Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Aardvark Founders. Pic: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

I have written here often of how technology only shortens the distance between people on the social web. In other words, using social web tools to communicate with friends and family is an extension of our social activities offline. As I write this on July 5th, I recall yesterday seeing tens of thousands gathered on bridges in downtown Portland, alongside the lake in Lake Oswego and milling around in Tigard, Or, to watch the firework displays commemorating Independence Day. Families with kids, couples and teens all very comfortable with each other for a few hours; it is very natural for us to gather with strangers and witness a familiar event.

Opening a browser on a computer or a mobile device today means participation in the social web. Not just because of one’s involvement in social networks but also by letting your friends or family know of your geo-location by allowing a mobile device app to broadcast your whereabouts for instance. Emailing and texting friends, tweeting and updating your Facebook status all let those following you know of your involvement on the social web every day.

This is of course very familiar to us, we surf the web in our own familiar ways using social networking tools, yet companies that wish to harness the power to advertise to this web of millions of people have been stymied for some time, stuck in social media channels wondering how to budge these masses even a quarter of an inch closer to their products. The web and those using it don’t ever stop moving but you can’t simply plant a billboard alongside this viral highway – the billboard’s message will remain right there where it was positioned, as we all go about our daily electronic sojourns.

Rob Glazer of Real. Pic: Kevin P. Casey for the The New York Times

I recently discovered two articles in the Business section of the June 28th 09 edition of the New York Times. The articles cover two companies and their products – one is RealNetworks, a familiar face in technology, the other a new company called Aardvark. Real is featured for launching new technology for hardware devices and Aardvark for creating a social web service that helps you reach hundreds of your online friends and peer group for answers to any of your questions. Real brings us technology based on the premise that the company thinks we need their product and Aardvark brings us technology that embraces the social web by connecting us easily with people we trust to answer our questions. [I used Aardvark yesterday to ask a question of my followers - "who uses online music subscriptions, which one is better and why?" and I received 6 great responses, even one from a friend in Sweden who urged me to use a service called Spotify.] It works.

Aardvark doesn’t bother all of my 1700+ Facebook friends either. As the NYT article points out –
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In my part-time alternate life as a consultant, I have often pondered why a person chooses to buy a Billabong sweatshirt as opposed to a Quiksilver one. The choice is not an obvious one. The products themselves are essentially the same. The name is the only real difference. The gradient between one and the other is an infinitesimal pattern of grey, yet the decision — and millions more exactly like it — happen everyday.

Jonah Lehrer has emerged over the past few years as neuroscience’s strongest and most interesting voice. His Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007) is as smart and fun a mix of the Two Cultures as you’re likely to find. With his spot as Seed Magazine’s Editor at Large and a contributing editor gig at Wired, Lehrer is poised and positioned to inform the public about brain science like few others ever have been.

With How We Decide (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), Lehrer turns his attention to the marketplace and how our brain power influences our buying power. Peter Merholz wrote that it was clear that Lehrer had “attended the Gladwell school of non-fiction writing, anchoring his facts in stories.” Maybe it was a compliment, but having recently read Gladwell’s latest book (the sometimes quite interesting but ultimately nearly pointless Outliers), I prefer Lehrer’s prose. It’s clear, concise, and lyrical, and at least I know there’s some science behind it.

The traditional wisdom says that we make important decisions by relying on the rationality of the logical brain to override the “animal stuff” (as Howard Bloom calls it) of our emotions and instinctual drives. In How We Decide, Lehrer contends that the process is a bit more nuanced than that. It’s a subtle dance, a process of bend and blend that depends on the situation. Well, it’s not quite that simple either, but Lehrer’s book often makes it all seem so. It ends with a “taxonomy of decision-making,” which helpfully applies many of the book’s anecdotal dilemmas to practical, real-world situations.

Coming to the brain and purchasing decisions from a different angle, Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Customer Behavior (Viking, 2009) argues that it’s all just so many peacock feathers. Miller is an evolutionary psychologist, so his lens is longer than Lehrer’s, but doesn’t mean he sees the situation any clearer or in higher relief. Like Lehrer, he writes to be read, but where Lehrer;s prose is positive, Miller’s negativity seeps into his sentences. His wit is by turns playful and biting, veiling and betraying a deep-seated cynicism toward the consumer capitalism he’s analyzing.

