I’ve been working with a great team on a startup focused in the area of digital content curation. At Minnebar this spring I had a chance to present on curation. Slides below.
Chicken Salad!
I’ve been playing My Town thanks to nudges from Paul Isakson and Emille Hitch.
We were chatting about the pending uptick in influence games will have on marketing. The game they suggested I check out with was My Town. I am often curious. This was another of those times. I was going to tinker and observe.
I’ve been playing for two weeks or so. However, I just launched the app and it tells me I’ve opened the app 18 days in a row so, I guess it is more like 18 days. My experience has gone way past observation.
At first I checked-in and bought property, upgraded it and even edited appearances. Simple. It seemed pretty benign, boring even… like Four Square (in my humble opinion). Then I got rewards. Yes. Rewards. There is something delightful about opening the app and collecting rent or being given scratch off tickets. It’s digital gift gambling and so much more. That’s weird to see myself type that out. It’s been fun. It’s been way more engaging than badges.
My wife and I went to a river town recently. It’s one of those antique towns… shops all over. It’s a “check-in” gaming delight. We’d walked around town before dinner, as we waited for our table, and as we did I quickly checked-in to all the places we went to gain points. I gotta catch up to Paul and Emily you know. They’re many levels ahead of me. Then we had dinner at a nice restaurant next to a river.
We ordered a Cheese Palate. Yum. For dinner my wife ordered Salmon, I ordered a Chicken Salad. When it came my wife pointed out that I’ve never ordered that before. I was a bit stumped as to why I had done that and had no explanation for her. When I could have had a really great Steak or Salmon dish, why did I order cold, curried chicken chunks with grapes and cashews? Who cared at the time? The view as great, the company, better.
As we left we got a chance to walk through town again. Yippy, more check-ins. Upon the occasion of my first check-in I was digitally gifted a Chicken Salad like I had been earlier in the day (when I thought nothing of it). It said it was “healthy and tasty.” It was then that I knew why I had ordered Chicken Salad.
My experience with My Town has gone way past tinkering and observing.
As I’ve played in recent days new digital items have been added from corporations like Microsoft for their Windows 7 Laptops, Powermat, and MTV. Here comes the invasion of gaming on marketing or maybe the other way around.
MTV digital gift with link to movie trailer
Before I bought this app I went looking for a video like this. I found others that featured one feature but none one that clicked through the app. However, and admittedly, I did not look beyond three searches.
Now, I am looking forward to more and more mockups on the fly.
Get it here! (iTunes link)
Gilt.com has a list of people who purchase from them. They know of that list how many of the purchases are returned.
Gilt just made an iPad app that re-imagines what it means to shop a digital store (electronic commerce). They’ve built easier ways to see many photos, photos zoomed in very closely and what sizes and colors are available of a particular product. They’ve also reduced the number of actions it takes to buy something, changed the way something is moved to a cart and placed the cart at the bottom of the screen. I find these changes all quite interesting.
I wonder if Guilt will see the impacts of these design and usability changes on things like number of products returned. I’d be interested in finding out. It’d lend some argument to the ROI value of design and usability.
Great publishers are great distributers and editors.
Brands went and still go to publishers because they have distribution channels for delivering messages. It’s kinda like the rest of us going to UPS or FEDEX or USPS to deliver a package. We pay for the use of their delivery channels. Brands pay publishers to buy space and/or time in their distribution channels to send their ink splatters and light rays to segments of people.
Those distribution channels are valuable beyond the simple utility of delivering a message however. Those channels have been built over time in breadth, depth, and trust. This value came primarily through the role of an Editor. Editors select content, arrange it and bring the important stuff (for the editor or audience perspective) forward. They tell story. They break stories. They report, often in one nicely crafted instance, the weather, changes in business and politics, the traffic and local cultural events, etc. They are helpful and over time build trust which leads to loyalty, recommendation, consideration, engagement, preference, action and so on. This sounds like what brands do. Now brands can be their own publishers.
Brands have the potential to build their brands by building their publishing (both distribution and trust) channels. Most of these opportunities are digital where the role of the Editor is recently being described as that of a Curator.
The question now is if and how brands will learn from and implement for themselves the lessons and behaviors that built the enormous value found in the publishing industry.
Brands can be great distributers with the digital channels now available. Brands have the expertise, the time and the money to be great editors and curators of digital content. It seems reasonable to conclude that one part of being a great brand is now also being a great publisher.
Messy desks are easy to see. Messy desktops on our computers are easy to ignore.
Poorly functioning store layouts and work environments are easy to see. Poorly functioning websites and content strategies are easy to ignore.
