I may work for LuxuryLab and therefore hold some bias, but this unprecedented study and subsequent ranking of 109 brands and their digital competency (especially related to the luxury industry) is worth checking out.
Download it here (after spending lots of time on our website where you can stay abreast of luxury news).
Still think I'm biased and trying to coerce you into yet another reading assignment you don't have time for? Then listen to AdAge, Jeremiah Owyang (overall guru, author of Groundswell and partner at Altimeter Group), or Hwanjin 'David' Choi, a Seoul, Korea based Tweeter who said something I don't understand about the Digital IQ Index but marks the first person I know of to spread the research internationally. (Serves me right, for my ignorant American bilingual nature. If his Tweet was negative, at least he was gracious enough to add the link.)
Whatever the case, check it out. If you do anything related to branding or online media it's truly worth your while.
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Awesome New Music Find: UK based master of fun, Jamie T.
I woke up this morning with an intense craving for salsa, the kind that leads you sprinting for the kitchen with eyes still bleary and a lack of balance that sends you bumping into walls. Usually I make my own chips, but this morning cried urgent hunger so I reached into the back of my pantry and grabbed a bag of tortilla strips I'd bought a few weeks ago out of laziness and should have thrown away.
But like I said, I wanted salsa. And if you know me, you know my combination of an iron stomach and twisted, stubborn hubris means I'll eat just about anything no matter how weird it smells or old it seems. And so I started eating.
The salsa was everything I'd dreamt of (literally, a salsa dream is what started this all), but the chips, they were a different matter entirely. And as I chewed I had a bit of an epiphany. Why should chips get stale? The answer is, they shouldn't have to.
It's not like chips are made of organic ingredients and real corn. They're practically crunchy chemicals, yet no one has solved the stale problem? It seems counterintuitive. Counterintuitive unless you're the chip company aiming to earn as much money as possible from families who will either devour your chips or buy a new bag the second the chips lose their crunchy freshness.
And so I wonder: Will it ever become truly integral for brands to tap into the entirety of their resource base in order to give us a product that's top of the line, as best as it can be for consumers?
Will we all ever truly be on the same team where win-win isn't a rare choice but a standard business practice? And if that were to occur how would innovation change? Most of all, how unstoppable could we be?
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Bring the house to shambles with the dancing you'll do to Finn Riggins, a band best suited for fans of Matt and Kim and other fast rock.
Since the internet came into existence everything was about leveling the playing field. There's Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, the bits economy of costs getting closer and closer to zero, the idea that music should be free, and the ruling principle that on the internet anyone can do anything. All these concepts remain, but now that the internet is growing into an unfathomable web of layered thoughts and contextual relationships it seems like our content consumption is depending more and more on 1. friend recommendations (something I plan to address in a future write up) and 2. the power of search.
Whether you're a traditional Googler, a nerdy early adopter of Wolfram Alpha, or a sucker for Bing!'s bizarre advertising, what you consume is depending more and more on keywords and the algorithms of search engines. Companies are paying a lot of money for SEO gurus to guarantee top search results and I only see this trend increasing. I could be totally wrong, but I foresee a time when we need complicated SEO techniques to guarantee search placement. And what happens then?
What happens to the mainstream web user who doesn't know the intricacies of SEO? More important, what happens to the people in that category who can't afford to hire someone to optimize their page? Will their content get buried because they don't have the money or resources to put their content at the top? Maybe I don't know enough about search (Full disclosure: SEO is my weakest area to date), but the thought seems plausible. Maybe someone can prove me wrong? If not, one day we'll have to kiss democratization on the internet goodbye and find ourselves entrenched in yet another classed system run by capitalism.
Last November I wrote about a dizzying 2008 video called Did You Know 3.0. Socialnomics author Erik Qualman created a Social Media focused video with equally fascinating statistics (and the exact same song as the previous video). Check it out:
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Take a listen to Free Energy, an emerging rock act with a gentle sentiment and the heart of a pride of lions.
For all of you psychology students who need a thesis topic, have I got a good one for you.
Please, dissect why it feels so much better to hear a favorite song on the radio than it does to simply play a CD or .mp3 file.
Of course the answer lies in the fact that it’s an unexpected surprise but I have a feeling there’s more. Is it partly because we relish in the fact that someone somewhere out there at a completely different point in their life might share this song with you and feel like you do? Is it because we crave familiarity and like to think that other people also want to hear the things that are our favorites? Or maybe it’s some sort of approval of our favorite things? Tell me everything that makes us feel that way.
