Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

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

At the end of the day, aren't we all just chasing a wheel of cheese down a steep hill? Fantastic photos on boston.com's The Big Picture blog.




Hulu introduced a desktop app, so that you can watch with a remote. I was playing around with it last night, and it works pretty darn well.

Now Hulu is releasing its own desktop application, allowing you to browse through the site’s content using your computer’s remote control (both the Windows Media Center remote and the Apple Remote are compatible). Both applications are native too, so you won’t have to deal with any quirkiness from Adobe AIR.

The same people who did that awesome Alice In Wonderland remix have moved on to Mary Poppins.




Rick Liebling wrote a great post about the term "social." I like his point about the difference between social interactions, between people, and content that through digital media becomes a thing that people use to be social.

All media isn’t social, all media is shareable. I don’t think we can attribute a quality like ’social’ to an inanimate object. To me, people are social (or not); videos, posts, photos, podcasts, etc. are simply content. Now, that content can generate social interactions between people – generate conversations, drive debate, challenge preconcieved notions – but the content itself is just that, content.

And I think I've blogged this before, but it's worth repeating. This is President Barack Obama as a college freshman in 1980.

Listen to this recording of Mike Daisey telling a story about Maureen Dowd, Facebook, Twitter, the death of print media, the movie Young Guns, douchebags, and more. There's a lot that will ring true - and hilarious - for anyone who spends time thinking about how we use the internet. (Warning: contains some NSFW language.)



Mike Daisey is a master storyteller. I've been fortunate enough to follow his work since his first New York production 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com back in 2002. I've probably seen Mike tell his stories live over a dozen times. Now it's your turn to hear what's so great about him.

Mike performs these stories extemporaneously, i.e. without a script. He simply sits at a desk with a basic outline of topics to cover and proceeds to weave together these incredibly complex and compelling tales.

(You may have heard about Mike a couple years ago when a group of students walked out in the middle of one of his shows, and one of the adult instructors actually walked onto stage and destroyed Mike's notes.)

Seriously, listen to this recording.

The recording is a little over an hour. So, you might want to download the MP3 file and listen to it at your leisure later on.

If you enjoy this, you should put yourself on Mike Daisey's email list, so that you can find out about his upcoming shows. His next show will be on June 8th at Joe's Pub in NYC, and will be all about bacon... mmmmm. Tickets are available here.

In marketing we talk a lot about the value of telling a good story. It's nice to have such a good reminder of what that actually sounds like.

I'm currently on the 7th version of mikearauz.com. Since I first put up the site in 2003, I've tweaked and evolved the site through different designs and structures almost once a year.

I'm starting to make plans for the next evolution...

What's changed the most over the past 6 years is the quantity of information, links, images, and videos, that I have to publish. I do believe that the significance of website domains is diminishing; so, I think of mikearauz.com as simply the name for the stream of information that I swim through online every day, and choose to share with anyone who wants to tune in.

I went back and read an old post from July 2007, What is a blog? I think that the basic premise still holds true. But, things haven't changed as quickly as I expected. The .com is still and important introductory point.

My goal for the next iteration of my website is going to be to present a deep and vast river. The river will include current blog posts (probably tending toward the lengthy), an easily browse-able blog archive, Tumblr links, pics, and videos, links shared on Twitter, sources of inspiration, and assorted hobbies and experiments.

How do you conceive of your website/blog? What are some of your favorite blog designs?

It's my favorite time of the week, when I carefully collect the very best favorite links, photos, and videos from the past week on my Tumblr blog.The web was overflowing with good stuff this week.


The National Library of Wales added their photo collection to the Flickr Commons:




A stop-motion animation fan-made music video for Death Cab for Cutie's "Little Bribes"

Death Cab for Cutie - Little Bribes from Ross Ching on Vimeo.

BBH-Labs announced a radical new agency where they only ask you to pay whatever you think their work is worth: Agency Nil.

