You Do The Dishes

How do you feel about email notifications?

I thought about them when using the new Disqus 2012 interface. I left a comment on a blog and forgot that I had left that comment until I returned to the site a few days later to read a post. That’s when I saw a notification that someone had replied to my comment.

I probably would have responded to their reply had I found out about it earlier, but given the delay, I lost motivation to continue the conversation.

So, a notification would have solved the issue, right?

I’m certainly not going to log in to the Disqus site very day to see what comments of mine have triggered interaction.

An email notification is a possible solution. Inboxes around the world are already stuffed to the gills. And, often times, my notifications get routed into a separate folder in my Gmail that I check periodically but not every day.

Would a Twitter notification system work? Disqus could send an @reply to me every time there’s an interaction with a comment I’ve left. I’d probably me more likely to check the comment that way. Plus, I wouldn’t get the junk in my inbox.

There might be privacy issues with this solution (but, maybe not, given the fact that I’ve already left a comment on a public-facing site). I suppose the key issue is what the open rate differential would be between email and Twitter notification.

I also wonder if this could go one step further. Instead of signing up for, say, the J Crew email list, can I sign up for a Twitter notification? Instead of sending me an email – they Tweet a link to that same content at me. Or bill notification messages – AT&T could just Tweet me to let me know my bill is available. I don’t need the email.^[1]

I like the Twitter system for daily emails because of the social sharing mechanism. If there’s a great deal on shirts at J Crew, I can just Tweet the link at friends in an open environment where others might see as opposed to the closed network of email.

Any thoughts from you guys? Would you mind if you had notifications Tweeted at you instead of emailed to you? Could you have a Disqus app that sent you push notifications? Are there privacy concerns with moving notifications outside of the realm of email? Would you be more likely to open the content if it wasn’t sent to your inbox?

 I am the absolute worst at waking up in the mornings. I’ve never been a morning person. In high school and college, I always preferred working late and getting things done past the midnight hour rather than waking up early to deal with things. I’ve just always preferred the solitude of night compared to the morning hours.

Anyway, waking up is difficult for me. As a result, I tend to hate my alarm clock.^[1]

So I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that UNIQLO has released an alarm clock app for the iPhone.

Now at first blush this seems incredibly odd – what business does a clothing manufacturer and retailer have making a non-fashion related app? But something about it makes sense.

UNIQLO has built a decent history of being innovative and adventurous when it comes to its digital initiatives (their Lucky Line, Lucky Banner, and Lucky Machine campaigns were all very creative). Its website pushes the envelope in terms of digital tricks (occasionally at the expense of usability – sometimes I just want to see how much a sweater costs) – And its clientele definitely skews younger and more tech savvy – the type of people who use their smartphones as alarm clocks and, more importantly, are geeky enough to look for better apps than the ones that are preloaded on to the iPhone.

UNIQLO has injected a strong digital underpinning into its brand’s DNA.

And the app carries that messaging through. Like the UNIQLO clothing and store it’s clean and simple to use. Not a lot of frills. Bright colors. Sparse interface. A little bit of quirkiness. The app wakes you up with a little bit of music and someone telling you what time it is and what the weather is like outside.

So it carries the brand message and qualities, is well designed and aesthetically on point, and it fulfills a need for the consumer. And it extends the brand beyond its core functionality.

I also love the fact that it has built in viral triggers that are easy to use – share to a variety of networks with the push of a button (who knows if people will use that, but I’d rather see apps include this in their minimum viable product rather than add it in later).

I like it.

Let’s just see if that’s still true at 6:45 in the morning.

GM, the third largest advertiser in the United States, announced today that it would pull its $10 million dollar advertising budget from Facebook. This budget goes towards paid ads shown on Facebook – the ones that you see in the sidebars. GM has said that it will still continue to spend money on its Facebook page and other social marketing efforts (approximately $30 million dollars, according to the WSJ article that broke the news).

If you take one thing from this post, it’s this:

GM’s decision doesn’t reflect on the effectiveness of social marketing.

