Hooo-ah. Just got back from bushwhacking through the far-right fringes of online conspiracy-theorizing.
It all started with StepRep. A while back, as part of our Great Dog Food Experiment, I “adopted” a used bookstore called the Book Bin, in Salem, Oregon. I created an account for the Book Bin and started monitoring their reputation using StepRep. Why? To get a feel for how everyday users interact with the product. To catch bugs. To come up with ideas for how it can be improved.
This week in my top keywords list I noticed something strange.
Goodgame’s thesis is that “militant Islam has been a card played by the global elites of the dominant Anglo-American establishment to achieve the long-term goal of a world government.” If you’re wondering whether the Freemasons, the British royal family, and the Bilderberg Group have a part in this plot, rest assured – they do. But how is Salem’s favourite used bookstore tangled up in the conspiracy?
With the help of Ctrl+F, I found the following passage:
However, bin Laden’s time in London has since been confirmed by Saudi-based journalist Adam Robinson in his book Bin Laden – Behind the Mask of the Terrorist.
Then this:
[I]n 1973 the Islamic Council of Europe was created with headquarters in London. The Council’s long-time Secretary General was a prominent Muslim Brother by the name of Salem Azzam …
So there you go. The name of the business, plus the name of the city where it’s located, appearing together on a single page. For a small business without a lot of online mentions, that’s enough to make it into this week’s top keywords list.
You see, at its core, StepRep is pretty simple. It collects data through queries to Google, Bing, and all the other major search engines. If you didn’t mind submitting multiple queries to multiple search engines all day long every single day, and sorting through all the hits to eliminate duplicates, you could get the same results StepRep does.
After the results are gathered, StepRep does some data analysis to determine sentiment and relevancy. But as the Bin Laden example illustrates, it’s not foolproof. The problem is that StepRep isn’t smart enough (yet) to figure out from context that the phrase “his book Bin Laden” has nothing to do with a store called the Book Bin.
Is that a damaging confession for me to make? Well, how would you do it? …How would you design a search algorithm clever enough to screen out bad results like “his book Bin Laden” without also screening out good results like “His Book Bin excursion was a success…” or “The Book Bin, laden with rare finds…” Bear in mind, this algorithm also has to work for every other business name in the English-speaking world.
If you’ve got a solution, you should definitely get in touch with us, because we’re looking for smart people to help us improve the relevancy of our searches. I thought this story was worth sharing because it illustrates just how difficult it is to achieve perfect accuracy. StepRep is getting stronger and stronger, but (unlike the Bilderberg Group) it’s not all-powerful…yet…
A few days ago Jason Kottke linked to this list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever, a whole month’s supply of first-class procrastination material. It’s an excellent resource, though predictably heavy on stuff from the last twenty years or so: the late David Foster Wallace gets six (well-deserved) entries, while Tom Wolfe gets only two, and Joan Didion doesn’t even make an appearance.
Yesterday I found myself reading Shipping Out, Wallace’s 1996 Harper’s article about his adventures on a seven-day luxury cruise of the Caribbean. He describes an “odd little essaymercial” by the author Frank Conroy that appears in the cruise line’s promotional brochure. The essay is “graceful and lapidary and persuasive”, but “also completely insidious and bad”:
In the case of Frank Conroy’s “essay,” Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.
This upsets me, because my great respect for Wallace makes me fear there’s something to his argument, which I would otherwise wave off as the predictable anti-consumerism of the Adbusters crowd.
Here’s my view. We’re all in agreement that King Lear is a work of art and that the latest Mountain Dew ad isn’t. In between, things get fuzzy. Is an indie film like The Kids Are All Right art? What about the current number one movie in North America, Inception? What about Spike Jonze’s 30-minute short film I’m Here, sponsored by Absolut Vodka? What about those Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like clips that went viral not long ago?
Wallace’s comments imply that there’s a straightforward heuristic one can use to differentiate art from non-art. I don’t think there is one. I think there are elements of art, craft, and commerce in all the works mentioned above.
Having experience in both advertising and art-for-art’s-sake, I can identify only one real difference between them: advertising is way harder. When you’re making art you have to please yourself and your audience – and if you don’t mind being a starving artist, you can settle for just pleasing yourself. But when you’re making an ad, in addition to pleasing your audience, you have to sell them something.
It’s tough. You have to think about every word and every image from two totally different perspectives. It’s tempting to compromise on one side or the other – weaken the pitch to make the ad more entertaining, or toss out the entertainment and focus on the selling message. But there can be no compromise. If your ad isn’t pleasing, your sales pitch will flop. But if your ad is pleasing and your sales pitch still flops, that’s it. You’ve flopped.
That’s why most advertising is so terrible. It’s not because marketers are hacks. It’s because it requires exceptional talent to make a good ad. I haven’t made one yet. I keep on trying, because it’s a challenge, but also (let’s face it) because I have to – marketing is the only career where a semi-talented writer like me can make a decent living. If I decided to join the righteous ranks of the artists, I’d be living in a cardboard box within a year.
From the excerpts Wallace supplies, I’d say Frank Conroy’s “graceful and lapidary and persuasive” Caribbean cruise essay is an unusually good ad. Did Conroy get any satisfaction from the assignment? In a footnote, Wallace reports that he got in touch with the author to ask him how he got into the “essaymercial” biz. The reply: “I prostituted myself.”
What would happen if all the talented writers in the advertising biz quit prostituting themselves and became artists? There would be a whole lot more mediocre novels sitting unread in people’s desk drawers. There would be a whole lot more undernourished authors living in their parents’ attics. And there would be just as many ads – only they’d be that much worse than they are already.
I wish David Foster Wallace were still alive to have this disagreement with.
That’s what we’ve taken to calling the little faceless creatures who currently dwell on the main page of StepRep:
The Weebles have been there ever since the site was redesigned back in February. Given the many permutations the main page has gone through since StepRep launched back in January 2009, the Weebles have demonstrated surprising staying power. We’ve often talked about how we’d like to replace them, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet. We want to make sure that whatever illustration we put in the Weebles’ place, we’ll be happy with it for a good long time.
To this end I’ve been trading ideas with our graphic designer, Marie-Louise. A couple weeks ago I enlisted our office manager Tiffany to stick a rolled-up paper tube in her ear and pose for me. (Tiffany has lately taken on the role of StepRep social media coordinator, so she was the logical choice to model.) Here she is monitoring the online chatter:
Maybe Marie-Louise will find a way to refine that image so it fits the style of the website, or maybe the idea will be tossed onto the junkheap along with our earlier failed attempts. Meanwhile, if you’ve got any suggestions for how we can communicate the benefits of reputation intelligence in a single illustration, please send them along. We’ve got some other design changes coming to the site in the coming weeks, so now’s the time to send the Weebles wobbling on their way.
When visitors find out that we follow the Agile software development process here at VendAsta, they invariably ask, “What would the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke think of Agile?”
When this question comes up, we laugh and quickly change the subject to David Hume, with whom we feel on firmer ground. But I’ve been reading Burke lately and may finally be able to answer this pressing question.
First some background. The Agile Manifesto spells out the principles of Agile design, which favours:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
Agile is usually contrasted with the so-called “waterfall” method, whereby a plan is conceived by the bigwigs at the top of the org chart, then tumbles down to the folks on level two, who add their contribution before sending it down to the peons on level three, who pass it on to the schnooks on level four, and so on, until it arrives at the bottommost level, by which time the bigwigs have all been fired and their replacements have started work on an entirely different plan.
