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Zero Moment of Truth – ZMOT – A New Mental Model of Marketing

January 30th, 2012 by Steve Nelson

All too often I get around to something that has been in my "must-read" pile for far too long and ask myself why on earth I haven't read it before. Google's "Winning the Zero Moment of Truth - ZMOT" has been hanging around on my Kindle since last September, and when I read it last week, I kicked myself for not sailing through it earlier.

You can read it too, for free, in about an hour, and you really should. It's free because it is an extended white paper for search engine marketing the Google way, but it really is more than that. It speaks to the changing model of behavior among all purchasers that has led to Google's success, and by extension, anyone who factors that model into how they go to market.

The basic premise is builds on a traditional path to purchase, modeled as Stimulus + Shelf + Experience. Stimulus is where you are first aware of a product, through advertising or identification of your need. Shelf is where you first evaluate the product, sometimes by literally picking it off the shelf and examining it. Experience is where you have bought the product and evaluate it post purchase as fulfilling your needs and expectations. The shelf encounter has been referred to as the "first moment of truth", where your examination leads you to choose yes or now, purchase or not. The actual product experience is the "second moment of truth" where your use of the product leads you to judge whether it fulfilled its promise or not.

Google's Jim Lecinski posits a "zero moment of truth" that now influences most buying decisions. Before even hitting the shelf, people hit the Internet (Google, they hope) to apply a first filter to decide which path to take. Marketers who feel they can make their case at the "first moment of truth" may be left emptyhanded.

The book does a good job laying out the model for those who haven't figured it out already, and gives some good exercises and practical steps to apply to your own product or brand. Lecinski also highlights the shift from messaging to modeling as the holy grail of marketers. I still hear too many marketers base first principles around the messages they want to convey to the marketplace, ignoring the complexity of the connected consumer and the network of influence that is often impervious to top-down messaging efforts.

I love to see new models well articulated, even if they are thinly disguised promotions of the most successful player of the model, and this is a good source for any marketer who needs a refresher course on how things have changed, and how quickly they continue to change.

Interesting contrasts

While ZMOT's primary contrast with older models of marketing is of great value, I noted a couple of contrasts with some recent ideas that are worth exploring.

Serendipity

There's a tension between highly effective search models and consumer-directed targeting on the one hand, and the rewards of serendipity on the other hand. Chapter 4 of ZMOT goes into the effect of rankings and ratings on peoples ZMOT choices. Yet people making more and more decisions based on ZMOT rankings, whether they're Yelp stars or Google's PageRank telling you what pages to see, will miss out on the discovery of the outliers, or products where the one good review out of 20 is from someone who has the same quirky taste as you. Salon explores this phenomenon in more detail in the article "How Yelp destroyed the thrill of exploring".

Though this runs counter to Google's hyperefficient market model, I think algorithms can factor serendipity in balance with relevance and user goals - (like the BananaSlug search engine's "long tail search" algorithm.)

Yes or not yes?

Lecinski isn't just a pitchman for Google, he's also an enthusiast for change, innovation and progress. From ZMOT:

"How can marketers keep up? 'Say yes.' That's one of Lorraine Twohill's favorite sayings, and I love it. It's always easy to be cautious and say 'no.' But ideas come from everywhere now. Embrace that! Say yes as often as possible. Be nimble. Take risks, try new things, learn and be surprised."

This is in contrast with another philosophy I've embraced from another great little book that you can read too, in about an hour, and you really should. Derek Sivers's "Anything You Want" isn't free, but it's a fresh breeze on entrepreneurial success. In it, Sivers says,

"If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about something, say 'no.'
When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than 'Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!' -- then say 'no.'
When you say 'no' to most things, you leave room in your life to throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say 'HELL YEAH!'
Every event you get invited to. Every request to start a new project. If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about it, say 'no.'
We're all busy. We've all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out."

Yes or no? Who is right? Maybe the answer is that Sivers's "HELL YEAH!" vs "no" is a ZMOT moment for us all.

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Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing Not So Smooth

November 23rd, 2011 by Steve Nelson

When Mark Zuckerberg introduced the new Open Graph at F8 in September, it was touted as enabling more frictionless social sharing of activities on the internet.  It sounded good at the time: by opting in to Facebook-ready versions of websites and applications, you didn't need to think before sharing. You knew by opting in that everything you did was sharable. The friction was removed from your act of sharing.

