.extendr launches premium
Posted on | April 29, 2009 | Comments
I’ve been working on a project called .extendr for a couple months and I am happy to announce a premium version of the service. Details below.
- Nearly 1/3 of Web searches look for people, but the average person’s online footprint is spread in too many locations to make an effective introduction.
- .extendr brings all your links in one place, creating your online table of contents - the address is always the same, but you decide what new content to add, so you’re always relevant.
- .extendr is a simple profile page, for which you decide your relevant groups and links; for a buck a month, premium members can enhance pages with pictures, expanded colors and graphics.
- Populated with your choice links, your .extendr page gives an Amazon-style, page-by-page “tour” of your digital footprint using a simple preview pane interface.
- .extendr is one link to rule all your links - your customized search results page.
- To learn more about premium, check out our FAQ, or Join Now!
Be useful and intersting, get followed
Posted on | April 22, 2009 | Comments
For individuals, I suggest twitter DOES NOT matter until either your friends are on or you find feeds pertaining to something you’re very interested in (e.g. Pro Cycling or something). Until then stay with the masses and point fingers at how stupid the notion of Twitter is. Hey, most every news story I’ve herd in the last two months has gone that route. That is until @Oprah got involved.
For brands, I wonder if there is a lesson to be learned with this simple thought about what makes Twitter matter. If twitter matters after it’s helping you do something — connect with people and subjects you care about — then why not engage Twitter as a communication platform and the community there, so your customers can find you there? Brands already do this in nearly every other possible way, namely try to be where their audience is. Why not twitter?
It’s a simple thought with potentially very significant implications for a brand as a whole. Consider the changes a legal department or PR or staffing might encounter to pull off a good presence on Twitter.
So, maybe Twitter can be a place you as a brand can be useful to people. If so, patterns seem to suggest that people will come and follow you there if they find you interesting and helpful.
Interaction explosion w/ Introduction angst
Posted on | April 22, 2009 | Comments
Slides I’ll be delivering tonight at Ignite Minneapolis. I am looking forward to it.
Tags: digital first impressions > idiom change > interaction revolution > paradgim shift
Users Want Social. Brands Want Media.
Posted on | April 13, 2009 | Comments
Remember when we bought our meat from the corner store owned by the Carlson family? Remember when that meat was raised by the Anderson family from the next county over to the east? Remember when you could go talk to the owners of what you bought and consumed? Remember when you could develop relationships with these people because you lived in the same community; your kids went to school with theirs?
Yeah, I don’t either.
But I know people who do and did. It wasn’t that long ago.
The Industrial Revolution changed our communities and our relationships. We could do a couple neat new things almost overnight. We could make tons of stuff and we could ship it for fairly cheap. This included our food as well as most everything else. The distance between supplier and consumer grew until recently I bought vegetables—organic ones from Trader Joe’s—that were literally grown on the other side of the world.
During and after the Industrial Revolution the presence of Brands grew in importance rather rapidly. Corporations made our stuff, not our neighbors. Time became an issue. Both parties—Corporations and Consumers—needed a shortcut, a mechanism to spread and trust the word about products and services, quickly, efficiently. It became less and less about the truly personal (e.g. “I got my leather bag from Farmer Anderson on the east side of the valley.”) and more and more about the invented-personal (”I like Brand X’s leather bag because their brand is like me.”).
Advancements in media only made it more so, and quite often, only so. Brands became synonymous with Media. Capital B. Capital M.
But now we’re living in what I see as an Interaction Revolution. And that’s a threat to Capital B and Capital M.
Overnight it seems, we can do a couple of really neat things. We can, unlike anytime before, connect and share with others and interact across distances and with little connection to geographic location. Increasingly, relationships and work groups are separated by large physical distances with little perceived loss in the quality of those relationships. In fact, some claim they are richer because of it. We appear to be more geo-agnostic as the months go by. Our social relationships are exploding, fueled by digital.
