Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

Here are a few of favorite links, photos, and videos from the week on my Tumblr blog.

Incredible photos of New York City.




Good advice for girlfriends everywhere: THE GUIDE TO BEING SO CHOICE aka How Sloane Peterson from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Taught me how to be an Awesome Girlfriend. (via Chad)


danah boyd takes on a recent study of Twitter conversation that claims its mostly "pointless babble."

Studies like this one by Pear Analytics drive me batty. They concluded that 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have "pass along value"; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news. I challenge each and every one of you to record every utterance that comes out of your mouth (and that of everyone you interact with) for an entire day. And then record every facial expression and gesture. You will most likely find what communications scholars found long ago - people are social creatures and a whole lot of what they express is phatic communication. (Phatic expressions do social work rather than conveying information... think "Hi" or "Thank you".) Now, turn all of your utterances over to an analytics firm so that they can code everything that you've said. I think that you'll be lucky if only 40% of what you say constitutes "pointless babble" to a third party ear.

It's very very long, but you really should read this 1993 New Yorker profile of actor/scholar/magician Ricky Jay. (via kottke.org)

Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”

Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”

Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.

“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”

“The three of hearts.”

“Look inside the bottle.”

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately.

And in case you need further incentive, watch the beauty of this performance. It's so much more than a card trick.




Eric Tabone told me about this hilarious new form of internet creativity: comixed.com

Thanks to everyone who linked to yesterday's post and passed it around. And thanks for the great comments: Rick Liebling, Fabio Buss, Adam Wohl, Nora Geiss, Jacco, Alan Wolk, Kristine Akins, Ben Malbon, and Stephen Byrne.

And a special belated thanks to Clay Parker Jones for having the bright idea to integrate Listen, Measure, and Adjust as continual activities throughout the diagram.

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The biggest point I heard in the comments was what Rick said, how will your brand "bring value"? If your brand chooses to participate, it needs to contribute something of value to the community. This is something that I go on about all the time, so I want to make sure it's represented here.

I was trying to get at this in Step 2. Originally I had "Identify A Compelling Topic of Conversation." While this is still important, I want to make it a little broader.

2. Identify The Shared Desires Of The Network (See also: Desire Paths: Branding for Digital Lives)
Once you know what you want to accomplish from the brand's point of view, you need to find out what the people you're hoping to connect with want to accomplish. What brings these people together? What are the shared interests that motivate them to socialize with each other? In order to become a valued member of their network, you need to know how you can serve their shared desires. This may be through sharing information, appreciating their creativity, or developing a specific utility or tool that makes pursuing their shared desires easier.

And lastly, Stephen Byrne brought up an excellent point that you need to get the basics of branding right before you can even start thinking about this. Know what you stand for. Know how your point of view is different from everyone else's. Have a truly remarkable product. And be passionate about something bigger than your brand.

When you've got all that nailed, then your ready to become social.

Giving your brand a social life on the web takes more than a username and an avatar. It takes a lot of time, and a surprising amount of planning and attention.

Here are 5 key steps and 3 key continuous activities that brands need to go through in order to successfully participate in online conversations and forge meaningful connections with people who care about their product.

UPDATE: Step 2 has been altered slightly to "Identify the shared desires of the network" - read more here in Part 2.

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1. Define Objectives
Too often it is assumed that you should participate - immediately and everywhere - before anyone stops to ask what the brand is trying to accomplish. Are you trying to raise awareness for your brand? online or offline? Do you want people to talk about your new product? Do you want to establish relationships with your most loyal consumers? Are you trying to impress the CMO's teenage child? Do you just want to make your shareholders happy? Be honest about your motivations and adjust your efforts and measurements appropriately.

2. Identify a Compelling Topic of Conversation
Your brand is going to be talking to real people. If you hope to keep them engaged in the conversation you need to know what they want to talk about. Figure out what the people you're trying to reach are interested in, and be prepared to talk about it.

3. Participate
Now the fun starts. You know why you're doing it. You know what you're going to say. Dive in and get started. The important thing to remember here is that participation doesn't end after you post something. The whole point of this social stuff is that people can respond. After you post a video on YouTube or start a discussion on Facebook or share a link on Twitter you need to stick around, hear what people have to say about it, and respond.

