Martin T. Focazio

Lights. Camera. Website! 

In my prior posts I discussed how the Post PC world is a  challenge to  the core model of how any creative agency works after that I discussed how new enterprise web management platforms give rise to low-cost competition to agencies seeking to expand into the mobile space. In this concluding piece on this topic, I’ll suggest that the next 5 years are going to be a transitional time for the “traditional” digital media agency, and that the business opportunities for agencies are going to undergo a major transformation in both the kinds of work they do and the way they execute on the work.

One of the classic discussions anyone who works for a digital media agency gets from friends and family is how to handle the question, “So what do you do for a living?”

At first, you say, “I work at a company that builds web sites for big companies.” and the response you get is, “Oh, you work with computers. My Google is running slow, can you defragment my keyboard’s USB for me?” You quickly learn to never utter the words “web site” in the presence of a civillian again.

So after a while you take another tack and the next time you respond with something a little more comprehensive and accurate.

“What do you do?”
“I work with companies to help them understand and capitalize on the native benefits of digitization of business processes, defining and deploying market-facing interactive interfaces optimized to the devices and services consumers are currently using and will use in the future.”

That gets a blank stare, a forced smile and then they pretend to see someone they know, wander off, and you find yourself alone at the party again. Eventually, you learn that the question is best answered with a dialogue.

Them: “So, what do you do for a living?”
Me: “I help companies figure out what they should do online.”
Them: “You make web sites?”
Me: “Often, a web site is created as a result of what I do. Not always.”

“Let me ask you a question. Imagine you run a company with 4 million customers and you send those customers a bill in the mail every month.

Each bill you send costs your company $15.00 because you need  to create the bill, print it, stuff it into envelopes and mail it out, and then you pay to collect incoming mail, open the envelopes, deposit the checks and so on.

But if your customers use paperless billing and online bill payment, it costs you only $4.00 a month in various fixed costs. But only 2% of your customers use the paperless billing your company offers via its web site. What do you need to do to get that number up to 50% of customers in the next two years?”

Them: “Ummm….I don’t know.”

Me: “I do. And figuring out stuff like that is what they pay me to do. ”

That usually works to explain what I do – and more importantly, it defines the real role of the digital media agency.  The best digital media agencies – and there are lots of them – have the ability to look at the whole realm of interactive digital media capabilities and business practices and then develop not only a digital solution that suits the client, but  to define the most important thing: what to do first. And second. And third.

People at a digital media agency also need to keep an eye on what’s happening out there in innovation land, think about their clients and prospects, determine if something happening online is an opportunity, a threat or irrelevant and make a compelling case to support the assessment.  I can’t even begin to count the number of online services I’ve signed up for over the years and the number of technologies I’ve dragged home in a bag so I could speak with authority and first-hand experience on how they work, why they matter (or not) and where/how/if these services/technologies/social trends fit into or threaten my client’s business strategy.  With this information, you bring the client ideas, plans, concepts and even prototypes so they can make informed decisions about what they need to do online.

At the moment, execution of the ideas is also a key part of the digital agency business. Someone has to design and code the stuff that makes the user experience happen, and having a good staff in place to handle the implementation of the big idea was the most sensible thing for an agency, so agencies are in the habit of handling much of the design/build effort in-house.

This would be a good time to drop this image into this post:

That’s most of the cast and crew of the movie “Transformers.” I did not count, but I guess there’s about 200 people in that image, and of those 200 people, I’ll venture to guess that less than 20 of them are actually employees of Paramount Pictures, the company that produced the film. It might be as few as none, depending on how the studio structured the production. Yet the hugely complex special effects – both physical and digital – get done. Schedules are made, people show up, the movie gets made. Now, we can argue that Transformer’s wasn’t a great movie, but that’s not the point.

The point is that execution of complex projects is not always something that requires a large staff – in fact, what it requires is a strategy, good ideas to realize the strategy, a creative approach  and good program management to select, inform and coordinate a group of experts to implement the concepts. Specialists from Cinematographers to companies that can make it look like it’s raining come together, coordinated and managed by a production company, and then disband. The scope of services you can get is amazing.

