Jonothan Stribling

When you’re one of the cool kids, it is pretty easy to forget that not everyone is in the cool club.

In fact, some people are so far removed from the cool club that they haven’t heard of Twitter, social media, ecommerce, WordPress, Android, the Nexus 1, or the RunKeeper iPhone application.

But generally, every human living in an advanced economy who can read has heard of Google and Facebook.

We’re so connected these days that it is easy to forget that there are a bunch of people who are not connected; who are yet to realise the liberating potential of the Internet.

And they know it. They know that no one uses the big yellow book to find a glazier or carpet cleaner. They know that their kids are doing things online that they might enjoy, that might make simple stuff easier but they haven’t made their move yet.

They are scared, intimidated and worried about looking stupid.

And all the cool kids reckon they are “stupid”. That’s why they are cool and not stupid, they are good at trying new stuff, seeing trends, labelling stuff.

Nothing online scares them. Except comic sans, fuscia backgrounds and being marketed to.

To me users should never be thought of as stupid. Rather, it is the marketers, designers and developers who make them feel stupid who are, well, stupid.

So many conversations in the tech, social, online communities concern the known world of tech, social and online.

It strikes me that it is a bubble where the people listening are the same people talking who are the same people publishing aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people reading the aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people thinking of the next aphoristic thought bomb.

It is exhausting, and to a complete outsider completely meaningless and uninteresting.

And because the same people are building the tools and selling the tools and dreaming up the next tools, the kids not part of the cool club are forgotten.

They are left to find their own way with poorly written copy, small fonts, poor documentation, badly handled errors, and unclear instructions.

And for anyone running an ecommerce site, a blog dependent on advertising, a remarketing program, or an online community dependent on user engagement and re-engagement this is not good for business.

Whilst Australia has high number of Internet and mobile users, future growth will come from people changing their habits and behaviours. This means they will go online, start booking stuff and buying online, connecting with friends online.

It is up to the people working to build online experiences on Internet devices to make this journey as easy as possible and remind all users that it is never the user, it is always the tool.

This means talking to people who you might not talk to often to find out how they use the Internet and if not why not.

This means looking outside the closed network for cool kids and digital hipsters to identify wants, needs, desires, fears and anxieties.

It means making sure that your website works for them and meets their needs.

It means having a presence in Google and Facebook which are two of the most common first steps online for a new user.
It means giving a voice to some members of the community who need it most by showing them how to setup a blog and start publishing.

The promise of the Internet and web 2.0 is social transformation for the better and we need to strive to make sure this promise can be delivered.

One of the hardest things to do is get a project, a blog, a business or a wacky plan started when you have a job and a life.

I have fallen in to the trap of creating great plans in my mind and then finding something else to do.

Like watching So You Think You Can Dance, Lost or Mad Men.

Or perhaps the footy game or cricket game just demands watching.

Or there might be a drink at a nice bar with some friends calling your name.

If you have dreams of being a player and work in a job every day then sometimes the nice things need to take a break so you can stop procrastinating and build on those dreams.

I am still working on building mine but here’s what I have learnt so far.

Make a routine of doing stuff

Routine used to sound so, well, routine to me, so boring. I wanted spontaneity, colour, laughter. The idea of a routine was enough to make me quit my job and hitch-hike up the east coast with a beautiful girl from London. But that is for another post.

Now I realise that a good workable routine can help create the space to have all the fun stuff whilst feeling good that I have met my commitments.

To get a routine started write down all your projects in different areas for the next 12 months. Then write down all your free time including time you currently devote to TV, mindless Internet meandering and lying around doing nothing.

For example I have free time whilst commuting, after dinner during the week and Sunday afternoon. This means that every week I can write two blog posts and spend four hours working on my super secret plan for being financially independent.

Don’t be scared

Starting out can be a scary prospect sometimes, chiefly because of irrational fears like “what if I don’t finish”, “what if I fail?” and “what if I am kidding myself?”.

The real question should really be “how much of a dickhead will I feel if I don’t do anything and continue being a lazy arse?”
Fear of failure is actually fear of being successful.

Turn off all distractions

If you’re like me, then you have 16 different things happening at a time including, twitter, facebook, that interesting article, that funny YouTube video, that cartoon I should laugh at, some technical documentation, a email from my wife, an sms from a mate and oh yes what I was meant to do doing.

Turn it all off!

It won’t hurt a bit and you might get something done.

The real answer to getting it done, is just getting it done, or as Gary Vaynerchuk commands, hustle.

You’re a small start-up. You’ve invested heaps of time and money in your twitter client which will be supported by advertising and suddenly Twitter throw a spanner at your well greased wheel.

What do you do?

Last week Twitter announced that they had acquired atebits, the folks behind the Twitter iPhone app tweetie.

As soon as they did there were a heap of tweets lamenting that Twitter had done so and saying “I feel sorry for all devs”.

There are people forming unions and grabbing the pitchforks to storm the barricades. They are talking about creating a new open platform to better Twitter.

The feeling was that Twitter had sucked the creativity out of being a twitter hacker and acted in a unilateral and nasty corporate way.

I think it is a great story. Some smart people developed a great application and have now sold it and made some money.

