Yesterday at the SHC Social Media Summit, kudos were given to the Zombie vertical effort pulled off by a rogue splinter faction of UX zealots. Let's talk about that for a moment.

First, some history. By some accounts, Sears is an international retailer with a rich history, but not as much modern zing as a brand might want. At least a brand who's stated goal is to sell lots of stuff to lots of people. We -do- all sorts of innovative things online, but that's probably not the public perception.

To lots of peeps Sears is still where you might go to buy your dishwasher, or where your mom goes, if your mom is as old as my mom. Which let's be honest is kind of old. "They've always been wonderful to me, Peter. Did you know that during The War they were the only place I could get kerosene?"

"The War"? Kerosene?

Anyway. Just before Halloween UX Sears released a little gem, a zombie vertical page aimed at servicing the zombie demographic for all their shopping needs.

www.catalog.sears.com/zombies

Image-wise, this was kind of "a departure from the brand message" of the company that was able to bring you petroleum distillates during the Big One. It was also crazy successful. It's early in the day here, and I can't seem to find anyone here yet to get me some numbers, but with no advertising, on our test-test server that we're having "engagement challenges" on, no budget, and no work done during normal work hours, the effort had about a zillion media mentions... mainstream, web-nerd, and advertising industry venues.

Like I said, -crazy- successful. Why? Let's take a look.

7 Reasons the Zombie Vertical rocked

1. First: zombies Topically, this was a win. It's still a win, months later. The zombie thing still has juice. Lots here for everyone- the gaming enthusiast, the political satirist, the survivalist. Sometimes the stuff you sell lacks a certain panache... but who doesn't love zombies?

2. Soooooooo different. So different This is where a lot of the Magic Happened. "Zombies? Sears??" The incongruence of the brand and the idea, what was expected on the web and what we actually did and put out there for real normal people to see, this had a powerful effect. Word spread like, ahem, a virus. A zombie virus.

3. We weren't selling anything What? Nothing? Counterintuitive, but still kind of a wicked-powerful idea when used correctly. We didn't try to really sell anything on the page; it was clearly just for fun, and to play around with engagement ideas. This earns us a little buy in ( heh ) and credibility.

4. It was produced by a small group of zealots It seems like it's easier for a small, motivated group of slightly-off people to do amazing work than it is to get similar results from a humming, well-running and benefit-laden corporate organization. The people that did the zombie vert were on their own time, with their own equipment, and had only one ( albeit key ) executive champion. They weren't told to do this; it was an idea that some people came up with it and were allowed to run with. That authenticity came through at every level of the experience. The team was definitely "well versed in the vernacular of the genre," this burned through in every bit of the experience, and the people who were into zombies loved it, and helped carry word of it forward.

5. Word of mouth only We didn't put up a banner ad. Didn't get space in the circulars, or TV ad time. We really didn't tell the public at all. But we sure as hell told our friends. All of them, on Facebook and Twitter, and some other places. The singularly powerful sentiment of "hey, check this out..." from a loose-tie-friend echoed thousands of times is more effective than the most expensive advertisement campaign. People turned the downside of having no budget on its ear.

6. Smart, shareable, discoverable content Give people interesting stuff, stuff -designed- to be shared and talked about, and you have so much more of a chance of that actually happening. The idea "of course our stuff is awesome" generally, sadly, isn't enough... it has to actually -be- awesome. Also, within the zombie vert experience there was discoverable content, "easter eggs". This is huge, and is a technique for growing engagement that makes a lot of traditional marketing people nervous.

7. Management didn't kill it Not that they could because, well... ( wait for it... ) they're zombies! Bazinga! Very few people knew about this little opus before it exploded onto the interweb, but when it did the suits were calling and people started to get Very Nervous. But cooler heads ( or just Heads with More Political Clout ) prevailed and when traffic spiked and people we ( meaning SHC ) couldn't control were saying all these ( almost entirely positive ) things about our brand, we let it go. And go it went. Or something. It did well, and brought in a lot of traffic, and piqued a lot of interest.

Some interesting tidbits to consider:

Everyone loves a success If this failed to win, or worse brought some sort of negative attention to us, it'd be harder to leverage it FTW in the future. The fact that the zombie vert did so well went a long way to build a heaping spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of a "web experience that is decidedly off brand message an potentially harmful to us in the marketplace" go down.

