Dan Lewis

1) SuperSimpleSongs: Letter Magnets

With almost 30 million YouTube views in just over three years, I am definitely not alone in liking this one!  It’s simple and elegant.  I really like how they turn “now” into “know” at the end.

2) Sesame Street: James Earl Jones

There’s a back story here.   It’s going to be hard for an adult to get through it — it’s incredibly slow — but that’s part of the point.  Muppet Wiki sums it up:

The first time a child sees the performance, he responds to the invitation to say the alphabet along with the actor. Upon later viewings, the children would name the letter as soon as it appeared, but before it was named by Jones. Further repetition encouraged children to shout out the letter even before it appears. The “James Earl Jones effect” thus demonstrated to Sesame Street’s producers and curriculum advisors the value of both repetition and anticipation, and supplied proof that Sesame Street could promote interactive learning as opposed to merely passive viewing.

3) Captain Jean-Luc Picard… Really.

Sadly, he calls “Z” “zed”, which is something James Tiberius Kirk would never do.  Never.

4) Sesame Street, Tilly and the Wall

I admit that I had never heard of Tilly and the Wall before seeing this clip.  It’s fun, unique, and engaging — and the second of three Sesame videos.  (I’m biased, I know.)

5) Sesame Street: Hip Hop ABC

Show this to any pre-schooler and watch.  It’s addictive. But on a personal level, I really like this one because if you focus on the Sesame Street Muppets, you’ll see that their individual personalities can come out even when singing the same song. Especially Grover and Elmo.

Chalk this post up to occupational hazard: working for Sesame Street, I am naturally exposed to the ABCs on a regular basis.  Later this week, I’ll be putting up a collection of great ABC Song videos, so please subscribe to my RSS feed if you want to be notified when that’s up.

1) Beard ABC, by Tim Yarzhombeck

I think most of these are somewhat plausible facial hair configurations, although the Z look is over the top.

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2) The Brand Alphabet, by In Picture Design

Most of these are familiar, but I confess — I can’t actually identify all 26 brands.

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3) Fire in the Hole, by Oliver Munday

Truth be told, I’d rather that this didn’t include parts of toy soldiers — but then I remember, they’re plastic, not real.

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4) Not-Quite-Sign Language Alphabet, author unknown, via A Public Flogging

I’ve always been a fan of turning the black space around objects into the focal point of a piece, so this one fits nicely.  Blur your vision if you can’t see the ABCs immediately.

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5) The Alphabet Sky, author unknown, via Ajsha’s Blog

There are a few neat ones over there, but this one is the best of the bunch.  It looks up toward the tops of buildings to see the shapes — letters — formed by sky peeking in.  Brilliant.

Mike Arauz, a digital media strategist, had a great observation in March of 2009:

If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it’s not because I like your brand, but rather because I like your friends.

Spot on, and it applies to friends, and sharing, generally — not just to Facebook.

But on Friday, I received the email below from American Airlines.

American should read the Mike Arauz quote above a few hundred times, because they did basically everything wrong.  Why is American Airlines explicitly asking me to spam my friends?  And why do they think I’d sell my friends for a handful of air miles?

I clicked through, thinking that maybe I misunderstood.  Maybe they were offering my friends 10,000 air miles, and wanted me to make the introduction, so to speak.

Clicking the banner leads me to a Flash movie (??) and then, finally, this form:

Nope.  They’re offering my friends 1,000 miles to sign up — and they mention that as an aside.  As one member of FlyerTalk (a forum dedicated to air miles deals) noted: “My friendships are too valuable to me for me to try and market to them for a thousand miles. The relationships are worth a lot more than that.”  Bad play, American.

Then, there’s the email.  You fill out the form and it generates an email, automatically, and sends it to your friend(s).  I grabbed the “preview” text, below.

The email above isn’t editable, which means that I’m stuck with it*, and it invokes another quip of wisdom I picked up from Hugh MacLeod recently:

* And I would definitely have changed the email.  American suggests “a dream vacation to Manhattan” as a potential use of the miles.  Given that I live in Manhattan, work in Manhattan, and a lot of my friends do too, that would be a really bad vacation for me to suggest to my friend down the block or to my co-workers.

