While thinking about this, I’ve been watching a lot of AMC’s hit zombie TV show “The Walking Dead.” (Season 2 just came out on Netflix and I’m home for Christmas…so why not?) Funny enough, it was in this show that I found my big nugget of wisdom about the recession. One specific quote, actually.

A little context: a character, Andrea, is asked why she trusts in Shane, a member of the group who has alienated everyone else by becoming increasingly survivalist and less compassionate towards strangers. Andrea responds with a simple line: “he doesn’t act like a victim.”  

In “The Walking Dead,” there are those who despair about their circumstances and believe they have no control over their situation. And there are those who accept what is happening to them and work hard to overcome the odds. The economy’s no different – people have a choice about whether they want it to be an excuse or a reason. You either throw your cards in the air and go sulk in a corner or play to the best of your ability. You’re not waiting for the storm to pass – you’re building an umbrella with whatever you’ve got.

I know comparing a weak economy to a zombie outbreak’s quite a stretch, but still. Choose to be affected, not a victim. (Even if being a victim  literally means “to be affected”…you get what I’m trying to say.)

Hopefully it works out for you. And me.

PS. I’m not advocating a dog-eat-dog attitude…you can be survivalist without being cutthroat. Shane’s a dick anyways and you don’t want to be like him.

Boston’s all up in a hoo-ha after local restaurant Pigalle responded angrily to a pretty aggressive comment from a dissatisfied customer. As you can see in the above screenshot, a female customer was unhappy with her Thanksgiving dinner pumpkin pie and complained about it pretty dramatically on the restaurant’s public Facebook page, prompting a response from whoever runs it. (You can read a more in-depth article about it over at BostInno.)

I’m not going to defend Pigalle for what they said and did  (my general experience has been that people don’t react too kindly to being told to go fuck themselves), and as a public establishment in the hospitality industry an outburst like this is definitely unprofessional and damaging. I will, however, contend that Pigalle had every right to respond negatively to a customer like her. 

In my past experience as a community manager I’ve noticed that people are overwhelmingly entitled, presumptuous and rude in their direct interactions with brands on social media. And while some of that can be attributed to brands establishing a norm where negative comments are consistently rewarded with incentives and freebies or a human tendency to broadcast grievances more often than praise, I contend that the biggest reason is because people don’t really recognize that when interacting on brand pages, they’re still talking to another human being. It’s easy to forget that behind the faceless entity and corporate logo of the brand page there’s an actual human being or two sitting at a computer somewhere reading these comments. Would Sandy (the woman above) spoken the same way face-to-face with a waiter or a manager at the restaurant? I doubt it.

With small businesses, each insult cuts deeper too. Massive brands like McDonalds have PR companies or trained in-house teams who most likely don’t have a deep connection with the brand they’re working for. In other words, the community manager for Pizza Hut isn’t going to take a negative review personally. However, with small businesses and particularly restaurants, it’s likely that the social media assets are run in-house by staff who are more likely to take comments personally. Often times, it’ll even be the owner, or in this case, the head chef. Cooking’s an intimate thing as it is – it’s understandable to see a chef take offense to a comment like Sandy’s. (Perhaps admen should teach ‘em how to have tougher skin.)

To reiterate, I think Pigalle was justified to call her out for her comment instead of playing nice and safe PR. Just a shame that they went overboard with it. If I was behind the controls of their Facebook page, I’d probably have written something like the following in response:

“Hi Sandy, thanks for your comment. We’re sorry to hear that you didn’t like our pumpkin pie and didn’t enjoy your Thanksgiving meal with us. Our cooks and our establishment have the highest of standards with regards to our food preparation, and take meal dissatisfaction very seriously. Had you approached one of our servers or managers with your concern, we would have gladly prepared another dessert to your liking in order to remedy the situation. Instead, you decided to post a rude and disrespectful comment on our wall. Once again, we’re sorry that meal was not to your liking, but given what an unpleasant customer you’ve made yourself seem to be, perhaps we would be better off without your business. Have a Merry Christmas and  a wonderful day.”

…but that’s just me.

