Generationals "Put a Light On" and a brief meditation on the pointlessness of everything

It's a strange and fruitless thing, embedding a favorite song on your blog. I'll watch it not here, but on YouTube like everybody else. Yet I love this video (and band) so much and posting it allows me some fictitious yet vital sense of partnership. Like I have shared something and by sharing, own one of its smaller fractions.

I think I hate the Internet

I hate sploggers. I have a Google news alerts on all of Karsh\Hagan's clients. And all of them, especially "American Crew," are triggered a dozen times a day by sploggers. This vomiting up of noncontent should be punishable by law.

I hate teases. People who Tweet things like, "This made my day! LINK" or "Check this out! LINK" Can't you even bother to tell me whether the link leads to a photo or song or give me some little hint?

I hate faux modesty. Status updates like, "I can't believe my blog post is getting so many great, smart comments! LINK" Give me a break. Your transparent attempt to draw traffic to your blog by feigning humility is silly. If you have a great post up, just post the title and let me decide for myself.

I hate complimenting up. I hate insulting up, too, of course. But at least the time-honored practice of drawing your betters into pissing matches requires nimbleness, persistence and balls. The newly popular method of flattering your betters so you can bask in their reflected glory really makes my skin crawl. "I can't believe I'm about to meet INSERT NAME HERE!" Or "Love your most recent post INSERT NAME HERE!" Or "In the offices of INSERT NAME HERE and so psyched to be meeting all their awesome and talented people!" Stop it, stop it, stop it. Nobody buys your lame attempt to ride someone else's coattails.

Oh my god, I think I hate the Internet. When did this happen? What the hell is going on?

You don't need a flashlight if you're a lighthouse

Social media analysts like to buzz about how important it is to join the conversation. To search it for verbatims. To monitor and measure and react to it. All that is not unimportant. But I don't think it's the main thing, either.

Our job is not to control consumers' conversations, but to capture their imaginations. And the best way to do that isn't by spinning in the comments or linking on the forums. It is to create content worthy of being passed around.

I had a personal experience with viral content recently. On Aug. 24, 2010 I published this post named "Patton Must Have Worked in Advertising." It was subsequently picked up by The Denver Egotist. Then by The Orlando Egotist, The Des Moines Egotist, The San Francisco Egotist, The St. Louis Egotist and Design Taxi. It was named post of the month on Only Dead Fish. Quoted on waxmuseum. And linked on Twitter here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. And then my eyes glazed over and I broke Google.

I'm not saying my little essay was the equal of Arcade Fire's devastating multiscreen music video. (Linked at PSFK, The Denver Egotist and Contagious Magazine. Go watch it now.) I'm just sharing it because it is a personal story. And the lesson I have learned is this. "Join the conversation if you must. Create it if you can."

How transparent is crystal clear?

Interesting to follow the war of words between award-winning journalist Erin Rosa and Mullen's Stuart Foster and Edward Boches over the past couple days.

The story is that Mullen helped launch an online publication called The Next Great Generation, which claims to give 18 to 25 year olds a platform "to share their thoughts regarding life, work, brands, technology, environment, money, faith, sex, love."

On December 15, Rosa published an article named Beware The Next Great Generation:

Meet the “Next Great Generation Blog” a publication that wants “an opportunity for Millennial Generation writers to develop a voice and gather a following, along with a real chance for older generations to listen in,” according to an e-mail message sent from Generation blog editor Gillian Maffeo today and obtained by CampusProgress.

They fail to mention that the blog will also be a great opportunity for advertisers, too, as a little investigation shows the website is really a creation of the Boston-based Mullen public relations agency, and Maffeo is an account executive at the company.

Foster and Boches commented on the post and on Twitter, pointing out that The Next Great Generation's about page openly states that the blog was "started by Mullen’s Edward Boches" and asking Rosa for suggestions, to which Rosa replied in the comments:

It's like I rang the supper triangle for a bunch of "tech startup" advertising fanatics. I'm sorry, but I really don't have time to respond to people who can't read what I wrote or pen a coherent argument. And now, even funnier, Mullen is trying to ask for my advice via Twitter on how to improve their blog! (Actually admitting somewhere on the website that it's a product of an advertising agency to boost business would be a start….)