There’s a big difference between social marketing and people clicking on display ads.

A few quick thoughts:

• Marketing, not advertising. Facebook is a social site where interaction and engagement are most important for the user. People are much more likely to click on the organic content in their News Feeds, than on what essentially amounts to display ads that have social content. Perhaps the GM news underlies the point that Facebook is an engagement platform (conversations on brand pages or between friends about content from a brand page) and not a one-way communication device (ads with some social proof). It’s difficult to get people to click on display ads. We already knew that.
• Bad for Facebook; good for agencies and brands. Advertising is easy for Facebook to monetize. Marketing is much harder. That’s bad news for Facebook’s valuation and business model, but it’s not bad news for social marketing agencies whose bread and butter is creating content that spurs a conversation and delivers a brand message. Notice that GM still said that there is value in the “content” on Facebook.
• Facebook will go on the offensive. I’d like to see a barrage of data coming from Facebook on click-through rates and the effectiveness of their ads – unlikely to happen before the IPO though. With so much of their revenue hinging on ad products, I can’t see them sitting by idly.^[1] Undoubtedly there are brands that have seen strong click-through rates with Facebook ads. The GM experience might not be universal.
• What was the objective? The WSJ article stated that “General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising on Facebook after the company’s marketing executives determined their paid ads had little impact on consumers” and “GM, started to re-evaluate its Facebook strategy earlier this year after its marketing team began to question the effectiveness of the ads.” The italicized words beg the question of what GM’s objective was with the ads? Was it to drive conversion? Referral traffic to the site? Engagement on Facebook? Addition of Facebook fans? Sharing of GM branded content? Without knowing those objectives, it’s hard to understand the full reasoning or implication of GM’s decision.
• Why do this now? Why announce this three days before the Facebook IPO? To decrease Facebook’s leverage? To drive the stock price down? Cue the conspiracy theories.
• Everything is conjecture until we get some data. That’s the only way to truly understand this story. What were the spends? What were the key indicators that determined success? Without those metrics it’s difficult to draw any real conclusion about the effectiveness of Facebook’s advertising business.

There are two ways this can go and one inevitable truth here. Either Facebook’s ad products are not great or GM’s experience with them is an outlier. Without some pretty sweeping data, we’re not going to get a real answer there. But what we do know is that, even with putting the effectiveness of Facebook advertising to the side, the marketing, branding, and consumer relations capabilities that Facebook provides are revolutionary.

So, while GM’s decision here might affect Facebook’s bottom line, it won’t change the broader cultural and business impact that Facebook has had.

All views here are my own and don’t reflect those of Attention or any of our clients. 

The next time someone says, “Make this go viral!” point them in the direction of this quote:

All one needs is access to a sizeable mailing list or ad­buy — bread and butter
for large companies who retain advertising firms — and some email or web­-based tool that enables peer-­to-­peer sharing, in to improve one’s advertising yield by 10%, 100% or
even more.

Big Seed Marketing means companies can get the benefits of viral marketing without the
extreme difficulty and unpredictability required to achieve an R value greater than 1. The
real value of viral marketing, therefore, especially for large media companies, is not in
the occasional, unreliable, campaign that “tips” its way into public consciousness from
some small seed, but rather the systematic enhancement of standard ad buys with viral
tools, yielding smaller, but still often quite sizeable returns on investment.

The quote is from a paper on mass, viral, and big seed marketing written by Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti, the guys behind BuzzFeed.

With all the viral triggers available today (i.e. frictionless sharing, social share buttons), big seed marketing is definitely the method du jour.

Amass a whole lot of people (FB fans, mailing list members, Twitter followers), share interesting content with them, and then give them the tools to deliver that content to their connections (via retweet or share).

The BuzzFeed guys like the big seed approach because it demystifies the viral approach – rather than searching for a mythical influencer (I do disagree with the BuzzFeed guys here – I do think that there are influencers and that reaching out to them should happen in conjunction with big seed efforts) spend your money on 1) growing the seed and 2) creating interesting shareable content.

