Posted 06.28.11 by Becky Lang
Everybody’s talking about Google’s new social venture, Google+, today. Check it out yourself and begin getting amped to use features like video chat Hangouts and extensive Social Circles. Tech blogs are betting that this time Google will get the social element of web browsing down, leaving failures like Buzz and Orkut in the past.
I admit that Google+ looks well-designed and exciting, but there’s one element of the whole release that I’m skeptical about: their limited invite system. As Tech Crunch writes,
So when can you try Google+? Here’s the thing that will be a kick in the pants to some users: Google is beginning to roll it out today, but it will only be a very limited field trial. You can submit your email address here to be entered into the system and notified as roll-outs continue, but Google says that they have no set time table for a full rollout. Again, this is phase one of what Google hopes to do with Google+, so they’re taking it slow.
From a layman’s perspective, part of what made Google Buzz less-than-engaging was that when I signed up, no one was really on it. Instead you were waiting around for people to join, and the first people using it weren’t your best friends and family members – they were tech-heads and early adapters. The lack of social relevance made Buzz instantly fall flat, meaning that people got bored with it before they saw it as a way to really connect.
When comparing this to Facebook, the original base of users was entirely different. Instead of a select group of tech-connected people, it was a bunch of college students, all connected by real-life social elements like proximity and attendance at the same university. The user base was young and open about their lives, online constantly, and eager to share, flirt, post party pictures, poke, stalk each other, whatever. Sure it was limited, but limited within a close group of people, which allowed those limits to encourage a feeling of relative privacy as a group.
This strategy was successful because it was built on the idea of a social graph, a term Mark Zuckerberg introduced to the world. A map of how people relate and interact, he’s spent years trying to translate it online using Facebook. With this as a core goal, Facebook’s functionality developed from suiting a smaller group of connected users to creating a world where people could sustain more connections than ever. When it came to functionality, features were based on how good friends, co-workers, groups and even brands/customers communicated, working slowly to invent features as social graphs changed and proved them necessary.
While Google+’s features do acknowledge social graph elements like cliques, privacy and replicating “neighbors sitting on porches,” the implementation system is backward. Instead of rolling out with a bunch of regular users and seeing how closely interconnected groups are using their tools, they’re starting out with a disconnected invite system. I’m not sure who gets access first, but I’m guessing it’s not a demographic of young, highly social people who want to flirt, gossip and impress all their friends.
I’m dying for an invite to see what it’s all about, but I won’t be able to truly understand what it is and leave relevant feedback unless the people I interact with are right there with me. Why not just open it up to entire social groups and see what problems/opportunities arise instead of carefully testing it among a small number of select individuals?
Note: What about Facebook’s attempt to pull a Gmail and release their own mail system? It could also be that hyping up a service and then creating a several-month lag time before it’s available also diminishes interest significantly. If it would have come out right after all they hype, I would have used it more. Now it’s here and I don’t think anyone is using it, at least not anyone I know. Maybe both will end up excelling at what they were good at it in the first place.
-Becky Lang
Posted 06.27.11 by Becky Lang
I’m going to take a leap and say that Tumblr is “the next Facebook.” A blogging platform with a social element built in, Tumblr’s growth has been exponential. Last year, they were getting about 250 million pageviews a month. Now they get that many in a day. When looking at their activity on a chart, you can see they’re almost to the point of runaway growth. The platform has over 20 million blogs, which is 85,000 more than WordPress. Most major publications use Tumblr to blog creative “extra” content or communicate with their followers, so why haven’t many brands caught on?
Three major things separate Tumblr from other blogging platforms. First, it’s the easiest to use. There aren’t many options when making a post, and the ones that exist are incredibly intuitive thanks to the telegraphic icons and pared down tools. Secondly, Tumblr is customizable, even though you don’t have to host it yourself. You can grab a theme and dig right into the HTML, adding whatever functionality you want. But the biggest difference is that Tumblr is built around a community dashboard. You can follow as many people as you want, and the homepage is a never-ending scroll of posts by blogs you follow, skinned in an easy-to-read format. Recently, Tumblr has created spotlight pages for writers, artists and other figures to follow, and they’ve appointed editors to curate certain topics, like art, design and writing. What was once a free-for-all meme generator is now a more organized experience.
