Lifelogging: The Ability to Quantify Yourself

With more and more data available and at our fingertips, it has become possible to track every area of our lives. We can track our finances, our location, our friends, our movement, our jogs, our calorie intake, and even, our sleep patterns via digital channels.

Below is a video of Hasan Elahi's Ted Talk on tracking his entire life in response to ending up on the FBI watch list by accident:

This trend towards tracking everything is impacting the health and wellness sector in a unique way. In the last few years, a new trend has emerged, Lifelogging. According to the Lifestream blog, Lifelogging is the process of tracking personal data generated by our own behavioral activities. While Lifestreaming primarily tracks the activity of content we create and discover, Lifelogging tracks personal behavior data like exercising, sleeping, and eating. Lifelogging revolves around analyzing and learning from data to help optimize personal behaviors.

Some interesting apps and devices are capitalizing on this trend:

• UP by Jawbone is a wristband + iPhone app that tracks your activity and sleep. The idea is that the wristband inspiring you to move more, sleep better and eat smarter. 
• Nike+ is one of the best-known examples for tracking exercise. You can track your workouts via Sportband, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPod Nano as well as online. 
• BodyMedia FIT is an armband to track physical activity and sleep patterns. Tracking is done by iPhone or Android apps as well as online. 
• iHealth Blood Pressure Dock is the first blood pressure monitoring system for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. 
• Meal Snap asks you to take a photo of your meal and then estimates how many calories your meal was. It tracks your meals and progress towards your diet goals over time. 
• Sleep Cycle is an iPhone app that acts as an alarm clock. It analyzes your sleep patterns and wakes you in the lightest sleep phase so you wake up relaxed and refreshed. 

And, this Lifelogging trend even extends into tracking changes in personal appearance. People are tracking how their face changes over time with the Everyday app, an app that allows you to take a picture of your face every single day. As noted by Techcrunch, the app functions in the following way: “When you first load up Everyday, you’re asked to take a picture of your face. Once you do this, you’re asked to align a grid to where you nose, mouth, and eyes are. This means that for each picture you take, your face can be in the same position…. And there’s also an overlay photo mask of your original face picture (which can be switched on and off) to help you align your face. And the real key may be the alert system, which allows you to set a time each day to get a Push Notification to take the picture of yourself, so you don’t forget.”

Moreover, communities are developing around Lifelogging. For example, the Quantified Self community is an online community around the users and toolmakers who share an interest in self-knowledge through self-tracking. The community includes a forum, a guide to available self-tracking tools and projects, and videos around the subject. Additionally, it has even expanded offline into Quantified Self Show and Tell meet-ups and an annual conference.

As the ability to quantify yourself through real-time data becomes more and more engrained in society, it will be interesting to see the results. Will people gravitate to the idea that they more they know, the more they will be able to better themselves? Or, will it result in a backlash?

For more information on this topic, here's a link to a collaborative post I wrote for work with Alina Koyfman, "Mobile Devices: My Tool for a Better Me."

News: For the Masses, By the Masses?

This is a repost of the latest article I wrote for my work blog on how digital tools are changing journalism. ___________________________________________________________ As social media gets more integrated into people’s lives, they’re demanding more control over the content they interact with. This behavior is happening organically in the digital space. In response, newspapers are changing the way they create content to include consumer participation – and consumers are changing how they interact with the news.

According to an eyetracking study by the Poyner Institute, the shift within newspapers towards focusing on more digital consumer participation makes a lot of sense:

• Online participants read an average 77% of an article versus the 62% within broadsheet and 57% within tabloids. 
• People consuming news digitally also read more regardless of the length of the article. 

This could directly relate to the fact that people have the option digitally to aggregate news in a way they rarely can offline.

And, people are taking advantage of this by personalizing the news for themselves:

• Digg Newswire and Redditt both allow consumers to act as an editor by voting news stories up and down depending on the topic and its relevancy to the individual.
• Trove creates personalized content based on individual user’s interests. It instantly builds a user’s personal home page by matching its channels to the user’s Facebook likes and interests. It then searches and analyzes articles and blog posts to find entities – people, places, things, or concepts – in text. Based on what it finds, Trove classifies the article into one or more of hundreds of topics.
• XYDO is a news-based social network. It focuses on the social endorsement, prioritization and engagement of news. XYDO provides users with a prioritized view of articles/features, editorials, blogs and other news being shared within their social graphs, together with the ability to observe and track broad global news trends and specialized domain-specific trends. Personalized news emails, the XYDO brief, are sent to the users regularly.

