This momentum isn’t sustainable. While print magazine subscriptions continue to hold strong, magazine publishers cannot expect a comparable revenue stream from tablet subscriptions.

That’s because magazines’ initial success on the tablet parallels the same circumstances in the early days of the web. 15 years ago, traditional magazine sites were part of the back-bone of web content; the future seemed promising.

But success was short-lived. Over time, new publishers—the Gawkers, Huffington Posts, and Buzzfeeds—provided a far superior web experience by evolving in ways that magazines didn’t. Even now, 9 years after the creation of Gawker, publishers are finally beginning to adopt web-based standards in publishing rather than porting content from their printed magazines.

Lessons from the Web: Evolving Mechanics

There’s one crucial lesson magazine publishers should take from their past experiences on the web.

The way we consume media today is strikingly different from even two years ago. We now spend our “bored at work moments” on Tumblr looking at animated GIFs and beautiful photos. We stopped visiting mass media sites. Twitter is a better functioning homepage for links. In 12 months, over 2% of all web users visit Pinterest.

For magazine publishers, these changes represent new mechanics in the software that powers the web. From the late 90s to today, emerging mechanics sprouted a new breed of digital media companies. For example:

• The mechanics of blogging software dicate that the newest items goes at the top of the page. As a result, we changed how we value news and content. New beats high-quality, in-depth, and reliable content. Audiences are wired to get a rush from novelty.
• The mechanics of Twitter transformed why we share. Media consumption became a form of self expression, and publishers optimizing for a social network’s news feed won.
• The mechanics of Pinterest are transforming our media diet around collecting things. A constant stream of images is more valuable than a million-dollar photoshoot with only a few resulting images.

The lesson of the web wasn’t simply adapt to the Internet, but rather adapt to new mechanics. Throughout the history of the web, mechanics continued to produce new behaviors, and, in-turn, changed what people value about the media that we consume.
Losing with Editorial Quality

Magazines assumed that 
editorial quality, the standard for traditional channels, was the winning value proposition for online channels.

On the web, editorial quality continues to be a difficult point of differentiation. Only a few traditional magazines can compete with remarkable content on the web, like The New Yorker, The Economist, and Monocle. For these reasons, magazines publishers wouldn’t dream of placing their web content behind a paywall. Puzzlingly, the current magazine paywalls on the tablet seem sustainable.

Kottke.org, one of my favorite sites, is produced by one person and surpasses the traffic of many major magazine sites. Grantland.com is on track to eclipse Sportsillustrated.com while only launching six months ago. A small team of writers, or even one individual, can compete on editorial quality in ways that a large magazine portal profitably cannot.

To win on future platforms, including tablets, mobile, and the web, publishers must identify and adapt to new mechanics as they emerge. With the right approach, publishers can pioneer the next evolution of media behavior on the tablet.

Something to think about: while media companies must adapt to changing mechanics, its audience is fixed. How will new mechanics affect the content that each magazine’s audience finds most addicting? How do publishers evolve their content to match its audiences’ changing media habits?

It’s not surprising, especially if you look at the recent YC list: the reigning model for entrepreneurs seems to be (1) make software-based (predominately, web-based) tools and (2) scale it up.

I see few entrepreneurs pursuing hardware startups, and for good reason. Challenging the Samsungs, Apples, and GEs of the world seems onerous without generous capital, long lead times, IP, and research budgets. While I’m bullish on hardware companies like Nest and Jawbone, they face far more challenges than the average software startup (ignoring the daunting competition that both received from incumbents Honeywell and Nike, respectively).

Thankfully, there’s an opportunity for the next ebb and flow of startups to be far more successful in hardware. The next startup bubble, perhaps in 7-10 years, could be a hardware bubble. It’s fueled by the thriving maker movement, a return to making physical stuff by a growing population of hobbyists and engineers.

Today, software is an easier course of action for entrepreneurs. The barriers to entry are low, with frameworks (Rails, Jquery) and services (Heroku, AWS) making it dead simple for anyone to take on the technical burden of building an app. Equipment is easy: a laptop and server. Combine this with the lean startup ideology and a small, young team can build just about anything within a reasonable timeframe. It’s no surprise that Instagram can pull off an amazing app with eight people and an insane tech stack, all impossible five years ago.

What’s interesting is that the same dynamics are beginning to shape hardware too. The forces that made software so alluring to entrepreneurs are finally permeating to hardware: open source platforms, lower capital requirements, and easier development.

Open Source Hardware

While open source software platforms have been commonplace for decades, I’m finally seeing significant progress in hardware. It’s allowing for amateurs to build and manufacture products without significant professional expertise, akin to emergence of web frameworks that democratized web development over the past decade. Recent estimates approximate 350 open source hardware projects, the most significant including Arduino (physical computing platform), Makerbot (3D printing), and Sparkfun (electronics).

Many hardware developers are opening up their designs (e.g., CAD files) and firmware to allow for a sort of remix culture for hardware. We’re not at the point of “APIs” for hardware, but small communities are quickly building amazing open source projects. Wikispeed, an open-source car, and Open-source Ecology, industrial machinery, are great examples of this.

