Social Concierge

It is no secret that I am what you would call a social media junkie. 

I would prefer the term digital anthropologist, however that may come off as a bit pretentious.

Regardless, I love studying human interaction online, on devices and physical computing as it pertains to everyday life.

I find it fascinating what people share, how they share and reading between all of the lines. 

What motivates someone to share a location, a thought, a picture, a link?

We are a generation obsessed with sharing and when that sharing starts to pay off we intuitively start to understand that the things we share become a kind of currency that starts to pay off through positive feedback, recognition or even in hard goods.

Sharing is the currency that fuels networks, it is the virtual oil in the virtual oil fields of our culture. 

The things we share echo far beyond our finite networks and may be seen by people across the world unbeknownst to the the person who originally posted the content. 

The potential for something to penetrate deeply and then permeate into culture is far greater than anything we have ever experienced before in human history and that is what excites me the most.

I recently went on a business trip to Los Angeles. 

I stayed at the Loews in Santa Monica. 

Traveling has taken on a whole new dimension now that Foursquare and Instagram allow me to flaunt everything I see and everyplace I go. It allows me to share where I am and what I am doing with my friends and get all kinds of positive feedback and recommendations about the area I am in.

Upon entering my hotel I checked in on Foursquare and snapped a cool Instagram pic of the view of the beach. 

Within a few minutes I was greeted by the hotel via Twitter with a tweet from the hotel welcoming me.

Upon responding I was immediately sent a tweet saying:

This made me feel great, it showed that the hotel was attune to what was going on in the social media streams in regards to their guests and by publicly greeting me and extending their hospitality it made me feel special.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg.

After I checked in I immediately headed over to the office for a long days work. 

Upon return to my hotel room I found a silver platter with a bucket full of iced down Coronas and a bowl of mixed nuts.

I didn't order this so I was a bit apprehensive about taking any thinking it was weight sensitive and I would be paying $30 a bottle for beer I can go get for $5 down the road.

But then there was something else there.

A hand written note.

It said: "Dear Mr. Elimeliah, Thank you for choosing to stay with us and posting it on your social media site! Please enjoy this amenity and "Welcome to the Beach! Sincerely, Loews Santa Monica Beach Hotel"

I cannot even express how happy this made me feel. 

With what probably cost the hotel virtually nothing they made me into a customer.

There is no way that I am not staying there again on my next trip and I made it a point to share this experience with my networks and got a number of replies from influential friends who all thought this was pretty damn awesome.

I don’t know if this is a regular hotel policy or if it was an ad hoc moment where whoever is running the hotel social media responsibilities had the brilliant idea of carrying out this amazing tactic but it was brilliantly executed.

I wanted to share this expierence because I don't think that brands realize how easy and inexpensive it is to use social media as a way to connect with customers and put fourth a simple gesture that will potentially secure them a customer for life.

Well done Loews social media person, whoever you are.

Designer Data

Creativity has largely been influenced and owned by the traditional channels of the art world. 


The sweet candy of the eyes and the powerful potion of the ears.

All the pretty pictures and beautiful scenarios, shocking movies, seductive soliloquy and chaotic abstraction are classic tenets of the creative world.

However we are entering a new frontier of creativity, an age where data is becoming the clay in which creativity is molded with.

For centuries data has been shackled within the boring annals of the actuarial world. 

Its qualitative arms and quantitative legs bound by the weight of monotonous graphs and plebeian charts. 

Confined to bland colors and simple shapes and presented on canvases of slide shows and endless flowcharts and spreadsheets that would have any artists ready to run for the hills.

Data has long been held hostage in infinite rows and columns and kept at the lowest level of abstraction so that it may be processed into stale stacks of incomprehensable numbers and characters that have kept its creative potential out of the hands of artists for ages. 

Kept guarded by the mathematicians and the scientists who have claimed ownership over this powerful raw material in an attempt to keep it pure and of intellect, shielding it from the emotional perils of the art world.

