The thoughts, opinions and suggestions on this blog don't necessarily reflect the opinions of my employers or associates (past or present). Just so you know.
I went to see a block of arctic ice melting on the steps of St Pauls Cathedral on the weekend. It looked like this.
And I got chatting to the people who put it there who tried to explain some science to me. It went a bit like this, when things of different temperature are put into the same environment with each other they'll have a fight with each other in trying to achieve an exact balance between each temperature. So for example if you put the left overs of your roast chicken in the fridge before it has time to cool this will raise the internal temperature of the fridge until it balances that of the chicken, and then the fridge will then fight the chicken back down to it's normal temperature again. This is why we feel so cold when we go outside in the winter, our bodies are fighting to make the outside temperature the same as ours and the outside is fighting to make our temperature the same as it's own. That's a battle we're never going to win so we get cold. There's a name for this but I've forgotten it.
Anyway it made me think about other kinds of friction between elements that are fighting each other, and how they'll only settle once a balance/comprimise is achieved. It could be true of politics (government policies meeting peoples ideals), business (services matching expectations), economics, nature, relationships, the lot. And that the fight is pretty much a consistent as change is a consistent. So we want balance, but will never get it.
Or if we do it might be based on the complete removal of something else.
Even though it's the title of the post and it's mentioned 8 times in the text.
Type 'Facebook advert' into Google Images or Google Video and you don't get any ads for Facebook, they've never had to make any as far as I know. But that's not to say that Facebook has never appeared in media spaces that hold advertising, they probably appear more often than those who are paying to be there.
I was listening the BBC World Service this morning and the word 'Facebook' was mentioned atleast 5 times in 30 minutes. It's such a normal part of everyday conversation now that we don't even notice it's mention. But should we? Facebook is a commerical organisation geared for profit like any other, when they get mentioned they get awareness, and increased user engagement which can then be sold back to advertisers for a reason to be there in the first place. Like a snake eating it's own head advertisers are helping to create a media channel monopoly by plastering 'like us on Facebook' everywhere and then having to pay out the other end for what they've created to get their ads into Facebook.
This free advertising ride has come to an end on French Teleivision atleast. Broadcasting regulators have issued a stern warning that name dropping both Facebook or Twitter and encouraging users to 'check us out on --- and ---" is to stop unless the companies pay for that promotion of their brand.
American Football is a shining example of an advertiser centric product development. The DNA of it's game model is structured to cater for advertiser in a way that something like chess never will be. Multiple breaks, sponsorship opportunities and of course the holy grail of ad space; super bowl ads.
I've been thinking about 'advertiser centric product development' in contrast to the much more favoured 'user centric product development'. Particularly in relation to smart phones, and as a tactic to dislodge Apple from their lead in smart phone sales (won largely as the pioneers of user centric product development, and now probably beyond catch up).
Competitor smart phone manufacturers (anyone other than Apple) seem in complete disarray in trying to win their bit of market share at the minute. Probably rightly so as it's pretty much a rapid land grab for long term technology and platform relationships at the minute. One opportunity that seems a no-brainer, yet still not applied, would be for a handset producer to simply insert an RFID card into their handsets that allowed the owners to 'one touch' in their Facebook likes. Pretty much making that Coca Cola Village stuff universal. Then doing a deal with brands/advertisers to integrate the other side of the technology into the real world, and as there's something in it for them (real world like harvesting) they'd probably fund the process.
Because I still think QR codes are rubbish and will end up in the land fill of digital hype with Second Life, Friends Reunited and Myspace pretty soon.
Likes are the tangilbe return on engagement, marketeers like tangibles. The obtainment of them is becoming a currency in it's own right, often with a cost per acquisition/like. Likes are often confused with advocacy, but they're not. Marketeers like likes. Brands are keen to harvest likes with an appetitie like never before, with distinct opportunities to define 'harvest seasons' when cost per acquisitions look the lowest and like crops are at their most abundant.
In the 17th and 18th century coffee shops were widely seen to house an intellectual and cultural age of enlightenment. Now we just use them to connect to the network through various devices in isolation from those around us.
Carbon
In order to keep global warming below a critical 2 degrees we'll need to reduce to carbon emissions to pre 1960's levels.
Perhaps we're going to start needing to go backwards inorder to go forwards.
