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Oreo: connects Chinese families through custom-built 'Emoji' app on Wechat

Users of the Wechat social network were invited to take pictures of themselves and their children and paste them onto Emojis, a smiley face used in Japanese web messages, which is gaining increasing popularity in China.

Oreo is running the campaign on an official branded account on Wechat, a social network which lets brands build mobile apps directly into their account.

The app was designed to allow users to create and share content with other users without leaving the application.

Users are invited to share Emojis with family and friends, using a selection of templates and animated actions.

Activity is being supported by Oreo-branded bus shelters in major Chinese cities, which allow people to project Emojis onto a big screen and print out stickers of the Emojis to take home.

The campaign has resulted in more than 99 million Emojis being created in 11 weeks, with some 10 million shared with family and friends directly from Wechat.

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Oreo connects Chinese families through custom-built 'Emoji' app on Wechat

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Users of the Wechat social network were invited to take pictures of themselves and their children and paste them onto Emojis, a smiley face used in Japanese web messages, which is gaining increasing popularity in China. Oreo is running the campaign on an official branded account on Wechat, a social network which lets brands build mobile apps directly into their account.

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Apple takes on Dropbox & Whatsapp with software latest updates

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Apple takes on Dropbox & Whatsapp with software latest updates

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"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." ~ Steve Jobs
announced a flood of new features for its software platforms for Macs and iPhones, many of which might feel familiar to users of apps like Dropbox, Voxer and WhatsApp as Apple moves to keep up with developments in cloud and mobile communications technology.

Among the unifying themes:

1) Tying Apple devices together with features like calling and emails that can work simultaneously across iPhones and Macs.

2) Bringing other apps services directly into Apple's native apps, allowing a user to for instance use a photo editing app within the company's native photo service or add their data to Apple's notifications stream.

At an unusually lighthearted keynote, Chief Executive Tim Cook said that the updated iPhone platform iOS 8 was "a giant release" for both consumers and developers.

The reveals included some neat developer features that make programing an app for Apple's devices a lot easier with features like Swift - but also put mature services like DropBox and Skype under pressure by essentially aping them as native Apple features. Jan Koum, the founder of Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger tweeted his own veiled criticism at the event which seemed heavy on familiar features.

But some developers felt that Apple was still leaving a level playing field for other developers to compete with its own apps. "Everyone's iterating and moving forward," said Nick D'Aloisio, who just won an Apple design award for his News Digest app. "It's part of the industry. Now whoever has the best product wins."

Among the big reveals:

- iCloud Drive seeks to redeem Apple's struggles with cloud sharing with a service eerily similar to Dropbox. It stores documents and data from apps in the Mac's Finder window, syncing the data across devices and even across Windows. (Ironically, Steve Jobs tried to buy Dropbox back in 2009, and then when he was rebuffed vowed to destroy the company with iCloud.)

- A featured on the theme of bringing devices together, called Handoff, lets users swipe an email from their iPhone to their Mac (if they're close enough) to continue writing the email on that device, or pick up where they were browsing on Safari on a separate device.

- A calling feature very similar to Skype and Viber allows users to take phone calls on their Macs and not just their phones

- Mark-Up, an extension to Mail and Safari that lets users edit attachments by drawing on them.

- Mail Drive allows Mac users to send attachments up to 5 GB in size.

There were also a raft of features specifically for iOS 8 and messaging that appeared to draw on the popularity of third-party apps:

- A new native feature on the iOS keyboard called QuickType uses "language models" to predict words before they are typed, with an interface very similar to that of SwiftKey, a predictive keyboard app that has not been able to sell on Apple's App Store because of the closed ecosystem for iOS. Ironically enough, now that Apple has the QuickType feature, it would allow iOS users to buy and install third-party keyboard apps.

- Within iMessage Apple revealed a push-to-talk, and push-to-video feature very similar to push-to-talk features announced by messaging service WhatsApp several months ago, and popularized by the messaging app Voxer.

The founders of keyboard app maker SwiftKey said they were "delighted Apple has decided to embrace the importance of opening its platform to third party keyboards." Without mentioning Apple's QuickType feature, Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock added: "Are we going to build SwiftKey Keyboard for iOS 8? Of course we are. We've already started."

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Apple Echoes Dropbox, WhatsApp, Others With Raft Of New Software Features

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"Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." ~ Steve Jobs announced a flood of new features for its software platforms for Macs and iPhones, many of which might feel familiar to users of apps like Dropbox, Voxer and WhatsApp as Apple moves to keep up with developments in cloud and mobile communications technology.

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Google's Panda 4.0 update focuses on content quality

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Google's Panda 4.0 update focuses on content quality

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It's official. Panda 4.0 has officially hit the Google search results.

The Panda algorithm, which was designed to help boost great-quality content sites while pushing down thin or low-quality content sites in the search results, has always targeted scraper sites and low-quality content sites in order to provide searchers with the best search results possible.

Panda 4.0, which Google and Matt Cutts confirmed began rolling out yesterday, has definitely caused some waves in the search results. However, the fact that Panda 4.0 is also hitting at the same time as a refresh of an algorithm targeting spammy queries like payday loans makes it a little bit more difficult for webmasters to sort through the damage.

With the payday loans refresh impacting extremely spammy queries and Panda targeting low-quality content, some webmasters could potentially get hit with both of these or by just one or the other.

While usually people complain about losing rankings, Alan Bleiweiss from AlanBleiweiss.com showed via Twitter that Panda can also bring about some serious improvement to a site's traffic as well.

Prior to Cutts confirming via Twitter that Panda 4.0 hit, there had been plenty of speculation about a change with either Panda or Penguin, although many found it hard to pin down exactly what the change was.

"It was interesting to see the chatter amongst SEOs over the last few days," says Marie Haynes of HIS Web Marketing. "We all knew that something was going on, but there was significant disagreement on exactly what Google was doing. Most of the black hats were saying that it was related to Penguin because they were noticing huge drops in their sites with the spammiest link profiles."

This would have been the changes to the payday loans update, where the goal is to target the spammiest search queries Google sees. There was also plenty of debate on forums and Twitter about whether the shake-up we saw was Panda-related or Penguin-related. And with the payday loans update thrown in there for good measure, it was definitely confusing.

"I was really hoping that this wasn't a Penguin refresh because the majority of the sites that I had done link cleanup on were not seeing any improvement and if Penguin refreshed and none of my clients were seeing ranking increases, then that would not be good," Haynes says. "I was also puzzled because one site that I monitor that has been adversely affected by several Panda updates saw a vast improvement today. It does not have a bad link profile and would not have been affected by a Penguin update. "

"When I heard the announcements that Google had released two algorithms over the last couple of days - payday loans and also a big Panda update, everything made sense. And still, so many of us are waiting for that big Penguin refresh. It wouldn't surprise me if that happens in the next couple of days," she says.