Send me a thorough thesis and I’ll give you something (what it is will depend on how well off I am at the time). And then together we can figure out how to apply that beautiful “Omigod they’re playing my song” feeling to product perception and marketing.
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And now for an artist you'll probably never hear on the radio but probably ought to listen to anyway. His name is Parov Stelar and he's an Austrian jazz electro guy who knows how to drop a beat.
Parov Stelar - "Matilda" (I can't even tell you how much I'd LOVE to be in this video, or at least throw paint water balloons around an empty room while wearing all white.)
Until a few days ago I was fairly ignorant when it came to Augmented Reality (AR). And then I found the application below.
Nearest Tube, An Augmented Reality App for the iPhone
Now I'm obsessed with Augmented Reality but in my research I've been particularly fascinated with the attitude of people in the AR community. They are extremely forward thinking and I believe this is one of the reasons why AR will accomplish incredible feats in the future. They're so confident, so inspiring, and so full of opportunity. One of the most common phrases I keep hearing as I read up is, "When technology catches up we could build..."
From now I want to apply the same attitude to my thoughts on marketing, advertising, and life in general. It's not about adapting and staying caught up to emerging technologies (phrases I've heard so often), but anticipating them and foreseeing their capabilities. That, I think, is the trick. So thank you AR and everyone in it. You've already, even though I have yet to use your technologies, changed my life.
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For rock music that makes you feel like you're flying, check out Fanfarlo.
Cyber warfare. It's one of the only social media related news I heard about after reports started coming out offering reasons why Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal were experiencing so many problems. It was DDoS (Denial of Service Attacks) related to the conflict between Russia and Georgia, and the attackers wanted to stifle the voice of a guy with a handle of Cyxymu.
In turn, people suddenly started talking about ways to back up your social media profiles and Twitter accounts, and just about everything else on the elusive cloud where we're all starting to store more of our data. They also started talking about cyber warfare and how it might become a piece of the future. But before the lights went out on Twitter I had no idea Cyxymu even existed, and goodness knows I didn't know to he was someone whose voice was important enough to send internet usage for millions to a screeching halt.
Now my appetite for Cyxymu's words is insatiable and it makes me wonder. If an attempt to stifle a voice sends its decibels further than they would have reached before, can this so called cyber warfare really be effective?
Let's hope not.
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Now for some affable folk (although as a warning, some of his songs will hit you hard and leave you wallowing on the floor in sweet misery...okay that was major hyperbole). Check out Brooklyn's own Jonah Smith.
If you're a runner, or simply a watcher of runners, you may have noticed that when jogging or sprinting with a partner, people tend to match their stride with one another over time. To me this is phenomenal. The possibilities for moving forward seem endless, yet somehow when two people run together they unconsciously make up for differences in body size and tendencies in order to match each other's movements. I'm convinced that this has something to do with harmony and our tendency toward it.
If I were in the field of physiology or something like that I would study this, but then again maybe it's better to let this phenomenon remain one of the countless unexplained miracles of life. And so here I remain, amazed at yet another simple thing in life.
In other news, in light of all this rekindled Twitter buzz I started up my Thrill Twitter again. Thrill itself isn't really up and running as we speak, but music will always pump through my veins so this Twitter widget is a select list of music recommendations specifically focused in the world of indie music. Think of it as a refined place to broaden your musical tastes and wax music. I always take recommendations and love talking music, so feel free to reach out and contact me about it. In the meantime, enjoy.
Today's Blogger music recommendation is Lisa Hannigan, an folk-pop artist whose earnest voice and fragile lyrical masterpieces create a comforting, curl-up-by-the-fire sort of feeling. P.C. Greenwood calls Hannigan one of the most engaging and mysterious singers of the past two decades, adding that Hannigan could be "Jeff Buckley's long lost Irish sister." I very much agree.
I read the most recent New York magazine atop the atmosphere (aka on a plane) yesterday and found myself enamored with Sam Anderson's article "In Defense of Distraction". Anderson acknowledges our crackberry crazed worlds constantly interrupted by Facebook, Twitter, email and everything else, and then makes the case for why all of these new innovations and tendencies for multitasking might not be such a horrible change.
