Twenty Eleven

The onset of the new year has always been a trigger for hundreds, even thousands of predictions.

We are all excited and look forward to the potential of the new year and try our best, based on how the previous year ended, to predict what new occurrences will take place in the year to come.

Rather than try to predict what will happen I will make it more personal and list what I hope will happen.

2011 will be the year the web truly goes mobile.

The browser will once again be the main gateway to the mobile web. Apps, as cool as they may seem, will become relegated to games, soundboards and photo manipulation.

The allure of the browser and its instant access to a plethora of information will continue to guide users through the mobile web.

Look out for some major breakthroughs in mobile commerce.

2011 will usher in a new breed of mCommerce sites that will be specifically designed for making purchases on the go. Mobile commerce will allow merchants to use tools like geo-location, social media and hyper-personalization to sell their wares. Interfaces will become much more simplified and check out will take place through a centralized payment method associated and secured by the device.

The Social Web will start to splinter out and become more topical.

We will see a set of new players who will attract some of Facebook's minions who have grown tired of the piles and piles of general information that has grown boring and useless.

We will see players like Quora, Instagram, GroupMe, Hashable and others who will offer up robust alternative social experiences rather than relying on FB's very general town square approach.

Now that Facebook has become a strand in the fabric of our lives we will start to see some of the more darker angles of the social network. Users who will have grown bored of old high school friends will start to create multiple personalities that will allow them to play out the fragments of their personalities as they relate to different aspects of their lives. Could get really interesting.

The deal is the new ad.

Ads will no longer be one sided communications. They will have to hold the promise of a deal, if you want a deal you will have to interact with the brand in some way. Ads will now try and lure audiences with tangible promises that will get them to engage.

YouTube will go on a spending spree buying up (web) video production companies en route to becoming the first "Studio" born from the web. We will see higher production value and more in depth content flanked by babies making funny faces, teenage girls lip syncing and a new massive network with tons of great content surrounded by all of our silly videos. It's a beautiful combination.

Tablets will rule.

HTML5 will do what Flash did but better.

Twitter will become a full fledged human alert service where we turn first for breaking news as well as whimsical thoughts. We the people surrounding the content that is useful to us with our own ramblings and witty repartee.

Privacy dies. We elect to share everything we do online, the new definition for antisocial will be someone who can't or won't share online, those folks miss out on all the fun and eventually start a new society in caves.

The TV becomes a major portal to web content. We will see a huge shift where millions will access specific large screen web content and apps directly from their TV. The big screen gets a curtain call.

Apple will no longer only appeal to the "Crazy Ones".

Inspired by the Apple of earlier years we will see a new slew of obsessive compulsive, design oriented, sexy companies all playing hard to get.

Apple will now be forced to join the ranks of the IBMs and the Microsofts of the world and seen as a Big Brother type company. Google is not far behind.

Form and function will finally be completely integrated. Design heavy websites will become a thing of the past. We will encounter much cleaner and easier to use designs that will eliminate the clutter and allow us to do what we need to do without distraction.

Content becomes truly personalized. More and more web services will be using Facebook and Twitter as sign in methods and our social content and connections will be there to greet us in almost everything we do. Sharing will no longer be the holy grail as we will be conducting our lives on the web in real time for all to see.

Billion dollar valuations. Companies making zero or very little money but that service millions of users will continue to get billion dollar valuations all based on the rabid use of its audience. 2011 will not be the year we finally see pay walls and other monetization methodologies take hold but it will surely set these companies up for big pay days once they do figure out how to make money.

This is just a glimpse of what I hope will transpire in 2011.

Its been a wild ride so far and it only gets more and more interesting each and every day.

Happy New Year!!!

Your Virtual World Can Save You Real Life Bucks

Pushkart.com is a site that puts a spin on the typical web coupon merchant. They offer a service that links discounts to your online presence. They take a survey of your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media and evaluate your “Social Networth.” The higher your value, the better the discounts. It offers a way for businesses to integrate into the social media culture – when you redeem a coupon; Pushkart passes the savings on to your friends and followers.

Main Street USA

Just when we all thought the digital revolution was going to annihilate all forms of traditional media, entertainment and commerce.

Just when we started to forsake all forms of normal activity for an alternate world where you Like Followers and Tweet your Places.

Just when just about everything was done behind a computer screen along came a new wave of mobile technologies that threw a wrench into every futurists chances of being the one to accurately predict the ultimate demise of an age.

We humans are wired to anticipate the worst especially when we are smack in the middle of an evolution.

So in a preemptive measure we have all but said our eulogies to the ways of the past and have embraced a new future predicted to live and breath in cyberspace.

A future fraught with information overload, oppressed by privacy concerns, a life encumbered by social networks that were to incarcerate us in front of our computers lest we miss the latest status update from a distant friend we once went to middle school with.

Everything from social interactions, love, family, shopping, entertainment, study, games and journalism cowered at the massive berg that hovered over its dark future.

Commerce, being the blood that flows through the veins of humanity, is one area of our culture that has gotten the most scrutiny and that has been affected most by the web.

Online shopping steadily gained ground on the massive emporiums and charming boutiques that once lined the grand avenues of our cities and the strip malls of our suburbs.

Everything included free shipping and was received almost as fast as you could take it off the shelf and bring it home.

It was all but over for Main Street USA and aside from a generation that wasn't born wired, a new generation turned, almost exclusively, to the web to peruse an endless catalog of anything their hearts desired and the ability to get it at the speed of light.

Just when brick and mortar was licking its wounds and trying to rethink how it was going to survive the next onslaught of the web a funny thing happened almost twice as fast as it took the internet to administer its first deadly blow.

The mobile web was born and with it came a whole new way to enjoy the world around us.

New apps were created, by visionaries who understood that we couldn't forget our beautiful world, started to appear on our phones.

Apps that allowed us to use the world around us as the content we reacted to and our pocket computers is what we use to record and interface with our reactions.

All of sudden we sought out new and interesting real places to go so that that we are able to declare our visit.

We started looking at the world around us so that we may report within 140 character headlines that we saw a guy picking his nose on the F train or that we overhead some ridiculous comment some swarthy eccentric made at the bar while trying to convince a girl to friend him on Facebook.

We are now able to navigate winding streets for the best route possible and book a reservation at the restaurant with the most stars at the same time.

