[Editor's note: This blog post has been given a shamelessly incendiary title in a heavy-handed attempt to provoke a little discussion.]



As Google becomes the most well known and most used digital technology brand in the world, their company motto - and probably the closest thing they've got to a brand positioning statement - "Don't be evil" is no longer specific enough to give people a sense of what Google's brand means in their life.

Among all the hoopla about the big advertising event last night (I think there might have been some kind of sports thing going on too...?), was the news that the most popular website on the internet, Google, decided to spend $5-6 million on a TV ad promoting their already hugely dominant web search service. As much as anyone may have enjoyed the spot itself, I think that a lot of people had the same question that me and the people I was watching it with had: Why does Google need to waste any money on a TV ad during the Super Bowl?

I continue to believe that Google is quickly going to replace Microsoft as the most popular personal computing operating system; they're invading through the mobile device. As mobile devices become our primary computing devices, Google will become the dominant operating system. And this new market position presents a slew of new opportunities and challenges for Google.

So far, the Google brand has been built on branded utility. They provide one phenomenal service, Search, and an array of other extremely competitive and useful tools and services (YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Docs, Reader, etc.) all at no monetary cost to the user (just let Google watch you use the internet : ). And this model has been one that most smart brands have started to chase in the past couple years. Don't just interrupt, make yourself useful. Add genuine value to your customer's lives in everything you do, and in every experience you create.

Ironically, Google has only ever had this kind of approach to branding, and now finds itself missing the more fuzzy aspects of a well-rounded and well-loved brand. What are its core values? What's important to Google, that a potential fan would identify with? What kind of emotions bubble up when someone thinks of Google? Why would you choose Google over Apple? What is it about Google, as opposed to Apple, that makes someone say "I'm a Google person"?

Google is going to have to come up with good answers to these questions. And I think it's wise for them to start experimenting now.

The ad that they ran last night during the Super Bowl, and the other search ads like it, are an interesting foray. Their strength is that they remind people of the personal emotions and investments that are part of the Google experience. The ads' weaknesses, on the other hand, are that they keep Google as something that can mean anything to anyone; Google is whatever you think it is.

Can a brand be successful, if every person who uses it has a unique perception of what it means? And if so, then where's the community?

I've got plenty of questions. Hopefully, you've got some answers. What do you think? Comments welcome.

Three years ago I was lucky enough to discover The Feltron Annual Report, a beautifully designed and wonderfully idiosyncratic catalogue of one man's life during the previous year. I purchased a hard copy of the 2006 Annual Report, and have been a huge fan of Felton's work ever since.

This past year, I got to work with Felton on some stuff for Undercurrent. And as a result of Felton's new methodology, I actually got to contribute to this year's report. After every encounter Felton had, he would hand the person a business card invitation with a unique code and a url, where they would go to fill out a form to record the details of their meeting with Felton.

Last week Felton released the new 2009 edition.

I think it's his best one, yet. I highly recommend doing yourself the favor of purchasing a hard copy.

I dropped Felton an email, and he was generous enough to answer a few questions. (Thanks to my co-workers and fellow Feltron fans Bud Caddell and Clay Parker Jones for contributing some of these.)


Your Annual Report must take an incredible amount of time and effort. Why do you do it? What's the most rewarding thing about it? What's the most challenging part?

It is a pretty time-consuming project, but it's also my favorite part of the year. The project evolved from earlier attempts to draw content for personal design projects from my daily activities… but was encouraged and fueled by bloggers and fellow designers commenting on how much they enjoyed it. Today it has a number of facets: research and development, professional self-promotion, personal curiosity, as well as it's own incredible momentum. Ultimately, keeping the endeavor fresh is the toughest part, but I am thrilled that (to date) the directions I have explored keep finding favor with an audience.


This year, instead of recording all of the data yourself, you asked everyone you interacted with to fill out a survey about your time together. Why the new format? How did it meet your expectations? How did it surprise you?

There have always been questions about my behavior that I have felt unqualified to track. My mood is one of those qualitative traits that I would rather not judge for myself, and the reporting system I devised provided a less biased way of recording it. Overall I was interested in how others see me, and what is memorable about an encounter with me. Ultimately, we all have our own self-image, but your public persona is how other people see you, and what they remember and tell others. This was what I hoped to record, evaluate and communicate. Of course, it has it's limitations. I didn't find that anyone recorded their dissatisfaction. I presume that if we had a negative encounter, that person was not interested in telling me my faults.

One of the most surprising things was how high the response rate was. Many of my friends were extremely committed to the project and recorded nearly all of our encounters in exacting detail. It even became a part of the routine of our outings… and is a little missed in 2010.


As a result of your new approach, this year's data was much more qualitative than in past years. Can you tell me about the tools and method you used to parse the data for this year's report?

In order to quantify all the responses, I had to essentially transcribe each entry into tags that I could sort and filter. For each question, I would run through the responses and extract the pertinent information… the things I ate or drank, where we went, the topics we discussed. Everything was reduced to a tag with as much specificity as provided.

