Both are regular targets of ridicule as time-sinks, examples of wide spread vanity, and general creepiness; and while they may be all those things – worst inventions they are not. In fact, I think there is a lot we can learn from the popularity of each. In either case, rather than mocking these games and their fans we might be better served instead by looking at what they’re telling us about societies own short comings and how we as designers, developers and strategists can not only respond to them, but try to alleviate them.

Think about this from Jane McGonigal’s recent TED presentation

“We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right work.”

Then consider Time’s take on Farmville – “more a series of mindless chores” than a game. To me, the real criticism lays at a society and industrial system so devoid of meaning or fulfillment that people get more out of tending a make believe farm.

Similarly, in describing Foursquare as “Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism” and creating “another layer onto a generation living virtually” I have to wonder if the author has ever actually played the game. In fact, Foursquare is an outstanding example of how a game can actually move people out into the physical world. After all, you can’t really play the game without going out into the world, and the more places you visit, the higher your score. If anything, it’s the pressure coming from brands and agencies trying to find an angle and those who ask “but how does it make money?” that have pushed Foursquare away from the core that made it popular in the first place. Instead of focusing on how to make the game play better, the Foursquare team has ended up focusing on how further enable coupons and business oriented reporting tools.

While it’s easy to poke fun at either of these or write them off as nothing more than mindless wastes of time, doing so misses the message in each. While businesses decry the loss of passion and dedication of their workforce, and brands fret about a lack of relevance, the solutions are staring us in the face.

What if though, instead of that next micro-site; you, your agency, and you client actually tapped into this need for meaningful work and provided the structure and toolset for people to do it? What if a brand project was able to motivate people in the way Farmville or Foursquare does, but for something more than digital farms?

Here is a small example of how Fight is trying this:

A while ago, one of Fight’s clients, Portland General Electric came to us with a challenge – how could they use the web to get people more information about energy efficiency? While we could have set them up with a Twitter account to send out efficiency tips, or a micro-site about wind farms we decided to go a different direction. We instead started a project called Operation Switch. The purpose of Switch is to give people simple missions – installing CFL light bulbs, or washing your laundry in cold water – that while individually small, have a huge benefit when done collectively. After the first mission, Switch participants managed to make changes that will result in 14,445 fewer pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere.

We’re still in the early stages of the game, and it’s likely that we’ll continue to tune things along the way, so far peoples response to being given work that means something and then shown the results of their work, is proving that the desire to act is there it’s just up to us to help make it happen.

These are all actual lines I’ve heard, just this week, in support of ignoring the role of ROI in establishing the effectiveness of brand efforts in the social media space. There are hundreds of others. Ignoring for a second the completely arbitrary and increasing flawed notion that “social media” is distinct from the web in general at this point, each of these examples continues to point to the exuberant ignorance so many of “social media experts” flaunt on a nearly daily basis when talking about their own work and value.

A couple points I’d like to make:

1) Each one of these is used as though it were rhetorical, when in fact, businesses make judgements on these types of questions every single day. Every restaurant owner has to pay ACTUAL dollars to maintain their washroom. This is one aspect of their “I”nvestment in their business. In “R”eturn they hope this invest plays a part in people dining at their establishment. If this restaurant owner wanted to find a more solid dollar value of this investment, she could easily just block off the restroom and see the effect on her business. Whats the ROI on mowing the lawn? Ask Nike how much they spend maintaining the grounds of their WHQ campus. Then ask them how much of a factor that campus is on retention for them. Want to know the ROI on putting your pants on? Try going to work one morning without pants. Then try paying your rent once you’ve been fired. Thats ROI.

My point is this: it’s fun and cute to toss these pithy lines around, but it might be worth your time to make sure they’re based in some semblance of reality first. Your own inability to see the value in these things only proves YOU can’t measure it, it doesn’t mean there isn’t value.

2) I’d be inclined to let the purveyors of this flawed logic hang their own careers expect for this: when you devalue your work, you devalue mine too. While YOU may have to wave your hands at the notion that YOUR work has any measurable return, I don’t. But when you pedal this baloney, you make the hill steeper for all of us.

Please stop.

