Via Kottke #

Well, well, well. As a proud owner of a Nike+ FuelBand # I agree.

Speaking at the launch of Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital, which he co-authored with AKQA chairman Ajaz Ahmed, Stefan Olander, vice-president of digital sport for Nike, said brands should stop focusing on clicks or “likes”.

He said: “A whole industry is stuck on trying to force old metrics on to new channels.

“Too many businesses are thinking ‘I need to sell inventory’, rather than ‘How can I add value to a smartphone, or a new device?‘”

On the topic of social media, Olander questioned the recent valuation of digital companies such as Facebook, commenting that a $100bn valuation of a company based upon an advertising model is “a little risky”.

He said: “Advertising is an old model that is being squeezed into the new framework of social media, when the fact is that people don’t want to be interrupted.”

According to Olander, Google AdWords is the only commercial model that is proven to work.

He said: “You look at the Instagram $1bn valuation – and Instagram doesn’t make money.

“But it will be interesting to see, when it is combined with Facebook’s platform, what value that creates.”

Nike has moved away from investing in advertising to the creation of digital services such as Nike+. According to Olander, “once you have established a direct relationship with a consumer, you don’t need to advertise to them”.

Via Media Week #

Or, expecting more from Seth.

I know I’m walking on thin ice here as he has no doubt thousands of avid readers and supporters, but I find myself having to be a little critical of Seth Godin’s post today.

I’m not often taken by Seth’s daily dish #. There’s nothing wrong with the advice that he serves up, it’s just that there’s a lot of stuff that is irrelevant to me and my work. Relevance is important, because as he points out in a list in today’s post which I’ll get to in a minute, one should “Focus on the scarce resource online: attention.” And of course, just like that TV show, if I don’t like what I’m seeing I can change the channel.

I followed a Tweet that led me to today’s post from Seth, and it caught my eye because I’m always irritated by messages that emanate from social media marketing companies or SEO companies that promise the earth but actually offer very little, and at first his post struck a chord with me. And by the way, I’m not suggesting that Seth is even remotely in the same camp as those folks I just mentioned. Still, I felt a discomfort with his list #.

It’s a comprehensive list and was no doubt crafted by Seth to suit his audience, one that he surely knows by now, although I feel that the title is relevant only to those who want to do that (its title is How To Make Money Online.) And those that want to do that will no doubt be spurred on further after reading his post, for better or for worse. For everyone else, I’m not so sure of its value.

As I went over the list a few times I found it becoming more meaningless with each pass. It felt ridiculously outdated. And there’s my, hopefully mild, diss on Seth. It would also be a diss on any readers who think that the list is important in 2012 though.

Here’s why: Do we still not understand how the web works and how people use it? In 2012? Do we still need these self-help style lists? If we do, then unfortunately we haven’t come very far since the advent of the world wide web in the 1990′s.

We’ve had Web 1.0, and we’ve had Web 2.0 but there won’t be a Web 3.0. We now have Mobile. Seth’s list may have better served his audience if he’d made that the subject and the content.

You can read it here #.

Via: PSFK #

Some of my Boards on Pinterest..

Or: Really? Guys are scared of Pinterest?

This morning I read this on Salon.com: Pinterest’s Gender Trouble # . The headline struck me as odd on two levels. 1. Trouble, not problem or issue, but trouble. Strange choice of that word I thought. 2. Really?

I think it’s a meta moment. Either Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams has written a shallow article about, um nothing, no trouble. Or guys are shallow. Or both. As Salon has published the article I suppose it makes it relevant somehow. I think I should write an article about how Twitter is too gender-balanced and how that’s a problem.

Anyway, I think the person who left this comment below is on to something. The word he/she could have used in place of the phrase ‘not as important’ is ‘snobbery.’

vp19
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2012 07:55 AM PDT
There’s also a geographic bent to Pinterest. Studies have shown that a disproportionate percentage of its members are in heartland states such as Iowa, as opposed to tech-centric coastal states such as New York, Massachusetts and California for other social networking sites. So not only does Pinterest trend female, its strength is in “flyover country,” not states teeming with Ivy League and Stanford alums. (Obviously, then, it’s simply not as important.)

Now I doubt that Facebook’s 200 million members in the USA are stuck in “flyover country.” And I guess the guys are ok with Facebook because they can leer at the personal pictures of women posted up there or something. You can’t do that on Pinterest. Oh wait, are we saying that there are no guys in “flyover country”?

