Perry

Hewitt

Category: General

Mastering digital project momentum

What are the factors that make a digital project take off and gather momentum—or drop like a stone?

We’ve all been in kickoff meetings for large-scale web projects. People show up bright-eyed and well-intentioned, ready to take part in a brainstorm led by someone with fashionable glasses. Colorful sticky notes and Sharpie fumes create an atmosphere of endless possibility. And by and large, that’s a good thing—kickoffs are a reasonable way to assemble a team and get everyone aligned. But once people leave the headiness of the room, I’ve seen many projects become far more complex and less orderly.

How does that happen, and how can you, as a digital leader, strive to prevent it? Read the full article over at A List Apart.

Photo credit: Jay Peg

October 15, 2013
Friday 5 — 10.11.2013
1. How do the words we use segment us by personality, gender, and age? An open vocabulary study of over 700 million Facebook posts by 75,000 volunteers provides a range of insights into attributes associated with language use. As the word cloud shows, men use profanity and talk about xbox far more than women on the social network.
2. Direct messaging, long the neglected stepchild of the Twitter user experience, are about to get a lift with experimental new feature @eventparrot. Follow the account and it will direct message you with personalized breaking news, defined as news items noticed by the people you pay attention to.
3. GigaOm posits why app-based tablet magazines are a failure, despite a few notable exceptions. Paid individual magazines titles continue to draw only a very small market. The desire to create the bespoke apps seems to stem, as one commenter put it, from an obsessive need for control of font and layout rather than a more sensible embrace of the messy, social open web.
4. Perhaps the other end of the continuum of perfection and permanence is analog and ephemeral, like the live performances of Pop Up Magazine. As many of us relentlessly record and document, a new niche emerges for a live 100-minute show, where nothing goes online or is recorded.
5. 91% of US adults own a cell phone today, and 41% of them use it to watch video. Pew’s latest report on online video shows continued growth not only in consumption, where comedy and education videos lead the pack, but an increase in adults posting video online to 31% from 14% in 2009. A full 35% of those video posters harbor hopes of their video going viral.
Weekend fun: fancy a little telekinetic rage with your coffee?

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
October 11, 2013
Friday 5 — 10.04.2013
1. Have fun playing with bitly’s new Real Time Media Map, which visualizes how content from different media outlets is being consumed across the U.S. As you can see from the drilldown above, we read a lot of The Onion here in Massachusetts.
2. Next week Google Analytics opens its free, online Analytics Academy. Another example of MOOCs as the new marketing — and a great opportunity for anyone in digital looking to develop skills in a fast-growing segment.
3. Snapchat shifts focus from the fleeting to a full 24-hour window with its move into Snapchat Stories. Users can now construct chains of moments into stories which expire after a day.
4. Group messaging service What’sApp is being billed as another great threat to Facebook. Like WeChat, the service has strongholds in multiple markets outside the U.S.
5. Twitter disclosed its IPO plans to raise $1 billion revealing both lower than anticipated revenue, and 218 million active users/month. Most significantly, 65% of advertising revenue is now from mobile.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
October 4, 2013
Why digital is bigger than the screen
“Digital is bigger than the screen,” says Zach Dunn, who co-founded digital experience company One Mighty Roar with his brother, Sam. [tweetable]We can already see how digital experiences are transcending the screen[/tweetable], from ubiquitous FitBits and Jawbones to emerging Google Glass to Evernote’s move into Moleskine and PostIts. Arduino experiments are everywhere, with Intel today announcing its entry into the maker movement via Galileo. Cisco predicts that by 2020, there will be 9.4 internet-enabled devices per person, and has even launched a connections counter to track the rise of the so-called Internet of Things.

“Internet of Things” is a bit of a misnomer. [tweetable]Ideally as more interactions become internet-enabled, the device as a clunky intermediary will reduce in importance[/tweetable]. Private home automation is an easier first frontier. If a wearable sensor can tell my house I am home, turning on the lights and turning up the heat are straightforward. Companies like Withings have established home markets with a number of smart devices from scales to blood pressure monitors. Users track their own personal health data, and can opt into more public sharing for motivation and support.

