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

First off, it’s early. Second, there is:

-Lots of opportunity to be solved for.
-Lots of implications to be embraced.
-Lots of “best practices” to discover.
-Lots of behaviors to change.
-Lots of culture to shift.

image via Wallie-The-Frog

I know it might seem obvious. I know. However, “social media” is just media that happens to be social. Right?

Media is text, still images, moving images, and audio. It’s just media. We’ve had media in these forms for generations now.

In the past, few made media. Few distributed it. Many experienced it. Now we all can create it in all it’s forms. It’s easy. The barrier to entry is remarkably low. We’re all publishers now. Or rather, we all have the potential to be. Many of us are.

So what makes media social? To my mind the subject and the mechanisms for distribution are on the top of the list.

When the subject of media is a person’s life or relates to it or that of those they know it’s quite understandable that we’d want to share it. We’re social beings. But it’s still just media.

When the sharing apparatus — the distribution channel — is structured to make promotion easy it’s reasonable to expect the media to seem to amplify itself. But, remember, it’s just media.

So when media about people is easy to create and distribute in a way that makes it easy to share you get an explosion of media that happens to be social.

Maybe what is more important than the tool or the object of sharing is that we have an explosion of the inclination for social activity. That seems more core than the tools themselves.

Now the question is, how good are we at it?

Toyota is electrifying and connecting your wifi machine in public places via “Solar Flowers.”

Marketing is experiencing changes. Not only that but ads find themselves in dramatically different environments than ever before. The previous dominate mediums of words and images — read print and TV — changed in minor ways every couple years. When they changed assumptions were rarely challenged. The web is providing communication new dimensions, it’s democratizing information, and driving social realities toward new behaviors. It’s forcing change and change more rapidly.

The innovators are developing and including new mediums in marketing ecosystems. Marketing as operations, marketing as manufacturing, marketing as fulfillment and here with the solar flowers, marketing as service comes to mind. Who knew marketing could do stuff for people? Who knew it could help people accomplish what it is they are already doing? Who knew it could go beyond impressions that raise “awareness”? Marketing as service can drive past “consideration” and possibly strait to “preference” if it’s done in a way that helps. I mean, why not have a preference for someone or some brand that’s provided for a need of yours with out you having to ask or even realize you needed it?

Here I am reminded of the Ritz Carlton Service model. How can marketing anticipate needs, provide for them without being asked and respond with “our pleasure.”

image via Toyota USA

Many assume each page of their website needs be treated equally. What can Baseball teach us?

I watched the Bluejays host Boston last Wednesday streaming live on my iPhone while on the treadmill. While I could talk at length about behaviors changing because of diversified media channels I find the stats on Toronto pitcher Roy Halladay more intriguing at the moment. The Bluejays are paying attention. Close attention.

When Halladay pitches the Toronto infield seems to huddle together on the right side between first and second like it’s cold outside and that’s where the bonfire is blazing. The second basemen stands dramatically to the first base side of the bag and the shortstop covers second from about 10 feet to the third base side of second. To bad for third. He stands alone in this lopsided arrangement. You can almost see him shivering. Metaphorically of course.

Moreover, the infield ought to pay extra special attention to the first pitch each batter gets. Why? 34% of all batters facing Halladay hit the first pitch. The highest in the league at the time. The graph of at bat connections off Halladay shows a highway of hits to the right side of the field. Thus the unusual arrangement of men with mits is because they know the stats, they want to win, and they believe they can give themselves the best chance by acting accordingly.

Now baseball is fanatical about it’s stats. That’s the first and obvious take away. How many of us are paying the kind of attention to our website stats like a coach does for his baseball players? The data is easy to get. I suggest we all take a page from baseball and get above, way above, 500 on our websites!

Figure out what your visitors are doing and help them do more of it.

We’re all publishers — at least we all can be if we want. So what. So what? Are you kidding? Culture is being changed from the bottom up because of it. Further, because corporations are a mix of our collective culture they’re challenged to change as the culture does. The pressure is on for a shift in power, values, and decision making because we’re all publishers. It’s changing the fabric and our assumptions. It’s challenging the power hierarchy we’ve created for ourselves. Wag the corporation.

As the social sphere becomes increasingly digital its empowering change in our social norms. In the very least, we now have a time shifted and geo-agnostic social fabric. It’s also redistributing the power of voice that was once consolidated. That’s why some people are pumped. The notion of this kind of change is an exciting prospect. It’s also why some people are so negative about it. It’s hard to change and all the more when your business model is part of it. And, if your reaction is not positive or negative it’s likely one of bafflement. Maybe the tools don’t make sense or maybe the implications are just really not apparent or tangible. Regardless of understanding or opinion the change is still happening.

Let’s be honest, it can feel like a big shift when social norms change. Yet, it also feels subtle. What is up with that? One expression of the shift is that we formerly sourced all of our stuff/content almost entirely from the positions of power. These were corporations for the most part. It makes sense. That’s where stuff/content was avalible. Go there to get it, right?

Those people and/or corporations in the previous model positions of power got accustom to the assumptions we were all holding. We did too. Namely, we paid attention to corporations, gave them the name “the man” and in doing so supported their position of power. Now, many of us get that same, better or different content, sometimes even more compelling content, from each other. It’s happening subtly in little decisions over time yet it’s a big shift in power. It’s a redefinition of cultural notion of “the man.”

So how are corporations handling it? I don’t know. Each of them are acting individually. What’s interesting to my mind is that they are not JUST reacting. Sure, some of are ignoring the change. Yet, some are proactively restructuring both inside and outside power to align with this new social shift. They’re becoming something different than they were built to be. They still have power but it’s beginning to be distributed differently. It’s being augmented.

If that’s the case then assumptions are changing. And as culture changes so also do corporations and their composition. We’re all presented the opportunity to wrestle with the rock and the hard place of ubiquitous publishing along with the voice and power that comes with it. It’s time to identify our assumptions. It’s hard to do because we don’t pay attention to them. Assumptions are tricky that way, they’re assumed.

What parts are uncomfortable to you about the culture and therefore corporations shifting toward one that incorporates omni-publishing? Odds are those points of unease will be your doorway to your assumptions. Ask questions of them and reevaluate your assumptions value in this new climate. Change them if you like. Don’t if you don’t/ Either way, it won’t stop the shift in the larger culture.

We can now provide content and help one another in ways that renders us different and more powerful as individuals than ever before. We can all be in positions of power. It’s an emerging social protocol. It’s challenging the power structures of the cultural fabric as a whole. The power is shifting in corporations because of it.

Happy wagging.

photo via ¡arturii!