Living the Dream

The article linked below talks about how you're beginning to see major brands abandon the dot-com URLs that they've been pushing in their campaigns since the mid-to-late 90's for the "big three" social networking spaces available on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

I've been stressing for some time that the idea that savvy users are going to seek out your site for information is one that is past its prime.   The mantra today should be write once, and deliver everywhere you have interested consumers of that information.

There are some things, though, that are very different about using social media for marketing that these brands should be thinking about before they abandon their traditional campaigns.

Encouraging "Fans" is implied benefit

When you encourage someone to "become a fan" on Facebook, or to "follow you" on Twitter, you're creating an opt-in consumer relationship.    This implies some sort of benefit to the consumer who is opting in.    If you encourage this relationship, and then use these mediums only to spit back the same material that you are pushing in traditional campaigns, you risk user backlash.

You've got to be willing to give up complete control of the message

The bigger the brand the more (usually) carefully controlled their image.   When you start to utilize social media for marketing, you could be venturing in to uncharted territory.    You're saying to your audience that you want to build a relationship with them – and this implies a back-and-forth that requires you be willing to give up some control of the message in exchange for genuine interaction with your audience.   Savvy brands understand and capitalize on this – but if you're unprepared for it, it can catch you off guard.

You're committing to response

If you say "Follow us on Twitter" and people do, you need to be ready to respond when users lob questions or criticisms your way via @youruseraccount replies or mentions.     Especially in regard to responses to criticisms, silence can be deafening.

You're taking the good with the bad

Social media channels can be fantastic tools for building a brand, and they can grow organically and rapidly – but by the same token, when there is a problem or concern with your business or brand, word spreads just as quickly.    Understanding how these tools work, and appropriate uses for each requires that brands using them be committed with appropriate time and resources to make them successful.

Know the tools

There's nothing worse than watching a company or organization attempt to use a social media tool and fumble badly because they're not aware of appropriate use, lingo, or etiquette.  I have seen several news organizations, on air, encouraging Twitter followers to "twitter us with updates".    When I hear this I cringe – because in a split second, an organization who is attempting to broaden their reach by embracing social media tools has suddenly destroyed any faith I had in their understanding of the technology.   Instead of seeming savvy, an organization that is meeting me where I'm consuming, they come off as users – and it destroys any benefit.

Check the link below for the article that inspired this post.

Ads Drop Dot-Com URLs in Favor of "Facebook Us".

By now you've likely heard loads of coverage about the Apple iPad, and it's positioning in the market as (depending on who you believe) a natural progression of the netbook, or a heretofore nonexistent class of device that is poised to usher in the new era of appliance based computing.

You may have also heard about a few of the shortcomings of the device in it's current form. One of these shortcomings, multitasking, I believe Apple knows has to be addressed in both the iPad and the iPhone. As both devices continue to evolve, I would expect this capability to be pushed out to users with a new generation of hardware.

The other shortcoming that nearly every list includes is the lack of Flash support in the browser. Here, I don't think there's any chance that Apple will ever turn around. They've drawn their line in the sand, and as the initial shock of not having support for such a core web component has worn off, much of the argument for Flash being a core web component has started to lose momentum.

Adobe Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow published a now infamous blog post about the iPad's lack of Flash support that prompted Wired to declare that Adobe had resorted to "playing the porn card" in an effort to put pressure on Apple to revisit their decision.

It's worth noting that Lee has since updated the original post to include the disclaimer that the blog post was his own, and not an official "Adobe" blog.   I would imagine that this update itself was prompted by Lee's own desire for self preservation within Adobe.   Having been a member of the Adobe team for 8 years myself, I can assure you it's not a freewheeling corporate culture.

All this aside, the real issue in play is the continued relevance of Flash on the web, particularly in an HTML5 world, and the desire that Apple has to maintain strict control of their ecosystem.    Let's look at these two issues independently for a few minutes.

Where does Flash fit?

You can remember a time, I'm sure, when the temptation existed to develop content in Flash for the web because it allowed you to eliminate inconsistencies in behavior and display caused by lack of adherence to standards by the major browser vendors.   Like them or not, Microsoft was always the worst offender in this area, choosing to attempt to define their own standards and attempt to "lock in" users once they were hooked.   It's smart business – but horrible for the overall well being of the web.    That's not Microsoft's fault – but rather it's the fault of their customers (corporate customers in particular) who allowed themselves to be sold solutions that offered no vendor independence.    This is the very reason why IE6 still continues to exist today.    There are too many legacy systems deployed in large corporate environments where it's simply not cost effective to migrate away from these non standard solutions.

Now, though, even Microsoft is trying to encourage their customers to move toward standards based technologies and away from IE6.    The continued support of this legacy technology has started to burden the company that once championed it, and it's no longer good business to ignore that there are better solutions available.

Instead, now it's Adobe who is in the position of trying to keep users locked in to a proprietary solution for something that can more easily and effectively be done via video encoding/embedding standards available to any browser that wants to adhere to them.    All without the need of a separate plugin, within the browser itself.     Make no mistake that Adobe sees this as a huge threat to the dominance that Flash has enjoyed in the "video on the web" space for so long, at a time when "video on the web as a replacement for traditional content" as a concept is really just starting to click for the average user.    