It's pretty hard to argue with Rosa's credentials, but is she seeing a conspiracy where none exists? Or do brands that sponsor content platforms have a responsibility to find unequivocal ways to disclose their involvement? When is clear not clear enough?

[Disclosure - Rosa and I both used to blog at SquareState and have met a few times at Drinking Liberally and other political functions.]

What to read when you're not reading the One Show Annual

Tom Morello once said that his musical inspiration was a horse. Not sure what that means. My inspiration is Wonderpets. But I digress.

Seeking influences from outside your industry is a good thing. It prevents reflexivity and tunnel vision. It's not that you shouldn't be reading The Denver Egotist and AdFreak. You should. And here are a few other publications that might influence your work in ways you can't predict:

infosthetics.com: In modern communication, Information design is as creative and important as graphic design or art direction. This blog highlights some of the coolest and most creative ways to visualize the data points that make up our world.

Various style blogs: Working on American Crew, most of us at Karsh\Hagan try to keep up with fashion. The Sartorialist, Streetpeeper, Selectism and Street Etiquette are a few blogs that have developed a following. Trendsetters reveal themselves through their clothing, and seeing their styles gives us insight on how to speak their language.

wired.com/underwire: According to Gareth, more Americans played a video game in the last six month than went to the movies. The Underwire is Wired's blog about both games and movies, plus everything else that influences geek-pop culture.

creativesocialblog.com: Increasingly, and especially in digital, the power of an idea isn't defined by how many consumers might see it, but by how many consumers pass it around, mash it up, and make it their own. Creative Social is a survey of that type of work.

wallpaper.com: Architecture one of the loudest and most lasting expressions of culture. This blog puts it in the context of design and fashion, linking humanity with the spaces we build ourselves.

[Ed. - Matt Ingwalson wrote this post for Karsh Connect and cross-posted it to his blog.

Twitter is screwing up Friendfeed

On January 4, 2008 I wrote, "Serial online publishers need a great way to aggregate their content into a single news stream." Since then, real-time news streams have cropped up faster than social media gurus at a travel and tourism tradeshow. The recently sold-to-the-man Friendfeed seemed especially promising. I can't tell you how many times I've stared at my Friendfeed page and wished I used the damn thing. But I don't. Here's why.

Ninety-two percent of Friendfeed users post to Twitter way more than any other social network. (I am guessing at that number. But it's definitely really high.) Which means that when viewed in real-time, any given user's Friendfeed page looks like a duplicate of his or her Twitter page.

It's not, of course. If you sift through it there are probably blog posts and YouTube uploads and music links. They're simply lost among the tweets.

Thinking about that made me realize a way in which Twitter is different from every other social website in history. All social media is about conversation. But YouTube, blogs, Flickr, Facebook, Upcoming, Slideshare, delicious and so on all start with shared content. The content starts a conversation. The conversation creates a relationship.

Twitter starts with a conversation. Some people join Twitter, realize they're in the middle of a conversation they don't understand, and eject. That's fine. Hang with the conversation long enough and you start to get actionable intelligence.

But the conversation itself is not fit for a news stream. Because there is no news there. It's just data exchange.

So today I pulled my Twitter feed off my Friendfeed news stream. If everyone in the entire world could follow suit, I would so appreciate it.

[Ed. - Crossposted at Ingwalson and Karsh Connect.]

Traditional media outlets are faster (but dumber) than bloggers

A very long time ago, a certain Denver newspaper megacorp decided to launch a little thing called Politics West. The effort centered around the Gang of Four blog, wherein a bunch of professional pundits got yet another platform for their personalities. At the time I was doing a lot of political blogging. And someplace I can no longer locate, I wrote this little rant about the idiocy of the SCLM. It went something like this:

Bloggers are more passionate, more involved and more willing to engage in long conversations than journalists are. The only competitive advantages they have over us are speed and access. In what business model can you make money by ignoring your advantages and instead copying a bunch of activists who are willing to work their butts off for free? The media provide us with fast, accurate information. That's their job. Why won't they do their job?

Which is a roundabout way of linking to a post from Trendsspotting:

Cornell Researchers report that most news flowed from the traditional media to the blogs: The traditional news was found to lead blogs discussions by 2.5 hours on average.

