocks and cheerleaders with experience in appealing to and engaging with human beings.

Buzz Machine Hindsight. Remember a few years ago how Madison & Vine got all frothy about the power of advertainment? Remember BMW films and how it was the vanguard of how products would be sold? Advertising and entertainment were the peanut butter and chocolate of the future. Angelina and Pepsi would co-star and a Grammy category would eventually be born.

I don’t hear much about that anymore. Do you?

I keep this in mind while evaluating some of the stuff being thrown around as ‘where its all heading’ today.

…unplug, pop open a cold one and enjoy the long holiday weekend friends.

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Posted by Corey

Twitter & World Conquest?

August 20, 2010

Sure, it makes for dramatic charts to measure growth by posts. But posts can just as easily be a measure added noise. More important to Twitter's longterm relevance are engaged, active, regular users over time.

A little quick math based on this article on Twitter growth which would have us all believing Twitter is taking over the world and changing the way everyone does everything.

Twitter has 93MM users worldwide. That’s a sizeable number. Probably the equivalent of several nations for those prone to enjoying irrelevant hyperbolic comparisons.

Twitter struggles with an 83% dormancy rate in its open accounts. Hm, that could be an issue couldn’t it?

That means Twitter in reality has +/- 16MM regular, active, engaged users worldwide.

If Sysmos (quoted in the original article being referenced here) is right, and North America makes up 50% of Twitter’s user base, that means there are about 8MM active Twitter users in North America.

If  the Comscore study is right and that figure is closer to 27%, then it’s only 4.32MM users. The North American  population is 344MM, just for a measuring rod to determine ubiquity (which in my mind is a prerequisite of lofty claims to seismic cultural change).

Looked at as part of the North American population, that means Twitter – in its argulably most mature market, with few well-known competitors, zero cost or barriers to entry by consumers (with Internet access), and after two years of incredible hype and awareness – has an engaged userbase of approx. 2.3% (on the high end) or 1.26% (on the low end) of the North American population. This is not insignificant, mind you, but neither is it paradigm-shifting ubiquity – especially for something that is inherently ‘free’ insofar as user adoption goes.

This number further assumes that 100% of all active users are 1) not spammers, 2) not follower-collectors, celebrities, government folks or corporate accounts who use it for broadcast and marketing and 3) that of the often hundreds of follows heavy Twitter users maintain, there is even remote chance of them seeing much of any individual follow’s output.

If, after two years of over-the-top media hype across one of the most rapid-fire and advanced communications networks in the world, only 2% of the population has opted to use Twitter regularly in North America – a country whose cell phone bills speak reams about its desire for connectivity – then we are not looking at an overnight revolution but a slow, drift. And Twitter is not a powerhouse, but a fringe tool.

It’s also very possible that the 22% North American growth rate (measured in sign-ups, mind you) is cannibalized by the 83% dormancy rate and that Twitter’s engaged user base in North America is not really growing at all – just cycling through usernames.

Admittedly, ’100% growth’ and ’93MM users’ are nice statements for 140 character tweets. Looking a little deeper though, is revealing.

Reading a headline like “Twitter achieves 100% growth in one year” could easily stir up executives to rush into social media without considering the context of both the headline and their own constituencies. What, after all, is the makeup of that 2% of the population that are active Twitter users in North America? More importantly, what proportion of those subsets are actually constituencies your business stands to benefit from engaging with?

Were I considering the role of Twitter in my business efforts, I  would gauge my efforts, resources and expectations accordingly. That is not to say exclude Twitter, but it is to say have realistic and proportionate plans for it. I would also add that while the media frenzy creates a sense of urgency around any new technology, in fact, a sense of reasoned thought is more likely to yield beneficial results.

Headlines often get our attention but they are not always worth our attention.

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Posted by Corey

A Cognitive Surplus Upgrade Experiment

August 19, 2010

Hi. Long time, no post. In early August my family retreated to a small cabin in Maine. I brought along two Kindle books, Clay Shirkey’s Cognitive Surplus and Nicolas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains. I was drawn to both texts because they seemed – or so the media positioned it –  to present opposing opinions on the topic of the Internet and more specifically the social tools now becoming commonplace in our lives.

I read Shirkey’s book first. I enjoyed Here Comes Everybody and his latest did not disappoint (though it did cover much of the same ground). Overall it presents an optimistic portrayal of a world where people, with the capacity to pool knowledge and effort as never before, have ever greater opportunities to harness our collective power to do good. Certainly the Apache’s, Linux’s and Wikipedia’s of the world are testimony to the power of a collective effort.

I then read Carr’s Shallows and it too did not disappoint. Backed by numerous neurological studies, he built a strong, historically expansive case documenting the behavioral changes that come alongside the adoption of our new technologies and tools. Carr helped clarify McLuhan’s original and often mis-attrbuted one-liner ‘the medium is the message’, which has always meant the tools themselves change who we are more than the content they carry. This change, is in fact, the message of a medium.

Triage mode.
More importantly though, in Carr’s descriptions of the shallowing mind, I saw reflections of myself. Specifically in the erratic nature of flitting between Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and the 5 email accounts I actively maintain. Further, I reflected on the nature of my workday while using these tools. I often characterize my day as being in ‘triage mode’. Triage mode finds me focused on a single subject for a short time, trying to rapidly diagnose its needs and the most immediate servicing of that need before jumping to the next thing. The trouble with triage mode is that it is stressful, exhausting and cannot be sustained with any quality for long periods of time. I would also argue that the best ideas and highest quality of output rarely come from triage work.

If Clay Shirkey believes we can use technology to harness the collective brainpower of millions of people, Nicolas Carr is calling into question the individual capacities of those brains to conduct the deep, linear, thought that has historically lead to innovation. This begs the question, ‘Which is better, one million minds shallowly focused but interconnected or one hundred minds, deeply focused but somewhat less connected?’

My experiment.
In many regards this question is a moot point. Our new connectivity is a fact of life. However, it did afford me the chance to think about myself. What I decided is that, unhappy with the frenetic feeling I had (especially in contrast to the relaxed on-vacation state I was in while reading these books) I chose to conduct an experiment over the last month. Here’s what I did:

  1. I Turned off the auto-check on all my email accounts. To get email I would need to manually check for it.
  2. I set up specific times for email checking and resisted the urge to check email while I was in the midst of other work.
  3. I stopped using Twitter and Foursquare altogether and scaled back Facebook to before work, after work, and occasionally at lunch.
  4. I put down this blog for a month.
  5. I shut down all digital media from 8pm onward during workdays and all weekend until 8pm Sunday night when I allowed myself a check-in to ramp up for Monday.