Newspapers are also adapting to find real time, socially curated content. For example, New York Daily News is now requiring that every editorial computer has tweetdeck installed on it. This was mandated by Scott Cohen, the New York Daily News’ digital executive editor. Even more interestingly, the Guardian just began an experiment in which consumers helped curate the news. Beginning Oct 11th, the newspaper began publishing a live account of its news diary online, allowing consumers to see the scheduled news of the day as well as any upcoming breaking news. Consumers were encouraged to tell editors what they thought about individual stories and suggested stories using Twitter by tweeting with the hashtag #opennews. They could also follow the editor’s opinions about stories in a Twitter feed and add their own opinions to the conversation by tweeting to the hashtag #opennews. Editors dropped stories in the queue that received a lukewarm response. The purpose of the experiment was to increase readership, online conversation and positive sentiment around the Guardian’s news.

And, tools are coming out that change the definition of what it means to be a journalist. For example, Public Laboratory is creating a number of tools that are available to allow anyone to cover the news. These tools can take aerial photos or video of an event or story. These tools are facilitating the means for anyone to tell their story from a different standpoint.

However, this evolution in the news begs a question. Does news that is created or influenced by the informed public elevate certain stories like celebrity gossip over others such as the protests in Syria? Or, does it allow for truly unbiased reporting or information gathering? There are examples that point to both options as possible and indicate that the answer will probably lie somewhere in between. It feels like time will tell.

Tapping our Digital Behaviors to Ignite Social Change

This is a repost of an article I wrote for my work blog in October on how digital technologies are being used to impact positive social change.
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The rise in digital technologies is empowering social change on an unprecedented global scale. While it is true that digital technologies fueling social change have allowed for some negative consequences such as increased surveillance and the ability to mobilize riots, this article is specifically focused around positive examples. This is evident in the use of social media to change regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, to monitor elections in Kenya, and to aid earthquake relief efforts in Haiti. One particularly interesting example is the Cairo Harass Map, which empowers women to report sexual harassment via email or SMS. The purpose of this project is to end the social acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt.

Many social change projects focus around fundraising platforms that tap into existing digital behaviors:

• 50/50 is a 50-day creative collaboration fundraising campaign encouraging creative projects that generate awareness and raise money for the famine in East Africa. 100% of the donation goes directly to UNICEF. 
• Thanksforteaching.us is a 30 day campaign, hosted by tbd, dedicated to thanking teachers all over the world by sharing the actions, dreams and passions they inspired. This campaign aims to bring the spotlight back on the teachers that make our classrooms thrive in a time when funding for schools is being cut. 
• Africa Needs You is trying to raise money to combat the famine in East Africa through leveraging the cultural phenomenon of paid celebrity tweets and turning it upside down. It is asking people to challenge celebrities via twitter to donating a tweet – the equivalent of $10,000.
• Charity Swear Box looks for swear words on twitter. When a person enters his or her twitter name in the search box on the Charity Swear Box homepage, it checks all his or her past tweets for any sign of a swear word. These are added up to a suggested amount to donate to a favorite charity such as Unicef, WWF (World Wildlife Fund), and Feed the Children. 

Digital technologies are simplifying and enhancing the communication required to get social change moving. For example, in the past year, the Social Change Impact report stated:

• 110 million Americans expressed an opinion on an issue by posting a comment on a blog or Web site.
• 93.8 million Americans joined or created a group on a social networking site devoted to a cause.
• 82.1 million Americans texted to make donations, voted, organized a demonstration, etc. related to a specific cause or issue.

Digital technology is allowing people to get involved in social change issues faster and more frequently than ever before. And, digital technology as a conduit for social change is cross-generational. As noted in the Walden study: eight in 10 American adults, from Gen Y to through the Silent Generation agree that thanks to digital technology, people are getting involved in positive social change issues faster and more frequently than ever before. This belief is strongest among the Baby Boomers.

