Crayon, join the conversation

PSFK and me -- we go way back, yo. I attended the trend site's first NY Conference a couple of years ago and walked out with more good ideas than I usually come across in a month. The following year, I got to give people some good ideas when I moderated a panel about collaboration and coworking.

This year marks Piers Fawkes' third time around. The PSFK 2010 Conference happens at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in downtown Manhattan on Friday, April 9th.

I'm happy to offer you a 10% discount off the ticket price - just follow any of this post's links to the Eventbrite order form and you're golden.

I won't be able to attend this year but wanted to encourage those of you in New York to check it out. What's in it for me? Nada - although I am sending my man Amadeo Plaza in my place (disclosure: Piers provided a discounted ticket).

What's in it for you? Plenty of great ideas, brilliance and inspiration from all walks of business and life. This year's speakers include:

• Colin Beavan - Green pioneer and journalist aka No Impact Man
• John Dimatos - Resident Researcher concepting tech solutions for UNICEF at NYU
  
• Nick Felton - Designer and creator of the annual infographic Felton Report
  
• Zach Lieberman - Creative technologist whose work bridges the real world with the digital
  
• Steve Grasse - Revolutionary behind Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction
• Andrew Hoppin - CIO who leverages digital media to create political and social impact
  
• Grant McCracken - Anthropologist and author of the book Chief Culture Officer
• Shantell Martin - Illustrator & VJ who creates vivid video-projection 'Oras'
  
• Steve Powers - Contemporary artist who recently created the city-wide A Love Letter For You
  
• Erik Proulx - Creative catalyst who inspires peers about their future; filmmaker behind Lemonade
  
• Avner Ronen - Television and entertainment market change maker and founder of boxee
  
• Tina Roth Eisenberg - Graphic designer; and global tastemaker through her blog SwissMiss
  
• Naveen Selvaduri - Social agitator and founder of mobile application foursquare
  
• Andy Spade & Anthony Sperduti - Creative experience builders behind Partners & Spade
• Ouigi Theodore - Visionary community-led brand builder behind BK Circus
  
• Rob Walker - National columnist and instigator of Significant Objects storytelling project
• Adam Wells - Design Director incubating new ventures & experiences for Virgin Group USA
  
• Peter Weijmarshausen - Realigning the product delivery with his 3D printing at Shapeways

As you can see, this isn't the usual roster of the same ol' marketing and social media faces. I hope you'll have an opportunity to attend.

I'm also going to ask (ok, tell) Amadeo that he needs to drop me a couple of guest posts about the best ideas he hears so even if you can't attend, you'll get to drink in a bit o' the PSFK Conference goodness.

 
It has been at least a couple of years since I've done a proper "predictions" post, although last year I contributed to a fantastic 2009 predictions ebook that Peter Kim pulled together. This year I contributed to a similar ebook, but this time with my new best buds at Powered, Drillteam and Stepchange.

The book makes for some interesting reading and will give you a peek into some of the things the new Powered is thinking about right now.

You can download it for free right now but I'd like to give you a little taste. I have just one prediction -- that in 2010, marketers will (have to) stop just messing around and actually get serious about social media. Here's what I had to say...

I think it’s time to admit that for the past couple of years, we’ve had it pretty easy. Before you shout me down, hear me out. I’m well aware that the recession slashed our budgets, hammered our headcount, and applied an almost unprecedented amount of pressure to deliver outsized results with whatever it was we had left. But when it comes to social media marketing in particular, we’ve been getting a bit of a free ride.

In 2009, most companies still looked at social as an inexpensive, experimental nice-to-have tactic. They knew it was no longer a good idea to sit ‘this social media thing’ out, but ticking boxes on an innovation checklist often took the place of rigorous planning and results-oriented thinking. When so-called social media experts weren’t trying to convince one another that now might be a good time to invent some new-but-not-improved definition for the generally accepted success metric ROI, they were chiding naysayers with flippant questions like, ‘What’s the ROI of putting on your pants in the morning?’ If this doesn’t sound like you, congratulate yourself for being ahead of the pack.

But for everyone else, welcome to 2010: the year social media gets down to business.