Here’s the geeky stuff from the paper:

With viral marketing, you tell a small group of people about something and hope that it spreads far beyond them. B is the probability that they tell someone and Y is the number of people that they will tell. BY is the reproduction rate (R) of the campaign. If R > 1, you have a viral campaign. Something is viral if each person who shares it shares it with more than one other person – that’s what causes the exponential growth. But, this is tough because you have to get each additional person to also have R > 1. A viral campaign will die out very quickly is R < 1.

In traditional mass marketing, if N is the number of impressions an ad receives and p is the probability that someone clicks on the ad, then pN is the expected number of conversions for the add. So the number of impressions that you purchase sets a cap on the number of conversions you can have.

The BuzzFeed guys say that somewhere in between the two is “Big Seed Marketing” where even with a R < 1, a campaign can be a success because it’s seen by more people than would see it via traditional mass marketing.

So, what is “Big Seed Marketing”? Let’s take an example. You show 400 people a display ad and there’s a 50% probability they click on it. So, 200 people will view. That’s traditional mass marketing. Now, let’s say you include a viral trigger in the ad – “Share this on Facebook” – which makes those initial 400 people your “seed” group. If each of those people has 400 friends and there’s a 50% change that they share, then 40,000 additional people see the ad – 400 seeds x 50% share x 400 friends. And then those 40,000 people can also share the ad.

Big seed marketing is smart because it is efficient – it’s essentially the underpinning of the Newsfeed on Facebook. Build up a large enough fan base, then get a fraction of those fans to interact with your content, which puts it in the Newsfeeds of their hundreds of friends, which gets some of those friends to interact…so on and so forth. Your message spreads beyond its small seed without the use of influencers.

The question, especially in social, is how you grow that seed size. I believe the answer is content and I believe that companies need to spend money on building the infrastructure to share and then creating things that people want to share.

The contours of how the courts and law will react to cases containing social media issues are still being determined. While society-at-large is quickly adjusting to the new technologies that are shaping our communications, the courts have historically been much slower to understand the implications of technological advancements. It’ll be fascinating to see how the courts manage to keep up with the quickly evolving tech/social landscape as definitions of communications expand and change.

Here are two cases – one where the court got it wrong and one where it got it right:

Your Online Actions are Constitutionally Protected Speech. 6 employees in a Virginia Sheriff’s department were allegedly fired because they “liked” the electoral campaign of their boss’ challenger in the upcoming election. The existing sheriff argued that the employees were fired for budgetary reasons (a permissible reason) while the employees argued that they were fired in retribution for voicing their political opinions (protected by the First Amendment). The question here is whether the act of clicking the “like” button on Facebook is speech. The district court said that the “like” was not protected because it was not substantive enough to be considered “speech.”

He’s wrong and is going to be overturned (Volokh agrees).

Non-expressive actions are clearly protected by the First Amendment. Actually saying “I support Barack Obama” is the same thing as wearing an Obama 2012 t-shirt is the same thing as attending a Barack Obama rally is the same thing as becoming a fan of Barack Obama on Facebook is the same thing as retweeting a quote from the Obama campaign. All of it is the expression of a political opinion. Read more about the case here.

Takeaway: Virtual actions can be just as expressive and loaded with meaning as verbal or written statements.

Your Don’t Have an Expectation of Privacy Online. If you think you do, you really need to take a look at what you’ve been posting and make sure it’s appropriate. A criminal defendant charged with disorderly conduct attempted to quash a subpoena issued upon Twitter seeking production of Tweets from the defendant (I’m assuming that the Tweets would help the government prove the actions of the defendant). The defendant argued that the subpoena violated his Fourth Amendment privacy interests.