Today data is as accessible as air, it is everywhere and in forms that make it conducive for creative applications and visualizations.

Data is the creative DNA in which our new and exciting app culture is built upon. 

Billions of bytes of chatter, gigabyte upon gigabyte of goodies all readily available to be played with and manipulated into tiny screens that help us do everything from managing our social lives to finding the best food trucks in our area. 

We now live on data, we feast on data and we consume data more than any other age in history.

The creative world is quickly becoming obsessed with data. 

Art and design is being driven by data, neatly packaged streams of massive amounts of human data, collected by the billions every single second of the day being transformed into neatly designed applications that fuel our creative juices and allow everyone to take part in the creative process.

Big ideas are now formulated not by an aesthetic execution but by the mixing and matching of strands of data, all different kinds of data, social data, urban data, physical data… the list is endless. 

Consumers pour their souls into computers and devices, they tweet and post and checkin, they bump and share and play, they fill oceans of data every single day and there seems to be an endless supply of different data to play with.

Its is an almost perfect ecosystem where consumers exude data and in turn breathe it back in.

Artists love mediums, especially mediums that are free, easy to use and can create world changing expressions. 

Data is this new medium.

Culture's Camera

I cannot take credit for the picture but I can take credit for the metaphor that I have attached to it.

I added the little Facebook/Instagram lock up.

Pop culture has it's camera.

Facebook just purchased a really expensive camera, a really really expensive camera, and rightly so.

The social nation exists because of the content that its citizens pour into it and when content is the lifeline of the network the network must then commit to providing those users with tools that will enhance the content they so rabidly share and ingest.

Facebook purchased Instagram for a whopping one billion dollars.

A company that has been in existence for 551 days and employs less than 15 people.

I ask myself, why couldn't Facebook, who already gets 8 billion photo uploads per month, simply build in a few fancy filters and emulate Instagram's functionality?

Doing so would have cost them no where near as much as they paid for Instagram.

Facebook understood the social and cultural relevance of what Instagram represented.

It wasn't simply an app that takes cool pictures but a lens in which its users look absolutely fabulous in but even more importantly a lens in which they endorse everything they love from a very intimate angle.

Polished user generated content.

Instagram makes no money, it's functionality is relatively simple and up until last week it relied completely on a single hardware platform.

So what gives? Why would Facebook take such a huge interest in Instagram?

Here is my take.

Facebook has been focusing on leveraging real posts as advertising.

People talking about brands and then brands sponsoring those stories to give them an extra boost through the network.

They are personal, they are authentic and they are engaging.

Now go to SearchInstagram.com and type in Nike you will be blown away with the creativity and awesomeness of a brand in the wild.

Brands are no longer the only one telling the story, consumers are now producers and they have their own story to tell around a brand.

Facebook understands this and I think that is why they purchased Instagram for such a whopping amount of money.

It is the fastest way to own a public storytelling machine, now apply Facebook's ad model of boosting user generated stories and there you have it the world's most powerful ad engine boosting consumer endorsed, personal stories and content that is as genuine as it gets.

Facebook understood that Instagram was being used as the vehicle for the public to not only consume and share what they so intimately love but to share it in context for how those products and services live within their private lives.

A billion dollars may have actually been a bargain.

Play - to amuse oneself; toy; trifle; embed Spotify songs into all of your web properties.

Graphite

The internet as we know it started off as a gated community where the likes of AOL helped to onboard the masses into what would be the most prolific and connected age of all mankind. 

Content, limited as it was, was housed in neatly kept buckets while chat rooms allowed for interactivity and engagement with other users.

Email, news, communication and connectivity was delivered in one neat little package.

Web browsers then bullishly elbowed their way in and opened up the web to allow for a more serendipitous perusal. 

Browsers let people navigate the web in a more free form way by breaking down the rails that AOL had set up to onboard it's users. 

However it was very difficult to find relevant properties without having a search function to bring up websites that matched what you were looking for.

Search engines then took hold and level set the two states and offered up the entire web in a much more organized fashion.

