mediation

Planning for a start not an end: how Skype's Phone Box Experiment is encouraging us all to call more landlines by sending their man into the middle of nowhere

so you're Skype and you're brilliant and everyone using you loads for free internet to internet calls.  but the value ready to be unlocked in your business is in paid for calls to mobiles and landlines.  what to do?  ...well in an email this morning from Skype they pointed me in the direction of their solution...  in a cool idea, Rob Cavazos has journeyed into the middle of nowhere and is awaiting our calls, whilst always staying within the frame of a camera.

the website seamlessly introduces you to the idea whilst clearly articulating the options and benefits of adding credit to your Skype account so that you make calls to non-internet destinations.

the challenge now is amplification, amplification, amplification.  Skype need to ensure they capitalise on their investment in getting Rob into the middle of nowhere and land the idea in spaces and places beyond their site.  they have a YouTube channel which is a great start, but I can't seem to track down any kind of live feed?  the project now needs to go into overdrive to create WOM and conversations in and around what's going on with their experiment...

getting their man there was one thing, I look forward to seeing if Skype can pull off the other trick of ensuring that the idea has traction and momentum so that their idea is a starting not an end point.

Digital and OOH collide in Dublin: what happened when Playhouse and Daft.ie turned a buliding into a digital playground

Dancers from Playhouse on Vimeo.

so about to head for the weekend and XFactor but just picked this up on the twittersphere and thought it was a rather delightful thing to end the week on.  from the 24th of September until the 11th of October, Dublin's Liberty Hall is being transformed into a giant 50 metre, low resolution, TV screen.  the best bit - anyone can join in...  members of the public are being invited to create animations that will be displayed on the building as part of the project.

brilliant example of digital spaces and places being amplified in the real world.  echoes of the HBO project but with an added open invitation for anyone to showcase their creativity...

here's hoping that they're investing in amplifying it... desktop applications that show what's going on in real time, lots of YouTubeness, and perhaps some kind of digital book that captures and showcases the best examples.

more of this kind of thing please...  and if you want to get creating then click here.

Measuring the Groundswell: how Forrester are identifying and quantifying groups and behaviours in the social media space

so I've started reading Groundswell, a book about how social technologies are transforming business, by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li.  some of its early content is a little objectionable, for example "some people were using Twitter in some pretty silly ways ... giving hourly updates on what they had for lunch or what meeting they had just entered ... that gets pretty insipid after a very short while".

tell that to the kids behind scanwiches - who've created an awesome space which displays cut profiles of globally inspired sandwiches accompanied by simple ingredient captions.  the point is that its not our place to judge.  the world is evolving, and what's a great more important that deciding whats insipid or not is working out how to help brands enter and thrive in a world of social medias.

fortunately then that the authors get beyond this to very usefully classify six groups according to the different activities and applications that people use in the Groundswell; the "social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other; rather that from traditional institutions like corporations".  the classifications are:

• creators - publish blogs / content, maintain a web page, upload content
• critics - who react to other content online, postings comments, ratings or reviews or editing wikis
• collectors - saving URLs and tags or using RSS, collecting and aggregating the internet
• joiners - participating thru maintaining profiles on social networking sites
• spectators - who consume what the rest produce
• inactives - the nonparticipants

all well and good, but  here's the cool bit.  they've created and made public their Social Technographics tool that allows you to profile a group of people based on age, country and sex against these six behaviours.  you can then index them against the general population, allowing you to plan and build social media strategies based on the kinds of behaviour people already demonstrate.  which in Mediation's book is pretty darn cool.

so the profile of 25-34 year only men in the UK looks like this:

with the most predominant behaviours being spectating and joining (66%  and 59% of 25-34 UK men doing those respectively).  but what's interesting is the likelihood of them being collectors, indexing 183 against the all adult population.  the list obsession so loved of the lads mag genre re-invented for the social media space.

does this tell you what your social media strategy should be?  no.  does it help you identify and quantify the predominant behaviours of the people you're trying to target?  yes.  and that's important.  I've sat in two many sessions where the phrase 'we'll get people to create content for us' has been thrown out.  it of course may be the right suggestion, but a little objective rigeur and analysis never hurt anyone.  even if it was about what you had for lunch.

