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Friday 5 — 2.7.2014
1. Is your app addictive enough to make money? Eric Reiss lists eighteen elements to consider when gauging your app’s ability to engage and retain users.
2. If you’re trying to see what an addictive app looks like, you could do a lot worse than Flappy Bird. This difficult game manages somehow to infuriate and retain users, raking in $50K in revenue per day in the process.
3. QuizUp, the delightfully addictive and competitive quiz app, has launched an iPad edition. The additional real estate will be used to surface more navigational elements, particularly those that drive social engagement.
4. Maybe we’ll play games like QuizUp on our iPads, but have we by and large moved on from the tablet? This article posits that the pace of technology innovation is leaving tablets in the dust as phones become larger and, well, “phabulous.”
5. Internet audio still seems like an incredibly undervalued medium. Maybe PRX’s launch of Radiotopia, a new site that aggregates the best story-driven shows on the planet, will get more people tuned in and turned on to the possibilities.
Weekend fun: Is it binge-watching or bingewatching? Should Bitcoin be capitalized as a concept and lowercased as a currency, or vice versa? Can duckface truly be one word? If these kinds of questions keep you up at night, Buzzfeed’s excruciatingly correct style guide to the words we use today is well worth reading.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
February 7, 2014
Digital in the enterprise

Thanks to Vala Afshar and Michael Krigsman for inviting me to participate in a CXO Talk: Conversations About Innovation in the Enterprise.

Vala wrote up our conversation about digital transformation and teams, content strategy, and the (erstwhile?) role of a CDO over on the Huffington Post.

February 6, 2014
Friday 5 — 1.31.2014
1. 新年快乐 — or, Happy New Year! Tencent’s WeChat has greeted the year of the horse by allowing users to send lucky money via mobile. This smart marketing move is aimed to inspire transaction among WeChat’s nearly 300 million global active users, and perhaps lure new users drawn by the feature.
2. In another nod to the increasingly visual nature of social engagement, Twitter has released new mobile photo sharing capabilities this week. It’s a move to keep people in the app, and drive engagement by issuing a reminder to @ mention others when you upload a photo containing people.
3. Facebook takes a crack at a “distraction-free” newsreading experience with the launch of Paper. It’s a definite upgrade from its Android Home experience and more like Flipboard — but will it offer too much competition with its own app?
4. Blogging is dead — long live collaborative publishing. Medium, the originally invitation-only content platform has announced a $25M round of investment. Medium pays some of its writers to attract quality content, and provides a lovely admin user experience for all. There are still some questions about Medium’s overall direction — how much is it a curated magazine versus a place for all storytellers?
5. How do you make sense of all the social media noise to inform the news? CNN and Twitter announced a partnership with a new tool aimed at journalists. Dataminr, a firm better known for financial services products, is shifting to help CNN use algorithms to identify accurate, breaking news stories from Twitter.
Weekend fun: Before all those SuperBowl ads go live on YouTube, amuse yourselves with this penguin dance-off. (h/t The Dodo, my new go-to source for all things animal-related).

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
January 31, 2014
Digital in the DNA matters

More and more, it’s becoming apparent that digital publishing is its own thing, not an additional platform for established news companies. They can buy their way into it, but their historical advantages are often offset by legacy costs and bureaucracy. In digital media, technology is not a wingman, it is The Man. … How something is made and published is often as important as what is made.

— David Carr, writing in the New York Times about the vital role of digital in the DNA for creating great media

January 28, 2014
Digital world and humanity

It is not enough to be passersby on the digital highways, simply “connected”; connections need to grow into true encounters. We cannot live apart, closed in on ourselves. … Media strategies do not ensure beauty, goodness and truth in communication. The world of media also has to be concerned with humanity, it too is called to show tenderness. The digital world can be an environment rich in humanity; a network not of wires but of people.

— Pope Francis, who recently referred to the internet as a gift from God, reflecting on the nature of digital and social connection for World Communications Day

