No Boundaries

I need to both: wrap-up Sundance while I can still remember all of  it, and post my Vancouver images from last November. But I’m currently enthralled, although less and less every day, with the above-titled phenomena.  And I mean phenomena in the scientific sense of the term. I think business schools will be studying exactly what happened over the last week-and-a-half  for a long time to come.  My focus has shifted from the merits of Flash, which was the core of the debate, to Twitter, social marketing campaigns and how everything is very different these days.

My personal opinion about what happened is:  Apple, having opposing lines of business: selling gizmos and selling stuff that runs on gizmos, crossed something of a rubicon.  They were faced with either marketing their device with an obvious and important feature missing or giving up the ability to control and monetize all sorts of things that run on the device.

Apple chose a bold and aggressive path.  They targeted Flash as very bad for almost anything (or Adobe as lazy at any rate) and themselves as providers of a forward-looking salve to the badness in having excluded it. Once that sort of argument is made, retreat isn’t likely. None of this is good for Adobe, but I think, in many ways, it has turned out worse for Apple.

Fresh from a Sundance seminar on social-network marketing, I quickly installed my Tweetdeck when I first heard of the missing Flash content. With the search terms Flash and Ipad, I monitored, every now and then, as the tweetstream unfolded. This proceeded and has outlasted any conventional media coverage and, to me, was just incredible in both sheer volume and the varied directions of the content.

The tweets took three general forms:

The disappointed were those who had been over-hyped and were saddened to see the device was less magical than they had thought it would be.  These tweets contained lists of items that they wanted to see on the device,  almost always including Flash.  These were prominent early, diminished rapidly from that maxima, and have continued to roll in steadily.

The Flash-defenders tended to focus almost exclusively on the absence of Flash, Apple’s motivations in having excluding it, and how useless they feel the device would be without it. Their overall theme was the blue lego block/tile which is present when Flash or other plugin content can’t be shown. These were fairly constant for the first week but have dissipated dramatically in the last couple of days.

The HTML5 fanboys were those who dislike Adobe and Flash very much. The depth of the animosity is surprising. These tweets contained both glee and malice in equal measure.

Early on, the tenor of these evolved from a  general sense that “Adobe is evil” and “Adobe’s comeuppance is glorious” (paraphrasing there) to the well-spun reason for the Flash exclusion: that it is buggy and crashes browsers. Most unfortunately for Apple, the computers  mentioned as crashing were overwhelmingly mac’s. I can’t remember seeing a single mention of a PC crash.  In a tangential evolutionary path, tweets listed other software (word etc.) that crashes mac’s and offered thanks to Apple for excluding those. These are somewhat diminished from elevated early levels, but in the last day have shifted away from citing performance problems on mac’s.

A quick note on how Twitter works is important here. I was monitoring for the two search terms: Flash and Ipad. Tweets are often sent within small networks and re-tweeted (or restated and sent again) by those who receive them.  So a single popular tweet can be magnified, by a factor in the thousands or hundred’s-of-thousands probably, in a view of all of the tweets that mention certain terms.

My take-away from all of this is that: two years ago, a public relations or marketing strategy could be thought-out and implemented using pundits, journalists, celebrity endorsement, advertising in all sorts of media, product placement etc.  If, for any reason, the strategy took a wrong turn, all of these could be managed.

Twitter and other forms of social media are very different. If a message (Flash is buggy)  takes a wrong turn (my mac is constantly crashing), the wrong message can avalanche and there is no control.

Recently there have been many examples of the positive use of social media in marketing and political campaigns.  There is a less happy lesson in all of this. The tweetage of the disappointed were unfortunate for Apple but could have been repaired with addition of this and that to the device before release. The push-back from the Flash crowd was probably expected and could be explained as the disappointment of those left behind. But the unanticipated tweet-roar that mac’s are constantly crashing, from the Apple faithful, may have done some real damage to the brand.

I did an extremely small amount of research, googling four of the mac-crash-afflicted, and determined that they are probably of the very young demographic.  So, from my entirely unscientific exploration, Flash appears likely to crash your browser if you are using a mac, and extremely likely to crash your browser if you are using a mac and looking forward to your sixteenth birthday.

Speaking very generally, the possible magnification of an opinion, misconception, or whatever in Twitter due to rabid retweeting by those who share a particular prejudice is more than a little scary. On the other hand, it is a wonderful check on conventional media.

Perhaps social media should be considered more of a biological system: only marginally predictable over time and capable of becoming out-of-control. Politicians and corporations will surely look at it with greater caution going forward.

Time to shut down my personal TweetDeck. The contraption may be the greatest distraction of all time, including the television.