All of these rules of course were contingent on not having a pressing issue at work to contend with.

I addition to these changes, I picked up a few other habits aimed at retraining my brain toward greater focus on singular tasks. These changes included:

  1. I backed off of caffeine. While I enjoy the taste of coffee, caffeine makes me jittery which contributes to the frenetic stress I associate with triage mode.
  2. I made a point to read each night before falling asleep. Sometimes I’d only make it ten minutes before passing out but I tried for at least a half hour per day.
  3. I throttled back on web use a bit. When I found myself just flitting about aimlessly (the equivalent of channel surfing on TV) I would put the computer down and go find something else to do (often that would be reading).
  4. I tried to fit in a few minutes of meditation daily. I have a martial arts background which included some training in Zen. Stilling the mind is a central task of zazen (sitting meditation) and I decided to re-employ this practice, albeit in much briefer sessions.

The results.
The results were noticeable. At first it was difficult. I felt a little cut off and out of the loop. I missed that up-to-the-minute deluge of information, even if 99% wasn’t really all that important of impactful of what I was doing at any given time. A few days in though, I found myself getting reacquainted with quiet.  The first thing I noticed is I mulled things over more. Everything. I wasn’t trying to make rapid fire decisions but rather contemplating options, opportunities and consequences.

I found my temperament at home and at work became more evened out. I was not getting rattled or frustrated as easily, and began experiencing much less of the low-grade background stress of ‘triage mode’. As a result I was more enthusiastic about my work on any given day.

I also began to feel more focused on a task while I was doing it. I was getting better at extending the amount of focused time I could deliver before the ‘itch’ to check in with my email or otherwise ‘take a break’ (read, ‘distract myself’) kicked in.

Generally I became more optimistic. This last note is important. Triage mode put me in a mindset of damage control. I found myself racing from one thing to the next, pressured to make quick, efficient diagnoses of what was needed and then to remedy the need quickly. This can be useful in emergencies. Overdone, it can lead to knee-jerk judgements and substandard solutions. At the very least, it often left me with a feeling of racing just to get it done rather than ‘thinking it through’.

Overall my efficiency and the quality of my work improved and I began to realize that without the constant thrumming of data – often irrelevant if entertaining or interesting – I was able to do better work, quicker. I also found myself feeling better connected to my family in the evenings and on weekends.

Quality of surplus.
I’ve been thinking about Cognitive Surplus and The Shallows ever since embarking on my experiment. Were I to sum it all up, I would say both authors are right and despite the media portrayal, the books are complementary, not opposing, positions. We now have the collective capacity to pool resources as never before. This creates incredible potential. However as with any type of transaction – the time we spend using digital tools is time we don’t spend doing other things. Carr convincingly points to the fact that using any tool necessarily changes how our brains work. It is up to us to be conscious of this and to make wise decisions in accordance with what we’re trying to achieve.

Personally, I feel like I walked into digital media years ago determined to make them conform to my needs . Somehow, along the way, they conformed me to their nature. The outcome was a flitting, short-attention-span, frantically-trying-to-filter-and-respond daily life.

By taking stock of my habits (which often had formed unconsciously as my phone got smarter or I signed up to tinker with a new online service) and then reshuffling my behaviors, I have realized dramatic and generally positive effects. While I’ve softened my hardline experiment a little, I continue to stick to many of the original principles of it because of the benefit they’ve delivered to me.

I believe my experiment has, in short, made my cognitive surplus (and the rest of my cognitive capacities) more valuable to me and by extension, to the people I endeavor to share them with.

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Posted by Corey

The Hipstamatic Effect

July 7, 2010

Recently I started fiddling with the iPhone’s Hipstamatic app. I’ll say it; it is cool. Popular too, it seems many of my iPhone-toting friends have begun running their images through Hipstamatic’s filters. The most astonishing thing about Hipstamatic is how it can transform everyday images into faux-retro works of art.

Through Hipstamatic and tools like it the same people who used to utter such classic phrases as, “I can’t draw a straight line” and “I’m not creative” are beginning to experience the joys of being ‘creative’ in that classic, artful sense of the term. This is wonderful. Everyone should enjoy that experience at some point.

Apple has built an empire on this very premise – that all people should be given the chance to be creative. From its numerous templates for iWork, iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band novice noodlers can create sophisticated looking pieces from photo albums to home movies to business letters, resumes and reports. Pick a template, drag and drop your images and surprise yourself at how polished it all looks!

Do McPictures beget McThinking?
With Hipstamatic I can take any mundane subject, like my thumb (featured above) and turn it into a fairly interesting image. I can do the same with pictures of my car, my kids, a bottle of wine or a cup of coffee. Interesting images can be found everywhere and made from everything. By and large that is a good thing, I think.

But (there’s always a ‘but’)…

Is all this instant artiness one more example of how technology is training our minds to skim rather than dive deep?

In the traditional sense, art – in music, lyrics, poetry, pictures, video – was meant to offer insight, perspective and commentary. Beneath the surface of many art pieces was deeper thought. Even Duchamp’s inverted urinal and Warhol’s Brillo boxes – everyday consumer items elevated to art – held commentary and thoughtfulness. The objects themselves were the distillation of a lot of thought and intention.

With a Hipstamatic picture, something mundane like my thumb is given unnecessary layers of polish which attribute to it no real depth of meaning. It’s still just my thumb.

If we do this again and again, with music, photos, blog posts, etc. are we training ourselves to be superficial, to subvert the seeking of meaning and depth for the less strenuous world of canned effects applied to shallow topics for a shallow visual or aural thrill? Are we creating the fast food of art – tastes good going down but offers no real nutritive value? Worse are we training ourselves to think this way? If so, how will it impact everything else we do – our careers, relationships, purchase decisions, political views, and on and on?

I am guessing many will agree with me that culturally over the past few decades we’ve placed a significant emphasis on transient instances of ‘cool’, media soundbytes (often out of context) and tabloid journalism, shock-value fashion, music and movies and other examples of quick-fix stimulation over insightful thinking or meaningful commentary. In my mind these are related to the ‘one click’ pleasures of Hipstamatic type tools that make it very easy to settle for – and focus purely on – the cosmetically cool even if it is conceptually vacant.

