It’s almost like you can’t really win when you win.

Greg McKeown on the Harvard Business Review blog recommends purposely pursuing less by using extreme criteria to eliminate what’s not essential to you. You’ve probably heard that before, but then he goes on by encouraging you to quit giving more value to something just because you already have it.

Instead of asking, “How much do I value this item?” we should ask “If I did not own this item, how much would I pay to obtain it?” And the same goes for career opportunities. We shouldn’t ask, “How much do I value this opportunity?” but “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?”

I’ve had a quote from German theologian Frederick Buechner in my desk draw for about 6 years that directly relates to finding that point of what’s absolutely essential to you.

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

“As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.”

Although I don’t think we should be surprised that big companies like Target know so much about us and are acting on it, it does surprise me that Target has decided to cloak how much they know about us by sending us random coupons, too.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

This randomness is what disturbs me because are they throwing in random coupons to disguise what they know about me or just because they get better usage when they do it. Either way I think they are treading on shaky ground ethically because they are admitting they understand that the consumer doesn’t like that they know so much about them.

When I talk to college students about working in communications the only thing that I say that I can guarantee them about a career in communications is that people always love to read, see, hear well told stories and that how will tell will continue to change.

1. Word of Mouth. A recommendation from a friend is huge and that’s what happens when people talk about your positively on social media.
2. It’s where the users are. One out of five web site page views is on Facebook. If you maximize the traffic on facebook to your web site what would that be worth in Advertising spends?
3. People are already talking about you on social media. Are you going to join in the conversation or just let them talk behind your back?
4. When they talk about you, you have a great opportunity to help them. Many companies have whole customer service departments set up on Twitter.

Without money the site can’t function. Okay, let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else, we don’t crash EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed! Users are fickle, Friendster has proved that. Even a few people leaving would reverberate through the entire userbase. The users are interconnected, that is the whole point. College kids are online because their friends are online, and if one domino goes, the other dominos go, don’t you get that? I am not going back to the Caribbean Night at AEPi!

Find the number that best dictates your success. Measure everything about that number. Determine which factors move that number in a positive direction. Measure everything about those factors. Use the most efficient way possible to influence the main number in the right direction to find success.

I’ve read a lot of hype that says that Amazon is pushing the device to make more sales, but I really believe that is a pure content device. It’s a great reader, beautiful HD player and runs all the Android apps once you get out of the Amazon App store.

In contrast to most critics I actually prefer the size of the Fire to the iPad and I don’t really have any issues with the Silk web browser. My wife carries it with her everywhere- It’s the perfect purse device.  She has a Nook e-reader before and we’ve installed the Nook App so she has her previously purchased Barnes and Noble’s e-books on her Amazon Kindle Fire.

You really have to have an Amazon prime membership to get the most out of  the Fire. With the a Prime membership you can stream videos to it and participate in the Kindle lending library.

• Reliability – Your web site has to be up to accomplish your goal.
• Ease of use – If it’s not easy for your users to post content forget it.
• Speed – Your web sites must be fast for someone to enjoy it.
• SEO – The mother’s milk of web sites.
• Social – Does it play well with Facebook and Twitter.
• Administrative costs – It may be free, but how many server administrators does it take to run it?

It all comes down to the original communications model. Sender -> Message -> Receiver and then all the noise. You want to find the right channel to minimize the noise. At  Christmas the noise is everywhere in all the channels.

Hallways receive my vote for the best part of a conference (especially those with big leather couches). I’ve been to large conferences with 15,000  in swarming masses and to small conferences with only 12 attendees and in both cases (and all in between) I’ve benefitted the most from the conversations in the hallway. Some of those are random conversations that I’ve struck up with the person sitting beside me and others are more strategic accidentally running into a speaker  (after stalking them from the speaker’s lounge).

I think social is digital.  To me social is the core of communicating with technology to build relationships. It’s online. Through a computer. Actually through a smart phone (not mobile because they are more often not mobile). Through analytics, insights.

The most valuable part of being digital is being personal and social builds personal into digital.

When I started put all those together as digital, the numbers behind it all started to matter- analytics. When I looked across the board in communications I saw the numbers outside of the web- TV, print, direct mail.

Now, I see all those things as communicating with technology. Everything falls into communicating with digital. Convergence.