The whole project still reeks of thoughtless execution — even when you get past the punch-in-face language representative throughout the campaign.  Tactically, American approached the project with the attitude that the Internet was frozen in time in 1999.  There’s no way to share the offer with your friends outside of the form above.  There’s no special URL you can share on Facebook, Twitter, IM, on a message board, or via an informal personal email.  I need to provide not only the email addresses of my contacts (by hand — no importers apparently) but I also have to provide their first and last names.  Even to the FlyerTalk crowd, many think it’s just “too much work.”   (And it leads to creepy requests.)

What should American have done?

1) Redo the offer to focus on the payout to my friends.

Give my friends a meaningful incentive to join — a chance to win a free trip, or upgrades for life, or something really cool.  AAdvantage miles are meaningless to them if they are not in the program already — especially if they are invested in a competitor’s program.

And American has to lead with that information.  Make it obvious to me that they’re giving me a unique opportunity to do something for my friends.  This encourages sharing, which is American’s strategy.

And of course, they should have tied it to the payout to me.  How’s this for a great offer:

“Invite your friends to become an AAdvantage member — and your friend will be entered to win two first class tickets anywhere we fly!  And if they win, so do you — we’ll give you two first class tickets, too!  And just for signing up, both you and your friend get 1,000 AAdvantage miles!”

Much better (even if inarticulately written).

2) Make it dead simple to share everywhere.

In order to share, I have to fill out a form.  The form requires that I know my friends’ email addresses, that I invite my friends one-by-one, and that they’re going to be OK with me sending a pretty stupid email to them which, by the way, is clearly not written by me and reads like the spam it is.

And it is way too complicated.  American should be making it easy to share — that’s the whole point of the email!

Here are a few ideas:

And most importantly:

3) Hire someone who could have prevented the mistakes outlined above.

I am a typical over-sharer.  I am active on Facebook, Twitter, and even FourSquare.  I have a blog and regularly share links via two IM clients.  Making something which I cannot reasonably share is a disaster, because if I could have shared it, I could have easily and gladly distributed the link to hundreds of people.

There are a lot of “me”s out there.  Trying to tap into these networks is easy — if you just think it through, and if you give someone in the organization the authority to modify the plan before it gets executed on.   There really is no excuse for the disaster above.

I’ll be at the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Summit next Friday, and I’m not a good fit for it.  Which is why I’m excited to be there.

While Sesame Workshop produces content across types of media, the core content is, of course, video.   Video plus Muppets necessarily requires a too-l0ng-for-real-time production cycle.   Factor in the time it takes to ensure that the content is educational — as demanded by the Workshop’s mission — and being reactive, on video, in real-time is basically impossible.

So I’m looking for ways we can fit in.  We can definitely be trendsetters which dictate some degree of the information stream, but only in small doses.  There’s a huge, untapped pool in which we can make a difference, and I’m hoping the RWW Summit helps us understand that.

On a similar note, I’m still looking to put together a panel on how we can use social media to improve the lives of children (defined as ages 9 and under).  If you are interested in helping, please drop me a note.

Newspapers are slowly dying off because the cost to distribute content via newsprint — something that used to be the industry’s biggest competitive advantage — is now a massive disadvantage.  But the editorial cycle, where writers and editors are vetted and hired; articles are vetted and edited by these pre-screened talents; etc.

The goal is to maintain a high level of quality and accuracy.   This comes at the expense of speed, as additional checks and approvals inherently require additional time.  Note that in the pre-digital world, this didn’t matter, because publications were only able to publish once a day anyway — they, quite literally, had all day to write, edit, and fact check articles.

But the alleged benefits — again, quality and accuracy — are supposed to be the point of differentiation between newspapers and newer media, e.g. blogs and tweets and email blasts and the like.  So when the New York Post publishes a column by Filip Bondy bemoaning how Major League Baseball veterans are relegated to the undignified designated hitter role, one expects the argument to be a home run.