So, what could brands do on Tumblr?
Brands are increasingly becoming editorial. The best way to actually make customers want to visit your website or follow you on Facebook is to provide useful, interesting content, rather than slap campaign messages in their face. Tumblr would provide a way to place longer-form content on a social media platform that people are already hanging out on. It’s that simple. If you provide compelling content, people will reblog it, and suddenly brands will get more and more followers. By gaining influence on Tumblr, you can have a built in audience of tens of thousands of readers. Not only that, Tumblr gives followers the chance to reply or send messages, making it possible to create a two-way dialogue. Brands could even reblog customer testimonials.
How could brands change Tumblr?
Brands have had an enormous impact on the way Facebook works. From monetizing it with targeted ads to insisting on more customizable development options, brands have almost changed Facebook as much as Facebook has changed branding.
I could easily see this happening with Tumblr too. Right now, Tumblr hasn’t monetized and their servers crash constantly because of their high traffic. If brands moved onto Tumblr, they could easily create a suggested follow feature similar to Twitter, or preview sponsored content in their Radar or Explore sections.
To me, Tumblr seems like a natural step between editorial content and social media, and when used right, it could transform the whole way a brand interacts with customers. Time to get on board.
-Becky Lang
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Posted 06.20.11 by Becky Lang
I just finished reading Wired’s article Feedback Loops are Changing What People Do, which was one of the many brilliant Wired pieces that make you think “holy crap civilization is about to change and soon our sunglasses will let us see through walls.” I suggest you read it yourself, but I’ll give a short recap before I relate it to marketing.
Imagine if there were a way to receive information about the level of plaque and decay on your teeth on a daily basis. You can bet you’d start brushing more. The problem is, monitoring that type of information is either impossible or takes too much effort. With a feedback loop, that could change. Feedback loops are the simple process of receiving real time information about an ongoing activity that lets you know whether you need to ease up or add more intensity. It started in technology like thermostats and then was adopted by psychologists like Albert Bandura as a way to help people improve their behavior. They’re highly effective, but they’ve been widely unavailable or impossible, until now. As we get better at collecting and organizing information, the technology to stick sensors everywhere is getting dramatically cheaper – thus shoes with built-in accelerometers.
This presents a huge opportunity for brands that want to do more than just shill product. Brands have a lot of information. Regular brands have market research, but any brand related to technology has real-time information that can be easily pumped into feedback loops. On a small level, a brand like AT&T is using them to improve customer experience. My phone texts me gentle reminders regularly when I’ve reached certain levels of my data plan. But what if we could program it to provide personal loops, like a text that tells me I’ve called my mom 80% less frequently than last month? Quirky, but interesting.
A brand that encapsulates this idea is Mint.com. Instead of just collecting data about your finances, it analyzes your information and reflects it back to you in useful ways. Who knew I was spending that much on gas? Better cut down. Of course there are still problems with Mint – it’s not happening in real time, for one. If I had an app that let me know my bank account balance at any given time, you can bet I’d spend less money. But Mint is constantly at least a day behind. The other problem is its tone – instead of being gentle and harmless, it plays on fear as motivator – “ACTION REQUIRED,” “Unusual Spending,” “Fee” – phrases that cry wolf when your unusual spending on housing was nothing more than paying rent.
Whether or not we could articulate what feedback loops are and why they work, this trend of reflecting useful data back to customers was going to grow no matter what. I’m excited to see what it brings.
-Becky Lang
Posted 06.07.11 by Becky Lang
Now that Path has released another app, “With,” we can see their gimmick is 4-letter social apps that end with “th” and feature sentimental value wrapped in awkward copywriting: ”If you would prefer not to see Jason’s moments, simply pause him,” ”Friendship has its benefits. Closer friends receive special benefits…with more to come.”