We can now research and book vacation destinations while waiting to be served our discounted meal and then trash the venue because of a lack of a Wifi connection and charging stations at the tables.

We have taken the web to the streets and now Main Street USA has a chance to reinvigorate itself by offering its charming and unique personality to our mobile web experience.

We use our devices like metal detectors, constantly trolling for new places, unique items and great deals.

Hoping to find hidden rarities and unparagoned places that will make help our status updates attract more friends and followers to our personal brands.

Venture outward!

The world is anew through the power of the mobile web.

Written & Sent from my iPhone

Hiatus

Its been some time since I had a moment to blog, thank goodness I have been super busy.

There is a new post coming very soon but in the meantime check out our Freedom + Partners blog to see some of my latest thoughts.

http://www.freedomandpartners.com/news

Stay tuned!

Ideas.

Rational thought within the context of one's life is required to maintain the continuity of one's path and it is understandable that we contain certain trains of thought so that we may prove ourselves to be trusted to maintain a unified sense of control over our environments.

However there are times like this, 2am on a Sunday morning, where one needs to put aside those restrictions in order to refocus on some of the fundamental aspects of one's life.

I am not a star athlete nor am I a brilliant mathematician, I am not consumed with scientific proofs nor do I care much about social caste. But one area of thought that best defines where I spend the majority of my time is in the realm of ideas.

So I am going to attempt to try and express a thought that has been churning deep within me for some time now, it may seem a bit extreme, however it needs to be articulated before it dissipates into the abyss of thoughts that were cast aside for fear of the implication of expressing them.

So here goes.

The feel like the perception of a great idea has become grossly misinterpreted.

Ideas today have become the possession of the over organized, of the psudo-creative and an exorbitantly formal realm.

We as thinkers have become stale because we have been taught that our ideas need to be meticulously cataloged and acutely plausible to execute.

We have lost sight of the great idea and the excitement and chaos that comes along with it.

Any great idea requires a certain degree of change and that change should be shrouded in chaos and be overwhelmingly exhausting to even begin to think about putting into practice.

Ideas cannot possibly be so neatly organized, innovation cannot begin to grow and evolve within the confines of our necessity of certainty.

An idea that doesn't require painstaking thought and agonizing exploration cannot possibly be worth anything more than the amount of time it took to appear in our minds.

Our ideas today seem to arrive masked with a facade that they are magically conjured by creative shamans who deceive us by re-wrapping some other shallow idea that managed to pass itself off as brilliant, but meanwhile just serving as an anesthetic so that the masses don't crave anything better.

We are casting off our greatest ability as humans, we refuse to wander within the chaos of the unknown because the lack of certainty scares us to death.

It is the ability to explore that makes us the greatest creature on earth. We have become blunt in our ability to defy convention in order to evolve further into enlightenment.

We do so because we fear we will lose control over the comfort of relative certainty.

Many of today's industries think that they are built on relative certainty, the ability to innovate the obvious has become the short cut we have chosen because it confirms our control over what we believe is truth.

The truth being our hunger for money. Our desire for power and our belief in our abilities to manipulate perception.

Investment in the exploration of the unknown is where our money is best spent.

Conventional wisdom keeps us where we are, breaking that convention is what takes us further than where we started from.

We have become modern day magicians, no better than any aboriginal tribe that believed in what it was safest to believe and continued to live according to that false certainty until it was proven otherwise by some other dominating faction that decided to unmask the pretense of the prevailing civilization.

Great ideas need to be radical, they should be near impossible to execute. A great idea should be introduced by those brave enough to delve into the primeval terrestrial terrain that the idea is mined from.

At the inception of the idea we really only catch a glimpse of change in its rawest form and we must then excavate it and polish it from the confusion that encases its potential.

That potential is what is hidden, it is the potential that we must place our beliefs in and that potential can only be identified by those smart enough to understand that it cannot be immediately organized and broken down into digestible bite sized processed pieces. It needs to be looked at as the raw material for change.

I believe that only truly great men and women undertake such ideas, they are naturally inclined to identify them either in their ethereal form or when stumbled upon by accident by some coward who is unable to identify it as anything other than something that should be filed into a folder that follows an organized convention of orders so that it may refined for mass consumption.

Everything we do has a standardization yet we fail to understand that in order to create better process for change we must shed the current order that requires the change. Only then can the idea become realized and change be instituted.

Time plays an important role in the cultivation of ideas, once an idea is accepted then the change must take its course, it will last as long as it takes for a new idea to be properly introduced.

That time is where we must grow and evolve so that we are ready to accept the new system once it has matured and is ready to be adopted. Otherwise we stunt evolution and remain stuck within our own obsessive need for control.

Ideas are like earthquakes, they should shock the public, they should impact and then inspire, there is no vote, no polls taken to meter its level of awareness and popularity, it is the force of evolution being set into motion and an idea so great that no one man can alter its path.

We fear such ideas.

When introduced we become defensive by using our stringent organizational requirements for introducing even the simplest idea. Any idea that threatens the comfort of our current certainty is automatically defused at its onset by the effort it takes to introduce its tenets for consideration.

Why do fear change?

Why do we fear evolution?

Why do we fear chaos?

Isn't it the same chaos that formed this very earth?

Isn't it the same chaos that emulsifies life and isn't it the same chaos that ultimately prevails once we have exhausted our ability to avoid it?

We must embrace the chaotic process that is involved in cultivating ideas. Rather than worrying about how the idea will impact our comforts or how it will be communicated we should spend the time and energy on the idea itself.

Once the idea has become revealed and its value for change accepted it will then instantly make itself understood on every level that it will impact.

Our job is not to manipulate its transmission but to usher its progression.

Ideas are powerful, change is powerful, nothing worth anything is painless.

We crave new ideas, we have become gorged on what is now and our minds thirst for something new.

Disruption is the only way to replace what has become stagnant. We must embrace change and culture new ideas for our own sake, we must cast aside some of our stringent organization and make room within our processes to let new ideas come to life.

Great thinkers are born with ability to explore the unknown, they are blessed with the courage to stand behind advancement and they are girded with the will to see it through.

Do not disregard your ideas, never let something go unexplored and always make room for chaos so that your ideas may have a chance to be one of the few that may advance mankind into higher realms of creativity and a more unified collective consciousness towards advancement.

An Impassioned Plea

My blog is typically reserved for the outré geeky, divinely techie, obnoxiously smart advertising insight and digital deliciousness but today a different passion overcame me and I needed to wax about a topic that is very close to my heart.