On another note: Pigalle will be fine. A while back, an Atlanta restaurant called Boner’s BBQ (God, I love that name) got in a hoo-ha of their own when they called out a negative Yelp reviewer. (You can read about that whole thing over here.) Like this Pigalle incident, people flooded the restaurant’s wall with posts of disgusts, vowing never to eat at the restaurant again. You’d have thought that Boner’s would be out of business within weeks, but that wasn’t the case.

The truth is that social media is a bubble, and it’s easy to forget that there’s a silent majority. Almost everyone who left a negative comment was someone who worked/was super active in social media and had read about the post somewhere online, likely in a trade publication like AdWeek. When you factor in the fact that a) most of these commenters are from out of town and would’ve never eaten there anyways b) most of these commenters aren’t in the restaurant’s target demo and would’ve never eaten there anyways c) a high percentage of the restaurant’s current and future customers will have either never heard of the incident or not reacted negatively to the news, the restaurant’s fine. Boner’s actually got a boost in sales and publicity following their PR incident. It was in character for an edgy/outspoken joint like theirs to call out a bad review. Perhaps it’s in character for an upscale restaurant that caters to people serious about food like Pigalle to do so as well?

The event’s also set off a giant argument about the ethics of brandjacking and where to draw the line. I’d like to offer my own opinion of where the line is by being one of the few to defend American Apparel’s brandjacking of the hurricane.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re on the East Coast. Chances are you had class/work cancelled. Chances are you didn’t lose power. And chances are when you were bored all day, you went online and went e-shopping for a bit. There’s no shame in that.

American Apparel didn’t look at the hurricane and go, “here’s a way to inject ourselves into the conversation!”  They recognized the truth of the situation, and where the eyeballs were going to be. They didn’t prod anyone into doing anything they weren’t going to already do. Hardly a Kenneth Cole fiasco.

And for that reason, it’s not valid to claim that only disaster-related retailers have the right to peddle their goods. Tedeschi shops recognized that people were going to stock up on supplies and invited them to do so at their store. AA recognized that a larger-than-usual audience was going to be bored online and invited them to shop. Fundamentally, there’s little difference.

And I honestly don’t get why brands who put out rainy day playlists or a list of movies to watch are getting hacked to death. They’re responding to needs too.

Instead, here are two brandjackings that would offend me:

“Hurricane Sandy blows hard. So do your test scores. Sign up for Kaplan SAT classes today!”

“Hurricane Sandy reminds us of Sandy Cheeks. Miss Texas? Come to Boners BBQ for some Austin ribs soon!”

See the difference?

People get too goddamn offended by everything these days, anyways – and most of the time it’s only because someone says they should be offended. Every article I’ve read about this stuff so far has been in the tone of “HOLY SHIT THIS IS AWFUL U SHUD BE MAD TOO.” Fair journalism right?

It’s all a double standard anyway. It’s fair if you genuinely were offended because the brandjacking dealt with an event concerning the loss of life. But I wonder if you were as outraged with brandjackings of the Bin Laden killing (“Fuck Yeah, America” sales galore.”) Either all of it is okay, or none of it is.

In a way, this reminds me of the #notguilty brandjacking Entemann’s did. That was pretty bad for the reasons I’ve listed above. But there was one big similarity between that and Sandy: a general atmosphere of negative emotion. People were pissed about the Casey Anthony verdict then. People are anxious and worried about the Hurricane now. And it’s those emotions that make us more trigger-happy to push the “too soon” button and flip out.

I don’t know, just my two cents. Hope it doesn’t offend anyone. Feel free to tell me I’m wrong.

Except something happened: I hesitated. And I eventually put my phone away without tweeting anything, because I felt something that hadn’t really felt while using Uber: guilty.

Let me explain. I’m a senior at Boston University, and while I don’t really buy into a lot of college lifestyle stereotypes I definitely think college students need to live frugally shitty. I’m talkin’ about choosing easy mac over filet mignon and walking over catching a cab. And while I’ve saved up quite a bit from DJing the last couple of years, watching 17 year old Egyptian princes (I’m not kidding) drop $10,000 night after night at clubs (not kidding either) has generally made me hold back from purchasing luxuries, even if I can afford them. When I do indulge from time to time, I feel bad afterwards. It’s weird: as a college student, I don’t feel like I deserve to have nice things. 

