more rude book title action 2 Nov 2007 11:06 AM (17 years ago)

This one is from John Parkin, formerly a copywriter at HHCL, now a spiritual retreat host in Tuscany - and an all round top bloke. I dont usually like new age self help type books but I really liked this one. It's not because of the swear word. But because it translates a very Eastern and traditional concept (letting go) into something living, modern and true-feeling :J

titles and words 18 Oct 2007 1:29 AM (17 years ago)

I passed this graphic in a shop window in the back streets of Shoreditch the other day. I've since discovered it is the title of a straight talking introduction to the world of being a professional designer. The thing that upset me at the time was not the rude word, so much as the wording. I'd have much prefered

ALL DESIGNERS ARE WANKERS

(so that it sounded like a classical syllogism; eg like the famous ALL CRETANS ARE LIARS)

call me old fashioned

:J

ps it looks like quite a good book though

Brand is for Beginner 8 Oct 2007 5:58 AM (17 years ago)

Hello blog reader, I have sinned; it's been 3 weeks since my last post. Sorry it's been so quiet. mostly because my life hasnt been. All the action by the way is over at greenormal, in the run up to my new book launching:

There's a thought I have been musing which doesnt really fit the green blog though. It's the notion of 'brand' being for beginners; being a concept we need to use to gain easy acceptance in general audiences, but something which nearly always gets in the way of the real work of thinking through a strategy to connect your organisation well with people.

I was chatting to someone who markets a (new generation, relatively unknown) university. On the one hand 'we need to build our brand' is a consensus that gets him a budget. On the other hand this leads by a piece of linear thinking to the idea they need to spend this money on a logo, some ads talking about something generic to higher education ("a brighter future awaits at..."). Meanwhile everyone they want to speak to is on facebook, talking to real current students about real reasons for going there, eg they happen to have some of the best parties in the North West, the media course has really good links with a local broadcaster and loads of people get jobs there etc. You know - real reasons to choose this place.

I met several other similar new universities at that conference. With one I hatched a plan to pitch a documentary to C4 called simply "Freshers" (you can guess the rest) which was set on their campus. With another who has especially strong green credentials we talked about whether there were ways to leverage those in schemes and education campaigns which connected with young greenpeace members and similar.

I dont know about you but I expect a college logo to look something like the badge on a school blazer. And it really wouldnt matter to me if they had a 'better one'. I expect a university ad to feature a picfture of an ex student giving a testimonial, and/or to feature a stock shot type image of 'blue skies' with a headline like 'The sky's the limit at...'.

Educational branding is of course rather tricky anyway. But I'm just using it to illustrate a general point that has come up often recently. You use 'brand' to describe a 'need for spending' - a shortfall in public regard - but for god's sake (usually) dont use it as your strategy, as if it described the solution to that problem.

There's another side to this too. Brand as a concept overall in consumer markets is also for beginners. Coca-Cola in the 1870s and AOL in the 2000s both offer a certain kind of safe familiarity and certain quality in a new and chaotic frontier market - amidst (then) tainted drinks and (now) worries about data and credit card and identity security. They were 'for beginners'. But do not necessarily survive any transition to a more sophisticated, knowledgeable mindset; a move to juices and open browsing respectively. Just as in the wine market, only beginners buy safe well known brands (Piat D'Or).

Much to discuss here, just wanted to post something to dust off the cobwebs :J

poetry 2.0 16 Sep 2007 12:29 PM (17 years ago)

what follows is is the coolest thought virus I have been sent in some time (thx Helene) - apologies to those who've seen it already - and to those who havent, enjoy:

(via netlingo who reported it is a real story, although subsequent digging showed that these haiku originated in a salon.com competition salon.com link)

HAIKU POETRY ERROR MESSAGES

In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft error messages with Haiku poetry messages. Haiku poetry has strick construction rules, each poem has only 17 syllables; 5 syllables in the first, 7 in the second, and 5 in the third. They are used to communicate a timeless message, often achieving a wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity (and are much better than "Your computer has performed an illegal operation.") Here they are:

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

The Web site you seek
Cannot be located, but
Countless more exist.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

First snow, then silence.
This thousand-dollar screen dies
So beautifully.

