Greg Verdino

First we'll land on the moon. Then we'll buy blouses.

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

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

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

What do you think 2049 holds in store?

via Get Elastic.

Bits, bytes, posterous, punk

A recent post by Steve Rubel inspired me to dust off my "lightly used" (a euphemism for "never used") Posterous account and launch a new blog-like-object called Verdino Bytes.  With an easy-to-use bookmarklet for clipping content straight from the web and an even-easier-to-use post via email function, Posterous is ideal for creating and sharing content that falls somewhere between my fully formed blog posts and my malformed tweets.

It's a perfect tool for capturing and sharing everything from cool photos, interesting videos, random thoughts, stray ideas and crap I find all around the interwebz.  And with my regular blog output dialed down while I peck my way through the manuscript for my book, it's a simple low-impact way to pump out web content (ahem, make that micro-content) without giving my McGraw-Hill editor reason to believe I've taken her money and run.

The blog you're reading now is and will remain my primary online hub, but if you're looking for more regular updates over the next few months -- and are OK with the eclectic nature of what I'm posting over there -- you may want to subscribe to Verdino Bytes.  For the most part, there will be no duplication between what I post here and what I post there so it's more great Verdino for the same low price (e.g., free unless you're reading this on your Kindle, you big nerd.)

Even if Verdino Bytes doesn't seem like your cup of tea, you still might dig this video I posted there tonight.  Produced by an Australian reputation management firm (meaning a reputation management firm based in AU, not a firm dedicated to managing Australian reputations), it draws parallels between the punk rock movement in the 1970s and the social media revolution going on right now.  Good stuff.

[Feed and email readers click to the blog to watch the video.]

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

If Twitter were a state, it would be Arkansas

No offense to Arkansas.

I've only been there once, for just one day, so I could be way off base here.  But bear with me for a few moments. 

I was traveling with Jaffe and we flew into a quirky, sleepy, little airport early in the morning.  As we hit the road by car, headed to our meeting, Arkansas seemed to comprise little more than open fields dotted with a handful of cows hanging around doing a whole lot of nothing, and the occasional seemingly-deserted house. Now, anyone with even a passing knowledge of business and geography knows that Arkansas is also home to at least one vibrant and vital hub of activity, a place that is chock-a-block with conversation and commerce, a place that is a can't-survive-without destination for thousands of business people and millions upon millions of consumers. But neither hustle nor bustle were among my first impressions of the state.

Jaffe and I spent most of the day sitting in a coffee shop, waiting for something to happen.  When our meeting finally happened, it was a bit of a let-down, fraught with mixed messages and crossed signals, and then aircraft technical issues grounded us in Arkansas overnight. 

On the flipside, Jaffe did manage to convert a stranger into a fan, or more precisely a follower who hung around with us both at the airport and later that evening in the hotel bar, where rather than engage in any kind of meaningful conversation we half-watched American Idol while blurting out a real-time stream of running commentary.

In one random moment of surprise and delight (and social media serendipity), we bumped into blogger, Twitteratum and IBMer Doug Meacham, who just so happened to be in the same place at the same time.  It was a nice few moments of interaction with a social media friend that I only rarely see in person.

If you happen to live in Arkansas, you might protest that -- on the basis of a one day visit -- I've gotten it all wrong.  I missed the point, have no idea what I'm talking about, and that only a true resident can know the state the way the state was meant to be known.  You'd probably be right but it doesn't change the fact that my experience of Arkansas was my experience of Arkansas.

Back in New York when anyone asked, "So what was Arkansas like?" I might recount a rendition of the story above.  Or I might just say something like, "Well, are you on Twitter yet?  It was kinda like that."

For new or infrequent readers who don't know that my tongue is generally planted at least somewhat firmly in-cheek, I should also point out that the mockingbird is Arkansas's state bird.  Which, by way of the clunkiest segue possible, brings me from the great state of Arkansas to the great state of the Twittersphere...

