iPlot

Intention Economy: Data + Meaning

If you only see one slide show about the State of the Internet in 2009, "Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)" by David Gillespie, an Account Director at Maclaren McCann, Toronto, is a good choice: a mesmerizing 256 slide manifesto on the Intention Economy with Data (as the bank) and Meaning (as the currency).

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)

View more documents from David Gillespie.

Vote for the INDEX: 2009 People's Choice Award

To help expand the global conversation about design to improve life, INDEX:, a global non-profit network organization based in Copenhagen, is partnering with Facebook to promote the online voting for the INDEX: 2009 People's Choice Award and enable an online discussion during the live stream of the awards show on 28 August.

Worldwide voting began online on 20 August through www.designtoimprovelife.dk, and on-site in the Danish capital on 21 August. During the People's Choice competition, everyone can vote for their own personal INDEX: favorite to win the People’s Choice Award. On 28 August at 18:00 GMT, INDEX: will be using Facebook technologies to let visitors watch the awards show on a live stream from the Danish National Broadcasting Center. Remote viewers will also be able to chat with their friends on Facebook while watching the award ceremony.

The winner of the People's Choice Award will be announced at the INDEX: Award Ceremony on 28 August, along with the juried winners of the INDEX:Award 2009. The winner of the People's Choice Award 2009 will receive "The Egg," a chair designed by famous Danish designer Arne Jacobsen in 1958 for the Radisson SAS hotel in Copenhagen. All 69 design finalists will be on public view at the INDEX: Award Exhibition, as well as on the INDEX: website.

Among the INDEX: finalists and candidates for the People’s Choice Award is frog design’s Project Masiluleke – a HIV Self-Test Kit that combines existing, low-cost diagnostic technologies with mobile support services.

To make your vote, visit: www.designtoimprovelife.dk

next09: From Google Economy to Twitter Economy

I'm still processing the many great insights from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums and one that stands out from the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international participants, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees consisted of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

Jeff Jarvis: "The Great Restructuring"

The first day, the keynote day, was a little disappointing, maybe because expectations were so high. Jeff Jarvis warmed up the crowd with his trademark "What Would Google Do?" Powerpoint deck. While a terrific thinker and speaker, for some reason he and the audience did not really click although he presented a lot of thought-provoking content. The rather stiff response may be attributed to the fact that the attendees were either too familiar with what they heard or felt slightly overwhelmed. Or maybe they were indeed excited - but too German to show it…

Umair Haque, who followed Jarvis, faced an even tougher, albeit partly self-inflicted challenge: explaining the new paradigm of "Constructive Capitalism" in 45 minutes. That's like asking Marx to walk you through his Communist Manifesto in a Twitter chat. It didn't help, certainly, that Haque used the much gushed-about Prezi presentation software; all the zooming in and out was dizzying and, if anything, exposed the lack of stringency in his outline.

Fortunately, Haque had an opportunity to correct this first impression and reiterate some of his thoughts on a panel with Jarvis a day later, which turned out to be a much more suitable format for his ideas on the transformation of capitalism. He also took the occasion to rebut the attacks of Andrew Keen ("The Cult of the Amateur"), who, on the opening day, had chastised Haque (and all the other thinkers he considers to be under the dark influence of Silicon Valley) for propagating rampant free market liberalism and a dangerous new radical individualism in the guise of the social, consumer-empowered share economy that the conference was celebrating. Keen poignantly remarked that Twitter was getting us back into the 18th century: rather than liberating us from institutional hierarchies, it would reinforce an old power structure and an all too human division of roles: between those who follow and those followed.

Andrew Keen: "Digital Vertigo"

Jeff Jarvis & Umair Haque: "When Money Talks"

Keen accused Haque et al of naïveté and insisted that Google and the other web juggernauts were not "leveling the playing field" through link love (by sharing the scarcest resource on the web: attention), as Haque had claimed, but were rather using it to expand their pursuit of world dominance. In Keen's eyes, Google's openness is nothing but a suave mechanism to foment a monopoly in the attention markets. In the same vein, a party pooper in the audience asked Jarvis: "If free sharing is the future of business, why doesn't Google share its page rank algorithm?" Jarvis' response wasn't all too convincing: concerns over malicious abuse of the data. Hmm. So much for radical transparency and trust as overriding principles in the share economy.