Brands don’t just empower individuals to feel an emotion – they create a perception about the individual who uses them. The brands you choose, and the characteristics associated with them, tell a story of who you are. I’m sure that’s why buying a car is such a goddamn gruesome process. To be honest, I don’t really think the golden question is whether car X has enough horsepower or fuel mileage. I think the golden question is this: what does me driving this car say about me? 

So if I’m tweeting about Uber all the time, as great of a service as it is, what does that say about me? Probably that I’m a spoiled college brat who’s too much of a bum to walk or take the Green Line like other college students. Or just a general douche McMuffin. Not exactly the kind of image I want to project. Hence why I don’t ever tweet it out, even if I do take one from time to time.

And the truth is that there are plenty of other brands I feel guilty about interacting with on social media. Did you know I’m the foursquare mayor of Marc by Marc Jacobs on Newbury Street? Did you judge me a little unfavorably just now? You must understand why I don’t broadcast that. Though now that I have I can tell you that they sell some really sweet wallets for cheap.

To summarize: guilt from having access to a luxury brand I don’t think I deserve limits my social media mentions and interactions with the brand. 

I bet you do this too with dozens of brands. And it’s not really your fault. The 2008 Financial Crisis and the subsequent war on the 1% and figures like Mitt Romney have done the unthinkable: they’ve started to make people feel ashamed of feeling successful and having nice things. Or maybe your parents are awesome and raised you to be humble.

Think of the most expensive luxury good you own. I bet you adore it more than anything else in your closet. I wonder how many times you’ve mentioned it on Facebook or Twitter though? Why haven’t you?

There are, of course, people who do the exact opposite. When they get a new Louis Vuitton bag, you’ll bet the whole goddamn world knows. They’ll be Instagrams of it, tweets of it, Facebook posts on it… hell, she’ll probably make it her cover photo and even update her Google + page just to tack it on there. To put it quite frankly, there are people who have no shame about having nice things and letting the world know about it. 

I talked earlier about how brands’ characteristics can become associated with the individual who chooses them. Well, in this case, it’s the opposite: a person’s characteristics, within a contained social ecosystem, can become associated with the brand. 

Maybe that’s why I think Uber can be douchey: because of some of the other people I know who use it. You know – girls who roll to the club together and tweet out “rollin’ up in style with my ladies in an Uber haterz wanna be uss #gettinslizzard.” Oh God, I think I need a cold shower just from typing that.

So here’s the dilemma: you’re Uber’s community manager, and there’s two groups of people who are seriously messing with your social presence:

- A group of customers who overshare their interactions with your brand, *generally* irritating readers and damaging your brand perception

- A group of *arguably* higher priority customers who undershare their interactions with your brand, damaging your brand awareness

How do you find the middle ground? Let me know what you think in the comments below or by tweeting me at @Mister_Wang.

PS: I’m coining “consumer social guilt” as a new SM buzzword. May it be incorporated often in your future drinking games.

Campus ambassadorships are a funny business.

College reps, student brand evangelists…whatever they’re called. I’ve done one or two, and I’m sure you have too. Planning events, handing out t-shirts, inviting people to Facebook Pages…the whole schpiel. Most people have had them, and even more will as more brands start setting up their own ambassador programs.

Brands have plenty of reasons for launching campus rep programs: to market towards an important (and easily influenced) consumer market still developing their brand loyalties, to counter the diminishing returns from traditional advertising, to leverage the viral power within campuses, and maybe even to develop a student talent pool to recruit future hires from. I’m sure there are more reasons.

There are some negative side effects, such as inauthentic brand evangelists and the loss of control over brand presentation (a Microsoft ambassador once unflatteringly described the Xbox Kinect to me as “video games for fat people”), but overall, the pros outweigh the cons, especially when you consider the low cost of execution.

What about the students, though? What do they get out of these programs?