No kidding. The media reports the news. The people converse and decipher meaning. That is the way things ought to work. I think newspapers are failing because they tried to subvert this order, asking citizen journalists to find news items for pundits to discuss.

Denver Broncos use blog to discuss Cutler trade

I've expressed my admiration of the Broncos blog. And my disappointment in seeing our star quarterback demand a trade. Both those sentiments are doubly true today. Cutler was traded to the Chicago Bears. And the Broncos immediately gave their fans a open forum to vent their frustrations or express their excitement. Well done, team.

Deep breath

Given what has happened to my family, blogging feels kind of rude. But I'm not hitting the delete button just yet. So here goes. You can expect a post at 9:00 am for the next several days. Things are going to be kind of random. I hope you read something you can use.

Marketing takes intelligence. Advertising takes guts.

These are words I have written before:

[Blogging] immortalizes everyday language, holding it to an impossibly lofty standard.

And I am thinking about those words now after reading a post by Noah Brier named "When Too Much Listening Is A Bad Thing."

It's precisely those emotional comments that [the Microsoft/Jerry Seinfeld ad campaign] should have been aimed for and seemed to have succeeded at. So why did they drop it? Well, my theory is that it's because a bunch of people with blogs and such started talking about how they didn't like/didn't get the ads. Lots of people were saying that Microsoft needed to respond and listen to what the consumer was saying, but I call bullshit. In a quote for PRWeek I explained, "Other than the Super Bowl, how often do people talk about ads? Microsoft should let this play out. I think there are times to listen to everyone and there are times not to listen to everyone... The people talking about this may not be the audience for this ad. They may not be talking to early adopters." And I stand by that.

In the end I guess my point is that there are times to listen and act upon what you've heard and times to listen and respectfully ignore the feedback.

Brier is right. More than once I've prepared a marketing director for the idea that an ad (this radio spot, for example) might offend someone. But these days, a client might get more than a cranky phone call. He or she might get an angry blog post that an antsy junior marketing executive sends to an unpredictable CEO who forwards it to the whole senior management team, which immediately convenes a committee to seriously consider the matter. The next day the agency phone rings, a junior account coordinator picks up the call, and an effective, wonderful ad dies.

In Hey Whipple, Squeeze This Luke Sullivan wrote that we marketers get so tied up measuring public opinion, we forget that we have the power to shape it. The Internet appears to give us the ability to measure opinion more accurately than ever before. But it gives disproportionate weight and unprecedented permanence to isolated, impulsive rantings.

For the most part, I've been blessed with courageous, focused clients. But the weight of the written word makes even stout hearts wobbly. Sometimes the best course is to just sack up and plow on.

The key to being a great Internet brand is to be a great brand

There have been lots of new media channels invented in the past decade. Ad agencies have a responsibility to be experts in all of them. And the only way to get good at something is to practice. So I have a blog. And a microblog. And a tumblelog. And nevermind any social networks, online communities, and video or photo sharing sites I may be a member of. (They're all aggregated on Friendfeed, if you're interested.)

Recently, I've had this crazy thought. It's sort of unorthodox. So of course I'm going to blog it and let the whole Internet tell me I'm dumb. Here goes:

Web 2.0 is more like a conversation than a media experience. Yes, some of these conversations will be about you. But you shouldn't try to control them. People will start saying nice things about you when you stop being an asshole.

The fact is, no company has ever been able to control the conversations that went on about them. Ever. One hundred and fifty years ago, someone was saying that Joe's Horseshoes suck and someone else was agreeing and suggesting Benjamin's Horseshoes as an alternative.

Today, companies have the ability to see these conversations take place in real time on the Internet. So they want to get involved in them. But that makes as much sense as barging into someone's living room and telling them to stop badmouthing you.

Instead, create something useful and beautiful. A better product, a better experience, a tool or widget, or even an ad. And then trust that your creativity, value, attitude and usefulness will shine through.

I'm not saying that brands should exit the social media space. I'm just saying that being engaged is nice, but being great is better.

/ebullience

Karsh\Hagan intern Justin McCammon is interviewed by Why Advertising Sucks and mentions how "stoked" he is to "work on real client work alongside real, live copywriters."

I happen to be one of those real, live copywriters and trust me when I say I'm not that exciting. Go read the interview for more of Justin's insights.

