Christine in a Hurricane with Her Greyhounds and an iPad

On Facebook, October 29 around 8 PM Eastern Time, buried amid stale political rants and drolly amusing someecards, I found a status update from my friend in Morris Plains, New Jersey:

Power keeps flickering and I think my windows are going to blow in. Storm hitting now. #timeforadrink

By this time on that terrible night, most of Christine’s 550+ Facebook friends were watching Hurricane Sandy on TV, safely hundreds or thousands of miles away. Surely everyone in its path had long ago evacuated. But there it was in a simple status update: Christine had stayed.

Now the storm was personal, and the social media network of virtual “friends” that skeptics often downplay became very real. Friends from years past and far away kept vigil, posting prayers and good wishes and the jokes which sometimes seem to help most of all. Friends watching conversations develop between Christine and other locals as they reported from the heart of the storm—familiar buildings torn apart, fires breaking out, the strange calm of the eye as it passed over. And through it all, the cracking winds, bowing windows, exploding transformers and flooding neighborhoods, we stayed connected. For Christine and for each other.  Television news suddenly didn’t matter so much. Who cares about Al Roker when you have your very own friend in a hurricane?

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The Narrow Road to BlackBerry

The first haiku I will not share with you in haiku form. It was constructed strictly to win a contest, and I’m not talking about a beauty contest here. At stake were ten new  BlackBerry PlayBooks, to be awarded to the ten best haikus published on Twitter about the new device.

The contest was beautifully simple: Tweet an original haiku about the new BlackBerry PlayBook while complying with the following restrictions:

Rule 1:
The poem must consist of three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively.

Rule 2:
The poem must not mention competing products (Read: Don’t mention the iPad).

But most of the entries went something like this:
          Please for God’s sake give me
          A PlayBook  cuz I wanna win really bad!
          Down with iPad!

This created somewhat of an unfair advantage for winning contestants like Lisa Akari who knew how to follow rules, knew how to construct elegant haiku, and were familiar with Basho. Her approach was to honor the form while having fun. Sadly, there is also a low road to victory.

My approach was to create the kernal of a hypothetical marketing campaign. To be honest, I’m a little in love with my concept, but my execution through haiku was ungainly, like the debut of a beautiful model in ill-fitting clothes. So in this blog post I’m pulling it out of haiku and presenting the concept alone.

I wanted to convey a sense of universe-at-your-fingertips awe about this new tablet computer. I wanted to capture the feeling you would get if you could have this power with you wherever you went, from an evening at home to an afternoon at the neighborhood coffeeshop to a rained-out vacation on the Oregon Coast. All accessible through a tablet computer. I came up with this:

Haiku 1 Tagline Concept
Columbus was wrong. The world is flat.

I do think this is much more interesting than the official PlayBook tagline: “The world’s first professional-grade tablet,” which violates Rule 2 in spirit even if it does not name the iPad explicitely, and has readers reaching for their Chicago Manual of Style: Is that a compound adjective and do I need a hyphen?

So yes, I prefer my approach and I want to see it used in a new marketing campaign. That would be the greatest prize of all. But getting a brand new PlayBook is a decent consolation prize and I’m eager to get that into my hands as well. When you enter a contest on Twitter, there is always a little bit of doubt: What if the contest is a scam? What if the Twitter @blackberry account is run by some pimply teenager in Medicine Hat (the Gas City), Alberta?

I have to admit I started to worry after getting the initial “You’ve Won” announcements and then not hearing much more. So I sent the following haiku to fellow winner Lisa Akari as we were both waiting for updates:

Tagline Haiku 2
     Blackberry haiku
     Sweet promise, like morning mist
     Evaporating

But then I checked my email. There was a notification about my winning entry and a new form to fill out. This time they asked for my social security number as well as a written signature. So at last I will receive my new PlayBook as a genuine winner of the haiku contest. Or I will provide my social security number and signature to some scam artist in Alberta.

It is hard, sometimes, to separate the hope we have for tomorrow from the coarse reality of the moment. As  Matsuo Basho recorded in The Narrow Road to the Deep North:

     Bitten by fleas and lice,
     I slept in a bed,
     A horse urinating all the time
     Close to my pillow.

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Need Cash? Pimp Your Virtual Self

This post first appeared on Technorati.com.

