The conundrum of responsive design.

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I remember when Netscape launched its frames tag. I remember how it blew my mind. I immediately tapped out some code that nested frames in themselves rendering a vortex M.C, Escher would’ve been proud of.

I also remember how frames collided with the classical design training I’d received. As did the notion of setting a table width parameter at some percentage, or even better simply ‘*’ to fill the gap depending on the browser’s width.

These were the earliest precursors to a unique problem facing the digital interface designer.

The Golden Ratio does not apply here.
When I began taking drawing and painting in high school and college I spent a lot of time studying laws of composition – from the effects of visual symmetry to the almighty Golden Ratio. An underlying assumption beneath all of it was that as an artist you had full control of your canvas. You chose the width and it was finite and fully contained and would not change. Early on, digital design began to wreak a certain havoc on this fundamental premise.

As digital media have evolved more and more control has been taken away. For the print designer converting to digital in the late 1990′s, it was a shock that the right and bottom edge of the browser ‘canvas’ could change outside of your control. Browsers also rendered code differently, monitors came in different sizes and resolutions. Way back when even certain colors were unavailable. Time passed and the technology progressed. With the move from static page (hard coded HTML) to data driven websites compiled on the fly, designers lost even more control over the consistency with which their choices would render across a userbase. Current best practices in SEO, social media, etc. exacerbate this issue still more today.

Where in print the designer has near 100% control over the rendering of the piece (last minute, crazy client requests, noted) in digital the capacity to define how a page renders is shared between multiple parties and systems. Suddenly the computer science concept of graceful degradation became a part of the problem the designer was tasked to solve for.

Convergent Pipe. Divergent Media.
Now we are embarking on an age where responsive design (the term isn’t even in wikipedia yet!) will likely move to the forefront of the digital designer’s mind. While pundits will say with great certainty that media are converging, I would argue the opposite. Media are diverging. If television, radio, magazines and outdoor are considered ‘media types’, then we today have far more media types than even a few decades ago. Today ‘online media’ is a misnomer as there are a multitude of types. I don’t know about you, but I own an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop, a desktop and a Kindle. Many of my peers do too.

What has converged is the pipeline, not the media. The internet now feeds all of these screens (and increasingly the television, radio and even billboards). It is a common infrastructure underneath a variety of diverging media types. When you experience digital content, you tap into this pipeline with one of a multitude of devices that interpret and render that content as appropriate to the form factor of the device.

Content producers – from publishers to advertisers – have continually struggled to chase after the functional requirements across all these screens. Where once you’d publish to a single format, now your content is served digitally and needs to be viewable across a range of devices, each with their own rules and characteristics. Responsive design seeks to solve this problem with a technological efficiency. Rather than creating a separate experience for mobile, tablet, laptop and TV, responsive design uses code to identify a device and respond to it by serving up the best rendering for the nature of that device.

Interestingly, this very complex problem is being solved with simplicity.

Is keep it simple, stupid (or smart)?
I remember reading years ago Marc Cuban’s post on the Internet becoming more boring and his perspective has stuck with me since (though I don’t entirely agree with it). Borrowing from his premise, it could be argued that the increasing requirements of our data-driven, socially-enabled, multiple ‘last mile’ devices, environment is forcing certain commonalities on digital experience design. Could this, combined with general usability best practices which are predicated on a level of intuitive familiarity and therefore some degree of standardization, be painting us into a corner aesthetically?

At this time I want to clearly stipulate that there is still great diversity in the needs and outcomes within the broad spectrum of digital media. This is not to say all sites are starting to look the same. That said, I do think there are some strong arguments to be made that certain broad formats have arisen which many sites are adapting to out ofnecessity. I might typify some these as the information portal (e.g. a Google, Yahoo, or CNN.com style layout), the blog construct (used for sites primarily focused on publishing information) and the social network framework (profile handling, media sharing, rating and reviewing). There is certainly cross over as well. What each of the above has in common though is a lighter reliance on interwoven graphical elements. More and more the elements of design are moving away from ‘hard coded’ graphics (jpgs, pngs, etc.) and more to those elements that are rendered by parameters entered with code commands (e.g. CSS styles, system-rendered text).

Responsive design places a higher premium on the generous use of system rendered elements and a reduced use of hard graphics. When hard graphics are used, responsive systems mandate that they need to be considered in a variety of configurations and scalable sizes such that they can morph to meet a 320px width or a 1440px width or greater. Likewise copy is best rendered in system text – with its designer-averse limited number font options – such that is rags dynamically. Even the once locked-down ‘navigation bar’ now needs to be thought about in multiple configurations.

