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Cutting the Cord will be a multi-part series of posts discussing the numerous facets that are involved in getting rid of your cable television subscription. We will take a dive into the following topics:

• Equipment & Cost
• Interfaces and Controls
• Content Content Content (delivery models etc.)

Currently, cable is a system that works, and aside from the occasional outages and poor interfaces, it works well. Up to now, we as consumers of televised media know what to expect from our cable providers. When there is a storm, we know we may experience an outage. When the cable isn’t working, we call the cable company to have someone look at that mysterious box that sits under our televisions. However that paradigm is beginning to change.

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If you haven’t noticed recently, there has been an encouragingly large amount of good being done in organizations. The Pepsi refresh project is a platform that allows causes to submit their ideas and they are voted on by a community. The winner gets a fairly large donation from Pepsi. American express has also joined the good with their Member’s Project with a similar system.

So what is with all the good? Is it just a PR stunt to make them look… good? There may be some of that there, but I also think there is more. A recent study has shown that 50% of the brands recognized by consumers as inspiring outperformed the S&P 500 by an average of 45%. Earnings per share of companies with high employee trust out performed low trust companies by 186% (WatsonWyatt.com).

So there seems to be a connection with brands that make great products with happy employees and having a system of good embedded within the organization. It is most likely because they are working for more than just a paycheck or glory. They are working for a company that cares about the world and proves it through their actions; which in-turn makes an employee care. This can then have a domino effect that leads to better designed or built products, better customer service and happy customers. Sure it sounds idealistic, but it’s being proven true.

So what can we do as marketers? Look for ways to integrate good into our organizations. Not just giving money to some org that you can get a tax write-off a PR for. But create a tie-in between your employees performance and how you give back. Create internal rewards in the form of giving. Create internal platforms to allow your employees to set goals and compete against other departments. It will become a virus that inspires your company and in the long run will increase the bottom line.

Great piece for Flash in the Can.

The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo.

Really smart, insightful post on what agencies have to do to continue to be relevant. Marketers and agency folks take note.

A recent study reports that traditional ad agencies digital skills aren’t up to par, according to an Adweek article this week.

Adweek’s article states:

Based on both reports, agency rhetoric about digital skills appears to be ahead of reality, said Mark Sneider, president of RSW/US, a Cincinnati-based consultancy that helps agencies hone their new business development efforts.

“Simply doing social and digital, such as creating Facebook accounts and developing banner ads, isn’t going to be enough as marketers get hungrier for better direction — and results — in the digital/social world,” Sneider said. “The agency that can help clients understand how to use social/digital and how to integrate these [media] effectively into more traditional initiatives will, in the end, win the day.”

The ongoing debate of “who does it better?” between traditional and digital agencies continues, however, as TQ mentioned in his post Remember Color TV soon, if an agency can’t do digital and do it well, they will end up in the land that advertising forgot.

While I certainly don’t have the most tweets of all the IQers, nor do I have the best (hat tip: @boutte, @texturl, @fakebobmorris), but I believe that I have the first. Twitter went public in the summer of 2006 (before that, it had been just an internal tool for Odeo employees), and, ahead-of-the-curve guy that I am, I posted in August. Here’s my first tweet:

Another piece of frequently forgotten twitter lore — the service launched as twttr. The reason for this was twofold. First, Twitter came of age in the years when vowels were totally uncool (I’m looking at you Flickr) and second, Twitter was designed for SMS shortcodes and so it had a 5 digit code that spelled out twttr (89887). Apparently, now they use 40404 to send and receive messages via mobile phones.

So find your first tweet at myfirsttweet.com and see if you can beat mine. Post yours in the comments if it’s memorable for funny or < gasp! > earlier than mine!

Belgian agencies just announced they are sick and tired of being abused by the pitch process and have taken all their websites down (temporarily) in protest. They want agencies and clients to follow standards for pitches which include maximum number of agencies that can be involved and other rules of engagement. They make the point that in the end brands suffer if their agencies are being forced to invest heavily in unfair or unreasonable pitches. http://www.saatchi.be

A trend that is picking up steam is self-monitoring, allowing individuals to connect the wide variety of mobile devices, new kinds of sensors, and today’s fast computer networks in order to collect, analyze, visualize, and correlate data about themselves. It goes by other names such as living-by-numbers, personal analytics, the quantified self (a great blog), and personal informatics.

I’ll be writing up great examples of these tools and systems that support individuals in self-monitoring and self-reflection to improve their lives. I’ve collected a first installment of health and wellness tools, some of which we’re experimenting with at the IQ offices. I’ll also be presenting at the Personal Informatics workshop at the premier UX/HCI conference ACM CHI 2010, which will take place in Atlanta in April.

Withings Weight Scale

Withings wireless weight scale

Imagine a scale that reports your weight on a small LCD but that also uploads data to the cloud. Your data can be viewed on the web as well as on a free iPhone application.

Fitbit

Fitbit self-monitoring

Fitbit is an accelerometer-based sensor that can provide a record of a user’s entire day, from sleeping (you can clip the fitbit to your wrist or waist-band), to daily activities, to exercise. The system turns accelerometer data into inferences of steps taken, calories burned, and periods of exercise. The fitbit website enables review and reflection, and also allows users to upload food log data, to provide caloric intake data.

BodyBugg and GoWear Fit’s Body Media 3

gowearfit bodymedia 3.0

These two product+service bundles (customers pay for the device and then pay a monthly service charge) use the same hardware device. It’s worn on the upper arm and tracks a combined blend of data to determine a current level of effort. The BodyBugg and Gowearfit Body Media 3 sensor is more complex than the fitbit, including skin temperature measures, as well as galvonic-skin response (it can measure skin moisture and use that to infer how active) a user is.

Airstrip OB (for pregnancy)

airstrip OB for iPhone

Airstrip has a product that allows pregnant women to monitor their health and the health of their fetus. The iPhone app connects to a hardware fetal heart-rate monitor and sensor (provided by the doctor’s office) and the data can be sent in real time (and stored) for review by medical professionals. The system requires a back-end server and other technology, but the iPhone application provides customer-focused views as well as more medically focused “strip charting.”