We now enter into a new age where the web is being blanketed and sectioned off into graphs. 

The social graph, as defined by Facebook in 2007 at the f8 conference is "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related", what this does for users is it offers them the ability to login to websites and applications that will automatically populate sessions with the personal data that Facebook makes so portable. 

The social graph also allows for friends to connect through these destinations and requires less time to get up and running by simply logging in with a Facebook account.

This kind of social portability and interaction is naturally embraced by users because we crave recognition and community to help boost our self esteems through the feeling of belonging to something and the hope that we get positive feedback on the content we view and share.

There is a certain kind of thrill a user gets when logging into a new app or website with a Facebook account and seeing the level of familiarity they are used to seeing on Facebook itself.

Facebook, as broad and as vast as it is only contains a certain amount of social information, kind of like the world's active directory, a glorified address book if you will.

The information contained in our portable social graph profiles allows for a very particular experience based on the information we carry.

At it's core the data we supply Facebook is highly social and somewhat disparate and tends to cause friction when advertising or other foreign, non-social data is introduced into the stream.

We also get caught up in the trap of talking to walls rather than to one another so conversations are less engaging and our profiles tend to resemble a messy wall of who we think we are or want to be.

Fear not, there are other graphs that are forming which will provide us with an identity that is much more robust and personal than who our friends are and what their statuses say.

These new graphs are also much more advertising friendly and actually allow us to collaborate with advertisers rather than feel like they are an intrusion on our personal streams.

The interest graph is an emerging layer that is taking the web by storm. 

The interest graph shares and provides websites with a much deeper level of personal interests based on content users have carefully curated to represent the things we collect, we have, want or aspire to get.

Pinterest is currently owning the majority of the interest graph by allowing users to curate highly creative and personal mood boards that will eventually give websites and applications access to a much more personal level of insight into a user.

The interest graph is much more focused on what we like than who we know and will revolutionize the way we shop, discover and curate content on the web.

Rogue services like Instagram, Cinemagram and other interest capturing apps will now have a much more native repository for images captured, filtered and animated and browser plugins will be focused on being able to cut and share all kinds of content from the depths of the web and put them directly on to our personal boards.

The term "Content is King" has never been more relevant.

We can literally dissect websites and media and re-aggregate it based on our own preferences. 

The interest graph will help to better serve up visual content that aligns us with our tastes in fashion, culture, movies, technology and images that we feel best represent who we are and what we stand for.

The interest graph will extend our network of friends way beyond those we have friended on the social graph helping to create new circles of friends based on common values and interests. 

The interest graph is still very much up for grabs, Pinterest has a strong lead in this category as the go to network for users to create interest profiles.

Aside from the societal and interest graphs another emerging graph that is taking shape is the active graph. 

Companies like Nike, Fitbit, Jawbone, and Garmin are all vying for top dog in this category. 

The active graph represents a more physical profile of a user and can be highly valuable in allowing users to access sites and services that help track all kinds of physical, emotional and health related data.

Data is now currency and currency requires banks to house and protect it, social networks such as Facebook, Pinterest and Nike Fuel are literally banks that want to securely house the precious data that is collected every second of the day by billions of people who are pouring personal data into their respective networks and then allowing us users to access that data through an almost infinite network of apps, websites and digital services.

Social networks are now redesigning themselves in ways that allow the network to milk the public of the most amount of personal data as possible in order to then make that data more valuable and used as the key to unlock millions of websites and apps that fall into the respective categories of social, interest and active.

Whole ecosystems and economies are being built around networks that own the largest portion of the respective graphs.

This data is gold and mining this data is like mining for precious metals or oil and needless to say it pays off big time.

The utility and organization that social networks provide us is what we get in return for supplying these repositories with our personal data.

Open Graphs enable us to navigate the web in a much more personal way, it gives us the ability to seamlessly insert our data in tons of creative configurations that automatically become highly personalized simply upon logging in.

