With the press now focusing mostly on hardware battles (“Can the Xoom beat the iPad2?”) we have almost overlooked some signifcant advances in mobile interfaces. Take Android’s new map application: You push a button. You say “From here to the next McDonalds”, and the phone guides you there. Amazing. Android now has voice enabled mobile search, email writing and even translation!

If Apple really integrates and improves on Siri, the virtual personal assisitant service it acquired last year, your voice will soon book you a restaurant table, movie tickets, and the cab home – without ever typing a single word. What a great and seamless way to buy things. (And fantastic way to scare advertisers, of course.)

However, this is about more than just establishing a really useful connection between products and people.

In my book, the future wants to look a lot like StarTrek. So how do people aboard the Enterprise use their computers? Textinput via keyboard is reserved for really complex operations. Entering coordinates for a new course, maybe. But if you want some information, you just ask.

We are approaching a time when keyboards will be our second choice of input. Combined with the first samples of semantic intelligence, that’s going to make computers beautiful and simple and great and everything I want. But I feel this will also have an effect on the tone of voice on the web in general.

If you look at forums and written feedback on the net, you can’t help but thinking there’s a gigantic gashing hole along the starboard side of civilization. The flaming wars on Usenet were fluffy cotton candy against the invectives people hurl at each other on any given forum today: whether they talk about the Miami Heat, nuclear power or a new mobile phone tariff.

An internet of voices should put a lid on some of the SCREAMING! that seems to be everywhere today. Because the “typed internet” offers us two layers of depersonalization and camouflaging. The first layer is the fictional avatar identity, like “nomadguy23″. The second one is keyboard-typing. It is less personal than handwriting, and definitely much less personal than talking. No wonder it’s tempting to snipe.

I have a feeling that an internet of voices will be a more polite internet: First, because our digital assistant phone will be right there “listening” to us. Even though he/she/it might not be real, it is a completely different experience from posting into an anonymous form field. Most of all though, talking aloud makes us socially accountable.  Remember when our parents explained the concept of “outside/inside voice” to us?

Imagine using Google mobile on a train. As long as typing was your first method of input, googling “articles about the “Whore of Akron” (forumspeak for LeBron James) wasn’t all that hard. But now you have to talk into your phone in this crowded subway car. Wouldn’t you rather say “Articles about LeBron James with really unfriendly and harsh ciriticism”? ;-)

I sure think so. And I definitely hope so, or the subway of the future will have to make do without me.

PS: Longer interview with the founder of Siri is here. Well worth watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EySAW1C60is&feature=related

Theoretically, targeted ads are also more valuable than ads targeted to an audience aggregate. In a perfect world, this will allow digital media companies to scale back the avalanche of shitty little punk ads they currently hurl at us.

So, theoretically, I like targeted ads.

However, when targeting is both persistent and wrong, it can get down right creepy. Last November, I was looking for a short term apartment in Tokyo, and www.sakura-apartments.com is the market leader, offering partments all over Tokyo. In English.

So I showed them some love, spending a considerable amount of time on their page. But the moment I left their site (without booking), I found myself under a steady shelling of Sakura GoogleAds, regardless of where I went on the web. And even after I had left Japan, the barrage just would not stop.

The following are but a couple of screenshots I started taking after more than two months of total Sakura immersion. More than two months filled with constant variations of a very irrelevant offering.

Imagine a Mariachi band that just won’t leave your table. Now imagine that same Mariachi band showing at the office, and in your living room. For weeks.

In the end, I got desperate and decided to try a headfake. I used a different mail account to send a “departure note” to my gmail account, hoping that the everwatching googleeye would recognize the futilty of showing me further ads.

About a week later, the ads stopped.

I am not sure if it was the headfake or my February trip to India. But boy I am glad that the other websites I visit aren’t as zealous in their targeting as Sakura.

Consulting companies like The Dachis Group promise to help companies with the transformation of becoming a Social Businesses. The to-do list usually looks something like this:

• keep the dialogue with your customers going
• get ready to customize to your clients needs
• be transparent about your ways of production
• consider the impact on your community

While recently walking through the maze of an older New Delhi neighborhood, I couldn’t help but think that that’s pretty much the standard there already.

Obviously, we can’t just scale everything back to a neighborhood store. But the connection that these storeowners had with their community felt very much like the social dimension so many businesses are looking for on Facebook and Twitter.

If an agency names itself Anomaly, it forces a burden of proof on itself that wouldn’t be there, had it just picked a bunch of initials. However, Johnny Vulkan, one of the founders of the New York marketing outfit, doesn’t look like he’s about to crumble under the pressure: “We don’t think of ourselves as an advertising agency.” he insists.

