Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

(Update: Be sure to read the comments. That's where the real meat is. Thanks everyone for contributing to such a great discussion.)

I was doing a little research on online fan communities for TV shows. After browsing fan blogs, fan message boards, fan LiveJournal groups, fan vidding sites, and fan wikis, I realized that Facebook fan pages must seem like an offensive joke to the real fans.

Facebook has lowered the barrier to entry to being a fan to nothing more than a simple mouse click. The upside is that it makes it easy for the subject of the fandom to collect people who care. The downside is that being a fan of something on Facebook means about as little as it possibly could.

Back in November, I was thinking about the different levels of fan participation and how they create different levels of relationships.



In this universe, Facebook has essentially created a distant satellite, floating out there in the ether beyond audience.

I guess for non-entertainment or non-narrative based subjects, they're just happy to have any kind of fan. But, this gap in seriousness and effort among different online fans highlights one of the reasons why engaging fan communities can be tricky.

That said, there are plenty of reasons why it's worthwhile.

Comments welcome.

Although we often use the word in new contexts, the basic definition of conversation hasn't really changed. A conversation is an informal exchange of thoughts or ideas. Most importantly, though, engaging in a conversation means that you don't say everything that there is to say. You expect the other person to make a contribution, and you intentionally leave things unsaid so that the other person has an opportunity to add their part. (Brands often have trouble with this. Twitter is really good for this.)

During the internet's relatively short, yet prolific, evolution we've seen this communications technology enable incredible new forms of conversation: listservs, message boards, image boards, instant messaging, blogs, social network sites. And mobile technology has extended many of these conversations to our pockets, including conversation via text message.

Over the past two years Twitter has emerged as a powerful platform for global networked conversation, unlike anything we've experienced before.

I've been trying to wrap my head around what exactly makes Twitter so special. (And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.) What I've realized is that it's not any one specific aspect of Twitter that makes it special. What makes Twitter a revolutionary communications tool is how it combines seemingly elemental aspects of digital conversation.

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Place: Mobile / Web Based
In the olden days, in order to be in a conversation with someone you had to be in the same place. For a while this extended to the digital world, even as mobile devices became ubiquitous. Text messages stayed on the phones, and web-based chatter stayed on the web. Twitter merged these two worlds in a revolutionary way.

Time: Real-time / Archived
Conversations have traditionally been thought of as happening in real-time. Most people would probably agree that Instant Messaging is probably the closest digital equivalent we have to off-line conversation. But, the web allows us to make every exchange permanent, and more importantly searchable after the conversation is over. Twitter has bridged this divide. Our contributions to the Twitter conversation are available instantaneously (barring any technical difficulties), yet also available for catching up on or discovering later.

Access: Public / Private
Digital conversations have typically been either one-to-one or one-to-many. Twitter enables us to move along that spectrum of intimacy fluidly. Our messages are usually available to everyone in the public timeline, yet only our network of followers is intentionally listening. We can address our message specifically to one person either in public with an @reply, or in private with a direct message. We can switch from one to the other seamlessly.

Network: Open / Invite-only
The network structure of Twitter is its most unique aspect. Anyone can join any conversation. The barrier to entry is effectively zero. Yet, people are constantly receiving personal invitations to connect with new people via public @replies. This has allowed Twitter to achieve a scale of connectedness unmatched in even social network sites. We can follow many more people that we would typically consider ourselves "able to maintain a relationship" with, and yet almost everyone we connect with is at least a friend-of-a-friend.


Twitter the company and Twitter the tool may not last. Like so many social network sites before it, we may very well see a more savvy competitor take it's place. Or the tool might get integrated into other existing sites like Facebook or even Gmail, making the independent version inconvenient. But regardless of who enables this new global networked conversation platform, you can be sure that it is special. And it's not going away.

This post is extra good, 'cus I'm choosing items from 2 weeks' worth of my favorite links, photos, and videos from my Tumblr blog.

My recipe for the delicious Hemingway Daiquiri (great for the warm weather we're about to experience this weekend in NYC):

2 oz white rum
2 oz fresh lime juice
2 oz fresh grapefruit juice
1/2 oz maraschino liqueur (look for Luxardo)

Shake vigorously with ice, strain, and serve with a slice of lime in a chilled cocktail glass


Michael Surtees posted an excellent round-up of design blogs based in NYC.