In another comment, after a discussion about Cat Ladies, things veer rather too close to homophobia.

disigny
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2012 08:46 AM PDT
Tell the truth now: how many “Cat Gentlemen” do you know?! (who aren’t Gay)

And then there’s the “what females do are totes inscrutable to me..” comment.

MichaelL
WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2012 06:44 AM PDT
From a male perspective, Pinterest appears like what I used to see middle or high school girls doing in their bedrooms – cutting out pages from magazines and pasting them together into collages of images. It was inscrutable to me then, and it’s inscrutable to me now. Nevertheless, I’m sure it has resonance with them, so I just figure I’m not their target audience and move along.

I really like Pinterest, I like it a great deal more than Facebook and (gasp!) Engadget. I post manly things on my Boards – I mean who the hell is more manly than Harry Crews? No one, I say, no one! Check him out on my Pinterest! #.

I also love the company of women.

With today’s news that Microsoft is investing a large chunk of money in Barnes & Noble’s Nook unit #, $300 million to be exact, it had me thinking about how B&N investors had been largely ignoring the Nook division as it soaked up profits from B&N’s bottom line.

I wrote about it here # where I had asked myself a question in terms of B&N competing with Amazon: How can a company worth $719 million (at the time) compete with a company worth $88 billion? And one that already has about 60% of the e-book business, not to mention a huge percent of the printed versions. And then there’s the shareholders, a good many of whom are institutional. They drove down the price of B&N stock when Lynch suggested spinning off the digital business. Lynch is right when he says “shareholders seemed to be underestimating the Nook’s potential.” The Nook might just be able to compete in the e-reader category as it already has a 27% share of the market.

Well Lynch, B&N’s CEO, gets the last laugh, at least for now as we won’t know how the Microsoft deal will help in the long run, and as B&N’s stock is up 52% today the investment community must be happy too. And perhaps I was right too, when I mentioned that 27% e-reader market share.

Microsoft saw value. It had to as it is being left out of the Tablet market.

We live in interesting times. With Apple being sued, along with a handful of book publishers # for suspected price fixing activities, and Amazon sitting pretty in the background with its own price fixing model at hand, i.e sell low, things looked bleak for the Nook. Yet one partner with deep pockets provides the momentum for the Nook to step up into the fray. The e-book, e-reader wars are on.

Whatever happens, the battle for e-book or e-reader supremacy won’t affect me until the demise of the book. Long form reading on back-lit screens is not for me. As much as I’ve embraced all things digital I still remain firmly committed to the tactile in both my reading needs and my audio listening preferences. Books and records; the heft of the hardback, and the fidelity of the needle for me every time.

Ok, let’s switch gears.

I have just finished two books. Novels that have enthralled me like no others in quite some time. Both debuts from two gifted writers- one Irish one French. City of Bohane by Kevin Barry and HHhH from Laurent Binet are so startlingly original it seems unfair to compare them to other literary endeavors, yet in literature as in digital actually, the new new thing is rarely completely new.

Page 5, City of Bohane:

‘Did he have it coming, Jen?’
‘Don’t they always, Cusacks?’
Logan shaped his lips thinly in agreement.
‘The Cusacks have always been crooked, girl.’

Jenni was seventeen that year but wise beyond it. Careful she was, and a saucy little ticket in her lowriders and wedge heels, her streaked hair pineappled in a high bun. She took the butt of a stogie from the tit pocket of her white vinyl zip-up, and lit it.

‘Get enough on me plate now ‘cross the footbridge, Mr H.’
‘I know that.’
‘Cusacks gonna sulk up a welt o’ vengeance by ‘n’ by and if yer asking me, like? A rake o’ them tossers bullin’ down off the Rises is the las’ thing Smoketown need.’
‘Cusacks are always great for the old talk, Jenni.’
‘More ‘n talks what I gots a fear on, H. Is said they gots three flatblocks marked Cusacks ‘bove on the Rises this las’ while an’ that’s three flatblocks fulla headjobs with a grá on ‘em for rowin’, y’check me?’
‘All too well Jenni.’

That conversation takes place 50 years in the future in a city in the Southwest of Ireland. Things have not improved economically. Being Irish, Barry clearly has an ear for the cadence and lilt of Ireland’s working class phrasing and further deconstructs it as if everything now, here in the future is only spoken, where words are no longer pressed to paper. The palpable violence that ghost-shades the entire book reminds me of Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange’

Page 1, A Clockwork Orange:

‘What’s it going to be then, eh?’
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much neither.