Personal fabrication

Hardware startups can operate on the same principles as lean software startups, quickly iterating and operating with only a few thousands of dollars in capital. Prototyping was always problematic—a one-batch run of a product can be incredibly costly to fabricate, yet it’s a necessity to secure funding. While traditional manufacturing requires labor-intensive tooling and setup, new technologies such as additive manufacturing and CNC tools operate like desktop printers, taking in files and outputting physical objects. Every garage is a potential high tech factory, making it much easier for an entrepreneur to move from hardware idea to finished product.

Makerbot, a $2,000 3D plastic printer, democratizes manufacturing at the consumer level. The company has managed to drop materials costs down to pennies per cubic centimeter, a big difference from the industrial printers running at $300,000 per machine and $100 per cubic centimeter of plastic. Mid-tier priced equipment allows for “Kinko’s of manufacturing.” Techshop, Fablab, and 100K Garages are all examples of small, decentralized manufacturing operations where individuals can fabricate prototypes and end products without approaching traditional factories.

Long Tail Manufacturing

As with software, lower costs and easier manufacturing will allow access to new markets for hardware. We’re predicting a long tail of manufacturing—niche hardware products made possible by low volume fabrication, on-demand manufacturing (and consequently, no inventory), and a shorter learning curve. Economies of scale is no longer an issue.

This is substantiated by the numerous hardware projects on Kickstarter without mass appeal, but sustainable at lower volumes due to greatly reduced costs. The Pebble Watch project on Kickstarter is a great example of this new breed of hardware startups, prototyping and producing a first run with relatively lower capital to a market that wouldn’t be valuable to large manufactures.

Realizing this future and its potential has a lot to do with the maker movement. Education seems to be the biggest hurdle, as technology is finally at a place where cost and capability are not barriers to entry. The Maker Faire, just a few days away on 5/19 in SF, will be a hotbed for discussion on how to raise awareness for new technologies and educate the next wave of entrepreneurs on opportunities in hardware.

Here’s why.

Brands are getting better at making content.

A few years ago, a lot of brand-created content sucked because it was outsourced to agencies (who are shitty content creators to begin with). While agencies were pretty good at creating commercials and print ads, the transition to making quality web content isn’t something that agencies have in their DNA.

So brands have realized that they don’t have to overpay for poor content and are doing it on their own. I’ve noticed that the best brands have dedicated content creators in-house, including writers, photographers, video editors, etc. Familiar with OK Trends? That’s one dude (maybe more now), who’s only job is to mine data and make fancy charts for OK Cupid. An agency doing the same thing would be morbidly expensive compared to the salary of one passionate employee.

The brand means something.

A couple weeks ago, I saw this exchange among James Gross, Thierry Blancpain, and Noah Brier, quickly bookmarking it for blogging (bolding is mine):

@James_Gross: Instapaper is an app that strips the ads out of a creators work. With that in mind, interesting perspective on curation…
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@blancpain: That’s a fallacy. In 99% of all cases you’ve loaded the article’s page once before sending it to Instapaper.
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@heyitsnoah: sure, and then the creator is completely lost. Was just hearing this complaint from a longform journalist yesterday.
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@blancpain: Why should he be lost? I visited his page and he got his ad hits. I wouldn’t have clicked any of them either way.
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@heyitsnoah: not the ads, the actual recognition for the journalist/publication. You remember the story, but not the creator
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@blancpain: Instapaper versions contain author and publication in all articles that I checked. More prominent than on websites…
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@heyitsnoah: more prominent than the giant masthead? Do you remember where the last 5 stories you read on instapaper came from? I don’t.

James, Thierry, and Noah are getting at the subordination of brand relative to content. The outcome is, as Noah tweets, “you remember the story, but not the creator.” While I think this is a problem for any feed, aggregator, stream, the same can be said about much of today’s media content. As more content is discovered via sharing rather than browsing a site’s homepage, I’m caring less whether I read that benign “top 10 list” or Apple announcement on AllthingsD, Mashable, Techcrunch, or the Verge. It’s all blending together as general tech media. There’s still great content with interesting perspective, but I don’t notice/care about the publisher, even though I’m retweeting and linking to the article. Looking back at my tweets over the past few months, I’ve noticed that I’ve linked to Forbes 15 times–I had no idea Forbes even published good content outside of their magazine.

Some publishers’ brands are the things that you remember when consuming content. I think of GOOD and Vice as great examples of these cases, where the content is significant because it’s under the brand’s masthead. Both of these publishing brands have extremely strong POVs on the world, rarely rewriting content for the sake of page views.

Similarly, brand-created content (yes–I’m sure that my terms might start to be confusing) has a POV. When I’m browsing Art of the Trench, the content matters because it’s from Burberry. In rare cases is the brand ever subordinated –it’s typically related to the content that I’m consuming since that’s the source of ROI. It’s this relationship to the content creator, that is, remembering from where the story that you read came, that publishers/brands/individuals justify investments into quality content. Which is a good segway into…

Quality comes easier.

Brand-created content has insane editorial standards. I remember my days at AmEx where I couldn’t write a sentence of banner copy without three rounds of review with the legal and brand team.

