Last week I was wondering aloud whether we might be on the verge of seeing Google emerge as the new major player in the OS wars. This morning I watched this:



It's amazing to see how quickly this is happening. But, you can be sure that the pieces are all falling into place very quickly.

Start thinking about what the computer (including mobile) experience looks like, when it's being lead by someone like Google, and the 2.0 perspective that comes along with it.

Whether you think digital agencies are "ready to lead" or not, failing to bring a digital mindset to marketing and communications challenges is no longer an option.

Yesterday, Ben Malbon tweeted a quote by Garrick Schmitt from the Razorfish FEED 09 Report (PDF): "Brand marketers neglecting digital is akin to showing up to a cocktail party in sweatpants."

This reminded me of the Shel Silverstein poem and illustration above (which Johanna helped me to track down).

The digital age is here. And it's permanent. This means that regardless of whether your career has been labeled digital or not, it is essential that you bring a digital mindset to all of the work that you do.

This is beyond tools, platforms, and capabilities. This is a new way of understanding our world that changes every aspect of our work.

Investment must include time, not just money.
Achieving a valuable return on your investment now requires a commitment to time as well as to money. It's not enough to purchase entertaining experiences and attention through advertising. In a digital world, people expect every channel to offer a dialogue. If no one has the time to respond to the people you engage, then your efforts are wasted.

Strategy must be part of the execution, not just a set up for it.
Planning no longer ends when the creative brief is presented. By the time ideas become a reality, the people we're designing for have changed, the culture around them has changed, their behaviors have changed, and the way we connect must change as well. Strategists must be constantly involved, guiding and readjusting the execution as it goes.

Process must be agile, not all-at-once.
The experiences we design must be ready and able to evolve once people start interacting with them. In a digital world we expect the experiences to learn from our interactions and improve as we use them. The structure of the client-agency working relationship needs to reflect this necessity.

Efforts must be continuous, not intermittent.
If you spend a lot of money to capture people's attention, bring them together, and hopefully give them something compelling to do, you better be prepared to stick around and foster the relationships you start. If you think of it as a campaign, and walk away when it's over, the people you engaged will find someone else to love and you'll have to win them all over again when you come back.

Measurement must happen during, not after.
In a digital world we can measure and report on our efforts all the time. This means that measurement can be ongoing. We can use measurement and monitoring to give us constant feedback about what we're doing right and what we need to change. Measurement is no longer for cooked-books backwards-looking proof that we didn't waste our money.

Basically, there's no on/off switch, no beginning and end, no start and stop. Just like our own connections to each other enabled by digital technology are always on, brands need to be always on for the people that they aspire to do business with.

You want to read about a perfect example of this? Read Jane McGonigal's case study on the I Love Bees ARG (PDF). (This was way back in 2004, by the way.)

plan: (v.) to organize what you're going to do before you do it

strategy: (n.) a plan focused on accomplishing a specific goal that takes into account what challenges might arise, and how best to overcome those challenges

This is pretty much what strategic planners do, right? (Although "strategic planner" is a bit redundant; I prefer just "strategist".)

And the question remains, in a digital world, to what extent can we make intelligent predictions about what's going to happen once we set our plans in motion?

A plan is typically something that happens before things start.

So, what do you call a plan that continuously evolves during its execution?

On a related note, I love this bit of wisdom that Gavin left in the comments:

I read a story about communication between pilots and between pilots and air traffic controllers. ... And when you are in a plane, that can have fatal consequences. Imagine if we had to communicate like our life depended upon it. Maybe then we'd think more carefully about the words we use ;) - Gavin Heaton

As Apple takes mobile computing to the next level with its immanent tablet computer, and Google continues to be a rejuvenating force for Apple's mobile competitors with its Android OS, I think we're beginning to get a glimpse of a future in which Apple and Google are the dominant operating systems for most people.

Five years from now, I can imagine Microsoft's Windows Operating System becoming a relic of an era before mobile computing ubiquity. In this new world, I see Apple and Google running the only two operating systems anyone ever really uses.

I feel like there's a plague across the advertising and marketing industry (and maybe we're not the only ones). This isn't the first time I've mentioned this, but I think it's worth revisiting.

We use words and phrases that are not commonly understood by the people we're communicating with.

There seem to be two reasons why this happens.

1. We think that it's ok for words to have multiple meanings.
We are too generous. We want everyone to feel smart and valued and right. But, sometimes not everyone is right; sometimes some people are wrong. And making ourselves clear, saying that we mean this and not that can actually help both us and the people we're speaking to come to an understanding about what needs to be done and how it will be accomplished.

