Welcome to The Very Daily Weblog of Joshua Blankenship

Quick growth is often seen as an indicator of success on the web. But in my experience, hardly anything that grows fast does so without strain and stretch marks. The quick growth often forces your hand to implement before you can strategize. Then you waste time trying to fix mistakes brought on by speed, hopefully before the hoopla surrounding your launch dies down and everyone leaves for greener pixels. I wonder why slow growth isn’t popular on the web? Too boring for us? Not immediately measurable?

Here’s my subscriber stats from when I started using Feedburner in November ‘07—current:

No huge swells of change, no massive influxes of traffic. Not very exciting, is it? Just a slow, (surprisingly) steady uphill climb which enables me to (hopefully) build long-term relationships with fine people like you. Nothing flashy. Nothing newsworthy. Not even a lot of traffic* in the grand scheme of things. Then again, sustainable relationships take time, effort and hard work, and those things aren’t nearly as sexy as big stats.

But they’re way more valuable.

*It would have been easy to prove the point without the actual stats numbers, but why bother trying to be something I’m not? Transparency is valuable, too.

Hugh McLeod runs a site called Gaping Void where he posts (occasionally NSFW) cartoons drawn on the back of business cards and discusses social media, the web, and a few other marketing projects.

I’ve become interested in his take on what he refers to as “social objects” (and defines in depth as “sharing devices.”) These are the things social networks are built around.

He posts his cartoons as hi-res downloads that are free to use for personal use, and they make the perfect case study of the social object theory.

As a “Social Object”, a cartoon that one can actually print out and hang on their cube wall, or put on a t-shirt, a business card etc is far more powerful and useful than say, YET ONE MORE IMAGE you can find on the internet and e-mail en masse to your friends.
— Free Cartoons as Social Objects

He goes on to discuss that this sort of open policy makes him money “indirectly” by connecting him with other people/organizations and building relationships around these social objects.

I don’t create the online cartoons as “products” to be sold. I create the cartoons as “Social Objects”, i.e. “Sharing Devices” that help me to build relationships with. As with all things, the REAL value comes from the human relationships that are built AROUND the social object, not the object in itself.

I think we make the mistake of believing our [product, service, message, church, cause, etc.] is intrinsically valuable and will therefor spread because of its internally-perceived awesomeness. “Well, WE think it’s important, therefor anyone smart will too, right?”

But things aren’t valuable. At least not in a sustainable sense. Everything depreciates, everything becomes irrelevant over time. No matter what we do, if we want it to last, to have impact and meaning, we need to admit that the human interaction(s) that organically occur around shared experiences are VASTLY more important than any thing we create.

If it can’t be shared, if socialization can’t happen around it, then why bother?

Apple is having a good time at the expense of Microsoft in almost every commercial they make. So Microsoft’s response is to hire Crispin Porter + Bogusky and give them a $300mil blank check (kidding… mostly) to woo the younger set, ostensibly convincing everyone from 18-35 that Microsoft and their products are cool and hip.

Ignoring the fact that Microsoft and their products aren’t cool or hip, and ignoring the fact that CP+B only knows how to market to one target audience (honestly, how hard is it to write ads specifically targeted at college guys?), how is this going to work? How is this going to directly effect the bottom line of selling more Microsoft products?

Because if it does anything other than bringing in more dollars than it spends, it’s a complete waste of time and money for everyone except CP+B, who get to have fun w/ a budget and win awards (and get new business to replace the old business they lost because most advertising doesn’t actually work, it just gets talked about and looks pretty, which is very different than selling more products.)

Enterprise Rent-A-Car just sent me an unsolicited email. En Español. If you’re going to interrupt me with advertising, at least make sure it’s correctly targeted.

One of the things that amazes me about web design culture (if there is such a thing and it is cohesive enough to call it a “culture”) is how out of touch our perception(s) can be versus reality. In truth, we as an industry can have a pretty limited view of the medium we work within.

For example, which social networking sites are growing and attracting visitors right now. I’ve never even heard of IMEEM, I never would have guessed AIM Pages is growing faster than Digg, I can’t believe GeoCities still has more traffic than Flickr, etc.

Add in to the mix that this is just U.S. users and it gets even more bizarre since Google’s Orkut had 24.6 million visitors in September, but only ~500,000 of those were in the U.S. When was the last time you had a conversation about Orkut? Never? Yeah, me too.

I can almost guarantee you that most web designers turn their noses up at these sites because we think they’re not particularly well-designed (at least aesthetically) and yet, that’s where all the people are. The beauty-lover in me desperately wants to believe that MySpace is an anomaly of mass scale and yet, most of the other sites that are growing have just as many flaws and are just as ugly. You know what that means, right? We’re putting a ton of resources into visuals on sites that no one is using.

I don’t know how to create an organic, growing community. The task seems at odds with itself from the starting line. But as an industry, I think we need to start figuring it out more and not relying on the purely visual side of our skillset to get us through.

Thoughts?

All that said, the metrics for TechCrunch’s article are probably a bit silly. It’s only U.S. data, and honestly, a year timeline? On the internet? Things move far too quickly to think that’s an actual representation of reality in the same way it would be for a traditional business. I’d rather see the last 6 months. IMEEM probably shows up on the radar because it’s so new (e.g. it didn’t have much traffic initially.)