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Cabinet of Curiosities

Quick note to tip you off to the new Tumble thingy I just started. Too time pressed to post much around here, and there's a lot of (often silly) stuff I want to point to but doesn't belong in de.li.cious.

How to deal with fans

Love this solution that the clever Monty Python crew came up with in response to You Tubers posting old clips online. They took the most popular ones, put together their own You Tube channel and posted high definition versions for fans

In the process, they promoted the Monty Python DVD collection, and saw a huge lift in sales.
It isn't that hard, is it?
Treat your fans like people, co-create value together and everyone's happy.

They make it look easy.

via the recently discovered but much liked propagation planning blog.

Spreading the message

Great story of the now legendary Shepard Fairey Obama poster. Love the answer he gave Obama when asked how he spread it so fast ("well there's the internet, and you're a really popular guy!").

Way of Life

You probably have already seen this new work for T Mobile.
I must confess, I heard about it a while ago but kept avoiding actually watching it. I think I was being a bit stubborn, I didn't want to see a commercial that lifted an idea from the Improv Everywhere crew, no matter how well done (it may be the wily underground DJ/producer side of me that cringes at glossy commercial versions of grittier undergound thing.

Iain at Crackunit has written an excellent post about this, so at least I know it's not just me. Thanks Iain, for a very well articulated insight (it had been bothering me trying to figure out why it was bothering me, if you know what I mean).

Perhaps stories of togetherness and collaboration are best told in places where people are together, collaborating. And perhaps they should be told in ways that reflect the brilliance, excitement and usefulness of what doing things together using tools and technologies - not metaphors - is actually all about.

Or maybe in those places it’s not about telling stories at all

Storytelling and metaphors. Where would advertising be without them?

Love this tweet from Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere

Process not Product

How do we make the things we put out there (communications, experiences) the start of the process, and not the end of it? How do develop those sparks that lead to further participation, activity and sharing? If you've been reading Faris' recents posts, it's very much about "creating stuff the internet likes" and encouraging the remixing and recombining that leads to sharing. (This could be a record for the number of links to Faris in one post?)
While marketers get very hung up on the fear of "losing control", I am really fascinated with how other media and in particular newspapers are tackling this. Substitute "news" and "content" for "brand" and the parallels are clear. Here is an interesting take on how this thinking is evolving in some circles.

“Networked journalism” means opening up the production process from start to finish - and beyond. It already has the tools: email, mobile-phones, digital cameras, online editing, web-cams, texting, and remote controls. This is channelled through new communication processes like crowd-sourcing, Twitter, YouTube, and wikis as well as blogs and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV).

Networked journalism is a process not a product. The journalist still reports, edits, packages the news. But the process is continually shared. The networked journalist changes from being a gatekeeper who delivers to a facilitator who connects.

It is obviously a huge shift from being authorities and the authors of news PRODUCTS to being nodes in the stream of PROCESS that involves readers and a wider ecosystem. But this is already what has happened with Wikipedia as it has evolved to a living, real time collaborative news source. I guess the point is that these connected ecosystems that facilitate the shaping and reshaping of news/brands/content will emerge whether we like it or not. The question is whether marketers will step up to be the facilitator who connects or not?

Smart Facebook Application. Seriously!

Finally there is a Facebook application that is actually good.

Whopper Sacrifice asks you to pick 10 friends to defriend and in exchange you get a free whopper. Yes, a free whopper for ten former friends.

For the first time (I think) someone has bothered to take the time to think about what Facebook users actually do (not much it appears, other than making friends and then periodically reviewing the list to see who you can scratch off) and made a fun sport of it.

So cool to be broke

Over on Rob Walker's link stream there are a couple of interesting (ok, irritating) links on the "trend" of our new found frugality. Of course, as Rob says, this is no trend.

We will know there has been actual change in the culture if and when people stop referring to an alleged change as "cool," not to mention announcing the new trend coinage, as in: "The new year will be marked by a cultural trend I am calling 'Luxury Shame'." Ridiculous.

And

The instant labeling of an era is, in itself, a form of commodification, an attempt to brand-name and market a cultural epoch

Well said x 2.