Basketball.

My love of the game started at a tender age, from sun up to sun down there was only one place I could be found, either warming up on the half courts or running full on the main court. When not playing I was in front of my television screen watching my beloved Knicks playing every game like it was game 7 of the Finals.

I was born in Brooklyn, a basketball town to two huge basketball fans. Both my parents imbued in me the torturous agony of being a Knicks fan. I idolized individual players like Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic and Reggie Miller but was taught to save my utmost affection for our hometown Knicks.

Year after year I watched Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, Doc Rivers, Xavier McDaniel, Greg Anthony, Larry Johnson, Gerald Wilkins, Mark Jackson, Kenny Walker and an assemblage of other players constantly fall short to the superstars of the league.

As if adolescence wasn't tough enough.

I will never forget that summer afternoon watching the Knicks and the Pacers clash it out when suddenly O.J. was absconding in the passenger seat of a white Bronco.

My mother immediately stood up and threw her empty cup onto the living floor in complete outrage and disgust, she was right in the middle of a tirade against Reggie Miller as she was going into detail about how Reggie Miller's family must have been Rhodesian and that Rhodesia was now known as The Republic of Zimbabwe and it was because of his ancestry that Reggie had acquired his lanky frame and lighting speed.

Her outrage wasn't at the murderous villain who was fleeing from capture along a Los Angeles highway, it was that our beloved Knicks had been interrupted right in the middle of a classic battle with one of our arch enemies the Indiana Pacers.

Neighbors came down, people came out of their apartments, the phone started ringing and there was suddenly an uproar, the entire neighborhood was in distress and it had nothing to do with O.J. as a matter of fact no one could care less, it was all because we were missing the game.

No other city in the world focuses its energy on its hometown team more than Knicks fans.

Imagine how abominable their play has been over the past decade, how gruesome the situation has become. We were raped and pillaged by a man who decimated our team both physically and financially and if your a New Yorker, spiritually.

We have become reduced to a side show that can barely beat the Maccabi Tel Aviv team that comes to play annually.

Sure we have the Yankees who are a pristine dynasty. They have brought us some comfort but the real die hard New Yorker knows deep in their hearts that until the Knicks win we cannot rest.

We now have a chance to sign a legitimate cynosure, the real deal, a certified kosher superstar! Someone who would soak up the lights, become the toast of the town and give us fans a reason to cheer again.

The Garden would once again become the Supreme Mecca of basketball and the great people of New York would once again ascend 34th street with pride night after night to catch a glimpse of the hero we so desperately pine for.

That hero is a young man who was destined to play in this city. He payed his dues to his home town, he gave them a taste of what it is like to win but was unable to bring them a title because of a slew of reasons that all boil down to one. This basketball king was meant to claim his crown on the largest basketball stage in the world.

Winning a title in Cleveland would have been like winning the Battle of Brandy Station as opposed to winning a title in NYC, akin to winning the Battle of Gettysburg. What Lebron doesn't understand is that destiny is playing its hand and it isn't ready to show.

How can one man so naturally gifted and so destined for basketball greatness settle for bringing a title to the Rust Belt? A city whose national fame is based on the fact that it was ranked as the best city for business meetings, with nick names like "The Cleve", "Sixth City" and "C-Town". Don't we have a supermarket chain named C-Town?

Lebron, the time is now. There is no other place in the world where you will bask in the glory of the greatness that is NYC. No other city will shower you the praise and the honor you have earned. Consider Cleveland your college years and now step up into the big leagues and "make it here".

Watch as great actors, prolific musicians, comic geniuses, political dignitaries, eccentric artists, renown writers and brash billionaires all dedicate their evenings to watching you crush the competition.

Savor the city that will cater to your every whim. Come into your own in the cultural capital of the world and stake your claim to the throne that awaits you in Midtown.

You will not only amass great wealth and admiration but you will re-inspire a city that has been dormant. You will ignite a basketball renaissance that will reverberate throughout the world and will bring prestige back to the American Basketball.

Winning a title in any other city will always be second rate to the millions of fans who will line the Canyon of Heroes as you glide through to the sweet tunes of a custom written song by Jay Z that will define you as a champion year after year.

Throngs of people who "make it here" will be screaming your name and you will be the toast of the town.

Tell me what other city can offer you that?

Social MEdia

Social Media has officially eclipsed search as the most popular activity on the web.

It consumes our attention and has become the one of the most central focuses of everything we do.

Personal sharing.

People are rabidly addicted to themselves. We are our own biggest fans and the fact that we can now build and interact with whole communities that we custom build around our own self interests and with people who can add value to our lives gives us a renewed sense of confidence and purpose in the world.

It is what I call REVOLUTION ME. Indulging in one's own self for the sake of growing and bringing value to the community you so desperately want to be an active member in. On the surface social media seems like a very self centered activity but in reality it is an activity that empowers a collective that gives back to those who contribute to it.

"No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the people without desiring something like a revolution for the better." Sir Robert Giffen. Essays in Finance, vol. ii. p. 393.

We have long outgrown the simple avatar and short bio and are now represented by a complex series of personal entries.

Hundreds of thousands of moments recorded using a mixture of media such as text (long winded blog posts and spurts of short messages), pictures, videos, hyperlinks and even our whereabouts.

Devices such as computers, smart phones and netbooks, digital cameras, MP3 players, eBooks and gaming devices give us the ability to feed and access these social networks anywhere and anytime we wish.

We now carry with us a sizable network of friends, colleagues, acquaintances, experts and and stragglers who all help us make decisions and are a sounding board for whatever it is that is swirling around our minds.

We are arm ourselves with a village of people who can help us make decisions at any time of day from what to order on a menu to signing a huge business deal. We can take a photo of a shirt and share it with 400 of our closest friends and get instant feedback before we buy it.

Everything we do we now do collectively.

A flurry of new start-ups are now enabling people to shop, conduct business and disseminate information in all kinds of new ways and with much larger and targeted audiences than ever before.

The early promises of the internet are now starting to become realized and it took social media to ignite that revolution.

No great change ever came from the top down (sorry Obama), great change is usually the result of the masses collectively deciding that something must be done.

I am excited and anxious to ride the wave of the next generation of businesses that are cropping up and being fueled with the fire that is social media.

