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Have you ever looked at the work of an agency and wondered why their television commercials and print ads are so great and why all their interactive work is so weak? Here are five reasons why that dynamic exists (each of these could be a blog post in and of itself).

1. Masters of the Brand – The concept that ad agencies hold the keys to their clients’ brands. Any control that agencies had over the brand is now in the hands of the consumers, who have a collective voice far more powerful than any agency’s, one that is amplified by the current generation of web technologies. Brand broadcasts have been drowned out in favour of brand interactions. Designing these interactions requires a change in mind-set from that of the tastemaker to that of the proactive listener, an adjustment that many agencies are having trouble making.
2. Hierarchy of Media – The belief that the importance of a medium or channel is proportional to what clients are willing to spend on it instead of what the value will be on it for their clients, essentially prioritizing cost over return. Rather than taking the time to educate their clients on the importance of the digital space, many agencies would prefer to take the path of least resistance and continue to push the services that both they and their clients are comfortable with. As a result, the interactive component often ends up being a poorly conceived, underfunded afterthought.
3. Creative as a Department – In order to do great interactive work, creative cannot be a department, it needs to be an adjective, one used to describe everybody involved in a project. Each team member needs to be able to innovate in his or her function in order for a project to reach its potential. In addition, the central idea driving a project should not be the exclusive domain of a single individual or department. It needs to be free to come from a strategist, a developer, a designer, a project manager, a usability engineer or even the client (heaven forbid) depending on the needs and nature of the project.
4. No Technology – Many agencies do not have their own in house technologists, which limits their ability to fully understand the medium. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to innovate. It is akin to someone offering marble sculptures without being a marble sculptor themselves. An artist can have flawless concept sketches, but in order to realize those concepts, the artist needs to understand the stone all the way to its core. Otherwise, the true potential of that marble block will never be realized. Similarly, an organization that does not have a deep, functional understanding of a technology will never be in a position to fully exploit it, much less direct someone else to do it.
5. Allocation of Talent – This stems from the Hierarchy of Media. The highest paid and most influential positions in many agencies still belong to those who work in television and print, reinforcing to employees that those are the desirable areas to work. As a result, you will often see someone leading or playing an influential but dispassionate role in an agency’s interactive department in the hopes of using it as a stepping-stone to one of the traditional forms of media (sadly, this happens on the client side as well for much the same reasons).

Side note: I stopped including the songs at the end of each post because I didn’t like the aesthetic of the player and they don’t show up in the RSS feed.

I’ve heard a number of people say this over the past few months and I could not disagree more. There is and will always be a lot of value in asynchronous threaded discussions. However, message boards as they exist are a dated technology much in need of an influx of some of the features and concepts that are driving the newer forms of social media.

One idea that I have been mulling over is integrating tags into message boards. It is small and hardly revolutionary, but I think it could add considerable value to the experience for everyone involved. When a user creates a thread, they add tags based on what they think the conversation they are starting is about. The tags will then be editable by everyone so how a thread is categorized can evolve with the conversation. The tags can then be used to highlight those conversations elsewhere. So if I am in one thread, I can see at a glance and browse related threads based on how closely the tags align. Similarly, they can be used to provide additional context for users on pages with other content types. For example, if I am on LeBron James’ profile page on NBA.com, I will be able to see a feed of all the conversations that have been tagged with “LeBron James”. That is a relatively simple example, but I imagine on an ecommerce site, it could become a fantastic way to let your community merchandise for you, creating another sort of recommendation engine. By connecting the tags to a user’s activity, the tags could also be leveraged to create much more robust community member segmentation than what could be gleaned from a users’ profile (I imagine you may even be able to identify where they are in the sales funnel depending on their activity). All this using a pretty commonplace technology that would be relatively inexpensive to implement. Has anybody seen anything like this before? I would love to hear some more ideas on how the message board could be improved upon.

On a side note, how awesome would it be if you came to a community site and there was a tag cloud with one of the prominent tags being “flame war”? All name calling and childish behaviour would be on display just a click away.

I went into this keynote with no expectations, having never heard of either Jane McGonigal or Alternate Reality Gaming (for a great example of ARG, check out World Without Oil, one of Jane’s creations) before. In fact, I was debating whether or not to go to this or Secrets of JavaScript Libraries. However, I found this event to be unequivocally, the most inspiring and eye-opening event I attended during SXSW.

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First let me preface this by saying that if you are involved in the interactive industry and haven’t read Getting Real, you should. The way 37signals approaches web development really is a breath of fresh air. Although Jason Fried (President and Founder of 37signals) didn’t really share any concepts that hadn’t been communicated in some way or another in Getting Real at SXSW, it was great to hear it directly from the man behind it all (note: Jason ended up sharing 14 lessons instead of 10).

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I don’t really need to post about this as it has been covered just about everywhere you can think of, but since I was there, I thought I would share my thoughts on it and provide a couple updates to the story. First of all, I didn’t think Sarah Lacy’s questions were that bad. I found some of them to be quite insightful. I was just more upset at how she started off the interview by attempting to humiliate Zuckerberg (very odd considering she was hand-picked by Facebook). He clearly wasn’t totally at ease to begin with and isn’t known to be very open so I doubt embarrassing him would encourage him to open up.

Also, her conversational interview style didn’t seem to work too well for him as she ended up talking far more than I think anybody would have liked to hear, leading to the mob uprising. While the way the audience reacted was not warranted, she reacted very poorly to the situation. If she had ignored them, the interview would have likely had a happier ending. Instead, she went on the defensive, lashing out at the audience and even her interviewee.

To make matters worse, in an interview she gave at a party shortly after the fiasco (nearly 40,000 views so far), she put the blame on not only the audience, but also the organizers, implying that what she was talking about was over the heads of the audience and that SXSW isn’t a good forum for someone of Mark Zuckerberg’s stature (funnily enough, he showed up and did an open Q&A at a Facebook Develop Garage the next day to some acclaim).

This dissolved all sympathy I had for her as her reaction to the situation clearly put her at just as much fault as the audience. Regardless of who was to blame this should have been the point where she apologized and admitted to having had a tough day, instead she insults the audience that includes a number of key influencers that could have a profound impact of the sales of her upcoming book. I wonder how her publishers reacted. I would love to know what their sales projections were for the book before the interview and whether or not they have shifted and in what direction.

Related Links
Full video of the interview
Sarah Lacy’s first article for Business Week in the aftermath (still unapologetic)

In a succinct presentation, Charlene Li from Forrester Research presented a process that can be used to create a social media strategy, identified some examples of how companies had used social media to their advantage and gave the audience some tips on where to start. While several members of the audience expressed disappointment (through the Meebo chat) that the strategies used in many of the examples Charlene provided are now fairly common place or part of most social media strategist’s consideration sets, I think those audience members missed the point.

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Not that I think that many people are reading this site on a mobile device. I just wanted to try out a service called MoFuse that creates a mobile site for your website from its RSS feed.

Check it out:
http://thinkinginteractive.mofuse.mobi/

Apparently it publishes an iPhone version as well.

Update: I tried out the iPhone version (thanks Brian) and it is pretty slick, complete with those AJAX page transitions that scream Apple. Although you could just as easily open the site feed as it automatically displays in the Mac reader (without the slick transitions though).