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Hoist with my own petard

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So, yesterday I posted a certain rather long blog rant as a result of a bit of Intertube detective work prompted by a client question.

The short version: we discovered a site that blatantly games social networks, offering to sell Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and other social “audiences” in bulk. I knew such services existed, but this was my first direct encounter with such a raw and gaping cluewound.

A key takeaway – the evidence of our research suggests that while one can buy large follower counts, the majority of the followers you receive are “low value” phantom accounts. Accounts with tiny follower counts, very low activity, and a pattern of spam-like behaviour.

The coda to my rant, alas, is that in the hours since I posted it I’ve seen a most unusual spike in my own Twitter follower count. More than 700 new followers in less than 12 hours. My usual rate is around 3-4 net new followers per day.

From a quick analysis, it’s evident that around 90% of these new followers are, guess what: phantoms. Spammy and fake accounts set up, presumably, as part of the same pyramid scheme my own post set out to expose. All of the suspect accounts are also following the very service I was outing in the first place.

This is either entirely accidental, or – I fear – a bizarre, calculated form of retribution from the very scammers I called out.  Ugh.

I have, it seems, been hoist with my own petard.

I suppose one part of me ought to be celebrating this spike in followers, but in truth it just makes me quietly sad.

BuyFansToday may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen

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“What fresh hell is this?” – Dorothy Parker

The notion of buying your social media audience has come up many times before.

There was that awful, lame-brained PayPerPost thing back in 2007. At the other end of the spectrum, there was a much earlier (and far more ethically-constructed) experiment by Marqui to sponsor bloggers directly  - a program that generated A LOT of noise at the time (disclosure: I ran product management at Marqui, so I’m kind of biased).

But yesterday I stumbled across something different. Something very, very different and unquestionably, immeasurably worse: an organization that sells social media fans and followers in bulk.

Make a cup of tea and get comfortable. I’m going into a full-on, extended rant here.

Here’s the background:

One of our clients was trying to figure out how a competitor of theirs went from a scant few hundred to over 14,500 Twitter followers in a matter of weeks.

Even more odd, when we looked into it, was the fact that the competitor appeared to have added the exact same number of new followers every day for a period of several weeks.

Here’s a chart from TwitterCounter that shows the growth (click to embiggenify):

The tell-tale signal here: this looks entirely inorganic.

Nothing that exists in social media is inorganic – it’s lumpy, unpredictable, and delightfully human. By definition.

This account was flatlined at 3,416 followers for months, then suddenly started adding precisely 138 followers a day, between September 5th and November 7th. On Monday of this week, something else happened – they’ve added exactly 1,422 followers each day since. That kind of steady, predictable community growth just doesn’t happen naturally.

It all smelled decidedly fishy to us, and sure enough – it is.

When we looked deeper into the competitor’s Twitter profile, their follower list included a host of sketchy-looking accounts with tiny follower numbers and (in many cases) few or zero tweets.

With help from Sysomos and some team smarts, we took a sizeable cross-section of the new followers and did some profile comparison.

The curious thing we found about many of these followers: lots of them seemed to be following all of the same companies and other accounts on Twitter.

Many of them, for example, follow this list:

Zaarly
YazeedRacing
Saatchi_Gallery
CheaterVille
SinusDynamics
Jeffbeacher
MyCauseWater

… and a host of other over-lapping or related accounts. That seemed more than a little weird in itself, but the plot… curdles.

ALL of these accounts also have one shared account that they follow in common. An account called BuyFansToday  which links to the site of the same name.

This is, as the name so clearly announces, the epicentre of some industrial-grade skullduggery.

At the BuyFansToday site you’ll learn 10,000 Twitter followers can be bought for a mere US$699.95. Want Facebook fans? 10,000 shiny news ones will set you back US$849.95

Just… wow.

In case it isn’t immediately obvious, here are three reasons why this is just a hideously, almost criminally bad idea:

1. IT’S A LIE.

The marketing rhetoric on the BuyFansToday site states:

Having a Facebook fan page with lots of fans can do wonders for any product that needs customers. A community of real fans will buy and use the product, as well as notify their friends, who will then go on to use the product as well, and to notify their friends, creating a continuous cycle of promotion.