A number of brands are leveraging this momentum to align with specific social change campaigns:

• Levi’s WaterTank game was a Facebook game that inspired consumers to participate in online water-saving challenges. Each challenge completed “unlocked” water from the Levi’s WaterTank and ultimately supported Water.org’s life-saving clean water projects worldwide. This game has evolved into Levi’s Go Forth Platform.
• Aviva USA’s Status for Youth made the brand's new Facebook page a catalyst for good. "Status For Youth" asked people to donate a status update to a youth-related charity. In lending their voice, people also influenced the amount of grant money given to each charity.
• Pepsi Refresh is funding programs across a number of disciplines that “refresh” the world through local communities. Projects are focused around education, communities, art and music.
• Chase Community Giving’s American Giving Awards is Chase’s first-ever celebrity tribute to community heroes, offering 5 charities a chance to share $2MM in grants so they can continue their work helping others.
• Starbucks’s Create Jobs for USA is a partnership with Opportunity Finance Network to create and sustain jobs through providing capital grants to select Community Development Financial Institutions. Additionally, this platform wants to build a community of interested people via Facebook and Twitter to express opinions and ideas about to improve and take action in local communities.

As the world becomes increasingly more interconnected, it will become more important for brands to think about ways to incorporate social change platforms into their brand promise.

The Emergence of Digital Secret Social Clubs

This is a repost of an article I wrote for my work blog in September on the rise of the secret social club in the digital space.
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The idea of the secret social club has been prevalent in the real world throughout much of history. However, until recently, this was not replicated in the digital space. In the last few years, status stories shared via social platforms and in real life have become increasingly more attractive and prevalent. Digital secret social clubs have begun to actively tap into these status stories. These clubs unify members not only through their exclusivity but also through shared passion points. They provide members a way to be on the inside, “in the know” about specific passions from food to art to travel. These clubs also give their members the outlet to be able to lead the way to the “unique,” the “cool,” and the avant-garde in their community.

The idea of the secret social club taps into some key emotional needs of consumers:

• The desire for unique stories to tell 
• The promise of “shared” experiences
• And, the feeling of increased social status.

As noted, in Trendwatching’s report, Statusphere: "When individuality is the new religion, owning or experiencing something no one else has is the ultimate status fix.” Secret social clubs are directly answering that need by providing participants stories that aren't common knowledge for the masses and helping consumers tell their own status-yielding stories to other consumers.

• Excursionist is a members-only travel site where travel is tailored to a consumer’s passions and around unique experiences. The trips are curated by world-renowned experts and guided by people in the local community.
• The Global Party is a worldwide extravaganza featuring luxury lifestyle brands and 80,000 of the world's elite inspired by the adventures of fictional character, Phileas Fogg. 80 exclusive parties will take place in venues across the globe all launching within 24 hours. This is based around an effort to raise funds and awareness for a collection of charities around the world.
• Diner en Blanc is an exclusive pop-up secret dining society. Members must dress in white to recognize each other and everyone brings his or her own food, tables, chairs and glassware to a secret but public location, which is revealed shortly before the start of event.

Secret social clubs allow brands to reward loyalty in a smart way. Brands can provide well thought out and unique incentives. For example, the Patron Social Club encourages consumer participation by promising the more a person participates the more likely he or she is to get an invite to one of the secret dining society events. This intrigues and engages consumers well beyond a simple offer or coupon.

The one of the strengths of these branded social clubs is that they share credible and original content that’s engaging and relevant to their target audience. They create compelling content their consumers actually want to consume. Moreover, these secret social clubs provide a holistic experience for their members by taking digital experience off-line into real life social engagements and then bringing the real life engagements back into the online experience. The branded secret social clubs have found clever ways to engage the social media audience to amplify an experience that already works well in the physical world.

The Convergence of Fitness and Digital

Wow! It's been a while since I've had a chance to write anything. It's been a busy summer between moving from Minneapolis to Manhattan and starting a new job. Anyway, fall is finally here in New York and with it, I want to repurpose some blog posts I've been writing for my current employer. I hope you enjoy them! Here's the first one from August:
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Keeping fit while traveling has always been a bit of a challenge. While a lot of hotels have gyms and a person can always throw on sneakers and go for a run, it’s easy to lose focus on the road. Workouts get off track. And, it’s easy to get out of shape.

As noted in trendwatching’s 11 Crucial Trends to Watch for 2011 report, the convergence of wellness and health is an emerging consumer trend. Health has become as important as traditional status symbols and consumers expect health-related tools to “improve their quality of life, rather than merely treating illnesses and ailments.”