With searching comes loss
And the presence of absence:
"My Novel" not found.

The Tao that is seen
Is not the true Tao - until
You bring fresh toner.

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you are seeking
Must now be retyped.

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Is Facebook a waste of Time? 11 Sep 2007 1:11 PM (17 years ago)

That's how it is being billed to employers, who are increasingly blocking access.

The TUC have taken a sensible line on this: general secretary Brendan Barber said: "Simply cracking down on use of new web tools like Facebook is not a sensible solution to a problem, which is only going to get bigger. It's unreasonable for employers to try to stop their staff from having a life outside work, just because they can't get their heads around the technology. Better to invest a little time in working out sensible conduct guidelines, so that there don't need to be any nasty surprises for staff or employers." bbc news(1)

Some HR consultancy firms are takling a more alarmist approach "Workers who spend time on sites such as Facebook could be costing firms over £130m a day, a study has calculated. According to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees "wasting time" on social networking. The study - based on a survey of 3,500 UK companies - concluded that businesses need to take firm action on the use of social networks at work. Some firms have already banned employees from accessing Facebook. Mike Huss, director of employment law at Peninsula called on all firms to block access to sites such as Facebook. He asked: "Why should employers allow their workers to waste two hours a day on Facebook when they are being paid to do a job?" He said that loss of productivity was proving a "major headache" for firms. bbc news(2)

I actually think they are both wrong. Facebook helps workplaces be more productive and innovative. A good starting point for explaining why would be the social life of information; a great book which explains why informal socialising within the workplace is the key not only to culture and motivation, but also to innovation; for instance as people pass on the implicit 'dark arts' of the job in pubs (or donut breakfasts at IBM was their example) more often than meeting rooms. Someone told me recently that there are 11,000 employees at the BBC on Facebook. That's of huge value to the BBC I would guess. Imagine they had to pay to build their own social network instead to encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas. I was at an innovation day at a major bank yesterday and one of the questions asked was why - having spent a whole day looking at trends like social networks - they were banned from using it themselves from work? What if they launched something in that setting - would they need to go home to view it?

Even if you run a call centre, the enlightened ones know that the secret of motivation and having a feeling for the culture is workplace friendships. there was a study recently which showed that the two values employees value most highly are integrity and work-life balance. And the irony is that they are the two things employers most ask people to compromise.

I did a search on Facebook for Mike Huss and (unless he is the Michael Huss listed as having no friends!) couldnt find one in the UK of the right age and employment background. Lets keep looking though, it would be brilliant to catch him with a random and perhaps slightly flirty friend request from an absolute babe (ie one of our friends), that he answered in his lunchbreak :J

Does Anybody Know 'Guy Decoene'? 9 Sep 2007 12:30 AM (17 years ago)

Quote from a two star review of my last book from Guy Decoene if that's his real name:
"The Sirco brand is a prominant exemple of new-marketing-branding-and-so-on... in this book. To bad the brand has been taken out of the market recently ... :-) "

Actually no the Sirco brand was an example which hadnt launched when I wrote, which I presumed would be marketed badly. The point in the book was what they should have done - which they didnt. He's based in Belgium, if you know him can you send him this as a two star review of his review? Maybe invite him to explain himself?

Or maybe it was someone with sour grapes about something, in which case why such a lame line of attack?

Lots of brand featured in business books dont maintain their success. There's that quote from Tom Peters saying the in Search of Excellence case studies may have failed; but it was "the right principles, just the wrong examples". I'd be more inclined to say that success is ephemeral and nobody (including business authors) are always right. Except in this case.

:J

Folksy but Fake 9 Sep 2007 12:01 AM (17 years ago)

You've got to wonder why this is 'okay'.