4. Identify Friends and Fans
Once you've started some activity, it's time to see which people you connected with. Based on your initial objectives, which friends, followers, and fans are on board? Which people have expressed an affinity for your brand and might be able to help you reach the next level? Learn the names of the people who want to help you build your brand.

5. Foster Relationships (see also: Spectrum of Online Friendship)
Now it's time to do the work to transform your online acquaintances into advocates. Reward behaviors like engaging in a public dialogue with the brand and sharing links that are important to the brand. Exchange public and private messages with your friends and fans. This doesn't have to cost money, either. Usually the most valuable thing you have to offer is simply your attention. The quality of the relationship you foster is a direct result of the time you devote to it. (Not unlike real life.)

You could do all of these steps and not see any results if you fail to integrate these essential ongoing activities. Throughout this entire cycle it is imperative that your brand continuously Listen, Measure, and Adjust.

Listen
Every good conversation starts with good listening. Don't be the asshole who shows up and starts blabbering without ever stopping to hear what everyone else has to say. Start by monitoring Twitter search and Google Blog Search. Find the most popular blogs related to your brand and start reading them. Are there any Facebook fan pages already established for your brand or something similar? What are people saying there? Keep doing this.

Measure
How can you know if you're on track to meet your objectives if you're not measuring your efforts and results. This is as important to do before you start as it is once you begin. Make sure that the metrics you choose are appropriate for your objectives. If your primary objective is getting people to talk about your brand, don't just measure how many followers you have.

Adjust
The biggest difference between this world and the marketing world that came before it is that the brand is no longer in control. The people you interact with have as much ability to shape the discussion and affect the experience as you do. You need to be ready to react and change what you're doing to suit the exigencies of the situation in real time.

Remember that Listen, Measure, and Adjust are things that you need to do continuously as you develop your brand's online social presence.

Remember that becoming a social brand is an ongoing cycle that repeats over and over, not a campaign with a start and end date.

Remember that the results of your efforts depend on the amount of time that you're willing to put in.


I know I'm not the first person to tackle this, but I thought it was worth a try anyway.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Are these the only key steps or activities? What else would you add? or take away? Have you seen this or something else work with the brands you work with/for?

Undercurrent (where I work) is running a survey about the social media industry. Please help us by taking the survey yourself and telling others about it. Blog it, Tweet it, pass it around your office, share it with friends, agencies, and clients.

http://bit.ly/socialmediasurvey
* please use the bit.ly link when sharing
** and how about the hashtag #smsurvey when tweeting

The objective of this survey is to gain a greater understanding of how social media is put in practice by agencies and clients, including: how objectives are defined, how results are measured, who is doing the work, the level of compensation, and what resources are most popular among practitioners.

Who should take the survey? Anyone that handles social media strategy, manages a social media team (internal or external), or conducts social media outreach on behalf of or within a brand.

It’s important to get a wide variety of data, so please share and spread this survey. We’ll keep the survey open during the month of August.

The survey should only take about 10 minutes of your time.

What are we doing with this data? We plan on releasing a free report (probably slideshare) on our findings, along with a free download of the full dataset. We’re hoping that what we collect will be beneficial for the entire industry. When you’re done with the survey, you’ll see a link to follow to request the report and dataset.

I really think that there's a lot we can learn from this. And the more people we can get to take the survey, the stronger the findings will be, and the more we'll all learn. Please help.

http://bit.ly/socialmediasurvey
* please use the bit.ly link when sharing
** and Twitter hashtag #smsurvey

This video is kind of sad, a little frightening, and darkly funny. And it's a great metaphor for why your brand can't afford to take a break from their online social life. (It's a little long, but totally worth it.)



via Clay Parker Jones

Building relationships and sparking conversations in online social environments like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube isn't like running an advertising campaign. There's no end date to your efforts. Brands can't walk away from the fans that you earn and the dialogue you start.

There are plenty of other experiences for your fans to try and other brands for them to meet.

