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Labour Day Break

Time for a break.

Labour Day weekend is my favourite long weekend of the year. Summer laziness is replaced, in theory, with new resolve.  It's always the time of year when I get recharged and energized, so I better get to work on that as soon as possible.

I think I'll spend today shopping for new pencils, a themed lunchbox and refreshing my memory about the good times I've had this summer with the family.

Hope everyone has a great long weekend, I'll get back to posting some time next week.

Grief Over Our Social Graph

Expect to see a lot more discussion over the next few months on the issue of social network interopability and portability, as it's becoming an issue that's increasingly hard to ignore. Our "social graph" is the aggregate sum of our network and connection, the bits and pieces of information and content we pull together in various applications (Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook, YouTube, Pownce, the list goes on).

It should be easier for us to move our "stuff" around, and we should be the ones that actually own the content (right now, everything that takes place within Facebook, for instance, is both unsearchable via Google and can't be used anywhere else. That sucks).

Here are some thoughts to get you thinking from Brad Fitz:

an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.

(read Brian Oberkirch's thinking on this, and don't miss this post, a personal favourite)

(check out the new version of Plaxo and their new lifestream feature called Pulse, which is an attempt to pull together various social media streams as a way of attacking the problem).

Game On

I'll be the first to admit it: gaming doesn't really get the love it deserves around here. I don't play games like Halo much, and I feel much more comfortable thinking and writing things (like remix culture: it's msuic-related, and more fun, to me).  Unless I'm missing something, I think it's safe to say that most planners/strategist types (digital or otherwise) go on and on about engagement, storytelling and the rest, but pretty much ignore the world of gaming. This is a shame, as there is so much to learn about things like transmedia, alternate reality platforms, community and yes, engagement from the gaming world.

Video games like Halo are also where interesting things have been happening in the fusion of play -> interaction -> storytelling. I recently saw a show on Bravo called The Future of Books, and the main thing I took away was how hypertext has slowly changed the very essence of storytelling: what was once fixed (beginning and end) is becoming a more open-ended, participative, interactive process. The same is happening elsewhere, like newspapers and journalism, for instance. What is happening with music and remix culture is also being seen in publishing and traditional notions of storytelling. And it dawned on me, that pretty much sums up what gaming is about, isnt' it (thinking of games like Halo)? Gaming is very much about storytelling.

Just last week Wired published a fascinating article on the development of Halo 3, and the thousands of hours of meticulous observation and research that went in to the design of the game. It's really phenomenal stuff. Designing an experience which is immersive and challenging, but not too easy OR overly frustrating involves analysing every virtual square foot, and massively sophisticated modelling. In a word, engineering fun is very, very serious work, and the degree to which brands will need to "engage" consumers accustomed to participation/interaction/play makes games like the Halo franchise I all the more important for digital communications-types need to study and understand. Static and fixed is being replaced in all media with fluid and malleable.

This excerpt from the Wired piece outlines what I think is one of the keys: the idea of "flow" states will need to become part of how interactions are designed online, not only for games but for anyone (marketers included) to engage people (I don't like the word 'engagement' either, but what else to use?)

ideal in gameplay, the goal every developer aims for, is an experience that keeps players in a "flow" state — constantly surfing the edges of their abilities without bogging down. Modern videogames are often compared to Hollywood movies, but the comparison, many Bungie designers will tell you, is inaccurate. A movie is static. "You sit there and absorb it all in a single two-hour shot, and it's perfectly linear," says Frank O'Connor, one of the writers tasked with scripting the story line in Halo 3.

Creating a game, in contrast, is like a combination of architecture — constructing environments that influence the behavior of people inside them — and designing a new sport. Gamemakers have to devise a system of rules and equipment that gives players a few basic goals and then allows them to find their own ways of achieving those goals. The flow comes from constantly discovering innovative ways to solve these open-ended problems.

That may be an awfully lofty goal for marketing communications to aspire to, but a couple of things that I want to point to: definitely check out the great insight from Paul Isakson on the idea of game/play and brands.

Also, check out this and this on Alternate Reality Gaming. Good stuff, and the author on the second one makes a great point:it's no coincidence that the successful campaign for Halo has been created by video game designers (42 Entertainment).

It's often said that the worlds of music and gaming are the progenitors of social media; the wider changes taking place in media today have their origin in those worlds. Remix culture, new models of storytelling, community, interaction, play, it's all there, and has been there in music and gaming communities for ages. I definitely see this from the perspective of remix culture and community (mainly because that's the world I come from).

Recently the Nine Inch Nails nailed (ouch, pun) a great transmedia campaign, prompting some to suggest that marketers can learn a lot from how the music industry and artists engage their audience. Now I can see a little more clearly why gaming really deserves a lot more attention, at least around these parts!

See: Random IS Beautiful

A little while ago I titled a post Messy is Beautiful (thank you, Mr. Weinberger) , so you can imagine how happy I am to have stumbled upon Random Got Beautiful.

It's a collaborative photo project making lovely use of participatory culture. The creator, Nikki Farquharson is inviting anyone to contribute a photo around a theme-currently it's colours she's after.