In itself, that’s a reasonable explanation of how real network effects can drive business to companies through social media. But there is nothing about the approach BuyFansToday is taking that generates “real fans”.

Elsewhere on their site they claim:

We don’t use dummy twitter accounts when you buy Twitter followers from us.

Bullshit.

As we’ve seen above, what you’re buying is a network of shell accounts. Fake Twitter followers (and, no doubt, equally bogus Facebook fans, YouTube fans, and so on) seemingly created for the sole purpose of fulfilling a contractual obligation to follow a certain quota of other accounts. It’s a tissue-thin pyramid scheme.

It’s entirely likely they have legitimate (albeit woefully misguided) social media users in their database. I don’t doubt it. However, from an unscientific, but statistically valid, sampling of the followers for this competitor’s account, we saw an average of 9 tweets (all time) per follower, 29.85 followers, per account.

Most of the Twitter accounts we analyzed are less than 100 days old, and many of them only tweeted a few times at the beginning and have been entirely dormant since.

Analyzing a selection of tweets, a lot of them are just pure gobbledegook – spam-like phrases stuffed through the Twitterpipes to synthesize a gauzy illusion of real activity.

Three random examples pulled from three different Twitter handles:

- “Yeah, TheClevelandShow komt terug.”

- “Never stop it ahahhaa.”

- “Smh these twitter beefs need to last longer lol now the tl back to being dead.”

 

These are, by any rational assessment, dummy accounts. Pun intended.

These aren’t real people, you idiots. They don’t care about your company, they’re not even actually following you – not in any real sense of the word.

It’s all a rather pathetic lie.

2. IT DOESN’T WORK.

Marketers naturally assume that the bigger the network, the better. Nope.

For more than 100 years, the business of marketing has been predicated on reach, on scale. Impressions counts, audience volumes, counting eyeballs (eww) – if we can get our message in front of a big enough audience, we’re sure to hit our target. Spray and pray.

But this is advertising-led thinking. It’s the economic logic of spam. And that’s just not how social media works.

In social media, Metcalfe’s Law seems to be the idea many marketers chase after:

The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.

Sure, there seems to be value in having a big following; in achieving a certain critical mass. But here’s the thing: in order for the value part of the equation to work in a social network context, the connected nodes actually need to be contributing something and communicating with each other; else they’re just dead links.

My corollary to Metcalfe’s Law would be:

The value of a social network is proportional to the square of the number of engaged contributors to the system.

Note: it’s “contributors to” not “users of“.

In any audience group, only a percentage of the members will be active participants. In a social media audience group you’ve acquired through BuyFansToday, that percentage is going to be vanishingly small.

Indeed, it’s questionable whether the word “audience” is even valid in this context. If these people aren’t actually looking at you, they ain’t an audience.

It’s like you sold out the Albert Hall, only to walk on stage and discover only six people were actually in their seats. Oh, and you didn’t even sell the tickets – you paid people to be there.

I was chatting about this episode with a good friend and colleague at another agency, who commented:

“…through their eyes, they have 14,000 followers so they are sitting on top of a goldmine…but are they? If you look at their following through a qualitative lens, they are really sitting on top of a fool’s goldmine (yes…I just went there).”

Nicely put. It’s the quality versus quantity point that is most important here. Followers and fans are only of any value if they:

  • have consciously chosen to follow or Like you, and;
  • are engaged in spreading the word about you among their own circles of influence

The followers you’re buying wholesale through scams like this clicked a button, got paid, and have absolutely no interest in who you are or what you do. They may never visit your site, are not sending you any traffic, are not buying your products, and will almost certainly never even see any of your tweets – let alone respond to them or share them among their (questionable) networks.

That dog don’t hunt.

3. IT DAMAGES YOUR BRAND.

Contrary to what the founders of organizations like BuyFansToday evidently think, people aren’t sheep. And this is the key thing:

Social Media is like Soylent Green. It’s made of people.

