If you ever wondered what my company Third Wave is all about, we got something for you. Here’s a short presentation explaining who we are, what we do and for whom.
Download as PDF.
If you’re interested in working with us, let me know. If you know someone who might be interested, please forward the deck.
The current kerfuffle about Urban Outfitters apparently stealing the idea for a jewelry line from an etsy artist is a good opportunity to express two thoughts about how we handle shitstorms.
But first, here’s the source for the outrage:
Not cool Urban Outfitters, not cool.
Here’s how it spread:
What can we learn from the Urban Outfitters PR disaster?
Now.
I’ve learned the hard way that situations are always more complex than they may seem at first. It’s just so easy to get worked up by a tweet or a quick blog post. But like in this case, it helps to wait a bit and do some more research on the situation. Just like Helen Killer from regretsy did who found out that the artist complaining about getting ripped off by Urban Outfitters is definitely not the first one to “have the idea” for this kind of jewelry. And that might be something you want to know before you add to the retweet storm.
Do you think this shitstorm will hurt Urban Outfitters sale? Will it even make a small dent in their revenue? Do you think GAP felt the backlash against their logo relaunch in their registers? Or what about Nestlé and their Kitkat shitstorm? Did the sales drop?
From everything I know, not from one of the companies that had to endure a social media shitstorm I have ever heard that it had substantially hurt their sales. I mean, I have a Kyptonite bike lock laying beside me while I write this. And they have been part of every social media deck as the bad example for years.
What I mean is, is what my buddy Matt talked about at Next11: what we mostly focus on with social media is in a lot of cases not what really matters for bigger brands. So before we all add the “Urban Outfitters”-case to our decks, let’s think twice and come up with something more relevant for our clients that talks about the difference between something hurting a brand and something hurting their sales and how to handle and plan for that.
Update: Urban Outfitters reacted
Here are my favorite talks from the international track of the Next11 conference (Disclaimer: Next11 is a client of Third Wave. We have curated the social track for the conference.). As soon as more videos are available, I will write another post about the social track.
In my opinion, Russell Davies' talk about Buttons, Behavior, Robots and Toys was the best presentation of the whole conference. I follow the man's output closely. But even I heard something new.
Andrew Zolty is co-founder of Breakfast NY, an agency in Brooklyn which is basically a tinkering shop but has received a huge amount of praise lately. Watch the video to see why.
Kevin Slavin is the founder of area/code, which he has sold to Zynga recently. His talk about algorithms will blow your mind. I've seen the talk before, but even hearing it for the second time took nothing away from the effect.
We're living in crazy and amazing times. And these are just three presentations from Next11 that give you a glimpse of what's happening around us. Check out the other videos from the international track.
We are living in times of exponential change driven by emergent technologies – everything will be different.
There’s an idea that somehow, if we just do things with more effort or skill, we can go back to the Brady Bunch and mass markets and mediocre products that pay off for years. It’s not an idea, though, it’s a myth.
The pain isn’t from the change, the pain is from the struggeling against the change.
While we try to get a better understanding and a finer definition of what we do at Third Wave throughout the last weeks and months, I developed this growing fascination with change and our (as in humans) abbility to cope with it…or lack there of. So I’ve recently written out part of a presentation that dealt with the change we’re facing. So here’s how we (as in Third Wave) cope with change.
Third Wave Berlin