If you’ve been on Facebook the day a change is made you’ve certainly seen it in your news feed.  Today, for example, Facebook changed up the contents of the primary feed, made the photos larger and added a widget to the right sidebar about what your friends are doing. If your friends feed is like mine, then it is full of all manner of whining about how people want facebook to switch back and hints on how to find the old interface. On the otherhand, I like it. It’s an improvement. I think it makes facebook more useful for me while removing steps I took in their old interface to see what I wanted to see.

If you’ve ever redesigned a web site, you’ve heard about how much people hate change. My favorite redesign story about how people hate change was when I worked at The Commercial Appeal a decade ago and we launched their new design in January 2000. The design eliminated frames from a Pagemill design and started to implement CSS– we designed the whole thing in Dreamweaver. It wasn’t a great design, but a huge step forward. Faithful readers of The Commercial Appeal’s web site reacted like we had dug up Elvis and moved him to a hidden grave.

One particular set of emails from a retired lady who had moved to Chattanooga stood out from the rest. The day after the redesign she reamed us for moving things around and messing up her daily return to Memphis via the Internet. Her email was pretty similar to the other 1000 or so emails we received about the redesign. What was unique about this lady from Chattanooga was the 2nd email we received from her two weeks later. She emailed to apologize for her first email and to let us know she actually liked the new design and now everything she wanted was easier to find.

So, the moral of the story is Users Hate Change, but eventually with a good well-tested design, they will come around and use the site.  I promise you all those people swearing at Facebook today will have forgotten about it in a weeks time.

For me, I like change– for better or worse. Innovation and improvement are hard. If you are unwilling to change you’ll never know if that next step is two steps forward or a step backward.

–

Jakob Nielsen has a great related post on how users are resistant to change: Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign

It really surprised me that IE 7 was finalized in November 2006– almost 5 years ago. I was excited when it was released so we could get rid of the dreadful IE 6. W3 Schools show that IE 7 makes up 6 percent of the current browser market share. As more people abandon Windows XP that will decrease quickly, but if you are viewing this in IE 7 I want to encourage you to move your online life to a new platform– upgrade IE or download firefox, safari or chrome.

We’re debuting our online campus at Fellowship Bible Church Sunday morning at 11 a.m. I’ve been working on the launch team on this since around September and will be one of the rotating hosts for the service.

Besides the video stream of the service there is also a chat feature to allow discussion of the message, a place to notes on the screen and the bible passage for the sermon.

If you’re not in church on Sunday mornings at 11 (central), you should stop in, check it out and say hi. I’ll be there.

Curious as to what their site looked like, I checked it out and wow. It was still my site design, 10 years later. I showed one of my colleagues the site and he said it had “stood the test of time” and didn’t look that out of date (for a 10 year old design).  I think this was one of the first sites I wrote a little vbscript and created a database for a school comparison tool. Of course, we started picking it apart… left aligned, tables, too many images, background image, etc.

A good roundup of these criticisms comes from a column from a Knoxville News Sentinel reporter Michael Silence. The prediction is based on two assumptions. First, that everyone is tiring of all the noise generated from social media. Second, that corporations are not seeing any return on social media  and will pull the plug on social media spending.

From reading his column, I don’t think Silence is endorsing these views, but I disagree with both points.

First the noise claims – The idea goes social media creates more noise and shortens attention spans making it harder to be heard. Basically the attention span claim is a typical old media vs. new media argument (or the I hate change argument). It’s been applied to radio, television, music videos, web sites and now text messaging and social media. The argument is correct  that people pay less attention to social media than a newspaper column. The growth of social media creates less of an appetite for long form media, but that doesn’t make social media evil or the effects of it wrong. It’s just different, meaning communication techniques have to evolve to communicate effectively.

Second the return on social media investment -  Many companies jumped on the social media bandwagon to just be in the game and not be left behind and they ended up being left behind because they didn’t look, listen and planned before they acted. They jumped into social media without any knowledge of what it meant to be engaged with their community not mention any  goals, no plans to measure what they did. Companies that have a social media plan, that have engaged their community have seen enormous returns on social media. In fact a lot of companies that went into social media with goals and a plan are now investing more into social media because they have seen a great return on their investment. This is true for companies large and small.

