Hello.
As you can see, my blog is off to a rousing start.
Anti-Wall Street
April 24th, 2009 § 0
Forbes has just wrapped a series on the unexpected business acumen of Trappist monks. Most Trappist monasteries remain sustainable by running small businesses and selling simple commodities (or fantastic beer). And contrary to what you might expect from a few elderly monks selling cartons of eggs part-time - they’re raking it in.
This is mostly shocking to the author for two reasons. 1. The monks obviously do not fit the profile of successful businessmen (i.e. they are not short-selling junk bonds). 2. They are nice. It’s sad, but it seems that in the self-reflexive world of Wall Street, an act of kindness as simple as passing a lunch tray can be an out-of-the-box leadership building experience.
The author continues to break down what he sees as the seven “business secrets” of Trappist monks and reminds us that a business and a brand functions best when everyone is driven by the same lofty goals, in this case, “service and selflessness.”
A few years ago, an article from Forbes reminding readers of the importance of “service and selflessness” would seem at the very least disingenuous and definitely obnoxious, particularly when next to full-page ads for expensive cars and unaffordable condos. But today it comes off as pretty solid advice. It’s worth a read, whether or not your yacht has been seized by the government.
New Media Nostalgia
April 22nd, 2009 § 0
Last week, the curators of weird, web ephemera at Urlesque counted down the 100 Most Iconic Internet Videos and did so without a hint of irony. It was my first encounter with a website expressing nostalgia for pop culture media that is only meant to be consumed online.
The first question I asked was, is this possible? Can you feel nostalgic about “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” (which came in at number 25 on the list) or any other video that was experienced for two minutes, shared with a few friends, and promptly forgotten a few weeks later?
This is the problem with much of the pop culture media content that is meant to be consumed online - the conversation evolves faster than most people’s ability to keep informed. If you don’t get the joke, you don’t risk being misinformed for more than a few days. Everyone will have moved on by then.
But let’s say I were to encounter someone playing “Counting Blue Cars” by ’90s one hit wonders Dishwalla. I didn’t particularly like that album or the band, but I still feel as though I experienced it in a way that is far more meaningful than any internet video. It makes me think of a particular time and place in my life when that song seemed vitally important to popular culture even though I had no attachment to the song and probably actively told people how much I disliked it.
This is what is perhaps lost in the clamor for realtime information. Shouldn’t the goal for anyone that works with the web - whether it is a company establishing an online presence, web designers, or everyday bloggers - be creating meaningful, memorable content rather than quick laughs?
I expect there will be a time when we are nostalgic about Internet content, and someone (perhaps Kevin Smith) will one day host Remember the Oughts, where we can collectively laugh and sigh at the good old days of “Star Wars Kid” or the “Diet Coke and Mentos Explosion,” but it seems far off.
Things the Internet Has Killed
April 22nd, 2009 § 0
Some time ago I started a compendium called “Things the Internet has Killed” to track all of the commercial giants that the web seemed to be knocking off on a weekly basis. Retail outlets, the film industry, Metallica - they were all dropping like flies.
With “foreign correspondents” being added to the hit list this week by the New York Times, I thought it a good time to share a few other recent death knells for old media that I’ve collected:
Cinema: An Interview with Ridley Scott
High School Journals: The High School Notebook as a Social Media Casualty
Newspapers: Saying Goodbye to the Seattle Post Intelligencer
Journalism School: What’s the Columbia J-School to do?
Culture (all of it): Rise of the Amateur, Death of the Professional (video from the Colbert Report)
Foreign Correspondents: No Reporting Behind a Nation’s Back
Three Degrees of Separation
April 22nd, 2009 § 0
I am an active member of a number of different social networking sites and my friends on these sites fall into one of three categories: 1) People who are actually my friends; we talk, email, IM, have lunch together; 2) People I sort of know, used to know better, or know mostly through a tiny online avatar; and 3) People I actively ignore.
By far the largest of these categories is #2 and these are probably the people to whom I am LEAST “connected” (those in category #3 I know well enough to have a reason for ignoring them).
But because of online networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, there is an immediacy to our friendship that could not have existed just a few years ago. In essence, the degrees of separation in our relationship have been removed.
Nicholas Christakis from the Harvard Business Review offered this from his research:
“Yet although a person may be connected to other people by six degrees of separation, he or she is influenced only by those up to three degrees away.”
He goes on to explain that not only is the window of influence is tightened around closest friends, it gets progressively weaker with each degree: “We have found that a person is 15% likelier to be happy if his or her friends are happy, 10% likelier if the friends’ friends are happy, and 6% likelier if the friends of those friends’ friends are happy.”
What does this mean for marketing and business? On its face, it seems remarkably obvious: my actual friends in category #1 are going to have a greater influence over my life than those in #2 and #3.
This effect has spurred businesses to take advantage of the immediacy of online friendship to develop communities around their products. The problem for marketers is that while technology has minimized the degree of separation, it is only in rare cases that businesses have been able to replicate a feelling of community strong enough to engender trust and influence. So most companies just end up in category 3.