blackberry vs iphone.

I'm weighing in now; the people who love to argue that the iPhone is overpriced, over-hyped, and inferior to the Blackberries they have been using for the last couple years, are the equivalent of the people who until 2003 or so, would argue that Apple products were overpriced crap, and that Windows was vastly superior, and the far more intelligent choice.

You're confusing familiarity with usability. You're arguing that a cheaper, more limited experience is always better than a more expensive, broader one. And, more than slightly amusing since we're living in the soon-to-be cloud computing age, you're arguing that a full featured, desktop class mobile web browsing environment isn't a game breaker.

We're living in times of change. Microsoft has stopped copying Apple in favour of Nintendo, and the new 'sensible' choice in competition with Apple is RIM's Blackberry.

[N.B. - I am currently less than 24 hours into owning an iPhone. I am reserving the right to revise my impressions if this just turns out to be afterglow.]

ugh.

In the last week, I had a (decidedly positive) change in my employment situation, spent a weekend away with friends, and fell into a pile of new clients this monday.

Expect a post tonight or tomorrow, but sometimes work will crush me.

absurdity is not an argument.

A common mistake in attempts to make a strong political statement, is to drawing a parallel between a commonly held position, and a contradictory position that people will likely react strongly to.

In these two examples, the parallels are between torture as a government sanctioned activity, and torture as a Coney Island attraction, and between the brutal, disturbing murder of a young man on a bus, and the use of animals as food and test subjects.

All I’m going to say is that these ideas only work if the point made falls carefully between two extremes - either people need to generally agree that, despite exaggeration, the points are the same, or people need to be able to justify the comparison made as less directly offensive than the thing you are trying to argue against.

I understand that there is a notable segment of the population that thinks hurting animals is wrong.  But arguing that human life is of the same value as animal life gets people to stop listening to appeals for the animals at all.  

I understand that if people are offended by seeing torture, they should be offended by it being government sanctioned.  But taking a day out with the kids and turning it into some thing mildly traumatizing doesn’t exactly cause a groundswell in support of civil liberties.

If the parallel you are drawing approaches the absurdity than the offensive action that inspired it, you are doing something wrong.  You are doing your argument a disservice.

All attention is good attention, if the only thing you want is attention.  If you want change, you’ll have to do better.

a small note from personal experience.

I meet /  know a lot of people more or less my age who are facing a crisis of identity - i.e., they want to find themselves.

For some reason, this usually manifests itself in wanting to go on an exotic vacation, or move to another country where you don't know anyone, for a little while.

I'm of two minds on this.  My recent, short, wonderful vacation has resulted in my being notably more driven, and having greater focus on how to achieve the things I want.  More or less, being in Jamaica gave me enough distance to evaluate my life without my usual bias.

But I think this was based on my having some clue what I wanted, and being fairly certain who I was.  I'm not sure I would have gotten any closer to a positive outcome if I hadn't known those things.

Where you are is part of who you are.  So, going somewhere else to decide who you are will probably result in, at best, a temporary definition that doesn't fit as well when you get back to real life.

As a round-about way of tying in to the stated purpose of this blog, you don't define a brand by changing everything first, and figuring out what it means second.  Figuring out what a company is, is the same as figuring out who you are - you should do the hard thinking and honest answers part before you get to the radical changes.

Otherwise people will just assume you're trying anything that keeps the hard questions at bay.

the bare minimum is insufficient.

No one is ever going to appreciate a person who just does exactly what they are supposed to do.

I don’t mean to suggest that completing tasks on-time, and competently is inherently insufficient.  I’m just saying that good enough doesn’t really warrant praise.  Praise is for exceeding expectations.

Some people, and many companies, deal with this fact by habitually under-promising, so they can guarantee over-delivering.  This works fine, but has the effect of underwhelming clients during a crucial phase, when you’re still trying to hook them.

The solution I aim for is to use the approach, and the creativity and strategy behind it, as a way of creating the interest, hooking the people I work with, and over-promising without committing to results that aren’t reasonable.

Of course, I will still under-sell the potential results.  The last thing anyone wants is a client expecting a best case scenario, and not getting it.  But if I’m going to impress someone with my pitch, it’s bad strategy to attempt to impress them preemptively with the results, rather than with the ambition and beauty of the strategy.

The more important part, though, is that a strategy or approach that impresses a client is more likely to bring intense work and dedication out of people on the implementation side - you don’t get people to work harder than they intend to by telling them they need to achieve impossible results.  You do it by giving them a process that is interesting enough to care about.

Alternately, you can under-promise, get people to do nothing more than what is expected, and then complain about your reputation, or lack thereof as ‘okay’.

nike+ human race.

Nike’s Human Race is probably the best promotion I’ve heard of this year.  This is fairly unsurprising, considering it’s directly tied to Nike+, a joint product of Nike and Apple, the two greatest media machines in the corporate world.

