communication. community. cognition.
Last month, I ranted about how Social Media is not a commodity — not an easy bundle of off-the-shelf “solutions.”
Well, our friend David Armano over at Logic+Emotion has the same idea, and provides us with this picture that replaces my thousand words. Enjoy:
“Ugly” and “rough” – at least in the English language – sound sort of like they are. They certainly don’t roll off the tongue like “pretty” and “smooth.” There’s a whole chicken-and-egg argument that we could make about whether ugly-sounding words describe ugly things, or if we associate the ugliness of a word to that sound because of its meaning.
But that’s for another day.
This is really a brief thought about the value of the Ugly and the Rough.
I know this may seem like an alien concept to many of you, but there are many Walmarts at which I might shop depending upon where in the metro area I am. And I’ve noticed something peculiar in each of them: from the time you get in the front lobby to the time you enter the actual store, the floors have all been replaced with a textured, stone-like surface. It looks very nice and stylish, and even somewhat trendy. And it’s now in all the stores where I happen to be.
It also aggravates me, because it happens to be in that area where the shopping carts are stored. Because of the rough floor, by the time I get into the main part of the store I can’t tell if there is a bad wheel on the cart, or if the cart is going to squeal or drift. By the time I figure out that I have a bad cart, it’s usually more of a bother to go back than it is to live with the annoyance. And that, my friends, is human engineering at its most scientific.
If the floors were smooth, I’d be able to test my cart right there on the spot, and if it was a lemon I could move to the next cart in the stack. And so would you (if you shopped at Walmart.) And so would everyone else. And the carts would all be scattered, and there would be a traffic jam as the picky and the persnickety all jockeyed for the Golden Cart that holds the magic ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory. The expensive new flooring actually serves a hidden purpose — to keep people moving into the store.
Have you been to Google.com lately? Don’t bother clicking over on my account. Aside from occasionally changing the cartoony image in the logo, it’s pretty much the same. A simple white page with a search box a third of the way down in the center. No glitz, no glamor, no videos in your face. Google is flat-out ugly. Because of the ugly and simple, it also loads very quickly, meaning a massive cost savings in terms of bandwidth and time. Given the number of searches processed, adding an additional quarter-of-a-second to the pageload times would be a lot of time wasted for end-users.
How much more popular would Yahoo! Search be if the search experience weren’t so noisy? Granted, Yahoo! has always been more interested in being a portal, but Google lets you have a portal page too. It just doesn’t jam it in your face. When I want to search for something quickly, I don’t want stock quotes, headlines, the weather, links to my mail, and a giant banner ad for my credit score. When I want the portal, I’ll go to the portal. When I want to search, I want a search. Ugly and simple wins.
I’ve been very grateful for those of you who enjoy this site enough to subscribe. For the longest time, there was a slow linear progression of the subscriber base. That slope got steeper the day I added those big ugly orange subscription buttons to my sidebar. I had a couple of people tell me they were ugly and had to go. Yet the previous ones were too small, the colors didn’t stand out, and too far down the page to attract attention. For most people, the buttons appear on the site with no scrolling necessary.
Yes, they are ugly. Yes, they break the color theme. Yes, they eat up valuable real-estate. And yes, they work. They’ve helped me connect with more people, by encouraging them to consume these words at the time and place of their own convenience, not mine. (Tired of seeing those buttons? Peruse Occam’s RazR in an RSS reader, and tell the Subscription Monsters to be gone.)
Ugly and Rough are ugly and rough… but at times are elegantly effective.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Google, Yahoo, Walmart, user experience, web design[/tags]
South by Deep South is really happening. No joke.
September 26-28 in Birmingham. We picked a date that did not conflict with either a Crimson Tide home game nor a NASCAR event. As it happens, we’ll also have the 10th Annual Sidewalk Film Festival going on, so it ought to be an amazing weekend all the way through. Not to mention a full-bore WordCamp wrapped up in the SxDS proceedings.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, sxds, south by deep south, wordcamp, birmingham, sidewalk film festival[/tags]
{{myquote|If you’re going to kill a sacred cow, grill it nice and thick, and don’t smother it in cheap steak sauce. Anything less is eternal disrespect.}}
Inspired by David Armano on Twitter.
I’m lucky, in that I don’t have a bad commute to the office and back. Of all the major thoroughfares leading into downtown Birmingham, coming in from the East on Interstate-20 is the best by far. Yet if the weather is bad, or I happen to hear about an accident on my route that might slow things down, I bail to the back roads.
