This is Violence

The Longview: Old Spice on Twitter

Back in August I wrote about some data I had collected on the Old Spice Twitter account and now, six months of data later, it seems like a good time to hang up this project and move on to something else.

Before I do that though, I thought it would be good to take a look at what happened, think a little about what I would have done differently, and finally to publish the data I collected.

What Happened
There were a few things that prompted me to start this project. First was shear level of attention the project got. I can’t think of another brand effort on Twitter that got the ad industry talking more than this one. Second was the lack of data available on the project. While I’m not an analyst of any sort, as a strategist, data matters a huge amount to me and at the time I started this, baseless blog conjecture was the only form of data available. While my data won’t tell us anything about sales, my feeling remains that some insight is better than none. Finally, I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the ad industry is great at remembering the names of successful projects, but a lot less good at remember how or why those projects worked (subservient chicken, I’m looking at you). My goal with this is to provide some level of historical context for this project so that people can look back understand it at hopefully at least a slightly deeper level.

So what insights can we gather from 6 months of data?

For the most part, I think what I said in August still stands up.

“Much of the conventional wisdom around brands on the web these days centers on the notions of communication and reciprocity. The idea here is that if a brand wants to be successful within the context of the “social web” they’ll need to act a lot more like people and a lot less like companies. But looking at the Old Spice campaign - I have to question some of that.

It’s worth noting that the Old Spice account follows back less 1% of the people that followed them. Also, their rate of communication is about .8 tweets per day. At the same they have about 1% daily increase in followers - about 1,000 per day. Basically - @oldspice was looking a lot like a celebrity account: lots of followers, very little following. This had me wondering if people were following Old Spice the brand, or Isaiah Mustafa, the spokesman? Further confusing the issue though is that unlike those accounts, there isn’t much human connection coming through the account. It’s mostly humorous non-sequitors, and even then, there’s not much of that being produced.

In fact - nearly the entire catalog of bi-directional communication, supposedly the point of brands in the social space, happened in a very short window right before the end of the campaign. This was the time when Wieden was staged their famous video twitter responses.”

I ended that post thinking two things:

1) People who followed the account we’re connecting with Mustafa, not Old Spice
2) That either the conventional wisdom how digital marketing works was wrong, or that the Old Spice campaign was actually a traditional T.V. campaign that happened to be on Twitter.

Since then, a couple things have happened that I think bolster point one and begin to point to answer for point two.

From June 22, when I started this, to September 8, the Old Spice account went from about 91,000 followers to almost 119,000. A net gain of about 28,000 followers in about two and half months. From September 9 to January 23 the account went from about 119,000 to about 119,840. A net gain of about 840 followers in about four and half months. Although the rate of tweeting stayed at about 1 per day, and the tone of the campaign remained consistent, people were clearly no longer interested in following it.

What happened on September 9? That was the day WK launched their new campaign for Old Spice with Ray Lewis replacing Isaiah Mustafa.

Back in August I closed with a couple questions

“…was the Old Spice campaign one of the best social media/web/interactive campaigns ever, or, was it actually the perfect example of what a post-web T.V./broadcast/traditional campaign should be?

If it’s the former, than I think we in this industry need to reexamine our canon of what makes great digital advertising - because we seem to have gotten a lot wrong.

If it’s the later, than I wonder if this isn’t an accidental (or intentional?) example of just how effective the internet and the web have been in totally blurring the lines where content lives and instead leaving us to focus entirely on the nature of the content - in this case, traditional “lean-back” content using Twitter as a distribution channel.”

As I’ve watched this campaign go forward, I feel more and more certain that the Mustafa era of Old Spice was in fact the 2010 version of how traditional advertising should be done: tightly integrated across multiple channels, but using the mechanics of traditional broadcast advertising.

Given WK’s mastery of this format, it’s not that surprising.

All the activity in the digital space, and especially on Twitter, was almost completely tied to television. So much so that the only real activity that happened on Twitter was when it was used to direct people to other commercials. Commercials made in near real-time, but commercials. Whether intentional or not, the Twitter account never had a life of its own outside the T.V. spots and the character they created.

