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Digital Marketing Anti-Predictions: What I Hope Goes Away in 2009

My Prediction Piece, on JackMyers.com. I should not have defaulted to the edit team for the graphic. Oy!

Contemplating the Bottom

I was out hiking with friends yesterday, enjoying what was damn near perfect weather in Marin. As we walked we caught up.

One friend is embarking on an AIDS ride in the spring and has started training for the ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

One friend just converted the garage from an office back to a garage, and a sleeping nook to a washer-dryer room.

One is selling a motorcycle.

One had a TV program cancelled but thanks God that it wasn't a full-time job and now has a reel to show for it.

One struggled to get funding for a startup and is now committed to bootstrapping.

One had to acknowledge that real estate sales were not going to pick up and took a second job managing a catering business at a hotel.

One experienced layoffs at a job, and then paycheck reductions for an area of the company and wonders, what will be next?

So how about you, Jory? How are things with you?

"Fine," I said. "I guess." I wondered if I was deluding myself.

Let's Not Give Millennials a Swift Kick in the Pants (Yet): Consider the alternatives

My latest on BlogHer. A fascinating read by Ron Alsop about the largest cohort, which is entering the workforce and wreakig all kinds of havoc.

Pondering Motringate, the economy, and my take on agencies playing nice

My latest on JackMyers.com.

What the Motrin Moms Campaign (and resulting MomBlogger reaction) Can Teach Us About Redemption in the Blogosphere

We Can't Fully Leverage Social Media Until Brands, Media Buyers, and PR Learn to Play in the Sandbox Together

 In This Economy, Why Invest in Social Media?

Dispatches from the Monaco Media Forum

This was my second year of klatsching with leaders in the media technology space. This event is a personal luxury, and not just because it's in Monte-Carlo, though that helps. It's also a place where I get to take two steps back and look at the emerging view of new media.

There definitely were some highlights:

--Tina Brown was interviewed by Larry Kramer about her foray into new media, The Daily Beast. This was a big deal for me because I got my career start in print and have always respected her work. Now, here she was, a newcomer in this space. She was asked if she would go back if she was offered a chi-chi print job again. She said no--online is where it's at.

I asked her about a comment she had made on the Colbert Report: something about the Web freeing her to do what she couldn't get away with in print. I thought that was a curious statement, as I've found blogging puts your writing under an even finer microscope. While more voices can be heard, more voices can be heard commenting, correcting, and taking issue with what you say.

Over breakfast with Tina and her General Manager Caroline Marks, I learned what she really meant by that. Tina loves to make changes at the last minute, and get scoops without worrying about losing them. The Web is so much more immediate. While 10,000-word pieces in The New Yorker provide depth, the Web provides immediacy and instant connection to audience. These things are just what freak out most print editors, especially ones that built their careers on print, but she embraces the user on the Web.

My favorite content: Not my session I'm afraid. We suffered from panelitis--too many panelists. By the time we got through with introducing ourselves there was scant time for questions. And I wanted to sit with all of them and talk shop. At least I got to learn about some pretty cool projects:

Amra Tareen, allvoices
Reggie Brandford, Vitrue
Hans Peter Brondmo, Plum
Johan Pouwelse, Tribler
Sadato Tanaka, Enigmo

And our moderator, John Clippinger, of the Berkman Center at Harvard

I think there was one picture taken of me--the only proof I have of attending this year

I'm fighting jet lag at this point. Thanks, eirikso, for the proof.

I took copious notes during Jeffrey Cole's State of the Mediasphere keynote. Some key takeaways:

• "Old media" doesn't disappear; it adapts. Think radio after television was invented; it created partnerships that allowed it to remain relevant. Movie studios learned to monetize in other ways when people stopped going to movie theaters. TV may be challenged with moving ad budget, but it will explode in growth as it moves content online.
• The average household spends $260 per month on services that didn't exist just a few years ago. And wealth doesn't determine usage; the poorest households still spend $180 a month.
• There are three ways to get content: 1) steal it--not viable; 2) make it fee-based, which only works for the most premium, proprietary content; and 3)advertising--now accepted as the price for free content. But if your ads don't work, the public will tell you. (My addition: so now the key is to create better ways of advertising and engagement.)

