Open up your mind and say, ahh...

There’s a marketing principle called “the paradox of choice.” Essentially, more than 2 choices means people will be more inclined to do nothing. We do great with “this or that,” but not great with “here are five options.” Sure, we can do it, but it’s not a native mental process.

Your email signature, more often than not, has grown. It looks like this:

Jennifer McSomebodyImportant
Director, Really Important Projects With Names That Don’t Make Sense
51 Brilliant Drive #808
GorgeousCity, XX 93100
Office: 814.555.0181
Cell: 814.222.1148
Phone Near the Bathroom: 814.202.2222
jennifer.mcsomebodyimportant@us-bigcompany.com

http://bigcompany.com

Check out our blog! http://bigcompany.com/blog

And then the social links:

Okay, Now What?

You did it because you wanted to show that you were very accessible. What you’ve told your receiver, however, doesn’t translate well. It most definitely doesn’t tell them how you prefer to be reached. It also is a lot to absorb, and so people tend to discard what they can’t absorb.

So, maybe pick 2, 3 at the most:

Physical address, if that matters.
Phone or email.
One social network.

And that’s about it.

Why? Again, we’re looking to eliminate a choice problem. Make it super streamlined.

Try it. You’ll appreciate the difference. More importantly, your customers will.

The Boston Celtics know how to win. And while the team is now preparing for the next NBA season, Peter Stringer, Senior Director of Interactive Media is on the court every day. With 6.5 million fans on Facebook and 600k followers on Twitter, Peter’s work is just getting started. Serving customers in today’s hottest networks is one thing. Catering to a worldwide community of rabid sports fans requires in a series always-on digital arenas takes a different level of engagement altogether.

As part of an ongoing series that celebrates the experiences, vision, and strategy of those leading transformation, Peter shares with us how the Celtics approach social and digital strategies to compete for attention and affinity before, during and after each season.

What is the prevailing mission and purpose for the Boston Celtic’s social media strategy?

Fans have an insatiable appetite for news, information and inside access to the team, and we try to provide that across as many platforms as possible where we’ve established an audience. For the Boston Celtics, that currently means Celtics.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. If our fans are congregating on these platforms and discussing our team, we want to be the dominant voice in that conversation.

From a business standpoint, we want to learn as much about our fan base as possible, and turn those passionate fans into customers. To achieve that, we are actively collecting data from them in exchange for opportunities to win tickets, merchandise and unique Celtics experiences. We want to know where they live, what other brands they like, if they already buy tickets, etc. We have a product that our fans are incredibly passionate about, and therefore, they’re willing to make that value exchange.

What are some of the unique challenges you face as a sports franchise?

Social media and sports dovetail very nicely, so in some ways my job is actually easy. But the challenges I face are much more practical in nature. For instance, when you’ve got a massive audience like we do, you can’t afford to make a mistake. That toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube. You want to be sure that the message you send out is on brand, not only from a marketing perspective, but also from a basketball operations perspective.

I take great care in managing our social media properties to be sure that they reflect our team and brand in the right way. The Boston Celtics have a reputation built on 17 championships and 60 years of history. I don’t want to tarnish that with one poor tweet that doesn’t hit the mark or sends the wrong message. It can be tempting to try to be funny, sarcastic, or irreverent, but risk usually far outweighs the reward.

Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but that’s the lens through which I see our social channels. I look at every tweet, Facebook post and Instagram photo as an official statement from the Boston Celtics. And at the end of the day, the social media channels should reflect the team’s brand as a whole, and not attempt to create it’s own identity. After all, our product is our players, head coach, and the team’s incredible legacy. So I try to channel their voices, their thoughts and their moods and deliver them to our fans.

What is the current size of the communities you manage and what has overall growth and size of your social media footprint evolved?

Facebook is obviously our biggest channel, with over 6.5 million followers. That makes us the second biggest Facebook fan page in North American team sports. We were growing by about 15-20,000 fans a day until last year’s F8, when changes to the News Feed throttled our growth dramatically. That seems to be true for most teams and brands, and our reach rate per post has been decimated by the Edge Rank revisions. Given how frequently Facebook tweaks their platform, it was bound to happen, but I think Facebook has really hurt brands in this regard. These days, only photo galleries really seem to get any penetration into News Feeds thanks to heavy sharing by fans.

We’re at about 580,000 on Twitter, and that number continues to grow. During the postseason it’s been escalating at much faster rate than normal, which is to be expected. The quotes, pictures and notes we’re tweeting are getting a lot more attention the further we progress in the NBA Playoffs.