The court ruled that the defendant was wrong for a few reasons. First, Twitter’s Terms of Service clearly state that the content you upload to Twitter gives Twitter the right to do a whole lot of things with it (distribute, publish, transmit, etc.). By giving Twitter those rights, the user can’t then believe that they have any proprietary interest in the Tweets. Second, there was no reasonable expectation of privacy because the Terms of Service make clear that  “[w]hat you say on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly … [t]his license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same.”

Twitter has also filed a motion to quash – essentially stating that it puts an undue burden on them to produce this information, it violates the Fourth Amendment, and that the users do have a continuing proprietary interest in their content. The court hasn’t ruled on the motion yet. (Read more here)

Takeaway: Well, like you’ve been told a million times before, what you put on the web is not yours to protect and keep and lord over. As soon as its up on the internet, things become murky and you should just assume it’s public.

*********

I’m an admitted attorney in the state of New York so I need to include this disclaimer. Nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. Reading this post doesn’t establish an attorney-client relationship, and this post is not a substitute for legal advice. This post is not attorney advertising. 

iTunes turned 9 years old last week and they still haven’t figured out #social. Apple: How is that possible?

— Richard Ting (@flytip) May 7, 2012

Interesting thought, right? iTunes and the iPod/iPhone revolutionized the music industry by legitimizing the selling of digital files and creating an amazing mobile device to play those files.

But for all of its ingenuity, iTunes and Apple have failed to fold the major trend of the day into what is arguably its flagship service.

iTunes has no social DNA.

The iPod/iTunes introduction definitely preceded the social revolution inspired by Facebook, but it seems odd that Apple has completely failed to successfully embed some sort of social thinking into subsequent versions of iTunes.

It’s odd, right? The biggest tech company in the world failing to add social components into its flagship product, especially when there has been so much buzz in recent years about the socialization of digital music – see everything written about turntable.fm and the streaming music set (Spotify, Rdio, etc.) as well as buzz for SoundCloud, etc. A friend pointed out, and I think it’s very true, that iTunes in some ways feels like AOL Instant Messenger when placed in the context of the whole digital music spectrum – first to the game, definitely revolutionary, but then surpassed by others that built on its potential.

Apple did try to create a social network around iTunes by introducing Ping. It didn’t go as well as planned. Look, I’m not going to sit back and second guess how Ping was put together, especially with the benefit of hindsight, but there were major problems with it.

It failed because it was dense and difficult to use. It failed because it never felt like social was the primary function of the network. It failed because it didn’t allow you to do things that you could do on social networks (status updates, view others activity streams, real time updates). It failed because it lived in a bubble and refused to build on the social networks that already exist and are booming. The failure is well documented.

I do think that the main stumbling block with Ping is that it was envisioned as a closed network and it simply did not have the momentum to maintain those feedback loops – there were no viral triggers embedded in its DNA. Social is about creating pathways for people to share and discover information. Ping was introduced as if Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist. Take a look at every nascent startup right now – they have social mechanisms that make sharing easy. Ping didn’t do that. And without those pathways and without the content to maintain a self-contained network, there was no way for Ping to maintain users.

But let’s focus less on why social hasn’t been integrated into the iTunes experience and more on how it could be:^[1]

Enable easy social sharing on mobile devices and iTunes. Spotify does this well. If you’re playing a song on Spotify via the desktop app or the mobile app, there’s a button that allows you to broadcast that information to your friends. It’s a simple way to increase engagement with your product.

good lord this is nice #NowPlaying Otis Redding – Let Me Come On Home on #Spotifyopen.spotify.com/track/3QOSKKTi…

— Varun Shetty (@VarunSShetty) May 4, 2012

Apple could do something similar in two ways. First, it could include some of these social sharing buttons in the iTunes interface to allow you to Tweet or Facebook your friends and let them know that you bought the new Black Keys album on iTunes. Second, and WAY better, they could add social sharing to the Music app on the iPhone. Listening to the Beastie Boys? Just click the Share via Twitter button to let everyone know (they already have made a deal with Twitter to integrate the app into iOS and the integration is seamless, so why not take full advantage of it?). That way you can say: “I’m listening to Holocene by Bon Iver on my iPhone 4S – buy it here on iTunes [link].” Social sharing buttons aren’t groundbreaking – why not use them?