Strange words from an company that just took home the Outdoor Grand Prix at the Cannes Advertising Festival for it’s “Be Stupid” Diesel Campaign. But what is it then? A lot of attention usually goes to Anomaly’s attempts at creating and owning intellectual property. But you might call that a symptom. At the company’s core lies a different understanding of an agency’s marketing competence, one that encompasses more than telling the right stories.

“Marketing includes the product, the pricing and the distribution, as well as promotion”, and according to Vulkan, most current ad agencies only work on the promotional communication part. This allows them to assemble large teams of highly specialized experts for creating ads. Which, in turn, necessitates massively selling those experts, even if creating ads might not be the best marketing solution. Ad agencies have little incentive to risk other routes of creating economic success for a client’s product. That’s why, regardless of the hours we put in, Vulkan claims that “Advertising is lazy.”

Anomaly aims for more. Like a business consultancy looking for lasting competitive advantage, Anomaly works to let a product win the marketing game consistently; not just when huge media spends spike the customer’s interest.

This sounds great in theory, but we all know that the “lazyness” of advertising is created and supported by many a client’s tendency to underpay creativity and overpay labour. How does Anomaly overcome the problem of putting a price on creativity? That’s where their signature features of creating actual products, co-owning intellectual property, and success-driven pricing come into play. By exposing themselves to business risks, they expect to gain a share of voice in the entire marketing deliberations of their clients.

“When you decide you’re in the business of asking the real questions and solving the real problems, you often find very quickly that the problem is the product itself. … In the old days, the client comes in and puts a mediocre product on the table, and everyone in the room is not saying how this product is not as good as the competition.” I am pretty sure these “old days” are pretty much yesterday’s meeting for most ad agencies.

To be able to criticize a clients product and survive, Anomaly assembled a different kind of team. A creative CFO, a media planner, a Nike brand manager, an Urban Outfitters CD, an innovation strategist,… And it’s not only the skillset that’s different, it’s the attitude, too. From the beginning, Anomaly quickly became “a place for refugees from various parts of the creatives industries.” People who weren’t quite happy with the limits and the isolation of their previous jobs.

“I guess ‘curiousity’ is the main quality we look for.” Vulkan is talking about what the smarties at IDEO have called “T-shaped people”, experts who are able to collaborate and cross-pollinate with other experts: bringing together things that seem apart.

A typically anomalous project – and one of my personal favourites – is “Avec Eric” a television show for Michelin-starred Eric Ripert, Chef of famous NY restaurant Le Bernardin. Anomaly created – and co-owns – the show to raise Ripert’s profile and explore his potential as a brand.

I asked Johnny how the various talents at Anomaly approach such a project. Not surprisingly, it depends on the perspective that promises to be most productive. “If you’re a designer, you look at the form, as an advertiser you might look at the best story to tell, if your a business consultant you understand the cost of a product”. With Eric Ripert, they realized it wasn’t about PR stunts, or great headlines. “Avec Eric was very much driven out of media thinking.” The goal: creating a longform story which gives space to Ripert’s unique character, plus building a sellable media property, while avoiding direct competition with the glut of cooking shows out there.

The result was a combination of travel diary and cooking show. “Avec Eric” centers around Ripert’s convictions regarding the production of food. It shows him visiting producers and friends, and celebrates how their love of quality is an inspiration to him. “We wanted to show Eric as what he really is, this intellectual kind of chef.”

“Avec Eric” was a big success commercially as well as creatively, grabbing an Emmy in its first season, with the 2nd Season wrapped and the 3rd one in planning.

While Anomaly came up with the concept, most of the actual writing and directing is done by a production company specializing in cooking shows. One of my final questions was therefore, whether the Anomaly way of doing things doesn’t move the agency into a mere producer’s role. It might, says Vulkan, but agencies have always done that: ”An Art Director does not take a photograph. They don’t direct the film. Don’t edit it. They ask questions of people who do that.”

Most of the skills that Anomaly’s new world of marketing demands should thus be well within the comfort zone of a good creative. “Open Mindedness is probably the key. … It’s that balance of having a strong opinion, but then having enough humility and space to allow experts to help and lead you.”

After all the talk on how Anomaly is different, Vulkan admits that “that’s actually, bizzarrely, not a new role at all. … We’ve just broadened the number of people we play with.”

With so many more options to do work, the folks at Anomaly might help your brand without ever shooting an ad or writing a line of copy. But you’d be a fool to call them lazy.

After restarting the brand with the “Crazy Ones” (1998) Apple marketing has now reached the other end of the arc.

“Here’s to the lazy ones! The sofa people. The big butts on a small pillow.”

This campaign violates everything that made me love Apple since I bought my first PowerBook Duo 230 in 1993. It makes me squirm, and it makes Apple look like General Mills.

But there is hope.

Here are 7 reasons why Apple commercials will become better this year. And while they probably won’t be like “1984″, they surely won’t be as bad as 2010.

