Thursday, April 30, 2015

Dumb as a Rock: My Path to Understanding Emoticons.

Image result for emoticon smalls continue to rear their cute little faces. This article, on the science of emoticons, lead  to reading a 2011 NYT story on emoticons in the workplace. Today, as I used Slack for the first time, it was surprising to discover emoticons embedded in the ecosystem. This revelation lead to an Emoji Cheat Sheet  for enterprise tools including Github, Basecamp and others. Facebook added them back in 2013 in an effort to, "...bring more ways for users to express themselves through small pictures" according to Adweek. Though friends and connections have been using emoticons for years, I'm an emoticon.  I thought their use degraded the written word, especially in a professional setting. Call me a curmudgeon. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe people drive too fast these days).


Then it hit me. Nestled just off 101, right over the Golden Gate Bridge you'll find Ring Mountain: a Marin County Parks Open-Space Preserve and my favorite refuge. The area was home to Coastal Miwok Indians who carved petroglyphs into the mountain's boulders  more than 2,400 years ago. You can just make them out in this image (oval shapes in the center).


Zooming out from Petroglyph Rock and shifting slightly to the right, you'll see San Francisco's skyline. The view changes daily as sky-scrapers continue to sprout. These buildings house tech boomers, like Twitter, that specialize in brief, rapid communication. So it's full-circle, from carving images in rocks to inserting digital faces. Each medium is a shade on the palette of self-expression. To downplay or ignore new colors is a limitation, not a better path.

Long live .

Thursday, April 16, 2015

If Ellen DeGeneres was a lawyer...

The spark for this post was something like, “Want a master class in new media? Follow Ellen DeGeneres.” But it’s not a level playing field. As an entertainer, with a television show in daily syndication by NBC Universal throughout the US and Canada you’d anticipate a large fan base.
85,832,900 subscribers though? It’s a ridiculous number. To put it in context, Oprah Winfrey has about half of Ellen’s subscribers (+10M likes on Facebook, +27M followers on Twitter, 435,000 subscribers on YouTube, +3.7M on Instagram). Jimmy Fallon also has about half with +24M followers on Twitter, almost 7M subscribers on YouTube, nearly 5M likes on Facebook, 3.2M on Instagram, and over 300,000 followers on Google+.

Ellen DeGeneres doesn't wait for people to come watch her show, or hope they record it, rather her brand constantly adapts to new tools and places content where people spend time. She inserts her daytime talk show in different locations online throughout the day, reaching people who have regular 9 to 5’s and allowing those who do catch or record her show to share their favorite clips with their communities online.

But it’s not just thatshe uses new media tools, it’s howshe uses them. Bouncing them off of each other….from games that started on her syndicated television show to an app for one and a syndicated spin-off television show for another.

Peruse her pages and, as you do, think to yourself, “If Ellen DeGeneres was a lawyer or insurance agent instead of a comedian, what kind of thought-leadership-empire would she build?”.

P.S. Shhhh! Don’t share the answer, go out and do it for yourself!

TheEllenShow - YouTube (+ 11.5M subscribers)
Ellen DeGeneres on Pinterest (425,000 followers)
Instagram (@theellenshow) (+11.3M followers)
Ellen only has 2 connections on LinkedIn but 7,900 followers on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Company Page.
Ellen on Vine  (+ 2.8M followers)
Ellen is on Snapchat.