When those people see you inflating your audience numbers with spammy behaviour, they will judge you.

Prudent, intelligent, thoughtful people (the kind, I hope, you’d want to number among your fans and followers) make decisions to follow brands, in part, based on the influence of their peers, friends and others they aspire to emulate. When they look at your followers and see an endless list of spambots, fake accounts, and anonymous weirdos – how well does that reflect on who you are?

Looked at this way, you can think of your followers as reputation votes. When someone credible awards you the gift of a Like or Follow, it reflects well on your brand. When you hoover up hundreds of dummy followers through some automated system, it makes you look lame and foolish.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you’re an up-and-coming new line of innovative sports equipment. If sports is my thing, and I hear about your products, I’m going to be interested to see who else is following you in social networks. Pro athletes, perhaps? Coaches? At the very least, I’d expect to see a bunch of like-minded sports fans in your lists.

If I look at your Twitter profile and all I see is an endless parade of sketchy-looking accounts, with typos in their bios and no apparent connection to sports performance, I’m going to feel, at best, confused.

More likely: I’ll conclude that your online behaviour seems to be attracting spam accounts, for whatever reason, and I’ll opt not to follow you. I’ll also think a lot less of your brand because of the unflattering pall being cast upon you by the quality of your followers.

That sounds arrogantly dismissive, perhaps, but I’m human. Understand this: your brand isn’t what you say. It’s what people say it is.

 –%–

*deep breath… exhale*

So… yes. I know I’ve ranted long and hard about this, but it just really, truly frosts my nuggets. Hard.

Why? I think it’s rooted in that Soylent Green analogy.

Social media is people. The Internet is people. Forget about the fact that there are billions of dollars and huge corporations all over this thing and go right back to where we started. Go back and read the Cluetrain again:

Networked markets are beginning to self-organize faster than the companies that have traditionally served them. Thanks to the web, markets are becoming better informed, smarter, and more demanding of qualities missing from most business organizations.

 

If we lie down and just let clueless douchenozzles like BuyFansToday corrupt and pollute the communities and spaces we’re building online, then we’ve squandered the whole point and true potential of social media. It’s just wrong, dammit.

Do you like how advertising and marketing worked back in the unidirectional, broadcast-only, pre-Internet world? Do you really want to return to that?

If not, then I believe it’s your duty to spread the word about clueduggery such as this as far and wide as possible. Alert your clients. Friends don’t let friends dunk their budgets in crazy.

My apologies, by the way, for being coy about the name of my client (and their competitor) here. Cluelessness benefits from sunlight, I know, but I’m not comfortable directly outing the competitor for what, I hope, was simply a really bad decision based on a poor understanding of how this stuff works.

Buying a service like this is, I’m convinced, utterly misguided – but we can’t blame the ill-informed clients for the fact that such a service exists. They just took bad advice.

And yes, I know, I’m probably being hypocritical by directly linking to a number of the other BuyFansToday users, above. I’m astonished that even respectable institutions such as London’s Saatchi Gallery seem to have fallen for this particular variety of snake oil.

Perhaps they’ll come across this post in their analytics and come to understand the error of their ways.

UPDATE: Related reading from the latest Inc. Magazine (thanks to Heather Kernahan for the tip): Does it pay to buy a Twitter following?

Leona

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When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Shakespeare (of course). Sonnet XXIX

America’s First Woman President?

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I’ve been quietly following the career of Elizabeth Warren for a while now and I continue to be impressed at every turn.

Now running on the Democrat ticket for the Massachusetts state senate seat, Ms. Warren has been kicking up a healthy cloud of positive buzz on the road. One particular moment, taped at an event in Andover, has been bouncing around the Interwebs for over a week now, but I make no excuse for re-posting it here. It still deserves a broader audience – even whatever meagre additional views this wee blog might muster.

Here’s the killer quotation. Deserves to be copied and spread even further and wider than it has been already.