Social highlights: Wine tasting, BTYB Accel Partners, who shipped over top California wines, along with wine educators in the Napa region (They had one of my favorites, Chapellet) and dinner at the Hotel de Paris--the reason why, this year, I brought a dress. I made a major gaffe last year when I interpreted "Business Casual" to mean what it does in Palo Alto. In Monaco it means not Black Tie, but step it up, nonetheless.

The place was gawrgeous.

Photo by hebig

Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School won the Monaco Media Forum Prize, given by His Serene Highness, Prince Albert II.

Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz of VPOD TV took this shot.

I caught up with some folks I know:

• Mariana Danilovic: My Monaco buddy. A woman who epitomizes girl in tech. Likes shoes, likes geeking out on business models.
• Kevin Welsh of Antics Digital Marketing. I met him and his lovely wife last year.
• Jason Goldberg: The dynamo who brought you Jobster and is now knee-deep in his latest adventure socialmedian
• Dina Kaplan, Blip.TV COO and Co-founder. I always like seeing her!
• Auren Hoffman, Rapleaf--Since 2000 I've seen Auren just about everywhere, a side effect of working for start-ups in the Valley and at one time living blocks away from each other. He makes Monaco feel like home. Auren, gimme another study I can cite about women on the Web!
• Randall Rothenberg, Interactive Advertising Bureau. No conference that looks at the state of the digital advertising world is complete without this man. Pick. His. Brain.
• Lisa Sounio of Dopplr, along with her entrepreneur husband. Someone who will make the fun if she isn't having it. (Loved the tie!)
• Dave Sifry, Offbeat Guides: Dave talked about his latest endeavor which actually has a PRINT component. Think print on demand meets travel search. Too cool.
• Jennifer Schenker, Businessweek. We met earlier this year in Greece. I love that things are heating up in Europe.
• Spencer Reiss, Wired contributing Editor, and the guy who made the program possible. Nice work! Being a programming Chair is alot like herding cattle, isn't it?
• Alexis Maybank, Alexandra Wilson, Gilt Groupe. I met Alexandra in New York earlier this year and still insist their luxury shopping club would go over like chocolate at BlogHer. They announced their new CEO, Susan Lyne, earlier this year.
• Jamie Kantrowitz, MySpace, UK
• Esther Dyson, always challenging the status quo, and not letting the Facebook person steal the floor.
• Jack Myers: The one and only. My latest post went up while we were in Monaco.
• Nancy Cruikshank of Videojug. Always interesting to talk to her about the business of video content in the UK.

And some new people:

• Jonas Nordlund, Digital Image, SA: Superentrepreneur. He indulged me as I asked countless questions about what it's like to live in Monaco.
• Johnathan Medved, Vringo: A serendipitous connection, as we both were up at 4:30 a.m. to catch our flight from Nice. Great travel conversation about life in Jerusalem (his, not mine), families, the economy, my experience as a Shabbas Goy...
• Simon Waldman of Guardian Media Group
• Dan Scheinman and Danielle Barbieri of Cisco Media Solutions. Cool people who are local! We chatted on the way to the hotel about Cisco's blogging/enterprise publishing solution
• Larry Kramer, Polaris Ventures, (founder of MarketWatch).
• Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital: I saw RIchard when he moderated a panel with MySpace's Chris DeWolfe last year. This year we got to chat briefly.

A lot for 36 hours.

Life in Tight Jeans

Roughly 18 months ago I succumbed to H-band's wishes that I wear jeans "that fit." I had always been under the assumption that my jeans did fit. They didn't drag on the floor, I could zip them up, and I could eat copious amounts of food while wearing them without having to undo the top button.

"It looks like you have no shape," H-band said. "And you have a beautiful body."

I don't disagree with the notion of showcasing your assets in a way that accentuates them. I have broad shoulders and like to wear V-neck or boat neck tops. That doesn't mean I like to hike my rack up to my collarbone and create a mini-Grand Canyon with my cleavage. The jeans of this decade seem like the ones I tried on in changing rooms in the 80s and 90s and rejected come back to taunt me: You only thought you wanted that small pouch in back like the cool kids in 16 Candles. You used to toss me aside with those Wranglers and say you'd never wear anything so tight, but you were wrong! Now, if you can slip your comb inside your back pocket, you are a loozah!

