One characteristic of the new socialverse we have entered is unmarketing. Emphasizing pragmatic and authentic communications over tightly engineered and polished. Unmarketing tends to favor raw expertise over filtered ideas. Unmarketing favors content over commercial messages. Unmarketing is audience specific rather than audience generic.

Here’s a great comment in reaction to a recent Dell video that gets at this:

On another note, I think videos like this are a very effective way to help potential customers internalize what a product really is in a way that is simply not possible from reading a website or product brochure. If you’re selling HPC hardware  you owe it to yourself to lay out a couple hundred bucks for a cheap video camera, grab a systems engineer, and start shooting short video tours.

But don’t tell marketing: over producing something like this with scripts and professional on-camera talent is a guaranteed way to make sure that people will point and laugh at your lameness.

There’s a popular myth about messaging – keep your messages positive for maximum impact. This same myth gets wrapped up in most corporations outright avoidance of anything overtly competitive, and internal “positivity” movements which spurn any negative phrasing.

Researchers (messaging is as much a science as an art) have established that we are either better at detecting or remembering words that carry negative meaning than those that are positive. That our brains potentially respond more strongly to negative emotional cues than to positive ones. Here’s an example from recent economic battle cries:

Drive Growth vs. End The Recession

Or, as given in a recent article

Peace Now vs. Stop the War

The words War and Recession may capture our attention faster and with more emotion than the alternatives.

There are plenty of examples across the Tech industry of this at play. Look at what Salesforce.com did with it’s anti-software movement – and graphical representation. Rather than message “go SaaS” with a big check-box, they used a stop symbol with software through the middle. The added twist is they drove clear differentiation about what they were, by speaking to what they weren’t. Negative messages and frames often draw a cleaner line than positive.

Take the often messaged word, “Open”. It’s loaded with meaning – open source, standards-based, open API, free, penguin. Any number of technology audiences interpret it in any number of ways. It’s used by so many, it can’t be “owned”. Rather than a message, it’s become a confusing descriptor.

Messengers and marketers would be better off focusing here on what they aren’t.

Open vs. Zero Lock-in

Open vs. Non Proprietary

The messaging rule here is clear – don’t shy away from messaging the negative if you expect a positive outcome.

Out of the blue it reloads years old archived email. Total nightmare. Renders GMail entirely useless.

Tim Bray has joined the Google Android team. This is a great move for him and an even better move for Google. And he is right on.

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient…

The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.

Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.

I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.

"Concentrate every minute on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can– if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you."

Marcus Aurelius on internet addiction (A.D. 121-180)