Rich Nadworny

A View From the Tweet Seats

2013-01-31T13:02:14-05:00

This weekend I was part of an experiment conducted at the
Flynn Center for the Performing Arts. Marketing Director Leigh Chandler invited
a group of local "Tweeters" to attend a concert in order to share live
reactions through social media. Using the hashtag #FlynnTweets, we sat in the
first row of the otherwise closed off balcony and watched a show with
guitarists David Hidalgo and Marc Ribot.

As I walked into the theater, I met a colleague of mine. Her
husband was one of the sponsors. The first thing he said to me was that he
hoped we weren't going to disturb the performance.

I can understand that. No one wants to pay money to see a
concert only to have someone in the next seat tapping into their (bright) smart
phone and giggling when reading responses. That did happen up in the Tweet
seats. But since we were far away from the paying guests, no one seemed to
mind.

Watching and tweeting simultaneously is a tough balancing
act. It's a common challenge even at social media conferences, where people
spend more time tweeting out key quotes from speakers than they do sitting
back, listening and reflecting. It was an issue at the Flynn as well; several
Tweeters lamented that they felt "split" between trying to enjoy the concert
and providing social commentary.

Another challenge is that we who tweet love to see what kind
of response we get. After all, that is the whole idea of "social" media; not
just broadcast but response and conversation. It was a little too tempting to
check your smart phone to see who responded or retweeted you. More often than
not, it was the person sitting next to you in the balcony. So there was this
strange but fun conversation happening between us as almost a secret layer to
the concert.

The tweets, though, did get great feedback outside of the
building. A number of people on Facebook or Twitter responded that they wished
they were there at the concert. It certainly spread the word about Hidalgo and
Ribot to people who might not have known who they were. It definitely got good
PR play in the local media (it helped that the major newspaper had a person in
the Tweet seats).

Will it have a long lasting effect, or will it be
sustainable? According to Leigh Chandler, she wants to do this again. She
certainly pulled together a fun group of people for the inaugural event. I'm
sure there are others who would love to have a great, free seat in exchange for
tweeting.

Will it sell tickets? Well, that's the real question. It's
not feasible to do this for a sold out concert, nor does the Flynn need to. I
wonder, though, if it's possible to always have a few Tweet Seats way in the
back, so they don't disturb anyone.

One idea might be to not focus so much on the
concert or event itself, but to reward people who've already purchased tickets
backstage access before and after a concert so that they can tweet and post
pictures. That would be a great, social reward to paying and loyal customers.
It's certainly something tweeters and others would brag about on social media.
The content from those interactions could provide a sustainable fodder for
Flynn's ongoing marketing.

What the Flynn Center really did during #FlynnTweets was to
firm up its position as a very innovative organization in Burlington and to
firm up established relationships with key influencers. Whether the tweets
themselves provided great value might not be the point. I would love to see them
continue to integrate social into their core business beyond the occasional social
event.

I hope that's the case, mostly because I love what they do,
in our community and in our schools.

Check out my Storify stream of #FlynnTweets.

9/11 vs. Newtown

2013-01-22T15:17:44-05:00

I recently read a New York Times op ed by Professor Adam Lankford about his upcoming book The Myth of Martyrdom. In it, he compares terrorist suicide bombers with U.S. mass murderers who commit suicide -- and found that their psychological profiles were a match. In other words, he argues that if any of the perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S. lived in Iraq, or Afghanistan, chances are that person would have acted out in the same way -- just with different weapons. However, the difference in the way we've reacted to foreign terrorists compared with domestic mass murder "terrorists" is striking.

After September 11th, we made a serious commitment to reducing the chances of that ever happening again. We banned box cutters, big toothpaste tubes and shampoo bottles on planes. We required passengers to take off shoes and other personal apparel during airport security screening. We embarked on a national and international eavesdropping effort to track suspicious people and actions in a huge database. And then we went to war in an effort to root out perceived weapons of mass destruction.

On the other hand, we didn't open up numerous mental health clinics overseas to treat those disturbed potential terrorists. We didn't encourage everyone to take flying lessons so they could steer passenger jets in an emergency. We didn't try to get every nation in the world to build more weapons of mass destruction as deterrence. We didn't say, "shoe bombs don't kill people, bad people kill people," and we didn't arm all airline personal and passengers.

So far, the gun control debate in this country has been largely misdirected -- partly due to the fact that we have a $30 billion gun industry with NRA lobbyists funding well-organized propaganda -- and targeting politicians through campaign donations. But as far as I know -- no one is seriously suggesting that we should ban hunting rifles or minimize the fun people have at shooting ranges. I haven't seen any proposal to ban all handguns.

Rather, what many reasonable people have started to realize is that no one needs guns of mass human destruction unless their aim is to kill a lot of people at once -- a task best left to our military or SWAT teams, if necessary.

Actually, Americans are angrier about last month's horrific school shooting in Connecticut than they were about the September 11th terrorist attacks, according to a recent poll.

To put this in perspective, 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan combined, resulted in about 10,000 American deaths. During that same 10-year period, according to government data, gun homicides resulted in more than 110,000 American deaths. And while not all of those deaths involved semiautomatic weapons, it still seems obvious that we could reduce those numbers by taking some basic, even conservative steps, like banning sales of certain weapons and cartridges, cross referencing gun and health databases, and funding more studies on gun violence.

In post-Newtown America, the simple fact remains: We need to treat gun violence as a serious threat to our common defense.

Surf Free or Die? It's Time to Pay for What We Consume

2012-11-07T12:30:29-05:00

Today, we have a wealth of opportunities to do things
digitally, through our mobile devices or on our computers. We have content to
read or watch, friends to chat or message with, pictures to posts, and snark to
tweet. For most of those, we're able to do so by purchasing a device and Internet
connection. Few of us actually pay for all of that activity or content. No one
is paying for all of it. Some of us pay for a few things but not others.