I wasn't sure if H-band wanted me to better showcase my assets so much as he wanted me to showcase my ass. It felt a little too democratic to me: Is it really MY ass he wants me to showcase, or just a woman's ass, and he just happens to have some suggestive power over mine? Some of his suggestions feel like they are intended to make me look better or more stylish. But this suggestion felt more like he was asking me to dress up as someone else. Someone more screwable.

We grabbed a few pairs from the racks at Nordstrom. Citizen, Red Engine, Paige. What happened to Guess and Levis? I really missed Forenza. I looked at the waist sizes and began to put pairs back on the rack.

"What are you doing?" H-band said.

"Just looking at the sizes. These don't fit." I said.

"Will you just humor me, please? Take those back and let's see how they look."

It seemed a long process, having to prove something by cameltoe, but so be it.

The first pair was the largest, I put one leg through and immediately felt tightness around my thigh that made me question whether I would be able to get my leg back out.

"Too tight!" I said, wriggling my leg out and reaching for my roomier GAP jeans.

"No, no hun! Those were probably about right. Put them back on! Please ... put them back on."

As if to prove a point I wrangled my right leg back into the pant leg. Then the next one, then yanked them upward. I was wearing a denim girdle, and I hadn't even yet zipped the damn things.

"You see!" I said, about to take the jeans off. "I can't even zip these things!"

"You haven't tried," H-band said.

"Haven't tried! You can already see that I don't need to; these things are skin tight!"

"Exactly," H-band said. "Now just zip them up. ... Pleeeease?"

There was no way I could zip up these things without doing the top button first, which landed right above my pelvis, about three inches below the waistband of my Victoria Secret hipsters.

"Maybe we'll go to lingerie next," H-band said.

"Don't bother," I said. "They don't fit."

"Just try zipping them first."

I sucked in, "zzzt." "That was too short, hun. It should be more like a zzzzzzzzzzt, not a zzzt."

"Just look at yourself," H-band said.

I tried to mentally Photoshop out the waistband of my underwear and focused instead on my glutius maximus. I stood with my back facing the mirror, looking over my shoulder. The jeans were so tight across my backside that it pinched along the diameter of my booty. I had four buttcheeks.

"You look incredible," H-band said. "Though maybe that's not quite the right size."

"You think?" I said. Just then our saleswoman knocked on the dressing room door.

"Everything alright in there?" she said.

"Yeah ... looks like we need a few new sizes, though," I said.

H-band opened the door, and the saleswoman stared at my crotch.

"You pulled ones that were much too big," she said.

"Are you joking?" I said.

"Nope, look at this," she said, pulling the only fold of material that existed, at the top of my thigh. "You shouldn't have any bunching here. These stretch out a lot. You'll end up swimming in them." She left to get a pair two hip sizes smaller. H-band seemed pleased.

"You really look great in jeans," he said. So I bought the next pair I tried on.

Since that day, the pair I bought have stretched out. I can now sit in them for prolonged periods of time, even plane trips. H-band says they look big on me, but then I wear my old pair on weekends, the ones that slouch off my hips and suggest that I might have some junk up front, and he gets off it.

On our next excursion, he convinced me to buy an even tighter pair, rationalizing that they wouldn't stretch out so much. The saleswoman at the boutique told me she has many pair like the one I was trying on and to trust her when she said that they stretch tons.

"Get something that feels too small," she said. I looked up at what must have been a picture of her young daughter and wondered, did she wear these jeans before or after getting pregnant? The pressure on my hips made me wonder if I was limiting my child-bearing capability.

We left with my husband insisting that I wear the jeans out of the store. I sat down, and the waistband tore into my stomach. I felt the edges of muffin tops at my sides. I wondered, how is it that jeans that are meant to make me look so skinny make me feel so fat?

"You look amazing in those," H-band said.

"They always stretch out," I repeated to myself.

Fear

I live in a teensy weensy house. H-band says I exaggerate its teensy-weesiness. Our friends say it's really cozy. I like how, when the sun begins to set, it lights the living room in burnt yellow.