As for Instagram, we just passed 200,000 followers today, and that growth has been driven by taking a unique, more artistic look at the team. The credit for that goes largely to our team’s creative director, Keith Sliney (@pantone356). I snap a few photos here and there from the road, or if I see something at practice that warrants sharing, but by and large, he’s the driving force behind that platform and I believe we’re the #1 or #2 sports property on the service, and among the biggest brands globally as well.

We’ve been dabbling in Pinterest this season with merchandise and photos from our Instagram feed, and that’s picked up some steam. We were also the first team to my knowledge to try running a “Pin It To Win It” contest based on Pinterest to promote our Celtics web store.

What are the expectations of fans and how are they engaged as customers and as stakeholders?

Sports fans expect scores, news and information instantaneously on their phone during every waking hour. They no longer want to surf to ESPN.com, Celtics.com or anywhere else. They just expect it to show up in their Twitter feed. And so for us, that means tweeting our news as soon as we can effectively (or realistically) break it. Running social media for a sports team is an around the clock job, because this type of news can break at any time.

The challenge here is that some of the news fans really want will never be able to come directly from the teams or leagues first. When it comes to trades, for instance, that news never breaks on a team’s official feed first, because we’re not allowed to announce anything until it’s actually official and approved by the NBA league office. By that time, players’ agents, league employees or even team executives have already leaked the story to reporters. So connected journalists have a huge edge in that regard, when it comes to breaking news first. However, we still have a massive advantage in audience size. A beat writer who covers us probably only has 10-20,000 followers, so it may take them time to get their tweet circulated. Our tweets, on the other hand, get a lot more amplification and tend to circulate quicker, especially when we have big news.

That said, we do spend a lot of time mobilizing and orchestrating our fan base. We were the first NBA team (and to my knowledge, pro sports team) to put our @Celtics twitter handle on our court, and we’ve been promoting #CelticsChat throughout our local TV broadcasts throughout the season. We curate the conversation from #CelticsChat into GameTime Live, our live stats and game-blogging application on Celtics.com that allows fans from all over the globe to follow the action and join in a conversation around the game.

But I think the biggest thing we can provide through our social channels is an inside look at the organization. For instance, last night’s Eastern Conference Finals Game 6 vs. Miami is a perfect example. I snapped a photo of a simple message on the dry erase board in our locker room that was authentic and symbolic. It said, “12:30 Flight – Pack for a Week.” The implication was simple for fans in the know; it was a message to our players that after we win Game 7 vs. Miami, we’re flying directly to Oklahoma City for the NBA Finals. It was a motivational message from the coaching staff to our players, and by sharing that picture with 200,000 fans on Instagram, and 500,000 on Twitter, we sent a message of hope to a fan base still reeling from a disappointing loss. It helped turn the page from the past to the future. It was simple, raw and powerful; the perfect combination of insider access and emotional marketing. We just shared our coaches’ marketing to our players with our fan base. It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever shared with our fan base, and I really think it struck a chord with them.

What were some of the challenges you faced to get here? What challenges do you still face?

Staffing and bandwidth remain a challenge for us. When I started with the Celtics in 2005, I was a one-man show and my job was simply managing Celtics.com, a site that had little-to-no basketball content and was simply a ticket sales driven property. Given my journalism background and existing passion for the team since childhood, once I got my feet wet, I started overhauling the site, revamping the design and emphasis into a content driven site. Then we started dabbling in video and production in the 2008 season when we won our 17th NBA championship.

In the following seasons as Twitter and Facebook emerged, to me they were obvious extrapolations of what I was already doing with Celtics.com. But every time you add a platform or distribution channel, you add additional work. We’ve yet to launch a mobile app, and part of the challenge is simply a resource issue. Professional sports teams spend millions of dollars on world class athletes, but our technology and staffing budgets aren’t anywhere near what outsiders would imagine.

How did you get buy in?

Buy-in on social wasn’t really an issue here at the Celtics; I’ve been given a lot of freedom to drive the direction of our digital and social media platforms by our CMO and Team President and they’re very much sold on the importance of social media. As our Facebook and Twitter grew to become some of the biggest of the biggest in pro sports, and the audiences wildly outgrew our email database, it became clear that these channels would evolve into a large marketing channel and that’s exactly what’s happened. I’ve certainly done some evangelism internally, and I’ve done quite a bit of speaking around the country talking about what we do as a brand in the social space, so that helps as well.

What are some of the prime metrics that you use to define success?

From a success standpoint, I keep my eyes on how many tickets we’re selling via our social channels, and database growth. I look at the number of names we acquire for our database from each promotion we run, the best of example of which would be Celtics 3-Point Play, our first-of-its-kind Facebook application. On a more granular level, I look a News Feed reach and post sharing; ‘Likes’ and comments on posts are far less important in my view. Most comments are garbage anyway, and a ‘Like’ is almost meaningless unless the numbers are well above or below the norm. Sharing is far more relevant – if someone is willing to share your content with their friends, that’s a far better indication that you’re hitting the mark.