The open graph race is a literally a land grab right now. 

The networks with the most users are the gatekeepers of these graphs. 

The king of the mountain will likely change hands often as new networks with better more robust functions appear.

It is important that we are aware of the fact that we are now labeled vertices across isomorphic graphs that will both intersect and collide until we figure out a clear hierarchy of graphs and subgraphs that will properly organize our information and allow us to use our personal data as a set of keys to unlock highly personalized experiences across all digital properties.

It will be an interesting transition to observe as we digitize everything we see and do into these networks, our entire culture, fueling the creativity of app designers and developers, website engineers and the like who want to use our personal data for building communities and utilities that will hopefully benefit our lives as people and make us more connected by enhancing our human interactions and not turning us into cyborgs that are conditioned to simply syncing our observations into a digital black hole.

Social Parsimony or Google+ Vs. Facebook

There was no way in hell I was going to miss an opportunity to articulate some of my thoughts surrounding Google+ and how I personally think it completely redefines the entire social ecosystem.

I consider myself one of the lucky few to have gotten early access to the new social network.

It is a rare opportunity to explore its environment and see it evolve before the onslaught of social dalliers start littering it with billions of bytes of content and continuous activity.

For now my stream mainly consists of people like myself who are getting a lay of the land in order to better understand its geography.

Not because we are sociologists but because most of us are in the business to create and communicate content and we are always looking for the best ways to deliver our content and disseminate it to our audiences.

We are the early explorers of new channels and we are typically a kind of litmus test for their eventual popularity because of the way we instinctually scrutinize the effectiveness of these new channels.

What excites me most about Google+ is that it isn't the new kid on the block that has to claw its way past its competition, it doesn't need to raise money, it needs no additional growth to compete and in many cases it already has the manpower to exceed any advances or innovations its competitors can try to come back at it with.

Google+ isn't something new, it is something that has evolved slowly over time.

Nothing truly great simply just appears.

Especially in the cases when greatness instantly explodes on to the scene, it eventually fades away because it doesn't have the wherewithal to withstand the complexity of the interaction that its users will require of it.

Greatness requires time and maturity.

Google+ is the eversion of tons of wildly successful and ubiquitous online tools all being sucked into one single place and energized by the force of social networking.

First Google perfected and contained the beast that is searching the web.

Then Google conquered personal email.

Google went on to reinvent video with YouTube.

Blogger became a writers paradise.

Analytics were made available for free to everyone big and small.

Google brought us the entire Earth and every single street and side road that is contained within it and exactly how best to navigate them.

It houses our images, and now our music, there are archives of books and a huge cache of free productivity tools.

Google also provides us with a cutting edge browser in which to peruse the web.

Oh wait, did I mention that Google is also the most popular mobile operating system and is quickly becoming a major player in the tablet and PC operating systems race as well?

Anyway... you get it, Google is huge!

And with a simple addition, using the sign for addition. Google adds a Social Layer on top of it all and appropriately calls it Google+ (g+).

Like some new variable in an equation, "g" represents an amorphous set of technological offerings that is forever adapting to accommodate its ravenous audiences. Plus (+) is the social layer that represents all of us.

Now you dont have to be a social media expert (although everyone claims to be one) to immediately see the similarities between Google+ and Facebook. The comparisons are obvious. However if you look deeper it will quickly become clear that Google+ has a much better chance of becoming the premier social network over the next few years.

Social media is made up of billions of rabid users. Highly social, competitive and technologically infatuated people who love nothing more than seeing themselves inside of the technology that most fascinates them. Technology that shines the best light on the personas that they maintain online.

A new subset of people who evolve culturally through a constant strive for identifying the "killer" that will eventually replace that which they find to be most advanced with something they are led to believe is even more advanced.

Feeding off of the drama of the eventual fall of the current titan and reveling in the defeat of the once beloved cultural epicenter. Then over valuing its victor with loyalty and adherence to its infrastructure.