We moved in over Memorial Day weekend in 2004. It seemed like a nice "in-between" place for us, a place where we could test our growing relationship, when H-band was B-friend, and midway into a grad school program. I was working in the city and picked up the bus every day just a few yards from our front door. It was one of the best commutes I'd ever had.

The house had a very affordable rent, almost too affordable. We later learned that the owner was trying to sell the place and kept the rent low to keep people there. For me, that meant saving almost $1,000 a month, compared to what I was paying in the city. That $1,000 became more meaningful when I quit my job to freelance and explore the blogging world. I didn't have gigs lined up, just a book proposal and a desire to learn what was next without knowing what it would look like. The house gave me the luxury of living in uncertainty.

When I quit my other work to make BlogHer a full-time business, our little, rented house made an irregular paycheck possible. We were able to take risks because we weren't tied down to a mortgage. We had a scare when the landlord sold the house, but the new owners let us stay without raising our rent. I was relieved and annoyed at the same time. In my mind I'd set a two-year clock and thought we'd move out when then-B-friend had finished grad school. He was now starting a job, and I was now working from home. The house seemed to be getting smaller.

I noticed things. The unrenovated kitchen didn't have enough counterspace. B-friend and I had to make room by placing a cutting board across the sink. There was no dishwasher, which made for some arguments over opposed philosophies on how long dirty dishes should sit. In the colder months, ants invaded. Some of the braver ones would run across my computer screen or up my pants leg, making me smack myself continually, paranoid that more were close. In the long summer, mosquitoes somehow made it past the cracks between the adjustable screens and the uneven window frames and tortured us in the middle of the night. By the time I came to and heard the buzzing in my ear, our visitors usually had feasted two or three times. Despite the summer heat I'd mummify myself in sheets to prevent more bites and wake up wet with sweat.

"I can't keep doing this," I said, every summer.

"Don't worry, Babe." B-friend said. "We won't be here much longer."

To stay sane I'd walk one block to the local main street on hot summer nights and get ice cream or gelato.

"You won't be so close when we move up into the hills," B-friend said to me, looking eastward, where we took most of our walks, both because the hills provided some challenge and because our thoughts of the future gravitated upward, where the real estate became grander, and more elusive.

Our dining room was too small for our scratched, second-hand dining set to be placed in the middle of it. We'd pushed the table against the wall and set only two chairs at one of the corners. That was all the space B-friend and I needed. That was all the space B-friend needed to propose.

After we married, we fantasized about moving out, getting more closet space, and real furniture to dignify the plates and flatware we'd received by the boxful. We didn't feel right about unpacking it all, thinking that it was just a matter of months before we'd have to pack it all back in again. Every week we looked at patterns, browsed Pottery Barn catalogues for dining sets, found things for "the house," not the one we were currently living in.

We'd heard the economy may become unstable, so we kept our plan, but stopped looking at houses--it was just too painful to look inside a home and not be able to make an offer. We looked only enough to know where we'd look, when the time was right. We figured it would just be another few months.

My company received a round of funding, and we hired staff and moved into an office space on the Peninsula. Though I had been "unofficially" making the drive to Redwood City a few times a week, having official headquarters there now made our home's location problematic.

"If we don't buy right away," I said to H-band, "We'll need to figure something out. Get a place in the city, maybe." H-band placated me as much as he could.

"What's the point of renting a place in the city when we will buy a place soon enough?"

To keep me engaged he indulged me in cleaning out the storage room under the house and the garage--things you do to prepare for moving. We bought travel guides to South America and planned a trip for sometime later in the year, to get away. I ended up squelching the plans when a number of business trips to Europe made planning another trip at that time seem frivolous, and when, driving from a cousin's wedding a few weeks ago, we'd heard some news that made all this speculation about the economy feel a bit realer.

A few people were laid off at H-band's company, and then a few more. This raised some hackles, as I--a dot-com refugee--remember how that started, with just a few, then a few more. H-band began to watch more shows on CNN and MSNBC.

"They don't talk about the same things anymore," H-band said. "They talk about changing the way we live."

"We've been saving," I said.

"We could save more."

Finishing up dinner with friends last night, one of them said, "Well that's my night out for the week." It occurred to me that, some time ago, I stopped counting my nights out for dinner. While I couldn't buy a house, I had become quite accustomed of buying anything else I needed, when I needed it.