Here are my bets for their next releases:
Moth – An app for cripplingly anti-social people (not butterflies – get it?) to take pictures of themselves, sitting alone.
Both – An app that lets you both use Twitter and scorn it for being a temple of narcissism at the same time.
Math – An app that reduces all pictures of your friends to binary code. Twitter is built in.
Goth – A photo sharing app with spider and Hello Kitty filters.
Hath – An app that lets you take pictures of cute possessions you “hath,” written in a Biblical tone
Anyway, I’m having trouble figuring out what the purpose of W/ is, especially since Twitter just announced it will be hosting photos. Plus, who made the logo? Lisa Frank?
What do you think?
-Becky Lang
Posted 06.06.11 by Becky Lang
I’ve always been pretty “meh” about Rosetta Stone, mostly because it’s so expensive but also because its method of making you guess at pictures for hours seems a lot more brainless than other experiences I’ve had learning foreign languages. But when I saw today that they’ve released an iPad app, I got a bit excited. Finally, a chance to use Rosetta Stone on a touch-screen platform, at a much cheaper rate. Or so I thought.
Turns out that to use the Rosetta Stone app, you have to have their software, which starts at $179, and that’s just for one level. Compared to all the free ways you can learn languages in this day and age – LiveMocha, Voxy, etc. – spending $200 to learn a fairly piddly level of French seems old-fashioned.
The great thing about the Apple App Store and app culture in general is that it has challenged companies to offer simpler, cheaper versions of their software to turn more people on to what they do. That’s why Apple released Pages and Keynote apps for a meager $10.
A company that understood this idea was Adobe. Sure CS5 will still cost about as much as a used car, but their iPad apps are all under $10. Instead of translating their entire services to the iPad, they figured out how to distill certain functions and features to give an Adobe experience without charging Adobe dollars.
I was hoping that Rosetta Stone would do something similar, and release apps geared around certain functions, like an app for mastering the Arabic alphabet, or one for learning Chinese radicals, all at $10 a pop. Those I would have bought.
-Becky Lang
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Posted 06.03.11 by Becky Lang
People were talking about Cheerios all over the web, so why wasn’t anyone visiting their website? We helped the brand move away from a standard model into a centralized hub of the information people were seeking out every day.
After working with Zeus Jones on social media projects, the folks at Cheerios were curious about how we’d apply our digital strategy and design sensibilities to retooling their website. They asked us to create a proposal, so we got to researching. Right away, we encountered a tough question. What would motivate people to visit a cereal company’s website? We weren’t sure.
We started searching Cheerios’ presence on the internet and found out that not only was it a frequently discussed brand, but that there were blogs, forums and queries about Cheerios popping up every day. Common questions centered on babies’ first foods, Cheerios and heart health and keeping kids healthy. Cheerios turned out to be a sociable brand, even popular enough that many mom bloggers had styled their blogs around Cheerios-centric themes.
Despite all of that discussion, Cheerios’ website reflected little of that content. It was missing an opportunity to become a centralized, trustworthy resource and reflection of its devoted fan community. Cheerios decided that instead of spending money on Google search ads, they would invest it in exploring how their website could be more relevant. At the time, the first result linking to a Cheerios website was, on average, seven links from the top. If it became a real destination for all of these discussions, it would climb in search results naturally.
We decided to build Cheerios.com around the 65 most common search inquiries about Cheerios. The goal involved a simple inversion of strategy: Make Cheerios.com reflect what people wanted to know about Cheerios, rather than what we wanted people to know about Cheerios
Adding Content and Making it Social
We started with the question – what would make people want to visit Cheerios’ website in the first place? With that in mind, we began developing different segments that would be helpful and engaging for visitors, and made the content front and center. To make it feel less like a brand telling people what’s what, we built the site to be social, inviting visitors to share their stories, advice and anecdotes.