Did you find yourself nodding in agreement at the above? There’s something about being in control of your own destiny — and something restrictive and constraining about being stuck on an interstate staring at the same bumper stickers. I’ve seen drivers who pass an exit before hitting the roadblock, and then back up as much as a half-mile in the shoulder just to get off the interstate. But once you start along the scenic route, do you really get where you want any faster?
“As long as I’m moving,” I tell myself. You’ve got to do something. Yet there are times that doing nothing is precisely the best course of action.
Politicians offer sweeping solutions for many “big issues” in the U.S., all predicated on the notion that we must “do something.” Somehow, the act of committing time and resources to a perceived problem makes you better, because you “did something.”
I had a client that was facing a minor media issue. Very, very minor. On a scale of one-to-ten, with 10 being “catastrophic,” this was somewhere between zero and one. A couple of people in the leadership wanted to counter false and anonymous accusations made through email. They saw the email, but virtually no one else did. Yet they wanted a full-court media blitz.
When faced with pressure, we all revert to different habits. Some people freeze, and some people react. They have a natural impulse that tells them to “do something!”
It took some time, but I had to explain to them that their proposed “solution” would cause far greater confusion and distress than the original message. It would simply introduce the falsehoods to a much larger audience, a fraction of whom might end up believing it. I suggested they assume a posture I call “Active Waiting.” Passive Waiting would be the ostrich-head ignoring. Active Waiting is sitting still with a purpose, as an animal ready to pounce. Active Waiting is the admission that the timing of your chosen direction or activity is just as important as the action itself.
When you are throwing a surprise party for someone, do you just lounge around their house doing whatever you want? No — you find a safe hiding place to wait, and you focus your awareness on the door. If your mind wanders off the task of Active Waiting, you run the risk of making a noise at the wrong time or casting a shadow in view of the window.
Active Waiting takes as much time and energy as “Doing Something.” It is doing something, even if it doesn’t resemble it from a given perspective. Like staying on the Interstate, it’s often the best course of action. Tom Petty had it right: The waiting is the hardest part.
(In an effort to provide a place for the Social Media Curious to dip their first toe, Ike continues a series of articles aimed at those who are looking for very basic context.)
At the most basic level, your participation in Social Media needs to include monitoring and listening. If you don’t know what’s being said about you, you’ll never have a chance to correct misperceptions or outright lies. Being functionally deaf makes you blind in targeting future efforts.
For those organizations that fail to even listen, the top hesitation is the fear of finding “bad news,” and not knowing how to deal with it. Given the flood of information that you might find about yourself, it’s easier to play the ostrich and pretend it doesn’t exist. While that might make you sleep a little easier, your shareholders and stakeholders might see things differently. So how exactly do you prioritize these potential “reputation threats” as they circulate?
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you use monitoring tools to find a knock against your company in a blog or public forum. Aside from simple traffic statistics and site popularity, here are a few measures of “viral-ness” you can use to determine which ones are capable of becoming a big problem down the road.
A quick glance can usually knock a couple of these factors out for a particular instance, and you can move on. If you see a message that hits six out of seven flags, you may want to do an internet search for an unusual string within the message, to see if this is already moving and where.
If you see one that hits all seven warning triggers, you probably need to put it in the hands of whomever would handle your reactive messaging. A direct response might be in order, unless it comes off looking like an attack. But you need to be prepared for the likelihood that many people will see this attack on your brand and reputation.
As with all things in Social Media, your mileage will always vary. This tool is not scientific — but will empower you to concentrate your time on the messages that matter. It beats getting caught in the paralysis of analysis, or wasting resources on issues that will never materialize as real reputational threats.
(Ike Pigott regularly writes at Occam’s RazR)
Charlton Heston at the 1963 Civil Rights March.
Charlton Heston died a few days ago. I never met him, but he did provide for one of the most memorable incidents at my last television station.
Several years ago, Heston was visiting Birmingham, waiting in our lobby for an interview appearance on our noon newscast. Our Managing Editor, Al Volker, was running a last-minute script update from the newsroom to the studio. As he rounded the corner at the reception desk, he spotted Heston — and without breaking stride — blurted out:
“OH JESUS! IT’S MOSES!“
We asked Al if he ever went back and talked with Heston, or got an autograph.
“Nah. It would have ruined my story.”
In hindsight, what would he have gained from knowing Heston’s reaction? Nothing. The story is better left unfinished.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, television, Charlton Heston, ABC 33/40[/tags]