In my opinion, this is the direction that digital media agencies must go – they must be more like a production company that managed large scale programs by bringing in and managing experts in a variety of domains. Need an iOS app? Bring in the iOS app guys. Need a Roku app? Bring in the Roku folks. It might even be the same people – but the agency hires based on the needs of the project at the time.

Equally important, the domain experts who provide services to the digital media agency need to be just like the specialists in the film production world. There are companies that are the best in production trucks and trailers and there are companies that do nothing but stunts and while smaller in size, they are vitally important to the big productions.

This will require a new way of thinking and vastly greater use of online collaboration tools and faster processes.

Note: This post is a continuation of yesterday’s post. 

Follow the money….

While the matters of skill sets and workflow adaptation for a post desktop world are not trivial, it pales in comparison to the real threat that is faced by all classic digital media agencies – the lower revenue-generating ability of mobile application projects.

Here are some numbers I dug up:

• Alex Ahlund, former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps, and later an advisor to Appolicious, wrote a guest blog article about app sales on TechCrunch. According to that article, a survey of 96 mobile app developers showed the average cost to develop an app was $6,453
• An article on OS X Daily about iPhone Development Costs reported that the development cost range for “small apps” is $3,000 to $8,000 and that “more complex or recognized brand apps” can cost $50,000 to $150,000.
• A well-written article on PadGadget.com explored The Cost of Building an iPad Appand suggested the development costs (as compared to design and other costs) range from $12,000 to $150,000 or more.
• One of the developers of the Twitterrific iOS application has posted an insightful reply on StackOverflow (a programming Q&A site) about the potential development costs of a mobile application. He estimates that a high quality app can run well over $200k during the course of two months, with two developers working 60 hours a week.

Now I know that in a world where you can find any number of companies that will build a very nice web site for only a few thousand dollars, the fact that the pricing of mobile app development is so low should not be a real threat, because professional companies can charge more for higher quality services. But, to use a worn out term, “this time it’s different” – and to explain why I need to go deep into the way-back machine to go back to the genesis of the “digital agency. ”

In the beginning, was the web server, and it was good. 

It is hard to overstate just how radical the basic idea of the world wide web was back when it came out.  The whole thing started with a really simple communications protocol that didn’t require any pre-arrangement between the client (web browser) and web server – all you needed was an internet connection and the web address of the server, and in a series of exceedingly simple transactions between your web browser and one or more web servers you could gather and place information on a screen with remarkable ease. Add pictures and boom, you’re building web sites.

A web site could make it look like back end systems were actually working together – you could slap an interface together that was pulling information from three different web servers and it would all look OK.

This was utter magic in 1996 – by sticking a web server on the document repository over there, and putting another web server on an image repository over there you could quickly begin to simulate the imaginary seamless “back end system” that the client always wanted.

This was the genesis of what I call “Virtual Technology” – the highly realistic simulation of a well-constructed back office system in which data is effortlessly managed, structured, shared and routed according to enterprise-wide business rules and requirements.  The better the simulation, the better the web site.

By the mid 1990s, companies like Think New Ideas, N2K, AGENCY.COM, Modem Media, Razorfish, US Interactive and a slew of others came into their own as large entities able to charge seven figures for a web site not because they could create and operate the back-office systems that their Virtual Technology interfaces simulated – they grew because they could design a way of making the interface act like the middleware between the systems that didn’t really exist. It’s all a lovely simulation because disconnected systems can – in the web browser – appear to be connected. This approach – treating the “back end” as a messy, complex place best ignored and left to others – was (and often still is) the approach taken by many digital media agencies and “web developers.” While there was real progress in making back-office systems directly “web compatible,” back then much of the technology needed to make that happen didn’t exist and was custom-coded.

Then there was a big crash in the digital agency world during the 2001-2004 “nuclear winter” that came after the dot-com blowout, but in this time, new bits of jargon emerged – the “platform” and “Web 2.0″ – of which only “platforms” turned out to matter much.