Because it’s easy to ignore does not mean it’s unimportant for your goals, your team or your customer.
Messaging is often pointed at a “target” (ew) and notably focused on the demands and desires of brands. “Let’s drive traffic” is heard on a near infinite loop.
I wonder what it’d look like for these “campaigns” to focus on accomplishing their goal as a good chauffeur would.
image via gamikun
It seems we like things prepared for us.
We can get water from the tap and yet if bottled is available we often choose it. We can just bring the clothes home as they were presented on the store rack, just slipped in a bag but often we allow tissue and maybe a sticker to accompany them. Webapps on the iPhone were all we had for quite some time but now we have downloadable ones and often we’d rather have those.
What do we make of this? I think we desire to be cared for, to have things prepared for us. What can you prepare for someone today?
Above are just three examples. How many can you think of?
It’s a question I asked myself while driving today. Retail products assume a lot. They know the problem they intend to solve and are packaged, marketed and placed on the shelves as such.
What if you’re working on something unique? Many teams are. To build unique things the common stuff needs to be placed together in new ways. Or, uncommon things will need to be organized and leveraged in accessible and scalable ways. Neither approach starts with a retail like disposition.
Do you want uniqueness?
I received new Moo cards today. This time I got the big ones. Not my choice. I am fond of the small ones for their easy to carry features. So, I was looking to hack. How could I make carrying the big cards with a little fun and easy? I figured I’d make a holster out of the box. Viola.
Now, maybe it’s unrealistic… maybe unprofessional. Sure. Maybe. The office overwhelmingly suggested I was a geek. I think it’ll be notable and fun. We’ll see how it goes.
I think Apple described the iPad as “… the internet in your hands” in their Keynote on Wednesday because they described the iPhone in similar form. “It’s the internet in your pocket,” they said of the iPhone and “It’s ___ # of songs in your pocket” they said of the iPod. I think they are making a mistake. Or, we just don’t really understand what they mean of the statement yet.
It’s an underwhelming set of features, the iPad. It’s just a huge iPod TOUCH at first glance. Who cares? And if you’re using it while standing at a high table or sitting in a recliner chair or couch your golden like the presenters at the demo were. Anywhere else and hello neck pain (sitting at a desk without a keyboard)? So, its seems like the device has a limited numbers of use cases because of form. Maybe. Or we’re missing something when we look at it and it’s specs only.
A huge difference with the iPad and iPhone to my mind is pent up and experience educated demand. When the iPhone was released I remember people, including myself, so fed up with their mobile phones that they were overjoyed Apple, the maker of tasty user experiences, finally brought their touches to relinquish the pain of other devices.
Not so with the iPad. We don’t hate our laptops or even our other non iPhone mobile “smart” phones like we used to hate our pre-iPhone phones. We’re happy for the most part. So, when we see the iPad it’s not easy to see that the CRUX of the product is that it’s a huge screen and NO MOUSE! The thing does not have a mouse! It removes the pain many of us have learned to live with, namely, that a # of applications on our computers are annoying hard to use. Remember the last time you’ve known what you want to make and not how to make it on the computer? The iPad is a huge step in the direction of reducing the number of times that thought comes up. It will force the redesign of user experiences and user interfaces to make it easier to make things.
This is huge! I really did not light up to this until I watched the QuickTime of the Keynote on Apple.com. The first half I was underwhelmed. The second half where they show the redesign of the User Interface of Mail, and the iWork apps was totally invigorating. With the iPad Apple is dramatically upgrading the potential for an entirely revamped workshop of digital tools! Every application, every tool can now be made better for users to use! It’s about fingers.
There are an untold number of things I wish Applications would do differently to make them easier to LET me just do what I want to do. Excel is one that comes to mind. Where are all the buttons to get what I want to get done done? Apple redesigned Numbers for the iPad! There are so many other applications like this. The work flow for many (if not all) apps is dependent on a mouse now. The iPad work flow can’t depend on a mouse! It all needs to be redesigned and re-imagined with touch as THE access point.
Welcome to the world of computing much more like working in a workshop where all the tools you need are right where they need to be for you to work on what your working on. They’ll have to be. All you have are your fingers! The tools for things will need be visually connected to what your trying to work on, right there along side of them.
So, as it turns out it is about your fingers. But, it’s not necessarily all about the internet.
The next most interesting and maybe more obviously connected to monitory gain of an entire industry is that the iPad comes “pre-installed” with banner ad blockers! If users shift their work flow to the iPad the multi-billion dollar industry of banners ought to WAKE up. Build something, build HTML5 banners, build something different. The behavior of users and the characteristics of their devices will again drive change in business.
Back to the iPad specifically. It’s about your fingers!