In her own words:

She liked the idea of creating an online collage of random photographs taken by different people, open for anyone to submit and view.
‘Random is Good’ is a motto for Nikki, so her friend Anthony suggested to call this site Random Got Beautiful (or RGB for short) once colour was decided to be the first theme.
She wants as many people to get involved by submitting themed photographs to one place.

The result is, well, beautiful!

The Edgeconomy

Umair continues to shine with his analysis of the economic shifts in value creation that are being brought on by networked communities. He always does a great job of explaining how (and why) old-school thinking leads to wrong strategic decisions that fail to meet current media and business challenges.

(Plus, it's probably good to have an economist's perspective on some of this stuff, it helps to balance out the reliance on too much right-brain thought/philosophy on social media ;)

Here, he takes on the M&C Saatchi "one-word equity" idea, and neatly summarizes why it's important to think about complexity and conversations in strategic thinking:

Brands don't need to be reduced to single words. 

Reducing and deconstructing themselves into nothingness is exactly the strategic opposite of what next-gen marketing really will be about. Rather, marketers must learn to embrace - and manage - the complexity that happens as interactions at the edges of firms phase shift from thousands to billions. This complexity live in things like conversations, memes, bubbles and crashes, viral effects, network pressures, etc.

Put another way, the edgeconomy - the millions of markets, networks, and communities that are the edgeconomy - offer marketers the game-changing opportunity to bring brands to life, to build social and cultural institutions around them, to embed value creation into the very fabric of consumer behaviour itself.

What could be more powerful than that?

Richer Together

Thanks to Marc Schiller for pointing to this Dave Winer quote (advising Jason Calcanis) that has stuck in my head for the last few days:

"...he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it."

Building eco-systems for others to profit/prosper/do well is a very interesting thought, but it's even better when it's thought of in the context of real co-operation. At the broadest level, the collective inter-dependency makes 2.0 eco-systems much more intesting and healthy organisms than just naked individual pursuit of $ (though that is certainly possible also, for the selfishly inclined). It's just that, as Jason argued recently, co-operation drives evolution, and the tools that we have access to now are facilitating that more efficiently.

That's the theory, anyway, and I'm sticking with it.

Jonesing

Instead of chasing the latest 2.0-co-creation buzzword tactic, a lot of marketers can learn from Jones Soda, who have been building a rock-solid brand that has remained close to its community for the better part of fifteen years.

Giving their fans a voice, keeping it fun and keeping it real.

This article would be a good place to start.

(Jone's Soda) solicits suggestions for the next off-beat flavor, the next wacky name, like Whoop Ass energy drink, and even the quotes found under the bottle caps usually come from Jones fans. Then, van Stolk and his team discovered the ultimate way to create an emotional connection with consumers—putting their pictures on the bottles. The popularity of the customized bottles, which the company now has a patent for, led van Stolk to establish myjones.com to allow consumers to create personalized labels for 12-packs of soda to be shipped directly to their homes.

Fellowforce

Another entrant in the open-source innovation/crowdsourcing space: fellowforce solicits ideas, solutions and innovations to business problems, handing out prizes to winners. People have great ideas all the time that they never do anything with; they might as well get paid, right?

Aspiring copywriters sharpen your pencils: they're offering a 1% ownership stake for the fellow that comes up with the best tagline.

 

via

To Etsy is Human

I've been putting some thoughts together this week around the idea of brands and the age of conversation (great book), mostly things that have been kicking around here and other blogs, and I was lucky to come across this post from James on Etsy.

On the Etsy blog the founders provide a lot of inspiration on how they think about and built their community and business, and why it's completely different than how most companies have done it in the past. I love the part I've clipped below, it really sums up how thinking about conversations isn't a tactical question, it really should come from within the culture of the company and what it believes in, how it's all about being human first and foremost:

 

large corporations try to sanitize all their outgoing messages for the sake of keeping face. It is very easy to identify this kind of behavior. Whenever you read something and it sounds like a series of pre-made phrases strung together, instead of a human being speaking, this is sanitized communication. To me, this stuff sounds inhuman.

I want Etsy to stay human. This means allowing each person’s voice to be heard, even if it’s squeaky or loud or soft. I will not put a glossy layer of PR over what we do. If we trip, let us learn from it instead of trying to hide it; when we leap, let’s show others how to leap. Hence the title of this whole blog post: Open Etsy.

Internet companies like Etsy don't have all of the answers, not by a long-shot, but there is a lot to be said for the 2.0 web way of thinking (if you could put it that way). In a word, "Be More Like the Internet".

 

Must be Paradise

From time to time I talk about the musical subculture that I have been a part of for the last twenty years or so. Now, as a recently proclaimed "post-subculturalist" (thanks Morgan), it might be a good time for this little clip from the Maestro documentary, which profiles the legendary club (Paradise Garage) in New York city which was one of the spiritual homes of this subculture.

The mid-80s: a time when it meant something to be "underground", when subcultures emerged from deep social divisions, and when music was the primary vehicle and platform for identity, community and culture. Ah, the good ol' days.