How to cook everything.




Beautiful watercolor paintings by Molly Brill.



My friend and talented writer and actor, Eliza Skinner, wrote a great post:

Ever wonder about how people get cast as “incredibly ugly girl who accidentally makes out with a cat” or “giant fat person who farts at the party”? How is that presented in the character breakdown? How does the agent call the actor and tell them they are up for it? And how does the actor feel about it? Well, I’ll tell you what I know.

This slow loris loves to get tickled.




Awesome music video.


Oi Va Voi "Everytime" from Katarzyna Kijek on Vimeo.


One of my favorite bloggers, Helge Tennø, posted all of his fantastic slides on Flickr. You could get lost in here.



Bud Caddell has a whole slew of good posts this week about what brands need to learn about fans. This point is one of my favorites.

The best conversations are ones where I know something you don’t and you know something I don’t. We share what’s new. Too bad this isn’t how most marketing and advertising works; marketers love conversations (about their products).

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The next time you have to have a conversation about "user generated content", print out this check list and bring it along with you. Does your audience have the skill, time, desire, interest, and knowledge necessary for participation?

Bud Caddell is doing a great series of blog posts this week devoted to fans and what brands need to learn about them.

Yesterday, Bud pulled this excellent point from a paper by Josh Green and Henry Jenkins, "The Moral Economy of Web 2.0".

If you hope to have your fans (or any online audience) participate in an experience you're designing, you have to be able to check off these boxes.

Skill
Does the audience possess any particular talent necessary for participation (a talent for making videos? a talent for blogging?)

Time
Does the audience have the time it's going to take to contribute to your project?

Desire
Is the audience passionate about the subject of your project?

Interest
Is the audience curious enough about the subject of your project and participating in the experience itself?

Knowledge
Does the audience know what they need to know in order to have a satisfying experience?

Our social life has become an outward indication of our social status.

The always insightful Jonah Lehrer makes this point in his recent post, Connectivity and Status Anxiety:

The web has, in part, turned our social world into a positional good. Consider a fancy watch. When someone wears a Rolex, they don't get a more accurate sense of time. Instead, they get an object that signals their social position. At the same time, they effectively raise the expectations of everybody wearing less expensive watches.
...
A similar thing is happening with social networks. We're always noticing the person who has more of what we crave, be it friends or followers or page views.

Traditionally people have used objects and possessions to demonstrate social status. Whether it's the Rolex watch, the Cadillac, or the Manolo Blahniks. There are status experiences - the trip to Paris, the African safari, the ride with the cosmonauts. And there's even status knowledge, your expertise in Opera, Italian wine, or maybe even Ruby on Rails (within the right circles).

Now our social lives are measured in equally explicit ways. Every social behavior online has a clear, and often public, metric assigned to it: friends, followers, subscribers, etc. And these numbers are worn online like the Rolex watch at a cocktail party. They create anxiety. They create ambition.

I'm not sure what the lesson is, but it's fascinating to think that this is the first time humans have seen their effectiveness as social beings measured in such a conscious way.

Certainly it's debatable whether or not these numbers measure the quality of your social life, but never the less they create a new kind of status and new pressures and aspirations for our social lives.

Spectrum of Online Friendship - View more presentations from Mike Arauz.

I apologize if you're getting tired of all this Spectrum of Online Friendship stuff. I promise to leave it alone for a little while after this post.

All of the great comments and feedback helped me to clarify what this had to do with digital branding.

I've adopted two additional dimensions of online friendship: Time and Social Activity.



These variables are independent of each other. I can feel invested without having spent much time. I can spend a lot of time, and feel very invested, but I might not share very much with anyone else online. etc.

Each of these measures are defined from the point of view of the friend, not the brand.

Online Brand Equity is a product of these three core elements of online friendship.

• The Investment that your friends feel in the success of your brand online


• The amount of Time they’ve spent being your friend


• Your friends’ levels of Social Activity within their own networks

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There are two other important qualities that were suggested: reciprocity (the degree to which the actions and feelings are mutual) and the particular quality of the friendship (as Faris described - "Lover? Brother? Mother? Friend? Partner? Confidant?..." etc.). While each of these are definitely important factors, I don't see them as being independent axis of their own.

