Twitter launched Vine on Thursday. Vine lets users create and share videos lasting up to six seconds. Building on the huge success of Instagram, Vine users can follow other people, whose posted videos show up in a feed on their phones and can be easily shared.

On Monday, four days after its release, hard-core pornography showcased in the prominent Editor’s Picks section of the mobile app. <Giggle.> The algorithms had gone either wrong or right, depending how you see it, and recognized that porn was a rapidly accelerating trend.

Porn and technology have always had an symbiotic relationship. Almost as soon as photography was invented, it was being used to produce pornographic images. I worked in videotape marketing when it began, and porn hugely accelerated the explosion of video rental stores. For the first time, people could view smut in the privacy of their home, rather than venturing to some seedy part of town with the perverts.

Porn accelerated the Internet as well. I used to attend Comdex in the ’90s and I remember one year when there were so many x-rated exhibitors that they moved it to a separate area on it’s own, which of course was called – Cumdex. Porn accounts for so much Internet traffic that when you use a traffic ranking service like Hitwise porn is automatically suppressed from the rankings. Otherwise, the numbers overwhelm all other traffic.

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So, how to get organized for the New Year? I’m a compulsive to-do list maker. I’ve got one list in MS Outlook, one in Zoho, and a big complex one in MS Access. If anything I’m over-organized. But, those lists in different places make it difficult to see the forest for the trees and it’s fragmented.

I also want to have my priorities with me all the time, and to be able to adjust them in a snap. That means going mobile, as in mobile phone and iPad. I want to have all the data in the Cloud, so I can get to it from anywhere.

Well, I got there just in time for the New Year and it’s great. Tasks at my fingertips, and easy to adjust and prioritize – available on desktop, phone, and tablet.

I set my criteria as I did my research:

• I wanted to have a project and task hierarchy, so I could handle more complex projects when I needed to.
• Having a good iPhone app was critical. I also wanted an iPad app, but as I experimented I found that if I could use the full website on the iPad, that was good enough.
• Like most people, my tasks creep forward a day frequently. Having easy date adjustments is key. Changing a date to tomorrow can’t take five clicks.
• A lot of my tasks originate and end in email. This became even more important than I thought. You want to either have integration into the email client, or the ability to mail tasks to email – preferably both.
• I was willing to pay for functionality, but not go broke.

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A while back I got a letter from Comcast announcing the my old cable modem was too old to take advantage of the speed of the network in my neighborhood. They said all I had to do was fill out an online form and I would be sent a new modem. As a geek, I was excited! I filled out the form and submitted. I was told I would get the modem in 6-8 weeks – letdown. Then I got it in the mail in a week – expectations exceeded!

Comcast sent a very nicely packaged box with every cable I could ever need and then some. Then design is simple and elegant, and likely inspired by Apple. There are three straightforward steps: Set Up; Connect & Power-Up, and Activate. What could go wrong?

Essentially to setup a new cable modem, you connect it and plug it in. I thought it would take at the most 20 minutes. It took about an hour and a half. Why?

Connecting and powering up the modem took no time at all. The modem even showed connection to the Internet within 2 minutes, a clear increase in speed and much faster than my old modem. So, what took the extra hour and fifteen minutes? Activate did.

Comcast elected to create this activation step for their own uses. There is no consumer benefit there, except to get your gear working. It probably helps Comcast confirm the right modem is with the right person, which seems redundant given they shipped it to me and knew what it was.

Still, so why the extra hour and fifteen minutes? Well, all the extra boring computer stuff that can be so infuriating. To activate you had to go to a Comcast website and punch in some account info. But when the modem was first hooked up, there was no Internet access through the router which was connected to the modem. So, I had to find a laptop and cable to hook directly to the modem. But, it didn’t work, so that took 3 full power cycles on both the modem and laptop before it could finally, finally connect. I used Internet Explorer as after my previous experience I thought another browser might not work (got forbid I had used a Mac!). Then, when I finally “activated” it was unclear which devices were to be activated due to the picture used on the page, so I only activated the voice modem I already had. When I figured that out and rebooted the modem and the laptop 3 more times. I still could not get back to the activate page. You can imagine the frustration.

