All posts in category Community

The bottom half of culture

“Complete assimilation really means complete acceptance. The immigrant who is completely assimilated has lost the faculty of adding whatever is special about himself to his country; for any artist, complete assimilation means the adoption of an aesthetic where no lines are drawn and no choices are made. That quality of selection, which is what is at stake when an artist comes across with his or her version of anything, is missing. When an artist gives an all-encompassing Yes to his audience, there is nothing more he can tell his audience, nothing he can really do for them, except maybe throw them a kiss. Only the man who says No is free.”

-          Greil Marcus, The Presliad, Mystery Train

I thought of Elvis last Wednesday, and what Greil Marcus wrote about him in the 1970s.

It was when I went to the Brits. I sat in a box with other people who also have nothing to do with the music industry, and watched the celebratory roll-call. I watched the haircuts and the clothes and the shoes and the wireless instruments that weren’t plugged in. I watched the endlessly moving lights and the stage that perpetually re-built itself.

Having spent the last 10 years easing backwards from the world of popular music – it’s not on the TV, I don’t listen to Radio 1 or commercial radio – I found myself almost laughably ill-informed about the events inside the O2. I’d never heard Emeli Sande sing. I’d no idea what Taylor Swift looked like. I didn’t even know the guy who won Best Male was.

When you’re this detached from the narrative unfolding in front of you, strange things happen. The performative aspect starts to strike you as weird. It’s like some big club that everyone knows the rules to except you. Without knowing the context or content, you realise you’re watching reputations rather than people. Performances not characters.

Robbie Williams seemed like he saw through the whole thing just as much as I did. Given his irony-drenched 90s, this phoned-in version comes off like an ironic take on irony. Irony eating itself.

His song seems to take an awfully long time.

Writing about the Elvis of the 70s, Greil Marcus noticed that, after losing himself in crap movies and a brief, energised comeback, the great man now “performs from a distance… singing as if there are no dangers or delights grand enough in the world to challenge him. There is great satisfaction in his performance, and great emptiness.” (This is from the same book as the excerpt quoted at the start of this post.)

This was what I was thinking of when I watched Robbie. But it spoke to the complacency that the entire shebang stands for. The breathless and incredulous acceptance speeches couldn’t mask the winners’ sense of entitlement. They knew they deserved to be there. They’d been fluffed for it. Any self-doubt is crushed beneath the self-worth that such a showy display bestows on them.

Somehow, an industry that is on its knees finds the time and the money to be this complacent, this indulgent. It’s like putting on a fireworks display as you re-arrange the deckchairs.

There’s no room at the Brits any more for the wayward, the anomalous, the unscripted stuff of life. Real people are shut out – both on and off the stage.

Strangely, they all accept the rules. To paraphrase Marcus, there’s a great deal of satisfaction at the Brits, and very little No; everyone says Yes. It’s also utterly empty.

I was thinking about all this when, on Friday, I attended The Story. It’s a conference, run by Matt Locke. It examines storytelling in all its forms. It shines a light on disciplines and people that are creating amazing experiences. You buy tickets through Eventbrite.

The Story is not the Brits. It isn’t empty. It’s positively brimming with ideas, with experiences, with life.

At lunchtime I was describing my Brits experience to a colleague. Afterwards she mentioned to me she’d thought of this exchange when the final speaker quoted John Updike. The quote is worth capturing in full.

“Celebrity is a mask that eats into your face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen.”

This was Rob Manuel, co-founder of B3TA, GIF-celebrant and, at The Story at least, defender of “the bottom half of the internet.” He used the quote to remind us that the people who occupy the ‘top half’ of the internet can sometimes start to get a bit carried away. Media owners and opinion-formers are becoming very superior. Informally they sneer at the ‘commentards’; formally the media likes to demonise dissent as ‘trolling’.

This is a profoundly disheartening development. It’s elitist, anti-democratic. We know best, says the top.

It sounded a lot like the way I was made to feel at the Brits.

Let’s keep the inappropriate and the uncomfortable and the different at bay. Let’s maintain the ‘natural’ order of things.

It’s bad when it happens to music. It will be terrible if it’s allowed to happen to culture generally.

The Brits is what happens when an industry thinks it knows best, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. It’s what happens when young upstarts that don’t fit the conventional or current paradigm have to fight to get heard, before they inevitably prove the industry wrong, take over the world and eventually get co-opted by the very industry that tried to kill them off.

The Brits is what happens when complete assimilation creates an aesthetic where no lines are drawn, because there’s no artistic vision at stake, other than success.

The Brits is, it’s fair to say, the total antithesis of The Story.

What The Story served up was small victories, personal memoir, irrepressible creativity and the passion of real people.

Here was a collection of people who had said No, not Yes. They had refused to accept the rules. And as a result they were free.

It was exciting, vivid, strange, shambolic, and not always the full picture. Sometimes you had to work to interpret the meaning of what was being said. Sometimes it was apparent that having done great work doesn’t necessarily make you a great speaker.

But that was OK. Because asking an audience to work with you can be the most engaging storytelling of all.

This was proper lean-forward stuff. For once I didn’t take notes. I didn’t tweet. But no-one can tell me I didn’t participate fully.

I just listened and then talked about what I’d heard with my friends. The conversations, as much as the talks themselves, led to this post.

With the Brits there are no gaps to fill in, no narrative to be identified with, no insight to be passed on, or misunderstood.

But effective, combinatorial listening in Conway Hall meant you went away far richer than when you walked in.

The point was made indirectly by Rebecca O’Brien, Ken Loach’s producer, when she talked about the challenge of non-narrative documentary. An audience still needs structure even if the film resists a conventional authorial voice. The insight was a useful one. An audience needs just enough scaffolding that it supports what’s built around it, but make it too visible and the audience becomes too passive.

