GregHay.com

So, you got here because I Tweeted about it or my mother passed you a link, now what? What else do you read? What might you like? Odds are you’ll scroll through a couple headlines on the main page and make your decision right then and there. You’ll leave or you’ll stay, it’s simple. But how do I convince you that I have content you may like? How do I even know what you like? I think Liveflows has figured that out (http://f1.liveflows.com/index).

Go take a look at what Louis Gray is doing on his blog (http://www.louisgray.com/live/) with the footer on the site. The new footer tool allows you to see what is popular on his site right now without out having to read the whole site. This is great because as new user to a site I don’t know what to read, this is an awesome tool for discovery.

“But Greg, I like Digg, Del.icio.us and I follow Scoble on Friendfeed, I don’t have time to check out every site to see what’s great.” This is where I would disagree with you, this won’t make discovery slower, I in fact think it will make for a much more tailored and personal web experience. I think this plug-in is more powerful than Digg or Friendfeed. In time, I think the value of Liveflows will grow as it dynamically builds out recommendations to networks based on preferences unique to each user. I would love to see them go to a model that it would sync with my Facebook and Twitter and work as a plugin the browser level. Imagine getting an instant referral from friends the moment you land on a site, it would be like automatically knowing the best bars in a new town without having to call everyone in your phonebook or ask in your Facebook status.

Right now Liveflows only works on sites that opt in, but I think there is a ton of potential here for a really fantastic browser based experience.

Editors Note: The image has zero to do with this idea, but it’s close to summer and what could possibly be better and more rewarding than swimming out to a raft, climbing up on it and proceeding to throw your younger bother off of it all day long? Not much. I love summer.

Brands can tell me their products are awesome until they’re blue in the face and I will rarely believe them, but if a friend loves something, inevitably I’ll try it. It’s simple,; word-of-mouth marketing works better than any other type. How the heck else could you explain my father’s love of BluBlockers in the 90’s? (http://www.blublocker.com don’t click on that, the site is as bad as you remember the ads.) There’s no way he fell for the commercials and thought he’d see “brighter” when it’s sunny out by putting on sun glasses?!?! I believe the same crappy orange hunting safety glasses are now being shilled as HD wraparounds, or something like that. But at some point someone showed him a pair and he fell in love*.

Publisher's Note: I don't have any pictures of the old man wearing these in the wild... crap

So how do brands take that dynamic online? How can they get you turn to a friend wearing a dumb pair of glasses and ask them why the hell they have them on? Facebook has started to put that together with how they’ve changed the “Recommend a Friend” system. Now brands are part of that equation, what my friends have becomes fans of is suggested to me.

This is a great move and absolutely the next logical step in word-of-mouth marketing online. Who can you trust more than your friends? Certainly not a brand on their own, but if all your friends have become fans of it, why not? It’s a smart strategy and I just hope brands stick with it long enough to allow organic growth to work like it should. Eventually they will attract the right audiences and because the Facebook comminty is making the right suggestions; their value and the trust of the consumer will spread in a positive way. One that brands couldn’t pay enough to get today through TV ads or shipping all the BluBlockers than can muster to all my father’s friends.

*Full disclosure. While they made you look like a total douchebag, they were kind of sweet to read with.

New York Talk Exchange

The February issue of Seed Magazine had a piece on the New York Talk Exchange project at the MoMA, which I saw. The premise of the project is that all the telecommunications out of New York City in a single day would be mapped to see how the city communicated with the country and world at large. The findings were as one expects; New York City makes a lot of calls and makes them to all parts of the country and world, sort of a no-brainer. But the interesting thing is the VOLUME of calls made per New Yorker relative to those of their small town counterparts. According to Carlo Ratti from MIT who conducted research for the project, a formula emerged; Communication increases according to population size scaled to an exponent of about 1.5*. Why is this interesting? Because conventional thinking would have it that New Yorkers should talk as much on the phone, per person, as the population in Syracuse, but instead according to the findings; on average a New Yorker will talk 30 times more that a Syracuse Townie (full disclosure, I am a Syracuse Townie).

