@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Socnets and user statistics

In recent days several articles and coincidental life events have made me compare social networks with real-life friendships. Yesterday, there was the news that a Harvard University survey has found that user engagement and repeat-return usage on Twitter is noticeably lower than the headline news about sign-up growth of 2000+ percent would suggest. Additionally, as with other social networks, Twitterites seem to be complying with the 90-10 rule: principally, 10 percent of members produce the content (in Twitter’s case 30 percent of it) whilst the other 90 percent either passively consume or relay on the links.

*  http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

Separately (and connectively), it’s been announced by the new CEO of MySpace, Owen Van Natta, that the company will be reducing its workforce by 30 percent to improve cost efficiencies and provide users with the type of personalization which increases their stickiness to the site. By my reading of it, this should in turn should make MySpace more attractive to potential advertisers since they’re more interested in what I’d call “captive spiders who weave” than “time commitment gnats”.

* http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/88a7d514-5aa1-11de-8c14-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

* http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/16/myspace-layoffs-slashing-_n_216330.html

* http://www.businessinsider.com/myspace-is-in-far-worse-shape-than-its-new-executives-thought-2009-6

Regardless of whether it’s Web 3.0, Web 2.0, Web 1.0 or Web wannabe #1, the metrics technology companies and PR-marketers-advertisers are interested in are still the same:

· unique monthly visitors

· average time between visit(s) — in days

· average user engagement during a single visit — in minutes

· average # of links clicked through within defined time

· average # of pages visited

· # of votes / comments / download / shares of an article

*     CPCs, CPAs, CPMs

This is the case whether we refer to Nielsens, Compete, Technorati, Hitwise or Omniture methodologies for extrapolating site traffic and user engagement.

Since I have direct experience of managing a global portfolio of TMT investments which involved assessing balance sheets to ascertain whether or not I would re-invest / write down / exit the company, and I’m sufficiently tooled mathematically to analyze numbers beyond PR blurb and occasional media hype (“explosive growth!”, “up 2000 percent year-on-year!”, etc.), I tend to take the numbers reported with a healthy grain of salt.

Personally, I believe the pseudo quant benchmarks we currently use to track online success are only a 1/3 of the picture of the why-when-where-how-what-whos of user behavior and probably another 10 percent can be extracted from online sample questionnaires of the sort conducted by Survey Monkey and another 5 percent from standard market data research of the type reported in ACORN / Datamonitor / Jupiter Media Matrix etc. All-in-all, even with the likes of Adsense incorporated into the equation, I would say that we have a less than half complete perspective on online behavior, users’ underlying motivations (transient as well as established), content valuation and trust dynamics.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that few Web companies have consistently genuinely understood their audience, the content they’re seeking and interested in, the dynamics of community ethos, their need for purposeful participation and…………….HOW TO GENERATE INCOME from and with users.

Ultimately, this is why no company has created the definitive and foolproof online business model where profitability is self-generating, user loyalty is guaranteed and there is true symbiosis in company-customer revenue share…………(yet).

Personalization and preferences

In any case, I was thinking about personalization and the difference between online engagements compared with real space interactions because three events recently happened within my circle.

(1.) My friend Josephine bought a new apartment in NYC.

(2.) An entrepreneur friend asked me to help him produce a dynamic version of his insights on business.

(3.) My mother says she’s ready to date again; sadly, my father passed away over 2 years ago and this is the first time in many years she’s been single. My parents were married for 35 years and had known each other since childhood so this is really new territory for her.

Now, if I was a Facebook aficionado I’d probably buy Josephine an e-card and post it onto her wall — that is if she was even on Facebook which she’s not (and it’s not as if she’s a technophobe, she’s a developer at a big US bank) and if I actively used FB which I don’t. If I was a Twitterite I’d IM out the entrepreneur’s advice as “How to make money: tip for the day” in 10-word tweets. Plus if I was registered on an online dating site I’d probably scour the male prospects of retirement age for my mother and/or openly pin up a “WLTM” notice with her photo attached.

Of course, I’m doing none of these things.

This tells me that whilst the Web and technology are making good progress there are still some areas of personalization, privacy and trust where the services currently offered simply……..DON’T DO IT and we revert to established social norms.