It's not a blog

I love the Denver Broncos. Since I have neither the spare time nor the attention span to hunt for news about the team, I listen to 104.3 The Fan during my morning drive. I get training camp updates and interviews. I also get non-stop promos for the Sports Guys' blog. There's just one little problem.

It's not a blog.

There's no RSS feed I can load into my feed reader. There's no way I can leave comments. There are no outgoing links that I can follow. There are no permalinks that make it easy to quote and share posts.

Typing isn't blogging.

You know who actually has a pretty good blog? The Denver Broncos. Religiously updated twice a day with photos and news from camp. The Broncos get it. Go team.

Dumber every day

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" is awfully interesting. Sort of along the lines of a post I wrote last year named "Am me getting myself dumber now?" But it's a really long article and I didn't quite finish it. Just too much stuff vying for attention. Like this Mercedes spot about all the stuff vying for attention, via AdFreak:

Denver's best blog is, um, what's a blog?

5280 is looking for Denver's best blogger, among other things. Who you vote for probably says a lot about your definition of the word blog.

Is Colorado Confidential a blog, or an online news organization? Is SquareState a blog or a community of online diarists? Is there a difference? How do you compare a team blog that covers an industry (like The Denver Egotist) with any one of a hundred achingly personal blogs written by artists and mommies and, hey, look out for LOLcats! How would you compare an issues blog like Coyote Gulch with a link+snark or tumblr blog? Does Twitter count as a blog? (After all, it's "a website where entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.") Does national pull come into play, and if it does, how do you not vote for Talk Left?

The point is that all-in best blog contests are a bit like all-in best band contests. (Or, for that matter, The Denver 50.) They're only as strong as the people who judge them.

[Hat-tip to The Denver Egotist, who asks for your vote.]

The other reason creatives stay up late

You'd like to think the late nights ad folk are famous for are just a by-product of our undying passion for the work. But that's only half the story. Alongside desire, there's fear, as Bart Cleveland explains:

The advertising industry is a great white shark, always feasting, yet never satisfied. You had better get better if you want a career that lasts for more than a few years...

The cause of the problem for many seniors in this business is that too many have avoided committing themselves to growing in responsibility or ability.

The ability that many senior-level people lack these days is Web skills. And there's been no shortage of people predicting doom.

Yesterday, it was our own Denver Egotist:

Being in such high demand, are these developers simply moving to more established landscapes, or is Denver simply a microcosm of a national drought?

On the national level, there was Brian Morrissey, quoted here via Scott Goodson:

Clients are placing more emphasis on mastering social media but find their agencies ill equipped to help them succeed in that space, according to a new survey.

And there was Benjamin Palmer worrying that ad agencies aren't up to the Web 2.0 challenge:

Everyone talks about how the industry is changing, nontraditional media, fragmented audiences, blah blah blah. It's true, it's progress, and it's fantastic. It is also obviously scaring the crap out of traditional ad shops.

I see this meme over and over. And I'm never quite sure who these "traditional ad shops" are. Maybe it's because I've never worked at a Madison Avenue monolith; I imagine they'd be harder to evangelize. Both of the agencies I've had the pleasure to work for in the past four years embraced Web 2.0. And when I write "embraced," I mean, "threw our arms around it and kissed it like Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams making out in The Notebook."

At TT&D, we built the first social network for iPhone users, launched a UGC contest for WOW! and asked Colorado to build us a state activity map for Colorado Farm Bureau Insurance. At Karsh\Hagan, we're enabling student-generated content for Regis University, launching McDonald's film on YouTube, and we've got a few new projects upcoming, one of which will be here on May 15.

I know these aren't quite Barbarian Group-level technology applications. I'm not trying to go toe to toe with Palmer creatively. But the "agencies genetically can't get the Intertubes" meme sounds like something invented by interactive shops. And I'm not buying it. Because as Palmer himself writes:

[I]t's not that hard to adapt, if you really want to.

In fact, ad agencies have a better 2.0 mindset than some interactive agencies. (Although many have been slow to realize their advantage.) As Ian Schafer wrote:

[I]f the agency doesn’t have a full media/creative/public relations offering, they probably won’t be able to have the right (and unbiased) experience and best practices to succeed in social media.