However, it seems that the friction only got shifted to the person you are sharing with, and in addition, the relevance of what you are sharing is being highly diluted.

Before:

  • Alice reads an article on the Washington Post. She clicks "Recommend".
  • Alice's recommendation shows up on her wall, and so also shows up on her friends' news feeds.
  • Alice's friend Bob sees the link, and trusting Alice's recommendation, clicks and goes straight to the article.

After:

  • Alice, having opted in to the Facebook Open Graph-enabled Washington Post Social Reader, reads an article on the Washington Post.
  • Whether she would recommend anyone read the article or not, the social reader posts to Alice's timeline that she read the article.
  • The post shows up in the newsfeed of Alice's friends.
  • Bob sees the post, and clicks on the link to see what Alice read.
  • Bob is confronted with a page requiring him to grant the Washington Post all sorts of permission to share everything he reads with all his friends, unless he opts for a different privacy permission.
  • Bob says screw that and goes away. Or if he's like me, he selects the text of the headline, right clicks to look up on Google and goes to the page to read the article without all the permission nonsense.

What we're left with is less sharing and less relevance. More friction? Not for Alice, maybe, but more for Bob and for the free flow of relevant information.

Thanks to Molly Wood for ranting about this issue here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57324406-256/how-facebook-is-ruining-sharing/

 

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Intranets 2012: Trends and Predictions

November 9th, 2011 by Steve Nelson

Intranets 2012
I took a dip last week into the world of intranets for a client who was bringing together their content and community managers from around the world. I offered my take on trends and predictions the digital workplace: where things are in 2011, where things are headed in 2012 and beyond.

I drew from recent experience: having helped this client re-architect their internet presence I knew about their organization, customers, and platform; from my work with Sun Microsystems prior to their acquisition by Oracle, where I was part of the team to turn their intranet from a top down, centralized system to a more decentralized and social system; and from my work with Linden Lab, the creators of the virtual world Second Life, where I brought the collaborative tools of the intranet into the virtual company workplace we built for them inside of Second Life.

I also drew from a variety of resources, such as the Nielsen-Norman Group’s Intranet Design Annual 2011 of the top ten intranets - always an informative document.

One helpful model that provides perspective relative to these trends is the Gartner Hype Cycle. A number of features of new and trending intranets fall all over the graph, and it helps to look at their take on areas such as enterprise information management and content management when considering how real or out there intranet trends are. For instance, “Virtual Worlds”, which was certainly an intranet trend 4 years ago (when Gartner themselves predicted that by now, 80% of users would be visiting the internet with their avatar), is now at the bottom of the Trough of Disillusionment.

“Trends” were things I observed or discovered during my dive into source material. “Predictions” were things I made up as I went along. You'll see that these trends aren’t isolated silos, many of them interrelate with each other, and so it isn’t really a linear list. But in a linear blog post, I have to start somewhere.

Platform

Although intranet platforms have specific features that are certainly part of other trends: customizable, mobile, the most significant platform trend is the adoption of platforms and versions that include these features. Enough time has passed between the introduction of Web 2.0-influenced features and their planning, rollout, testing and deployment in real intranets. These feature are no longer just predicted or in pilot, but they are real. Besides specific features, the platforms have evolved in their ease of management, maintainability, extendability. This has had an effect on the teams assigned to intranet activities and their assignments.

People

Several factors are influencing the people who build, maintain and use the intranet. As I mentioned, the deployment of new platform versions has shifted assignments away from migration, deployment or more difficult wrangling of the platform into submission. According to Nielsen-Norman, three areas that have benefited from this are:

  • Usability testing and feedback into design
  • Tuning - especially in areas such as search effectiveness
  • Content - curating and culling.

Management teams are becoming more aware of the intranet and its importance to the company. Intranets that are well instrumented for specific key performance indicators are able to make more-than-anecdotal cases for their returns on investment, which brings the intranet positive attention at higher levels.  We are also seeing corporate buy-in as executives become social content creators with executive blogs and the like.

Intranet platforms also allow for more decentralization of management and governance. This decentralization was often accomplished by having many separate intranets, but now platforms can allow for this decentralization within a common framework.