I don't know if Einstein or Lennon would have benefited had they been children of today's technological world as Anderson suggests, but this article is certainly worth the read. A day later I'm still deciding whether or not restlessness will be an advantage in our society of "techno-cognitive nomadism" as Anderson puts it, and I'm still wrestling with the effects of the world we've created for ourselves.
Regardless of whether or not I can completely jump on board with his thesis, Anderson made a point in this article that I hope will stick with me for the rest of my life. In refering to Winifred Gallagher's new book Rapt, he talks about the importance of attention. Gallagher argues in her book that the ability to focus your attention is essentially the secret of life. Whether it's an attentiveness to what you're eating (which can supposedly help you lose seven pounds in a single year) or the fact that you're able to pay attention to your loved ones, attention is Gallagher's Holy Grail.
It seems to me sometimes that distractions don't matter because there's all the time in the world to pay attention to what's important. "I can find peace in Central Park tomorrow or read that literary masterpiece in a year," I often tell myself. But our time, even for the long living, is more limited than we sometimes realize. A person can absorb 110 pieces of information per second. The average person then, is limited to the absorption of 173 billion bits of information in a lifetime (not even three times the amount of dollars Warren Buffett has to his name). Suddenly what I'm reading or the time I spend learning about any given subject is much more significant.
At the end of the day, or at the end or our lives for that matter, we are ultimately made up of the things that snagged our attention. Some, fleeting distractions, others, lasting obsessions and unending dedications. How we leave our mark though, is all about where we focused our attention.
You may not be able to learn everything or see every beauty, but you have 173 billion chances. How will you live with those chances? What will you do with yours?
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Today's music recommendation is Matthew Barber, a singer/songwriter with a knack for a low key sound and breathtaking lyrics. My favorite Barber song is "And You Give." Give it a listen; it's well worth the 25,080 bits of information you could process in the time it takes to drink this song.
Matthew Barber - "And You Give"
Wasn't it worth it, if only for the line "Then came fall, babe, and we fell hard. Bruised our bodies, skinned our knees and our hearts."
I hesitate to bring death into the blogosphere unnecessarily, but this thought struck me for the first time as I was riding the B63 up Fourth Avenue through Brooklyn. I’m shocked that I’d always taken this for granted without even once questioning why, but now I pose the question to everyone.
Why are mortuaries, funeral chapels, or funeral parlors often called funeral homes? Wouldn’t it make more sense if the gravesite was a funeral home and the mortuary simply a funeral hotel or temporary resting place?
I’m baffled.
And Now For The Music
Boy Eats Drum Machine is coherently unpredictable in an edgy way that screams, “This is the future of music as it should be.” Check out the tracks below and listen to beauty emerge out the buzzing and rattling bass lines. Keep in mind that this is one guy, a frenetic turntablist and artist.
I was introduced to this video yesterday. It immediately burned a place in my mind and now it is impacting(and will continue to impact) almost everything I do. Kristen Wiig will make you laugh, Judy Grimes will tell you how to travel cheap, and a Korean baby singing "Hey Jude" will make you melt. But if you watch only one online video this year to date, make it this one:
I won't say much because frankly I'm still speechless, but this video speaks so much to Chris Anderson's recent blog on the power of scale in Wikipedia, the acceleration of our world as spoken by Fortune Mag's article on adaptation in the business environment, the potential of computer power in the future as spoken by Wired, and just about everything else that touches our worlds and my academic studies.
I kind of feel like I just saw the best Apple product to reach stores, read a bunch of incredibly informative journalism, and crashed into a world of amazing uncertainty. I'll admit, I have goosebumps.
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If you weren't blown away, check out Army Navy. They're a happy hardcore pop band. In this day and age who can really get enough uplifting guitar licks and inviting melodies? The band's new album just released so give them a listen and enjoy.
I am a determined lover of life who insists on trying almost everything at least once and becoming passionately obsessed with most of it. I read constantly, eat frequently, and rarely lose sight of my goals.
My work has brought me into LuxuryLab (a new think tank/luxury brand consulting company), music publicity, magazine writing (music features, restaurant reviews, etc), and coaching Columbia University softball. Learning is at the core of my being so I'm an aspiring DJ and renegade marketer on the verge of new academic discovery at NYU.
More than that, I'm the person you'll find dancing in the living room as the sun rises over New York City.
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