LittleBird

Back in 2005, I had an idea. (Yes, I have about one good one every five years.) I looked at the success the daily e-mail newsletter Daily Candy was enjoying, and wondered why there wasn't a Daily Candy equivalent for men. Daily Candy, with its trend spotting and sample sales, its chic illustrations and its girlish slang, was using an Internet technology, email, to hit women in a sweet spot that the magazine industry had been hitting them in for years. But why should women be the ones to have all the fun? Who was serving the male market?

This struck me as a window of opportunity, so to fill that void I started Single Shot. The format was simple: One email a day, once a day, every business day, targeted squarely at men. Not being a man myself, I was perhaps not an expert on what would appeal to the less-fair sex, but I did my best. I dove in and started churning out daily emails, trying hard to tap into my inner male, and relying on my husband to edit out anything too un-dude-like.

Although Single Shot ultimately succumbed to the demands of my day job, I have ever since believed that email is a hugely under-developed medium. For a while, it looked like RSS feeds might kill email as a medium for commercial messages of any kind. RSS seemed like a great way around the boatloads of spam that was filling up inboxes from Gmail to Outlook. I personally set up a Bloglines account and set all of my commercial emails to stream into it, side-by-side with my favorite blogs.

There was just one small problem: I never visited it. Only rarely did I go back to my Bloglines account to catch up on my favorite blogs -- even the ones written by close friends who happen to be comedic geniuses. The commercial emails I opted in to receiving -- mostly retailers like Banana Republic, whose clothes I actually wanted to look at -- quickly overreached the maximum capacity of my account, so that any new messages could not be viewed. RSS -- at least the way I had set it up -- just didn't work for me.

So it warms my heart to see signs that email is back on the rise. To me, the clear evidence appears in the form of a handful of fashion companies making strides in both e-commerce and editorial. If you're having a hard time seeing the money, let's start with the leader of the pack, the Gilt Groupe, valued last summer at $400m.  Follow that up with Rue La La, which is basically in the same business, then Billion Dollar Babes, Top Button, The Outnet, and for kids, Mini Social. With some variation, the business model of all these sites is essentially the same. One sale a day. Once a day. Every day of the week. And though they hold the sales on their respective Web sites, you receive an alert not by RSS feed, but by e-mail. 

It's not that I buy from these sites every day, but I just like to look at their merchandise. And I do it every day. I like to know what's out there, to know what my peers are buying. I just like to look at fashion. It's like a small vacation I take while I'm sitting at my desk. It's pure pleasure, antithetical to all the other work I do at my desk. And because I look at it so often, naturally I have my moments of weakness when I actually buy.

The there are sites like Who What Wear. This emphasis here is not on e-commerce, but on editorial. Pictures of celebrities and models off-duty, and detailed descriptions of their fashion choices. Throw in a few lucrative product placements and what's not to like?

So for me, it's fashion. But what is it for you? Shoes? Cars? Golf courses? Vacation destinations? The variations are endless. Email works. If it didn't why would spammers keep piling it on? They do it because they know the numbers are in their favor. And even after all these years, after new technologies, after trend after trend, it still works.

 

Anyone with any interest in how corporations behave in the social media space should read Burson Marsteller's Global Social Media Check-Up 2010, which reveals some pretty interesting statistics about how companies in the Fortune 100 are using services such as Facebook, Twitter -- and even blogs.

Read it on Mashable.

It ends with some good advice for companies who want to use social networking to extend their brand.

I hope you can forgive this small diversion away from my usual topic of the Internet industry, but I've been mulling something over and I can't rest until I just put it out there. (And no, it's not about nude yoga, despite the picture.)

When I think of American Apparel, the clothing company based in my home town of Los Angeles, whenever I see one of its hyper-sexualized billboards (or Web site, where the picture came from), or stumble across one of its ubiquitous retail outlets, I smell a fish. And I've run across them often, in cities as far flung as Montreal, or even Soeul. That company has stores everywhere. Many, many of them. I just passed one on the way to Malibu that was on water-front property, in fact.