Is that our fault or is it the fault of companies making
these things? A lot of digital businesses
still rest on the concept of monetizing "eyeballs," that famous dot.com era
term. In the best sense that meant you'd make your money on advertising. In the
worst sense it meant that your business really didn't have any business
strategy, only a hope that some other company would eventually buy you out. The
Instagram owners famously admitted that they had no plan to make money. Mark
Zuckerberg figured out a way for them by buying the company for $715 million.

Even if we don't pay for using sites and service, free isn't
free. The price of free is advertising. There are very few instances
where advertising doesn't make the product worse; since most digital
advertising has little to do with the reason we use the products in the first
place. Digital advertising relies on advanced targeting which means part of the
price people pay is divulging some private information about themselves and
their habits.

I struggle to find "free" advertising based content where
the advertising makes sense from a user perspective. An old example is
Stardoll, although I have to admit that most of the information about their
advertising strategy is three or four years old. They offered a smart
advertising platform that integrated with game play. I'm hard pressed to find
other good native content examples. Instead digital companies shoehorn advertising
onto sites with poor results for advertisers and consumers. No one on Facebook
is complaining that they see too few ads.

So, digital companies are changing the way they work so they
can make more money on advertising. Both Facebook and Google have implemented
changes over the last few years so that you see less content unless someone
pays for it (i.e., an advertiser).

Imagine, instead, if we actually paid for the sites,
channels and apps we used. I pay for
some of these, such as Spotify and Evernote. I pay for the New York Times digital
subscription as well. It's not a lot but paying for the extra services is worth
it. I'd pay for Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as long as they charged modest
fees.

Take Facebook for example, with its billion users. If they
charged everyone $4/year to use it, about the price of one Starbucks grande latte, it would triple or quadruple its income. Of
course, not everyone would pay. Even if half of all users dropped out (even
two-thirds, actually) they'd still make more money than they do on advertising. The people
who would stay are probably the ones who use it best, like it most, and get the
most value out of it.

Young digital companies don't want to charge users right
away, they want to grow a following as big and fast as possible. Pinterest and
Instagram keep breaking records for the fastest growing sites or social
channels. If they charged people right away, they most likely would never have
achieved such growth.

Now that they have grown and proved their worth, is it too
much to ask people to pay to use the services? I think not. I think it's a
choice business can reasonably offer its customers: Will you pay us to allow us
to keep making this experience better for you? Or would you rather we find some
ways to interrupt your experience with targeted or non-targeted advertising? I
would be willing to bet that the most valuable customers would agree to the
former. The overall numbers of user accounts would go down but we're already
seeing a high number of fake or dormant accounts that populate both Facebook
and Twitter.

At a recent tech event here, two young start-ups displayed
their wares next to each other. One was a gaming company that charged people to
download and play the game. The other was a social startup that was giving away
its software with the hope that people would use it. Guess who the VCs are more
interested in?

Is paying for a good service the only solution?

If VC companies could only make money on operations and not
by selling companies, we would see a radical re-alignment of digital investment
and probably more digital properties that charged for services. If we saw more
native advertising combined with great digital ad creative, we might not mind
the interruption. But neither is likely to happen in the near term, despite the
many discussions to the contrary.

Face it, if you started a chocolate chip cookie company that
aimed to give away your product free in order to grow your customer base, every
bank, VC company and angel investor would laugh in your face. If it was a
digital chocolate chip cookie company, probably not.

I admit, that I love creating great online advertising (yes,
it's happened more than a few times). But a look at the digital landscape's
advertising is just a depressing and irritating exercise.

Maybe it's time to kill Free. Let's pay for the good stuff
and force the bad staff to improve or go away. Advertising won't disappear but
maybe this would force it to be as good as the paid platforms it exists on.

Why You Need a Social Media Policy, Even If You're @HubSpot (or @WGAins)

2012-11-01T18:24:45-04:00

The discussions about social media policies moved from the
"nice-to-have" guidelines to the necessary legalistic, corporate documents a
few years ago. Most companies who engage in social media now have some type of
policy outlining guidelines and expected behavior from their employees. Some
brands have a link to their policies from their Facebook "About" tabs.

The need for having an internal social policy is simple: it
reduces risk. In reality, the social policy is most likely a variation on other
internal, employee documents. One advantage it does have is that it clearly
states what behavior is allowed and forbidden in specific social channels.

Legal teams like social policies. Social media scares them
to start with, so having some type of protection is necessary for them. It's
also a good for all of the employees. The clearer companies are with their
employees, the fewer misunderstandings and mistakes will happen in the social
channels. Social policies won't stop all poor behavior. But they will cause
some people to pause and think before they act socially. And if companies need
to take disciplinary action, employees can't say they haven't been warned.

Do all companies need a social media policy? Maybe. But
there are certain types of companies that do themselves a disservice by not
having one.

Take HubSpot, for example. HubSpot is one of the bright
social media stars out of Boston. It's seen strong growth and has assembled one
of the best teams of social media thinkers in the country. It offers a suite of
inbound marketing tools along with training and is a boon for both newbie
social companies and more mature ones. It's one of the reasons we at the
#BTVSMB invited Rick Burnes to come to Burlington a few years back.

Which is why I was quite surprised to see this pop-up online
in a comment stream:

It made me wonder: Does HubSpot, who teaches others how to
act socially, have a social policy themselves? Here is a clearly self
identified HubSpot employee, a supposed social media pro, talking about minors
and "Over The Pants Hand Jobs." Posting on company time no less.