In public spaces, internet-enabled interactions raise security and privacy concerns, but provide opportunities as well as solutions to longstanding problems. Three ideas to consider for physical campuses of any kind:
1. Immersive experiences: Imagine a person picking up a signifying object (example: a gavel for the law school), and interact with it to summon up an immersive digital experience. Images, video, and sound can create this experience in a setting as dramatic as a whitewashed room (museums, take note) or in a smaller surround-sound booth setting.
2. Traffic management: The ability to measure opted-in wearable devices crossing a threshold would improve campus foot traffic management. This could improve wait times at a fitness center or limit time spent in lines at popular food trucks; wearable devices on the alert recipients to could be customized to preference (elliptical, taco truck) in either case.
3. Serendipity creation: At a networking event, how do you find the three-five people most interesting for you to meet? There are analog attempts to solve this problem: events like WebInno provide colored nametag stickers if you are hiring or looking for a job. And skilled superconnectors like Peter Boyce (who pointed me to One Mighty Roar) will always be relevant. But what other personal metadata might spark valuable conversations? Imagine an opt-in system where people’s professional and personal interests display above them, and alert others to proximity of those with similar interest. Might it be possible to create or even just enable serendipity?
Much of this is technically possible, if not yet robust. And the structural lag in both social norms and privacy policies remains enormous. While you may not yet feel the need for your own Internet of Conference Tables, consider the opportunities as internet-enabled interactions through devices come to private and public spaces.

Photo credit: mozillaeu
October 3, 2013
Try it: 3 ways to use your Twitter archive
In the past 7.5 years Twitter has gone from novelty to newsmaker. Today, Twitter boasts 200M monthly users and over 170B tweets sent with particularly strong growth in the coveted 18-29 demographic.

If you’re a Twitter user and curious to delve into your past (even though you may regret some of what you’ve shared), Twitter allows users to download all past tweets. To access your own Twitter archive, go to the gear icon top right, click on settings, and scroll to the bottom of the page. A link will be emailed to you where you can download the zip file, but note that Twitter prevents you from downloading too frequently.
[tweetable hashtags=”#twitter”]Three things to try with your Twitter archive [/tweetable]:
1. View tweet volume and navigate by month. For me, tweet frequency corresponds with conference attendance and making new connections. My archive shows the year I skipped SXSW with a far lower tweet volume in March. Click through tweets by month to see what’s going on in your high or low volume outliers.
2. Search for the terms you mention in your bio. Unless you’re wonderfully creative, your Twitter bio is probably the best indicator to followers of what you tweet about. My bio references social and mobile technology and Arsenal Football Club. A search of my Twitter archive shows 659 references of social, 361 mentions of mobile, yet only 65 mentions of Arsenal, showing that there’s room to grow as a fan!
3. Play with the data in the csv. In addition to the clean interface you get when clicking on index.html in the zip file, Twitter provides both JSON and csv files. A non-technical user can download the csv and sort the data in a variety of ways. One way to visualize the topics you tweet about is to download the csv, pull the text of all your tweets, and then plug them into Wordle, as I have below:
October 1, 2013
Two must-read pieces on social media

This month, two articles explored real-life examples of some of the unintended consequences of popular social media services and the kinds of behaviors they engender. What does it mean for the presentation of self in everyday life if the technology ensures the public audience is getting larger, and everyone is tuned in?

First, in Vanity Fair, Nancy Jo Sales reports on how pervasive social media contributes to a problematic culture of Friends Without Benefits:

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and new dating apps like Tinder, Grindr, and Blendr have increasingly become key players in social interactions, both online and IRL (in real life). Combined with unprecedented easy access to the unreal world of Internet porn, the result is a situation that has drastically affected gender roles for young people.

In The Awl, a writer reflects on how a city park writing performance led to internet infamy in I Am an Object of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything:

As a member of the first generation to freely and gladly share my pictures, videos and thoughts online, I’d always—until now, anyway—adopted a “What’s the worst that could happen?” attitude, mixed with an “Everyone else is doing it!” mentality towards my online presence. Many of the best things in my life couldn’t have happened without sharing these pieces of myself online—meeting favorite authors at bars thanks to Twitter, getting another chance at a lost crush thanks to Facebook. And yet, I still felt thrown when I was presented with an image of myself that I couldn’t control.