It was just one week ago at pii2010 that Jeff Jarvis scoffed openly at our culture’s obsession with privacy. Very soon, he predicted, it will be considered selfish for people not to share a bit of themselves online. Sharing, after all, is at the very heart of almost every innovation these days. We steer complete strangers to our favorite restaurants. We help pharmaceutical companies create more effective drugs. The value of personal information is undeniable. But just days after Jarvis’ prediction, we find a new and interesting twist. Now you can give up your personal data for the most unabashedly selfish of reasons–profit.

A New York start-up called Statz has just announced the debut of its online service, enabling users to sell their personal data to businesses–everything from cell phone records to eBay transactions to OnStar data.

It’s a fascinating concept. Maybe even a sound one. But there is one kind of personal information that is not to be shared just yet. If you agree to participate in the Statz Marketplace alpha trial, you are forbidden under the terms and conditions from writing online about your experience until the full, public product launch.

For businesses eager to dig into my personal data prior to the official launch, I can share a few insights here:

• AT&T Wireless Revelations
  – I pretty much only call 3 people
  – I can never get my wife to answer her cell phone
  – My wife apparently screens her calls
• OnStar Data Revelations
  – I can’t resist oddly named towns like Humptulips
  – Small children can’t resist pushing the bright red OnStar emergency button
  – I am too cheap to make the jump from analog to digital OnStar

Please note that I am providing the above insights from my personal data free of charge. In the future, I expect to be compensated based on the going market rate.

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Excuse Me, Ma’am, Excuse Me, Sir, Excuse Me

Sir, if you would be so kind...

Nearly 30 years ago I stood outside the public library in Olympia, Washington with a sheet of paper in one hand and a pencil in the other. I stepped nervously toward anyone who came near me. “Excuse me, I have a few questions about the Falklands War and…” the last few words spoken to their backs as they walked away. I was an introverted kid with an extroverted school assignment. I needed 40 people to take my survey, but after 45 minutes I had only 3. So in the end, I sat down on the sidewalk as the sun dropped behind the Black Hills and made up 37 people. Some of these imaginary people had strong opinions about the Falklands War. Others were not sure. Conveniently for my research, their responses spanned the complete range of available choices.

I did not tell this story to my 14-year-old as he went off this weekend first to Costco, and then to Trader Joe’s. He needed 100 people to take his survey and he was willing to talk to complete strangers to get it done. He also talked to neighbors and called everyone on his mother’s cell phone list. But after all this, he was still only halfway done. So in the end, he sat down at the computer and created an online survey.

Before long, thanks to Facebook and Twitter, he had more than enough responses to finish the assignment. Conveniently for his research, these responses spanned the complete range of available choices. And these were real responses from real people across the United States and Canada. For the latter, he added metric equivalents to the questions about mileage (now if only I knew the metric equivalent for the word mileage).

The online results confirmed things we already know about social media: That the average Tweeter is 25-50 years old; that social media brings people together from across geographical and political boundaries; and that people are, by nature, actually very helpful. 

Best of all, sharing an online survey is faster and easier than making people up. So maybe I should go back and find out what people really think about the Falklands War.

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How to Get Yourself Unfollowed on Twitter

Too cold for Twitter?

Bill Gates just showed up on a list of suspected undesirables, in the company of con artists, Civil War veterans and, well, some of my dearest friends. The list was delivered courtesy of The Twit Cleaner, a free service created by Aussie Si Dawson to remove annoying people from your Twitter stream. While it’s easy to discount the report for its number of apparent false positives, the categories alone are useful as a sort of inverse best practices list—a manual for how to get yourself unfollowed on Twitter. And on closer inspection, you might find that some of the obvious false positives are not so obvious after all.

Reports begin with a list of accounts exhibiting “Dodgy Behavior,” including that most insidious of abuses, “Try to Sell You Crap.” But other behaviors in the Dodgy category, such as inclusion of links with every post, are actually considered by some people to be good behavior. Consultants trying to help marketers establish their brand on Twitter often recommend including a link with every post so that click-throughs can be measured for ROI. They forget to see the Twitter stream from a reader’s perspective, in which the conversation is both motivation and destination. A stream of endless links is not just an annoyance, it’s a conversation killer. And if every post within a community is designed to take participants outside of that community, it begins to look a lot more like advertising than peer-to-peer communication.

