Commercial Content Writing: Sparks Exhibits
For over ten years, I contributed research and written work for Sparks Exhibits and environments (now Sparks Marketing). These texts ran the gamut from weekly internal newsletters on the latest in interactive technology, to longer form articles for the weekly online blog. The first example here shows several samples of shorter form text and the latter two longer, more involved articles. Many more examples can be provided upon request.
Sparks Exhibits: Short promotional writing for industry educational series
Dark Social: how analytics are getting 'linked out'
Text for Sparks Tech EM Blog, 2017
By Joe Cantrell
Pdf version here
You might remember previous discussions here about the so-called Darknet or the Dark Web, namely the layer of the Internet that can only be accessed by specialized private means, such as encrypted peer to peer applications and secure, anonymous Tor network connections. While these 'dark' activities bear a similar name, they differ from Dark Social in how they function. While the Darknet is concerned with secure connections and file transfers, Dark Social (also called direct social), is a term coined by Atlantic writer Alexis Madrigal to describe the traffic generated by Internet-based sharing applications that do not pass on data about themselves.
This may not sound very exciting at first, but there is a lot of value tied up in this data. Many organizations rely on getting a clear understanding of how their online information is being shared, in order to tailor their content to best serve their customers. This type of monitoring is known, in part, as web analytics, and typically measures referrals from other websites. This works well if users are navigating to those sites by clicking on links from other websites, or from social media sources that are publicly and openly shared, like Facebook and Twitter. In the current moment, this paradigm is sadly lacking. The technique dates back to the salad days of the Internet, when most site references were based on embedded URL hyperlinks in pages. With the appearance of 'Web 2.0,' analytical practices were simply extended to social media sites.
Today, the understanding and use of the Internet is vastly different. While old-school web browsing is still very much alive, more proprietary activity, like direct messaging and mobile apps do not share the same data that traditional web browsers do in terms of where the link reference is coming from. If you click a link in a typical web browser, it shares information about the webpage that the referring link is located on, browser type, etc. Dark Social sources, on the other hand, do not pass this information, leaving the managers of websites completely unaware if the traffic they are receiving is from apps like Snapchat, links shared in email messages, or from secured browsing networks like Tor. This unknown sourcing is becoming an increasing portion of web referrals, taking almost 18% of referred links, just under the traditional browser percentage of 21.5%.
So what are web content managers to do to get an accurate reflection of their traffic? Brewster Stanislaw of the analytic firm Simply Measured suggests attaching custom Urchin Traffic Monitor (UTM) parameters to links. These parameters are supported natively by Google analytics, and although they may not tell you what particular app referred your link, they can help differentiate between a mobile app and a link send via email, for example.
Alexis Madrigal makes a broader claim that our narratives for standard social platforms like Twitter are wrong. Although these sites are commonly thought of as means for sharing information, he claims what they actually do is less like the sharing, and more like public publishing and archiving. He warns that optimizing for Facebook and Twitter is not enough. Until analytical tools are developed that better reflect the current situation, Madrigal advises that the best metric for dark social is the content itself, pure and simple. In other words, if you want to be shared, be good.
References:
Why we love to hate to love obsolescence
Text for Sparks Tech EM blog, 2017
By Joe Cantrell
Pdf version here
Remember the phone you used five years ago? For many, the image conjures up thoughts of technology that has been rightfully replaced by something that is better, more functional and more fashionable. But at the time you used your previous device, it probably worked just fine for your purposes. It might still have been functioning just fine when you changed phones. So what is exactly driving this change? To answer this question, we need to look at a process that has been over one hundred years it he making: obsolescence.
The modern idea of obsolescence became prominent at the end of the 19th century as the industrial revolution and mass production became the norm for most of the Western world. Previous to this time, the idea of conservation and thriftiness was the norm - to dispose of something before it has completely worn out was a sign of wastefulness. This began to change with the availability of convenient, disposable goods. Among the first of these were men's collars and cuffs.. For many men in large urban centers, reliable laundry services were unavailable, so they instead purchased disposable paper cuffs, collars and shirt fronts that could keep up their social appearances without the need to buy multiple shirts. By the end of the 19th century, over 150 million of these collars were sold. This paved the way for the radical change it the way we use our goods, as items from watches to handkerchiefs became more expensive to repair than to discard.