When I think of brand-created content, the tone is closer to Fred Wilson than Gawker. There’s still a desire to “go viral,” but it’s subordinated to building a perspective, one that has readers clicking-through to the product for sale or subscribing to future content.

Since content is published less frequently, brands can devote resources to making something amazing. It has more purpose–there’s no need to create 10 articles per day to meet advertisers’ page view needs.

So by quality, I really mean stock content. I’ve talked a lot about Robin Sloan notion of “stock” in the past, but here’s a quick review:

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

An example: Dollar Shave Club’s video. Now bear with me; yes–I understand that this is not “content,” at least in the traditional sense. But it represents a dedication to creating a piece of stock that’s surely to sick around the Internet, long after Dollar Shave Club dies. Quality stands out–this video returns way more for the startup than 6 months of 3 posts/week blogging about male grooming. And for a typical media brand trying to monetize content, it’s rare to get resources to make something like that.

Lastly, the big brands (GE, Ford, AmEx, etc.) have enormous budgets and an appetite for survivable risk. GE’s video of a drone helicopter filming a fly-through of a factory might not have been the most successful (in terms of production costs), but they were willing to take a chance that it would work. Again, I don’t see most media companies sinking resources into similar stock ideas.

Form is open.

Brands can choose any form of content: articles, photo blogs, Tumblr, video, games, contents, etc., allowing brands to be experimental with content. And within each form, brands can create original content or go for something more shallow, aggregating, sharing, curating, and re-writing content as they desire. There’s no journalistic standards that one approach is better than another, creating a lot of flexibility to free up resources for big projects. Contrast this with media publishers, where extensions into new forms is a pretty big departure in style.

They’re sneakily monetizing content.

“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” – Metafilter.

Since few sites manage to sell content, most publishers monetize readers. I believe that this drive for ad sales, and ultimately page views, distorts publishers’ ability to deliver content that people actually want to read. A more compelling business model, it seems, is to just sell something else.

This is the case with Red Bull, a manufacturer of energy drinks, as one of the largest and strongest publishers. Building an audience with compelling media is a hell of a lot easier than buying TV ads. Same with startups, all executing the classic Joel Spolksy blogging model of “make your customers awesome” to acquire customers. 37Signals’ blog, Signal vs. Noise, is easily one of the most popular sources of design content, monetized via raised awareness and conversion to its SaaS products.

In some cases, content and product have kinda merged into a weird hybrid. Fab.com describes itself as a content company. Just like a magazine, the products that they promote represent an aesthetic perspective, a lot like Pinterest/Svpply. And unlike media publishers, companies like Net-a-porter, Fab.com, and Gilt offer instant gratification via e-commerce integration with their content. It’s no surprise that Gilt is planning on publishing a magazine later this year.

One thing that I’ve noticed is how much self-directed criticism is aimed at the industry. People, it seems, are aware of how shitty everything is, but there’s a general apathy to improve it.

Here’s what I mean:

This is a screenshot from Techmeme, an aggregator of Tech news.

See all of those links to other sources for the OMGPOP deal? Every article is basically the same writing, same length, and same quotes. Marco Arment sums it up well:

“There’s a continuum between 100% original reporting and zero value being added to the source content, but I don’t think I’m being unnecessarily inflammatory by labeling the posts on the far end of the continuum as rewriting.”

I could click any of these sources and get an identical experience, a web of rewriting, paraphrasing, and regurgitation of stock copy. Recently, MG Siegler left Techcrunch and had a chance to reflect on it all in this awesome rant:

Most are stories written with little or no research done. They’re written as quickly as possible. The faster the better. Most are just rehashing information that spread by some other means. But that’s great, it means stories can be written without any burden beyond the writer having to read a little bit and type words fast. Many are written without the writer even having to think.

There will be 25 stories about Google TV or something else tomorrow which will all say basically the same thing. Maybe one or two of those stories will have actual insight or information. Maybe none will. If any do, it’s the exception, not the rule.

This seems to validate everyone’s worst fears–a commoditization of content. For traditional publishers hoping to avoid the “quality doesn’t matter” debate, the new media companies have decided to screw any notion of quality. What’s shocking, to me, is the deprecation of brand. Old-world companies would stand by each article as the voice of the brand. Today, every tech site just seems to blend together, with few differences among AllthingsD, Mashable, Gizmodo, etc. in editorial quality. Success, it seems, is their ability to be more link-baity than one another–to be THE article to which people link on whatever mundane topic. AllthingsD doesn’t have an “audience” in the traditional sense. They don’t have “readers.” They have people who happen to click AllthingsD links. Case in point: the meteoric rise of the Verge. In a world where tech news had strong editorial, I couldn’t imagine a site launched 5 months ago reaching 300K uniques.

While quality isn’t anything to be proud of, Arianna Huffington had a recent rant about how story topics are decided.

“Going viral has gone viral. Social media have become the obsession of the media. It’s all about social now: What are the latest social tools? How can a company increase its social reach? Are reporters devoting enough time to social? Less discussed — or not at all — is the value of the thing going viral. Doesn’t matter — as long as it’s social.”

