Sara Goepel

A friend of mine has become slightly obsessed with (and an author within) the Urban Dictionary. I think her love of the English language brought the concept of this evolving dictionary to her consciousness, but the ability to create words and phrases based on modern life is quite powerful and in most cases a good laugh.

What I find most intriguing is not the creation of the words today, but how historians will look back at them to analyse and understand the people of this era. For example, today’s word of the day is Jingle Mail. Definition:

Jingle mail is the package containing the keys to your house that you send back to the bank when the interest rate on your adjustable-rate or IO/neg-am mortgage resets, or the property tax bill gets reassessed at double what it was two years ago, or you find out that heating and AC and repairs cost a ton of freaking money, or you lose your job because of the recession that’s coming with the housing crash, and you can’t make the payments any more.

“My neighbor put up the Escalade and the Beemer that he bought with his third HELOC for sale, and has been having garage sales every week for the last month to raise cash … I give it about 90 days till he sends in the jingle mail.”

Can you see what the Urban Dictionary will tell us? In 150, historians will look back to March 18th, 2008 and see that the word of the day was Jingle Mail. Why is this word relevant and humorus today? Hmm… let’s see the world is skating on thin ice awaiting the true impact of the subprime mortgage crisis, yesterday, one of America’s largest investment banks was sold for a 17th of its value, oil is at a record high per barrell and people are scared of a recession and a depression.

What’s the impact of all of this on culture? Let’s check out the urban dictionary and see what are people saying? How is their language evolving to cope with what’s going on?

I can almost see the thesis abstract on the sub-prime mortgages crisis, there will be a foot note reference to the urban dictionary showing how the economic waves rippled down into culture by the formation of new words.

Awhile ago I read an interesting article with Scott Griffith , CEO of Zipcar.com in an Adaptive Path newsletter.

The most interesting part was about Zipcars’ approach to user experience being ingrained in the brand ideals of the organisation. These ideals start at the website and then they are interwoven into the lifetime experience of the customer.

From interview

Question: In terms of the design of that service — you’ve got a lot of components — a web site, mobile (I don’t know if it’s SMS), you’ve got the cars themselves, and a call center. How explicit is the design of the service? How planned is it? What does Zipcar’s blueprint look like? Is it really refined and detailed, or is it a bit more organic?

Answer: Well, we have one. We have a culture that we’ve tried to develop that, we hope, matches the brand that we deliver; and that’s all around self-service. The design is meant to be simple in nature, elegant, and self-service focused. It starts in the company’s culture and in the DNA of our brand. We’re very serious about keeping all of our user systems very simple, but we have a group internally that we call our product group.

They focus on the lifetime experience that a member has with our service, from the first time they go to our web site through the last time they ever use one of our cars and decide not to be a member any more. They map that cycle and follow it; we’re constantly trying to refine and improve that map, that architecture. That timeline, by the way, lasts for typically four or five years, our members stay with us for multiple years.

We think about that whole experience as they use the cars for the first time or review their online billing for the first time. They might have a problem on the side of the road, to refuel the car, get into an accident; these are all experiences that we have to deal with, because we’re treating these cars very much like car ownership, but you’re just buying it one hour at a time.”

I love the idea that to truly deliver an extraordinary customer experience, it needs to start with a careful definition of what that is; then ingrain the solution into the companies brand and culture. Give the customer a full experience that starts with marketing/sales material and then seamlessly embed it into every interaction that the customer has with the company over time.

Every second year in Wellington, an Arts Festival of great magnitude is unleashed. It’s quite a spectacular event as acts from all over the world in Theater, Dance, Music, Art and Literature are asked to come and perform/speak in New Zealand. As NZ’s remote location makes it expensive to travel to and from, this festival is a great opportunity to see what’s hot in the performing arts arena in the rest of the world.

As part of the Readers/Writers’ week- the festival brought over Joesph Stiglitz to speak. Dr. Stiglitz is a very big brain. He’s a 2001 noble prize winner, former head of The World Bank, former Chairman on Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and current professor at Columbia University and an accomplished author.

I wasn’t a fan of the format of the talk because he was being interviewed by a journalist who was unable to offer pure Q&A without giving his own journalistic spin/opinion on each topic. However, I did enjoy the content.