And as I consider the language and grammar deconstructions of both those chapters, the upending of rules as if rules in literature ever mattered, I’m reminded of Russell Hoban’s classic post-apocalypse novel, ‘Riddley Walker,’ a telling of history by the survivors that couldn’t be written – it was an oral history.

Hoban went beyond Burgess and Barry by taking the grammar deconstruction to its obvious place in a post-apocalyptic world, a place where there were no longer written words. Language then became free of grammatical constraint, where punctuation in oral history was not mandatory- it was personal. The speaker or narrator decided whether to pause or exclaim for effect, or not..

Page 1, Riddley Walker:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly. He done the reqwyert he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and ther we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, ‘Your tern now my tern later.’ The other spears gon in then and he wer dead and the steam coming up off him in the rain and we all yelt, ‘Offert!’

In all three of these books the central characters are “telling” not writing. The only narrative they’re left with is oral history.

In future the digital version of this will be known as Twitter.

In HHhH, Laurent Betin goes back into history to the period in Nazi Germany just prior to World War 2. It is, ostensibly, a historical novel, one that follows the rise through the ranks of the SS and SA, of the cruel Nazi, Rienhard Heydrich, who became too well known as the sinister figure “the Butcher of Prague.”

Yet is it? Heydrich did exist and he did commit atrocities across Europe during the war, but Betin is not satisfied with the genre. He wrestles openly in the book with his fear of memory polluting his attempts, as Brett Easton Ellis puts it, at “neutral, journalistic honesty.” Or as Wells Tower says “HHhH is an astonishing book – absorbing, moving, for the agony and acuity with which its author engages the problem of making literary art from unbearable historical fact.”

Here’s an example. Betin is describing how fighters had slipped out of Czechoslovakia and into France where they joined with the French army to battle the Germans:

…a few months later it will be practically a whole division and it will fight alongside the French army during the war. I could write quite a lot about the Czechs in the French army: the 11,000 soldiers, made up of 3,000 volunteers and 8,000 expatriate Czech conscripts, along with the brave pilots, trained at Chartres, who will shoot down or help to shoot down more than 130 enemy planes during the Battle of France.. But I’ve said that I don’t want to write a historical handbook. This story is personal. That’s why my visions sometimes get mixed up with known facts. It’s just how it is.

Actually, no: that’s not how it is. That would be too simple. Rereading one of the books that make up the foundation of my research – a collection of witness accounts assembled by a Czech historian, Miraslav Ivanov, under the title The Attack on Heydrich – I become aware to my horror, of the mistakes I’ve made concerning Gabcik.

Remember this a novel about a true story. We know from history much of the story. Yet does the book by Miraslav Ivanov mentioned above even exist? Does/did Ivanov?

As David Lodge points out “Binet has given a new dimension to the nonfiction novel by weaving his writerly anxieties about the genre into the narrative, but his story is no less compelling for that…”

It is truly a work of art. And I believe that now I’ve read it, it deserves its place on my bookshelf as a future classic, where someone else can pick it up and consider its heft, both literally and figuratively.

Something that an e-reader cannot provide.

The Books:
City of Bohane: A Novel
HHhH: A Novel
Riddley Walker, Expanded Edition
A Clockwork Orange (Norton Critical Editions)

“The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.”

(Uses Mechanical Turk to create human descriptions of photographs.) Via The New Aesthetic #

File under the Internet of Things along with Little Printer #

Lomography: An analog company surviving in a digital world #

In my class the subject of “digital marketing” arises quite often (not least because I bring it up as a discussion point..) and as we kick around the subject it becomes apparent to my students that they cannot learn “digital marketing” just as they can’t “learn” social media. Yes, the so-called experts lard on the tips and tricks of social media marketing in endless streams of newsletters, Tweets and blogs, but ultimately it all boils down to online social media brand channel marketing, and that, I presume, doesn’t sound as sexy. “Hi, I’m an online social media digital brand marketing expert” is quite the mouthful. What is it that you do again..?

Social is for people, marketing is for brands. Don’t be confused.