Last week it was revealed by the Wall St Journal that Marie Digby, the girl made successful by Youtube homemade videos with 2.3 million views has been signed with Hollywood records since 1995. Whereas on her myspace page until last week (when the label announced 'just' signing her) it said she had 'Type of label: None".

I know how it works culturally; she's pretty, the videos look and sound good and now she's famous and faking things is in some ways quite sophisticated, almost transgressive (like the banned video ruse)... so she's 'the next lonely girl fifteen' and any criticism and feeling betrayed is more than balanced by the fact she is a star.

But I dont know why it works legally. Isnt it blatant dishonest advertising. Not even the grey area of her blogging that ""I NEVER in a million years thought that doing my little video of Umbrella in my living room would lead to this . tv shows, itunes, etc !!!" when it's a two years in the making viral campaign by her label. But the outright lie of saying she had no label...?

I believe the technical term for this approach is astroturf (fake grassroots). The accepted line is it doesnt work. But apparently it does. Now YouTube will be inundated with fake (ie real, high quality, major label-grade) folk acts. And in a dramatic twist a 'real' (ie crap, unsigned) one will be 'exposed' as a fake, creating a paradoxical hit. And so on.

There's a real question lurking in here somewhere which is, should the media which are (only apparently) uncorporate and created by the people be exposed to corporate manipulation. Wikipedia thinks not and is rooting out PRs writing product puff pieces, a task made easier presumably by now being able to trace and track the source (the CIA on wikipedia story). If YouTube can remove anti-islam videos, pornography & so on, why not videos from 'fake real people'? just a thought - although the place where the most blatant lying was done was MySpace, but same argument applies. If when advertising something in the classifieds you fail to mention you are trade rather than a private individual I believe you can actually be prosecuted. Does MySpace constitute a classified advertisement...?

I'm going to put up a myspace page soon with some music I've been making over the summer in lieu of blogging (sorry about that but everyone needs a break sometime). I am not remotely tempted to invent a fake biography that rivals fatboy slim. Well okay remotely tempted, but I cannot tell a lie.

:J

from wsj

Monsieur Herd 20 Jul 2007 9:29 AM (17 years ago)

(There follows a topline write up of Juliana Xavier's write-up of her interview with Mark Earls)

Mark Earls sees himself as someone who can help clients and its brands "to get over there". His job is to see the bigger picture from an outside perspective in order to draw a pathway. We have spoken for almost two hours, under a persistent very English rain, about business, brands, culture, psychology and even physics. In order to explain to me some of his case studies he had to talk about all other kinds of subjects, which I have realized are all source of information for his thinking. It was a different interview, because it was impossible to stick to the guidelines I’ve got so used to, but slowly Mark became more aware of his own thought process and it started to get a form.

Usually inside a company people in different departments are focused on specific things and don't see the bigger thing. Marketing is only the surface of the business, while there is much more behind it. It has a political, economical and above all it also has a social dimension. It is fundamental to put things in context, each bit of the problem, in order to get a triangulation that connects: business, people and culture.

Business:

Try to understand what is behind the business. Have in mind that there are all kinds of little things and particularities that are not evident, not even to the client and that are important in order to contextualise the problem and understand what the brief is really all about. It also helps you connect to your client – talk the same language - and get him to trust you. Mark tends to work on very simple questions, asking businessmen to explain themselves: how do they make money? Is there any pressure on that people who are running the business? What are they promising as opposed to what are their competitors promises to people.

Culture:

Mark always assumes that all marketing is spam, unless it has some social value, political value. So he is always trying to do something that cannot be accused of that, by looking for things that actually make the world look more interesting rather than less interesting. For Mark, it is important to have sympathy (or find where you have sympathy) with the brand’s agenda/ point of view. He believes that we’ve slipped away from the personal in business with intellectual thinking styles and processes that give us the impression that there’s a way of reducing the odds of failure and increasing the odds of success. When the truth is that none of these things guarantee success or the avoidance of failure. In order to find what is interesting, what can change the way people feel about things, to do something that has culturally real value you have to understand how the culture works. Look at creative and cultural noise. Trying to find something to kick against, something that in itself challenges what people think, or how people assume things are.