The rest of the post discusses how Huffpo and its counterparts have become obsessed with writing about NOW, chasing the latest “story.” For Arianna, the problem is that too much content is planned around what’s trending or will trend. What’s missing from her rant is the reason: page views. If you’re in the business of maximizing page views, there’s a simple recipe: talk about what’s talked about or try to be talked about.

Finally, there’s the criticism toward quantity. The top-of-the-page post on Techcrunch right now is “Apple stock up 50% this year,” posted a mere 21 minutes ago at a length of 320 words. Long ago I unsubscribed from a Techcrunch RSS feed, since 99% percent of the 100+ articles they published daily were complete trash. MG Siegler breaks it down:

“Because the emphasis is on speed, even if a writer does know a lot about a company/topic, that takes a backseat. Writing a bland story with a few facts in 5 minutes is valued much higher than writing a good story in an hour. And that’s valued much higher than writing a great story over the period of a few days or god-forbid, weeks.”

Again, quantity makes a lot of sense if you’re chasing page views. Author-time and page views are certainly not correlated, with the highest quality articles just as likely to perform poorly as a benign update on some Apple news.

So what does this formula look like when applied to a traditional publisher?

Go check out observer.com. Does it remind you of the old newspaper? Does it matter? That’s right, you were distracted by that listicle about the top 25 startups in NYC on Betabeat, the “low-down on high-tech” (I thought that was Silicon Valley Insider?).

What’s crazy to me is that this formula is successful. In a world where traditional publishers can barely scrape by, feeding a page view business model means catering to the lowest common denominator of editorial and publishing toddler-level content.

Counter-argument: who cares?! While Felix hates what the Observer has changed into, he admits that any loss of integrity has little value:

“And so, in the proud tradition of good blogs everywhere, readers are left with a highly variable product. The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the more opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.”

I really wanted to bold this entire paragraph since it epitomizes the supposed “future” of monetized media.

It’s shockingly depressing. People want junk food, regardless of how bad it is for them. Newspapers bundled everything together, so it wasn’t exactly clear that only 2% of readers cared about the stuff containing any notion of journalistic integrity. The other 98% were just reading the sex-columns and human-interest stories. Now that everything is unbundled, we’ve learned what we already know, that people gravitate toward the sensational.

Evan Williams, in a recent interview on News.me, talks about what’s wrong with this:

“The web is completely oriented around new-thing-on-top. Our brains are also wired to get a rush from novelty. But most “news” we read really doesn’t matter.”

Right. Everyone reads TMZ and feels bad about it afterward. But here’s the next sentence from Evan:

“…a much smaller percentage of the information I actually care about or would find useful was produced in the last few hours than my reading patterns reflect.”

Hypothesis: this has a lot to with how our web consumption patterns have evolved over the past few years. The distant past of spending a few hours catching up on the news are long gone. When’s the last time you visited a media site’s homepage and browsed the category (gasp!) sections? What was once the dominate media consumption behavior has fragmented into discovery from endless channels, a mix of sharing, algorithms (Google News, Techmeme, Buzzfeed), aggregators, and endless apps trying to feed content in clever ways (I can’t even begin to rationalize the impact of Tumblr, a weird mix of sharing, aggregation, and feeds).

More on that later.

“The puzzle is why firms pay huge sums to big name consulting firms, when their advice comes from kids fresh out of college, who spend only a few months studying an industry they previous knew nothing about. How could such quick-made advice from ignorant recent grads be worth millions? Why don’t firms just ask their own internal recent college grads?”

This is something with which I’ve struggled in consulting, first in branding and now in digital. 

Hanson has a pretty good theory:

The CEO often understands what needs to be done, but does not have the resources to fight this blocking coalition. But if a prestigious outside consulting firm weighs in, that can turn the status tide. Coalitions can often successfully block a CEO initiative, and yet not resist the further support of a prestigious outside consultant.

To serve this function, management consulting firms need to have the strongest prestige money can buy. They also need to be able to quickly walk around a firm, hear the different arguments, and judge where the weight of reason lies. And they need to be relatively immune to accusations of bias – that their advice follows from interests, affiliations, or commitments.

All three of these functions seem to be achieved at a low cost by hiring good-looking kids from our most prestigious schools. These are the cheapest folks you can buy with our most prestigious affiliations, they are smart enough to judge where reason lies, and they have few prior affiliations to taint them with bias. They can not only “borrow your watch to tell you the time,” but can also cow you into submission in accepting that time.

I buy it for traditional management consulting. But does this theory hold for digital strategy as well?

Quite a few of my projects fall into the CEO-validation bucket. In these cases, Hanson is right: a consulting firm can catalyze change in ways that a small digital marketing team cannot. Any firm with a solid brand name (and an increasingly young team) will do, since the client doesn’t expect to be blown away.

But in most cases, no one knows what to do. There’s a ton of complexity with an unknown problem. Frankly, there’s a lot of making-it-up-as-you-go.

Digital strategy in an agency/consulting context is often staffed with the “good looking, smart-sounding young people” that Hanson references. Assuming they’re digitally savvy, the obvious answer requires just a hint of due diligence. Unfortunately, the obvious answer also seems foreign to anyone outside of the Internet-Twitter-Pinterest-complex in which too many young digital strategists live.

