Blessed are the Meeker, Devitt and Wu

If you believe, as we do at Rassak, that effective communication in the digital era involves understanding the future of communications platforms and devices (in addition to the words, images, video and more that are delivered over them)… then this new edition of the Morgan Stanley Internet Trends presentation from Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt and Liang Wu is a fascinating (and important) read.

Synthetic Life’s Cute Face

[Photo Credit Science]

I don’t want to read too too much into this… but I was struck by the image accompanying a decent amount of the online coverage of Craig Ventner et al’s synthetic cell that’s been global front-page news  over the last week. Artificial life tends to spook people — not give them the warm fuzzies. And yet this cartoony photo is warm, fuzzy, even cute! Was it a deliberate choice to include this photo in the Science magazine article released by the team of biologists?  They are business people too, and they have an interest in making their news accessible/human/soft/unscary to lay people (regulators and donors are often lay people as well) — so a human touch (even a subconscious one — in the form of perceived doe-eyes and mouth) is valuable.

Doing the Honors — Leveraging Human Desire To Build Community

YouTube is not always what it seems. On the face of it it’s a video site. It’s also a search engine (some say it’s the second largest one). It’s also a great example of a community … and their community platform offers many lessons for digital community leaders. Here’s one:

My almost-teenage son was very excited last night. He and some friends made a tribute music video of a song by teen heartthrob Justin Bieber.  They posted it to YouTube.  He was thrilled that the video received three “honors.” The video was ranked as most watched, top rated and most discussed — in a specific category, in a specific geographic region.

Good community organizers understand the desires of their members. Great community organizers leverage those desires to grow and engage their communities.

YouTube — one of the most fascinating community platforms — has leveraged technology to do just this. At least 100 community members multiplied by a huge, huge, huge number of categories and geographic regions were “honored” (great choice of word!) with feel-good feedback on their work yesterday. And this happens everyday. This is certainly not the only reason that 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute (source, YouTube).  But it certainly helps.

PRACTICAL TIP: Even if you don’t have the technology built into your community platform, do something (anything) today to honor members. And honor them for something that will encourage an action that will grow and further engage members in your community.

P.S. Check out the video… my son plays Bieber :-)

Brandbending: A (Quick) Experiment in Perception

Are You Hiding?

The brochure of the exhibit

Last Saturday I checked out an exhibit called “Hide, Skin as Material and Metaphor.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York. While I cant’ say I liked the work visually, it certainly struck me as interesting on a number of levels.

It really got me thinking about skin… and really what the skin of our companies are.

Brands are definitely a skin. And they often are something companies hide behind—a manufactured image beamed over TV or ads that can bear little connection to the reality.

Social/digital/community media is changing this.

When people become the carriers of the brand in a very active way (employees, customers, partners) the skin of the company changes a lot.

For people in charge of branding, that’s a wonderful or scary thing. Or both.

BTW, the museum is in a really cool building.. the customs house at the foot of Broadway, almost at the lower tip of Manhattan. According to a plaque outside, customs duties were the main source of US revenue before the income tax was instituted. And most customs duties came through that building.