I not only believe the work Fight does contributes positively to the bottom line of our clients, we work very hard to prove it. When you say things like “Whats the ROI of putting on pants?” you’re basically equating the work I do to something literally any one can and does do every single day. The logical conclusion a client could draw from this is that brand activities on the social web are something that you should do, but not really consider, or worry about, or invest in. Like pants. Im not sure then how this leads to needing specialists. I don’t need to hire a special person to put my pants on me each day. If helping brands succeed on the web is the same thing, why would hire any one to help me with that?

This line of “logic” typically centers around two basic concepts:
1) You can’t measure the ROI of T.V. or Billboards, or any number of other marketing efforts, so why are we worried about it for the web?
2) ROI is an outmoded, and what we should be looking at is some “brand new” RO_ fill in the blank. The current favorite is something called “Return on Engagement”. Ugh.

Now, this topic is a big part of why I helped found Fight, so maybe I’m a little more sensitive than others, but this is something that has affected every agency I’ve worked for, and every agency every one of my friends has worked for. My feeling is that as long as we, as an industry, wave our hands at this, we’re just going to keep fighting the battles with our clients that we always have. Until we embrace our role, and benefit, to the business of our clients, we’ll always be the ones with the shrinking budgets, forced to justify everything we do in some sort of aesthetic argument with people who may or may not have any understanding of what we do. Instead of looking at ROI as a limit to creative freedom, we should be embracing it as our single best path forward in expanding that freedom.

Looking at point 1) Can one measure the ROI of a billboard or a T.V. spot? Possibly. I would say probably. But lets say for the sake of argument that we can’t. What does that have to do with anything? Shouldn’t we be measuring the value of our work where ever we can? And besides, the web stands to be possibly the most important marketing tool available precisely because it can be so well measured. I have no idea why we’d ignore such a powerful aspect to this medium.

As for point 2) The fact of the matter is this: Every single thing our clients “invest” (or, for clarification, pay us) in, has some sort of “return”. The fact that aspects of this return may be hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not there. Without knowing what to measure, and how to measure it though, we’re left just guessing if our work has any value. Worse, we can’t prove its value to our clients. The real problem here arises when agencies fail to ask questions of their clients at the start of projects. Is increased sales the reason your client came to you? Then you better be sure you design a program to increase sales, and then measure your results. Is “engagement” the most important thing to them? Then the return on their investment is a demonstration of increased engagement. Find out how to measure that.

Continuing to ignore the role of ROI in marketing, or worse, couching it some sort of pseudo-science, is not just a sign systemic laziness in our industry, it’s keeping us in the backseat when it comes to our role in business when we should helping to lead the way.

In the physical world, brand competition can be, and has been, essentially symmetrical. Even as new competitors come into the market, there are certain practical restrictions – legal, social and physical that they’re all bound by. Competing brands have similar opportunities based on similar goals, laws, availability of scarce resources, development of distribution chains, and access to communication channels. This symmetry helps to create a stasis that keeps established brands on top prevents upstarts from posing immediate risk to established institutions.

In the digital space though, almost none of this applies. Resources are not scarce to begin with, and become more widely available everyday. Practically speaking, there is no such thing as a distribution chain, and where there is something that might resemble one, the iPhone app store for example, access to it has nothing to do with the size of your organization. Because on the web individuals have access to the same level of technologies as any organization, and because they can distribute it just as effectively, it means that brands are now not just competing with other brands, but with individuals whose goals are not only not the same as a brand, but possibly in direct conflict. The competitive landscape is flat with established brands fighting what amounts to a global asymmetrical battle.

What this means is that when people lament the ability of something like Twitter to create a traditional business model, or even a business model at all; or when they mock Twitters inability to make a profit, I think they might be missing a more important point: Regardless of whether or not Twitter turns a profit, the fact is: Twitter doesn’t have to. Well okay – Twitter has sucked down enough other peoples money – they might actually have to turn a profit, but whether or not Twitter itself survives, the fact is: a couple people can, in their free time, disrupt the way people all over the world communicate. And even more importantly, this can and will happen over and over, and likely with increasing frequency.