The next offenders in the report are all guilty of sloth. Of not tweeting in at least the past 30 days. This is the group most despised by the Twitter Doubters who point to inactive accounts as proof that Twitter is a passing fad, and who complain that the numbers most often cited for success are bloated and inaccurate. But it is here, in this list, that you’ll find your timid friends. They are good people at best, and at worst they are far less annoying than people who tweet Bartlett’s quotations every 30 minutes. It is also here that some of tomorrow’s best conversationalists are getting ready to shine. Sometimes an account that has been inactive for months will suddenly blossom into a busy, insightful stream of great information. When the time is right. So these offenders, more than the others flushed out by The Twit Cleaner, deserve a second chance. Interestingly enough, some of the people I’ve found on this list are “social media experts” who are advising teams across major corporations about how to use Twitter. No need to name names. They deserve a second chance too.

The last major category is dedicated to people who don’t seem to interact with others in the community. It is here, not surprisingly, that you will find the big celebrities. People who are either so famous or so smart that they can’t possibly be expected to follow you or respond to your questions. You’ll also find experimental accounts that are expanding the horizons of Twitter as a medium and by definition will be breaking the rules of good social media behavior. Accounts like @Genny_Spencer which publish real day-by-day accounts of life in Kansas between 1937 and 1941. Or TwHistory‘s re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg through journal entries from its participants. These experimental accounts are worth following because they show us new possibilities and enrich the medium.

Celebrities, on the other hand, may be less deserving. It makes sense to keep up with people who you are truly interested in, but when it comes to the visionaries, rest assured that their most valuable insights will be retweeted to death within minutes. Better to follow your friends, and those experts who are not afraid to engage in conversation with ordinary people. The big names, whether they are major brand accounts posting endless links to the same corporate website, or major celebrities who only respond to other celebrities, these big names should remain suspects on the list of Twitter abusers.

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Why Twitter Belongs on TV

It seems appropriate to start this conversation while sitting in the Urban Coffee Lounge (UCL), an independent coffee shop with a clear view of Starbucks across the street. Starbucks, CEO Howard Schultz maintains in Pour Your Heart Into It, owes its success as much to giving people a place to meet and share ideas as it does to the quality of its coffee. Co-authored with Seattle writer Dori Jones Yang, this Starbucks history book appeared more than ten years ago, before the drive-through windows, the Safeway outposts run by non-Starbucks employees, the instant coffee (gasp!) in packets, and other tragedies that Schultz swore would never happen under his watch. Notwithstanding these complications, the importance of bringing people together is still true, even if it is a little truer at the coffee shop across the street from Starbucks these days.

When Schultz joined Starbucks back in 1982, the company was still focused on selling beans and equipment that its customers would use at home. But he recognized that there was a larger and more profound problem in America than just bad coffee. People no longer met together with friends and neighbors as they had in the past. Suburbs carried us away from cities and towns, televisions and air conditioning pulled us inside and isolated us further. The need to connect remained, but the places to do so were in short supply.

The success of Starbucks has led not to fewer independent coffee houses, but to more of them. Add to this the increasingly ubiquitous access to high-speed data connections and the mainstream adoption of social media, and what we have been experiencing in the last 20 years is not so much a transformation of culture as a reversal of cultural deterioration.

It was at Juanita’s UCL that I met Jack, a retired architecture professor from the University of Hawaii. He was watching a group of teenagers who were talking with each other while at the same time texting and IMing other friends. What got his attention was the way they pulled the two conversations together as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Jack is working on a book about small town communities. About how they have disappeared and re-emerged through the decades, surviving to the extent that they adapt to short-term change while continuing to address the timeless and fundamental requirements of a community. Needless to say, the sight of a bunch of kids talking and texting at the same time fascinates Jack.

Not long after meeting Jack, I saw that the school bus in Juanita Village drops students off directly in front of the Starbucks entrance, and half of them go straight in. Others head over to UCL, and I like to imagine that when they start texting in the middle of their in-person conversations, they are talking to friends across the street.

Cupping preparation

Meanwhile, Jack recommends a few architects and books for me to look into, so I start my homework with Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. Published ten years before the introduction of Facebook, the book is nevertheless relevant in the world of social media with lessons that apply to any community structure, whether physical or virtual: Do not over-design based on pre-conceived notions of what people will do; Resist the pressure from your developers to have every detail worked out in advance of construction; Recognize that community structures and their occupants thrive by changing together, and changing constantly. Twitter may have started out as a way to answer the question, “What am I doing?” but users happily ignored this restrictive textbox label and the medium evolved into an ongoing dialogue about what people are thinking and what is happening in the world.