Either you believe that we have turned a corner culturally with respect to our attitudes toward consumption and consumerism, or you don't. Wake up folks!
Calling the circumstances we find ourselves in right now a"trend" is shallow, and a great example of what is wrong with most trend watchers and forecasters.

Outlook

"So the outlook for 2009 if you're trying to change the world is pretty good. If you're trying to get people to throw virtual sheep at each other, it's going to be a lot tougher than 2008"
(Paul Miller, co-founder of The School of Everything)

He has a point, now might be a good time to discourage virtual sheep applications?

Passing Some Links

Just want to jot down some links that I've had on the shelf, along with a note or two ;)

• Here is a video from the MIT Future of Entertainment. It's a conversation between Henry Jenkins and Yochai Benkler, and it's great. We are still in early days when it comes to transmedia and the implications of convergence culture, and I found this talk very enlightening as to where we might be headed.

• I mentioned "Transition" as one of the dominant themes of 2009, and this post from Fred Wilson does a very good job of cutting right to the chase. Citing the automobile industry, retail, publishing and media as examples, Fred believes that this year will be remembered as one in which a number of industrial era business models will collapse. Talk about transition! It's a must read (thank Neil for the link)

Reading his post also made me realize that while social media pundits, or experts, chatter endlessly about people not "getting it", real change in business will occur as a result of inevitable forces that demand reinvention or lead to obsolescence. Put another way, the dual forces of radical change in media and networked economies, combined with a tanking economy will make a lot of conversations about media tactics (social or otherwise) irrelevant. The problem for a lot of business is much deeper and beyond the scope of fixing the communications. (Adrian wrote about something similar, from another angle, in his Ad Week piece recently). But that's just my hunch, and I'll get back to this in a future post (when I have more proof!).

• Over at Tim Brown's blog I came across a talk by Paul Saffo, expounding on the theory of a "Creator Economy". If you are interested in how the growth of communications networks impact the future of value creation (of course you are, that was rhetorical), you must check this out. This is the kind of thinking that will guide the emergence of new business models, and it's fascinating stuff. Karl has recently posted some great thoughts on social media and value creation as well. I like the distinction he makes between the two fundamental sources of value creation (platforms, like etsy, and the use of social tools to connect niches, or build personal brands. Smart).

It's a Wonderful Herd Life

Watching the classic "It's a Wonderful Life" is an inevitable part of every Christmas for me. It doesn't matter how many times I've seen it, I still get choked up (sappy, yes).

Apart from great acting courtesy of Jimmy Stewart and the Christmas emotion, one of the genius reasons why the story works so well is that it brilliantly exposes some of our deeply held assumptions about human nature. In a word, we assume that the individual hero will deal with the problems they are confronted with. Man against the world, that sort of thing.

When George Bailey gets into the mess that he does, we witness the reaction of a desperate individual as he tries to deal with this (by heading to the bridge to contemplate jumping!). This jives with our very individualistic interpretation of human nature. It is only when George is enlightened as to the degree to which his life impacted the life of others that he (and we) realize that this assumption is wrong. It is only when George appreciates the herd nature of our existence that his life takes on a whole new meaning. In the final scenes of the movie, when George is bailed out by his community, the social and herd nature of life surprises him (and us). George discovers the hidden truth of who he is (as Mark might say), and in the process we're confronted with some of our misconceptions, as well.

While thinking about this, I came across this excellent post from Stowe Boyd, writing about the nature of social contagion and our herd nature. I like his resolutions as well, sounds like great advice to me.

Back to the Grind

How has your New Year kicked off? All has been well on this end. A lot of down time with the family, which is great, and of course a resolution to be more diligent here on Chroma with the posts. Like a few fellow bloggers, I think that Twitter has sucked a lot of time from both my RSS feeds as well as time spent posting here. But this will change!

I spent a lot of time catching up with the RSS backlog over the holidays, and it was just packed with great posts that I had missed, so keep the posts coming you less-lazy-bloggers-out-there, because they are very welcomed and very appreciated.

Heading into 2009, it was nice to see a fairly recurring theme in a number of posts, as well. Actually there were two themes. The first is the sense that 2009 will be a year of major transition in our economy, media, politics, society and culture. The other is that marketing and marketers can become a lot more proactive and serious about their contributions to society. To paraphrase Valeria Maltoni, how can we help to create a better world, rather than help to sell one?