We no longer take into account things like business models that have long term sustainability and profitability, instead we reward the victor through our own devotion and support. In praise of the mighty champion we flood its channel with billions of bits of personal information making it a valuable cistern of human content that can then be mined by corporations in order to better profit off of the golden nuggets of our souls that we so publicly reveal openly.

There is a principle called parsimony.

Parsimony is a rule that states that if there are two options and if one option is to be true, well-established social norms and etiquette must be either re-written, ignored, or suspended in order to allow it to be true, but if the other option is to be true no such accommodation need be made, then typically the simpler of the two options is much more likely to be accepted.

Basically people will migrate towards the network that gains them the greatest amount of accessibility and usability options that house our personas and is preferred to the one with the less complex options regardless of what is in actuality a better network. Its just how us crazy humans work.

Social network ecosystems like Twitter, Facebook & Google+ will naturally grow in size to accommodate the complexity of the human data being fed into the network.

But if the complexity of the data diminishes so will the size of the network.

Hence MySpace.

The less dynamic and complex the data the less dynamic and complex the network.

Now this is where Google+ wins.

Google has all of the tried and true tools that are already being used by billions of people worldwide. All Google has to do is simply and methodically converge all of these tools and it will continue to grow its Social Network dominance simply by exposing more and more of its already successful products within Google+.

It has been some time since I have been this excited about a new platform, especially since everything Google has done since its inception is all coming together now and the picture is starting to become more clear.

Mobile, Web, Social, Publishing, Productivity, Entertainment, Advertising, Navigation, Telephony and countless other vital tools for living in this new age all thrive within Google's veins.

I cant wait to see how this all plays out, my bet is that Facebook will not withstand the solid foundation and maturity that Google+ brings and will be relegated to AOL and Yahoo status. Facebook will survive on its fumes and hopefully weather a maturation phase to better define itself and its place in the social ecosystem or it will simply run out of resources as Google will continue to dominate yet another part of the web.

By the way, Twitter will be just fine.

Personal Gain

The origin and evolution of social networking has had many inroads, message boards were the earliest and most primitive form that roamed this new chaotic landscape of the Internet.

Ideas were being shared and distributed across small networks of early adopters, subjects mainly consisting of the new media itself. As the platform evolved networks like AOL fostered a new level of social sharing in the form of instant messaging and chat rooms dedicated to almost every topic known to man.

Websites were still very primitive and typically communicated in one direction. Early websites were a shallow bucket of information that was closed to comments and conversation.

Without the ubiquity and the transparency of two way communication brands and content creators were reluctant to open up their sites to public conversation.

Blogging was an evolutionary shift that blew the doors open to public sharing as we know it today.

Bloggers tend to be highly opinionated, precisely focused and generally catering to a particular niche of audience that cares to read and comment on a particular subject of interest. Blog commenting forced a certain level of transparency so that the conversations would be fair and controlled.

Social Media grew out of the womb of this kind of public sharing, our social media profiles are now deep enough to verify our identities and allow us to share our thoughts and essentially micro-blog everything that goes on in our lives. This transparency is a form of social currency that give strength to our voices.

Social networks encourage and enable us to record every second of our lives and in many cases it is the recording and sharing of our lives that helps dictate many of the decisions we make throughout the day.

Where to go for lunch may be based on a Foursquare check-in made by a friend, a business deal may have evolved from a simple Twitter exchange, a relationship could hinge on who may have poked you on Facebook today or what your official relationship status is. Political views and status comments now quantify our social positioning and how the world views us as individuals.

But I ask myself, how has this really improved our lives?

How has this contributed to our advancement as human beings?

How do we benefit from being more social than ever before?

I try to weigh the pros and cons of every permutation of sharing across all kinds of topical social networks and I still wonder where the personal benefit is gained.

There are metrics that weigh sentiment and influence, popularity and frequency that have obvious benefits to brands that glean deep insight into the markets they service but where are the personal analytics that give social media users the metrics for success or failure in our own personal lives?

How can we gain deep analytical insight into improving ourselves?