The developers complaining that Twitter is cutting their lunch should take a deep breath and start developing products that are better than any alternative so they attract eyeballs or acquisition. And perhaps work with open standards so they are not vulnerable to the whims of a corporation running a closed system.

Founder of Seesmic, Loic Le Meur writes that the competition should create innovation, although his post pre-dated the Tweetie acquisition.

Twitter obviously realise that owning the eyeballs and the experience across multiple platforms will ensure potential monetisation opportunities from advertising are not lost.

And given that last year the Twitter COO, Dick Costolo promised a new advertising platform that “we would love”, all evidence points to Twitter, that large and very popular start-up, growing up.

I do hope the advertising is as smart as Robert Scoble breathlessly writes that is going to be. As an online marketer, the idea of an advertising platform that people love is fantastic, and very likely fantastical.

What will be very interesting is whether Twitter becomes a start-up success story with super smart advertising, clever acquisitions and careful nurturing of their developer segment, or if they crash and burn having created a new paradigm for communication.

Once upon a time there was a Hollywood star called Tom Cruise who had the world at his feet.

He was famous, rich and in love with a beautiful young woman called Katie. Being rich and successful, woman loved him and men envied him.

Then one day late in 2005 whilst talking with talk-show host Oprah, Tom celebrated his success and the joy of life by dancing a jig on her sofa; by jumping the sofa.

Tom’s fans were appalled and ashamed for him. This irrational exuberance was not the Tom they loved and respected, it was a freaky guy who seemed to be more than a little self-absorbed. Gradually Tom’s fans turned away from him and stopped seeing his movies.

Jumping the sofa, much like jumping the shark for TV shows, was the beginning of the end of Tom’s glittering career. It represents the moment when his star had reached its ascendant and began to fall.

Tom had misjudged his audience and sent out the wrong message. He had the wrong idea about what people expected of him.

Jumping the sofa is pretty easy to do online.

All you need to do is veer off course into the ridiculous – unintentionally.

Change your argument halfway through a blog post.

Go off on an tangent about how there was this guy I went to school with who is now working in Amsterdam and reckons it is one of the greatest cities in the world, not for the drugs but the people.

Oops.

Get your developers to build something without talking to your customers.

Send an email campaign to the wrong customer.

Display the digital camera landing page to someone who clicked on the Ipod advertisement.

Launch a new product without talking to your customers or your market.

In fact it is easier to jump the sofa online than it is in real life (metaphorically of course, you could be jumping on your sofa right now and no one would care).

The easier it is to publish, the easier it is to be ridiculous, comical and absurd – and to turn people off.

There are quite a few examples of jumping the sofa online. Here is a very short list.

Facebook privacy policy change

In January this year, Facebook modified their privacy policy and automatically opted people out of the extra privacy setting that removed a user’s content from being displayed in search engines.

This shocked and dismayed Facebook users as it was a significant breach of trust for fairly transparent commercial reasons.

People need to be able to trust that the online spaces they populate with personal information. Facebook jumped the sofa and betrayed this trust.

Microsoft Vista

Microsoft Windows Vista was launched with a bang in 2006 and very quickly fizzled as users complained about bloated and slow software, random crashes, and pointless steps that made it harder to do things.

Under pressure to release a new operating system after significant market share gains by Apple, Microsoft focused on the flashy unimportant stuff like phat icons and forgot about the things that make an operating system a pleasure to use.

Microsoft jumped the sofa by focusing on pretty graphics and slick marketing at the expense of features that enhanced how people experienced the product.

Aol. logo

The merger between AOL and Time Warner is a great read about hubris overcoming commercial reality. Ten or so years later AOL Time Warner has demerged and AOL has relaunched as Aol., a content and media network polluting the Internet one crappy article at a time.

The story of Aol. is one of jumping the couch so high that a business that had 30 million ISP customers in 2001 is now a media company. Aol. is a great lesson in evolving with the market and listening to customers even if there might be some short term costs.

Google Buzz/Google Wave

Everyone loves Google. Sing it with me. Everyone loves Google.

The Google brand is so strong that they threaten to launch a new product and the Internet goes into meltdown chasing “exclusive” invitations so they can be among the first to get tell their friends about how great Google is and how Google are the next Google.

Sadly, most of these releases are overblown hyperbole. Google Buzz was an exception. Linked to GMail, Buzz had real potential to allow multiple conversations all easily indexable, searchable and findable.

Unfortunately Google forgot to listen to user concerns about privacy and automatically added email and chat recipients as followers in Buzz. This was fine except the follower lists were public.

The fallout was massive, providing “evidence” to many people that Google didn’t care about privacy.

To their credit Google fixed the problem very quickly and proved why they are one of the strongest global brands – they listen to their customers and admit when they haven’t.

These are just a few examples of how some brands have jumped the sofa online by getting caught up in their own hubris and not listening to their customers.

The Internet makes it easy to listen and even converse with your customers. Get online and research your next decision before jumping the sofa. Talk to your customers. Take a moment to think about what you’re trying to achieve.

Have a really good think before you climb up on the sofa and make like Tom Cruise. And if you still want to, then go right ahead.