Google has said previously that they try not to throw multiple updates at once or within a very short period of time, so it is interesting that they pushed out two completely unrelated updates - although updates that could both impact some the same sites - within a couple of days.

Releasing two back-to-back updates makes it a lot harder for webmasters to analyze the changes and what specifically was targeted in these updates, and could affect Google's ability to evaluate how well (or not) the two updates worked. It also means webmasters might have a challenge knowing what changes need to be made in order to recover search rankings.

However, Haynes speculated that some of the Panda change might have been to reverse some of the damage done to sites that had great content yet were impacted for other on-page reasons.

"I think it's too early to say what this new iteration of Panda is affecting, but I can tell you that in the case of the site that I saw big improvements on, no cleanup work had been done at all," Haynes says. "It was always in 'Panda flux.'"

She says some Panda refreshes would hit it hard and then occasionally the site would show a slight increase with a refresh.

"This is by far the biggest increase, though," Haynes says. "It really is a good-quality site and I believe that what caused it to be affected by Panda in the first place was a site layout that caused crawlers to get confused. Underneath that confusing layout is a site full of really good content. It may be that Google found ways to see past structural issues and recognize the good content as the structural problems would not affect users, just crawlers. But really, that's a guess."

Panda first blazed onto the scene in February 2011, and was believed to be Google's response to criticism of how well content farms were ranking. Google later announced that they internally called it the big Panda update, after Navneet Panda, the Google engineer who created it.

While there have been many smaller Panda updates and a couple larger ones, each rolled out monthly over a period of 10 days, Google had announced several months ago that Panda would be integrated into the algorithm updates and that the "softer" Panda would be less noticeable. However, that clearly isn't the case with Panda 4.0, which has had a widespread impact, both positively and negatively.

Dr. Pete Meyers from Moz also studied the changes they saw from the latest Panda update, and noticed that eBay got hit particularly hard.

Digging into the May 19th data (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain fell completely out of the "Big 10" (our metric of the ten domains with the most "real estate" in the top 10).

In fact, Meyers notes that eBay's drop was so significant that it dropped from 1 percent of their queries to 0.28 percent. It won't be surprising to hear of more sites who have seen a drop due to Panda 4.0 - especially sites that have been notorious for having low quality content.

We will definitely see more come out in the next few days as webmasters and SEO professionals have a chance to evaluate the changes and what might have caused sites (either their own or competitors) to either rise or fall in Google's search results. And since we're still awaiting a Google Penguin update ( Penguin 2.0 launched a year ago this week), I wouldn't be surprised if we see one of those updates coming soon, especially in light of Google releasing both the payday loans and Panda 4.0 so close together.
Image Credit: Galen R. Frysinger
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It's official. Panda 4.0 has officially hit the Google search results. The Panda algorithm, which was designed to help boost great-quality content sites while pushing down thin or low-quality content sites in the search results, has always targeted scraper sites and low-quality content sites in order to provide searchers with the best search results possible.

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No one is better than Coca-Cola at having all of its communications, down to the very packaging, embody the brand promise of happiness and sharing.

Leo Burnett in Colombia had the latest clever idea in that department. It dreamed up a design for Coke's plastic bottles featuring a cap that could only be opened when fit together with another bottle's cap and twisted. Thus, you have to pair off to be refreshed.

To show off the design, the brand found people in most desperate need of a little friendly conversation, who are also generally not opposed to pairing off: college freshmen at the beginning of the school year. It put a stash of the bottles on a campus. The students had to partner with someone if they wanted to open their Coke.

The idea is reminiscent of last year's sharable can, which split in half (created by Ogilvy & Mather France and Ogilvy Asia-Pacific), except this time the eager freshmen got to have a whole Coke-along with a small exchange that got the ball rolling.

CREDITS
Client: Coca-Cola
Agency: Leo Burnett, Colombia

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Ad of the Day: Coke Designs a Friendly Bottle That Can Only Be Opened by Another Bottle

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No one is better than Coca-Cola at having all of its communications, down to the very packaging, embody the brand promise of happiness and sharing. Leo Burnett in Colombia had the latest clever idea in that department. It dreamed up a design for Coke's plastic bottles featuring a cap that could only be opened when fit together with another bottle's cap and twisted.

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Cola's second life. | HELLO YOU CREATIVES

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UK is the world's leading e-commerce exporter

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UK is the world's leading e-commerce exporter

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The " Global Retail E-mpire " report analyses the estimated value of online retail based on Google searches for six of the biggest e-commerce markets, making up half of global e-commerce volumes: the UK, the US, Germany, the Nordics, the Netherlands and France. It predicts that online trade between these countries will grow fivefold in the next seven years, from £15bn in 2013 to £79bn in 2020, as the retail sector becomes increasingly global and interconnected.

Peter Fitzgerald, Director at Google, said: "The global increase in the number of people with internet access coupled with a rise in consumer confidence, combine to provide the ideal market conditions for e-commerce. The success of UK retailers can partly be attributed to operating in the most advanced e-commerce market in the world, but also to the high level of trust international customers have in UK brands and retailers. Looking to the future, any retailer wishing to enter the market must adopt a digital-first strategy to succeed."

The UK's online export success has been spearheaded by the fashion sector, where online marketplaces such as ASOS, Net-a-Porter and Farfetch feature among the top 20 most sought after retailers by international buyers. UK luxury and fashion brands are also performing strongly, with Burberry, Dr. Martens and Barbour some of the most searched for British brands from overseas.

Anita Balchandani, Partner at OC&C, said: "Over the next decade, online retail will become increasingly international. This represents a great opportunity for British retailers, by providing new ways to grow and expand. At the same time, international expansion poses many challenges and will require retailers to master new capabilities and complexities.

"As a market matures, and new pockets of demand emerge, localisation will be crucial - from tailoring the range on offer, to ensuring that delivery and payment methods work for each market.

"It is equally critical to localise only where it matters to customers, to avoid the cost and complexity of over-tailoring the retail offer by country. ASOS, for instance, services customers around the world from a single location in the UK but executes its digital marketing activity in a localised way, allowing it to strike the right balance between customer relevance and cost.

"Online marketplaces like eBay create opportunity for retailers of all sizes, allowing them to internationalise at low risk - researching consumer behaviour, testing their online offering and benefitting from the traffic and brand awareness of the marketplace itself. We expect online marketplaces to be part of the mix for retailers particularly in the early days of their international expansion, and to play a complementary role with a retailer's own website and stores.