To Google's (and Jarvis') defense, one could counter with Haque's sharp line: "When we're all hyper-connected, the cost of evil goes up." True. Moreover, Google does provide real value as it has created a win-win-win business model (advertisers, consumers, Google) that is vastly different from the toxic chunk Haque bemoaned in the non-sustainable and ultimately value-free products that toppled capitalism as we knew it: the Hummer, fast food, derivatives, etc. And yet, if advertising is the admission that you have a mediocre product, and that it is in fact an expression of "failure," as Jarvis put it, then it is hard to reconcile this view with the fact that advertising remains the main revenue stream in the very Google economy from which Jarvis wants us all to learn.

Despite the flaws in Jarvis' and Haque's thinking, however, I am eager to defend them. It's easy to deconstruct constructive visions of the future as ill-informed descriptions of present realities but it is a much bigger task to actually come up with a positive vision. Keen, the rebel with a good cause, does nothing but throwing a bomb, which he readily admits, but he falls short of offering an alternative to the frameworks Jarvis and Haque and others provide in response to the fundamental crisis of capitalism.

Google wouldn't care about any of this intellectual arm-wrestling all that much. It is fully consumed with doing what it does best: firing out beta-products and services, successfully failing by failing rapidly. One mistake that it made, however, may arguably have lasting implications. It didn't buy Twitter. And so the question, it seems, is no longer "What would Google do?" but "What will Twitter do?" Does Twitter mark the beginning of the end of the Google economy?

Jyri Engeström, who sold Twitter-competitor Jaiku to Google and is now a Google employee, might have a clue. On a panel with social media guru Chris Messina he offered some good insights on micro-blogging trends on the web and defended the new Google Profiles ("you have to opt in"). Messina seconded him and brought up another interesting point that established the context for upcoming business models in the Twitter economy: the "glocalization" of Twitter. He described how Twitter is failing to extend the real-time conversation to the whole world, simply because of time zone differences: one part of the world is always sleeping when you're tweeting. The instant social web conversation is therefore asynchronous, after all, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envision services that bridge the time zone gap and deliver tweets when the recipients can actually receive them (keeping them on the top of the feed), almost like an echo across time zones. What if the real value of real-time was the delivery of tweets when it really mattered?

The whole time dimension of Twitter is uncharted but valuable territory, and there are other add-ins, integrators, and localization services that will emerge in this vibrant new ecosystem. The conversation on the social web is as rich as the human communication (if not richer), and it is just beginning to fully emerge.

What everyone agreed on at next09 is that the next big frontier on the web (and in the Twitter economy) is how businesses talk to their customers. We are witnessing an irrevocable convergence of players. Conversational services such as Twitter and Yammer are moving into the social networking space and are acquiring the credentials of social networks and collaboration tools, while traditional social networking sites such as XING, LinkedIn or Facebook are embedding conversational features to catch up with the irresistible pull of real-time communication.

For both groups, and in fact for all other companies, Umair Haque's advice is golden: Take one of the big ideals (democracy, peace, transparency, equality, etc.) and apply it to an ailing industry that is in need of transformation or at least some serious disruption: healthcare, finance, news, energy, government – you name it. Combine that with the principles of the Twitter economy – transparency, instantification, collaboration, and free sharing – and you have a winner.

Top Social Brands 2008

The question which brands are the best at “socializing” with their audiences is often asked, but rarely answered. Now Vitrue, a social media advertising solutions company, has attempted to capture a snapshot by releasing a Top Social Brands of 2008 list. The ranking is based on the Social Media Index (SMI), a measurement system the company launched to help track brands' share of voice on the social web. The Top 100, which range from the iPhone, CNN, and Disney at the top of the list, to Jet Blue, Puma, and Sears at the bottom of the list, were drawn from Vitrue's daily analysis of online conversations about more than 2,000 popular brands in blogs, social networks, microblogging services, and photo and video-sharing sites.

