With nearly two decades of experience, research and continued education in Computer Science, Mathematics and Engineering, I have taken away a few axioms.

80% of writing code is thought

We're not just staring at the screen.  We're thinking.  Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle completely in your head.  Now imagine you have to paint the full picture, cut each jigsaw piece, then carefully put them all back together.  You haven't even written a line of code yet and you still may have gotten it all wrong.

90% of thought is simplification

Short Hand Guide To Identifying Crappy Code:

• Complexity is a trap.  If I have to make more than a few function calls to get what I want, its too complicated
• If the class is longer than a few function calls and a few properties its too big
• If it requires longer than a few minutes to understand what its doing and how it fits together, It's too abstract
• If one class knows too much about another class, its too coupled
• If any piece of code makes more than a few assumptions about its input, its doing too much
• If the language (api/interface) between two objects is inconsistent, the code is not well thought out
• If there is code that is never used, it is over designed
• If it can be simplified, simplify it.
  

20% of writing code is actually typing code into your editor

This looks like a flurry of activity on the keyboard and ends in a short lived triumph. You're not nearly done yet and you realize that there is a very good chance you'll need to throw this all away should a simpler, more coherent design presents itself (see rules of simplification).

Let Your Customers Deisgn Your Software

Even the best laid plans of mice and men can't forsee the off-the-wall ways your end consumer decides to use your product. 

I am never surprised at the myriads of creative ways consuemers try to tweak, fit and change your product to suit their needs. 

This inevitably leads to a considerable re-thinking of what you built. This doesn't mean you'll need to change anything, but it should very strongly encourage your future product roadmap.

 Make the least amount of assumptions as possible and build the bare bones product.  I call this MVP, or minimum viable product.  Let your early adopters guide what features you add.  This is a fundamental step towards avoiding bloat, bells and whistles, saving time and delivering value to your consumers.  This is also called the maturation of your product.  We typically do this through a limited beta.

Use Google+ Circles The Right Way

What's a circle anyhow?  Consider a sociological view. 

My childhood friends don't care about IPO's and Tech news, but my business contacts do.  My mother doesn't need to hear about my transgressions from last weekend's epic party.  Likewise, neither does my boss...

Conversely, my business contacts would probably be annoyed at the absurd amount of pictures I post of my dog (My mom loves them).

Circles allow us to 'speak' to the correct audience in the correct way with content and engagement that matches the culture of that group.

These relationships form social circles.  There tends to be some, but little overlap in their members.  

Here is where it gets really neat.  

These social circles are self organizing, self governing and well defined social norms.  They have unique "micro-cultures" defined by the members of the group.  We talk differently, we behave differently, we share interests and values unique to that particular circle.  Millions of years of evolution has created these inherent biological responses to improve survivability by allowing the formation of empathetic communities that work together towards a common goal.

A Brief History Of Web Based Social Organization 

The correct way to create an online social network, is to model it after real life. But we (developers of social networks) didn't get that right away.  We had to go through a sort of learning process. Excluding early forms of online social organization (BBS's, IRC, Chat Rooms, Forums), it went something like this:

MySpace (a failed attempt at social organization), to

Twitter (an introduction to one method of communication useful to social groups but suffering from a high signal to noise ratio), to

Facebook (who only much later understood the social paradigm and 'tacked'  groups onto a mature platform).  

What Happens To Facebook?

Facebook was one huge step forward, but it failed in one fundamental way.  While they had correctly implemented the notion of a social circle via groups, they didn't teach anyone about it.  It was treated like some sort of complicated security feature and most users failed to adopt (or understand the importace of) it.  

The 800lb Gorilla

Google+ took the lessons of hindsight to correct on this paradigm.  Google took 'circles' and made it the core of its platform.  Users are confronted with circles the moment they begin using +. 

There's work to be done... Early adopters of Goolge+, are struggling to understand how to use this modailty and begin to fall back into the habits of old.  

Some use it like Twitter.  Some like Facebook (shove all their contacts into a single group or completely ignore groups).  Some don't take the time to think about their content's (comments, posts, media, etc) audience before posting it.

While we inherently must rely on our underlying trust and judgement how we organize and engage with our circles, what we're ushering in is (hopefully) the adoption of a new way of thinking about the content we put on the web and for whom. 

Thanks to the internet, deep market and behavior analysis has become a mandatory factor in spending your ad budget.  Traditionally, print, TV and billboard advertising has lacked this feedback loop.

Regan National Advertising is attempting to prove the effectiveness of billboard advertising, by running these billboards and then re-surveying residents from these areas.  

Interestingly, only 1.3% of randomly surveyed residents were able to correctly answer the question, "What was the first word spoken on the moon?"  Regan believes that after running these billboards, another random survey will prove a higher percentage of correct answers, while a control city will remain the same.

If a higher percentage of people answer correctly, Regan can leverage its findings to re-ignite the billboard advertising market.

I've seen these billboards all over Salt Lake City lately.  They were brought to my attention by my business partner, Tyson Quick.

Read more about this clever experiment that helps add tangible metrics to an advertising medium with a traditionally fuzzy ROI.

Who Killed Social Media Marketing?

Nobody:  "Social Media Marketing is not dead, your strategy is." - Kevin Mesiab

So What Gives?

There's a lot of grumbling from the blog pundits about how Social Media Marketing is dead.  Even the so called "Social Media Mavins" and the "Marketing Gurus" are espousing an end to the 'hay days' of Twitter, Facebook, Social Bookmarking for marketing exposure.

They're Dead Wrong.

The days of massive conversions by spamming tweets, dm's and other nefarious tricks are dead.  But any marketing strategy that relied on this kind of "spray and pray" were dead before they started. 

So Adjust Your Strategy

I recently interviewed Jordan Kasteler from BlueGlass Interactive, Inc for Jounce.com.  Jordan is an expert in delivering high value, high ROI deployments utilizing Social Media Networks, the right way.  

Watch this quick interview and learn how to CPR your failing campaigns back to life.

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