Lest you think I’m some art elitest I am not. I admit it, I like Hipstamatic. I like Garageband and iMovie too. They’re fun to use and as noted before, I think everyone should enjoy the feeling of creating music and imagery and art. I think everyone should recognize that they are creative in some way. However, every new technology or tool brings with it benefits and consequences and if I were to criticize our society it would be that we are myopic, focusing more on rights and benefits than on responsibilities and consequences.

For all the marvels today’s digital tools offer, I can’t quiet this nagging sense that being the shortcuts they are – these tools are in some ways distracting us from an important aspect of the process of creativity, the hard work of innovation rather than the comparatively easier pursuit of decoration.

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Posted by Corey

Context Is King: getting more from social media.

June 29, 2010

The story of social media is sexy from a marketer’s perspective. As traditional media fragmented and mass audiences scattered, along comes a new technology offering access to huge numbers and at a low cost. Companies were ready to hop in bed straight away as the opportunities became obvious: Crowdsourcing, free video distribution, product evaluation, coupon distribution, followers and friends, even the chance to be seen as ‘liked’ by millions.

More recently, the headlines have started to move on. Facebook and Twitter are old news and the social media elite are now talking about other socially-enhanced topics like business operations. Yet I don’t believe we’re far enough along yet to drop the topic of social media and marketing. Social media, it seems to me, is being held hostage by the past.

I am not a number, I am a free man.
Every marketer worth his/her weight will utter the words, “It’s all about the customer and solving the customer’s problem.” While it’s never occupied the proportion it deserves on the proverbial creative brief, the ‘Target Audience’ heading is omnipresent. Marketing and advertising – ever since their hands were forced by fragmenting media – have been trying to laser in on a customer-centric, target-marketing approach.

Ironically customer-centrism seems to take second seat in much of the dialog around social media.

Have you noticed that social media hype is always about numbers? Millions of views, tens of thousands of followers, memberships the size of nations? Is it me or do these all seem like old-school, mass media ways of thinking about this stuff? The equivalent of Super Bowl viewership stats for the 21st century. I have to ask myself, ‘If we all talk about it this way, are we collectively opting for a cognitive box from the mass media era?’ What would happen if size didn’t matter?  Or more importantly, when we strip out size, what are we left to work with?

Technology today has enabled people to fully customize their exposure to media and yet the marketing industry clings to the old discussions based on volume. One would expect as we transition into this brave new world, we’d let go of the traditional worth-as-measured-by-volume discourse. Have we?

Pedaling Influence.
To hear it sold, the value of social media is predicated on its ability to deliver access to communities. These communities are often self-organized thanks to social media tools. Each community has its own value system and world view which, according to the Marketing 101 noted above must be understood. Access to the broader membership of a community is granted through its leadership, often called ‘Influencers’ in the jargon. Someone with influence and respect within a community is in a position to impact that community’s opinion and behavior around a brand, product, cause, etc. Naturally, social media strategy then has much to do with engaging Influencers.

Identifying these Influencers can be tricky though. Many of the measurement tools I’ve worked with use traditional quantitative measures like number of posts, number of comments, number of inbound links, etc. All of these in various combinations might well point to influence however these measurement are most appropriate to bloggers and perhaps forums. Unfortunately, bloggers (and by this I mean those who tend to blogs followed by more than a handful of their family and friends) and heavy forum participants are a small proportion of the social media space that is advertised as beings hundreds of millions strong.

Most of the citizens of the social sphere belong to the networks like Facebook. Another sizable subset (with significant overlap) use popular tools like Twitter and increasingly Foursquare. These are the social media masses advertisers are promised access to. On the surface, these sites and tools are the new NBC’s of the world, the place where mass groups gather (even if now, they gather for very different reasons and sort themselves into millions of subset groups). My question is, do we as marketers know more about these people than we did about the TV viewer of the mass media world? I would say yes, we do, but not as much as is often advertised. For this reason, we should give pause to consider a few things. Let me explain:

For privacy reasons, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace are reluctant to grant automated systems access to user profile pages or information through their APIs. When these companies even hint at it, their memberships protest quite loudly. What they do offer is access to groups, fan pages, video pages (on MySpace) and the like. The trouble here is that these types of pages are notoriously static (fan it and forget it behaviors) and in addition these pages provide little information on the people who are associated with them (basically their name and anything these people post on the comment boards which in turn tends to be minimal, see ‘fan it and forget it’ above).

For tools like Twitter, profile information is by its nature shallow. In addition the posts are short, making evaluation difficult. Sentiment dictionaries, used by automated tools to guess at the overall positive or negative nature of a collection of words, are at best only ‘somewhat accurate’ owing to the complexities and ambiguity of so many words in our language. With only 140 characters to work with, determining sentiment is very difficult. To take sentiment numbers at face value can be very misleading. Add to this that being ‘the shit’ in some communities is good while in others its bad. Slang matters too.

The result in both these cases is that identifying influencers in social networks and Twitter-type tools through any sort of automated process is quite difficult to do and comes with a significant margin of error. This is through no lack of effort on behalf of the tool creators, its just that the really useful information is not being made available that way.

By way of example, if you wanted to find the opinion leaders of urban, inner city males aged 18-22 with an interest in video gaming, it would be impossible to do this through any of the automated tools. Yet this is precisely the type of target profile many brands (rightly) are building their marketing strategies around. A quick search for ‘urban youth’ on Facebook is disappointing. So too is a search on ‘video game fans’ which returns no shortage of groups (1900+) but their memberships are in the double-digits.

That leaves blogs and forums which are indeed good places to look for opinion leaders. Here the automated tools deliver even greater value. The nice part about blogs and forums is that they tend to be topical which means by tracking a specific URL you’re already honed in a little. On the downside, the reality is that consistent, steady bloggers and forum participants are a significant minority of the massive numbers sold as accessible through social media. The Internet, being a longtail technology, has millions of blogs but most only have a handful of followers. The number of mass blogs delivering access to large communities is a much smaller proportion. Again, those mass media expectations are inappropriate for social media.

In this way, all the talk of access to millions sounds a lot more cut and dry than it is if you’re trying to tie your market strategy down to a well-defined customer set.

Managing social media: Less money, more manpower.
Compared to traditional advertising which has for decades been trending more expensive and less effective, social media definitely costs less money. However, despite the advertising of access to hundreds of millions of people, its reach is not nearly as great as the old mass media used to be. This means reaching a large community meaningfully through social media will require an investment, even if its not as heavily on cash.