I really didn't intend this blog post to be informative or educational I really just wanted to express my excitement and anticipation for what I think is going to be one of the most exciting times in history.

I will leave you with this wise and prophetic quote from Malcolm Gladwell.

We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by 'we' I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't."
— Malcolm Gladwell

Let's all make more people make it!

Small Talk

In 1923 the study of small talk was pioneered by a polish anthropologist named Bronisław Kasper Malinowski who postured that a "phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information."

Malinowski explains that small talk is nothing more than conversation for its own sake, or "…comments on what is perfectly obvious."

Malinowski insisted that all anthropologists have daily contact with their informants if they were to adequately record the "imponderabilia of everyday life" that was so important to understanding the culture.

The "imponderabilia of everyday life", a term that has for decades been a subject that was incredibly difficult to define and even harder to employ in the study of social behavior.

Until now!

I am the furthest thing from a scientist but I feel somewhat confident in saying that based on Malinowski's criteria for adequately recording the "imponderabilia of everyday life" I may actually have some expertise in this particular area of anthropology.

In today's advertising world social media has become a necessary focus and its trends change by the minute. It is a living target that must be communicated with at the speed it is traveling.

We can no longer rely on the trusted billboard, the reliable circular or the memorable television commercial to speak to an audience. We must now communicate and interact directly with our audiences and in many cases even include them in the critical functioning and the overall success of our marketing initiatives.

As marketers we no longer have to spend countless (billable) hours trying to guess what the deep inner thoughts of our audiences are. Working in huge groups and spending millions of client dollars trying to hit our targets while blindfolded and hoping to get as close to the bulls eye as possible.

Today we live in a new world, a digital world with an ocean of "imponderabilia of everyday life" flowing rapidly across our eyes and every current in that ocean brings with it the vision we as marketers need to communicate with our customers.

Before social media took the grand stage we were an industry dominated by advertising shamans and persona like Don Draper whose strength and charm would give license to conjure up campaigns from deep inner wounds, giant egos or some mysterious connection into the consciousnesses of the public. The bravery to express those ideas against mostly unfounded assumptions were often awarded and then were copied again and again because they slightly resonated with the general public.

There were no questions or arguments, no forums for feedback or criticism, the general public trusted the techniques of advertisers because they believed that advertisers knew how to communicate and that if it was on TV then it must be important.

A new age has dawned (its so cool that I can actually say that).

An age where everyone has a voice.

There are 500 million people, all connected, that are expressing and exchanging ideas, praising and complaining, competing and supporting and buying and selling from one another.

Gathering virtually, all day, every day to form new and unique groups and societies, thriving on the social web while living simultaneously and performing necessary tasks in the physical world.

We are communicating constantly and in our own natural environments that shift as we shift. Advertisers must now also shift if they are to remain relevant voices in the"imponderabilia of everyday life."

The only way we can expect to communicate with our audiences today at the pace they are living is in short succinct and informative dialog. What I would like to call Small Talk.

Now you may be questioning my decision to attach such a mundane and even annoying moniker to such a monumental shift in society and are probably thinking it should be called something more along the lines of The Great Conversation.

But if you recall at the beginning of this post I introduced an anthropologist named Malinowski who explained that small talk is nothing more than conversation for its own sake, or "…comments on what is perfectly obvious." What he calls small talk.

Those "comments on what is perfectly obvious" amongst one another are the secret formula we as advertisers have been yearning for all these years. It is our direct line of communication with our audiences and the source for which we should base our marketing strategies.

There was a time when commerce and daily life was driven by conversation.

Consumers lived in well defined communities and completely relied on the trust of the community and the ability to engage in dialog regarding every aspect of that community.

The products these consumers desired to purchase were often used by other people they knew and the reputation of the products would be woven into the daily chatter.

If the goods were defective customers knew exactly who to complain to and if they were in high demand it was immediately recognized by the peddler selling those goods.

The source of these goods were usually supplied by a man with a cart whose ability to make a living was based on a keen talent for listening and responding to the needs of his customers. Being an active voice in the community.

Everything happened in real time, no check out lines or customer service reps, it was advertising and selling in the midst of a bustling life that was vibrant and exciting.

Everything returns in new incarnations.

Today there are virtual communities are all over the place, each one of them with very specific needs.

In an article written by Moses Ma, a partner at Next Generation Ventures, Moses writes "These social networks act to fill a deep psychological need in our society. The reality is that customers are starved for real community. Consumer's brains are wired to operate within the social context of community - programming both crucial and ancient for human survival."

Brands must now rejoin the societies they supply. They must once again become part of the ecosystem and re-establish the meaningful connections of the past through the powerful medium that is the future. In short succinct messages (140 characters perhaps), not huge special effects or sexy flashy models but speaking as the community speaks, in small talk.

Buenos Tardes 2009

The digital decade is coming to an end.

A decade shrouded in uncertainty.

It began with a fright, the Y2K scare had those who would eventually usher in the digital revolution uncertain if the the time would even come, like a sort of stage fright for what was to be one of mankind's most progressive moments.

When the year 2000 stepped into the spotlight and we all blinked for a second to make sure everything was ok, what happened in that blink was the beginning of a revolution. Something did actually happen, we just didn't instantly realize what it was.

Everything went digital.

Vinyl vanished, analog moved along, information sped at us on the superhighway, music metamorphosed and relationships reignited. By the end of the decade we were all instantly connected via the social web.

Everything we did was digitized. The places we went, the people we met, the things we saw and what we thought at that exact moment was to be shared by everyone everywhere with access to the internet. We were armed with devices that would enable us to share every moment of our lives and exchange them with others like a social currency that would redefine the caste.

The result of the digital revolution was a new hierarchical division of society according to Twitter followers, Facebook friends, or LinkedIn connections.

At its onset it was the decade's abolitionists, its digital ambassadors, who were thought by many to be destroying the physical threads of society. The phone, the television, the printed word and all forms of media were all being harrowed so that the seeds of improvement and efficiency could flourish.

Suddenly we were able to store our media in the heavens and have anything we desired rain down on us at the push of a button, the click of a mouse or a tap on a screen.

The 2000s was a decade where our lives all instantly synced. At the end of the 20th century our grandmothers couldn't program their VCRs and digital displays were blinking endlessly like a beacon calling for help. In the beginning of the 21st century suddenly grandma was able to set up her email and is now forwarding powerpoint slideshows, mom shops online, dad is on Facebook and Twitter, teens are sexting and kids are programming smart phone apps and becoming millionaires.