But the most important constituents are the thousands of employees who integrate the intranet into their working experience. New intranet architectures aren’t just rolling out corporate data and functionality down to the employees, but emerge from the use of the intranet by the employees. With trends of the social and mobile intranets this comes to the fore.

One more thing to note relative to the people who use the intranet, especially when combined with some of the other trends such as mobile computing, is enhanced 24/7/52 connectivity to the company. This is a two-edged sword with many implications, and it warrants not just technical but management attention.

Parallel Tracks

You’ll also see the trend of the parallel path, based on the factors of platform and people. By parallel paths, I mean what’s going on in the intranet relative to what’s going on with the internet at large. There’s a high degree of overlap, and then there are the things that make each domain unique.

For instance, in the internet, multiple platforms and technologies are emerging, competing, evolving all the time, but for any given intranet, platform decisions are more locked into specific choices. External technology may be advancing with new solutions and platforms but for a company that has picked a specific version of a specific platform, they may not get those advances for some time.

On the other hand, the intranet may be able to do some specific things that aren’t available in the internet at large because certain assumptions can be factored in such as officially blessed software and hardware. Or things that would not be acceptable from a privacy standpoint can operate on the intranet. For instance, some intranets include with search results the names of other employees that were searching for the same thing. Because an internal resource has rules and expectations of usage and privacy, they might be able to get away with this, but imagine if every Google search told you exactly who else was looking for the same… remedies.

The key effect, though, of parallel paths is when people jump the track to the other side. When features available on the Internet at large are absent from the intranet, people have a tendency to make use of them for business purposes. When you ban certain websites from internal access, people use their phones to get to them. When an intranet is not sufficiently social, people move their business conversations to outside venues. This happened at Sun. More people used the private Sun employee group on Facebook than were actively using their intranet. These venues may still be private relative to the internet at large, but they are still beyond the governance or measurement of the intranet. They are telling in the kinds of features for future intranet development, and they will happen anyway, but this needs to be factored in.

You also see track-jumping in the other direction: as intranets become more social, people may begin using them for workplace-inappropriate socialization, picking up where they left off on Facebook in their own hours.

Social

Speaking of social, this is certainly a trend, and one with a number of related trends. At Sun we spoke of turning the intranet upside down, and rather than reflect a centralized-org-chart-mirroring view of the organization, we architected the new SunWeb to reflect how people do (and can) collaborate out of emerging social connections.

When I say social, I mean several things: architectural components of the underlying data, the interfaces offered to employees, and the adoption and use of the platform.

Architecturally, we see that rich individual profiles and connections are at the heart of a social platform. The connection graph of how people are connected to each other and to information is the key data structure.  Such a graph can certainly contain a representation of the top-down org-chart view of the organization, and its departments and groups and management. And it can contain the corporate eye-view of information, organized along department lines. But the graph can grow in other ways, based on people explicitly making connections and groups of interest, or having these connections recommended or realized based on how the network is actually used.  An explicit group might be formed as a Mac user interest group, or groups can be formed spontaneously by the system recognizing all Mac users. And search results can be factored by these social data.

Social ultimately means enhancing the ways people already work together, and integrating it into the platform.

Social participation and support begins with individuals, and in addition to having rich profiles as part of the social entry point for individuals, systems are being developed that provide social ratings or scores for individuals. Peter Reiser, now at Oracle, has devised a “community equity” score that factors in participation, contribution, influence and expertise.

As I mentioned in the "parallel tracks" trend, people now have an expectation of having systems support the state of connectedness with each other and with information.

Realtime

Another trend that follows user experience and expectation is the trend of the realtime intranet.  You see this in several ways. One of the ways is in the proliferation of Twitter or Facebook like status updates in the intranet. Once you have the social connectivity, seeing the activities of those people and groups you are connected with is natural. This capability is available to augment Intranets in products such as Yammer, but will be seen more in the platforms themselves.

Realtime access to information is also enabled via dashboards and mashups.

Realtime also incorporates the ability to establish intranet connections using variations of VoIP: Voice, Video and Virtual over IP.