That it was followed by the one ‘bad powerpoint’ presentation – from LOCOG – was unfortunate, but appropriate. The Olympics was a story with plenty of emotion already invested in it by the audience. But the mundane stakeholder presentation behind it showed too much scaffolding. Exposition nearly killed the story dead.

Like the Brits, and 70s Elvis, and as Rob Manuel pointed out, our mass-scale storytelling is in trouble, and not fit for purpose. It’s full of people being seen, not seeing. It doesn’t so much celebrate the unconventional as assimilate it. By handing down to us the things we are supposed to be interested in, it becomes complacent, flabby, and stale with the fixed paradigms of entertainment constructs. It renders audiences passive. It treats people the way children’s media treats children – like someone else, somewhere else, knows best.

But the people in charge don’t always know best.

They’re just in charge.

The Story showed this loud and clear.

We heard about the economists who created the derivatives pricing equation, a self-fulfilling prophecy that led more than indirectly to the financial crisis.

We heard about the inhibition schooled into our children that prevented from then writing freely, from the storyteller making it her business to shake them up a bit.

We heard about the post-war moment when a socialist-minded electorate created modern Britain only to have the narrative wrested from them by future governments.

These stories demonstrated that we identify more with the small and the specific way more than we do with the general and prescriptive. Life, in all its messy, complicated ways, is made up not of media owner narratives but of the stories that emerge from specific individuals, objects, times and places.

Edwyn Collins, who recovered from his stroke and re-built his identity and memories from scratch, only did so because he refused to listen to the doctors who told him there was no point.

Both Rob Manuel and Laura Dockrill, a kid’s writer and the day’s best speaker by a country mile, talked about a more democratic approach to creative expression. Right now we suffer from a top-down sickness, whether it’s Manuel’s elitist media owners, or Alice Lee’s analysis of children’s media – media that tell us more about the adults who made it than the children it was supposedly made for.

‘Commentards’, children, Occupy activists, Paralympic vloggers – given the opportunity, fascinating stories can and should come from anyone.

Somewhere between the Conway Hall and the O2 I learned that, as Greil Marcus said, drawing lines still matters.

Going up against power structures, like the animator who worked with Cartoon Network did, or Ken Loach does, or Occupy, is necessary if you don’t want your view, your story, to become completely assimilated. If you want to retain the faculty of adding whatever is special about yourself to your story.

And, crucially, if you still want something more to tell your audience.

I’ve tried while writing this to come up with the usual, what-this-means-for-us-in-advertising, finishing flourish.

But I’m not sure I can. We’re a very long way from what the Story represents, at least institutionally even if not intentionally.

In advertising, to reach people and tell our stories, we use the very media owners and power structures that The Story asks us to guard against. We try to convince people – who we call consumers and probably think of as children – that we do know best. When we say we want to hear ‘their story’ we don’t really mean it, except in a few, moderated cases.

We can’t do small, messy, or authentic very well.

We sponsor the Brits. Or, as I did, accept hospitality invites. We support the media power structures.

We are the top half of the internet.

On the tube I saw, briefly, a bunch of advertising that, in comparison to what I’d just heard and seen during the day at Conway Hall, seemed superficial, thin, obvious and clichéd.

But this means there is hope.

Brands that do find a way to celebrate the different, the small, the uncomfortable, the specific, and maybe even the inappropriate might start to stand out.

They might start to have something of life about them, rather than the scripted simulacrum that most advertising becomes, despite itself.

Then perhaps we might genuinely add whatever is special about them to a story that feels genuine and real.

3 Comments
by jimcaig on February 25, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Community, Perspective, Work
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Posted by jimcaig on February 25, 2013

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2013/02/25/the-bottom-half-of-culture/

Communities and cake stalls

It was our son’s school fete this last weekend.

My wife helped run the cake stall.

Some friends who saw this picture on Instagram asked me whether she’d made all of the cakes.

Which, not least because there were just as many behind the stall waiting to be displayed, struck me as rather fanciful. Imagine how long it would have taken to bake all of that!

Of course, however long that was, somebody did have to take the time, but it wasn’t my wife alone. It was a bunch of parents keen to help raise money in a way that was relatively easy for them to achieve.

That got me thinking.

Everyone pitched in, everyone had a role to play. It’s what cake stalls are all about.

But it also seems to me that it’s what our open source, social, collaborative web is all about. Businesses and services spring from the communities of which they’re part.

Let me see if I can make this rather tortuous metaphor work.

You have a site that you’ve acquired for little or no outlay. A shop window, if you will. It’s not there to generate profit necessarily, at least not yet. But to gain a foothold, or at least traffic, it needs to be useful, or structured in such a way that it helps its users/customers to easily achieve their goal.

The site then gets populated by the product of expertise and time of its contributors. What gets sold is crowd-sourced from anyone who wants to contribute. There’s little inducement to do so, apart from a sense of altruism, a distant promise of your work contributing to a a greater good, and perhaps the fact that lots of others will probably be doing it.

Of course, then people who pass by the site are attracted by the wares on display. They know making a purchase will help the cause, but they do get something lovely in return. It’s a win-win. Everybody’s happy.

And the more popular the site is, the more the people keep coming. If the product was good, they even come back. My wife and the other parents were busy serving people all afternoon. They were selling a product people could consume while travelling around doing other things, so people knew there was a site where they could get cake even if they hadn’t seen the site yet. And as the for the people around the site itself – well, we know how contagious popularity can be.

But what about the product itself?

Well, all the cakes were different shapes, sizes, colours, tastes and quality. The basic building blocks of the product are so universally understood that anyone could join in. But they’re also endlessly adaptable and open to being customised. Recipes, like software, are freely available everywhere, published and shared by those with sufficient amateur enthusiasm and the skill to know what to do with them. I bet the recipes have been refined, adapted, improved. Tested all the time, with lessons learned from willing focus groups and beta users.