Miller writes like he’s the first academic to discover the field of marketing, as if Stewart Ewen, Douglas Rushkoff, and Marshall McLuhan (!), among many, many others hadn’t already upturned similar soil. In addition, his arguments smack of psychoanalytic reasoning (i.e., many of our purchasing decisions are driven by the libido and thereby illustrate material sublimation, many others are driven by narcissism, etc.) dressed up in evolutionary garb: We buy stuff to advertise our potential to each other as possible mates, sexual and Platonic. It’s certainly not all bad or bland though. Miller’s idea of “fitness faking” (about which I’ve written before) makes a brief appearance, and his “Exercises for the Reader” (similar to Lehrer’s concluding taxonomy) are a nice touch of pragmatism more science books could use.

After having read both of these books, I don’t feel any closer to understanding the Billabong/Quiksilver dilemma, but as Miller writes on the very first page of Spent, echoing McLuhan, “consumerism is hard to describe when it’s the ocean and we’re the plankton.”

Aaahh the social web. As you can see in the image above, the Portland Ad Federation has an annual awards fest, The Roseys, that honors local agencies who provide the best creative work in marketing and advertising or, as a quick Google search returns, “Portland Advertising Federation: Celebrating 100 Years of Setting the Standard for Portland’s Creative, Design, and Media Community!” [I have a problem with that byline - can an advertising federation set 'the standard' or should the federation be setting standards?] Anyway, I digress.

So, as noted above, PAF has recently launched a web site created by Anthill Marketing for this year’s show, with the motto – “Nothing Says I’m Better Than You Like A Rosey” and “Our City Is Better Than Your City.” On the site you can ’spin a wheel’ [whoop-de-doo] and a needle comes to rest on such intelligent phrases as the ones below:

Austin: “Award winning copy in Austin: Yee-Haw”
Boulder: “There are two things Alex Bogusky can never take away from you: your pride and your Rosey”
Seattle: “Fast Company’s 2009 most creative city. How depressing is that?”
San Francisco: “Goodby this, Goodby that. Fuck Goodby”
Vancouver B.C.: “Remember, this is the city that brought you Alan Thicke and Lover Boy”

Well, well, well… [another side note: you've all heard of a band called The Weakerthans right?]

I’ll cut to the chase – I can see exactly what Anthill/PAF were trying to achieve – “edginess” “talking points” “hope this goes viral” etc etc. Basically they want a social media smackdown; bring it on, Portland will fight that fight, look at our logo we are raising the finger at you, yeah you San Francisco and you Goodby…. unfortunately it comes across as if we’re back in high school here, meanwhile not all of Portland’s creative community has embraced the tone of this campaign.

And so, along comes The Nosey Awards! Two Portland creatives [egged on by me I have to admit,] @adognamedpants and @motorcoatdave, created that site along with the Twitter name @noseyawards and the Twitter search hashtag #noseys. Finally things get interesting…

Here’s a fact – on Twitter no one owns a hash tag. For instance, here’s one #nooneownsahashtag. There, I just created it but I can’t own it because the Twitter community owns it by using it. And so it goes with #roseys and #noseys. Anthill and PAF cannot own #roseys and now that #noseys has come along and is being used by Twitter users who follow the thread, the two hash tags become joined at the hip…take a look at my TweetDeck grab below:

The Rosey Awards can’t shake off the Nosey Awards, they are now one and the same. Wherever the Roseys try to go on Twitter the Noseys will be right alongside. The Roseys and the Noseys can now duke it out all summer long. And this is a good thing. The Noseys are creating a ton of brand awareness for the Roseys – a rising tide lifts all boats. As people pile on this particular bandwagon, both pro and con, those little hash tags will be used thereby elevating the experiential awareness of the Roseys across an extremely wide arc. A campaign like this fits rather neatly into my idea of Authenticity and Authority on the Social Web.

The Roseys and the Noseys smackdown will be worth watching and I know it will create an interesting case study; it might even get more people to join the current 25 people on the Roseys FaceBook Group.

Tyler Kongslie took some great shots in and around the Nemo warehouse during the Mixed Media event on Friday June 26. See the whole set here.

Bryce Kanights- Part 2 of 3 from Nemo Entertainment on Vimeo.