How does strategy materialize in the organization?

We revisit strategy mostly during the offseason, because during the season, there’s not much time to be plotting this stuff out. There’s always another game or practice to cover, corporate partner to satisfy or internal fire to extinguish. But on the whole, our strategy is simple: Our fan database is at the center of everything we do, and all of our digital platforms should be geared at building our database, which in turn gets us in front of more potential customers. “Engagement” is a great buzzword for social media, and it has its place, but monetization is the leader in the clubhouse for me.

How have you organized around social media to manage an extensive and engaged network? What does the social media organization look like?

I oversee our digital marketing and social media, and have a full-time direct report who generates a most of the written content we distribute. We also have a part time video producer, a full-time video host, and another part-timer who helps out on our game nights. We’re looking to add a technical developer this summer, and may potentially add additional staff as we continue to bite off more initiatives and create more content in the digital space.

Any special practices for internal coordination?

– Social CMS?

– Style Guide?

– Best practices?

– Training?

Given how small our organization is, a lot of this stuff isn’t formalized. As we grow, we’ll need to put more processes in place. For now we’re small and agile, but we certainly aim for consistency in our approach in terms of how we deliver against our digital and social media platforms.

Any final advice, tips, or cautionary tales to leave us with as we put your experiences into action?

I think to do social media right, you have to appeal to your fans’ passion points, even if your brand isn’t something they’re are organically passionate about. The only way to do that is to understand your audience and your customers. That’s easy for the Boston Celtics to sense, but probably a lot harder for consumer brands to decipher. I would advise figuring out who they are and what they want before you formulate your strategy. That means collecting data, surveying fans, keeping up with your competitors and studying leaders in the social media space.

While the US waits (and waits) for trains to gain steam as efficient, viable modes of transport, plans are in place for a massive new rail network connecting Beijing and Hong Kong, where the West Kowloon Terminus (WKT) will welcome travelers–or send them on their way–in light, bright, ultra-modern style. Amtrak it ain’t.

Aedas designed the 430,000-square-meter station, which looks far more like an intergalactic depot and shuttle hub than terrestrial travel headquarters. WKT will support both regional commuter transit as well as high-speed long-hauls, and in a unique shift, immigration and customs domains for both arrivals and departures will be situated on-site, stacked one floor above the other. Below, all of the converging 15 tracks will be subterranean, making WKT the largest below-ground station in the world when completed in 2015. After emerging from a journey, however, the expansive, largely glass-clad indoor spaces convey an immediate sense that you’ve reached a true destination: sweeping sky-high, 45-meter-tall ceilings are topped off with a green roof that frames an amphitheater-shaped pedestrian area and observation deck, along 400,000-square-feet of as-yet-to-be-sold commercial space. The only thing it needs now is a Sbarro, amirite?

It’s fair to say that Millennials are the most tech-savvy adults in history. That advantage, one might think, would make them poised to become the most financially successful–if it weren’t for the fact that they entered the job market during a global recession. That doesn’t seem to faze them: If surveys are to be believed, they’re also more progressive and less materialistic (perhaps by necessity, as they’re all more debt-saddled than their predecessors).

These images, taken by the young Swedish photographer Sannah Kvist, seem to bear that out–snapshots of Millennials surrounded by all of their worldly possessions, which generally occupy no more than the corner of a room. The “All I Own” series stems from Kvist’s personal struggle with consumerism: “I had lived for 23 years when I took the photo of me and everything I owned and thought it was a sad collection of junk I’ve managed to buy,” she tells Co.Design. Similarly, the friends and acquaintances she has photographed since then have been amazed by “how much shit they actually owned.” (If you’ve moved recently, you’re probably familiar with that feeling.) “I think most people actually got an eye-opener when they built the piles.”

All of Kvist’s subjects were born in the ’80s, like herself, which, the artist says, is the most important limitation of the project. “It is the first generation, at least in Sweden, who had to grow up with worse social conditions than their parents, while the way we consume has changed radically.” Rather than investing in a permanent apartment, Kvist’s models tend to live in sublets, traveling with a few boxes (or Ikea bags) from one short-term arrangement to the next.

Age wasn’t the only requirement; nothing could be left out of the picture. “Everything should be in, but one can hide some stuff in the back,” Kvist says. The models are given carte blanche to arrange their things and give their most valued objects most prominence. “I noticed how quickly they began to ‘compose’ their stacks,” the artist continues. “Much time was devoted to fine-tuning them. They were proud of some things, less of others.” The compositions, in effect, became self-conscious expressions of each participant’s persona.