Thinking from a different place - the rewards of letting go: what happened when Vizeum debated who exactly is in control?

but what does it all mean?: Hook, Grant, Bailie, McClary and Corcoran with chair Chris Maples debating at Vizeum this evening

who's in control?  that was the theme of this evening's Thinking From A Different Place debate at Vizeum.  do brands make what customers want or do customers determine what brands make?  do creative agencies still control creation of the best ideas, or are the crowd now creating and aggregating the best content?

a panel, consisting of Vizeum's Matthew Hook, We Are Social's Robin Grant, Martin Bailie of Glue, Michael McClary from Microsoft and Andy Corcoran from MTV all awesomely debated a range of subjects from the decline of the newspaper industry to the impact of technology, taking in the future of media agencies and the nature of brands and advertising on the way.

it's easy to summarise such a debate by saying that its all getting more and more complicated and more and more difficult and we all need to move faster and faster and be better and better to stay ahead; but a few interesting comments steered the debate in a more illuminating direction.

Martin pointed out that we focus too much on the next big technology, or on the specifics of what people are doing with technology now, rather than focusing on two millennia of human psychology to point us in the right direction.  as he put it, if we "get the basics right you're 80% there" - produce interesting stuff that's based on a interesting point and view and land it in the laps of as many of the right people as possible.

the question of listening to customers was numerous times, in particular by McClary who observed that there's a "danger in highlighting [and responding to] only the loudest voices".  Hook agreed, observing that whilst you can engage 1,000s in a conversation, many brands are interested in talking to and influencing millions.  Corcoran reminded us of the Henry Ford quote that "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted they'd have asked for faster horses".

but it was the nature of control that caused the most interesting debate.  Grant: "historically brands were more in position of control"; Hook: "marketers desperately want control, they do everything they can to create predictability [of the result of their actions]"; Bailie: "it doesn't matter - no one controls brands; get rid of the idea of control"

for me its about maintaining a balancing act; about knowing when to keep and when to let go of control of what a brand does and how it does it.  would you ever let the crowd determine your core creative idea or brand positioning? ...almost certainly not.  would you let them create content inspired by it? ...yes.  should you let them make your products? ...no.  should you le them choose the ingredients? ...of course.

a point was made about the recent successes of Facebook and Twitter, with a question being raised about what business they're in.  they are - of course - in the business of aggregating audiences.  that's the media business.  the point of whether or not they can monetise that aside (big aside I recognise but run with it), part of their success is down to the fact that they capitalise on the fact that one of the best ways to grow an audience is to get your current audience to do it for you.

giving away control - of your product, or whatever is appropriate - is a particularly effective way of getting an audience to do just that.  give them ownership, give them reasons to talk about you brand, its point of view and its products and services.  but most of all give them a reason to come back, to stay part of the conversation with you.  because its those conversations that are the most valuable bit of media real estate of all.

A new lore of averages: what Clay Shirky and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade can teach us about defining target audiences

insight after insight from Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.  the above chart is copied from chapter five which covers collaborative production. it shows contributors to the Coney Island Mermaid Parade Flickr site ranked by the number of photos they contributed.  a couple of users contributed the most whilst the most users contributed only a little.  Shirky observes that:

"...the imbalance is the same shape across a huge number of different kinds of behaviours.  a graph of the distribution of tags on Flickr is the same shape as the graph of readers-per-weblog and contributions-per-user to Wikipedia.  the general form of a power law distribution appears in social settings when some set of items - users, pictures, tags - is ranked by frequency of occurrence"

that there's a massive imbalance between people who contribute in collaborative projects we know.  but its something that we don't often enough plan for in a media world where we increasingly ask (the audience formerly known as) consumers to user-generate and co-create on our behalf.  Shirky goes on to point out that:

"...the imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them.  fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that us enough to create profound value for millions of users ... the spontaneous division of labour driving Wikipedia wouldn't be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality rather than limiting it ... large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behaviour of some nonexistent 'average' user"

and there you have it.  he said it.  there's no such thing as the average user.  we all know this, and yet we still struggle to capture the targets for our advertising campaigns in neat tangible soundbites.  the demographics of old have (thankfully) long gone, but whilst they're been replaced by more contemporary means - attitudinal or usage based targeting - our one-dimensional thinking too often remains...

we are still, by and large, expected to think of and present 'one' target audience.  an 'averaged' person or group based on some attribute of attributes that are most relevant to the brief.  but look again at where the mean 'average' sits in the above chart... it not only fails to capture the few individuals who would be super-involved in what we have to say or ask them to do, but massively over-estimates the extent to which most people will commit attention to our branded projects.

we need a new lore of averages for our targeting-think.

when we describe target audiences we should be thinking of them as sitting along the above spectrum.  how do we plan on one hand for the very few but valuable super-attention givers from whom a lot of the effectiveness of the media investment will derive?  whilst on the other hand plan for the 'mode' individuals, the vast majority who will contribute the smallest amount of attention to what we have to say?

this spectrum, this logarithmic curve of attention, exists at whatever level you aggregate.  be it a population, or an age range, or any segment no matter how - whether attitudinally or behaviourally - it is defined.  there is no average user, no average consumer, no average contributor, co-creator, or co-collaborator.  let's stop kidding ourselves and clients otherwise.