1. No buzz-worthy new products

It seems that for the first time in years, the product line will feature mostly upgrades on the hardware side. iPad 2, iPhone 5, iPod Nano 7. Remember the free-of-charge otherwordly iPad buzz of early 2010? That won’t happen this year. While maturing products are great for us… Apple won’t be able to do another round of “Introducing. The iSomething.” It will need some glamour.

2. The Creatives at TBWA/Chiat/Day

Imagine hiring the best storytelling creatives in the world, and then asking them to come up with a 2 minute product demo. Again. And again. Eventually they will snap and present Steve Jobs with such a barrage of fantastic ideas, that he just can’t help but pick one.

3. By now, everybody knows how to touch

Apple proved in 2003 that smart and complicated need not be the same thing – at least for phones. Ever since, the competition has been playing catchup. And they are getting close. Despite raging interface IP wars, Samsung, HTC, HP, Blackberry, Motorola, Dell, Asus are turning fingertouch interfaces into a mainstream feature. With more and more comparable gadgets out there, just showing how the iPad or iPhone works, will no longer be enough of a differentiation.

History never lies. Remember the first iPod campaign?

No. You’re thinking about the second one. Here is the first one.

Before the silhouette dancers became icons, Apple was explaining how the iPod worked. This is where we are with the iPad now!

4. The Windows Phone 7 Spending Tsunami

Despite the fact that Microsoft hast lost the battle for smartphone dominance, Apple nevertheless has to take one on the chin by Windows Phone 7. Late to the show – as usual – Microsoft still has enough cash to flood the TV market. They spent 500 Mio USD on the launch of Windows Phone! And they will have to keep spending, or else become completely irrelevant. Guess what the ads are showing. Happy average people, swiping away. Apple will have to style-up.

5. The mighty Android

In 2010 Google’s Android OS overtook Apples iOS. In the next 3-4 years, it will become the world’s leading mobile OS. Already, Android devices can pretty much do what an iPhone/iPad can do, and just as smoothly.

What should give Apple even more thought, is that Google is starting to release innovations on Android first. Like the new 3D enabled Google Maps that also works offline. That’s a full-on usablity advantage. This should make the guys in Cupertino nervous. And the Apple ads better.

6. Steve Jobs must be bored

Over the years, Steve Jobs has briefed, influenced and signed off many memorable ad campaigns. However, Apple has not come up with an iconic campaign since 2006 (Mac vs. PC). It’s time Steve, isn’t it.

Here is a small collection of great Apple ads.

1984, “1984″

1998, Think Different

1999, HAL

2003, iPod Silhouettes

2006, PC vs. Mac

7. Because I put it on my Christmas list.

Happy 2011.

This fall I was lucky to be able to visit the headquarters of Smart Design in NYC. The global design firm is one of the recognized voices in the resurgence of design. Their iconic work features prominently in Gary Hustwit’s great documentary “Objectified” (Trailer here): a fascinating look at how designed things impact every second of our life.

However, when I sat down with Smart Design’s co-founder Dan Formosa and Paul Katz, their Director of Innovation Engineering, we hardly talked about how they design better working products or how they make sure their design is meaningful. Instead, we mostly focused – and I felt almost sad about it – about the relationship between design, advertising and media. I am writing “almost”, because as it turned out, SmartDesign have a whole lot of clever and fascinating things to say about this as well.

“Back in time, someone would design or invent something. And they would hire a marketer or advertiser to make it known. … At some point in time, probably in the 1950s when television and advertising became extremely popular, the sequence of events flipped.” Advertising campaigns became the primary product, and design updates became a campaign feature – because novelty is easy to communicate.

The media budgets grew – and put marketing in the driver’s seat, while design had to ride in the back. Nowhere was this more obvious than with the annual chrome mutations in US car design. But this kind of “applied design” touched everything, and often an excess in style was used to hide a lack of quality:  “If you saw something that looked like it was designed, you’d be very suspicious” remembers Formosa.

From Applied Design to Meaningful Design

Luckily, things have changed. People have become better at judging design as our culture has become used to advertising. Not only have they learned to ignore the chrome of the 50s and 60s. They have also learned to ignore the tech overkill of the 80s and 90s. Now people are asking how something works for them, and if it adds something meaningful to their life.

Social media have enabled and strengthened this mindset. “Previously if companies made something and it wasn’t great… it would have a life span of a couple of months before word got out. It was much easier to rely on a promise and on a brand. Now… people will know much much sooner.” And Social Media have made it easy to talk about it. The resulting bad buzz can quickly hurt brands and their products’ sales, and good buzz can propel an unknown brand into the limelight just as fast.

Formosa now routinely asks people during speaking engagements whether they have ever used their phone to check for consumer ratings or tests while they were in a store, about to make a purchase. He says almost everyone has. “People feel like they need to check the reviews on the internet and what people are saying. So the purchase is really made by the trust in the social network, not by trust in the brand.” This kind of reassurance was previously only used “for expensive things, but now it’s for little kitchen items.”