As it is I managed to find the most serendipitous card possible for Josephine. Typically online sites including the e-card repertoire of Facebook will only show the front cover of a card and not the back nor what’s on the inside (message, layout, font style etc. — although www.moonpig.com does allow us to create DIY cards), and we can’t get a feel for the weight and quality of the paper used. Sometimes, these things matter because we may have an entire theme for the gift(s) and accompanying card we want to send our friend(s).

This is the front and back cover of the card I’ve sent Josephine:

Not only is it super-duper cute, it’s also LOL (and not simply because it’s made by EMOTIONAL RESCUE LTD!).

My pet name for Josephine happens to be…………..“Rabbit” and, well, I’m a tiger cub to her so the kitty on the back makes this the most fortuitous and specific card ever! Maybe it’s a “sign” and further proof that our life paths were destined to cross — LOL.

Even funnier is that I’d never been in that card store before; it was a completely accidental foray because I decided to get off the bus a stop early and had to cut through a side street to get to my destination. Moreover, once inside the store I couldn’t even find the “New Home” card section. There was an entire profusion of cards for Father’s Day on 21^st June and the displays were haphazardly labeled which made the shopping experience not as smooth as it could be, btw.

Just as I was about to leave the store I spotted the tiny section at the back given for cards of the ilk:

· “Sorry you’re leaving!”

· “Congratulations on passing your exams!”

· “Get well soon!”

When I saw the card I bought her I LOL’ed. This elicited a really strange (aka startled) look from a fellow shopper; people aren’t accustomed to spontaneous LOL when you’re alone I’ve discovered over the years — they think you’re either crazy or there’s something on their face like a pen mark or gigantic spot — and despite attempts to socialize myself out of spontaneous LOLs, I do it quite a lot even when I’m by myself because there are a billion and one unexpected wonders in the world which spark up that LOL ……………like finding the perfect card for my friend.

So along with the spot-on personalized card, I’ve sent her presents with the Chinese elements of earth, wind, fire and water.

Although we can’t see each other often because of the distance (and costs of transatlantic flight), we do have proper talk-TALKs on the phone which just can’t be replicated in online IMs or lengthy emails. Both forms disintermediate important bits of the emotional content of real conversations that enable us to correctly pick up verbal signals about the other person’s mood, feelings and frame of mind. In fact, during the American Presidential nominations Josephine and I had a long and involved discourse verging on disagreement about who was the better candidate; my money was on Obama from the outset, hers on Hillary Clinton who was then the Senator for New York. It’s unimaginable that a series of tweets would have enabled us to explore our positions the way that that telephone conversation did.

Of Josephine’s many brilliant (and unsung) qualities are her empathy, her tolerance towards others and her patience. We have completely opposite tastes and opinions on politics, music, fashion, education, career issues, etc. etc. etc. so in a social network environment we’d probably never have become connected — because recommendation algorithms aren’t sophisticated enough yet to link people based on perception, trust, values and personality traits and not just cultural interests (books we read, films we’ve seen, gizmos we’ve bought, etc.).

So it’s my luck and good fortune we met by chance in real-life actuality rather than cyberealty.

Josephine recently wrote that I am “quite different and always have the drive to try something, I have to be more like you when I grow up ” which is incredibly sweet since she’s older than me. Ironically, my mother hopes I’ll be more like Josephine when I grow up because she’s a lot less boisterous, a lot less opinionated about everything, does not get into stand-offs on matters of principle like I do and has a steadier and less tiger-fierce disposition. LOL.

My mother’s obviously a great woman for experiencing me @ full velocity and intensity, up close and personal for so many years, and still speaking to me, :*).

Now, onto personalizing some Flash files for my entrepreneur friend.

Well, there’s absolutely no way that even the best Flash developer in the world would be able to turnaround a specific and functional design that he’d like within a few hours, as I did. This isn’t for any technical reason; of course that Flash developer is a gazillion times more talented than I am code-wise. However, they wouldn’t have the advantage of cumulative perspective on him, his tastes and his motivations which I’ve been lucky enough to gain over many years.

Here too the personal effect comes into play. It also means that I’m more likely to be spot-on in my solution which, essentially, is to transform his classical content into more contemporary forms and we trust each other to brainstorm more openly.

Btw, I LOVE Asimo and the Kindle so you can all see how passion for a brand / product / concept can translate into other media and be adapted and personalized by someone like me. In the Kindle flash format, the pen scribbles the title and the content is loaded as an external MC swf upon click of the button.

