Rassak’s Law: Creativity and Competition

Over the years Rassak has helped a bunch of companies solve sticky problems through creative communications. So when I was invited to present to a group of business execs and investors at Gild International in Barcelona last week, I thought Creativity itself would an interesting topic. Big thanks to Saar Gur,  David Hornik, and Steve Reale for the great ideas to prep for this talk. I wish I could’ve used all your examples.

BTW, if the bit in the video about “brutal editing” in the creative process speaks to you… it’s a theme I have spent some time on in this blog. See Editing Engineers, What’s In a Word?, Less is More, and Where Blood Tasted of Blood and Honey of Honey.

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Shorter is Sweeter (And Smarter) — The Proof

When communicating, make your point early. While you still have your audience's attention.

Just one of the many brilliant things about digital branding/communications/advertising and the like is that the results are so easy to measure.  We look at a lot of results data at Rassak–and often use it to improve things, even on the fly. But the data is often proprietary and unshareable.  I thought I’d share one interesting tidbit with you from some personal communications I put out on the web last week. Nobody can yell at me (except me) for sharing this.

Last week was the week leading up to the Jewish new year AKA Rosh Hashana  (in fact it is actually today… so if I were an observant Jew I would not by typing right now!). I’ve traditionally made a new year greeting and sent it via email to people who I think would be interested in the week before the holiday. Even though my greetings have been in video format for a few years, this time I decided to upload the video to YouTube and share it that way.

Once the video is seen a minimum number of times, YouTube gives you back viewing data — demographics, etc. One of my favorites is the “hotspot” data. This data compares your video to other videos of similar length — and shows where people, on average, tend to leave your video.

My new year video, is about one and half minutes long. You can see, in the image above, where people begin to get a bit antsy. This data is based on about 900 or so views on YouTube.  If you like, you can check out my  video for yourself here. And happy new year!

Now.. not all videos (of course) have the same graph. Here’s a cool video of a guy explaining hotspots.. and he shows some of his graphs.

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The Quiet Conference… Less Content, MUCH More Communication

I just had a very interesting and valuable  four days on what is known as the “quiet” Balearic island of Menorca. It’s quiet compared Mallorca and Ibiza.

The conference is Menorca TechTalk and is hosted by tech entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky. He gathered a number of really smart, successful entrepreneurs and investors (and young and upcoming startuppers) from around Europe, Latin America (he’s originally from Buenos Aires and is now based in Madrid), Asia, the States.

techtalking

I prefer to network one-on-one… visit people at their offices, go to breakfast, take walks with people. I guess you could say I like the quiet approach. And that is why I liked this quiet conference. The ratio of organized content to total time was an astonishing 3 content hours to 48 total (waking) hours (with waking hours varying by person). Most people were in attendance for four days).

Slow and quiet is good for communicating. I really enjoyed experiencing the interactions and connections with people unfold over four days. I learned a lot. I was able to help people as well. Different small groups and interactions formed, then broke apart. Informal demos were given, ideas and advice explored…

My gut is that the relationships I made (or reinforced)  in Menorca will have a different quality to them more quickly than others made at louder, more content-heavy conferences. And the information I gathered and was able to impart was better too.

Quiet is good for relationships and information.

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Secrets of the Web’s Most Popular Video EVER

Distribution, Distribution, Distribution. Photo credit Reed Kavner

In a rather excited blogpost (lots of exclamation points!!… count them) Visible Measures, a company that makes it possible to track video views online, has listed the top viral videos of all time.

Number one is “Soulja Boy Crank That” logging in at 356,300,000 views.

Check out the video. It’s very very smart. Do you think its a coincidence that the most watched online video of all time does the following things so well:

Branding: the song has the singer’s name in it — and it’s no cameo.. “Soulja Boy” basically IS the hook/chorus. This makes it easy to remember the artist, easy to talk about, easy to find again.