What a company will save in hard costs it will make up for in softer costs, namely people and processes. This is the part that’s often overlooked on proposals and strategic plans. Unlike advertising campaigns which have a beginning and an end and a media schedule and a concrete list of deliverables, social media outreach is an ongoing commitment that requires continual monitoring and manual intervention if its to be used well.

Making this commitment means installing processes for listening, filtering, responding, measuring, making sense of the measurements, acting on the outcomes of the measurement and finally keeping management in the loop. By corporate standards that’s a tall order and not an insignificant amount of work. Therefore that social media budget adds up in different ways.

Social media also sets up an expectation with customers. Like good advertising for a bad product, to tease interest and then disappoint can be a big misstep and do more harm than having not participated in social media at all.

Return on social media investment.
It is true, making social media work means identifying the influencers and engaging them. It also means having proper expectation about how great a group any one influencer will reach and how long it will take to propagate a message through a community. Despite the ‘instant success’ nature of public relations around social media, most initiatives take time to propagate across the Internet.

Today’s automated tools can only do half of the necessary work in managing a social media effort. In some ways, I would say they are even dangerous in the wrong hands. If you have an old-school mass-media mind, its easy to get all excited by a simple keyword search whereby your brand is mentioned thousands of times. On the surface this looks good right? But mentioned by whom? At what sentiment? Are the people talking about your brand the people you’re targeting with that customer-centric strategy you have? It’s tempting to say all chatter is good chatter and who cares who is talking as long as they are talking. This is a slippery slope. Talk to everyone in one voice and you talk to no one – that’s a lasting outcome of the decline of mass media. People expect to be addressed on their terms, not generic ones. In fact, we all tune out anything that doesn’t speak to us on our own terms. (Ask a 16 year old how many diaper ads they’ve seen vs. a new mother.)

So casting wide social media nets to accrue stacks of mentions in some aggregate score card might begin dumbing down your strategy, making it generic and eventually impotent. The numbers thrown around in social media presentations can easily lead one astray because, God love them, those big numbers feel like the security of the old mass media world we’ve been dragged away from kicking and screaming.

‘Socializing’ a brand means aligning it with a constituency.
To make social media work it needs to remain customer-centric – otherwise its noise and shallow tactics, neither of which offer enduring value. Companies need a concrete strategy based on constituency insights that go deeper than having a Twitter feed and being a Millennial. People don’t organize themselves that crudely online and neither should companies in their outreach strategies. This means acknowledging that the measurement tools of social media are an initial filter and that manual intervention by someone trained in the company strategy is required.

Those constituency insights become ever more important once you’ve identified a real influencer. Engaging that person, who is savvy and ahead of the curve by definition, will take some skill. It’s mandatory that what you’re offering is aligned with their own values and world view, otherwise they’ll pass. You have to know what makes them tick beyond just the fact that they use social media a lot and well.

What makes people tick is more anthropological and psychological than it is technological. Technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. Views on government and institutions (of which corporations are included), concepts of success, wealth and status, definitions of family and community… these are the real drivers that make influencers and by extension their communities act. Aligning with these drivers therefore is critical.

The social media measurement tools of today can bluntly separate wheat from chaff but they are not well set up to provide insight into the individuals within a community. For that, you need to begin with a deep investigation into the constituency you want to reach. You the must map your company’s vision and values to that constituency group and align your offer with their action drivers. Finally you have to investigate the people behind the numbers returned in your social media reports to ferret out the influencers. Done right, the power of social media to create preference in a grassroots, authentic way is unleashed.

Social media isn’t about access to 500 million people. That’s yesterday’s measure from yesterday’s dynamics. Social media today should be viewed as the conduit, a tool, used by people within their self-defined communities. From a marketers perspective it brings the added benefit of allowing us to catalog some of people’s behaviors and to find places where they organize around other like-minded people.

The word ‘media’ itself might even be part of the problem because it makes us think this is a marketing tool like TV, radio and print. It’s really not. It wasn’t created to be and despite ad units sold in the margins (with their abysmal click through rates), it still isn’t thought of that way by anyone but marketers. People don’t like being sold to as a rule of thumb.

This isn’t to say using social media as media doesn’t work. Companies have succeeded in using it for tried-and-true tactics like sampling, coupon distribution, sweepstakes, etc. How deep the relationship with the brand or company is because of this is suspect in my mind though. You may get my attention by offering me a sale but now we’re competing on price which is another slippery slope (and brutal on margins).

When the strategy changes to engaging a community its best to look less at the gross numbers spit out by systems measuring clicks and comments and to look instead at the behaviors of the people you want to reach and how they might be happening in social media. Then you can create an engagement that is about something more personal than winning a prize or getting 20% off.

The mass media age was about size and numbers. Today context is king.

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Posted by Corey

Quantifying A Paradigm Shift

June 22, 2010

For some months now I have had a friendly sparring session going on with my friend Brad. Last October, Brad posted to his blog a piece on iPad and Bumptop that I took issue with. My issue – to be clear – was less with the eventual outcome than with the timeframe. As followers of this blog know, I take a Now Not New outlook on technology and believe that despite the hyperbole and headline writing, the rate of adoption of technology is not quite as fast as advertised.

Clay Shirky wisely measures cultural revolutions (which I’m equating with the popular term ‘paradigm shift’) not by technologies but by enough people modifying their behavior because of them. I do not believe Apple’s iPad, or any tablet device for that matter, can possibly ‘change the computing experience as we know it’ in two years – which is the line Brad drew in the sand.

In a past post, I made note of the actual rate of MP3 player adoption into mainstream culture, noting that while it seemed that suddenly everyone had one, in truth the technology had taken nearly a decade to achieve the current ubiquity it enjoyed (which, incidentally is still less than half the population). Was this game changing? Absolutely. Did it happen overnight or even within two years? Not at all. Paradigms don’t shift, they drift and that presents opportunities and a mandate for calm, level-headed thinking.

Numbers talk.
Back to iPad. Brad playfully swatted my proverbial hornets nest when he Tweeted at me that at 2MM sales, he was ahead of his own schedule in terms of his prophecy.

I decided to do some digging to build my argument:

Apple has sold 2MM iPads worldwide, mostly in America. For arguments sake, let’s attribute ALL of the sales to America.

According to one source, the population of North America was approx. 340,831,831 in 2009*.

(*Its worth noting the U.S. census numbers for the U.S. are lower but that only 72% of people participated in the census in the first place.)

