There was all sorts of kerfuffles kicking off over on Amelia's blog yesterday in response to her post on the whether "Crowdsourced Advertising can work"... the chief protaganists in the story are Idea Bounty and the Peparami brief that Unilever famously put on there...
You should go on over and have a read of all of the points of view that people contributed around the issue... it's clearly one that, unsurprisingly, has niggled away at a fair few people.
My contributution wasn't really to do with the ins and outs of how the crowdsourcing works in this form, who spots the best idea, asking people to create a derivation of existing agency work and all those sorts of things.
It was more of an overall thought, and thinking about where this trend might end up...
What we do know about digital information on t'internet is that
whenever things become digital, they lose 'value', no matter that they
cost the same to 'produce' as they did before.
Music tracks being a prime example, of course.
And if there's a place where these newly digitised pieces of
information can be gathered at almost no cost to the creator, that
place will become swamped with stuff that just crosses that threshold
of 'good enough'.
Like Myspace, for instance. The home of a million 'ok' bands (mine and
yours included).
...so...
...do we run the risk of making the main thing our industry has to sell
(the 'ideas') into our equivalent of MP3s? Hosted in the idea
equivalent of Myspace?
Or does it not matter, because every
advertising/media/digital agency could never monetise 'the idea'
anyway, it was always about product/commission/build etc?
It's been gnawing away at me for the last day or so too, so I thought I'd take the comment, put it on here, and see what you all think.
If we digitise the 'ideas' part of the industry, and create an open, democratic, myspace-esqe platform open to all ideas, will we indeed drive the 'price' of ideas down like MP3s did to music?
And what happens to 'quality'?
When the process of submitting ideas is as quick and painless (and most importantly as CHEAP) as this, will it just encourage many environments around the internet to spring up and become 'the home of OK ideas...'?
Or is it the turn of agencies, like record labels, to realise that the world has changed and the way that they once made their living isn't as viable as it once was..?
If, as I believe, it's going to be through cross-disciplinary effort that we build successful, conversational communications between people and companies, we should get all sorts of different perspectives from across the board on the principle of bonfire building.
So, to that end, I decided to start asking a few folk whose opinion and work I think highly of about the principle, and their perspective on it.
First up, I'm delighted to say we've got Jake McKee, of Ant's Eye View, Community Guy and Lego fame...
Let’s start with something social… tell us about yourself…
I'm Jake McKee, co-founder and Chief Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View (www.antseyeview.com). I've spent my entire career on and around the Web trying to help businesses use new tech, people, and processes to improve the way that customers interact with the company.
At AEV, our focus is the same: helping clients improve customer experience and drive customer engagement by building strategies that tap into those new technologies, as well as age old improvements in people and process to truly improve the bottom line.
Outside of work, I'm an amateur photography, infrequent mountain biker, and a proud dad of an insane smart and funny 3 year old.
How did you get started in bonfire building?
I actually went to college for traditional 3D product design. Even in high school I was fascinated by the idea that people got paid to think about how people used things and to design products accordingly. I graduated about the time the Web started taking off and brought that product design thinking to Web development.
When I joined the LEGO Company in 2000, I lucked into working for a boss who encouraged me to own the relationship between LEGO and the adult LEGO enthusiasts. That led to a full-time gig at LEGO doing community work, helping to form the community development team, speaking about community work, and blogging at CommunityGuy.com.
How do you persuade others of the need to build social bonfires alongside setting off advertising fireworks?
The answer to this question is a bit different if you’re talking about being an employee of a company working inside the enterprise towards change versus working as a consultant helping those folks see change through to completion.
Looking at the work that needs to be done inside the organization (since that's where the buck stops), I've always talked about the strategy of "Success by 1000 paper cuts". Start with the smallest element you can effectively do with minimal budget, little managerial approval, and minor legal team approval.
Nothing breeds acceptance like success. Even tiny successes excite people to see more. Succeed, expand your efforts a little, succeed again, rinse and repeat. Before you know it, you'll be launching huge programs but with far more support than if you tried to launch a big program straight away.
Where do you see the balance between the bonfires & fireworks at this point in time?
Well, there's probably not much of a "balance" at this point! I think largely we're still seeing a vast majority of the social efforts being funnelled through the traditional marketing/advertising lens. With a sadly rare exception, most business people are struggling to get past their own training - we're all programmed to believe that protectionism is a huge business value.