A “platform” in agency-speak is a way to use a large “back end” system to present and operate a web site that is more operationally optimized and able to connect to other back-office systems “machine to machine.” For example, if you’re in the business of selling widgets, you can pick a platform like ATG or IBM Websphere or eBay’s Magento (or scores of other systems that range from free to millions of dollars), and those platforms will handle things like inventory management, shipping logistics, tax calculation, customer information management, special offer presentation, customer service, offer personalization and much more. They also have “hooks” – little programs – that connect them to things like warehouse management systems or financial reporting systems.  Platforms  have a repository of user interface templates and content rules that are used to create the web pages that the customer sees. Basically, these platforms are massive databases and programs that access the databases, an it is all presented by putting bits and pieces of information together via templates that become the screens the user sees. Designing a good user experience for a template-driven platform can be a great challenge, but done correctly, it allows for a scalable, manageable online communications infrastructure for any organization of any size.

Great advances in platforms came along, and today, it’s hard to find good large-scale web site that isn’t built using at least one kind of “platform” as a starting point. Even this tiny blog is on a “platform” called WordPress. Platforms make it possible to deploy and integrate interfaces to complex systems with less effort and cost. Hold that thought, it matters much.

So, after a cooling off period after the crash the digital agencies were once again doing very well designing not only the user interface template screens but also the customer-optimized process flows that would be based on the capabilities and limitations of whatever platform the client was using. And still, seven figure budgets prevailed for very large scale web planning and development projects.

That’s because it’s hugely complex to even identify and describe all of the use-cases and interactions that could help a client improve their business performance, much less design the overall user experience or build the templates and make them work.

Digital agencies that got good at helping their clients stay informed about the way emerging digital platforms and tools could be used to change or improve their business or industry were invited by their clients to envision and validate approaches to online communications & commerce, to help the client prioritize these approaches, to structure and visualize the proposed solutions and then to actually execute the projects. The execution of the desktop web project is still, very much, the linear process that I described in an earlier post.

Now two paragraphs ago, I was talking about “platforms” and how they make it easier to build and manage complex systems with less effort and cost. The other thing that platforms do is make it much easier to separate content and function so that any arbitrary device with an internet connection can interface to the platform. In english, that means a web site is only one “version” of the kind of user experience a good platform can support.

In fact, a good platform can support many different user experiences via Application Process Interfaces (API’s) – simple rules that let one computer program talk to another and exchange information.  With this model, we reduce the web site to just another interface to the platform, along with many others:

And here’s where it gets interesting.

In the post-PC world, we’re not talking about an interface to a platform as much as we’re talking about one software platform (iOS, Android, Xbox) integrating with another platform (WebSphere, ATG, WordPress) machine-to-machine via native applications (and also having a tight, effective, well crafted interface that suits the device itself).

Here’s the challenge:

Each platform – iOS, Android, XBox, whatever comes out next – has a unique, complex and non-replicating skill set needed to create a great native application (I’ll go into why Native Applications are still better than Mobile Optimized Sites at another time). It’s mostly software development – meaning a well-engineered experience is required, and as anyone who has worked on software projects knows, domain expertise+technical knowledge+dedicated teams=great software.

OK, so you hire people with the software skills you need and drop them into an office and now you’ve got a “mobile practice” right?

Well – maybe not. You see, all of that effort defining process flows and interactions that made these platforms work for the desktop web is very much reusable by the app developer. In fact, they don’t have to – and shouldn’t – use every possible feature and function of the supporting platforms. The post-pc user experience is typically based on a tactical subset of all of the things possible on the desktop web.

And this is where the economics of it all come into play. Smaller shops can be platform specialists – iOS, Android, Xbox – whatever – and they can build great apps that connect to these platforms without the need to define what the platform does holistically or how the company manages the overall platform. That work is left to the digital media agency and systems integrators.

