Think

During last week's presentation on Advertising & Transmedia Storytelling, I touched upon a wide range of topics, examples and people, and didn't have enough time to do most of them justice.  So, as promised, this post provides some further detail, as well as links to additional resources and recommended reading for anyone who wants to know more about the topics that I mentioned. (Apologies in advance: this is longer than most Think posts, since there's a lot to cover.)

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of speaking at Transmedia: The Story To Sell, a new conference held in Amsterdam, organized through a collaboration between the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and mediaLABamsterdam, and dedicated to exploring the emerging concept of transmedia storytelling.

Earlier this year, it was reported that women 55 and over are the fastest growing segment of users on Facebook. Just yesterday, however, Inside Facebook released a 60-day update, finding that fewer people in the same age group are revisiting their profiles.

The original report was seen as a sign that older generations are beginning to embrace social networking. Citing similar patterns (for example, people aged 45-64 being the f astest growing demographic in mobile texting), a new-found optimism for boomers and their relationship with the Internet emerged. However, the new revelations have stunned the digital community who have started to question whether the technological learning curve is just too great of older users.

A glass half full will always lead to disputes—unless, perhaps, it is half full of whiskey.

Last month, I was graciously invited by Ian Fitzpatrick to contribute to the Optimist Conspectus. In his words, it’s a “compendium of contemporary optimism, one perspective at a time.” He asks What you are optimistic about? and then looks at commonalities among the answers.

There's a new Kindle in my house, and we're excited about it. But I wonder if the mainstreaming of the e-book is taking something away from our relationships.

Going back. My wife and I are book people. Readers. My wife has spent over 20 years in book publishing and is currently the senior publicity executive at a large publishing house. I used to be a writer, and while my writing was for the screen any writer is by definition a serial gobbler of books. We're both pro-Kindle, at least to the point of giving that thin little machine a chance to show us that we can happily read on it.

I generally hate surveys, despise filling out forms, and avoid signing up for anything I know I won’t use at least once a day or that isn’t mission critical.

I just finished an hour session, teaching Hunch.com about me. Hunch is a consumer web application looking to help users make up their minds. In their words, “Hunch helps you make decisions and gets smarter the more you use it.” So I answered a vast array of cleverly compiled and seemingly never-ending questions. Throughout this process, I noticed something…I didn’t find myself in a huge rush to get to the payoff.

How old were you when you got your first computer? Maybe you tapped your fingers alongside a crackling dial-up modem or played “Rescue the Kitten” to refine your grade school typing skills? Cherished memories, indeed. Now I know people who secure a gmail address for babies still in the womb.

User backlash has become a predictable reaction to redesigns of Facebook. Polls show that 94% of people disapprove of recent changes to the site layout, rejecting the ‘stream and filter’ system.

It seems, as Robert Scoble puts it, that Facebook has “pissed off its users” with each reinvention it undertakes. Back in 2006, the introduction of a newsfeed sparked  major outcry, with users petitioning and boycotting the changes. Today, people are just as furious: a disgruntled mob – one million strong – has pressured Facebook into bringing back some ‘old’ design and user experience features.

Why are people so upset?

Go humans go. This ad greeted me Monday morning as I exited the subway in DUMBO. It found me in Chinatown too. I was intrigued and a bit startled. I assumed it was part of a larger campaign, but this was the first I’d seen. Go humans go…to me, it had Martian undertones. And that Quaker man! He hasn’t changed much over the years.

Suppose a SlideShare presentation you uploaded six months ago suddenly receives 90,000 views. Overnight. Accompanying this massive spike in activity is an email from SlideShare encouraging you to tweet, blog and flaunt your success. Gleefully, you follow SlideShare’s recommendation and tweet the proudest 140 characters you’ve typed in a month. That tweet might look something like this:

Apparently, I’m a SlideShare rockstar! My presentation on Slideshare has been getting a lot of views! Consider me “#bestofslideshare.”

Now suppose the date to be April 1st.

You’ve been had.