Related to realtime is another time-factored collaboration mode, which is pop-up collaboration. This is where collaborative spaces that have a limited-time or special-purpose duration can quickly be established and used for the purpose.

Crowdsourcing

A byproduct of the social intranet is the ability to tap into the “wisdom of the crowds”. There are several trends to consider here.

First is the rich source of metadata available, both explicitly and implicitly generated, that follows the use of the intranet. Explicit metadata includes user commenting on or rating content, explicitly following or subscribing to other people, tagging information, and so on. Implicit metadata accumulates as people interact with the network. Similar to how Google tracks for what you are searching for, what you are clicking, what you are doing, tracking your actions helps promote valuable content based on what people are actually paying attention to or using.

Group creation and management of content includes the ability of individuals to create content, but also to collectively create and maintain content through systems such as wikis.

Question and answer systems such as Quora provide infrastructure for tapping into expertise in an explicit way.

Finally, incentive based idea factories are finding their way into the intranet though systems such as Spigit, where ideas can be proposed and promoted, voted on, and systems of employee incentives can be factored in to motivate employee innovation.

Semantic

Some of the trends I’ve alluded to, especially those that tie rich metadata to people, information, and actions, are at the heart of semantic web technologies that are finding their way into the intranet. This means that there is meaning defined or derived associated with data, so that searching for information, or the connections among people and information, can be automated and continually improved.

Semantic technologies allow different kinds of information to have a structural layering that captures information about the information that can be used to make searches or other interactions more accurate and efficient. Semantic data will also be critical in the natural language processing that follows speech recognition technologies. One of the amazing things about the new Siri capability of the iPhone 4s is not that it can recognize your speech, but that it can make so much sense out of it relative to the information it knows about.

Mobile

Mobile access to the intranet is a big driver of change and capabilities, and is interrelated with other trends as well.

Mobile access entails a number of issues. Mobile devices need to be supported, but mobility applies to the worker and her environment, not just the device. Mobile security needs to be ensured. Mobile worker policy, more of a management and governance issue than an intranet issue, will both be enforced and enabled via the intranet.

Twice as many of the winning sites in the 2011 Nielsen Norman annual had versions for  mobile devices compared to 2010. One trend is for mobile versions of an intranet to focus mobile specific features, and not be a mobile version of whole intranet . Mobile device support can also have some degree of control and specification when designed for a company-issued device. And there is a proliferation of location-aware apps, not just on mobile devices but on all platforms, that can both feed location-relevant information into the intranet, but serve up more relevant information to the end user.

There’s an App for That

One trend in computing that started with the proliferation of apps on the iPhone, moving on to the iPad, and now even to the desktop. It’s been an interesting dynamic change as what were once standalone applications such as word processors became browser-based applications, and what were once information sources such as websites became mobile apps. I think this is still shaking out, but with common development platforms afforded by technologies such as HTML5, where a common source base can be accessible via a browser or wrapped up in an app, I think you’ll still see both, depending on context. Even standalone apps that take advantage of reference or linking revert to a browser to fulfill the links.

The role of the app will be to encapsulate specific functions or content for easy access and interaction. Intranet apps will start to be more common, and not just on mobile devices.

In the Cloud

Lots of babies named “Cloud” were born this year, and not just because they’re 3rd generation flower children.  But to me “Cloud” is more than just storing a file somewhere outside of your own computer or server, and more than just serving up software from a server. The notion of cloud is access to information from wherever you are without having to think of how to address the information by location or even filename or URL. The cloud experience gets you to your information wherever it is.

Custom

Customization and personalization is not just cosmetic - it adapts the intranet to how individuals actually work and think. There may need to be common elements presented to all employees so that they can have a shared base of knowledge and experience.  Customization also presents challenges to support desks who don’t know exactly what an employee may be looking at when faced with a problem.  However, customization (as with other features) can happen explicitly and implicitly. Implicitly as usage patterns are observed, much like Facebook or Google customize views based on what it calculates as relevant to you. Customized collections of information sources or feeds make it easier for employees to have the information they need or use most where it is most conveniently accessed.  Finally, many platforms now have an ability to support user-selectable widgets and plug-ins.

Programmable

Programmability of an intranet can include lower-level APIs to the data or interface so that modifications or mashups can be created by people with both access credentials and technical capabilities or resources.