That mindset was passed along in school, and backed up by nearly every business dealing we've had in our careers. Getting past that mental training is going to some time and some serious effort, but it will happen. With an entire generation being raised to expect a direct connect relationship with the companies they do business with, it's seriously only a matter of time.
That said, I don't think we'll ever get away from seeing fireworks. In fact, I hope we don't. Fireworks can be a lot of fun, and can do lots of great things... IF they are a component of a larger, social-infused strategy.
Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?
It's not terribly exciting, but I think we're going to continue to see the same progression we've been on for the last few years, just with an increasingly accelerated pace.
Companies and consultants alike are certainly still struggling to get to a more social-minded place, but the pace at which things are moving is picking up speed.
Success is leading to success, and we'll be seeing a lot smarter, bigger, more successful campaigns over time... ...success by 1000 paper cuts.
Yes indeed, lest we forget it's Bonfire night, and given the history of the Bonfire & Fireworks analogy on Feeding the Puppy, it would have been remiss of me not to post the latest thoughts I've been having on this more fitting of days...
(As a brief reprise, for those who haven't seen or have forgotten it, skip through this again...)
After the IPA Social Event (which I first started writing about Bonfires
for), we all thought it'd be a good idea to keep the momentum behind
the project going... build on the success, keep the bonfire burning as it were.
After all, it was just the end of the beginning.
Rather than a formal evening organised event, though, we wondered if holding three concurrent conversations over coffee, somewhere in London, would mean that people could spend half a morning dipping in and out of different conversations... sharing experiences, results, case studies and the like.
How best to make it happen?
It's not just an 'advertising' issue
Largely every type of agency and communications company going are all looking at this area, whether they're involved in advertising, PR, corporate comms, internal etc.
The shift in the way the world communicates has affected many industries, not just the one that you or I happen to find ourselves working in.
At its simplest, I think everyone can take the graph below, look at their own industry as say 'yep, that's happening to us, and we're not totally sure how to deal with it /create it / measure it / value it / charge for it yet.
So we'd love to see folks from across as wide a spectrum as possible... the sharing of results & case studies is something that the Measurement Camp guys have been doing a great job every month, so we'd love to see them down there.
Then there's all the folks interested in making businesses internally
social too... Enterprise 2.0, or Social Business Design. I found the Corporate Social Networking Forum earlier this year a fascinating insight into how other industries are harnessing the available tools to add significant value to their businesses.
And I'm quite sure that I'm missing out folk too... so in order to make an 'easy to manage' list of folk to tell about it, I've made my first twitter list...
Making a list, checking it twice...
We'll get on with confirming a date, thinking a bit more about the format & subject matter... just generally firming things up a little more.
And you?
Well, if you think you'd be up for meeting up one morning for a couple of hours in early December and sharing some social insights over coffee, then just add your twitter name TO THIS LIST HERE*.
Happy bonfire night... see you all soon I'm sure.
(*fingers crossed that I've got the list thing working OK...)
Ever since writing it, I've been particularly interested in creating work systems that incorporate elements of games.
Because as the principle behind 'spoonful of sugar' would have it, if you add an element of fun to a job, the job becomes a game. And we'd all like it a lot more if our jobs were a bit more like games, yeah?
So I was very excited to find out about this forthcoming book...
Total Engagement Using Games and Virtual Worlds to change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete
Of course, I can't tell you owt about it, as I've only just ordered it from Amazon. But the blurb certainly sells it to me...
"Implementing components of multiplayer computer games in the workplace
will address a host of age-old problems. Games can not only stem
boredom and decrease turnover, but also enhance collaboration and
encourage creative leadership. Games require extraordinary teamwork,
elaborate data analysis and strategy, recruitment and retention of top
players, and quick decision making.
Recreating some elements of games -
such as positioning tasks within stories, creating internal economies,
and implementing participant-driven communication systems - can not
only boost employee engagement but overall productivity."
Sounds really interesting, doesn't it? I'm very much looking forward to reading it
(thanks to the tip off from the guys at Natron Baxter, an Applied Gaming outfit over there in that there USofA...)
Anyhoo, I think that it appeals so much because, as kids, my brother and I were big fans of 'God Games' like Civilisation, Populous et al, and like most blokes my age I've lost days to Championship Manager.
If you're not familiar with the principles of such games, they are based upon an absolute mountain of data... with tens, hundreds or thousands of different characters, units and the like all needing your care and attention on a turn by turn basis.
You've got a set objective at the end, of course, but the only way to win the game is to set that big objective aside, and deal with the game on a turn-by-turn basis.
