Open up your mind and say, ahh...

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