ChaosScenario

What are we writing?

Ryan Barrett of Cheap Thrills had an interesting idea, and whether you're a contributing author to Age of Conversation 2, I think you'll enjoy her effort.

She's collecting passages from the different authors' chapters.

If you wrote a chapter, please go on over and post a brief snippet from your work.

If you just want a sneak peak, this is the place to get it.

Enjoy! - Cam Beck

Is Our Children Learning?

Here's an interesting video about fully utilizing the technology that is available today to disrupt and break through the restraints of the traditional classroom environment in the hopes that it will enable our kids to learn. There are going to be a lot of people who reject the concept because it's not what they had to do to learn.

Before we go off on a tangent about how stupid our kids are and so forth, we need to check ourselves first. Are we willing to challenge our own assumptions?

The world is different than it was 30 years ago. Shall I list a few significant ways this world come together to evince a design to compete for the attention (and the education) of our kids?

1. We didn't have satellite TV.
2. We barely had portable music players, and certainly not anything that could store hundreds of hours of music at once.
3. Cable television was not widespread. Mostly it was just the big three networks, and if they didn't have something on that you wanted to see, tough luck.
4. Nearly 6 in 10 mothers stayed at home to ensure the kids (the students) did what they were supposed to.

Don't look at this as a plea for a return to a bygone era. That's not the point. It isn't that kids aren't learning, anyway. It's that they're not learning what we want them to in the manner we want them to learn it.

The point is that, for good or ill, the world has changed, and we'd best be prepared to deal with it. Today's tools give us the ability to play in the same space our kids want to play in. We have the technology. We have the wealth. Why are we withholding it?

Thanks to Mike Sansone for the video. Thanks to President George W. Bush for the quote that just keeps on giving. And most of all, thanks to the teachers who won't quit on their kids and who won't quit learning. - Cam Beck

For more information on learning, please see my brother's article, "Your Education Plan," in which he also pays tribute to one of our learning heroes, George Cressman - our grandfather.

Innovation by the Hour

While I enjoy performing research, one of the most rewarding parts of my job is finding interesting solutions to business problems that the research uncovers. The process itself can be at once both stimulating and tedious. You have to enjoy the process, though, because you're not always going to be able to apply solutions you might dream of because budgets, timelines, and narrow-minded thinking might prohibit it.

Here's the dilemma: Agencies typically bill at an hourly rate, not at the rate of innovation. So if in the process of developing and selling a solution that is workable within the scope of the project, you happen to make a highly innovative but simple connection of two disparate ideas that will help you more quickly solve a different problem you might encounter on another project, for another client, to whom does that idea belong, and what can you charge for it?

The Client Owns the Idea
You could make the argument that the company that you billed the time to while you made the discovery owns the idea, but in some cases it was never even presented -- it was just one of the paths you went down when you were looking for something else.

The Agency Owns the Idea
And you can also say that the agency owns the idea, except many times key stakeholders aren't really aware that the idea exists. All they are aware of is the final outcome, which they may or may not be satisfied with, either of which they can usually live with if the client is happy and pays their bills on time.

Plus, since the innovation initially occurred on someone else's dime, the apparent cost may be disproportionate to the time billed on it. Since the idea is far more valuable than the time spent on it (for this project), how can the company in good conscience bill another for an idea when they have agreed to pay based on time spent? (Answer: They can't.)

The Employee Owns the Idea
Companies provide resources and create an environment where connections can be made, but ideas are not promulgated apart from people.

If the idea is that innovative and the employee recognize it, the enterprising employee may look to advance himself by assuming the risks, breaking off to form his own company and sell the idea on the open marketplace.

Or he may use the idea to advance the company for which he works (and his own status within it). This is especially attractive if

1. The person is confident that his company will sufficiently reward him for the innovation and
2. More risk is entailed in launching the idea than he is willing to assume.

Learn, Practice, Practice
Lewis Green includes this anecdote in his email signature. It represents an exchange that allegedly occurred between Pablo Picasso and a patron who commissioned Picasso for a sketch that Picasso quickly executed:

And what do I owe you?" she asked.

"Five thousand francs," he answered.

"But it only took you three minutes," she politely reminded him.

"No," Picasso said, "It took me all my life."

Reflecting on this recently, I started to wonder: In a marketplace where ideas, not time spent, are the chief source of prosperity, why do we bill hour time hourly?

Rather than measure our success by number of hours billed and the rate at which we can bill it, a more telling metric would be to measure the number of useful ideas generated and cataloged per project.

I suspect that the company that established a way to catalog, recognize, reward, and recall such ideas as needed would eventually build a surplus of useful innovations in the course of a project that would benefit them and their clients tremendously.

The Copycat Web
The truth is that ideas are promiscuous anyway, so claiming exclusive ownership of them is problematic. The guy who first called the home page the home page is not living a life of luxury because he collects trademark fees from everyone who has a home page.