Lastly, here are just a few tips for how brands can start to put this mindset into action:

• Have a unique point of view, and don’t be afraid to be opinionated about it. (more thoughts here)


• Measure the actions that create value, not just the actions that are easy to measure. (more thoughts here)


• Reallocate time, effort, and money to cultivating deeper online friendships. (more thoughts here)

The response to Tuesday's post, Spectrum of Online Friendship, has been overwhelming (translations: Italian and French). Some great blog posts by Gavin Heaton, Dan Howarth, bnox, and PSFK. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read it, to share it with others, and especially to everyone who left such thoughtful and though provoking comments.

I'm going to adapt this into a presentation (hopefully this weekend), so keep an eye out for it here on my blog and on Slideshare.

There were a few important questions raised in the comments that I want to respond to.

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Nancy reminded me that most online friendships are extensions of off-line friendships. So, who am I really talking about here?

This spectrum uses the relationship structure of people on the web who are reaching a point where they would actually say that most of their friendships are online only. While this is only a small fraction of all internet users, it's a quickly growing segment, as digital technologies enable us to expand our natural Dunbar number (which Faris raised and touches on here). For some people, it's even easier to maintain online only friendships (often with people in distant geographic locations) than it is with people you're expected to see in real life. Our traditional definition of friendship has evolved.

Some people have several hundred Facebook friends, thousands of blog readers, tens of thousands of Twitter followers. These relationships used to just be an audience. Now they're becoming a lot more like friends.

People who have the ability to cultivate meaningful relationships with tens of thousands of people have a lot to teach brands who are trying to figure out their role and their goals in the social spaces on the web.

This is what my spectrum attempts to articulate.

Several people raised the possibility of adding multiple dimensions to this spectrum. I would label this primary axis as "Investment." On this axis we are measuring the depth of investment that one person feels about another person's ideas/work.

Here are some other proposed axis (help me figure out which ones are most worthwhile and what they would look like):

Time
How long has this been going on? Time is a huge factor in this universe. All of these actions take time; and time is an increasingly hard to come by commodity in our digital world. If I've spent years along this spectrum with you, that means a lot for the quality of my friendship.

Reciprocity
To what extent are these actions and feelings reciprocated? Arguably the more balanced the relationship is, the more valuable it becomes.

Social Activity
To what degree and frequency is this friend active within their own network? Certainly as we use this as a model for brands this becomes an important factor in evaluating various relationships. Someone who's a prolific blogger or Twitter user in their own right will do more to raise awareness of you and your ideas than someone who rarely talks on the web, right?

The beauty of adding any of these as axis in a multi-dimensional model is that they are independent from each other. While I may have reached any level on the Investment axis, I could be just 1 week into the time axis, or the relationship could be complete unrequited, or I could be hugely prolific on my own channels, or not.

What's the ideal combination?

Update: Part 2, responses to comments here.

"What is a friend?" This question is constantly echoing across the internet. But, digital relationships (just like non-digtal ones) are not absolute. They are fluid. And online friendship is better described along a spectrum defined by the actions people take and how we feel about them. The more useful question for individuals and brands who are interested in cultivating online friendships is How do I move my friends from acquaintanceship to "best friendliness"? (as I called them on my Friend For Hire flyer PDF)

Last week I wrote about how online friendships are different from what we've traditionally called friendships. Digital technology has affected the number of relationships you can maintain, and the intimacy of those relationships, effectively enabling us to create fans who feel like friends.

I wasn't finished thinking about the nature of online friendship, though.

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Passive Interest
This is the easiest level of engagement. It asks the least of your friends, and achieves the least commitment from us. But, it's the crucial starting point. I follow my curiosity to you, I'm interested in what I find, and I choose to pay attention. e.g. repeat visits, blog readers, fans, followers, etc.

Active Interest
This is when I care enough to let you know that I care (in a nice way, not in a stalker way ;). It's a small step, but a big opportunity for you to identify key members of your audience who are candidates to move along the spectrum. We don't yet expect a response, we're just letting you know that we're listening. e.g. people who leave comments on your blog, wall comments, @replies on Twitter, etc.

Sharing
At this point the audience member starts to become a fan. You and your work become part of my identity as I use it to talk to my own friends about what interests me (remember that we share content for social reasons). I also have made myself more valuable, because I am now partly responsible for the spread of your ideas. e.g. social bookmarking, retweeting links, posting links and content to my own sites and profiles, etc.