This superficial recommendation bothers me. After getting praised over and over for a brilliant idea involving [insert latest social network] to [group of people who don't know what you're talking about], it’s not hard to think that you’re a genius, accompanied by an inflated ego with the belief that you can solve a business problem better than a CEO with 40 years of experience.

This lack of discipline and rigor is independent of youth, visible from the 22-year-old-staffed-agencies and the 40-year-old-Deloitte’s-with-no-cultural-experience as they peddle digital strategy wares. Making smart things (and decisions) on the Internet requires a different set of skills.

That said, the CEO is tackling a problem that’s a couple layers down from quantum physics complex. The self-anointed-digital-strategy-expert won’t hit the right answer after a couple of brainstorm sessions after reflecting on the latest Facebook app or shiny startup.

Something to think about: is industry/business experience critical for digital strategy? And if it is, why are most firms staffed by young people and no ex-McKinsey/ex-client-side veterans?

Bonus Q: If I wanted to hire the best digital strategist the US, what would he or she look like? 

The idea is that these “strategies” from nature could solve human challenges in the real-world. Check it:

“Imagine nature’s most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter “filter salt from water” and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels.”

For the challenge “Protect itself from animals that want to eat it,” AskNature has 130 strategies from organisms described in excruciating detail. “Anti-reflective lens” is one such strategy, used by the Hawk-eye Moth as the “inspiring organism.”

AskNature is an inspiration database for common problems in science. Instead of trying to re-invent new processes, consider a solar-panel based on a leaf’s photosynthesis or build a community modeled after honeybees.

For an engineer, AskNature seems like an awesome resource–hundreds of solutions that are proven to succeed. While I imagine that scientists frequently look to nature for inspiration, the Biomimicry Institute has taken it one extra step by codifying the knowledge.

What’s intriguing is that startups, digital strategists–really anyone is business, do this all the time.

How often have you heard, ”what if we did something like Pandora?” in a brainstorm. Pandora is AskNature’s version of an “inspiring organism” for the strategy “recommendation engine.”

“What if we did something like Mint?” Mint is a placeholder for the strategy “visualization” and “aggregation.”

Digital Mimicry

“What if we did something like x” is essentially the same mechanism from AskNature. We’re asking “what online organisms could we mimic?”

“Startup x” for “verticle y” is essentially a cliche in the startup world. Airbnb is Craigslist for hotels. And Getaround is Airbnb for cars.

These analogs are helpful; we don’t have a term for what Craigslist or Airbnb does in terms of strartegy or function. Going back to biomimicry/AskNature example, “anti-reflective lens” is the strategy employed by the hawk-eye moth to avoid predators. But unless we have the term “anti-reflective lens,” phrasing it as “do something like the hawk-eye moth” is a damn good substitute.

“What if we did startup x for client y” is a simple way to do a bit of biomimicry on successful online organisms. It reminds me of Steven Johnson’s philosophy on where ideas come from. New ideas are commonly just tweaks on an old idea, but molded into a new context. Without going too deeply on his philosophy, we look to existing startups and websites for inspiration. Just like the coffee houses in the age of enlightenment, a broader exposure to successful startups and websites makes the exercise much easier.

Lateral Inspiration

The weird thing is that the most successful online properties and startups aren’t necessarily good analogs for inspiration. I don’t reference Google, Facebook, ESPN, and Yahoo News to generate ideas. But I do look to smaller companies like Uber, Pinterest, Kickstarter, or Turntable for inspiration. That is, “what if we did a Pinterest for client x?” is far more effective than “what if we did ESPN for client x?”

The difference is that the smaller startups are more interesting in terms of digital mimicry. They are on the edge of innovation, and when I use them as an analog for idea generation, it’s far more compelling than the obvious examples. And when a new digital property sprouts up, like Percolate, there’s a new to-be-named strategy (perhaps “content idea filtering?”) to add to my library of inspiration. The entrepreneur/strategist looking for compelling ideas has an advantage if he or she is constantly searching for interesting sites/startups to mimic, combine, and tweak for a new industry/client.

To summarize:

Things we care about: strategies from the edge of innovation on the Internet. If the Internet was nature, I care about newly evolved organisms that have adopted interesting/unique strategies to conquer common challenges for survival. That is, referencing a newly discovered microbe that can survive in radioactive waste dumps are far more interesting than inspiration from humans, one of the most carefully studied organisms in history. Note that intuitive strategies such as “walking” and “intelligence” are not entries in the Biomimcry Institute’s database.

Things we don’t care about: feature sets. Referencing ESPN’s content or Yahoo’s brand isn’t helpful for idea generation. It needs to be a functional thing, logically fitting into the cliche phrase “it’s this for that.”

The big question: what does an AskNature database look like for the Internet, a sort of library of digital mimicry knowledge?

Suppose I have a challenge for my users, like “learn new things.” What functional strategies does Khan Academy use? And once those strategies are named, we can stop saying, “what if we did a Khan Academy for client X” and start saying “what if we did to-be-named strategy,” inspired by Khan Academy?

In short, I’m talking about real-time anthropology/evolutionary biology of the Internet, tagging organisms with their strategies to same detail and breadth of AskNature. Back to Steven Johnson’s point: it would be awesome to codify it in one place, especially for the folks who can’t stay current with the edge cases of digital innovation.