As for Kvist’s own fight against collecting junk, it may be a losing battle. “Now that I live in Gothenburg, where it’s easier to find a sublet where you can stay longer, I have increased the household goods again. I just recently bought a life-size skeleton made of PVC. I have no further comment.”

In a nondescript central Los Angeles neighborhood sits a renovated warehouse, home to the Southern California Institute of Architecture, or Sci-Arc for short. The small graduate school, which is noted for producing architects who go on to work in highly specialized fields like digital animation, is run by a core group of LA architects who place special emphasis on advanced fabrication. The school’s new Robot House, for example, is a dedicated laboratory for students interested in, well, learning how to program robots.

Robotic arms, to be more specific. The Robot House (it’s more like a room) has five of them, Staübli-brand machines with “hands” that can be programmed to do just about anything. Initiated in spring of last year, the lab has already produced some pretty cool stuff. The latest is a complex acrylic sculpture called Hot Networks, authored by Brandon Kruysman and Jonathan Proto, the two young designers Sci-Arc appointed to run and teach the Robot House lab.

In Hot Networks, Kruysman and Proto have given each robotic arm a different task: one positions the work surface, a another picks up and places a plastic cylinder, a third heats up the plastic as it’s set into place, melting and deforming against the others. Another arm airbrushes the cooled pieces, and the fifth arm films the whole thing for posterity. It’s a bit like earlier robotic building experiments (like this one, in which an arm builds a brick wall), but about five times more complex.

The highly choreographed network is made possible by a programming language the duo wrote specifically for the Robot House. Esperant.O, as it’s cleverly called, translates MAYA’s dynamic systems (like skeletons and moving parts) into a language that the mechanical arms can understand. “Esperant.O opens up an entirely new way to engage making through industrial robotics,” write the duo on their website. MAYA, an animation and rendering software that’s typically used to make stuff move on-screen, is being used to control real-time moving parts. For anyone unfamiliar with the software, a vastly over-simplified analogy would be a cartoonist who’s invented a way to control real-life people using his pencil and paper.

It’s funny that we never really get a good look at the morphing plastic sculpture. But the ambivalence the designers seem to feel about showing off the piece plays to the concept behind Robot House. The final product might look cool, sure, but it’s just a byproduct of the real work – the programming itself.

Some of America’s most compelling brands are harnessing the conversational aspect of social media by setting up “listening command centers” to capture, monitor and utilize social media conversations. In doing so, they are monitoring online conversations about their brands, reacting instantly to viral buzz, and creating companies that consumers feel involved in–and in some cases, even bringing in bigger profits as a direct result.

One of the first to introduce this technology was Gatorade, which launched its mission control center in its Chicago offices in June 2010. The technology allows the company to monitor social media conversations about the company through a range of visualisations and data-streams.

It also enables fans to participate in the company on a new level. During the Super Bowl, Gatorade enabled fans to interact with NFL starts through Ustream, and they’re now running regular live social media events, such as having sports stars answer questions using Twitter and Ustream.

And this command center technology isn’t just for big companies–it can benefit public services and charities as well. The American Red Cross believes social media will play an increasing role in disaster response, as it can provide real-time information and give relief workers a direct line to affected individuals. Its new digital command center launched in March, just in time to respond to the thousands affected by dozens of tornadoes that ripped through 10 states.

Dell played a major part in helping the Red Cross launch its command center, modelling it after its own social media listening center and providing equipment and funding. Dell’s center launched in 2010 and has since been at the forefront of its marketing and customer response strategies. Said Dell’s VP of social media and community, Manish Mehta, “Ground Control is about tracking the largest number of possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback, good or bad … It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’–those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there, and deserve to be heard.”

Dell’s ground control center tracks around 22,000 daily posts about the company across a wide range of social media, and enables Dell to participate in online dialogue about their brand and use social media insights to improve their products and marketing.

The technologies that makes this listening possible come from multiple different monitoring platforms like Salesforce Radian6, Sysomos, Nielson BuzzMetrics, and others–the platforms capture millions of social media conversations from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs, and presents them in a graphic display showing trend information, sentiment, geographical data, and share of voice.

Clemson University has also built a listening center with support from Dell and Radian6. Chief officer Jim Bottum believes Clemson may be the first academic environment to adapt listening command center technology. Students monitor the six large display screens and conduct research projects based on the data, including a recent project aimed at conversations about emergencies to help law enforcement agencies deliver better service in their communities.