As a result, we see shops that can bid $30,000 for a suite of mobile applications built to operate with the existing web platform while the larger digital media agency can’t even hold a kickoff meeting for that price, much less actually deliver the mobile apps.  So the clients give the mobile work to “the mobile shop” or the “xbox shop” – and at the moment, it’s an annoyance. But when you look at the numbers for where consumers are going, it’s mobile, mobile and mobile. And that work is being shopped around much more than the desktop web work.

So, are companies like Razorfish, Organic, RGA and the many smaller shops (like where I work) at serious risk?  Maybe. But the digital media agencies – at least the good ones – have something that the small shops don’t, and that’s where I see the biggest change and biggest opportunities.

Part 3: Lights! Camera! Website! 

No matter how you look at it, we are in the “post-pc” age.  While the “desktop internet” you access with a keyboard,  mouse and a screen that’s 12″ from your nose is not going away, the reality is that the whole world’s window on the internet is going to be primarily via wireless connected devices that you can hold in one hand. Small screens are ascendant.

At the other end of the scale is the “lean back” experience of watching Television – the big, wall mounted screen with lots of pixels.  In between we have our tablets and laptops, and buried in the pile of wires in the corner of the room we find a bunch of devices that expect network connectivity and interact with one of more of the screens that orbit our heads.For now, the pixels on the big screens are dominated by the pay television companies – Comcast, Time Warner, Dish Network, etc. but as I’ve suggested before, the threats to their business model are very real. The big screen on the wall is just an extended display for your mobile, and it’s connected to the same accounts all your other screens use – Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and so on. This “over the top” model is making huge inroads and is about to attain a small but critical mass in 2012, threatening the core business model of the pay tv industry.

It’s not just the pay TV business that’s threatened, it’s also the basic role of the digital media agencies that is at risk.

This cartoon describes rather well the job of a Digital Media Agency -  the places I have worked as a Strategist for most of my career:

While the last 4 panels are a bit, um…harsh, the first part of this cartoon defines very clearly the problem for digital agencies in a post-PC world.  The post-PC world does not have the same work process at all.

In the post-PC world,  the entire process of creating a user experience is condensed, faster and relies very heavily on the capabilities of the hardware and the “Software Development Kit” (SDK) provided by the device manufacturer.  It’s also very iterative, and you can’t accurately simulate the user’s experience until the software is compiled and running on the device itself.

You still need to know what you want to do and why – so the research, ideation, strategy and planning are still a big part of the project (fortunately for me!) but the roles of design, copy, information architecture and interface coding are radically shifted.

Additionally, in the post-PC world, the reliance on an exquisitely programmed and managed “back end” system is huge  (outside of mobile games).  The post-PC world is very much about efficiently programming thin clients, and then applying a coating of branding over what is fundamentally a software development project.

This is very obvious if you look at some of the major iOS applications – you can plainly see that they let the Apple native user interface elements from the SDK  be the primary interface, and they simply applied some colors and logos – these interfaces are barely designed, but highly engineered:

(From left to right, that’s Twitter, Yelp and Kindle apps for iPhone)

Ultimately, for the post-PC word digital media agencies are competing not only with small, nimble teams who charge less for mobile development (more on that in another post), they are competing with the device platforms themselves, platforms that lend themselves to rapid, efficient and low cost development due to their Software Development Kits and native user interaction widgets that are built in to the device software. These software tools simplify a great deal of the decisions about user experience design, and also eliminate a considerable amount of the effort needed to get to market. You can simply modify a “build” and “push out some changes” via the SDK. Ultimately, the iteratively engineered experience is what drives the post-PC world, and this is a big challenge for many agencies.

This challenge is one rooted in the core model of how any creative agency works, which is, despite the various clams to the contrary made by virtually every creative agency in the world, almost always a linear and hierarchical process. This is because the core concept driving the process is a series of events when the work done up to that point is declared “finished.” Essentially, the ideal process for an agency is a one-way ratchet where at each round and transition the client gives irrevocable approval to the work presented, which is always in an incomplete state until near-final delivery.