A More Human, Modern Design
When approaching the design, we went away from flashy, hackneyed graphics and tried to keep it simple and centered on people. We wanted to focus on the emotion of visitors who are concerned about their children’s health and proud of their accomplishments and creativity as a family. Recipes, baby photos and other social and educational content would take center stage.
Posted by Adrian Ho
Ever since I read the Atlantic article about the IARPA building software that analyses metaphors to search for potential terrorist activity, I’ve been thinking about all the different applications of this thinking to what we do. I was spurred into action by yesterday’ announcement that the traditional FDA food pyramid has been replaced by a more modern food plate.
The metaphoric shift here is quite clear – from “diets that are built” to “diets that are eaten. However there are some less obvious consequences that emerge from this change such as the loss of the hierarchy of foods like grains which used to occupy the base of the pyramid. Or the elimination of a mechanistic “builder” mindset towards the feeding of oneself and one’s family.
While subtle, these metaphors clearly shape behaviour in different ways, however beyond the terribly hackneyed television ad construction of using a metaphoric illustration and then ending the spot with “that’s sort of like (insert product), I don’t think we use metaphors enough. Seems like they could be very interesting briefs for writing and design?
Posted 05.27.11 by Becky Lang
Tech investor and all-around rich guy Peter Thiel is getting press today for his Twenty Under Twenty program, which awards innovative young thinkers with $100K.
Getting paid to not go into debt for the next 15 years definitely has its appeal. After all, now that college prices are spiking, people are starting to question the merit of higher ed in the first place. Don’t you wish you could ask someone who just graduated what they think about it? Luckily, this very blogger happens to be 23 and one year out of college. (Har har.)
Since graduating and starting to shell out hundreds of dollars every month paying back my degree in English/Cultural Studies/ Journalism (what can you say, I had dollar signs in my eyes), I’ve been surprised by how negative my opinions about college have become. Sure I loved the 4 years I borrowed from the rest of my life, where I got to write papers about food porn and take naps every afternoon, but once you start paying for it, it seems a lot less lovable.
Almost every skill that I learned during that time that I actually use now came from internships. Aside from Chinese language classes and a couple classes in Freudian lit and post-colonial studies, I learned little that I still actually think about. Beyond that, if someone was dying to know more about Freud or post-colonialism, it’s increasingly easier for them to learn those subjects on Wikipedia, iPad apps, social learning sites and in good old libraries (and eLibraries). Those things are generally free. Internships, however, make you actually work on deadlines and learn lessons like “What it’s like to publish a negative review and get told by anonymous web commenters to go kill yourself.” You don’t learn that in lecture.
Going further, a lot of what I learned in college was geared at making me think and speak like an academic, which is actually a totally useless skill in the real world. Why learn to have a point counterpoint about “jouissance” other than to come off as a total prick over a wine and cheese sampler? Why spend years on a dissertation that no one will read without learning how to turn it into an eBook or pitch it as an article in a magazine? Internships teach you how to actually create things geared for the real world of understanding and consumption.
Peter Thiel’s approach is somewhat different from mine. It assumes that these teenagers already have the know-how to take $100K and invest it wisely. Looking at descriptions of them, they are clearly extraordinarily brilliant, and probably capable of doing just that. But for the rest of us, a higher ed model built around the old paradigm of apprenticeships, now incarnated into internships, might save us money and help us get more jobs.
-Becky Lang
Posted 05.26.11 by Becky Lang
A default conversation I often have with my dad is, “What features do you think will be on the next iPad?”
Now, my dad and I have very different approaches to technology. I dive in and intuit everything, and he reads extensively first. When he bought an iPod, he actually read iPod and iTunes for Dummies before booting it up. So while he subscribes to Mac World, he’s the kind of user that still needs to read a few arguments/ instructional chapters before putting a password on his Wi-fi.