The premise is dead simple.  You’ve got an army of people, running all over the world, using the Nike+ product to track their progress, training against themselves day after day.  You use the product, and the behaviour they’ve integrated into their daily lives, and you make it a marathon, run individually, tracked over the software.  A global event that has no costs tied directly to the physical event.  Just aggregating the data that’s already being tracked and stored, creating a central side for participants to visit, and donating some of the massive advertising budget to publicize the event.

I personally have only heard about it through local radio, but I don’t see why it would need to be a huge media blitz, considering the only participants are those who already use the Nike+ system, and are therefore accessible through that channel.

This is what the internet is for: taking people from different areas, with different experiences, and reminding them that they are indeed connected.  Attaching that feeling of connectedness with your product, which the consumer has already connected to a physical pursuit, and achievements related to that pursuit, furthers the long, impressive history of Nike crafting itself as something people want to be associated with for competitive, social, and quality reasons.

That, and really, a global crowd-sourced marathon called the Human Race is more or less guaranteed to get my attention.

aggregation does not a destination make.

Interesting observation:

I set up Facebook to import my posts from BrokenGentleman.com as notes.  A post that appeared both on my blog, and tumblr, to no response, got 5 comments within 5 hours on Facebook.

This, oddly enough, got me thinking about FriendFeed.

If a service’s only value as a destination is the ability to import data from multiple places and aggregate the same grouping of data from multiple contacts, then why am I headed there instead of to Facebook, which can do many of the same things (and could do all of them, if Zuckerberg and company saw potential there), while providing an established wealth of value and content of it’s own.

Honestly, if Facebook would let me set it to import more than one blog feed, and expanded importing support to more outside services, I could easily see it becoming even more of a destination than it already is.  If people are already going there to see what is going on in the lives of their associates, why not take advantage of that and put the things you are doing in front of them, whether they are RL or online based.

This is likely one of the posts that is more for me than for anyone else.

upsetting realizations.

I just came to an unappealing realization; all of my more original ideas are about revitalizing or expanding on established brands, ideas, products, etc, rather than breaking new ones into public consciousness.

Obviously, I'm going to need to think on this.

starbucks, personalization, and brand as signal.

Starbucks is, to put it lightly, in a wee bit of trouble.

What they have on their side, is a rabid customer base, who sees the brand as a reflection of their own taste and sophistication.  Lots of people who love starbucks would argue with me about this, but I’d bet the majority of them take some form of pride in being able to order their quad long non-fat venti no-foam caramel macchiato.

Starbucks should draw attention to this type of customer, and this specific skill, in it’s promotions.

A simple idea:

Run a contest inviting customers to submit their own drink modifications, combinations, etc.  The things you can do when you actually know the Starbucks menu and ordering process are pretty interesting.  Let people enter a drink of choice, or if you really want to go overboard, create a Facebook application that makes the ‘signature drink’ a badge on their profile.

Get some big wigs at Starbucks headquarters, or some high profile Starbucks fanatics (there are a lot of them out there) to test out 10 selections, and pick a winner.  Prizes are fairly easy, maybe a trip for 2 to Seattle, your signature drink added to the menu at the Pike Place location for the duration of your trip, and your chosen ‘home’ Starbucks location for a year.

This wouldn’t cost much, but considering the amount of press it could generate based on 1) the number of people addicted to Starbucks in some capacity or another, and 2) the celebrity connection Starbucks has developed, it seems like a solid investment with a probable high return.

The key points here are recognizing the potential for personalization in the brand, and recognizing the need for each location to serve as an anchor point for its customers.  I fully admit that’s why I was at Starbucks last night, and will probably be there tonight.

the integrated content debate.

Over the last month, I've been trying to keep my online writing / outposts / profiles more up to date, and more connected.  This has gone fairly well, as it serves to keep me involved in more of my accounts online, commenting, communicating, writing and linking more.  But I also wonder if the feeling of RSS incest that I get when something particularly vapid travels my watched corner of the blogosphere, is going to start to kick in for the small group of people who follow me, and the even smaller group who follow me on several different networks.

Currently, My tumblr, twitter, and facebook accounts will post links to anything that goes up on broken gent.  Similarly, facebook and broken gent link to all other accounts online of note.  It won't be long until I try to integrate my tumblr feed into my facebook account as well.  I admit I worry that people will think the multiple locations are meaningless if they interconnect too much, but my rationale is this:

Brokengentleman.com is for my theory and experience related to communications.  I use tumblr as a less focused clearing house for what interests me, and brokengent is definitely part of that world, as well.  Facebook is about me in entirety, so I intend to unify my various accounts there as well as I can.  Twitter is really just a collection of status messages, and linking to blog posts there is the same (in my mind) as changing my MSN status to 'New post at brokengentleman.com'.

Is this level of interconnectedness, which will probably only increase, beneficial, or will it only serve to over-saturate my already limited market / audience with the same content.  I can't say yet, but I'll be watching, and probably changing my approach to fit my observations.