The classic digital agency model also seeks to “replicate methods” and “productize process” because it is inherently based on the similarity of the delivery environment – a screen with a keyboard and mouse running a web browser. The delivery environment is standardized, thus the production process tends that way too.

Yet sometimes the digital media agency instinctively recognizes that this process does not work for some reason once we get away from the standardized world of the desktop web. For the “special project” – a Roku app, an Android tablet app, a Smart TV app, we often see the use of things like a “war room” or “skunkworks” or some such name, because “the process” does not work for a project that isn’t  like a “basic” web presentation.  People and equipment move into physical proximity, and we are encouraged to demolish the artificial division between “disciplines” so that excellent work could be envisioned and executed by people who were previously “developers” or “designers”.  Instead of well defined roles, we have people with hybrid skills – a designer who can write iOS code, an information architect who does great copy, a project manager who can write functional specifications. The teams are small, they are nimble and they are often quite brilliant in what they produce.

However, these projects are still treated as exceptions to “the process” and they are still subject to the same pricing and project management models that come with the painstaking bespoke user experience planning and development processes that comes with any desktop web experience by a digital media agency worth using.

Today, the irony is that the same digital agencies that created the hugely efficient digitized world we now have are about to experience the same thing that travel agents, fax manufacturers, the US Postal Service and thousands of other organizations experienced in the last 15 years: An attack on their core business from low-cost alternatives to their well-established business models.

Next Post: Follow the Money.

One of my favorite all time books is “The Innovators Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen. In a theme that should be well known by now, the premise of the book is that emergent “good enough” technologies threaten established business models and disrupt markets. The examples in the book are many, and the story plays out the same – an innovation that’s not “as good” as the leading solution, but cheaper or able to deliver unique features – is derides as “lower quality” or “not robust enough” than existing solutions…then the marketplace leaves the incumbent in droves for the “less good” solution, which becomes better and better until it IS better than the current offering and then is on the way to being the market leader.

The internet is “worse” than the networks it displaced.

Digital cameras were “worse” than film.

Facebook is “worse” than the Internet at large, it seems that the cycle never ends.

And so I turn to streaming access to media “over the top” (meaning it bypasses the cable box by going “over the top” of it via the Internet).

Over and over again, I read derisive commentary from within the pay television industry about how services like Netflix and Hulu are “poor substitutes” for a cable TV subscription, and how the “video quality can’t compare” and so on. It all sounds so familiar. OTT services are “good enough” for people for whom video media consumption is an elective activity, not a constant presence in their life.

This past Sunday, the Superbowl was presented as a live stream via NBC Sports via their nifty Sunday Night Football silverlight “app.” I submit that this was a turning point for OTT services, because the OTT application used by NBC Sports was actually better than the live TV experience.  Not only was I able to pick the shots from several difference camera angles or scenes, I had full control over the experience, from pausing to sharing sections to seeing social media commentary, statistics and more. It was wonderful, engaging and, for “linear programming” (that’s industry speak for live television), it hit all the right marks.

So I’ll suggest that the year 2012 is the year that “shows” become “apps” and the best programming will find itself needing to be surrounded by the best overall user experience of concurrent, high-density information delivery as well as great interactivity.

This is the year where OTT moves from “good enough” to “better.”

In so many ways, the disconnect between the digital world and the analog world is never more clearly defined than when a client with a long-standing business engages a digital media agency to help them do something good for their business online like increase sales and decrease costs.

The one big secret that digital media agencies almost never reveal is that all of the very top players in the online space (Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Facebook, etc…) generally design, build and maintain the vast majority of their own software and user experiences from the ground up and think “online first and only” for all of their activities.

The one big secret clients keep from their digital media agencies is that the online initiatives have virtually no ongoing operational responsibility for maintaining and managing the site systems & content.

Over the next weeks, I’l be posting a series of items that explore the digital agency/client relationship and how it can be improved.

Please add. in the comments, your opinions about what drives you nuts about your clients  (from the agency side) and if you’re a client with a digital media agency, what drives you nuts about your agency.  I’ll keep identities private as requested (all comments are moderated, so they won’t automatically show up).