Now maybe I missed the post where some of my social media
favorites like Laura Fitton, Dan Zarella and Brian Halligan, all HubSpot gurus and some of the smartest people in the business,
write about social media masturbation (although you could make the case that this
IS what social media is all about. But that's another post.). I can't remember
them tweeting about encouraging employees to make highly inappropriate comments
with the brand name attached.

Actually I'll bet the opposite is true, given the recent
examples from Chrysler and Kitchen Aid.

The super smart Mike Volpe wrote an opinion piece a few
years ago arguing that having a social media policies was stupid . I think Mike
only got it half right that time. You need to hire smart people AND have a
social policy. I think Brian Halligan's gang went 0 for 2 this time.

Insurance companies are part of a very risk averse industry sector. That's
an understatement. Their business is based on risk avoidance. That might be one
of the reasons why many of them have been late to online and social media.

Yet in that same comment stream referenced above, there are
comments from an employee of William Gallagher Associates, a company who
describes themselves as "a leading provider of insurance brokerage, risk
management and employee benefit services to companies with complex risks and
dynamic needs."

In the comments the young man expresses great support for
the risky behavior of underage and binge drinking. Now, I'm not an insurance guy but shouldn't
they be promoting less risk, not more? While the guy is not as easily
identifiable as a William Gallagher Associates employee as the HubSpot guy, it
doesn't take much effort to find out, or to see that he too is commenting on
company time.

I've worked with a few insurance companies in Massachusetts
and I know it's a tough, competitive environment. I'm not sure promoting binge,
underage drinking is the right brand message for William Gallagher Associates. Insurance
companies place a great emphasis on building trust between their sales people
and their customers. Maybe saying impetous comments builds trust for some
people. But I'd rather not buy my insurance from someone like that.

WGA does participate in social media: they have a very good
blog, a small Twitter presence and a pretty good Web site. I bet that they
don't have a social policy either. As a risk management company, they probably
should.

I may be missing something though. WGA CEO Philip Edmundson also tweets under the name PoliticsOfObesity. It's a great stream, by the way. Could it be that he's starting a new focus, Politics of Binge Drinking, and using some of his staff for research?

None of this really comes close to the Chrysler debacle.
Maybe I am picking on HubSpot, but it's only because they're big guns that can
take it. But both of these comments are so off brand as to raise some serious
questions.

What do you think?

[If you want to actually dig into the comment stream I
reference put on your waders because there's a lot of garbage there. Another
example of how broken online newspapers comment sections are. NOTE: Morgan has subsequently deleted his posts but you can parse out where they were.]

Vermont's First Social Media Election

2012-03-25T18:33:01-04:00

Earlier this month, Vermont's largest city, Burlington, held a mayoral election that featured two non-incumbents vying for the top municipal job in the state. Voters went to the polls on March 6 to choose between Democrat Miro Weinberger and Republican Kurt Wright. When Weinberger won a decisive 57 percent to 37 percent victory, that ended a campaign that had run for six months and what should be described as Vermont's first social media election.

Just to be clear, other campaigns had used social media before in Vermont. And social media wasn't the only media: Classics like print and database marketing played a huge role in the campaign. No, what was different this time was the focus, engagement and the amount of activity. It's a role that will only grow over the coming years.

Social media has had a foothold in Burlington politics for three years. In early 2009, three city councilors Karen Paul (I), Nancy Kaplan (D) and Ed Adrian (D) set up Twitter accounts and started tweeting from city council meetings. It was a successful experiment. Since most of us here in town don't want to spend hours at those meetings, it gave residents a way to follow what was actually happening at these meetings from the comfort of their homes. More importantly, it gave people a chance to reach out or ask one of those councilors a question, in real time. From a democracy standpoint, it looked like a good way to increase citizen participation in municipal issues.

The act of using social media caused conflict within the city council itself. Some councilors didn't like the fact that their peers were sending social updates on their phones or computers. They felt that the social councilors were not showing proper respect to people who had actually shown up for the meetings. A number of the non-social councilors put forth a resolution banning electronics (and thus social media) from city council meetings. The resolution lost. One of sponsors of the resolution was Mayoral candidate Kurt Wright.

The mayoral social campaign started in earnest at one of the first Democratic primary debates in September 2011 when area journalists and tweeters agreed on using a singular hash tag, #btvmayor, for the campaign. What followed was a combination of reporting, campaigning, connections and tussles.

Of the six mayoral candidates (four Democrat primary contenders, one Republican, one Independent) only one had a credible presence in social media beforehand: Jason Lorber (D) who had set up and used his Twitter account as state representative (@VTJason) several years before. Once the others got into the race they, or their campaigns, quickly followed suit. For the primary months, most of the #btvmayor chatter was descriptions from the many public debates held between Democratic contenders.

Then at the Democratic caucus everything changed. The four round, single elimination primary battle between the contenders came down to the third round where, mano-a-mano, Miro Weinberger faced off with Tim Ashe. And the result was tie! The problem was that a ton of people had already left the premises, which meant that they couldn't vote in the unprecedented tie-breaking round.

Twitter and Facebook went wild. Those still in the building called out on social media, on email and on the phone to bring everyone back. Outside the building, traffic chaos ensued. In the end, the pols decided to reschedule the final round for another day. But that one, short crazy hour showed everyone that they ignored social in campaigns at their own risk.

As the two-man Weinberger/Wright campaign kicked in the social media activity ramped up (Wanda Hines was also a candidate, but she did very little campaigning, no social media work, and wound up with a very small percentage of the vote).