I guess my point is this: if one wants an image of the competitive landscape of the web, picture an infinite amount of competitors, with unlimited resources and desire, and no constraints, financially, legally, or ethically. This is the baseline of competition online. As Chris Anderson points out in his book Free, technology is basically free, so the question of whether or not you can monetize something online is, for many people, largely moot. At the same time though, the projects individuals are making can and are disrupting all aspects of business. The people inventing the Twitters, Facebooks, and Napsters of the world are not faced with the same constraints that the Nikes, or Cokes, or Starbucks are. While the later is constrained with all the organizational trappings of being a business, the former can doing something because it’s “fun” while still having the same access to the same audience.

As the web has become more ubiquitous, the role it plays in our lives has only increased. As it increases, the ability of any brand to functionally, and successfully exist within it has also become critical. At the same, because technology allows for more and more individuals to operate essentially as brands, the future will favor those organizations who understand the web as more than a technology, but as a complex and dynamic and ultimately asymmetrical social construct.

Two quick stories:

Story One:
I think I had a fairly common high-school experience: I got by okay, though I was not what one would call “popular”, I was an average student, and for the most part I found the U.S. school system, like most social systems, to be designed to support the personality types of those who designed it. I did had a private studio in the basement of the school where I spent about 1/3 of my days doing “self-guided” (read: alone) industrial design study. While I can’t say high-school was the torment for me it was for some of my friends, I would say it was decidedly NOT the “best years of my life”.

Story Two:
In 2000 I found a design website called Extra Lucky run by then San Jose based designer Joe Stewart. After exchanging a couple emails, I began writing for the site, and at the same time started a near daily conversation with Joe that has lasted almost a decade, through his time in New York during and after September 11th, though two cross country moves, my engagement, his first child, and next week my participation in his wedding. Important to note though: we’ve been in the same room exactly 5 times in those 10 years.

I bring this up in response to several articles about or around Vincent Nichols, the Catholic Archbishop who recently described the social web as leading to “transient relationships”, “dehumanizing” community life and, causing a general loss of “social skills”. His commentary came up after the suicide of Megan Gillan who overdosed on sleeping pills after being bullied on the social network Bebo. What’s troubling to me though about the Archbishops position, and those that support him, is that by focusing on the social network specifically, or the web broadly, they’re hoisting up a convenient straw-man at the expense of actually helping anyone while trying to tear down the a major support system for a lot of people.

In George Pitchers article in the Telegraph he asserts that there is something fundamentally different and fundamentally less human now in society than we were pre-internet. But while it’s undoubtedly true that the world is different, I’m not sure we can honestly say it’s any less human. The logic here assumes that relationships we have in person are somehow intrinsically more profound than those we have online. Anyone who’s worked for any length of time in advertising, where “friend” gets tossed around with great freedom, knows this is not the case. More importantly to the subject at hand, anyone who’s ever been to high school also knows this isn’t the case. So while I met my finance in person, in high school, most of my communication with my actual friends is over IM these days. I’ve met more people face to face that I first connected with on Twitter this last year than I met total in the previous 3 or 4. I’m just not sure we can point to any specific coloration between relationships online and off in terms of quality. Though my feeling is that this has less to do with technology and much more to do with our notion of “friend”. In Andrew Keen’s article Social Media Can Open Our Eyes to the Value of Physical Life Robert Scoble says of the effects of the web on society “What we are really yearning for is intimacy”. But has that ever not been the case? I have to wonder if we what ascribe to social media, or the web isn’t a new problem at all, but rather something we’re only just openly talking about, perhaps ironically, because of the social web. Was there ever a time when we didn’t yearn for realness? If we’re to look back fondly on a time before the web, don’t we also have to acknowledge the very dark, isolating nature of those times too? History has a funny way of remembering the winners, those for whom the system worked, while quickly forgetting those that didn’t succeed, those that got lost along the way.

Ultimately though, I wonder if the Archbishop is even asking the right question. Whether or not social networking, or the web, Bebo, or any of it is “dehumanizing” us is moot. For better or worse, this is a major component of human communication now; and the reality is that what it provides isn’t a less human relationship but rather a different type of relationship, and for many people, a better type of relationship. I say better because for the most part human social systems are designed by people for whom society already works and everyone else either learns to deal with it or gets left behind. The web has been the exception. It has become the place where those who might have stayed in the corners can and do have a voice, and more importantly, can create social systems that make sense to them. So while the relationships developed online might not look real, or useful, or complete to those getting by with society the way it is, they are clearly tremendously valuable to many people and by understanding this and acknowledging it rather than demonizing it, we can turn our attention to helping those who actually need it rather than wasting our time lamenting technology.