"As the global retail landscape continues to develop, we also expect retailers to look for innovative ways of shipping goods directly from the source of supply to the buyer - making international delivery between countries even faster and creating a seamless shopping experience."
By Shané Schutte

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UK: World's leading e-commerce exporter - Real Business

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The " Global Retail E-mpire " report analyses the estimated value of online retail based on Google searches for six of the biggest e-commerce markets, making up half of global e-commerce volumes: the UK, the US, Germany, the Nordics, the Netherlands and France.

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EDITD raises $4.4m for international expansion

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EDITD raises $4.4m for international expansion

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Fashion data firm EDITD has raised $4.4 million from Index Ventures and Frog Capital.

EDITD is the world leader in real-time market data and analytics for the fashion and apparel industry.

The company will use the funds to drive further hiring of key strategic positions in its London, Melbourne and recently-opened New York offices.

Fashioning a new industry

EDITD aren't the only fashion startup leaping ahead in the UK.

Clothing fit visualiser Metail raised £2.6 million in December, and fashion brand ecommerce platform Silkfred crowdfunded £120,000 in October.

Back in August, Fashion Technologist Chloé Watts wrote for Tech City News on how co-working is disrupting the fashion industry.

[button link="http://www.uktech.news/2013/09/12/this-seasons-five-fashion-tech-trendsetters/"]See London's finest fashion tech startups[/button]

Retail wagging

And retail in general is leading the way. Britain became the world's leading e-commerce exporter last month, and retail dominated the second wave of Future Fifty companies revealed in December.

StreetHub are one startup driving this forward with their click and collect system for independent shops.

Big names

EDITD's clients span five continents and include ASOS, Gap, Gilt Groupe, Missguided, Target and Motel.

They use EDITD to help them understand their customers and competitors, by tracking and analysing more than 50 million product stock keeping units.

Beating the market

CEO Geoff Watts says the funding is further evidence that EDITD has changed a whole industry.

We'll keep building our products, our infrastructure and our capabilities, so our customers can keep beating the market and achieve stellar results.

London Fashion Week

Fashion comes to the spotlight more than any other time in Britain at London Fashion Week - starting this Friday.

Watch out for Tech CIty News ' coverage of the events.

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EDITD raises $4.4m from Index and Frog Capital - UKTN (UK Tech News)

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Fashion data firm EDITD has raised $4.4 million from Index Ventures and Frog Capital. EDITD is the world leader in real-time market data and analytics for the fashion and apparel industry. The company will use the funds to drive further hiring of key strategic positions in its London, Melbourne and recently-opened New York offices.

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Hire Space receives funding for national roll-out

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Hire Space receives funding for national roll-out

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Hirespace boasts 1,200 venues, and organisations across the board are now signing up for the service, from Westminster Abbey to Borough Market. For some sites, the service has been transformational. "We've earned Pimlico Academy enough money from venue hire to pay for an extra teacher," said Mr Poland.

However, the start-up has remained London-centric to date. This latest tranche of cash will be used to expand nationally, starting with Manchester and rolling out to seven other cities. "There are so many incredible spaces that are going virtually unused," said Mr Poland. "They don't have the budget to market themselves effectively."

Hire Space charges the venues a 10pc commission on every booking. This decreases to 5pc for community centres and charitable organisations.

Last year, 500,000 people visited the site seeking venue space. The company processes about 60 inquiries a day, and £7m worth of inquiries have now been processed through the site.

The duo have also diversified into conference facilities for corporate space hire.

Hire Space specialises in finding "unusual" venues, says Mr Swannell. "We have the places that you could never find through Google, or even though an agency, like a tube carriage in Walthamstow or on a boat."

It has been essential to keep evolving the business model to keep ahead of the copycats, said Mr Swannell. "We have noticed several others starting up in this space, although some have already fallen by the wayside. We see it as a validation of what we're doing."

Once Hire Space's national ambitions have been realised, the two founders plan to attack the international market. "We'd like to move into a new international territory within the next year," said Mr Poland. "We want to be the world's go-to online resource for finding any kind of venue."

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Hire Space raises £1m for national roll-out

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Hirespace boasts 1,200 venues, and organisations across the board are now signing up for the service, from Westminster Abbey to Borough Market. For some sites, the service has been transformational. "We've earned Pimlico Academy enough money from venue hire to pay for an extra teacher," said Mr Poland.

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Vodafone is the latest to launch a mobile wallet

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Vodafone is the latest to launch a mobile wallet

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Two ad-tech companies are creating what they believe will be the third-largest mobile ad exchange behind Google and Twitter.

Rubicon Project, a technology company that helps publishers and advertisers buy and sell ads programmatically, is partnering with the mobile ad network InMobi to launch the exchange which will sell both native mobile ads appearing in-stream and banners.

InMobi, which is based in India, has carved out sizable chunks of the mobile-ad markets across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. For brand advertisers hoping to hit consumers in emerging markets, where mobile phones outnumber TVs, the new exchange may provide an easier reach.

"Large agencies have global footprints," said Naveen Tewari, the InMobi CEO. "When they work with us, that global footprint comes alive."

The "third-largest" claim is difficult to verify since Google doesn't break out mobile and Twitter hasn't disclosed numbers for its MoPub unit. InMobi delivers ads reaching 759 million active monthly mobile users, across 35 different countries and on 30,000 applications, according to the company. Its native ads, introduced last month, hit less than a third of mobile users and account for 20 billion impressions a month, out of a total 140 billion.

It plans to ramp up its native ad business in lieu of traditional banner ads, much like everyone else in the mobile ad industry. And, like everyone else, it's playing catch-up to the leaders.

The new exchange, Mr. Tewari said, will "democratize native advertising, which has been kept in the walls of large players, like Facebook, Twitter and Google."

Facebook has tapped the floodgates of mobile-ad dollars with its in-stream news feed product. Twitter's MoPub, which signed a $230 million deal with Omnicom on Tuesday, introduced native ads in April.

Frank Addante, the CEO of Rubicon, which is powering the InMobi exchange, said the new offering would "provide native ads at tremendous scale."

Ad-tech firms like his are increasingly moving into the mobile space. In 2012, Rubicon bought the mobile-ad platform Mobsmith. "It's a large market," Mr. Addante said. "And it's a market that's definitely very thirsty for automation."

On May 19th, PubMatic, a programmatic ad platform, acquired the mobile server Mocean for $15.5 million. Another Rubicon competitor, AppNexus, inked a deal with Millennial Media, an InMobi rival, for a mobile-ad exchange in the fall. Millennial Media's reach (around 650 million monthly active users) is shorter than InMobi's, but the network hits more mobile-applications and has a larger business in the U.S., where CPM rates are higher.