If you think that’s good, it’s even better when you hear the passion with which she delivers the lines. Here’s the clip:

The frisson I feel when watching this is akin to how I felt when I saw clips of Obama’s keynote at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

I called it back then – I felt convinced he’d be the first black American president. Sadly, I didn’t put any money on this or tell anyone other than my Dad (back me up here, Dad – I did say that, right?)

Well I’m going on the record this time. I think Elizabeth Warren could be – perhaps should be the first female president of the US. Only after Barack’s done his full two terms, of course.

Just hoping this post doesn’t jinx her chances entirely.

Facebook drops the Like gate

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In the last few weeks, the Facebook team has rolled out a number of changes to the way the site works. The many changes to the user experience (like the new “ticker” and the increase in character limits on posts) have been widely covered and discussed elsewhere.

A much more significant change that is not getting as much attention is the complete removal of “Like” gates on commenting. To be clear: this means Facebook users can now comment on ANY Page without having first Liked the Page.

Why is this significant?

In the past, the act of clicking “Like” acted as a useful psychological gate. People with an axe to grind might be disinclined to publicly say they “like” a brand or organization just to be able to post a nasty comment on the Page. That (admittedly paper-thin) barrier has now gone.

More importantly, the act of “liking” created a relationship, of sorts, between the fan and the organization Page. This gave the Page two valuable things. It allowed the Page administrator to track all kinds of meaningful analytics about the behaviour of the Page’s fans. Secondly, by becoming a Page fan, users were willingly “subscribing” to see status updates from that brand or organization’s Page appear in the news stream on their own Facebook Pages.

As Josh Constine of the blog Inside Facebook puts it:

“By previously reserving the right to comment to those who had Liked a Page, participation in a conversation was a value exchange. Users got to share their opinions, and Pages got to reach those users through the news feed and appear on their profile.”

That value exchange is now gone.

Facebook have already made compensatory changes to their “Insights” analytics system, adding more granularity to the way Page admins can track interactions on their Pages.

This may help pacify Pages admins who view Facebook primarily as a measureable advertising and promotion channel. It seems almost as though the trade-off logic is: “you don’t get to have a relationship with everyone who comments on your Page any more, but in return we’ll give you more manageable data about how engaging your content is”.

From the perspective of anyone with a Public Relations mindset, however, the fall of the “Like gate” has some serious ramifications.

The Impact on PR

As Page walls are now entirely open to the public, we can expect the monitoring burden for Pages to increase considerably over time. To quote Josh Constine again:

“A brand experiencing a public relations crisis could see thousands or even millions of users descend on its Page to leave complaints or insults without gaining any new fans.”

The message for all of us involved in administering, monitoring and managing Page communities within Facebook is: diligence.

Issues can erupt at any time. The simple barrier that previously helped throttle the volume and velocity of comments on pages is gone. This heralds a ripe new opportunity for spammers, malcontents, and trolls. It also throws open a door for people with genuine concerns and complaints, removing that psychological barrier.

What should you do?

Now is the time to take a close look at your Facebook Page policies and processes and tighten things up BEFORE some seemingly innocuous post escalates into a full-blown crisis, played out in full view of the Facebook public.

Four things:

  1. Review and, if needed, revise your Facebook comment moderation policy. Think of this as insurance. It’s important to publicly state some “rules of engagement” as a permanent link on your Page, reserving the right to delete comments and, if necessary, ban certain users if they post offensive, defamatory, or otherwise inappropriate comments;
  2. Take a close look at your monitoring and comment triage protocols. Are they robust enough to manage an increased comment flow? Is your process for review, escalation and response approval sufficiently streamlined and efficient? What are your provisions for off-hours and weekend monitoring?
  3. Review staff training. Do the frontline teams charged with monitoring your Facebook Pages understand their responsibilities? Are they empowered to encourage healthy, positive debate within your Facebook community? Do they know when to escalate issues, when to step out of the discussion, and where to go to find answers?
  4. Look to your crisis plans. What will you do if your Page gets overrun by angry commenters or spam bots? Will you switch to real-time monitoring and response, switch off commenting, or even shut down your entire Page?
Of course, if you’re ever feeling uncertain about how robust your Facebook monitoring and management protocols are, feel free to drop me a note. I know some people who can help with that.