Data feeds can also be made available through RSS or other machine-consumable formats.

Finally, mashup toolkits like Zembly Yahoo Pipes make it easier for individuals to construct apps or widgets that incorporate multiple data sources.

Emergent Intelligence

The intranet is getting smarter through more capable, semantic and social software in the platform, through the experience and knowledge that accumulates through its operation, and in the experience of the groups who create, manage, maintain and use the intranet.  This results in the emergence of new collaborative capabilities in any company. There will be a real trend toward serendipitous, unexpected ideas and innovations enabled by these new smart intranets.  That’s my final prediction.

Summary

It’s easy to see in retrospect how these trends all interrelate. The challenge is to work in any of these areas while being aware of consequences and opportunities in all of them.

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Are You Ready for the Ready Phone?

November 7th, 2011 by Steve Nelson

I'm seeing a trend for the smartphone to be more always-ready. Three examples of this include:

  • iPhone Camera at the ready: "You can open the Camera app right from the Lock screen" in iOS 5
  • iPhone Siri at the ready "There’s more than one way to talk to Siri. When the screen is on, simply bring iPhone 4S up to your ear. You’ll hear two quick beeps to indicate that Siri is listening to you."
  • Galaxy Nexus Face Unlock at the ready: "With Face Unlock on Galaxy Nexus you can now unlock your phone with a smile. No complicated passwords to remember, just switch on your phone and look into the camera to quickly unlock your phone."

The app-centered phone computer suffers from how many steps between idealizing and realizing a task. By the time you unlock your phone, locate and launch the photo app, aim and shoot the UFO is gone.

Smartphones should add these to this sense of ready:

  • Unlock and Go App: combining Face Unlock with voice to confirm your ID and launch a specific app.
  • Siri APIs: Developers can create apps on a Mac that are Spotlight-aware, giving semantic capabilities to the OS X search engine (find all files that are images in landscape aspect ration taken with ISO 800 speed since last year). It would be nice if iOS apps were Siri aware so that you could trigger specific apps to launch in a specific state based on Siri responding to your request. Much like launching Apple's built in apps like Calendar, Contacts or Safari, you should be able to write an app and register its semantics (somehow) so that Siri could take you there.
  • QRCode Ready: This is the app that got me thinking about the above. I attended a webinar on mobile marketing with a focus on QR Codes, and clever ways that they are leading people from an encounter in many online and offline contexts to a specific app or web-based action. But when I see Jimmy Fallon holding up a QR Code on his show, (yeah, I know that's what the pause button is for on my DVR) and I fumble for my phone, enter the code, unlock it, find the icon for my QR Code app, launch it, chose the right mode to scan the barcode and aim and focus it on my TV screen, the moment has passed. Adoption and use of QR Codes would be greatly increased if I could aim my phone at the code and click and there it goes:

AP42.com

What else would make your mobile device ready-to-go?

 

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On the 30th Anniversary of My First Internet Post

November 1st, 2011 by Steve Nelson

The earliest artifact I can find that marks my presence on the Internet is 30 years old today. The fact that it is still there should tell you something about the longevity of your posts and tweets. (It may not have been my actual earliest post, just the oldest that has survived until today.)

Thanks to Google, we can see my post to the fa.editor-p newsgroup.  "fa.editor-p" is descried as an "Interest group in computer editors, both text and program." The "fa" means "From ARPAnet" and the "p" stands for "people".

November 1, 1981, 9:50 pm

At 9:50 pm I was probably at home accessing the PDP-11/70 at Zehntel via a dumb terminal (not really as perjorative as it sounds) over a modem of somewhere between 300 and 1200 baud. Even my email address at the time looks like something out of a badly written movie:  menlo70!sytek!zehntel!steve@Berkeley - some ungodly combination of UUCP mail gatewaying into ARPAnet.

For even more fun,  go to http://olduse.net tonight after 9:50pm and nav your way into fa.editor-p you'll see my post in all its green phosphor on black screen glory.  This project is described as "Olduse.net is Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago."

And I love this Q&A from its FAQ:

Q: What about privacy? I posted something 25 years ago that I regret.

A: It's not like this is the only copy of this archive of Usenet. Not a lot can be done about something that has by now echoed its way across the net for decades.