Knowledge and experience, maybe? Hardly. Most of these programs are run remotely – aside from a few emails and the occasional phone call, students are essentially left to figure things out on their own. When employees on the brand side chime in, it’s usually to provide best practices on accomplishing specific objectives, like how to increase Facebook event attendees or where to target flyers. They rarely ever teach ambassadors about the bigger picture: stuff like the strategic approach to campaigns, and how to target and tailor content for specific audiences.

The biggest failure of campus ambassadorships is a completely uneducated approach to social media. These programs are often measured solely on vanity metrics, such as Facebook likes or Twitter followers, when they should be also looking at other data like brand engagement, mentions, sales, and sentiment. As a result, student goals for the semester typically may simply be to “get our page 1,000 likes.” Furthermore, without proper knowledge about social media, most social media “marketing” efforts consist of getting friends to do the ambassador a favor by clicking a button for them. What brand wants those kinds of fans or followers? What student wants to bother his or her network with brand spam? Most importantly: what future employer will believe that those efforts reflect expertise in digital marketing? After all, we’re only doing these ambassadorships to impress future recruiters, right?

It doesn’t help that brands seldom provide reps with proper (or any) resources to execute a good campaign. It’s rare that you’ll ever get a budget for advertising or promotional materials; most of the time, you’ll get cheap things like pens and t-shirts. What good do they do, anyway? Fans are earned, not bought, and even if they could be bought, a koozie wouldn’t do it.

The programs aren’t run well because the brands, agencies and corporations don’t care about the students. They don’t care about providing an optimal learning experience or sufficient resources. They clearly don’t even care about how their brand is represented – if they did, they wouldn’t hand creative control of it to a bunch of college students.

The truth is, they’re looking for new customers and relying on your personal brand to penetrate channels advertising can’t, and access your personal network. Think about it: never are you given enough of a budget to conduct a feasible advertising campaign on campus. Thus, you’re limited to promoting to your personal network, which is exactly in a way what the brands want.

Essentially, you’re getting paid (at least I hope you are) so that you can open a once-inaccessible door for brands to start spamming your personal network. Starting to feel uncomfortable yet?

On another note: students, is this the college experience we dreamed of? I know that the fear of graduating without a job offer has got us career crazy, but when did our priorities shift? Picking up samples instead of girls? Dropping brand facts instead of acid? None of us dreamed that we’d spend our Friday nights handing out energy drink samples, but here we are…being completely taken advantage of in every way by brands and corporations.

At the end of the day, we do gain something: a modest wage, and an extra sentence or two to put in our resumes. I believe, however, we lose so much more. We’ve sold our time, our work, our friends, our network, our respect and essentially our soul. All nobly sacrificed to help brands sell their hummus and tacky clothes.

We are, literally and figuratively, fucking sellouts.

Americans have a real love connection with flying. And why wouldn’t they? Growing up hearing about the exploits of Hughes, Earhart, and pilots from all the Great Wars, combined with a natural desire for adventure and discovery, has romanticized a form of transportation. No matter what age you are, you’ll still find yourself from time to time with eyes wide, face pressed against the airplane window peering out into the clouds, like a two year old really seeing the world for the first time.

An airline’s job is to capture the essence of that awe, wonder and excitement in the journey. But how far they have failed! Long gone are the days of Pan Am – today’s airline passengers feel incarcerated in airplanes decorated in dull shades of grey and navy, with sullen employees. Flying used to be fun. Now it’s about the same as a visit to the hospital. With lines, delays, missed connections, and a shitty experience overall, most airline experiences are stressful as hell.

I fly from Boston to LA several times a year to see family. I’d been using JetBlue for a while, partially because they do a direct flight to Long Beach, but mostly because of their advertising. In it, they’ve declared “their standards beat their extras,” touting their DirectTV, extra legroom, and free checked bags. I think the fact that airline advertising focus on features shows how far they’ve fallen and how little they have to offer. “Fly with us. Your first checked bag is free.” “Fly with us. We have 4 extra inches of legroom.” Features are nice but there’s got to be a more compelling reason to fly.

