Facebook goes old school

I was a little amused today to receive a direct-mail solicitation from Facebook. Apart from the old-school, off-line strategy, a few other things caught my eye:

• The address block wasn’t customized. Surely Facebook, with all it’s data-mining prowess, could figure out that I’m the marketing contact at GeoEngineers.
• Facebook offers four weeks of dedicated phone support with this offer. Phone support?!
• There was a $100 coupon!

Based on this direct-mail campaign, I’m guessing Facebook has concluded that companies not using Facebook advertising must not be social-media savvy. I can see how it might come to this conclusion, but I think their assumptions may overlook a distinct group of companies—GeoEngineers included—that have chosen not to use Facebook ads as part of a well-thought-out social media plan. I’ll need a lot more convincing—and a much bigger coupon—to sign up.

Coming up for air

One of the qualities of a truly creative experience, I’ve noticed, is that you enter a state of mind in which time moves very quickly and you sort of lose touch with reality. This usually happens in short bursts of a few hours or perhaps as much as a half a day. This is one of the joyous parts of creativity, and a good sign that cool things are happening.

Earlier this week we launched our redesigned corporate web site, and for the first time in 238 days (according to my handy WordPress alert), it occured to me that I needed to blog on the topic. Yes, 238 days is a long time to be locked in a creative time warp, but looking back on this giant project I think it’s accurate to say that it has been pretty all-consuming—so much so that many other things (including blogging) had to fall by the wayside. It’s amazing how fast those 238 days went for me and my creative team.

The results, though, have been very gratifying. The site was built around client needs and expectations, so the positive feedback we’ve received from clients is exciting. The part that I’ve enjoyed nearly as much is hearing from some of our staff that the new site has given them a new and more favorable understanding of their company. We rightly focus on clients when we do these big brand projects, but they also have the potential to shape the company’s sense of itself, which in the long run can be every bit as powerful.

Is the Web dead? Hope not.

Today my team completed the visual design phase of a major overhaul of our corporate web site—a big milestone in a project that’s been underway since last fall. In an interesting (and somewhat alarming) coincidence, today I also happened to read an article by Farhad Manjoo in Slate that asks the provocative question: Is the Web Dead?

Like Manjoo, I’ve been following the rapid growth of device-specific apps and have begun to wonder if the Web as a browser-based experience may soon be a thing of the past. Manjoo makes the case that the Web’s universality—its ability to display content regardless of the device or browser software used—will be its salvation. I suspect he’s onto something there, and I would also argue that for every “death” of a technology platform, I could show you an example where a new technology failed to supplant the old one it was supposed to kill off.

In any case, I’m betting that the Web will continue to remain vital—and perhaps exist side by side with apps—for the foreseeable future. Which, of course, is probably only about a year or two.

What do Keith Richards and the Great Recession Have in Common?

It’s been quite a while since my last post. Multiple looming deadlines and a much-needed vacation resulted in a significant downturn in blogging activity. I’m back in the saddle now, and a little more focused.

While sitting on a warm beach drinking magaritas last week, I had a chance to read a couple of interesting books that turned out to have a common theme, despite the widely divergent subject matter. Life, Keith Richard’s epic autobiography, is highly enjoyable dive into the chaotic 40-year history of the Rolling Stones. Richards spends the first couple hundred pages of the book recounting the massive cultural shifts of the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a teenager during this period, he was obsessed with American blues and shared his passions with a very small clique of similarly obsessed Londoners—including Mick Jagger. Richards and the Stones labored in obscurity for a time, but exploded onto the world stage in just a few short years. In many ways, he came to define what it meant to be a rock star in a new and more tumultuous era.

After 547 pages of music history and debauchery, I thought I’d try my hand at a slightly more serious topic—the Great Recession. Michael Lewis’ The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine was a very insightful journey into the dark underside of Wall Street’s investment banks and the subprime Ponzi scheme that triggered the largest financial collapse since the Great Depression. Lewis follows a small group of individuals who, through obsessive research and at significant personal cost, accurately predicted the downfall of the investment banking system and made huge profits by betting against it.