Calling people to action: the video is jampacked with imagery of, well, people watching the video. And many times they are watching it together. What a terrific, not-so-subtle reminder to share the video and enjoy it with others.

The thing is built to work. Crank dat.

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What Attention Looks Like

Here are some kids who have attention SURPLUS. Are you up for the job of being as compelling as what they’re engaged in. Here’s the video from the NYTimes.

pay attention

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Booktips: “The Art of Letting Go, Enterprise 2.0″

I have been checking out a really interesting/smart book called The Art of Letting Go, Enterprise 2.0.  The book is a series of essays by people like Stefan Bocking, who runs webs services at Vodafone, Gotz Hamman, business editor for the big German weekly Die ZEIT, Andrew McAfee, a professor in tech and ops management at Harvard biz school. The essays address ways web 2.0 technologies (many of which are communications technologies which is one reason I’m so interested in them) can be used as business tools.

Enterprise 2.0 – The Art of Letting Go

Here’s one bit that caught my eye.. I’ll quote directly from McAfee’s essay called “A Definition of Enterprise 2.0″

One of the most common phrases I hear in discussions of any type of IT initiative …. is “It’s not about the technology (INATT).” I’ve heard this from vendors, consultants, technologists, executives … analysts, pundits and academics ….

People usually mean one of two things when they say INATT; one of them is correct but somewhat uninformative, and the other conveys a lot of information but is incorrect and even dangerous. The correct-but-bland meaning  is “It’s not about the technology alone.” In other words, a piece of technology will not spontaneously or independently start delivering value, generating benefits, and doing precisely what it’s deployers want it to do. Technologies have to be managed in order to do any of these things; they’re not magic bullets or miracle cures.

….

The other meaning behind INATT is “The details of this technology can be ignored for the purposes of this discussion.”

As somebody who has seen many  times how the details of anything — including, and often especially, technology — is experienced by users/customers can have huge impact, I think McAfee is right on! in saying how wrong this second point is.

But I disagree that the first point is bland and does not bear repeating early and often — even if people seem to get it. Communication is aided by technology… but it really (really, really, always) is about people.  I am going to start using the acronym myself… but I am going to add a letter to really make the point: INATTA (the second A being “Alone”).

My little note isn’t nearly as smart as many of the points in McAfee’s essay and in the book in general. Check the book out for yourself.

Thanks to Tina Kulow for the booktip.

Oh, BTW, the book as a website.

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Never Qwit Listening

Just after writing about Coldplay watching the exits to see if they’re playing the right songs,  I came across this cleverly named (and actually clever also) app that serves a similar function. Qwitter (made by some developers called Contrast out of Dublin) sends you an email when somebody “unfollows” you on Twitter — and also sends you your most recent Twitter update before they’d headed out the exit for a “hotdog or whatever”. It’s a rough (but better than nothing) way to track the relevance of your content to people.

A screengrab of the Qwitter site

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Coldplay Analytics

I liked this quote by Coldplay’s Chris Martin in the band’s recent 60 Minutes interview

“When we look out from the stage you can’t really see people so much but you can see the light of the doorway of all the exits. So the way to tell at the beginning of a tour which songs are working and which ones aren’t is if you see people’s silhouettes in the exits then it means you’re probably not playing the right song. ‘Cause a lot of people are probably going to get a hotdog or whatever. So I know we’re doing OK when all the exits are clear. That’s my way of judging it.  The Silhouette Factor”

It’s a bit like tracking “exit pages” in Google Analytics to see what pages are causing people to leave a site.

The bigger picture idea here is that it is really useful to listen to your audience. Yes, it can be good to survey them in advance of something … but it’s REALLY GREAT if you can keep an eye on them while they’re actually interacting with you. This makes everything you do better… your products are better, your communications are better. The web provides some pretty excellent tools for tracking real customer interactions with your ads, your content, your messages, and often with your product itself.

Honestly, though, I’d rather have Martin’s job :-)

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