While the AppNexus mobile exchange does not offer native ad formats, a representative from Millennial Media said it plans to do so "later this year."

Most of InMobi's ad network's inventory now is devoted to direct response, although the company is attempting to strengthen its branding business. And it's trying to improve its presence in the U.S. -- what the company has called its "East to West" strategy -- but has struggled to get a foothold. Francisco Cordero McNamara, the VP-North American sales, recently departed.

The network partners with around 100 publishers, including the social messaging app Tango. Around half of InMobi's native ads land on mobile games. They reach thousands of eyeballs -- one of the publishers is 2048, the red-hot iPhone puzzle game now atop the download charts -- but appear on several lesser-known games and mobile-apps as well.

Brands may worry about their marketing appearing on these niche sites and apps, Mr. Addante admitted. But he claimed Rubicon, which went public earlier this year, will work to help brands on the exchange preserve "brand protection and security."

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Ad Tech Companies Create Mobile Ad Exchange to Rival Google, Twitter

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Two ad-tech companies are creating what they believe will be the third-largest mobile ad exchange behind Google and Twitter. Rubicon Project, a technology company that helps publishers and advertisers buy and sell ads programmatically, is partnering with the mobile ad network InMobi to launch the exchange which will sell both native mobile ads appearing in-stream and banners.

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The latest edition of the annual Internet Trends report includes: 1. Key Internet trends showing slowing Internet user growth but strong smartphone, tablet and...

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This article is from the archive of our partner .
An inside story of the 45-day process that went into making one bland corporate tweet is riling up the Twitter-sphere, but that extensive time length is misleading folks about how the social media world actually works.

Business Insider spent a day at the offices of Huge Inc., a team of social media marketers and advertisers who run the accounts of eight different brands. The story particularly follows their work with one of those brands, President Cheese, which has a small Twitter following.

"We Got A Look Inside The 45-Day Planning Process That Goes Into Creating A Single Corporate Tweet," reads the story's headline. The President Cheese tweet in question was outlined in early March and finally posted on April 30th, and the result was an easily-missable post about room temperature and cheese.

Sharing a Camembert with friends? (How generous!) Get the best flavor by serving at room temperature. #artofcheese pic.twitter.com/R6iWPeKv1z
- President Cheese (@presidentcheese) April 30, 2014

It garnered no retweets and just two favorites before Business Insider wrote about it. That absurd ratio between the amount of planning and the lack of success of the tweet came in for plenty of criticism.

http://t.co/Mz7yGIe58j Beyond satire - how a social media agency took two months to plan one tweet which got no RTs (HT@adamblenford)
- Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) May 27, 2014

This is AMAZING! 45 days of planning for a tweet about cheese, that gets no RT's. http://t.co/94fpye4U94
- Vikki Stone (@vikkistone) May 27, 2014

Sad tale of a tweet that took 13 social media experts, 45 days to plan, create & get approved: http://t.co/cJgrTW36kT pic.twitter.com/FZ3ZvmS8dh
- Andrew Bloch (@AndrewBloch) May 27, 2014

And so on, with most of the focus on that comically long 45-day period.

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Did This Tweet Really Take 45 Days to Create?

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This article is from the archive of our partner . An inside story of the 45-day process that went into making one bland corporate tweet is riling up the Twitter-sphere, but that extensive time length is misleading folks about how the social media world actually works.

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www.fuffr.com Fuffr is a small team dedicated to broaden the way people interact with handheld devices. Through cutting edge technology Fuffr allows for touch on any surface outside of the screen, paving the way for fresher, better and more interactive user experience. We want to unlock the true potential of your mobile device!

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"We'll sacrifice unit margin if we can make up for it with the profits from extra conversions. For us, this means more happy drivers and better business results," says AdHarmonics CEO Seth Birnbaum.

Bidding for profit means empowering your digital teams with the means to drive the best business outcomes. Transition them away from narrowly defined targets, which can stand in the way of their new main objective: profit from search.

3. Capture demand in the moment

Search is different from your other marketing channels because the customer is completely in charge of how and when she wants to interact. That's why one of the key tenets of profit-driven marketing is a healthy respect for the 24/7 nature of the constantly connected consumer. A product search on her phone in the morning could lead to research on her desktop at work before she finally makes the purchase on her tablet that evening while watching her favorite TV show on her laptop.

Customers expect brands to be there when they need them, and this reality needs to inform how you control your spend. So profit-driven search marketing is less about creating demand for your product and more about capturing user demand. When a potential customer searches for a brand, product, category or the competition, are you there to whisk him down the purchase funnel? What if he's searching at 11:30 p.m. on a Friday late in Q4? Is your budget gone at that point in the day or fiscal year?

Travel advertiser Airbnb, for example, takes a flexible approach to budgets allowing them to stay tuned into their customers' needs. According to Maria Hwang, online marketing manager, "We will spend as long as we can make a certain profit. We're not constrained by budget. Our leadership is focused on the business impact of our search investments and empowers us to find new ways to drive results."

Profit-driven marketers match their search spend to fluctuating demand and search queries. As you see increased volume from spikes in demand or higher positions, your investment needs to increase as well. Looking back at the chart we referenced at the beginning of the article, we can see that the spend and search volume align if you're doing this right.

Capturing demand means reaching every potential consumer in the moments they're searching. If your search team's budget is capped or you're relying on a predetermined schedule for your paid search budget, your brand is almost certainly missing out on opportunities to win customers.
Questions for your team
The shift to a profit-driven mind-set won't always be easy. It'll require buy-in from a variety of stakeholders within your organization. The pitch can be easy ("more profit!"), but empowering your search team to act quickly might be a bit more arduous. Here are three questions you should ask yourself to help start the shift:

1. Are current KPIs inhibiting the team's ability to maximize profits?

2. Who should know about and help manage the total profits driven by search marketing? How can this help win more budget?

3. What technology and staff need to be in place to optimize for profit?

4. Your search team very likely has the answers to these questions and will be thrilled that you're asking.

We have a lot more good information on how to take advantage of profit-driven marketing. Take a look at our related strategic guide, "The Profit-Driven Marketer," and stay tuned for more case studies and additional content in the coming weeks.

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The Profit-Driven Marketer: Setting a New Standard for Performance

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Profit-driven marketing flips digital tradition on its head by approaching marketing as a profit center instead of a cost center. A profit-driven approach means spinning familiar problems in new ways. Here we identify the main pillars of profit-driven marketing -recognizing value, targeting outcomes and capturing demand -to help you get to a better bottom line.

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Confessions of a social media strategist

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Confessions of a social media strategist

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A couple months ago, I woke up, as I hope to be doing for many years to come, and went to work. I sat in a brainstorm. We came up with a bunch of content ideas for our brands' social channels - images, GIFs and lines of witty copy. I went back to my desk, opened a container of leftover lo mein and realized I'd wasted the last four years of my life.