So whilst your overall big strategy is there, it's actually much more important to continually pay attention to the thousands of smaller tactical decisions.
The big strategy is as simple as 'win the space race' or 'defeat the other competitors'. The methods you use to do that constantly change and evolve depending on the circumstances...
Is it possible to do it for companies? Well, I believe so already... let's see what interesting examples and ideas the book brings when it arrives next week.
I just came across this, as it started sending traffic to Feeding The Puppy...
...it's called Trendsmap, and it lets you look at Twitter Trends by location on a map of the world. Oh yes, yes indeedy...
...then if you click on one of the words hovering over the area you're looking at, it will bring up the box on the left with the most recent tweets from that area on that subject.
I've been off, as you may know. I've returned to 413 emails, and many more items to read in my RSS reader...
Did you know, by the way, that when you accumulate more than one thousand items in your Google reader it gives up telling you exactly how many things you've got to read, and just says '1000?+'...
...it might as well say 'more items than you'll ever get through, idiot.' Just because of that, I'm going to read every single one.
But until I get through all of those, I thought I'd just make a note of the things that are the first things I've got a sense of that went on...
i) Google W.A.V.E. = WhatAVexingExercise
There was obviously a huge hoopla around Google Wave's release, and it seems that some folks out there would have (and maybe did) put their grannies on eBay for an invite...
...and on that, I'd like to thank Graham and Simon for both getting me one...
Now, I've not honestly had the chance to use it 'in anger' yet, as it were. So I'm really only going on what a wide variety of other people have been saying...
By and large, the sense that I get is one of frustration, bemusement, annoyance... people are having a bit of a hard time coming to terms with what it is, what it can do, why it's different etc. Why? Maybe two things contributed...
i) Lack of Patience - it was never going to be something that worked for everyone immediately, but maybe folk are just too used to finding 'the next big thing' online that you just 'get' in about 5 minutes.
ii) Crap Launch Strategy - dropping it in the laps of lots of people all at once isn't helpful... instead of giving people invites to the equivalent of the first telephone (hello? anyone there? HELLO..?), maybe it should have been an invite to a few folk join a wave that existed already...
However, everyone's still talking about it, so maybe that was the goal... I'm going to try out some specific projects on it, and see how using it properly pans out.
If you're still unsure what it is, This video I found via Fiona will give you a simple overview...
ii) Foursquare comes to London
I've been quite excited about Foursquare for a while. In their own words, Foursquare is "all about helping you find new ways to explore the city. We'll help you meet up with your friends and let you earn points and unlock badges for discovering new places, doing new things and meeting new people."
Basically, when you go to a bar/restaurant/coffee shop etc, you 'check in' using Foursquare. You get points for checking in, and you can achieve different badges for checking in for all sorts of different reasons... see the list here.
You can compete with your friends to earn points, get rare and better badges and so on. So, on the face of it, it's a fun local game you play with your friends...
All well and good, a simple GPS enabled game. But where I think it gets interesting is that once they know where players are, what badges they earn, the points they collect and so on, they can serve them up special rewards and offers...
It's this sort of thing that I think means Foursquare could have a big, big future... advertisers have spent years trying to think of different ways to encourage people to visit their shops, restaurants, venues. This offers a way not only to find out how many people visit, but to create ways that encourage them to do so more often, and reward them for being the most frequent visitors too. It certainly gives us an insight into how GPS might be used in future.
iii) IPA Social was... very social indeed
After spending six months working on the project, it was a bit of a shame to miss the event, but the IPA Social event on the 6th October went off very well indeed it seems... some quotes from a few things people posted afterwards...
"Every strategist and brand owner needs to understand social, and what
role it should play in building their brand. A social strategy should
be an integral part of a brand and comms strategy, and should sit
across every discipline within an organisation – it can’t just be the
responsibility of the social media manager. That’s not to say there
isn’t a role for social specialists. Implementing a social strategy
requires a robust understanding of how to behave in the social space,
and experience in these craft skills counts for a lot. Specialist
practitioners implement media planning and buying, advertising
creation, packaging design, PR, POS, call centre operations, and pretty
much every aspect of implementing a brand strategy you can think of.
Social’s no different – specialist implementation is both valuable and
necessary."
"It seems that the term
social media itself is counter productive - a fundamental change in how
people are able to communicate with each other will naturally have
knock-on effects to all businesses that deal with communications. But
it will affect each differently. So 'social media' means something
different to an ad agency than to a PR agency because it impacts what
they have traditionally done in different ways. So the advice that
clients get from their roster is that 'social media' means a range of
different things."