Weinberger's team was quick to start using and promoting its social channels. They made a big push into Facebook and used Twitter aggressively in order to dominate the #btvmayor stream. The Wright campaign jumped in too, finally setting up profiles for their candidate, although he had been an established politician on the state (representative) and local (city council) level for over a dozen years. They also started producing YouTube videos. On Twitter, the battle for hashtag dominance had begun.

The most interesting part of the #btvmayor hashtag was that it brought in people who normally weren't active or connected to the Burlington social media world. This included journalists, politically active citizen, and just regular Joes and Janes. To be clear, the political teams dominated the stream but that obscures a broader picture.

Another difference this time around was that we introduced social media as a key part to live debates. For the past three years, my organization #BTVSMB has hosted social media breakfast events here in Burlington. Now, we partnered with debate hosts to open up the social channels to increase debate participation. In the first debate we worked with the Burlington Business Association to take candidate questions from social media. In the penultimate debate, we helped the Burlington Free Press as the local paper hosted a complete social media debate where ALL of the questions came from social. That had never been done in Vermont before. I think it was the most interesting debate of the entire six-month campaign.

In the end, the candidate with the best social team won. Weinberger had surrounded himself with Internet professionals from the get-go as he realized how important online could be in his campaign. As he moved through the campaign, his staff beefed up participation from people with a strong social presence. Wright relied on a few young Web developers and interns. They faced an uphill battle online and never caught up.

Both teams desire to dominate the stream often led to pitched political battles. Most ended with personal insults and attacks. Which maybe proves the point that Twitter streams, like online message boards, are not always the best place for detailed, nuanced discussions.

What the social streams did have was the political passion and engagement that was often lacking on both the street and in the candidate debates themselves. One thing that's clear from the #btvmayor social campaign is that it did a great job in solidifying relationships within political teams. Whether it brought in any new votes is another question.

For once, though, the social media activity in the mayoral election accurately reflected the final Burlington vote tally. Perhaps that clearly points to social media moving away from early adopters and more solidly into the mainstream. At least in this little corner of Vermont.

One thing is clear though: social media as a part of major Vermont political campaigns is here to stay. And that is a very good thing.

Has Ben & Jerry's Lost Its Way?

2011-09-09T15:51:05-04:00

Ben & Jerry's launched a new ice cream this week, "Schweddy Balls," in honor of Alec Baldwin's old Saturday Night Live skit. In an instant, Twitter was abuzz. Schweddy Balls and Ben & Jerry's both zoomed to the top of the trending list. Mashable wrote about it, as did a number of other media outlets.

However, the new ice creams looks like another indicator that the great Ben & Jerry's brand has lost their way.

The brand has always gone its own way. From the idea of putting lots of things in ice cream to committing itself to social justice, Ben & Jerry's has always stood out. It's done so by taking stands that are true to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield's philosophy, but it's always used a large dose of humor and word play.

Once it launched Cherry Garcia, it also embraced an alternative, hippy style that was also true to the Vermont brand. It followed that with flavors like Phish Food, but also Chubby Hubby, One Sweet Whirled, Karamel Sutra and Half Baked, to name a few. Clever names, names that made you stop, think and laugh.

This year, however, we're seeing names like "Clusterfluff" and "Schweddy Balls." To which I can only respond "WTF?"

I wonder if Ben & Jerry's is losing market share to younger college audiences and 20 somethings. Clearly, that's where the brand is headed, with names like these. They're certainly not targeting the people who buy Chubby Hubby. If so, that's a major shift for the brand. What competition are they afraid of?

Maybe they've just run out of creativity. For the past few years, it seems like half the flavors at the scoop shop have chocolate in their names. There's also been a lot of focus on celebrity co-branding with Colbert and Jimmy Fallon. And now Alec Baldwin.

Clearly, though, Schweddy Balls and Clusterfluff show that Ben & Jerry's have crossed an invisible brand line. Branding "expert" Allen Adamson from the venerable agency Landor Associates explains what's happening in an AP article:

'You don't get noticed today without taking some risks. If you do something that offends no one, you won't get noticed,' he said."

In one sentence, Landor redefined branding as offending someone.

That's not the Ben & Jerry's brand. They've never been offensive. They've stood for what they believe, yes, even when it hasn't been popular. They've been true to who they are, but always done so with a twinkle in their eye. But, offensive, never.

I admit, as a Vermonter, I'm overly sensitive to our Vermont brands. Maybe it's because we don't have so many. In the last year, we've seen our beloved Magic Hat forced to sell to a beer distributor and watched the exodus of key people who made the brand what it is today.

I remember going to the original Ben & Jerry's in the old gas station across from the park and listening to Don Rose (the tallest guy in our shul, no less) playing the piano. I saw first hand as they expanded to Europe. I still follow what Cohen and Greenfield do to support sustainability and local businesses. And I've always enjoyed eating and laughing at the crazy flavors, even Sweet Potato Pie.

But Schweddy Balls or Clusterfluff? No thanks. I'm sure they'll be successful from a marketing standpoint, but from a brand standpoint they are way off. It's certainly not anything I'd bring home to the kids.

As a final nail in the coffin, there's a quote from the AP article

"The company's not worried about offending people with the name,spokesman Sean Greenwood said. 'We're the caring company,' Greenwood said Thursday."

If you have to say it, it's not true.

Corporate People

2011-02-16T18:00:09-05:00

A lot of people got very worked up last year over the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. In it, the Court decided that corporations were just like regular people and thus deserved the right of free speech. The more I read the news these days, the more I think those justices might be on to something.

Take for instance the latest news that the Entergy's Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is still leaking. This has been an ongoing issue with the plant, one that the company initially denied. According to the court's decision, we should all look at this as a simple case of corporate incontinence. And we all know that it's not right to make fun of incontinence. Still, we do expect Vermont Yankee to do something about it. I mean, it's one thing if they're doing it in the privacy of their corporate home, but it's another entirely if they're making a mess while out visiting!