Some business units were a little miffed "Why weren't we told?", "Why didn't we have input?", "Why did you feature -that- particular product?" and so on. Much win pretty much silenced these voices, but some of the risk in a project like this is that if you don't pay homage to the usual stakeholders and something goes well, they might be a little raw they didn't have input, or that you dared to do something without consulting them. If your effort tanks, these are the people who dance and pass out 2x4s at the ass-whooping party. In high school, they were the hall monitors, people who got perfect attendance, and ran for student council.

Followup would be cool. Engagement would be cool. A permission asset would be cool. I'm definitely not saying we should do another zombie thing. I -am- saying that it'd be cool to retain the eyeballs of the interested people who rushed to our site to see what was done, so that next time we can help make them part of the fun. I don't mean collecting their names to spam them, or send them a "heads up" to watch for something "new and exciting"... I mean make them part of it. Actually talking to these people, the ones that opt in somehow, is pretty important.

Train this team, for the Next Thing And there will be a Next Thing. The very net one might not be as popular, but developing this kind of skillset on your team is golden.

To sum up:

* Your subject matter might not be exciting, but you can talk about it in a sexy, exciting way. Do so.

* Do something people don't expect; play against your brand perception

* If your job is to sell something, take a break from that, and just give something away.

* Nurture the small band of zealots you have

* Don't advertise. If your idea is cool, it will fly on it's own. "Advertising" is lame.

* Design your content to be sharable; technically and with compelling excellence

* Give things room to breathe. when you have that first urge to take it down, don't.

And remember, when everyone else is out of kerosene, try Sears. It's a great tool for fighting zombies.

; )

Labels: mom quotes, Pete, Social media, zombies

Due to the fruit-fly lifespan of even the best twees, Solis implied Old Spice dropped the ball by not continuing to milk their idea of having The Man Your Man Could Smell Like do more viral vids for release on YouTube.

Andrew leans over and whispers "But that's not what they were for."

"You don't do the last job, " I reply, nodding and verbally retweeting master criminals everywhere. "You do the next job."

That's why we learn from the Zombie thing, and continue to practice that kind of awesomeness. But we don't do another Zombie Vertical thing.

Labels: criminal wisdom, Pete, Social media

The words in this book are written for people, not computers... You have to be somebody before you share yourself. ix

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he. — publilus syrus

[web 2.0] promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom ironically, is more for machines than people. p.3

It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging I social engineering. p.4

Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. We shouldn't seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence. p.5

Being a person is not a pat formula, but a quest, a mystery, a leap of faith. p.5

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. p.6

There is a constant confusion between real and ideal computers. p.6

The brittle character of maturing computer programs can cause digital designs to get frozen into place by a process known as lock-in. This happens when many software programs are designed to work with an existing one. p.7

Software is worse that railroads because it must always adhere with absolute perfection to a boundlessly particular, arbitrary, tangled, intractable messiness. p.8

The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality.

The philosopher Karl Popper was correct when he claimed that science is a process that disqualifies thoughts as it proceeds... p.9

If it's important to find the edge of mystery, to ponder the things that can't quite be defined—or rendered into a digital standard—then we will have to perpetually seek out entirely new ideas and objects, abandoning old ones like musical notes... I'll explore whether people are becoming like MIDI notes—overly defined, and restricted to what can be represented by a computer. p.10

The human organism, meanwhile, is based on continuous sensory, cognitive, and motor processes that have to be synchronized in time. UNIX expresses too large a belief in discrete abstract symbols and not enough of a belief in temporal, continuous, non abstract reality... p.11

The ideas expressed by the file include the notion that human expression comes in severable chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract tree—and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications. p.13

"network effect." Every element in the system—every computer, every person, every bit—comes to depend on relentlessly detailed adherence to a common standard, a common point of exchange. p.15

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful. p.17

humanism in computer science doesn't seem to correlate with any particular cultural style.p.17

the web 2.0 designs actively demand that people define themselves downward. p.19

• Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing the individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.
• Finance was transformed by computing clouds. Success in finance became increasingly about manipulating the cloud at the expense of sound financial principles.
• There are proposals to transform the conduct of science along similar lines. Scientists would then understand less of what they do.
• Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
• Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence.