But software is only a collection of code, raw ingredients that must be combined in the right way to provide an experience people actually want. What makes them sing is the injection of people’s time and knowledge to create something more than the sum of its parts. To create value from labour.

But how to put a price on that value? At our cake stall that some contributors had a more fixed notion than others of what their labour was worth. This presented the people in charge of the site itself with a decision to make over the pricing. How should they balance what they thought people would be prepared to pay with what the makers thought their labour worth?

In the end they decided on a fixed price strategy. Everything cost the same, which made things more straightforward for customers, and made sure no-one felt they were being taken advantage of. In the community good will is as important as the immediate generation of revenue.

The added bonus is that this approach created a level playing field that made it easier to get an idea of what people liked. When everything costs the same, people start to make judgements on other criteria – what the product looks like, which is more popular, what people recommend, perceived quality of ingredients. The sellers, if they were looking for it, probably learned a lot about their market that day, insights that they could pass on to contributors so their next batch of product might sell better next time around.

Now, I know that the expectations at a school fete are set differently to the open market place. Everyone’s set to spend money, because that’s the expectation. Context counts too – compared to whatever else there was there – the bouncy castle, the raffle, the coconut shy – a cake stall provides something physical and tangible for customers to take away along with the satisfaction of contributing.

And kids love cake. Everyone loves cake.

But the enterprise knew its market. No shame in that. It knew it because it grew from the community it set itself up to serve. People wanted it to do well. Those who provided the service didn’t want to let the community down. Those who contributed were also the customers, and the customers knew everyone was doing it with the best intentions.

Perhaps  this is what a community business model looks like.

Purposeful, open, collaborative and iterative.

Web-built businesses are pretty used to this, I guess?

How long before every business starts behaving that way?

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by jimcaig on July 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Behaviour, Community, Creativity, Perspective
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Posted by jimcaig on July 4, 2012

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2012/07/04/communities-and-cake-stalls/

Not interesting, but interested

A guy I used to worked with gave me a real shock once. When it came to presenting he was one of the most natural performers I’ve ever seen.

A relatively senior guy at the agency, he was especially excellent at that most particular of skills, hosting the company meeting.

He had a great mix of the witty and the self-deprecating, which meant you really warmed to him even as he (gently) mocked you.

But he revealed to me once that this apparent natural confidence evaporated when he found himself talking to people in less formal, more social settings. He felt incredibly self-conscious. He found it awkward approaching a group of people, for instance, in the pub.

I was surprised by this disconnect, but it was something my colleague had grown used to. He had developed a strategy to get over it, too.

He asked questions.

Seems obvious, but he’d realised that people felt engaged if you showed you wanted to know about them. This approach deflected his self-consciousness and focused instead on the circle he’d joined.

It allowed him to stop worrying about his own ‘performance’ and instead demonstrate he was someone who made people feel valued.

In his words, his mantra was “don’t be interesting, be interested.”

Not only is this a useful anchor for ensuring you don’t feel like a spare part amongs friends and colleagues, I think it’s also a design for life.

And for those of us in this business I think it’s imperative.

One of the inspiring reference points for this blog is Joe Strummer’s wonderful maxim ‘no input, no output’. My current obsession with combinatorial creativity relies on curiosity. Six years on, I’m still sharing Russell Davies’ post on ways to notice the world around as creative stimumlus.

But I’ve started wondering lately whether a similar re-frame is something that brands are crying out for, too.

Brands and their marketing mainly – still – attempt to cultivate interest in what they do, as opposed to demonstrate a curiosity about their customers. You might get the odd bit of curatorship, or some community management, or some customer service, but ultimately the brand still considers itself at the centre of its universe.

Consider the alternative path my colleague might have taken.

Imagine if before each social engagement he had felt it necessary to generate some ‘new news’ with which to regale his audience. Imagine he felt it incumbent upon him to decide on a ‘messaging hierarchy’, based largely, of course, on what he thought would be most ‘motivating’ about him to his friends. Imagine if he treated his nights out as part of his ‘customer relationship management programme’.

Imagine if, in essence, he decided to apopt the brand marketing approach.

This, of course, is absurd.

And equally I don’t really believe that brands could fully adopt the ‘act like a friend’ approach. That’s been done to death.

But they do call it ‘social’ media for a reason. And while people don’t want to be friends with brands, brands that understand social dynamics, and think of their audience rather than themselves, will do better in the new social landscape?

And if, the future of marketing is “many, lightweight interactions over time“, then brands need to find ways to talk to people that don’t leave them looking like the pub bore.

With good timing, Phil was telling me recently about some community management work his agency had been doing lately. Their experience suggested that even the best brand-centric content, no matter how well produced it is, doesn’t fly like the content that builds on conversations people are already having. Listening and responding is more likely to make recipients take notice of your content, and therefore your brand.

In other words, being interested in people is more effective than trying to be interesting.

So, is your brand interested in people? How do you ensure that interest in its consumers is exhibited in its behaviour? What does it like to do with its spare time? What is it curious about? Where it does it look to remain interested in people’s world?

What’s your brand’s social life?

1 Comment
by jimcaig on May 22, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Behaviour, Community, Perspective, Planning, Work

Posted by jimcaig on May 22, 2012

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2012/05/22/not-interesting-but-interested/

Polemic, metaphor and Firestarters 5

 

Amazing talk from Cory Doctorow at this week’s Firestarters. Cory covered a head-spinning amout of ground, at a dizzying pace.

His theme: the impending ‘war on general computing’.

His premise: that computers are becoming so pervasive, powerful and increasingly invisible that the tension between personal autonomy and the protection we receive from lawmakers is going to become even more palpable and troublesome.