Working from the same first set of numbers above, 259,561,000 of this 341MM were internet users – or 76.2% of the population. That means 1 in 4 people weren’t even using the Internet yet which as an aside somewhat surprised me.

Attributing ALL iPad sales to North America, the 2,000,000 iPads sold are in the hands of approximately 0.58% of the North American population. That’s just a hair over a half of a percentage point. So yes, iPad sold faster than iPhone, and that’s a neat short term stat, but within the perspective of the internet-using population we’re talking fractions of a percentage point here.

As an interesting aside (thanks to my friend Jim for pointing this out) when the government went to switch from analog to digital TV in 2009 anywhere from two million to six million U.S. homes still had rabbit ears on their set top. Ask a techie and 2MM in terms of an iPad is a paradigm changing mass. 2MM in terms of legacy rabbit ears is a fringe minority. Subjectivity is a funny thing.

Ok, for argument’s sake, let’s peg a ‘paradigm shift’ at perceptual ubiquity in the marketplace. Per this study MP3 players enjoy a 44% market penetration in 2010. They feel pretty ubiquitous right? They’ve changed entire industries after all and it seems everyone owns one so I’m going to use 44% for now (we can revise later).

Let’s assume Apple iPad sales will continue at pace moving forward, even though some people are beginning to back away from this bullish outlook. I’m feeling generous, so if Apple sold 2MM iPad units in two months let’s give them 1MM in sales per month in perpetuity. That’s fairly liberal I think as the early adopters’ enthusiasm is being assumed as ongoing and applicable to everyone.

By this figure, to be in the hands of 44% of the North American population (150MM people), thereby equating with the iPod in terms of game-changing impact for a significant proportion of the population, Apple will have to sell iPads, at 1MM units/month, for the next twelve and a half years.

Unfair to put the burden solely on Apple when Samsung, HP and Dell are all working up tablets? Okay, let’s double the sales figures per month for tablets. Even at 2MM units per month you’re still looking at 6 years to reach 44% of the population.

Driving the point back to my friend Brad’s two-year plan; to put a tablet in the hands of 44% of the population in two years, you’d need to sell 6.2MM units per month beginning on day one. That’s very aggressive in a new category wherein the market need being met is poorly articulated at this point.

To those arguing with my subjective benchmark of 44% pegged to the MP3 player, this brings us to the definition of paradigm change. First, MP3 players are more appropriate than say iPhone/smartphones because the latter has even less market penetration. Second, the free (mis)use of phrases like ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘change the computing experience as we know it’  and the running-around-with-our-heads-cut-off  it creates is precisely what I am taking issue with.

To call something a paradigm shift, which is defined as a fundamental change in approach or an acceptance by a majority of a changed belief, attitude or way of doing things, it must impact the behavior of a larger population than the smart phone (currently about 10% of the marketplace) or iPad do. Not by a little… by a lot. By the definition of the word, even the MP3 player/44% example is not a valid basis.

By contrast, according to this nifty website there have been about 153,073,000 PCs sold in the world this year. That includes laptops, desktops, and notebooks but not handhelds. That’s a paradigm shift in process (that was at its early stage three decades ago). Smartphone and tablets are still at their early stage. Will they take three decades too? Probably not. But they won’t take two years either.

So why am I making such a big deal out of this?

Overcoming NYopia.
My point here is not that the iPad isn’t a successful product by business terms. Apple continues to impact the computer industry and the iPad will effect lasting change on computing. No arguments here. Even more encouraging is the fact that you don’t need to create paradigm-shifting technology to do quite well in business. Hell, the people who reshaped rubberbands, colored them and call them Sillybandz are making a fortune on a very old technology.

The important realization – I’ll say it again – is that paradigms drift, they don’t shift. This gives us time to think and consider. This gives us the ability to make plans, create a strategy and spend wisely. This means we need to take a collective deep breath and think about things a little more.

Yet any time a new technology hits the media hypemachine, businesses (from Wall St. on up) have a collective freakout. Reason goes out the window, everyone begins truncating thought and talking in superlatives. Worse, companies begin allocating a lot of resources and money based on these knee-jerk reactions fed by poorly contextualized information. You can call this jockeying for early-mover advantage but this doesn’t always work. You can shoot from the hip in the name of ‘experimentation’ if you want, but experimentation without a process for learning is wasteful. And yes some companies do these things and still come out on top. But that’s the would-be actors in Hollywood dynamic. For every Tom Cruise there’s 10,000 waiters working for $8.75/hour. Shouldn’t we want to improve our odds a little?

So Brad my sparring partner, I do not contest that tablet computing, like the mouse, modem and microchip, will have a lasting impact on the evolution of computing. I do not, however, believe that will be experienced by the vast majority of people within the next two years. I also believe that it is this vast majority of people that most companies do business with. It might make sense to spend some time looking at how they really live, act and engage with the world.

They say fortune favors the prepared mind. Part of preparation is looking ahead. The other part is keeping your head amid the exaggeration flying around.

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Posted by Corey

Is news 2.0 dangerously dumbed down?

June 12, 2010

I have a soft spot in my heart for Newsweek. Growing up, my father had it around the house and I associate it with breakfasts before school where he’d sit with me munching Cheerios and catching up on current events. I recall thumbing through Newsweek myself as a youth, more interested at the time in the photos than the articles. Even today during visits to my parents’ house I will happily kill some time reading articles in Newsweek. My father even got me a gift subscription of my own a year or so ago. However, a year into it, I found little time to devote to Newsweek what with the Economist, WIRED, Nat Geo, Smithsonian, the Wall St. Journal and the New York Times lying around the house. Plus the books, blogs, and work-related literature.

That said, I have for some time now been following Newsweek as it struggles alongside its brethren to find a new place in today’s media environment. Doing so forced me to ponder the role of news publications in a world of real-time Twitter feeds. I followed with great interest Newsweek’s decision to significantly alter its format. I had come to much the same conclusion as Newsweek did; namely that the news itself was parity and couldn’t be provided fast enough by a formal corporate entity to compete with pro-am Twitterers. This was not because of being a printed product. Even a digital version (iPad, Kindle or otherwise) does not free a professional company from the organizational layers that slow down the process of getting news to market.

I believed (and largely still do) that what professional outfits could deliver that amateurs could not (at least as well or as easily) was depth, perspective, and the resources to gain access where amateurs with Tweetdeck and Flip cameras could not go. Newsweek and I weren’t alone in this thinking. The Economist came to a similar conclusion – which didn’t surprise me as I think it reflected the organization of that magazine’s business in the first place. I was hopeful Newsweek’s decision would help turn them around.