p.19-20

Someone who has been immersed in orthodoxy needs to experience a figure-ground reversal in order to gain perspective. p.23

The Rapture and the Singularity share one thing in common: they can never be verified by the living. p.26

A computer isn't even there unless a person experiences it. p.26

Guns are real in a way that computers are not. p.27

The first tenet of this new culture [Silicon Valley, et al, sic] is that all of reality, including humans, is one big information system.p.28

...it promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves. p.28

I say that information doesn't deserve to be free... What if it's even less inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?... there is a technical use of the term "information" that refers to something entirely real. That is the kind of information that is related to entropy... Information is alienated experience. p.28

Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. p.29

What the [Turing] test really shows us, however, even if it's not necessarily what Turning hoped it would say, is that machine intelligence can only be known in a relative sense, in the eyes of a human beholder. p.31

Chess and computers are both direct descendants of the violence that drives evolution in the natural world. p.33

In order for a computer to beat the human chess champion, two kinds of progress had to converge: an increase in raw hardware power and an improvement in the sophistication and clarity with which the decisions of chess play are represented in software. p.34

When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful. p.36

Consciousness is situated in time, because you can't experience a lack of time, and you can't experience the future. p.42

people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. p.47

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable. p.55

The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. p.59

If we are to continue to focus the powers of digital technology on the project of making human affairs less personal and more collective, then we ought to consider how that project might interact with human nature. p.62

FUD—feat, uncertainty, doubt. p.67

Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. p.69

What computerized analysis of all the country's school test has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. p.69

The places that work online always turn out to be the beloved projects of individuals, not the automated aggregations of the cloud. p.72

The deep design mystery of how to organize and present multiple threads of conversation on a screen remains as unsolved as ever. p.72

It's the people who make the forum, not the software. p.72

once you have the basics of a given technological leap in place, it's always important to step back and focus on the people for a while. p.72

People will focus on activities other than fighting and killing one another only so long as technologists continue to come up with ways to improve living standards for everyone at once. p.80

If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation that truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. p.83

The limitations of organic human memory and calculation used to put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. p.96

There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments. p.97

Each layer of digital abstraction, no matter how well it is crafted, contributes some degree of error and obfuscation. No abstraction corresponds to reality perfectly. A lot of such layers become a system unto themselves, one that functions apart from the reality that is obscured far below. p.97

Locks are only amulets of inconvenience that remind us of a social contract we ultimately benefit from. p.107

Economics is about how to best mix a set of rules we cannot change with rules that we can change. p.112

The economy is a tool, and there's no reason it has to be as open and wild as the many open and wild things of our experience. But it also doesn't have to be as tied down as some might want. It should and could have an intermediate level of complexity. p.117

cybernetic totalism will ultimately be bad for spirituality, morality, and business. In my view, people have often respected bits too much, resulting in a creeping degradation of their own qualities as human beings. p.119

Ideal computers can be experienced when you write a small program. They seem to offer infinite possibilities and an extraordinary sense of freedom. Real computers are experienced when we deal with large programs. They can trap us in tangles of code and make us slaves to legacy. p.119

If each cultural expression is a brand-new tiny program, then they are all aligned on the same starting line. Each one is created using the same resources as every other one. p.120

That's one reason web 2.0 designs strongly favor flatness in cultural expression. p.120

Let's suppose that back in the 1980s I had said, "In a quarter century, when the digital revolution has made great progress and computer chips are millions of times faster than they are now, humanity will finally win the prize of being able to write a new encyclopedia and a new version of UNIX!" It would have sounded utterly pathetic. p.122

The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first order expression. p.122

Only people can make schlock, after all. A bird can't be schlocky when it sings, but a person can. p.123

The decentralized nature of architecture makes it almost impossible to track the nature of the information that is flowing through it. p.123

In more recent eras, ideologies related to privacy and anonymity joined a fascination with emerging systems similar to some conceptions of biological evolution to influence engineers to reinforce the opacity of the design of the internet. Each new layer of code has furthered the cause of deliberate obscurity. p.124