Then I saw this ad:

A Breath of Fresh Airline. Easily one of the best taglines I’ve ever read. And easily more than enough reason to be curious enough to book a Virgin America flight ($450 round trip – about the standard price.) Promising something entirely different than what I’ve seen from the airline industry is ambitious, and I expected to be let down.

So I roll up to LAX to check in for my flight and this is what I see:

Neon purple lighting. Red Carpet. BEYONCE’S SASHA FIERCE ALBUM blasting over the speakers. What the hell was this? I thought for a second I was either at a club or a trendy nail salon. Thrown off, I checked in with a super cool lady and dropped off my luggage ($25 / suitcase, eh), picked up my GORGEOUS ticket (I know, right?) and went through security, right past the United line (that, in contrast, looked like a funeral procession.)

Virgin has its own set of gates in LAX, and as I looked around I couldn’t help but notice how…good-looking and interesting everyone was. I’m serious. There was not a single person in that waiting lounge I would not have been down to have a beer with. I saw musicians, artists, students, retired couples, architects, advertising folks, and startup people. No secret that an airline’s patrons reflect the airline. That’s why so many senior folks fly with United.

Anyways, I get on the plane. And. HOLY. SHIT.

SEXIEST. AIRPLANE. EVER.

Leather seats. Remote. Touch-screen display. Power plugs in seat. SEXIEST SEAT EVER.

Oh, and there’s Wi-Fi on board. That too.

Then the flight attendants start coming around. And their uniforms are SWEET.

Turns out that they were designed by Banana Republic and intended to pay tribute to the airline uniforms from the 60s. You know what were the two sexiest industries in the 60s? Airline and advertising. You know who did the Mad Men collection? Banana Republic. Bam.

I noticed that in the front pocket there was a small pouch for storing personal items. Nice touch. I also noticed that there were only two things tucked into the pocket: a safety card and a barf bag. I liked the elimination of clutter, but where was the in-flight magazine? The SkyMall I loved to ridicule? (More on this later.)

Once we’re in the air I start playing with my touchscreen monitor, with Virgin’s “RED” entertainment system loaded on board.

Let’s recap all the awesomeness on here:

• 20+ live television channels (free)
• On-demand movies and TV (some free, some cost $$$ with current selections like Avengers, Girls, Breaking Bad, etc)
• On-demand music with a variety of full albums (free)
• Games (free)
• Seat to Seat IM and chatting (wasn’t working on my flight but THAT IS AWESOME)
• Flight tracker powered by Google Maps
• Shopping mall (so that’s where SkyMall went…)

And BY FAR the most impressive feature: the ability to ORDER FOOD AND DRINK FROM YOUR SEAT. You select the items you want on the menu (from free sodas to alcohol/premium drinks like VitaminWater that cost money, and free snacks or quality food at cost like a chicken bahn mi wrap), add to cart, checkout (pay with card if required) and an attendant comes over to your seat within 30 seconds with your items. Amazing.

Now, I get really impressed with attention to detail. The red carpet in the check-in didn’t go unnoticed. The gradual way the seat light turned on to give me time to adjust when I hit the switch was very nice. I’m into this stuff. Which is why I’m going to spend a bit of time here talking about their cup.

Look at this cup. It’s the most beautiful plastic cup I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s shaped like a gem with many different panels at different angles, and when light hits your drink it DAZZLES with color. I seriously spent so long analyzing the cup that some passengers gave me weird looks. I was gonna take it with me off the plane but forgot to.

So it was a red-eye flight. But I was so wildly entertained by everything on board that I ended up staying awake the entire flight and playing around. Totally worth it.

As I left the plane, a female flight attendant (who had been amazingly helpful and nice the entire flight, like the rest of the crew) asked me how my flight was. I told her  I was never flying with any other airline again. She smiled, thanked me, and reached out and touched my shoulder with her hand. It actually kind of took me aback a little. I wasn’t used to a human moment from a flight attendant. Then again, I wasn’t used to a human airline that understood its passengers.

My verdict? Don’t fly anything other than Virgin America domestically if you can. Reasonable prices (though the add-ons can add up if you watch like 10 movies and get drunk in the air), amazing services/amenities, and an unheard of sensation of comfort and excitement throughout the amazing brand experience Virgin America has put together. Well done, Richard Branson. I’m already excited for my next trip.