2. Jargon.
Jargon is a despicable passive-aggressive rotten sickness that we use to mask our inability to communicate clearly. Jargon words are adopted by a particular industry or discipline to refer to something unique to that work. Jargon becomes insidious when it's used in speaking with people who don't understand it. In these instances, we use jargon as a way to gain power; the other person is made to feel ignorant, and we are made to seem more knowledgeable. This power play, however, comes at the cost of understanding. And without understanding, you can never have true agreement.

In both of these situations, if you can't clearly define what you mean, then you should say something else.



Our job is to help people figure out how to communicate. We should strive to be better at communicating ourselves.

This is why (as my co-workers will attest) I like to argue about semantics. I think that knowing what we mean and the words that we choose to express that meaning matter a lot.

I think that meaningful words can help us to do better work, and make the work easier to do.

When I was down at the Future Trends conference earlier this week, Rick Smyre told an interesting little anecdote that got me thinking about what I do for a living. A few years ago Rick was speaking with a big shot exec from a big shot global corporation, and this exec told Rick that his company was doing away with their Strategic Planning department, and shifting to what he called Adaptive Planning. Rick asked this exec, "Why?" The exec told Rick that Strategic Planning is founded on two basic assumptions that no longer hold true: 1) You can predict outcomes and 2) You can control the process.

Wikipedia defines the discipline as "the formal consideration of an organization's future course."

The world has changed. The new reality that this exec described sounds like it applies to the digital space. The fact that you can't know for sure what's going to happen and that the experiences and messages we design need to be able to adapt, has been a constant motif in my thinking over the past few years.

I wonder what you think? What does Strategic Planning mean to you? What do you think of those two basic assumptions? Should the discipline be called something else for the digital age we live and work in now?

A few thoughts from Twitter to kick off the discussion:

Brian Chiger: I understood it to be about understanding consumers emotions/behavior & serving their needs.

Andy Hunter: always figrd stratplan=having informed (v.s reactive) course of action, knowing those u serve, doing things better.

Check out more of my Slideshare docs here.

This is the presentation I gave Monday at the Future Trends Conference in Miami. Lots of good people there, and I'm sorry I wasn't able to stay for all three days.

The proliferation of mobile technology and the rapid integration of both access to the web and access to our social graph via our mobile device demands that we begin to design experiences that were previously thought of as "off line" to spread online.

Digital technology, and the role that it plays in our lives, has evolved dramatically over the past 10 years. Think about how constantly we now rely on digital technology to communicate with each other, to get information, to entertain ourselves, to organize collective action, and to document our lives.

Now think about how many of those experiences now take place within the context of your social graph, within the context of the aggregate of all of your digital relationships. Every digital experience we have now is connected to our digital relationships.

The way that we live our lives and experience the world around us has always been social. But, digital social networks are fundamentally different because they take our basic human desires to explore our identity, our relationships, and our place in society, and makes those desires explicit. Figuring out who we are, who our friends are, and how we fit in, used to be intuitive; now all of those questions are broadcast, shared, archived, searchable, and deliberate.

The era of Spreadable Media is now at hand. Videos, links, and other digital experiences do not spread by themselves. They spread because we choose to spread them. And we choose to spread content for 3 reasons: to strengthen my bond, to define our collective identity, and to gain status.

In order to design digital experiences that can spread, you need to know the network you're trying to engage, understand their shared desires, and give them the tools they need to share the experience.

That's what's going on with the web. Now consider how quickly web-based social behaviors are becoming integrated into our mobile experiences:

• Mobile internet adoption has reached over 50 million users (via iPhone and iPod Touch) more than twice as quickly as it took regular internet adoption to reach that same penetration (via Netscape) (source)


• The number of people using social network sites on mobile devices more than doubled from July 2008 to July 2009 (source)


• The % of mobile web users posting status updates via Twitter or another service has now reached 25% (source)


• Facebook now has over 65 million mobile users, approximately 26% of all active users (source)

Mobile technology is making every experience both digital and social. That means that the experiences that we previously thought of as happening "off line" now play by the same rules as online experiences. The same principles that make things spread online now need to be applied to real world experiences to help them spread in the digital space.

There are a few interesting technologies that have popped up in the past year that I think have a role to play in this new reality.

Mobile Location-based Apps

• Foursquare


• Brightkite


• Loopt


• Gowalla


• Google Latitude

Mobile Augmented Reality

• MIT Sixth Sense prototype (TED Talk)


• Layar


• Wikitude


• Nearest Subway


• Yelp Monocle


• TAT Augmented ID


• My own concepts: facial recognition and social tagging