This year, we’ll see more companies go beyond flavor-of-the-month tactics to approach social from a strategic perspective, considering both where it fits within the integrated marketing mix and (more importantly, from my perspective) how social thinking gets infused into all components of the customer experience – from the first awareness impression through every last post-purchase interaction. We’ll see marketers think about how social can deliver against their company’s key business objectives and then design sound programs that actually do exactly that (hint: ‘get on Twitter’ is not a key business objective unless you’re Biz Stone; increase customer satisfaction, retention and repeat purchase are.) And finally, we’ll see a serious focus on accountability. When social media was on the fringe of the marketing roadmap, we got away with playing around. Now that it sits squarely in the mainstream, it has to work hard.

I’ll admit my prediction isn’t as sexy as others you’re likely to read this time of year (give it up for mobile social, geo-location and augmented reality everybody) but I can guarantee that this is the one that must come true if we all want to be sitting around the table peering into the crystal ball at the start of 2011.

I wrote this prediction back in mid-December (and frankly have been harping on this particular point for a couple of years now) but those of you who follow goings-on in the social media space will notice that in the time between mid-December and now, others (including Forrester Research) have pointed to the very same trend. So that must mean it's true. Right again, Verdino...

Grab your copy and share the love. As always, feel free to chime in with reactions, thinking and snide remarks.

 This is just flat-out smart and cool.

The Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsytems and Boing Boing to host The Digital Open, a tech expo for teens under the age of 17. Last week they announced a series of winning projects, one of which caught my eye -- not because it made use of amazing, forward-looking technology, but because it ostensibly uses no technology at all...

Actually, that's not quite true. Let me explain.

The project, developed by a 17-year-old girl named Alexis McAdams, is called "DiorActive" and essentially takes the big world  issues -- political, social, cultural, economic, environmental, etc -- that we all hear about (in the abstract) through the constant barrage of information available at our fingertips every day and brings them to life in a tactical, experiential way at a human scale. How? By portraying them live in the real, physical world, reenactment style or interactive diorama style.

You can learn more about the project and its inspiration in Alexis's own words  (video):

So of course technology plays a role -- the real world experiences are informed by all of the online and media information available to DiorActive "builders" as they research the issues they'll bring to life. But the idea of using technology simply as a conduit to bridge a world-scale issue that we hear about to a human-scale physical experience that hammers the issue home in a meaningful, personal way is brilliant. And I think that it also speaks to an interesting blur between the digital, virtual and physical and provides a firm reminder that even for a generation that was "born digital," real world connections matter most of all.

As marketers, we intuitively (if not through hard and fast data) understand that online activities ranging from traditional digital advertising to web-based research and social media word-of-mouth translate into real world behaviors. As social computing evolves and becomes increasingly mobile -- and increasingly blurs the distinction between online connections and real world friendships -- the distinction between the digital and physical worlds will become less, well, distinct. And as we geek out over shiny objects that tap technology to enhance the physical world, it's good to remember that it flows the other way too -- that real world experiences can, do and will absolutely serve to enhance the digital (think about even the humble tweetup...)

I love the way Alexis's DiorActive project reminds old people like me, "hey, while you guys talk about where this might all be going, some of us are already there..."

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What do you think?

While mobile still has a long way to go before it becomes a key channel for most marketers, it would be foolish not to keep an eye on new developments in mobility.

Although I don't write many posts about mobile on this blog, in the past couple of weeks on Verdino Bytes I blogged about two separate and very different mobile implementations.  Looking back at those posts now, I think they are even more interesting when viewed in tandem than they were individually. So I thought I'd take a second look at both technologies and provide some additional context.

On July 8th, I wrote about the incorporation of 2D barcode technology into this year's Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Black-and-white visual codes developed by a company called Jagtag appear alongside one of the photo spreads. Readers can use just about any camera-phone to shoot and send an image of the barcode to receive an MMS message containing a set of additional mobile-friendly model photos. Super simple in its execution, this implementation offers consumers, publishers and advertisers a practical way to extend old world media (in this case a magazine, but it would work equally well with newspapers and out-of-home) into the mobile channel via exclusive content and supplemental information.