Strikingly missing is the Obama brand, arguably the most social brand in 2008, and there are other shortcomings. Vitrue’s press release states that some powerhouse technology brands were omitted from the list “as they provide the backbone of many social networks. While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.” You could argue, of course, that this distinction is rather arbitrary as the lines between technology and content are somewhat blurry and will continue to dissolve. Just take the iPhone as an example – it provides social technology, per Vitrue’s definition, but also uses it to socialize its own brand. The same applies to Amazon, CNN, the New York Times, and all other brands that constitute either latent or manifest social networks online.

Another pitfall is the narrow focus on volume and the lack of analysis as to what makes brands score higher. A high score may not always be attributed to an effective social web strategy. Brands may simply top the list because their sales have been successful and they are therefore much talked about (or, conversely, everyone’s talking about them because their sales are tanking). There is no metric for measuring if the conversations were largely positive, negative, or highly contested. As one commenter on Vitrue's blog poignantly remarks: “Looking at brands as something capturing share of voice online, without understanding the drivers of said volume, is kind of like looking at shadows on the cave wall and mistaking them for the truth?”

In any case, Vitrue’s list has started an interesting conversation and helped socialize its own brand.

Press Release: Announcing The Vitrue 100

Advertising Age: The Most Social Brands of 2008

The Art of Life in the Age of Digital Reproduction

While not a member of the Net Generation (the 88 million Millennials for whom social networking is a birthright) myself, I have many friends and co-workers who qualify, and I am constantly baffled by their ease and eagerness to narrow- and broadcast their lives through digital media in post-privacy openness. The audience size doesn't matter, it can be narrow or broad, but cast it must be, even if it is often mundane. And yet, it is one of the ironies of such "ego-casting" that the status updates, which become critical life signs, the activity metrics of one's public life, do not begin with "I" but mostly appear in third person on Facebook and Twitter and the likes. This is because all these outlets treat the amateur publisher as a dramatic person per se: "Anthony is happy." – "Tim is working on an economic stimulus plan." – "Sarah loves Tea Leaf Green." When the Net Geners aggregate their social media publishing output into one FriendFeed, the effect becomes fully obvious: here we have the constant flux, the permanent Now as manifest and yet as fragmented as it can be. "It ain't why, why, why, it just is," Van Morrison sang, and another famous Irish artist, James Joyce, based on the concluding free-flow monologue of his Ulysses, would probably agree with the inevitability of "the river of life" as a never-ending "stream of consciousness" that affirms nothing but the fact that one is alive: "Yes."

For the Net Geners, the stories of their lives become more important than the lives lived. It is not the experience itself, it is what they can tweet, blog, Flickr about it. An event has not happened if it is not being shared. The narrative of life is the narrative of life. Life is an ongoing drama that must be dramatized. Engagements announcements via Facebook relationship status changes, travel itineraries via Dopplr, rants via blogs, moods and emotions via Twitter, instant gratification via GPS apps – or all of that cross-posted and mutually amplified across different locations and time zones, onto desktop and handheld. The seamless and fully immersive conversation is an imminent act of self-branding – what you click is what you get.

A few months ago, Emily Gould, who had made herself a name as Digital Demise Cassandra with her exhibitionist account of web exhibitionism in the New York Times Magazine ("Exposed"), wrote a piece for Technology Review in which she sought to contrast new media author Clay Shirky with Walter Benjamin, two brilliant thinkers from different generations: a daunting task because the relationship is "complicated," as both of them would state on their respective Facebook pages. Gould used the bold juxtaposition to depict a fairly pessimistic picture of the Net Geners as a cohort of hyper-connected individuals who are ultimately blogging alone. In her eyes, Shirky is an Internet triumphalist who is far too optimistic about the social web's implications on our social lives: "You get the sense […] that he's somehow managed to avoid walking down any dark alleys, or staring too long at any piles of fetid garbage"

Tellingly, she finds Benjamin's seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in 1936, much more relevant for the assessment of today's "new age of technological reproducibility." Benjamin writes: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. […] One might subsume the eliminated element in the term 'aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." Gould concludes that "Maybe, in the same way that Benjamin says the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ('Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!'), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on – talking, being introduced to new people by friends – are threatened."