A lot of people will point to last night as a triumph of social media, or of Twitter, or Facebook. And they’ll be wrong. Last night was a triumph and a stark reminder of the power of brand. Any one can get on Twitter and pitch their product or give away iPhones, but how many brands could tell a hand full of individuals about an event and have 4000 people show up, at mid-night, and then when you’re an hour late, and no one can ever hear you, still view it as a success?

So next time you’re in a meeting talking about your ‘consumers’ and ‘targets’ and ‘units moved’, consider the power of ‘fans.’ Are you treating your customers like they’re fans? Do you ask yourself “Is this tweet actually interesting?” or “Is this a great experience?” or “Am I making this website to actually benefit my customer?” Being on Twitter or Facebook or anything like that doesn’t mean that you now relate to your customers. Relating to your customers comes from just that: relating to you customers, as humans, not cash machines. There is no short cut. There is no technology solution.

Trevor Warren said on Twitter

“Right now 1000s of social marketers are licking their chops wondering how to recreate the #Chappelle event for some new juice shop.”

I’m sure he’s right, and this is the sad part of all this. The burn this event had through Twitter and Facebook had nothing to with ‘social media marketing’ and everything to do with a passionate core of fans and a brand that has created great experiences for years. There is literally nothing you can do on Twitter to make 4000 people show up at midnight for your event. There is no advertising in the world that will fix a broken experience. What you can do is start today asking “Is this is a great experience for my customer? Will this make them a crazy, ravenous fan?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement from Philosophical Investigations is a sort of heartbreaking realization for anyone who has ever bargained with their pets, as I have, offering all sorts of rewards if only they would admit that they can speak. At it’s core though, this idea also rings fundamentally true to me, separating the concept of hearing from understanding and asking if we can ever really understand something without the empathy that comes from similarity.

A few years ago I was listening to Andrew Keller give a presentation about CPB and at one point he asked the audience, maybe rhetorically,

“Why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr? How much more relevant might Kodak have been in digital photography if they had come up with Flickr?”

The question has stuck with me since, serving as a sort of a personal challenge. Over time, I’ve posed this question to a number other people, and although almost universally their response has been that it wasn’t possible, rarely could anyone articulate exactly why. This just added to the challenge for me. Why not? What was so fundamentally or structurally different about Flickr from any other run of the mill marketing site that made people so certain that it was impossible for some agency, somewhere, to create it?

What I’ve come to believe is that it has nothing to do with the idea itself but rather it’s that, from the perspective of the advertising world, the web is Wittgenstien’s lion. There are instances where agencies hear the web talking and they recognize the words it’s saying but, in the end, the web, the people who create for it, and the social dynamics that drive it are that lion. There is no understanding because there is empathy because there is no similarity.

It was dysfunctional from the start, going back to the very beginning of the relationship between agencies and the web both as a concept and a practice. For the most part agencies didn’t get into the web because they had any great love for the medium, but rather because there was money to be made by adding another channel to the mix. Viewed as addition to the creative arc that existed, the history and the nature of the web was never really a consideration and as time has gone on, the web and agencies have drifted further apart.

Part of this drift I believe is rooted in the structure of mediums that make up advertising. A key element of what makes agencies work is being able to reduce a medium down to a set of finite, permanent truths and techniques and then codifying them. The existence of these fixed rules and the mastery of them is what allows an agency to focus on concept and execution rather than having to spend their time constantly reexamining the core fundamentals of the of any given medium. The web on the other hand, seems to defy consistent explanation. If I describe the web as a system of hyperlinked documents, thats technically true, but it fails to explain the underlying power or social importance we know the web has. Even trying to explain the technically simple Twitter to someone who’s never used it can prove perplexing. What use does anyone have for broadcasting 140 characters worth of content? But further, listening to people explain Twitter more often turns into an explanation of that person’s experience with it. For some it’s a CRM tool, for others it’s quasi instant messaging, for others its a news stream, for many it’s a combination of all of these and more. For Maureen Dowd it’s the end of civilization. Most often, what I hear is: “you just need to try it to understand it.”