Twaining personalization for populus sites and the potential of Semantic technologies

It’s fantastic for user choice that socnets like MySpace are interested in increasing personalization and granularity for what are mass audiences (150+ million registered members) so that our online relationships more closely proxy our off-line ones. Beyond the technical innovations of the Semantic Web — RDF, visual knowledge representation, ontologies, SPARQL, FOAF, axiomatic acronyms etc. — what semantic technologies are also attempting to do is to increase the picture we have of online behavior beyond the less than half of the picture I mentioned earlier.

At some point, there will be some contextual information that’s traceable at every time-point on the continuum and can be extrapolated on the nature and meaning of relationships of the type that explains why we’d choose to buy and give a particular friend this specific card as different from all the other mass-produced cards out there. Why we would read one particular article or purchase that FMCG / white good / investment item / property in preference over another.

A whole myriad of qualitative data points that are not currently provided by what I called the “pseudo quant metrics” of online behavior. This is also why I’m developing a matrix of media sensor tools; there’s a definite information gap here and to-date none of the semantic technologies I’m aware of are dealing with it.

As for the personalization question, there seems to be some fluidity in each successive cycle of the Web wave which is actually similar to our bricks+mortar existence.

We went from consolidated portals with their high volume push content (“pile them high, sell them cheap”) and cursory customer feedback to specific micro-tribes of blog sites (“customize everything” — phone covers, iTune libraries, interior design — and identify cultural leaders and first adopters) to the current coalescence of content with context (“the social graph of consumers and their comments”).

Management of techcos deliberate continuously between implementing features of universal appeal to help a platform gain critical momentum and mass traction versus delivering very specific and customized tools that individual users request for their needs.

It’s not an easy dichotomy to resolve but it’s fairly certain that some companies will crack the conundrum in time.

Crossing my fingers again…………

Apparently there are going to be experiments running on Twitter this week to test the “wisdom of crowds” theory and whether we have psychic abilities:

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/twitter/5415852/Twitters-psychic-experiment.html

* https://twitter.com/RichardWiseman

Ordinarily, I’m disinterested in Twitter; it encourages ADHD = not mentally productive, is equivalent to scribbling graffiti whereas I like reading, cogitating and writing reams that stimulate my brain cells to discern and connect the sense from those reams, and I also don’t have the narcissism or insecurity requisite to adopt a “Please love, applaud and validate me / my ego / my id / my super-id and my 140 character updates about what I’m doing RIGHT……NOW!” and spam millions of followers with that status snippet every other minute.

It’s not only a case of “too much information and noise” but a concern about “information disjoint.” With blog posts, we can anchor our themes and then explore tangents that ultimately loop back to those themes. With tweets, there’s rapid-fire of randomness and surface links which may foster incoherent and unstructured thought paths and orientate our brains to lose its natural sense of logical deduction, cogent connectivity or reductivistic capability.

Nevertheless, this particular experiment does interest me for three reasons:

(1.) It’s in collaboration with the New Scientist and I know the online editor of New Scientist — having worked with him 12 years ago.

(2.) It’s got a PURPOSE (academic analysis on psychic interactivity) rather than asking me to be passive and consume some update about someone’s (maybe uninteresting) life and whether they fed their cat/dog this morning and ate cereal / toast / an apple for breakfast in a micro-blog “Big Brother, This Is My Life” way.

The test should produce some insights into the extensibility and applicability of Twitter other than as status update provider. It may show Twitter as an instantaneous information harvester on a substantial scale, which would be helpful for advertising / PR / marketing firms.

(3.) There are as-yet inexplicable phenomena (like premonitions, déjà vu and how different people can have the same visions of fashion trends etc., independently of each other) that are quite interesting.

I do tend to be skeptical about social media-induced tests because that’s what a natural sciences background develops in a person: if something isn’t consistently observable or conceptually provable under scientific conditions, then its existence is questionable — even if a million people say it is so and they feel it is so. A million people saying there must be aliens does not make it true….(yet).

This science training probably explains why I’m less susceptible to social hype and marketing psychology than other people. My motivations are oriented from objectivity, purpose and need to-do’s rather than the type of sheep/lemming-like mimetic desires postulated by Réne Girard:

* http://www.cottet.org/girard/desir1.en.htm

* http://french-italian.stanford.edu/opinions/girard.html

I’m also not one of those people who get all excited about Area 51, the paranormal or charlatans who charge US$30 to read your palms / the tea leaves / Tarot cards / scrunched up napkins and offer the same garble to you as everyone else: “You will meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger…………….I sense a move somewhere………..And there’s someone close to you who’s going to affect your life in a big way…..etc.”