Farewell Jack

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“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.” – from Jack Layton’s final letter to Canadians, penned just two days before his sad and untimely death at 61.

Canada and the world have lost a true gentleman; one of the last genuinely honourable politicians and a deeply decent human being.

As Max Valiquette put it on Twitter:  ”1980s: city councilor. ’90s: runs for MP. ’00s: party leader. ’10s: Official opposition leader. The man deserved another decade, I think.”

Thank you, Jack, for restoring hope in the left. So sorry you were denied the time to finish your great work.

Thoughts on Google+

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It occurs to me that in all this talk about Google+ vs. Facebook, Google+ vs. Twitter (and Google+ vs. ALL THE THINGS!!) we’re kind of missing another important perspective.

As usual, many of us have fallen into the all-too-easy assumption of OR logic. We’re examining and considering all the ways Google+ might OR and, potentially, NOT other social services.

Will Google+ kill Facebook? Does Google+ render Twitter irrelevant?

This kind of binary thinking makes a certain sense, of course. We’re naturally inclined to see things in competitive terms and it’s certainly true that Google themselves have represented G+, in part, as a competing alternative to Facebook, Twitter and their ilk.

But if we only look at things in terms of this OR that (or, even more extreme, in terms of this NOT that), we’re assuming that there must be one SocNet to rule them all (and in the ToS grind them).

This is not the lesson we ought to be taking from the history of the space. Social Networks rarely die; they just find their niche.

Sometimes, that niche is relatively small and defined by geographic, demographic, or industry-specific parameters (think MySpace, Orkut, Badoo – emphasis on “relatively” small).

Sometimes the “niche” is huge and, I guess, no longer a niche (Facebook, Twitter), but that still doesn’t mean the other SocNets have been killed or rendered irrelevant by the gimungous dominant players.

In other words, AND logic is often much more applicable than OR or NOT here.

Sure, there’s a natural and understandable race for dominance among the big players – fueled, in large part, by the needs of investors as much as it is by the lust for power, fame & glory on the part of the management teams. And yes, one (or more) of the big SocNets will always “win” for a while.

SixDegrees.com was the early winner, way back in ’97. Then it was Friendster, then Orkut. MySpace came along and held the pole position for a long time. Now Facebook is on top of the heap and getting bigger all the time.

But with the exception of SixDegrees, none of the other, earlier SocNets has entirely ceased to exist. They just found the niche that allowed them to coexist with the rest of the networks out there. In the same timeframe, other significant networks have also arisen and achieved enormous followings (look up the user numbers for Badoo some time), without too much speculation over whether they’ll OR/NOT the others.

Facebook didn’t kill MySpace. It may have rendered it less relevant from the perspective of investors, advertisers, and many users (particularly the influential digerati), but MySpace still seems to be going strong in many markets around the world.

So, right now, Google+ has a (large, rapidly expanding) niche. That niche – for the moment at least – is geeks, phreaks, early adopters, and the digerati. People like you and me, in other words. No, it’s not your Mom’s social network – but then neither was Facebook when it launched.

Can Google+ grow to the point where it “kills” Facebook? That seems unlikely and, more to the point, historically UNevitable :)

Sure, it’s growing incredibly fast (I’ve seen reports suggesting 20 million+ users by this weekend), but a more reasonable projection would be that Google+ AND Facebook will settle into their respective, very large, niches – that each will continue to be relevant in different ways for a long time to come. This would also seem to suggest that increasing overlap and content integration between the two services should naturally continue to evolve – an entire after-market of third-party integrations will arise to bridge (and, essentially, erase) the divide between the services.

It’s AND logic. Both services can and, most likely, will continue to be relevant to different markets or for different purposes.

One other aspect worth thinking about is the extent to which the various social networks can become infrastructural – deeply integrated and woven through the fabric of the web.