He talked about copyright, privacy, spyware, hacking, data, marketing… seemingly everything. And he did speak very quickly. Many people I’ve spoken to since took few notes; the tweet rate seemed down significantly on previous Firestarters events.

There will be good write-ups, naturally, and a couple have appeared already (here and here). I think, though, that we might need some sort of blog wiki that can aggregate the different fragments that different people will have been able snatch the Google 9th floor ether.

Whatever you managed to grab hold of, chances are you were nevertheless intoxicated by what was really the first Firestarters lecture. In a very good way.

Like any good polemicist, Cory had an entire arsenal of metaphor and soundbites at his disposal. This is not a criticism, in fact quite the opposite.

I was thinking about the nuggets that stuck in my mind, and what made them stick. A combination of language, imagery, humour and resonant metaphor made what Cory had to say incisive and powerful, as opposed to merely interesting and thought-provoking.

He talked about how censorship and surveillance used to be different things. If you wanted to ban a book 50 years ago, all you had to do was limit the books’ appearance in book shops. The restraint was on the publisher, not the reader. Now the enforcement of censorship requires surveillance of the reader, control access and putting restraints of the movements of the user. Censorship and surveillance have converged.

Cory can also pull a great emotive metaphor out of the bag, especially when building on the way users are being blamed for the capabilities of mass produced technology. Copyright, he argued, used to be like a tank mine, which only blew up when a record plant would do the wrong this. Now it’s like a landmine, blowing up 14 year old kids who unknowingly infringe arcane publishing laws.

It’s a powerful image – capturing immediately the innocence of young transgressors and drawing the lawmakers as a common ethical enemy.

My favourite was when Cory forensically analysed how legisltation designed to solve one copyrighting problem unwittingly gavce birth to other problems, either because smart technology owners were given an opportunity to circumvent the new law, or because the bluntness of legislation scooped up a bunch of other people and users and issues along with the very specific issue it was trying to address.

His masterstroke was to talk about this by using the kids’ rhyme about the old woman who swallowed a fly, then a spider, then a mouse, cat and horse. It brilliantly punctures the futility and absurdity he sees in lawmakers’ efforts to control an uncontrollable situation.

Now I’m not necessarily saying I agree with all these statements in the cold light of day. And I’m sure my re-creation of the metaphors hasn’t done them justice.

But in the moment, in the room, they’re intoxicating and persuasive.

And it worked because his whole talk was based on a metaphor. He painted the copyright wars of recent years as merely the skirmishes that precede a far bigger war – the war on general computing. He got us to think seriously about the future by telling a powerful story of the past.

Capturing complicated ideas is difficult. Metaphor is often the best way to somehow make these ideas more powerful even as they become simplified. When I was writing my own Firestarters talk on the future OS of agencies my head was full of the notion of architecture as a metaphor for other constructs. Designing space and guiding behaviour. Setting the initial conditions for what you want to have happen. The way buildings can reflect the times, culture and people who made them.

I haven’t been to one of Andy’s Metaphwoar events yet, but I certainly intend to. Consciously thinking of parallel forms of expression can make what we’re trying to say more clear and more tangible. It can make clients more likely to buy what we do. It can make us better communicators.

At each Firestarters Neil always mentions that we should consider the event as a part of a conversation. Certainly what I’m getting out of each session is evolving. Last time out Phil talked about the community aspect of it. Perhaps this time the out-take might be that it’s not just the subject matter that Firestarters opens up to us, but also access to the ways that smart people are able to communicate and help us learn in the first place.

Here’s to those who don’t just have something new to say, but are finding potent and engaging new ways to say it.

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by jimcaig on May 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Community, Creativity, Perspective
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Posted by jimcaig on May 4, 2012

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2012/05/04/polemic-metaphor-and-firestarters-5/

The future of planning: Wedding Planning

I’m reading a book called Grouped. As a result I’ve decided that the future of planning is Wedding Planning.

We should all become Wedding Planners from here on in.

I don’t mean we should create huge events. I don’t suggest we make people spend loads of money. And I certainly don’t mean we enter a whole new line of business.

Let me explain.

When you get married you want to celebrate with everyone you know.

You draw up a list of who’s important to you, then invite them to a celebration all about you and your partner.

You probably generate a long list first. And you probably do this by thinking through the different relationships you have, then working out whether they deserve a spot beside you at “the most important day of your life”. TM.

You have your family, your school friends, the mates from university and work, then some other people you’ve collected along the way.

Then you think about a table plan. Who sits next to who.

These can feel like huge decisions, but it’s often surprising how easily the list you made can be segmented into appropriate table groups.

And, weirdly, how 8-10 people per table feels  representative of your life.

There’s some crossover between groups, but mostly you realise that there’s pretty much only one thing that everyone has in common

You.

At this point you realise that you’ve formed a bunch of different groups from the various phases and moments of your life.

And none of them know each other.

Now, these groups don’t exist because you’re organising a wedding.

But weddings are pretty much the only day in your life that all these groups are in the same place at once.

This is why you feel so special.

Because it’s all about you.

They are your audience for the day.

You’ve created something for them to share in. You sent them an invitation to join in something that was important to you and they came.

We do this all the time, of course. We rarely do it at such scale or with such intensity as we do when we get married, but maintaining ties and connections with those separate groups is important to us throughout our lives – so our life is spent sending and receiving invitations, sharing thoughts, connecting with people we like in an effort to maintain a sense of belonging.

Ideas and communication flows back and forth between us and the networks we belong to. We share different interests with different networks, and different relationships with different people within those networks. Our ties may be stronger or weaker, our communications with them may be more or less frequent.

But the different networks remain important to us. The groups we belong to form part of our identity.

It’s just that those groups are compartmentalised most of the time.

This image from Grouped is the one I think is the one that sums it up.

 

(By the way, you can read the second chapter from the book here.)