And there was that fish smell again -- and it wasn't coming from the ocean.

According to the American Apparel entry on Wikipedia, "The company was ranked 308th in Inc.'s 2005 list of the 500 fastest growing companies in the United States, with a 440% three-year growth and revenues in 2005 of over US$ 211 million." They have 200 retail locations world-wide, and while that is only a fraction of the thousands of stores that a company like the Gap has, I still find myself asking: Who is wearing this stuff?

For all of American Apparel's rapid growth, it's retail stores cropping up in malls and on high streets the world over, I can't put my finger on one piece of their clothing in my closet. Moreover, I don't know anyone else who can. And to achieve the kind of growth that a company like the Gap has achieved, you'd have to have Gap-like ubiquity. Let's face it: everybody wears clothes from the Gap. You may not always want to admit it, but you wear them. And everyone you know does too.

And is that so bad? The quality is there, so who needs to know your cotton cable-knit pullover didn't come from, say, Nordstrom? Bloomingdales? Any other place with more cache? American Apparel doesn't have near the quality of the Gap, and though the price point may be tantalizingly low, wear too much of it and you won't look Gap stylish, you'll just look, well .... cheap.

So how, I ask you, HOW does this store not only stay in business, but spread. Like a brush fire. The answer is, it can't last. Mark my words, American Apparel is not long for this world.

Just got finished reading David Armano's list of Six Social Media Trends for 2010 and thought you might find it of interest. Most of the points are pretty obvious, but I like to see these points lined up in a tidy fashion.

One point that he missed, I think, is that new social networks will emerge that tie social networking to other services. Like, if you were building Amazon.com today and selling books, you wouldn't think of creating the site without a major social networking component, right? That's just how business is done today.

I've already revealed part of my plan to improve on Microsoft's Outlook program. So today I want to build on that a little bit. (You're getting it free for now, Mr. Gates ... but the next one will cost you.)

Let's talk about Outlook. Specifically, let's talk about your contacts. Before I explain my plan, I should admit openly that I haven't installed Windows 7 yet. Although I doubt it will significantly improve the arrangement of the Office suite of programs -- Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, etc. -- I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I just haven't seen the new OS yet.

But with that out of the way, I need to get a point through directly to Mr. Gates's minions who engineer Outlook, and for that matter Outlook express and any other contacts database, before they go releasing any new versions of anything. And here it is:

Guys, (and I do mean guys,) people marry. People have families. Now, I know this may be a rare occurrence in Redmond, where the male to female ratio is might be more than slightly skewed in favor of those with the Y chromosome, so let me just explain how that affects email. When people marry, they become deeply connected. They share money. They share clothes. They share germs. They develop intermingling familial connections. They become deeply connected in every way EXCEPT the Outlook way. In Outlook, you are considered an individual, regardless of your marital or familial status. You could be a Siamese twin, and you would still need your own separate contact information to fit into the Outlook contacts file. And if you were a Siamese twin, there would be no way for others to see the unique relationship between you and the other with whom you were sharing fleshspace. That is the Outlook way.

In Outlook, an entry can be associated with multiple physical addresses -- home, business, what have you -- but a physical address can't be associated with multiple entries. This leads to a lot of duplication, because you have to put in the same address for two different contacts over, and over again. And it leads to confusing naming entries like this one, which is for my parents:

First Name: Dick & Fleur
Last Name: Middaugh
email: dickandfleur@att.net

(I know it sounds crazy in the age of free Gmail, but a lot of families share one email address, too.)

The problem gets sticky when you go to search for your entry. In Office 2007, entries are indexed by first name, so you have to remember who you entered first -- Mom? Or Dad? Bill or Sharon? Zendyl or Abraham?

Outlook does get a little personal by soliciting your contact's birthday and even their anniversary -- but it would never go so far as to assume that your contact could be married to another one of your contacts. So be prepared to enter any anniversaries twice.

