I think too much. And so can you!

Or why I stopped using Facebook.

When you deactivate your Facebook account, it takes you through several steps of grief for your loss. First, there’s “are you sure you want to quit? You’ll no longer be able to connect with…”.

This was the first reason I knew deactivating the account was the right move. It pulled up 4 people I wouldn’t miss. Sorry mom.

Next it showed me pictures of puppies being tortured. “If you leave, our intern will turn this pug into chili.” That almost worked. But then I remembered the pug chili I had last time I visited Tucson. Absolutely gummy. No one’s gonna eat that, no way they waste their time on it.

After showing me visual cues of my depressing life without Facebook, they showed me a poll, asking straight up why I wanted to leave. They gave me a list of choices. Privacy, no. Relevance, no. None of the reasons listed are the reasons I left.

I’m not high-minded about Facebook. I don’t think it’s beneath me. I signed up as a way to understand the site, and learn about how others used it. At first it was interesting to reconnect with people from high school and college. As someone lacking in basic social skills, it followed the same path as most other interactions with people. Meet. Quick chat to catch up. Never talk again. And since I make my real life miserable, imagine how my virtual life went. FMVL.

After a few months, I stopped finding people. Then I started dropping people who showed up in my feed to much. Then I stopped logging in. Then I stopped responding to alerts from the site.

Then I realized, this is just what I thought it was. Partly the technology, partly who I connected to, partly my personality (and responsibility), Facebook for me was the worst kind of surface level relationships. The kind I’ve run from my whole life. Most of my interaction on the site was the kind of high school crap that I avoid like the plague. Farmville, MafiaWars, pointless causes, invites I couldn’t accept. For me, Facebook was like the entire internet sending their daughters to me to sell Girlscout cookies.

When I tried to make a go of it, I realized I couldn’t even find the people or things I was looking for in my feed. It was all noise. And that’s when I decided to split for good.

The media is starting to paint Facebook as some kind of bad guy. The media will figure out the right mix of privacy plus greed plus technology for their stories shortly. But it isn’t. The truth is, it’s an amazing service that they offer for free. For me (and I suspect many others in the near future) Facebook has just become boring.

It was a fad to join. And it will be a fad to quit. I guess you could say I’m an early adopter.

*Full disclosure: Facebook did not show me pictures of tortured puppies, or threaten to do so. But it was kind of implied.

**Originally published on Desonesto Doctrine

you know what word fucking bugs me? content. if you are out there telling clients or anyone else that ‘content is king’ then you’re an idiot. well, not a total idiot. ‘content’ is king. ‘content’ is also vague. ‘content’ is generic. ‘content’ is open ended. ‘content’ is meaningless.

there’s a scary trend that says content alone draws people. if that were true there would be thousands of you reading this right now, when there are more likely dozens. there are people working on software that will randomly combine words to create content without using a human brain. i wonder if this content will also be absent any insight. no need.

here is the news. people don’t want content. they want information on topics that interest them. they want stories. they want entertainment. they want the assembly instructions for the exact piece of video equipment they just bought but can’t connect to their audio system. they aren’t just trolling the internet looking for any old combination of words. they aren’t.

so if you’re planning your site or marketing or anything around the idea of having plenty of content, it’s important that you start calling it something besides that. call it literally by what you intend to offer people to read that will make it valuable to them. for example, the wall street journal has a successful paywall. why? because they don’t offer some vague content. they offer financial news and information that is brimming with insights.

starting to make sense? and yes, i know all about keyword strategy. it’s valid and valuable when it brings a web user to a relevant page. re-read that, because if you’re thinking you’ll post hundreds of rudimentary articles on rotating tires and capture a car lover, you’re nuts. think about the way people use the internet today. now. they are mission oriented. they aren’t just surfing page after page like they were in 1995 or even 2005. want proof? see: smartphone penetration. people log on, get the address or time or phone number they need, and log off.

when they do want more information, they want detailed information or information with a point of view. so if you’re preparing ‘content’ make sure you include some of that. don’t plan content. plan specific things you want to communicate, with an editorial viewpoint that makes those things informative, interesting or polarizing. and hopefully things that couldn’t be written randomly by software.

Had a conversation today about music with people from several generations. I was pretty much the median age of the group. The older participants were referencing music that I recognized and some that I have in my collection. We were talking specifically about music that people had purchased in multiple formats from vinyl to 8-track, cassette, CD and finally digital formats and why some music was more important to upgrade than other.