Think about that next time you tweet!

My first Internet Post captured on Google Groups

Via Google Groups

First Internet Post via http://olduse.net

First Internet Post via http://olduse.net

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“Hello, I’m an iPhone. And I’m an Android”

October 26th, 2011 by Steve Nelson

I'm thinking back to the classic Apple "Hello I'm a Mac. And I'm an PC" ad campaign with Justin Long and John Hodgman as I'm onto the 20th month with my Android-powered Nexus One Google phone. I had been holding out for a Verizon iPhone until Google was nice enough to give me one of theirs, unlocked and without contract. I've been impressed with Google integration, and though I haven't written extensively about my experience, my Android phone really has a lot of limitations.  I'm not sure it even counts as the "And I'm a PC" equivalent (as those ads didn't even start to poke fun at the user experience of Linux+Java users), but still. I've always been on the "Hello, I'm a Mac" side of the equation with computers, but on my mobile, I've been on the other side of the tracks.

I've played around with the iPhone 4s and have been impressed with the Siri voice integration system. I haven't used one as my regular mobile device enough to know if the novelty wears off, or whether it is another game changer. So far I think it is.

I have used the evolving Google Voice Search on my Nexus One. It has improved over the 20 months, both in its accuracy and in its results. The fact that it is backed by voice recognition servers that are continually learning and improving has always impressed me. Better recognition doesn't require a new software version - the servers it connects to are improving with every use. Google Voice Search accomplishes some of the same things as Siri does. But the Siri experience, with integration of multiple sources of information both in the phone's information space and on the Internet, is remarkable. The response via voice (vs. display only as with Google) adds to the experience. And the whimsy is a bonus, and is what makes it an Apple experience.

When I woke up this morning, this message was on my Nexus One:

Important Change 1. If you are using Android 2.2 or later version. Services and front apps(The Green items in the running list) cannot be killed directly, you have to force stop them manually. You can go to settings to ignore them automatically. 2. Ignore System apps: after you tapping OK button, it would build a ignore list automatically for you. You can go to settings to change the ignore list later.
"Important Change 1. If you are using Android 2.2 or later version. Services and front apps(The Green items in the running list) cannot be killed directly, you have to force stop them manually. You can go to settings to ignore them automatically. 2. Ignore System apps: after you tapping OK button, it would build a ignore list automatically for you. You can go to settings to change the ignore list later."

At first I thought it was an Android system message, but it was from an task-killer app I had installed. I can't imagine this kind of thing getting past the app folks at Apple, and I felt like John Hodgman with a phone.

So, not sure how much longer the waiting game goes on: iPhone 5? iPhone with 4G? I don't know, but I'm headed for "Hello, I'm an iPhone". Siriously.

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The Digital Dark Age

October 19th, 2011 by Steve Nelson

My son updated his status with "Anthropologists in 2,000 years are gonna be pretty pissed about how we store information today." True, but I think we'll feel the effects before that.

When I was growing up, I not only read the magazines my parents subscribed to and the books on their shelves, but also consumed old magazines and books that I found at my grandparents' houses. My view of the world in the 60's and 70's was expanded by taking in the cultural records of a previous generation, including those my parents read as children. Whether it was Readers Digest from the 30s or the Jerry Todd series of books from the 20s that idealized small-town America for me (and apparently for Ronald Reagan). Having access to cross-generational source material deepened my perspectives at the same time I was learning about the world around me from more contemporary magazines.

Such as Mad Magazine.

Much of what I learned about popular culture, including faraway places such as Madison Avenue, suburbia, teenage-hood, adulthood, came from the pages of Mad Magazine. I each eagerly awaited each issue, as well as the paperback books that anthologized Mad going back to the 50s.  Even now as I design and build prototypes, I still reflect on articles like the one from 1963, "If Kids Designed Their Own Christmas Toys" by Al Jaffee.

If Kids Designed Their Christmas Toys - Mad Magazine

When my kids were growing up in the 90s, they dug into my old Mad books the same way I dived into them when I was their age, and the same way I dug into the magazines at grandma's house. My poor kids were showing up at school with all sorts of pop cultural references from the 60s; they assumed everyone knew what potrzebie was. I think they're better off for it.