It seems that we are, in some sense, returning to our pre-industrial revolution social graphs. We’re sharing life with others across distance, fueled by what I call the Digital Porch—that place where we all meet in public to share life together. We had a similar shared experience before, when our communities supported the notion of a physical porch. Now we’ve recreated it in what is being called “social media.”
I’m interested in the order in which the term “social media” is approached and appreciated by Corporations and Consumers. It’s pretty clear that people approach the “social” side of social media first. The media, with a small m, is theirs (photos, and videos and text). They’re making media themselves for the purposes of sharing with others. Corporations, on the other hand, are typically approaching “social media” because of the Media side of the term, with a capital M. It’s about purchasing audience share.
Here’s the crux—people want to build relationships with others first, as a path to creating trust. Call it Relationship before Brand. Corporations are not well practiced in having relationships (despite decades of practice inventing the idea that a relationship exists between you and a brand). They prefer Brand before Relationship.
My money’s on the people.
My money’s on the tiny grains of conversation that merge to build relationships, then community, then tribes, then nations—a cumulative, snowball effect just as powerful as the mechanized chain of Paid Media Branding from the last century. Of course it will take a while. The current empire wasn’t built in a day, either.
To survive this evolution, brands need to be redefined as the individuals inside the company—versus messaging and media outside; to become less about the volumes of media inventory anyone can purchase, and more about the interpersonal connections only each employee can nurture. Brands need to be oriented towards Social (capital “S”) first and media (small “m”) second.
Let’s talk about this out on the Digital Porch.
A billion dollars from merging traffic?
Posted on | April 11, 2009 | Comments
I wonder if the way we drive sheds any light on how we can or do embrace innovation. I wonder why on the highway in big cities we crowd up at the beginning of merging entrance and/or exit ramps. I wonder if that sheds any light on describing why we don’t see any more innovation than we do. I wonder if thinking differently about driving could lead to the next billion dollar company. What do you think?
My typical commute includes driving through Minneapolis on Hwy 94 west bound and exiting on Hennepin. That exit ramp is a single lane of traffic on the right side of the road, nothing crazy here, and starts as an entrance ramp to 94 from 35W North. I think there are literally thousands of places like this in the country. It’s about a 1/2 mile long. Yeah, pretty cool. It’s plenty of distance to get our merge on. It’s blocks and blocks of wonderful lane changing opportunity.
Every-single-day, everyone and their Grandma intending to exit on Hennipin and all of their cousins trying to enter the flow of traffic on 94 from 35E all pile up at the beginning of this long entrance/exit ramp and wait for each other to merge. Shoot, most of the time people merge across the solid white lines before they turn to dashes and say “it’s time to merge.” Apparently you get points for being extra extra early to the next lane. Who knew.
Anyway, I don’t get it and I don’t proclaim I have an answer. I am just wondering about it. Is there something here to be learned. It seems peculiar enough to look into. The only thing I can come up with is that, as a whole, we like predictability far far more than we are maybe cognitively aware of. It expresses itself all over and in our driving too. Maybe most of us just follow and do as others are do and a couple people are this way. That’s plausible. Yet, it seems everyone wants to just get in line for whatever they’re expecting to happen as soon as it’s fundamentally possible to do so. Then we wait for what we expect to happen to actually happen. Maybe we get something from this. Maybe a chemical reward in our brains or something. What ever it is, in the very least we habitually follow those who do.
I could be reading into this too much. I am OK with that. But it seems so interesting to me that there is ALWAYS a line to get in line at this spot on the hwy. I wonder, why don’t we have lines to get inline for the change innovation brings? The only other place we get in line to get inline that I can think of is the airport. Is this get in line to get inline simply about predictability? In that case, it’s clearly not enough for us to know that if we miss our entrance/exit ramp there will always be another ramp coming up soon. It’s interesting that we have lines to get in line for change on the hwy but not in business and not for innovation. Is that interesting enough to you to go find some dollars in it?
keep looking »