There’s been some discussion out there about what happens if Google+ reaches 750 million users (the most recently-published Facebook user count), but this is in some ways a less interesting question than considering which of the various SocNets might end up becoming accepted as an infrastructure service.

This is interesting to me because the different approaches of Facebook and Google seem to represent opposing ideas about how the web should work.

We can’t truly understand Facebook’s ambitions and machinations, but the prevailing opinion seems to be that Facebook intends to, in essence, BE the Internet for the majority of people. It’s the old AOL view of the world: that the Web should be packaged up and filtered for us. The “walled garden” approach.

The Facebook “Open Graph” thing, that has Facebook Like and Share buttons popping up all over the web, is a key pillar in this strategy. Facebook wants to be everywhere, and everything is pulled back into Facebook.

Google’s approach might appear similar on the surface (+1 buttons appearing everywhere, everything pulling back into Google indexes), and yet Google already feels a lot more infrastructural in so many ways.

They already have a truly web-native OS in Chrome (to say nothing of their role in Android – the fastest-growing mobile OS right now). This suggests that Google, with Google+, Chrome, Gmail, YouTube and Google Apps (if they can get the damn things integrated) may have a much stronger chance of being an infrastructure play than Facebook ever could. And I’m actually kind of OK with that idea.

I find it a little hard to define, but Facebook seems to want to pull everything in to its playground, whereas Google seem rather more inclined to make their toys show up wherever you already are. Sometimes, anyway – although I sense their thinking about all this is probably as confused as mine is.

So. Where does this all leave us? I have absolutely no idea. I just know that Facebook, Twitter and their ilk are not likely to disappear off the map anytime soon just because of Google+. I project a good few years of confusing coexistence still to come.

For now, though, I’m enjoying the Google+ experience and can see myself spending an increasing amount of my time in here.

It’s entirely natural, by the way, that Google+ is, at the moment, positively choked with discussions about what Google+ is.

No surprise here. Back in the early days of blogging, a lot of what we used to blog about was, in essence, “whither blogging”.

In the first 9 months or so of Twitter, most of the people on Twitter were talking about Twitter.

And so with this new shiny social media object: the vast majority of discussions inside Google+ today are discussions about Google+

This is simply because we’re all following the fundamental rules of Social Media Club:

The first rule of Social Media Club: you talk about Social Media.
The 2nd rule of Social Media Club: you TALK ABOUT Social Media
Rule 3 – If someone says stop, goes limp, taps out: Twitpic it.
Rule 4 – Unlimited Likes to a Circle.
Rule 5 – Multiple conversations at a time.
Rule 6 – No shills, no spammers.
Rule 7 – Threads will go on as long as they have to.
Rule 8 – If this is your first time at Social Media Club, you HAVE to comment.

Jane Jacobs for Toronto Mayor!

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As I ease back into the old blog after too long away, permit me a bit of a rant about the state of the city I call home. Seems appropriate, in this municipal election season, to think about what is to become of Toronto in the years ahead.

See: I’m worried. More than worried – I’m bitterly upset and depressed to watch this once bright and hopeful city slowly consumed by untrammeled construction and the want of any coherent plan.

It’s a conversation I’ve had with countless friends, cab drivers and complete strangers time and again in the past couple of years; the consensus always being that we’ve squandered the splendour of our city and we don’t know how to fix it.

When we first lived here, I used to love picking up visiting family and friends from the airport and driving them back to our home in the Beach along the long arc of the Gardiner Expressway. As we swept past Exhibition Place – rising up onto the elevated section of the Gardiner, over Bathurst, curving in towards the heart of the city – that iconic Toronto skyline would start to open up before us.

It was like a curtain going up; Toronto announcing itself to our visitors: “just look at the magnificent city your friend calls home.”

There’s the Skydome, backed up by the CN Tower, opening the door to the grand rise of the Royal York away back behind the rail tracks, leading the eye on up across the serried towers of the downtown core – the still-impressive gold-plate windows on Royal Bank Plaza, Mies van der Rohe’s TD Centre towers; and to the right, the sparkling expanse of Lake Ontario, stretching so wondrously far I think my Mum’s still secretly convinced it’s the ocean.