Today, HubSpot released its second State of the Twittersphere report.  Some of the key findings are (un)surprisingly similar to other recent data from ratings giant Nielsen -- that while the service's top-line rate of growth has been through the roof, more than half of all Twitter accounts show little to no sign of activity.  No Tweets. No followers. No friends. 

A deeper dive into the data seems to suggest that the typical Twitter user looks more like my cousin Joe (no relation to Jaffe) and less like me. 

Joe's profile shows no bio, no location, the generic o_O avatar and a single exploratory tweet from more than a month ago.  He has fewer than 10 followers and is following just 23 other accounts.  Look at the accounts he follows and you'll find mostly celebrities and mainstream media outlets, with a few social media micro-celebs and a spammer thrown in for good measure.

At best, you might argue that Joe sees Twitter as a passive experience -- he "tunes in" a handful of brand name channels and watches the content they post.  You might call this the Oprah Effect and this patttern seems to back-up a recent POV from Brian Solis that, for the majority of users, Twitter is a broadcast platform rather than the conversation we social media insiders make it out to be.  And let's face facts people -- with more than a million followers but only a handful of celeb follows and no @ replies since April (none to regular people), Oprah hasn't exactly "joined the conversation."  To the contrary, she has launched yet another broadcast program - although with just 50 or so tweets since joining the service almost two months ago, it isn't a broadcast worth tuning into.  (Love him, hate him or write him off as having hit his peak with That 70's Show, at least Ashton Kutcher seems to get it closer to right - but I digress...)

There's a more likely scenario though, isn't there? 

You can see it in my cousin's profile, but you might infer it from the HubSpot and Nielsen data as well.  That Joe simply visited once, just for one day, and hasn't been back since. (Holy crap, did Verdino just tie together the loose ends of this rambling post?)

This is more an observation than a judgment, since after all, I'm not a big proponent of the bigger-is-better thinking that gets so many marketers hot and bothered.  Maybe my cousin Joe is a living embodiment of the state of Twitter (an argument that would please the naysayers and skeptics) or maybe the true state of Twitter is best understood by taking a long, hard look at the most active users that live in its epicenter -- and we don't care how it looks to outsiders who don't get it (an argument that plays right into the hands of the social media "experts" but is perhaps closer to right.)

In other words - maybe microblogging is meant to be, erm, micro after all. 

And in the end, the value doesn't come from the millions and millions of strangers who may or may not actually be there, but from the dozens or hundreds or thousands of friends that we choose to interact with every day.

Thoughts?

NOTICE (6/16: 9pm EST)  For some reason, comments aren't displaying for this post anymore.  It seems like Typepad is still logging them and hopefully they can help me figure out how to fix the problem. Don't let that keep you from adding your own thoughts though, and try checking back soon to read the thread.

Book 'em Verdino: announcing microMARKETING

I'm excited to announce that I've inked a deal with McGraw-Hill for the publication of my first business book, microMARKETING: A Breakthrough Approach to Building Brands by Thinking and Acting Small.

If the title alone isn't enough to clue you in, I'd like to give you an idea of the ground I'll cover in the book.  Here's a bit of how I described the book in the proposal itself:

A media revolution is underway, fueled by a micro-content phenomenon that is shifting the balance of power from mass communications to masses of communicators.  This shift plays out daily on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Ustream and other social sites.  It’s in the notion that an otherwise normal individual can use social media and low-end technology to become a micro-celebrity with a significant following.  It’s in the viral effect that takes hold when even one online influencer (in essence a one-person media outlet) sparks a conversation that makes or breaks a brand.  It’s in the shift in behavior that is turning the smart phone into the “first screen” for Gen Y and many increasingly-mobile Gen Xers.  It’s in the shift from watching 60 minute television shows interrupted by 30-second advertisements, to watching 30-second pieces of online video content with no advertisements at all.  It’s even in the changing of our expectations of product design and retail sales, giving rise to dozens of successful small businesses and individuals (think Threadless, think Etsy, think Mimobot, think Lemonade) that can create and sell enough high quality, unique or custom merchandise at a premium to shoppers for whom choice and individuality matter more than convenience and price. 