It wasn't the MSG talking, and it wasn't one of my typical bouts of chronic self-loathing. In fact, the feeling of worthlessness had been lingering for the past couple of years I've worked in my agency's social department. And for some reason, that "lingering" manifested into a full-blown epiphany after three heaps of Mott Street's finest noodle.

My role came into existence not long ago, as platforms like Facebook and Twitter began to amass huge user bases. Advertising agencies established social content departments (or "community management" departments) to specialize in setting up and managing brand pages across various social networks. Over the last five years, the social content populating those channels has gone from thoughtless copy and primitive design to, well, less thoughtless copy and less primitive design. But as you might infer from my tone, that evolution is painstakingly slow. And egregious social strategies and executions are wasting money, deteriorating the value of brands and have me sweating over greasy noodles.

The underlying issue is that social departments place too much value on engagement. Those "likes," "comments," "shares," "re-tweets" and "pins" are the metrics that social content creators use to 1) judge success and 2) dictate what future content looks like. Here's the catch. The people who are engaging with that content are predominantly worthless. Seriously. That's not to say that all users on social are worthless. But the ones who mindlessly "like" a brand's Facebook post because an overt call-to-action told them to are. And wouldn't you know it, those are the users who are dictating a brand's social content strategy. This is why the last five years have brought an influx of mindless social creative like "SHARE this post!" and "RT if you love Brand X." They get engagements, and engagements supposedly equal success. And the vicious cycle keeps on turning.

The other abhorrent trend has been the pathetic attempt by brands to "keep relevant." In and of itself, relevancy is important for any company attempting to message modern-day consumers. But for me, relevancy comes from a general understanding of current social norms, vernacular, visual aesthetics, etc. For instance, the bravery of showing a same-sex couple in your creative. What isn't "keeping relevant" is creating "real-time content" that references Miley Cyrus twerking or #Whaling. And it's certainly not celebrating the day's obscure holiday, whether it's National Donut Day or Wear A Hat To Work Day. But without fail, and because social content creators typically need to meet a certain quota of tweets and Facebook posts, you'll see brands celebrating these momentous holidays each week of the year.

For brevity's sake, I'll only list one more gripe before I reveal the light at the end of the tunnel. The lack of creativity and innovation exhibited by those who create this social content is baffling. Well not baffling, because in most instances, they're chartering waters only mildly understood by them - and never understood by clients. And to be fair, the demands of producing massive amounts of content in short periods of time isn't exactly conducive to producing smart work. But the demands do not warrant the limitless imitation that happens in social. Blatantly repurposing work between competitors, ripping off popular Internet memes, no intention on differentiating one's brand within the space. A traditional creative department aims to deliver work, whether good or bad, that's memorable and different. The antithesis is true for social.

Of course, despite all these concerns with the industry, and the realization of a worthless life, I didn't turn the ignition and shut the garage door. There is light at the end of the tunnel. For starters, Facebook's change in algorithm, and the case studies they've been circulating, de-emphasize engagement and re-emphasize frequency and reach. We're returning to a normal advertising structure, where creative is given media support, ensuring it's seen by the right people. Additionally, Facebook will start penalizing brands who post creative that panders to these worthless users (e.g., "LIKE our post!"). Twitter, despite not having an algorithm, will hopefully make moves to reward smart creative, too. But perhaps the brightest lights are the increasing media and production budgets being allocated to social. This money will ultimately increase the scrutiny from clients, the need to prove what leads to ROI, and it'll ultimately bring stronger talent to social creative departments.

It has made the last few months a bit more manageable from a self-worth perspective. But maybe that's because I work at one of the leading digital agencies in New York. For the 90 percent of agencies or brands that continue to employee these corrosive practices, let this be a wake up call. Until then, I'm going to finish my lo mein in peace.

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Confessions of a social media strategist - Digiday

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A couple months ago, I woke up, as I hope to be doing for many years to come, and went to work. I sat in a brainstorm. We came up with a bunch of content ideas for our brands' social channels - images, GIFs and lines of witty copy.

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... Zip drives ate floppies.
CDs ate Zips.
DVDs ate CDs.
SD cards ate film.
LCDs ate CRTs.
Telephony ate telegraphy.
Text messaging ate talking.
Tablets are eating our paper ...

Imagine a table:
Hundreds of meters long and wooden.
Worn and oiled.
Old and knotted.
Wide enough for a person.

Now - open the sky and dump down upon that table all the digital publishing tools we have. Let rain down the infrastructure and typography, the platforms and devices. Separate them into their smallest components. Spread them out evenly.

Grab a ladder.
Place it next to the table.
Climb it and look down upon it all.

What do you see? What can you build?

A magazine

When I first saw The Magazine I smiled.

I smiled because it was so sensible, so rational, and so immediately obvious.

It felt like a platonic mobile-publishing container. No cruft, all substance. A shadow on the wall. The kind of app that's doing nothing fancy but everything right. The kind of app deemed anathema by Future Publishing Authorities because, quite frankly, it's boring.

We feel like we've seen this before, but - have we?

In a conversation with renowned Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen about the newspaper industry, Joshua Benton remarked, "The perception of the incoming disruptors is that they are low quality, and therefore not really worth paying attention to."

Let's pay attention.

Cars & publishing

In 1967 Honda unveiled the N360.

The N360 was a kei, or light style car; a subcompact.

Honda N360 - a sexy little beast - via kemeko1971

I like to imagine the engineers at Honda huddled together, dumping the sum total of all car design and production technology on our worn, wooden table. Around they gathered and together they asked, "What's the simplest thing we can build with this?"

With that question in mind, Honda - who had only been making motorcycles since 1949, and cars since 1963 - took one of their motorcycle engines and placed it in a Mini Cooper inspired body. It had 31 horse power. It was reliable. It was affordable. It got 39.4 miles to the gallon.

The N360 was something an American car company would never dream of producing. You can't blame them though: they had no incentive by which to dream such dreams. Unlike the American automotive industry, the Japanese automotive industry wasn't beholden to industry momentum or legacy. And when you're not beholden to legacy, you can be excessively brazen.

In the software industry we talk about MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products. The N360 was a Minimum Viable Car.

The N360 didn't make it to the States, but the followup - and near equally cute - N600 did. Next came the Honda Civic, then soon after, the oil crisis. We all know how the story goes from there.

"They started with cheap subcompacts that were widely considered a joke. Now they make Lexuses that challenge the best of what Europe can offer." - Christensen, Skok, Allworth

Honda was a nobody in the car industry. But they gained foothold and marketshare by building a car that was more appropriate for many consumers. They had built a subcompact.