To give credit where credit is due, Outlook took the bold step of including a field for your contact's Web address and even -- wait for it -- their IM name. But although my own version of Outlook is called "2007," a year when the social networks were well established and on their way to virtual hegemony, still it does not include fields social networking links.

<Knocking on glass> HelLLOOOO! Microsoft Outlook makers! Are you in there? Wake up already and make some changes!

Or don't -- and I'll be over soon to crack the whip.

A lot of companies are looking for ways to use the social networks for marketing purposes. In fact, I think it could well be argued that Facebook and Twitter have reached their saturation point in terms of marketing. Everybody has a Twitter account, from Oprah to Buy.com. Even my Facebook account has a couple commercial connections, including one to my favorite brand of reusable bags, Baggu.

One piece of advice that I am constantly impressing upon the marketers with whom I work is to be careful of being so focused on social networking that you miss the next big thing. If I were writing this blog two years ago, the focus would have been entirely on ... well, blogs. And there was a time when everybody had to have a blog. Those who became myopic about it are the ones who lost out pole position on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and so on. You need to keep your sights on the horizon.

And I spot something on the horizon that has me wondering. I recently posted a status update that said "Could Mafia Wars Kill Facebook?" I was receiving so many Mafia Wars updates from friends that it was becoming annoying. A friend's response to my post informed me that you can turn Mafia Wars off. You can effectively block any app/game of your choosing from appearing in your feed. This I had not known.

But this got me thinking. How many other of my friends are tolerating Mafia Wars in their feed? How many Farmville updates are eeking into our collective consciousness? And aside from those two, what are the most pervasive social games?

Find them. Own them.

What if your notification said "Summer Day has sent you movie passes to an AMC theater on Mafia Wars," or "You have received an invitation to Mafia Wars, brought to you by "Thugs Life," in theaters October 18." I don't know anything about Farmville, but what if you could use a Caterpillar tractor to sow your seeds, or sell what you grow at your local Ralphs, a sponsored Web community?

As much as I find these games have infiltrated my Facebook feed, I haven't found that any advertising has infiltrated these games. And getting your brand inside one, is like loading up the old Trojan Horse and rolling right into Troy. Let the games begin.

 

  

Long before the term social networking came to mean something you do online, long before the emergence of brands like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Shelfari, LinkedIn and so on, long before user-generated content, most of the content you'd find on the Web was created by content providers. And the content providers did things the old-fashioned way: They built Web sites.

 

And they filled their Web sites with whatever they had lying around, or they paid generously (or not) to come up with new content. A writer would write. A graphic artist would turn digital shwoops into logos and designs, a photographer would shoot images, and in a way that's not so different from laying out a magazine, they would put content together and publish it. On the Web. In the form of Web pages.

 

But it didn't take a genius to see that all the labor that went in to putting that content together was expensive. And at the time no one could really see how to make money on the Web -- other than to start a business and sell it to a bigger fish. And for a big fish -- a big company like NBC or The New York Times -- there was value in putting high-quality, polished -- if expensive -- content on the Web, and that was to extend the reach of their brand. So some of the best content available on early Web sites was paid for by the marketing arm of the old guard of media companies. And that's still true today.

 

I worked for one of the biggest of the old guard -- Disney -- around the turn of the millennium, and one sad fact was becoming apparent at that time: Building content took a lot of work, and it was really expensive. We were a long way from the point where ad revenue would support the cost of our pages.

 

It was easy to see that UGC, user-generated content, was the way to go. But because our site, ZoogDisney.com, was targeted at children, there were numerous reasons we could not allow our users to input their personal information, one of which was the recently passed COPPA law. So we started to fish around for ways to make the site dynamic, to make it change from day to day, without having to do the work of producing content ourselves. So instead of considering user-generated, we started to consider user-sensitive content.

 

User-sensitive content is content you create without knowing it, simply by surfing the Web. For instance, if Google publishes its list of the top 50 search terms, that is user sensitive content. Another example would be an interactive map that shows user hot spots. A collection of site users in, say, New York, would make that city glow red on the map. It senses what users are doing and reports on it.