Editorial Note: For most of 2011, I avoided blogging because of concerns that what I posted here would be construed as reflecting the position of my employer, and by extension,  my opinions on the business of media and entertainment in general would be assumed to be what I think of our clients and their business specifically.  

In short, my personally held views as well as my household’s approach to accessing media and entertainment content (I have not had pay television service since 1992) was not congruent with the business model of many of my clients, who are in the business of selling subscription packages to television service.  

However, in the last quarter of 2011, I experienced a bit of an epiphany, and realized that my “contrarian” views on the media and entertainment business were in fact relevant and useful to my clients , and in hearing my clients speak at public events and in shareholder communications, I began to see hints of awareness of the changes I’ve been espousing, and I see that in important ways in the media and entertainment industry at large there’s an agreement with my own views of the future of how people discover, select, buy and use media and entertainment products.  So I’m unleashing the full Marty here, now and in the future, because I’ve been keeping this stuff bottled up for a while and there’s a great deal to share.  In this post I’m going out outline some of my thoughts, and then I’ll be keeping this blog going with field notes at the collision of Media and eCommerce. 

Is this guy the biggest threat to the “traditional” media and entertainment business? I think so. 

Here’s why. At the beginning of November Rovio announced that they hit the 500,000,000 download mark for Angry Birds. In the announcement was this tidbit:

“Angry Birds Fans around the world have so far played a total of 200,000 years of Angry Birds, with 300 million minutes of playing time daily. “

That’s a huge number – and that’s time people aren’t watching (or more accurately paying attention to) television.  The real effects of this lack of attention – and the attendant lack of interest in programming bundles – are going to become apparent and widespread in 2012. Television has already been surpassed as the medium of choice – the battle is over, the Internet won – it’s just that the television beast is so big it does not realize that the internet has infected the entire ecosystem.

Some of industry is still at the “denial” or  ”anger” phase of the Kubler-Ross stages of death and dying –  I read defensive articles like this one reported in Media Post, that make the absurd claim that “[L]eisure time spent online still amounts to just 12 minutes a day, or 4% of the five hours total leisure time that people have per day.” and in the same study, they report that the figures “[do] not include social networks in the definition of leisure time. It also excludes computer and console games.”

Ummm…yeah, OK. Well, it’s not hard to get to those numbers that they left out.  Facebook has 800,000,000 active users (logged in in the last 30 days) and they spend anywhere from 14 to 45 minutes a day using Facebook. Facebook alone blows away the “12 minutes a day” balderdash in the study.  Excluding games from the study is like doing a traffic study at a busy intersection and excluding trucks from the count. In 2010, consumers spent 8 hours a week playing video games (console and computer). The gaming business is just over 10 billion dollars a year.

I think that there’s a more important issue at work here, and it’s related to the Reference Price Effect – how a buyer’s price sensitivity for a given product increases the higher the product’s price is relative to perceived adequate alternatives. Television services are being seen in a new context – and the pricing model is questionable to more and more consumers. 

The key is the “perceived alternatives” concept. A copy of Angry Birds – at about US$1.00 – establishes a lower end reference price not just for other games, but any “individually accessed screen-based entertainment items” – and I include episodes of television and rental of movies in that grouping (the sale of movies is largely dead, more on that another time).  The question is where is the upper end of the reference frame? I suspect it’s in the single digits – or will be there soon. Certainly Redbox has set the standard for video rentals at $1.00 a night – and I think that the sheer volume of content being produced is, in purely economic terms “inflationary” – there’s an oversupply of content and as a result, the perceived value of most of the content offered is decreasing.

