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.
Well worth a look, could be useful for a lot of things...
There's a wealth of lovely Twitter data interpretation doodahs around at the moment.
I follow Jo at the Brighton Argus who just pointed out this one...
...it's called TwitterSheep, it takes the bios of all the people who follow you, and turns it into a word cloud.
This is the cloud for me, @willsh...
So with that as a very quick test, TwitterSheep works I guess; it'd be good for looking at other people, maybe, and seeing who you should follow.
It's not a precise science, or course. It's kind of woolly...
(apols)
Like me, you may have become increasing in thrall of the gentleman's game over the last few years...
...yes, that's right, cricket.
Since the 2005 Ashes, it has moved from being in danger of becoming a relic of a forgotten era, to a hot topic of conversation, beloved of pop stars (like Lily Allen and The Duckworth Lewis Method) and celebrities and TV presenters...
....and most importantly, lots of ordinary people like you and I.
Is it because England, finally, have started winning? Well, that helps certainly.
But I think there's something more powerful at its heart; the shift in how the world communicates.
Transmedia Storytelling
Over the weekend I was attuned to the second one day match (oh, Australia, you can have the one day series, it's like winning a battle after the war has been won).
I was listening on TMS, checking the scorecard on the ECB app for the iPhone, having a sneaky glance at the Guardian's OBO coverage, and also following a few of the cricket commentators on Twitter...
It occurred that perhaps the revival of cricket is down to it being the perfect sport for Transmedia Storytelling.
Transwhatia Whodeia?
OK, a quick explanation... Transmedia Storytelling is something that I first encountered via Faris (as most folk in the agency arena did), and then through Prof Henry Jenkins' book Convergence Culture.
What is it?
Transmedia Storytelling is about using lots of different media to tell separate parts of the same story, as opposed to retelling the same story in lots of different places.
An oft-used example, first suggested by Jenkins, was The Matrix Trilogy; you could just watch the films, but would get more points of view, background etc from comics, computer games, animations etc etc.
The Matrix: Neo goes in to bat for his friends
Read Henry Jenkins' Transmedia 101 for a much fuller, better description...
Transmedia Storytelling & Cricket
So we can see from the way I followed the cricket this weekend how the Transmedia theory is clearly at play in cricket.
In addition to the places I was attuned to this weekend, there's the Sky coverage, Five's highlights show, newspaper commentary and analysis, Cricinfo, various cricket forums etc etc.
But why does it work so well for cricket? I think it's down to four things which are a fundamental part of the game itself...
1. Duration
Cricket takes a long time. Even the 'short' version like the 50-over game I listened to yesterday takes the best part of a whole day to play.
So in an era where 'appointment to view' is dying out, people perhaps don't necessarily want a sport that they have to sit down at a precise time and watch for 90 minutes.
A sport where you can duck in and out at any point during five days is very suitable indeed for the way we live our lives and communicate nowadays.
2. Access points
You can't sit and watch five days of cricket on the TV. It's just too long for people with jobs, families etc. So you need a variety of different points of access to suit what you're doing at the time...
Get the score from a mobile phone, some opinion from the Guardian's OBO, tune into TMS (Test Match Special) on the radio if you're at work. Meet a friend in a pub to watch a couple of hours play, talk to other fans on forums about the form of players, or just talk to your friends where you talk to them already (email, facebook, text message etc)
You can use any of these different access points whilst the game is still in progress, which makes the game, and your 'participation' in it, much more engaging than it was before.
3. A love of information
The ease with which data has become measurable and malleable is changing a lot of things in the world (how we listen to music, buy books, see our travel patterns etc). We know that humans really seem to like looking at data visualisations that augment our experiences.
Cricket was always a game of stats and numbers, of course, but now technology is being brought to bear in lots of interesting ways, in everything from the coverage itself (Hawkeye, wagon wheels etc)to the ease of access that everyone in the audience has to the statistics only once available in Wisden.
Detailed information in this new exciting, highly visual form helps give the 'story' that's being told an amazing amount of depth, and helps people understand it more.