Vermont Yankee, like many other older people, seems to have a hard time recognizing its problem. It should listen to the Supreme Court and go out and by some Corporate Depends before things get out of control! Otherwise the doctors at the Vermont Legislature in Montpelier will surely want to operate on it.

That's not the only way big corporation act like real people. In some sense, those huge profits companies make these days are like a version of Corporate Viagra. Yes, they sure appear big, robust and powerful. But it's not that simple; those profits seem to be hiding a more serious affliction, namely employing fewer people, making fewer things, and rewarding people with obscene bonuses.

Nowhere does corporate Viagra seem more rampant than in the financial sector. Even though they've deflated the world's economy, they're still rewarding their Big Swinging Dicks, to use a phrase from Michael Lewis' book Liars Poker. If these obscene profits and bonuses last for more than four straight years, should we call a doctor?

You know, now that I think of it, the Supreme Court was dead on in saying the corporations were just like people. They reminded me of a time I lived in Sweden. Back in the 80s and 90s lots of Swedish men couldn't deal with the demands and equality of Swedish women. So they went looking for wives in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. I'm not saying they were trafficking or doing anything illegal; those men were just looking for the path of least resistance, where the women were trained in subservience.

And when you think about it, that's pretty much what a lot of corporations did when they moved its manufacturing overseas. They left the American workers just like all of those Swedish guys who couldn't deal with those terrific, smart blonde women.

It sure looks like some corporation act like people. Or more precisely, it seems that some corporations act a lot like weak men.

So maybe being just like a person isn't really all that great. Maybe it's okay for corporations to act, well, like responsible businesses. I mean, if you push this all the way out it might mean that one day we could actually elect a corporation as president of the United States. And that would be a supreme mistake.

The Creativity Conundrum

2010-09-16T12:39:53-04:00

For most of us who work in marketing, we consider ourselves to work in a "creative" industry. That is: we're charged with coming up with creative solutions to marketing problems and, usually, the ones with the best creative ideas win. If you work in an agency, you've probably heard, ad naseum (Latin for: until it makes you sick) that creative is king.

The bigger question for me is: where does this creativity come from? Or maybe a better question is: how do you foster a creative environment?

A number of recent articles make some interesting points and seriously call into question the practices of so-called "creative workplaces."

The first article by Timothy Williamson of Oxford University, talks about imagination. He posits that rather than fictional flights of fancy, early humans developed imaginative skills built on real experiences. It was the evaluation of alternative "realities" that gave imagination its evolutionary power. Imagining different ways a saber-toothed tiger might eat you increased your chances of survival.

Imagination is the critical ingredient for creativity. But you have to have lots of real-life experience to have a really good one.

In a similar vein, Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide penned an article that shot down one of Malcolm Gladwell's a-ha points of outliers. He jumped on the idea that practicing something singularly for 10,000 hours will increase your chances of becoming a superstar. Instead, a recent study of professional athletes showed that those who group up in small towns and played a variety of sports growing up were most likely to become professionals. It flew in the face of the Tiger Woods theory that focusing on one sport, intensely, was the best path to stardom. Variety of experience, and lack of success in many of those experiences, actually makes us perform better.

The same is true of study habits. In our schools today we think that immersing ourselves in specific topics and studying them intensely will increase our knowledge and test scores. Actually, studies show the exact opposite to be true. Varying the types of materials studied, or even varying the content studied, yielded better results. Here's the money quote from Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College, "The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work."

Finally, once you have all of these experiences and have gathered knowledge in different ways, what do you need most? Time off, actually. In studies about our "always on society," research shows that what our brains need most is time to process all of the different inputs we receive during the day. Always on is stimulating, but it doesn't make us smarter. Here's why from Loren Fran, an assistant professor of physiology at UCSF who specializes in learning and memory: "Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it's had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories." He said he believes that when the brain was constantly stimulated, "you prevent this learning process."

So you'd think that business that specialize in creativity would:

Encourage people to experience many different things
Allow people to work on a variety of projects and clients to increase their reality-based experiences
Provide an array of research and creative materials, across disciplines, to make people smarter
Make sure people don't do the same thing all the time, every day
Ensure that people have enough down time, either at work or at home, to process everything

In short, companies would be in the business of developing more renaissance, or hybrid, people (See more here, in an older blog post). It's those people who should have the greatest chance of creative thinking and doing, which in turn should drive business results.

Right?

Unfortunately, today's creative workplaces are nothing like this. People toil long hours focusing on the same types of work and projects day in and day out. Companies talk the talk about interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration but they walk the walk of siloization and isolation.

And time? We're expected to work longer, and more intensely, with every passing year. It would be one thing if creative companies provided down time, or thinking time, at work, for everyone, another if they provided sabbaticals or longer vacations to do the same. But if they're doing that, I haven't heard much about them.

To paraphrase Shakespeare: Some are born creative, some achieve creativity, and some have creativity thrust upon them.

As creative business people, we should help our people achieve creativity. But we won't succeed unless we radically alter the way we've built up our business and employee practices.

Can We Stop Growing?

2010-08-19T16:00:16-04:00

This month's news about Magic Hat Brewery's sale to North American Breweries was a shock to us Vermonters. Magic Hat is one of my favorite brands, favorite beers and employs some of my favorite people. Now this original and quirky company risks losing its local control and connection, through its sale to an (to me) unknown entity. I don't really know any of the details of the how and why of the sale, but from what I've read online and off, it seems that Magic Hat's purchase of Pyramid Breweries on the West Coast had something to do with this.

If that's so, then the need for growth may have resulted in loss of control.