In an Agile environment, the bigwigs work alongside the peons on cross-functional teams that plan, design, and implement one or two small improvements at a time, in a series of short intervals called sprints, lasting a week or two. At the end of every sprint, a working piece of software is released, and the team pauses to consider the results and to set objectives for the following sprint.
Edmund Burke was a parliamentarian, pamphleteer, and the foremost English critic of the French Revolution. He’s sometimes smeared as a reactionary, but in fact he was a gradualist, who favoured measured change within a constitutional framework over all-encompassing plans dreamed up in a philosopher’s salon.
In Reflections on the Revolution in France he spells out the superiority of the gradualist approach:
[I]n my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. By a slow but well-maintained progress, the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first, gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series. We see, that the parts of the system do not clash. The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise. One advantage is as little as possible sacrificed to another. We compensate, we reconcile, we balance…. From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition.
Of course, by its very name, Agile would seem to be in conflict with the precepts of gradualism. The whole point of Agile is to allow for rapid adaptation to changing circumstances.
But that apparent conflict is an illusion, as Burke’s history teaches us. The French Revolution was the quintessential waterfall project, in which a small group of visionaries, untroubled by any practical concern for how governments and economies function, arbitrarily rewrote the entire body of their nation’s laws. Their plan, so elegant in the abstract, fell apart at its first collision with the reality of human behaviour. The inalienable Rights of Man gave way to factiousness, bloodshed, and tyranny. Almost a century passed before a stable French republic emerged.
In software terms, the French Revolution was a flashy new release that was so buggy and unpopular that it bankrupted the company.
Meanwhile the British, by an Agile process of small fixes and improvements, continued their “slow but well-maintained progress” toward universal democracy. Even now the Brits don’t have a written constitution, and they seem generally untroubled by the deficiency. You could say they favour “responding to change over following a plan”.
It might seem like a paradox, but Agile is a gradualist approach. Edmund Burke, it turns out, would approve.
Before Christmas I started working on this idea for a MashedIn ad. I wasn’t trying to be tasteless. I’d recently read an article that talked about dogs’ amazing sense of smell – possibly this review in the New York Times of Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know – and I started thinking how dogs have an advantage over humans in their ability to detect common acquaintances. When I meet a stranger on the street I have no way of knowing that he works in the same office as my friend Barry. If I were a dog, I’d be able to smell Barry when the stranger approached.Being clever humans, we’ve developed technology to bring us up to speed with the lower animals. Speech was the first such “technology” (if you can call it that) – one caveman could ask another one, “Hey, do you know Barry over in Cave 93?” Later on someone developed written communication, making it possible to attach labels to your friends for instant identification. This worked all right in small farming communities where no-one knew more than ten or twelve people, but when people moved into big cities, labels became impractical. Whenever two Babylonians met they’d have to spend a half hour circling each other, looking for common friends.
Then came the printing press, the telephone, the internet, social media, and at last we’ve reached the apex of technological achievement – MashedIn, which allows people to identify common friends and interests across multiple social networks.
I’m not a real artist; my freehand drawings look like something a third-grader’s mom would hang on the less-visible side of the fridge. I illustrate by tracing from photos. Yet somehow even when tracing from photos I manage to get some faces completely wrong.
It’s funny. Sometimes I just slash in a couple lines and discover, to my surprise, the intended face staring back at me from the screen. Other times I spend hours – well, I could spend hours, though I usually give up after twenty minutes or so – anyway, I spend a whole bunch of time tweaking and erasing, but no matter where I push the lines, the drawing still doesn’t capture the essence of its subject. The pieces are all there, but somehow they don’t add up.
I suppose real artists must know some tricks that I never learned. They could look at the pictures below and explain why cartoon Jeff doesn’t look anything like real-life Jeff. Something in the nose, maybe? The lips, the eyes? All the above?
My guess is that a proper portrait artist will know how to select the one or two features that are most characteristic of the subject and subtly exaggerate them in a way that seems true-to-life – even though it departs from the actual lines of the face. That’s just a theory. But what is Jeff’s most characteristic feature? I can’t decide.
I had a request to post these drawings of some of my VendAsta workmates, created for a recent MashedIn cartoon, on the blog, and with mild trepidation I oblige. Of the sixteen I think about nine turned out pretty well. To the other seven subjects, I apologize.
This cartoon I recently finished for MashedIn is a little over three minutes long. At a frame rate of 12 frames per second, that means it consists of about 2,160 frames. Almost every one of those frames had to be drawn individually.
Each frame consists of multiple layers. For instance, this image of me checking my wallet contains a layer for my face, another layer for my beard, a layer for my shirt, and a layer for my hands. (The microphone is another layer, but it’s a static unchanging picture, so it only had to be drawn once.)
My hands, luckily, are only visible for about a quarter of the cartoon. I used various shortcuts to avoid having to do my shirt over and over, but it still had to be drawn a few hundred times.
So there are, to be conservative, about 5,000 individually drawn images in the cartoon. It took between thirty seconds (for the beard) and two minutes (for hands and faces) to draw each of these pictures. So, once again guessing conservatively, call it an average of a minute per frame.
5,000 minutes is about 83 hours.
Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad. 83 hours is only two weeks of work, give or take. And I worked on this cartoon, off and on, for almost two months. So why’d it take so long?
Well, bear in mind, that’s 83 hours of pure, mechanical, repetitive drawing. That doesn’t include any time for reflection, aesthetic evaluation, leaning back in the chair and stretching, or pausing to make tea and bring up a new artist on iTunes.
Nor does it include all the extra work involved in filming and editing the original video, hunting down sound effects, tracing my co-workers’ faces for the “virtual wallet” section, and making all the elements flow together smoothly.
I’m not complaining. I consider myself very lucky that I’m getting paid to do this stuff. But I often wonder if the investment of time is worth it. How many people, in the end, will ever see this cartoon?
Of course, every time we create a video, it’s a gamble. We’re gambling a few weeks of my time on the chance that the video will find a wide audience. If it doesn’t – and so far, none of them have – we can still throw the video up on one of our blogs for the amusement and edification of people who wander by.
Still, it makes me wonder. Are we gambling wisely? A couple months back, Brendan pointed me to this Social Media Revolution video. At the time, it had been seen by a few thousand people. “We should make a video like this!” he enthused. And his instincts were bang on – before long the video went viral, and now it’s got 1.8 million hits.
But what would “Social Media Revolution” look like if I made it? Instead of Fatboy Slim it would have a soundtrack by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. And instead of graphics that flew by almost as fast as you could read them, it would have a stammering voiceover by yours truly. And instead of 1.8 million hits, it would have 180.
Last week Jason and Dave were down at the Twitter Chirp conference in San Francisco. While they were there they showed off a new app that the MashedIn team developed, which we’re calling Flutter.
It’s a mobile app for location-aware phones. Suppose you find yourself in an unfamiliar place – maybe at a conference in a faraway city – heck, say you’re at the Chirp conference in San Francisco. So you pull out your iPhone (or whatever), point your browser to Flutter, and bingo – up comes a list of people who’ve recently tweeted (or accessed Flutter) using their mobile phones in the vicinity of the conference center.