4. Understanding of the game
There's a lot of depth that in the complexity and techniques of the game; all in all, there's a lot to get you head around. Which is what help makes cricket the perfect Transmedia foil...
Where once cricket was inaccessible through complexity, the emergence of all of the different access points means people have been much more likely to find a route in that suits them; they can choose the depth of understanding they want to go to, and find their favourite access points in.
Cricket suddenly becomes a lot more sociable, as more people find that they have a 'route in' to talk about it. Cricket is a social object (as Mark testifies to here).
It no longer matters how much you know really about cricket; you can still join in a conversation about it.
Accidental Transmedia Storytelling
Sky's TV coverage, BBC's Radio coverage, the Guardian's OBO, Crickinfo, the ECB app, forums, the commentators on Twitter, your friend's commentary on his Facebook status... and all the other access points I've missed...
...no-one sat down and planned for all this to happen.
Various entities have rights here and there, other organisations reported on things in a particular way, some commentators & producers took it upon themselves to try something new, and people started getting involved themselves.
A more restrictive set of media rights would not have produced as a diverse a set of access points for people to have come into cricket.
Not only do I think cricket is a great example of Transmedia Storytelling, I think it shows what can happen when you cede control (whether on purpose or not) to people so they can help create a different part of the story.
The lesson for companies I think is this:
Transmedia Storytelling works best with more access points. You don't have to create all of those access points yourself.
But in order for other people and organisations to create them, you have to let go of as much control as possible.
Hello, FTP'rs... earlier this week we started the Social Lego Principles. Well, we're up to ten great ones already... they're below. Thanks David, Carrie, Justin, Mat, Clare, Katy and Vijay
I've uploaded the deck so far to here:
If you want to join in, there are TWO things you can do now...
I'm also thinking that we could try and get together in a room somewhere, and each of the originators can present their principle. Why? Apart from sounding like it might be fun, sharing it in a live forum might help everyone come up with even better ideas... leave that one with me.
Anyway, the first ten in full...
If you pick up a single block, it's a not a very interesting thing. Even a few of them together just look like a vaguely similar collection of objects. The really cool stuff starts when you have enough blocks available to start building something meaningful.
Which is why it's hard to understand what the fuss is with something like Twitter by just looking at one person's account, or looking at individual tweets. The more blocks you connect together, the more interesting things become.
No kid in the world has ever sat down with a box of Lego for the first time and built a scale replica of the Death Star. It takes a while to figure out what blocks go together, what looks good, what works, how many of each type of block you'll find.
Building something in social media takes time and practice. The more small things you learn to create along the way, the more tips and tricks you'll pick up for the future. If you build a person, then a car, then a house and a street, soon you'll have a good idea how to build a town.
Everyone in the world owns a unique Lego set. It's made up of the models they own, the pieces they've lost and the ones they've acquired. They also like putting things together in their own unique, creative, individual way. As a result, if you ask everyone to build a car, each car will look different.
Coming from the mass media age where everything looked the same, worked along the same rules, this is a big change to get your head around. Controlled consistency is out, homogeneous case studies pointless; embrace the wonder of differentiation.
From David Wilding...
DW: "It's all well and good having a safari set and a motorway set or whatever, [but] it actually gets really fun when you merge the sets together to create bigger "uber-lego"; the sort of lego hybrid that the people who designed the sets hadn't imagined you would make when they created it... point I'm making here is about how social networks and apps all crunch together to create something quite cool"
Think about the boxes of Lego you were given as a kid. When they all found themselves in the big central bucket, that's when things really got interesting. Equally, when Twitter links to a blog or to Facebook or to Google Maps... wonderful things can happen; better than anything any one social media tool can do on its own.
From Carrie Morley...
CM: "When I was little, my cousin and my brother used to spend hours at my grannies making battle ships out of lego. They would then put them in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs and drop 'bombs' (also make from lego...) and break them to pieces... perhaps what gets constructed quickly is so thrilling because of the speed and ease by which it can be deconstructed, pulled to pieces, and (perhaps) then made better the next time around..."