So I ask: where are our digital publishing subcompacts?

Current offerings

There is an intuitive usability implicit to the physicality of our printed books and magazines. A reader is given two possible directions - which one depends on language and culture. And from there, a mostly linear, usually obvious interface.

Tablet and smartphone books and magazines are not so obvious. They're so not obvious that we often need tutorials explaining just how to use them.

How to read

Why did we jump to such complex interfaces?

Homer

Perhaps we Homer'd.

When Homer Simpson was asked to design his ideal car, he made The Homer. Given free reign, Homer's process was additive. He added three horns and a special sound-proof bubble for the children. He layered more atop everything cars had been. More horns, more cup holders.

The Homer

In product design, the simplest thought exercise is to make additions. It's the easiest way to make an Old Thing feel like a New Thing. The more difficult exercise is to reconsider the product in the context of now. A now which may be very different from the then in which the product was originally conceived.

Our now

Publishing incumbents have been faced with disruption for years. But a curious, natural thing is happening: another, increasingly difficult to dismiss publishing ecosystem - disconnected from and unbeholden to legacy - is emerging. Bubbling up.

A few years back, 'publishing' startups were usually launched by one of two types of individuals:

1. Technologists disconnected from traditional content ecosystems

2. Incumbents of traditional content ecosystems disconnected from technologists

What publishing startups really needed during that narrow window of time was both: Technologists who got infrastructure and product, coupled with the stewards of the content of the incumbents. What they needed - and often lacked - was a mutual empathy.

Now, it's not so clear. The content of the incumbents becomes less important as new content creators emerge. And emerging they are.

With history as our guide, it shouldn't be a surprise when new entrants like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which began life as news aggregators, begin their march up the value network. They may have started by collecting cute pictures of cats but they are now expanding into politics, transforming from aggregators into generators of original content, and even, in the case of The Huffington Post, winning a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting. - Christensen, Skok & Allworth

We can look to even more recent examples to see an evolution of this trend.

Matter

Launched on November 14, 2012, Bobbie Johnson and Jim Giles' new publication MATTER may be indicative of the quality of publishers to arrive in this emergent space. In March, 2012, they raised $140,000 from 2,500 supporters on Kickstarter - the equivalent of an angel round of investing for a technology startup.

With those funds they built their website, commissioned writers and photographers, and have set out to explore the somewhat uncharted intersection of paid content and high-quality journalism.

In their words:

MATTER isn't quite a website, it's not really a magazine and it's not exactly a book publisher either. Instead, MATTER is something else - a new model for high-quality journalism, an area that's been hit hard by the transition from print to digital media. We think that our focus on selling individual long-form stories for consumption on any device, whether it's your computer, phone, e-reader or tablet, could be a sustainable way of paying for the hard work required to produce the best reporting.

What a great invocation: not quite website, not quite magazine, not quite book. It sums up well the liminal space in which we play as digital publishers.

The first article they published was 7,826 words. You can read a preview or buy it for $0.99. Buying the article gets you:

Distraction free web edition

eBook for Kindle, iPad or other readers

Invite to a Q&A with the author

They also sell memberships - which includes a seat on their editorial board.

MATTER is building their most valuable asset: community. They're hungry and talented. And they're the tip of an iceberg.

Not quite website, not quite magazine, not quite book. Whatever they may be, we're poised to see more like them - soon.

Skeuomorphic business models

Skeuomorphism is traditionally attached to design decisions. We bring the mechanical camera shutter sound to digital cameras because it feels good. We render paper page flips in our digital reading applications because it's familiar.

But skeuomorphism also cuts into business models.

A publisher like MATTER brings the best of the old - an understanding of editorial ethics, storytelling, craft - and changes the shape of the content and distribution models of the content to match digital. This isn't always the case.

Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium - no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry. The simplest example is with magazines.

Just look at the covers in Newsstand:

Not a single cover is readable. This may seem like design skeuomorphism, but it's not. No designer looked at those covers in Newsstand and said: "Perfect! Ship it!" It's driven by business decisions and legacy-facing infrastructure.

The farther out we zoom, the clearer this becomes. A generalized print magazine may be composed of the following qualities:

Each issue contains a dozen or more articles.

Issues operate on a monthly cycle.

All articles are bundled and shipped at the same time.

Almost all of these qualities are the result of responses to distribution and production constraints. Printing and binding takes a certain amount of time. Shipping the issues takes another chunk of time. In order to find a balance between timeliness of content and shelf-life, a month makes a pretty sensible - if brisk - publishing schedule.

Old into new

So why do so many of our digital magazines publish on the same schedule, with the same number of articles as their print counterparts? Using the same covers? Of course, they do because it's easier to maintain identical schedules across mediums. To not design twice. To not test twice (or, at all).

Unfortunately - from a medium-specific user experience point of view - it's almost impossible to produce a digitally indigenous magazine beholden to those legacy constraints. Why? Not least because we use tablets and smartphones very differently than we use printed publications.

One of the great benefits of being part of the emergent publishing world is that you don't have multiple mediums to publish across. You can and probably should focus squarely on digital. Perhaps later - contingent on market demand and content quality - you can consider publishing a print anthology to give your publication a stronger literal edge.

So what are these so called 'indigenous' qualities of digital?

A Subcompact Manifesto

Subcompact Publishing tools are first and foremost straightforward.

They require few to no instructions.

They are easily understood on first blush.

The editorial and design decisions around them react to digital as a distribution and consumption space.

They are the result of dumping our publishing related technology on a table and asking ourselves - what are the core tools we can build with all this stuff?

They are, as it were, little N360s.

I propose Subcompact Publishing tools and editorial ethos begin (but not end) with the following qualities:

Small issue sizes (3-7 articles / issue)

Small file sizes

Digital-aware subscription prices

Fluid publishing schedule

Scroll (don't paginate)

Clear navigation

HTML(ish) based

Touching the open web

Many of these qualities play off one another. Let's look at them in detail.

Small issue sizes

I've written quite a bit about creating a sense of 'edge' in digital space. One of the easiest and most intuitive ways to do so is to limit the amount of data you present to the user.

It's much more difficult for someone to intuit the breadth of a digital magazine containing twenty articles than a digital magazine containing, for example, five. By keeping article number low this also helps decrease file size and simplify navigation.

Small file size

Speed is grossly undervalued in much of today's software - digital magazines inclusive. Speed (and with it a fluid and joyful user experience) should be the thing you absolutely optimize for once you have a minimum viable product.

One way to bake speed into a publishing product is to keep issue file sizes as small as possible. This happens naturally when you limit the number of articles per issue.

