Push vs Pull, or, How I Need to Know About Your Product

Sharing some love for the extraordinarily attractive Harvard Business Review Classics series, which appears to be devoid of any presence on the web as an independent entity.

This I don’t understand. A series obviously aimed at capturing and retaining a consumer — attractive design, brilliant product aimed at a specific market, consistency in both to encourage that ‘collect them all’ instinct. I will buy them all as they come out.

So why isn’t there an RSS feed or Twitter account to inform me when each new volume comes out?

Contrast the blog maintained by 33 1/3, Continuum’s series of books on classic albums. There are usually five or so posts per month (I know this, obviously, because I can look at the Google Reader stats), featuring news on new additions to the series, alongside events and media surrounding each publication. It’s low volume — but enough to alert me to things in which I have already indicated my interest. What’s more, it’s done with an openness and transparency — for example taking readers step-by-step through the submission process for new titles — that encourages me to think of it less as a marketing tool, but more of a dialogue on a subject (and with a product) with which I’m already engaged.

It’s surprising how few companies are aware of the change in consumer mentality that is taking place with the increase in available data and the appearance of filters to help users better manage their inflow. RSS readers, Twitter, even Facebook — these are content aggregators allowing incredibly supple management of inputs at a granular level. My Twitter account is a highly idiosyncratic mixture of friends, information pertinent to my job, and select entertainment/leisure news. It’s unique to me, and it’s something that I’m continually redesigning to meet my needs. Which means that I’m spending more time with it than I am in the presence of content distribution hubs — magazines, websites, bookstores, TV, the transistor wireless machine — over which I can exercise less control. So if you’ve made it onto my Twitter follow list, you’re there because I want you to be. It’s permission marketing in the purest sense.

Indeed, there is the possibility for the impact of your message to be amplified; as Matthew Forsythe points out, ReTweets are “socially targetted”:

People usually only retweet things they’re interested in or they think their followers might be interested in. So as the tweet travels through the twitterverse (for lack of a better word), the message is finding people who are more and more likely to be interested in its content.

I’m not asking you to beg for my attention. That would get on my nerves. Just send me a little note every now and then when you have something new that I would like. Cost to your business = zero (well, thirty seconds each time you publish a new volume). Increased revenue to your business = more than zero.

Why not help your customers build their identification with your product? This is a recession, isn’t it?

Update: More offenders from the world of publishing. Hesperus Press‘s striking On series: Stendhal On Love; Virginia Woolf On Not Knowing Greek, John Donne On Death… are there more? Who knows? Bloomsbury‘s indescribably elegant The Writer and the City series, so far only catalogued by enthusiasts on LibraryThing.

Meta-data in Architecture

I spoke recently with a local architect who is buried in meta-data. He explained that 15 years ago a building would be conceptualized in two dimensions as a structure with four walls and a roof, but since then the complexity of any given project had become ten times more complicated. There is the building code. There is material science. There are environmental best practices. There are economic concerns. There are geographic considerations and there is a ton of ethnographic data. Collecting, managing, and synthesizing all those datapoints has become a huge challenge.

Enter the Building Information Model (BIM). This is a 3-D version of Autocad with meta-data baked in. A building plan used to be about how many bricks, at what cost, in what colour. Now the building model can calculate how much latent energy went into the creation of a specific brick. It can tell you how much diesel fuel it likely took to get each brick on site. If the cost of steel has just spiked, the BIM can tell you how much steel the project needs and it will substitute in a cheaper material and isolate any resulting problems. You can literally drill down on any element in the design and get the underlying data.

Hearing about building models and the associated software made me think of ERP systems in large corporations. They are expensive, exclusive, and data intensive. But then I had to catch myself. There is nothing particularly difficult or expensive about collecting meta-data and making it available at a super-local level. We are doing that already. The interface and the network simply need to catch-up.

(photo by 0100 Design)

How a cellphone is like a wisdom tooth

A pair of unwanted Mollarollas

The Skype app debuted in Apple’s app store last week.

Obviously, cellular carriers are nervous as all get out because everyone’s iPhone just gained the ability to place calls to just about anywhere over wifi, which means that when those first-gen iPhones’ contracts come up for renewal there’s a real chance many users will find themselves umotivated to keep paying for cellular network access (effectively erasing the difference between their iPhone and an iPod Touch of similar storage capacity).

So what? It’s the usual battle between technology making stuff cheap and easy and institutions that profit when stuff is hard. It’s going to end the way these things always end: the things we used to pay for now will become cheap and easy and people will find other ways to make money.

In the meantime, look what just happened to the cellphone.

What is a cellphone, anyway? The best I could come up with is this:

a cellphone is a device for realtime two-way audio communication over a wireless network that isn’t exactly the internet.

Describing the iPhone as a cellphone with various other applications is analagous to describing a PC as an electronic typewriter that also does other things: call it the iType. If it’s a cliché to say that the iPhone is so much more than a phone that it’s actually a pocket PC, then why is it (and the many devices similar to it) the size and approximate shape of the device it is not (its name notwithstanding)?

It really doesn’t have to be phone-size anymore, nor did it ever really need to be from a functional standpoint. But making it phone-like was a design decision that made it for, rather than ahead of, its time. Like all good design, that decision was an elegant reaction to a restriction: in a world of single-use devices, the universally useful device needs to be clearly for one thing if it’s to make sense.

It’s Swiss Army-multiple-use-collapsible-pocket-tool vs. Swiss Army knife.

But the restriction that made the iPhone a phone is fast on its way to obsolescence. The cellphone is a vestigial piece of technology. In the way that wisdom teeth remind us that we used to have much bigger jaws fit for chewing tough, raw plant matter, the cellphone shows how we used to transmit information wirelessly: vocally in realtime two-way exchanges.