That, my friends, is a lot to keep in mind when doing a GUI design. It seems logical then that most responsive design is very open and minimalist. The fewer elements to juggle the greater likelihood of achieving a pleasant aesthetic balance across multiple configurations. That’s the up side. The downside is an increasing likelihood that sites will begin to look more and more alike over time as ‘best practices’ funnel most design solutions into a common suite of tools and tactics.

So in having to increasingly keep it simple, are we in effect dumbing down digital design? Maybe.

But maybe the highest order of usability design is coming to the foreground now precisely because of responsive design.

Looking ahead through print and television.
Among some UX professionals there is belief that a GUI – be it mobile, tablet or browser, should not call attention to itself. The role of the UX designer in this school of thought is to facilitate an experience with minimal distraction by the navigational system being used to do so. In this sense the GUI is the wrapper around content – whether that content is video, static images, sound, touch-responsive activity, a game, or even a passage of text. The site itself is not the art but rather the mat and frame through which the art is presented.

If UX design evolves in this manner, that too will fly in the face of traditional design. Graphic designers who work in traditional media like print and packaging treat every word and element – from the legal copy and nutrition information to the headlines and images – as a part of the final art. What navigation there is in a printed piece (the binding perhaps) is often, though not always, outside the designer’s primary area of interest. Similarly, a bag, box or jar is navigable through its folds and tabs but the package designer tends to work around these elements, not with them (most, though not all of the time).

With radio and television, the first media to contain content changed or disappeared with time, the navigation (turning the dial or clicking the remote) remained distinctly detached from the actual content (the music or TV show). Radio and TV program producers didn’t have to think about the dial used to change channels (except to be interesting enough to keep people from reaching for it). The mechanical navigational systems of televisions and radios were instead given treatment by industrial product designers whose objectives were of usability and style but not communication of content.

Navigation within navigation.
With digital media served on screen bearing devices the lines get blurry. In some ways even redundant. Today’s physical digital device has its own mechanical navigational system (power and volume buttons, etc.). Within its screen is housed a content distributing intermediary (the site or app) with a navigational system of its own. No wonder older people find computers much more difficult to use than televisions. There is twice the navigation to learn.

In this light it is obvious that companies like Apple are trying to evolve past this redundancy. The iconic iPod spinner (and the mouse before it) was an attempt to solve this by simultaneously addressing the mechanical and digital navigation with a single interface. Today Apple is trying to remove as much mechanical navigation as possible as witnessed by its “one button” iPhone and iPads.

Interactive design has until now had two navigational masters, that of the mechanical device and the GUI. Today’s touch-screen systems and simplified physical devices are now pushing the burden of navigation squarely into the digital GUI. Where a TV has a remote which is distinct and separate from the content, the interactive experience nests the navigation very close to the content. This may be why designers have struggled to decide whether or not the navigation is part of the designed content or the container, much like a TV’s channel dial once was.

It would seem that responsive design, if it continues to gain momentum, will begin to force that hand. With responsive design the best navigation is the most simple, fluid, flexible and out-of-the-way. This is contrary to the traditional designer’s goal of styling it to the same degree as the content. This means that the digital GUI, like the mechanical device navigation of TV sets and radios back in the day, will increasingly be under pressure to disappear into the background while the content – a served video, uploaded image, shared post or installed game – will be the focus of the experience.

I am inclined to believe that market forces (cost efficiencies), an increasing reliance on data, and technological innovation (new device form factors) will exert significant pressure toward the adoption of responsive design principles.

How designers address the conflicting agenda inherent in responsive design (simple, intuitive, undisruptive usability) with the commercial needs of content publication and its reliance on differentiation and novelty to garner attention remains to be seen.

Social Media and the big browser bias.

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It’s easy to think everyone in the world shares certain experiences. When we hear 800MM people use Facebook we can easily assume they use it just like we do – opening their laptops at work or tapping into a tablet computer. The social media revolution we’re steeped in seems to be happening all around us and the media go to great lengths to remind us of just how much everything is changing.

Occasionally though, we come across a piece of information that calls this into question.