Brand Loyalty vs. Product Usability

Successful Brands are obviously learning to react to that. At one point we shortly talked about Apple, of course. More than any other brand Apple understands how usability and meaningfulness are now the core of success for a technology brand. Apple has built its second coming not on technological innovation, but on superior interface design for existing technology. At the same time, their advertising has moved from mindblowing (Macintosh, 1984) to sleep-inducing (iPad, 2010).

(I’d like to insert Apple’s iPhone 4 launch as an example of this new mentality. When the tech writers were throwing hissy fits about the lack of Flash support, Apple barely flinched. But when the first customers reported problems with reception and dropped calls, Apple reacted. It updated the system and offered free phone covers that reduce the problem. Obviously, the real-life complaints mattered more to Steve Jobs than the journalists’ perception of the product. http://gizmodo.com/5571171/iphone-4-loses-reception-when-you-hold-it-by-the-antenna-band)

Smart Design sees this move from trust in brand values to trust in proven usability as a fundamental trend for many product areas. It creates a two-pronged challenge for brands: 1. People have learned to quickly disinvest from a brand if it disappoints. 2. Only extreme user experiences get documented in the social media.

Better make sure that you design your products to deliver an all-around satisfying experience, says Formosa. A disappointing experience easily warrants a negative comment. However, in a prime example of life being unfair, a product that actually delivers what it promised rarely triggers any reaction.

If you want to build up word of mouth, “what’s really critical for good design is: to exceed expectations” says Formosa. If it just does what you thought it would, “are you actually going to take the time to tell the world on Amazon it did that?” asks Katz. To trigger a positive response, he says, you actually need to get people fired up. “When you look at products that have a lot of good feedback, those are the ones that exceeded expectations.”

Design obviously regains an edge over advertising when the playing field gets redrawn like this. “Companies realize that everyone’s got the same kind of ammo [technologically]. So what do you do to distinguish yourself? Design is really the powerful distinction here,” says Katz. “The investment that companies make in advertising or branding to build up that equity, should be – and is being diverted to design.” adds Formosa, because “the equity that a company has in a brand is much less valuable” these days.

Exceeding expectations: Ford Fusion Hybrid and Flip Video

Digital technology has become incredibly powerful, enabling us to do ever more – and truly magical stuff. But being the limited monkey-descendents that we are, we can only use and appreciate these powers, if the complexity behind them is hidden. “The need to simplify life is great,” says Formosa, and Smart Design has created success by making things ergonomically and emotionally easy to use.

“The Flip camera is definitely a good example” says Katz. While the producing company Pure Digital had introduced low cost video in various forms before, it was the Flip model co-designed by Smart Design that took off. The Flip’s legendary simple user interface – a single red button – brought creating and sharing video into the realm of the everyman and everygranny.

The Flip’s design language not only speaks of simplicity, but also of accessibility. “It’s a very nicely designed camera, but it’s not so precious. So people would throw in their pocket and take it to the beach.”  Doing to video what the iPod did to mp3s, the Flip exceeded user’s expectations, became an overnight sensation, and created an entire new category in the videocamera market.

Giving people something to talk about by making life simpler was also behind another recent Smart Design project: The new dashboard for Ford’s Hybrid limousine, the Ford Fusion Hybrid.

Early in the design process, a big challenge emerged: conventional American driving styles (pedal to the metal? :-) tended to keep Hybrids from reaching their full fuel saving potential, sometimes even making the cars fall short of the advertised miles per gallon (MPG).

Smart Design solved the problem by reducing information and adding a new perspective: “Traditional dashboards inform you about the car’s performance. We decided to also show the driver’s performance”. The new owners of a Ford Fusion will immediately see how their driving style influences the fuel efficiency of their car. To help them adapt to a new way of driving, SmartDesign replaced the rational metrics of traditional gauges with an emotional display of unfolding green leaves.

Success without Advertising

As lofty as this sounds, the results are solid: The first test driver not only matched the announced 41 MPG, he exceeded it by more than 10 gallons – and wrote about it. Other magazines reported similar experiences. And probably so did most non-professional  drivers. Did exceeding expectations make a difference? In a 2010 car market that saw Hybrids struggle for the first time, the Ford Fusion Hybrid is still on a strong growth path, closing the gap to the market leading Toyota Prius.

While driving the Fusion Hybrid created conversational capital to boot, the advertising campaign for the Fusion Hybrid probably didn’t. But maybe it doesn’t need to. If your design exceeds expectations, you just need to tell people.

Interview with Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK.

When I first stumbled upon PSFK.com, I was fascinated by its seemingly all-encompassing, anything goes content. So, when I recently talked to the website’s founder Piers Fawkes, my hopes were high that he would wax poetic about the complexity of the PSFK system. However, these expectation were quickly smashed to bits: “It’s simple.”, said Fawkes, “our mission is to inspire people.”