Reasonable subscription prices

Ideally, digital subscription prices should reflect the cost of doing business as a digitally indigenous product, not the cost of protecting print subscriptions. This is yet another advantage digital-first publications have - unlike print publications transitioning to digital, there is no legacy infrastructure to subsidize during this transition.

Fluid publishing schedule

With smaller issue sizes comes more fluid publishing schedules. Again, to create a strong sense of edge and understanding, the goal isn't to publish ten articles a day, but rather to publish just a few high-quality articles with a predictable looseness. Depending on the type of content you're publishing, days can feel too granular, and months require the payload to be too large. Weeks feel just about right in digital.

When I originally presented these ideas at the Books in Browsers conference in 2012, the dismissal of pagination was by far the most contentious point. I don't mean to imply all pagination is bad. Remember - we're outlining the very core of Subcompact Publishing. Anything extraneous or overly complex should be excised.

I've spent the last two and half years deconstructing scrolling and pagination on tablets and smartphones. If your content is formless, then you might be able to paginate with minimal effort. Although, probably not.

Certain kinds of pagination increase the complexity of an application by orders of magnitude. The engineering efforts required to produce beautiful, simple, indigenous, consistent - and fast - pagination are simply too high to belong in the subcompact space.

Furthermore, when you remove pagination, you vastly simplify navigation and thereby simplify users' mental models around content.

No pagination is vastly superior to pagination done poorly.

Navigation should be consistent and effortless. Subcompact Publishing applications don't require complex how-to pages or tutorials. You shouldn't have to hire a famous actor to show readers how to use the app with his nose. Much like a printed magazine or book, the interaction should be intuitive, effortless, and grounding. The user should never feel lost.

By limiting the number of articles per issue, and by removing pagination, many of the routes leading to complex navigation are also removed.

HTML(ish) based

When I say HTML I also mean epub or mobi or any other format with an HTML pedigree. HTML has indisputably emerged as the future format for all text (and perhaps also interactive) content. By constraining Subcompact Publishing systems to HTML we bake portability and future-proofness into the platforms. We also minimize engineering efforts because most all computing devices come with high-quality HTML rendering engines built in.

Open web

Simply: whatever content is published on a tablet should have a corresponding, touchable home on the open web.

Content without a public address is non-existent in the eyes of all the inter-operable sharing mechanisms that together bind the web.

Publishing jobs to be done

Clayton Christensen - author of The Innovator's Dilemma - likes to look at the relationship between consumers and products from the perspective of the jobs-to-be-done theory. In his words:

The basic idea is that people don't go around looking for products to buy. Instead, they take life as it comes and when they encounter a problem, they look for a solution-and at that point, they'll hire a product or service.

The key insight from thinking about your business this way is that it is the job, and not the customer or the product, that should be the fundamental unit of analysis.

In his recent Nieman Reports piece on disruption in the news industry, Christensen uses the contemporary example of "I'm waiting in line for coffee and have ten minutes to kill." The person with the problem hires their smartphone to entertain or educate them for those ten minutes.

More contemporary jobs

Within the scope of contemporary digital publishing are many, many, many yet-to-be-satisfied jobs-to-be-done. One that has irked me for years is the lack of a great solution to 'subscribe,' for money, to a website or author or publisher. When I find a new writer with whom I'm enamored, there's usually no effortless or indigenous way to pay for their content.

RSS may be fine for a backend protocol and packet structure, but from a 'normal' consumer facing point of view, RSS has never made sense. (It's sort of like git without github.) In effect, creating a better kind of consumer facing RSS is to solve the above problem.

Connected with this generalized notion of subscription is that the output to which you're subscribed should be quick, lightweight, predictable, reliable and cached locally. If you hire an author or publication to solve a problem, you may partially be paying for the content, but you'll really be paying for a great reading solution with those attributes. It just happens to have their content.

Outlining a system

To begin, let's sketch out the world's simplest desktop editorial system.

Our system has three columns: Issues, Articles, and Article Text. You click an issue, it shows you the articles. You click an article, you see the article text. There's a button that says Publish. That's it.

So where does it publish to?

The open web

For most content - in most contexts - a publisher will only benefit from giving their content a publicly referable address. So the first obvious place to publish to is the open web.

Easy. We've done that for nearly two decades now and have oodles of mature tools to handle open web publishing.

On the open web, optimize first for reading and second for one or two calls to action: an app download or an email subscription. But whatever you do, don't undermine the reading experience. To undermine open web reading is to undermine open web sharing (no one wants to share something that's hard to read) - and that's the whole point of having our content out there.

Tablets and smartphones

Desktop - the open web - is easy. Tablets and smartphones are still hard.

Tablets and smartphones are used differently than desktops and laptops. They're frequently without an internet connection. Smartphone users 'snack' and want content quickly. The open web isn't always the fastest way to get content: it (usually) doesn't cache content, and it's not accessible without an internet connection.

To simplify the tablet equation, let's assume we're only interested in publishing to iOS devices. If only someone had built a delivery mechanism to push content from our editorial system to readers seamlessly and in the background ...

Newsstand

Ah! But someone did - Apple: Newsstand.

Apple's Newsstand? "But isn't that where all those horrible things live?" I hear you say. Or, "Oh? That folder I've never opened?"

Newsstand is perhaps the most underutilized, under-imagined distribution tool in the short history of tablet publishing. If you squint your eyes and tilt your head at just the right angle, you'll notice something magical about Newsstand: given the proper container, it's a background downloading, offline-friendly, cached RSS machine people can subscribe to. For money.

It handily solves our job-to-be-done.

The Magazine

Which brings us back to The Magazine.

In the words of Marco Arment, creator of the magazine:

I don't consider The Magazine to be a member of "the magazine industry" any more than blogs are members of "the publishing industry". Those terms evoke the old and established, while this is the new and experimental.

He goes on to say:

Many iPad magazines are carrying unnecessary and expensive baggage from their print days. Some born-digital magazines even took on print baggage simply because they thought they needed it.

In one gesture Marco set loose an N360. He's designed and programmed one of the first truly tablet-indigenous subcompact publications.

Each issue contains only four or five articles.

Each issue is less than a few megabytes, meaning they download in seconds, rather than minutes or hours like many other digital magazines.

The subscription price is $1.99 a month.

Subscribing is seamlessly baked into the platform via Newsstand.

It's published twice a month.

It's an unpaginated application.

The navigation is consistent and completely intuitive.

It's HTML based.

UI and UX

There is almost nothing to the app. On the main reading screen you have three options:

The main magazine

The Magazine doesn't need a how-to, an instructions page, or a fancy video. This app mimics the intuitive usability of a printed publication as well as anything else we've seen.