How can we take a step back and click a button and see how we can better our own lives through the analysis of our social media activity?

I'm sure anthropologists and psychoanalysts could have a field day with this. Examining profiles and offering advice and insight into a persons behavior just by reading a log of an individuals social media stream over the course of a few days, weeks or years.

Imagine your therapist asking to see your past years Twitter posts to better understand your issues, imagine if there were analytical tools that gave you the power to read between the lines and help you figure out who you are and where you should be focusing your efforts in life?

This is a gaping void in the world of social media and as more and more people realize that this information can be used for the betterment of their own lives we will see more and more money being poured into services and tools dedicated to this purpose.

What better way to use the information we share every second of the day than to help us become better people?

So I throw out this thought and hope that we collectively realize the potential of the billions of bits of personal information we share with the world every day.

No Stone Unturned

We have entered an age where our attention is constantly occupied by all kinds of new spaces.

We are no longer limited to television, radio, outdoor signage and other traditional spaces where content, specifically ads, have been intruding upon our lives.

Technology, specifically mobile technology, has taken us even deeper into our attention caves.

Our focus now lives comfortably in deep cavernous spaces, in new and undiscovered places.

Smart phones, eBooks, tablet computers, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter streams. Tagged photos, online radio streams, text messages, Wifi signals, location check-ins and local deals have cannibalized our attention away from the old television commercials, ancient billboards, sagging signage, morbid magazine ads and so on.

It is the age of digital distraction and these distractions are both complex and constantly changing.

To capture audience attention we now have to start communicating in places that are very different than the past. Places that we haven't yet discovered or even fully understand.

Communicating in these new spaces requires new kinds of techniques and a new kind of language, a more stealth and subtle way of storytelling. It requires us to not only tell our stories but to disrupt and inject them directly into real life situations. As virtual as they may seem.

It has been ages since I have used a traditional phone, my cell phone is my main line of communication.

I recently used a land line, upon picking it up I heard a dial tone, a white noise that lets us know that there is a signal and that we can start dialing. It immediately occurred to me that this tone is a completely wasted opportunity. Why didn't the carriers stick a message in there?

A similar thing happened when I was walking down the street, completely immersed in my iPhone, suddenly alert messages started popping up informing me of nearby hot spot locations.

These signals were coming from apartments, businesses, office building and even personal roving hot spots. Except all I was seeing was either a silly name or some jumbled letter & number combination.

Why not communicate through these micro channels that are ubiquitous to all and have our undivided attention?

This led me to sit down and to think about all of the new "places" that exist today, it now excites me to find and try to come up with creative ways to communicate through those tiny spaces.

I am extremely lucky to live in NYC, it is a great opportunity to explore some of the new, less conventional or less obvious, places that people are spending the majority of their time in and to find creative ways to enter into those spaces and communicate a message in the new and unique language that the spaces require.

So next time your out for a stroll take the time to look around and notice all of the amazing opportunities that technology offers us as marketers. Think about new ways to communicate with a population that is now living in these spaces, try and find creative ways to augment and enhance these spaces and try to retrofit your ideas to live in these new and interesting environments.

Like to Be Liked

From big box brands to the local store around the corner, every marketer seems to be convinced that offering consumers the ability to LIKE a brand or service is a way to measure loyalty and build community.

It has become one of the new holy grails of marketing.

The LIKE button is everywhere.

Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter, Check In to us on Foursquare...

The ravenous desire for a brand LIKE is quickly becoming a driving force behind many ad campaigns today.

It is now prominently displayed on television spots and outdoor ads, clamoring for your LIKE.

This new phenomena leads me to wonder, does a LIKE really mean people actually LIKE what they are LIKING?

Normative social influence says otherwise, there are conclusive studies that say what we do in public is often the opposite of what we really believe in private.

When a user clicks that LIKE button they are seemingly making a public, social proclamation that they endorse whatever that cute little blue thumb is attached to.