Virgin America has made flying sexy again.

Lots of people I know are looking for jobs right now, and I’ve been quietly following along with their progress and rooting for them on the sidelines. I’ve noticed happily that many of them have been smart and built out a presence online with a fleshed out LinkedIn profile and a sleek website. I’ve also noticed, however, that a lot of their profiles, messaging and branding use the phrase “Hire Me.”

I appreciate the straightforwardness, but there’s something about it that just doesn’t sit right with me. There’s some sort of presumptuous tone to it, and as millennials inevitably pegged with an entitlement tag, it’s definitely something we should be staying away from. It’s even worse when it’s (often) used as part of the phrase “you should hire me.” Should? Nobody owes us anything. Even if we’re trying to argue that we’re qualified for the position, we’ll just come off arrogant.

Maybe I’m overanalyzing, but it also feels like using the phrase puts you at the complete mercy of a recruiter or company. That we’re just sitting around, waiting for somebody to come round and drop a job off in our lap instead of being proactive and hunting one down (again, entitlement.) Like, “Please help a college student out. Hire me! I have rent to make!” It sounds a little desperate. Yeah, things are tough and jobs are scarce, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little self-dignity.

I’ve always thought that hunting for your first big-boy job is a lot like working out a mutually beneficial partnership. You need a job so you can have steady income (mostly to spend it on pickled lamb tongues) and so you can start your career with some solid work experience. The company needs to hire you because they’re understaffed and have work sitting around that needs to get done. You can help them do great things and they can help you achieve great things. One can’t work (literally and figuratively) without the other. As the Joker once said to Batman: “you complete me.”

I graduate in December (obligatory LinkedIn plug) and have started thinking about how I want to present myself in the job process. I don’t think using “hire me” is the way to go. Let’s stop saying that altogether and change the language. Instead, we should be saying:

Let’s collaborate.

Let’s make great things.

Let’s work together. 

Something that particularly alarmed me during the whole ordeal was how quickly new developments and discoveries were unearthed and disseminated to the masses. I suppose even as a digital strategist, I’m still alarmed by how quickly news spreads on Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the Internet. The Reddit community in particular should be commended for their work during this crisis, helping put together many of the initial puzzle pieces immediately following the shooting and even beating the mainstream press to certain details. 

Indeed, the beauty of the web is that it has allowed anyone with an Internet connection to become a journalist, a capacity that was critical during the Middle East uprisings and the Occupy movement, among countless other examples. With the abundance of information available on the Internet, it has allowed anyone to become an investigator as well.

This is where things start to go a bit south for me. As the names of the wounded and the dead began to leak out to the press, thousands of people Googled and found their blogs, their profiles, their websites, and essentially all traces of their online identity. People scanned the tweets of the wounded to learn about their lives. People checked Facebook profiles to get a glimpse of what victims looked like. It got so bad that some random guy on Facebook unfortunate enough to share the same name as the shooter received hundreds of messages and friend requests, and had to issue a statement declaring his innocence and asking to be left alone. 

The biggest story unearthed from these efforts has been a blog post from a girl killed that night. The girl, an aspiring journalist, had recently survived a shooting at a mall prior to the movie theater tragedy, and had written a lengthy post about the event where she reflected on life’s value and meaning. The bitter irony of her post had not gone unnoticed, and mainstream media shone a spotlight on her blog, inviting millions of readers to read the post. A Mashable writer even dedicated an entire post to her, entitled “Grief in the Age of Social Media”, quoting numerous of the girl’s tweets from before the theater shooting. Quoth the Mashable author:

I wanted to know everything: Who they were, what they were like, who they left behind. What set this event apart from other similarly awful events in U.S. history was that I could learn all of those details through Facebook and Twitter.

Through social media we have the ability to celebrate the lives of those like 24-year-old Jessica Redfield — who has largely become the face of this tragic day — in a way that wasn’t possible before.