Create activity streams. This takes the previous suggestion a step further. Allow folks to create a running history of what they’re listening to that they can share with friends (Last.fm already does this). Allow them to tag locations where they heard songs. Integrate with OpenGraph to get this information in front of as many eyeballs as possible.^[2]

Make iTunes a home for artists. MySpace is staying alive right now because it found a niche as the go-to site for bands to connect with their fans. It’s still an arena where Facebook has yet to make major inroads. Often times, we’re trying to figure out how to integrate e-commerce into existing sites. With iTunes, we have a different problem – how do we build a community around a shopping experience. Bringing the artists’ into the fold could make a huge difference. The current Lady Gaga Ping page contains her name, number of Ping followers, similar artists, and her Twitter stream. Give me one reason why I would EVER visit that page.

What about allowing artists to have a home on iTunes? Copy MySpace. Allow streaming songs there (obviously, major legal and licensing hurdles to overcome); allow multimedia content; give artists the option to build their presence out via iTunes. If they can do that, the fans will come. And then the artists have a direct portal to e-commerce (although that portal will be available under the terms that Apple sets).

Social recommendations. Half the fun of listening to music is sharing it with other people. The other half is looking down on people who don’t know anything about the bands you’re listening to. There’s a certain amount of collaboration/one-upsmandship that makes turntable.fm so much fun. Is there a way that can be baked into iTunes? Leaderboards or discounts for users that are able to recommend music for others – where that recommendation results in a purchase? I personally like this idea because, although I was very excited for the Genius function (you choose a song, Apple creates a playlist from it), I felt that it never lived up to what it could be. Plus, people are better than robots (for most things).

Discovery through social data. Take a look at what Next Big Sound is doing – aggregating social data about acts to allow people to draw insights and make decisions about them. With the proper segmentation this could be a fantastic way to find out about new music. Billboard even uses Next Big Sound to come up with a “social” chart. An iTunes integration would be great – allowing people to find popular music as it’s gaining momentum.

******

Apple’s work has been revolutionary in so many ways, but it would be nice to see them push iTunes even further.

As mobile engagement rises, people continue to discuss the fact that consumption is the primary activity on those devices. Take SneakerheadVC for example:

Mobile, and specifically touch, is the first interface optimized for the 99% who consume rather than being over-built to serve the 1% who create. It is read first, contribute second. Mobile offers bigger images, swiping actions that are intuitive and physical to create a visceral experience with fewer buttons and way less typing.

That makes total sense and I think that, empirically, he’s absolutely correct. These mobile and tablet devices are primarily being used for second-screen activities and for passive web/app reading when were on the go.

But there’s a great creative power in these devices that we’re just starting to unlock.

The things that Phineas mentions – mainly intuitive design on mobile devices – can just as easily spur and ease creation as much as they do consumption. In fact, mobile creation is even more appealing because you can create tools that don’t need to be “over-built” as Phineas believes most web creation tools are. The constraints of the mobile environment can actually help create a more appealing arena for creation. As long as something isn’t text heavy – continuous typing for me is still an amazingly frustrating process on the iPhone and iPad (it might be less taxing on Android devices but I bet by not that much – there are some pretty neat tools that allow you to create.^[1]

Take the tumblr I made for Niki’s birthday, for example. I used the tumblr iPhone app to help put a lot of it together. It has an incredibly intuitive interface and the ability to capture video or photo media (or easily upload the media that other people sent to me via email or MMS) is seamless. While walking around SoHo two days before her birthday I was able to upload three posts on the go with minimal effort.

Look at Picle for another example. Take pictures on your phone (or use ones from your photo library), place them in an order to tell a story, and then record your audio over the pictures. Slideshows on the go. Sure, you can do this on your computer. But that just seems cumbersome to me.