She misses the point though. While Benjamin rightly observed that the mechanical reproduction of a piece of art may lead to the decline of its 'aura,' the mechanisms of the social web propel the exact opposite: they grant a 24/7 continuum of time and space, an ever-lasting, ubiquitous (tele)presence that has perfected our ability to constantly produce 'aura' rather than destroying it. The web has democratized content, and art has made way for the art of life. When the Net Geners spill their beans through digital means, they are all about 'aura:' the allure of a life told in real-time, as a highly interactive application that turns all input instantly into output and renders the actual obsolete in favor of the staged, eventized, and narrated. Someone once said the US went directly from barbary to decadence without civilization. Similarly, one could say that the Net Geners go from experience directly to expression without reflection – it is indeed a read/write web. Context trumps content, and the appeal of social trumps everything.

Is that a negative? Who knows. What's certain is that Twitter, Facebook, and et al have inexorably altered the culture of human interaction. It will take future generations to craft a fair judgment – and ultimately, it may not even matter. In the meantime, it is helpful to assume that "Everything Bad Is Good for You" (Steven B. Johnson). Progress has no rear view mirror, and chances are you have no choice. If you want to have a life in this new "Age of Digital Reproduction," you better get your own social media platform in place.

Trends for 2009: Radical Transparency

Now that Barack Obama has appointed YouTube as his “Secretary of Video,” as CNET comments, it raises the question what does Generation O’s new transparency mean for businesses?

At first sight, well, it means danger. The airlines British Airways (BA) and Virgin Atlantic recently experienced that first hand. The Economist reports that several crew members were fired after making derogatory comments on the airlines’ Facebook forums about safety standards and passengers. The staff gushed about cockroaches on board the planes and shared other juicy details that -- if true -- were less than flattering for their employers. Public relations experts such as Aedhmar Hynes from Text 100 were quick to point out (in the Economist article) that online transparency can only be as radical as its regulation is regimented and that employee empowerment needs to go hand in hand with employee education.

Yet Hymes’ recommendation sounds like radical transparency that is not quite so radical, and may run counter to the very notion of transparency. Moderated radical transparency, so to speak, is as oxymoronic as, say, risk-averse hedge funds. So does this episode mark the beginning of the end of radical transparency? Not so fast. It’s all a matter of managing expectations. For starters, it is worth acknowledging that radical transparency can have radical implications. In fact, collateral damage should almost always be assumed; it is part of the game. If you’re not willing to take that risk, don’t take it! But note that in most cases (unless you’re a military defense contractor, the CIA, or another organization that needs to respect strict legal requirements), your customers may then assume you have something to hide. And, if you’re perfectly honest, that’s probably the case, no?

Airlines and other travel industry companies are especially vulnerable when it comes to bad PR because the perception of their service is so critical. Customer expectations are high, and every little interaction -- and there are hundreds of thousands every day -- is closely scrutinized. See Untied, the customer forum for rants about United. Airlines are also impacted by variables that are often beyond their control, at least partly. Remember JetBlue’s winter storm fiasco in 2007? The brouhaha around BA’s and Virgin Atlantic’s Facebook woes does not make for a case against radical transparency; rather it highlights an inconvenient truth: airlines – as well as the majority of service brands – are radically transparent by the very nature of their business.

If flight attendants complain about unpleasant passengers, then it reveals a bigger issue at stake that transcends the sole PR dimension: Radical transparency may bring out the skeletons in your closet. If the bond between your customers and your brand is just a bit flawed, you’re not only facing a PR issue, you’re facing a fundamental issue at the very foundation of your brand promise that can severely threaten your business. Staff members who think not so highly about their customers are the problem, not the fact that they are sharing their opinions on Facebook. BA and Virgin Atlantic did the right thing, and it was not a “fiasco,” as the Economist labeled it, but rather a cleaning of the system. Exposing black sheep among your personnel may hurt in the short term but can serve as a real benefit to your brand in the long term. When your business is in the service industry, those ticking reputation bombs need to be dealt with anyway. Promoting transparency is a valuable concept to preempt them and, well, promote the truth. It will come out anyway, sooner or later. And then radical transparency is not a strategy but the only real option left.