We all want to gain acceptance from people within our networks so we may intentionally LIKE or retweet something that we may not really believe in, we do this in order to gain greater social cohesion within our networks and this cohesion seems to make us feel closer than we actually are.

In reality many of us rarely see or interact face to face with the people in our networks, however we have a deep longing to maintain the relationship so that we may feel more secure about the amount of friends or followers we have.

The more friends and followers the more important we seem, at least to ourselves.

As marketers and advertising professionals we must really reconsider and try to better understand how valuable a LIKE or a FOLLOW actually is.

Solomon Asch, a trailblazer in social psychology, would conduct studies using social confederates as influencers to get people to conform with something that was obviously false.

These confederates would knowingly opt for the wrong decision and in doing so would cause the other unsuspecting participants to do the same.

However when the same participants were asked to make the same decision in private, many of them would opt to do the opposite of what they did in public because the pressure for social acceptance wasn't a factor.

Social conformity forces people to copy the behaviors of what individuals perceive as normal for the social network they are in.

In doing so they create for themselves a sense of comfort in knowing that the chances of becoming a social outcast is slim and that by participating in the interests of the network the user actually feels as if they are strengthening the network they so desperately want to be a part of.

Herbert Kelman, a Harvard psychologist, codified three major forms of social influence:

Compliance: a public conformity, while possibly keeping one's own private beliefs.

Identification: conforming to someone who is liked and respected, such as a celebrity or an industry thought leader.

Internalization: the accepting the belief or behavior and conforming both publicly and privately.

There have not been any conclusive statistics regarding the number of LIKES and the effect it has on a brand's bottom line, it is way to early to gather this information.

However I would like to raise the concern for the importance of LIKES or FOLLOWS or RETWEETS as a measurable metric of success.

We need to all step back and dig a bit deeper into the motivations behind social sharing and LIKES and try to figure out how these interactions actually impact a brand.

This will help marketers decide how much money to put behind efforts to gaining more LIKES and allow brands to spend their money more wisely and on more effective ways to gain consumer engagement and loyalty.

A Brick Wall

Newspapers, magazines, periodicals and most other publications have all felt the impact the web has had on their age old subscription model.

Information, news, facts, gossip, research and studies are readily available for free across the vast information superhighway.

Anyone can find anything at anytime for little to no cost.

But one must ask themselves... who creates all this content we consume on a daily basis?

Quality content is the one thing that cannot be manufactured without the need for highly specialized and creative professionals. The web has made us ravenously hungry for this content and at the same time we so freely consume it we simultaneously have taken for granted the amount of work that goes into its creation.

One of the major challenges for content and online utility creators has been to try and reverse the notion that content and utility is free and to get users to pay a premium for access in a similar way they pay for cable TV. Through subscriptions.

The problem with subscriptions is that it is fundamentally adverse to the way the internet is used. The birth of the web promised everyone free access to all kinds of content. Everything was free but that was only to make the case for the potential and the existence of the web.

We live in very different times now. The web is not only stable but it has become the backbone of our society.

In the past if you wanted to read a specific article in the New York Times you purchased the entire paper even though it was just the one article that may have interested you.

Sharing the article would require you actually physically handing the paper to the person you wanted to share it with.

I know this sounds like a painstaking task...

My grandmother has this great habit of clipping out articles and sending them to me in the mail, with an actual stamp on an envelope.

We see a similar pattern with cable television, if you wanted to watch a particular show on HBO you had to subscribe to the entire channel and even that was bundled into a package of other channels you may never even flip to. Then you would have to record that show on a VHS tape and somehow get that tape to whoever you wanted to share it with.

The horror!

Luckily the internet came around and the mighty web has fragmented everything.

We now gather our news, entertainment, research and other sources from a variety of different places on the web.

We may want a certain column from Wednesday's WSJ or only the Monday recap of Sunday's big games, we may only be interested in the Approval Matrix in New York magazine or simply want to watch a particular segment on a television show we may never watch in its entirety.