But this is where we seem to lose people. The exciting thing about the MashedIn technology that powers Flutter is that it reveals connections across social networks. For instance, if you’re a Facebook user who’s never heard of Twitter, you might nevertheless discover you’re connected, through a mutual friend, to a Twitter guy who isn’t on Facebook.
So let’s take another look at that list of people who’ve recently tweeted from the conference center. Right at the top of the list you’ll see the people you’re connected to – your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn contacts, sure – but also people you don’t know directly but whom, based on mutual connections, you might want to meet.
What you do with this information is up to you. The Techi blog speculated that Flutter could be useful for stalking people. Well, I guess…but if Flutter is the best stalking method you can come up with, you really need some stalking lessons.
No, we think the main benefit of Flutter is that you can meet new people in strange locations. You might not know anyone at the Chirp conference in San Francisco, but think about how many connections Flutter could potentially reveal…
Maybe Flutter reveals that you’re connected via your ex-boss Cindy to a fellow conference-goer named Amber. So you fire Amber a message – “Hey, I used to work for Cindy. You want to grab a coffee and talk about that freaky hair-helmet of hers?”
Will it work? Maybe, maybe not…but it beats slouching back to your hotel room to watch old Friends episodes on TBS.
Before Jason and Dave left for San Francisco I dashed off a press release to see if we could generate some buzz for Flutter. I guess in retrospect I should’ve spent a little more time obsessing over the wording, because some people, like the guys at Techi, seemed to miss the point.
I’m on vacation, sunning on a patio in Palm Springs while my unfortunate colleagues shiver back home in Saskatoon.
But I’m still keeping up with my email. StepRep brought me an interesting result this morning. A while back my band Sea Water Bliss put out a low-budget music video that became moderately popular, especially in Europe. The video has appeared in a bunch of blogs written in a bunch of languages that I can’t read.
Thanks to StepRep’s Reputation Monitor, I receive regular updates on my band’s virtual tour of the Old World. Today I was alerted to the fact that our video had appeared on the French blog Fumez La Moquette (“Steam The Carpet”).
Having by now seen my video praised as well as belittled in numerous online forums, I hardly needed to strain my tenth-grade French skills to interpret what the commenters were saying about it. Most of them liked it, some snarked about it, and a few wondered how many trees were chopped down to make it. (The answer is “many”.) But this comment piqued my curiosity:
sinon le bassiste dans la vidéo me fait pensée à l’acteur dans Very bad trip le beau frère louche
(“By the way, the bassist in this video makes me think of the actor in Very Bad Trip, the dissipated brother-in-law.”)
It took some Googling to figure out that Very Bad Trip is the title under which the film The Hangover was released in France and Belgium. Isn’t that weird? Instead of translating the word “hangover” into French, the distributors released the film under an English-language title that was different from the original title! Why would they do that?
Anyway, this commenter is saying that Sea Water Bliss bassist Andrew Hall looks like the co-star of The Hangover, Zach Galifianakis. See the resemblance?
Zach Galifianakis and Andrew Hall
Mmm…maybe a little in the beard area?
This is just one more example of the fun that can come from using StepRep to monitor your online reputation. And that’s my contribution to StepRep’s marketing efforts for today. Now where’d I put that crossword puzzle…?
Since I don’t have time to make animated cartoons any more – and how’d that happen, by the way? – I’ve been spending a lot more time drawing static comics lately. At first I thought this would be a good deal easier. Since the images didn’t have to move, I figured, I could churn out ten times as many of them.
Alas, it’s not so easy. The movement in the foreground of an animated cartoon lets you get away with simple solid colours behind, whereas a comic, I’ve discovered, looks empty unless you put some scenery behind the characters. As another example, when I was making the Spokesmonster cartoons we always saw him from the same head-on perspective, so I just re-used the same three monster heads over and over again; comics demand a little more variation in the perspective, so each individual figure needs to be drawn.
Having spent many hours over the past few weeks creating this comic for my co-worker’s band Sexy Mathematics, and many more hours creating this other comic for the StepRep platform for online business directories, I have a renewed respect for real comic book artists, who have to churn out a twenty-page issue every month. Of course, they’ve got an unfair advantage over me: they actually know how to draw. Me, I have to take photos of my subjects and painstakingly trace them.
So thanks to Chris and Liz from Sexy Mathematics, and to Nicole and Tavis who posed for the StepRep comic. (Consider growing sideburns, Tavis. Seriously.)
We don’t have much of an advertising budget here at StepRep. To the extent that there’s a marketing department, I’m it. So I’m always jealous of other companies that can afford to shoot promotional videos with paid actors, real lights, decent sound, and so on.
But then sometimes you see the videos that these other companies choose to invest their energies in, and it makes you wonder.
Behold, Microsoft’s preparations for the Windows 7 Launch Party!
Perfect. It really can’t be improved upon. Unless…just maybe…
First off, and most importantly, look at the picture on the left. Neat, huh. I killed an hour yesterday drawing it. I like the girl’s raccoon-eyes and the Eurotrashy look of the guy with the moustache. What does this image have to do with StepRep? Nothing, but I used it to accentuate a recent post on the StepRep blog about being secretive. (We’re against it.)
Meanwhile on the MyFrontSteps blog I’m really focussed on explaining what MyFrontSteps is all about: Finding and sharing trusted local services. We were a little wobbly on this concept for a while, but we’re going to work harder to make it clear to people. We’re calling our strategy adjustment Plan B.
Just kidding. Even if I had an opinion about how the United States should fix its health care system – which, as a Canadian, I don’t – this wouldn’t be the place to air it.
But over the long weekend I was reading this article by David Goldhill in the Atlantic. Goldhill argues that the problem with American health care is that it’s not paid for directly by the consumers – sick people – but by the insurance industry. He points out how weird this is:
We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance.
So unlike other businesses, which have to focus on good service and competitive pricing to attract customers, health care providers can get away with half-assed service and Byzantine pricing schemes because their real customers aren’t the poor chumps in the paper gowns, but the insurance companies.
Goldhill also writes – and I’m arriving at the point, here, so stay with me:
It’s astonishingly difficult for consumers to find any health-care information that would enable them to make informed choices – based not just on price, but on quality of care or the rate of preventable medical errors.
It’s a matter for democratic debate whether health care should be a consumer good like any other; whether it should be paid for out of pocket, or by an insurance company, or by the government. But I think everyone would agree that citizens ought to be able to shop for a doctor in the same straightforward way that they shop for other services – by comparing prices, by looking for reviews online, and by asking their friends who they recommend.
Correction. I suppose there’s one group that would disagree: bad doctors.
People who are bad at their jobs rely on consumer confusion to keep themselves in business. No-one deliberately goes to a bad doctor twice; but many of us are too ill-informed to tell the difference between good medical care and bad.
The same applies, of course, for any industry. People innocently give their business to reckless real estate agents, clumsy carpenters, and visionless videographers.
Obviously, consumers suffer. And competent real estate agents, carpenters, and videographers suffer, because they lose business to hacks. You could even argue that the hacks suffer – they lurch along in careers they’re lousy at, instead of getting a clear economic signal that they ought to try a different line of work.
