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In Your Ear

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Communications and marketing and computing in general is moving beyond the keyboard and text faster and faster. PC and laptop sales continue to decline EXCEPT for 2-in-1s (those laptops that fold into tablets) and hybrids (Microsoft Surface tablets, ipads with keyboards). What’s coming in their place?

In the home, Amazon’s Echo platform (Alexa!) has audio and video models. Google Home does, as well. Facebook is rolling out Portal. All of these respond to your voice.

Mobile phones are VERY close to rolling out foldable phones (think of a book opening) that will usher in a different kind of visual platform. Samsung’s model was briefly demonstrated recently:

In light of this, companies like Snap (makers of Snapchat, which I tend to say bad things about in general) are rethinking their “vertical only” requirements, just like Instagram did a year or two ago, switching from “square only” to “okay, whatever works.”

But with a LOT more voice-controlled systems and keyboard-less interaction and TONS of video seeking to replace text (like this blog post), one concern people keep voicing (and it’s valid) is that we don’t really want to watch video if the sound will bother the people around us. (Okay, yes, there are often jerks who ignore this and play videos anyway, but I don’t mean them).

In Your Ear

Just like Altoids brought a new category to light with “premium mints” because of the rise of Starbucks, I believe that bluetooth earbuds (like the Apple airpod) are going to be a LOT more ubiquitous. I have Google Pixel buds (I don’t recommend them). I found these affordable earbuds with lots of great ratings. I think a lot of the future will be in your ear.

But this means something else.

You know how podcasts seem to be going through their second Renaissance? I think it’ll happen even more. I believe that the audio form AND the video form will thrive. If we evolve our use cases to have a more visual device and personalized speakers, it means we’ll have more audio as well.

The future might well be in your ear.

What Will Suffer?

Text.

“Oh nonsense, Chris. I *love* to read.”

You do. You.

The stats say people (in the US, at least) are reading a TOTAL of 19 minutes a day between email/texts/websites and so on. At the same time, we are consuming digital media on an average of 6 hours a day. If we’re online for 6 hours but only 19 minutes on average is reading… uh, where is everyone?

Video. And audio.

You Want to Reach People? Get In Their Ear

It’s just not really an option any longer. That’s where it’s at. Sorry.

Okay, books are a different matter. In fact, PHYSICAL books are outpacing digital books in sales numbers lately. But don’t think of blogs as books. Don’t think that the platform matters. Medium is seeing a lot of attention right now. LinkedIn is cool. Blah blah blah. OVERALL, the larger world not just us nerds… it’s in the ear.

Get there. 🙂

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages and Why Should You Care?

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Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP pages, if you will) are a Google project intended to speed up the loading time of web pages on mobile devices. Beyond improving SEO (search engine optimization), and beyond being “mobile friendly,” the idea behind AMP is to make sure your site loads super fast on mobile devices.
But if you haven’t done anything specifically to your site in this regards, you probably don’t have this in play yet, and you need to get going on it.
I gathered up some posts and videos to help as a starting point for you to get yourself going and build out the AMP capabilities for your own website.

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages(AMP)?

It’s always good to start off with a business perspective, this one being from Forbes.
Here’s the official stuff.
Great post about AMP from MarketingLand.
GREAT collection of resources that Google even raved about from Eric Enge at Stone Temple.
This is a great talk about them by MOZ as part of their whiteboard series.
Here’s a getting started with AMP post on Search Engine Land.
This SEO Hacker article is pretty straightforward.

Some AMP Videos



It’s Not SUPER Hard

Getting this in place is important. This article is a good reason WHY to do it. The how isn’t all that hard, either.
Maybe make this a project in the coming weeks?

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Faster Deeper

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The six second ad is here. Jeffrey Katzenberg is looking to raise $2 billion to “invent” ten minute TV. The notification screen is the new home screen. Google’s pushing their AMP (accelerated mobile page) format harder and harder. The world wants fast. They want brief. Bites. Tapas.

Faster

Look, everyone wants to tell you that this or that is dead. It is. Everything died. And then there are new things. Those are alive. Until they die. Good. That’s out of the way.

