Trumblog

Language defines, or at least provides structure for our thoughts and therefore our actions. A language without singular pronouns is probably used by a culture that sees the world as made up of groups. How would this culture act versus a culture whose language uses the first person singular pronoun in every sentence? Would one culture be more prone to narcissism? Would one focus on the good of the group over the individual? If we were building a language today and could see how its structure was constraining our culture how should we change it?

In computing this is even more true because the language and its structures are the foundation of thought on how programs will function. It places limitations on what the program can perform or at least makes some things easier to perform and makes others much more difficult to achieve.

Now think about how hard it is to understand these restrictions from within the system itself. What sudden blow to your understanding of the world would be needed to see it? Jaron Lanier delivers that shock with “You Are Not A Gadget.” Lock-in of structures from computer languages restrict us and disregard our humanity. The drop-down lists of relationship types, religions, ethnicities and the like on Facebook pigeonhole us as individuals and the strict layout of profile pages hide our unique and messy personalities. Crowdsourcing is not the answer to everything and subsumes the unique individual into the masses. Online anonymity releases the inner troll in us all. Open-source culture makes the building blocks of culture of greater value than the original composition and strips context from the content. We have stopped being original and merely churn through the detritus of past decades. The promise of the web in the mid nineties has let us down.

Alternately sounding like a truth-teller and a crank Lanier rails against the limits of MIDI, status updates on Twitter and Facebook, open-source culture, the lack of original music since the 1980s, Wikipedia, search engine optimization and belief in the Singularity. It’s not hard to find chinks in his arguments and overreaching leaps, but focusing on those errors avoids the real issues that he delves into. Anyone who works with web 2.0 and espouses openness owes it to themselves to read this opposing view and not dismiss Lanier as a late hippie lamenting the good old days and unrealized promise that they held.

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More thoughts and observations that just can’t seem to make themselves into a fully formed blog post, but worth mentioning all the same.

• I can tell that the use of Foursquare is growing because my mayorships have shrunk from the teens to 4. In a major metro area you have to check in daily or kiss that mayorship goodbye
• Social networks/ social media platforms without iPad apps: Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr. Guys – Social, Tumbleroo and Flickrstackr are eating your lunch. Or do you know something that the rest of us don’t.
• Can’t find Facebook Places? Not surprised since checking in with Facebook Places is only possible via the Facebook iPhone app, the Social iPad app and touch.facebook.com.
• Why does the AnyStop: MBTA app for Android use a map of the NY subway system as the background to it’s start up screen and why isn’t anyone else up in arms about it? C’mon guys, a custom map for each city please.
• Why isn’t there a decent WYSIWYG HTML editor for the iPad? I’m spoiled by the WordPress editor and adding markup by hand is killing me. I’ll willingly pay for one and I’m sure that I am not the only one.
• When I first read about Swype in the New York Times I was very skeptical, but it’s amazing. So easy, so fast. When I show it off to fronds they think it’s magic. Now when I use my iPad I want to Swype it too. License it Apple, you’ll be happy you did.
• I had no idea how valuable it is nor how much I file email messages until I wasn’t able to do it with the Android mail app.  Google please, please let me file my Exchange emails in the mail app.
• I thought it was the lack of apps and consistently underwhelming specs, but I guess the reason that we dislike BlackBerries is because they are forced on us by the IT department. At least that is what a study by Crowd Science says.  Maybe once corporate starts handing out iPhones and Android devices we’ll all reminisce about our old BlackBerries like I do about my dear departed Treo.

One last thing that I was going to make a Marketing Byte, but really deserves it’s own post and will get one later this week, is FutureM here in Boston. FutureM is a week-long series of events on digital marketing, social networking, mobile, etc. that is being presented by MITX. My colleagues from Jack Morton and I will be attending a lot of the events, tweeting, blogging and generally adding our two cents to the event. More details on where you can follow us later. I look forward to seeing you there.

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Yes, that’s right, while I do not have a “personal relationship with Jesus” he is stalking me on the Twittersphere. Does that make him my disciple? Oy.

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The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culturemade it to my bookshelf because of the dust jacket (I was a sucker of the Mad Men style graphic) and its being stocked in the staff recommendation shelf of Porter Square Books. A quick perusal of early chapters led me to believe that it was a history of marketing and the authors’ CBC bonafides sealed the deal for me and I bought it.

The marketing worked, but unfortunately I was the wrong audience for the book.

