CrapHammer

Peachpit: A big hard pit inside a nice juicy peach.

Talk about NOT getting it.

What am I on about?  I was about to purchase the ZAG ebook in PDF format as I wanted to read it right away. As I love Neumeier, I wanted to be sure to give him some of the $$ and support his publisher all at the same time.  Naive of me, eh?

But then my eye caught this little box on the right side of the page.

I have an idea. Hey Peachpit, why not just put the following on your e-commerce website?

To think I was about to hit the BUY button and then my eye caught all these "warnings" and "instructions" about the DRM reader and special software and...  Fuck.  Can you make it ANY more difficult or BELITTLING to buy an ebook?

Sigh.

Death to your agency

 

 

"The kind of content that will kill your agency is briefless content. It will kill your agency because nobody is telling you what to do and you won’t have a mandate to do it. You will have to work it all out for yourselves. It will kill your agency because it will be bespoke, unique and without comparison. You will have to fight harder for it, harder than you fight for stuff now."

 

Taxi gets it.

Do you?

Quote source:  some content

More reading:  other content

Not many bloggers left.

What do a 15 year old girl, a dentist, an engineering student and a blogger all have in common?

In this case, they are the last of the english-speaking blog owners inside Iraq, giving us a view of what life is like on a daily basis.  I found them through a referral from Remi to a wonderful, must-read article from the BBC.

"How could they give us this water? Why should I respect, obey or even recognise my government if they are not providing us with electricity, water, or even security?"

" Breathing slowly.  In and out. That's what I have to do to keep myself from crying, and stay alive."

"We're really strangers in our country... oh well, excuse me, I don't think "our" should be used anymore. I'm not sure whose country it is, but it's not mine for sure."

I spend a lot of time following interesting thinkers in my industry.  I've also been known to visit blogs or sites out of a drive to understand or gain insight into an ethnicity.  But sometimes blogging exposing me to a world I couldn't see any other way.  And these moments move me and cause me to pause.

This article was one of those.  Here is the link again.

Shifting Spheres of Influence

So, while I was in Florida I realized that I had mistakenly set a post up to publish while I was away without ever finishing said post.  Pretty brilliant, eh?

So here is the re-post as I was meaning to make it.

"Social networking is not a platform, it’s not a destination, it’s a behaviour."

Katie is speaking out against this tendency of brands to worry about how they can get their brand into facebook or myspace rather than really leverage this emerging phenomenon.

I couldn't agree more.  But let's break it down a bit.

Social Networking and this whole Age of Conversation has taken the continuing fragmentation of media and made it non-linear.  If we thought the media world was fragmented before, we now have an unlimited number of forever forming and reforming communities within just one social networking site, let alone all of them combined.

Being on YouTube or Facebook doesn't guarantee viewership.  It's the same with every social networking site.  Understanding and engaging the communities within and outside of these social networking sites that matters.

So this raises a number of questions.

• How are people using these tools?
• How do different communities use the same tools?
• How do we identify the behaviors of people and communities we desire to interact with?

But as I sat and thought about this some more, I was taken back to an old associate, Stuart MacDonald, and a phrase he used to love to drop like a bomb in any meeting. 

"Where's the value?"

Consuming media is wonderful.  But it is a subset of activity that I participate in when I log into my personal spaces.  I am also looking to create media, build relationships and have conversations.   Ironically, these other activities generally result in my consuming media.  Only the media I'm consuming is directed and positioned by how the community and those I'm interacting with perceive its value.

• So is it really just a challenge of seeding as many "new media" firms would have us believe?
• How should we segment or target our engagements in a non-linear environment? (who should we engage?)
• What should we measure? (so we actually understand the value we are creating/participating in)

I'm going to go out on a limb.  What if it is all about behavior?  Could I not maximize my reach within twitter by looking to engage with all of the people on twitter that are speaking on a topic of interest to the engagement or campaign in question?  And then follow this activity into other platforms?

Calling it a "Conversation Age" is great, but we can't personally engage in a conversation with every person, customer or prospect.  And if this phenomenon is truly non-linear in nature, then that means we can't identify it in simple variables.  We would have to apply the principles of chaos to marketing.

That means it can't be seen when looking at the number of visitors to a site, the number of conversation online, views of our media or even reach or brand equity measurements. These are the individual data points and alone they tell us a misleading story.  We would have to be looking for patterns of engagement.  Ways that these (or other variables) interact and present emerging patterns.  Ultimate success would be when these patterns are stable yet non-linear in nature.  Continuing to morph and adjust as they interact with emerging communities online.

Is system thinking coming to Marketing?

So, you think you can market? Ha!

Want to prove you have what it takes to bring a viral campaign to market?  Here's your chance.  Gavin has launched a contest online together with The Bargain Queen.

The budget is tight but they have significant resources to bring to bear.  And you could get a pretty amazing case study (not to mention an ipod touch) out of the deal.

Get all the deets by clicking here!

C2C, the way to go.

Consumer to consumer transactions used to be a wash.  They stayed inside country borders for the most part.

But today, consumer to consumer transactions are changing the world.  Consumers are transacting serious business across country borders in ways that just didn't happen before.

Ebay, etsy lulu, shopify, etc.