These are exciting times, but they can also be scary times for marketers who have been trained to think that bigger is better, and for whom the excesses and successes of the past 50 or so years – big budgets for major media ad campaigns designed to sell mountains of product through big-box retailers – seem to be the only way to build a big brand.  For better or worse, the new reality is that the old way doesn’t work so well anymore. Simply put, micro-content and macro-marketing don’t mix – and trying to maintain the status quo while consumer behaviors and expectations change amounts to little more than a recipe for failure.

Enter micromarketing – a new approach to building brands, marketing products and services, and growing meaningful long-term customer (and corporate) value.  Micromarketing emphasizes relationships over reach, interactions over interruption, and the network effect over the broadcast network.  It is built upon the premise that the “next big thing” is really lots and lots of small things, and that to survive and thrive, even the biggest marketers must think and act small (make that “micro”), too. 

microMARKETING is not a "Twitter book."  Puh-leeze... In signature Verdino-style, I will aim to help marketers understand the larger trends that are driving the popularity of tools like Twitter and what the real world implications are for businesses (even if Twitter itself -- or Facebook or YouTube, for that matter -- goes away), but my focus will be aimed squarely at the big picture.  I also don't plan to trot out the same ol' tired social media case studies.  In fact, one key piece of my approach is to help large companies understand how to thrive in the era of micro-content and micro-culture by taking lessons from the people and organizations that are involved in the revolution at the grassroots level.  In other words, I'll be looking at what the biggest of big corporations should learn from "whatever experts." 

Again, from the proposal:

Over the past several years, social media has evolved from a trend to watch to an irrefutable fact of life for marketers of all sizes.  Now – before most companies have even gotten social media right – the mainstreaming of micro-content services, the ubiquity of powerful low-cost handheld technology (from Internet-ready phones to consumer-grade HD cameras) and the rise of DIY culture promise to change the rules of consumer engagement yet again.  It is important to understand how these changes impact our ability to build brands, manage customer relationships and drive sales today, and this will only become more important over the coming years as more and more consumers flock to the technologies that are powering the shift.

On the flipside, it is also important that marketers not get swept up in the hype surrounding a single tool or tactic, losing sight of the bigger implications for their businesses.  As has happened with core social media tools like blogging, podcasting and social networking (and short-lived fads like Second Life), marketers now run the risk of not seeing the forest for the trees – of jumping on the “Twitter bandwagon” with short-lived, ill-advised tactics that do little to impact their businesses.   

On the one hand, microMARKETING educates decision makers about larger trends and what they mean for companies who are looking to more effectively engage consumers through new digital channels.  On the other hand, it delivers tangible and practical case studies, stories, tips and tricks from familiar competitors (other large corporations) and unlikely sources of inspiration (micro-businesses and individual creators.)

microMARKETING is slated for a May/June 2010 release.  I need to hand in the final manuscript by mid-October.  Needless to say, I've got my work cut out for me over the next few months.

That may mean less blogging for the next few months, although I'll still try to post here at least once/week.  And you should stay tuned for periodic updates on the book, my progress and the process.  Hell, I may even ask you for some input along the way.

Finally, I'd like to thank the good folks at McGraw-Hill -- especially Donya Dickerson -- and my agent Ethan Friedman at LevelFive Media.

Good times, ahead...

GyPSii: all-in-one social networking for the iPhone

As 2008 came to a close, my blogger-buddy Peter Kim asked a batch of social media folks to think about what 2009 would have in store for our industry.  I included location awareness and mobile social networking among my predictions:

Geo-location, location, location. Location awareness will be the mobile utility of the year as more and more consumers use their GPS-enabled phones and mobile social software (mososo) to find great stuff to see, do and buy wherever they may be at any given time, and foster real world face-to-face connections with the people in their social networks.