Hank came up with a radical idea. Forget begging your way onto the bottom of a long and fairly shaky ladder, working to cover expenses. Hell, why not just launch an agency instead? But an agency with a difference. An agency that doesn’t charge. Agency Nil - Will work for all it's worth.

Theresa Andersson is a one-woman band:




A collection of beautifully designed quotes on Flickr:




Sparked by Tumblr's recent addition of a stats page, alicetiara wrote a great post about how these kinds of digital measurements become a stand-in for social status. She gives us a few things to remember:

1. They are always stand-ins for more complicated status measures.


2. Techie/geek/engineer types love quantified metrics precisely because they facilitate comparison.


3. Quantified status metrics spur competition and therefore increase user action.


4. Social status is an under-studied, under-rated aspect of product design and motivation for user action.

Keep an eye on Rocketboom's own video tracking website, Magma (still under development). From NewTeeVee:

Magma, a viral video tracker built by the Rocketboom team, was revealed in a sneak peak for attendees of the NY Video group last night. I selfishly love this idea, even if it’s a ways from being a business, or even a working service.

Found this photo of one of my favorite French actors, Louis Garrel, and many other incredible portraits on hedislimane.com




BONUS:

Yesterday, Ben Hedrington, tweeted a link to this great little interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. I liked it so much, I made this little slide-share deck to spread the good word.

A lot of what he said sounded like a perfect fit for the agency model I posted about last week. I think his advice is broadly applicable for all kinds of digital companies, and especially for companies who are trying to create things for the internet that people out there will actually use and appreciate.

My favorite two quotes are:

We really focus on what’s new, what’s exciting, and how can you win quickly with your new idea.

We say to the engineering management, “It doesn’t matter what I think of your product. What matters is whether you end up with users.” This is a vote. And there will be a vote. And you will either win or lose.

Google's development process is iterative, and focused on quick wins. And ultimately they put it to a vote – by the end users. They set their best ideas free into the wild, and let them either survive or die based on whether people actually find them to be useful.

I'd love to see more digital creative agencies act more like this.

Digital strategy should be a continuous and iterative process, informed by a steady flow of measurement and used to guide tactical adjustments in pursuit of the client's primary online objective.

This thought was taken from Gavin Heaton's two excellent posts last week about digital strategy.

Continuous Digital Strategy

Strategy is an ever-evolving process which is revisited across the lifecycle of any project. ...each of these steps are to be touched on in rapid iteration in the planning, execution/implementation and evaluation phases of any project.

Strategy Drives Decisions

It is easy to think that once you have set your strategy, that a button is flicked and that the focus switches to execution/implementation. But this is rarely the case....The are always, always, competing priorities – and what may appear to be strategically necessary one day will be out of favour the next. This is frustrating, time consuming and expensive for all involved. The opportunity, however, is to focus on a flexible approach to strategy – and this means using strategy not as a way of aligning messaging or building a campaign or a brand. It means using strategy to drive decisions.

I encourage you to go read the full posts: Part 1 and Part 2

In the marketing industry this approach is too often a luxury, rather than the norm. These posts resonated for me because I happen to be in the midst of a strategic adjustment for a project I'm working on right now. And fortunately a few key things were in place in order to afford me the ability to work like this.

Let go of the campaign mindset. Digital is not like traditional marketing. And one of the most important ways is that digital never ends. If you go in with a traditional campaign mindset you may be successful at generating a flash of attention, only to watch it evaporate as quickly as it was earned (or bought). If you're not sticking around to transform that attention into new relationships, you're wasting your effort.

We're not perfect. The internet is unpredictable. We do our best to make a well educated guess as to how people will interact with the experiences we create. But these experiences will live in an incredibly interconnected ecosystem and inevitably be affected by factors beyond our control. We should be ready to adapt.