How hard could it be? Observe how digital organisms are evolving. Tag each organism with a respective strategy. Visualize the data for interesting trends.

The first plan I had was to crowdsource the “it’s this for that” relationships for startups. I assumed that it was pretty hard to examine and track digital organisms, so having a big database of connections would make it a hell of a lot easier.

Example: there hundreds of startups that are essentially “Craigslist for industry x”:

(via Andrew Parker)

The startups in the above image are all just simple “it’s this for that.” Etsy is Craiglist for arts and crafts. Obviously, Etsy has evolved quite a bit since it started, but I’m sure that at its inception, people compared the site to Craigslist in terms of functionality.

Making a Digital Mimicry Database

I created a little site to try to codify these relationships called StartupDNA.

When you visit the site, you’re asked to fill-in an “it’s like x for y” statement for a startup. An example: “Think of a site that’s kinda like Kickstarter. Then fill-in the statement: ____ is kinda like Kickstarter for ____.”

I thought that this would be a clever way to build an evolutionary tree for startups, essentially what the Craigslist diagram above does. Once I had the relationships among startups, I could then begin codifying the functionality that was mimicked. Sadly, it’s really hard to complete “it’s like x for y” statements. It’s not fun unless one has an insane knowledge of startups. The whole mechanic was flawed.

So I dropped the project in favor of a new iteration: WebRecipes.

For several startups, I’ve replicated the work of the Biomimicry Institute, examining online organisms and attempting to codify strategies that they employ. Pandora, for example, has strategies “music recommendation algorithm” and “streaming music” as a solution to the challenge “discover music,” “learn your music preferences,” and “personalized radio.” To make it generic enough for lateral inspiration, I took it one level higher to “recommendation” and “streaming” as a solution to “discovery” and “personalization.” These words became tags. Click on “recommendation” and you can see other startups that employ this same strategy.

The problem with WebRecipes is that it took a shit-load of work. Examining each startup required a good 30 minutes (as it should). Plus, I was really only codifying the startups with which I was already familiar. I wasn’t really getting anything out of the database that I didn’t already know. I abandoned WebRecipes after adding 30 companies to the database.

So after all that work (and coding), I still have the same vision: just like AskNature, I want a database of digital mimicry, a portfolio of interesting sites that make brainstorming new ideas a hell of a lot easier for clients/startups.

Something to think about: is this doable? What direction haven’t I thought of? Is there any value out of a digital mimicry database?

I’m stoked to make something, but I’m not sure if the vision could match reality.

Update: a reader has pointed out the irony of my recommendation; essentially a “it’s this for that:” an “AskNature” for the “Internet.”

There’s been so much talk about brands (and agencies) to behave more like startups. Part of this means making more tools–things that serve as a platform. Things that people sign-up for. Things that people will pay for. Things that scale and aren’t fleeting. Things that enhance your existing products (e.g., Nike+).

Behave like the YC list.

Few brands (and agencies) pull off such an ideology. Making tools is difficult, and it’s certainly not in the DNA of most organizations whose business isn’t already based around programmers.

The alternative to tools is content, also extremely difficult to do well. But at least it’s already in the corporate DNA, specifically a brand’s agency’s DNA.

This cross-roads, tools vs. content, has me thinking a lot about how to use marketing dollars. Make an awesome thing for the Internet? Or stick with the tried and true infographic, video, or blog post?

Robin Sloan, in an article about startups and tools, made an awesome point about this divide:

The reigning model for startups: make a tool and scale it up. The tool’s potential users can be rich (e.g. Salesforce) or they can be numerous (e.g. YouTube) or they can be rich and numerous (e.g. the iPhone) but any way you go, you are always a step removed from the object of attention. You are not the deal, you are not the Lil’ Wayne video, you are not the flirty text message. You are the facilitator, you are the mediator, you are the vessel.

Robin blew my mind with this point about tools: regardless of how awesome your tools are, content is always the top of the long-tail. Robin goes into a few historical points: we revere Photoshop, not Thomas Knoll. Or a Macbook, not Steve Jobs. Content is different; in music, video, and literature, the maker is tied intimately to the audience.

This is exactly how I feel about the awesomely done Nike Basketball videos. Ignoring the fact that they sometimes give me chills, I’ve got a greater connection to the brand than, say, Footlocker’s tool, Sneakerpedia (and yes, I had to research the brand behind Sneakerpedia).

Sneakerpedia will die. Or be recreated over several iterations–perhaps even undergoing the notorious pivot. Nike’s commercials (especially this one) define culture. Tim Carmody sums it up well in a comment on Robin’s article:

Art, on the other hand, doesn’t go away. Well, actually, the vast majority of it goes away almost immediately. But great, memorable art almost never goes away, even as technology and history and society move on, while great, memorable technology almost always does.

So where does this leave the tool vs. content debate?

What if brands made tools for content? Again, Robin threw down a sweet idea:

Think of Pixar, the Great Toolmaker’s side project. They sell movies, not tools, but the movies wouldn’t be possible without the tools that Pixar and Pixar alone possesses. Pixar is a place where brilliant toolmakers work for a tiny user-base: the artists across the hall. That partnership, and the feedback loop between tool and user that it permits, produces jaw-dropping results.