Men's paper collars were a predecessor to mass-produced disposable goods.
By the 20th century, this expectation of a constant stream of better commodities to replace the old led to the systemic embrace of obsolescence as part of the economy and of modern life. As time progress, obsolescence expanded as an idea and eventually branched off into three major areas: technical or functional obsolescence, planned obsolescence, and stylistic or psychological obsolescence.
Technical obsolescence occurs when a technology is no longer adequate to do the job it was designed for, a new technology appears that does the job better, or the job for which it was designed is no longer needed. For example, hand cranks for cars became functionally obsolete when the electric starter was invented. This would seem to be a natural by-product of continuing technological development resulting from the need to increase efficiency, but soon the link to technological improvement and commerce gained attention. Economists, like Joseph Schumpeter, observed that industry must constantly adapt to new and changing circumstances by means of a constant influx of new consumer goods to eliminate and replace old ones.
Schumpeter called it 'creative destruction,' and promotional campaigns against the thriftiness of the previous century and towards a more disposable society became common.
Calculators were among the first IC-based e-waste items. By the late 1970s, reductions in size and performance changed the product from a state of the art technology to a disposable good.
Planned obsolescence has more complex origins. The push towards more disposability of the early 20th century drastically changed after the 1929 stock market crash. During the great depression, cash-strapped consumers were less likely to buy consumer goods until they were no longer functional. Responding to this, American real-estate broker Bernard London self-published a pamphlet called "Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence." In it, he called for manufacturers to deliberately design their products to wear out or break after a limited amount of time, maintaining the cycle of obsolescence and driving the economy. The process was adopted and continued after the depression as it allowed for many companies to increase their sales volumes while lowering their material costs.
Planned obsolescence was brought to negative public light with the publishing of Vance Packard's book The Waste Makers in 1960. Packard re-introduced the term into the public consciousness, but with a critical focus. His portrayal of the practice portrayed industrialists of the time as greedy and working against public interest as well as the increasing wastefulness of American consumer culture. Despite this exposure, industry adapted in kind, rebranding it 'dynamic' or 'progressive' obsolescence, with the idea of replacing the image of wastefulness with one of patriotic consumerist cooperation. Regardless of terminology, planned obsolescence became a permanent fixture of the economy and continues to the present. In recent news, Apple has been accused of planned obsolescence with critics claiming that the elimination of the headphone jack in the iPhone7 was driven not by technological innovation, but the desire to sell more products by steering consumers toward other proprietary accessories.
Psychological obsolescence on the other hand, encourages the disposal of objects even when they are still perfectly functional. This is done by associating the newer product with fashionability and the older one with being 'out of touch' or 'behind the times.' This type of obsolescence can be easily seen in the fashion industry where an expectation of constantly changing style is distinctly visible. Psychological obsolescence is also prominent in technological market, especially mobile technology which often acts as a marker of fashionability and social status, with tech companies increasingly building it into their business models. Functionality aside, if you would feel embarrassed by using a cheap 'burner' phone instead of a smartphone, you can blame psychological obsolescence.
All this obsolescence might seem like a fair price to pay for the affordances of the contemporary digital worlds, and there is a case to be made for this. After, all it would be unlikely that the consumer products we enjoy would even exist if the obsolescence-driven markets had not created a demand for them somehow. But in light of global environmental concerns as well as issues of access and power in regards to technology, the question of obsolescence and waste is becoming an increasingly large problem.
Despite increased public awareness of the issues of waste, the amount of e-waste produced each year is immense. As of February 2015, only 27% of cell phones were recycled. If the estimate for the iPhone 7 pre-orders are correct, they have already sold 16 million phones, with the majority of the buyers in possession of previous model in working order that is a lot of waste to chalk up to keep up appearances.
So what are we to do in the face of this problem? From the production side, modularity like Google's now shelved project Ara, might be one solution. Another might be for tech companies to stop trying to play to expectations of 'world changing' products intended to be all things to all people and focus on more specific needs for more diverse markets. In addition, designing technologies with an eye towards their possible reuses after their moment in the sun has passed may help mitigate the needless waste associated with psychological obsolescence. On the consumer side, perhaps it's time to adjust our expectations of technology and to consider the cycle of obsolescence before we rush out and purchase shiny new devices.