A tweet may not be the truth...

I thought a comment I left on AdFeak merited it's own post here. AdFreak was writing about a planner who'd been fired and publicly pilloried by StrawberryFrog, in part because he posted "casual, flippant tweets" while he was on leave from the agency due to allegedly imaginary family emergencies:

While I can't comment on this situation, I can say there have been times I have consciously kept my tweets and blog posts upbeat, even though my life was anything but. Our digital selves are not necessarily accurate, blow-by-blow accounts of our days. They're more like highlights that have been edited for a diverse audience of people who may not want or need to know about the rougher patches of our lives.

Sometimes tweets are a bit like kisses. They may not be the truth, but they are what we wish were true.

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."

Welcome to my homepage. Now get going.

I can't think of a single personal or brand website that I visit on a regular basis. (Maybe The New York Times.) Instead I grab feeds that interest me (Like ColoradoPols, Noah Brier, Reach for the Wall, Selectism, Pitchfork and Sometimes Daily). I integrate interesting people into my news stream (Such as Alan Wolk, Barack Obama, Andrew Hyde, Universal Sports and Redhead Writing.) I subscribe to video channels on YouTube and look through my friend's photos on Facebook.

Like Jaffe said:

Today, consumers' digital homes are their Facebook profiles, their blogs, their custom-created communities. That's where they "live" in the digital world and that's where we need to hope they invite us to come and hang out from time to time, not the other way around.

My favorite personal websites right now are single-page designs that encourage visitors to connect on social platforms. Sites that are portals into larger stories. Sites that encourage you to leave them. (Such as Adelle Charles, Bud Caddell and Zach Klein.) My home page, Ingwalson.com, works the same way.

Brands could think of their websites as hubs, with links to content, connections and on- or off-site storefronts. Help people get where they're going. And don't bog down the pace of their lives.

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.]

"We decided that to know and be known was a good thing"

PSFK:

And these [online] communities blossomed, starting with close friends and family then expanding to include co-workers and long lost childhood chums, finally welcoming obscure acquaintances and total strangers with whom we’ve never had a face to face conversation. We decided that to know and be known was a good thing, but never really thought it through.

This is good stuff. It's infused with melancholy and understanding. It gets to the heart of the human condition, to the war that rises from the conflict between the need to be loved and the desire to be left alone. And it is a subject that resonates with anyone who has ever experienced something too heavy for Twitter. Social media encourages infinite how-you-doings, but is totally unprepared for any answer other than, "Fine."

2008 Denver 50 on Twitter, Facebook and so forth

• Join our Facebook group
• Follow @Denver50 on Twitter
• Save it on your calendar
• Get your tickets now.

The Denver 50 artwork shown here was created by Justin McCammon and Camille King.

Confusion 4/23/08

Does the increasingly collective nature of modern creativity make charades like the Shave Everywhere credits inevitable? Am I suddenly sort of excited about Johannes Leonardo? Are Omnicom and Havas really posting nice profits? Did Scott Goodson just find a cooler search engine? Is Twitter on the fritz? Does the new Barabarian Group site kick ass (h/t Toad Stool)?

The answer to that last one is, "Yes." The rest are just questions buzzing through my head that I'm too busy to answer right now.

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.

Am me getting myself dumber now?

I consider it part of my job to stay on top of the ways in which people communicate. Blogging, microblogging, social networks. Updating my Twitter page via my cell while overseeing a spot edit and rewriting the script on the fly.

Some of these tools have proven valuable. Others have increased my mania. But now it appears I may just be making myself stupid. From The Atlantic Monthly:

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.

The rest of the article is protected behind a password. But here's an excerpt from the magazine:

At the most basic level, the the mental balancing acts that [multitasking] requires - the constant switching and pivoting - energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning.

In other words, you can do a lot of stuff, but after you finish, you can't really tell anyone what you did.

It may be true, because while I was typing the excerpt from The Atlantic, I must have forgotten my place at least a dozen times. This from a guy who can recite the alphabet backwards and perform chunks of Shakespeare from memory.

I think maybe this is why many in the ad world - like Sally Hogshead - are worried that new media will hurt our ability to concept. Navigating the maze of strategies, media and applications can be awfully distracting. Especially to a creative mind that verges on the manic without any help from hyperlinks.

It's easy to say,"Unplug, grab a Sharpie and go concept in a coffeeshop." But what happens when your creative director asks you if you've seen the latest viral video and you haven't because you've been off, you know, working?

And now, in an act of WTF blogging, I'm ending this post. Because I've checked my email and my RSS feeds at least a dozen times in the last 20 minutes and I've forgotten what my point was. If indeed I had one.