I think of StepRep and MyFrontSteps as an alliance between consumers and competent service providers. By connecting with the businesses they know and trust, people can steer their friends toward experts that won’t rip them off.
As you can see, this post has very little to do with health care. But it has everything to do with reform – reforming the way consumers think. We’re no longer powerless, even when we’re sitting in a waiting room wearing a drafty paper gown. The internet has given us amazing new tools for evaluating the quality of the services we pay for. We’ve just gotta start using them.
Originally this post over at the MyFrontSteps blog – which is loosely based on a real conversation I had with a friend this weekend – was going to be done in comic book form. But I realized that the amount of effort involved (assuming twenty or so frames, it would probably have taken me the better part of a week) was disproportionate to whatever promotional value the project might have had. So I contented myself with drawing the first frame and typing up the rest of the post in plain ol’ dialogue style, which only took a couple hours.
A couple weeks ago Brendan and Jeff took off to San Francisco for the Inman Real Estate Connect conference. They arranged for a little demo booth where they would show off StepRep and MyFrontSteps to fellow conference-goers. So before they left, Jeff asked me to come up with a screensaver they could put on their demo laptop.
Jeff told me had nothing more elaborate in mind than a MyFrontSteps logo bouncing around on a white screen. But I had a little extra time on my hands, so I came up with something a little fancier – an animated overview of the MyFrontSteps strategy for changing the way businesses advertise.
After they got back from the conference I snazzed up the 1-minute screensaver with a little musical accompaniment (a 1935 tune called “Every Little Moment” by the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra) and stuck it up on YouTube.
But instead of letting you watch it here, I’m going to send you over to a new post on the StepRep blog, enigmatically titled If John Wanamaker were alive today…
Every once in a while I’ll get an email from my father drawing my attention to some online advertising campaign that he thinks I’ll find interesting. I imagine it’s his way of encouraging me: “Hey, son, it’s not only your crazy company trying to promote itself on YouTube – real businesses are doing it too!”
Thus was I recently directed to FedEx’s new YouTube campaign starring Fred Willard (whom you know from movies like Waiting For Guffman and Best In Show, and of course as the CEO of Buy N Large). Willard stars in a series of mock infomercials (directed by Bob Odenkirk, of Mr. Show fame) called 1-2-3 Succeed!
They’re pretty funny.
Despite being covered in the business section of the New York Times, the campaign hasn’t exactly caught fire. As of Tuesday evening, none of the videos has been viewed more than 10,000 times. These are Spokesmonster-like numbers; it’s nice to know I’m competing on the same plane (if not quite at the same salary) as Odenkirk and Willard. But despite the slow start, I hope the ads are a success. Not for FedEx’s sake, but for the sake of the advertising biz.
I’m not saying the future of the advertising industry rests on the success or failure of this one campaign. I just think they’re good ads, and I’d like to see more like them. But take a look at some of the comments on FedEx’s YouTube page:
[T]his type of humor is low-brow and incompatible with the sophistication that consumers expect from FedEx.
Throw it away and start over. Not funny or informative. Worst FedEx ad campaign ever….
This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. The marketing group at FedEx that put this out should be on the chopping block. Dumb, stupid, boring, and won’t bring any customers to FedEx so is therefore a waste of money. I think I threw up a bit in my mouth these are so bad.
…Not that it’s hard to find YouTube commenters to say mean things about your video. But the early response reminds me of other innocuous ad campaigns that backfired – like those Microsoft ads with Jerry Seinfeld that everyone hated so much. Or this reviled Motrin ad from last year. Why is it that when advertisers try to be a little inventive, they often enrage as many customers as they amuse? Meanwhile, there’s no penalty for being dull and predictable. We don’t even notice the boring ads – they pass through our buzzing brains like busboys through a fashionable restaurant, eyes down, trying not to draw attention to themselves. Every once in a while one of the busboys dares to give us a smile, and we respond by lashing him with our walking sticks.
I can understand why people dislike Microsoft, and I can therefore understand how those people might dislike the Seinfeld Microsoft ads. What’s strange to me is that those same people seemed to dislike the Seinfeld ads much more intensely than they did all of the far more banal ads that came before and after it. You’d think Microsoft would have gotten some credit for trying something different, but it seems that people resented the attempt much more than they resented the ad itself.
“How dare you try to entertain us,” they said. “Go on about your unseemly business, just don’t make us look at you.”
We citizens of the mass-consumer age have a fraught relationship with the advertising industry. It surrounds us – we swim in it like the ocean – and maybe these ads frustrate us not because we really think they’re that bad, but simply because we notice them at all – and for a few seconds they remind us how far we are from dry land.
The last time we saw the Spokesmonster he was knuckle-walking off into the sunset, his life having been perfected by StepRep. Now it’s MyFrontSteps that needs a promotional push, so our beloved mascot has been forced to cancel his retirement plans.
(Watch for a cameo by MyFrontSteps CEO Brendan King!)
Over at the StepRep Blog, I sing of the many wonders of the brand new StepRep homepage. (Or are we calling it the “dashboard”? I’m not sure if we’ve decided yet. To my mind it’s definitely more homepagey than dashboardy, but I’m ready to be convinced.)
It’s a pretty big change. Most of our previous updates have been off in the margins where they could be easily ignored. This one’s hard to miss. Go check it out.
At the MyFrontSteps Blog we unveiled four new cartoons. Robert Scoble, Vanessa Fox, Alice Myerhoff of Inman News, and Jennifer Pahlka of Web 2.0 Expo answered the question, “What have you done to make your house a home?”
Meanwhile, over on the StepRep Blog, I talked about the latest Facebook-related updates to the product. We’ve got a new way of integrating StepRep with your Facebook account, and a new way to interact with potential customers from our Facebook app, Homebook.
This is turning into quite the little blog network around here. Along with our sister site the StepRep Blog, we’ve recently added the MyFrontSteps Blog, which would be – I don’t know, a crazy old aunt?
Search Engine Optimization Journal points me to an interesting post by Jeff Sexton at Grokdotcom. Jeff is talking about how negative reviews on your website can actually improve your reputation:
It all boils down to credibility. Customer reviews simply have more credibility than your sales copy, so they inspire more confidence in the buyer. And negative reviews lend credibility to the review process itself, standing as visible proof that the reviews are not edited.
Of course, if all your reviews are bad, then reputation management is the least of your problems: there’s probably something seriously wrong with your product or service.
But Jeff makes a pretty good case that if you sweep bad reviews under the rug you’ll do more harm than good, and he gives an example from his own online shopping experience. Bad reviews just wind up migrating to other sectors of the web where searchers will still find them and where you’ll lose your power to respond. Anyway his post is worth a read.
He got me thinking about my own experiences with bad reviews, and how I’ve chosen to deal with them. Now, I’m not a Persuasion Architect like Jeff Sexton (though like him, I’ve had the privilege of making up my own silly job title: Cartoonist-in-Chief), so bear in mind that these are the ramblings of an amateur.
Seems to me there are three kinds of negative reviews:
Case 1: You’ve genuinely screwed up and the reviewer is calling you on it.
Case 2: You haven’t really screwed up, but because of miscommunication or misunderstanding, the reviewer thinks you have.
Case 3: The reviewer is just a jerk.
In all three cases, you may be strongly tempted to just delete the review and pretend it never happened. But if you do, you’re missing an opportunity.
In Case 1, you deserved the bad review. Hopefully you’ll learn from it and do a better job next time. In any event, here’s a chance to demonstrate how on-the-ball you are. Leave a follow-up comment. Explain how you goofed and why it won’t happen again. Offer to make good. A bad review with a timely follow-up is almost as good as a good review, for the reason Jeff Sexton mentioned: credibility. A good review could be from anyone, but only the most paranoid visitor would accuse you of making up bad reviews and sticking them on your site.
In Case 2, you haven’t really screwed up, but because of confusion or bad information the reviewer thinks you have. Most likely this communication breakdown is due to clumsiness on your part: bad site design, fuzzy writing, a failure to make your product or service clear to outsiders. Then again, maybe your reviewer just isn’t very bright. Either way, now’s your chance to clear up the misunderstanding. Your follow-up comment will simultaneously demonstrate your attentiveness and help other confused visitors see the light.
In Case 3, someone is just yankin’ your chain. Don’t let it be yanked. Again, the follow-up comment is a valuable tool: blatant falsehoods can be corrected, insults can be deflected with good humour. (Outright slanders can just be ignored.) The goal here is simple: to demonstrate that you’re the bigger person and get visitors on your side.
Again, I’m not a Persuasion Architect; I’m just an average schmuck with his own set of biases. My preference is for openness and engagement, and luckily I work for a company that shares those values.
It’s something to think about, though. There’s a lot of hostility floating around the internet – for every honest, thoughtful, constructively-critical review on the web, there are a hundred imbecilic bleats. I suppose it has a lot to do with users being able to remain anonymous; there’s little incentive to restrain their worst impulses. Perhaps the growth of online communities like MyFrontSteps, communities with social context – where if you act like a jerk, all your real-world friends will see it – will help mitigate some of this rudeness. In the meantime, what’s the best way to deal with this culture of negativity?
We’ve had a few enquiries from attentive viewers of the Spokesmonster cartoons. “Hey,” they say, “in one of the cartoons you promised we’d be able to add the StepRep widget to our Facebook profiles. When’s that happenin’, ya slackers?”
Well, the development team is working on a way to push stories from StepRep into your Facebook account. We’ll let you know the minute that happens. But in the meantime, there’s a cheat you might like to try.
If you go to the Facebook application directory and do a search for “RSS”, you’ll find a whole whack of apps with names like RSS-Connect, Simply RSS, and Blog RSS Feed Reader (to name only the first three that come up). These apps allow you to add an RSS feed to your Facebook profile.
Now, back in StepRep, go to the Widget Settings screen and right-click and copy the location of the little link that says RSS Feed. Carry that address over to Facebook and paste it into whichever one of the RSS apps you’ve chosen to install, and voila, there’s your StepRep widget, right smack on your Facebook profile. Your friends can see the stories you’ve chosen to promote, and you can stop blaming that clown who made the cartoon for getting a little ahead of himself.
By the way, we’re not endorsing any of these RSS apps, so if this trick doesn’t work for you, don’t come running to us.
***
In other news, we now own the domain steprep.com. Previously some wretched cyber-squatter had taken residence there, but we finally convinced him to drag his smelly sleeping bag off our doorstep.
So now if you suffer memory failure, or if you lose all your bookmarks, you won’t have to scratch your head over where to find us. Just type “steprep.com” into your address bar and by the mighty magic of the 301 redirect you’ll be whisked to our home at steprep.myfrontsteps.com.
***
Update 3:03 pm – a few minutes after I finished this post, I received word that the development team had just released an update. I talk about the new “My Content” button and “Promote this” checkbox over on the StepRep Blog.
Scoot over to the StepRep Blog to read about the newest subdivision in the MyFrontSteps community – Homebook. (Tagline: “Where your friends live…online.”) Homebook is a place to hang out with your friends and talk about your homes. We’ve just released the app for Facebook and MySpace:
A couple weeks ago I wrote a post called Selling sunrise. The gist of it was that no matter how great your product is, it will live or die based on how well it is marketed. Whether you’re selling soap, or sliced bread, or sunrise – if people don’t understand how your product will improve their lives, they’re not going to use it.
Here’s a good example. After watching the most recent Spokesmonster cartoon, which deals with referral fees (a feature that’s still in development), a guy named Doug made the following comment:
That is a terrible business model. $100 for a referral. As an interior painter I would not pay $10 for a customer referral until I have been paid by that customer.
Doug’s right – $100 for a referral is a lousy deal if you don’t get a guaranteed sale out of it. That’s why with StepRep you don’t pay a dime unless you complete a transaction.
This is hugely important, and I guess the point wasn’t made clearly enough in the cartoon – anyway, not clearly enough for Doug. Let me run through how the referral model will work.
1) You don’t have to offer a referral fee if you don’t want to. You can just use StepRep to monitor and manage your online reputation – for free – and ignore all the extra features.
2) You set the amount of the referral fee. We don’t know how big your business is. You could be peddling fifty-cent shoelaces or million-dollar yachts. Only you know how large a fee you’re prepared to offer.
3) The fee is split 50/50 between the new customer and the referring customer. That’s why I worry that the term “referral fee” might be confusing (and if you have a better phrase, get in touch with me). Really what you’re offering is a referral fee plus a discount.
–and most importantly–
4) You don’t pay a dime unless you make an actual sale. It doesn’t cost you anything to offer a referral fee, and if no-one takes you up on the offer, that’s okay, you can just go on promoting your business the old-fashioned way – radio ads, coupons in the mail, paying some kid to dress up as a giant cheeseburger and stand on the street corner waving.
The referral fees won’t be coming along for another few months. Hopefully by the time this feature is ready, we’ll have a better sense of how to get the idea across to new users. Meanwhile, thanks for the feedback, Doug.
Springtime is here – even in the Canadian prairies. It makes a big difference, waking up to sunshine rather than chilly darkness. This morning my alarm went off at 7:30 and I was glad to see that it was already full daylight outside. I lay in bed for a while and thought about the word “sunrise”.
The sun doesn’t really rise. It stays where it is, and the rotation of the earth causes us to fall out of shadow and into the sun’s light. The word “sunrise” reflects an ancient, intuitive, pre-Copernican conception of how the universe works. But it’s the perfect word. You couldn’t possibly do better.
Let’s say you’re in marketing and your boss asks you to develop a pitch for a new feature. “People on our side of the planet are tired of this constant darkness,” your boss might say. “Electricity bills are through the roof. Plants aren’t growing. We’re always bumping into things. So we’ve decided to rotate the earth once every 24 hours, so that for 12 hours out of every 24, this side of the planet will get direct sunlight.”
“What a great idea!” you say. “What are we calling it?”
“Well,” says your boss, “that’s where you come in.”
So you sit there spinning your globe, trying to come up with a good, concise, marketable description of this new feature.
Hemispheric illumination shift?
Rotational shadow escape?
Sunward earth turning?
Ugh. A PR campaign can probably be built around sunward earth turning to convince people of its benefits. But who’s going to get up at 5 AM to watch it happen?
There are two components to marketing. First, you need to make a complicated new thing seem straightforward and familiar to an audience that probably isn’t paying much attention.
Second, you need to make it – for want of a better word – beautiful.
I’ve been trying, in the Spokesmonster cartoons and on this blog, to get across the benefits of a service that offers a lot of great features – some of them hard to explain in ten words or less. Hopefully I’ve been making a bit of progress. But I still haven’t come across that magic phrase that makes everything clear and beautiful.
Nothing to do but keep trying. Meanwhile, I’m convinced that, like sunrise, StepRep sells itself – once people experience it for themselves.
Over at the StepRep blog, Jeff has a link to an interesting news item: Twitter has made a small change to its profile pages which might make a big difference in future Google results.
I should start by saying: I don’t really “get” Twitter. I suppose I might come around. I’m one of those cats who won’t eat his food when it’s served in a new bowl. I resisted joining Facebook for almost a year, to the exasperation of my friends. Then I joined, and now I…well, I still don’t really “get” Facebook, actually. I think it’s clunky and poorly organised. And I really didn’t need to reconnect with that old high school acquaintance who now spends his days SuperPoking everyone he ever met. But thanks to Facebook, I have enjoyed some rousing games of online Scrabble, and at least my friends don’t crack jokes about what an old man I am any more.
It’s funny. Twitter is getting a reputation as a place where loud-mouthed narcissists blab about watching TV and cutting their toenails. As you’ll recall, when blogging first emerged as a fad a couple years ago, it got the same rap. But in spite of all the bad press, I embraced blogging easily while I’ve resisted Twitter.
Why? It’s simple. Twitter demands brevity. I’m a windy writer. I exhale in complete paragraphs. If I have something to say, it probably can’t be said using less than five hundred words. A hundred and forty characters? What can you say in a hundred and forty characters? It takes me a hundred and forty characters just to furrow my brow in preparation for writing.
Trying to sell me on Twitter is like trying to sell a fat guy a Smart Car. He might be able to squeeze himself behind the steering wheel, but he’ll never be comfortable. He needs a minivan or an SUV – something that leaves room for him to fan out his flab.
I need a blog to fan out my flab.
I’m not dissing Twitter, any more than I’m dissing Smart Cars. If you’re comfortable with that 140-character limit, great. If you can find ways to be interesting within that limit, better still: you’re a far more disciplined writer than I am. As Blaise Pascal said, apologising for the length of one of his letters: “I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter.”
Perhaps I could compress this blog post to 140 characters. But I’m too busy.
There’s an old saying and I don’t know where it came from and I’ll probably quote it wrong. It’s a piece of advice about how to structure speeches. It goes something like this:
First, tell them what you’re going to tell them.
Then, tell them.
Then, tell them what you’ve told them.
You could paraphrase the above as: always assume your audience isn’t paying attention.
I think it’s pretty good advice, whether you’re giving a speech or marketing a product. Even when they’re looking right at you, people’s thoughts are often far, far away – as far away as Mars is from Earth. If you send out just one probe, it might get lost in space, or burn up in the atmosphere, or crash in the mountains. Better to send out two or three probes and hope one makes it to the surface safely.
Sadly, a marketing career based on repetition, repetition, and more repetition can get a little…well, repetitive. As one of those fancy-schmancy tea-drinking corduroy-wearing “creative” types, I get bored with writing assignments that merely require me to rearrange last week’s sales pitch. Haven’t I explained StepRep often enough? Can’t I move on to something different?
This week I’ve had a few “rearrangement” assignments sitting on my desk, and I’ve been having a hard time getting into them. I’ve been trying to come up with a different angle. A friend of mine called up and left me a voicemail where he outlined an analogy he thought I could use. I’ve paraphrased him quite a bit, but here’s what my friend had to say:
Remember the popular girl in high school? It didn’t matter what she did – it didn’t matter how boring her life was – people couldn’t stop talking about her. Maybe she broke up with her boyfriend, or crashed her car. Maybe she just chipped a nail. Somehow, whatever she did, no matter how mundane, word got around. She was at the center of the conversation. People flocked around her.
Meanwhile, the uncool kids wandered the corridors, feeling invisible and isolated. Their tastes were a little more obscure – they were into opera, or poetry, or model trains. Without hangers-on to gossip about them and spread the word about what they were doing, it was difficult for the opera buffs and the poets and the model train enthusiasts to connect with one another.
What the popular girl had, what the unpopular kids lacked, was brand name recognition. In effect, gossip did for the popular girl what billboards and TV ads do for Coke: made her ubiquitous. If you’ve got an appetite for a soft drink, the word Coke is never far from the front of your mind. Maybe if you stopped to think about it, you’d decide that you’d much prefer a bottle of Boot Hill Sassparilla. But you don’t stop think about it. The waitress asks you what you’d like, and you name the first drink that comes to mind, and Coke is it.
Now, ubiquity is not something that can be acquired on the cheap. Coca-Cola spends a fortune keeping its brand in the public eye. But you probably don’t want to be Coca-Cola. You’re content to be Boot Hill Sassparilla – provided that the people who like sarsaparilla know where to find you.
StepRep can’t make sarsaparilla as famous as Coca-Cola. But if you’re a sarsaparilla maker, you can use StepRep to help ensure that people see your brand when they’re searching for sarsaparilla.
StepRep can’t make poets as popular as cheerleaders. But if you’re a high school poet, you can use StepRep to help build your brand name recognition within that small circle of high school poetry fans.
There! That’s a pitch I haven’t tried before.
I feel refreshed.
–
PS. I tried Boot Hill Sassparilla on a visit to Santa Fe a few years back, and thought it was pretty good. I think it’s local to the southwest – you can’t get it where I live. I hope they’re still making the stuff.
After I posted the most recent Spokesmonster cartoon yesterday, I sent the link around to all my friends and invited their comments. One friend, a StepRep user, emailed back with his thoughts on StepRep and the whole concept of online reputation management, and I thought I’d address his arguments here.
He wrote:
I have not really added anything to my StepRep profile page because … I kinda thought that the system does not really make any sense. If everyone knows that the page is managing your reputation, then they know that it is only showing the good stories about you and leaving out the bad stories. If I wanted to buy something for my house, I want to read all the bad stories about the contractor, not read his “managed” page which only tells me the good things. Why would anyone read a StepRep page when they know it is clearly biased?
The guys at the French website L’Atelier raised a similar point when they reviewed StepRep a few months ago. And it’s a good question, a question we’re going to have to learn to confront if we want the site to keep growing.
Here’s how I’d respond to my friend:
“Bad stories” only tell you so much.
Your argument is kind of like saying, “Why would anyone ever go to the Air Canada website? Air Canada isn’t going to share all the bad stories about flight delays and grumpy flight attendants.” But “bad stories” aren’t the only things consumers are looking for online.
If someone is trying to decide whether to hire you as (say) a contractor, one of the things that person might look at is a site that offers unbiased reviews. But once he’s decided to hire you, the unbiased reviews aren’t going to give him your phone number, or link to your blog and your Facebook page, or link to stories that have appeared about you in the local press, or show who you’ve worked for in the past, or link to photos of the actual work you’ve done. Your StepRep profile page will do all that.
Building a reputation based on trust.
Down the line, as the StepRep / MyFrontSteps community grows, your StepRep profile will also give visitors valuable information about your reputation: they’ll be able to see which consumers have endorsed you or linked to you as a “trusted service provider”. If visitors are MyFrontSteps users themselves, they’ll be able to use the StepRep Directory to find the service providers that their friends trust and recommend. This is a far more valuable piece of information than some anonymous whine left on a discussion board somewhere.
Influencing search engine results.
Of course consumers won’t treat your StepRep profile page as if it’s the only source of information about your business. They’ll look at other sites that come up when they Google your name. But here’s where StepRep comes in handy. Because StepRep was designed to be very attractive to search robots, the links leading from your widget and profile page to the stories you’ve marked as “good” will influence search engines to give more weight to those stories.
The results probably won’t be dramatic. StepRep’s influence might be just enough to nudge positive stories a little higher in the search results, where people are more likely to see them.
(PS. MyFrontSteps’ Jeff Tomlin had a great post a while back about how Google ranks pages. Reading it will help to explain how the StepRep profile page and widget work.)
Making yourself a little more Google-friendly.
In the second Spokesmonster cartoon, where we talked about online reputation management, maybe we made it seem like the objective was only to chase away criticism and negative reviews. And sometimes that’s part of it. But there’s another objective which is likely to resonate for many folks who run small businesses – folks who might not have much of an online presence right now. And that’s simply helping searchers to find you when they Google your name.
Say you’ve got a fairly common name, like – oh, I don’t know, Michael A. Charles. Googling my name brings up a whole lot of irrelevant results – irrelevant to me, I mean – like the American artist Michael Ray Charles, the Australian blues guitarist Michael Charles, the Houston dentist Michael A. Charles.
By using my StepRep widget and profile page to aggregate and link to all the sites that refer to me – the real Michael A. Charles – I can influence Google so that it’s more likely to put those sites in the first page of results, where more people will see them. And that Aussie guitarist can slink back down to the second page where he belongs.
Does it all seem a little complicated?
As you can see, I’m still figuring out how to make these arguments as brief and punchy as possible. StepRep has a lot of different angles – notice I didn’t even mention quotes and referral fees, which are the subject of the most recent cartoon.
But really the best selling point is that it’s all free. You can set up an account in about two minutes. Try it out, explore the site, maybe add the StepRep widget to your blog or website, see if it makes any difference to your Google results.
Meanwhile I’ll work on polishing my rhetorical skills.
Wait, is this Part III, or Part IV? I’m already losing count.
Anyway, this video helps to explain the third tab in StepRep, the one marked “Referrals and Quotes”. These functions are still a couple months away, but the video should give you a pretty good idea where the product is headed.
For a high-tech company, you’d think we’d have a more sophisticated way of recording this local TV news report than just pointing a videocamera at the TV. But Krystian was the only one of us who bothered to make the effort, the videocamera method is what he chose, and I for one think the result has a certain scruffy charm.
MyFrontSteps CEO Brendan King is the main interviewee, but watch for cameos by Chris, Mariatta, Kevin, Guy, Jason, Brett, Carey, and the back of Rachel’s head.
…And yes, the monster is in it too.
Update, Jan 23 20o9. Okay, we’ve got a higher quality version of this video up now. In case you want to show it to your grandma or something.
It has come to my attention that the single most popular post on this blog was one I made just before Christmas titled Monster evolution.
I couldn’t figure out why, until I tried Googling the phrase, and discovered that there’s a stylish and addictive Flash game by that title. It seems that most of these visitors are more interested in the game than they are in our silly promotional cartoons.
I suppose the polite thing to do would be to go back and change the unintentionally deceptive title of that post. Instead I’m going to exploit the coincidence and use it to draw still more attention to our silly promotional cartoons. Also, I promised to post more of my monster concept sketches but I never got around to it.
By the way, just because I’m posting these pictures, don’t think I’ve deluded myself into believing I know how to draw.
Cagey Camel
(Cagey Camel is the code name VendAsta’s developers used for the second iteration of StepRep. I pictured Cagey as a surly tough in a leather jacket, like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.)
Bartleby the Scrivener
(Obviously Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener isn’t a monster. But I identify with his lazy stubbornness, which is probably why I decided to put him into the cartoon. He looks a little like me.)
The cool thing about StepRep is, you’re just sitting there minding your own business, not thinkin’ about nothin’ – maybe you’re passing the time drawing pictures of monkeys – and an alert pops up in your inbox to tell you that someone out there in cyberland is chattering about you.
Of course, we’re using StepRep to monitor StepRep’s reputation. Which is how we found out that the French technology website L’Atelier had written a story about our beta release.
My French is pretty mal, but from what I can tell the tone is positive. The author expresses a little skepticism in the final paragraph, where he questions the usefulness of the StepRep widget. Seeing only good reviews on a site, he writes, is normal, and it doesn’t inspire the consumer with confidence. One can always use a search engine to seek out other views.
That’s true, of course. The benefit of the StepRep widget is that it allows you to broadcast positive reviews to multiple locations (to your blog, to your website, and soon to your profiles on various social networking sites) with a single click of a button. Rather than merely copy-and-pasting a review into your website from some other source, it provides a link directly to that source, so that the visitor can confirm its authenticity. And by driving search spiders to the stories you select, it will influence search results so that the favourable stories are more likely to rise to the top.
Anyway, it’s nice to be getting a little attention from our European cousins. À bientôt, mes amis français!
We’ve been winding up for the official release of StepRep and it’s been hectic around here. I pass by guys crying in the corridors all the time. And right at the peak of the hecticness, Brendan and Jeff – our CEO and main marketing guy, respectively – have buzzed off to the annual Real Estate Connect conference in New York City. Well, they say they’re at the conference. More likely they just going to Broadway shows and taking long hansom cab rides around Central Park.
I hope Brendan and Jeff are meeting lots of interesting people and having a good time in the States. It should be a little warmer there anyway.
Meanwhile, StepRep Beta is now live. You should try it out. It’s pretty shiny, and getting shinier every day as the techies hunt down and exterminate the remaining bugs. And it looks swank, thanks to the design work of my office buddies Marie-Louise and John (left).
But don’t worry, the monsters are still there to ugly things up a little.
By way of comparison, the previous cartoon took me about three weeks to create. Although the running time is only a little longer, the new cartoon – measured in terms of file size – is almost three times as complex. My working file for the second cartoon was 35 megabytes; the new cartoon came in a little under 90. (Garson Hampfield, which is almost seven minutes long, took up only 43 megs.)
MyFrontSteps house exterior
There’s a lot of little pieces in there. For example, this drawing of a house took me over an hour. In the cartoon, the house flashes by in about five seconds. It’s pretty small to begin with, and by the time it gets shrunk still further and compressed by YouTube, virtually all the detail is lost.
In addition to the house there are drawings of a kitchen, a bathroom, and three views of a living room. Each drawing is onscreen for only a couple seconds. Each took about an hour. So that’s almost a day of work right there.
What I’m saying is, I’m an idiot.
But apart from spending an inordinate amount of time on tiny details, the main reason the new cartoon took so long is that for the first three weeks I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. Flailing around for a direction, I spent most of my time drawing monsters.
Since I’m between animations, back in flailing mode, I thought over the next few days I’d post some sketches showing how these monsters evolved, starting with…
I’ve got a funny job. For the last two weeks I’ve been doing nothing but drawing cartoon monsters. I’ve spent entire days with my feet up on my desk, pad and paper in my lap, doodling snail ladies and lizard rappers. For the longest time I had no idea where this was taking me. Maybe I was using the doodling as an excuse to avoid doing more productive work. But all these monsters will be going into the next Spokesmonster video, so I figure I haven’t been totally wasting my time.
I just did a tally of my completed monsters. I’m up to eighteen now. (Many of these are just drawings that will be flashed onscreen for a moment or two, but some of them have been broken down for limb movements and facial expressions.) Here’s the thing: I’d like there to be roughly as many girl monsters as there are boy monsters. But I’m already out of whack. I’ve got twelve boy monsters, only six girl monsters.
Why is it so much easier to come up with male characters than female characters? I’m not the only animator with this deficiency. Look at the old Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons. Disney had Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck, but they were stuck in minor supporting roles. Warner Brothers had Bugs Bunny in a dress – that’s about it. The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park all have girls in them, but I’d reckon there are ten male characters for every female one.
Why aren’t animators more interested in drawing female characters? Perhaps they’re limited by a sense of decorum. You needn’t have seen too many episodes of the Simpsons to summon up examples of Homer being dropped from great heights, having heavy weights dropped on him, or losing his pants. Those things just don’t happen to Marge or Lisa. If the definition of comedy is inflicting pain or physical humiliation on your characters, and if our culture is uncomfortable with seeing women brutalised in those ways, that’s a powerful disincentive to drawing female cartoons. Why use Daisy Duck if we can’t clunk her over the head for laffs? We’ll just use Donald instead.
But I wonder if the gender disparity doesn’t derive from something more fundamental. Look at the design of the male and female icons on bathroom doors. The male icon is a simple stick figure. The female icon is a stick figure with a dress. Boiled down to their most basic forms, the woman requires more lines to draw than the man.
I’ve noticed in my own drawing that it takes longer to design a female character than it does a male character. With a girl monster I have to worry about hips and boobs and hair and making sure the facial features look feminine – I don’t mean attractive, I just mean that you want your girl monster to actually look like a girl. The cheap way to do this is to give her lipstick and long eyelashes. Or you can be a bit more subtle in the shaping of the jaw and the placement of the eyes, so that makeup is unnecessary. Either way, it takes a little extra work. And I’m a fundamentally lazy guy.
With a boy monster, you just hack out your basic human figure and you’re done – it’s a boy.
For some reason, by default, cartoons come out male.
Why is this? Obviously, there’s a long and complicated history behind the iconography of maleness and femaleness, and much of that history occurred back when women weren’t in a position to complain about what the men were painting on bathroom doors. But those bathroom icons reflect something other than centuries of sexism. Maybe stick figures are assumed to be male for a reason: the basic male shape really is composed of simple straight lines, while the basic female shape is made up of more complicated curves. Maybe it’s not just sexism that skews my monsters male by a ratio of two to one, but physiology.
If my speculation is correct, the pro-male bias appears at the very earliest stage of the creative process – the stage where the cartoonist, chair leaned back, feet on desk, idly doodles on a scratchpad. If every doodle starts as a male, then of course the cartoonist will wind up with a gallery of male characters.
Maybe I’m making an assumption, though. When women doodle, do their doodles come out female?
A co-worker emailed me a link to this article about the Motrin “babywearing” controversy. (And here’s the ad that touched it all off.) I guess Motrin has erred in the same way we did with our first cartoon a few months back – by underestimating the touchiness of the ad-watching public.
I have no advice for Motrin or for parents who wish to wear their babies. But I, and the Spokesmonster, feel their pain.
I’ve been animating the Spokesmonster non-stop for the last two months. After the first cartoon was released, just when I would have liked to take a break, it immediately became urgent (as I described in previous posts) to begin work on the follow-up.
But now that the second cartoon is complete, I can take a bit of a breather and think about what comes next. Our next project here at MyFrontSteps is an application aimed less at the business crowd and more at average folks – homeowners and renters. This new application will allow people to showcase their homes to their friends, their neighbours, and the whole wide world.
Is the Spokesmonster the right character to introduce this new application? Hard to say. One possibility we’ve discussed is that we might retain the Spokesmonster but introduce another character (or characters) to help shoulder promotional duties. And since I already had in mind a friend’s suggestion that the Spokesmonster needed a girlfriend…
Spokesmonstress concept sketches
Spokesmonstress concept drawings
Maybe someday the Spokesmonster universe will be as crowded as Ronald McDonaldland.
Picking up where I left off. Yesterday I explained how the first Spokesmonster cartoon seemed to anger and confuse viewers. A more cautious advertiser – or a more sensible one – might’ve concluded that it was pointless trying to salvage the concept, scrapped the character and started fresh with a new ad campaign involving puppies or wisecracking children. But we are neither cautious nor sensible here at MyFrontSteps.
The controversy had unexpectedly presented us with the perfect opportunity to demonstrate how the StepRep service will enable users to keep track of what’s being said about them online – and even do a little damage control. Here’s the Spokesmonster, inspecting the dents in his shiny reputation:
(Of course, the actual user interface is a little less cartoony than the version that appears in this video.)
So now that’s all cleared up. Where do we go from here? A female friend suggested one possible direction. “I think,” she declared after watching the new cartoon, “that the Spokesmonster needs a girlfriend.”
In mid-October, the Spokesmonster made his debut on the projection screen in the MyFrontSteps blounge (that’s the boardroom/lounge, where we hold meetings, drink beer, and play video games). The monster ate a squirrel, the audience chuckled, applause was dutifully bestowed, and everyone shuffled back to work.
A couple days later, the cartoon was uploaded to YouTube, and someone posted a link on the StepRep blog.
A couple more days passed, and then we got word that Benn at the Agent Genius blog had posted an article about MyFrontSteps and StepRep. At the end of his post he linked to the Spokesmonster cartoon and asked his readers, “What do you think?”
“Aside from trying to insult as many people as possible with the video, what exactly is the point here?”
“Not funny, not cute, not quirky, not effective at all. By the way, this 100% hillbilly found it a poor attempt to engage, insulting, and quite boring.”
“hi guys. this is really really bad. really bad. nothing good about it at all so nothing salvagable. scrap scrap scrap.”
“It is another case of someone putting up a video that is a result of a brainstorming gone too far.”
“Wow. Way to insult the user! Marketing, basic professionalism EPIC FAIL!”
This was pretty perplexing to us here at MyFrontSteps. It certainly hadn’t been our intention to insult anybody. We thought the cartoon was goofy and harmless.
Obviously, what we find funny in the blounge is not the same thing they find funny in the comments section at Agent Genius.
But you can’t make an ad that everyone hates and then defend yourself by saying, “They just don’t get it.” Marketing is about appealing to your consumer. If the consumer hates your ad, whether he “gets it” or not is beside the point. The ad has failed.
But here’s the funny part. StepRep is a product to help people monitor, manage, and build their online reputation. And now it was our Spokesmonster who required reputation management!
It seemed that this was a perfect opportunity to put our reputation management software into service. So we rushed a sequel into production…
This is the first post on what for now we’re calling “Monster’s Blog”. Which is a pretty weak title. Fortunately WordPress makes it pretty easy to go back into the settings and change the name of your blog if you come up with a better idea.
In the next couple days I’ll be posting the history of the StepRep Spokesmonster. Meanwhile you can link to both of the videos in the section called – tentatively! – “Cartoons”.