Which brings me around to the Digital Dark Age my son mentions, and though it is usually applied to the more distant future when historians won't be able to read my floppy disk I think the effects are closer at hand. Will my (theoretical) grandkids come to my house and expect to see what their parents were reading as kids? Some of that remains. But when all reading is streamed from the iCloud onto an iPad, whom do we trust to keep it around for my kids' kids to read? Where will that transgenerational culture fix occur? Kids are already having trouble with the old media. I'm sure lots of material will get scanned in for perpetuity by Google, et al, over time, but will the serendipity of discovery in grandma's attic still be as intensely rewarding?

Lots of people lament the closing of newspapers, magazines, bookstores for all the immediate, personal feelings people have about the their love of the tangible media of books, magazines, newsprint. And others are concerned about the far future. But I say watch out for the intermediate-term effects of this Digital Twilight.

Meanwhile, my son is starting a new series of paintings inspired by the HyperCard stacks he grew up with from the early 90s. After all, even this digital anthropologist has a hard time opening AppleWorks files from 2010, let alone fossilized HyperCard stacks from 1987. But with the help of some oil paints and canvass, future art historians may know what we once clicked.

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AP42 Social Media Workbook – Why? (and other questions)

October 18th, 2011 by Steve Nelson

AP42 Social Media WorkbookOne of my favorite quotes I use in presentations about social media is from Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group.  It's a tweet he made, so it fits nicely on one slide: "Just reviewed a customer's social strategy. Solid work: Focused on business goals, organizational readiness --not a "Twitter strategy"  He has it right; so often people want the shiny new thing without asking why, or asking a number of questions for that matter.

In my early web days a client said "We want Java on our home page."  Not "We want certain functionality or user experience on our home page," but they wanted Java, specifically because it was novel. "Why?" we asked, which led us to a better solution.  Or even worse "We want our logo done in VRML." OK, maybe that was my idea, so we can all be susceptible to answering questions nobody asked.

Yogi Berra had it right, "If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else."

The other day we were brainstorming the opportunities to use QR codes to connect the dots between people seeing various sorts of media and an online experience. Of course, the QR code was the shiny object that caught our creative attention; and for a while they will continue to attract the curious visitors because of their novelty.  And of course we always came back to the goals, the destination, the user experience. Why would someone scan the QR code, and what would they expect to find and do at the other end?  It always comes back to the right questions.

This is why we published our AP42 Social Media Workbook in the form of six questions you should answer before setting off on your social media plans and programs. We start with Why? and move on to two forms of Who? (as in "Who are you?" and "Who are your customers?"), and on to the What? When? Where? and How? that give you insight into your business goals and organizational readiness that Jeremiah reminds you to keep focused on.

The AP42 Social Media Workbook is the first step. Following that, you'll develop a Playbook that is your bible that directs your activities - who is doing what, where, how, and on what timeline. The next step is to do it, measure it, refine it, and keep doing it all again.  Check it out - head over to our website and download the AP42 Social Media Workbook for free, or, if you're so inclined, concentrate on this shiny new QR code:

QR code link to the AP42 Social Media Workbook

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Steve Jobs at NeXT: Apple’s Government in Exile

October 10th, 2011 by Steve Nelson
Steve Jobs courtesy Wikipedia

Steve Jobs

As I was reflecting on the death of Steve Jobs, I thought back to the impact Apple had on my career, and my one encounter with Steve Jobs. Much of the coverage of his life and death focused on Steve starting Apple in a garage, making it a huge success, and turning over the reins a month before his death. Though of course it is included, the 12 years from 1985 to 1997 when Steve Jobs was not at Apple are as significant a part of Apple’s history as what was going on at Apple. It made me realize that Steve Jobs at NeXT was in essence Apple’s government in exile, a shadow government whose parallel efforts, once rejoined with Apple, allowed something to happen that may not have happened had Jobs stayed at Apple for the duration.

I developed products for the Macintosh from 1985 to 1993. At Kinetics, we launched the first practical product to connect the Mac to the Internet (yes, there was an Internet back then, folks). By the time we started Kinetics, Jobs was out at Apple and by the time we shipped our first product, he had started NeXT (one of our first customers, by the way).  He would not return until 1997, and in the meantime Apple continued to develop inspired products with loyal customers and remarkable marketing. I stayed close to the company, and as Kinetics became part of Excelan we continued to integrate Mac computers into the mainstream.