Measurement is for guidance, not for back-patting. The metrics you choose, and the frequency of your reporting should be structured to help you determine if you're doing better today than you were yesterday. If so, where and why? If not, where and why not? What can we adjust in our suite of tactics in order to test a hypothesis about what might work better in the near future.



The great news about all of this is that digital media makes it easy.

I'm going to be away for a few days. Hopping the pond and spending a long weekend in London. It's supposed to be a bit of a vacation, so I won't be posting anything between now and next Tuesday or Wednesday (maybe even Thursday!).

But, I've got a complicated idea kicking around in my head right now, inspired partly by this post by Tim Malbon at Made By Many, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this question:

If you were to categorize all the different kinds of sites on the web, from biggest audience to smallest, what would those categories look like? Where would you draw the lines? What would separate one group from another? How are these distinctions useful?

I'm thinking about sites from Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook, all the way down to tiny blogs and single serving sites, and what Bud Caddell likes to call the forgotten ship-wrecks of the web resting at the bottom.

Discuss. And please be sure to leave your full name and a link to your site with your comment, so that I can give you proper credit if I end up stealing your brilliant ideas : )

P.S. My last post A New Business Model for Digital Agencies got some great comments. I recommend checking them out.

What if your digital creative agency sold 100 little digital experiences instead of 1 big website?

UPDATE: For instance, this would work like in a retainer relationship, the client agrees to pay $500,000 and the agency agrees to concept, design, develop, and launch 100 individual digital experiences (sites, apps, whatever) in 10 weeks.

Last Thursday I attended The One Show Creative unConference. I met some great people from some of the best digital creative agencies all over the country. Matt Anderson, from Struck Creative, lead a thought provoking discussion that helped me to answer to some questions I've been kicking around for a while:

• What should digital agencies do as fewer clients are interested in buying that big expensive flash site?


• How can digital agencies adapt to an environment where the appropriate tool for the job often means that the work can be done quickly and cheaply? (WordPress, anyone?)


• How can an agency increase their odds of creating a big hit when it's impossible to predict what's going to catch on?

Most digital agencies rely on selling the execution of a big beautiful, usually flash-based, website. The more complex the site is, the more expensive it is, and the better it is for the agency's business. But, the market for that business is disappearing.

I want to see a new digital agency model that sells a package of 100 small digital experiences, that can each be executed quickly and cheaply, instead of selling the 1 big digital experience.

Here's how I imagine it might work.

Rule 1: If it can't be done quickly and cheaply, it's not an option.
The agency should be structured in order to take 1 digital experience from concept to launch in 1 week for every 5 employees. If you have a 100 person agency, you should be launching 20 small digital experiences each week. Embrace the tools that will help you get it done.


Rule 2: Make a lot of pots.
Sean Howard told me this story, which I quoted when I wrote about the end of the microsite.

A ceramics professor comes in on the first day of class and divides the students into two sections. He tells one half of the class that their final grade will be based exclusively on the volume of their production; the more they make, the better their grade. The professor tells the other half of the class that they will be graded more traditionally, based solely on the quality of their best piece. At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the students who were focused on making as many pots as possible also ended up creating the best pots, much better than the pots made by the students who spent all semester trying to create that one perfect pot.

Rule 3: Sell ideas, not things.
When this agency pitches clients, you don't pitch one big idea, you pitch the first 10 small ideas. You say these are the first 10 ideas we're going to build, and there are 90 more where that came from. For $500,000, we will concept and execute 100 ideas over 5 10 weeks. These ideas will each be designed to spread your message, attract the attention of your desired audience, build relationships, and compel action, if applicable.


Rule 4: Everything launches, the client gets to buy the hits.
No one can predict which idea is going to become and internet sensation. And not every potential hit will get approved by the client's legal or PR department. These concerns don't matter because you're going to launch every good idea you come up with. Work for the client initially launches without the client's name attached. If it takes off and becomes a hit, they get to claim it. If they don't want it, the agency can either take it for themselves or kill it.