People:

When it comes to people Mark is actually interested in their behaviour not thoughts. Culture is the stuff in which we all swim through all our lives. With all the assumptions we carry about how the world is and how we are in the world. But each of us, individually, does what we do because of the other people around us and how we see them through the length of our culture. We are not consumers. We are people living lives. People's lives with each other and their enthusiasms are what are important.

If you have got something that is interesting enough that generates certain behaviours with consumers, then other people will copy it or react against it. So he's always looking at what is the behavioural context or prototype that he wants to generate. It is a quite difficult place to be, because actually human behaviour is complex, adaptive and therefore unpredictable. You don't know what is going to happen.

It is much more about observation. You have to ask people but bearing in mind that people are expert in research. Mark believes that people's accounts of their own lives are – however plausible - largely irrelevant to their behaviour. Our brain is designed to give us the impression to do what we do because of our own independent decision-making capabilities, whilst we do what we do through many other influences, mainly other people and how we see what other people are doing.

There are many ways Mark explores all the areas and subjects he needs to explore in order to understand each vertices of the triangle. Technology is one of the most important sources for him, because it has enabled him access to information in all of areas that he never thought possible - not just information, but also experimentation.

He has also developed a circle of experts in food, drinking, tech, culture, who can give him really useful expertise on specific fields of knowledge: cultural experts, sanitarians, anthropologists, etc. Talking is really important; it brings things to the surface that he’d never consider if he just sat and thought about it.

“And I just ‘worry’ at things until it all makes sense.”

In the end, the important thing is to come up with an idea that resonates with the business issues and the culture where it is operating at, so that people actually do things differently.

Where are the Jones? just tipped (or Facebook did) 19 Jul 2007 2:01 PM (17 years ago)

I know this because 6 largely unconnected friends of mine on Facebook all just joined the Where are the Jones? group. It's been criticised thus for only attracting a daily audience of about 500 at YouTube, most of whom must be journalists, marketing strategists, media watchers or bloggers. Come to think of it most of my friends on FB are... Oh anyway it just tipped, Facebook is the ultimate cultural divining rod, right? And with the numbers so low you have a really good chance of getting your script made, assuming there are less writers than viewers. I like the episode where he says he is getting out of the car for a stretch and then farts repeatedly. It's certainly a new tone of voice for Ford advertising. :J

The other thing that's doing the rounds like wildfire is the idea that people's blogging reading and writing time is now FB time. If that's true no-one is reading this, so I might stick a note on my FB page just in case. I couldnt help noticing that Facebook in London appeasrs to be growing quite fast; it was 510,000 four weeks ago tonight its 790,000. In the introduction to Michael Birch's (Bebo founder) brilliant talk the other day at Glasshouse, Michael Smith (Firebox & Mind Candy founder) joked that its was "brilliant that so many people had taken time away from their Facebook - I mean Bebo - pages to come out tonight."

What Michael Birch predicted among other things was that the next phase of social networks - with the incorporation of video - could see them become like giant reality TV shows. That obviously links to their own rather more hyped kate modern. This programming strand from the makers of Lonely Girl 15 also features user generated suggestions in scripts. Plus Bebo have their new talent contest style partnership with Current TV. link

Bebo are also doing a lot with "music discovery"; Bebo bands. This being based on the insight that you often discover music through friends. He also thought location based mobile social nertworks would kick off, as your virtual life and your real life collide (how many friends are within 500m now...?). It's certainly true that when people meet today they seem to use Facebook as a social alternative to biz cards. He also said that the new wave were all about real friends/conversations rather than MySpace style friends collecting which seems to be true.

Fascinating times we live in, as we say every year.

