With all the almost-identical application-based startups vying for attention at this year’s SXSW Interactive festival, I think the idea launching here that will have the most impact on the Internet actually comes from the Film festival.

I’ve decided what my New Year’s resolution for work is going to be.

I’m going to try to eliminate the word “engaging” from my vocabulary, especially
in client presentations.

I have a confession to make. I like microsites. Not as in, our company has 500 different disconnected sites for every promotion and product. As in, we have built an online experience that can change your mind about who we are, that’s either something you haven’t seen before, or something done better than you’ve seen before, or both. The kind of thing you’d seek out and share with your friends.

Most dotcom sites are simply not designed or developed on the back end to accommodate this kind of thing. Does that mean we give up on the idea that the web can do more than help people achieve rational goals like research or reading news or putting something in a shopping cart?

I think the microsite hate we’ve seen over the last few years was mostly well founded. There was a lot of clutter and a lot of money being spent on nonsense. That said, I really don’t understand why the online ecosystem of a big brand can’t include a few super groovy entertaining brand experiences that blow people’s minds.

As long as the number of microsites is kept within reason, why exactly shouldn’t brands build them? The Internet has this awesome feature called a hyperlink. As long is there is a clearly marked way to get back and forth between dotcom and branded experiences, what is the problem?

I think something extremely important has happened in the last year or so, driven by things like Facebook and smart phones reaching mass scale. And it’s simply this: There is no virtual world anymore. The part of people’s lives that they experience through interfaces like computers and phones has become just as “real” to them as the part they experience directly through their senses.
What happens in social networks doesn’t feel separate or less real to people, any more than it feels like phone calls happen in some artificial alternate universe.

There are a lot of impressive statistics that show how much time people spend online and with their social networks. But the point is, a quantifiable shift in mass behavior is one thing. A collective psychological shift in what we all perceive as reality is something else entirely.

A lot of interesting things fall out of this. One big one is that for our industry, it means the moment we’ve been anticipating for years, where digital finally and forever stops being thought of as some kind of geeky side experiment and truly becomes the way brands connect with people, that moment is now.

There’s an interesting story behind how Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat, a book my 20-month old son is now obsessed with in its latest incarnation as an iPad app.

In 1954, Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss read an article in Life magazine bemoaning the sorry state of the books available to teach children to read, which at the time were all in the “see jane run” category. Seuss decided he was going to write a good book for early readers. So he took the list of the 400 words children learn first, and went from there. He spent nine months trying to craft the best possible book from that list. The result uses almost all one-syllable words, and only one word, another , that had three. From those utterly simple raw materials he crafted an incredibly creative, emotionally complex story (check it out if you haven’t read it in a while) that is super easy to understand even for tiny infants.

This reinforces a belief I’ve always had that the simpler the language we use to describe concepts, the easier the concepts are to grasp. To go a step further, I think ideas that can’t be described simply tend to not actually be ideas. There is a real tendency in our business to err on the side of trying to describe things precisely, which leads to a lot of complexity of language, use of jargon etc., and works against getting ideas across.

So I think it is better to err on the side of clarity of explanation. Unless of course the project is about defining the details of something precisely.