This article on the ‘digital divide’ was pretty interesting reading. The data from the Department of Commerce is in some ways hard to believe given the seeming ubiquity of all things digital.  For example, only 40% of households with an HHI under $25K have wired Internet access in their homes. Now, you may say those are America’s poor, so its not surprising. True, but what about one of America’s fastest-growing market segments? A segment with over $1 Trillion in buying power today which is expected to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2013. Of this highly desirable and rapidly growing market group only 57% of households have wired Internet access. They are the Hispanic American population and they show up on many marketing briefs today. Similarly, of the African American population only 55% have wired access to their home.

When you consider all the hubbub being made about engaging Twitter’s 20MM or so regular U.S. users, the following market segments are worth reflecting on: Today there are 17.5MM African American people and 21MM Hispanic people accessing the Internet primarily via mobile devices.

Internet usage, including Facebook usage, is very different on a mobile device. Mobile websites are far simpler, often little more than navigation, text, images and the occasional video clip. Standard websites, viewed through a mobile browser are arguably even less engaging. They usually require a lot of pinching and pulling to make a page anywhere near legible. Oh, and filling out forms on a 320px wide screen if not especially gratifying. Even Facebook’s smartphone app pares down the experience for mobile by stripping out the custom pages from brand sites and reducing the experience to a wall, info page and photo gallery. That of course is for the 40% of cell phone users have smart phones anyhow. The other 60% on feature phones, more or less miss out altogether.

Those of us working in the digital media space tend to have smart phones and very likely tablet devices too. We tend to use laptops or have big display monitors at our work stations. Our homes tend to have wireless broadband connections too. And because we work this way, its easy to forget there are significant portions of the population who don’t. If we do forget, we can also neglect to address the unique environment these people are experiencing digital content in.

With budgets tight and time also short, its easy to focus on the big browser experience and leave the small screen an afterthought. Yet for some businesses, this can mean leaving a trillion dollar market segment unattended to.

Bridging the gap between creativity and usability.

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For the creative person working in marketing and design, ‘be different’ is important. From day one, creatives are trained and usually rewarded for thinking outside the box, pushing limits and breaking new ground. As a result, when a creative person perceives a pattern in an industry, category, approach, etc. their natural reaction is to zag when others zig. In advertising this is often the difference between breaking through work and being lost in the noise.

The agenda of the user-experience designer is different. Someone tasked with managing usability needs to make sure the person engaging with their interface can quickly and easily navigate the system, accomplish their tasks and find their way to the next logical place. This has much to do with leveraging existing paradigms and conventions as appropriate. So where the creative person sees ‘different’ as an advantage. The UX designer sees it as a potential barrier to usability.

Much of the interface design work that goes into websites and apps falls on the shoulders of people who are classified as ‘creatives’. While a digitally native designer might snap to the needs of usability quicker, there is still an overwhelming urge among most creative people to substitute in the ‘new and different’ whenever possible. That could be in anything from the placement of navigation to the use of icons instead of words.

I recently stumbled upon a useful analogy for helping creative people understand where and how creativity and usability should meet and merge. I thought I would share it with you as you might find it helpful too.

My analogy is the automobile. There is all sorts of creativity in automobile design. From aesthetics, to the placement of cup holders, to the shape and position of taillights. However, every car manufactured has some common elements. A steering wheel on the left side is one (for cars in the U.S.). the gas pedal on the right and brake on the left, is another. The shape of those pedals (vertical vs. horizontal orientation) is yet another.

It’s fair to assume that car designers have entertained other replacements for the steering wheel. Joysticks, video-game like controllers, etc. And certainly, some modifications have been made (like adding buttons to the steering wheel for controlling the sound and climate systems). But by and large the steering wheel looks the same now as it did 20 years ago. That’s because the steering wheel is directly related to the utility of the car. If you can’t steer you can’t drive. And if every time you get into a new car, you need to learn to steer again there’d be many, many more accidents on the road.

In fact, when you think about it, if a car’s usability is compromised it can be immediately frustrating. Most of us have rented a car where the lights and windshield wipers are on different sides. Imagine you’re driving. In comes a flash rain shower. You quickly reach for the wipers and accidentally turn on your high beams. Think about what that does as you’re trying to keep your car in its lane and dealing with rapidly diminishing visibility. In a addition to frustrating, it’s also dangerous. Fortunately, digital design usability issues aren’t usually lethal (though they may lead to products being killed).