Blogging vs Writing 14 Jul 2007 1:11 AM (17 years ago)

I've been forced to consider what the relationship is between writing (free, promotional) articles for publications and my blogging. Here's what happened:

1. I agreed to write an article for a trends magazine, to a tight deadline
2. I used my blog greenormal to get input on 3 successive drafts
3. after a lot of help from comments at greenormal I got to a draft I was really happy with
4. I sent it in on time but quite tentatively because I actually worried it might be too theoretical - but they wrote straight back to say they really loved it too
5. then I got this message:

"we can’t really publish the piece in the magazine, as since the piece has been published on your blog it’s been picked up by other people and posted elsewhere online, like PSFK. It’s a hazard of being a printed magazine, and an old media way of going about things, but as ___ is expensive and fairly exclusive we can’t really publish content in the magazine that will have been available for people to read a from six weeks before we come out. Instead, we were going to run the essay as part of our newsletter this week, if that sounds ok"

I can see their point I suppose. And there's no hard feelings - they've said they are open to other submissions.

But on the other hand the article was very much the product of a discussion on the blog

And most publications really like the fact that I am a blogger, and want to mention my blog as much as my books

And you could say the same thing about my book as it was freely available in draft form on the blog and I have given getting on for 20 public presentations telling people in detail what the 'model' in the book is ('the grid'). The publisher could worry that it would seem old news by the time it appears. But its different with books, you buy them as references to dip into and draw from, you want them even more when you are familiar with the contents in some ways.

The same with journal articles. These are often papers which have been given at MRS conferences, summaries of arguments appearing in longer studies or books. They are for reference rather than having to be new news.

I dont know what to do about this because I have usually shared drafts of all my articles and in many cases they have been helped by it. I think this case is unusual because firstly it is a trends magazine ('you heard it here first') and because there is such an overlap in audience; between psfk (who I didnt approach about this piece, but its a free bloggosphere) and ---. whereas something for a magazine in turkey, for the innovation page, the marketer magazine etc is more remote.

On the other hand this is the modern world. A place where the CEO of LEGO once wrote on his blog "Draft presentation for board meeting. Comments please."

Here's some possible things I could do:
- make it clear to anyone who wants a free article for their non-free magazine that they can only have this if they agree I can share it on the blog (I made that sort of upfront agreement with my publisher)
- publish the articles on my blog retrospectively so they get priority
- get input from the usual suspects by mailing the article to them rather than posting it
- or if I am to comply with professional journalistic constraints and act like someone else actually owned the IP: charge publications the commercial rate (about £1 a word) for articles & refuse to write free ones
- or even start an online journal for plannersphere articles written and shaped on people's blogs including mine

As far as that article goes I actually think it is worth publishing & is pretty good, so I think I'm going to do the green thing (recycle) and develop it further into a whole new unblogged article and either submit it to a journal who is waiting on a proposal or maybe even a national newspaper I've written for b4, who presumably may not be as concerned about earlier drafts and comments online, any more than they would be about my having produced a book covering the same ground.

Cloud Seeding 9 Jul 2007 3:50 PM (17 years ago)

I find that trivia and the minutiae of daily life are a great source of stimulation or inspiration or maybe just stimulation. I'm working on a new project requiring a wide spread of starting point concepts and it is the tiniest things, like a word on a poster or a book in a bookstore I hadnt seen, that can trigger an idea. It's a bit like cloud seeding. Including the fact that you dont know if it actually produces more rain on the ground. For those who dont know about cloud seeding (& I must admit i was pretty hazy on it) I thought this was really interesting btw:

"The largest cloud seeding system in the world is that of the People's Republic of China, which believes that it increases the amount of rain over several increasingly arid regions, including its capital city, Beijing, by firing silver iodide rockets into the sky where rain is desired. There is even political strife caused by neighboring regions which accuse each other of "stealing rain" using cloud seeding. About 24 countries currently practice weather modification operationally. China also plans to use cloud seeding in Beijing just before the 2008 Olympic Games in order to clear the air of pollution" (Wikipedia)

Anyway here are a couple of fragments to show what I mean by trivia and minutiae. Both gave me ideas:

- did you know that readers of my green marketing blogs tend to visit proportionately less at the weekend than readers of this one? Could be all sorts of reasons but I like to think greens switch their computers off when they arent at work (I dont - partly because there isnt a really clean line between life & work, not leat because I work from home - but maybe I should)

- ethical dilemma of the day. I saw someone handing out those cheap phone call cards in the high street today. I took one because I figured she got paid to hand a certain amount out and no-one else seemed to be interested. But then I wondered if by taking this piece of card I was supporting an industry of needless flyers and cards - if we all refused they'd have to stop and it wouldnt take too many of these tacky, glossy cards to equal a plastic shopping bag.