The younger people in the room had purchased fewer formats. Some avoided vinyl and most had just missed 8-tracks and cassettes altogether. More important, the younger the person, the more they questioned the idea that they would have to re-buy (or share) things in another format. At first, I thought they considered digital format to be the ultimate format. But it has already been shown that digital can take on many forms, especially as hardware makers invent proprietary formats or as new compression methods are invented.

But the conversation took a different turn. A few people felt that music didn’t need to be re-purchased because it didn’t need to be saved at all. They treated it like the old edition of a monthly magazine. Once the month is passed, it goes in the trash.

It started me wondering on whether the lack of a physical manifestation of the music, especially the album art and liner notes (remember those?) made the music harder to hold on to. Did reading the lyrics from the sleeve create a stronger emotional connection to the music than clicking Download and adding the aac to a playlist?

If the digital generation discards music so easily, will an artist like Pharrell fade away? Especially when you consider the fragmentation of media and the number of outlets for music discovery multiplying daily, will there ever be another artists logo that is scrawled studiously on the notebooks of 5 generations? Or will each song touch a small group of niche listeners before being deleted from their hard drives, and their memories?

Ask anyone who has ever bought a car, and they will tell you it sucks. It sucks. There is rarely a case in which someone will say  - I bought a car, and it didn’t totally suck. If confronted with such a case, it is memorable. Just hearing about it.

Once, all shopping was like this. Annoying sales people, haggling, uncertainty about price, value and financing. Buying a TV in the 70’s was like this. Even into the 80’s.

But it stopped. Because people who ran stores must have at some point gone shopping for themselves and realized – “I hate this. It sucks. I would much prefer to not be harassed by this sales person, and have a simple way to understand what this TV will cost me.” And shopping is easier, and people (no doubt) buy more crap than they ever did before. Maybe not this past 6 months, but you get the idea.

Whichever auto dealer gets that first wins. The dealership that gets rid of the pressure tactics, stops hiding people’s keys, makes it easy to understand financing, puts a simple pricetag on the cars, and is not going out of their way to let you know that you can’t leave there without feeling cheated will win.

Saturn gave it a go. Nice try boys. Only problem, they were owned by GM. So they caved in to GM techniques and made shitty GM cars. It can be done, and someone will figure out how to do it, and they will sell more cars than the guys who do it the old way. The way we hate.

***

FYI, This is not a response to any recent experience. I’m not on the market for a car, and haven’t been in a dealership for over a year. But I still can’t wash the stink off me.

Let’s begin this post with a simple notion: content is the trend. It’s where everything is going. Not serving ads but creating content that communicates messages either directly or by the nature in which the content is delivered. This is where we’re going. If you don’t agree, pretend you do for the next simple notion.

What if.

Ads online have never been as successful as marketers had hoped. Sure there are conversion rates that have met goals, and sure there are exceptions. But by and large, web users avoid ads in search of content. Go back and read that again. It’s important.

Look at Twitter and Facebook (yes, again.) Facebook has many, many, many users and in terms of ads they are stuck with glorified Adwords, because they know users would like the service left if there were banners or (gasp) rich media ads getting in the way of people updating their status.

One thing Facebook has done is give users a chance to switch out ads and give a reason. I don’t know what Facebook does with that data, and have never been served a better ad in exchange for one I rated “irrelevant.” In fact, I have had the irony of rating an ad “repetitive” and having the same ad replace it. Wonderful.

Twitter hasn’t even figured out how to get Adwords on their site, especially as people use their FREE service via third-party applications. All sans ads. Yes, I just went French. The speculation and rumors about Twitter’s ad strategy is to integrate ads into users’ feeds. To make the ads part of the experience. (For a lot of Twitter users, the whole thing is a big list of ads and personal promotions anyways, this won’t be much different.)

But what if we took Facebook’s Ad Rating system, and Twitter’s integration strategy to the next logical step. We know that people are more receptive to ads that interest them or are more relevant. Always.

What if we treated ads as content? And what if we treated ad serving networks as channels, like channels in any other medium. A user could CHOOSE a channel that served more rich media. Or a channel that specialized in GET RIPPED NOW!!!! ads, or adult content if that’s your thing. It would also mean a user could avoid that stuff if they didn’t wish to see it (anymore.)

Obviously this isn’t possible today. But think about the effects on conversion if users were allowed a vote on the subject, style or media of their ads. Think about the boundaries you could push with rich media if you KNEW you would only be served up to people who actually asked for it.