With web and app designs, it can be tempting to move the navigation or treat buttons in creative ways. Though one should exercise extreme caution in doing so as it can be the equivalent of swapping the wipers for the headlights on the steering column of a car.

Now, you could dig in here and call up the iPod as an example. The now iconic spinner wheel was a huge shift in interface. It was very different, very new and ultimately very successful.  That said, I have two thoughts on the spinner. One, Apple probably spent a small fortune testing usability before it released the product. I don’t know that for sure, but I’m guessing they did. Second, the spinner found its home in a whole new device without a prior paradigm to reference. MP3 players were far different from the mechanical needs of portable CD players. If you’re creating a new product category, the opportunity might arise for a complete break from convention. But if you’re designing for a device with a history – like computers and I would argue even by similarity, tablets (which still rely heavily on the visual concept of buttons) – you’ll likely get better usability by keeping critical aspects of the interface familiar.

By the way, the car analogy is also useful for clients. An agency’s clients often seek to be new and different just like their creative teams. Marketers know that sameness in advertising rarely lead to gains in marketshare. However, websites and apps are not really advertisements. Sure it helps a brand, but by the time someone is on your website or using your app, the goal has changed. No longer are you looking to ‘break through’ or ‘stand out’ in the advertising sense. The job instead is to deliver on a promise and experience. Good experiences can have a degree of novelty, true, but they also should be efficient and easy. They should feel satisfying and never be confusing. Navigating the experience should be quickly familiar even if the screens loaded are full of new information, ideas, games, videos, tools or whatever. This is precisely why designing a website or app is like designing a car. You’re getting into it to go somewhere and do something. Anything that makes that harder in turn makes the vehicle less useful, no matter how sexy it is on the surface.

Pulling The Plug on Your Social Media Strategy

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Today your business has dozens of choices for measuring social media. Platforms exist for evaluating everything from influence to engagement using various counters and algorithms. I recommend you begin with something simpler though. I think you should ask yourself one simple, illuminating question…

“If I pulled the plug on my social media efforts – closed it all down starting tomorrow – what would my business lose?”

To answer that question, first clear the playing field. Set aside for now the industry pressure of having all your competitors in social, therefore you have to be. Set aside too any mandate coming from the corner office.

Instead, ask yourself what your company would be like next week without your Facebooking, Twittering, YouTube channel, Foursquare badges, Tumblrs, etc. etc.

Draw two columns on a sheet of paper. In column A, add up everything you’d save by shutting it all down; the man-hours internally, the cost of content creation, the meetings, the analytics software licenses, the agency retainer fees. This all amounts to the true cost of what you’re doing now and its a good thing to have in mind.

Now in column B write down all the things you’d lose as a business without your social media campaign in place. What would happen if all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers simply went away?

Take a cold, hard look. If closing your social media campaign means losing a few coupon redemptions, the occasional mention among the bazillions of tweets happening daily, and the bragging rights to some six-figure ‘fan’ count you’ve yet to figure out how to make use of, then your social media strategy is probably in need of some refinement.

On the other hand, maybe closing down your social media stuff would mean you’d know less about your customers. Maybe it would mean you’d not have that convenient focus group for getting feedback on new product ideas. Maybe it would mean you couldn’t service your customers as efficiently, or detect and address their concerns as quickly. Maybe it would mean your brand awareness would drop because your name wouldn’t circulate as much on the blogs your customers frequent. If any of that’s the case, then your investment in social media is probably paying off even if you still haven’t been able to attribute sales to it, let alone define what an ‘engagement’ really is. (That’s okay, by the way, the entire social media industry is struggling to agree on terms like ‘engagement’, ‘activate’, and ‘influencer’.)

If you’re using social media to distribute coupons you’re essentially treating it like an online FSI or DRTV spot. That may provide some sales, but the cost of maintaining that program almost always comes out of profit margins as you continue to give away coupons in return for nothing more than a click count.

For a real return on your social media investment, your column B should be full of words like ‘insights’, ‘higher satisfaction’, ‘feedback’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘quicker’. These are the things social media can do that FSIs, DRTV, and advertising simply can’t.

Most companies are looking at 2012 and asking themselves what to do with social media. Everyone is going to invest in it, true, because no one wants to be the Luddite in their competitive set. But how much do you invest? And where?

Look down again at column B on your sheet of paper. What’s missing from that list that social media could do for you? Whatever it is, that’s where you should aim your strategy and make your investment this year.