Fast forward many months and I am saddened by the news that Newsweek is on the auction block. Despite cuts, reorganization, redesign and a new editorial format, the publication is still losing money. This at a time when apparently some newspapers are seeing a rebound and even – gasp – profitability. Candidly, I am a bit perplexed as to why. Perhaps it has something to do with the cost of operations. However, I can’t right-mindedly hide behind that. The circulation continues to drop (see inset at the start of this post) so obviously interest by consumers is waning. So why is Newsweek failing?

The Internet-era expectation of ‘free’ hurts for sure. Why pay for something when you can get an approximation for free?

Our increasing focus on multitasking, skimming and toplines vs. reading deeper has an adverse impact as well. In fact, WIRED just published a fascinating article on the impact of the Web on our brain discussing these very effects. (I will have more to say on that topic in another post.)

Then there is the ‘good enough’ factor. From MP3 compression to single-feature Flip camcorders, we are again and again turning down rich feature sets for ‘good enough’ convenience. This is not inherently wrong, but it is a compromise with consequences. In a world of 140-character headlines piped to my desktop, perhaps the market for deeper investigation is just smaller than anticipated.

Lastly, the prosumerization effect has dealt  a blow to the cause of getting to the ‘truth’ (and I would argue it is the pursuit of ‘truth’ that is important, not the establishment of some objective absolute truth). I am all for anyone having the right to publish. There are huge collective political, economic and innovation advantages to our world with its incredible and widely available publishing tools. There is also a price tag. Today anyone can call anything news. When millions and millions of people do exactly that, we encounter a two-tiered challenge. Simply to digest the volume of superficial information is all consuming. Worse, it leaves little time (or energy) for sorting out the thoughtful from the thoughtless.

Translated into social circle terms; struggling to keep up with 150+ Facebook friends is hard enough. Having anything deeper than a status-update level of intimacy with any one of them is extremely difficult indeed (and I would argue reliant on a relationship outside of digital media). It is the same news I believe.

Right now, I can go out and find a ‘news’ headline (in a blog, publication, forum, etc.) on any topic, however irrational, that confirms what I want to believe*.

*I do not believe Obama is a Nazi by the way, I chose that topic for its absurdity

If so much of my time is spent simply digesting these headlines, and I choose only those headlines which fit my existing world view, then in effect I am creating a cognitive bubble. Everything becomes both myopic by nature of the media channel I choose and dumbed down because I never get much further than the headlines.

Personally, I find this very troubling.

There needs to be a place in the world where depth is important. Watching publications that pursue depth as a business go on to fail is disheartening. I have thought for a while now that the term ‘news industry’ was a misnomer. The news industry is less and less about ‘new’.

What then should it be about?

I would like to add as an addendum here that I by no means claim Newsweek is a source of absolute truth. I recognize its left-leaning political slant and would even go so far as to say that without an editorial slant there is little likelihood anyone would be interested. My point is that I would much sooner have the option to read, compare and weigh the perspectives of lengthier articles in Time and Newsweek, each trying to go deep on a topic, than to merely take the televised evening news headlines from Fox or MSNBC at face value. It seems the market for depth in news is waning and that is cause for concern.

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Posted by Corey

Word of Finger: Persuasion & the Science of Marketing.

June 9, 2010

Amazon has its reviews. YouTube has its star system. Sites across the web invite people to comment, rate and review products, content and even each other. A whole other batch of people make decisions on these ratings. Does this seem unusual to anyone else?

Think about it. No one vets the people making these reviews. They could be anyone. Yet when twenty-five people give an Amazon book 5 stars we’re inclined to believe it must be a good book. Why? Are these people at all qualified to rate a book? They might be professors of literature, sure. They might also be brain-dead dropouts. Or worse (and in high probability), they might be friends of the author signing on to plug the book without having even read it. You just don’t know.

But a book is a $15 purchase; even if you buy it and dislike it, no real harm is done. However, this isn’t just happening in the small-ticket category. It happens among ‘considered purchases’ too – electronics, even cars. Again and again we allow perfect strangers, people we know nothing about, to influence our purchase decisions. It’s one thing to say I won’t trust the advertiser because they’re going to spin the story – of course they are. It’s another to go 180º in the opposite direction and rely on a bunch of strangers who with minimal effort can register their whims on a comment board.

Consumer Reports used to be the resource for people looking for vetted, impartial reviews on products. I’m staggered that said company has not made more noise. This ‘trust a stranger’ social media world  is a perfect environment for Consumer Reports to demonstrate its value and become a superbrand. Why they aren’t more vocal is beyond me.

Recently, WIRED magazine’s Jargon Watch introduced me to the term Word of Finger. It’s meant to differentiate social-media style buzz from true word of mouth though I think WIRED missed an opportunity in its definition.

Word of Mouth traditionally has implied dialog (and not necessarily orally, despite the term). This in turn implies the people probably know (at least something about) each other. Historically we don’t express our opinions to strangers unless we’re professionals paid to do so. Word of Finger, as I see it, recognizes the nuance that some social media actions are indeed between strangers. In this sense I would argue Word of Finger isn’t as valuable as Word of Mouth even though the former travels faster and has a broader reach than the latter owing to the dynamics of (true) friend networks vs. simply connected networks of individuals.

In this sense Facebook would be Word of Mouth – even though you actually enter the information with your fingers. Amazon’s comments panel is Word of Finger for most people (unless you happen to know one of the commentators). With the former, you know the people and can gauge whether they have any valid capacity to review a topic. With the latter you have no clue who they are, what they know or if they’re in any way qualified to make a judgement call on the topic at hand. Common sense would dictate that the Word of Mouth references have higher persuasive capacity than the Word of Finger. But is this so? I find scant information on the matter. This post on a Nielson blog was as close as I got. Witness the following chart:

What is surprising to me is not that people don’t really trust commercial advertising (duh.) but that absolute strangers have such a high level of trust. It’s worth noting here though that this is a measure of trust and not persuasion – an important difference. I may trust that you actually believed a certain product was great but whether that’s enough it make me buy it myself is another matter.

To date, most of the social media measurability I have seen is tied much more to reach and awareness issues. I would argue that this is because marketing people, and especially new media marketing people are firmly focused on a technological aspects of what they do. Geeks get a rise out of the idea that Facebook is getting as big as China. A nifty statistic for sure, but for most practical business purposes somewhat meaningless.