"In the future, I'd predict only seeing agencies getting involved in
campaign activity, with the ongoing rumble of conversation being
handled purely client-side. All it requires is an understanding of how
to use the various platforms appropriately; no specialist skills are
required to participate to the full. In the beginning, agencies will be
needed to help out educating their clients on how to use the platforms
with case studies and such, but that should be the extent of it."
So, what next for IPA Social? Well, if you want to find out, and get ivolved, maybe you should join in the conversation here on the IPA Social facebook group...
Meanwhile, I'll get on with reading 1000+ articles... or maybe I'll just hit 'mark all as read'... :)
Jason is Managing Director of PHD North in Manchester, and is nicely fostering the 'Feeding The Puppy' spirit there... he recently attended the 'Science of Success' seminar in Manchester featuring Malcolm Gladwell & Daniel Goleman, and has come away with four main thoughts inspired by what he heard there...
...'can I share them on Feeding The Puppy?' asks Jason. You certainly can, Mr Spencer...
----------------------------
4. Patience is a necessity
You can’t hurry success … but we want to see results by
Thursday.
In Outliers, Gladwell’s latest book, he focuses on what makes
people and groups of people successful. Time is a key element.
Not to mention
hard work, luck, persistence, collaboration and failure along the way.
Experimenting is key – if you only ever do what you’ve always done, you’ll ever
get what you’ve always got.
Fleetwood Mac are a classic example of this – it took 11
albums before they made their very own classic Rumors, one of the top 10 selling records of all time, as
Gladwell explained.
Too often nowadays, we don’t have time. Everything is moving faster and faster
in every aspect of our lives. Patience is needed.
The recent case of football clubs being investigated and
fined for poaching young players because it is quicker and easier than nurturing
talent, is a case in point.
Chelsea, take heed. Is it any coincidence that Peter Kenyon is now leaving suddenly? Let me know what you
think, but there is a certain irony in the speed of this too linked to this
overall theme.
So maybe we are now at a key moment where the excesses and
greed and impatience of recent times will enable us to take a more balanced,
long term and patient view on where we go next.
Football clubs will have to nurture talent as well as buy it
in.
Brands need to use media to create bonfires as well as
fireworks. Nurturing long
term relationships not short term fixes is where brands are headed next.
Is this really possible or likely or just some kind of
rose-tinted view of where we will end up in the next year or two?
Jason is Managing Director of PHD North in Manchester, and is nicely fostering the 'Feeding The Puppy' spirit there... he recently attended the 'Science of Success' seminar in Manchester featuring Malcolm Gladwell & Daniel Goleman, and has come away with four main thoughts inspired by what he heard there...
...'can I share them on Feeding The Puppy?' asks Jason. You certainly can, Mr Spencer...
----------------------------
3. Beware success
If you only ever shout about yourself, people are
going to stop listening…
It is all down to “expert failure” and how we deal with overconfidence in others.
We tolerate it rather than condone it. Or at least we have done until now.
This is essentially the chronology of the recent banking
crisis and can be specifically seen in the demise of companies like Bear Stearns for instance. In gathering as much information as
we can, we become more confident in our ability to predict outcomes. It makes us
experts.
This leads to a “miscalibration gap” as Gladwell coins it,
where we believe we have more knowledge and control over situations than we
really do have.
While a bit of overconfidence is no bad thing – do we really
want surgeons who fail to reassure us that everything will be alright? As
Gladwell pointed out – too much blinds us to the reality of what is going on and
clouds judgement. His view is we should encourage humility in our experts, rather
than expertise per se.
This got me thinking about successful brands. A little
humility goes a long way.
Big brand behaviour or behaving like a market leader is all
very well but it goes back to the point I make earlier around speed dating. You
cannot ignore the “you” in all this.
If you only ever shout about yourself, people are going to
stop listening.
Brand confidence is a good thing. But never forget that the
most important element – the target audience/consumer. Or it may end up in
disaster.
Does this work for brand leaders in practice as well as
theory? Can brands really suffer from some sort of Shakespearian hubris? Let me know what you think….
"Social Media is a conversation. That seems to be one thing that we can all agree
on.
But given that Social Media is a rather noisy and opinionated
conversation, what value do we think we will have by adding our voices to
it?