So what do Keith Richards and these lonely money managers have in common? First, both of them recognized they were on the cusp of a huge cultural event. They didn’t always know how things would play out, but they knew they were going to ride the wave, wherever it took them.

Second, both stories describe people who were absolutely driven to succeed. Richards tells of learning the guitar by spending his every waking hour copying the chord progressions he heard on American blues albums. Lewis’ money-manager heroes turn out to be the only people stubborn and obsessive enough to understand every detail of the complex financial instruments that were selling like hotcakes but were ultimately worthless. This dogged dedication to a goal—whether it was dominating popular music or learning the intricacies of modern finance—was central to the protagonists’ success in both cases.

And finally, both Richards and the money managers in The Big Short looked at the status quo and realized they had a better approach. Both faced naysayers and struggled for long stretches while the rest of the world caught up to their vision. But in the end, both Richards and the money guys who bet against the system came out on top in the most spectacular fashion.

Those of us who aren’t multimillionaires or global rock stars can nonetheless take a few lessons from these folks regarding risk, reward and the occasional benefit of challenging the status quo.

Goin’ Slow

Blogging, I’ve come discover, falls off my priority list pretty quickly when more urgent tasks demand my attention. It’s been more than two weeks since my last post, which is a good indicator of my very full life. So often I take on more and more personal and professional projects and sometimes lose track of the quieter, more therapeutic tasks that keep me focused and energized.

It is against this backdrop that I came across an interesting article by Tim Wu in Slate titled The Slow Photography Movement. For those of you familiar with the slow food movement, which encourages us to develop a more local, sustainable relationship with our food, Wu encourages those of us who enjoy photography to pay more attention to our subject than the photographic equipment we’re using. Digital photography, with its instant gratification and almost limitless capacity for storing and distributing images, can seem so immediate that we lose track of the meditative value of photography in much the same way as fast food has distanced us from the joys of a well-prepared meal. Wu’s advice is valuable and can be applied to a number of creative tasks that have become digitized and commoditized.

Now if I can just clear a few items off my to-do list, I’ll find some time to practice what I preach!

Thinking Inside the Box

Our office is undergoing a major remodel in a month or so, and the logistics folks asked us to consider which items in our office we’d absolutely need to have with us for two months and which could be stashed in longer-term storage. I was told that my list of must-have items needs to fit in a box or two.

Thankfully, I’m not a pack rat, so it’s going to be pretty easy to distill my essential items down to a pretty short list. My computer, certainly. A family photo, perhaps. It’s actually quite liberating to know that these few items are all I’ll need to keep me busy and productive.

This little exercise did prompt me to reflect on how much marketing communications has changed. If I had been asked to pack my essential work materials into a single box ten years ago, I would have looked around at shelves full of archived transparencies, cases of printed collateral, hard files, etc. and probably broken into a cold sweat. As I sit here planning our corporate social media strategy, I realize how so much of what we do as marketers now is about influencing opinions and behaviors in a virtual, interactive realm, and much less about generating stuff. On the whole, I think that’s a positive development.

Now if I can only experience a similar transformation with the contents of my basement…

Learning by Osmosis

I’ve led a number of different creative teams over the years, and one of the things I’ve come to notice is that the folks that really thrive on teams and in larger organizations have a common characteristic—the ability to learn multidimensionally.

Unlike many of their peers, who tend to learn by absorbing information in linear, sequential steps, multidimensional learners are able to naturally gather information from multiple sources and synthesize this information with what they learn through formal training. This ability to absorb and process information in a more exponential fashion enables these high performers to offer immediate value to their team and accelerate their career growth.

I call this trait learning by osmosis, and I often see evidence of it shortly after someone joins my team. The new staffer will attend formal training sessions, but will be listening simultaneously to conversations, reading company communications and generally being open to and interested in other information sources. Within a day or two, the trainee will begin piecing together disparate bits of information and will begin asking questions to verify the connections he or she has drawn. The process accelerates from there, and shortly the new person is contributing to the group in unique and valuable ways.

Of course, I’ve also experienced situations when this trait is absent, and this too has a way of surfacing early in someone’s tenure on the team. The learning process only seems to happen at the rate at which formal training is provided. Compared to the high performer, the linear learner’s growth curve remains fairly flat. Sadly, these situations don’t usually end well.

