Although Twitter co-founder Biz Stone calls it “non-traditional” in his blog post, the model sounds very similar to Google. Tying ads to only searches will help to avoid upsetting the user base: you won’t see the ads unless you use Twitter to search for something. And at the same time, the advertisers will have at least a vague idea of what you’re interested in.

After having taken such a long time to think of a revenue model that “puts users first, amplifies existing value, and generates profit“, I expected Twitter to come up with something way different than this. I anticipated them not to resort to an advertising model for revenue, and instead go for something that would’ve involved the users in paying for the service.

That kind of system shouldn’t be created by suddenly forcing users to pay for the basic functionality they now get for free, but by carefully investigating what sort of new premium features the most active Twitter users would be willing to pay for, and combining that with a system that would allow users to earn and give credit for the things they do on Twitter. I myself, as an example of a pretty active Twitter user, wouldn’t be excited to pay for the tweets I send, but if I could get new and effective tools for finding more like-minded people to follow me, I could be willing to pay for that. I could also pay for the ability of setting up custom groups for tweeters, and I could see some media companies and journalists, reportedly using Twitter more and more often as a source, be willing to pay for special features tailored to their needs.

With a credit-earning system in place, the average Twitter user who wants to use a premium feature wouldn’t necessarily need to flash out his credit card every time he wants access to premium features. Instead, he could use credits that he’s earned by doing things like favoriting tweets and recommending users to others. Such a system would help drive the further growth of Twitter as well as support the existing ecosystem, where many additional features have already been introduced through 3rd party apps, mashups and community-driven innovation.

Of course, building such a system and then growing its value would take time. It seems evident that some investors and monitors have grown frustrated to wait for Twitter to find a way to start making money for all the publicity and millions of users the service has attracted. It feels like Twitter’s had to press the panic button and come up with a solution that will appease the investors for the time being.

But that seems incredibly short-sighted. More and more clearly, the biggest challenge that people are facing in the digital age is that it will, if it hasn’t already, disrupt the traditional business models of so many industries from advertising to entertainment to communications to all media in general. People are forced to look for entirely new models to nurture both business and usefulness online, and in the long term, only those who embrace this current time of uncertainty as a real opportunity and dream up something bigger than just a slightly modified copy of the old will truly succeed.

In the music business, record labels all complain about how illegal file sharing and new digital distros are killing their business. But this graph shows that while labels are seeing their profits diminish, artists and promoters are experiencing growth in the amount of money they make from live performances. Digital distribution has opened the door for thousands of small, independent artists who in the past didn’t have that much chance to get discovered.

I’m not saying that the future of the music industry is entirely in free file sharing or that it would be easy for Twitter, or any other service, to build a complex system that manages to both credit users for their actions and make real money at the same time. But I’m saying that look left or right, up or down, it’s evident that there is a big change taking place, and that change will require us to completely rethink our approach to a lot of the business we do now. Twitter’s advertising model doesn’t look like rethinking to me. Instead, it looks like reusing and slightly repurposing something that’s already been used. And they’re doing it at a time when the world calls for something much bigger than that.

Karri Ojanen

His tweet made me think of a number of things I think should be common sense, knowledge and understanding in this industry by now. I made a list of some of those. Besides Matt’s tweet, my list is inspired by the Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by Bruce Mau, and if you end up reading through my list, I encourage you to continue by reading through Bruce’s.

Most of what we think we discover now as “new” was in fact already discovered before
Recently, I watched the documentary “Objectified“, directed by Gary Hustwit who also did “Helvetica“. Listening to people like Bill Moggridge talk in the film, I had several moments where I thought that many of the fundamental insights, thoughts and even methodology that people now feel like they’re discovering as “new” in the context of software, interactive media and interaction design where actually already discovered earlier, but in a different context. What’s hard for people is to take that knowledge and to apply it to a different context. That’s why, even if the things we think we are discovering now aren’t genuinely “new”, there’s tremendous value in rediscovering those things and applying them to the current context.

Clients don’t envision the future, they inform the present
It’s way too easy to blame almost every challenge in this industry on the client. Henry Ford said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse.”" If we’re the experts in this business, we need to be the ones who envision the future of it.