To see this in action, you don’t have to look much further than the Modernista! “site” or the Skittles attempt at the same thing. In both cases the “words” of the web are all there: Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Google; but what’s not clear is whether there is any understanding. Certainly Modernista! understands the mechanics of each of these, they get the function. But why did Modernista! put portfolio on Flickr for example? Is it to have a conversation about the work? As far as I have found, no conversation exists. What does Skittles want me to know about them from a tweet stream? That people eat their candy? In both cases, the goal seems more to demonstrate their mastery of the toolset than to engage in any meaningful way with the web as a social construct. Moderista! is a useful example, but they represent the rule when it comes to agencies and the web. Take the new site for Booneoakley. Lauded by the ad world as “embracing social media”, it is, in my view, a commercial. Yes, the videos are on YouTube, but thats the end of it. Again, it’s reducing the web down to a set of tools on to which one sets graphic design.

But in my mind, and even bigger part of this drift is based in the motivations and definitions of success within agencies. Advertising is, as a culture, about a single great event. It’s about the rush of make or break moments and the success of individuals. Its entire structure both physically and culturally has evolved to support this, from the make up of project teams, to the relationships with clients, to the award shows. The precognitive creative director, the image of the art director and the copy writer sitting around late into the night until the perfect idea is hatched, the pressure of the pitch, the reveal of the single amazing idea; these moments are mythic and they have been repeated season after season, year after year for decades. But this high risk/high payoff endeavor also requires fixed targets and the ability to master techniques. It becomes almost impossibly difficult to justify investing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, the reputation of the agency and ultimately the client’s brand on a concept whose technological or social underpinnings may be irrelevant before the concept is even executed. This is why T.V. is to advertising what the web never has or could be: For 60 years the fundamental nature of the medium has remained fixed, allowing people and agencies to become masters of its manipulation rather than having to re-learn the fundamentals every 6 weeks. The ownership of the medium extended past the creative execution to ad buying and even to defining the measurements of success. It’s this history that drives articles targeting agencies with titles like “10 tactics for success in social media”, “How to measure ROI on the web” or “Whats the Next Hot Thing Online?” It’s the need for solid and stable jumping off point, the need to have mastered the fundamental framework and have it reduced to simple, repeatable process.

For the most part, none of this really exists with web projects. This is evident in the content of those articles and the fact that article by article, week by week, it would seem the rules and advice constantly change. And of course, they do. The web is, by the most generous estimate maybe 15 years old, still in its primordial state, undulating, cracking and rebuilding. This might offer some hope that as it matures as a medium, it may gain the stability of something like T.V., but I think this is unlikely. Practically speaking, without something like the FCC, there is simply no organizing force to create stabilization. But more importantly I think it’s unlikely because, going back to the attempts at defining Twitter, the first task in stabilizing something is to define it, and rather than moving towards definition, the web is racing faster and faster away from it. As connectivity become more ubiquitous, the web as a concept is actually broadening so far it’s now beginning to consume other mediums. Take Hulu, for example. What part of that is the web and what part is T.V.? Or XBox’s platform for networked gaming, which currently also allows for the streaming of movies, and will soon include the ability to browse movies as well as integration into Facebook and Twitter. Or, consider for a moment that as this connectivity shrinks the distance between us it will also force us to acknowledge that for most of the world, the interface of the web isn’t through a laptop, but through a cellphone. And finally, we must reconcile the fact that they very notion of “laptop”, “cellphone” and “T.V.” are changing right in front of us.

Going back to our initial question, it’s easy then to understand why Flickr didn’t come out of an agency. Rather than the single big idea or the snappy slogan, Flickr is the result of a constant collaboration with members. Rather than a fixed structure, Flickr is a reaction to the ever changing technical and cultural landscape of the web that surrounds it. Rather than the vision of a single Creative Director or copywriter, Flickr represents the work of user experience designers, interface designers, analytics experts and developers of all stripes. Rather than seasonal campaign, Flickr is the result of years of consistent development and refinement. It lacks nearly every characteristic that would be recognizable to an agency. But, how valuable would have it been to Kodak? How might it have changed their relationship with their customers? If value on the web is about the experience, what’s the value to a brand to own an experience like Flickr? If attention is the only scarce commodity online, what is that attention worth?