Last time we were having our iPad conversation, he said, “Do you think the next one will have Flash? I really hope it does.” This surprised me. I should have figured my dad would know what Flash was – he is an architect after all, and has to use a lot of complicated software. But after I realized that he knew what Flash was, I was surprised to find that the “my dad” demographic was so for it. Why?
My basic theory would be that people who are in favor of Flash are not fully participating in the social aspect of the Internet. If you’re watching movie previews and online shopping, printing coupons and reading The New York Times, the preeminence of Flash might not bother you. It might even contribute to your entertainment.
Let’s do a thought experiment and travel back in time to when I was a younger pup who did not know anything about HTML and just liked to hang out on the Internet, writing on Live Journal and finding new indie bands to listen to on my 2nd-gen iPod. I wasn’t exactly sure what Flash was, but whenever I right-clicked on something and saw that it was in Flash, I was disappointed. It seemed locked, part of some higher-level corporate Internet. It did not want to be shared and copied, it wanted to stay where it was, communicating what people had put so much money into communicating.
What I like about HTML5 is it strives to make everything pluckable. Nothing you click on is a dead image that you can’t copy and paste and share on one of the dozens of places people are sharing content. It feels like you can really dig your hands in and become part of it, rather than surfing and running into all these walls. The ultimate impact of switching to HTML5 is an internet that feels more open, interactive and transparent.
I want Steve Jobs to keep up the fight. Maybe cuz I like a fight, but mostly because I want to see what people create while trying to find a better way around it.
-Becky Lang
Posted 05.24.11 by Becky Lang
I had to laugh when I saw the Gizmodo headline “Ballmer Promises over 500 New WP7 Features in Mango Update.” One thing we think about at Zeus Jones is how frequently software fails to engage consumers simply because it’s so overloaded with features, making it – above-all- confusing. 500 features almost seems like a parody of a common criticism of Microsoft.
Just like with graphic design, a platform can benefit from minimalism. The best-selling apps are often one-note functions that fulfill a specific need, rather than providing dozens of ways to approach one task.
Admittedly, a smart phone is a lot more complex than an app, and it does need more features. But even despite that, it seems like Microsoft’s new tricks are just keeping up with other phones, rather than developing anything revolutionary. When you’re talking about threading email conversations or image search features that Google discovered first, you’re implicitly saying “We didn’t create anything new.”
But despite all that, maybe people just hate these phones because they feature primarily white text on a plain black background. Why that design choice? It’s one of my pet peeves, and it gives the phone a flat, one-dimensional affect.
What do you think? Is there hope for this phone?
-Becky Lang
Posted by Adrian Ho
Here are the slides from our presentation at Planningness last week.
The presentation was about our realisation that our traditional strategy and production processes were holding us back as we tried to build more modern kinds of marketing programs. Through the course of some other projects we landed upon the idea of production as strategy or thinking as you make and making as you think. We’ve tried to lay out some of the things we’ve learned along the way – but we’re definitely still learning.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Also, another big call out to Mark and Claire who (yet again) put on another fantastic event with some really inspiring speakers. We had a great time as usual and it was extremely nice not having to board a plane hungover the next day!
Posted 05.20.11 by Becky Lang
There are lots of things we want from the next iPad, but what would really sell me on it is if it presented a way to make touch-screen typing easier.
I don’t think the final solution should have to be something like this Kickstarter project geared to make typing feel more like touch-typing.
Tablets aren’t going to reach their peak of usability until we can easily input data into them without slowly fumbling over keys or sticking them in a diaper. (OK I’m being way too mean to this project. I do kind of want one.)
It may be time that we move beyond touch typing.
The Android platform’s swipe technology is a huge step in the right direction. It’s the totally intuitive idea that almost no one would ever think to come up with. I was shocked recently when I watched a friend send a rapid-fire text politely blowing off a guy she’d met the night before with nothing but a few casual swipes of her thumb. That same message would take me minutes on an iPhone.
What Apple needs to do if they want iPads to be able to take on traditional laptop roles is completely revolutionize typing. Swipe is great, but it still requires looking at the keyboard (as far as I know).