Thoughts on Influencer Strategies in Social Media

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Just as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are famous for being… well… famous, so an increasing number of people are becoming influential today because they continually discuss being influential. Set aside the irony of a space where simply talking about influence can lead to you being labelled influential. The term ‘influence’, as used in today’s discussion of social media, is too generalized in my opinion.

Is conversation, sharing and retweeting a measure of influence? Sometimes.
If a blogger puts out an opinion that is well received and results in numerous retweets and shares, does it mean this blogger has influenced all those retweeters?

By today’s measurement methodology the assumption is yes, but I’m not so sure.

In the world of editorial, someone who agrees with your post enough to retweet it immediately is most likely to have already been in your camp to begin with. The political gridlock in our nation demonstrates this well. Democrats rarely influence Republicans and vice versa. Yet all of the candidates, when they publish perspectives, see them shared rampantly. That’s because the vast majority of this sharing happens among their pre-existing supporters. In this sense, what we today call ‘influence’ may in some instances be more a measure of the general acceptability level of an idea rather than of the influence of the blogger. It’s important to remember that social media networks tend to connect us by commonalities not differences.

Leveraging networks organized by commonality is very powerful for certain strategies like rallying a support base or solidifying brand loyalty. There are more challenges, however, when approaching new markets as one would with a growth strategy.

Influence and Growth Strategies
When it comes down to actually influencing people to the point of persuasion, where they change brands, opinions, preferences, etc. leveraging an influencer is trickier. True influence between people sits squarely in the domain of those qualitative human dynamics that semantic keyword analysis is still not very good at accurately recording.

There is more at play when influencers are seeking to succeed at persuasion. Two additional factors, beyond the influencer, play an equal if not greater role. They are the influencee (person being influenced) and the product or idea being decided upon.

For example, if you aspire to be like Katy Perry and Katy Perry drinks fruit juice X, you can probably afford to indulge your desire to be like Katy and buy that fruit juice. Here Katy Perry is very influential on your choice because the barrier to adopting Katy’s preference is low. The same holds true for bloggers who vouch for low-cost, impulse item type purchases.

But if Katy Perry drives a Porsche and you want to be like Katy it’s harder to realize your dream. You can’t necessarily go out and buy a Porsche right? True, Katy is still influential on your desire to have a Porsche but her value as an influencer is compromised by the socio-economic situation of the fan and the high-price of the product.

If you’re targeting people who can afford Porsche’s and those people are not generally influenced by the likes of Katy Perry, well then she’s not the right influencer. Conversely, if you’re targeting people who like Katy Perry and trying to sell them a Porsche but as a group they can’t afford a Porsche (or aren’t old enough to drive yet!), then your strategy (and target) are misaligned with your influencer.

Anyone in marketing will recognize this as the exact same dynamics that play out in traditional celebrity endorsement strategies, which is of course what social media influencers are within their circles of influence.

Higher involvement decisions bring challenges to influencer strategies.
Generally speaking, as products become more expensive they become a higher-involvement choice. Higher involvement decisions tend to mean that the ability of any single influencer is mitigated by the alignment of the influencee and the nature of the product. Other factors come into play beyond simply being influenced.

  • Can I afford the product? Are there sacrifices involved in purchasing it?
  • Does purchasing it lock me into a platform or brand at the expense of others?
  • What is the cost of ownership?
  • Is it compatible with other interacting devices?

These types of questions come up when you buy things like cars, electronics or appliances.

I explored this in a prior post called the Persuasion Paradox.

The original info graphic from The Persuasion Paradox. Click to enlarge.

Of course, this is a moving measure which is dependent upon the community being targeted: A $600 iPad might be an impulse item to some people and a very special treat requiring disciplined saving for others. The person you’d choose as an influencer for the former might be very different than the one chosen for the latter. Especially since the authenticity of the influencer is so important to their influence on a community or group. Someone who can easily drop $600 on an iPad probably is not an authentic voice to the disciplined saver.

Getting down to brass tacs.
Because of the importance of these nuances on the topic of ‘influence’, generalized definitions without context are insufficient for strategic planning purposes. In fact generalized thinking can lead to assumptions that waste resources (say, like signing a Katy Perry as a spokesperson to blog on behalf of an $85K sports car). An influencer’s impact should be considered against at least two factors.