Now, if you’re not married yet, you have all the wedding stuff to come – but I’m willing to bet the idea of separate networks resonates with you.

If you are married, then you’ll remember that writing the invitation list really brings it home.

And if it did, it can be quite disarming when you realise the list you’d make now might be different to the one you made then.

Because networks change over time, too.

Now, here’s the thing.

Does what I’ve described here sound unrepresentative or uncommon? Am I describing ‘influential’ people, or just people? Is this characteristic of ‘early adopters’ or just part of everyone’s social experience?

I’m pretty convinced that most of us are at the centre of a number of networks in this way.

Knowing this, wouldn’t we want to move away from the assumption that there are a small number of hubs/mavens/influentials/whatever who could drive advocacy simply because we reached them first?

Wouldn’t we want to start creating campaigns, content and experiences for people that reflect everyone’s position at the centre of their own range of networks?

Wouldn’t we want to treat them the way they always feel but rarely get to actually experience – at the centre of their own world?

We won’t, nor should we, always want to build things that are relevant to all networks. By definition this is not how people really live – they compartmentalise. It’s only really a few moments in life (like weddings, for instance) where this is remotely relevant.

But weddings give us another clue as to how to behave. As my Mum said to me when I was getting married myself, the wedding format is pretty universal – it’s the small tweaks, the customisation, that makes it personal. The music, the food, the setting, etc.

And when we’re deciding on those tweaks we will have an audience in mind – whether consciously or unconsciously.

An audience made up of people from our networks.

The tweaks are part of the story we want to tell about ourselves.

So what if we thought of those individuals each as a potential bride or groom, at the centre of a set of compartmentalised groups?

And what if we were to think not about audiences but about individuals who want to belong?

And what if we thought of these individuals, not our clients, as the people for whom we really need to craft the little customised things that can help them tell a story about themselves?

You know, like wedding planners.

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by jimcaig on February 29, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Behaviour, Community, Perspective, Planning
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Posted by jimcaig on February 29, 2012

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2012/02/29/the-future-of-planning-wedding-planning/

Social Practice +1

That’s +1 in the Google sense, obviously. I wouldn’t suggest I could improve on what Pats McDonald posted on Friday.

It’s a brilliant piece over at The Social Practice on how Google+ might be “a trojan horse for the social web”.

Do click through to have a look at it – it’s a fantastic point of view on a central issue for brands, about how socialised web experiences can become useful for consumers.

Pats characterises the shift from a Facebook world to a Google+ world as a shift ‘”from destination social to dispersed social’.

Google+ helps diffuse social experiences, while Facebook tries to hoover them all up.

I felt immediately spurred to comment – which I did, but thought I’d reproduce it here as a post….

At the moment my impulse is to back the dispersed model.

This is partly because I instinctively recoil from suggestions that experiences will become homogenised.

And no-one ever made any new friends on facebook.

As Neil worried recently, sharing amongst peers you already know could well lead to a poverty of serendipity. Everything becomes served.

This might still be a concern with G+, of course, but the dispersal mode allows for greater mutability and adaptation. This has to be a good thing.

As you say, users expect seamless experiences as they switch between locations, tasks and devices. Simply enabling access to a single destination from all these angles ultimately won’t be sufficient.

When the digital world sneezes the real world tends to catch a cold sooner or later. Which is to say that as consumer expectations are increasingly met online they are also raised in parallel offline. I would argue that prescribed destinations and user experiences increasingly won’t be able to meet these expectations.

People won’t just want seamless, they’ll want frictionless. And the mobile web simply supercharges this imperative. The ‘consumer benefit’ will need to go far beyond sharing – as you point out, businesses will need to assimilate social into a more dynamic, responsive and intuitive mode of service provision.

And let’s not forget the entirely non-tech drivers to this.

People copy. They identify. They learn socially more than they do independently. As I’ll Have What She’s Having has reminded us (not that we’d forgotten), this is as much about behaviour as it is innovation.

Contagious behaviour, social diffusion, whatever you want to call it – people’s desire to know they’re doing the right thing remains paramount. People look for the ‘huddles’ – and the boundaries to these huddles are becoming increasingly blurred. National to local. Online to offline.

The Guardian’s nOtice platform is a classic example of collapsing the distance between a national back-end investment and allowing for numerous local derivatives.

Is Freecycle an online service fulfilled offline, or an offline community model enabled using online means?

The best social businesses will be those that use the dispersed model to provide reassurance and feedback from peers. They will create environments of ‘safe’ decision-making through visible participation. And they will make themselves discoverable and useful wherever users want to connect with them.

Predictions are probably useless, so all this no doubt says more about me than it does the actuality of what will happen.

But it’s exciting nonetheless.

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by jimcaig on November 20, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Community, Innovation, Technology, Utility
Tagged , ,

Posted by jimcaig on November 20, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/11/20/social-practice-1/

Advertising as social object

My wife was telling me something funny this morning.

Our son is 5, and has just started his second year at school.

They start doing PE properly this year, and the school was a bit late telling everyone the children would need a PE kits.

The staff put up a poster to highlight what parents would need to supply.

Kids would need shorts and a T-shirt every Wednesday. The image showed a boy wearing a white T-shirt and blue shorts.

Immediately, Mums who are used to being fully prepared and totally in control of things like this when into overdrive.

Mornings were spent searching for blue shorts and white T-shirts.

No joy in M&S, said one pair who’d reconnoitred the high road.

We heard from others who’d come up short in Crouch End.

T-shirts were being bought in packs of four just for the sake of the one white one.

Gangs of parents at the schools gates were discussing what might come to be known as the great white PE T-shirt shortage of 2011.

One child’s mum was even proclaiming her boy would just have to wear red shorts – and anyway it was ridiculous that the school should expect everyone to go and buy new things overnight.

She was right in principle, of course, but what damage might that do to her child, we all thought.