I spent much of Friday poring over Jessica’s tweets and couldn’t help thinking how well we’d get along. She was an aspiring journalist with an amazing sense of humor. Her comebacks. Her use of capital letters and exclamation marks to show excitement. Her determination. She had a self-awareness and confidence that many people spend entire lives trying to cultivate.

Put simply, she was fabulous. The kind of fabulous you want to surround yourself with. The kind of fabulous you know is going somewhere in life.

I say all of this, and yet, we’ve never met, and we never will.

You’ve got to be kidding me, right?

Certainly we’ve got to be celebrating the victims’ lives and mourning what they’ll miss. But diving into their personal lives and going through the details of their existence uninvited like it’s some locked diary hidden in the bottom drawer of their cupboard isn’t the way to do it. It doesn’t serve the dead any purpose. It doesn’t  uncover any critical details that move the case against the shooter forward.

All it does is that it indulges the living’s morbid curiosity and fascination with the whole matter. Even worse, it makes us believe that we can understand and empathize with the victims’ families. We can read all their tweets and blog posts until we know everything about them and we still won’t know who they are. We still won’t be qualified to talk about them as if they were someone we knew. And if do, it’s insulting.

Now, I was going to write a lengthy paragraph about how media has only helped fuel this obsession with their emphasis on page views and sensationalism over actual news, but I’d be beating a dead horse. Instead, try this: the next time you see an article about one of the victims, read it carefully. Does it read to you more like a piece of news or a piece of entertainment? Does it provide you with critical details pertinent to the tragedy and the case against the shooter? Think it over.

Look, we’re all human, and we’re prone to being morbidly fascinated with tragedy, death, and gruesome stuff. The Internet’s filled with all sorts of really fucked up shit for people to read about and watch, like notes from prison doctors during the  Holocaust and videos of people jumping from the Twin Towers during 9/11. I’m sure you’ve seen something really screwed up at least once and I’m not here to tell you you’re sick for having been curious enough to look it up.

What I am saying, though, is to consider keeping your voyeurism in check when it comes to diving into the deceased’s personal lives. It’s not our business and no good or purpose can come from it.

Recently, it’s become more focused as a recommendation engine, having developed an “Explore” function that helps you find cool places around you based on certain search criteria. It’s a direction that’s the most powerful of the three listed above, with the greatest benefit provided to users and with the most potential to develop into a badly-needed revenue stream for the company. With foursquare’s recent mobile redesign, the move to enable Explore on the web, and the ability now to “like” or “dislike” venues to influence recommendations, it’s evident that they’re betting heavily on the recommendations.

The recommendation engine has come a long way and is pretty freakin’ decent these days. A recent search for “sushi” (something I know very well in the Boston area) pulled up pretty much all the best spots in the city. Explore’s great if you’re looking for something very specific, like a bar that serves a certain type of beer or a coffee shop with free wi-fi.

The problem is that a lot of people use Explore because they expect foursquare to deliver recommendations based on the social data they have, and that’s where the experience goes sour. Foursquare recommendations are built around the assumption that you trust every single one of your foursquare friends equally. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Think about some of the “friends” you have on foursquare. Former roommates. Acquaintances. That random biddie you made out with two years ago at a house party. Do you really care or trust where they’ve been or what they like? Foursquare assumes you do, and recommendations that come up are usually ranked based on how many of your friends have been there or if any one of your friends has left a tip on there.

Right now I’m right around Newbury Street, home to a lot of awesome restaurants and shops. “Explore” is recommending that I go to either Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Panera, or Au Bon Pain. Kind of a buzzkill. These recommendations are based on the fact that either 20+ of my friends have been there or some random foursquare friend has left a tip there. I don’t visit places just because everyone else has or because some rando thinks the clerk at a Dunkin’ is “wicked cute.”

The missing link is reputation. 

If foursquare introduced a reputation system where users could either choose their influencers or allow users to build credibility and trust, they could integrate it with their engine to deliver better peer recommendations based on their social data.

Method #1: The External Way 

When Heineken Man says to check out a bar, you abso-f*cking-lutely check out that bar. 