A while ago I went to the Saatchi gallery and found they were being so kind as to give out free marketing to visitors. And it was attracting a bit of interest.
Well I went back on the weekend to find that they're still giving out free marketing, but they're keeping up with the times and collecting Facebook likes now to.
Very forward thinking for an entry point, the only problem is that it gets a bit clunky at the exit point, where they have to actively remind people to log out to avoid a very interesting engagement for the next visitor.
Which led me to think that there would probably be a lot of money waiting for the people who can create a very clean mechanic to procure Facebook likes in the real world. Like one touch payment stuff but for likes (which is pretty much a currency in it's own right now). To do this at scale you'd need infrastructure innovation, like when Oyster cards came along. A big opportunity for the smart phone market potentially given the size of Facebooks audience and that revenue is coming soley from brands looking to engage with that audience. If they'd only start to think about something other than copying the iPhone and trying to own music.
Then all those high street shops that are sticking big old Facebook and Twitter icons in the window could stick a little box behind them and get collecting some permissions.
(I know you can do this via QR code things at the minute, but they're pretty rubbish in my opinion).
An extra child born today in the United States, would, down the generations, produce an eventual carbon footprint seven times that of an extra child in China, 55 times that of an Indian child or 86 times that of a Nigerian child.
The 2003 World Values Survey found that the happiest people in the world live in Nigeria, where almost 70% of interviewees described themselves as 'very happy'. But does this mean that Nigeria should be a model for other countries? Nigerians probably compare themselves mainly with other Nigerians and not with, say, Americans. The underprivileged tend to adjust their desires to their means. They forsake the exclusive desires of people who live in rich countries so as not to be disappointed.
I've got a brand new theory for you; great business's are built on the remarkable use of both myth and maths. That's it.
We've spent the best part of the 20th centuary freeing ourselves of myths through the growth of science and logic. Sometimes this is, of course, for the better, but sometimes for the worse. There's a lot to be said for the power of myths, and we're increasingly loosing our connections to them.
Take for example innocent's yes no bins. A mighty myth that has served them extremely well over the years, and unike a lot of myths is actually true.
But myth on it's own does not always a succesful business make. You need to get your numbers right in the background, the maths. You need to know what you want to achieve, how your going to measure that and how your going to positively effect those measures. That it from a former employee, innocent where as good as the maths bit as they were the myth bit.
Another great example of myth and maths is Obama's presidential campaign. The story is the stuff of great yankee myth, and was indeed compared to another great American myth of Abraham Lincoln. But behind the myth lay the maths, and when both came together he was off to the races. Or the White House.
Zocalo is the mexican word for town square, a place where the local community meet to eat, drink, sit and talk. I heard a great story by this chap last week of a community movement in Brighton to create their own Zocalo event once a year, in which local residents are simply asked to put a chair or two outside their front door for the day and chat to anyone who wants to join them. It's called Zocalo Brighton and was set up in 2001 by the group White Dot as a way of encouraging people to watch less telly closed off in their living rooms and form more meaningful relationships/entertainment with the people they live around. Again another great example of social media with not a hide nor hair of that Facebook or twitter stuff.
I've recently been experiencing the same effect on the canal. Having limited inside space your front and deck quickly become your extended living space for eating, reading, smoking and sitting in nature. This then very quickly and naturally leads to conversations with passers by and other boat dwellers. Here I am buttied up to Jesse and Max behind Frank and just down from Tim, all of whome I speak to a few times a day.
Perhaps we all just need to sit outside the front door a bit more.
I was having a conversation with some one a while ago about sexy digital vs unsexy digital. Sexy being this type of well talked about, case studied and awarded stuff like this, and unsexy being the more behind the scenes clever stuff with data ike this. Like most stuff we can get over excited by the sexy stuff whilst turning a blind eye to the unsexy.
This piece in The New York Times made me realised the same is true in business. On every apple product you'll find the line 'designed in Calafornia, made in China'. We hear a hell of a lot about the designed in sexy and sunny Calafornia but very very little and the China bit. The fact is that Foxconn Technology (who produce all of apple's stuff) now employs over 430,000 people and are accounted for making about half of all the electronic goods sold in the world at the minute (they don't just work with apple exclusively). Yet I've never seem to read about their growth or business strategy in the likes of Monocle or Wired, and I've no idea who their CEO is and what his secret to success is. For every Obama there is always going to be atleast one Dan Siroker though, and there's probably quite a bit they can teach us if someone would bother to tell their story. Those stories are probably worth telling.