Driving home from dinner, H-band said, "We need to think of ways to cut back, before we have to."

"But we have been cutting back. For years we've been cutting back." Or more accurately, not running up credit.

"But all those people who haven't now will, and that's going to make it tough for everybody."

I thought of my few consumer obsessions--wine, spa treatments, travel, and clothes.

"I never noticed that TJ Maxx," I said as we passed it on I-80 through the City. "Is that one new?"

This morning I went to yoga class--the first time in three years. I felt stiff and tight, despite being one of the youngest people in the room. The past few years my body has contracted, possibly from being hunched over computers, or crammed in Economy Plus. I got home and expected H-band to be ready to leave on one of his Epic bike rides. The house smelled of fresh toast and fruit. He was still in his pajamas, watching political shows.

"Aren't you taking off soon?" I asked him.

"I just wanted to relax a bit more," he said. "I like relaxing here."

We watched together. More of the speeches we've seen over the past month.

"No one says it's going to get better soon," he said. I had heard much of the same. He stretched out on our massive two-year old couch. We bought it when we got married, anticipating a much bigger space for it shortly. It was so big we had to move the coffee table out of the way to accommodate the long ottoman it came with. The room seemed to be more a receptacle for furniture than our living space.

"I gotta say, Babe. Despite all the planning, all the looking, I'm happy here."

I had one foot out of the house, and now I've put that foot back in. 

American Girl Redux

So my sister--your mother--breaks down and buys you an American Girl doll. Her name is Julie, but you call her Juliana, because Julie is your Mom's name, and that's creepy. Mom and Dad even take you to the adoption center in Midtown Manhattan, where you get to pick little Juliana out.

They even make your little brother go. This is a special day!

You even get to go to the American Girl restaurant, where little girls get to eat with their dolls--but not without a reservation! Mommy and Daddy rent twins so that your little brother doesn't feel left out.

Look at all the men waiting on the dolls, working so hard and hoping for SAG credit!

So now, after Mommy took you and your girlfriends to see Kit Kittredge, the five year old's equivalent to Sex in the City, and bought you a doll, and taken you to the American Girl restaurant (booked 3 months in advance) and even bought you a cake, what do you say?

   

Help me get my Twitter on

I've noticed that a significant amount of my peeps' blogging has been relegated to Twitter, and I can see why. Tweets are a lot shorter, and in many ways more accepting, than posts. We Tweet the most random stuff, and people are still interested, or not. Doesn't matter. The point is, you are engaging folks; you are trying.

So I'm *trying* and feel like the old farts I try to get to blog who insist that real content must come via print or a "traditional" media source. These are the people, who when they tried blogging, wrote articles instead of posts, and wrote with formality. I still edit for Tweet-worthiness. And God forbid I ask for feedback, like I did when I was in Spain. By the time I remembered to check back for suggested restaurants in Barcelona, I was back in New York.

It takes a huge paradigm shift to get into the mindset of sharing in Tweets. I'm just not feeling my Twitter mojo yet, that sensation similar to what I had when I became addicted to blogging. When that happened, every experience would immediately become translated into a post. I would immediately begin thinking through how it would read on the blog. I have yet to have an experience that I can whittle down a thought or experience into 140 characters.

Nor do I have a rhythm. I notice that some people Twitter in Tweet clusters: I'm near my computer or mobile phone and have 5 mins to kill, hence I will throw out three or four Tweets. I'm a cluster Twitterer, though even my clusters are few and far between. Others are more dutiful. They keep a feed going in some fashion at all times. You could get a decent picture of their life just by reading their daily dispatches.

Then there are those from whom we get the goods. They've taken to Twitter like flies to a rumproast and get and give the goods on people. They pick fights, throw out statements they know will get picked apart and responded to. I was really good at sifting through my RSS feeds for the jewels. I'm less good at sifting through Twitter feeds.

I'll take some tips and hints.

Chatting with Lisa Belkin about the "B" Word

I wrote about Lisa Belkin's NYT Magazine piece two weeks ago, and then got to interview the writer and ask her quite directly about her thoughts on "having it all" and that ever-evasive balance.

Too cool ...