However, I am interested in how the brain works, perception variances and simulations of collective recognition which may be anticipatory / predictive / psychic, so this Twitter experiment may contribute to discovering something new in that area:

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/twitter/5415852/Twitters-psychic-experiment.html

* https://twitter.com/RichardWiseman

As a side note, I may also try to follow some of these 25 media folks on Twitter as recommended by Advertising Age:

· http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=136967

However, it’s unlikely I’ll become a fully-fledged Twitter convertee since it’s only a glorified real-time IM without the ability to attach documents, edit-in-place or wiki drag+drop SVG content which means that it’s not very technologically visionary or conducive to full-scale and meaningful collaboration, imo.

Incidentally, NO, even if Twitter does contribute to providing evidence of the “wisdom of crowds” this does not mean Twitter is the beginnings of the Global Brain.

Something like what QWAQ (the Squeak metaverse brainchild of Alan Kay, David Smith and co) or hybridizing Google Finance with Google Knol, Google Wave, Google Earth and Google Draw would be closer to the Global Brain. Alan Kay is a bona fide genius and so are the people behind Google, so if we were to test psychic phenomena properly (e.g., the predictive nature of technology vision) they should definitely be included!

PREMONITIONS + ME

There are well-known stories about the power of dreams and how various famous scientists were inspired in their dreams towards their discoveries — such as Mendelev and the Periodic Table:

* http://www.amazon.com/Mendeleyevs-Dream-Elements-Paul-Strathern/dp/0312262043

* http://www.springerlink.com/content/q6r2450w44632192/

In my case, I’ve had vivid, stark and near real life dreams ever since childhood. Some of those dreams might be considered “pre-cognitive” or premonitory whilst others surface whatever subconscious anxieties and aspirations I’ve accumulated during everyday existence and transposed into my sleep experiences. Notably, as adults, we’re socially conditioned to control / hone / subjugate certain aspects of our mental faculties to appear more mature, sensible, regular and responsible — which can actually result in us losing the openness, wonder, creativity and imagination that we had as children.

Personally, I believe the child and the adult mind in us can co-exist harmoniously and is a necessity for innovation and the achievement of dreams. Without intending to “freak” anyone out, I’ve seen items and existences in my dreams which I haven’t read about in books, seen in movies or been exposed to in any media.

For example, I’ve found myself in dreams walking into a stark white classroom where three teenage schoolboys I’ve never met before in real-life were showcasing some computer panels to me. These panels were sheets of Perspex that popped up from their study benches, accompanied by a keyboard which is like no keyboard I’ve ever seen in real-life. It was not QWERTY, the keys–alphanumeric arrangement was completely different and the device was shaped like a crescent moon.

What struck me within the dream was that there was not a single electricity socket anywhere in the room, no fluorescent lights up in the ceiling and no PC terminals. The Perspex sheets rose out of slots in their study benches and were charged by a power supply not reliant on wires or plugs. Holographic maps, videos and an interactive game were launched with finger motion by one of the boys. The dream was so striking that when I awoke I immediately sketched the set-up and the keyboard I’d seen. If I ever prototype it, I’ll let you know!

[Yes, I did have the dream long before witricity came onto my tech radars: http://www.witricity.com/]

In another more recent dream I saw colonies of skyscrapers sitting atop what appeared to be columns of flat-surface mountains. There’s barely any forestation and yet the colonies are clearly self-sustainable and their inhabitants healthy and happy. The construction is somewhere in Africa, but not the Africa we’re familiar with today. This is an Africa of inter-racial diversity as can be seen in the nationalities of people living and working within the skyscrapers, and the Mayor of the colony is a native African man of about six foot three, a broad face and an open smile.

The people and items I can see in my dreams are as clearly defined as the keyboard I’m typing this blog entry with.

Interestingly, the highest concentration of dreams of the nature “Maybe this is a sneak peek into the future” I’ve had revolve around my husband and my family. This will sound strange, but I know what my husband is going to sound like, his personality and what my children are going to look like and their characters.