Learning to advertise without advertising: what Mediation learned when he went along to listen in on The Guardian's Media Talk Live

so the latest MediaTalk podcast from the Guardian is up and out, but this week's is a bit special.  one because it was recorded live, but two because Mediation was lucky enough to be in the audience for the recording at Guardian Towers.  the panel - social media expert JD Lasica, reporter Sarah Lacy, blogger Robert Scoble, BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones and of course the wonderful Emily Bell - discussed a range of topics focused in and around the changing ecology of media business.

lots of sense talked (mainly by JD "shooting dinosaurs in a barrel" Lasica and Emily "we didn't listen enough to our audiences" Bell), but there was one question posed to wards the end (44 mins and 33 secs in if you're interested) that wasn't answered.  Susan Bratton asked: "there was some conversation about lack of innovation in advertising and sponsorship support, what would you like?".  Sarah Lacy said that it was "like porn - I don't know what it is but I'll know it when I see it"...

JD Lasica observed that interruption marketing would be gone in 10 years, and that you've got find "new models to make advertising that's personalised, customisable to me.  something that's welcome, useful, that I want on my screen".

it's an observation that often goes unsaid.  Mediation has often suggested that the problem with making media business models work in the new ecology isn't advertising.  the problem is adverts.  controlled and crafted packets of what an advertiser wants you to know work fine (brilliant even) in a broadcast model, but they're pretty pants in a conversation space.

in fact you could argue that - to paraphrase Cluetrain - brands are conversations.  in this context the ad format is as dead as a dodo; media business models will kick in again when, and only when, we collectively learn how to monetise advertise without advertising.

you can listen to to the whole podcast here, and read Kevin Anderson's blog post summary of the discussion here.

big thanks to the Guardian having me along.  a joy and a pleasure, if a bit weird seeing my favourite podcast being recorded.  awesome stuff.

'Plausible Promise': what Clay Shirky and Eric Roberts can teach us about devising successful big ideas

Clay Shirky opens up his Here Comes Everybody with the story of Evan Guttman, who used social media tools to help his friend Ivanna retrieve her lost phone when the finder - a young lady called Sasha - refused to return it to it's rightful owner.  he makes the observation however that these evolving social media tools (online publishing, forums, wikis, online social networks etc) are on their own not enough...

"[social media] tools are simply a way of channeling existing motivation.  Evan was driven, resourceful, and unfortunately for sasha, very angry.  had he presented his mission in completely self-interested terms ("help my friend save $300!") or in unattainably general ones ("let's fight theft everywhere!"), the tools he chose wouldn't have mattered.  what he did was to work out a message framed in big enough terms to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence."

you need what he quotes Eric Roberts with calling, 'plausible promise'.  and it was this idea of plausible promise that occurred to me when I saw the above mastercard ad for The Eden Project's 'big lunch'.  which is - to quote the mastercard website:

"a national initiative developed by the Eden Project to bring the country together, by asking you to sit down with your neighbours for lunch in a simple act of community ... on Sunday 19th July, the nation will witness the street party to end all street parties. The organisers of The Big Lunch are inviting as many of the UK's 61 million people as possible to simultaneously sit down together, to meet, eat, talk, laugh and feel hope."

the event - for which there's also a film-making initiative in association with Raindance - has social media at it's heart and is using Twitter, Flickr et al to enable interested parties to organise themselves into action.  but I'm skeptical about the 'plausible promise' of it all...  big enough to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence?

it's certainly big enough, with mastercard's not-insignificant investment behind the above 40" tv ad campaign, but is it achievable?  despite a brilliant and very functional website, will individuals really organise themselves into having lunch with a bunch of people they don't know in order to 'feel hope'?

it possibly most likely that people who already know each other will perhaps drag themselves into action using the big lunch as a sufficient reason to do so; but I fear that this fails on the second of Roberts' requirements.  it's simply not - I fear - very plausible.  any marketers and agencies would do well to check to what extent an initiative they decide to undertake fulfills the two plausible promise tests.

marketing success for initiatives of this type require more than just promise; they need to feel real, achievable.  they need to feel plausible; and I worry that this doesn't.  I hope that the big lunch is a success.  I hope it brings people together, I hope that it makes a difference, and I hope that the time, effort and investment that has gone into making it happen is worth it.