The fact is that as the power of these devices continue to grow, we’ll see a boost in the creative power that they provide us. that the 1/9/90 proportion (1% create, 9% curate, and 90% consume the information on the web) will hopefully start to skew differently.

Creating content is naturally fun and rewarding but there is a huge barrier where people believe that creating digital content is difficult. The truth is that these devices are eliminating those difficulties on a daily basis.

So, go forth and create. It’s easier than you think.

I bought tickets to go to the movies on Friday.^[1] That’s not really groundbreaking, right?

But the ticket purchase process was interesting to me.

Discussing plans with my friends over Google Chat, I decided that I’d buy tickets for all of us. Now, I was sitting at my laptop with my browser open. But instead of going to the Fandango website to log in and order tickets, I pulled out my phone, fired up the Fandango app and bought tickets via mobile.

Why? It seems counter-intuitive to pull out a new device and buy tickets when I already had a browser window open and I’m the quickest gun in the west at opening up a new tab.

Well, the mobile purchase process is just easier. I’m already logged in to the app once it’s open, the purchase process takes less clicks, and the UI on the Fandango mobile app is far more intuitive and cleaner than the website.

I’m certainly not alone in recognizing the increasing reliance on mobile engagement. Phineas wrote a great post about mobile design recently and how it is increasingly important given the 1/9/90 rule and the fact that mobile devices are consumption tools. Google, recognizing the upcoming mobile tsunami, also published a Mobile Playbook for executives. As smartphones and tablets continue to become more prevalent, mobile design will necessarily become more important. A non-mobile optimized site or the lack of an app will be a big deal in a few years. In fact, a lot of people have said and bet on the fact that apps are going to replace browsers eventually.

So if I’m a designer, I’m designing for mobile before I even think about native web or desktop.^[2] It’s because mobile puts the consumer/user first out of necessity – everything has to be more simple. So start with those principles on mobile and expand them for other versions.^[3]

As people shift towards using their devices to browse, especially during second-screen activity, it’s going to be increasingly important to make sure that mobile design is right on.

So, the mobile buying experience was the first thing that stuck in my mind. The second thing that stuck in mind later that evening was that mobile technology saved me from a classic Varun boneheaded move. We get to the theater and see a massive line to get in. Not surprising given that it was opening night. I go to the kiosk and swipe my card only to realize that the card on file with Fandango is my wife’s and she wasn’t with me. So, I figure I have to wait in line at the box office, talk to a human, and remedy the situation. While in line, I mess around with my Fandango settings and realize that I could just have the tickets sent straight to my phone and scanned by the ticket taker. No need to talk to anyone, no need to worry. I did, however, feel like Zoolander (“The files are IN the computer?!?!”).

Genius.

And just another way that a savvy mobile process makes the consumer experience just that much better.

The NHL released an app called Preplay for the playoffs which asks fans to predict various outcomes within a live playoff game. The range of “bets” you can make is staggering – winner, score, first to score, first player to score, face-off winners, next to score, score at end of periods, etc. While using it I thought that the UI was pretty slick and intuitive. There’s also a leaderboard, prizes (virtual trophies), a forum to talk trash to friends, save percentage, and a tie in to offline activity (a guide to local bars showing the games).

I’m not sure what sort of engagement/loyalty rates the app has seen in its first week in existence, so it’s tough to say whether it’s a success or not.^[1] I do, however, think it’s a great idea because it taps into two broader behavioral trends.

Second Screen Activity

With the release of this app, the NHL is making a bet on second-screen activity. The twin growth of mobile devices and social media has triggered in people the desire to multitask constantly. People turn to a second screen to get more information/utility/entertainment out of whatever primary activity they’re taking part in. Some of this second-screen activity is complementary (checking Twitter streams during a basketball game to see what other fans or writers are saying, posting on Facebook about the Oscars during the Oscars, checking in on Get Glue when Mad Men comes on) and others are substitutes (playing Temple Run during the Office, checking your Twitter stream for political news while watching Project Runway).