Okay, so what does this have to do with Social Media, Mustaches or Antics? Well, it got me thinking about Twitter and scale of conversation versus other sites like Facebook and MySpace. Perhaps the answer to why Twitter works is not that it’s new, but in fact it is the same as why New Yorkers talk on the phone so damn much.

There is a theory around urban environments and their growth that puts forward the idea that as population size increases as well as population density increases, that people begin to move and interact faster at a subconscious level because survival and competitive instincts kick in. Therefore in New York, we feel compelled to chat on the phone more and walk faster because instinctually there are so many more of us competing for space and mindshare among our peers that the fear of losing drives us to use the phone more and briskly pass tourists on the sidewalk.

What does this have to do with Twitter? Think about it. What did we do on MySpace? I looked at your page, turned off the dumb song you picked and maybe checked out your pictures, but I was alone on the page. With Facebook I could chat with friends, tag the same pictures and the Feed of news kept reminding me that I was not on Facebook alone, so that same instinct that tells me to walk fast, also told me to update my status and make witty comments. I was competing for mindshare among my friends. Now with Twitter, the entire experience is a New York City sidewalk, I’m never alone at any stage of the experience. @thejames says something witty, I have to come over the top, @haynow gives an update to her house being built, I have to respond. That instinct that drives me to make a call while walking home “just because” is the same that drives me to Twitter every 2 hours all day. I believe Twitter’s success lies here, with our competitive drive, not that we all can produce 140 Characters or we really want tickets to a Sun’s games from Shaq.

Thinking about urban dynamics and Twitter has led me to thinking about its tipping point: it may not be when Steve Rubel bails on it, but it may be with the environment gets so large it can’t hold all the calls.

If each successive community we love gives us faster feedback on our peers and more reason to compete and make noise, is the next one a purely mobile experience? Will Google’s Grand Central transpose my calls into Tunblr pages? Will a Britekite / Timelines mashup tell me what is being discussed in the bar down the street from my house? I think it’s going to end up somewhere in the middle of all of that, the line between mobile and the desktop/laptop computing experience will be totally blurred to spur a faster platform for communication and more “people on the sidewalk” to compete with.

I can’t wait.

*SEED Magazine, “City Gravity”, Feb 2009

A little self-promotion.

Last week Clean Freak Confessions launched (http://www.cleanfreakconfessions.com), my first project with Federated Media. It’s a hubsite, developed by Hoovers, that hosts cleaning discussions by leading bloggers.  The cool thing about the site is that the conversation there is real, the cleaning experiences are ones people really have and they’re not forced. It’s my first time in this sandbox, but I’m enjoying it and learning along the way.

Touching on the subject of vacuums (mom is going to kill me for this), my mother is the only person I know who bought one from a door-to-door salesman. I don’t remember the time of year, I picture it being a dark and rainy night but that can’t be true, this story couldn’t have a setup that sweet. Most likely it was just a simple knock at the front door that brought a Kirby Vacuum into our lives.

The guy was young and talked with enthusiasm about his wares. I think he had my brother and I instantly when he sucked up change and it didn’t enter the bag but stayed in a trap. I have no idea what we were thinking; perhaps Elliot and I thought that every time it passed over the floor it would fill with change. I also don’t know which one of his tricks convinced my mother to buy; when he emptied fireplace ash on the floor and cleaned it up, when he put on the shampoo head “easily” or when he collapsed the whole thing into basically the same shape but folded over (it was the 80’s I guess that was a selling point).

Either way, we had a Kirby Vacuum after that night…. and it was never as sweet as it was right before we bought it. Loud; check. Heavy; check (it used to sit at the top of the stairs for hours until someone got the courage to carry it down). Impossible to use; check. We never shampooed at thing with the “easy” attachment. Overall, that vacuum sucked.

Why bring that up? Because that’s the value of this type of campaign by Hoover, not necessarily to get me to speak about vacuums in particular, but to get us talking about cleaning and stories about it.

In this case: point Hoover.