iPlot

Power to Prezi!

Is it a presentation tool? Or a visual storytelling tool? Visualization software? Or a zooming editor? Budapest-based Adam Somlei-Fischer, founder and lead designer of Prezi, and Peter Halacsy, founder and CTO of Prezi, were interested in soliciting feedback on their product’s category when they visited frog design’s San Francisco studio last week and demoed their tool. Having marketed mind-mapping software previously in my career, I felt sympathetic: At the time, we went through a similar exercise, and after endless discussions and focus groups we ended up with a label only a committee could come up with: “enterprise productivity software.” Yawn. One must not be concerned that the Prezi guys will get trapped by the lowest common denominator – they’re too smart, too opinionated, and too small (ten people).

Suppose, though, Prezi is a presentation tool – as the name (and Techcrunch’s praise: “the coolest online presentation tool”) may well imply – then of course it faces a mighty contender: PowerPoint is the dinosaur in the room. Microsoft's program has been around for 25 years, and by some estimates 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created every day. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any major company that completely foregoes using it, despite its disputed benefits and “Death by PowerPoint” claims that accuse the software of being an all-too-convenient prop for poor speakers. Edward Tufte, one of the most vocal PowerPoint critics, in a famously agitated essay (“The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”) even drew a causal relationship between NASA’s PowerPoint slides and the Challenger crash in 1986.

For PowerPoint haters, Prezi surely offers hope. Unlike Keynote, which is highly popular among designers because it offers higher visual fidelity and a better user experience, Prezi differs radically from PowerPoint in that it requires an alternative mental model: Information is displayed in a non-linear fashion. That’s also true for mind-mapping, but Prezi offers additional linear paths, knowing that “time is linear” when you present, as Adam Somlai-Fischer put it. Users can jump in and out of these paths and are thus given enormous flexibility in storing and presenting information.

This very flexibility, however, presents a serious adoption barrier: Many first-time users, as the two Prezi founders would readily admit, struggle with the challenge of filling a “blank canvas,” as they can become overwhelmed by the freedom (and pressure) created by a level of user empowerment they’re not used to within the strict confines of PowerPoint templates. Prezi is asking you to literally think outside the box, but there is a real danger that the brilliance of the tool can get in the way of your content. I saw several conference speakers rely on Prezi this year, and while some of them used it so masterfully that I didn’t even notice the software, some were deliriously inundated by Prezi’s rich possibilities and went gaga with dizzying “jump cuts” from topic to topic, disrupting their presentation and confusing the audience. At the end of the day, you still have a story to tell, and Prezi’s simple way of putting information anywhere you like can ironically lead to the very information overload it aims to avoid – it is just too tempting to create mega-maps and add more and more data to them. But that’s just a minor concern, and some training and (self-imposed content discipline) will make you easily forget about PowerPoint.

Prezi has a lot going for it. Backed by TED and solid VC-funding, with a soon-to-open new office in San Francisco, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey as advisor, and a ton of media buzz, the company is poised to aggressively grow adoption in the mainstream corporate world. Power to Prezi!

http://www.prezi.com

Learn Prezi in five minutes

Another Bubble?

All Fake? Some Lessons about Morality and Viral Marketing

There is some brouhaha over a guest blog post on Techcrunch in which Dan Ackerman Greenberg, who bills himself as the co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group, reveals "The Secret Strategies Behind Many 'Viral' Videos." The article provides an honest view on the dishonest practices of clandestine marketing campaigns on YouTube, run by Greenberg and other firms to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral.

Greenberg's strategies of "YouTube optimization" include the use of misleading tags, fake comments (preferably those that stir up some artificial controversy), paying bloggers to embed the video, as well as aggressively sharing it through Facebook networks and email lists. In a nutshell: fire on all cylinders, even if that means deceiving users.

Greenberg's look behind the scenes of YouTube marketing has immediately led to a wide moral outcry among Techcrunch’s readers ("basically it's all about using various forms of spam? Classy. What next, an article on how to make money from stock market scams and flogging dodgy pills?"), including Greenberg's father and Techcrunch's very own Michael Arrington ("I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this").

As of this writing, the post has provoked more than 350 comments but Arrington's "longer response" is still due. The obvious editorial cluelessness is not the only irony in this little affair: Greenberg's post itself has become viral and is now on the homepage of Digg. While some commenters view this as evidence that the guy obviously knows what he's talking about, others suspect the controversy has been a calculated effect to forge the viral spread of his post. In fact, some commenters speculate that the whole affair may be fake, designed as a live experiment on viral marketing (if you look at Greenberg's firm's web site, you hope they are right).

Or maybe it is because the content is actually pretty interesting and a lot of marketers are taking notes?

In any event, the dispute is another one of these fundamental clashes between idealists and pragmatists (who always run the risk to be called "cynics"), and it is a particularly odd one because you could argue that a marketing idealist is actually a category error. No one will question that morality has its place in marketing, but to expect marketers to not manipulate their communications is a little bit naïve. We're not talking about investigative journalists here; we're talking about people who are paid to move products through entertainment and information. Persuasion is still at the core of the marketer's profession (even if you don't buy into all of the techniques described in Cialdini's classic "Influence - the Psychology of Persuasion"). In today's world of online social media, moral standards of the past are continuously eroding, not just because of clever and shameless marketers like Greenberg but also because of the big network players such as Facebook and YouTube, which have given marketers the kind of viral leverage they need. Can you really expect businesses to not take advantage of the system? Isn’t search engine optimization essentially manipulation as well?

Granted, for some observers Greenberg may be crossing a line with his dubious practice of contrived user-generated content; and yet, others will just call it "guerilla marketing." Everyone can decide for himself if s/he wants to work with this guy. But neither Greenberg nor Techcrunch should be blamed for having initiated this discussion. It just shows that the new brave world of social media is shaking up the foundations of our ethical beliefs, and that they will need to be redefined if they are to last.