Digital technologies mean that we can reach people further away.

Digital intermediaries mean we can effectively transact online.

9 year old Rhain Davies knows the power.  His grandfather posted a youtube video of his son's football highlights.  Never expecting his grandson to be found and signed by a major football club, but that's exactly what has happened.

Doc Searls is focusing a variety of these phenomenon at the Harvard University project VRM. It's worth checking out.

"VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties."

The principles are very familiar to all of us involved in this age of conversation:  User-centricity, "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle, Reciprocity, Network Effect, Relationships...  What is different is their initiatives.  This is not just talking about things.  It's engaging people to grow VRM.

"[one initiative] is making it easy for listeners and viewers of public broadcasting to pay for the goods they get on the radio or over the Net.  Right now only 10% of those listeners contribute to their public stations..."

Image Source: Nicobobinus

CMA my WOM

I was given a free ticket to the CMA Word of Mouth conference today.  Thanks to the Moffitt'ster who is now going to kill me for my rant below.

My CMA Word of Mouth Rant

What gives when a word of mouth conference does not make wireless access ubiquitous and simple?  It's not like every speaker isn't talking about the power of the network to support or even drive word of mouth activity.  And it's not like we wouldn't want little sean to be able to spread the word while on-site.  So why no mention in the literature on how to get on-line???

I have to give some slack as we are talking about the CMA here.  But it's time to wake up!

On the positive side, I got to meet a few neat people as I wandered around hunting down the trail towards the secret WAP password.  In the end, I scored.  The access was pretty bad but it was there.  Okay.  On with the cool findings.

Word of Mouth in Canada

Some really interesting stuff is actually happening up here in Canada.  Who knew??

Nike

• Spoke about the global football (soccer) campaign
• Strong Nike point of view
• Engage your audience
• Involve your audience
• Respect your audience
• There will always be those who don't agree or find fault.  If you are not being authentic and involving your audience, then you deserve to be called out.

	Chevrolet (McLaren McCann) This one surprised me - letsgochevrolet.ca Integrated campaign Online:  create an avatar and use Text to speech technology to tell your story Avatars are amazingly configurable Results (in the first six weeks) 80,000 unique visitors 35,000+ avatars created Average time spent on website:  5minutes 46seconds 5% of chevrolet site activity attributed to viral area
	Monster.ca www.evalu8me.ca Brilliant.  Evaluate your style and value as an employee. Invite your friends.co-workers to evaluate you with anonymity. Limited seeding.  No compensation.  Continuing growth. Amazing tracking and data collection.

Noteworthy:

• Ogilvy and Dove not tracking anything, basically  (most of the Evolution success story was conjecture or quotes from third parties with no access to data.)
• Demographics and psychographics are dead.  Have to go deeper.  Interests.  Passions.  Etc.
• Most lift off viral is fractional.  Epidemic lift is extremely rare.

Image Credit:  NaOH

Pringles Jingle, Penguins Wiggle.

Is that a tuba or are you just happy to see me?

Here is a great little tidbit from CGM.  I love this video.

[embed not working.  click on image below to watch the video.]

As Pete from CGM points out, those who have participated are certainly engaged.  And while I'm excited to see this promotion, I have some hesitations.

I guess I'm more than a little skeptical that these were all uploaded by consumers.  There is a prize so I can understand people would be motivated and the quality would be higher than normal.  But the audio and production quality on some appear more than a little suspect.  Check this one out where they've added in lawn mower with bird sounds and made it appear "home filmed" by letting her leave the frame a bit.

Potential seeding aside, it falls a little short of co-creation in my book.  I like that they are opening up and allowing me to create the message, but there are no vehicles to support communication or for building a relationship with Pringles.  I don't feel like I'm working with P&G to create something new or of value to the brand we share.

On the seeding issue, I think it would be even cooler if they did like Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum and provided a context and even downloadable pieces I could work with.  I'd rather a brand be up front about the seeding by creating a pro version and letting me see what the pros would do.  This creates a context for me to create within.  I can spoof it, steal from it, do exactly the opposite, etc.

Write a book, wiki-style.

Gary pointed me to "We are Smarter than Me".

"We Are Smarter Than Me has been formed to prove that the community itself can write a compelling book better than individual experts."

I can't help shake this sense that this is Crowd Sourcing mania gone slightly over-the-top.  But the list of team members, collaborators and advisors reads like the who's who of business schools and business publishing/research.

So I stopped by amillionpenguins to see how that "wiki book" was faring.  Here are some of my favorite quotes from the Preface of thos soon to be released novel.

"This is the non-temporal essence of loss."
""Dead line" such harsh words , like the walk of the damned or proof of sobriety with a pistol aimed at your temple."
" A ship is struggling in gales and torrential rainfall from huge monstrosities of clouds hanging astronautic [...]"

After a few minutes reading, I can only hope that the idea is to re-write it with a team of crack ghost writers or an army of baffled editors.  Maybe it was about the publicity?  The wiki editor "John" has this in his latest post:

"Phew - what a rollercoaster it has been. A Million Penguins has been running for three weeks now and we’ve had just under a quarter of a million page views and more than 9000 edits."

Let's hope the publicity is coming from other media with these numbers.  ;)