Category Archives: Work Stuff

18 Highlights From SXSW 2011

Posted on March 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

My brain is totally full of new ideas and memories that I picked up at SXSW over the past few days. It’s probably the most productive, most inspiring, and most fun week of the year. As I move the brain-data from the buffer cache to the hard disk for better storage/retrieval, here are some of the highlights:

  1. Didn’t even make it out of the Austin airport without eating great BBQ when I landed. Who knew the Salt Lick stand in the airport was open at 10:30 am?
  2. While queuing up for a certain gadget to go on sale, I ended up waiting in line behind a prominent tech/startup lawyer from Boston, and we slowly discovered we have lots of friends in common.
  3. While standing on the sidewalk with a coworker Friday night, three different groups of friends happened to pass by in succession, while a fourth pulled up in a pedicab. My friend thought I was some crazy Austin maven (when it was really just dumb luck).
  4. Pedicabs as preferred mode of transportation
  5. My panel on Saturday afternoon was standing-room-only; in fact, some of my friends tried to get in but were turned away. So, it was a quantitative success, at least. (There’s a good writeup here)
  6. The panel moderator, Bob Garfield from NPR/Ad Age, said he wanted to punch me in the face. I called him a not-nice name. All in good fun (seriously, he was amazing).
  7. Meeting the dude from @Longreads, my absolute favorite Twitter follow.
  8. 90s karaoke after-afterparty with some coworkers and assorted other friends, half of whom are in good bands. We did three-part harmony on “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
  9. Theophilus London did a 90-minute hip-hop set at the Bing party for about 60 people, and it was amazing.
  10. Ted Leo solo show–just a man and his guitar
  11. Local Natives show–like Beach House + Fleet Foxes. Awesome
  12. Vimeo hosted a european-style rave at a giant abandoned power plant, with an amazing light show. When we got there we realized that Diplo was the DJ. Afterward, hosted a chilled out afterparty for some of the Vimeo folks in the Hilton lobby.
  13. Excellent copywriting tips from the editor of Groupon
  14. Geeking out with a handful of transmedia experts at GMD’s party
  15. Ran into my college newspaper editor, who just finished a stint at Camera Bag and is now a researcher at Carnegie Mellon.
  16. Watching the JWT folks have fun with the JWT BBQ truck and corresponding (disturbing) video, which was projected on walls around town.
  17. So many great food trucks!
  18. Club soda and Diet Coke, all night every night.

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Posted in Music Stuff, Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Cannibal Animals

Posted on March 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

So this is amazing. Can’t wait for SXSW! (which, by the way, I’ll be blogging about on my other site, adgeek.us. Follow along at home!)

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Posted in Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Vox PowerPoint, Vox Dei

Posted on February 11, 2011 | 2 Comments

[Warning: This post is a somewhat heated response to a flawed marketing deck. If that sounds as boring to you as it does to me, you should skip it. I worried that I was over-reacting by writing it, so I ran it by a friend of mine, Steve Evans at Banyan Branch; his commentary is included below in bracketed italics.]

 

Guys. Just because something is on a slick PowerPoint slide does not make it true. This is not a knock at all on PowerPoint—the best and most dangerous thing about PowerPoint, though, is that the software makes it easy to take bad ideas and make them look respectable and polished.

Our brains are wired to quickly determine the reliability and validity of ideas, pictures, people, and words, and external cues play a big role in that. If a book is nicely bound, if a movie is beautifully shot, if a man is well-groomed, if a song is well sung, we give more credence to it. It’s professional.

And therein is the dilemma. Good PowerPoint slides are easy to create. Good ideas are very difficult to create. But bad ideas can become good PowerPoint slides–we’ve all seen it. Continue reading →

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

My Guest Post on Ad Age

Posted on February 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Quick plug: wrote a guest column for Ad Age that went online yesterday, highlighting some of the topics I’m hoping to touch on in my Social Media Week panel next week. The panel is entitled “Social Listening Done Right,” and the column lays out a brief primer on what that might entail.