September 29, 2013
Friday 5 — 9.27.2013
1. Kudos to the Boston GlobeLab team on the beta launch of 61 Fresh, which features the most popular local stories shared on Twitter. Great to see the Harvard Gazette make the top-tweeted, and I’m buying a drink for the genius who added the “mute sports” feature.
2. Maintaining a website requires constantly updating rapidly deprecating software, keeping up with new end-user hardware, and managing expiring links in the content. Law libraries have come together to create Perma.cc to mitigate link rot in academic scholarship.
3. Why do 15% of American adults report that they don’t use the internet or email? 32% of them cite reasons tied to their sense that the internet is not very easy to use. Non-users expressed both usability and security concerns.
4. WeChat is the multi-featured messaging app quietly taking over the world while U.S. based media outlets cover Snapchat. Recent enhancement include celebrity wake-up calls and vending machines, the latter being a quiet step toward a financial services offering.
5. Gaming company Valve has announced Steam OS and Steam Machines, and a third announcement is slated for today. Valve has been a case study in disruptive innovation as a lower-priced entrant that cleverly crept into the console market.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
September 27, 2013
Try it: News visualized with Topicly
As Flipboard collects another $50M on a $800M valuation, traditional news publishers are experimenting with more visual displays of the news. The Washington Post’s Topicly is largely algorithm-driven, full-bleed display of news stories by volume. Editors plan to incorporate more social media from the web as well as from the Post’s own journalists.

A few observations:
- This is a good example of desktop user interface informed by mobile — see how the three horizontal line icon is rapidly becoming a standard meaning “expand this” on the desktop web.
- More context and functionality in the interface (what do those numbers in the expanded menu mean?) might be helpful to understand what you’re seeing. Is it sheer volume or is there a measure of resonance? Is there any editorial hand?
- Sites like this are tough beasts to feed with visual content: see how some of the images are pixellated when you click through.
- This is a revenue experiment, as well as a visual one. There is a site-level sponsorship at top left in addition to interspersed native advertising. Sites looking for sustainable models will continue to experiment with sponsorship of specific features and functionality, like Citi sponsoring the launch of Quartz’s annotations.
September 25, 2013
Friday 5 — 9.20.2013
1. Upworthy, a curated service providing a “steady stream of important and irresistibly shareable stuff” received another $8M. Here’s the post.
2. Irresistible stuff of a more tangible nature remains wildly popular at Pinterest, which now claims 70M users. Unsurprisingly, Pinterest announced ads are coming in the form of promoted pins.
3. Measurement is beginning to catch up with the way we consume media today — which is less about traditional TV time than mobile screen time. As of September 2014, Nielsen will include TV viewing on a smartphone or tablet to capture new viewing behaviors.
4. Are we suffering from the Dribbblisation of design? Meaning, are we too focused on the superficial look and not enough on the ugly work of designing systems for the job to be done?
5. So long, skeuomorphism: iOS 7 came out this week, ushering in an era of flat design. The update improves multitasking, access to settings, and even lets Siri be a guy. Not every iOS app is updated yet, but here’s a rundown of some apps that made the most of the relaunch.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Please let me know what I’ve missed in the comments below.
September 20, 2013
Mobile mandate

In case the persistent drumbeat of blog posts, newsletters, and conferences underscoring the mobile mandate were not enough, here’s some compelling new data from Pew:

63% of cell owners are what Pew calls “cell internet users,” people who access the internet via phone. The number has doubled from 31% since 2009. See also that email and internet use were equal in 2009, and by 2013 internet is 13 percentage points higher. Presumably, as cell internet users move beyond email, they have higher expectations for mobile web and native app experiences.

The report also includes recent demographic data. If your organization is focused on 18-29 year olds, take note: 85% of them use their phone to go online.

So what are digital publishers doing about the rise of mobile internet use? Last week, Digiday asked publishers what mobile-first meant to them. Definitions varied, with emphasis on interface design or short-form content. All concurred that optimizing for mobile is a core element, not an option. Buzzfeed, for one, has seen mobile traffic rise from 20% to 40% over the last 12 months, and predicts an increase to 80% as networks improve.

Now you’ve seen the numbers and read the anecdotes — what can you do to improve your mobile readiness today? Here’s one idea, taken from Facebook’s successful shift of emphasis to mobile by turning off the desktop version internally. The next time your agency shows you design comps, or your team shows you a prototype, ask that it be demoed only on a handheld. At the end of the meeting, during the last five minutes, have them show you the desktop version. [tweetable]It’s time to flip the focus toward mobile [/tweetable].

The separate mobile use case is dead; the universal mobile mandate is here. Digital leaders need to work with their agencies and teams to flip the process: think, build, and ship mobile-first.

September 17, 2013