My future (as per my dreams) seems to involve living beside a lake and being involved with a key piece of US policy on climate change.

We’re going to have to wait and see whether this becomes reality or is simply my creative imagination working over-time and spilling into my dreams — LOL.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably take part in this Twitter “wisdom of the crowds/psychic” test for some fun.

The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference is taking place this week and there are some quite interesting interviews, including with the founders of Twitter about their potential revenue model plans:

http://d7.allthingsd.com/20090526/d7-video-twitters-biz-stone-and-evan-williams/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/27/twitter-founders-revenue-_n_208046.html

There’s also an interview with Facebook’s new Russian investor who’s committed US$200 million to acquire preferred stock at a US$10 billion valuation for the company.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090526/the-first-video-interview-with-facebooks-new-russian-investor-plus-coo-sheryl-sandberg/?mod=ATD_skybox

I’m slightly apprehensive of writing this blog entry because I certainly don’t want it to attract either controversy or spam. Nevertheless, I think it’s also important to compare marketing that’s smart and respectful to users and marketing which is, frankly, stupid and alienating.

Let me start with the smart one because if we’re going to follow good practice examples………..Always prioritize the smart ones at the top and leave the stupid ones to be the sludge/slag/s*** that collects at the bottom — just like in chemical fractional distillation.

On April Fool’s Day, I received the following email from the slideshare team:

Hi twain,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,

-SlideShare Team

Now, I’ve been a user and fan of slideshare for about 3 years; I was one of their first members and within my first two postings Jon Boutelle, the CTO, sent me a connection request. Then Rashmi Sinha, the CEO, voted one of my slides her favorite. Over the years, I’ve followed slideshare’s progress and periodically I watch out for their competitions — recently they did one on the credit crunch:

· http://blog.slideshare.net/2008/11/20/credit-crisis-in-30-slides-results/

Anyway, being someone who tends to verify and cross-verify sources (a habit of due diligence as a banker as well as from being the Editor of e-Intelligence), my immediate thoughts on the “You’re a Slideshare RockStar” email were:

(1.) Ha ha, it must be an April Fool’s.

(2.) Better go and see what’s been happening to my slides on slideshare.net

(3.) It’s plausible………….

You see, Google Knol had recently awarded me another “Top Pick Knol Award” for my “How to LOL” entry:

* http://knol.google.com/k/twain/how-to-lol/31fjy9fjsu1x2/25

Separately, on dipity.com, my first ever timeline attracted 12,000+ views and the CEO is following my content.

* http://www.dipity.com/twain

In any case I checked slideshare.net and, lo and behold, my view counts had miraculously jumped by several hundred thousand. Naturally, my arithmetic skills kicked in and I cross-checked the figures provided for each link where the slides were being viewed (on slideshare itself, on other blogs, on associated sites etc.):

The numbers didn’t add up……………so I knew it must be an April Fool’s.

I then went onto Kosmix (which is now set as my browser homepage instead of Google or Apple or Bloomberg, btw) and searched under the term “#bestofslideshare”. It showed up under the Trending Topics of the Twitter panel, so I clicked the link and this is what I saw:

I LOL’d. It was………A BRILLIANT APRIL FOOL’S JOKE on the personal pride (some may call it narcissism in its extreme forms) of all contributors in the social media sphere and incorporated the uber-posterchild for Internet traffic for the moment — Twitter.

#bestofslideshare was so brilliant and pinpointed every arc on the marketing map that drives Internet + mobile traffic, reciprocity of cross-marketing and the viral effects of fame generation that I nominated it on ‘Huffington Post’ as “Best April Fool’s 2009.”

Who cared about YouTube turning its videos upside-down for the day? Or Google’s CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity)? Or any of the others on offer here:

* · http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/01/april-fools-2009-best-pra_n_181568.html

In any case, I swapped a few emails with the slideshare team (CEO, CTO and CFO) to congratulate them on their ingenuity. Here’s some of what I wrote:

The #bestofslideshare campaign didn’t use any profanity, advertise fake pharmaceuticals for certain male hormone drugs or ask/demand us to pay some faux charity or boiler-room scam.

It was strictly and purely about us each promoting our own slides in a way which was different and positive. Not all of slideshare’s N millions of members are going to be able to email their friends and say, “I won the slideshare competition” or “I made 100,000+ views!”