Social media marketing is like an online version of direct mail marketing: where the direct mail folks can focus on demographics such as median age and income in zipcodes, social media marketers attempt to divine the truth in profiles of social network users. The direct mail folks presume that everyone in my zipcode will eventually require a new roof, which statistically speaking is probably true. I just don’t drop a letter in the mail letting my local roofer know that I “Like” him and to please stay in touch.

Meanwhile, if everyone who “Likes” all those brands on Facebook, really “Liked” them and bought their products, we’d probably be able to bring the US economy out of the doldrums by the end of 2012.. Engagement in the US economy would provide better results than everyone just having an “awareness” of it I would say.

So what I’m attempting to parse here is that marketers’ use of media, whether you call those media social or not, is not something new. It’s ancient history. What’s new is the online platform, and just glomming your marketing on to the web without a decent strategy and an understanding of your audience, (while hiding behind a bush called “social,”) may result in unexpected results, e.g. none.

Let’s now look at an analog company surviving in the face of a digital onslaught. And while we do, let’s consider that effective “digital marketing” is just marketing grounded in a strategy that embraces the power of the web and mobile platforms and what people do on those platforms.

Lomography # is not so much a company as it is a vision. It is also a passion. It is niche and vibrant. As they say themselves “Lomography is a Magazine, a Shop, and a Community dedicated to analogue photography.” #

First and foremost it embraces people who have fallen for the Lomo, a rare Russian camera #, that as the NY Times says ‘produces charming photographs that often contain artsy blurry streaks and are oversaturated with color due to the camera’s body design and construction..’

One of Lomography’s founders says this:

“Instant photography is covered by digital cameras and the iPhone,” said Mr. Fiegl. “You want to share a photo of something right now, you are covered. But our version of analog is different because it’s fun and unexpected, you don’t know what’s coming and you won’t, for a few days or a week, when you get the pictures back.”

Lomography’s founders understood the market for digital was covered so they created a new, niche market instead. And then they looked to the web and began to use that platform to allow Lomo lovers to share in an online community.

Lomography doesn’t compete with Instagram, Hipstamatic or Flickr because they don’t have to.

“We’re growing year-over-year. Our retail sales are more powerful than the Web,” said Mr. Fiegl. “People play around with the cameras, they understand it and it convinces them.”

The company is future-proofing its business by preparing for an era when the rest of the vestiges of analog photography become extinct. They have installed film processing facilities in some of their retail stores and offer a mail-in development service for their users who don’t live near a drugstore or place that process photos.

Although Lomography regularly designs and releases new products, including a 35-millimeter movie camera called the LomoKino and different kinds of film each year, it has no plans to make or market a digital camera.

“We’ve considered it,” said Mr. Fiegl. “But in a way, Lomography is freer. We don’t have much competition and we don’t have to top anyone’s megapixel count. We’ve decided to stick with the analog side of things.”

They created a new market. Here’s the story #

Designer, developer and mobile expert Josh Clark # challenges Jakob Nielsen on mobile usability: we should be asking how we can do more, not less, with the mobile experience.

He starts here:

For all of Jakob Nielsen’s many great contributions to web usability over the years, his advice for mobile is just 180-degrees backward. His latest guidelines perpetuate several stubborn mobile myths that have led too many to create ‘lite’ mobile experiences that patronise users, undermine business goals, and soak up design and tech resources.

The notion that you should create a separate, stripped-down version for ‘the mobile use case’ might be appropriate if such a clean mobile use case existed, but it doesn’t.

[Edit] With more mobile phones being sold than PCs, with a growing number of people using phones as their exclusive web client, the idea that we should treat the desktop as the ‘real’ website is simply becoming quaint.

If I’m understanding the argument correctly, it would appear that Nielsen wants to hang on to a problem that he’s used to solving: User experience on desktops and laptops. Here’s his advice #, advice that includes his idea that a brand should have two sites, one desktop, one mobile. That is just plain wrong and Clark takes him to task over it. One url across all devices is the correct answer. Near-ubiquity in mobile demands it.

Here’s a synopsis of Clark’s points:

And the wrap up:

Mobile isn’t less. In fact, I think the real question is often, “how can I do more on mobile?” Because these devices, despite their smaller size, can do more than desktop. They’re full of sensor superpowers. In many cases, there are opportunities to add content and features to mobile experiences, rather than strip them away. The ideal that we should all start with is that we should build a single website and then gradually enhance the experience to adapt to the capabilities of the specific device.