So what to take away from this? Well, without access to WK’s long-term strategy for the brand, without clean sales data, and without budget insights, it would be hard to draw any meaningful conclusion about overall success based on a handful of Twitter stats. But I think it does serve as a brick in a larger understanding of the nature of brands online.

It’s not at all a shock that if your goal is to create an online footing for your T.V. campaign, this would seem to be a great model. If, however, your goal is to create an active community outside your T.V. advertising, it would seem the conventional wisdom is at least more right: you’re going to have to create a uniquely compelling and ongoing reason for people to join.

Just as with T.V., single spikes in activity online seem to only create single spikes in interest. The important thing is understanding what you’re trying to achieve - no single approach is good for everything. If your goals are the sort of goals advertising is good for, than I think it could be worth looking at how WK conducted this campaign.

If this campaign reenforced anything for me it’s that in the end, advertising is advertising, no matter where you put it. The web is an amorphous medium, capable of looking like a lot of things - though some better than others. What it doesn’t do is take a set of ingredients and make them something different. If you pour advertising ingredients into the web, advertising comes out.

What Would I Have Done Differently?
Well, a lot.

First of all, I wish I would have tracked a couple other accounts to compare against. For example, back in August I made the comment that Old Spice account felt a like a celebrity account to me - I wish I had been tracking at least one celebrity account to see if it acted the same way. Also, I wish I had been tracking another CPG-type brand just to set a baseline. Finally, I wish I would have tracked my own account over this timeline, again as a baseline.

Also in hindsight I just wish that I had more data. If I had to do it again I would have at least tried to keep track of @ replies coming from and going to the Old Spice account. I want to have a better sense of what the conversation, or lack-there-of looks like. Something I have in my notes, but didn’t track well enough to include it in the final data, were the kinds of tweets the account sent out. At some point I noticed the account started sending out more DR-type tweets and it would have been nice to be able to see what effect those had.

At the same, as much as I would love to have this data, tracking Old Spice data isn’t my full time job and making the process of data collection easy is part of the reason this happened at all. I could have set up a Radian 6 or ScoutLabs account and gotten everything I wanted and more, but I wonder if I would have been able to keep it up long-term. Unlike the work we do here at Fight for our own clients, this one was purely a side project for me.

What’s Next?
So that’s the end of this project. I already have a couple ideas for followup projects and hopefully I’ll be able to take what I learned from this experiment and make those better. I have to admit - it’s hard to have 6 months of work into something and then start over knowing that it will be months before I have a useful base of data again. On the other hand, I think the marketing industry as a whole, and advertising in particular, is overly obsessed with “today.” We too often lose the the insights that can only be gained by watching how “today” turns into “tomorrow” and then “6 months ago.” Sometimes the only way to uncover the fundamental truth of something is to be able stand back, sometimes miles back, and look at the broader ways things relate to each other. It’s understanding those truths that drives me as a strategist, drives everyone at Fight, and ultimately is what I think results in the sort of culture shaping work I think we all want to make.

The Data
This zip file contains my original Numbers file, and an exported Excel file. The Numbers file has all my charts formatted properly but I think the Excel file should be serviceable too. I marked in purple the date (9/9/10) as the date Ray Lewis was introduced to the campaign. Marked in orange are 3 days that show what seem to be odd changes in the number of tweets shown for the account. I’m not sure what’s going on here - it could be something totally normal that I’m just unaware of, or it could be some system error on Twitters part. I’m just not sure.

This data is, for whatever it’s worth, free to take and do whatever you want with. If you do something interesting with it, I’d love to hear about it.

Some Questions about the Meaning of OldSpice

The Portland Ad Federation had an event with Dean McBeth from Wieden+Kennedy to talk about the Old Spice campaign. I wasn’t able to attend, but it did motivate me to do a little analysis of a project I’ve been working on for about a month.