It was stunning. But now…?

Now the relentless wall of bland, pre-fab condos has robbed our city of any grandeur it ever aspired to. We’ve already walled in the lake with an ugly march of concrete boxes. Now we’re busy shutting off every other once-inspiring vista the city ever offered.

Poor old Ted Rogers must be gnashing teeth in his grave – $25 million he paid to get his name up on the side of the Skydome. You can’t hardly even see it for condos now.

Even newer, but still quirkily-lovable buildings like the Air Canada Centre “Hanger” have fallen victim, with yet another faceless glass-box and two overhigh towers completely unbalancing a space that held such potential. John McEwen’s magnificent sculpture, that proudly dominated the Hanger’s main entrance, cowers now under the shiny, looming new palace of Mammon they call “Maple Leaf Square”. (I hear they’re going to move the sculpture off to the side into it’s own little green space as part of the new development plan. Just like Toronto to relegate something impressive and dramatic to the status of a parkette.)

And this is just the experience of driving through one stretch of the city. Don’t even get me started on the slow-motion disaster of our transit system, the lip service paid to cyclists, or the weary, nerve-wracking misery of being a pedestrian in our downtown area.

Ack.

So here’s my wish for Toronto’s new mayor: be a designer.

Be an architect, an urban planner. Be a builder and a breaker. Be someone with the courage and the sheer force of will to slam the brakes on, pause, re-think, and build a plan to renew this city before the mess spreads too far.

It can be done.

Look to Birmingham. The city I lived just outside of for 20-odd years had become, by the mid-70s, a misplanned muddle of 50s and 60s concrete monoliths; hostile to pedestrians, toxic to business, and just no bloody good to anyone.

Now, though, it’s a city transformed and well on the way to becoming one of the most liveable megacities on the planet, thanks, in large part, to the bold vision put in place by the city council of the 1980s and the new “Big City Plan.”

That’s what I want for my Toronto. A Big City Plan for this great big city.

I know dear Jane Jacobs isn’t with us any more, and I doubt she’d run for mayor even if she was. But is it too much to ask for at least one of the current mayoral candidates to have read The Death and Life of Great American Cities? Maybe they have. Maybe one of them will surprise us yet.

[UPDATE: it has been suggested by three friends whose opinions I respect, that I may be inadvertently misrepresenting Jane Jacobs' views here. This is certainly not my intent and is, if anything, a casual accident of poor word choice on my part. It's challenging to discuss Jane's complex thinking and her remarkable legacy without using such obvious phrases as "urban renewal" and words like "planning" and yet I should acknowledge that much of what passed for "urban planning" from the middle of the 20th century onwards was precisely what Jane took issue with in her first book. I do think she made a distinction between good urban design and bad urban planning driven by misguided zoning laws. So in calling for a mayor who will be the kind of urban planner Jane might have liked, I guess I'm really looking for someone who represents my own inevitably skewed and very personal view of what a plan should be and how my city should look. Better?]

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes…

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This feels like a really weird post to write.

After more than three years at Thornley Fallis, I’m leaving for pastures new. More than that: I’m leaving the agency business entirely and getting back into software – my first and enduring passion. I can’t say exactly where just yet, but this is a really exciting move for me and I can’t wait to break the news.

First, though, a fond farewell to Thornley Fallis & 76design – my home-away-from-home and extended family for the past three years. It’s hard to be leaving at a time like this. The firm is probably in the best position it has been in all the time I’ve known them, with extraordinary new people coming into the team, terrific clients, and some genuinely cool new projects in the pipeline for 2010.

I will always be proud to be able to say that I worked with Joe Thornley, Terry Fallis and the entire team there – remarkable people doing outstanding work. Joe’s recent post about “The New PR” paints a clear picture of the vision of the firm; a vision I know they’re putting into action every single day.