Issues

By keeping issue size small, The Magazine mitigates Table of Contents complexity. There's no need to 'zoom out' or show a macro view of the length of each article. When there's only four or five articles per issue, the user intuitively senses the edges. Navigation need not be more than a simple list.

Swipe to delete an issue and it collapses down to a neat row. Tap a deleted issue and it downloads again in seconds.

The Magazine also smartly handles links. Tap a link and you're shown an annotated version of that link at the bottom of the screen (or in a pop-over on the iPad). Effectively, they're footnotes. The author summarizes the link's content and if you then wish to visit the URL, you can, by tapping again.

The result is a very solid reading environment. There are no accidental buttons to press. There's no confusion as to where you are. There's really only two places to be in The Magazine: reading an article or scrolling through the always succinct ToC.

Newsstand

Perhaps the most magical part of the entire experience is The Magazine's integration with Apple's Newsstand. Newsstand provides two critical functions:

Background downloading of content

Paid subscription conversions

Newsstand is the only place in iOS that allows 3rd party applications to download content in the background. What this means is that new articles are available almost immediately after Marco hits publish (or whatever his button says) in The Magazine's backend. Which means as a reader you don't have to preemptively load content before getting on an airplane or subway. If there's new content, it will be waiting and cached for your offline pleasure.

Newsstand also mitigates all complexity and trust issues connected with payments - you're paying Apple, not Marco. The infrastructure allows you to give readers a free starter subscription, and then later - seamlessly - convert them into a recurring, monthly, payments.

Open web

And finally - unsurprisingly - The Magazine also nails the web.

the-magazine.org is minimal and optimized for two actions: reading and converting to a The Magazine download.

Presently, the full text of the articles isn't online. I would love to see an A/B test around full / truncated content conversion. My gut tells me that app downloads / subscription conversions wouldn't change by switching to full content. But sharing would increase dramatically.

Users are much more likely to share a link to the full-text of an article than a truncated version. Increased sharing means more eyeballs, and more eyeballs - if conversion rates remain static - means more downloads and subscriptions.

Keep in mind Christensen's jobs-to-be-done - users are probably more excited about paying for the cached, simple, svelte, eminently hirable reading experience The Magazine provides, than simply getting to the full version of any single article.

In just a handful of screens, The Magazine cleanly answers the question posed above in our subcompact editorial system: where does your content go when you hit Publish?

Clarity

The clarity of The Magazine is exciting. It's doubly exciting because it's precisely the sort of app at which incumbent publishers balk. This is expected. Again, from Christensen:

Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.

We are the new customers: The new readers, the new writers, the new publishers. The Magazine is indeed cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient than most other publishing apps.

It doesn't take much imagination to connect a minimal container like The Magazine with the deeper investigative editorial ethos of and get even more excited.

So why doesn't a publication like just publish to Newsstand? Because the tallest hurdle before Newsstand is that you have to program an iOS application to use it. A cost prohibitively expensive endeavor for many publishers. And, complicating matters, publishers usually aren't good at producing software.

The fact that Marco - a programmer - launched one of the most 'digitally indigenous' contemporary tablet publications is indicative of two things:

1. Programmers are today's magicians. In many industries this is obvious, but it's now becoming more obvious in publishing. Marco was able to make The Magazine happen quickly because he saw that Newsstand was underutilized and understood its capabilities. He knew this because he's a programmer. Newsstand wasn't announced at a publishing conference. It was announced at the WWDC.

2. The publishing ecosystem is now primed for complete disruption.

In Paul Graham's essay Startup Ideas he talks about the kind of programmer Marco is: the self-motivated producer.

Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be able to implement them. That's not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) but it's an advantage. It's a big advantage, when you're considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if instead of merely thinking "That's an interesting idea," you can think instead "That's an interesting idea. I'll try building an initial version tonight." It's even better when you're both a programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.

Marco is not just a publishing-interested engineer, he's a subcompact publishing magnate. He lives happily outside of anything resembling the incumbent big-P infrastructure. And from this removed stance he produces podcasts, a magazine, a reading application, and curated reading lists ... all using simple tools wrapped in minimal containers.

You need technological awareness to be a future publishing disruptor; even if you don't see yourself as such.

Distruptationalisticly

We're on the precipice of a wave of tools and systems that have nothing to do with incumbents and everything to do with the bubbling new wave.

To quote again from Paul Graham's essay:

When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but important market that the big players ignore. It's particularly good if there's an admixture of disdain in the big players' attitude, because that often misleads them.

The winter of 2012 will be the first holiday season where a broad swath of consumers will have both an awareness of tablets, and several good enough options to choose from (occupying multiple price points). If 2013 doesn't prove to be an inflection year for digital publishing - and particularly for the non-incumbents - then I don't know what market circumstances would be necessary to make it so.

Our current tools are a bit kludgey, a bit clunky, a bit too tied to the past. The Magazine is a great first example of a subcompact publication, utilizing Newsstand - an existing under-leveraged tool - to indigenously and ingenuously deliver content.

I'd be shocked if there weren't a dozen other publishers prepping to launch similar magazines. Or, even better: someone building a system by which anyone could launch a Newsstand app like The Magazine - for minimal cost with minimal complexity.

It's easy to dismiss.
There's lots of disdain.
Why not be part of the group that shakes it up?

Take all of our digital publishing nuts and springs, bits and bolts and spread them out on the old table. Climb our ladder and look down and ask yourself:
"What can I build for subcompact publishing?"

Followup reading, inspiration and thanks

This essay - the entire concept of Subcompact Publishing - was obviously hugely inspired by:

Clayton Christensen, David Skok, and James Allworth's Mastering the art of disruptive innovation in journalism in the Fall 2012 issue of Nieman Reports. If any of the above interests you, I can't recommend more highly going and reading that report.

Marco's The Magazine - an app that helped crystalize a lot of my thinking around these topics.

Christensen did a supplementary interview to the Report piece which is also worth your time. Somewhat related, but also unrelated, he has a wonderful TEDx talk on measuring your life. If, like me, you're not particularly religious, just replace the word "god" with "Google" in your head, and suddenly it makes a lot of sense. ("Google will judge you when you're gone." - oh, yes, yes Google will!)

There's a bunch of links in the Noted section below on the N360 which really is a neat little car. I've become more than slightly obsessed with finding one to take for a drive.

Thank you to all these people (known and unknown - I'm looking at you, unsung post-war Honda engineers) for making these wonderful things.

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Zip drives ate floppies. CDs ate Zips. DVDs ate CDs. SD cards ate film. LCDs ate CRTs. Telephony ate telegraphy. Text messaging ate talking. Tablets are eating our paper ... Imagine a table: Hundreds of meters long and wooden. Worn and oiled. Old and knotted. Wide enough for a person.