Ideas aren't spread because you spent a lot of time on them.

They aren't spread because you bill a high hourly rate.

Ideas spread because they're useful.

So why do we continue to bill by the hour? Maybe because that's the most reasonable accord clients and vendors can reach.

Or maybe it's because we lack the imagination to think of something better. - Cam Beck

Happy Mother's Day

It's a day late, but I wanted to make sure we really sit to reflect on just how many lessons Moms teach us in a 24-hour period. Enjoy!

- Cam Beck

My Media Diet: No Rest for the Weary

The brilliant and indefatigable Arun Rajagopal requested that I share my media consumption habits.

Books
I read mostly nonfiction -- focusing on business and marketing, history and current events, self-help and philosophy --, but I've been trying to break out of that by reading a little more fiction. To that end, I read The Sea Wolf by Jack London last month. I just finished The Christian Husband 2 nights ago. Currently I'm making my way through the excellent *Personality Not Included, for which I will write at least one review when I finish, and Hitler 1936-1945 by Ian Kershaw.

News
I admit it. Although I love newsprint for reasons David Reich, Bob Glaza and Tangerine Toad all expressed at one point or another, I still get most of my news online. I regularly check USAToday.com, MSNBC.com, WorldNetDaily (plus its print monthly, Whistleblower), and various news aggregation websites such as The Drudge Report and Scott Baradell's Spin Thicket, both of which often take me to news stories on websites I would not have otherwise found. I also pick up whatever is lying around here in the office. There is usually a Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Dallas Morning News, and a USA Today around here somewhere.

RSS Feeds

Podcasts

Who's Next?
Now I'm going to look to the younger generation to see what our future holds. I'm interested in what media Nathan Snell, Ryan Karpales, The Great Haw, and Mario Vellandi are consuming. And because I need some help in speaking and writing (and because I've found their contributions very helpful), I also want to hear from Lisa Braithwaite and Kristin Gorski.

Step up to the plate. Time to share. :)

- Cam Beck

Don't Break the Back Button on Flash Sites

A recent academic study conducted by researchers from the Universities of Hamburg and Hannover found that people don't use their browser's back button as much as they used to, compared to other elements of a website. The back button is still the 3rd-most used Web feature, behind hyperlinks and contextual buttons (buttons that occur within the content of the page). Be careful in how you interpret this new information, though. The back button is still one of the most important parts of the browser.

The study just demonstrates that the way people interact with websites changes as our tools for building rich user experiences become more robust. The back button is as useful as it ever has been, so if you're thinking about breaking it just because it makes it easier for you to build a Flash site, don't.

What makes the back button so special?
The back button is a classic error-recovery tool that is useful for every application. Most of the time, the ways we recover from errors are invisible to us. We just know intuitively that we can recover. When we miscalculate the ease of recovery, we are inconvenienced in some way or another.

Let's look at some common examples of mistakes in our lives and how our recovery can be thwarted by poor usability.

1. When you walk out the door without your keys, you just go back in to get them. If the door locks automatically behind you, you're screwed.
2. When a slip of the tongue insults your spouse, you quickly correct yourself. If your spouse doesn't tell you were offensive, problems ensue.
3. When you print the wrong version document, you open up the correct one and print that instead. If your documents are indistinguishable to the naked eye, you have no way of knowing which is correct and which is outdated, you can cause yourself and your company embarrassment, and you could perhaps lose important business.

The back button works in much the same way. It's one of the reasons the Web is such a low-risk medium. The easier it appears to be to recover from an error, the less risk a person will perceive when confronting a task.

If the back button doesn't work on your site the way 99% of the people on the Web have learned the back button is supposed to behave, users are forced to relearn a special interface rule for your site, which increases perceived risk and decreases adoption.

The back button naturally works well for websites built in HTML sites, but to keep them working the way they're supposed to in Flash, it requires extra effort.

Some Bad Examples
If not done properly, browsers will see the Flash site as a single page, and no matter how deep you are within the site, clicking the back button will take you off the site entirely, forcing you to find your way back to where you were (or to give up and spend your time elsewhere).

(Dig a little bit into this site or this site, and hit the back button to see what I mean.)

See aceofcakestv.com for a particularly egregious example. This site is so hard to navigate that it requires special instructions just to inform people how to use it.

I take no pleasure in pointing out that 2 of the 3 bad examples of back-button breakage listed here are actually agency sites. For more information on this problem, check out this classic piece on Web Ink Now.

Not wanting to go through the process of ensuring the back button functions the way people are accustomed to, rather than risk losing a visitor, many times Flash developers will simply prevent anyone from using the back button through meta refreshes or otherwise controlling the way they point you to the site. This makes the back button inactive.

Those responsible for making such decisions only think they're trapping a user on a site, but the truth is anyone can get out of any site at any time by clicking the close button.