Having followed the PR business closely from the inside for the past ten years, I don’t think there’s another agency anywhere in Canada capable of delivering the quality of service and consistent innovation the TF team turns out. I would heartily recommend TF to anyone. Thank you, Joe, and thank you to the whole TF/76design crew – it’s been a great ride.

My decision to move on from my agency years and return to “the client side” has much more to do with the opportunity in front of me than anything else. I wasn’t looking around, but something came along that just made instant sense, from the very first conversation. But now that I’ve settled into the idea, I don’t think I’ll miss being an agency bloke. Timesheets kill me.

More news about the new gig as soon as I’m able to reveal it. For now, adieu TF crew, see you at Third Tuesday!

HoHoTO 3.0 – Why do we do this?

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[Cross-posted from the main HoHoTO page]

Yes, we’re doing it again.

As those of you following the tweets have noticed, HoHoTO is returning this December 16th at The Mod Club in Toronto.

New to all this? Wondering what the heck a HoHoTO is and whether you need an inoculation? Check out this summary video from last year’s phenomenal event, or just… well, you know what to do. If you’re still confused, here’s my post about last year’s event.

Last year, we set the ticket prices at a starting level, then steadily increased the price as the days ticked down toward the event. This year, we’re taking a different approach – less strongarm, more faith in the natural generosity of our fellow Torontonians. I’ll get to the full explanation about ticket pricing in a minute.

First, let’s remind ourselves why we’re doing this in the first place:

HoHoTO grew organically out of a shared belief among a relatively small group of people. A belief that spread like a wildfire through the tweetstreams and blogvines and quickly turned a much, much bigger group of people on to the same core idea:

That people in our own town are hungry and – dammit – we can make a difference.

HoHoTO is about a lot of things. It’s about having an insane night of unbridled, unforgettable FUN. It’s about meeting old friends and new and spilling drinks on them. It’s about dancing like you’re 19 again. It’s about awesome raffle prizes and fantastic surprises. It’s about creating memories to last a long, long time.

But at root, it’s about something even more important. Not to get all glum and earnest on you, but HoHoTO is – and always has been – about helping feed Toronto’s hungry.

That’s why we do this thing.

  • In Toronto, people just like you and me made more than a million visits to food banks last year.
  • Food bank use is growing – up 18% nationally this year over last. The largest ever year-over-year increase on record.
  • More than 37% of the people using food banks are children (and if that doesn’t break your heart, you need to examine your soul)
  • The median monthly household income in Toronto is only $980. Hunger in the GTA is a result of lack of money, not lack of food.

Now you have a sense of why HoHoTO was created — to help the Daily Bread Food Bank with desperately needed funds and food.

So far, with our original Holiday party in 2008 and the summer spinoff (oh so wittily labeled HoHOTo) we’ve managed to raise over $38,000. This year, we’re going to try to beat that in one night. Our goal is $40,000. Yes, we’re mental.

Here’s the deal. If you’re employed, gainfully self-employed, or independently wealthy and thinking of coming to HoHoTO, the chances are you’re a hell of a lot better off financially than any of the people we’re trying to help. So we’ve got a bunch of $20 tickets available – but are you really only good for twenty bucks?

A hundred bucks to you is what you take out of the ATM on a Saturday night and find it’s all gone by Sunday morning. To a food bank user, that same $100 could be all they have left after rent and basics to feed their whole family for a month.

Please: before you say you can’t afford any more than the basic ticket, stop and think. Yes, you can.

This year, you’ll see there are blocks of tickets available at a range of price levels. There’s no difference between the $20 and the $100 tickets. Only you will ever know the size of the donation you choose to make.

If $20 really is all you can spare, that’s cool. We still want you there, and we know you’ll be spending more on the night for drinks, cabs, etc.

But please, if you can – think of paying for your ticket at one of the higher levels. It’s just the right thing to do.

OK. Enough begging. The tickets are now officially on sale, here. Hook yerself all up and get ready to have the ultimate Santastic holiday experience at the return of the original party that Twitter built.

Be there, or we’ll bauble your eggnogs.