r+d

Posts on innovation, user experience, research and design 
Tags


Filed under

Twitter

 
February 21, 2011
 

Conan's budding empire

Conan_pic

I don't watch a ton of late night television these days, but I love the rare occasion when I am able to catch some Conan (or Jimmy Fallon for that matter). Throughout the years, Conan has somehow managed to maintain a freshness to his show that is hard to pin down. In any case, I was intrigued by a recent Fortune article describing Conan's rise to the top of a digital empire after The Tonight Show debacle. What started out as a quest to be the host of The Tonight Show has ended in him charting a new path for the entertainment industry; one that bridges multiple media and has far-reaching implications for media distribution in a new age:

Weeks before Conan made its debut on TBS, O'Brien gave a presentation to top publicists in his new studio on the Warner Bros. lot. He and his digital staff explained that a guest's appearance on Conan was no longer just about being on air for 10 minutes; it was a connection to O'Brien's full social network of millions of fans -- a connection that could last for days or even months. "The same goes for their charities and pet projects," says Wooden. "We're ramping up our efforts to be producing digitally exclusive content with either guests on the show or people who can't appear because of scheduling conflicts."

How is he able to do this? The numbers from the Fortune infographic above tell the story: he's killing it across the board in new media. He has been since the first tweet (he set the world record for most follows in a day according to the article). 

What's most interesting to me is that all of this couldn't have happened much sooner than the time it did. Had Conan assumed the reins a few years earlier and the transition from Leno had failed (as it did) he would have had little recourse. He'd have been off the air and out of a show most likely. A modern-day Arsenio Hall.

But because of all of these alternative delivery channels and media, Conan was able to linger, rally his base and re-emerge as a new type of media icon for a new age of media consumption:

Like millions of other Americans, Conan O'Brien's life has been disrupted by the digital world, and he's been forced to reinvent himself. YouTube, TiVo (TIVO), Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have greatly diminished the cultural relevance of The Tonight Show, whose overall audience has shrunk 44%, from 5.6 million a night to 3.9 million, over the past five years, and whose key 18- to-49 demographic has shrunk from 2.4 million to 1.4 million during that time. O'Brien had worked his whole professional life with one goal in mind, to get to host The Tonight Show, and he got there, but he was born 10 years too late for it to really matter. Accidentally, however, he's learned how to innovate and make the Conan brand mean even more than The Tonight Show brand to a young, passionate, and growing audience.

Innovation in action.

Filed under  //   Coco   Conan O'Brian   Facebook   I'm with Coco   Twitter  

Comments [0]

October 27, 2010
 

How Square manages fraud

I came across this video tonight and thought it was a good example of how companies are beginning to harness the power of this sea of information we're swimming in to handle complex, real-time decisioning. In this case, Jack Dorsey describes the types of information they use to manage fraud risk at Square

Frommer: "One of the most interesting things for me is fraud. How do you do fraud in a different or smarter or in a 2.0 kind of way"
 
Dorsey: "We have strong identity on both sides [of the transaction]. Our users are putting up their Twitter accounts, their Yelp accounts, they put in an address which is on the map, so we can use this information to understand who they are and what they are trying to do so we can minimize a lot of that fraud and a lot of that risk because we have a greater understanding of their reputation in the ecosystem and in the world.
 
Frommer: So whereas my credit card company may be looking at my purchase history, you may be looking at my social media history to see if I'm a real person.  
 
Dorsey: Exactly. There's so much information out there that we can use to establish reputation and people are putting this information out willingly. You're saying, I am at this location, I'm buying a cappuccino now, or I think this about this news article, or I'm a business and I have a Yelp account with five stars. So there's a lot of information we can use in a very, very comfortable way to understand who a person is and verify their identity.
 
Frommer: And you can archive that in real time as transactions are occurring, your system can do that. And you're doing that now?
 
Dorsey: We're doing it.

Interesting fact that may only interest me
One other point to note. Jack mentions that only 6% of transactions have moved online. The other 94% are still happening in the "real" world. While I can't fact-check that statement, I'm sure Jack did. 
via

Filed under  //   Jack Dorsey   Twitter   Yelp   fraud   square  

Comments [0]

October 19, 2010
 

Quick thoughts on Twitter's UX

I liked this passage on some of the psychological differences between the UX of Twitter and Facebook, particularly the concept of following as a subscription and the type of relationship that sets up vs. friending. Given the privacy debacle Facebook has been dealing with the past 36 hours, the note on the simplicity of the privacy is also a big plus for Twitter.
 
Twitter nailed a few important things in their user experience compared to alternatives like Facebook. Posts are public by default, so there aren’t debates or surprises about privacy. Streams are built out of subscriptions (“following”), not “friendship”—a word that loses meaning when your friends are 500 strangers.

via 37 Signals 

 

Filed under  //   Facebook   Twitter   UX   privacy   usability   user-centered design  

Comments [0]

August 9, 2010
 

Twitter's recruiting video

Nothing too fancy here. Just a creative and interesting recruitment video that seems to be channeling Wes Anderson. All they needed was a slow-motion running scene to cap it off. Young companies are fun. 

Filed under  //   HR   PR   Rushmore   Twitter   Wes Anderson   recruiting  

Comments [0]

June 24, 2010
 

Magnets, hooks and glue

Hooks

Mark Trammel from Twitter recently hosted a Web Masters Tour event in Philly for User Interface Engineering, a usability consultancy. While the article is not surprisingly, focused on Twitter, I really liked the concept of magnets, hooks and glue and found them to be widely applicable.

From the post:
  • Magnets are things that pull people to a service but may not keep them there. Celebrities are strong magnets for Twitter but do not keep people there.
  • Hooks get people to return to a service. Connections with family members and subject matter experts get people hooked on Twitter.
  • Glue is a mix of news & information sources, celebrities, friends/family, and local businesses. When people get a good mix of these items on Twitter –that binds them to the service.
Again, the definitions are specific to Twitter, but the basic principles are fundamental to customer acquisition and retention. I thought this was neat shorthand for thinking along these lines.

Read the full post at UIE

photo | sun dazed

Filed under  //   Twitter   customer experience   cx   ladder of engagement   made to stick   user experience   ux  

Comments [0]

March 25, 2010
 

Location Wars at SXSW

Speaks for itself. It's a little long (i.e. you get the point pretty quickly), but if SXSW was intended to be the one of the early, important skirmishes of the nascent location wars, this is how Foursquare fared against Gowalla, Twitter, Flickr and a few others. Incidentally, Foursquare is widely believed to have been the victor. It's still early though.

Filed under  //   Flickr   Foursquare   Gowalla   SXSW   Twitter   Vicarious.ly   check-in   location  

Comments [0]