I finally activated the whole thing through my iPhone and the cellular network (not using Comcast at all) since I could never pull it up on my laptop. Then after a few minutes and two power cycles there was finally Internet access. After powering the whole network (modem, router, switch) on and off a few more time, everything was finally working.

I can only imagine my 80 year old mother trying to do this, assuming you pretty much had to plug it in and turn it on, which is the way it should have been.

There was no consumer benefit to the Activate step. It could have been completely eliminated in the design. Clearly in many cases there are too many variables to have this seemingly simple step work. For instance, how many computers are directly connected to a cable modem these days rather than going through a router? And if you can’t use the Internet to activate the Internet, you are in a Catch-22 you’ll never get out of (I had to use my iPhone Internet access.)

How does this experience apply to your marketing processes? Is there a seemingly simple step that could trip up your customer registration and bring the whole thing crashing down? What is the weak link that determines the fate of your whole service or consumer experience? The beauty of good design is frequently what you can eliminate, not what you add.

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I’ve always been a fan of frameworks such as Forester’s Groundswell that help you think through marketing options for emerging media. Having a structured way to sort out the (wonderful) chaos of social media helps you figure out ways to achieve your objectives.

Recently, I was looking for some information on International Social Media use and I was introduced to The Global Web Index. They claim to be the world’s largest and most detailed market research on multi-platform internet usage. They conduct 130,000 interviews globally over 36 international markets, with 3 waves each year so I think they come pretty close.

I’ve found their insights to be crisp and exciting. Given my recent work in the area of PR, there was one finding that particularly grabbed my attention – a Renaissance for Professional Media. The thinking goes like this:

The first generation of the Internet focused on the new ways that everyone could create and publish content. As the Internet has evolved, Internet users have moved more to the consumption and retransmission of content rather than producing it themselves. What is dominating Facebook and Twitter activity is ‘snacking’ on content and then quickly retransmitting it to your followers and friends.

So, where does content come from? A growing trend, accelerated by the use of social channels by traditional news sources, is the trend for users to get their news from a traditional source but then to follow up via social channels in an attempt to get the most up-to-date information possible. (Click to enlarge these slides, use the back button to return.)

Traditional sources still drive mass knowledge – but now from their online platforms for online users. Even for highly engaged social media users traditional news sources are still the main channel through which they get breaking news.

The excellent work by The Global Web Index highlights the opportunity presented by strong content and curation strategies in your area of expertise. Their full report is available on Shareshare and is the source of these two slides.

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WARNING: This is a non marketing-oriented post that is going to make your eyes bleed unless you are interested in the techie side of CRM.

Over 10 years ago I built my own CRM system in Microsoft Access. Total geek city, I know. It was perfectly suited to the way I kept track of interactions with people, and it was a snap to export contacts to Google Contacts, different mobile phones, etc. Even today it’s still state of the art.

However, this system is one of the few things keeping me chained to a laptop instead of giving me the freedom to work on a tablet or smartphone. MS Access is a monster program which keeps me on Windows rather than Mac, as well, though I can run it under Parallels on the Mac.  So, being stuck on this CRM system is inconvenient from a couple of perspectives.

I decided I wanted to move the whole setup to the cloud, ideally someplace that would have a great iPad user experience. That would enable me to access my info, contact history and to-dos from anywhere, and to not be chained to specific hardware –  use either a tablet or laptop – and free me to work on any operating system I wanted to – Windows or Mac.

I quickly developed a list of criteria that would probably be suitable for a number of people looking at similar issues:

• CRM Functionality: Leads, Contacts, Accounts
• LinkedIn Connection
• Twitter Connection
• Calendaring Integration
• Google Contacts Sync
• Custom Fields Creation
• Import / Export
• Can Import Past Activity
• Tablet / Mobile Experience
• Base Price
• Extras Price
• Term of Contract / Ease of Migration in Future

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