Interactive media works best when it’s… interactive
TV and video still work, books still work, great stories are definitely still great stories. Banner ads may have a purpose and some of the content on YouTube gets hugely popular. But the one thing about interactive, online media that is different to traditional TV, radio and print is that it’s two-way communication, it allows instant interaction. The best solutions online are those that encourage and use interactivity to the max.

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
That’s a quote from Steve Jobs. But I wish that it wouldn’t need to be – I wish that everybody who develops solutions for interactive media would understand that visual design, technical design and user experience design shouldn’t be separated. Form and function aren’t to be divided into separate processes – they are one.

Great design isn’t based on research alone, it’s research + intuition
The great “big ideas” of the digital age won’t come from academic research alone, they’ll come from intuition, from a real “design sense”, from the designers’ and developers’ understanding of today’s world and the people who consume media.

Separate the problems and you’ll mess up the solution
We are all strategic thinkers, developers, designers and writers, on some level. Of course, we all have our titles and own specific areas of expertise, and so it should be, but when we brainstorm, discuss great ideas and seek for solutions, the technologists, the strategists and the experienceists should all be around the same table. And never mind who ends up leading that process, or who the greatest ideas end up coming from – arguing about who should lead will only distract us from getting to our common goal: finding the best answer.

From Bruce Mau: “Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.”

Keep up your connection to the work at ground level
Without a hands on approach to its business on all levels of management, the company will lose its touch with the reality. Those at the top level of management should be as connected to the everyday reality of the business as those on the lowest levels – as much as possible.

If you talk about Twitter to your clients and discuss it with your peers, make sure you have tried it yourself. If you’re asked to develop the design for a new blog, make sure you’ve blogged. I find a surprising amount of people in this industry who haven’t actually used the things they talk about.

Think of not just the media you can buy, but also the media you can earn
Learn to think of ‘media’ in new ways. Don’t think of just the media you can buy, but also the media you can earn from your audience, if you get them engaged. And then how that media goes back, and gets redeveloped by both you and the audience again. When you’re thinking of designing an effective interactive solution, think of building an engine, not a billboard.

The effort to control will more often lead to loss of control
An effort to control what is being said about you will most often lead to even more things being said about you. Instead of trying to control the conversation and trying to stop it, see what you can make out of it. When there is a problem, the only way to fix it is to fix it. Stopping people from bringing the problem up will only make it worse.

You need vision first before you can develop passion
“Social media”, “user experience design”, “platform solutions” – all of those (and many more) are just buzzwords until you come up with a plan.

Too many companies have not decided whether they want to conserve the past, define the future, or just turn to others for leadership. They lack vision, but they keep asking their workers for passion.

Karri Ojanen

One online community that shows how digital media is shaping our lives in both practical as well as social and cultural terms is Craigslist. The service that bears the first name of its founder, Craig Newmark, may not have come so far in terms of its visual look from its humble beginnings as an email distribution list in 1995. But in terms of its influence and reach, Craigslist has grown to a remarkable size, serving over twenty billion page views each month.

With over eighty million new classified ads going up every month, Craigslist has become the host of both good and bad: from apartments, goods and services to finding a date or someone to stalk, to allegations of enabling child prostitution and – ironically, given Craigslist’s own past as a small, local community – crushing smaller, local businesses.

Such a great variety of things can be found on Craigslist that Jason Paul, a young journalist, finding himself unemployed after graduating from college, has decided to live his life off Craigslist for nine months. What does that mean? Here are the basic rules Jason has written for himself:

• “I will start with $2,500 that I’ve saved during college
• I will have a car, a phone, a computer and cameras to document the trip
• I am not allowed to live out of my car
• I am not allowed to live with someone I know for longer than a week at the beginning of each city
• I am allowed one large bag containing clothes and a few staple foods
• I am not allowed to initiate contact with someone unless it is through an online interaction”

So, simply put, Jason aims to find all his jobs, housing, friends, food and other necessities entirely via Craigslist. It’s an idea that reminds me a bit of Morgan Spurlock’s “30 Days“, but times nine, and pulling in the digital aspect. Jason is documenting his experiences on his website, LivingCraigslist.com, and of course, you can follow him on Twitter or become his fan on Facebook.

Would you try the same thing (or have you already)? What sort of things have you looked for, and found, on Craigslist? How do you think this is changing us as people – or is it really?