We do everything online, and as we move into the next decade of the digital revolution that convergence is going to become more intimate, more fluid, easier, faster, more integrated than we would ever imagine it could be. Our new technological world will be more tangible, more tactile, easier to control and at the same time so much more complex than it has ever been.

2000 is about to update its profile to 2010.

Incalculable Probability

Throngs of digerati who have been chatting online since the days those creepy rooms opened their digital doors in the what seems like ancient halls of AOL, have been priming themselves for this very moment in time.

Message boards, instant messages, blog posts, dating websites, multi-user RPG games, Craigslist, Friendster, even email have been the "boot camp" for the new social media expert. Years of early forms of social media have sharpened the online digital social skills of geeks everywhere.

Bill Gates who became the poster boy for success in the digital age said in the year 2000 "In the years ahead, the Internet will have an even more profound effect on the way we work, live and learn. By enabling instantaneous and seamless communication and commerce around the globe, from almost any device imaginable, this technology will be one of the key cultural and economic forces of the early 21st century."

That was a pretty bold prediction in 2000 and pretty much exactly what is happening now.

Bill went on to say in the same essay "All these advances will soon create a ubiquitous Internet--personal and business information, email, and instant messaging, rich digital media and Web content will be available any time, any place and from any device."

We live in a world where the social bar is becoming less about looks or money, success or intellect, its how many followers you have on Twitter, Facebook friends or how many comments you can generate on a blog post.

In the past month there has been a bit of an apprehensive backlash against those who claim to be social media experts. People who charge money to brands in order to help them navigate the murky waters of social media like a digital tour guide helping to make sense of what is going on in the landscape.

It seems kind of weird for people like myself to imagine that brands are paying for what we do each and every day. Paying for the witty snippets, great timing, passive aggressive pokes and overinflated praise, the hook-ups and the super secretive"DM me" via the @ or the RT, the #FF or the open conversation about the success your having and flaunting every second of your life over a number of social networks that equal to the second or third largest population in the world.

Napoleon Dynamite had a scene that for me immediately summed up how much confidence social media can give someone like Napoleon's brother Kip (prototypical social media expert).

Kip represents the forefather of social media "experts" the guy who was so desperate find ways to assert himself into society, despite his physical and other lacking, that he immediately jumped on to the social web to sway his hidden swagger and land himself the woman of his dreams.

When Napoleon complained that Kip "...stayed home all day and eat all the frickin chips" his response was "Napoleon, don't be jealous that I've been chatting online with babes all day. Besides, we both know that I'm training to be a cage fighter."

Chatting online and becoming a cage fighter, in that simple statement Kip explained to us how invigorating social media can be and how empowering it can be for someone like him to even consider himself for such a unattainable goal as cage fighting.

Social media levels the playing fields. It gives everyone an opportunity to have a voice and to express who they are from within.

Granted, its behind a screen and somewhat anonymous, but its no different than the facades people put on and social games they play in real life but only now its your digital prowess that gets you up that ladder.

So now its the eve of 2010 and a new social landscape is upon us.

Brands want in big time.

Brands want to take hold of the conversations and ensure that their carefully crafted messages translate in the social media world as they once did in the regular world. Brands want to monitor and react based on the ambient awareness that they are paying these social media experts for. In return brands want results, they want the same results they used to demand of traditional campaigns. That is impossible.

I will explain why.

BusinessWeek published an article on December 3rd entitled "Beware Social Media Snake Oil" in this article it warns the public of so called experts who may or may not be what they claim to be.

Steven Baker concludes in his article "Many argue that a fixation on hard numbers could lead companies to ignore the harder-to-quantify dividends of social media, such as trust and commitment."

It is those "harder-to-quantify" things that bring us back to a time where we trusted people to do what they do because only they can do it.

It was a time when a rainmaker sold products or services not based on some book or some scientific business method but on his charm and the intangible understanding of society and the way to navigate influence it.

It was a time when there was a role where someone who intuitively knew where the herds were running not because he or she was part of that herd but because they were helping to direct it through a methodology that was nothing more complex than just something they were born with.

Today's social media experts are no different.

Some will promise the world and scam you out of every dollar you have and others will lead your brand to that social media pie in the sky.

They will shepherd your brand into the awareness of millions, maybe even billions of people in a shorter time and with a fraction of the advertising budget. The right person can create a world wide conversation that could make or break your brand, they can kill it, resurrect it, re-birth it and refine it almost instantaneously.

Social media manipulation is not an art, its not a science nor is it something that can be fabricated or coerced the way traditional advertising did on TV, in magazines and the early web.

It is a digitally amplified version of the world we live in where the fast, the witty, the nimble, the intelligent, the verbose, the passionate and even the somewhat anti-social persona is what draws the most attention.

The future will bring us more tools, more channels and more ways to perfect the persona that we all want to portray online.

New tools and applications, services and ideas that will give the public more power to control the world around them and to shape the social media landscape to their exact specifications. Digital refinement.

The "experts" will be more like anthropologists than programmers. They will be less artistic and more articulate.

They will be those castaways who now control the velvet ropes into the hottest social networks on the web.

It is the Kip's who labored all day knowing that somehow this technology was going to reveal the superman within. They knew that there was a fire hidden beneath those glasses and wiry frames. They knew that there was an "expert" hidden below those thin mustaches and buttoned up collars and they were right.

Social media experts have indeed arrived, some fakes and some true.

When considering a hire have them show you their world, describe their day and talk about their successes. Not every social media campaign is going to produce exacting results, rather it is an ongoing step in the social ups and downs of living and breathing in a social network online. There is no end, death maybe, but an ongoing brand story that everyone may or may not want to be a part of.

Your next "expert" is going to help your brand live that life and communicate and navigate a whole new world.

So when the question arises in your next strategy meeting if social media experts really exist you can rest assured that they do and in many many different forms.

Scary. But Fun!

Very Clean

The industry has been turned upside down with the announcement of brands now going directly to digital shops for work.

It is a truly historic time that I personally feel very privileged to be part of.

There has been a great debate brewing as to if digital agencies were ready to lead.

Daniel Stein of EVB sent me a link to some work that has made me more of a believer.

A conte so succinct and perfectly executed in every way. A video, simple, charming and completely engaging made by EVB for Orbit.