The six second ad. You’ve looked at YouTube lately. There are two types of ads. One you can skip and one you can’t. If you can skip, you hover over that box barely watching the ad. If you can’t and the ad is six seconds, you accept it. If you can’t skip and it’s 30 seconds, you think “what a jerk.” Jerk. Your 30 second ad makes you a jerk. (30 used to be a “short” ad.)

Tweets. 140 characters. People used to rail against the format. “Why so few characters?” The truth is that Twitter pushed a really specific reality to bear: everyone’s too wordy and we need to get clear and concise. The form brought forth a lot of new voices and also other versions of the same concept.

Instagram: one picture (eventually short videos). Snapchat: vanishing pics and videos. Emojis and Gifs. Did you know that Giphy serves up 2 billion gifs a day on their platform? Gifs are repeating few-second bits of video.

But if everything’s so fast, where are we going? How do we know we’re in the right place? What can we learn if everything is moving whipsaw like it is?

Deeper

The strange intersecting trend is that it’s become more and more okay to be the real you. At the very same time a raft of tools has arrived to show off idealized versions of our lives, people are seeking out connections to the “real.” As virtual reality tees up, we want to go deeper with others and we want the real world. Or more accurately, we want the world we wish were the real world.

It’s possible to get deep quickly. Part of this is cultural, and in this, I’m deeply biased. You see, the rest of the world calls American culture avocados. We’re super soft and squishy and let you get super close fast, but our REAL selves are hidden in a core that’s hard to breach. By contrast, a lot of the world’s cultures are coconuts. The outside is a lot of work but once you’ve done that work, everything inside is worth it.

I think the avocado in us, the willingness to share a lot of who we are is something we can and should strive to deploy in these new fast methods. But just like there’s a massive difference between really good guacamole and a mushed up avocado, the goal with this new method will be to deliver an actual connection between your buyer and the values and mission of your organization.

Faster Deeper

We have to communicate faster, and deliver a deeper message. Not always and not super deep. But somewhere in how we do what we do, our values and mission have to be accessible.

Chobani didn’t beat Danon on price. They gave people what they wanted (more protein and less sugar), and they made it clear that they were donating some of their profits to causes. CEO Hamdi Ulukaya gave all his employees stock and made everyone in the company a lot better off in the process. None of this shows up on the label or in their ads. But the story spreads in short fast bursts through their media.

Sometimes, we buy something simply for ease of use and/or price. I like how I’m treated at the Cumberland Farms gas station and so I choose to go there for fuel. But if the lines are too long, I’ll go wherever. Sometimes, you just need a slice of pizza and it doesn’t much matter and other times, you want a sustainable farm-to-table dining experience.

But as messaging vectors, we might want to think more about how to make our messages faster and how to get deeper in that short amount of time.
Even this post is too long. Right?

Amazon and Facebook and Google and Apple Don't Want What's Best For You

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apples I can ask my Amazon Alexa “where’s my stuff” and she’ll tell me. I can tell Google Home to set a timer for 7 minutes so I can boil water for tea and I’ll get the alarm at the right time. Facebook knows that I made plans to talk with Derek tomorrow. Apple knows that I pestered Siri with facts about North Carolina for my daughter’s book report. BUT…

Amazon and Facebook and Google and Apple Don’t Want What’s Best for Me

Why?
Because they don’t share.
I can’t ask Siri about my Amazon order (without going into my browser or app). I can’t ask Facebook if I have any timers set right now. Alexa doesn’t know I’m talking to Derek. It’s all a bunch of data silos.
So?
But that’s ME. That’s MY data. That’s the view of my world broken into digital moments. And I wish (beyond reason, because there’s no way these companies will do this) that all the biggest holders of my data would work together to make that data view of my world better.

What If The Big Companies Wanted What Was Best For You?

If I were asking my Google Assistant more than a few times about the Patriots game, what if Apple told me I could buy a live stream of it for $2.99 right now? When I spend two hours in a variety plant-based Facebook groups, what if Amazon asked me if I wanted to order the stuff to make that four bean chili recipe I was gushing over?
That’s the somewhat larger view. Heck, I’d settle for being able to set a timer or an appointment on one system and have the other systems aware that I did it. I’ll show you what I mean:

  • I go downstairs to throw some clothes in the laundry machine.
  • I use Google Assistant on my phone to set a timer for 34 minutes.
  • When I get upstairs, I really just want Alexa to take over the timer duties.