A couple of my journalist friends were a bit creeped out by the extent to which brands are listening to customers, fans, and detractors, which I thought was common knowledge by now. Just so you all know, yes, companies are monitoring what you say about them on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, comment boards, etc. If it’s public, it’s being scraped and served up as market intelligence.

It’s not spying and it’s not a bad thing at all. Companies listen to online conversations so they can monitor what people are saying about them, find out what people say about competitors, and gather feedback that leads to improvements in products or operations. It’s really a no-brainer, and it benefits everyone. If it creeps you out, stop tweeting/commenting/blogging. (In which case we call in THIS guy to gather info…but wouldn’t you rather we just read your tweets?)

Anyway, the column and the panel are about best practices for conducting these monitoring activities. Obviously, the live discussion will be more fun than words on a page (if only because there could be dissenting opinions), but check out the column and let me know what you think. Any questions or issues we should be addressing during the panel?

If you’re in the NY area, you should come. The panel will be in JWT’s office building (a sponsor of Social Media Week). Register here.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

I’ll be blogging from CES this week

Posted on January 5, 2011 | 1 Comment

Two points of geek business:

First, I’m leaving at 4 in the morning tomorrow to go to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I believe this is my fifth time going to the show, but my first time as a non-journalist, so I’m expecting a somewhat different experience. Journalists get treated like rock stars at shows like CES, with everyone clamoring to get their attention, get them into parties, buy them drinks, etc. I suspect the velvet rope will open slowly for me this week, if at all.

However, I’ll be blogging about the show, looking at the tech innovations from a marketing/advertising perspective. Check out my reporting at adgeek.tumblr.com (and big thanks to my employer, JWT, for supporting the trip–it’s a bit outside of what agencies typically do).

2) Holy crap. I love my new phone. I just got a Windows Phone 7 (the HTC HD7), and after a couple years of switching between iPhone, BlackBerry, and WinMob 6.5, it’s a revelation. This even surprised me, but it feels much more intuitive and functional than my iPhone 3G, and I suspect I’ll be putting the iPhone away for good (which is just in the nick of time, because the iPhone has started breaking down). I’m very rarely delighted or surprised by tech hardware, but the HD7 pulled it off.

The best feature is the tight integration with Facebook. Windows Phone 7 lets me merge my Facebook friends with my regular contacts, so everyone I know is now in my phone. If we’re FB friends, and your phone/IM/email/address is listed on your profile, it’s now in my phone. When you change phone numbers, my address book will automagically update. Incredible.

This will be perfect for a scene like CES, where I know lots of people but don’t necessarily have their phone numbers or business cards in my Outlook contacts. If we’re Facebook friends, I no longer need that stuff.

The other cool part: I have three different computers, all with different operating systems, and my phone syncs with any of them (and loads music from my iTunes folder, too!).

CES will be a good proving ground for the phone. I’ll be tweeting, blogging, shooting video, and taking pictures from my phone, so we’ll see how it holds up under pressure.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Work Stuff

Two Safety Precautions That Make Us Less Safe

Posted on July 1, 2010 | 1 Comment

1. Hyper-Sensitive Smoke Detectors

The smoke detector in our kitchen is so sensitive, it goes off when we’re preheating the oven, or whenever we pan fry anything. Guess how I respond? I take it down from the ceiling and remove the battery. I try to remember to replace it after dinner, but that doesn’t always happen right away. Firex, I’m sure your heart’s in the right place, but my family would be safer if you’d dial the smoke sensitivity back a bit.

2. Overly Strict Password Policies

IT admins, this one’s for you: If you make me change my password every 30 days, and I can’t repeat passwords, you know what you’re doing? You’re making me come up with a password I don’t use anywhere else, which means there’s a good chance I’ll forget it, which means I’m going to write it on a Post-It note. And that kind of defeats the purpose of your password policies, now, doesn’t it?