We are not Social Media gurus. In face we are rather sceptical of
people who claim they are. We are simply 10 people from across a wide range of
communications disciplines in the UK and the US who would like to share some
thoughts. Thoughts that have either been bugging us or inspiring us, thoughts
that we believe could form some of the building blocks for successful Social
campaigns. We came together to respond to and add our voices to some work that
the IPA had done earlier in the year.
We have each defined a Principle
which we feel is important in this Social world. You will find each principle up
here but they are also on our individual blogs where we will be curating the
conversation which we hope they will generate. Please do get involved, maybe you
think these principles don't apply, are there better ones? Are there changes
that you would like to make? Are there examples that you could add to help
illustrate them? The only thing that we ask is that as part of the advertising
and communications community that you become part of the conversation. After all
the more opinions that are being shared and built on, the more interesting and
stronger the outcome. At least that's what we are hoping.
Thank you in
advance."
You'll no doubt remember all the bonfires and fireworks posts from before... well, this is the project that it's been for (which I'm delighted to be a part of)...
It's well worth reading the brilliant summary of The Big Picture by Mark Earls first, and you can see the list of all ten principles here.
As for the principle I'm babysitting, at the moment it's as follows:
IPA social principle 03: Continuous conversation, not campaigning
If advertising is a firework, social media is a bonfire; slow to start, collaborative to build, then gets bigger and brighter...
The traditional advertising approach to campaigning is like setting off fireworks.
Great fireworks are attention grabbing beacons on steroids; they make crowds gasp in delight, and draw an audience from many miles around.
Yet while advertising burns very brightly, it dies very quickly. Fireworks are an expensive way to keep a crowd happy all night.
Social media isn't like setting off a firework; it's like building a bonfire.
It takes time to start. There's careful initial construction, a gentle blow here and there, and the gradual addition of more wood.
Then a couple of other folk gather around. Some of them will even help you build the fire; break some wood up, throw more on, poke around in the embers to make sure the fire doesn't go out.
As more people gather, and help the fire grow bigger, the more it will attract yet more people... with attention and dedication, as everyone fuels the bonfire it will only ever burn brighter.
A social bonfire isn't something you can 'campaign'. It doesn't fit snugly in four week bursts, it doesn't come with a guaranteed reach & frequency, and it's hard to know exactly what it's going to cost from the outset.
If you want to start a social bonfire, or want to help other people make their bonfires bigger, you're going to have to commit some time, effort, ingenuity and resource.
Because it's not just about the bonfire; it's about building it together.
"If you are going to engage, you have to have a plan and make sure that resources are available. Because you can't gracefully exit - once you're in, you're in. The days of walking away from a campaign are over – once we engage, we have to commit to it."
Denise Morrissey, Online Community Manager, Toyota
These ten principles are just a starting point; provokers of conversation, thought, ideas... an invitation to you (yes, YOU) to join in.
Why? Our aim with this project is to move the debate beyond simply the theoretical, and into the practical; examples of approaches that have worked, and which have not. What does success look like? What do you need to do first?
We believe that by sharing information and case studies around 'social communications' we will all, from the largest agency to the nimblest freelancer, from the most traditional client to the youngest start-up, benefit from this open source of knowledge.
So please, join the debate below...
(NB: I may take a while to respond, given circumstances, but some of the other guys in the group are going to weigh in too...)
I liveblogged the Guardian Activate Conference in July. Now that the videos of the speeches are online, it's a good time to revisit some of my favourite things from the day... I'll post up one video every few days or so...
Werner Vogels, Amazon - "Your worst nightmare on the web... you throw a party, and a MILLION people come... how do you cope with that?"
The area of cloud computing is increasingly fascinating... people are creating things around computers that they may need a phenomenal amount of storage space and processing power... but only for a brief period of time.
For instance, the Google Monopoly game which launched over the last week needed a lot more server power than they expected it to... and as such crashed on and off for about a week. They've just had to restart the whole thing all over again today...
I found Werner's talk huge interesting, because of the comparison he draws between computing nowadays, and electricity in days of yore.
Companies in those days needed electricity to do whatever it is that they made money from.
Werner's example is a brewer in Belgium, but we have our very own relic of this age in the Gym breakout area in our building...
(It's a particularly rare example controlled by table football...)
Think how mad it would be nowadays to run your own generator for a resource that comes out the wall, on tap, whenever you want it.
That's essentially the proposition for 'cloud computing'... computing that becomes a resource to be scaled when needed, and switched off when it's not.
It touches on a previous post about working spaces I wrote a while ago... when computing becomes as free and easy as electricity to access, it'll be interesting to see how we all work together.