All that being said, reputation protection is only one side of the equation, and it is the defensive one. As much as radical transparency can underscore that you have nothing to hide, it can also highlight that you have a lot to show. In this respect, it presents a huge opportunity for marketers. Dave Balter, founder and CEO of the word-of-mouth marketing firm Bzz Agent, made a compelling case for corporate transparency in a recent interview with the Harvard Business Review: “(…) Companies put rules into place to hide their ideas. They think the rules give them control over people and markets. But that’s totally untrue today. There are so many communication routes that you can’t possibly control the information flowing through them. Furthermore, attempts at secrecy prevent the company from making use of those information flows. You can’t always foresee the benefits of letting ideas out into the world, but they often far outweigh any harm that may result.”

Indeed, in the brave new world of always-on social media, companies may need to share everything about their business, including complaints, profit margins on particular products, and specific corporate strategies. And they may increasingly turn to proprietary channels to do so, bypassing traditional media and becoming media companies themselves. Add to that the fact that customers “own” and manage brands and not companies, and it is time for a fundamentally new concept of “brand presence.” Proactive radical transparency can not only become the mandatory platform for authentic, trust-building interactions with all stakeholders (or “brandholders”) but also open a new avenue for marketers who understand that effective marketing needs to be conversational and open-sourced.

So, here’s an audacious future vision of what radical transparency in corporate communications could look like. Taking social instant messaging one step further than existing formats (such as the micro-blogging service Yammer that applies the Twitter model to the enterprise -- “what are you working on”?), companies could make their live email correspondence public. Let’s call it Reality Email. An open and interactive email feed may propel knowledge-sharing and collaboration but also an ongoing conversation that customers, partners, and media worldwide can join. Remember the “Cluetrain Manifesto”? “Markets are conversations” -- and so are organizations and brands. Reality Email would take this literally literal. Companies “going public” with live-email might create a powerful new marketing broadcasting channel for brand-building in the new age of radical transparency. Does this sound radical? Perhaps. Will it happen? You bet.

The Marketing of a President

Now that we have a President-elect Obama, it’s time to reflect on how this was possible. The web is full of thoughtful analyses that examine Obama’s victory as one made possible through state-of-the-art marketing -- from Tomi T. Ahonen’s “For a We species, a We president: Yes we can,” to John Quech’s “How Better Marketing Elected Barack Obama” in Harvard Business Online, to Seth Godin’s "Marketing Lessons from the US Election," to the NY Times and, of course, the all-inclusive, behind-the-scenes “How He Did” it account in Newsweek.

Yet Obama’s victory is not only a victory through marketing, it is also a victory for marketing, for the profession as a whole. It restored America’s political capital but also America’s reputation as the spiritual home of marketing. It proved all those wrong who asserted the end of American brands and branding in general, and it has given more ammunition to marketers who passionately believe that smart marketing can indeed change the world. And so it goes that I am not only a happy American this week but also a happy marketer.

Every history of marketing must also be a history of America – see the TV-series Mad Men – and one might even posit that America’s history is a history of marketing. Seth Godin describes it this way: “The lesson that society should take away about all marketing is a simple one. When you buy a product, you're also buying the marketing. Buy something from a phone telemarketer, you get more phone telemarketers, guaranteed. Buy a gas guzzler and they'll build more. Marketers are simple people... they make what sells. Our culture has purchased (and voted) itself into the place we are today.” Arthur Miller put this more optimistically when he said: “America’s biggest value is its promise.” The same can be said about marketing.

The Obama campaign leveraged its promise with maximum effect: “Change we can believe in” is the motto of each and every transaction between a brand and its consumers. Buying or buying in always implies the expectation of a positive change -- a change in someone’s well-being, household, and financial situation or at any other levels of Maslow’s pyramid. But with “Change” as the ultimate promise and “Hope” as the ultimate motivation, the Obama campaign didn’t just generate leads, it created believers. The seven million names on its lists (email addresses, mobile phone numbers, Facebook and MySpace pages) represent a staggering 11 percent of the approximately 64 million votes the President-elect received. The loyalty of these supporters is of long-term value. Tomi T. Ahonen writes: “The Obama presidency can continue to engage with this active part of his core supporters, return to them at the re-election bid, and even use this support base to help in the elections of his successor in 2016 (assuming Obama is re-elected in 2012).” And in fact, Obama and team are not wasting any time and launched a new site, change.gov, right after the election to keep in touch with existing and new supporters during the transition.