A few months later, crayon began working with a mobile social network provider called GyPSii.  GyPSii allows people to use their mobile phones to instantly capture and share what they are actually doing, building a multi-media virtual diary on their world – the places they've been, the things they've done, the cool things they've seen -- and share their experiences with their network of friends.  It's an all-in-one mobile social application that lets you connect with friends, document your life and share experiences, all in real time.  And of course it seamlessly integrates with Facebook and Twitter - making it easy to update once and share everywhere.

GyPSii already has a nice global footprint, and it works on most carrier networks and on dozens of different handsets.  But the reason I'm blogging about them now is that -- as of today -- GyPSii has launched its iPhone App.  And crayon and our good buddies at SHIFT Communications are helping to spread the word and get some traction.

So if you're an iPhone or iPod Touch user -- and especially if you're a social media geek who has dabbled with mobile social software and likes to bang on new services -- it would be great to see you on GyPSii.  You can get started by downloading the free App from the iTunes right now.

If you'd like a guided tour of GyPSii's iPhone features, you can watch this short video demo:

[Feed and email readers, click through for the video.]

Once you've downloaded the App, be sure to friend me on GyPSii, follow them on Twitter and become a Facebook Fan.  But most of all, be sure to spread the word, because the more friends you have on GyPSii, the better it gets.

Looking forward to connecting.

This is your brain. This is your brain on Twitter.

It might be an overstatement to say that Twitter would blow your mind, but I think it might be fair to say that the work of University of Wisconsin-Madison doctoral candidate Adam Wilson will.  Adam and a network of others have been working on a brain-computer interface that will allow people to, among other things, tweet hands-free using nothing but brain waves to type and transmit 140-character messages.

Here's how it all works:

The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says UW Assistant Professor Justin Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."

Wilson, who used the interface to post the Twitter update, likens it to texting on a cell phone. "You have to press a button four times to get the character you want," he says of texting. "So this is kind of a slow process at first."

However, as with texting, users improve as they practice using the interface. "I've seen people do up to eight characters per minute," says Adam Wilson.

Sounds impressive, but you've really gotta see it in action.  Watch:

[Feed and email readers, click through to the blog to watch.]

Total, geeked-out coolness but -- more importantly -- tremendously useful for individuals whose brains work well but whose bodies don't.  Nice counterpoint to last week's celebrity-twit chatter, dontcha think?

You can get all the details about the brain-tweet work coming out of UW here or you can follow Adam (and Adam's brain) on Twitter.  He's @uwbci and you can distinguish his brain-tweets from his regular tweets by the fact that the brain-computer interface transmits in ALL CAPS (ooh, just like Oprah.)

GV Sighting: All that twendy Twitter twalk

Busy week... or maybe I should say twizzy tweek (which is, I suppose, a busy week for a twotal Twitter geek.  Unless Twitter+geek is tweek.  Ugh...)

Anyway, workload and a business trip that lasted one day longer than it was meant to couldn't keep me from spending a few minutes on the phone with a reporter from The Canadian Press, talking about the new vocabulary (#5) that has emerged among the Twitterati.  Crap, I just did it again, didn't I?

If you're on Twitter, you know what I mean.  The alternately endearing and annoying habit of appending a "tw" to the beginning of otherwise normal words, resulting in mash-ups like tweeps, tweetup, twoast, twendy, twetiquette and of course tweethearts.  If you're not on Twitter, you can get some schooling by visiting the Twictionary.

Either way, you may want to see what a rhetoric professor, a social commentator (whatever that is) and I had to say about Twitter twalk.  Pop on over to the CTV site to read the article.

Is status status or does context count?

Having gotten annoyed one too many times by friends feeding their Twitter updates directly into their Facebook status field, devoid of relevance and context -- do I really need updates like "@twitterbuddy17 lolz for realz.;-P" cluttering up my mini-feed? -- I updated my Facebook status to vent my frustration.

An interesting debate ensued.  See below to read what some of my FB friends had to say.  What do you think?  Is status status or does context count?