The convergence of fitness and digital platforms not only addresses consumers’ interest in improving their quality of life through wellness but taps into two seemingly opposed consumer trends: the increased interest in ultra-personalization and the emergence of inclusive, global communities of shared interests. Despite the obvious tensions between these two trends, fitness platforms appear to be capitalizing on the intersection of needs between the two.

Mobile apps are allowing for even more personalization and customization, giving customers added control of the information they receive, when, where and how they receive it. The ultra personalization trend has been instrumental in the creation of a number of fitness platforms:

• Nike+ is one of the most well-known running platforms. Using a tracking device within your shoe or another GPS-enabled device, it tracks each of your runs and provides an endless about of information about each run including maps, calories burnt, stride, etc.
• YogaTailor creates custom personalized yoga video workouts for you, maximizing the benefits within your available time and level of experience.
• Jog.fm helps you create a playlist to match whatever pace you want to run, walk or cycle at based on beats per minute (BPM). It takes the existing music in your library and mixes it according to your requested pace. While options exist for listening to others’ playlists, it still revolves mainly around your music, your playlist, and mostly your desired pace.

While people want to personalize their options for working out, they also want to share their experiences and get support from a community with shared interests. Brands are tapping into people’s need to have a community of support around them as they reach for their goals. This need is especially strong in the fitness category and can be the missing link in terms of exercise for a person who has to travel regularly. Fitness platforms are focusing on creating inclusive communities that can be accessed anytime, everywhere and are based on similar fitness interests and goals:

• Two weeks ago, Speedo rolled out their new platform, “Pace Club. Speedo’s Pace Club includes a mobile app that allows swimmers to sign up for training programs, log workouts, view professional athletes demonstrating proper technique and share their progress with friends through Pace Club’s virtual “Swim Team,” as well as on Facebook or Twitter.  Additionally, “Splash Tags” allow consumers to search for and review pools – as of launch, 3,500 pools had already been entered into the system, the most comprehensive directory in the country. There’s also a blog featuring content by Speedo athletes and a product widget showcasing relevant Speedo products.
• Endomondo is a social network for runners. At its core, it is a cross-platform running app with a huge network of fellow runners built in. It has apps across most mobile platforms and GPS-enabled devices including Garmin. With Endomondo installed on your mobile device, you can track where you run, how long you run, check your personal best times, and share them with friends. From the Endomondo site, you can view exercise summaries, issue invites and challenges to get your friends involved in your fitness push, and participate in site-wide challenges.
• Track-a-thon is an app developed by mcgarrybowen labs to support a runner’s fans. The runner downloads the app onto his or her iphone and then carries it with him or her throughout the race. The spectator can then visually track a person’s race progress along the course including runners’ distance, speed elevation and the music they are listening to (assuming the race allows music).

According to trendwatching, “the ‘consumerization’ of health means that more consumers will choose products with embedded health benefits that are actually well designed, desirable, accessible, fun, tasty, interesting or storied.” So, the next time you are going on a trip, consider checking out a few of these tools and see if you find it easier to stay in shape while on the road.

Heineken Star Player Taps into Fan's Love of Prediction

Soccer is my favorite sport. I've spent many Saturdays and Sundays at the pub watching soccer with my friends and strangers. And, I've definitely overheard and joined in many conversations attempting to predict the action on the field: "Oh, Gerrard is definitely going to score. There's no way he'll miss. I bet he goes for the top left corner." "How in the world did Rooney get a penalty there? I mean he didn't step on anyone's crotch this time!" So, it's not surprising that when Heineken StarPlayer by AKQA launched I would be interested.

Fans of sports love to predict what their team, their rivals, the refs, etc. will do. Through predicting behaviors and actions on the field, fans feel connected to the action, almost like they themselves are calling the shots. It opens the door to being part of something larger than oneself. It creates a community. A perfect example is the Boston Red Sox Red Sox Nation. Heineken StarPlayer taps into this existing behavior and expands it from the real-world into the digital space via mobile (iPhone only for the moment) and Facebook. It creates a game within the game.



As noted in the Creativity Online write-up, here's how the app works: "Heineken StarPlayer is a 'dual screen' soccer app that lets fans watch UEFA Champions League (UCL) matches on TV while they play the game in real-time.