All of this illustrates the power of community and provides further evidence that identity trumps utility. A great brand is one that diverts attention away from itself and towards an even greater purpose. That’s exactly what Obama did for the Generation O, which was in it to make history and be part of a movement, a new "we species” with Obama as its first we president.” Combine this political tribalism with an unprecedented level of open-sourced participation, and you have a powerful collaborative platform that outperforms that of any opponent. Obama won because his supporters were more passionate, more dedicated, and more engaged. And it didn’t hurt that he was a candidate they loved.

But what makes the Obama campaign truly unique is how it complemented its open community nature with remarkable on-message rigor. While large components of the action were decentralized, the campaign headquarters provided the central discipline needed to align them when necessary. For the most part it was not, and it felt as if an unwritten code, an impressive self-discipline had ensured notable collective focus and the absence of any drama on the trail.

This “Disciplined Decentralism,” as you might call it, is the major takeaway for marketers from the election. It was the foundation of a nationwide (and even global, if you consider the “moral” vote from non US-citizens around the world) campaign that became the first in an age of audience fragmentation to succeed in not only raising maximum awareness for a hitherto unknown brand, but also bringing about radical behavioral change. It has restored the American soft power overnight, as Joseph Nye noted, and it has also rebuilt marketer confidence. Can we marketers orchestrate social media, amateur content, and crowdsourced platforms with utmost message discipline on a large scale? Yes, we can. Can we reconcile authenticity and consistency? Yes, we can. Can we combine traditional broadcasting ads with low-fi video clips without diluting the message? Yes we can. Can we be our own media channel and bypass media without alienating them? Yes we can. Can we design campaigns that cultivate the small in the big and the big in the small, in other words, campaigns that use direct marketing (phonebanking, fundraising) but use them bottom-up and not top-down? Yes we can. Can we be hyper-targeted and still be inclusive and reach out to everyone? Yes we can.

Obama has radically altered the marketing playbook, and the astonishing rise of the brand Obama is a template for all marketers from this point on: Weaving together data and human intelligence, collective wisdom and individual charisma, strategic calculus and enthusiasm, the Obama campaign has reestablished marketing as marketing for the people, with the people, and by the people. When charismatic leadership meets organizational prowess meets community, the result is marketing that is truly presidential.

Facebook in Reality

Hat tip to Sara Munday who pointed me to the "Facebook in Reality" video she came across at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam. It's from a sketch comedy troupe called Idiots of Ants and a brilliant spoof on the notion of "radical transparency." The original Facebook, meanwhile, is suing the German StudiVZ, a social networking site for students, for taking a leaf or two from Facebook. Oh well...

Tough Times for "Tradigitalists"

David Armano argues that "Digital Marketing Needs a Reboot." Read this excerpt from his recent contribution to Ad Age, Digital Next:

"Old habits die hard. While consumers are out there spending countless hours on social networks, file sharing applications, chat, community sites, buying stuff, selling stuff and using multiple devices, some of us tradigital old fogies are still reaching for our beloved toolbox of the past in the hopes of getting their attention. While online user behavior tells us that people respond well to simplicity, we labor to create complexity in the form of experimental navigation and sites that take forever to load. When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our TV spots on them or -- better yet -- creating spots that looked like they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action happens in the comments. Have we thought about talking back to people or are we really just interested in telling our stories?"

For Facebook, Silence is Golden

I thought today that it got somewhat quiet around Facebook lately. There have not been any new features presented in a while now (at least not with much fanfare), and I'm starting to wonder if this silence is deliberate.

The company has almost constantly been in the headlines for months, at the peak of the hype and then with its Beacon disaster (not to mention the notorious SXSW interview with Mark Zuckerberg), which seems to make the self-imposed news moratorium a smart strategic move that calms the waters and gives the organization some more focus for the challenges ahead. Zuckerberg and Co. may have realized that the hectic, hyperactive PR pushes weren't all that helpful, and that sometimes no news is good news for a young brand that wants to grow up.