Quigley, Havens & Verdino get social (podcast)

Yesterday, Jane Quigley and I spent some time chatting with John C. Havens about everything from mobile social software and charitable causes to SXSW coolness and Adam Broitman (it was mostly John talking about Broitman, but still...)  That conversation aired live on Blog Talk Radio, courtesy of PepsiCo, and you can listen to it on-demand whenever you have the time.

[I've removed the BTR embedded player because it auto-plays but the show is at your fingers with just one click.]

Twitter is this year's Second Life

I know what you're thinking: "Verdino has finally lost his mind." While I'll admit that, to the casual observer, Twitter and Second Life bear very little resemblance to one another, the truth is that there are more than a few points of comparison -- both positive and negative, both trivial and significant. 

Last night I made a list of nearly twenty similarities -- and that was just off the top of my head, while multi-screening and talking on the phone.  Here are 10 of them.  Give them a read and weigh in with your own thoughts...

1) Both Twitter and Second Life are built around the concept of virtual presence.  Sure, they approach presence from entirely different angles, but they are both presence-oriented applications and really only come to life when they are populated by people having real-time conversations.  Looking at this through a business lens, when H&R Block began dispensing tax advice on Twitter and offering people the opportunity to 'sit' with a tax advisor in Second Life (both programs were piloted in 2008), they were really just testing two variations on the same theme -- the ability of a company to use new technology to have real-time conversations with its customers.

2) Avatars, avatars, avatars.  If you're gonna maintain a virtual presence, then you've gotta represent.  Second Lifers agonized over whether their Shogun warrior or hot chick in leather avatar best reflected their mood on any given day.  Twitter users put similar emphasis on which itsy bitsy square image of their face makes them look smartest, most approachable, funniest, most attractive, weirdest or most like their SL avatar.

3) Twitter and Second Life were both hailed as the next big thing -- until someone pointed out that they weren't actually big.  Remember the heady days of 2006, when each morning brought a fresh report of just how big Second Life was getting?  SL-maker Linden Lab loved crowing about the millions and millions of residents living in the virtual world, with the overall number growing by tens of thousands per day.  The only problem was that a deep dive into the numbers revealed that the vast majority of those so-called residents were simply inactive accounts.  Similarly, public estimates put Twitter's total user base somewhere in the 4-6 million member range, leading to much conversation about the mainstreaming of microblogging.  But topline numbers only tell part of the story.  According to HubSpot's State of the Twittersphere, the number of active users is a mere fraction of the total. Which kinda leads me to my next point...

4) Twitter, like Second Life, is where the geeks are.  I know we think we're normal people, but we're not.  We're early adopters.  We're social media insiders.  We're so-called influencers.  We go to parties and, of course, we trade Twitter handles so we can keep in touch.  Normal people don't do this.  Normal people avert their eyes when we mention Twitter during otherwise polite conversation.  This isn't just coming from me -- recently, Twitter CEO Ev Williams stated that he doesn't expect 'real people' to be on the service for another several years.  And trust me: as soon as lots of so-called normal people flock to Twitter, the early adopters will be griping about how the service just isn't the same anymore. In fact, if you're looking to reconnect with some of your old Second Life buddies, I think I know where you might be able to find them (hint: on Twitter.) Speaking of geekiness...

5) Both services gave rise to 'secret languages' that are all but meaningless to people who don't use the service.  Second Life gave us sim, rez, HUD, grid and griefers, plus the concepts of the SLURL, Linden dollar and the SLT time zone.  Twitter gives us DM, tweet, tweeple, tweetup and an endless array of otherwise normal English words preceded by "tw-", while providing us with a clear distinction between friends and followers, giving us a new way to use the @ symbol, and fueling the popularity of the tiny URL. If you're an active social media dude or dudette, you probably understood this paragraph perfectly well.  If not, I may as well have written it in Klingon.