Brands are not the only ones that realize the amazing benefits of command centers. Progressive agencies also get on board with the concept.

David Armano, executive VP of global innovation and integration at Edelman Digital, and his team just launched their first social intelligence command center (SICC) in its Chicago office. It combines four listening and engagement stations, a briefing workspace with cable television newsfeed, Polycom, and a content production section. The room is self contained and designed for real time monitoring, analytics, engagement and ultimately content production informed by the data coming in. It also has a full whiteboard wall where teams can actively work and plan.

“It’s essentially ground zero for real time communications,” says Armano. “Social intelligence or the insights we can gain from real time data is nothing without the ability to act upon it. Our SICC initiative is designed to not only master real time data, but act intelligently upon it.”

Taulbee Jackson, president and CEO of Radius and a member of the Super Bowl XLVI host committee, talked to me about the Super Bowl’s first-ever social media command center and his experience in managing the host committee’s interactive communications hub. “We had staff of about 50 people who worked two shifts for two weeks for fifteen hours a day. Our team was comprised of senior level social media managers, content developers, analysts, strategists and tech-savvy volunteers.”

Working out of a 2,800-square-foot space in downtown Indianapolis just blocks from the event, team’s objectives were clear. One: hospitality. “We are known for our friendliness, we wanted to make sure everyone had great experience at the Super Bowl coming from different parts of the country (whether it was on the aiplane, airport, street, cab, online)”, said Jackson. Two: safety. The team not only moderated conversations, it also was connected to other command centers in town that housed logistics and public safety teams so that in the event of the emergency their combined response would be instant. Three: create content and capture the experience to share with those who weren’t able to attend in person. Four: amplification. The team’s role was to amplify the positive experience fans had at the event.

The response rate of the command center staff was less than 3 minutes. Jackson says the event received over 64 million social impressions in one month from organic social amplification, which he estimates are worth $3.2 million. The main metric was the sentiment analysis, though. Real-time response and conversations moved the sentiment measure from 3.2 before the start of the event to 3.6 at the kick off (for every time someone said something negative online, 3.6 people said something positive).

Benefits of Listening Command Centers

So what benefits could a social media command center bring to a company or organization? The command centers enable brands to respond rapidly to trending topics in social media. For example, after Gatorade launched the “Gatorade has Evolved” campaign–which featured a song by rap artist David Banner–it was heavily talked up in social media, Gatorade was able to work with Banner to have a full-length version of the song ready to distribute to its Facebook and Twitter followers within 24 hours.

Listening command centers also allow consumers to participate in brand activities and shape their own experiences with the company. Thanks to its listening command center, Dell is able to provide almost instantaneous assistance to customers, and thanks to conversations and insights gained from social media, they’ve launched the (RED) line of products and FastTrack PC shipment, and redesigned the keyboard on their highest selling laptop after feedback that the apostrophe was positioned awkwardly.

The technology is being used for the more mundane day-to-day tasks of optimising landing pages and sending followers to the most high performing pages of the company’s website. Gatorade says it has been able to reduce exit rates from 25% to 9%, and has increased views of its product videos and other education material by 250%.

At Edelman, Armano says the company has used its SICC to train and act as a model to help several clients plan, design, and staff their own. “Not only that; internally for Edelman, the SICC initiative helps to break down traditional silos,” Armano says. “When analysts, strategists, content developers and media relations teams all see real time data in action–the silos melt away.”

Talking about companies and brands on social media is increasingly a two-way conversation, with listening command centers at the heart of marketing and customer interaction strategies. With application across a variety of industries, from Fortune 500 companies to the public service to education, it won’t be long before listening command centers are standard practice for engaging and monitoring customers.

Image: Flickr user Ludovic Bertron

They’re hot now but do mash-up apps have a future? We talk with Brandon Leonardo, cofounder of the Pinterest/ Instagram combo Pinstagram, to find out. We also pitch him a few of our ideas, including “Shazump,” “Spotifurious,” and “Angry Fruit Ninjas.” Let the investment cash flow!

Brandon Leonardo is one of the cocreators of Pinstagram, a “mash-up app” that combines features of… you guessed it. In essence, it takes the functionality of Instagram and splashes it in the elegant waterfall layout familiar to Pinterest fans. Pinstagram recently debuted its iPad app (and rose to be the No. 1 new and notable app in the Photo and Video category this week). Fast Company caught up with Leonardo to talk about the future of the mash-up app, and to pitch him a few ideas of our own.

FAST COMPANY: Tell me the origin story of Pinstagram.