Quite some tradition to become a part of: In more archaic times, inspiration used to be the job of the muses. Actually, they invented the job. As daughters of Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, they knew what being noteworthy and memorable was all about. And if they so wished, they would kiss an artist and help. Or not.

The muses wouldn’t stay fickle forever. There was a time in advertising when two publications offered help, reliably: Subscribe to Luerzer’s Archive and Shots, and you were guaranteed to see the most inspirational work in the industry.

Well. It’s been a while since I looked at Luerzer’s. As clients and agencies are trying to create relevant conversations, making a great ad becomes only one of many skills. The sheer number of things we advertisers now do has made inspiration more difficult again. While that creates headaches here and there, it opens up opportunities for places like PSFK.

Piers Fawkes explains this by introducing the pair of literal and lateral inspiration. Literal inspiration takes place when Creatives see the best work in their field. “And you need literal inspiration, for sure.” However, in his view, this only gives birth to work that stays within current boundaries. “It doesn’t create any new ideas.”

To stimulate the kind of radical thinking that creates conversational capital, creatives need “lateral inspiration,” says Piers: “See what else is going on, what else is exciting.” Therefore, PSFK picks up stuff that lumbers around in our peripheral vision and throws it onto the main stage. “We pick ideas that would challenge you, [that] aren’t very easy to translate into advertising.” This kind of inspiration obviously doesn’t work for everyone. But 750.000 readers every month think it’s worth their attention.

And while his strategy of lateral inspiration isn’t new, his business model may be. Other than Luerzer’s and Shots, PSFK is a free resource. Which brings back the internet-age-old question: Who’s paying?

Shouldn’t there be a significant cost difference between kicking out a link to my Facebook page every day (me, free) and a bunch of people each filtering a couple of hundred feeds a day (PSFK, also free). Not really, says Fawkes. Because his team has to read the whole internet anyway. The additional effort to post the good stuff isn’t zero, but it’s not worth messing with tons of Google ads or Freemium schemes.

“Anyone who’s got a creative job can come to us and get new ideas. We provide those ideas through Publishing, through Events, and through Consultancy. And the money comes in the other way.”

Turns out, PSFK is a prime example of Chris Anderson’s “Free” economy: offering freely available “datapoints” for free and charging only for the more cognitive efforts of recognizing meaningful patterns. Listening to Fawkes, this seems to equally reflect his personal beliefs, as it is a great strategy to enter the market: “[Traditional] research is all about controlling data, and then charging for that data. But, it’s all there. How can you charge for that data?”

Obviously, you could try. Instead, he wants PSFK to focus on creating value by making sense. On an average project, his team will look at about 800 data points from the web, and then establish links, trends, meaning… and of course a preferable course of action.

Compare that to one the old school research ways of locking a group of 20 people into a KGB-style interrogation room with one-way mirrors: If that ever produced a muse’s kiss at all, that muse increasingly looks like a chain-smoking 83-year old italian grandmother.

So the clients are coming, and they are expanding the reach of things that they want PSFK to have a go at. It usually starts with creating a report, Fawkes says “but sometimes we then move further and go into concepting: and this could be everything from communications to product, to retail, to service.”

Step by step, PSFK is moving into a hotly contested space: a seat close to the top of the table, preferably to the left of the client’s marketing director. It is here where the interesting talk is talked. Where the “high level creative thinkers” as Fawkes calls them, are being placed. All the while, the production expertise is moving further and further down the table – looking at their neighbor and whispering: “Whatdhesay”.

Of course, PSFK is small. Very very small. So there is no reason for Martin Sorrell to loose any of his 37 Billion £ sleep, yet. But Fawkes has indeed “thought about whether PSFK is a future agency model.”

He thinks his company has a shot. To a certain extent because it understands trends. But Fawkes is modest about the fact, that – while their method is pretty unique right now – other strategists could do this too, if they put the time into it. He thinks the quality that really sets them apart is being a medium, with “750.000 very interesting people reading our site every month.”

Big numbers are always cool, but what impresses more: those are mostly creatives. The social web may have enabled everyone to create, but the truth is, less than 1% do. Thus, whatever shows up on PSFK.com, during PSFK events, or on his twitter feed, influences the influencers. Fawkes is narrowcasting to the content makers and information brokers on the web. “We’re not mainstream media. But we’re a different kind of media.”

For the last two years I’ve read many articles on how one of the future functions of an agency is to have a community, and to give clients access to that community. I’ve always wondered what that would look like. It seems PSFK is off to a start worth watching.

Have you ever wondered who shows up in your Facebook TOP NEWS stream? And who does not? You probably felt that there’s a pattern behind it. You probably also felt you don’t have a clue what that pattern is.