A couple things that stuck out from this talk were:

• Stiglitz is a democrat
• GDP as a current measurement tool is ultimately flawed
• The USA have a great GDP- one reason behind this is that they have the most people in prison per capita. This means that there is less unemployment because people are being paid to build prisons and the individuals who may otherwise be unemployed are in prison. What does this say about the economy?
• Countries need to invest money in their children, health and infrastructure if they want to be sustainable
• Gloabalisation is not all good
• The American government is propping up their fragile economy until the election in November
• The world will feel the impact of the slowing US economy. China will use this time to take a breather from its constant growth
• It is a failure of Reserve Banks to only measure inflation as they should also be considering unemployment
• Government does have a role to play in markets; regulation is important to prevent corruption
• To prevent the inflation of the housing boom- how about tax a little less on wages and more on housing capital gains- which he believes mostly comes from luck
• The developed world needs to re-think the way they live because if India and China become such huge consumers, the planet will not survive. We have the resources and technology to test ways to improve the planet- we should be doing it now

I am not sure if a copy of this presentation will be online, but I’ll post it if I find it. In the meantime, if you are interested in hearing more from Dr. Stiglitz- here’s a link to an interview he did with Carnegie Council.

When is the last time you actually sat back and thought twice about entering a credit card in a website? Or thought about all the personal information- name, birth date, high school, address, phone number, place of employment, friends that you’ve put onto a social website for public consumption?

Websites like Facebook are not banks and do not have a 100% guarantee, you can’t call them up and say, “hey someone is stalking me at my house because of the information I put on your site”.

Why don’t people care about this about their most personal asset- their identity?

Identity theft is alive and well in our global village and it astounds me how blasé people are about it.

I suppose the moral is to always think twice and assume nothing before putting information online..

• Ask yourself, do I care that this is online and people can see it?
• Check the websites privacy statements and terms of use. For private online accounts, such as a bank or a company that bases its product on privacy- you are probably going to be okay. But read their terms and how liable they are
• Double check your social networking profile security options- am I as secure as I want to be?
• Remember email is not secure. Even if you are sending it through a site like Facebook- people are getting an altert to your message and a copy of your message sent to their personal email address which may be monitored at their work or be insecure
• Do I have enough information on my website that someone could call my bank and pretend to be me?
• Remember when you accept someone as your friend, then they are your friend; now they can see as much as your best friend even though you only met them at a party the weekend before.
• Remember a social networking site is an online tool, meant to be online, so ask your self why anyone needs your home address
• Also ask yourself what personal details on my profile are so mission critical (such as phone number or address) that someone can not send me a message to find out
• Remember when making an online purchase to consider what site you are putting your credit card details into (including home address) before making a purchase
• Always look for the http”s” and never buy anything when surfing the web on an unsecure wifi network- such as those you find in airports. You don’t know who’s watching you!

According to (Business week- Jan 2008), the view/usage of widgets has doubled from July to November 2007 with an estimated 586 million unique views. This is primarily due to the explosion of Facebook.

In the same time, the dollar spend by advertising companies on social networking websites is expected to rise to $1.56 billion in 2008. But is this good value for money for the advertisers?

Do we know what a Facebook user is worth? I suppose it gets to the heart of what is a user is doing on a social website? What are their behaviour patterns, do we fully understand how users currently engage within these social communities? Do they even see the advertisements or have the widget ads long faded into the backdrop like the mighty banner ads of 2003?

To combat the users desire to not click on ads, I sometimes wonder if marketers are banking on the effectiveness of subliminal messages.

2008 is going to be interesting year while widget makers and social marketing website will have to “show us the numbers” if they want continue to demand high premiums for their advertising space.

As a side, I always enjoyed this video on the Power of Subliminal Advertising.

The facets refer to three characterizing facets in any project (or release): business value, ease of implementation, and user value.

You compare these against the three constraints that govern every project (or release): cost, time, and quality.

“By crossing the characterizing facets with constraints, you are combining the subjective needs of the project stakeholders with the objective constraints of the project in a way that ensures all points of view are fairly considered. It also ensures that a project requirement is not included or excluded simply because one person yelled louder than the others”

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/faceted-feature

A long, but interesting read of Duncan Watt disputing Malcolm Gladwell’s influencer’s theory.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point-toast.html

I’d be curious to hear thoughts—I think a key missing element with the Madonna theory is that the influencer’s in that situation may have been media (MTV or radio) that played something over and over again until became a hit. How does the media powerhouse influence trends?