Rule 5: Phase 2 - Everything is iterative.
A tiny fraction of what you launch will be worth additional time and investment. Create strict qualifications for what makes the cut. Work on all of these select projects using an agile process, making small changes as you go. There's no finish line, there's just one improvement after another.


What do you think? Are you ready to go out and start this agency? I know of at least a couple people who would like to introduce you to some clients.

I'm sure there are lots of details I haven't considered. Please let me hear all about it in the comments.

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

A breathtaking aerial view of New York City. If you click on the Governor's Island view in the lower left corner, you can get a great view of my neighborhood, Red Hook, Brooklyn.




Gareth Kay wrote a great (and concise) column about the future of advertising.

We read a lot about the rush to do something ‘on’ the next tech phenomenon - do something on Facebook, have a presence on Twitter or (yes, still) launch a viral marketing campaign. But there is precious little conversation about the impact technology is having long-term on culture, and how this might challenge some of the assumptions we have built marketing programs on for the last few decades.

Check out this incredible YouTube mosaic video viewer (via ivanovitch). Some of my favs:

Alice in Wonderland, techno remix

Judy Garland, Get Happy

Gene Kelly, American in Paris (via lksriv)




Jason Kottke had a strange and wonderful dream in which he discovered the Fountain of Youth.


What if David Lynch had directed "Dirty Dancing"?




Iggy Pop, circa late 70's.

Websites built for marketing purposes are often built for the wrong reasons and fail to serve the needs of the client and the audience. The wrong reasons are often to impress executives or board members on the client side, to keep a company in business on the agency side, or just to win awards.

Yesterday I asked this question on Twitter, "Are websites still important?" (I wasn't going for nuance.)

As Ivan Askwith responded, "In a very limited sense, it's like asking if "books still matter." Websites have a massive range of functions and content."

True.

But.

I can't get this chart out of my head.



(From MTV Asia Being Young on slideshare)

This chart shows the average number of websites visited regularly by young internet users in different countries around the world. According to a 2007 MTV study, young web surfers in the U.S. only visit an average of 7 websites regularly. Though the data may be old, I think the basic trend point still stands. People are visiting fewer websites. People visit relatively few websites, and your branded microsite isn't going to be one of them.

So websites are important, but only to the extent that they are able to create a platform for information/content sharing and connecting with other people. Look at the sites that are the most popular: Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, iTunes, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube. They succeed by allowing what they offer to lead you elsewhere.

I want to see our measures of success reflect this new reality. Site visits and time on site should be replaced by click through out to other sites.

The focus of a brand website should be to successfully guide the visitor to other relevant content and experiences, and to use the brief bit of attention the site has earned as an opportunity to establish a connection with that person.

Most of the best digital creative agencies have been focusing on a shift away from entertainment towards utility. This is essential. Yet, at the same time surprisingly difficult to live up to. "We want this site to be incredibly useful... (but we also want to win some fancy interactive awards... so it has to be in flash... and has to be experiential... and... )" Don't let this happen to you.

Each site visit is a gift. Don't waste it.



The fact is that too often we build websites for audiences who don't want or need them. And then we have to go out and beg them to come visit.

Before a client shells out the $1 million for the new site, and then another $10 million for online display ads to get people to visit the site, they should demand that someone make a case for why they need any site at all in the first place.

And the starting point for the new site should be a single page with a handful of important text links rendered in basic html. Start there, and only add what is necessary. (Hint: it shouldn't cost as much as it used to.)

What do you think websites are for? Comments welcome.

Why don't more brands use organic search results as the ultimate measure of success for their online marketing efforts?

If you want to know if your brand is associated with a particular word or idea, then just Google the word or idea, and see if your brand comes up.

If you want to see if the messaging in your advertising is getting through, then go to Twitter and search for your message.