Digital is not just a website, its not just a microsite or just a banner. Its not just a touch screen display or an interactive kiosk. It is the next generation of advertising, storytelling and entertainment.

This latest piece is mature, charming and absolutely perfect in every way.

Are digital agencies ready to lead?

EVB certainly thinks so.

Social Environmentalism

It is no secret that I am a Twitter fanatic, I am continually fascinated with every aspect of the technological and societal impacts that Twitter has had on our digital and social landscape.

I came across a new site from GetTRASHED.org and McKinney that is using Twitter to save the planet and cyberspace one tweet at a time.

The site is www.recycledtweets.com

The concept is to recycle your boring Tweets.

The site allows you to recycle all the boring tweets polluting your Twitter feed with Re:cycled Tweets.

Take your friends’ cyber-garbage and turn it into cyber-gold.

And that’s not just clever wordplay: for every tweet you recycle, McKinney will donate a penny to getTrashed.org.

Think about it. You recycle your followers’ boring tweets, get all of your friends to recycle their followers’ boring tweets, and that’s a lot of birdseed for getTRASHED.

To participate simply follow these steps:

@reply to someone who posted a lame tweet.
Copy and paste their lame tweet, and add #recyclethis.
then Click reply.

Recycledtweets.com will recycle it and send them a new, transformed tweet. They’ll learn what an interesting tweet is. You’ll add another penny to the total being donated to getTRASHED.org.

But it’s up to you and the rest of the Twitterverse to take part of this initiative to help better social media content and the planet.

So get busy and take out the recycling—one tweet at a time

Getting Baked with Bogusky and Winsor

I recently got my copy of the new book Baked In by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor of CP+B fame.

Ad folks writing ad books is nothing new, David Ogilvy's legacy is probably better recognized by the books he has authored than any of the campaigns he had mastered.

What kept me intrigued about this particular tome is that it not only focuses on the tectonic shifts taking place in the ad industry right now, but it is also an honest assessment of where advertising is failing because of these drastic shifts in consumer engagement.

Baked In's focus is trying to teach brands how to make better products and to educate consumers to have higher expectations from these products so that the claims they make match up with what they actually get and in turn these products will simply advertise themselves by living up to their claims.

Who better to tell this tale than two ad execs who are at the top of the advertising game. It is either meant to make their jobs easier or render them completely obsolete.

Social media's meteoric rise has obviously spurned the need for a book like this and I was impressed at how relevant it read based on what we are seeing today.

However the shelf life (no pun intended) of this book may not last more than another few months as things are changing so rapidly.

Baked In initially started to read like a religious manifesto, talking about brands as if they were deities.

My rebellious mind immediately started to think about how these ideas would apply if the advice laid out in the book was being given in relation to starting a cult and it sort of matched up well.

My aversion to brands dictating social culture and dominating the social conversion may have skewed the way I am reading this, however I am trying my best to put that bias aside and accepting what the reality actually is, they do dictate most of our conversations.

With that said, the brilliance behind this book is that it's so passionately written and the experience behind the advice is apparent.

Both authors obviously believe in branding as more of an integral part of a social philosophy rather than just a means of selling stuff to people.

I get a sense that the authors believe that products are more than just things we want or need, that they are more of a promise that will make our lives better in some way.

An avowal that you will be better off if you own this product or use this service. Especially the ones that they help to peddle.

The book is full of repetition, reminding us a lot of what we already know.

I enjoyed the repetition of the "mixing marketing and product design deep within their culture" message because it is as simple as that and when adhered to it really can clarify the way we communicate those messages to the public.

By saying it over and over again, through real world examples, is a powerful yet subtle way to fasten this message into the minds of those who should be reading this book, marketers and consumers.

It is the expectations of the consumers that will ultimately be dictating the output of advertising from this point on.

Social networks and the internet today is far too powerful a voice to let any brand use marketing to get away with trying to correct the issues the product creates.

It's this extreme passion that when strained through the rational mind that turns every word on the pages of this book into well founded and quite practical advice.

But what else could we expect from two of advertising's great spin doctors?

The Pendulum Rest

When a powerful industry is uprooted from its long standing position, it is subject to a restoring force due to the natural laws of gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position.

However what is unique about the situation we find ourselves in here in advertising is that the acceleration back has actually altered the original equilibrium position.

What was once known as traditional advertising (print, radio, TV, outdoor) has been replaced with digital media. As the pendulum is settling back into place it is experiencing an altered equilibrium state that is quite different from where it originally started.

When released, the restoring force will cause it to oscillate about the equilibrium position, swinging back and forth. That dizzying oscillation is what we had been experiencing for about 8-10 years now.

The entire industry had been thrown into a flurry of definitions and a tug of war for the right to claim supremacy over the prevailing creative platform that is what we now know as Digital.

Perseverance and a new form of communication were both the sword and the shield wielded by digital creatives and technical professionals everywhere. Once considered nothing more than a service, we now stand tall looking out toward a new frontier.

An economic meltdown and new forms of social media helped usher in this new golden age of advertising. What was once thought to be an impossible battle soon became a truce, not a bloody victory, but a truce of sides willing to work together in order to thrive in this new environment.

Digital is not a revolution but an evolution.

It is creativity plus time.

Creativity thrives in free spaces. The onset of the web was about trying new things and failing for the sake of experience, like a toddler taking its first steps. It was a vast wide open space where ideas could be nurtured and matured.

But now the web is dominated by social media, news and entertainment and it is in those annals that we find fertile ground for our creative ads and capitalistic allure.

Powerful creative ideas compete powerfully when they are doing what those ideas are supposed to do, which is to provoke our audiences to not only be entertained, but also to think, to react and to interact. That is how advertising has evolved.

Digital is a repartee.

A succession or interchange of clever retorts.

The brands are now the straight man and the consumers are part of the act.

It is our job to set them up to retort not just for the sake of retort but for the sake of engagement and that engagement will eventually lead to loyalty and trust through allowing that conversation to take place.

We have been swung back in time.

Back to an age where the merchants engaged in conversation with their customers.

Like a digital souk where yelling and response both stimulates and excites all the shoppers into a frenzy, a lively center of commerce where the marketplace is the platform for socialization and communication.

Digital has converged advertising and the marketplace back into one area, back into a souk where people gathered to do business and to share ideas, crowded, bustling and exciting, the way it was meant to be.