Much has been written on the best strategies for creating the ideal conditions for success (by myself included), but very little on creating the best conditions for failure. Here's actor/director Paddy Considine on creating a playground for 'dropping the glove' as he eloquently puts it.
I used to have a couple of peony plants in my front garden that would bloom every spring. An interesting thing happens when peonies bloom, they completely collapse under their own weight and beauty. Their stalks simply can't support their magnificence and ambitions.
I've always liked informal/secret/grey economies. My parents used to partake in car boots sales throughout long summers in Wales and worked up a significant additional income in doing so. Then I came across the informal economies of Malawi last year and the associated benefits that come with them.
So I got really interested when I read a piece called 'The Gastronomic Underground' in the latest edition of the Idler. It's a very well researched and written documentation of the mercatini clandestini (secret markets) of Italy. The basic principle of which being that food producers come together on an invitation only basis, avoiding the attention of tax wielding authorities, to buy and exchange their goods on a hyper local level. The markets are often seen as a direct responce to the state's failure to support small scale agriculture and protect fragile local economies.
There are secret economies everywhere in Italy, where decades of bureaurcracy, political corruption, Mafia extortion and misguided tax regimes have created marginal trading structures that circumvent the official economy with remarkable creativity. The most recent estimates put Italy's shadow economy at around 26% of its GDP, the highest in Europe after Greece. In growing African economies this figure can jump to up to 60-70% of the total local economy.
The greatest point of interest for me however is something I've spoken about before, and that's the similarities between informal economies and agile 2.0 business. Those similarities best summed up in the below chart.
Already ventures such as Housebites (below) are bridging the divide between internet start up and a new type of ground up honest economy. Etsy being another fine example, a movement that has just delivered its first conference in an attempt to fight againsts in their words "decades of an unyielding focus on economic growth and a corporate mentality that have left us ever more disconnected with nature, our communities, and the people and processes behind the objects in our lives".
Could we be seeing a complete reinvention of the channels of trade, supply chains and methods of remunification forming before our eyes? Who knows, all I know is that they make for a bloody better story than what's going on in the chiller isles and chain stores of the country these days.
The case for small is often better argued through the case against big.
1: The film Etre Et Avoir.
2: Research show that small secondary schools of 300-800 pupils have better results, better behaviour, less truancy, less vandalism and better relationships than larger schools. The reasoning? Small schools make transformational human relationships possible, teachers know pupils and vice versa. 'You cannot teach a child well unless you know that child well'. Even knowing this the number of British schools with more than 2,000 pupils has tripled in the last decade.
3: Nobel economist Amartya Sen has shown that small family farms are more productive than big industrial ones. Ten family farms of a hundred acres can each produce more than one farm of a thousand acres. The reason? Passion, purpose, attention to detail, the effectiveness of human-scale housekeeping over industrialised systems.
4: Recent American research has American hospitals cost more to run per patient the bigger they get.
5: The bigger a company gets, the more impersonal and less innovative they are able to be. Which is why so many pharmaceutical companies outsource their research and development to small research start-ups.
6: When the accountants KPMG studied the results of mergers and acquisitions in 1999 they found that only 17% of all mergers added value to the combined company. With as many as 53% of mergers actually destroying share holder value.
7: Just 2% of all UK Charities hoover up 2/3 of charity funding.
8: No 3 star Michelin restaurant sits over 50 people
Economies of scale don't work so well when real human beings become involved. Scaling up usually means the added cost of inefficiencies of big management and infrastructure, more rules, more monitoring, more paperwork and pen pushing, and less trust and entrepreneurialism. As purpose is diluted so is passion, productiivity and ultimately financial growth.
nb: Most of this is lifted directly from the essay Small Is Splendid by David Boyle in The Idler No 44.
I'm getting very interested in failure at the minute, in that I seem to be surrounded by it more and more and faster and faster. I even had another idea (that I'll never do) to create a failure conference where all the speakers have to have had made some big failures, preferably in the digital and social world where the stage for failure seems to be far smaller than that for success. We need to see and talk about that failure stuff, sometimes more so that the success stuff.
