Friday, December 20, 2013

Living IN the moment, but not living THE moment

As you've likely heard, "Selfie" is the word of the year according to Oxford dictionary. Even Darth Vader got in on it. Let's set aside whether you think Selfie really is the word of the year and think for a moment what the idea tells us about ourselves.

Above all, the popularity of the selfie tells me that people want to take a moment from what they're doing and take a photo to remember the occassion. Well, ideally, that's what it means. But more and more, it seems like it's done just to step outside of whatever is going on at the moment to show other people who awesome it is.

My friend Damon Brown has actually written a Ted Book on the idea that documenting everything moment like this actually prevents you from living the moment. And, to a certain degree, I think many people do exactly this. His book is called Our Virtual Shadow, you should certainly check it out.

Earlier this year, I read a popular book called The Circle, by Dave Eggers which takes the idea of sharing everything to the nth degree. You should NOT check it out since I think it's a pretty ridiculous book as my review on Goodreads pretty well summarizes :)

So let me get to the another point in the spectrum where I think many people are, and I try as much to be. It's the place where you enjoy the moment you're in, but also try to record something for future remembrance. In "Note to Selfie", there's an honest take about stepping outside of the moment to capture something which actually let's you re-live the moment in the future. The author, John Dickerson, shares a photo of his kids looking at fireworks and how this photo actually helps them recall the surprise they had while watching them. I've actually got a similar photo of my daughter pointing at Juky 4th fireworks while my father is holding her. I'm sure we've all got lots of photos like that. Moments we look back on that allow us to re-live the emotions. We can appreciate those times even more with simple photos like that.

But as we shift to a world where everything we need can be done with a little device in our pocket, we're seeing a whole spectrum of usage. From the obsessed selfie queen, to the person who can barely take a clear photo with their phone. I tend to agree with Dickerson...That person who's obsessed with checking in every where they go, taking a selfie at every turn, and posting mundane statuses on Facebook? That same person would probably do similarly self-centered and annoying things without a smartphone.

The thing is though that our phones enable us to do all this sort of stuff with such little effort that unless we check ourselves, we'll go overboard. And that's exactly what Brown is getting at. There's definitely a happy medium. I try to stay the middle ground, but I sway too far to the over-usage category many times.

Since it's nearing year-end, now's as good a time as any to look back on what moments you've captured through the year. Every service seems to have a way to loo back on your year so check them out. How many of those statuses would you remove? Take a look at the photos you took on your phone. How many are really moments you care about? If you feel like you way over-shared on facebook, twitter, etc, then chill out next year. If you can hardly find memorable photos on your phone, then take fewer next year.

Just because your phone's in your pocket doesn't mean you've gotta take it out every time you're heading out the door, sitting down to eat, or watching a killer sunset.



Friday, December 13, 2013

Breaking the business - Beyoncé style


If you're on the internet, then you must have heard by now that Beyoncé released a new album on iTunes last night without any prior notice or inklings that she's even working on an album. Yeah, the internets were shooken last night so much that even BuzzFeed had to put together a list:
The Best Of The Internet’s Reaction To Beyoncé’s New Album
This article actually does a good job at explaining how this surprise album drop changes things from a cultural & business perspective:
Beyonce Broke the Music Business
However, I don't exactly agree that this destroys the music industry. Afterall, this album is still relased by a major label and there's tons of production that went into the music, video, etc. If anything, I think it validates what major labels can do in terms of production, packaging, etc. However, this does totally break the music marketing business. The article above describes some of what goes into marketing an album and judging by the fact that nobody knew this was coming, including radio stations, etc, the traditional marketing channels used to hype up a new release were definitely thrown to the side.

I think what this means, as the article alludes to, is that other major artists can really break the mold and get away from all of the steps usually taken before an album is released. This takes the idea of artists (and brands) directly connecting with their fans and takes it one step further...not only are they directly broadcasting their personal photos and activities on social media, they're directly delivering their product (music) to fans. They get to listen to it on their own and select the songs they like. They're not getting the biased takes of music marketing which selects the single and pushes it through Top 40 radio.

What Beyoncé is not as extreme as what some other artists like Coldplay and Nine Inch Nails have done since you can't just decide what to pay...you've gotta pay $15.99. It's also not as direct as what Louis CK and Aziz Ansari did when they released their stand-up acts for purchase directly from their own websites....you've still gotta go through iTunes for Beyoncé's release. However, I think this may be an appropriate channel. It definitely cuts out a lot of the middle-men, but artists can still rely on their labels for production work and the actual sales. None of it will ever come with the sort of surprise that Beyoncé hit the internet with last night, but artists will definitely be changing their business tunes very soon.


Monday, December 09, 2013

More on Brand Engagement

Just quick post about a topic I've written about quite a few times.

Instagram is the ‘best platform for brands’ in 2013, beating out Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
When Instagram announced sponsored posts, I suggested that it might work out really well as long as the brands fit well into the overall esthetic of Instagram.

This report shows, that even if it's not an ad, there's a lot to be said about how people interact with brands on Instagram. I don't know that it's strictly because instagram forces more simple, visual messages, but I do think photos have a much bigger impact than words especially when they take up 80% of your mobile phone screen. I believe twitter sees this with them recent changes to auto-display photos in the stream. Facebook has long seen this with utilizing bigger photos. Heck, even Medium just announced changes including a much more visual interface. It'll be interesting to see how the various social media sites adjust their visual impressions and how brands will leverage these abilities to connect to and engagement with their customers and fans.