The following day, I happened across a company called TAT and posted a video demo of their Augmented ID offering. Augmented ID is a super-practical spin on shiny new augmented reality technology that, via your mobile phone's camera, "visualizes the digital identities of the people you meet in real life."  Let's say you're a social media geek who writes a blog and networks on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  You step away from your computer to attend a conference or tweetup where you meet lots of new people face-to-face. With Augmented ID, you point your camera-phone at one of your fellow attendees and, through the viewfinder, see his live image enhanced with a series of floating, interactive icons representing his online social media profiles. In the grand scheme, this blurs the increasingly narrow line between online and offline identities, and online and offline social networking. In the less-than-grand scheme, it allows us to avoid stick-on name tags and nerdy small talk like, "So, are you on Twitter?" 

See it in action (feed and email readers click through to the blog for the embedded video):

So now, I'll tell you why I find these two technologies interesting although, of course, I already tipped my hand in the title of the post.  The first offers an enhanced traditional media experience to the mobile device. The second extends the social media experience into the real world by way of the mobile device. 

I'm not going to pretend I have any clue about where this might be headed, but I'm intrigued by the notion of mobile as the glue that binds together our online and offline experiences.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

If hindsight is 20/20, then foresight is -- well -- sometimes shockingly accurate too, even if some of the fine details are a bit blurry.  This video from 1969 (that's 40 years ago people) extols the virtues of a connected future: online shopping, webcams and live video streaming, electronic banking, email, touchscreen-based devices and even content delivery networks.  Plus it has a suitably creepy soundtrack. 

[If you're reading the feed or get my blog posts delivered by email, you may need to click through to watch the embedded video.]

So here we are in 2009 and I'd wager most of us would be hard-pressed to make predictions that will hold up 40 days from now let alone 40 years.  OK - maybe 40 days is a bit of a low estimate, but you get my point...

What do you think 2049 holds in store?

via Get Elastic.

Friend, look-alike, PR man and Now Is Gone author Geoff Livingston is stirring the pot today, with a pretty provocative proclamation -- "social media is dead."

Tucked away in a post about why the next Blog Potomac conference -- slated for October 2009 and featuring fellow crayonista Jane Quigley -- will be the last, lies Geoff's eulogy for a form of media and marketing that many still consider the latest shiny object in the marketing practitioner's box of baubles.

The technology adoption cycle has been maturing for social media (and social media, web 2.0 whatever you want to call it is definitely inspired by technology) for some time. Widespread corporate adoption is happening as we speak, albeit with many stumbles. Based on conversations I’m having, even the most conservative organizations are adapting now.

The time when social media as a special or unique or “shiny and new” type of communication is rapidly ending. Does that mean it’s going away? Hardly.

But from an innovators standpoint, as someone who lives on the edge, who wants to be where new frontiers are being created, we’re at the end. For me, social media is dead… That means it’s future forward.

While my experience with conservative organizations leads me to suspect that Geoff thinks we're further along the Technology Adoption Lifecycle (or more precisely the "marketing adoption cycle" - I don't think we can debate that the technology itself is mainstream) than we really are, I'm not sure that Geoff is wrong.  At least not entirely.

If we're talking about social media as a category, as something special, unique or new, then it probably is (or should be, anyway) dead or dying.  The notion of social media as a silo and as something that warrants specialized expertise is nothing more than a point of inflection between a new media landscape that is entirely, seamlessly social and an old media landscape that was always social anyway (even if we didn't know it.)

Then again, I'm not sure the death of social media matters a whole lot to anyone but the "next new thing" innovation junkies.  Is Geoff arguing in favor of shiny object syndrome at a time when, frankly, most marketers are still not making the best use of the last big thing?  Hey, I'm an innovator too (or at least, I like to think I am) and I'm also keen to identify and understand whatever lies around the next bend, but I also know that tomorrow's toys don't amount to a hill of beans to an in-the-trenches marketer who is (let's be honest) at best dabbling in social and still thinks they've had a coup if they convince their agency creative director to display the corporate URL at the end of the new 30-second spot.

So on the one hand we have a small band of serial innovators already seeking out greener pastures.  On the other, we have the rest of the herd who are just beginning to suspect that the ground might be shifting right beneath their hooves.

So whether social media is dead or not, it surely seems to be trapped in limbo.

What are your thoughts?  Is social media dead or is Livingston burying it alive?