Public Dialogue
This is the first phase that requires action on your part. I have either demonstrated an Active Interest or have Shared your work with my own friends. You foster a relationship by responding to my interest in a public forum. By doing so, you make the rest of your friends aware of my existence, and welcome me to the group. e.g. public @replies, referrals in a blog post, and references posted to our various sites and profiles, etc.

Private Dialogue
At this step, we begin to transform mutual interest into mutual trust. We are willing to share thoughts, ideas, experiences with each other directly. We trust each other with direct access, which has increasing value in an increasingly always-on world. e.g. exchanging email, TXT messages, IM, and direct messages on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.

Advocacy
At first glance, Advocacy looks a lot like Sharing. But, the crucial difference is that Advocacy means that I am making an explicit recommendation of you to my friends. It's too easy now to simply share, all it takes is one click on your bookmark tool bar. Choosing to actually say, "This is important. It's worth my friends' time. And I'm willing to risk my own reputation to convince my friends to check it out." e.g. same tools as Sharing, but different language; usually entails recommending the person or brand, and not just a specific piece of content

Investment
The brass ring of online friendship. This is the most difficult achievement to recognize or quantify. But it's the most important because it represents the willingness of your friends to take action on your behalf. In the words of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it." e.g. Your wins are my wins.

The last tier, Investment, became clear to me in the wake of well-wishes deservedly showered on David Armano after his announcement last Friday of his move to the Dachis Corporation. I was one of those well-wishers myself, and was genuinely proud and excited to hear about his new gig.

When I think about people (or brands, or people-brands) who have had success at moving their audience from one end of this spectrum to the other, Armano is one of the first examples that comes to mind. This is why he was able to raise over $15,000 in one night for a friend in trouble. And it's why thousands of people offered up congratulations when they heard he had taken this new job.

Look at what most brands are measuring in this space. It rarely goes much farther than the first tier, Passive Interest. We count visits, friends, fans, followers, etc. Unfortunately the reasons for these limited metrics have more to do with efficiency than efficacy. These metrics are the easiest thing to measure and they return the biggest numbers. But, as you can see there's so much more value to be had as we move beyond those basic actions.

Your online ambitions can only be as grand as the quality of the relationships you foster. What would you like to accomplish online? As you move your audience from Passive Interest to Investment the possibilities grow.

Caveats:

• In the digital world, none of these behaviors, even dialogue, requires a reciprocal feeling of friendship on your part. I can be your friend without you being my friend.


• These phases are not absolute gateways. It is possible occasionally to skip over one action or another and to advance to the next phase.

Translations: (OMG! Thank you so much!)

• Italian - catepol.net


• French - numerimatch.com

What would you add? What would you change? What did I miss? What's your advice on how to move from one end of the spectrum to the other? Love to get some comments on this one. Please pass it around.

A compendium of my favorite links, photos, and videos from the past week on my Tumblr blog.

Everyone should read this: 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs


This augmented reality puzzle game sort of blew my mind.


levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.


Photographer Peter Funch takes photos of street scenes from one single spot, and then meshes multiple images together in Photoshop to create these surreal scenes.




YouTube superstar FRED now has over 1 million subscribers on his YouTube channel!


The photography of Peter Sutherland




PSFK did a nice write up of Michael Romanowicz's awesome new site twenty4.tv - "Twenty4 Hours of Perfect Content” is a new digital art project that aims to turns your browser into a TV set using crowd-sourced content."

Ben Malbon, at BBH-Labs, has written a great pair of posts (Part 1 and Part 2) hashing out the debate over the alleged lack of "great work in the interactive space." (Clearly we're talking about the interactive marketing space, not the interactive space in general. :-)

To the extent that this charge is true (and it's easy to believe when you see the blank stare you get when you ask anyone in the industry for an example), I would add this to the Ben's list of reasons: our goals are either poorly articulated or simply the wrong goals for digital communications.

Too often campaigns are guided by outdated metrics like impressions, clicks, and time on site.

The opportunities of interactive, however, have moved on. Digital experiences have become effective tools for listening to a group of people with shared desires, connecting with that group, and creating products and services that they want.

The goals should evolve from earning attention to cultivating meaningful relationships.