It seems that Mad Men has generated a fan base interested in not only the history of marketing in the 60′s, but in what it does. Beyond the inner workings of DDBY during the hay days of Madison Avenue and the sayings of David Ogilvy, these fans want to know how guerrilla marketing, branded entertainment, product placement and viral marketing work and if they are working on them. They seem interested in origins of brand icons as well as esoteric ideas like the use of smell in marketing. If that is you then Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennant’s book will fill you in and provide a little history, fun facts and reassurance that marketers are not a great conspiracy filling your head with subconscious desires for unnecessary products.

On the other hand, if you are a marketer, then you probably live or know most of what is in this book. I don’t need another in-depth review of Clark Gable’s impact on undershirt sales or The Mercury Theater’s “War Of The Worlds” broadcast. Instead it was the odd Canadian reference (the authors are both from above the 49th parallel and I’d never heard of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919) and ideas for other books (great brands that were launched at the Chicago World’s fair of 1893; Juicy Fruit Gum, Aunt Jemima, Shredded Wheat, Quaker Oats, and Milton Hershey bought his chocolate making equipment there) that interested me more than the general overview of marketing that The Age Of Persuasion delivers.

One of the callouts in The Age Of Persuasion is called “The ‘I don’t like that ad, so it must not work’ myth.” In it they ask the reader to consider when they don’t like an ad “whether you’re part of the social tribe that brand is trying to reach.” The Age of Persuasion is a good book, I’m just not the target audience.

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Summer is officially over. Labor Day is behind us, the kids are back in school and it’s sure getting dark later these days than it was in July. Our family had a lot of travel between the end of June and the middle of August so we focused on making the most of the last few weeks of Summer 2010 together. We had a week in Maine and a camping trip in central Massachusetts where I read 4 books (reviews to be posted over the next week or so), we hiked up a mountain, observed cocktail hour daily, canoed, kayaked and generally relaxed and recharged. Here are a few things that I learned this summer.

• A ramshackle house with a view beats a fancy new house on the main road.
• Vacation home bathroom cabinet tends to highlight the dangers of vacation rather than the joys.
• I really do need a fireplace at home.
• Most old, rural towns have a theater or opera house on Main Street that the community is trying to save, because it’s left out of “back to basics” town budgets. Clearly in the good old days folks thought these institutions were part of “the basics.”
• Being out of cell range can be a blessing (and here AT&T’s network limitations work for them and Verizon’s reach doesn’t)
• Free wifi isn’t confined to just coffee shops and libraries anymore, general stores are getting In on the game as well.
• A Tick-Spoon has many uses beyond just removing ticks from children and pets, it’s a 1/2 tsp measure when camping and a great travel yogurt spoon.
• Stars are magical, shooting stars doubly so.
• Moose are wily, especially when it comes to being spotted by Trumbles.
• Pugs may not like to swim, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t want to play “king of the world.”
• The littlest things can be the most entertaining, like saying the funny name of a town (Athol, Athol, Athol).
• Pumpkin whoopee pies are the bomb.

It’s fall and time to get back to school, back to work, back to blogging on a regular schedule. Thanks for reading.

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Looking for something salty to get rid of my daughter’s cramps during competition I came upon this “healthy” snack. Yup, Multi Grain Pringles. Baked Doritos and Cheetos have been around for awhile and I sneered at them too, but somehow the Multi Grain Pringles really blew my mind.

I suppose that I should be thinking “Wow, I can have my Pringles AND the added benefit of fiber too.” But instead I’m thinking “Who is Pringles trying to fool?” These are are starch filled, molded, salty beyond belief, “crisps” in a can. Any benefit that fiber they have added is going to give me will be a negligible health benefit compared to the salt and empty calories.

Now I’m an organic shopping, farm share subscribing, sometime vegetarian daughter supporting kind of guy. So from my point of view this is an invalid brand extension, but what do you think? Is this a valid addition to the brand? Does this enhance the product or is it just lame? Let me know in the comments.

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I’ve written before about the danger of becoming a helicopter brand. The way to avoid this of course is to constantly deliver on your brand promise and then over deliver when you don’t.

Case in point:
This week I’m in Atlanta chaperoning my daughter and one of her friends at the Us Fencing Summer Nationals. They are performing well, but I cannot say as much for the hotel where we are staying.

Before my trip I was told that the hotel had been overbooked for the first night and that they were moving us to a different hotel for that night at no cost, plus an additional free night at the correct hotel as well as covering the necessary taxi rides and free breakfast for all. Yes, an inconvenience, but they made good. They wanted to put us in a hotel at the airport, but we negotiated for a room in town.

