brand new

The principles of social media

The IPA are holding an event next Tuesday to have a conversation around social media (itself, a rather smart reaction to a very unsocial IPA thing last year).  They've just published the principles, including ones written by the always smart Mark Earls, Amelia Torode, Neil Perkin, Faris Yakob and others.  Not necessarily nothing new in the thinking, but they stand, I think, as a smart summary of what social media really is (and that's not a channel).

You can read them here.

The interweb is awesome

Stumbled across this today.  A great new project called, excuse my filthy mouth, be fucking awesome.

It's a new platform where you get points for the good deeds you perform, and your points are based on what people think your deed is worth.  It's like twitter for good.  Better still it easily integrates with your twitter updates and your facebook friends.  Go and take a look, and be awesome.

Planning-ness

Mark Lewis has done a brilliant job in setting up the planning-ness conference in San Francisco the weekend of October 16th and 17th.  

It's a very different, and much needed, type of planning conference in that it's not really a planning conference at all.  There's a brilliantly eclectic mix of topics and speakers, a short and punch rule for the speakers and, perhaps most importantly, lots of learning by doing where you can pit what you've heard in action.

It's also very reasonably priced.  Try and make it out.  You can read more and buy tickets here.

Account Planning School of the Web time

Rob and Andrew have decided it's my turn to set an assignment for the Account Planning School of The Web .  You can read the last assignment set by Rob here and see the judges' feedback here.

I'm going to make this one about the art of writing the persuasive one page 'point of view', a skill probably most famously taught to P&G brand managers.  I'm less concerned about following a certain format.  What I think would be a good exercise though is to practice presenting an argument on one page of word in 12 point single spaced type.  

Despite the rise of the micro-writing style culture formed by SMS, email and twitter, this is an important thing to practice.  It is still often a key thing CMOs and CEOs will use in making a decision.  And our job is not just to persuade people in the real world, but to persuade and inspire other audiences to act - creatives with the creative brief; clients (and others) with pointed, well argued, punchy and pithy points of view.

So, this is the assignment.  You work for Wal-Mart's agency as a planner.  You client, at the CMOs behest, has asked you to consider whether Wal-Mart should build a standalone social network for the brand to help deepen the role Wal-Mart plays in the lives of the 2 out of 3 Americans who visit them every week.  Your job is to write a point of view and recommendation on what action should be taken.  In one page.  It will be sent direct to the CMO who is traveling China looking at expansion opportunities.

Some things to think about:  What's your point of view?  Why?  What's the CMOs point of view?  What's the brand's history (here's an intro to their past in this space)?  How do you play into this or change it? What's your evidence for the case you are making?  Is the page as pithy and punchy as it could be?

Please send your one page document to the email address on this site by midnight PT on Sunday October 4.  And if you have any questions, just add a comment to this post.

MP3s

I find MP3s a really interesting thing to use as a proxy when thinking about how our consumption of culture is changing.

To that end, I want to recommend two great articles. The first is Pitchfork's social history of the MP3.  The second is an interview with Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead on the New Yorker blog.  There he makes a very telling observation about the downside of the music explosion triggered by MP3s that reminds me of the whole thing about peak attention:

"The downside is that people are encouraged to own far more music than they can ever give their full attention to. People will have MP3s of every Miles Davis’ record but never think of hearing any of them twice in a row—there’s just too much to get through. You’re thinking, “I’ve got ‘Sketches of Spain and ‘Bitches Brew’—let’s zip through those while I’m finishing that e-mail.” That abundance can push any music into background music, furniture music."

Fairly often, we're pretty rubbish at some simple stuff

Stumbled across a couple of things recently that remind me how bad we are sometimes as an industry in what we do. 

The first was a fantastic article on the design process at Facebook.  It has four basic tenents:

1.  Designers there from start to ship

2.  Share early and share often

3.  Get your hands dirty

4.  Don't fall in love.  Software is impermanent - it is always changing and you need to accept that

Now whether you love or loathe the design, you can't deny that it is incredibly pervasive and successful. And when you look at their process - open, collaborative, agile, perishable, making and building as important as concepting - you realize how different it is to how we tend as an industry to work.  In our desire as an industry to build different output, perhaps we need to think about the possibilities that some different processes might create.  (Note, for example, that there are no creative directors)

The second was a very simple story from  Chris Evans that talks about his son's favorite new toy.  A used toilet roll.  It's popularity was down to the simple fact that it allowed his son Noah to use his imagination and design his own little bit of genius.  It reminds me of the trap we often fall into of literally not designing gaps into the stuff we make for people to fill in however they want.  It's about remembering that the important stuff really isn't the shiny objects we make, but what it lets people do with them.

A thought on the next conversation about digital in agencies

(Albeit with ridiculously broad brushstrokes and from the limited lens of comms and marketing)

First, digital was about a new channel - the interweb, mobile, etc. - and the notion of participation.

Next, it was about relationships and faciliatation - all that social network stuff. 

Now, a lot of the talk is about the physical talking with the digital - Bakertweet, Botanicalls, a lot of the stuff the brilliant Kevin Slavin does at Area/Code

Next, will the talk be about how we can use digital to re-invent and freshen up 'old' marketing formats eg the TV ad?  I think it may be after Fox's 'tweet-peats' of Glee and Fringe last Friday.  It may not sound so exciting, but it might be the most pervasive impact we see digital have in the ad world this year.

I hope things are going to be bigger than this - digital as a mindset and not a channel - but this thought of baking digital into old communications formats is going to be something we see a lot of in the next few months I think.  This IBM patent suggests some others think so too.

Nokia, more than a cellphone

With all the Apple fetish that exists in our industry we often forget about Nokia.  Which seems to be a mistake.  They're the largest cellphone manufacturer in the world, with 1.1 billion users globally and they have grand plans (as this article from the current Fast Company outlines).   

Anyway, this week was their big forum, Nokia World.  And they announced a brilliant idea called Nokia Money.  Essentially this is a bank's biggest nightmare as they have singlehandedly created the world's biggest networks of ATMs.  

What really interests me is the company's ability, that frankly often sees alien in the US (no doubt aided by the brilliant work of Jan Chipchase (speaking in NYC soon at PSFK)), to see outside the western world and focus on opportunities in emerging markets.  Not only are there twice as many people with mobile phones than have bank accounts around the world, but many of these are in the emerging, fast growing markets of countries like India.  Markets where micropayments, due to their sheer volume, can quickly build a very large business.  And it's also interesting to see another historical manufacturer understand that the future lies in the creation and design of ecosytems and platforms, not simply physical objects.

I think this is a platform to watch. It's going to be interesting to see the ecosystem that evolves around it.

Rhythm

I'm trying to find my rhythm in my new job and new city.  It takes time.

It means this blog has suffered from a lack of attention recently.  Going to try and fix that and try and post every day.  We'll see what happens.

And, after a break, Rob has asked me to set up the next Account Planning School of the Web assignment (here's the judging from the last one). Something should be posted later this week