Usable Clicks

Why do we waste our time (and why you should do the same)

Last night the UsableClicks guys dropped in at the Boxee meet-up at Webster Hall. We killed two hours with a thousand other Boxee fans (if you don’t know what it is, think of it as a complete entertainment portal for your Apple TV or computer that pulls in web content like Hulu in a Tivo-like format) learning about the new upcoming features and listening to the intense Q/A from the audience. Why do we do it? Why do we kill hours on end learning about products that only a relative handful of people use, that right now has minimal, if any, opportunities to leverage for marketing?

Well for one, we’re geeks. We love to know what’s happening before everyone else, and we love to know what cool new thing we’ll have to play with. But that’s not what it’s all about. We go to these events, watch the videos, and read the articles because for us to be good at our jobs we need to learn how the media landscape is changing for tomorrow. Something like Boxee can fundamentally change how content is produced, discovered, and consumed. And those three factors will have huge implications for how we enable our clients to reach their audiences in the future.

This is why we were on Twitter two years ago when there were only a few thousand people using it. This is why we all signed up for Foursquare, the new mobile social network that turns city living into a game, minutes after it was announced at SXSWi. This is why I use Outside.in to turn my blog into a hyper-local news source even though I know nobody at all using Outside.in (A company like Outside.in that can scale hyper-local news could change the news industry).

So we keep wasting our time. We keep putting in the hours, even when the returns seem minimal. We want to have the ideas before everyone else, we want to push our clients to take advantage of it, and we want to keep being on top of the ever changing media landscape before it settles. And you should too.