This is such a new idea, so it’s especially exciting to me: make internal tools to create amazing things. Instead of trying to build a massively-scalable tool for a brand’s millions of customers, build tools for a creative purpose (or maybe even better products!), whose users are a small group of 10 employees. The output could be a hell of a lot closer to Tim Carmody’s notion of “art” than the pitiful content coming out of mediocre agencies.

It reminds me of OK Cupid building the internal tools (i.e., databases and regression tools) to create OK Trends. Or AmEx using Percolate (sure, it’s a licensed app) to blog on Open Forum.

Could a few well done internal tools make big companies, like GE or P&G, Lil Wayne’s or Pixars of content?

Tool-based content could be the bridge between bad content (because it’s so easy to make) and great tools (because getting users is so hard to do). Perhaps it’s an opportunity for big brands to stop sucking on the Internet.

As I’ve witnessed the title grow in popularity (now including my own title), there’s no agreement on what a strategist does. For reference, Jinal Shah had an awesome post on the digital strategist role from an agency perspective:

“My title confounds me. It didn’t until I began to view it in the context of working in a global communications and marketing agency. I think now I have a more objective view of both the strengths and the weaknesses of this role. Some of this will be very common-sensical to you and I think it is, but I felt the need to articulate it so I can understand it better.”

Unintentionally, Jinal makes a great point: even if you’re hired as a strategist, the responsibilities don’t become clear until you’re well into the job. Yes, two parties hiring for a strategist and claiming to be a strategist can be stark disagreement.

While Jinal continues on with some really interesting requirements, my personal flavor of strategist has begun to take shape. As a strategist in a consultant-setting, I wish that there was a more specific title for what I do (e.g., digital experience designers?). But it’s the best we’ve got. It’s a necessary evil that we swim in ambiguity every time some asks us what we do. And it’s unlikely that folks who work in strategy ever realize the title clarity found with UX-designers, architects, or physicians.

But this isn’t a tirade on nomenclature, but on personal development. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d want out of myself as a digital strategist. For a young strategist-to-be, what wisdom would I pass down that will separate him from the assholes liberally adopting the title? Or put into a thought experiment: suppose you’re about to start a new digital consulting company of 10 strategists. Which skills help you identify the most bad-ass strategists (besides industry expertise)?

Here’s how I’ve set the bar for myself: four crack commandments for the strategist path.

1. Idea Development

In a weird twist of irony, idea development is the most important skill for me to grow as a strategist. I rarely see it discussed as a competency, an odd reality, since nearly every good or bad engagement ends with successful ideas. Great idea development starts with discipline. Great strategists can ignore the content hose for 48 hours, reflect on what they know, and create something meaningful on the Internet (i.e., Robin Sloan’s famous stock vs. flow). They have their own process for creating ideas, familiar with all the basic tools to do it (e.g., research, brainstorms, innovation sessions). And their ideas not just boring tactics, but function like startups (As I’ve mentioned before). They can create an amazing experience that could subsist on its own, strong enough that customers would pay for it. Awesome companies incubating these skills are firms like What If, Adaptive Path, and IDEO.

2. Product Vision

Part of this focus on startup-like ideas is vision. Using Nike+ as an example, I’d hope that its creator had the product-focused mindset to anticipate the many years, versions, and iterations that would go into the idea. Rockstar strategists have experience with long-term dedication to the development of an idea. They’ve at one point had a Steve Jobs-style obsession that required OCD fanaticism over details during development. They understand the underlying mechanics that drive their idea, like database-driven websites or simple javascript. I look to any product manager at a large company, founder of a startup, or kick-ass developer (i.e., someone at Pivotal Labs) for this training.

3. Execution

Warren Buffet once said that consulting (and banking) were the two industries to never enter post-graduation. Why consulting? Life-long consultants would spend all of their time recommending ideas and never learning if they were good. It’s an absence of feedback-loops. When a final deliverable has only a few recommendations, I can’t think of a better experience that would ensure success. The best strategists have been through countless cycles of idea develop and execution, learning from their mistakes and taking it to the next client.

4. Internet Culture

There’s a reason why I’d expect a group of 25 year-olds to come up with a better digital idea than a group of middle-America CEOs. When it comes to idea development, the most creative folks can effortlessly steal from the best of the Internet. I want to call it industry knowledge, but it’s not. There’s a difference between those who spent their high school days on message boards and someone who plays catch-up by reading Techcrunch. It’s cultural knowledge. It’s your ability to look at a client problem and steal mechanics from Internet heavyweights like DeviantArt or emerging startups like Kickstarter. You see the underlying force that make things on the Internet flourish and apply them to a client problem. To use Nike+ as an example again, I can imagine that the inventors reflecting on emerging ideas like collective behavior, data visualization, and quantified self to craft the experience. Without this tacit knowledge, digital novices cannot wrap their head an idea around until they see it brought to life.

Problem: this is an insanely difficult for a full-time entrepreneur, not to mention a digital strategist.

It’s the daunting task of going from client brief to a vision in a few weeks. Entrepreneurs at least have the luxury of an infinite window of time.  This is, by far, one of the most challenging parts of the job.