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Posted in Work Stuff

The Messy Business of News

Posted on June 2, 2010 | 2 Comments

Seriously, I’d love to just rant all day long about media stupidity, and why I can’t stand watching TV news, and why you should select your “journalists of record” carefully. (The list of tech journalists I trust is short–the list of IT tech journalists I trust is VERY short).

Instead of doing that, I’ll just link to other people’s rants. Today’s rant comes from Danny Sullivan, who is definitely on my short list of brilliant tech writers. Sullivan broke a nifty story last week about a lady who is suing Google because Google Maps’ walking directions allegedly directed her, on foot, onto a highway where she was hit by a car.

Great story with all the right ingredients: a crazy lady we can all shake our heads at, who had a problem we can all identify with (who hasn’t been led astray by Google Maps at some time or other?) And it plays perfectly into the whole “don’t trust technology” mindset that old people love, and the “haha stupid people” mindset that young people love.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Lessons from Lost

Posted on May 25, 2010 | 6 Comments

Before we start, I’ll just let you know that there are NO spoilers in this post (and please don’t post any in the comments). So you laggards who are waiting for the DVD, read on with impunity.

I won’t comment on the finale from last night, except to say that it sealed in my brain the impression that the show was a shoddy piece of storytelling. There–that’s out of the way.

The REAL issue that I want to think about a bit in this post is fandom. In my still-kind-of-newish advertising job, one of my focuses is on getting PEOPLE to become AUDIENCE MEMBERS, and to transition them from AUDIENCE to ADVOCATES. How do you get non-users of a product to consider the product? And then to purchase the product? And then to tell others about the product? That’s the bazillion-dollar question in this era of social media and in our increasingly recommendation-based economy: how do you mint FANS?

Lost was brilliant at it. Remember those first two seasons? Lost won fans by consistently, methodically revealing new puzzles for viewers to work on (but not solve). The show used the web to spread transmedia games and video clips with clues. Guys like EW’s Doc Jensen went WAY in-depth with episode-by-episode anlysis, and he was provided with tantalizing nuggets of info by the show’s writers themselves. And remember the Sprite commercial with the secrets about the Hanso corporation?

Continue reading →

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Posted in Random Links, Work Stuff

Newsweakness

Posted on May 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

Did anyone NOT see the Newsweek sell-off coming? I mean yikes. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Newsweek, as it was the first magazine I really got addicted to reading when I was in high school, and because landing an internship there was a dream come true (and a lot of fun). But they epitomize old-magazine thinking to me. And not in a good, Economist sort of way.

There’s a certain trend right now, pervasive in advertising and the media, of old people making strange decisions in order to impress or please young people. I went to a publishing/ad industry lunch the other week at which a bunch of suits were talking about the importance of Foursquare and Twitter–but nobody had their phone out to check in or tweet (nor could I picture any of them doing so). I’m not an ageist–I know plenty of 40- and 50-year-olds who are avid Twitter users, and are as “digitally native” as any 18-year-old–it’s just funny to watch a media pro target demographics that he or she doesn’t understand, and it happens all the time. The real irony of that lunch was all the discussion and even laughter about the “25-year-old planners” who “do all the *real* work at an ad agency.”

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Posted in Work Stuff

All the news that’s fit to…what?

Posted on May 5, 2010 | 1 Comment

Funny story: Apparently Steve Jobs hates the NY Times iPad app.

Been thinking a lot about my own news consumption habits lately (as in…oh…the last 8 years). But especially today, because I totally missed the Nashville flood until my friend Whitney tweeted about it this afternoon. Honestly, hadn’t heard anything about it.

I spend pretty much all day every day immersed in tech news sites.When it comes to non-tech news, I get almost all of it from The Daily Show and from links I see posted on Twitter (I follow mostly journalists and news organizations on Twitter).I also read The New Yorker, Wired, and New York magazines, but those aren’t really sources of “hard news.” On a day-by-day level, my news consumption is admittedly a bit scattershot.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff