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.

What the…?

That’s weird.

Clicking through to the page in question, part of an online pamphlet called The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the “Clash of Civilizations” for a New World Order by end-of-the-world expecter Peter Goodgame, I tried to figure out what this weirdness was doing among my search results.

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…

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.

Artist unknown. Photo by k1ng. CC licensed.

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 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.

Coming soon: Montaigne on Flash versus HTML5.

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.

But we’ll win ‘em over. Just watch us.

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…

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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.

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.

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.

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.