The chances of losing a visitor in frustration increase exponentially the more you annoy them.

Some Good Examples
One thing I've learned over the years is that it's easier to tell people what they ought to do than it is to actually do it. No one gets it 100% right, which is why any company website should be seen as a continuously evolving project -- it is never quite done.

Here are some sites that make noble attempts to keep the back button working right.

Flash is not evil or inherently bad. But if you're going to use it, make sure you use it correctly. There are tools available (Hat tip to my colleague and Flash developer at Click Here, Shawn Scarsdale, for the information about the tool) to make sure the back button behaves on Flash sites (and Flex and Ajax) the way users have come to expect it to behave on every other type of site. - Cam Beck

Get mom to a screening

Next Sunday is mother's day. Write it down now, don't forget!

So why get mom to go to a screening? Not a movie screening but a cancer screening. Yeah, it's not fun to talk about but cancer screening saves lives. Screening exams allow cancers to be diagnosed at the earliest stages and then treated when treatment will be the most effective.

This Mother's Day, send a gentle reminder to your mom to get those screening done:

This is self-promotion, the company I work did the work for this campaign. However, it's true, the early cancer is detected, the better the chances of successful treatment. You can learn more about cancer screenings and checklists here.

For my fellow bloggers, if you're so inclined, help us spread the word. - Paul Herring

The World is Just Awesome

Check out this new commercial from the Discovery Channel.

I've really been impressed with the shows on the channel lately, and because of that, I'm sure, this commercial may mean a little more to me than it does with those less familiar. Still, the tune is fetching, and you may get it stuck in your head for the next 48 hours as I have had it over the last 48.

If you haven't been watching the Discovery Channel, I suggest getting a good dose of Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs to shake you of your illusions about the tidiness of civilization. - Cam Beck

Be Joseph Jaffe. Fight Cancer.

Do You Want to Be Joseph Jaffe?

1. Download and print Joseph Jaffe's Name Tag (PDF 408Kb).
2. Take a picture and upload yourself holding it to this Flickr group.
3. Upload a video of yourself saying "I am Joseph Jaffe." You can embellish this phrase however you wish. Katie had a novel approach (Language warning).
4. Blog about it, including the picture. Link back to this post (That way I can consolidate them all for later and tally the results).
5. Donate at least $25 to the Frozen Pea Fund to help find a cure for cancer.

The background:
Although he planned to attend, Joseph Jaffe became ill right before Blogger Social, and he was unable to attend. Several people in the room “faked” Jaffe’s presence through Twitter by claiming they observed Jaffe in various states of embarrassment.

(I got this information second-hand, though. I didn't read the posts personally.)

Also present was the family of Susan Reynolds, cancer survivor, inspiration to many, and the one who, along with Connie Reece, is responsible for the Frozen Pea Fund, an organization founded and promoted almost entirely through social media.

Near the end of the event, crayon employee Scott Monty presented a check (courtesy of crayon client ooVoo) to the Reynolds’ family, for the Frozen Pea Fund, in the amount of $30,000. Once the excitement subsided, Monty made note of Jaffe’s absence and surprised everyone by auctioning off Jaffe’s name tag, with all proceeds going to the Frozen Pea Fund.

In short order, Geoff Livingston won with a $500 bid.

Geoff was sitting across from me at my table, and we discussed the possibility of letting anyone who wanted to be Joseph Jaffe for a day, for a $25 donation to the Frozen Pea Fund. Because of my proximity, I was the first to get the tag.

So what are you waiting for?
Download Joseph Jaffe's Name Tag. Fight cancer. Poke a little fun at one of the newest citizens of the U.S. Did I mention fight cancer? - Cam Beck

Marketers: Don't Prey. Pray.

Today is the National Day of Prayer in the U.S.

I originally did not intend to write a post about it, but as I drove to work, listening to the Focus on the Family broadcast, I reflected on something CK said to me once about how people have a distaste for marketers because they expect them to prey on people. If that's true, then marketers are seriously lacking in proper ethics and behavior.

Perhaps, I thought, this would be a good time to reflect on the things we can do to increase the likelihood that we behave in a way that brings credit to ourselves and our profession. I then was reminded, as I often am, on the wise admonition of George Washington.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. - George Washington

If CK's assessment is right, then I'm convinced that we need less preying and more praying.

The verse that immediately came to mind was Matthew 6:5-6, but before I posted it, I decided to break out and dust off (yeah, I know) my old study Bible and look up today's memorization verse. It's a much more appropriate passage for marketers, given our fears and motivations, don't you think?

"For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come to pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. - Jeremiah 32:27 (NIV)

I won't go into a long analysis of what that passage means, but instead will ask you to consider and meditate on it. Also, if you are so inclined  -- and even if you are usually not much for praying -- I would greatly appreciate your prayers, not only for me, but also for our leaders and our countries. - Cam Beck