Unfortunately when we arrived at the hotel that we agreed upon we were told that they had no rooms and that we were supposed to be at the airport hotel. When we got there our rooms we were told that our rooms had been canceled. Some negotiations and phone calls and we weren’t sleeping on the streets of Atlanta.

Once we got to our hotel the next day we found out that the refrigerator that we requested was not available and that the rollaway bed that we reserved would not fit in the room, which resulted in needing a second room though they knocked one night off our stay in that second room. They then delivered breakfast vouchers that they promised only they left 1 out meaning another trip to the lobby to ask for what we were promised.

Checking out of that room and into another one I happened to leave stuff behind, which turned up in their lost and found and retrieving it was perhaps the most pleasant experience I’ve had resolving a situation with my stay.

Now here is what could have happened: I could have been inconvenienced on the first night of my stay, but raved about how well they took care of me. I could be writing about how the Omni does a great job of not nickeling and dimming it’s guests for wifi and just asking for some contact information, rather than complaining that their IT support staff couldn’t get my laptop online. I could be telling the story of a hotel that found the stuff that I stupidly left in my room. I could be raving about how clean the hotel is or how close it is to the venue, but instead I’ll pass on that the smell of the cleanser was over powering and that bad layout of the elevators and floor levels confused everyone. I could have had a great experience with the Omni hotel, but they did everything that they could to avoid that.

So, a few lessons from this fiasco.

1. Keep your promises.
2. Screwing up is ok as long as you make good.
3. Make sure that you do not screw up a second time when making good.
4. If you screw up a second time you need to doubly make good.
5. Do not make people ask for you to deliver on a promise to make good on a previous screw up.
6. There are many opportunities to make people happy, don’t blind your customers to those moments because you dropped the ball too many times before.

Update:
This blog post and a tweet about my wifi connection issues got a response from the Omni, first via Twitter and then a call offering additional IT support. By that time I’d worked around things with my BlackBerry and iPad and preferred to watch my daughter compete than be on the phone with the hotel IT department. Then when I returned to my hotel room at 11PM on the last night of my stay there was a table laden with snacks and drinks as well as an apology note. I appreciate the thought from Omni, though we ended up rolling the table to a friend’s room since there was no possible way that we could consume all of the drinks and snacks ourselves nor in the 7 hours we had left in the room. The sentiment was right, but the delivery a little off.

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The most interesting trend in the development of the Internet is not how it is changing people’s ways of thinking but how it is adapting to the way that people think.

- Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, The Stuff of Thought

What viewpoint do you have?  Are you changing the way that people think or understanding their expectations and building a message that suits them? They are polarizing ideas. Do you develop strategies that encourage people to act in the way that you want or acknowledge how people act and support them? Force or pander? Proprietary system or open platform? One true vision or constant iteration?

There are lots of knee jerk reactions to these two ideas, but does a single minded subscription to one of these ideologies really achieve your end goal? Apple or Google?  Facebook or Twitter? In each of these examples we can see the benefits and drawbacks of each ideology.  I’m more of an understand the audience and provide them with the tools and media they are hungry for kind of guy, of course what I lose there in terms of consistent experience, maintaining customer touch points and general lack of control.  But that it’s not always the best or even a possible option and changing peoples way of thinking becomes the objective.   Know your prejudices and mindset then challenge them for the benefit of the project at hand.  That’s what leads to the best possible experience.

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I’m actually not in the office this week, I’m working from the US Fencing Summer Nationals in Atlanta where I am cheering on my daughter. But I realized that I didn’t mention that I switched offices a couple weeks ago away from the producers and coordinators so that I’m now surrounded by geeks like me the digital team. Not only that, but I got a window out of the move, though the view is nothing like what I had back in Cambridge.

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A couple weeks ago I wrote about coffee enhanced with the essence of bacon. Then I found this new blend of coffee that can deliver an enhancement that that is even more compelling than the flavor of bacon. What could that be you ask? Why sex of course.

Yes, Magic Power Coffee is a special blend that awakens both your mind and body. Not only does it taste great, but will also “increase the romance, passion and satisfaction in your love-life” for both men and women. Of course this isn’t just your basic cup of Joe, it’s a “combination of natural herbs, vitamins and minerals” including goji berry, American ginseng and of course “horny goat weed.”

No, I’m not making that last part up.

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