The time for one complete cycle is a left swing and a right swing, that is called a period.

A new period has begun.

Digital Dumbo - 150Days

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Space150 hosted a very entertaining Digital Dumbo last night that gave us a glimpse into the next 150 days of digital. I like digestible chunks... 140 would have been more appropriate considering Twitter was the unanimous winner amongst what everyone thought would be all the rage, but 150 is the brand.

Well done guys! Thanks for the event, free drinks and the Tron trailer!

News Twitter Style

MSNBC has released an amazing new free iPhone application.

The app itself is nothing new in terms of what it does but the amazing part is how it does it.

The news is served up in Twitter sized chucks. Part of the set up process is to login with your Twitter username and password so that you can easily tweet any headline instantly.

Best Buy is the flagship advertiser on the new app. As part of that partnership, Best Buy is running a new mobile campaign that provides links to its deal of the day as well as the company's Twitter feed.

Twitter has changed the culture of communication and both entertainment and news as well as big brands have quickly adopted this new method of communication to interface with audiences.

The impact Twitter has had in such a short period of time is a refreshing sign that adoption to new and better ways to communicate and implement technology are taking place and that the digital space is continuing its rapid growth.

Understanding how to harness these new platforms will be a challenge but seeing some of the creative ways its being executed is great.

Definitely check out the new MSNBC iPhone app for a glimpse into the future of reporting and disseminating information.

I Heart Twitter

Erik Natzke is an interactive designer who is constantly trying to blur the lines between design and technology. Erik (@natzke) recently ran a contest on Twitter where a random person who mentioned the hash tag #NatzkeFreePrint would win a free signed print of one of his amazing pieces of artwork.

I WON!!!!

I have watched You Tube, Google, Facebook, and many other web mainstays emerge and submerge and I must say that Twitter is by far the most immediate, exciting and interesting of them all.

The sheer volume of content, feedback, interactivity and potential is endless. The surface of Twitter hasn't been scratched and I am really excited to see what new ways to aggregate live awareness emerge.

I wanted to make another mention of a new website that has blown me away with its innovation to use Facebook as a content aggregation, it is a new site called Prototype-Experience (http://www.prototype-experience.com) it is for a new video game of the same name. Check it out and see what the future holds in store for social network content aggregation.

Anyways, thanks Erik!

What's the Time?

I realize that the conversation pitting traditional Vs digital has been going on for some time now and that it has probably gotten to the point where the mere mention of the topic induces nausea and anxiety.

If I had a nickel for the amount of times AdAge and AdWeek have featured articles on this topic plus the various blog posts, commentary and panel conversations not to mention a certain bubbly society that prides itself on this very distinction, I would be a very rich man.

However I am going to go against my better judgment and speak about the topic because an amazing analogy came to me that I feel best describes the situation we find ourselves in now.

The Set Up: Definitions taken from Wikipedia.

Traditional advertising is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling overall marketing and branding strategies and sales promotions for its clients.

Traditional ad agency clients include businesses and corporations, non-profit organizations and government agencies. Agencies may be hired to produce an advertising campaign.

Vs

Interactive agencies differentiate themselves by offering a mix of web design/development, search engine marketing, internet advertising/marketing, or e-business/e-commerce consulting.

Interactive agencies rose to prominence before the traditional advertising agencies fully embraced the Internet.

The digital agencies offered a wide range of services and grew very rapidly, although some have downsized just as rapidly due to changing market conditions.

Today, the most successful interactive agencies are defined as companies that provide specialized advertising and marketing services for the digital space.

Now that we are clear on the distinctions lets move on to the "Vs" part.

Traditional agencies have been farming out digital work to the smaller digital agencies for 10-12 years now pretty much keeping them afloat in terms of large budgeted projects and the infusion of how to service these larger clients from a creative production standpoint.

The smaller digital agencies have been assiduous in learning how the larger agencies function and have adopted many of the same practices in hope that they will slowly evolve into one of these larger agencies with digital as the core and in time start to compete with the larger agencies that have been keeping them in business all these years.

The larger agencies provide their clients with a multitude of other services that are critical to formulating an entire campaign and require the ability to manage hundreds of people and tasks that a smaller digital agency would be overwhelmed with, making the larger agency the ideal starting point for the brands to formulate its message.

The smaller digital agencies are fast and nimble and can complete similar tasks, but not all, in half the time because they have been bred to work faster and turn around very complex technical and creative work in a very short amount of time.

Now as I thought about the two I wanted to apply them to a real world example that would help me better understand the relationship that the clients had with the two worlds.

Then it hit me. A Watch!

Think about it... what do most people have on their wrists to tell time?

I would say most people who appreciate fine time pieces that are accurate, stylish and expensive are walking around with an analog watch. A watch that has been built in a similar way for ages and a watch that has thousands of moving parts each one of them interacting with the other all to perform one small simple task. Telling the time.

Kind of like a... Traditional Agency.

How many digital models does Rolex make?

Why wouldn't someone who could afford a fine timepiece choose to get a geeked out digital watch?

Its just as accurate if not more accurate, it can be synced up with a satellite or a database, it has the ability to provide many other functions all in the same form factor and can be encased in gold, platinum or any number of metals.

A digital watch can be made to do virtually anything its buyer wants yet everywhere I look I see analog watches on the wrists of those people who I would consider in the same bracket as the decision makers at the big brands.

It seems that people choose the more traditional analog watch that has that reassuring ticking sound, with clear backs that display thousands of gears all moving at once all to serve one purpose and one purpose only, to tell you the time. I guess the psychological advantage is that each and every one of those gears is there to serve you in its own way.

Sure from time to time you have to wind it up or shake it or change its battery, but most people enjoy the small effort that they have to put into this seemingly complex object. In the mind of its owner it is a precise instrument that is worn on ones wrist so that they can better manage their lives.

Not that different than a traditional agency, don't you think?

Thousands of people teeming all at once doing this and that in order to come to the very same conclusion that a smaller digital agency may be able to come up with using a quarter of the people in half the time. The digital agency has all kinds of functions, animation, design, data, social media, it is plugged in to all kinds of data and can instantly expand things into a million new directions, yet clients seem to prefer the reliable gears all turning for the single purpose of servicing them and them alone.

It makes total sense to me when I think about it in these terms.

Why should advertising be any different? Why wouldn't the head of a big brand want the prestige of a Parmigiani over the geeky sleekness of a Rosendahl?