Eventually my wife was chatting to another mum, who out of nowhere said this:

“I really am stupid, you know. I’ve been searching round for bloody white T-shirts and blue shorts!”

“We all have!” answered my wife.

“But I looked at poster again this morning. It just says ‘shorts and T-shirt’. It doesn’t say ‘blue’ or ‘white’ anywhere!”

At that point, had you been in North London, you might well have heard the collective sound of about 50 hands slapping 50 foreheads, accompanied by groans, “D’oh”s and other self-berating exclamations.

There was indeed nothing in writing to suggest the prescriptive colours mums had so readily interpreted.

Nothing that is, apart from the image of a boy, wearing blue shorts and a white T-shirt.

People’s propensity to fill in the blanks certainly is a force to be reckoned with.

And advertising need not be ‘social’ to become an object that influences the spaces between people.

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by jimcaig on September 23, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Behaviour, Community, Perspective
Tagged ,

Posted by jimcaig on September 23, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/09/23/advertising-as-social-object/

Architecture and Morality

Yes, the title of this post is taken from an old OMD record.

This record is brilliant. And OMD used to be very cool, you know.

If you don’t believe me, go ask, er, OMD.

Dazzle Ships was another one of theirs – the follow-up to Architecture and Morality, in fact. Great name for a blog, may I say.

Now the hitherto unseen link between agencies and architecture is made in your minds, let’s play with that association for a little bit.

Agencies are designed, of course, with a purpose in mind. They house a load of people and resources. They are the physical embodiment of some abstract beliefs and points of view on the world they inhabit. And different types of agency go in and out of fashion.

We all remember the baroque period of the 1980s, of course.

But more fundamentally (or perhaps just less flippantly), buildings and agencies each tell you something about their values from the way they are designed and used.

Architecture and Morality, you see?

And listening to a talk recently from former RIBA President Sunand Prassad, even more connections started to reveal themselves.

He challenged the idea of our built environment as a fixed entity; it always changes. Architecture is “not just about making new buildings as finished sculptures.”

The ‘new’ soon becomes part of the ‘old’, and the built environment is an “unfolding drama in which we all play our part”.

I like a lot how the life of an agency could sound like that.

And then this: architecture’s goal is to “construct our environment in a way that is better informed by the wisdom and inventiveneness of its public.”

‘Wisdom and inventiveness.’ How good is that?

This mutable, organic, crowd-sourced view of architecture makes for two interesting parallels with agencies, I think.

  1. Agency output: increasingly, as architects of consumer experiences, agencies are trying to build ‘unfolding dramas’ of their own, with communication products that are fuelled, propagated and enhanced by the users of those products, not just their designers.
  2. Agency construction: agencies remain only as vibrant and as buyable as the people they employ. Everyone has to ‘play their part’. The question is, how to effectively harness the disparate talents required these days.

This all sounds like great abstract theory, but the more I looked at specific examples the more the comparison seemed to hold. Some broad themes struck, captured below.

Co-Creation and Participation

Public consultations have long been part of the dynamic of planning and building. Often they can resemble a pitch process, where suppliers are whittled down based on initial ideas. The most popular doesn’t always need to be chosen, though, and early testing of designs can lead to improvements of less popular propositions that better answer the problem.

Should what we do be appealing as well as effective? Probably. But a world where effective wins out is one I’d like to work in.

Another way to involve the publis through the new trend of Masterplans, where rockstar architects come up with showstopping plans for a big complex, or even a town. This allows citizens to evaluate the big idea in abstract, purely as bold ambition. They can then assess whether the constituent elements (often developed by smaller, grittier practices) matches up to that ambition.

The recent attempt in Barnsley to create a Tuscan village style environment is a perfect example. Bold ambition followed up by gritty, planning-based projects by smaller practices.

Sounds far-fetched, but it helps to envisage a future for the overall project, and helps define the direction everyone is going.

In a world where brands are increasingly owned (or are perceived to be) by their customers, this big-picture consensus could be an interesting direction. You could see a Starbucks, M&S, or smaller, more local brands asking their own customers to hold them to account.

Hands-on clients

As our world becomes more complicated, the stuff clients appoint agencies to do will become broader, deeper, newer. Agency excitement at innovation will continue to correlate closely with client confusion – largely fuelled by us, of course.

More than ever we will need to bring clients with us, and architecture has found interesting ways to engage clients in the decision-making process itself –  from brief through to initial design and execution.

With the Sorrell Foundation, Sir John and Lady Frances Sorrell have engaged children in the design of their own schools. Their approach is to help turn the students into what they call “inspired and informed clients.” A re-design brief for a school canteen might see them taking the kids to restaurants and fast food places.

“They talk to the manager. They take photographs. They film it. They ask questions. They find out how it all works. They talk to the staff, the customers, and in the end they’re experts on fast food restuarants, and they can engage in a  conversation with their architects or designers.”

Brave stuff, perhaps, to let clients take a peek behind the curtain. But the rules are changing. Many agency skills, even (especially?) new ones like buzz monitoring and community management, are being taken in house.

I believe we maintain greater influence by ceding control a little where necessary. After all, it’s a lecture we’ve been giving clients for some time! Turning insight into ideas will always be what we do best, allowing into the process the people who pay us can only demonstrate that.

Effective and open design systems

In the 1850s and 1860s, Napoleon III and the great moderniser Haussmann renovated Paris in a way that completely cut a swathe through the old city that had remained pretty much intact since the Middle Ages.

The famed boulevards that now sweep up towards the Arc de Triomphe were revolutionary, and certainly a grand statement. Haussmann made the roads wide, the buildings broad, and the spaces open. But if anything these  choices were anti-revolutionary.  Having been plagued by rebellion and disease, the French authorities had found it impossible to maintain order and sanitation amid the narrow and winding back streets of the old city.