Where Adobe has leverage with Flash is (in my opinion) the desktop application space.   Adobe AIR   is a fabulous technology that, through the use of Flash, allows developers to build desktop class applications for deployment across multiple systems, eliminating the need to worry about what client OS is being used.   There is a tremendous built in development community who have spent years developing Flash applications for the web, and there is already solid user familiarity with the technology.    The transition makes sense, and it's one that Adobe would be wise to embrace, and put more marketing muscle behind pushing.    

Apple's Role

For Apple, the motivation behind ignoring Flash on these devices has little to do with being so magnanimous as wanting to champion open standards video on the web.    For Apple, it's the sheer terror of allowing that very same application style development that I just mentioned in to their very closed iPhone/iPad ecosystem.    If you've seen the quality of HTML5 based web applications in mobile safari (see the recently launched Google Voice app as a great example) then you know that Apple already has their hands full fighting off an App Store threat that is going to continue to grow as developers tire of the restrictiveness of the App Store submission process.    Add to this the potential of increasing that rouge developer base AND providing access to essentially an already built app catalog via Flash and it's easy to see that there's no way it's ever coming to either device.

Where do they go from here?

For Adobe, Flash as a source of video on the web will continue to stick around for a while to come.   It has upwards of 80% of the web video market now, and those kinds of huge numbers are unlikely to take a nosedive quickly.    Still, as Robert Scoble himself illustrated, this shot across the Flash bow by Apple has only served to remind content producers that Flash simply isn't the only game in town (nor even the best game in town) anymore.    Adobe would be wise to start thinking long term about where the platform is headed.    Most technologists would agree that eventually (there would be disagreement on timing, but eventually) the idea of requiring a plugin to play video from your site/source is going to have to go away.    Take video away from Flash, and Flash is still an awesome product – it just needs to be repositioned/reframed to developers.

For Apple, the very real threat of HTML5 is probably going to be a much bigger nightmare for them than the thought of Flash apps running on their devices ever would have been.    Now is the time to start considering opening up the iPhone SDK and removing some of the silly limitations that sandbox apps in and prevent them from doing things like running in the background, so as to offer a compelling reason to developers to want to develop natively for the device.     Eventually, they'll have no choice but to do this if they want to keep that App Store gravy train running.

Ok Adobe friends, tear me apart.    Cheers.

The end of this year seemed like a good time to collect my thoughts and take stock of what I’ve been able to accomplish in the last two years, and to honestly examine some failures.    Then, perhaps, I can look with some clarity at where I’m headed.

When I left Adobe in 2007 to join Marshall University as their new University Portal Administrator, I had high hopes for what I’d be able to achieve.    Admittedly, I wasn’t fully aware of the higher education culture, having collected all of my professional experience in the corporate world.   State government, and higher education in particular are very different animals.   Some of this is good (the pace, the relatively low stress factor) and some of it isn’t (embedded culture that inhibits progress, politicking, hyper-inclusion) but all in all it’s been a positive experience.

Some of the things that I’d highlight as already achieved successes, or successes that are near completion:

• A move away from archaic technology (classic ASP) to more open standards and a free form approach to development (embracing APIs, utilization of commercially available apps to do jobs that frankly do things better than we could on our own, PHP/mySQL as a core of the development environment, a right tools for the right job approach with the inclusion of some .Net, some ColdFusion, and other technologies where they’re appropriate.
• An effort to move a highly diverse group of content authors with widely varying skill level to a common publishing platform built around Wordpress.
• As much transparency as possible, documenting much of what is happening publicly, sharing appropriate resources with the community, and offering examples and code snippets online.
• Implementation of a technical knowledge base as a campus resource for developers.
• Pushing Marshall to social networking for marketing/information sharing with the establishment of University branded Facebook and Twitter accounts, with new ventures in to Posterus and other emerging technologies.
• Development of policy around social media interaction, providing a framework for other departments and groups to use as they grown their own social networking brands.
• Creation of base training modules on creation of web content targeted at three core skill levels, and using this content as a starting point to branch out in to augment other specific needs.
• The movement of all official sites toward a common UI to help establish brand continuity.
• The first substantial forays in to the mobile space, first with a base mobile site, then with an iPhone targeted HTML site, and soon with an iPhone app providing content to users at the device level.
• Using the Pastry Kit framework to develop supplementary mobile content for other devices

Additionally, I’ve taken a very active role in supporting our user base and student groups on campus, attempting to foster an environment that facilitates collaboration and learning, with a corporate minded focus on customer service.     All of these efforts have, I feel, been completed very successfully so far.

Some things that I’ve not achieved the success on that I desired:

• Bringing ALL web properties, including the Campus event calendaring system, student portal product, and intranet products under one umbrella with a shared vision/direction.   Right now, those responsibilities are splintered, I feel to the detriment of each of them.
• Gaining acceptance across the board on the need for cohesiveness in branding over individual expression.   A University setting is a difficult one in which to get agreement that specific entities should give up their individuality for the good of the collective appearance.   This is why I’ve not yet been able to drive complete agreement in look and feel across the web properties.
• Full utilization of existing technologies.   We have a multitude of tools that we could be utilizing more effectively, but to do that requires training effort and time commitment that aren’t realistic in the current environment.
• Making more agressive moves in to the student service space by improving both the breadth and efficiency of what can be done both on the web, and on the mobile device.
• Moving content approval authority out of the hands of committee, and in to the hands of the technology SMEs.

Still, even in these areas where I’ve not been entirely successful, I feel like progress has been made.   Perhaps not as quickly as I might have originally envisioned, but progress none-the-less.    It’s my hope that as we move in to 2010 and beyond, we can continue to execute on these successes, and strive to improve on them.