This isn't unique: Ben & Jerry's faced a similar issue almost a decade ago which led to their sale to Unilever. I hope that Magic Hat retains some of the same cultural control and freedom that Ben & Jerry's was able to keep.

But this episode and the relentless pursuit of corporate growth witnessed in quarterly earnings reports has me wondering:

When is enough enough? Does business size and growth matter more than quality and innovation? On the consumer side, do we have to keep on spending more and more so that our whole capitalist economy doesn't collapse?

I'm not sure this is really a marketing question, unless it pertains to a strategy of customer satisfaction vs. customer acquisition. It does tie into sustainability and business issues, though.

In today's economy, we should focus on quick, smart and connected rather than large, unwieldy, and generic. Just as major league baseball is trying to end its shameful steroids era, businesses should look to wean themselves from their adulation of unrestricted business growth hormones.

Smaller and even medium is sometimes better than big.

National Broadband Policy: Time to Pay Attention

2010-07-22T10:51:51-04:00

Several months ago, the FCC announced that it was formulating a national broadband policy. The U.S. was the last industrialized nation to do so, showing itself as a surprising laggard for our technically innovative country. Personally, I was encouraged that we had finally taken this step.

This week Wall Street Journalist Walter Mossberg on the blog The Hill commented that, while he was glad we were moving forward with a broadband policy, he felt it was too vague and too focused on rural areas.

Here's the money quote:

"There are plans and services that are sold in this country as broadband which wouldn't even be allowed to be labeled broadband in a lot of other countries they're so slow," Mossberg said. "And yet, at the very same time we pay more per unit of broadband speed than anyone else. So there's something wrong in my opinion."

We're behind in broadband. We're falling behind in mobile web (read Jeff Jarvis' great rant at AT&T and mobile). With every business more and more dependent on connectivity, you'd think that we'd see a more concerted effort to build a better infrastructure. With so many social media influencers gaining power, you'd think we'd see some type of movement to make better broadband in the U.S. into a reality.

But I'm not seeing any of that. Businesses are having a tough time and are turning more anti-government. Social media influencers are dizzy with the smell of Old Spice.

I'm not sure this is the most important issue of the day but it's a critical one for our country's economic development and innovation. As we're approaching election season, how many of the politicians running for office and asking for your votes have spoken about the national broadband policy even once?

I think it's time for us "influencers" to mobilize about something that's critical for our businesses and our clients' businesses.

Who's in?

Poetry Goes Digital

2010-03-11T14:30:55-05:00

I spoke with an old friend recently who's working on an interesting new project. Dennis Downey released a new iPhone app named Poem Flow where people can read or experience a poem per day. With our increasingly short attention spans and our desire to click on links, it feels refreshing that someone is trying to reinvigorate digital reading through poetry, of all things.

Some background: Dennis and I worked on a crazy startup in the 90's named Bali Hai. We thought we were working on the next big thing for kids' digital entertainment. Dennis had been doing some stand-up routines and had a concept he was trying to bring to life called Man-in-a-Box. After Bali Hai crashed and burned, Dennis worked on bringing his idea to life and it has ultimately resulted in Poem Flow.

One of the things Poem Flow is trying to do is to understand how we need to adjust the way we deal with text on screens, apart from simply transferring a print model to displays. And businesses like Apple and have focused on the same thing: How do we make text more engaging on a screen. Maybe that's what the iPad will ultimately do?

I find it fascinating to try this with poetry, specifically. Poetry is one of the oldest writing forms and one that's seemed to diminish greatly over the past century. Using new technology to highlight "old" content produces an interesting creative tension. Whether or not Poem Flow succeeds in finding an innovative solution to reading text on screens, I think it's laudable that it's trying to spread poetry.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so. About 40 teachers have contacted Poem Flow to see if they could use it in the classroom. And the Academy of American Poetry is working with Poem Flow to help curate poems and spread the word.

There are others who are trying to use new technology for poetry. Gavin Heaton, one of the editors of the book series The Age of Conversation, started a poetry crowdsourcing experiment on Twitter a while back called TwitterPoetry. It's starting to feel like an epic. It's a cool idea but one that might need a little more curating.

All of this reminds me of some friends of mine in Stockholm Sweden in the 80s. They were all studying literature or media studies at the time and they had an idea to rip out all of the print advertising in the subway cars and replace it with poetry. For them, it was a strike against commercialism and a blow for higher education. While they never actually did anything (remember, they were students) several years later the city of Stockholm did just that: they bought advertising space in the cars and put up famous Swedish poetry.

For now, I'm reading poetry on my iPhone, something I never thought I'd ever do. I'd love to see this in my kids' school. I'm not sure whether I like the moving text, though, since it makes me give up control, but maybe that's just me.

But anything that makes us take the time to stop, read and think has to be a good thing.

It's Time for Online Retailers to Support Local Communities

2010-01-05T15:00:39-05:00

Online retail continues to grow while local communities struggle with deep economic problems. Do these two economic trajectories have anything to do with one other? While there may not be a causal link between the two trends, it's time for online-only retailers to do the right thing: Charge and pay local sales tax.

Put very simply, the convoluted online tax system works like this: If a retailer maintains physical commercial space in a state, people who buy from its online domain are required to pay sales tax on their purchases. This is why individuals pay sales tax when shopping online from websites like Walmart or Costco.

If an online retailer does not maintain a physical presence, it does not charge and don't pay sales tax. This is why individuals don't pay sales tax when you purchasing on websites like Amazon or MacMall.

In the current system, local communities subsidize online-only retailers at the expense of bricks and mortar stores - you know, the retailers that provide jobs to the people in your community. Even more distressing, these subsidies come from local tax coffers.