If you've put in the time and effort to show your fans that your listening, don't make the mistake of letting it all go to waste by going dark for 3 months while you get ready for your next big ad campaign.

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


Watch Bobby McFerrin play with this audience. It's beautiful.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

Google gives the details behind how YouTube can profit from the sudden success of a video like the JK Wedding Entrance Dance.

Last week the world watched in wonder as Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's wedding party transformed a familiar and predictable tradition into something spontaneous and just flat-out fun. The video, set to R&B star Chris Brown's hypnotic dance jam "Forever," became an overnight sensation, accumulating more than 10 million views on YouTube in less than one week. But as with all great YouTube videos, there's more to this story than simple view counts.

Comparing the sales of different formats of music over the past 50 years:




An illustrated story about Ben Franklin.




Netflix shares its secrets of success. Such good advice for how to run a company in here.

The realization of a functional collective conscious is the ultimate outcome of ubiquitous digital communications. Our collective conscious refers to the things we all know, i.e. shared cultural knowledge, beliefs, morals, etc. A functional collective conscious refers to the new wealth of shared knowledge enabled by ubiquitous and instantaneous access to the internet. We are steadily moving towards a reality in which as soon as one person gains a piece of information, every human on Earth gains that piece of information. We will have the ability to access any information at will, and that function will be so quick and effortless as to be effectively the same as possessing the knowledge in our own brains.

Each year since I started writing about this back in 2007 (here here here here), this theoretical existence becomes a little less theoretical. There are a few recent developments that I see as pieces of the puzzle.

Status Updates
How many people do you know who are not posting status updates somewhere on the web these days? At the beginning of this year, a PEW study showed that the behavior of posting brief status updates is on the rise. As of December 2008 "11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others." That was up from 9% only one month before, and 6% back in May of 2008. Since then, Twitter has grown at a staggering pace month after month. Most recently, Compete estimates 23 Million unique visitors in June.

And now that status updates have become a normal part of Facebook and many other social network environments, the practice of continuously broadcasting both personal and public information that is important to us and our network is becoming a normal way of living.

Intelligent Location
Have you heard about Foursquare, yet: Foursquare Shows The Business Potential Of Location-Based Services and Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter. If you're predisposed to cynicism, you may skeptical of this new location-aware social mobile apps significance. After all, haven't we seen this before with Dodgeball, Brightkite, and Loopt? Well, none of them caught on like Foursquare has. And everyone I've seen use it is getting hooked on broadcasting their location and useful information about that place. They receive push notifications alerting them of a great new bar to check out around the corner from the cafe they're eating at or telling them to order the Six Point IPA because it's the best beer in the city.

Asking your local friends for recommendations in the neighborhood is nothing new. But, tools like Foursquare are creating a new level of pervasive access to that information.

Always Be Sharing
Have you found yourself visiting Tumblr or Posterous more often recently? These super simple blogging platforms have proven that they have a unique purpose on the web. They are here to help us deal with this modern dilemma: "I'm drowning in interesting information, and I want to do something useful with it." People share all kinds of stuff on these sites, design, photography, articles, quotes, commentary. But essentially they are a simple faucet of things found on the web filtered through the personal interests of one user.

We seem to be moving towards a way of living in which we feel obligated to share all information that we think would be relevant to our network. If our network is always listening, then we're always going to be asking ourselves "What do I have to tell them?"

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Do you agree? Have you found this to be the case in your own digital life?

Update: New statistics on Tumblr's popularity and growth are very impressive.

Video links shared on Twitter are more relevant on average than video links shared on Facebook or Digg.



According to this report from video monitoring site TubeMogul, people who follow links from Twitter to watch video, find those videos to be more relevant to their interests than people who are clicking on video links shared by their Facebook friends or the ones they find on Digg.

A little surprising with how much importance we place on the sacred social graph. If we compared how well we know our connection across these three sites, Facebook would probably host the closest relationships, followed by Twitter, then Digg. So why does Twitter deliver more wanted content?

The conclusion that I'm taking away from this is that a network of relationships built primarily on information shared, and only secondarily on personal relationships to the other people, is a more potent information sharing network.