The Disposable Memory Project: bringing a bit of jeopardy and mystery to a world too full of solutions and answers

a beautifully sunny idea for what will hopefully be a beautifully sunny weekend...  welcome to the Disposable Memory Project, which has the simple aim of telling the stories of cameras left in random places around the world.  the idea is that people will pick them up, take a few photos and pass them on, with the cameras and the photos they hold eventually returning home.

it's a simple, elegant idea for an age when experiences have higher value than things, when social aggregation can be virtual and where narratives aren't predetermined or linear.  I don't know if a brand is behind this, but I bet plenty wish they were.

at the heart of this idea are jeopardy and mystery.  if I leave a camera somewhere will it be found?  by whom?  what photos will they take and will those photos make it home?  there are no guarantees; something that feels exciting and different in a world - and marketing landscape - where amazing solutions vie for our attention and unbeatable answers clamour for our questions.

Mediation finds it more than a little comforting that in an on-demand world where we expect to be able to get whatever we want whenever we want it, some things aren't set in stone.  I intend to join the project and set me own camera on it's way.  I look forward to the uncertainty of its fate, and meeting - through shared virtual experience - some other people on the way.

Video. Everywhere. Always: What we can all learn about P Diddy's adventures in mobile broadcasting

Free TV : Ustream the idea that there will ever again be a status quo in media planning has surely got to be abandoned.  technology and interaction are now evolving at such a pace that the challenge is not just how best to use what's out there but firstly to know what's out there.

case in point is Mashable.  for two years it's been creating editorial about the best of Social Media news and views.  and I had no idea it even existed.  none.  so it's a thanks to PAffleck (thanks) who pointed me in the direction - via Mashable - of how P Diddy is using mobile app. Ustream.tv to broadcast his life direct from his mobile to the world.

he's not alone.  loads of people are doing it.  assuming you have a good enough phone (current limiting factor but this will change), you can upload your clips direct to your own broadcast stream.  better than that - if you see something cool you can start live broadcasting it - there and then - from your phone to your mates, or whoever...

I never thought I'd say this, but I guess we all have a thing or one to learn from P Diddy.  if he can do it why aren't brands?  how often are we and the clients we work with creating reasons and incentives for people to engage there and then with experiences that are happening right now in the real world?

it's difficult, but the reality is that we're moving to a world of video being everywhere always.  that's a lot of competition for our precious advertising space.  I for one - no matter how much I sometimes feel I have yet to learn - want to understand this now...  cos the brands that get this sooner rather than later may be the ones that don't just thrive, but survive, in a digital world where any status quo no longer and will never exist.

Two bits of communication, one voice: How British Airways is demonstrating local knowledge thru Social Networking site Metrotwin

"British Airways flies hundreds of thousands of passengers between New York and London every year. So it feels right for us to be backing something genuinely useful for people living in and traveling between NYC and London" ...is the elegantly simple reason that BA give for creating Metrotwin; a social networking site that twins New York with London and treats both cities as a single online community.

at the heart of the site is utility - classic aggregator territory here - with the site aiming to recommend only "the ten best places to drink coffee" and suchlike.  Metrotwin’s recommendations come from locals, bloggers and online communities based in both cities but can be reviewed and rated by everyone.

speaking at the Social Networking World Forum (social networking must have come of age - they have a world forum, though its not in Cannes so a bit to go yet) in London this week, Chris Davies, digital marketing manager at BA said that this and another social networking site from the airline had "challenged the perception of the brand" and made the airline seem more "up to date and exciting".

I'm not sure I'd go that far.  but the site is clean, simple, brilliantly designed and - most importantly - really single-minded about what its there to do and why BA is doing it.

I was going to do my usual "it's not joined up - they need to be amplifying their online content with broadcast" line, but I think the (presumably deliberate) separation between Metrotwin and the broadcast campaign that BA has been touting (the 'do what a local does stuff) is totally right.

two very different strands of communication from BA.  one generated by users, the other by the good people of Kingly Street.  one is digitally-centric whilst the other is broadcast-centric.  but what unites these two bits of communication is local knowledge.  do they need to be seamlessly integrated?  no.  they need to come from the same place, with the same brand voice; each living in - and making the most of - its own media world.

that said, I do hope that BA and agencies are using Metrotwin content in the online advertising.  it would be a shame to see such great user-generated digitally-centric content siloed in the site - get it out into online spaces, show the web what you're up to - cos its all good.

thanks to Hanson for the heads up on this.