Ever since July 22nd, about the time the Old Spice campaign ended, I’ve been tracking their twitter stats. How many people they follow, how many people follow them, tweets, and so on. Why track this? I’m not really sure other than that I found the campaigns transition from T.V. to the web unique and I wanted to see what the tail looked like. While I think things like ROI are critical, without continuous access to sales numbers all the industry talk about the role this campaign played in that regard is really just blog fodder. It’s fun, but sort of pointless. What really interested me was the nature of the campaign - how it existed in the context of contemporary advertising.

I’m not an analyst of any sort, and until I heard about Dean’s presentation, I hadn’t done anything other than keep a daily (or nearly daily) tally of a handful of numbers. Hearing about the PAF event though, I decided to dump them into a spreadsheet and see what, if anything, was there. Here’s what I got:

From 07.23.2010 through 08.29.2010 the Old Spice Twitter account looked like this
They followed 719 people
They had 116,848 people following them
They were on 3,669 lists
They tweeted 1859 times
Note: that tweet number is slightly odd though because on 08.26 they had 1909 tweets.

If you’re curious what that looks like - here you go:

Interesting.

Much of the conventional wisdom around brands on the web these days centers on the notions of communication and reciprocity. The idea here is that if a brand wants to be successful within the context of the “social web” they’ll need to act a lot more like people and a lot less like companies. But looking at the Old Spice campaign - I have to question some of that.

It’s worth noting that the Old Spice account follows back less 1% of the people that followed them. Also, their rate of communication is about .8 tweets per day. At the same they have about 1% daily increase in followers - about 1,000 per day. Basically - @oldspice was looking a lot like a celebrity account: lots of followers, very little following. This had me wondering if people were following Old Spice the brand, or Isaiah Mustafa, the spokesman? Further confusing the issue though is that unlike those accounts, there isn’t much human connection coming through the account. It’s mostly humorous non-sequitors, and even then, there’s not much of that being produced.

In fact - nearly the entire catalog of bi-directional communication, supposedly the point of brands in the social space, happened in a very short window right before the end of the campaign. This was the time when Wieden was staged their famous video twitter responses.

And here is where I get to the confusing nature of this campaign. For a campaign that’s been regarded as the best social media campaign of the year, and even the best web campaign of the year - it doesn’t look a lot like what we’ve assumed social media and the web look like: It’s not interactive, it’s not communicative, and the one technical boundary it pushed - the video twitter responses - was a boundary of traditional media, not digital. To the extent that there was engagement at all, it was limited to the terms of the brand: they choose a tiny fraction of the communication directed at them to respond to, and then retained absolute control over the tone and length of the “conversation.”

In the end, this all sounds a lot like a different medium: T.V.

Now, it seems like lately, “T.V.” or “broadcast” has become a sort of dirty word in digitally minded circles, but that’s not at all how I mean it here. But everything I’ve written to this point raised a big question for me: was the Old Spice campaign one of the best social media/web/interactive campaigns ever, or, was it actually the perfect example of what a post-web T.V./broadcast/traditional campaign should be?

If it’s the former, than I think we in this industry need to reexamine our canon of what makes great digital advertising - because we seem to have gotten a lot wrong.

If it’s the later, than I wonder if this isn’t an accidental (or intentional?) example of just how effective the internet and the web have been in totally blurring the lines where content lives and instead leaving us to focus entirely on the nature of the content - in this case, traditional “lean-back” content using Twitter as a distribution channel.

The Importance of Farmville

Among Time magazine’s 50 Worst Inventions there are many that probably deserve to be there: Hair in a can, the parachute jacket, and popup advertising among them. But two that stuck out to me as being misplaced on the list though were Foursquare and Farmville.

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.

God Save the Nerds

There seems to be a lot of concern recently that

A) Advertising is in crisis, and
B) That nerds, MBAs, bean-counters, data, numbers and/or strategists are to blame

While I agree there is reason to worry, I’m quite certain the underlying problem has nothing to do with nerds, or MBA’s, strategists or…numbers. Rather I believe the core problem is rooted in a culture of complacency within the creative leadership of agencies themselves.