BRANDON LEONARDO: Pek Pongpaet, his cofounder and I were having lunch on a Friday, joking around: “Pinterest is a huge company, and so is Instagram. What would happen if we just smashed them together?” We were just laughing about it. But then you could see the wheels starting to turn in Pek’s head. He brought it up a couple more times: “I think Pinstagram would be really cool,” and I kind of chuckled. The next morning at noon Pek called me and said, “You’re never gonna believe what I built. Look at your Dropbox.” By that time he had pretty much gotten the entire site designed. We went into hackathon mode, and by Sunday we were basically done with the initial version we launched with.

Are you in dialogue with Instagram or Pinterest? Aren’t you running afoul of laws here?

Pinterest’s waterfall layout was not invented by Pinterest. It’s a jQuery plug-in someone created a couple years ago and released it open-source. Pinterest gets credit for making it famous, but it’s not necessarily copyrightable. On the Instagram side, we’re using their public API. And it’s kind of a win-win: we’re sending them lots of likes, comments, and actions.

It seems like the sort of thing where either you get a cease-and-desist letter, or you get acquired.

No one has sent us a cease-and-desist letter. In fact we got coffee with a Pinterest engineer last week. The founder of Pinterest has actually used Pinstagram. On the Instagram side, no one’s contacted us.

You built an iPad app before an iPhone app. Why?

Instagram’s already on the iPhone. We’ll never be a better Instagram than Instagram. What we can do is build the best iPad viewer.

Let’s talk more about this idea of the app mash-up. How exactly do you splice the genes, and is there an island where you put your failed experiments?

You take the best pieces of each. The benefit to having a hackathon, is you have a severe focus on only what’s necessary. This is Pek’s and my third project together. The other ones are running, but this is the one that took off like crazy. But having an island sounds like a great idea. The island where source code goes is GitHub.

Do you think there will be more app mash-ups, more “Grey Albums” of the app world?

I think building products, period, is good. Any time you’re creating something and putting it out in to the world, you get a little bit closer to perfect. Nothing anyone has ever built has been perfect. But you keep improving on little things, and you get closer and closer. If you want to do a mash-up, you should do it.

Good. Because I want to pitch some mash-up apps to you.

Okay.

“DoodleJitter.” It’s a mash-up of Doodle Jump and Twitter. You can only play the game for 140 seconds or less.

That’s about how long I play DoodleJump right now.

How about a mixture of Shazam and Bump called “Shazump”? You use it to quickly exchange songs.

Do you want me to rate these?

Yeah, if you were a VC, how much money would you give me?

The music business is the worst business to be in, so I’d say no. Spotify is the only one I’ve really seen be successful.

OK, how about a mash-up of Spotify and Epicurious, called “Spotifurious.” You use it to stream unlimited food.

Could you use that in other parts of the world? I don’t think the U.S. needs more food.

“Angry Fruit Ninjas.” It’s just a much more violent version of Angry Birds.

Oh yeah… Absolutely. That sounds like a winner. That one I would give you the most money for. Throw some zombies in there, and in three years, you’ll be acquiring Zynga.

To me, the hottest and sexiest social network right now is your inbox. Sure, I love Pinterest as much as the next guy (who likes Ryan Gosling’s abs), and I think it’s great that Zuck took the company public, made people angry for wearing a hoodie to Wall Street, and then got married. You already know I’m down with Google+. But if you want to know the hottest opportunity in the world? It’s the inbox. Your inbox.

I’ve talked about this in speeches often, but I realize that I’ve not covered it on my site, so here you go.

Your Inbox is SO Sexy – Email Marketing Tips

Here’s what I know: you sleep with the phone very close to your head, as if you will have to answer it at 2:30 to run out and save the world. I know that one of the very first things you do in the morning is check your inbox. I know that when you’re in between meetings or leaving a lunch date, you’ll check your inbox and your texts, maybe your tweets. I know that you won’t rush to catch up on your RSS reader. I know that’s not the first thing you reach for in the morning. I know that you have a different state of mental rhythms when thinking about your inbox than when you think about blogs you read.

Why aren’t we all thinking this way? That the inbox is the sexiest piece of real estate on the web?

How to Give An Inbox Love

First, if you’re going to send mail, send it from a real “from” address. It doesn’t have to be from your main address (shouldn’t be, really), but it shouldn’t be from “donotreply@pleasedon’tanyoneemailmehere.com.” If people can reply, they will more often. If you tell me you don’t want people to reply, you’re saying you don’t want a business relationship, and I can’t help you with that.

Second, I’m a much bigger fan of plain text and/or very simple HTML formats over very pretty formatting. People aren’t getting your information based on the fact it looks like a gorgeous web page in their inbox. They want to read it.

Third, I loathe the starting line of “having trouble viewing this? Click here to view it in an inbox.” No letter coming from my mom has ever started that way.