January 26, 2014
Friday 5 — 1.24.2014
1. Google knowledge graph, which seeks to represent “real world things and their connections,” surfaces the relevant content you see on Google search results pages, like movie times. This week Google added to their results a short description of websites that are “widely recognized as notable online, when there is enough information to show.” There’s a lot of content creep from destination pages into search results, presumably to keep people on site for ad impressions on the Google domain.
2. There’s a lot of credit for brands moving fast in social media — here’s a terrific insight on the value of social media restraint for brands. Now that news travels with us everywhere on our mobile devices, there’s a feeding frenzy quality to breaking news. Brands dive in to add context to the news — whether it’s an earthquake or a Bieber peccadillo. This article points out the value in recognizing that just because you can find an angle for your brand, it doesn’t mean you should.
3. On February 4, a whole bunch of new generic top level domains (.gTLDs) will go live on the internet. Some feel this is just a clever way to part marketers from their money, with a hefty 185K price tag for each top level domain. Let the land grab begin.
4. Every exec who’s ordered an agency team to deliver a viral video should check out this New Yorker piece of research that finds six elements of avidly shared content. They include emotion and an element of social currency that translates into the insider handshake. Miraculously, quality storytelling makes the list: apparently some cat videos are more equal than others.
5. What do the Facebook news feed changes mean for brands? The updated algorithms will downplay text posts from brands in favor of more organic visual shares. This shift marks another way the visual web is raising the bar for content creators.
Weekend fun: At the risk of becoming a character in this New Yorker cartoon, I still have to recommend you waste three minutes over the weekend watching this 8-bit version of The Big Lebowski.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.
January 24, 2014
If engineering managers should code 30% time, what’s a digital leader to do?

Should engineering managers responsible for teams and deliverables still continue to code 30% of their time? Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of Mongo DB, published a persuasive argument for bucking the accepted path of coder –> dev lead –> non-coding manager.

Why? Horowitz points out that a manager who still codes will be more skilled in ensuring accurate estimates (in my experience, highly capable development team are prone to deliver overly optimistic estimates), able to make informed decisions regarding technical debt, and have improved credibility with their teams. There are, of course, obstacles — primarily allocating the time and solving for the plague of meetings that can accompany management.

What does this mean for leaders responsible for digital teams, many of whom occupy a CMO or similar role? In the 1990s when mainstream digital emerged there was a complete disconnect between the entire C-suite and digital practices. Executives had little or no exposure to the day-to-day operation of the internet. Websites in large companies were the domain of someone called a Webmaster, who sat in the IT department. Marketing was busy trying to keep those ugly and irrelevant URLs out of their paid media and far from their pristine collateral.
[tweetable]Today there is an opportunity to bridge the gap between executive experience and operational digital strategy.[/tweetable] Many still believe that promotion to manager and then director and then executive necessitate a complete remove from hands-on digital practices. While a leadership role must reflect disciplined, offline focus, something is lost when your administrative assistant is updating your LinkedIn profile. A marketing leader in 1995 could be relatively certain that best practices in existence since 1955 — brand, advertising, direct, outdoor, media relations — were not constantly being rewritten. Executives today have no such luxury.

How can leaders responsible for digital strategy and large teams keep up? Many successful marketing and media executives allocate time to work hands-on digital into their schedules: through hacks for managing their information diet, participating in structured social channels, and setting realistic goals for C-level engagement.

Ultimately, which will be more expensive: the time spent mastering and connecting through digital channels, or the risk of failure stemming from a knowledge gap between digital strategy and execution? Given the high value and fast pace of best-in-class digital, the cost of a personal disconnect from digital comes at a higher price for both the individual and the organization.

Photo credit: joeshoe

January 22, 2014
Digital reality and updated strategy

What are the digital, social, and mobile norms today, and what’s on the horizon? A quick overview of current state and strategy:

See more upcoming presentations on the Speaking page.

January 20, 2014
Friday 5 — 1.17.2014
1. There are now 3.2 billion compelling reasons to get excited about the internet of things: this week, Google acquired connected home device maker Nest for a whopping $3.2 billion in cash. In return, Google gets a jumpstart in hardware and an ace design team. Privacy concerns abound, of course.
2. Trying to make sense of this week’s ruling on net neutrality? Read this, and start to use preferenced as a verb. It’s an abstract concept for most people to grok, and a tough issue to get the general public get excited about — until it drives up the price of Netflix.
3. Here’s a succinct piece on content principles for brands on social media. We try at Harvard to reinforce the principle of sticking to your guns on value and not falling prey to the endless RT ask.
4. This HBR blog takes a stab at defining the endgame for social media in the enterprise. The third wave of individual use is here, and the onus is on the enterprise on finding ways to facilitate and empower connection.
5. On a wider scale than social, how do organizations measure their progress in adopting digital practices? This MIT Sloan report (sign in for limited free access) looks at nine elements of digital transformation that distinguishes the organizations doing it best — and dubs them the Digerati.
Weekend fun: Miss the Golden Globes last Sunday? No worries — relive it through the magic of animated GIFs.

Every Friday, find five, highly subjective links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally.

Photo credit: James Britton
January 17, 2014
Morning in Cambridge

January 14, 2014