Instead, we get classless claptrap.  Witness:

The DH may forever represent an unwanted demotion for older sluggers – [Hideki] Matsui, too, felt that way – but it is the fate of almost everyone, if they’re good enough to hang around. Thurman Munson was spared this indignity, in tragic fashion, dying at age 32.

In other words: “It’s a good thing Thurman Munson died in a plane crash, or he would have become a designated hitter!  How awful!”

If this made it past the controls at a newspaper, where’s the value in the process?

Last fall, I met with a friend who had recently spoken with an executive at another (not the Mets) professional sports team in New York.  The exec said that the single biggest change in the sports world in recent history was the advent of sports talk radio; specifically for you New York sports fans, WFAN.  Before WFAN, teams had a cozy relationship with beat writers and newspaper columnists — that is, the media — and the reporters and columnists would, by and large, echo the company line as gospel.  The team controlled information and access; in exchange, they left to the media the “right” to distribute the story.  It was a win-win, as the team got positive press and the journalists were glistened the experts.  For any baseball fan, this is self-proving: the Baseball Writers Association of America decides on the end-of-season award winners and Hall of Fame inductees.  (In any other industry do journalists decide award winners?  Could you imagine if the editorial page of the Washington Post named the Nobel Peace Prize winners?)

Sports talk radio changed all that, for at least three reasons:

• All of a sudden, there was a lot of space for analysis, even if the analysis was mostly blather.  When a radio host has to fill four hours a day, five days a week, he has to say more than the snippet the team gives him.

• The snippet gets challenged — especially by fans.  Radio gave the fans a chance to sound off, via call-in shows.   While not the focus of talk radio, there was no equivalent in sports.  Most newspapers and magazines published letters to the editor, but not about sports minutiae, e.g. whether a specific player should be sent to the minors.

• Reporters and columnists became sources.   Literally.  Radio hosts would invite them to call in; the hosts would put the questions to the writers.   Writers reply, and are challenged by the host (e.g. “Why did the coach call that play at that moment?”).

The end result:  Beat writers no longer had a monopoly on the sound bite, and when that went away, so did the teams’ cozy relationship with those beat writers (and the rest of the media population, for that matter).

The media wanted more access, as individuals wanted scoops; the team wanted more control, as stories took on live of their own.  The two goals don’t mesh.  That’s why we have an era where it’s not uncommon to see players yelling at reporters (or pushing away cameras); why Theo Epstein once donned a monkey suit to avoid reporters; why Allen Iverson talks about practice.

But today, the landscape has again changed.  With Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, ideas move way too rapidly to play the cat-and-mouse game between teams and the media.   And even more importantly, the new landscape is participatory, not broadcast.   There is no need for the team to play this cat-and-mouse game because they can — and should — manage their own memes.

Unfortunately, the radio era harmed the notion that “conversation” and “participation” are laudable goals, for in the radio era, attempts at either were doomed to backfire.  So, I suspect, it will be a long time before those once burned get over their new media shyness.

Imagine you owned a Major League Baseball team; well call it the Mets.  Your star player (“David Wright”) is, inexplicably, striking out a lot, and your team is having a bad year.  What message do you expect the sports media to hook into and spread?

In the Mets’ case, the media has hooked onto a meme.   “David Wright is striking out a ton, and it’s hurting the team.”

But it’s not true.   Yes, he’s striking out a lot — but he’s also outperforming the rest of his team.   He’s second on the team in home runs, leading in runs batted in, gets on base more often than anyone else, and even is second (by one) in stolen bases.   He is on pace for a “30/30″ season — thirty homers, thirty stolen bases — and 100+ runs batted in.   Yes, he’s striking out a lot more than in years past, but he’s having a good, if not great year.  He’s an asset, not a liability.

The Mets should combat this, just like any organization should if an asset is being treated like a liability by the press.  While the example above is sports related, the solution can apply to anyone in the public sphere.

The Three Ds of Meme Management

1) Develop your own soundbite.