 

User-Sensitive Dynamic Content. USeDyC. Nice that it rings kind of dirty, eh?

 

One of the finest examples of USeDyC I've ever seen is in the highly popular iPhone application Ocarina. The core functionality of Ocarina is to turn your iPhone into a musical instrument. You blow into the main port while fingering the touch screen to form different notes. But your use of the tool is tracked in a very USeDyC way. An interactive map shows where Ocarina is being used throughout the world. Not only can you see where they are, you can also hear what they're playing.

 

Now, before you go shouting "Big Brother!" about USeDyC, please consider that this is a form of personal information gathering that allows far greater privacy to the user than any of the other current social networking sites, which ask you outright for everything from your name and email address, to your personal photos, your sexual preference and who your friends are.

 

We never did arrive at the perfect use of USeDyC at Zoog, but it's a concept that I've carried with me because I believe so strongly in the value of it. I still feel that it holds the greatest value for those creating content for kids, but that's not the only outlet. As budgets get tighter and producers need to create more Web content with fewer resources, USeDyC will have its date with destiny.

I've been doing a lot of tinkering this summer with my various Web sites. I started this blog, I restored SingleShot.net, a site I built back in 2005, I launched EntertainMyChild.com, and I have another site brewing at IfICouldTellYou.com.

I've never been an engineer. I built my career managing techies rather than being one, so I'm having fun getting my hands dirty with some of the tools of Web production. Along the way, I've been amazed at the freeware available across the Web. To that end, I want to give a quick shout out to the folks who have given me cool toys to use on my sites. You can use them too, if you want.

Google AdSense (www.google.com/adsense): Yeah, it's a no-brainer. Google AdSense is kind of mind blowing. It doesn't cost you anything to put it on your site, and the bottom line is that it can make you money. I don't know how many people have gotten rich using Google Ads alone (though I suspect come have), and I know there are more lucrative forms of advertising out there, but for a lot of organizations from the sole proprietor like myself, to the biggest media outlets around, Google AdSense makes sense.

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics): If you don't have Google Analytics (or Urchin) on your site, you're just flat out missing good information. This free service gives you a really granular look at the traffic coming to your site. For the most part it's easy to use -- though there are some sophisticated tools within the service that are still all Greek to an advertising non-professional like me. But you can look past all that to answer questions like what is the average size of your users' monitors? What operating system do most of your users have? What browser? How many of your users come from other Web sites, and how many are just typing in your URL? It's an amazing resource, and any person who wants to make their site or their business better has no excuse for not using it.

Add This (http://www.addthis.com): With this simple tool, your Web pages go from static to viral. By adding a single piece of code to your pages, you give your users a variety of ways to share your content with other users. The search engines like it, too.

EmailMeForm.com (http://www.emailmeform.com) or MyContactForm.com (http://www.mycontactform.com): One quick way to guarantee that your inbox will be filled with spam tomorrow is to post an email address anywhere on the Web. Bots and crawlers are out there searching, and they can smell an @ sign a mile away. The way to escape this is to replace that email address with an email form. EmailMeForm.com allows you to make your form just that much more secure by using a CAPTCHA like challenge-response technology. But MyContactForm.com is a bit more customizable and I like that they put a little red asterisk by required fields automatically.

Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com): This isn't freeware (far from it), but is a reasonably-priced, easy to use tool for anyone who wants to send out legitimate email. I used this service to publish my daily email, Single Shot, and I found it easy to use. They have gone to lengths to stay on the ISPs white lists, as well, which means your emails are more likely to make it through the spam filter.

OK, so it's a short list, but an important one. These are the essentials for anyone looking to build a Web presence. There are certainly others, from quiz makers, to community tools like Kick Apps. And I'd love to hear from you about what tools you've put to use on your own site.

 

 



 

I am going to work for Microsoft one day.

 

Clearly, those kids in Redmond need my help. The first project I'm going to take on is to improve the way Microsoft's mail client, Outlook, deals with archiving old messages.