Paywalls have been one of the ways that publications have been trying to get people to pay for premium content. But the paywall structure goes against how we use the web.

I understand that Time Magazine wants people to subscribe to its publication, however I am not so sure everyone wants every piece of content in the magazine.

Apple was extremely successful in the way it allowed people to buy a whole album or just a single song. That model completely revamped the music industry and actually helped to almost completely eliminate the illegal pirating of music.

I believe that every piece of content on the web should be available a la carte.

Every article, news snippet, utility, video, image or anything that a content creator should receive compensation for.

If there is an article in the Times I want to read then I should be able to pay an access fee to read just that article or agree to view an ad that will justify the cost of my consumption.

Fragmentation is the key to monetization.

Subscriptions are just too much of a commitment for people who hoard and gather information from a zillion different places.

Everything can be made available in a fragmented format or in a limited access format so we can pay for what we actually want.

I may need to read a chapter of a book that I certainly don't need to own. I may need a certain tool offered in Photoshop for a single use but I certainly don't need to own a full blown copy of the application.

I strongly feel that by fragmenting premium content and utilities their creators will find that getting users to pay for usage will become a much easier sell.

The Social Media Stratification

The massive adoption of social networks within the lives of billions of people has naturally created a new layer of social classification within today's digitally oriented society.

Access to inexpensive computers and mobile devices has given everyone a personal platform to express practically everything they do, see and hear instantly.

One of the most popular channels of expression come in the form of social networks.

Social networks started off quite simply as a way to share stuff.

They have quickly become refined into hyper focused channels of communication offering a wide array of ways to express and share extremely detailed and targeted information.

Social networks give its users the ability to easily acquire a new type of control over a resource that is quickly becoming more and more valuable.

This resource is a new type of social capital that can be gained, shared and returned.

This new form of capital has stimulated waves of investments and shifts in power within the realms of technology, politics, communications and entertainment.

It has ignited heated debates over the control of and valuations of platforms, services and channels that help facilitate the ability to attain this power.

The debate dujour is the overvaluation of companies that create and innovate these channels.

Networks that are focused more on ubiquity and usability than the ability to generate actual revenue, and to the dismay and confusion of many, receive record breaking valuations.

Most see this as a bubble waiting to burst. I disagree.

There is a new wave of visionaries who are pouring billions of dollars into companies like Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Groupon, Instagram, Tumblr and other channels that are able to garner its users the ability to grow social capital.

These people have a vision and a belief that social capital will eventually be or is already as good as gold.

These vast digital plains are being mined for innovative ways to allow billions of users the ability to grow their social wealth.

To help stoke the desire to possess the power to control these social resources by building digital extensions of personalities, knowledge, insight and experience through apps, websites, games, services and devices.

We are essentially mining the human mind and soul and the precious ore that emanates is a new commodity that has a tremendous value.

My experience in both using and building social networks and extensions to social networks has driven me to try and codify some of what is going on.

I have attempted to identify a class system and have patterned it after Max Weber's famous Three Class System of Social Stratification.

This breakdown is based on my own attempt in identifying the highest tiers of the social network ladders.

I break it down as follows:

The Initiator: those who are able to effect wide spread interest in content, trends and discussions particularly in the realm of consumerism and purchasing influence.

The Celebrity: those who have gained celebrity status within their respected fields. Accomplished social climbers who are widely followed more for their antics than their opinions.

The Dynamo: people who use social media to help motivate others. Content is typically altruistic in nature however the widespread following inadvertently gains them strong social power.

This classification system is still very much a work in progress and will be something that I will be expounding on more in the coming weeks.

What I hope to achieve is to gain more insight and understanding into the new social structures that I find crystallizing around me every day.

As an advertising professional it gives me greater insight into how we communicate and share, how information flows and is interpreted based on its origin and the many paths it now takes to reach the masses.

We are now all a channel, a conduit, and it is up to us to decide how it is we want to refine the information through our personal spectrum and how valuable it is when we present it to the world.

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.