  1. Does the strategy seek to communicate with an existing community who have already accepted the general premise or ideas the influencer will put forth. If so, traditional quantitative measures of influence are a decent starting point for identifying an influencer.
  2. For growth strategies that seek to infiltrate a new constituency, care must be taken to ensure the sponsoring entity/brand, desired influencee and the prospective influencer are aligned to meet the overall strategic goal. This is easier with low-involvement decisions than it is with high involvement decisions.

As social media continue to mature it is time to take a more nuanced look at how we approach and measure the worth of these new tools and the new generation of celebrities/influencers they are creating.

Facebook brings social (media) Darwinism to brand pages

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As a pragmatist it was with great joy that I read of Facebook’s new metrics for brand pages. Hailed as giving brands new tools to measure engagement and word of mouth, I think these new metrics will be game changing in the Thunderdome of marketing.

Among the new batch of stats are a few sizzly big number metrics to make myopic brand managers dewey eyed. Measures like ‘friends of fans’ will have some folks salivating at the huge aggregate numbers of people that *could* be reached. That’s been social media’s big selling point for the past three years – the potential of the cumulative network effect – and no doubt it will continue to sell. Plus, these new numbers will make it personal – now your brand will be able to see its very own potential Facebook reach.

But the really useful numbers, in my opinion, lie outside the big potential reach values and are the ones that help contextualize measurements like fan counts.

Up until now trying to get a bead on what ‘engagement’ really means has been tricky. While terms such as ‘like’, ‘fan’ and ‘follow’ imply a certain level of conscious attention toward the liked/fanned/followed brand, there’s been scant real proof as to just how active those fans really are.

Facebook is starting to change that.

They like you, but do they really like you?
Soon a brand will be able to look at the proportion of its ‘fans’ who actually talk about and share the pages and content they’ve ‘liked’. They’ll be able to see the “weekly total reach” too, which will help indicate how many people (and news channels) spread the brand’s content across those delicious networks of potential reach.

These new metrics will be helpful in contextualizing the actual engagement of one’s fan count. For example, one very well-fanned Facebook page had wall postings averaging 4000-7000 ‘likes’. At first blush, that sounds awesome. Then I looked and saw they have 22MM ‘fans’. Taken as a proportion of the overall fanbase, that’s a response rate of three hundredths of a percent. By contrast email open rates seem to hover in the area of at least single percentage points (more here, and here too). Even FSI’s seem to score in a similar neighborhood (also, here) in terms of their redemption rates.

Now, before you get all disgruntled and start calling me a hater, I am not saying social media don’t work. Far from it. Social media are extremely powerful. More direct and intimate than any other media channel today.

I am also acknowledging that comparing comments on a wall post to FSI redemption rates is apples-to-oranges. The point is not the percentages. I am simply calling attention to the fact that that social media statistics are often served up without context. When context is provided – as above – it can at least give us reason to stop and think. (And that is never a bad thing.)

Yes, yes, I agree that using social media is not all about getting ‘likes’ and comments to posts. And yes, it’s true, you might be getting a lot of impressions with those posts and may be building some good brand perceptions along the way. All of this is very important and should not be dismissed.

But a big premise of social media is ‘engagement’ and ‘earned impressions’. As noted before, social media has been selling against these terms since its commercialization. But ‘engagement’ implies people DOING SOMETHING, not just observing a wall post as they would a banner ad. You can’t call yourself an engagement medium and then measure yourself by impressions and perception building alone. Social media is growing up, it’s time to ditch the kid gloves and raise our expectations.

Asking better from brands and agencies.
Facebook is raising the bar and doing so in a way that is truly authentic to the spirit of social media – right out in the open for everyone to see and share. By including the “people talking about” metric in public view, right on a brand’s page, visitors and page administrators alike will know whether the page is popular. That’s dropping the glove in a big way. No more can brands quickly claim victory simply by accruing six figure fan bases. A quarter of a million fans won’t matter as much if right below that head count is another number saying that only a few are bothering to talk about the page and its contents.

Moving forward, engagement will move from theory to practice and agencies and brands are going to have to do something to earn the attention and interaction of Facebook fans. The numbers won’t let us hide behind vapid claims.

Facebook has issued a challenge and client and agency will have to work together to be truly remarkable now. It’s a brilliant move on Facebook’s part (they’re on a roll) because they’re essentially guaranteeing their advertising partners will have to up their game and provide a better Facebook experience.

In some ways, it will be survival of the fittest. Then again, as my college mentor once said, “Nothing motivates like the fear of extinction.”