The problem being in my mind is that the more we ignore failure and rave about success, the more the people who pay us to do what we do will believe that there is no such thing as failure and everything is bound to succeed. This is a very dangerous place to be, and as the one who went through the dot com implosition where we lost our jobs, stated that firing staff is the worse thing we've ever had to do, and generally saw the mistakes up close, we should be getting careful now.
As for failure the sign of the times can been seen in the very real world right here in this piece by the New York Times. Some brief highlights consist of;
Hewlett-Packard killing it's iPad competitior TouchPad just 7 weeks after launch.
Microsoft abondoning it's Kin mobile phones only 48 days after launch.
Google killing Wave just 77 days after launch.
And Pure Digital buying Flip Cam for $590m in 2009 and then shutting the entire division this year despite their plans to launch what could have been a game changing Flip Cam Live.
The same hunger for Apple esque blockbusters can also be seen in social marketing. Brand Managers see the case studies (Old Spice Man/ Skittles you know the ones) can then want that for their brand, but for every Old Spice guy their are thousands of low reach social campaigns queued up for the social media grave yard. And even if we do hit success we're then challenged with the belief that every point of engagement is rich, advocacy driving, ongoing relationship type engagement. When it's probably actually not. Again for the few that do engage like this there are thousands who are just sitting back having done their view or like never to be seen again. We need to start getting a bit more realistic about this stuff pretty quick, and here's a good start on that.
Ultimately we've been very good at building the character of social shiz through some great success's, but we're also starting to see it's true character revealed through it's failures. And I for one don't much fancy that dot com down turn conversation in a glass meeting room of a bunch of very smart people who didn't have the forsight to see it coming again.
There's a popular english language saying of never in a month of sundays. I'm quite happy to have gone against the grain on this particular etymology at one time in my life by spending every single day of the month of August 2011 as if it were a Sunday. Here's the highlights.
I came across my first Little Waitrose today, and loved that it was 'little'. Not Express, not Metro, but little.
Little is a good word. innocent are known for their little tasty drinks.
And had an early business vision to become Europe's favourite little drinks company.
It was the little bit that I spent a lot of my time working on with the digital and social stuff there, communicating and showing the same feelings of a small and passionate start up as the company grew. By saying hello and stuff. A little mind set isn't exclusive to companies where you can count the employees on one hand.
The interesting thing about little is that it quickly becomes permisable. It's none threatening, was no great ambitions to worry about and can more easily be turned back on if you don't like it. Gu after noon puddings for example, what would before be selling you less product for more money is now doing you a favour in not loading up your daily calorie count and letting you reward yourself with a well deserved treat without the guilt trip.
I'm wondering if I'd be stretching the metaphor too far to suggest that a Little Waitrose might be given more permission to enter into communities such as Bristol and Stoke Newington than Tesco and Sainsbury's have been finding. The little seems to suggest far less commerical objectives at play, a humble and conscious acknowlegdement of a place in the community and statement of future intent (we won't buy next door and knock the wall down next week). Maybe I'm just fooled by baby talk too easily though.
I'm a big fan of getting humans involved with marketing stuff. It normally improves results drastically.
Here's an example.
Like most ice cream shops in London you can get free samples of any flavour in a traditional 'try before you buy' just by asking. But most people won't even think to ask, they don't even know they want to try ice cream today. But by sticking a happy human being outside (in this case the girl in the blue t-shirt) giving away free sample vouchers you're off to the races.
Everyone likes something for free. In we go and get our free sample (which we could have got anyway) and hopefully we'll like it so much we'll buy some. At the very least we've tried the product in real life and had a positive experience. And conversion rates of usual numbers of new customer visits go up, a lot.
One of the many things I never actually got done at innocent was a piece awareness raising activity for the annual Big Knit. Which would basically take this very thoughtful idea and help other volunteers to stage their own version. How do you communicate quite a complex campaign message in an environment know for its visitors going into zombie mode and only read about 8 words of communications per visit (your average supermarket)? Put human beings in charge of course, the best engagement road block in the world.
You've got to put the hours in to actually get anywhere.
Sounds obvious but the days I've started late, had lazy lunches and pulled in early I've clocked up far less miles than when I get going. It's all about the hours.