I can’t talk about creative leadership without thinking about Bill Bernbach. It’s sadly ironic to me that many of the creative directors who came to advertising largely because of the thinking that came out of the creative revolution are the very same who now seem to not be able to see the forest for the trees in this new era. It seems important to remember now that in the 1960’s and 70’s, T.V. wasn’t just a new technology for entertainment and advertising, it fundamentally changed society. Bernbach realized this, and saw that ideas and methodologies that had worked for so long in advertising were no longer relevant. I think the same thing is happening now, though possibly in an even more profound way. The fact of the matter is, the web and network connected devices are new technology, but they have also changed society in deep and permanent ways. Ideas and methodologies that used to work, simply don’t anymore, and any hope of remaining relevant will require a revolutionary new way of looking at things.

While it’s easy to point the finger at the new comers for the lack of big thinking, it’s been my experience that most agencies and most CD’s are so singularly focused on one notion of what “big thinking” can look like they’ve painted themselves into a corner and have yet to produce a single piece of socially important work online. As I did months ago, I have to repeat Andrew Keller’s question “Why didn’t Kodak’s agency come up with Flickr?” I could add “Why didn’t Coors’ agency come up with Foursquare?” Why have agencies relegated themselves to reacting to the creative, paradigm shifting thinking of others instead of producing it themselves? Over the last 15 years, brands have looked to agencies and their creative firepower to keep them relevant, and with frighteningly few exceptions, they’ve uniformly failed.

In his AdAge article, Tom Hinkes laments “Marketing departments used to be the creative engines powering successful corporations.” His solution to get back to this is for us to “Use the Force”

I’m not comfortable leaving the future of this industry to something George Lucas made up.

Instead, I submit that the solution is for us to actually be the “creative engines” again. To push ourselves to ask bigger questions than the next campaign, the next slogan, the next commercial, the next micro-site. We should be pushing ourselves to not just fill the medium, but to define it. To do this, will require more than just one point of view. Yes, great CD’s, AD’s and copywriters remain critical, but the problems are too complex for just this team. Instead, by bringing in “nerds” and by leveraging, rather than fighting data, we can tell the stories of the success of our work in terms “bean-counters” can care about. Instead of saying “trust us”, we have the opportunity now to actually prove the value of our work on a number of different levels. But more importantly, by broadening our definition of “creative” and by bringing strong analytical, customer research, strategic and business minds to the table at the very beginning of projects, and doing so not simply in support of the “creative team”, our work can actually become important again.

Ultimately, if we’re going to survive, it will be critical that we bring to bear the one thing that still differentiates great agencies: the ability to organize many people of different skill sets around one vision. The fact is this: the current system isn’t working and the reality is that the march of technology is make things more complex, not less. So while big thinking is critical, it’s just as critical to come to terms with the fact the big thinking doesn’t lie solely in the hands of “creatives.”

ROI + Pants

What’s the ROI of answering the phone?
What’s the ROI of watering your lawn?
What’s the ROI of putting on pants?
What’s the ROI of having restrooms in your restaurant?

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?

Shooting Ourselves in the “Engagment” Face

It all started Thursday morning when I saw this tweet. Describing himself as “In the zone”, the author proceeds to spend three minutes railing against the concept of ROI in web based marketing, claiming that ROI is the tool of the fearful and that key to effective marketing is…something else. This type of proud and boastful ignorance is so common in marketing, it’s almost not worth even responding to, but for some reason, Meerman really got under my skin.

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.

Proto-idea: Asymmetrical Brand Landscape

Note: I’m going to try something new here. In the past, I’ve spent what I think was a disproportionate amount of time researching and preparing blog posts. Which is not to say that either of those things are bad, but in my case, I’m just not sure my posts where any better for it. With that in mind, I want to start tossing out ideas that maybe aren’t totally worked out, but that I’d rather work on publicly than just sit on for months. So with that I present: Proto-ideas! Basically half-baked concepts presented as absolute fact. Here’s one I’ve been kicking around the last couple months:

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.

Heathers

People will look at the ashes of Westerburg and say, ‘Now there’s a school that self-destructed, not because society didn’t care, but because the school was society.’”
-JD, Heathers

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.