Here's an example of what was submitted for a food entry:

"some sort of entree along with a beet from the beet salad, a turnip from the side of turnips and strawberry rhubarb and some other dessert"

I could determine that YES, food was consumed, there was a SALAD an ENTREE a DESSERT, and that the VEGETABLES BEET, TURNIP and RHUBARB were consumed along with the FRUIT STRAWBERRY.

Once everything is transcribed in this way, I can tally the results, and look at the patterns over the course of the year.


How has this project (and the burden of recording all this behavior) changed how you live?

Well, the project has always been structured to record my natural behaviors, rather than influence them... which is why I refrain from tallying the results until the end of the year. Of course, recording other metrics with Daytum.com starts to create feedback loops. If you can see the miles you walk daily starting to fall, then there's an impetus to walk more. But truthfully, it only takes a few minutes a day of recording to create a pretty detailed data set of the year, and for the most part, I don't let it burden my activities.


This is a great example of a project that brings together personal and professional passions. What makes projects like these worthwhile? And what advice would you have for anyone considering their own project?

The beauty of the project for me is the virtuous cycle it creates between the personal and professional. The more annual reports I create, the more work of this type comes my way, and the more data visualization work I create, the better my annual reports become.

I made plenty of personal projects before I found one that resonated with an audience. I would say that you have to keep plugging away until you find something that sticks and that a small passionate audience can quickly swell into something larger and more significant once you have a toehold.


and...What's your favorite typeface?

That's the toughest question of the bunch. I typically have a compressed grotesque, a serif and sans that are in favor. Heroic has been a go-to compressed face for several years, while Hoefler Text and Futura are old standbys that would certainly make a desert island list.

Last week's New Yorker included an excellent Malcolm Gladwell article called "The Sure Thing" (abstract only). The article is about how entrepreneur's are rarely the risky mavericks that we like to imagine; rather, most successful entrepreneurs are extremely rational and risk-averse. They get ahead by doing their homework and limiting the potential downsides to their decisions.

The entire article is worth a read, but the part that stuck out was a little anecdote about John Paulson, a hedge fund manager who made billions of dollars betting against the housing market. This guy had a hunch that the housing boom was too good to be true. His team did the homework, and were convinced that housing prices were sure to come back down to earth. So they spent millions of dollars placing bets (in the form of housing insurance policies for banks) against the inflated housing market. Everyone thought that they were crazy. Conventional wisdom said that the housing market was a never-ending gold mine, and you were a fool if you weren't taking advantage of it. Conventional wisdom was wrong.

It got me thinking. If I was going to bet against a commonly held belief in our industry, what would it be? What are the assumptions that everyone is making right now (and putting real dollars against) that will prove to be foolish investments in the future?

My colleagues at Undercurrent had a healthy debate about this last week. One idea that got some attention was the assumption that there's a profitable business to be had in porting digital display advertising to mobile devices.

Personally, the assumption that I've been questioning most often recently is that more fans/followers = better. I think that holding your online relationships to a high standard, and limiting the quantity of relationships that you maintain, could ultimately provide more business value for the brand.

What commonly held beliefs in our industry would you bet against? Comments welcome.

Interesting question that my friend Nick Braccia, a contributor at Culture Hacker, raised the other day:

Are personal brands of individuals within agencies supplanting the brands of the agencies themselves?

Which is more famous on the web? Alex Bogusky or CP+B? Steve Rubel and David Armano or Edelmen? Tony Hsieh or Zappos?

I'm not sure that there's a definitive answer to this; it certainly depends on your perspective. But, no matter what the answer is, there is clearly a tension here.

It's a fascinating conundrum because as more companies encourage a more open and porous presence, encouraging their employees to tweet and blog on their own profiles, a natural competition will emerge. Ideally it's a healthy competition. In the case of Zappos, for instance, it's a mutually beneficial arrangement. And I think the best lesson that other companies can take from Zappos is that you're best served by going all in. If everyone in your organization is participating, then it tends to sort of level out.

That's sort of the tack that we've taken at Undercurrent, where I work. Our company's online brand is really the sum of the online brands of the individuals who work there.

I wonder if what we're seeing among digital agencies, which are obviously early adopters when it comes to internet behavior, indicative of what we're going to see across all companies and industries?

And I'm very interested in hearing from people who have insight into Human Resources, hiring, and retaining talent. Do you see this as a benefit or a necessary evil?

Comments welcome.

Yesterday Forrester Research released a new update to their Social Technographics model. Based on a survey of web users, they describe the level of participation across a range of common online behaviors. This is intended to serve as a base and framework for comparing unique brand communities or audiences to the general population.

These are not mutually exclusive behaviors. And contrary to the ladder metaphor that Forrester prefers, there is not necessarily a hierarchy to the behaviors, e.g. you do not necessarily have to be a Collector before you become a Critic.

The big addition this year is "Conversationalists": people who regularly post status updates to places like Facebook and Twitter.

I've created this re-design of their findings which hopefully makes the findings a little bit clearer, and also compares 2009 to previous findings from 2008 and 2007. As you can see the largest increase is within Joiners, people who have created profiles for themselves on various social network sites.

Click image for hi-resolution version