(this post is also up on ThreeMinds)

Karri Ojanen

The advertising industry has been rooted in the idea of the campaign – that is what agencies, by and large, do. And campaigns come and go, while a few overarching themes in them are constantly refreshed with new pieces of creative.

Now, even as ad agencies have been migrating into the digital space, most of them have continued to approach what they do through the idea of a campaign. And the idea of a campaign is the idea of ups and downs. For when the campaign is running, there’s media in the market, and the audience grows. But as soon as the media is pulled off, or as soon as all the people have seen the campaign, the audience breaks up and drives off. And then the agency and the client are on to the next campaign again. That’s what the entire advertising business has been about.

But those who see the future of this business in the digital age are starting to see the rise of platforms. Platforms that are built to last. Platforms don’t necessarily go into the market with a bang, with lots of media buy, but they grow over time. Platforms are rooted in utility, and they provide something that the customer, the audience, will feel like using, and using again and again. The best and most pervasive platforms become a part of the audience’s lives. They’re more like services and tools than a 30-second spot or a clever billboard ad.

And the platform, when it encourages the audience to create and distribute their own content, and aggregates it from various sources, then becomes a media engine for the advertiser: the content, the comments, and overall enthusiasm from the audience feeds back into the platform, which can then churn out the content back to the audience again. And that content is much more real, much more authentic than traditional advertising material, because it comes from the audience itself. That content is what is called earned media.

Some examples of great platform ideas are, of course, the Nike+, and, in Europe, the Seppälä Supermodel Search, which I myself was lucky to get to help create back in 2006, and the way that HSL, the Helsinki Region Transit Commission, has sourced both utility and marketing material out of its Journey Planner and Transit Cost Calculator.

The problem with these platforms to many in the advertising and media buy+sell industry is that they don’t match the idea that we’ve had for so long of what is advertising. To envision, design and develop these platforms, it takes a different kind of a team, a different set of talent than what’s been used in traditional advertising. And it takes a different mindset. The way that people consume media, the way that they connect, is now driven much more by technology than it was before. To develop platforms, a new breed of creative technologists need to get a real seat at the creative ideation table. And, perhaps even more importantly, to make sense of all the different connections, links and experiences across different technologies and devices, agencies need Experience Leads to replace the old definition of Creative Directors. It’s an opportunity, rather than a threat, for all of us to grow and explore new things.

Sure, old style campaigns will most likely still be made for a good while, as this giant industry slowly changes, just like VHS tapes were sold for a time after the coming of the DVD, but forward thinking individuals and agencies have started to realize the change that is taking place. And this change is driven by the consumer, the audience, who, ultimately, is our real source of income. If we lose the attention of that group, we lose our business.

Change is often scary, but think about it: wouldn’t it be nice to get away from the ups and downs of the campaign era, and enter a new era of sustainable growth?

Karri Ojanen

The announcement quickly created discussion about whether doing away with campaign sites and focusing presence on existing social media platforms is wise, risky, or threatens ad agencies.

Campaign microsites, like banner ads, are a form of online advertising that, for advertisers and agencies coming from traditional advertising, have been easier to define, plan, control, and measure. It’s reminiscent of the old order, and therefore easier to grasp.

However, it doesn’t mean that’s where the online audience is going. Generating awareness and driving people to the microsite takes effort, and has no guaranteed outcome. People get annoyed when a brand tries to interrupt their online activity with “incoming messages”. So it makes sense, then, to go where the people already are: existing, and hugely popular social media platforms.

Coca-Cola and Unilever will undoubtedly benefit from moving away from the old model of buying traffic for short-term experiences, but there is still something here that smacks of old channel-based thinking. People I heard talk about this during the week seemed to think of it as an either-or question: it’s either sites, or Facebook. From the news article, it’s difficult to tell whether that’s how Coke and Unilever themselves see it.

In the old, channel-based thinking, there’s a box for everything. “Social media” is one box, and television, banner ad and billboard are others. But in the digital age, that’s not how things work. The whole of the Internet is social – people are social. The boxes, i.e. the channels, are connected, linked to each other, and instead of choosing just one, smart marketers need to see how to connect them in a way that interests the audience. If Coke, Unilever, and other brands really get it, they won’t just do away with campaign sites completely and switch to another channel, “social media”, but learn how to best connect them and look at the digital experience holistically.