Get small, fast projects started, refine and improve on the hoof, learn new tips and tricks and quickly make the next version just that bit better than the last. 'Always In Beta', as Russell Davies would say.
From Justin Gibbons @ Work...
JG: "get kids involved and it takes on a new dimension, things you'd never think of like making a cake from lego, really raw creativity"
From Mat Riches...
MR: "I also love the fact that there was Duplo for beginners and Lego and then Lego Technics. You could get as involved and as deep into it as you wanted, and as you got more and more dextrous or nimble fingered..."
Lego have successfully realised with the extension of the main blocks into a simpler form for toddlers, and a more complex form for teens. There are a raft of different capabilities around social media, both for companies and the people they wish to connect with.
If you're connecting to a really web savvy, passionate audience you could build a Ning site to set up your own social network. If you're connecting to my mum, you may be better off with a simple Facebook group. But bear in mind technology is just the means to an end... unless there's something there that people actually want to do, no matter how suitable the technology they won't join in.
From Clare de Burca...
CdB: "No kid I know has the patience / skills to do lego on their own. As such it gets used as a joint activity - eg a friend of mine recently gave his 7 year old a model of the death star for xmas and spent a few hours each weekend working through it with him. They finished it in march. Its a very cool thing but 90% of the point was the time spent together doing it."
Collaboration is a huge lesson from Lego. If you build things together, you all learn faster. You all believe in the models and projects you build, so don't tear each other's stuff down. And the more you do together, the faster and more impressive it gets. And if one person gets too dominant and controlling, it damages the project, and everyone starts to drift away...
From Katy Lindemann...
KL: "how about 'throw away the rulebook' - Lego often comes
with instructions, but the most creative stuff comes when you throw
away the rulebook and you start trying new things and trying things
your
own way, instead of the way you've been told to....."
Sure, you might follow the rules as laid out by someone else first. But things get really interesting when you build things that help your community do exactly what it is they want to do. Copy the instructions first time out by all means, but the best stuff you build will be utterly and wonderfully your own.
From Vijay, with HT to Pushkar & Rishad...
VS: "I would add "Give the younger ones a free hand." I'd just come across this post by Pushkar Sane Global Head of Social Marketing Practice at Starcom MediaVest Group:
"Rishad Tobaccowala and I got around talking about Talent and Rishad said: “there is always a new wave behind us” - that made me think about the way we manage people in our industry.
In most cases we put people with skills-of-the-past in-charge of managing people who are actually bringing in skills-of-the-future... rather than thinking about managing talent we need to think about enabling talent and setting them free so that they can win"
If you think you should be operating in
social, but aren't sure how, but you know you have someone under you
who can... then your job is to run 'aircover' for that person.
NOW IT'S YOUR TURN... Add a new principle, suggest improvements to any of the existing ones, or add an example of a company which helps bring a principle to life...
Hello there, Feeding The Puppy readers... fancy working together on a wee project? OK, read on...
Over the last few months, there's been a couple of recurring themes here on Feeding The Puppy. Firstly, Twitter has been cropping up almost weekly, from Dell's $2m Twitter revenue stream to the use of it to power events like SXSW.
It's safe to say that it's stepped beyond 'fad' - microblogging is teaching people that the sharing of small pieces of information not only connects them to other people, it can create something very useful too.
You may remember that we like connecting and useful things.
Secondly, my ongoing Lego obsession shows no sign of abating; it's probably a combination of the fact that I grew up with it, and that as a company they've embraced their community to continually deliver a whole raft of interesting, engaging and delightful ideas about how to add even more magic to their products...
For instance, I was in Brighton with Helen and Dad on Sunday, and I took them into the Lego shop there to look at the augmented reality boxes they have... the look on the faces of all the kids & their parents in the store was brilliant.
(Basically you hold up the box in front of the screen, and the model magically appears on top of the box to show you what it will look like in 3D... get yourself along to a Lego store and give it a shot)
...see, I've gone off in another Lego trip again. If you want to know all about how 'Lego caught the Cluetrain', you should spend 40 minutes over lunch watching the brilliant Jake McKee talk about his 5 years there as Lego Community Manager:
Anyway, beyond 'Lego the company', I think 'Lego the concept' could well make for a brilliant analogy for how you can think about Twitter and other social media.