For a one-off event, #bestofslideshare was actually very democratizing and fun at the same time. It enabled people to promote their slides, cross-promote slideshare on twitter etc., ping it back and forth…before laughing at themselves with a Homer Simpson moment, “Doh! I’ve been had. It’s an AF! V. cute!”

Sure, some people may have considered the email of ‘You’re a Slideshare Rockstar’ to be “spam” but actually it was a smart one-off marketing special.

In fact, I hope you do something similar next year!

In short, #bestofslideshare was a celebration of its users and their content. It appealed to their personal pride in a good way. It re-affirmed their valuable contributions, it directed traffic to the slideshare.net site and then propagated it across the wider social media sphere, e.g. Twitter.

It was oriented from a win-win-win position which is why it’s brilliant marketing.

THE WORST WEB3.0 MARKETING EVER

Now for the opposite end of the strategic marketing spectrum: the lose-lose-lose. Readers are probably aware that one particular Web 3.0 offering, which I won’t pollute my blog by even naming, launched with a tacky and senseless “We organize that s***” video.

That marketing mistake (amongst the company’s persistent and many strategic faux pas) was extremely disappointing and alienating towards users — particularly since those users had spent months seeding interesting content, nurturing the growth of quality interactions and sharing their harvested gold nuggets with others on threads (including the company and particularly with the CEO).

Therefore, for the company to then launch with a piece of unprofessional, gutter-quality and narcissistic tripe was unbelievable.

It was not the use of s*** that was offensive.

It was the vanity and arrogance of the claim that it’s the company that organizes anything. Actually, it’s the core members who organize and prioritize the content. They separate the wheat from the chaff.

It was also the fact that after watching the video, people were no better informed about what the system actually does nor about the types of people who use the site or the quality of interactions they produce on the site.

The company can’t organize s***.

Left to their own devices, they don’t even know how to make their UI easy-to-use, functionally smart and speedy. They don’t know it’s important to provide user guides, despite being in beta for an entire year. They don’t know it’s vital to have open user feedback channels. They don’t know their system is attracting tons of spam and fake user sign-ups. They don’t know comment moderation matters to users. They don’t know what online democracy is and how to nurture it. Instead they decimate users’ content, breach user privacy and engage in all manner of policies that frustrate and annoy their core users — the very people who have patiently championed them and given them chance after chance.

Worst of all their marketing, which consistently insults users’ intelligence, doesn’t position their Web 3.0 offering as a smart solution at all.

It’s a tragedy and their problem to resolve.

MARKETING IS AS SMART AS THE PEOPLE WHO STRATEGIZE IT

I’m also going to share this observation about truly smart and strategic marketing, using Apple as the example.

A few years’ ago I met MT Rainey, who worked on several of Apple’s marketing campaigns during the 1980s. Subsequently, she established one of the UK’s largest independent advertising agencies and more recently has created an online social venture which offers mentoring services to new businesses and individuals about their careers as well as their lifestyles. Separately, in the past I’ve also swapped emails with Guy Kawasaki, one of the Apple Fellows (which includes Alan Kay amongst its luminaries) and one of the geniuses responsible for proselytizing Apple and imbuing the company with distinctive and positive brand values which have successfully transmitted through the generations.

Now, if we look at the LISA campaign of the 1980s and more recently the ‘He’s a PC’ one what we see from Apple is a consistent message spanning decades:

· faster than the competition

· smarter than the competition

· sleeker and cooler than the competition

Not once has Apple (or any of the tech brands which have stood the tests of time and fickleness of consumer tastes) ever allowed s*** / unprofessional / gutter-quality marketing to be associated with itself.

It’s not hip or avant-garde or smart to do so. Only stupid people would want to or go about sabotaging their own company by allowing it to be tagged with s*** in SEO engines and then attracting like-for-like s*** to their own sites.

Smart marketing is when the company appeals to the users’ better aspects. Like when slideshare encourages people to blog about the achievement of their exponential view counts and celebrates their content contributions — even if it is an April Fools.

More than anything, smart marketing is when the users are IN on the joke (and realize they’re perpetrators of the joke) rather than when the marketing is such that users are perceived to be the butt of the joke — like any explicit association of or reference to their content as s*** that the company has to organize.

Would-be marketers need to look at the best practices of brands like Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Nike, Nokia, GE and others to realize a simple truth:

PEOPLE LIKE TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES, OTHERS AND THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE WORLD.