Karri Ojanen

Sounds rather obvious, doesn’t it? But Engeström claims that the world’s biggest cell phone maker Nokia may have lost the crucial connection between what happens in the field and what happens in the managers’ world. Where at Google, says Engeström, even the most top level managers are still contributing to the code themselves and monitoring the development of their products first hand, at Nokia the bosses are lost in their own chambers. At Google, the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have even given up their personal assistants because they didn’t want to get estranged from their workers and the people who use their products.

A recent post in the Harvard Business Blog talks about the change we’re witnessing in organizations around us due to the development of networking tools such as Twitter. The writer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, recalls how America in the 20th century was called a “society of organizations”. Formal hierarchies with clear reporting relationships gave people their position and their power.

In the 21st century, however, the world is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within companies and other organizations. People with power and influence derive that power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done. There’s a study that shows some of the fastest growing companies realize that, at least on the level of how they use social media in their marketing mix.

But in terms of the organizational structure, I bet that Nokia isn’t alone with its problem. In fact, I think that most companies around the world that were born in the industrial era are struggling to change to become more like Google, a company mostly developed in the networking era of the 21st century, where a less hierarchical model of connecting and sharing ideas comes more natural.

In the advertising world, there is a debate about traditional vs. digital, and how to combine the things we have learned from both thus far to drive the future. The world we work in, in (digital) advertising, is going through constant change at a seemingly increasing speed with every new tool, piece of code, site and platform that becomes somehow meaningful. Maintaining a good connection to what happens on the ground is a challenge, but it’s easier for those who actively network and participate in the discussion, and who are willing to let go of the old hierarchical model of management. It doesn’t mean that everybody needs to be a coder, a director, a designer and a hyperactive, visionary Twitter user all at the same time, but it helps to have done a bit of it all to have experienced it first hand, and maintain that connection to the ground through all the cycles of change.

Karri Ojanen

I spent all of yesterday and half of today at Idea09, then switched to CaseCamp after lunch to check out a couple speakers there. While at Idea, I did what many others were doing – I tweeted quotes, thoughts and comments on what I was seeing and hearing at the conference live on Twitter. In total, I sent 36 updates yesterday and 36 today, the majority of which were from Idea09, sent with the #idea09 hashtag.

Today my tweets from the conference prompted a co-worker, who follows me, to tweet that the constant stream of updates is annoying him and that I should “censor” myself. Meanwhile, there were a couple dozen other people who were actively re-tweeting and following what I had to say from the conference, and I added 35 new followers during the day. So I quickly replied to my co-worker by saying that I understood his personal concern but that he should simply tune out the #idea09 hashtag if he didn’t want to read those tweets.

That prompted Christian Crumlish to point out that there should be a way for Twitter users to mute hashtags they don’t want to follow – an obvious opportunity for Twitter app developers or anybody else who would want to add this simple feature (that should already exist).

In no way do I mean to say that what my co-worker was saying was pointless. But the simple beauty of Twitter is that you don’t have to follow people you don’t want to follow. Among my followers, I understand that I have different people with different reasons for following me. I know that some follow me because of the things I say about experience architecture and design, some others for the tweets about mobile, and then there are others who follow me simply because we’re friends in real life. I know that not everyone was interested in reading my tweets from Idea09 today, and if some of those people stopped following me because of the high number of conference updates, they had every right and ability to do so.

I think what I’m saying here goes back to some of what Luke Wroblewski had to say as part of his presentation at Idea09 yesterday: the connections that people make on Twitter are 1-way, as opposed to the 2-way model on Facebook. If someone decides to follow me on Twitter, they can just go to my Twitter page and hit ‘follow’. There’s no “Confirm” or “Ignore” like on Facebook, there’s no message I need to reply to before they can follow m.

I think that’s something that my co-worker hasn’t fully understood – that and the fact that Twitter is indeed different to full blogs online.

The signal-to-noise-ratio on Twitter is quite low (the higher the ratio is, the less obtrusive the noise is, right?) because of the nature of the service. While I do try to concentrate on just a handful of things, such as UXD+IxD, mobile and sometimes local, Toronto news, in my updates, I don’t tweet about just one topic. If you decide to follow me for just one topic, you’re gonna have to learn how to tune out the rest, or otherwise just stop following me when the topic’s not interesting or the update frequency gets too high. You’re the follower, and you’re in charge of who you follow.