Facebook gave us a quick look at the math behind this, when they explained their EdgeRank algorithm at F8 developer conference in April. But in the last few weeks, more and more light has been shed on how it actually works. (I added a list of references at end of this article).

Here is the official part, the algorithm shown by Facebook at F8.

The EdgeRank is basically an individualized relevance score for each social object placed in the network: be it status update or video. So what is an Edge? Figuratively spoken, it’s like a finger pointing at your content. EdgeRank sums up the importance of these Edges for each individual facebook user. It does this by looking at three factors:

1. User Affinity (U): How closely has the possible receiver interacted with you in the past. If someone talks to you frequently, then his chance of seeing something you post increases. Other factors might also play a role. Facebook mentioned at F8 that it’s aware that Brand Pages are different. We rarely chat or send messages back and forth with a page.  Be aware that one-way interactions from your side don’t count. You clicking on someone’s profile won’t make your stuff show up in their feed.
2. Weight (W): What kind of interaction is taking place? Some interactions/Edges are more equal than others. A comment seems to get more points than a Like. But we still know very little about this. When asked about the value of a click on an outbound link, etc, Facebook developers at F8 made it clear that some EdgeRank secrets will remain untold.
3. Decay (D): How fresh is the post. This one is easy. The younger, the better. It also seems that posting new content improves the value for older objects.

These values are then multiplied to create an Edge value. Each object’s EdgeRank is the sum of the values of all Edges that point to it.

By limiting the Top News Feed to Objects with a high EdgeRank, Facebook created an automatic News Feed Optimization that vaporizes the social information tsunami and turns it into a manageable flow. While pleasant for me as a reader, and in line with Clay Shirkys prediction that the future is all about information filtering, this has tough social consequences: It can be the equivalent of a party where you start telling a joke, and everybody turns to leave.

With EdgeRank, Facebook is redefining the way we interact with our peers the way Google influenced the way newspapers write. (Ask a journalist :-) At it’s core it re-interprets “important for us” to be the same as “important for others”. It isn’t exactly a stretch to assume that we will adapt to fill out that reward strucuture. Wheter we have a Brand Page to promote, or whether we just want to make sure that our friends see our vacation pictures of Thailand.

A new thing to optimize: Social Relevance

Call it Social Relevance Optimization (SRO), call it dancing to Facebook’s tune: either way, chances are you’re already doing a good bit of it. From the party invitations to the funny videos that you post, you probably make sure not to annoy your friends with duds. And if someone leaves a comment on your wall, your tend to answer it. It’s all pretty much common sense and being polite.

In the old show-all-newsfeed this was actually the best we could do. The one-size-fits-all information filter was radical decay: When we looked at a feed we would see everything in our network, but only the 1-2 hours of it. Twitter still works like that. We probably missed most of the content, but at least everyone had an equally miserable chance to be seen.

Now that Facebook’s “Top News” is doing most of the filtering for us, brands and people who don’t know how to please the system will quietly fall through the cracks that EdgeRank pries open for them.

Difficult for virtual friendships. Desasterous for brand pages. Your brand might be on Facebook. You might have enticed hundreds of people to “Like” it. And yet: In the darkness that is a low EdgeRank, no one will hear you post. Social Media consultants BrandGlue estimate that since the introduction of EdgeRank, less than 1% of Likers/Fans see a new BrandPage post.

Welcome to SRO 101

Here is how you drag your Facebook brand page out of that non-relevance hole. The Daily Beast did an interesting one-month experiment with a new profile, and described what it took to make “Phil Simonetti” show up in other people’s feeds. They list a bunch of cool insights, but it really boils down to three things:

1. Promote your way out of the new page curse fast

A young brand page with few friends has a hard time for two reasons. First, the Interaction history with your Likers contains almost nothing (1 Like), so the Affinity value of your new object/post to anyone is rather low. Secondly, as long as you have less than 10000 Likers, you’re going to get very little interaction. It takes a lot of readers to get a stream of comments. Vitrue offers a free Whitepaer that claims the interaction on Facebook is around 0.5%. (Still better than Twitter where only 1 out of 300 will be retweeted.)

Your way out? Don’t trust the “Social Media are free.” hooopla when it comes to building your network. Use everything you’ve got to get past the treshold. Other websites, print, radio, TV, promotions.

If you can’t throw around money like that, do it the hard way: Bring some time, and be very nice to the first fans. Especially to the ones with few fans! Build deep recurring engement with them, because you might actually show up in their feed. Your changes of coming through on the feed of a popular Facebook member with 500 friends or more are close to nothing. (However, if you can convince someone with a 1000 friends to maniacally click on your content, by all means do it. :-)

2. Create Objects that invite an Edge

An Edge only happens when someone interacts with your content. So this is kinda obvious. As soon as you have enough Likers to be reasnoably certain that someone will answer, invite feedback. Ask questions. Throw in a provocative update to get the discursive juices going. Create comment surveys.