6) Both are built on buggy technology that hardcore users love to hate, but everyone else probably just plain ol' hates.  This was probably Second Life's longest running inside joke and also at the heart of its inability to scale. It lagged, it crashed, it acted as weird as a pink-spotted purple dragon avatar. Twitter eats tweets, drops adds and re-drops functionality willy nilly, and in its brightest shining moments serves up it's now infamous Fail Whale.  A casual user might give Twitter a try and walk away frustrated, while the most hardened Twitterati wear their beloved platform's foibles as a badge of honor.

7) Google came along to validate both models -- but then failed to make an impact.  And nobody cares.  When Google launched Lively last year, many saw it as a sure sign that virtual worlds were picking up steam.  But then Google shuttered Lively without much fanfare.  When Google acquired Twitter-competitor Jaiku, many took this as a sign that microblogging was mainstreaming.  But since it's Googlification, Jaiku has been more or less stagnant.  This certainly challenges the popular notion that Google is going to own the entire Internet one of these days, but there's still a shot that they'll just acquire Twitter and get on with it. OK - so now that we have 7 points under our belts, I think it's time to brace for the real hits. :-)

8) Both are magnets for lazy marketers.  I'm not going to argue that marketers shouldn't be thinking about how to use Twitter to connect with consumers.  I never argued that marketers shouldn't take a serious look at Second Life either.  But I kinda wonder how expending resources (if not money) to have someone on your team deliver priority customer support to a mere 10,000 or so Twitter followers without first fixing the traditional customer support infrastructure that frustrates your millions and millions of other customers makes business sense.  In fact, is it any different than spending resources (and money) to allow a few hundred or thousand Second Lifers to wander around your virtual hotel or test drive your virtual concept car?  Both reek of "shiny object syndrome" and a shallow attempt to check off a box on a list of innovation tactics.  What I'm saying is: if you're a company planning to do Twitter, you need to plan on doing it right.  And you need to understand where it fits into the bigger picture.  Otherwise, you should be prepared for this year's pat on the back ("great job, you're an innovator") to earn you a prime position in next year's negative case study. But while we're on the subject of next year...

9) Nobody will be talking about Twitter next year.  Maybe that's a bit extreme, but it certainly seems like Twitter is riding a massive wave of hype right now.  Put another way, Twitter is mainstream media's current "social media it girl" -- just like Second Life was a few years ago.  And we all know how that story ended; the wave crashed against the rocks, and the tone of the coverage changed considerably.  Second Life went from "you've gotta try it" to "you'd be foolish to waste your effort," and it seemingly happened between the June and July 2007 issues of Wired.  It doesn't take much to turn today's media darling into tomorrow's media target.  So maybe people will still be talking about Twitter, but mark my words -- the tone of the media coverage will be a lot less "gee whiz" and a lot more "what were we thinking."  But that's OK...

10) Much like Second Life, Twitter isn't the real story anyway...  If your social media consultant is telling you that you absolutely must have a Twitter strategy, you need to have security escort them out of your building.  Immediately.  You don't need a Twitter strategy.  You didn't need a Second Life strategy.  In fact, there is no such thing as a Twitter or Second Life strategy.  Both of these things -- along with the dozens of other emergent media options marketers can choose from -- are at best tactics.  At worst, they're just enabling technology platforms.  They might have a place in your marketing strategy, but none of these things are the strategy in and of themselves. 

As marketers, business people and just plain old people, we need to look beyond the story ("hey everyone, shiny new thing here") to find the story behind the story ("we are staring into the eye of a significant new truth.")  In the case of Second Life, the real story focused on SL as a peek into the 3D future of the web or a hint at the next wave of human-to-human interaction (don't think so?  watch your kids in Webkinz or Club Penguin.)  In the same vein, Twitter itself doesn't matter (at least it doesn't matter much.)  What matters is the rising propensity of people to publicly share even the most minute details of their daily lives, the shift from the asynchonous connectivity of traditional social networking to the real time connectivity of presence, and the rising expectations among even a relatively small subset of consumers that everything from information to service to support to access can (and should) be delivered instantaneously.  The real story lies somewhere in that rambling sentence, I think.  Try not to miss the tworest for the twees (sorry - see point #5.)