I’ve been thinking about how to improve this process. For an 8-week engagement, what’s the best way to go from statement of work to clients fawning over an amazing idea?

For this type of structured idea creation, I’ve found a few great sources for inspiration.

Many companies specialize in ideas, like innovation firms What If? or IDEO. Both are pretty public about their approaches (e.g., IDEO’s nightline segment), typically beginning with ethnographic research and followed by extensive idea generation. There’s a lot of talk about failing fast–a concept borrowed in the lean startup ideology.

Then I stumbled upon a different consulting firm. I have huge bro-crush on Adaptive Path, a UX firm with a sweet approach to idea creation and definition.

Alexa Andrzejewski’s slides on a “UX-driven Startup” have a few processes to steal. Her section on “coming up with a vision” echos much of what we hear in startup circles.

Alexa’s got a ton of great content from a project with Smart.fm. Here she describes,

“We brainstormed ways to fill in the blanks: ‘For people who… the new smart.fm is… It’s different because…’ Ideas that emerged included “Smart.fm is like a pickup basketball game—it’s easy to jump right in and participate.”

Dopeness.

Another great concept is called metaphor brainstorming (described in more detail here).

“We chose random metaphors and deconstructed their characteristics: Games like Marbles and POGs are about ‘keeping what you win’ and have ‘discrete, tangible, hand-held parts.’ We clustered metaphors with similar characteristics together, then used these characteristics to inspire design ideas.”

I’ve taken this idea further in the context of digital. Using the line, “what if we created a Pandora for [client]?”  It’s a lot easier to laterally think about concepts like recommendation engines or personalization.

Finally, I’m a huge proponent of customer development as the most important requirement before idea development. That is, “getting out of the building” and defining customer needs. Only then do we know that the idea will have some use for the client’s customers and not an irrelevant marketing campaign that no one cares about.

The exciting ones, where I think, “YES, do shit like that!” are inspired by a small class of startups, niche websites, communities, and dark corners of the Internet. Rarely do I find corporate marketing as interesting or worth referencing.

An idea inspired by Mint vs. a Burger King campaign has a lot to do with purpose. In the former, the idea is the business. It’s so good that it makes money. In the latter, it just needs to lure visitors in the same way Costco serves samples.

It’s why case studies are now Tumblr and Foursquare rather than Crispin + Porter. It’s why Ed Cotton points out that marketers are in awe of startups like Airbnb. “The makers” as he calls them, with the “perseverance and humility” that a team of corporate digital marketers can’t even attempt to grasp.

I.

Gareth Kay’s proverbial “ideas that do” begins to explain the dichotomy, that we should not be communicating products but make products that communicate.

Made by Many has some great thinking about how to create ideas that are more like startup products and less like marketing campaigns. It’s nearly word-for-word out of the lean startup playbook, borrowing many of the methodologies and transplanting them to client work.

Part of this is a big change in research philosophy. Instead of using “10% of our customers use mobile apps,” insights shift to questions like, “would you use this thing that we’ve create for you?”

I can only imagine internet-based clients having the capacity to support this vision for ideas, that we’ll fund something not to sell more widgets but to build a better widget. It also takes a leap of faith by the client that better product experiences will have a higher ROI than a snappy marketing idea.

II.

Getting back to the DNA of my favorite ideas, the other commonality is, as succinctly summarized by Paul Graham, “make things people want.” It’s a subtle, but significant change in perspective. The litmus test is not, “is this idea cool” or “would I play with it/send to a friend,” but “How would you feel if you could no longer use [idea]?” If 40% respond “very disappointed,” it’s a winner.

New ideas aren’t just gravy but the actual potatoes. They solve a real customer problem.

III.

“People don’t want things, but experiences.”

I can’t attribute this quote, but it’s ingrained into my mind. The user experience should always be the focus. Build a kick-ass experience and your users will forgive the other stuff (e.g., a clunky aesthetic).

In short, people don’t want a better banana, but a better banana experience. It’s the reason why almost every Internet business can (and should) be called a service experience.

IV.

The problem is that there are so few instances of companies fulfilling on this grand vision for experience-based ideas. A couple include Nike+ and Fiat Eco-drive, both darlings of this philosophy.

What’s common for both of these ideas is that they could pass the startup litmus test. While I loved Old Spice guy, I can’t imagine 40% of Old Spice customers (or prospects) lamenting his disappearance from history.

And what companies would have an appetite to pass this test? There’s a reason why Nike+ appears in every deck declaring an end to bad marketing ideas. Nothing has trumped it in the last three years.

It’s really easy to execute a marketing idea. All you need is money. And it’s so short-term that there’s no time to test and iterate. Building an experience that rivals startups (as Nike+ has arguably done) and solves customer problems is fucking hard. Made by Many’s attempt to use lean startup tactics with clients is way more work than just following a typical waterfall approach.

It gets back to my earlier point of marketers in awe of startups like Airbnb. While it’s fun to think about their teamwork and creativity, their story also includes a ton of failing and uncertainty. I can’t imagine recommending an idea that begins with, “right now it sucks and we expect it to fail, but eventually it will get better.”