Michael Leis

Got to see an excellent talk this weekend called Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley. If you’re not familiar with the term, it is a feeling of creepyness you get when a computer created person gets between 96% and 99% indistinguishably real. While we can project empathy and emotion on a simpler figure (think stick [...]

More and more I’m getting the feeling brand marketers hold the assumption that when a person clicks “like” on your page or site that it is the equivalent of subscribing to you, like email or Twitter. In reality, it’s a lot like this Flight of the Conchords song:

There’s a real significant possibility that 2012 might be the year people started searching Twitter as their entryway to making decisions instead of Google. There are two reasons why this could actually happen: t.co links and Korea:

What started as an innocent-enough giveaway app on Facebook blew up into a fascinating story of understanding just how important social capital is to people. Here’s how it goes:

Now months removed from the presentation that Brian Reynolds (Zynga’s senior strategist) delivered at sxsw, his main points are still resonant and useful. Here’s what I’ve boiled down, which I hope helps you think differently, critically about what and how you approach your next social effort:

It’s all about the power of innuendo. Yesterday’s memorable SXSW talk, the one that will be ringing in my mind for some time was “The New Frontier of Social Gaming,” delivered by Brian Reynolds from Zynga. What he’s working in is fascinating: the science of people having fun together on the internet.

Ever get a gift from someone that you weren’t expecting? What’s your next reaction? If you’re like me, it’s the feeling like you have to do something in return. In game mechanics, Amy Jo Kim would call that the implied exchange. In terms of behavioral economics, it’s about surprising your customers with gifts like Zappos’ [...]

Not sure if this has rolled out to everyone yet, but there’s new functionality that pops-up photos in Facebook instead of taking people away to a different screen. As mentioned in this cool, detailed post showing how they got to this design, it’s also worth looking at the all-new ad space provided in an area [...]

There are a lot of discussions going on about how to create loyalty in a world where the next best offer is a click away. Should we change the cadence or targeting or content of our emails? How can we add badges? Do we need a redesign? Then, towards the end of the year, it [...]

Everyone and their mom and their Website has decided that the best way to get social, or to get their content to go “viral” is by adding a button that says “share” on it. I’ve been going back and forth lately on the value of this word to people who may actually want to send [...]