The appeal of deliberate obscurity is an interesting anthropological question... One is a desire to see the internet come alive as a metaorganism: many engineers hope for this eventually, and mystifying the workings of the net makes it easier to imagine it is happening. There is also a revolutionary fantasy: engineers sometimes pretend they are assailing a corrupt existing media order and demand both the covering of tracks and anonymity from all involved in order to enhance this fantasy... the result is that we must now measure the internet as if it were are part of nature, instead of from the inside, as if we were examining books of a financial enterprise. p.124

Some of the youngest, brightest minds have been trapped in a 1970s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old software designs as if they were facts of nature. p.126

pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs i their pottery and becomes less creative. p.128

Spore addresses an ancient conundrum about causality and deities that was far less expressibly before the advent of computers. It shows that digital simulation can explore ideas in the form of direct experiences, which was impossible with previous art forms.p.132

A HYPOTHESIS LINKS the anomaly in popular music to the characteristics of flat information networks that suppress local contexts in favor global ones. p.133

A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation not a real thing. p.133

The definition of a digital object is based on assumptions of what aspects of it will turn out to be important. It will be a flat, mute nothing if you ask something of it that exceeds expectations. p.134

Hip-hop is imprisoned within digital tools like the rest of us. But at least it bangs fiercely against the walls of its confinement. p.135

The hive ideology robs musicians and other creative people of the ability to influence the context within which their expressions are perceived, if they are to transition out of the old world of labels and music licensing. p.136

Every artist tries to foresee or even nudge the context in which expression is to be perceived so that the art will make sense. It's not necessarily a matter of overarching ego, or manipulative promotion, but a simple desire for meaning. p.137

Even if a video of a song is seen a million times, it becomes just one dot in a vast pointillist spew of similar songs when it is robbed of its motivating context. Numerical popularity doesn't correlate with intensity of connection in the cloud. p.137

If you grind any information structure up too finely, you can loose the connections of the parts to their local contexts as experienced by the humans who originated them, rendering the structure itself meaningless. p.138

There are two primary strands of cybernetic totalism. In one strand, the computing cloud is supposed to get smart to a superhuman degree on its own, and in the other, a crowd of people connected to the cloud through anonymous, fragementary contact is supposed to the super-human entity that gets smart. p.139

Once organisms became encapsulated, they isolated themselves into distinct species, trading genes only with others of their kind. p.140

you'll generally find for most topics, the Wikipedia entry is the first URL returned by the search engines but not necessarily the best URL returned by search engines but not necessarily the best URL available. p.143

One of the negative aspects of Wikipedia is this: because of how its entities are created, the process can result in a softening of ambition or, more specifically, a substitution of ideology for achievement. p.143

The distinction between understanding and creed, between science and ethics, is subtle. p.151

computationalism. This term is usually used more narrowly to describe a philosophy of mind, but I'll extend it to include something like a culture... the world can be understood as a computational process, with people as subprocesses. p.153

My first priority must be to avoid reducing people to mere devices. The best way to do that is to believe that the gadgets I can provide are inherent tools and are only useful because people have the magical ability to communicate meaning through them. p.154

The whole point of technology, though, is to change the human situation, so it is absurd for humans to aspire to be inconsequential. p.155

Logical positivism is the idea that a sentence or another fragment—something you can put in a computer file—means something in a freestanding way that doesn't require invoking the subjectivity of a human reader... "The meaning of a sentence is the instructions to verify it."... The new version of the idea if that if you have a lot of data you can make logical positivism work on a large-scale statistical basis. The thinking goes that within the cloud there will be no need for the numinous halves of traditional oppositions such as syntax/semantics, quantity/quality, content/context, and knowledge/wisdom. p.155

"realism." The idea is that humans, considered as information systems, weren't designed yesterday, and are not the abstract playthings of some higher being, such as a web 2.0 programmer in the sky or a cosmic spore player. Instead, I believe that humans are the result of billions of years of implicit, evolutionary study in the school of hard knocks. The cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality... what can make bits have meaning is that their patterns have been hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren't really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a non-abstract continuation of reality... Realism is based on specifics, but we don't yet know—and might never know—the specifics of personhood from a computational point of view. The best we can do right now is engage in the kind of storytelling that evolutionary biologists sometimes indulge in.   p.157

Fourier Transform. A Fourier transform detects how much action there is at particular "speeds" (frequencies) in a block of digital information. p.161