Note that I said “most of” the content. Not all content. In fact, as TV Critic David Bianculli says that we’re in a time of unprecedented quality of television programming. There are many people who would prefer if they “paid only for the stuff they want to see” and not a “package of crap I don’t want” just to get the stuff I do want. The “A La Carte” (pay for the shows you want) model is seen by consumers as a solution, and the industry claims it would reduce choices and increase costs. Even the usually well-researched Atlantic Monthly goes along with this incorrect story line and makes an argument that buying media by the episode or the season would be “much more expensive” than if the cost of the programming were buried in a bundle with other content. They drag out the “premium content” idea as a justification for charging $40 a season for a TV show, but this is really missing a huge, critical point. “Premium” is a definition created by content owners, not consumers. Consumer might want to see the latest episode of “Breaking Bad” but they don’t need to see it. There’s plenty of other content out there, plenty of games, plenty of people on Facebook. For a growing number of people, the difference between “Breaking Bad” and “Angry Birds” is minimal.  It’s just something to do. But the sellers and distributors of the content urgently need consumers to continue to believe in the “Premium Content” fairy because their whole economic model collapses quickly without good stuff being bundled with a whole bunch of “crap nobody wants”.

Make no mistake – the economic model of bundled distribution (in the form of how Cable companies now do it) is collapsing, right now. It’s a simple number game. In the same period of time where the population increased the raw number of cable TV subscribers decreased.  That’s not just a loss of subscribers, that’s a loss of overall market share. There are countless pseudo-studies that are confirming that the decline is “illusory” – there are the same as the kind of studies that don’t count social media and gaming as “leisure time” activities.

Here’s the problem. At the moment, “Anonymous” and “Pseudonym” are synonymous, if not in reality, in perception for the public at large. If you really want to be anonymous on the Internet, you can, but it’s really, really hard (use TOR networks, proxies, etc.) and, generally, those seeking to be fully anonymous are seen as having “something to hide” – which, I might add is a perfectly valid reason to be anonymous (abuse victims, whistleblowers, etc. have lots of reasons to be anonymous to the outside world).

But it’s vitally important to understand that a pseudonym is NOT “anonymous” – it’s trivially easy to connect the dots from an online “handle” to a specific individual. I’ve done it a number of times for a number of reasons, and I’m not even using particularly sophisticated methods.

But the issue I think Google is trying to address with the “only real names” thing is the fact that it is difficult at first to tell if a person is using a trivially easy to deconstruct pseudonym (Prince, Lady Gaga, Robert X. Cringley,  John Cougar…) vs. an in individual who has created a hardened “anonymous” profile that can’t be traced back to an individual. While I think there are plenty of cases where an anonymous persona is a vital part of a free and open society, I am compelled to remind everyone that Google is not – despite its vastness – a free and open society. It is a private corporation, and it can – and does – make the majority of the rules it imposes on users. Although I hate the “take it all or leave it all” terms of service that seems to be the fundamental rules of so many things that are “necessities” these days (Mobile Phone Contracts, Internet Access, etc.), Google has made a clear rule: No pseudonyms, and by extension, no anonymous use of Google+.

A privacy broker is an idea that comes up every few months. Google – or someone – could step up to the massive task of being able to connect – securely and privately – virtual identities to real persons, a connection that can only be revealed under court order or with the consent of an individual with a pseudonym. However, this can never be 100% secure or safe – Google or other companies in the same identity management business may be compromised or compelled to connect online pseudonyms to individuals. Rather than face that possibility, Google (and Facebook), simply make it a policy that they don’t allow access without a true “real world” identity. And we can take it or leave it.

Welcome to the interesting times we all created.

In the agency world, this is what your clients look like in the majority of meetings. Every day there are hours and hours of conference calls and screen sharing presentations. I’m not going to go into the reasons why we and our clients all still use a dedicated voice conference system rather than computer-to-computer audio, suffice it to say that “dialing in” is a habit that is really entrenched and in any given week I’ll dial into anywhere from 10 to 30 conference calls. There are so many services offering conferencing services that its impossible to name them all, but I suspect I’ve used at least 25% of the different services out there.

So it is with no small amount of experience in the area that I can state without equivocation that All Teleconference Services Suck.

It’s not the voice quality – they vary but they are all pretty good. Where they all suck is in basic usability.