For ad serving networks, it would mean competition for brands or message types, or an opportunity to go niche in an effort to win users and get in front of more eyeballs. Potentially, this would raise the bar on ad quality for banners, and force ad serving networks to be more selective about what they serve. Headaches with huge upside if they could be disciplined enough to sign and serve ads that don’t anger users (or hell, serve up ads people might like.)

every time i turn around, there is a new tool or way to make design seem less necessary. i have been posing the question “form? or function?” to designers, ux pros, ae’s, pm’s and folks outside the industry for the past few weeks. informally, about 90% of respondents have declared function to be more important. landslide. much more important. one of the

remove any reference to design or form, and function is simply – what does it do? we can all agree that the utility of anything is crucial to it’s success. but how successful would any idea be without considering the form.

when i probe, “why” or “define function” more than half describe function as part of usability, and based on a strategy of engagement or towards a pointed conversion goal. the function of an automobile is to transport people and cargo. the form of the car is what makes many of us prefer a new lexus to say a model T, which serves the same function. i can safely say (with no research to back me up, whatsoever) that more people have bought a lemon, because it looked good than because they were misguided by the engineering information for a particular model.

jesus. form can convince people to smoke cigarettes. most intelligent adults wouldn’t make that decision based on the “function” of a cigarette.

this is true for ads, web sites, and apps. the function is the basic idea. this site holds a form, that simply gives my email address to a homebuilder in exchange for prices in a desired zip code. we would all agree that a form on a blank white page would not perform as well as a form comprised of the identical fields on a page designed to reassure, with a bit of explanatory copy and a link to a privacy policy.

that the link to the privacy policy needn’t even be functional makes the case for form. users need see it, to feel save hitting the submit button, but a quick look at the analytics on virtually any site reveals that it is seldom clicked.

if function is so much more important that form, why do most firms A/B test form, but never function. is it because digital strategists never err? no, it is because design of the form plays an important role in the perception of an idea, and ultimately the success of that function.

The hot topic and sign of the apocalypse du jour is crowdsourcing.

Since I’m a paid creator, the idea of it scares the hell out of me. When I first heard the concept I took bootb out for a testdrive on a viral web project for Lego. I think my experience can best be framed in terms of how the experience compared to a project executed at an agency.

Upside: I had the exciting feeling creative’s experience on those rare agency projects where you believe that anything is possible. I came up with 4 or 5 ideas, and submitted only the idea I felt was strongest (which is not possible in your typical agency scenario). So that was a good feeling – if they bought my idea, the could only buy the

one I wanted to sell, not combine ideas 2 and 3 and add in the headline from 1.

I think most of the hubbub about crowdsourcing is about the commoditization of creativity, but give it up; that ship sailed before I was born. Working on the one project I tried was exhilarating, and the competition only made my mind work harder on a great solution.

The lack of communication on the project was the greatest downside. It would be nice if they sent updates about the winner, and the production of that idea, and walked you through to the finish line. It would probably be a smart way to help launch the winning idea as well. Who would be more interested in seeing it than those that were bested by its creator?

My old explanation to opponents of crowdsourcing was it’s like Mixed Martial Arts. If you find it vulgar, don’t watch. Now, it seems even more apt, because MMA has caught on and has demonstrated staying power. It ain’t going away. The crowd has demanded more.

The same applies to crowdsourced ideas.

After presenting idea after idea to various clients and generally having them approve only the most bland or water down the most interesting, I teamed up with some friends and put together a site that we knew would draw attention and give us a chance at doing some damage control using social networks, blogs and as it turns out, the radio. It is called Ghetto Baskets. It’s an ecommerce site that sells junk we remember to our pre-salaried youth packaged in other junk, marketed as a solution to recessionary/ghetto budget limitations. You can see it here. Here’s what I learned so far.

Lesson 1: If you are putting something on the web to get attention, it better be attention getting. Sounds pretty simple. But I assure you corporate America’s marketing departments are not quite ready to hear this yet, in 99% of cases. If you put up the safe microsite with no utility or interesting content, there is nothing to share. There is nothing to visit. There is nothing. For all the traditional ad creatives getting upset about the digital revolution and it’s impact on ‘the idea’ I say the idea is now more important than ever. It’s just a slightly different version of ‘idea.’ If you’re marketing a product, and you ask an agency to build you a Flash (or Silverlight et al) microsite showing off the packaging and some testimonials, I have some exciting news for you — unless your product is some derivative of iPhone or competitor, you can forget about people giving a shit.