Ian Coyle pointed out to me how successful Dos Equis has been with their Most Interesting Man in the World commercials running during the NBA playoffs. One of the funniest lines from the commercial is "He lives vicariously... through himself." Ian sent me the link to the Twitter search, and sure enough that line is getting quoted on Twitter... a lot.

This seems like a fantastic measure of the efficacy of their advertising. And if it was a little bit more carefully constructed they could transform this casual bit of attention into a deliberate nightly people-powered Twitter campaign.

Companies spend millions of dollars on research and measurement, yet usually ignore the best (and cheapest) measurement of online success there is: Search Results.

Of course, the problem is that brands have to have success beyond the banner in order to see meaningful results on Google. Smart search engine optimization is a good start, but you're also going to need to build some relationships, and get people talking about your brand.

Which brings me back to this slide from my Online Friendship deck, defining Online Brand Equity:

(Click for full-size image)


In order to build a strong reputation, and have a strong following compared to your competitors, you need to invest in relationships. Online Brand Equity is a product of how invested people feel in your success, how much time you've spent with them, and how prolific the individuals are in sharing within their own networks.

If you have success in these spheres, you have success on the web. And it can be measured by simply Googling yourself.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the roles that fostering relationships and online conversations play in affecting search results? And what are the ways that a search result goal like this should be structured and articulated? Comments welcome.

While tracking the spread of my own idea, Spectrum of Online Friendship, I discovered this quote in a comment left on the Tumblr blog of Jay Parkinson, co-founder of Hello Health.

The idea that we "live for the survival of our ideas" is a provocative thought. When we think about how we live in the digital world, I think there's a lot of truth to it.

(Whether or not these ideas are original, I think is beside the point. The more time I spend in the digital world, the more convinced I become that there's no such thing as an original thought.)

Think about the skills we hone in the digital world. When we think of individuals who have achieved great success in the digital world, "cewebrities," and particularly web-savvy people, what do they have in common? They all have developed a talent for using digital communications technology in order to spread ideas that are important to them.

We get good at building a network of like-minded people. We get good at cultivating relationships that help those people to feel invested in our work. We get good at designing ideas to take advantage of the social dynamics that inspire people to spread them. We get good at giving up control of our ideas so that they can be adapted, remixed, and re-purposed, by others.

This is what it takes to be successful in the digital space. And these are the skills that brands need to work on to achieve similar success.

Understand the Spectrum of Online Friendship. Understand Spreadable Media. Understand Recombinant Branding.

A round up of my favorite links, photos, and videos from my Tumblr blog.

Side note: I'm trying to get back into the habit of saving more links to Delicious. I share so many links on Twitter now, that I have less inclination to post them to Delicious. But, I'm still reading and learning a ton that I want to share with you, so, look for those bookmarked posts and articles to show up on Tumblr and in my RSS feed.


BREAKING NEWS (5/1): Supreme Court Justice Souter To Retire at the end of this session.

NPR has learned that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning to retire at the end of the current court term. The vacancy will give President Obama his first chance to name a member of the high court and begin to shape its future direction.

Although, Souter is one of the liberal judges on the current court, he was actually appointed by George H.W. Bush. So, there will probably be extra pressure for Obama to not pick someone too liberal. Also, experts are speculating that Obama is very likely to pick a woman.


A beautiful music video with some really fresh design and motion graphics (via Fubiz):

A Lull "Skinny Fingers" from A Lull on Vimeo.

From the always awesome Big Picture blog, Human Landscapes from Above:




Henry Jenkins wrote about Susan Doyle's videos, how they spread, and what it means.

Susan Boyle's success is perhaps the most spectacular example to date of spreadability in action, and indeed, since we've discovered a fair number of busy corporate types out there who don't feel like reading the eight installments of "If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead," I figured I'd use this space to spell out again some core principles of spreadable media and show how the Boyle phenomenon illustrates how they work.

A very cool collection of video illusions with paper animation.

Noteboek from Evelien Lohbeck on Vimeo.