Keep in mind, though, that the relationship between EdgeRank’s AFFINITY and WEIGHT is complex. Facebook attributes different Weights (W) to different Edges. The Daily Beast experiment hints at the following sequence of feedworthyness: Comments beat “Likes”. Likes beat posted links. Links beat the opening/view of fotos and videos. This makes a lot of sense, as mirrors your effort and thus your commitment to a piece of content.

Logically, the likelihood of any of these things to happen is almost inverse. And the amount of responses influences your future AFFINITY ranking. According to a whitepaper by Vitrue, if you are trying to get a response, photos beat videos, videos beat links, and links beat Status Updates.

You’re going to have to decide what is more important to you: If your page has very little interaction yet, you should post photos and videos. If you already receive lots of views, and Likes, upgrade your strategy by asking for comments.

3. Get the right people to act first

Finally we get to the splendidness of Social Media, where an Idea will travel beyond its initial reception or seeding and go its own merry way reaching ever wider circles. An adventurous voyage, fueled by chance and serendipity. Facebook’s EdgeRank is turning it into a chaperoned walk in the park.

Why? Because the love and attention that you receive from a “Liker” will not be featured everywhere along the Social Graph, but only in his/her area. And As we already said, it is rather unlikely for posts to feature in the feeds of a wildly interactive power Facebooker who receives loads of attention from numerous friends.

A much more likely scenario is that your content will travel along a quiet backroad. If the first guy or girl is from a not so releveant subgroup among your Fans/Likers, that subgroup might be the only place your object every travels to, before it’s EdgeRank Decay value (D) buries it for good.

If you’re no Facebook bigshot yet, your task is to create reactions quickly, and in the right interest group. One of the ways to make sure your object gets Edges from the right people is an intial burst of facebook advertising. You can even target the ads to the most relevant subset of your BrandPage’s Likers, which should make it very efficient. This will invite the right people to act, and create early simultaneous actions/Edges. Which enables that object to show up in many more feeds, creating more interaction, which will help keep decay at bay.

Filter failure avoided. What about Filter dominance?

Facebook is neither evil nor innocent. While their ranking obviously helps me filter the information of 500 friends, the algorithm may also clandestinely support behavior that Facebook wants to happen: Facebook needs to promote groups? Tweak a line of code, and interactions/Edges with groups will score better in EdgeRank and move up in the feed.

But the even bigger challenge for Facebook lies in the inherent promise and problem of a post-broadcast communication system. We’ve all become information providers. But what if the information I produce isn’t deemed worthy by an impartial and utterly unemotional algorithm. What if EdgeRank thinks me and you are just noise.

Did 500 million people join Facebook to find out that only 50 million should be heard?

I’m a narcissist. ;-)

How about you?

___________________________

References:

The Article that made me start looking into this: http://www.doseofdigital.com/2010/07/facebook-page-exist/

Navigate to the Techniques sessions, and click on ‘Focus on Feed’. Questions about EDGERANK begins after about 20 minutes:

Video from F8 conference: Go to “Techniques”, click “Focus on Feed”, EdgeRank discussion starts after about 21 minutes. http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/

The Daily Beast Experiment: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-18/the-facebook-news-feed-how-it-works-the-10-biggest-secrets/full/

Vitrue Whitepaper on interaction rates: http://vitrue.com/blog/2010/09/21/anatomy-of-a-facebook-post-vitrue%E2%80%99s-data-behind-effective-social-media-marketing/

Informed speculation on what could be measured in EdgeRank: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Facebook-calculate-weight-for-edges-in-the-EdgeRank-formula

Link to HP Labs study on “Influence and Passivity in Social Media” which of course opens the same can of worms for Twitter ;-): http://www.jeffbullas.com/2010/10/08/average-twitter-user-only-retweets-1-in-every-318-links/

And finally: You can now vote for the “Black Art of Optimizing Facebook Wall posts” for  SXSW 2011!: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/7760

Thus, when I recently met Creative Director Juan Morales from SapientNitro in their Miami Beach office, I was curious about their creative culture. They seem to have found a way to use technology to surprise – and even bring forth a chuckle. SapientNitro’s award winning ideas include an icecream machine that dispenses free ice-cream when you smile at it.

Mixing Art and Science isn’t easy: It requires the right people and the right way of working together. So who does SapientNitro recruit? What kind of creative comes up with the idea for something like the Autotrader App that can tell you the value of any car you see?

Apparently, there isn’t a typical neo-creative yet: “We have a lot of kids here that never did advertising before.” says Juan. But as he mentions that there are many web-developers in his team, I can’t help but think that it’s probably easier to move from a deep understanding of technology into branding than going the opposite way.