The game can be played on a PC, iPhone or iPod touch and is downloaded from iTunes or played on the Heineken Facebook page. To score points, players anticipate events unfolding on the pitch live and make decisions on what will play out. When a key event occurs, the app triggers in real-time a 'Match Moment' and gamers are asked to choose from outcome options (for example, will that goal go in?). Players can compete and share scores with their friends, via Facebook, as well as other players around the world."

Online game results in an offline solution

I am always interested in seeing how digital trends and emerging technologies manifest themselves in the real world. I love the idea of taking the online world offline and the offline world online. This is already happening in city-wide scavenger hunts using tools like Foursquare and Twitter to pass on clues and through billboards like GranataPet dog food billboard in Germany.




Now, we have another interesting idea coming out of the UK - "Real Life Farmville." According to an article today in PSFK, "a large working farm will be taken over for the first time by web users across the world on Wednesday, who will vote on every key decision taken on its cattle, pigs, sheep and crops. The MyFarm experiment hands over power at the National Trust’s 2,500-acre Wimpole Estate farm in Cambridgeshire, UK. Up to 10,000 farming novices will choose which bull to buy, which crop to plant and whether to spilt fields to resurrect lost hedgerows."

MyFarm experiment capitalizes on the existing popularity of Farmville, which currently has 47 million players a month and is the second most popular game on Facebook, to help people understand where their food comes from.

As stated in the article: "'The National Trust is the UK’s biggest farmer,' said Fiona Reynolds, its director-general. 'This is all about reconnecting people to where their food comes from. Our TNS poll showed that only 8% of mothers feel confident talking to their children about where their food comes from. That’s really poignant.'"

It will definitely be interesting to see how the MyFarm experiment shapes up. Personally, I would love to see it succeed.

Back from the dead

So, it's been about a year since my last post. Needless to say, it's been a pretty busy year with work and living life (yes, I did run a marathon while not writing my blog). This, of course, has resulted in my choice to almost exclusively use tumblr to post quick videos and comments on things I find interesting.

However, lately I've found myself thinking about the idea of mentorship, professional development and the workplace. Throughout my career, I've had different mentors at different times. In one job my boss was a mentor. In other jobs, my team members were. And, in several cases, my mentor has been someone working in the industry but not at my company (this can be refreshing because it allowed me to be truly open and honest about situations, concerns and questions). Traditionally, the belief is that your boss should mentor you. However, this is not always the case and frankly doesn't always work (even though it can be great when it does).

As my friend, Anya Kamentz, states in her Fast Company article, A Case for Changing the Way We View Mentors: "We need a new model of mentorship. We're living in an age of networks, not hierarchies; knowledge and wisdom is distributed, rather than concentrated among the gray hairs. Moreover, we're bringing more of ourselves to work and we're often chasing meaning over profit. The new model has to be more flexible and forgiving, to allow for the fact that mentorships, like any relationship, come in different flavors and change over time."

Thanks to digital communications, we can connect and learn from people all over the world in meaningful and effective ways. Blogs, conversations on LinkedIn (both personal and within groups), Facebook groups and Twitter are opening doors that previously weren't visible. That being said, there are currently a few blogs I look to for industry advice and growth within the planning discipline. Additionally, I have also connected with some of the writers via LinkedIn and Twitter, allowing me to continue the conversation in a more meaningful way. Here's a list of some of my favorites, in no particular order:

• Gareth Kay's Brand New: Head of Planning at Goodby in San Francisco
• Carlos Henrique Vilela's  BR Planning: Planning Manager at Filadelfia in Brazil
  He has a really awesome series in his blog that any aspiring and junior to mid-level planner should check out - Advice for the Next Generation Planner
• Mark Pollard's Life. Then Strategy: Strategy Director at McCann Sydney in Australia. *He just became the SVP, Global Planning Director at Saatchi & Saatchi in New York as of May
  One of my favorite posts is his post, "Why the World Doesn't Need Another Digital Strategist."
• Heather LeFevre's Buy Me, I'll Change Your Life: Head of Planning for Strawberry Frog in Amsterdam
  She's also the mind behind The Planner's Survey, a great tool to assess what's going on in planning around the world, what salary ranges are in different locations and in different positions, etc.
• Ana Andjelic's i [love] marketing: Senior Planner at Huge in New York

Who are some of your favorites?