So everything was brought out into the open. Dissidents had nowhere to hide.

Haussmann had realised the wider the street, the harder it is to barricade.

I imagine every agency has its own back streets. Most likely with people hiding away, trying not to get found out. And able to remain hidden because no-one really wants to go looking for the problems.

The modern agency, because everything moves so fast, needs to be transparent. It needs to have people unafraid to suggest new ways of doing things. Like the new urban setting Haussmann created, it needs to provide a stage for people to parade their talents and be recognised.

A positive planning ambition

Sunand Prasand (remember him – I mentioned him ages ago in the intro?) reckons we need to overhaul the mindset of the (town)planning system. As the main interface between the public and decisions made regarding the built environment, it should exude a positive, optimistic attitude.

Of course, it doesn’t do that at all. It really functions as a form of ‘development control’ – effectively a means of stopping things happening.

Prasand instead envisages a system focused on ‘plan-making’, where “the imagining and working out of the future of our area” is an empowering, engaging experience for planners and users.

Where consensus is reached, and citizens could have a a “framework for what sort of development is welcome, and where”. When applications are made in line with that framework, they are approved. Simple as that.

Wouldn’t that make decision-making easier for us too? Not necessarily within agencies, but certainly perhaps with clients. An agreement about what kind of ideas are right and wrong, based on criteria and priorities, arrived at through a decision-making process of rationality and, yes, sacrifice?

This is planning, and yet so often, like its building equivalent, it’s done with almost no institutional memory whatsoever. And it’s done repetitively, treating each individual issue with the same subjective opinions as the last one.

I bet most brands and clients have some perennial problems that they’ve been dealing with for years and years.

Why aren’t they fixed yet?

Because we didn’t fix them last time. Because we’re note quite sure what we want. Or why.

So, that’s my quick tour around architecture – a world I know nothing about, but which upon first hearing about seemed to resonate with so many facets of our own agency world. If nothing else, it certainly got me thinking about some of the questions facing us as agencies right now.

What sort of experience do we want to build – for ourselves, for our clients, for users?

How should our constructed environment change as the world changes around it?

How do we harness the involvement of people who have a part to play?

I will be speaking at the next Google Firestarters in a week or so, on some of these issues. It’s been really helpful writing this ahead of the event – any thoughts and observations would be much appreciated to help formulate them further.

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by jimcaig on September 19, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Community, Innovation, Planning, Work
Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Posted by jimcaig on September 19, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/09/19/architecture-and-morality/

Grey areas and colourful arguments

While I’m not expecting anyone to have particularly noticed, I myself am very conscious that I really have been criminally negligent in tending to this blog of late.

The usual reasons: holiday, insanely busy at work, other projects that are very exciting but need loads of attention..

Once I returned I finally got around to looking at some of those drafted-but-never-finished posts that sit there waiting for you to decide what to do with them. Some just included a lone URL, clearly saved in draft form in a bookmarking capacity, never to be fully worked up into a theme. But a couple of embyronic posts were ones I really wished I’d got round to publishing.

One such draft was on an interesting piece of research that got published just under a year ago, by the LSE. It was written by Sonia Livingstone, Head of the Department for Media & Communications there, and was entitled ‘Media and The Family’.  The research examines quite closely the trends and developments in the way these two institutions are slowly re-shaping each other. There are conclusions, but they’re wisely tentative – in such a perennial debate the idea of things being fixed for too long is unlikely.

Anyway here it is in full.

There’s some fascinating tensions here.

If a fragmented media makes for a more varied set of values and influences within families, then it also enables a more diverse and empowering way for family members to assert their individual identities.

Younger internet users might well be considered ‘digital natives’, but they frequently are ill-equipped to get the most from their use – sometimes there can be problems from a lack of maturity, or sometimes from the pure lack resource or access.

None of this stuff sounds disruptive or earth-shattering. But balanced ambiguity rarely does.

(Mark always did say how useless I’d be on a rally – me and my love of grey areas.  What do we want? Well, that depends. When do we want it? When we’ve reached some kind of consensus between all interested parties…)

At the time, though, I thought it a nice riposte to those discussions you have where one faction says that the internet is terrible (turning us all in to zombies with minimal attention spans who can’t be bothered to remember anything, or speak to anyone, because, you know, we don’t have to, what with Google, GPS, the cloud, bookmarking and everything else we can do now wherever and whenever we want) while others dispute the internet’s responsibility for any of this (and even if it is then that’s nothing different to other pieces of technology that had everyone up in arms in olden times / days of yore – like the TV, the printing press, the wheel).

The scariest thing in all this is the sheer certainty with which some people see the world. I admit to the weakness of not really knowing what I think, yet. I’d like to remain agnostic for the time being.

But during my period of blog inactivity there was a far better example of how philosophical difference can be brought to bear on shared evidence. The UK riots and their attendant hand-wringing brought all sorts of attention to social media.

I loved the post Pats McDonald wrote on this for The Social Practice, flying the flag for the benevolence of social media.

I’ve always wondered whether we should see social media itself as either good nor bad. It merely is – and people’s interpretation of it says more about their own philosophical standpoint than it does anything intrinsic to social media itself.

But the LSE’s research reminds us of  the double meaning in ‘the medium is the message’. The medium isn’t merely whatever you choose to put into it, but the medium is our message to ourselves – we cannot helped but be changed by it.

Over time our behaviour, expectations, and socical interaction will all be affected in some way by the use of these tools. They are, after all, the archetypal ‘persuasive technologies’.

So, this research is to be appreciated, as it aims to do nothing more than objectively capture what it thinks is going on right now.

How people will interpret the conclusions is, of course, up to them….

