When news broke that General Motors would no longer retain Big Fuel, I admit to being disappointed for a myriad of reasons, but not surprised. Coming back to a radically different Detroit, I couldn’t help but take inspiration from the infusion of new agency talents making their mark on our region. From Goodby to Blue State, I was excited by what I saw was a radically different landscape of thought leadership coming to steward the industry I loved and worked in. What distinguished Big Fuel from the others however was that upon their arrival in Detroit, they were:

• Still an independent agency.
• Worked for a competitor.
• A company who shared its largest client with my former employer.

It was the latter of the three that left me convinced their mark on the Motor City was a fleeting one. The genesis of the thoughts recollected below detail my interactions with Big Fuel prior to leaving New York to take a position with my current employer. This is somewhat personal, and I’m sure to some refutable and maybe even insulting. It wasn’t designed to be. Contrary to popular belief, I welcomed them as competition and hoped they’d make it out of year one.

Here We Are Now…Entertain Us

It’s March 2010 and I’m at the Digiday event in Los Angeles. I’m scheduled to speak to a crowd of marketing professionals on the topic of organizing your brand for social media in addition to a panel later in the afternoon. I notice a few of my panelists are speaking at the event, including Big Fuel founder Avi Savar. Interested in hearing him speak, I find a seat in the back of the conference room.

“Oh crap.”

That’s all that went through my head as Avi used his minutes on the podium to introduce the attendees to his flavor of social. Here I was, tasked with building an “activation practice” that competed directly with what I was witnessing on stage – and there he was pitching a perfect game. For those who have never seen Avi Savar speak, let me be the first to tell you, the guy has a presence. He commanded the podium with a beautifully packaged overview defining social media engagement, his case studies were spot on and he left the stage confident, all ending with me Googling everything I could find about Big Fuel and subsequently emailing my CEO that we had a serious competitor on our hands.

I had done my due diligence. Looked at the features of the top social bookmarking sites on the web and did a cross-comparison qualitative matrix of what was and was not a priority feature.

Next was the open source evaluation of platforms where we ended up using Pligg, and then subsequently tearing all the code down and recreating their platform with an emphasis on images, because everyone loves pictures!

After creating a swanky video featuring a rising Internet dancing sensation to promote my site, we were off to the races. Up we went, and with that my influencer outreach began. One nod of encouragement from David Armano and my traffic began to skyrocket. People actually registered to be a part of my community!

Before I knew it, without much paid promotion behind hipstr, we were able to accrue almost 10,000 members from around the globe. I was still the primary driver of all content on the site, as we definitely had more lurkers than contributors.

After a while it got…stale.

In February I shut it down, shrugging my shoulders and refocusing my effort on upvoting, commenting and posting on Reddit. I simply couldn’t take out the 2 ton gorilla and that’s how I felt while reading this article on Google+.

Will Google+ survive? Sure, I think it can carve out a niche as a thoughtleaders’ social community. But will it ever achieve the mainstream success of its two syllable rival? Time will tell…

“This is the first day of my life
I swear I was born right in the doorway”
- Bright Eyes

It’s impossible not to acknowledge how quickly social media changed overnight. The reveal of the new Facebook profile page moved social media in a direction no other social network on the web could offer – an opportunity to start from the beginning.

Think about it. Social Media is a very “in the now” activity. Content to date has been a disposable commodity; a conversational info-snack. Yet at F8, Zuckerberg unveils a revolutionary feature that offers its 750,000,000 users three things. A place for:

1. All your stories
2. All your apps
3. A new way to express who you are.

Facebook is giving you a reason to fill in the blanks in your life, all the way back to birth. There has been a lot of attention on Lifestreaming being a feature that targets youth – growing up with Facebook as a pervasive utility similar to Google. However I think manifest destiny is with Gen Y and X. Sixty-One percent of Facebook users are 35 or older. The pendulum shifts constantly as Gens X/Y actively recruit parents and grandparents to come aboard and join the conversation. In fact in a list of dominant age groups across the world’s most popular social networks:

• 0 – 17: Tops 4 out of 19 sites (21%)
• 18 – 24: Tops no site
• 25 – 34: Tops 1 out of 19 sites (5%)
• 35 – 44: Tops 11 out of 19 sites (58%)
• 45 – 54: Tops 3 out of 19 sites (16%)
• 55 – 64: Tops no site
• 65 or older: Tops no site

They have years of content and theoretically have much deeper connections given age and family extensions. If Zuckerberg can convince Gens Y & X to maintain Facebook as a platform to share not just textually but through images and video, as they go through rights of passage (engagement, marriage, children), then it’s game-over. Want to see the grandchildren? Get a Facebook account. Kids are turning to teens? Share those albums on their pages so they can start their own timelines properly.

And I’m not even going to go into detail on the ticker. My initial reaction was negative but the more I acclimate to it, the more power I see for brands seeking ways to build stronger connections with their fans. Couple this with verbs and the potential to “dislike” and you now have an emotive, expressive social network with a thriving community of content sharing and update consumption.

It’s an exciting time for social media. Facebook, arguably the most binary look and feel of all the social networks, suddenly came to life through profiles and timelines. I’ve been a harsh critic through the years but after synthesizing both timeline and the ticker, this update has left me impressed.

Dan and I worked together at Organic. He had what I’d describe as an aura of kindness. He was approachable, humorous and genuinely caring. We didn’t speak often, but on occasion we’d talk cars and life. Dan once noticed the DEMF sticker I had on my Moleskine, which lead to stories about my involvement with the festival in 2001 through text messaging.  I could never tell if he was interested in my anecdotes or not, but he was so polite, he’d let me ramble about cultures coming together through technology and music. 