There will probably always be a need for advertising. The sheer ubiquity of the web though will require brands to rethink their value to their customers and reconcile their place online. If the agencies of today want a part of brands finding that place, and I would argue if they want to continue to stay in business, there will have to be more than an evolution, there will have to be a revolution. Agencies will not only have to reinvent the way they see themselves, but the way they see the world, the way they relate to their client and to dramatically broaden their understanding of why they exist at all. Our notion of hierarchy will have to change. Our concept of how a project lives and grows will have to change. Even our idea of what a project is or can be will change. The web breaks down so many of the structures weve built, and the same flattened landscape that our clients will have to deal with faces us as well, a failure to come to terms with this will ultimatly threaten the existance of what we call an agency. It’s a lion speaking to us, and our survival depends on not just hearing it, but finding some way to understand it.

Not like faux dive, this place is actually beat down. It’s in a basement, so the ceiling is maybe 7 feet high. The food is, objectively speaking, terrible. The furniture is ruined. The TV’s displaying the lyrics are all shot, and audio system, at least while I was there, was blown and would regularly cut out. A problem when your angle is karaoke. It’s hot, it’s cramped, it’s filthy.

“you can only eat this when singing”

And it’s wonderful.

It is, in my mind, literally the finest karaoke bar in the city, and as far as I know, the world. The reason is Sean the KJ.

“Sean, the KJ”

Sean runs the Hutch like it’s his personal party. Everything he does, he does to make sure that people are singing, and dancing and having fun. He will sing your backing vocals. If you get yourself in a tight spot on a song, he’ll grab a mic and get you through it. A couple times a night, he’ll get out there and do a song himself. When Im at the hutch I feel like I’m in Seans basement, and he’s made the party just for me and my friends, and I’m pretty sure everyone in there feels the same, from the 50-something guy who looks like life has been rough and sings the same song every time, to the Reed College kids.

The thing is, I think we all have somewhere like the Hutch, that place that by normal measure should be awful, but we love it because it’s a great experience. The Hutch isn’t great because it’s a dive, it’s great because it’s unabashedly what it is. It’s great because Sean is passionate about what he does and it comes through.

* * *

Thursday night was Nemos “Who Killed Social Media” event featuring our own Dave Allen (@pampelmoose), Tony Welch (@frostola) from HP (one of our clients), James Todd (@jwtodd), Lee Crane (@leecrane) and Matt Savarino (@ridertech) all talking about social media, the social web, and the difference between the two. Amber Case has a great account of the evening here, or you can listen to a recording of the event here.

What surprised me most though were the conversations and questions, both at the event and on Twitter, about specific tools. “What tools we’re going to be the next big thing?”, “Do all clients need all these tools?”, “Is Twitter just a fad?”, “What happens when the cool people leave Twitter?” and so on. I had a lengthy conversation with a couple people over Twitter over “what do I do if I know my clients customers aren’t using social media?”

I think some people left the evening a little disappointed by the lack of clear answers on these fronts, but I also think that was largely the point. While obviously provocative, there is a lot of truth to Dave’s title for the event.

While some people may have been hoping for more answers, I think the lack of any clear directive regarding tools could be taken accurately as being indicative that is no answer to give. When you ask “what’s going to be the next big thing?” you’re questioned is based on the assumption that being there early is somehow connected to success. I was talking about this with my friend Rob (@therob) and he put the problem with this line of thinking very well: “A rising tide doesn’t raise all boats, in fact the waves that follow may actually drown you.” Meaning, just because you’re there early doesn’t mean that your status is tied to the elevation of the technology, and in fact, as people flood the system it may be easy to over look the people already there. My point is this: by looking to specific technology as an answer, you’re focusing on possibly the LEAST important thing.

So when Dave talks about brands needing a community manager, I think a key take away from that is that it’s not a twitter manager, or a facebook manager, it’s a person to look out for the health of your community and their relationship with your brand. Yes, having an understanding of the current technology is important, but think about where we were just a couple years ago: Twitter was tiny, MySpace was still relevant. More important is having an understanding of how to engage with people, how create a conversation and be part of that conversation. The web is dynamic, and so is your audience and their relationship with technology. So rather than asking “what’s the next big thing?” to a panel, ask your customer. Good brand experiences aren’t built out of technology, they’re built out of intent. They’re built out of people like Sean. Before anything else, you need to be focused on creating and facilitating great experiences, and that isn’t about technology.