Good question, and just one of the things to keep an eye on this year.

Thanks for checking in, and sending everyone very best wishes for 2009.

Let's get on with it!

Who You Calling "Motrin Mom"?!

If you haven't heard about the shitstorm of controversy that erupted because of a recent Motrin advertisement that (some thought) poked fun at the issue of "babywearing", you will.

Regardless of whether or not you think the outrage was warranted, you have to marvel at the speed at which the controversy spread through blogs, and especially the efficiency of Twitter to get the ball rolling in the first place.

Now the motrin.com website is down, e-mails are being sent to apologize on behalf of Motrin and the first page of Google results for "Motrin Moms" is full of blogs coming down hard on Motrin. I told you, it's a big mess! (David summed up more here).

Here is my take. While a lot of Social Media "experts" are lining up to offer unsolicited advice on how to handle the damage control ("buy the right keywords!", "blog back!"), I think one of the important lessons here is that this shouldn't have reached this point to begin with.

You don't have to spend a lot of times on message boards or mom blogs to know that the issue of "attachment parenting" (and many other issues about being a mom) is very controversial. This is a topic that brands need to approach at their own peril, and should make sure that they live in the world of moms online to craft the right communications strategy. In fact, I'm pretty sure that no focus group in the world would have been able to convey the intensity of emotion around this kind of issue. And while moms in the past would have rolled their eyes at this on television, the simple truth is that those days are long gone.

There is no "social media" or PR strategy in the world that will compensate for communication that hasn't been well thought out. Really knowing your audience is more critical than ever.

Alex Bogusky was recently asked to make a prediction on the future of advertising and media, and he said "the only thing I know for sure is that it's going to get a lot rougher out there for brands". That stuck with me because it's simple and true. I think that this Motrin mess is just the kind of thing he was talking about.

(In the spirit of not speaking unless you have something nice to say, I have to say that I do like the infographical treatment on the work. I'm just saying).

Japanese Food Information Video

Love this. Fantastic isometric video style (just learned that term) and kind of bizarre music.

Time Flies

Just like that, a few weeks have passed since my last post.
I never apologize for not posting, because I know there are so many amazing blogs out there, and it should be a relief to have less to read!

At any rate, thanks for checking in, hope you have been enjoying the de.li.cious links, at least.

Hope to see some of you fellow Torontonians at Beersphere. We're kicking off at around 6:30 PM at the Bedford Academy. It will be great to see some friends I haven't seen in some time.

Our Old Language

Our behaviour and the technologies we use change faster than the language we use (I'm still "spinning" when I'm DJ'ing, even though the only thing spinning these days is my hard drive).

Similarily, old models trap us into using outdated mental constructs to make sense of a world that no longer really fits those models. I'm fascinated by this, and the process by which we collectively abandon those old models.

Journalism and the "news" is a perfect example. Matt over at the Newsless.org has written a series of brilliant posts over the past couple of months that explore new ways of thinking about journalism. An emerging theme is the assertion that the article is no longer the basic unit of the news

On the Web, the lowly, essentially static article often proves an insufficient instrument with which to present stories, yet the basic unit of today’s news site is still the article. For this reason, we still find it difficult to tell our most complex stories well on the Web.

From what I can tell, we inherited this state of affairs from our printed predecessors. When we started news sites, there was just no other plainly obvious way to present news stories, and most of those stories were coming from the newspaper at any rate. So we presented them on the Web the same way we do in print — discrete, self-contained compositions, including whatever context could fit into a paragraph or two, ornamented with photos and graphics.

Parallels to how marketers and brands think about media and communication are pretty clear. For the most part, the discret, self-contained composition has the "creative idea" (or, the television advertisement). Mostly because, well, that's the way it has been, technology packaged it like that, and so on.

Matt has some brilliant thoughts on what the future looks like, starting with the understanding that "every news event represents a data point to another story", and that a richer understanding of the broader topic might generate further interest in that topic. Many of the other data points might not be known to us right away, but it will be the job of journalism to provide that context by using powers of pattern recognition to connect the dots (planners pick up your pencils and get to work, because in marketing that will be you doing the lion's share of pattern recognition).