Vipin Singh, director of engagement marketing at World Vision, frames the issue more or less this way: “Isn’t social media really just traditional communication done through nontraditional means?” Looking at emerging technology through such a lens, even the most outlandish concepts can suddenly be seen as rational, normal. People who don’t regularly use Twitter, for example, think that bringing a stream of tweets onto your television screen is the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard of (barring New Coke). They believe that the Twitterverse is a ridiculous world in which people impulsively tell each other they are standing in line for a latte. But what is really much stranger is the way most Americans spend their evenings today, watching mediocre television programs in the isolation of their living room. Imagine experiencing the same programs accompanied by your best friend’s snarky comments, your brother’s bad jokes, or the oohs and ahs of fans watching simultaneously across your time zone. This is not simply a better way to experience entertainment; it is actually much more like the way things used to be. The way people experienced entertainment together for centuries before television made us lonely.

We tend to think of technology as liberating us from toil and risk, of giving us more control in an unpredictable world. The truth is that, more often, new technology simply liberates us from the constraints of old technology.

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Certified Organic Twitter Contributor

I think it’s about time we had an Organically Grown certificate for Twitter accounts. As in, “This account is unadulterated by get-followers-quick schemes, pre-scheduled tweets, inspirational quotations from unknown sources, and any link leading to whiter teeth.”

Most of all, it would be nice to know that a community of followers really cared about the ideas being posted and helped shape future posts with their own contributions. Instead, many Twitter accounts today are bloated from reciprocal following, where a person (or a fake person) insincerely follows hundreds of accounts just to cull auto-follows and take advantage of the easily flattered. Like many people, I used to take advantage of auto-follow features in social media tools, thinking that following back was a nice way to thank my new friends. Before long I discovered that my account was following escort services, Southeast Asian freedom fighters, and more get-rich-working-from-home accounts than you can shake an iPhone at.

We need to focus more on constructive relationships, and less on numbers and recognition. As social media consultant Mack Collier puts it, “Social media needs fewer rockstars, and more rockstar ideas.” When I was at South-by-Southwest last year, I saw all the luminaries with their orbiting fans, and even joined a small group discussion with one of them. But I learned the most from a college student who ran a computer lab at a small Texas college, from a New York writer moonlighting at Parsons School of Design, from Ricardo Rabago, the man behind PCC Natural Market’s social media presence. They see their followers as peers engaged in a running dialog about a shared passion. They recognize that a conversation between a few people is much more valuable than a broad communication to 30,000 deaf listeners.

Now that everyone is rushing to join the Twitterverse, there is a growing panic among newcomers that they are too late to succeed. A sense of being stranded on a sinking Web 1.0 island while the social media boat sails away to tropical sunshine. Of being left behind in Backward Town with a flugelhorn in one hand while the sold-out bandwagon rolls off toward the bright city of ROI. And it’s tempting under these circumstances to obsess over getting followers quickly, to rush the growth of the community.

Which is why we need the Organically Grown certificate. To recognize those who build their community one follower at a time, who respond to questions and ideas, who recognize others in the greater social media community, and who lead us, by association, to others who speak to the same passions and do it well. The fast-growing giant gets everyone’s attention, sure, but the naturally grown community is much healthier. It’s not just common sense. It’s true.

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Watch for Skateboarding Chickens

Forrest shows off

When Peter P. joined the Windows 7 team as a user experience designer, he was given an opportunity most designers can only dream about. There are more than 1 billion PCs in use today, over 90% of them running Windows. If you are looking to change the way people interact with the products in their lives, this is heady stuff.

Just don’t let it go to your head.

There are so many places in Windows 7 for a UX designer to make an impact, from the touchscreen experience to the new ribbons in Paint. But as Peter explained to me at a recent tweetup, users have made one thing very clear: Don’t mess with Notepad.

Turns out, people value the lowly text editing program not for its features, but for its lack of features. The top use of Notepad, especially among developers, is to strip out formatting. The last thing a Notepad user wants to see  is change in the name of improvement.

This is not simply a case of leaving well enough alone. When we watch how people really use products before determining the next feature set and put aside preconceived notions of how a product is supposed to be used, we develop better products. The same principle that has preserved the simplicity of Notepad for nearly 25 years led to significant enhancements to Excel early on when it was discovered that people used their number crunching software to organize text. This is why the very word processing features that have been kept out of Notepad all these years have been added, release after release, to Excel. 

If we look around us with an eye to how products are “misused” today, we can get a sense of where things are going. My son Nick doesn’t have an iPod, so he downloads music onto his digital camera. Considering the storage capacity of his camera, and the mediocre quality of the camera on my iPhone, I think he may be onto something.