Come to think of it I think I just glimpsed a half idea that relates to cloud seeding itself. Better go and work it up b4 bed :J

The Empty Format 7 Jul 2007 5:09 AM (17 years ago)

I'm playing with a theory of media. It's called the empty format.

it involves how the form of engagement of certain media have a life of their own.

For example Big Brother is the empty format of celebrity.

Twitter is the empty format of small talk.

The iPhone launch was an empty format of a craze
(it successfully simulated catching on before it actually launched)

The Y2k bug was an empty format computer virus

There seem to be a number of things going on here:
- evacuation: loss of content
- disembedding: loss of context
- self-reference; the 'story' become the story

If that's as far as it goes it is rather McLuhan meets Baudrillaird meets Kierkegard etc.

But what's interesting is to wonder what new empty formats could be created:
- an antisocial community where no-one has any friends in their network
- a massive prize lottery with no actual prize
- a 'word mob' boosting a search term to no1 in technorati, where the word doesnt exist

Dunno what the point of this is yet, it's on the workbench.

Really useful acronym guide for over 14s 7 Jul 2007 2:08 AM (17 years ago)

AIM site link

GGN

:J

Mis/Quote 1 Jul 2007 11:13 PM (17 years ago)

There's a new (or arguably) ancient form of myth emerging thanks to the internet. The quotation that is taken as correct and/or correctly attributed but is actually a mistake, compounded by hundreds of thousands of repetitions. If anyone has a year or two to write an Umberto Eco style book on modern culture viewed through the lens of semiotics (you'd make liberal use of 'langue/parole'), this might be a good subject. Here are a few examples I have tripped over:

- the chinese for crisis consists of the charatcters meaning 'danger' plus 'opportunity'. This was apparently concocted by an american presidential script writer. Victor H. Mair, professor of Chinese literature link. attacks this "widespread misconception" of "oriental wisdom" noting that the second symbol really means something like "incipient moment or crucial point," meaning that someone in a "crisis" must be aware of both danger and its special point in time. The second symbol definitely does not mean "opportunity!"

- “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it." is attributed to Goethe. It actually comes from a very loose misquote by Scottish mountaineer W Murray. link (what Goethe actually said was "Now at last let me see some deeds!”)

- the text to "the sunscreen song" initially circulated for some time on the web attributed to Kurt Vonnegut and a speech he had given to the matriculating class at MIT. It was actually written for the Chicago Tribune by journalist Mary Smich. When Luhrman was working on the single he first tried to contact Vonnegut to get permission. link

In the time before libraries, academic references and so on it was very common to claim a work came from a famous author. It gave it authority. In the intro to many of the penguin classics are long essays explaining that it is doubtful who actually wrote what. The internet seems to reintroduce the same effect, because quotations are doubled and redoubled.

The moral is:
"If it sounds good on Oprah then it's not exactly likely to be Shakespeare." (please do quote this liberally, but attribute it to any to a.no.other famous person of your choosing)

Of course it doesnt actually matter who said what. What's interesting is the way we still seem to crave a mixture of textual authority vs the power of the free floating thought virus, which is well designed for transmission (fitting a common point others will want to make with a quotation, worded in an accessible, catchy, sentimental way...)

:J

Brand Tarot Comments 30 Jun 2007 3:31 AM (17 years ago)

To start the moving process, any comments from the old Brand Tarot blog (now submerged in comment spam) go here.

Please link to this as the new brand tarot site. When it has 50+ (the other has 219 but I doubt half of those are actively used) links we'll move the whole thing over.

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