Foursquare users can scroll through their friends list and choose which of their friends are “influencers” to them. Likely you already know which of your friends you trust for recommendations – it’s just a matter of indicating it on foursquare. Additionally, users could even indicate what categories or topics their friends are influential about. You could have Jill be influential about boutique clothing shops, or indicate that Hiroki really knows his restaurants. Foursquare’s engine would take these influencers and assign them heavier weight in the algorithm, meaning that when applicable, their recommendations take precedent over the rest of your foursquare friends.

Method #2: The Internal Way 

You get this 5x badge for visiting 25 bowling alleys. How embarrassing.  

Foursquare doesn’t have to give users the option to select their influencers – they sit on enough social data to be able to figure that out. By using check-in data, badges unlocked, and tips left, they could easily determine what type of venues users are influential about based on frequency (sounds like Klout topics…hmm….) They could bake in a reputation system too, by measuring each user’s tip engagement (number of actions their tips generate, which are either “I’ve done this” or “Add to to-do list) at specific venues, looking at both total engagement generated (total number of actions) or user-specific engagement (total number of times person X got person Y to complete an action on a tip.)

When both are integrated with the recommendations engine, you get a complex internal system that can automatically determine each individual’s relative credibility and reputation and improve social recommendations. (In a somewhat unrelated note: remember how the first iteration of foursquare let you compete against others to be the “mayor” of your city? I’ve always missed that competition…with the internal credibility system, couldn’t users compete to become the most influential guide to the city?) Not only that, but you get dramatically improved tip quality as users suddenly have an incentive to leave worthy tips.

What do you think? Feel free to agree/disagree in the comments below, or tweet me at @Mister_Wang.

Geoff spoke about the evolution of the Xbox from solely a gaming machine into a massive entertainment destination. They’ve already been known to have the best online gaming experience out of any console, with friends lists, profiles, cloud storage and a massive online marketplace featuring third-party publishers. In the last couple of years, however, they’ve made numerous strategic partnerships with applications and media companies to bring all sorts of content to Xbox Live, including Netflix, YouTube, ESPN (and other live TV), Hulu, and HBO GO. Geoff admitted that Xboxes used to only be owned by 20-somethings still living in the basement of their parents’ house – now they’re owned by both males and females from all walks of life. The aspiration of the Xbox is simple: they want to be the only thing you ever need to plug in to your television.

Now, up until this presentation, I hadn’t really thought of the Kinect beyond gaming. But as I heard about how the interface of the Xbox was navigable via voice and gestures, I realized that there’s more to the Kinect than most people think. See, we’ve been fixated on the idea of a Smart TV for a long time, with Apple rumored to be working on one and other brands premiering prototypes at CES (although they all sucked.) But could it already exist? Watch this video:

(It’s not shown in the video, but apparently you can Skype from the Xbox too, which rocks.)

Things get even crazier once you realize that Microsoft isn’t just interested in content distribution; they’re interested in content production. As of right now, they’re working on a whole bunch of exclusive Xbox 360 web shows and such. Which isn’t all too special, until you realize that Xbox is building Kinect functionality into the programming. 

Let me repeat that: XBOX IS MAKING INTERACTIVE TELEVISION CONTENT.

Remember as a kid when you watched Dora the Explorer (not that I, uh, ever did or anything) and she paused for 5 seconds after a question to let you answer? Remember being as immature as I was (hypothetically, of course, seeing as I never watched the show) and shouting the wrong answers and Dora never knowing the difference? What if the show didn’t move on until Dora (through the Xbox Kinect) heard you say the right answer? What if Dora let you decide which path to the Gumdrop Mountain to take and turned the show into a huge choose-your-own-adventure? Moving on from Dora: what if you could cycle through cameras and views at a live football game? Watch instant replays with total customization? What if TV shows even added gaming elements into them? And how about when Xbox figures out how to make TV content actionable? Imagine watching Mad Men and being able to swipe and add Don Draper’s sweet aviators to your cart on Amazon. Or check-in with a gesture to GetGlue while watching Game of Thrones and share it to Facebook and Twitter. The possibilities are scary and ENDLESS.

I hope your jaw dropped while reading this – mine sure as hell did during the meeting. I’ve seen the future of TV, and it’s in Xbox.