I also believe that the discourse around social media has largely been focused on how it displaces traditional media. This has had the effect of funneling the thinking around social media into comparative dynamic which tends to force old categories to the surface. I would even go so far as to say the applications of social media have been largely focused on satisfying the same needs as traditional media – awareness, recall, exposure, impressions. This latter is probably the industry’s way of adhering to the principle of apperception.

Today’s social media industry is an art-meets-math world of stat reporting which offers click paths and session times with little sense of how these are correlated to persuasion or drive. Yet the difference between Word of Mouth and Word of Finger is at least 20% according to Nielson above and I would bet, figuring for persuasion as defined by actually acting/buying/changing behavior, that Word of Mouth (among true friends) delivers added value still.

Persuasion has always been the achilles heel of marketing and advertising in terms of metrics. Since the day ‘www’ appeared in browser windows, we have all promised more measurability, yet surprisingly little ground has been gained in measuring persuasion. We tend to now, as we did two decades ago, measure awareness and exposure because frankly, they’re the easiest measurements to make – especially online with server logs.

The bad news is, while social media can provide awareness and exposure they in fact do it less well than old media did; requiring more in both resources and attentiveness. It was much easier to buy TV time in the 1980′s and just run a campaign than it is to orchestrate a social media campaign across the splintered media landscape.

The original book Positioning written by Jack Trout and Al Ries made healthful mention of psychology, a key science in the understanding or persuasion which in turn is central to the objective of marketing. The newer edition (still over a decade old) embellished upon this even further going so far as to stipulate that a mind that is made up is very hard to change. (Think about the implication of that for a minute brand people.) Here are a few profound little tidbits:

“..short-term memory appears to be more auditory than visual, whereas longterm memory can be both.”

“Material learned while one is happy is better recalled when one is happy, and material learned while one is sad is better recalled when one is sad.”

“Minds tends to be emotional, not rational.”

“In order to change an attitude, then, it is presumably necessary to modify the information on which that attitude rests. It is generally necessary, therefore, to change a person’s beliefs, eliminate old beliefs, or introduce new beliefs.”

“Too many advertisements try to entertain or be clever. The Starch research people can demonstrate that headlines that contain news score better in readership than those that don’t.”

“We tend to think of boredom as arising from lack of stimuli. But more and more commonly, boredom is arising from excessive stimulation or information overload.”

It’s amazing to me what happens when you step outside of one industry and its lexicon (for example, marketing) and look at the dynamics from the perspective of another industry and its lexicon (pyschology in this case).

Related to this is the interesting if controversial Transtheoretical model. Conceived to help psychologists help people make healthier choices, it nonetheless provides some interesting insights into the idea of readiness and persuasion that could be applied to other fields.

Yet except for the occasional article here and there or the tromping around of the rare psychologist hired by an agency as a brand planner, there isn’t a sense that marketing is conducted as a behavioral science.

Shouldn’t it be?

Shouldn’t we be spending as much time studying the nuances of Word of Mouth vs. Word of Finger as we do oohing and aahing about the ability to ‘check in’ at a local Dunkin Donut’s to get a coupon? Shouldn’t sociology, anthropology and psychology be departments within agency walls? Wouldn’t these skillets enable a keener understanding of what all these new media opportunities truly afford us?

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Posted by Corey

Foursquare: We don’t need no stinking badges!

June 4, 2010

No doubt I am swatting a hornet’s nest with this post as many of my digerati friends sing hymns to Foursquare. But a little heresy is good for friendships so…

Foursquare is the shiny object of summer 2010 (Twitter, 2009′s hype queen, has aged out of contention). The hype cycle of Foursquare (and Twitter before it) is reminding me of SecondLife. Remember SecondLife? Among geeks it was the future. Among brands it was going to be a great new advertising frontier.

Among most of the population it was more effort than it was worth.

The buzz died down, a small groups of loyalists kept banking Linden dollars while the social media mouthpieces followed the hype machine to the next shiny object. Of course, they carried their prophecies with them to plug and play in the next Great Leap Forward.

Today Foursquare is enjoying that same level of guru evangelism. Advertisers are again talking about how its evolving to become a great marketing tool. Bloggers await the day Foursquare logs 1MM check-ins in 24 hours. Social media marketing consultants are barely capable of keeping the drool at bay as they discuss GPS-aware coupons and throwing out swag at branded flashmobs.

Don’t believe the hype.
Meanwhile there was a high pitch frequency above the din of Foursquare worship. This post about Foursquare struck me as interesting. It seems that Foursquare, like the iPad, isn’t a clear hit among geeks – traditionally the earliest adopters of all things digital. In an early Mashable poll – which is by its nature going to be social media geek-heavy in composition – Foursquare still splits about 50-50 pro-con among respondents.

Poll on 5/22 - an even split

Poll as of 6/3 - Still an even split.

I’ve been tinkering with Foursquare for about six months now. I am admittedly a casual user and have no ambitions other than to experiment with it a little. On the one hand there’s a small rush at being the Mayor of a location. There’s also some simple, competitive fun in ousting a mayor to become one. There’s even some curiosity when one spars back and forth with a stranger for mayoral status. I can imagine it would provide some sporting fun too to joust with co-workers over mayoral status for a floor, office, department, etc. So yes, there is some novelty with Foursquare which will probably continue to push new signups in the near term.

There are also the badges which I suppose could give a rise to some people. My guess is though that the people who use Foursquare badges as bragging rights fit into one of a select few categories.

  1. Media people trying to be bleeding edge
  2. Internet geeks transacting in their subculture’s inherently unsocial social structures
  3. College kids with Beer Pong Champion ambitions
  4. Bargain hunters trying to win a free ice cream cone at a local creamery

Mind you, these are all communities and they are all marketing targets, but they do not represent the great masses and marketers would be wise to note this.

Atlas shrugged (after tweeting, updating status and checking in)
Let’s now approach the issue of social media burden. While a foreign concept to geekerati, people with lives outside technology and media do find keeping up with this stuff a little bit of a nuisance. Witness the often-discussed disparity between the number of Twitter accounts and the number of active Twitter accounts. There’s a sense of obligation to keep up with social media. First it was Facebook. Then I had to add Twitter responsibilities. Now I need to keep up with Foursquare too? Really? At some point, there is burn out on all this stuff.