Gabor wavelet transform... This mathematical process identifies individual blips of action at particular frequencies in particular places, while the Fourier transform jest tells you what frequencies are present overall. p.161

Odors are completely different, as in the brain's method of sensing them. p.162
The number of distinct odors is limited only by the number of olfactory receptors capable of interacting with them. p.163

There is no way to interpolate between two smell molecules... colors and sounds can be measured with rulers, but odors must be looked up in a dictionary. p.163

smelly chemicals... are tied to the many stages of rotting or ripening of organic materials. As it turns out, there are three major, distinct chemical paths of rotting, each of which appears to define a different stream of entries in the brain's dictionary of smells. p.164

A smell is a synecdoche: a part standing in for them whole. p.164

Olfaction, like language, is built up from entries in a catalog, not from infinitely morphable patterns... the grammar of language is primarily a way of fitting those dictionary words in a larger context. p.165

Darwin's most compelling evolutionary speculations was that music might have preceded language. He was intrigued by the fact that many species use song for sexual display and wondered if human vocalizations might have started out that way too. It might follow, then, that vocalizations could have become varied and complex only later, perhaps when song came to represent actions beyond mating and such basics of survival. p.167

The brain's cerebral cortex areas are specialized for particular sensory systems, such as vision. There are also overlapping regions between these parts—the cross-modal areas I mentioned earlier in connection with olfaction. Rama [V.S. Ramachandran] is interested in determining how the cross-modal areas of the brain may give rise to a core element of language and meaning: the metaphor. p.171

conflict that has been at the heart of information science since its inception: Can meaning be described compactly and precisely, or is it something that can emerge only in approximate form based on statistical associations between large numbers of components? p.173

when you deny the specialness of personhood, you elicit confused, inferior results from people. p.177

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. p.180

software development doesn't necessarily speed up in sync with improvements in hardware. It often instead slows down as computers get bigger because there are more opportunities for errors in bigger programs. Development becomes slower and more conservative when there is more at stake, and that's what is happening. p.181

Some of the greatest speculative investments in human history continue to converge on silly Silicon Valley schemes that seem to have been named by Dr. Seuss. On any given day, one might hear of tens or hundreds or millions of dollars flowing to a start-up company named Ublibudly or MeTickly. These are names I just made up, but they would make great venture capital bait if they existed. At these companies one finds rooms full of MIT PhD engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks. At the end of the road of the pursuit of technological sophistication appears to lie a playhouse in which humankind regresses to nursery school. p.182

Labels: book, communication theory, future, gadget, innovation, Jaron Lanier, rhetoric, Social media, social shopping, technology, UX, UXD, virtual reality

"Do you want to talk about strategy or tactics?"

This is how I opened my recent guest lecture to IMC 454 at the Medill at Northwestern University.

This is Robert Mark's graduate school class on "Communication Skills & Persuasive Messages" a course, "designed to improve students’ skills in developing and delivering marketing communications conversations using both traditional and 21st Century social media technologies."

The overwhelming response was these students wanted to talk about strategy. When talking about technology, or marketing, and especially social media, people tend to confuse strategy and tactics all the time. My talk titled, "Drop the Megaphone," didn't give the highlights of the power of Twitter, or 6 steps to building a great Facebook page, we didn't step through process of how to make a viral video. (gack!)

Instead, I focused on what seemed to motivate this audience... so I went right for the wallet. I offered this bit of advice:

Buying attention is expensive. Earning attention is hard.

I asked them, "Which solution do you want to offer employers? Which makes you more valuable? Would you rather be good at something that is expensive to do, or would you like to be good at something that is hard to do? Choose now."

The thesis of my presentation was knowing how to communicate to an audience is important, but it is the ability of a communicator to engage with an audience that really makes for a standout value proposition to an potential employer.

Let's face it, buying the attention of an audience by investing in advertising doesn't prove that you have something to say, it proves that you are capable of writing a check.

I just feel smarter anytime I get to talk about Metcalfe's Law, the work of Shiv Singh (@shivsingh), and Michael Leis (@mleise) all in the same talk.

As is often the case with being in the room with a bunch of smart people, the questions and conversation during and after the lecture were the best part of the experience.

The best part of teaching, is that you often learn something about the subject matter in the process. I love that.

Labels: Business, Communication, Integrated marketing communications, Marketing, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Social media