So, rather than think of articles as compact pieces limited by the physical space they once occupied (in print for instance), and aimed at a target audience of people who knew what the story was all about in the first place because where would you have the luxury to spell out the context?, the job now is to expand our understanding by building richer stories, more layers and a stronger context for the interconnected pieces.

That last point is crucial, especially when thinking about brands and media, since we'll need to make sure that we don't confuse the article (the advertising) from the story (the context, the interconnected ecosystem of nodes that "bubble up" to a something much bigger). For, as Matt says, somewhat echoing a transmedia vision of what the future might look like.

We’ve been wedging our stories into articles for so long, it can be difficult to separate the two. But a big part of the opportunity before us is to start telling grand, complex and unending stories with tools fit for the task.

Welcome to the Future

Excellent video from the man like Faris.

2010: Entertainment and Communication from Faris Yakob

Social Roles in Social Media

Picnic: The emerging real-time social web

View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: picnic08 dopplr)

It is presentation week at Chroma. Here is one from the Dopplr folks, presented at the Picnic conference.

I like the emphasis on the different social roles that we play in social web environments, and how interesting those roles become when grafted on to the real world. So much potential for interesting applications here, need to really keep an eye on how this evolves.

Big Schlep

Great job by Sarah Silverman to enlist Jewish kids to visit their grandparents and convince them to vote for Obama.
So many great lessons here for marketers, from the timeliness of it, the narrowly specific message and speaking in a funny, real voice to her audience.
Could have gone a step or two further actually, in creating a forum to track the collective Big Schlep, and provide tools for friends to recruit others to the cause

Brand 2.0

Being "digital" means more than using digital channels to do the same old thing, or push the same old messages. At its core, digital media, and especially the social web, is about thinking about the world and people and brands differently.

Umair at Havas Media Lab refers to this as a fundamental change in a company's DNA.

The founder of icanhazcheezburger runs the site according to a couple of simple principles. First, make people happy. Secondly, think of one bit of content shared by one person to one other person. Not to 50,000 (hello viral marketers!). Just one. That personal and intimate.

Here is another take, from Ed at Influx Insights. Think of it as a crib sheet ;)

1. Are you useful?

    What do you do to help make people's lives better or easier?
    Are you doing something that no one else does?
    Are you doing it better than anyone else?

2. Do you entertain?

    Are you fun?
    Are you human and real?
    Are you interesting to interact with?
    Do people talk about and notice you and your communication?

3. Do you educate?

    Do you help people to learn or get more out of life?
    Do you tell people what you do so they can become their own experts?

4. Do you facilitate or participate in social connectivity

    Do you have fans?
    Do you connect them?
    Do you allow them to participate with you

Making people happy figures into the equation again. For modern brands, happiness isn't a means to end (capture attention, then hit them with a message), it's an end in itself.

Yet more wisdom from Adrian on Modern Branding below.

Modern Branding

View SlideShare presentation.

Gestures and Communication

Just to warn you up front, I'm not sure if this post will make much sense, I'm trying to make sense of a few thoughts kicking around in my head.

The catalyst for my half baked thoughts was this keynote presentation given by Deborah Schultz at the recent Web 2.0 conference in New York. In her talk, grandly titled "The Death of the Grand Gesture", she eloquently explained how social media is all about "whispers" and "conversations" (which you've obviously heard before), and how quiet, personal gestures are replacing "Grand Gestures".

Click To Play

A Grand Gesture is giving someone a huge bouquet of flowers on Valentine's Day, even though you've been a lousy spouse/lover/whatever all year. The metaphor works well for marketing. The Grand Gesture is the Super Bowl advertisement, whereas all the small, quiet gestures (the sum of all the small interactions, experiences and all that) are really what we're starting to pay more attention to. The Grand Gesture is the annual big advertising campaign, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Again, nothing really new for those of us documenting the evolution of social technologies and the impact to marketing and communications. In a word, unlike Grand Gestures, the social web is personal, real time (hello, Twitter) and small scale.