The term “soundbite” may come off as negative, but it’s descriptive here.  You need to find a message and boil it down into a sentence or two.   I did that above.

The message has to be short and to the point.   The more you say, the more things there are for the chattering class to analyze, refute, and often (and unintentionally) distort.    Be clear and succinct.*   Stay on message.   You want to tee up your idea and hope that it spreads, winning the day; or at least, is something you can keep reiterating across various media channels.

* And, it should go without saying:  Choose your words carefully to make sure you don’t sound stupid.  Last night, when the Mets removed their starting pitcher from the game after five pitches, the pitcher claimed that he was not injured and was appalled by the decision to remove him.  The pitching coach’s response: that the pitcher is a “habitual liar” when it comes to his playing condition.   Big mistake.

2) Distribute the message yourself.

You cannot control your message, no matter how hard you try.  But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

But the definition of “trying” has changed from the press conferences, interviews, and press releases rubric of years past.   It’s not enough to sit around, crafting the message and choosing which media outlets you’ll speak with.    Nearly any organization can distribute the message themselves.  Have key stakeholders (the general manager? the owner? even a PR representative or spokesperson) start a blog.  Create an organizational Facebook page.  Use Twitter accounts, etc.  None of this is groundbreaking advice, so it is rather absurd that organizations have not yet caught on.  Again, take the Mets for example.  To the extent they use any of these tools — and it is minimal — it’s for marketing purposes only.

3) Defend your message.

Once others hear, repeat, rehash, and discuss your take on the goings-on, some will criticize it.  You need to be ready to defend it.

That means engaging the critics on their turf, as the Mets and other sports teams often (and sometimes poorly) do take the media to task, head on.  But rarely do you see a team do this.  Instead, they hold press conferences, go on radio shows, issue statements, etc.  They don’t ever engage the fan directly via media properties they control.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Twitter, Facebook pages, and blogs is that you can receive — and reply to — feedback right then and there.  And the replies are public, so even if you don’t convince the skeptic, you may convince someone else listening or watching the argument.  Overlooking this value, in the current “social media” climate, is fatal.

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Applying the three Ds is not difficult.  It simply requires time and consistent effort.

One such example occurred last week, when Fox News ran an article claiming that Wikipedia founder (and my former boss), Jimmy Wales, was stripped of editorial rights due to an unrelated scandal.  He took to Twitter (and to TechCrunch, a third party blog) to set the record straight and defend himself:

The defense consisted of pointed replies to those who reacted skeptically:

Effective?  You bet.   The passion plus the time investment means that he’s taking it seriously; that this is important; and that the current media-driven meme is incorrect.  It’s believable and simulteaneouly remarkable.

It’s the approach everyone should be taking in managing the media sentiment of their organization.  Don’t follow the sports teams’ model.

I know the theme song to the horrid TV show Step by Step.   By heart, even.

Step by Step aired for six years on ABC’s “TGIF” lineup, and then for a seventh on CBS, totalling 160 episodes.  At thirty minutes per episode (including commercials — this was pre-DVR), a person who watched the entire run wasted over three whole days of his or her life.  It is still being aired in syndication on ABC Family: once a day on weekdays and twice-daily on weekends.

The show featured six children and later, a seventh and one cousin.  It was not significant enough, however, to vault any of those eight actors and actresses beyond the show itself.  A quick perusal of Wikipedia confirms this; in fact, one of the actors is so insignificant that he did not even have an entry in Wikipedia until 2009.   That’s not terribly surprising.  Step by Step was not something you commiserated over the next week at school.   No cultural icons came out of the show; there was no Balki Bartokomous or Tony Micelli or Mike Seaver.  Even in retrospect, the only things I can remember about the show is how across the board stupid the characters were (except for the nerdy kid, who was hardly praised for being smart) and, of course, the theme song.  Heck, it was only marginally funny.

Yet, I watched it often enough to be able to sing a significant part of the theme song by heart, over a decade after it ceased production.  And apparently, I am not alone.

We’re enamored by the lure of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and social media generally.  But don’t underestimate the power of television.