Two weeks ago, our verrückten German friends took care of the chickens while we were away in Montana for Thanksgiving. Before long we got a link to a Facebook page with a picture of Forrest riding a skateboard. I’m pretty sure a pair of 8-year-old girls put Forrest up to it, but it is pretty interesting.  I’m not saying that chickens are the next big thing in children’s entertainment, or that sports are the next big thing in chicken entertainment. But just in case, I’m keeping a lookout for skateboarding chickens.

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He Liked to Open Cans

Somebody at Dictionary.com goofed up this week, and it was wonderful. Tuesday’s word of the week was sommelier, which of course is a person who knows how to match the right Malbec with your roast lamb. The correct definition for sommelier was posted online (check 1), and also sent out through Twitter (check 2). But Dictionary.com’s original email notification contained not only the wrong definition, but mixed up the quotations illustrating usage as well (uh oh). To be fair, they caught most of the mistakes and sent out a corrected email later, but the damage was already done. I could not shake this misquotation from my mind:

When you read the above misquote, three things jump to mind immediately. First, Hemingway will have a hard time going online to check a menu if he dies in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961, long before the advent of Netscape and the first PC. Second, Hemingway is spelled with only one m. And third, he never wrote like this. Never ever.

And it is this last point that is most interesting to me. As soon as I read the misquote on Tuesday, I started thinking about what it would be like if Hemingway and other writers we hold dear had lived in the age of Facebook and Ning and Twitterific. Would they have a Twitter profile?  Henry James and Virginia Woolf, for example, could not condense the striking of a match into a single sentence, much less 140 characters. Hemingway at least is famous for short, simple sentences, such as, “He liked to open cans.” And you could tweet that easily enough. But out of context, it is essentially meaningless, like a keystone which by itself is a crooked rock lying on the ground, but supported stone by stone from each side is capable of supporting the entrance to a whole cathedral.

Social media applications are great for building connections with other people, but not so great for sharing unfamiliar ideas, especially complicated ideas that cannot be grasped in 60 seconds of video or 140 characters. Some things just require more time, more development, more contemplation. You’ll find a lot of funny jokes and recycled wit in social media. You’ll meet people from around the world who will help you when you least expect it.  But you won’t find many Charles Ives ringtones.

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When Earnest is Better than Frank

Honesty is not a policy. Transparency is not a communication strategy. But you’d hardly know this from the number of so-called “community features” appearing across company websites today—all in the spirit of an open and transparent approach that we’re told is so critical to survival in the Web 2.0 world. While it’s true that frank communication is important for credibility, smart companies have the right conversations in the right places.  A forum that publishes unfiltered comments should also include responses from real people in the company, creating a dialog between those who care enough about a product to share their opinions in public. Simply giving customers extra places to complain without monitoring and responding will more likely damage a company’s credibility than improve it.

Take Epson, for example. If you are looking for a new printer and considering Epson, it’s natural enough to go to the company’s website for details on available products. You would expect to find prices and feature lists. But Epson.com also includes customer ratings and comments on their site for each printer. You can actually learn a lot from customer reviews on Epson’s site. For example, you can learn that one printer is so loud it makes the ower jump, and another “makes little circles, like a slinky, in your photos.” Good information for prospective buyers, but not good for Epson.

A better integration of community features can be found on the D’addario company website, where team blogs connect employees with customers. An artist relations manager shares his bouzouki stringing nightmare. A regional sales manager dives into myths about saxophone reeds. These posts demonstrate that D’addario employees are interesting people with passion and expertise to share. If it seems unfair to compare ink jet printers to bouzouki strings, consider how interesting GEICO and Progressive have made the insurance industry. Progressive maintains a Facebook site dedicated to people who want to dress up as Flo, their quirky spokeswoman, for Halloween (check out the fan photos). Even the Washington State Department of Transportation maintains a funny and engaging community presence with an active blog and Twitter account.

The point is, successful Web 2.0 implementations nurture the relationship between a company and its customers. They demonstrate that people in a company are willing to contribute to this relationship by solving problems, recognizing loyal customers, and simply being personable. Ultimately, being earnest in the relationship goes a long way toward building loyalty, and is more important than simply being accurate about issues and challenges. You can be frank without  committing to positive change. But when you are earnest, you are committed.

Oh, and honesty? That’s just personal integrity, plain and simple. Something that seems to be missing from the Epson site, where someone from the company has seeded the customer comments with entries like this: “I found this printer to have exceptional print quality, easy installation and really like the Instant-dry DURABrite® Ultra Ink.”

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