But Deborah stopped short of declaring the Grand Gesture dead, and this is where it gets interesting. Because while it's easy to get caught up in the world of social media and get excited seeing top down models of communications erode, and be replaced by networked, personal and many to many models (and all of those "conversations" and whispers), I still think that work needs to be done to construct a model of communication that may not include Grand Gestures. What will that look like? Whispers and small gestures work, or work differently, when they are contrasted with Grand Gestures. One type of gesture provides context and meaning for the other type of gesture. How are we going to balance the two?

Here is a great example she provides to illustrate the point, and I love it.

When I first watched this, the first thing that came to mind was DJ'ing and programming music. One of the hardest things about programming music for a crowd of people is to figure this part of it out, the pacing of the Grand Gestures and how they contrast and tell the story side by side with small gestures. That's the game right there (tension, release, basic building blocks of storytelling).

The most boring thing in the world is to listen to a DJ (or any other form of storytelling, for that matter) that is only made up of either small gestures or Grand Gestures. And in fact, you'd be surprised at how many DJs ignore one or the other of the gestures. It's either all hits (you may remember this years ago with all the drumrolls in club music), or all slow burn build up (in which case everyone falls asleep, not good). The same can probably said about comedians or musicians. In every case, it just leads to boredom.

Thinking about media, social media and the decline of Grand Gestures in this way, it occurred to me that as the small gestures multiply, and the Grand Gestures wane (either by sheer media fragmentation that will render it harder to achieve, or by people just ignoring Grand Gestures all together), what will the communications model look like? What, if anything, will replace the Grand Gestures?

Just a few months ago, Ed wrote about "attention spikes", which is one way of characterizing the effort to produce episodic events, or statements, that can serve as punctuations to the continuum of conversations (examples include the Bravia stuff, Gorilla). I'd argue that having these spikes at all is just as important to how "creative" they are. One of the main things that attention spikes accomplish is to provide that Grand Gesture in the first place. In other words, the sheer scale of it is what counts, even more than the creative. Which probably be used as a starting point to properly account for the real interplay between "media" and "creative" in the first place, but that's another post for another time.

Getting there quicker

If you're as underwhelmed as I am with 90% of interactive "marketing", you might appreciate these thoughts via Knitware

as the web undergoes a seismic shift in favour of social and participatory technologies and the nature of our media consumption is fundamentally redefined (the user has the control, the ability to affect, utilise, share and edit the media through networks, communities, blogs and wikis) we’d expect to see a proportional shift in the marketing model as it mirrors its environemental changes, but in fact propensity to adap appears to be slowing down.  Don’t get me wrong there’s a healthy number of marketers out there sitting ahead of the curve and channelling their spend into participatory, social and utility based marketing campaigns.

But it’s simply no where near as fast as the collective consumer is adapting to and embracing their new environment. The Cluetrain Manifesto (written by Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger) pts it like this “to traditional corporations, networked conversations may appear confused, may sound confusing. But we [people] are organizing faster than they are. We have better tools, more new ideas, no rules to slow us down”. As an industry the feeling is that we’re slow to act, out of touch and that we simply ‘don’t get it’. It’s hard not to share some of that sentiment but it’s also very easy to see how we can change. By becoming more agile, more responsive and more involved in the new media-scape. By better understanding the fabric and nature of entire web and exploiting it the same way consumers do today.

My sentiments, here here! (Or is it "hear, hear"!?)

When Did We Start Trusting Strangers

Impressive presentation summarizing a massive worldwide study of Social Media and Influence, from the folks at Universal McCann. Nothing too surprising, but the figures are staggering, and the visuals are awfully purty.Universal Mccanns When Did We Start Trusting Strangers

View SlideShare presentation

New Media Nonsense

It is always good to poke fun at our industry. This time, Social Media "experts" and guerilla/buzz marketers are the target. But they deserve it, don't they.

What is Design?

If you have a few minutes, check out this interview with Julian Bleeker, from Nokia's Design Strategic Projects Studio.

Fitbit

Pretty cool technology that "tracks your fitness and sleep", though one can imagine a lot of fun and interesting applications that can be built on this platform (social challenges with friends, other ways to make your daily activity more gamelike?).
It would be nice if it was on open platform.