Great interactive work in 2009, doesn't look like it did 2, 3, 5 years ago. The success of the micro-site was easy to recognize and even easier to quantify, but micro-sites are only useful now to the extent that they connect visitors to the brand in other spaces across the web.

Great interactive work in 2009 will be measured in conversations generated and relationships fostered.

Here are a couple examples that have impressed me for their ability to spark dialogue and build relationships.

Dell: Social Media For Small Business Facebook Fan Page - a comprehensive how-to resource, with downloadable guides, instructional videos, and a vibrant discussion board. Since launch last October, it has brought together 33,469 people who are all interested in how social media tools can be used effectively for small business.

Zappos on Twitter - every day hundreds of Zappos employees are having unmediated conversations with thousands of returning and potential customers, cultivating loyalty and advocacy among those individuals, and creating awareness among each of their groups of followers. This is killer interactive, but it's not glossy, and it's not easy to identify; it's broken up into millions of conversations across thousands of micro-networks.

Writer Diablo Cody Live-Tweeting Episodes of The United States of Tara - each week this author spoke directly to her most interested fans on a back-channel of sorts. Now that the season is over, the question is what will Showtime do with the 853 super-fans that the account earned? How will they keep them engaged between now and Season 2, and mobilize them for the debut?

Although the internet has stretched the boundaries and qualifications of friendship, the possibilities it's created are much more exciting than the traditions it may have ended.

Back in 2003-ish, inspired partly by the popularity and novelty of Friendster(!), I created this flyer and posted hundreds of copies all over the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

(click to download PDF)



This is what friendship is supposed to be about, right? Moral support? Back-getting? And "Being there when it really counts?"

I was reminded of this when I read Julia's post about what she should do with her Facebook friends.

Email, blogs, social network sites, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, have all conspired to challenge our previously established idea of what it means to be a friend. This is a perennial discussion, but it's as interesting and relevant now as it ever has been.

There are two key aspects of friendship that have been altered by digital technology: the number of relationships you can maintain, and the intimacy of those relationships. Before the internet came along, both of these aspects were limited by time and space. You could make lots of friends, but only up to a point. Even if you became friends with lots of people, you could never make all of those people feel like the friendship was close. Only a small subset of the people could feel like they were your close friend.

Digital technology has shattered those limitations. People can now maintain huge numbers of relationships and also give each of those people a sense of intimacy in the relationship.

In the dominant digital social environments, i.e. blogs, Facebook, YouTube, even Twitter (much less popular, I know), we've learned how to broadcast the answer to the friendly question, "How are you?" Caring about the answer to this simple question is the basis of every friendship. And now we've created ways for us to continually update as many people as are willing to listen, cultivating an increasingly substantive relationship with each of those people.

Over time, these people naturally begin to feel invested in our well-being. This is what's so strange and new about online relationships.

We are social creatures. It's basic human instinct to care about others, and to want to be liked. If you're willing to share what you're thinking and caring about consistently and publicly then you can earn the attention and affection of an invested audience.

This is the nature of online celebrity. Before the internet came along, the people who rushed out to buy someone's book or new album used to just be fans. But, now if they read that author's blog every day or follow that musician's Twitter messages about recording the album, they feel more like friends.

This is the opportunity that excites me as someone who spends my time trying to figure out how to inspire meaningful connections between individuals and brands.

Digital technology has enabled us to create fans who feel like friends.

Augemented reality technology is one of many powerful factors conspiring to kill display advertising as we know it.

Yesterday, I stumbled across some incredible augmented reality work by Julian Oliver (via @BBHLabs).

levelHead is a spatial memory game by Julian Oliver.

levelHead uses a hand-held solid-plastic cube as its only interface. On-screen it appears each face of the cube contains a little room, each of which are logically connected by doors. In one of these rooms is a character. By tilting the cube the player directs this character from room to room in an effort to find the exit.

This is actually a working prototype. The sophistication of this technology, and its application in a game/puzzle is pretty awe-inspiring.

But, this other project of Oliver's really got me excited:

The Artvertiser

The Artvertiser is an urban, hand-held, augmented-reality project exploring on-site substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting art....The Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space....The Artvertiser software is trained to recognise individual advertisements, each of which become a virtual 'canvas' on which an artist can exhibit images or video when viewed through the hand-held device. After training, where ever the advertisement appears, the chosen art will appear instead when viewed live through the hand-held device. It doesn't matter whether the advertisement is on a building, in a magazine or on the side of a vehicle.