Even though I use Firefox on a daily basis, I always make sure I thoroughly test sites in IE because that’s the browser being used by the majority of our visitors. I normally don’t give our sites as thorough a viewing in Chrome and Safari as I do Firefox and IE and often times I just ignore Opera.

I have to admit that on personal sites I tend to ignore earlier versions of browser (like IE6). Even for a while a ran banner telling IE6 users to upgrade their browser.

For this survey Pew defined online content as  “intangible digital products such as software, articles, and music that need not have a physical form.” Some of my highlights of what we’ve paid for include.

33% of internet users have paid for digital music online

19% have paid for digital games

18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports

16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows

11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it

10% have paid for e-books

7% have paid for podcasts

5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games

5% have paid for “cheats or codes” to help them in video games

Although I am a proponent of all information wants to be free philosophy, I must admit I’ve paid for ebooks, music, apps and even web site access (for my kids, not for me). So what kind of online content have you paid for?

Social Media
Twitter will stagnate and be recognized as a niche product. Twitter’s web traffic has plateued and can’t seem to grow. It’s management will start grasping for straws and reduce access for outside applications to their API. Facebook’s growth will slow, too (it has, too there aren’t that many people with Internet access left).

Apps
The mobile web growth will increase while app growth slows. Companies will realize it is much cheaper to customize their web site designs for mobile devices rather than code 3 or 4 seperate apps.

Online Content
We’ll see more and more niche sites pop-up and make it. The sites will have to be run on a shoe string, but they can survive that way (A few of those may even be paid content that work).

Tablets
Tablets will continue to be huge for online content. Not for their apps, but their easy portability to access the web. iPads will continue to grow, but there will be a surge in cheaper linux based tablets.

It shouldn’t surprise me. I purchase Facebook ads, Google adwords and Yahoo BT banner ads on a regular basis. I know the targeting options and how to maximize clickthroughs to a custom landing page, but I am still surprise by how the ads were useful to me.

It reminds me how my grandmother used to read my hometown newspaper– First she looks through all the sales and any other shopping interests and then she would go back through the stories. She actually found the ads worth reading rather than something that got in the way of the information she was seeking.

It’s amazing how Internet advertising is coming back full circle where the ads are actually useful and make money just like the small-town newspaper. Unfortunately, this fledging form of useful advertising is now under attack with the Commerce Department proposing a new online privacy bill of rights for Internet users and the Federal Trade Commission proposing Do Not Track legislation.

Privacy online and Internet advertising has always been sort of trade off for me. I give up some information about me in return I receive something I want (information, news) from a web site with no direct out of pocket costs. The web site uses that information to target ads to me creating a better web experience and more value for their advertising.

Although I’ve pretty much used digital cameras since then and even pushed for the elimination of darkrooms, it makes me sad to see Kodachrome film processing going away with the New York Times reporting photographers scrambling to have their images developed before the end of the year. With even “a railroad worker who had driven from Arkansas to pick up 1,580 rolls of film that he had just paid $15,798 to develop.”

As I waited in line to early vote yesterday and watched voters punch at the touchscreen, bend over to get a closer look at the screen and raise their hands to require assistance I wondered how much usability testing our electronic voting system in Arkansas has undergone? This is the 2nd time I’ve voted using an electronic ballot so it has at least had some real world testing, but from just casually observing the 10 people voting in front of me in line there were some definite issues.

In general, I didn’t have any problems voting completing my ballot in under five minutes, but a couple of citizens stayed at their voting station the entire 20 minutes I was in the early voting site. In general if the voter was under 45-50, it didn’t seem they had any problems with voting, but voters that looked over 50 had a few issues and then voters over 65 took a considerably longer amount of time to cast a ballot.

Most younger voters are probably more familiar with computers and touchscreens than older voters. Of course back when we voted with pencils most older voters were more familiar with pencils and paper than younger voters.

The election worker who set-up my ballot told me at least three times that he had numerous complaints that the party affiliation line under each candidate was too small and make sure that I read it (of course, he didn’t realize that I just ignore party affiliation when I vote).

From my perspective I thought the ballot was easy to read. It was apparent what race I was voting in, who the candidates for office were and their party affiliation. The touch screen was very responsive to my command. My ballot was four pages long which I felt was a little long, but it really didn’t take to long to fill it out. The only part that slightly confused me was how many times I had to press complete to let the machine know I was done– I think it was three.