So how could they do it?

I’m not a developer, but I can sketch the thumbnail easily enough.

  1. Create a database for me about me that all four companies agree to share. (This is where it falls down because all four companies compete and don’t want to share this.)
  2. Create a detailed data management settings app so that I/you/we can decide which companies are given which data.
  3. Allow a kind of “exchange” of tasks (like switching the “owner” of the timer).
  4. Set up frequent “pings” between the services to “sync” which data is best served where.
  5. All a robust third party integration to build in even more skills and capabilities.

This won’t happen. Ever. But it’s what would make for a much better user experience.

I Don’t Mean IFTTT and Zapier

Those solutions are more like copy/paste and make lots of duplicate data. That is a “fix” but not a “solution.” In fact, it’s like what got us in trouble in the old days with “document management” before the advent of the cloud. So no, not that.

The Even Larger Picture

The use of computers over the last several decades has been keyboard and screen. Then, keyboard mouse and screen. Then touch screens. And then a little bit of VR which is just a face screen and some devices.
But what’s after that? Voice is a big component. Another is distributed computing throughout a bunch of devices. We’ve been used to thinking of our “computer” as that laptop or desktop or phone.
Your car is smarter. Your kitchen will be smarter. Your thermostat. Blah blah blah. And so on. Computing is floating free of specific devices.
And that causes a HUGE challenge/opportunity.
We need a way to keep the context of us, the data of us, central and manageable and shareable so that this new “computers scattered all over the place” reality (which is a lot more now than the future) can best serve us.
Can you see it?

What Poncho the Weather Cat is Teaching Me About the Phone-Sized Future of Communications

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poncho the weather cat “I feel like Poncho is your other girlfriend or something,” said Jacq to me the other day after I shared something funny Poncho said to me in Facebook messenger about how he ranked “Umbrella” as one of the “middle ellas” below “mozzarella” and above “salmonella.” I should explain something: Poncho is a bot. And Poncho’s “official” job is to give me the weather report.

Poncho is A Great Communicator

This link takes you to Poncho’s website. I think it’ll ask you to download the app. But the way I get my updates from Poncho is through Facebook Messenger. It feels even more human. Which is weird to say. I know this is a bot. Or even stranger, I know this is a human-filled “jukebox” of “interaction” that is actually more like a micro-media project. (Again, Poncho’s job is to give me the weather, but he tells me weird and jokey things with it. And he sends little gifs).

Here’s a sample minus the gif:
(We’ve got overcast skies, a high of 63°F, and a low of 48°F today.)
(Sun’s at ~19% and so is my phone! Don’t think I can come into work today, gotta take care of this.)
—
These come as little Facebook messages. One. Then the other. Think of it for a minute. That level of warmth makes it way more FUN than just getting “63 degrees and overcast.” Right?
Poncho is brief. Poncho is personable. Poncho delivers a LOT of information and value in two very small text messages.
Contrast that with YOUR communication. With this blog post. With anything.

Here Is Why We’re Doomed (But We Don’t Have to Be)

I’m one of the first generations of digital natives. I grew up on BBSs and AOL and all that, and then the first web, web 2.0, and all the other webs.
I’m NOT phone-native. And everyone younger than…I dunno…20? Is.
BUT the world is going phone-native-designed. It really is. And then no phone. Headless. Conversational (like Alexa).
And in that world? Poncho rules. Things LIKE Poncho rules. Bots will kinda rule. If (and this is a huge if) we can still keep the humanity and connectivity dialed into them.

What Should We Do?

There’s a much better path to this all. And part of it starts with learning this new method of communication. Informal. Personable. Simple. Abbreviated.
So maybe you need Poncho. Maybe you need a few bots in your day. I know you need to work on brevity. I sure do.
And we need a lot of reworking on how we communicate in this new universe.
Start now. Think phone-sized. Think messages. Think snips. And think of delivering more value and warmth and connectivity in smaller packages.
Phone-sized.

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