The answer isn't as simple as building a better Internet offering. It's about integration. Every day, I see the best Denver agencies staying up late, developing the ability to create great work across integrated media.

It makes me get all weepy. Just like that scene in The Notebook.

...but not their life.

Paul Tilley, the ECD of DDB/Chicago, apparently took his own life Friday night. [AdAge, Adweek] There has been all sorts of conversation on Twitter about whether a Feb. 18 post on the anonymous ad agency gossip blog AgencySpy was at all to blame.

A long time ago, I saw a quote from Wonkette herself that changed my blogging:

[I]t's OK to ruin someone's day but not their life.

The intensity of our industry is not proportional to its importance. Play hard, but play fair. Life is short. My heart goes out to Tilley's family.

Does the planet have a collective narrative?

The problem with Twitter is that the ability to microblog passing thoughts discourages you from ever assembling them into narrative. Take my my caucus-night tweet:

Wow. Over fire code. Running out of sign in sheets. This is best caucus ever.

Just one little tweet. Probably meaningless. Probably should've come home and blogged about the whole night.

But maybe not. Because maybe individual narratives mean less than the collective narrative of our planet.

There is a raft of new services that attempt to compile tweets into memes that reflect America's collective consciousness. Like TwitterLinkr. And Twemes. And the Google Maps/Twitter mashup that broadcast tweets in real time throughout Super Tuesday. (The map is here and a story is here.)

Most of these services have the word alpha or beta attached to them, so they're claiming permission to screw up early and often. But I'm dying to know what it'll be like to search a term like "climate change" and pour through the world's ideas.

We are all in this together. And maybe our collective whispers will become something more interesting than synthesized recollections could ever be.

Cross-posted on the agency blog.

Aggregation nation

I realize that what I'm about to write is trendier than a Barack Obama t-shirt. But I'm going to write it anyway.

Serial online publishers need a great way to aggregate their content into a single news stream.

The Biz of Coding agrees:

Managing scattered online Social Life on multiple Social Networking sites, I sense, will become a Killer App Category 2008.

So does Mashable

[A]s I try out more social networks and lifestreaming utilities, I’ve spread my personal brand all over the Internet. I’ve got podcasts, domains, writings, tumblogs, linkblogs and RSS feeds scattered all over the internet bearing my name. I need to find one or two good utilities and a slick looking format with which to consolidate it all in a useful, user-friendly manner.

There are several startups in the space. And SocialThing!, which is being developed by friends of friends, sounds similar.

Plaxo Pulse is similar, too. I have a couple gripes about it. One is that when you load your address book into it, it automatically invites everyone you know, instead of letting you select who you'd like to connect to. The result is that you're connected via pulse.plaxo.com to a whole bunch of business contacts who don't actually create any content of their own.

Someone's going to get this ironed out eventually. I just know it.

Cross-posted on karshconnect.

Some thoughts for new bloggers

Ian Schafer has some thoughts on the blogosphere:

Anytime the editorial content of blogs is tainted with cash, it de-legitimizes the medium. Even the promise of links is promising traffic which translates into potential ad revenue for the blog. Getting bloggers to create their own ads seems to take them away from what they are (probably) doing best: writing content for their readers. Collectively, readers are smart. They can smell a rat a mile away. Once they realize the content of the blog they are reading is influenced by money, they will move on.

Just to pile on, here are a few other things bloggers shouldn't do:

• Reproduce editorial content without linking to the author.
• Reproduce more than three paragraphs of content.
• Reproduce any photos or art without permission.
• Steal bandwidth by using an existing URL to post hijacked art.
• Fail to hat-tip to a blog that pointed out a story.
• Delete or substantially alter a post, unless you're deleting the whole blog.
• Cross post without linking to the crosspost.
• Astroturf. Seriously, nothing pisses me off like astroturfing.

When I started blogging, I probably violated all these rules. (Except the last one, which I consider almost unforgivable.) You have to give neophytes some leeway. And as more people and more brands enter into a Web 2.0 world, the code of ethics which has bound good bloggers is bound to be stretched a bit. Hopefully the medium won't get so corrupted it becomes worthless.

UPDATE: Here's another thought. Know the difference between anonymous blogging and pseudonymous blogging. It is important.