 

The way the program works now, when your inbox reaches a certain size you get a dialogue box offering you the opportunity to archive your old messages with a single click of the OK button. So easy. One click and potentially thousands of messages cease to take up any room in your inbox whatsoever.

 

But where did they go?

 

You assume they're there ... somewhere. I mean, they've got to be somewhere or they wouldn't call it archiving; they'd call it deleting. OK, but not knowing where they went is annoying, so you turn that feature off. No more archiving of old messages. But then, as your computer ages, as YOU age and accumulate messages and attachments, and maybe you buy a new machine and you transfer all the messages from your old machine to your new one, eventually you come to a point where you've got a pretty weighty inbox.

 

If your inbox happens to be the property of the company you work for and is hooked up to a network server, you'll very likely begin bumping up against a mailbox size limit before that ever happens. You'll start getting automated messages from your system administrator warning you of the limit, then eventually any messages sent to you will bounce back to the sender.

 

When I go to work for Microsoft, I'm going to design a system to alleviate these issues. To start, I will automate the process of removing heavy attachments, which contribute to the total size of your inbox. I'll give you the option of "Delete all attachments," "Save all attachments to a file then delete from message," or the option to save and delete attachments one by one with your approval, much like the "Find Next" feature for Find and Replace in Microsoft Word.

 

Then I'm going to give you an archiving function that doesn't require a computer engineering degree to execute. It will be drag and drop. You will be able to drop your messages to the folder of your choosing. And if you want the messages back, you'll just have to drag them back into your inbox. It will work just the way the rest of your system works. Cut and paste. Move or copy.

 

This is just the beginning of my work with Microsoft. I've got other plans for Windows. I'm just waiting for them to call me with that job offer.

 

 

 

 

This week the L.A. Times posted an article about "Kevin Pollak's Chat Show" that is required reading for anyone with even a minor interest in video on the Web. If you missed it, don't feel bad -- I'm not sure the Times ever even linked it from the home page. It was just a little blip in this week's mediascape and was quickly buried by Michael Jackson's final media barrage.

The article focuses on Kevin Pollack, because he is the name, "A veteran of three decades in show business," and it barely glosses over "his production partner," Jason Calacanis, who has a show of his own, "This Week in Startups," which airs on the same platform.

Jason is a bit of a polarizing figure. He founded Weblogs Inc. and sold it to AOL for a reported $25 million. The subscribers to his email blast number in the tens of thousands, but he still feels compelled at times to address "the haters." As someone who has followed Jason's career for a while now -- I think I may have been the first to ever put him on TV back in 1996 when I was a producer at MSNBC -- I can tell you that what Jason is doing over at the Maholo studios IS the revolution. And while I can't speak for Kevin, I can speculate -- probably pretty accurately -- about where Jason is headed.

If the name Josh Harris rings a bell, it might be from the documentary We Live in Public which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance this year. Josh was the founder of a company called Pseudo.com, a live audio and video webcasting Web site. And though I haven't seen the film, I did spend time at Pseudo's facilities, back when Jason had a little Web-only chat show on Pseudo called "The Silicon Alley Reporter," which evolved alongside his magazine of the same name. 

Pseudo was amazing. It was a 90s version of Warhol's factory. Josh Harris was visionary. An artist -- but hardly starving, having founded and sold Jupiter Research. Pseudo was an art party that happened all the time, especially when shows were taping. But even when a show wasn't taping, the DJs were still spinning and people still lingered. But Pseudo was also, all those years ago, what everyone expected video to become on the Web. It was like a small-scale broadcast network, with a slate of shows that "aired" exclusively on the Internet. You could watch them live, or watch them later.

But Pseudo was too early, and the technology had not yet caught up. The videos were minuscule. And herky-jerky. And gosh, it was hard enough to download images on that old dial-up connection, much less video.

And now, Jason Calacanis is picking up where Josh Harris left off. He was there for Pseudo. He was tight with Josh. Josh made his millions then started Pseudo. Jason made his millions and is positioned to have a Pseudo of his own.

The revolution is here ... and it will be televised.