Luther stands on a roof top somewhere in Shoreditch, they don't let him go up the West End. His mate's been trying to get hold of him on his mobile. When he tracks him down on the roof top in Shoreditch Luther tells him;
"You get a reputation for answering phones and all they do is ring".
Wise words from Luther. I stopped answeing my phone so much a while ago and it stopped ringing so much shortly afterwards. The same is true in revearse though, if you get a reputation for being responsive you will attract more and more engagements. There seems to be a slight irony when you apply this metaphor to a lot of brand use of social media. They want the upsides of engagement (higher advocacy and awareness via word of mouth etc) but find the picking the phones up bit of a bloody headache. So the brands that seem to enjoy picking up the phone get the better results.
The smaller something is, the more authentic it tends to be. The smaller it is the closer it tends to be to it's core passion, and the more successful it will be.
When Ayrton Sennna was asked “Who is or has been the driver you got the most satisfaction of racing against...past or present?” his answer wasn't any of the big name F1 greats, but a little known kart racer. Simply because it was pure racing, free from the coruption of politics and money that was common place in F1.
The further something gets from it's original core passion, the less succesful it tends to become. I'll leave you Beans on Toast.
Welcome to a new category of this blog. That was helpful. I doubt it will be trending on twitter any time soon, but it is going to give me chance to archive off some of the work I've been doing as this is helpful. Stuff that's been done and delivered. Actual output. Because it's all about output.
First up some branding (look and feel, positioning, tone of voice, that kind of jazz) I've recently created for some friends at a clever new agency called Fluxx. All brought to life by a talented designer chap called Trond.
I just came across play buttons in Rough Trade. Single function mp3 players that play one album, can't be deleted or overwritten. You wear it and play it. I think/hope we'll see more single funtion devices and physical applications that host digital applications shortly and the move to real and tangible.
When you live off grid you quickly appreciate how much electricity the stuff you rely upon uses. And principly when it's using more than you're creating.
Then you realise that other people actually give their electricity away for free. So you can charge up on their plugs, and use it up onboard. In this example the third floor of the National Theatre, which is sporting a wonderful view of the river today, also free.
The challenge isn't to just point at, talk around or think about stuff in the past or future.
The challenge is to pick it up and drag it into the present, kicking and screaming if need be. Making it part of the now. This is where sucess lies, this is the skill of people who get stuff done. This is what the vast majority of small business's are great at and the vast majority or big business's aren't. This is the bit that's getting quicker by the day.
Swap your pointing and clicking for dragging and creating.
I've been involved in a few Big Society type things over the past few months, but like most people I haven't really got a clue what it actually looks like. I've had a breakfast meeting with Lord Nat Wei about it, I've joined The Peoples Supermarket (which Dave thinks is a great example of Big Society) and I've got involved with The Ministry of Stories (also on Dave's Big Society hit list).
The closest I've got to understanding it all though is another lesson from the canal. The Goverment are planning to turn British Waterways (who currently manage the canals) into a brand new charity. Being a resident of the canals I've been having a look into my prospective new landlord and found the best picture of Big Society yet. Here it is below, it's the blue bit in the below chart. That's all the financial value that will be delivered to the new waterways charity over the next decade by the Big Society. Like it's name it's going to be big, and like it's creators it's blue.
And just incase you were also wondering what a sustainable business looks like, here's another great example from the same report. It's a business in a circle, like this.
When navigating a lock there's always a frustrating delay for the last quarter inch of water to fill inside the lock so that the level of water inside is perfectly aligned with the level outside. It will often look like both are at the same height but if you're a few cm's out the lock door isn't going to budge a millimeter for love nor money. You're pushing against a few hundred tonnes for canal water up until the time when the two levels are perfectly balanced, then and only then the lock gate will easily swing open.
Sometimes you have to wait for things to have their perfect time to work at their very best. Sometimes it looks like it's the right time bit it isn't, and as much as you try to push on through you'll be in for a lot of effort for very little results. But if you keep your patience and plan your timing right you'll be off to the races. It's the reason that some ideas fall flat on their face in their first release to the world, but a few months or years later the exact same idea will take off beyond imagination. Or using time and patience, rather than being completely single minded about 'new shiny things', can see ever increasing results.