I’m not sure what the solution is, but Apple has a good track record of inventing what other people can’t figure out, so fixing this problem would keep them right in stride.
-Becky Lang
Posted 05.12.11 by Becky Lang
I’m sure I’m not the first person to say, “Naming things is hard.” If naming was easy, firms wouldn’t charge exorbitant fees to deliver names. How much do you think Interbrand made off with before delivering the name Bing and saying, good luck with that, Microsoft?
Why should naming be hard? Why can’t you look at a new video chat service and say, “Ah yes, let’s call it Sky Peer-to-Peer … er … Skype! Done. Bring me my millions.”
Here are my theories:
1. From a semiotic point of view
All words are mostly arbitrary. Some have onomatopoeic qualities. Some family terms reflect babies’ first sounds. But for the most part, they have little to do with what they describe, simply getting glued on at some point in time. What makes them stick is their cultural context and collective use. Picture the name Skype before we saw its logo, it’s ability to keep long-distance relationships steamy, etc. It was just a silly word, and most of these silly words don’t mean much until the brand itself gains prestige. If the brand fails to gain positive associations – hi, Bing – the name is doomed from the start.
It’s easier for me to name something when I can see the packaging or website it will go on, because almost any name looks a lot less meaningless when attached to good design.
2. From a communication point of view
People tend to want names to broadcast a lot. Most naming assignments will include more elements to get across than words you’re allowed to use. “Ok, in two words, we need to communicate kid-friendly, educational, progressive, fun and technologically-friendly.” This isn’t impossible. You can come up with a metaphor or sound association that feels right according to those parameters, but it’s going to take time. Why? Mostly because you need to blow through all the possible names that literally telegraph those qualities, which you go down endless alleyways of Thesaurus entries and word lists to develop. You need to get all the ABC’s of Computers for Tots out of your system before you end up with Leap Frog. But like I said in number one, Leap Frog isn’t going to make a whole lot of sense at first. Names need to grow into their brand before they work. It’s a leap of faith, in some sense. As you can see from this chart I made back in the day, having a less concrete, less telegraphic name isn’t a boon to success. You have to give customers credit that they’ll figure out what your product is some other way.
Naming has some mystical connotations. Who named all the animals? Who named them in thousands of different languages? It’s a hard thing to do, and the best you can do is come up with your own ritual for getting your brain going. For me, I have to start by getting all the boring technical ideas out of my head, as well as the ridiculous, silly and inappropriate ones. By then, I’ve scanned the associations from every angle, gotten myself relaxed, and finally I can start to get somewhere.
Posted 05.11.11 by Becky Lang
This photography project showcases refrigerators around the world. They would not want to look into mine …
Check out this Flexbook design by Hao-Chun Huang. Be afraid Steve Jobs. Be very afraid.
I’m the only smoker at Zeus Jones. Maybe I should get some of these electronic cigarettes so I can blow water vapor in everyone’s faces all day. Or not. Either way, I love the crabby cynicism of the writer of this New York Times article.
This branding firm’s identity probably attracts a lot of vampires.
This tiny 9m x 9m house is probably going to get more and more common as the world population increases.
Finally, in case you didn’t hear from hundreds of people on Twitter, Buzzfeed declared us the most “hipster” town yesterday. Minnpost had some interesting thoughts about this.
Posted by Adrian Ho
MAE-WAN HO : Why beauty is truth and truth beauty from Institute of Science in Society on Vimeo.
I was back in London briefly a month ago for a conference my mum put on around the convergence of beauty and truth in art and science. I may be biased, but it was without question the best conference I’ve been to in ages. She brought together a really eclectic and group of artists and scientists many of whom had never met each other yet who spoke about their work in a brilliantly coherent way.
I left with a profound sense of relief that there are people who are asking important questions and trying to find answers through their work.
My mum’s talk which opened up the event is above. She’s planning on releasing more of the talks here on her Vimeo and also here on her main site. The full description of the conference is available here.