My one meeting with Steve Jobs was at the NeXt announcement (and some phone calls leading up to it) to see what the combined Kinetics and Excelan team could do for NeXT.  Given that the NeXT computer had built-in everything that Kinetics and Excelan were adding on to everyone else’s computers, we all realized that there wasn’t much to do. NeXT gave us a nice cube to play with just in case we got clever, but that was it.  We went on to join up with Novell, and integrating NeXT into the multiprotocol NetWare environment made sense, so we kept our connection going.

NeXT cube

NeXT cube

We kept working with Apple, as well, on projects such as Star Trek (joint Intel+Novell+Apple effort to put the MacOS on the Intel platform) and OpenDoc, while Apple was losing its edge and its way, replacing Sculley with Spindler and Spindler with Amelio. The MacOS was running out of steam relative to new operating systems, and having a harder time competing with Windows as well as threats from more capable operating systems like OS/2 and Unix as packaged by vendors such as Sun.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs at NeXT continued to develop its technology, initially as a high-end workstation of hardware and software, but ultimately the software that could be used to combine a powerful operating system with a user experience layer.  By the time Amelio at Apple needed a fix for the future, it was already there in NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. Amelio’s best idea at Apple also presaged it as his last. He hired Steve Jobs back.

OPENSTEP became OS X, and continued to become iOS. It allowed the Mac to survive into relevance into the new century. It made the Mac the computer of choice, and especially the notebook of choice, for many Unix-based developers who were developing a new generation of Internet-integrated platforms, interfaces, and applications. It allowed Apple to develop the iPod, iPhone, iPad and revolutionize multiple industries, to make the new century truly a new century.

What would have happened had Steve Jobs not been able to develop this platform at NeXT, unencumbered by the large organization and market responsibilities of a well-established Apple? Could he have done it there? Maybe. If he had not gone on to develop this at NeXT, where would Apple have turned in 1997 after abandoning its in-house efforts. Who knows? BeOS?  My guess is that Apple would have been bought by HP.

But it didn’t happen that way. Steve Jobs went to NeXT, did what he did, came back, and here we are.  I spent most of my time on the Apple side of that parallel path, but it’s good to see clearly that both paths led to what we know as Apple today.

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Backslash Backlash

October 4th, 2011 by Steve Nelson

\You may know that I sometimes use this space to offer gratuitous advice  to marketing and advertising copywriters and editors. In that vein, here's another word of advice:

There are no "backslashes" in web addresses.

I still hear radio and TV voiceovers telling you to go to "foo dot com backslash bar" (or even worse, "Log on to foo dot com backslash bar"). No. It should be "foo dot com slash bar".  (You don't really even need to say "foo dot com forwardslash bar" because in a URL, slashes only go one way - it's not like you get a choice.)

You think my internet service provider would know the difference, but no, the OnDemand VO says to go to "comcast dot com backslash help" and "comcast dot com backslash guaranty".

Many browsers will choke on this. Chrome will correct your backslash error, but Safari and Firefox will not. Not sure about Internet Explorer (though see if you can find the humor in this exchange). Try it yourself and let me know:  http://comcast.com\help

Right. No wonder my internet service… never mind, I don't want it to go away altogether.

This is a slash: "/"  This is a backslash: "\".

Those of you who know my lifelong operating system bias might expect me to blame Bill Gates for this (not the new philanthropic Bill Gates, but the old technobaron antagonist Bill Gates).  DOS and Windows use the backslash character to separate directories, instead of the slash character used by Unix. (I always thought it was just to be different from Unix, but there actually was a reason).  Because URLs use the slash to separate out what looks like a directory structure, and because the web was begun in the realm of Unix, you get slashes. Optimistic, positively forward slashes, not those regressive backhanded back slashes.

And why is "\" a backslash? Because it's leaning back in the line of text? But when I write it with a pen, that's the slash that I draw in a forward direction. And the forward slash… crap I'm starting to sound like Andy Rooney. On the other hand, he just retired, so there's probably an opening at 60 minutes.  That's at cbscorporation dot com backslash careers.

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