Attention is diverted. Individuals want entertainment/utility/information and will look to multiple sources simultaneously to find it.

So, you can see, that a branded app is an interesting solution to this situation. It’s an opportunity for a brand, like the NHL, to capture a fan’s attention on both devices (TV and mobile/tablet).^[2]

Predictive Polling

Rick and I have been fascinated by the idea of expertise. What makes someone an expert? Ideally, an expert should be someone that is right about their subject matter more often than not (far more often than not, in fact).^[3] People love being right – they’re irrationally convinced that they know more than they do.

Predictive polling puts that to the test. By asking people to predict outcomes and tracking those results, you can actually figure out who knows the most about a topic. Now, many of the NHL bets in PrePlay are simplistic – I don’t think you know that much about hockey if you guess who scores next in a playoff game – but questions on a larger scale do provide insight.

Regardless, I think this is a fascinating engagement tool because it feeds people’s desire to be correct and prove how smart they are. And it uses that as a hook to get them to watch the game.

*******

Ultimately, I think that sports leagues can do a lot in social media and with digital initiatives. Unlike some brands which struggle with name recognition and products that people have a hard time getting excited about, sports leagues have an amazing comparative advantage: rabid fans, national exposure, natural affinities, human drama.

Those experiences can, and should, be translated more and more through a digital lens.

By the end of this post, it’ll be clear why I’m mentioning these three people together:

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson wrote a post about Eventful’s Demand It! feature which allows fans to demand events, concerts, etc. come to their area. If there’s enough demand, the act plays the area. Pretty neat way to cure market inefficiencies (why play a half empty venue in Kansas City if you can play 3 sold out nights at a comparable venue in Hartford?).^[1]

Killer line at the end of the post (emphasis mine):

With the Facebook IPO on everyone’s mind, the topic du jour seems to be valuations, revenues, and profits. But the most impactful thing about social media is not the dollar value of these platforms, it is the people power of them. 

That’s it. That’s what this whole thing is about. The power of networks is in the people.

Rishi Khullar

My friend, Rishi, is an entrepreneur and founder of utellit. Rishi hates how impersonal the web has become. He hates how bland Facebook wishes for a happy birthday dominate the day. Rishi has a fantastic voice that he uses well. He’s hilarious. He thinks we should hear each other’s voices more, so he created utellit – which allows people to record audio messages for friends and share them via social networks. It’s a fantastic product.

Darin Brown

Darin is a great guy. He had a wonderful idea earlier this year of videotaping all of his wife’s friends/family singing Happy Birthday and then splicing the clips together into a fun video for her birthday. It turned out amazingly well and was a great gift – something more permanent in a digital age. And something that can be done because (luckily) most of us had access to cameras on our smartphones.

******

My wife’s birthday was this past Monday and I stole from both Darin and Rishi in order to make myself look good – this theft allowed me to see the power of Fred’s statement firsthand.

I decided to set up a tumblr site where friends/family could submit whatever they wanted to wish Niki a happy birthday. It was a neat experiment. Tumblr is very easy to use, it supports a variety of different media easily, and I was interested to see how people would respond. Some people are very familiar with creating content for the web, for others it is something new.

I gave people very little direction but was really amazed at what came back – homemade rap videos, animated GIFs, interview-style posts, lip-sync screencasts, songs, recordings, pictures, craft projects shared digitally. It was really amazing.

Most of all I wanted to make something that was different and personal. So much of our communication is impersonal nowadays, even for big events. It seems like we’ve traded intimacy for reach (we get more messages from more people, but they probably mean less).

I showed the site to Niki on her birthday and then read Fred Wilson’s comment yesterday and it really resonated with me. The fact is that all of this technology is only as worthwhile as the people using it. Social isn’t a technology – it’s a behavior. And it’s one deep-seeded in all of us. But with all the noise around the latest gadgets and toys, we can lose track of how powerful and fun these tools can be.

I’m glad I was able to see that first hand recently.