Further evidence of the impending obsolescence of display advertising. Individuals are increasingly defining their own experiences. Technology gives us the ability to see and hear what we want, when we want. And those choices are guided by our social connections, the people we want to be, and the communities we want to be a part of. And it's not just on computers any more.

Advertising that merely seeks to get people's attention and make and impression is getting less effective every day.

What is your brand doing instead?

Here's a way to put Oliver's Artvertiser technology to good use, and bring a little efficacy back to display advertising:

(This could work for any food or drink related brand) Create a mobile app for any GPS-enabled smart phone with a camera. As the user is walking around town, they can stop and point their phone at any nearby billboard. The app will replace the billboard on their mobile screen with directional signage to a nearby bar or restaurant, e.g. 3 blocks to the right is Anselmo's (Italian, 4 stars on Yelp)! Enjoy.

Some of my favorite links, photos, and videos from the past week on my Tumblr blog.

The Sound of Young America posted an awesome podcast:

An unusual Sound of Young America podcast: I talk with 43folders.com writer Merlin Mann, Homestar Runners creators Mike and Matt Chapman (aka The Bros. Chaps), and Jeff Olsen, creative director of adultswim.com, at the Integrated Media Association conference in Atlanta. The (somewhat cheesy) title of the session was "Blow Up Your Brand." We chatted about how to do something on the internet that people will actually give a hoot about.

Gothamist posted an incredible collection of photos of NYC during the 1970's by Allan Tannenbaum.




If Lost was an 80's TV show, it's theme song might sound something like this...




Improv Everywhere pulled an awesome April Fools prank. The CW11 News thought it was real.

As digital information merges with the real world, what I'm most excited about isn't being able to access digital information in new ways and in new places (as incredible as that is), but rather how we will begin to use the real world around us to express ourselves and cultivate relationships in a seamlessly digital world.

Faris wrote up this thought provoking post about technology gaps between generations, geographies, and socio-economic groups. But, this was the bit that stood out to me:

I've pointed out before that the idea of being online, or spending time online, is starting to make less and less sense. Data will increasingly leap from the screen into the world, augmenting reality in useful ways.

Faris isn't the only one who's been fascinated with the imminent merger of digital information and real-world interaction. Helge Tennø has become quite the connoisseur of augmented reality experimentation.

My personal favorite, is this future vision from Microsoft:



As inspiring as all of this is, it mostly hinges on non-social digital information being combined or used in some way with objects in the real world.

When we look at how the internet has evolved, even though it's the best tool we've ever had for accessing information on-demand, it's how we share that information and use information to construct our personal and social identity where things start to get interesting.

I'm excited about starting to integrate places we go, things we see, and even sounds we hear, into our digital lives. We're already seeing basic examples of this enabled by our mobile devices. When we look at the kind of technology imagined in that Microsoft video, and combine those capabilities with our growing social networks, the possibilities quickly become pretty phenomenal.

Image a world (the places where people have access to technology and the web) that is as well connected and networked as Twitter - news spreads at the speed of a keystroke - and any person, place, thing, or experience in the real world being able to be broadcast and shared through this network, just like a hot new YouTube video.

Imagine our reputations in the digital space being as influenced by the real-world experiences we choose to share as they are now by the ideas and content we choose to share.

And imagine how learning and problem solving in the real world will begin to take on the collective intelligence characteristics we've seen emerge online.

This is where things start to get interesting.

I'd love to hear other ideas or expectations you see coming out of all this new technology. And if you know of other interesting examples of new tools, software, mobile apps, or anything else that is helping to make this happen, please link it up in the comments.

Bud Caddell came up with this great way to describe what we do at Undercurrent. Please feel free to pass these around, or to create your own.

(Click on the image for a full size version)















The idea that brands have some kind of monolithic control over how they are perceived in our digital world is obsolete. What your brand means is defined by status updates, hyperlinks, and blog posts; not by the 3 Core Traits written on page 25 of the Brand Bible that your million dollar branding agency wrote for you. How your brand is perceived is now defined by the ways people interact with your brand; not by your shiny new logo. Your brand no longer has the ability to define the context in which it is experienced; now brands have to play in the arenas created by their audience.

The sooner that your brand embraces this new reality, the sooner you can start having fun again and start earning a little love.