Besides being an outstanding colleague, Dan was the author of Techno Rebels, an accomplishment cited as “…required reading for all lovers of dance music.”

When I left Organic for New York, he was one of the few people I wrote a thank you note to for being such a great colleague. He was also one of the few who wrote back.

Prodigiously,  I had the opportunity to return (albeit temporarily at the time), as part of the Omnicom media planning company PHD, focused on winning the heart of Chrysler LLC’s CMO with a pre-bankruptcy “we’re back” media strategy. Low and behold, across the room from where we presented, was a small group from Organic. Dan was there with us, smiling as we rolled out a series of digital media strategies that played symbiotically to Organic’s strengths.

Post-meeting, Dan and I were able to catch up quickly. He was excited to work with us, and made a point to simply let me know he was happy to see my career blossom in Manhattan.

Dan and I would indirectly stay in touch throughout the course of the last few years. His humor showing up on threads of comments between mutual friends.

Earlier this week I was informed that Dan was losing his battle with ocular melanoma – a deadly cancer that spread to his liver. Many of us didn’t know Dan was ill. It was jarring to find out and I admittedly did not take the news well. Today, Dan passed.

There are so many people in our lives who shape us. Dan’s kindness was a subtle attribute as was his creativity and deep passion for chronicling the cultural relevancy of our city. Like Detroit techno, Dan’s spirit will live on.

Rest in Peace my friend.

It's A Small World After All!

Tonight I received a message from my friend Constantin. For those who don’t know him:

• He’s Romanian
• He lives in New York
• He likes to hum the theme to Jurassic Park

Two out of those three bullets you could probably find just through Google Yahoo. But the last one? The last one is based on explicit knowledge of  who Constantin is. Having worked with him for 14 hours a day while at Converseon, you pick up on the traits others may not recognize. 

So I wasn’t surprised when he informed me that Duncan Watts, the supreme being of big data and Yahoo’s guru in the sandbox, had a new research project, called The Small World Experiment.

Quoting the site itself:

The Small World Experiment is designed to test the hypothesis that anyone in the world can get a message to anyone else in just “six degrees of separation” by passing it from friend to friend. Sociologists have tried to prove (or disprove) this claim for decades, but it is still unresolved.

Now, using Facebook we finally have the technology to put the hypothesis to a proper scientific test. By participating in this experiment, you’ll not only get to see how you’re connected to people you might never otherwise encounter, you will also be helping to advance the science of social networks.

Helping advance the science of social networks is a big task, and no offense to any large search portal listed in this post, but that was what I thought Google was doing with G+.

So how does it work? 

It starts with Yahoo having recruited “Target Persons” from around the world. In the instance I participated, my target was based in Israel. He was someone not in my network and was unfamiliar to me.

Once I was exposed to the Target, I was asked to try and reach him by using my Facebook network to identify the one single person I assumed would be most likely to be connected to him. Identifying my friend, I asked him to pass a message to him. From there the process continues until the person is reached. Possibly in Six Degrees or less, possibly more…I am curious to see how many hops it takes to get to the Target.

Implications of this project on a macrolevel are pretty powerful. We’ve asked ourselves countless times rhetorically, when are we done over-sharing?  Interestingly it’s less offensive to receive recommendations from Twitter, Facebook and G+ on who to add to your network verses physically reaching out to random strangers to connect to them with zero context as to why. For instance – I might connect with Constantin and mention my background (e.g.Hi I’m Romanian too!) or that I live in a close vicinity (e.g. I live in Manhattan!) but when I message him as a stranger with “I heard you like Dinosaur movies…” well I don’t know about you but that would startle me.

When I was asked to help reach a Target I didn’t think twice about clicking through. I was inherently curious as to what I’d see. The fact that so much of my Targets PII was in front of me was bothersome. I’m being asked to identify someone who could possibly help me reach a complete stranger. What if I was wrong? What if I offend the person? What if I asked for help based on assumed like interests with the Target that are untrue?

The world IS getting smaller, no doubt. The question is, does a smaller world require sacrificing privacy to live in it?

So let’s rehash.

1. There are over 100 million Android phones now activated.
2. Google Offers finishes its first month in beta
3. Google launches Google+ concurrently with Android app
4. Google acquires a mobile loyalty startup

I see dots being connected

You can add me on Google+ here.

I used Facebook to video chat with my friends.

Okay to clarify, I wasn’t actually using Facebook itself, but a plugin called Tokbox that embedded a video chat client into an application that ran on Facebook. It was cool! It was rad! It…ran out of novelty after a few weeks and I never used it again.

That’s not to say video chat is a poor means of integration, quite the contrary, and I believe it does have its uses. But a 1 to 1 chat client while Facebook’s newest competitor is rolling out group chat is simply not going to cut the mustard. Even more so, a chat client that lacks the ubiquity of Facebook’s reach – namely lack of mobile integration – makes, in my opinion, Facebook look unprepared. This was supposed to be a day celebrated through innovation and instead Facebook felt more slow and plodding and less methodical.

My quick POV? We are no longer synchronous communicators. We’re asynchronous. It’s why we prefer texting over talking. It’s the last luxury of time we have left – to think before we speak. And as such, like Tokbox, I simply don’t believe video chat is the (in the words of Zuck) “super awesome” killer feature the world’s been waiting for.