Either way, once-separate skillsets are finally converging, Juan says: “You get a new kind of creative.”
What is new about them? Mostly, their focus on making those digital things really work: Not just for the red eyed jury member in Cannes, but for you and me when we use it. “We’re consumers first.” says the Creative Director, which is really different from the old style CD who “only” needed to understand the consumer.

That’s why the guys at SapientNitro don’t think of themselves as a “digital” agency, Juan says. His team is creating ideas for their clients, any way they need them. He smiles while he relays some of the initial confusion that SapientNitro inevitably causes: being a tech company – and a creative agency! But the truth is, turning data into value will become one of the biggest fields for brand differentiation, and whoever is creative there, will have the clients ear.

It’s all about creating a fluid experience. One of the most important tools for making that happen will be the mobile phone. And it looks like the biggest motivator drawing us to into that experience will be gaming. Of course, Foursquare won’t keep me up playing until the sun comes up (Assassins II, anyone?). But it is definitely interesting how smartphones, by bringing virtual and physical together, are becoming the perfect “game controller for your life”, as Juan puts it.

Making digital things, mobility, gaming principles: it doesn’t sound like the job of advertising is going to get simple again any time soon. At SapientNitro, collaborative skills are therefore in high demand. To bring science and art together, you need to be great at what you do, but you also must be able to forget for a minute “whose job is what”.

To create outstanding advertising in this new world you still need the passion of a creator. But you need other people even more.

World’s most famous ex-adman Alex Bogusky opened the summit with a list of issues that will radically influence brand communication. He compared them to the invisible Gorilla in the well-know experiment on perceptional blindness. Bogusky stipulates that radical changes in the branding landscape are already happening, but most of us are focusing so hard on other stuff, that we can’t see them yet.

If brands are facing big challenges, what is the advertising creative’s role in this? In an example of the reinvention of the advertising industry, the students at BDW created a platform to help Justin’s Nut Butter get feedback on their product and packaging. (And I will talk about this more next week.)

Back to the invisible gorilla: Sustainabilty is one of these beasts we used to overlook, but it’s becoming more of an issue with consumers. What most of us are unaware of: It’s also becoming an issue for retailers. Walmart has decided to source increasingly from sustainable suppliers. And the more they do and talk about it, the more we shop in sync with it.

Surprisingly, star products like the iPhone / iPad are really bad examples for the changes that will happen to brand messaging. Why? As a result of the digital revolution, these products are fundamentally new – as opposed to being improved. With these new new products, enjoying a radically different experience trumps all other considerations on the consumer’s side. We don’t care whether Apple source the Coltan in my iPhone in a civil war ridden African country. We don’t ask where the electricity for Google’s servers comes from. We should. But we don’t just yet.

The big shift in brand messaging might first happen at the other end. On the side of the traditional consumer goods where utility can’t substantially change: like bread, or butter. These products have to find new stories to gain a communicative advantage, because we care less and less about the old stories. And differentiation on price alone won’t work.

Good brand stories are customer centric. They always have been. However, in postwar consumerism, most people centered their identity in a narrative of permanent growth and accumulation: first out of necessity (there was nothing) then out of carefree joy.

Well, it’s 2010, and not only don’t we suffer from lack of things, we also know that this accumulation of stuff has limits. What we are lusting after instead is a great experience!

As transparency about products increases, our knowledge will influence our experience of a brand. The first examples of this go back to the 80s and the animal rights campaigns against buying fur coats. This kind of transparency is exploding in the social media age.

A current example: I always knew that a Chicken Nuggets isn’t made of filet, I also assumed it wasn’t great chicken. However, reading that it’s basically made from pink goo that’s an entire chicken pureed with feathers and all, greatly changes my perception and enjoyment of the product. (It’s also the reason my daughter won eat it. A kid! Not eating Nuggets!) As these examples show, this new transparency neither has to be intended or fostered by the brands. The newtworks will make it happen anyway.

These changes will turn sustainability into an important feature of product. And in many cases, the most important aspect of communication.

1. Because consumers understand it’s necessary
2. Because consumers feel better enjoying the product
3. Because consumers share socially relevant ideas in their social network

Regarding the question of packaging, we can see all three factors are at work. The problem is huge. People are concerned about it. And people are starting to blog.

“Over 33 billion single-serve packs are thrown into landfills each year, one-third of which stem from a single brand of ketchup. The half-life of this type of petroleum-based packaging exceeds 1,000 years in the landfill. Thus, in an average person’s lifetime, 2.6 trillion packs will accumulate in a landfill that will stay there for thousands of years.” (Alex Bogusky, http://alexbogusky.posterous.com)

Which is why Justin’s Nut Butter is inviting the industry and its consumers to talk about its most successful product as something they need to change!

Of course, packaging is not the only way a brand can show that they care about sustainability. Using less energy when you make something, caring about your socio-economic impact in the community your making it in. All of this counts. And soon it will be counted, too.