Karri Ojanen

Featurewise, many knew to expect something like this. With touchscreens, Nokia is behind its competitors who have already rolled out several touchscreen and touchscreen + QWERTY devices ever since the first iPhone was originally announced in the beginning of 2007 (though people forget that Nokia did, in fact, launch its first touch screen phone, the 7700, already almost five years ago). Nokia is known for its good engineering and components, but engineering or the length of the technical feature list alone don’t equal good user experience. The iPhone, even with its own usability flaws (like the missing copy+paste), has shown that the mobile market of today is about the ease of use, the availability of services, and, of course good marketing and aesthetic design. Nokia’s Symbian OS appears stiff compared to the iPhone interface and Nokia has lost much of its coolness factor. The company that had got used to being almost the one and only is now faced by competition from not just Apple, but Google, Microsoft, and the well-performing Korean manufacturers, Samsung and LG.

So with the new N97 coming out in 2009, the key questions are: does the feature-packed device also pack smooth usability, and how well does it connect with services? Impressive hardware alone will not win back market share for Nokia.

As far as I can tell, the N97 doesn’t use capacitive touchscreen technology, like the iPhone, but has a resistive screen with tactile feedback, like the earlier announced Nokia 5800. That alone is not a major letdown, because the capacitive touchscreen tech also has its cons. It only responds to finger contact and will not work with a gloved hand. The N97 supports gestures, like the iPhone, allowing the same kind of browsing and zooming experience as on the iPhone.

At least in this video, the N97′s new Symbian S60 5th Edition OS looks smooth and the web widgets that can be moved around with the finger to personalize the user’s home screen look like fun. If this is the experience consistently through the phone menus, Nokia may be doing well OS-wise. But what about the services?

Nokia’s CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo boasts that Nokia is rolling out services that “coordinate the world” for the user, “make the mobile Internet experience personal,” and bring social services to the mobile in a way that hasn’t yet been seen. What’s behind Kallasvuo’s words, for one, is the new Point and Find service, which will let users point at landmarks with the phone camera to slurp down location info from the Internet. Read that again. People can point at a building with the phone, and get info about the building. Now that is pretty remarkable, isn’t it, and creates an incredible opportunity for marketers as well. Right now The Point and Find service has a website, or rather just one page with the text “coming soon,” but it is anticipated that the service will become officially available when the N97 comes to stores next spring.

The Google/T-Mobile G1 has the ability to spin Google street-view photos as the user spins. Nokia will obviously top that with Point and Find. But I’m sure it won’t be too long before Nokia’s competitors get similar services out, and that’s what’s so great about the mobile market now. Couple years ago, before the iPhone came out, things seemed a bit stagnated, with Nokia dominating almost everywhere in the world. But now things are happening. There’s also the new ‘Facebook phone‘ that 3/Hutchison Whampoa is launching in the UK that will probably become more quickly popular among real masses than the 500 – 900 euro Nokia N97.

I believe we now have much of the technology, much of the understanding, and much of the user base to be very, very close to a real breakthrough in mobile. The real always-on, always-with-you, social and location-aware Internet experience is coming together.

@threefour
@louisrosenfeld
@mmilan
@jeffparks
@martastrickland
@craigritchie
@ericamhc
@emenel
@conej
@mariobourque

You can read the whole article in his GeekMedia blog here, together with his presentation that is also available on Slideshare (the illustration above is my own, but inspired by by Graeme’s text).  As a teaser for the article, here are some of my favorite bits from it:

“The next big development will be the move from the Internet of data to the internet of things – everything can communicate with everything else.”

“We are going to move over the next few years from millions of computers CONNECTED by the internet, to one huge computer that IS the internet. Every device will be a window into it.”

“This will obviously mean that a huge amount of data is flying around, and that where there is more information, there is less attention. So brands will have to work even harder to earn that attention.”

“Remember, the internet is not a medium, it is a way of organising and structuring information. To have more chance of unlocking its potential, we need to think of it in terms of other systems for structuring information. For example, the alphabet. We haven’t worried about relying on the alphabet to store our information for the last 1500 years. And we don’t use the alphabet as an advertising medium. Well, we do, obviously – copy is written in words, ideas are created and sold in words. But it is something so fundamental that it goes on in the background. If we think of technology in terms of media channels like TV and radio, our frame of reference is too narrow.”