Here’s an example. If I want to start a conference call using our newest service at work, I have to dial the following sequence (X’s represent digits, left out of this post for security reasons – we pay for these calls!)

866-614-2162 596 XXX XXXX # * XXXX # 1

That’s 28 distinct keystrokes just to start a call. This company “The Conferencing Center” –  currently wins the award for most insane dialing sequence ever – a sequence so long that the speed-dial slots on my desk phone can’t fit it all in so I can’t even preprogram this sequence to save my sanity.

Here’s what I’d expect from a conferencing system.

10/4

As in:

1. A dial-in number – just a normal 10 digit phone number.

2. A system that recognizes my caller ID string and simply asks me for a 4-digit PIN to start a conference call.
No “conference codes”, no “press 1 to start your call” – just a PIN. Even better would be an option to “Automatically start a conference bridge when I call from this phone.”

3. A 4 digit participant PIN – also with the option to “Automatically Join Conferences when I call from this phone.”

As far as I can tell, such a beast is exceedingly rare. The closest I’ve used is found at one of our clients – they have a mercifully simple, and apparently in-house, conferencing system that uses simple 10/4 dialing, but without a “remember me” functionality.

There’s a simple truth to Social Media, and it is thus:

“Some companies should simply avoid social media.”

Every now and then, a client comes up with an idea that they need a “Social Media Campaign” because they think that they need to be “more engaged” with their customers and “drive awareness” of their products and services.   They hire “Social Media Experts” to help them. Peter Shankman wrote a scathing polemic about these folks, and while I agree with him in every way, what Peter does not suggest – and I do – is that some companies are just not suited to social media. It’s not that they don’t try – but it’s like white people dancing. It’s hard to watch without feeling a mixture of revulsion and pity.

Consider Citigroup. With 200 Million customers in 100 countries, Citigroup is a behemoth of global financial services.

Let’s see their Facebook page:

They have 13,721 “Likes.” In case you can’t do the math in your head, 13,721 people is 0.007% of their customer base.  Ow.

Twitter is even more sad:

When a company with 260,000 employees and 200 Million customers can’t even get 10,000 people to follow them on Twitter,  perhaps Social Media is a game that they can’t play.

I’m picking on Citi because it is so big and obvious, but I’m also picking on them because it’s fairly clear that Citi does poorly in social media because they can’t do well and that is because they haven’t really made a commitment to embed social media in their customer service operations.

The reality is that for Citi, social media is likely best used as an extension of their customer service function – and based on the way they have configured their Twitter account (Open Mon-Fri 9AM to 10PM) there is a clear indicator that they have neither the desire nor the ability to actually use Social Media to engage with their customers. I mean, it’s ALWAYS 9AM to 10PM somewhere on the earth, and to not even mention the time zone of their “digital office hours” really establishes the disconnect. Additionally, every problem resolution leads back to their phone center – not to a digital channel like their own online account center.

If you’re going to move into social media – for any reason – as a company, you have to realize that Social Media is a giant party for everyone’s friends and companies were not invited. That does not mean companies can’t be a part of the party – in a service role. Like the caterer. Or the band. Or the bathroom attendant.  Further, if at all possible you have to deliver your services at the party, not elsewhere.  Imagine if the caterer at the wedding required everyone to go to the building across the street for the meal. Imagine if a company got a request for service via a digital channel and the reply is to “call between the hours of X and Y”.

If your company can’t commit to making it possible for customers to interact digitally 98% of the time for any questions they might have (even if that means pushing them to your own secure web site) then perhaps it is time to rethink your Social Media plans.

Back in 2007, I posted about screen sizes to help settle some questions from the World Wide Web Artists Consortium group about the correct screen size.

I’ve seen the same questions about “what’s a safe width” cropping up again in other places, so I did a little digging into the analytics data I have access to.

My sources are:

1. The American operations of a very large international organization that provides disaster relief services around the world.
2. A national organization for a county that is hosting a major global event in the summer of 2012

So let’s do a very quick look at the data:

So it looks like the age of the wide screen is here. For most of us.