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by jimcaig on September 12, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Behaviour, Community, Perspective, Technology, Work
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by jimcaig on September 12, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/09/12/grey-areas-and-colourful-arguments/

The changing role of the ad

As the world of tabloid journalism continues to destroy itself, the lengths to which it is alleged the NoTW went seem increasingly sordid and desperate.

But the convulsions that are consuming NI are not merely a result of a press high on its own supply of power. The desperation, I would argue, is a result of the bigger structural upheaval that’s been facing the publishing industry for some time now.

As circulations decline, the pressure intensifies to capture eyeballs and imaginations with ever more lurid stories. Unfortunately for NI and others, both are less easy to capture, having migrated to the shiny, exciting digital playground where information is always new and fresh, content is available for free, in three dimensions, and where readers can become users, contributors even.

News titles need to react, and it’s timely that, just before the Guardian’s phone hacking scandal went crazy, the same title announced the codification of its ‘Digital First‘ strategy.

This article by Jeff Jarvis outlines what it means in more detail, but the key out-take for me was the death of ‘the article’ as the “atomic unit of news”. By no means yet irrelevant, its position as the default format for organisations who gather and share news is no longer assumed.

There are now countless other formats available: live blogging, linking and sharing on Twitter, open source data, interactive reader tools, crowd-sourced primary evidence, micro-blogging feeds, longer-form essays…  The boundaries of news narrative are now less fixed, more bespoke, and more in service of the best way to communicate, involve and engage the audience.

The article still exists of course – but as a way of fuelling or framing the narrative, rather than enslaving it.  But just think how much is left out from a standard article – “on the cutting room floor” as Jarvis refers to it.

It struck me that if we replace ‘the article’ with ‘the ad’ then those of us in brand communications are in a remarkably similar place.

The tools, formats and products with which we can engage audiences have never been more various. The amount of stuff we choose to leave “on the cutting room floor” through our default to a 30″ TV ad is quite some sacrifice – just think how much we’re opportunity we’re missing to engage and involve.

But, just as the article isn’t dead, neither should the ad be. Jarvis talks about how formats should be chosen based on the best way for journalists to add value – undoubtedly in our parallel marketing world that may well be a TVC. So, just as an article becomes something to frame or fuel more interactive or spontaneous elements of the narrative, perhaps the ad should become more informed or defined by what’s going on around it.

Too often, convention dictates doing it the wrong way around: Get the ad right, then work out the other stuff

If the ad is the first thing that clients try to get right, this immediately limits its potential to truly leverage all the other stuff that a campaign might feature. Instead of an ad that can change and reflect the way people are engaging with a campaign, the engaging bits become bolt-ons to the ‘core message’.

I understand the draw to the ad. For a brand marketer it represents the most intoxicating way of bringing that brand to life. Everything else seems slightly intangible. Plus, I imagine, it remains a sometimes glamorous world.

The net effect is that, still, ‘online’ is another line on the plan, that probably still has TV at the top. And we need to change clients’ default setting.

We need to put digital truly first.

The spirit of digital first isn’t just that articles appear first online, then later in the paper. It goes deeper than that.

It’s that stories get told more organically.

They don’t arrive fully-formed, they’re improvised, as further details emerge.

They’re co-created, as interest builds over time, with less obvious boundaries between publisher and user.

The narrative finds its own voice.

And I think brands need to find their own voice.

If brands found their own voice through their own improvisational version of ‘digital first’, then maybe the call of the ad would be less intoxicating.

Because there’s really no excuse not to these days. The means of digital production are owned by whoever wants to own them.

We’re all publishers now.

And anything that individuals can use for networking and communication, so too can brands.

Twitter and Facebook, obviously.

But photo-based networks like Instagram and Zapd let brands allow customers into their world in a new way.


 

Storify is a fantastic tool that brands could use to curate the story of themselves, as told by fans. Below, for example, is the the story of the first couple of days of Spotify launching in the US.

BBH Labs new video tool Vidazzle, despite the whiff of Essex its name brings, could do a similar thing. You watch a video, and in real-time little bits of the web fly past you, drawn by the references of the film itself, creating a richer, multi-dimensional experience. The curated experience becomes not the destination, but one more stepping stone in users’ journeys.

These are not ads, but communication products.

Blogging, too, I think is an underused platform for brands. I met with Say Media recently, who talked about bloggers and communities as ‘Influence Media’. This is true, and the blogosphere can provide fantastic advocates. But blogger outreach is hard, brands can risk looking like they’ve co-opted credible voices, and bloggers who tie up with brands are open to sell-out accusations.

What if brands blogged themselves? I’m sure some do, but I’m willing to bet they end up very corporate, or faux-cool, or else written by employees full of disclaimers about how their views don’t represent those of the company etc etc.

A phrase Ben Malbon used here stuck with me: don’t blog to lecture, blog to learn. Brands could really find their own voice through blogging, as well as throuhg all the other channels outlined above. And they would find their own voice in a way that’s far more authentic that a script that’s gone through 8 rounds of feedback and 5 layers of hierarchical approval.

Too often ads define brands for their own good, not the good of the customer.

Brands, know thyselves! Don’t make the mass consumer your sounding board.

Just think what kind of briefs agencies would get if brands already knew more about – and had tested in the real world – what they stood for! Maybe clients could worry less about every ad being a comprehensive summary of what they believe, and instead focus on the ads bringing to life what they do.

Maybe then the use of ads could become more like the use of articles advocated by The Guardian.

They would serve a purpose. They would help capture the narrative of the story at a certain point. They could help frame what’s going on right now as the brand continues to engage its customers.

But they wouldn’t ever be the end in itself.

Because in the end, an ad is just an ad.

But everything can communicate.

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by jimcaig on July 18, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Community, Innovation, Perspective, Technology, Utility
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by jimcaig on July 18, 2011

http://seewhathappensblog.com/2011/07/18/the-changing-role-of-the-ad/

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