Fourth, keep your letters to sub-500 words. People love brevity. You do.

Fifth, end with one call to action. Ask people for one action per email. That’s the super magic trick. This one tip, executed well, is worth money to you.

This last tip is worth it’s own column.

Get an Email Service Provider

It’s not okay to just send newsletters via your Outlook or Gmail. Well, you can, but it’s very likely they’re not actually being delivered all that often. It’s also far too difficult to manage that method.

I believe you need a great email service provider. I use a fairly hardcore one called Infusionsoft (affiliate link). It has a lot of features and isn’t right for everyone. If you’re starting out, and/or if you don’t have a lot of complex automation and delivery needs, you would do well to check out Constant Contact and/or Mailchimp. At the bigger side of the pond, besides Infusionsoft, there are many more, including Silverpop and too many to name. All of them have their great points and their bad points.

My #1 question for any decision you make on a provider? “What’s your method for dealing with spam reports and what is your relationship with the various spam cops?” This is wholly why you should choose one platform over another. If you compete on price only, you’ll find a very affordable system that might be sending your mail into the void. Take this as a lesson from experience.

Inboxes Don’t Replace Blogs or Social Networks

I still keep chrisbrogan.com well fed. Why? Because Google search doesn’t look in your inbox, and people hoping to find me and learn more about what I do and sell. You can’t really cut that out, unless you don’t need a lot of organic search to sell what you do. You need to be on a few social networks (Twitter and pick one). Why? Because you need serendipity plus the opportunity to connect where people are talking. You can’t replace that, and it just doesn’t happen on your blog. But again, this doesn’t replace your main site or blog. It feeds it. That’s the goal. Feeding.

My Secret Sauce at MY Newsletter

I’ll tell you what I’m doing differently at my newsletter, and I really encourage you to sign up for yourself to learn by observing, if you think this is useful. At my newsletter, I’m trending towards something like 85% content that isn’t intended to sell anything and 15% content to sell. That means that I’m “training” the community I have the pleasure to serve that I’m not trying to capture them in a sales funnel (It’s a Trap! Thank you, Admiral Akbar.)

I also reply back as fast and as often as I can. This inbox is everyone’s super easy private access to me. It’s the coolest thing I do in every week, business wise. And why do I do it? Because it helps others, and it empowers others to succeed at the stuff they’re doing, and it keeps me top of mind in the “helpful” category. That seems fair to me. You?

Start Giving Inboxes Some Love

Have you noticed the theme here at chrisbrogan.com? That’s an almost-out-of-the-box version of the Generate WordPress Theme (affiliate link). It has increased my subscriptions to my newsletter a TON. Just a simple theme change.

Now, I’m doing something a bit differently. I’m also using a popup box to invite people to get the blog sent to the inbox. These are two completely different processes at present. I don’t mix my newsletter with my blog. This is a personal choice. VERY few people do it this way. I can’t vouch for it being better or worse. It’s just how I handle it. What I do know is that the content on the blog is very different than what’s in the newsletter, so I keep the audiences quite separate. My newsletter isn’t for everyone. The blog is a bit more business-focused.

So there. Get into it. I think you’ll find some value in devoting some time to writing really useful newsletters and earning permission into the sexiest social network in town: the inbox.

In September 2011 at its f8 Developer Conference, Facebook introduced the social world to frictionless sharing and Action Verbs. With the rollout of its Open Graph, the 900 million strong social network declared that the future of engagement would be driven by both implicit and explicit actions. Explicit actions require the user to click a button such as “Like,” “Share,” “Recommend,” or “Comment.” Implicit actions on the other hand only require that the user run an app designed using the Open Graph platform where updates (or Action Verbs) are sent to the timeline automagically depending on what the app is designed to do.

But, this frictionless experience is not without its friction.

As Open Graph apps such as Washington Posts’ Social Reader or Spotify send updates into user Newsfeeds, such as “Brian Solis is reading…” or “…is listening to…,” what happens next is where friction is at risk of sparking. As I warned in earlier this year developers who don’t think through the end-to-end user experience or the “click to action” from engagement to the Newsfeed to the desired social effect may not only lose momentum, they may reverse adoption.

The goal of an Open Graph strategy is not to just send an interesting Action Verb into the timeline to entice a click, it must unlock a microcosm of fellowship. The Action Verb is just the hook, but it is what unfolds next that influences whether or not a new user installs the app and continues to use it as part of their everyday Facebook routine. Indeed, the Open Graph is an open invitation to creativity and innovation. At the same time, it’s also an opportunity to introduce ways to expand relevant shares and app-generated engagement from social graph to social graph.