Given how important high performers are to the success of a team, I’ve often wondered 1) how best to identify osmosis learners in the interview process and 2) whether it’s possible to train people to better learn multidimensionally. My success rate isn’t perfect on either. All I know for certain is that, when I’m successful at finding and retaining people with these traits, it’s a magical thing.

Kodachrome, RIP

Many news outlets reported over the weekend that Dwayne’s Photo Service, the last lab in the country to offer Kodachrome processing, stopped taking processing orders for the iconic film on December 30. We’ve known for more than a year that Kodak was going to discontinue Kodachrome, and there have been a number of great tribute projects around the country in 2010.

While I grew up with Kodachrome and have a soft place in my heart for its warm color tones and sharp detail, I’m personally kind of happy to see slide film go the way of the dinosaurs. Slides are hard to store and handle, processing slide film can be kind of fussy, and scanning transparency film to insert images into print layouts is time consuming and expensive.

Many photographers lament the passing of this great film, but I bet if you asked them when no one was listening, they’d all admit that they much prefer digital.

My Year-End Realizations

Before I get to my New Year’s resolutions, here are a few of my realizations for 2010.

1. I need to take an even more active role in managing my personal brand. This year, social media moved (at least in my mind) from a novel and useful side project to a front-and-center professional necessity. I think most of my company had the same realization. This means I now am consciously allocating more time and resources to managing both brands in the social realm.
2. Embrace new devices. Tablets and mobile devices are revolutionizing how we share information, and we need to be aware of the impact they are having on other aspects of our work.  For example, as a number of folks have observed, app design is beginning to shape how many companies are designing their user interface for web sites. While two platforms may be influencing each other, the underlying code is different, meaning corporate marketing teams will need to understand a range of different development environments. 
3. Adaptability is key to survival. While I’ve always known this to be true, the challenging economic conditions that persisted throughout 2010 really drove home the importance of being able to adjust quickly to changing circumstances. Professionally, this meant taking on new challenges without immediately knowing how I’d find the talent and resources to pull them off. As a manager, it also meant asking folks to stretch and take on new roles so the team could adapt to new requirements.
4. Corporate identity is a multi-platform game. With Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (and others) tweaking their sites to appeal more to corporate brands, it’s very apparent  that we’ll be maintaining and sharing branded content across multiple venues. In a period of scarce resources, the big question is: What will we need to give up or do differently in order to fully staff these campaigns?
5. Test assumptions. So much has changed as a result of the recession that I’ve found it valuable throughout the year to ask whether the way I or my company have done things is still the right way. More often than not, I’ve realized that  simplifying my projects, procedures, assignments, etc. and finding more creative approaches was the right thing to do.  If there is a silver lining to the recession, this may be it.

The Benefits (and Limits) of Social Media

I read a lot about social media issues, both to keep up to date as a marketing practitioner and because I’m fascinated by social and technological movements. There is a lot of great information available on this topic, but it can be tough to cut through the background noise and decide what is truly relevant and useful.

I’ve come across three articles in the past few weeks that offer good insights into the growth of social media and its implications for society and the marketing profession.

Devin Friedman interviews young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs for a recent article in GQ. He captures the excitement—and lingering anxiety—that many of us feel about this medium:

For the past month, I’ve been trying to fully engage with the social layer. I joined and contributed to such services and platforms as Quora, Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Blippy, Swipely, DailyBooth, Goodreads, Daytum, etc., etc. I tried to tweet five times a day… And what it all made me feel, mostly, was stupid. And anxious—that I didn’t have enough people following me and then that I was the kind of person who wants people to follow him. …I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. 

Another article, titled Social Media: Millenials’ Next Expected Skill Set, describes how social media tools are being integrated into college curricula, setting the stage for a new generation of graduates that understand how to leverage social tools for more than just keeping track of friends.

And finally, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point and other insightful books, writes in the New Yorker about social media’s capacity to truly drive social change:

 

Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

Gladwell makes a number of interesting observations about what social media tools do well—and not so well. Something to keep in mind when the hype begins to take over and you’re feeling anxious about being left behind.