Worse, with Foursquare every quick stop or leisurely hang-out becomes encumbered with a responsibility to check in. Instead of just getting an iced coffee, I am obligated to ‘check in’ at Starbucks too. Out to dinner with a friend? You might be that person who, with a living human across the table from you, is staring down at a little screen broadcasting your location into the ether. That’s not ‘social’ by any definition.

This isn’t to say Foursquare won’t be a successful business (apparently Yahoo! trying to land its for $125MM). Second Life is frankly successful despite falling way short of its hype. Twitter too is successful, though I would offer its value is drawn from its impact on news media more so than its role as a powerful media property from an advertiser’s or programmer’s perspective. However any valuation applied to Foursquare should not be mistaken as a validation that it is in some way a paradigm-shifting mass movement. A lot of money could be pumped into Foursquare marketing programs that will miss the mark because executives don’t realize Foursquare is a niche play for a very specific type of person.

As the novelty of checking in or being a mayor wears off for many people (there isn’t much of a benefit beyond a short-lived ego stroke), so too will the desire to login in the first place. And if you don’t live in a dense urban area, there’s even less reason to bother sticking with it. Like all those immobile avatars in SecondLife and dormant accounts on Twitter, my sense is FourSquare will enjoy a rush of curious first timers and then settle down to become yet another enclave of geeks and media people.

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Posted by Corey

Misalignment at the core of Adobe/Apple feud.

May 24, 2010

As a lifelong Apple fan I find it ironic that the company that positioned itself as the anti-establishment, anti-monopoly, anti-Microsoft is now behaving a lot like Microsoft. Funny what happens when you start leading in a market category or two isn’t it?

While Jon Stewart may rightly refer to Apple’s tactics around the Gizmodo iPhone leak as “appholish” behavior possibly more interesting still is the sparring between longtime pals Apple and Adobe. As many a geek is now aware, Steve Job’s essentially dismissed Flash – a core Adobe technology – as yesterday’s Web. Apple’s fancy new tablet will follow in the iPhone’s footsteps and not support Flash.

Adobe, understandably, feels like a slighted lover. After all these blissful years the two companies have been tag teaming the creative world. Now Adobe gets dumped. So what’s a spurned lover to do? Start dating others? Talking mushmouth about the company that dumped them? Wallow in sorrow and self-pity?

‘Ah,’ say the strategy people, ‘Let’s tug at the heartstrings of our customers. Let’s stand for freedom. Let’s be the underdog just trying to do right.’

Like some cheesy country-western song, Adobe’s new ad campaign is all about being the victim of love and it’s going to fail.

It’s going to fail because Adobe cannot possibly take the positioning its trying to take. It is, in short, misaligned. Here’s why:

History Lesson: Adobe Exploits Quark’s Quirks.
Back in the early 90′s the preeminent layout package was Quark Xpress. Designers had a love/hate relationship with the product. It was the best offering by far, but it had its bugs. Worse, as new versions came out, Quark got into the habit of hitting designers for a full license. That meant coughing up several hundreds of dollars to keep current not just once in a while, but at every update. This did not go over well both to individual designers and agencies buying 50 packages at a time.

Around this time Adobe, then best known for its Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat products released InDesign. It was a brave move. A huge proportion of the design community was using Quark. Changing to a new platform would be a hard sale for financial reasons, entrenchment reasons (printers were using Quark) and for proficiency reasons (How long will it take to get fluent in the new interface?). Adobe was smart though. They kept a lot of consistencies between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign which kept the learning curve reasonable. They made sure Quark could be imported into InDesign thus keeping legacy files relevant. They bundled InDesign into a Creative Suite (CS) of products which included Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat. This last move made changing layout programs easier and gave the sense of a 3-for-1 upgrade when buying Adobe Creative Suite 1. By bundling InDesign they did for layout software what Microsoft did with browsers by including Explorer in Windows. Maybe in hindsight this latter move should’ve served as a hint.

It took time, but eventually Adobe unseated Quark, the latter company foolishly sticking to its draconian pricing and releasing lackluster updates. For a number of years designers had both packages on their machines (usually Macs its worth noting). Printers too. Eventually though, companies stopped re-upping Quark and InDesign began to win out. After all, going to CS2 and CS3 upgraded your other Adobe products as well.

I would argue that Adobe’s success came from understanding and aligning with their target audience – creative people. They knew creative people are not tech people and would want a familiar interface if they were to make a mid-career switch. They knew layout was not enough and it made sense to bundle illustration and photo handling software (and eventually a visual web editor, which was the early GoLive product Adobe acquired.) They also knew designers were not keen on being exploited by the market leader (Quark) in having to pay full price for upgrades because Quark was the only real game in town (your basic monopoly move).

To big to wail: You can’t be the leader and the underdog.
Fast forward 15years, Adobe is trying to do it again. Casting Apple as the big, bad, monopolist, Adobe is playing the tragic lover. “Oh Apple, we still love you even though you treat us so bad!”

The problem is, this underdog position isn’t ringing true anymore. To begin with, Adobe is the new Quark. It’s the only game in town and the acknowledged market leader. Like Quark before it, Adobe has picked up the habit of producing very expensive new releases. Moving from CS3 to CS4 meant a full license and a nearly four-figure upgrade. Ouch.

Some designers swallowed the hit and jumped in. Now, with CS5 Adobe is asking for a full license again. That’s another four-figure hit for each seat. For old blokes like me, this stinks of Quark circa 1998. Does Adobe really expect its customers to believe they’re the victim of Apple’s monopolistic, totalitarian evil when they’re behaving like jerks too?

Therein is the essence of the misalignment. In this day and age we expect market leaders in a capitalist culture to behave aggressively to secure their competitive advantage. We may not like the tactics, we may choose the alternative (as Mac users did over PC’s and Firefox fans did over Internet Explorer), but its not surprising when big companies act the way they do.

It is, however, insulting to read headlines like ‘We love Apple’ and all the lovey-dovey, let-freedom-ring body copy that follows when it comes from Adobe. If you love someone Adobe, love your customers and stop screwing them for a thousand dollars with each new upgrade. Don’t talk about freedom as you use market leadership as a means of fleecing customers.

Right now there’s a company operating out of a garage or rundown loft that sees opportunity. They see Adobe as the new Quark and a chance to credibly take the underdog position and exploit it just the way Adobe did two decades ago. Were I Adobe, I’d be watching out more for the little companies seeking to nip 5% of my market than I would trying to paint Apple as the bad guy.

Besides, Apple is starting to do a good job of that on its own.

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Posted by Corey

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