Automatic status updates using Action Verbs are just the beginning. Now Facebook is introducing Action Links. If Action Verbs are designed to trigger the social effect, Action Links are intended to drive intended outcomes or “clicks to action.”

Here we see a couple of difference examples where an automatic update now included a link at the bottom for friends to take action. In the Fab example, the Action Verb is “faved” and the Action Link lets friends “Fave this Product.”

Like Action Verbs, no pun intended, the success of Action Links is dependent on the experience as designed by your UX or dev team. The click must, in the very least do one or more of the following…

1. Serve a purpose

2. Offer entertainment

3. Deliver engagement

4. Contribute to self expression or personal branding

5. Enable commerce

Don’t rule out F-commerce just yet. 8thBridge developed an entire platform on Facebook’s Open Graph that demonstrates what’s possible with Action Verbs and Action Links. In the example below, you see the introduction of three new buttons, “I Want,” “Love,” and “Own” on the TOMS e-commerce site. Upon the click, an Action Verb update is sent to the user’s Facebook Newsfeed expressing the sentiment tied to each button. At the bottom of the update, friends are invited to add the item into their own bag trying social and e-commerce together through peer-to-peer influence.

8thBridge also visualizes how Action Verbs and Action Links tie into a user-centric social commerce ecosystem where Facebook services as the epicenter for personal experiences and engagement.

As AllFacebook shared, the 8thBridge Graphite launch included several ecommerce partners that connect people, experiences and brands through what I refer to as the A.R.T. of engagement (Actions, Reactions and Transactions). While primary Action Verbs were based on Want, Own, and Love, other unique examples include:

Deb: I want, Ask a friend, I’m wearing

Guitar Center: Play

Hallmark: Tearing up, Smile, LOL

Nasty Gal: Neeed (yes, 3 “e’s”), Gimme, and Three hearts

Oscar de la Renta: Wore

Aside from the fact that GM abandoned Facebook advertising for the time being, it’s time to see Facebook as a vibrant and connected community, not as a stockade of eyeballs. The Open Graph opens the door to an entirely new egosystem of user-centered experiences that have yet to be fully defined or harnessed. And, that’s the point. Action Verbs and Action Links are only as meaningful as the outcomes and journeys they create.

Image Credit (edited): Shutterstock

Photo: University of Maryland

One of the oldest prizes in aviation is one step closer to being claimed after a team from the University of Maryland flew a human-powered helicopter for 50 seconds yesterday. The students managed the tenuous indoor flight with the Gamera II, beating the team’s previous record of 11 seconds set last summer.

The flight came at the end of two action-filled days of flying, fixing and flying again with numerous hops above the University of Maryland’s basketball court heli-pad.

The prize is the Igor I. Sikorsky Human-Powered Helicopter Competition from the American Helicopter Society and a win earns $250,000. In order to claim the prize a human powered helicopter must lift off the ground, hover for at least 60 seconds, reach an altitude of 3 meters during the flight and stay within a 10-square-meter area.

Yesterday’s 50-second flight was one of more than a dozen over the past two days, including a 35-second flight on Wednesday and a 40-second flight earlier Thursday (video below).

The Gamera II is a far cry from its robust spinning terrapin namesake. Like its fixed wing, human powered cousins, the delicate helicopter is a rather large, yet extremely lightweight aircraft. The entire craft has a width of 105 feet and each of the four rotors has a span of just over 42 feet, 7 inches. But despite the size of the Gamera II, it weighs just 71 pounds. That’s more than 30 pounds lighter than the original Gamera that flew last year, thanks largely to redesigned rotors and an improved truss design.

The design is delicate and an incident on Wednesday had them making repairs and delaying further flights.

Photo: Univeristy of Maryland

Carbon fiber rods and thread are used to create small trusses that in turn make the four large trusses that spread from the cockpit. At the end of each truss is a rotor that is perched just above the ground. With the rotors located close to the ground, the team can take advantage of ground effect, an aerodynamic condition where there’s a reduction in induced drag from the lift generated by the rotors. With the rotors spinning at just 20 revolutions per minute, less than one horsepower is needed to hover at two feet above the ground.

Gamera II is piloted and powered by a pair of students at the University of Maryland. Unlike its predecessor, Gamera II uses both pedals to power with the legs, and a hand crank to add a bit of extra power. The team estimates they gain around 20 percent with the arms over using legs alone.

The University of Maryland team is one of only three groups that has ever achieved human powered helicopter flight. A Japanese team held the previous record with a 19 second flight back in 1994.

More flights are expected today and the team hopes to crack the 60 second barrier. A live stream of the Gamera II in action can be seen on the team’s website.