It's time to change the system: All online retailers must be made to pay and charge a sales tax to help local communities.

The choice is ours, really, as consumers. What do we support more? Roads, schools and police in our cities and towns? Or 4-6% off our consumer purchases?

We may think that we're saving by embracing the rapidly growing realm of e-commerce, but in reality, we end up paying in an unacknowledged capacity - either through property taxes or increased sales tax, which hits our local retailers even harder.

Here are a few things to think about:

According to Mercent, Black Friday online sales for 2009 grew by 41% since 2008. That does not even include so-called Black Monday.

Washington Post's David Ignatius perceives the Californiazation of America, where local government don't have the will to balance spending with tax revenue, as inviting another looming financial meltdown.

Seth Godin shows succinctly how online retailers have already changed the nature of the record and bookstores. Online commerce has won here and is winning in other areas as well.

Online retailers don't need our help and don't need to be subsidized. They already offer more choice, greater convenience and more competitive pricing than brick and mortar stores. Our communities need our help. The question is whether lawmakers have the guts to legislate this much-needed change. I doubt they do. Maybe concerned local citizens should band together and publicly target and shame the sites that don't support their communities through local sales tax.

The difference between one online retailer and another is pretty slim. If the choice is between supporting my local police force and supporting some unknown corporate wonk, the choice is easy, if somewhat blunt.

And if you really don't want to pay sales tax, there's always New Hampshire, where you can basically live free or die.

Come on, online retailers. It's time to do the right thing. Pay up.

Go Ogle Has Droid Rage

2009-12-16T18:20:00-05:00

Google launched Droid more than a month ago with a solid male-focused campaign which included rockets blasting the earth. Maybe Google leading with machismo was a good idea for capturing some marketing share from Apple's iPhone, but now you have to wonder if Google hasn't crossed the line to just plain homophobia.

The latest Droid TV spot takes clear aim at the iPhone, labeling it a "princess" phone:

Google and Droid might be taking aim at another product, but they're certainly questioning everyone who uses an iPhone. According to Google, iPhones are for "girly men" (or girly girls for that matter), while real men use Droid. It's interesting to watch them break down the brand attributes as male or female.

Google/Droid/Male

Fast

Tough

Can Do

Apple/iPhone/Female

Clueless

Pretty

Useless

Hmm. Actually these ads feel a lot like the ads for pickup trucks. When one of the truck brands added an extra step on the back, another brand labeled it the "man step." Only sissies use man steps, apparently. That is, when they're not using iPhones.

As Google tries to paint all of us iPhone users as pansies, you wonder if that stretches to iPod users as well. Why wouldn't it? The question is: How many Google engineers have iPods or even iPhones for that matter? It used to be that the challenge was to show that tech people weren't nerds but were kind of cool. Now, cool is for wimps. Now techies eat raw meat!

You kind of wonder what's coming next? Maybe Google/Droid will use Dick Cheney as its macho spokesman. Not only does he shoot old men in the face but also without technology, his heart would stop beating. In some way, he is a droid.

If Dick won't do it, maybe Droid could poach the iMac ads and use Patrick Warburton who played Puddy on Seinfeld. I'm thinking of the episode "The Face Painter" where the guys paint themselves to go to a hockey game. Puddy scares a priest to death by screaming "The Devils! Haaaa!!" Just change it to "Droid! Haaa!" and you may have a winner.

And once Google has manhandled Apple, you know what's coming next, right? Microsoft's Bing. Bing! You can already imagine the hockey metaphor. The LADY Bing Award for sportsmanship in hockey is like the search engine Bing. Tame and soft. But real hockey, like real search, is about tripping, slashing and elbowing. Real hockey, like Google, is about fighting and losing your teeth! Hockey without violence is, well, it sounds almost European. Ah the possibilities.

Actually, I don't think the TV ads do enough for Droid. After all they're still only TV ads. No, what Droid needs are some real hardware extensions for real men, to really distinguish them from the iPhone girly men. Here are some suggestions.

Bottle Opener - To save Real Men's teeth or eye sockets, Droid should build in a bottle opener into every phone. Then they could do co-promotions with Budweiser. Oops, I meant an American beer.

Weaponize Droid - The Droid is pretty harmless actually. It needs some type of weapon in it. Maybe Google could create the Droid Shiv, with a little stiletto that pops out. A derringer would be another cool idea. Somehow, both of those ideas seem a little wimpy. Both stiletto and derringer sound too foreign. Google should bring in the NRA into one of the vaunted Google Labs to figure that one out fast.

Inflatable Droid - How about a Droid that inflates to one of those sex dolls? Apparently they now have motors at all of the orifices. If Google could figure out a way to do Droid voice control it would give Droid Men amazing power and control. Things they don't have in real life. It wouldn't do a Droid vibrator though, since there's already an app for that. (Of course!)

With those three things, the Droid becomes more than a phone. It becomes a real man's survival tool! Wimps, sissies and princesses need not apply thank you very much. You can wuss out with your iPhones.

Maybe Google really does have Droid Rage.

Twitter Ponzi

2009-12-14T18:55:29-05:00

I started using the site Twunfollow a few months back and since then I've seen evidence of what I call Ponzi schemes on Twitter.

Twunfollow sends you notices via e-mail any time anyone unfollows you on Twitter. I thought this would be a good listening tool to make sure I wasn't boring or driving off people I want to communicate with.

What I found instead showed that many, a majority actually, of my new followers unfollowed me in a day or two, especially if I didn't follow them back! Not that I mind that much, but these people didn't really care what I had to say at all. Their choice. What I do mind is that there seems to be some type of unspoken pact of "you follow me, I'll follow you" going on.