But if you can give up a little bit of control, and put forth something more interesting to the world (or at least your demo) you have some hope. We put up something we knew would piss people off, or at least give them a chance to drop some righteous blogposts on us, and that was good for business.

Lesson 2: Don’t be scared of criticism. Criticism is good. Any press is good press. This is more true than ever. In our case, we got 50% of our traffic from people linking to our site because the HATE our site. Which is awesome. The criticism is good, and it was baked into the idea. To encourage and also to diffuse the comments from getting too heated, we posted them on our blog, and gave them equal weight. The dialogue is fine with us.

Lesson 3: Transparency is good, but it means you ARE your brand. I had not ashamed of the site, or afraid to stand by the content and debate about it. Not at all. But I didn’t want to become the guy known solely for this site. It’s only an experiment. But after just a few days, strangers who had found the site started contacting me on different social sites because they had connected me to the site. In essence, any thing on the web is like a sex tape. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. Understand this beforehand and deal with it. If you are putting something up for a brand, web users are good detectives, they will figure out the brand, the agency, the creatives, and anyone the creatives went to Junior High with.

More lessons coming as they are learned.

Originally posted on Jason Baer’s excellent Convince & Convert

You’ve put your brand on social sites like Facebook and Twitter. Congratulations. You’re part of the conversation. When a consumer follows or fans you, you reciprocate. Very nice.

But if that’s where your engagement ends, you have an appointment with fail.

In any good conversation, both sides should speak, both sides should listen. Each side asks, and each side answers. As I’m certain you’ve read, a brand shouldn’t merely be blasting content and shouldn’t be fielding complaints full-time either. There are lots of people and companies using the social Web to promote their brand. The ones doing it best are those that proactively reach out to, and react appropriately when called upon by their fans.

If you’re a regular visitor to Convince & Convert, none of this is news. But here’s a twist.

Don’t Think You – Think Useful

If you really want to connect, try making the conversation about something besides you. One good example is the growing gourmet burger chain The Counter based in Santa Monica, California.

They use their account on Twitter to try out new promotions, announce products and encourage feedback from their loyal customer base. You follow them, they follow you back. You ask, they answer. You complain, they ask for detail and offer to help.

Recently, immediately following a mild earth quake in Southern California, @CounterBurger tweeted: Did you feel the shake? Go get a free shake at The Counter in El Segundo until 4.49pm.

How’s that for seizing an opportunity? And people showed up to take advantage. During the recent NBA playoff series between the Denver Nuggets and LA Lakers, The Counter offered free burgers to the first 50 customers to say “Go Lakers” in the chain’s Denver location. This is a fun way to activate followers in that region, and interact with them in a way that goes beyond their expectations. It demonstrates that The Counter is paying attention to the fans’ interests.

This approach is smart because it engages followers in a conversation beyond the brand, beyond hamburgers. It makes the relationship larger. Initially, a user follows The Counter because they like the restaurant (and the food), but now they’re getting to know the brand’s personality via interesting conversations and updates that go beyond the promotional or customer service arenas.

Compare your closest friends to your “work” friends, for example. You share a lot in common with your true friends, while conversations with colleagues are limited to your shared experiences at the office or within your industry. There’s an expiration date on those relationships.

AdAge Sucks at Twitter

This pretty much sums up why brands like Ad Age are missing an opportunity on Twitter. They ignore any conversation, they NEVER respond to comments or inquiries. And they break the most common rules of etiquette for the community. This isn’t surprising considering they represent both the print media (who clearly doesn’t understand how to exist online) and advertising’s Old Guard (who desperately want to remain relevant but usually can’t wrap their head around it).

A typical post is represented by an example like this one: Brink’s Set to Unveil $120 Million Rebranding Effort: NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — At a time when awareness of its br.. http://tinyurl.com/nt623f

They ignore the 140 character limit completely, clearly copying and pasting from an article. Doing this demonstrates that they don’t care about the way information is exchanged on a specific channel (in this case Twitter). Even worse, it has that old media stench, the “WE will tell YOU what is important and you will read every last word”. Using the full character count with a wasted segment of an introductory line also keeps the piece from being re-tweeted. (seeanother example of AdAge Social Media Blindness)

In this forum, it would be be best to rewrite the headline or summary of the piece to fit the forum. It would also help with engagement if they would add some posts asking for reader opinion or feedback, or by occasionally responding to a tweet in their direction.

Social site users aren’t there to talk about your brand, even though they may occasionally indulge you. They are there to share experiences. To participate in a conversation that they might not have offline. That’s why you should be there too.