Now lets look at the price differences between the two.

You can get a digital watch from Timex, Rosendahl, Abacus or Garmin that is Bluetooth-enabled with caller ID that will tell you the weather, act as a USB drive and locate the nearest WiFi connection for under $200 dollars. WOW! (see that excited me).

OR

You can get a Lange and Sohne, Alain Silberstein, Audemars Piguet, Blancpain, Breguet, Franck Muller, JLC, Parmigiani, Patek Phillipe, Ulysse Nardin, Vacheron Constantin within the price range of $5,000 - $2,000,000. These watches have hand finished mechanical movements and some additional mechanical complications like moon phases and power reserve indicators to very subtle ones like correctly handling all the obscure conditions of the Gregorian calendar.

Starting to see the comparisons?

Traditional agency Vs. Digital agency...

I admit that I personally do not wear a watch and I usually whip out my iPhone to tell me when my next appointment is.

And if I were to wear a watch I certainly would not feel comfortable sporting something that costs more than my buddies house. Nor would I want to have some geeked out digital watch that is solar powered with 8 selectable radio channels and 38 subcodes per channel and LEDs to indicate the hours and minutes in binary format.

So what is the solution?

Well, thats not for me to decide, but what I wanted to do here was to just present the situation against something that may help make a bit of sense to those who had some struggle with the whole Traditional Vs. Digital quandary and to put it into a little bit of a better perspective.

I will let you the reader decide what the answer is.

The Runaround

Navigation is one of the very first words that I had encountered when I started designing and developing websites in 1998. It was and still is the very foundation of what sets digital apart from traditional. The navigation is what gives our audiences the wheel in order to make their own decisions and to decide how and when they were going to interact with the brands that we put in front of them.

Web design is not advertising nor is advertising slowly becoming web design but what bridges the gap between the two is how we hand over the wheel when we design and formulate a navigation system to our now rich and complex online campaigns.

When I say navigation I am not just referring to that left hand down or that top centered line of icons or text. I am talking about how we take our audiences through the experiences that we build.

There are clients who will jump on the band wagon and throw millions of dollars towards whatever the hot new trend is right now because they want to take advantage of the immediacy of the crowd and its various waves.

The draw back to that is that a strategy needs to be formulated on the spot and executed flawlessly as to not seem like it is band wagon jumping and to also completely interpret what that wildly fast trend is at that exact moment, not so easy.

Then we have clients who want tried and true, a website or a digital campaign that embodies the very core of digital standards, upright information, clean sleek design and absolutely none of that horse play that goes on all over the web.

The safe route. Playing it safe in a dangerous world can sometimes be quite dangerous.

Then we have clients who are always a step behind, they want the best, they want to experiment and be the absolute cutting edge but due to not being guided properly and tending to fall in love with what has already been done successfully they simply end up missing the mark and looking tired and old once their shiny new digital campaign has launched.

Then there is the trend setter, the brand that has the digital eyes and ears to navigate the yellow brick road without falling prey to the disasters that ensue along the way.

The web is so vast and so precise that it is so easy to get it wrong. You have to stay one step ahead without over jumping that step and maintain a strong and steady grip on this bucking broma bull we have all mounted.

I read Ad-Age and AdWeek each and every day, the NYTimes and the Wall Street Journal and countless blogs (just see my blog roll on iPro, yes I do read all of those) and what I am experiencing is similar to the picture at the top of this post.

That Scarecrow that keeps pointing Dorothy in every direction and at the same time in no direction.

AdWeek will feature some CEO talking about the revolution that is Twitter and then follow up with another CEO bashing the social media trend. Yet another who says traditional isn't dead and then the very next day some famous Creative Director swearing that every single dollar must be put into digital, then another COO claiming that Facebook will raise the dead and yet another saying that Television is about to explode and then another saying that.... STOP!!!!!!

See what I mean?

I'm not saying that any of our prestigious publications are not doing their jobs, they are. But it is up to us to decipher what is and what inst the right direction to go in for our clients.

With so many options today it is extremely important that we try to stay away from just slapping on a trend and calling it a day.

The way of our business is that everything happens fast. The pitch takes place at lightning speed, and that sets up unrealistic expectations because we promised the client the world. The agency then wins the account and starts bidding out production, then the production shops have to all fight for the right to execute those unrealistic expectations against a crazy time line and zero budget - you can imagine the end result.

Lets remember that there are a hundred answers to every problem and each one of them need to be carefully examined before dumping tons of money into a campaign that will prove to do nothing more than scratch that digital itch.

As an industry (digital) we need to help navigate the deep channels that are now dominating our client's attention and guide them carefully as to where their money will be best spent.

The first step is carefully understanding each one of those channels and knowing how to wrap it around the right brand so it accomplishes the goals that the client sets out to meet. This involves having the right people who can hit those moving targets when the time comes and get the brand positioned with the channel that fits them best.

So the next time you read that "this" is dead or "that" is hot or "this" is dying or "that" is emerging. Keep in mind that everything comes and goes and that the web is a giant life cycle that keeps on feeding into itself as it gives birth to new and more interesting ways to navigate its waters.

Don't ignore what has been or what will be and keep in mind what is now and what works best for your brands. That is the beauty of this medium. Unlike print or TV it is never canned or done, it is an evolution that is constantly morphing as we morph within it.

Imagine a digital campaign that lasted forever, slowly evolving and taking on various incarnations but all seamlessly and effortlessly flowing through the same vessel as its changes. No new website, just an evolving digital idea, a story that intensifies and changes over time based on the terrain that it navigates over.

Now that's digital!

Digital Dumbo #5 - Freedom + Partners Rocks The House

Digital Dumbo - Freedom + Partners Rocks The House from Craig Elimeliah on Vimeo.

Digital Dumbo is quickly becoming one of the hottest must attend events in the digital social scene.

Dumbo is the epicenter of of digital New York and is home to many of the worlds best interactive, motion graphics, creative and technological studios in the world.

We get together on the last Thursday of every month for some well deserved drinks and socialization.

Freedom + Partners hosted the past event last Thursday by preparing a flash based audio and video installation that rocked the house all night with music that was all Brooklyn themed.

Community is one of the foundations of our existence and it is important that we are plugged into the digital community as both a contributing partner and active member of our small digital neighborhood.

Enjoy the video.