And to be honest, I felt that way when I started with Twitter as well, especially with people in my own field. But the people following and unfollowing have nothing to do with my field and, in many instances, already have upwards of 20,000 followers.

I've realized that the name of this game is building huge Twitter followings. And that wouldn't bother me except for the fact that in this early stage of social media, following size is one of the key measures of influence. Just try any of free measurement tools; most say the same thing.

If we use followers to identify key influencers, the whole system breaks down. What's worse, I see many brands following the same Ponzi scheme, trying to grow their Facebook fans to 1,000 or 10,000 by screaming out "Join Us and Raise Our Numbers." What they find is that many people are not really their fans at all and don't really care about the brand.

If you're using social media to talk to people who don't care about you, you should either stop or buy television advertising.

I'm not sure what to do about the Twitter Ponzi schemers. But they make the metric of followers and fans into a complete joke.

The Future of Content

2009-12-01T16:24:47-05:00

We’re seeing a media shift away from traditional
outlets like print and TV towards outlets like mobile and digital devices. One of the
huge implications in this is that our very stable economic model of
advertising-driven content is starting to disappear right before our eyes.
Newspapers can no longer afford to pay journalists to cover news far away from
their cities. Somehow we think citizen journalists will make up for foreign
correspondents. TV networks have shifted to more reality based shows because
they’re cheaper to produce and thus less dependent on advertising dollars. None
of this will improve over the coming years. The advertising model is on its deathbed.

But the online model hasn’t shown us a new solution. In
fact, online advertising, and even paid search, hasn’t come close to replacing
traditional ad dollars. Content may want to be free, but as a smart person once
said “There is no such thing as free content.”

So unless we all settle for user generated content of
various and dubious quality, how will we get that great content we’ve grown
used to? Here are some possible models for the future:

Subscription

There's nothing new here. In fact we hear all the time that
people just will not pay subscription money for content anymore, especially
online. Salon and the NYT tried it and failed, although the WSJ still plays
that way. While it may not work for news, I think it still can work for
entertainment. Just look at HBO.

HBO started selling subscriptions back in the 1970s and
they’re still doing it. And guess what? For $15/month, I get what I think is
the best content anywhere. Hands down. I gladly pay them to watch True Blood,
Entourage, Big Love and all of those other amazing series.

From a content standpoint, HBO shows that standing from a
place of high quality, and demanding that people pay to consume its product,
can work. I think the issue with content subscriptions is quality. People won’t
pay for mediocre quality because we can get that anywhere.

In the future, watch for more premium content subscriptions
to pop up

Brand Sponsorship

Back in the early days of radio and TV, we didn’t have
commercials. Instead, brands like Chevrolet, General Foods and even tobacco
companies sponsored entire shows. Talk about product placement!

We’re starting to see examples of that, like when General
Motors sponsors an entire show of Medium and then builds a new SUV into the
plot. The big question is whether brands will have the guts to sponsor
just one show and stand for it, rather than spreading advertising dollars
across the board like a nervous roulette player.

I think they will for a couple of reasons. With words like
sustainability and authenticity swirling around the brand-o-sphere, people want
to know what a brand stands for. By standing behind quality content, a brand
can take a stand while promoting itself and its products. Branded content itself is a goal for
many companies and there’s no better way to control this than by sponsoring the
content itself.

Whether this looks like old radio, or PBS or something else,
I think we’ll see more brand sponsored content in the future. Again, the
question of quality will play a huge role here. Personally I’d love to see
brands fight over talent like baseball owners fight over free agents.

Micropayments

One of the holy grails of digital, the idea of micro
payments seems so simple and logical that it’s amazing that it hasn’t happened
yet. Actually, given the state of our decentralized economy, it’s not so
surprising.

The idea of micro payments is that you pay a little bit each
time you consume content. Watch John Stewart online and pay a dime. Read a NYT
opinion piece and pay a nickel. It adds up based on the number of people who
consume all of this content. The problem is that there is no central system
and clearinghouse for gathering all of these payments and then disbursing them
to content producers.

We need the type of Giro system they have in Europe, which
acts as a centralized payment system for everything and has the buy in from
every financial institution and business on the continent. Who will do that?
Best bet is Google, but you know everyone will kick and scream if they do. Look
instead for a consortium of Google, Microsoft, Apple and other major players to
smoke that good peace pipe in the name of green (or gold).

Overlays and AddOns

The worst solution we’ll see is that everyone tries to tack
on advertising to existing content. Upload a YouTube video and someone will do
an advertising pre-roll. We’ll see more interstitials and bigger ads. Actually,
this is already happening but the question is whether this is working or not.

I heard an old VC guy say last week that as long as the
Internet can build eyeballs, someone will figure out how to monetize it. I
think this solution is part of what’s dying in media. We don’t want
interruptions, we want to get our content and get out of there.

Challenges

There are two problems with all of these. If pay for content
wins out, we might see a content haves vs. have-nots situation, where some
people pay to consume where others simply view bad content and read about the
good content. It’s almost an undemocratization of media. The other problem is
that people will go to great lengths not to pay, if they can get away with it.
In Sweden, for example, if you had a TV, the state expected you to pay a TV
license, or tax, to pay for national programming. While perhaps half of the
citizens there did paid, the other half did what they could to avoid it. It
wasn’t that much money, either.

If you look at what’s happened to the music industry,
though, it shows that smaller payments direct to consumer works. The big
studios lost, bands and music fans won. Of course it’s cheaper to produce music
than, say, a movie or TV series, but the model seems to work.

Personally, I’d like to see micropayments win out, but I
think the branded sponsorship and all that means to content control will
probably play a bigger role in content over the next few years. That is, unless
the new Bergman or Welles shows up on YouTube and changes the whole game.