So I've started to pull together the following, which I'm going to call...
The purpose of these principles is to create something that's very easy for people who perhaps aren't as au fait with the social media landscape to 'get it', and start thinking about it themselves. Because if more people start to understand what's going on, I think our world will be a better place for it.
SO HERE'S WHAT TO DO...
I've created three principles as a start point - please comment, improve, refine, develop those initial three.
Then there are obviously more principles than that, so how would you extend the analogy? As a form, I think it works ok as...
- a short title
- an example from the world of Lego play
- how that example works in the world of social media
So here's my first three...
If you pick up a single block, it's a not a very interesting thing. Even a few of them together just look like a vaguely similar collection of objects. The really cool stuff starts when you have enough blocks available to start building something meaningful.
Which is why it's hard to understand what the fuss is with something like Twitter by just looking at one person's account, or looking at individual tweets. The more blocks you connect together, the more interesting things become.
No kid in the world has ever sat down with a box of Lego for the first time and built a scale replica of the Death Star. It takes a while to figure out what blocks go together, what looks good, what works, how many of each type of block you'll find.
Building something in social media takes time and practice. The more small things you learn to create along the way, the more tips and tricks you'll pick up for the future. If you build a person, then a car, then a house and a street, soon you'll have a good idea how to build a town.
Everyone in the world owns a unique Lego set. It's made up of the models they own, the pieces they've lost and the ones they've acquired. They also like putting things together in their own unique, creative, individual way. As a result, if you ask everyone to build a car, each car will look different.
Coming from the mass media age where everything looked the same, worked along the same rules, this is a big change to get your head around. Controlled consistency is out, homogeneous case studies pointless; embrace the wonder of differentiation.
...and now, over to the other people posting below... I've brought thier principles up here, and made an image & title for them...
From David Wilding...
DW: "It's all well and good having a safari set and a motorway set or whatever, [but] it actually gets really fun when you merge the sets together to create bigger "uber-lego"; the sort of lego hybrid that the people who designed the sets hadn't imagined you would make when they created it... point I'm making here is about how social networks and apps all crunch together to create something quite cool"
I totally agree. Think about the boxes of Lego you were given as a kid. When they all found themselves in the big central bucket, that's when things really got interesting. Equally, when Twitter links to a blog or to Facebook or to Google Maps... wonderful things can happen; better than anything any one social media tool can do on its own.
From Carrie Morley...
CM: "When I was little, my cousin and my brother used to spend hours at my grannies making battle ships out of lego. They would then put them in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs and drop 'bombs' (also make from lego...) and break them to pieces... perhaps what gets constructed quickly is so thrilling because of the speed and ease by which it can be deconstructed, pulled to pieces, and (perhaps) then made better the next time around..."
An excellent point that contains a lot of what social media allows you to do... get small, fast projects started, refine and improve on the hoof, learn new tips and tricks and quickly make the next version just that bit better than the last. 'Always In Beta', as Russell Davies would say.
From Justin Gibbons @ Work...
JG: "get kids involved and it takes on a new dimension, things you'd never think of like making a cake from lego, really raw creativity"
Kids don't stop to ask things like 'but why would people join in?', 'how long will it take?', and especially not 'what's the ROI likely to be?'. Kids build lots of things, and they build them because, well, it looks fun to do. Some work, some don't, but they learn lessons quickly and move on.
If you can tap into that mindset, and involve your customers and fans, where you're building things in social media, you're more likely to build something that other people want to play with too.
From Mat Riches...
MR: "I also love the fact that there was Duplo for beginners and Lego and then Lego Technics. You could get as involved and as deep into it as you wanted, and as you got more and more dextrous or nimble fingered..."
Mat rightly points out Lego have successfully realised with the extension of the main blocks into a simpler form for toddlers, and a more complex form for teens. There are a raft of different capabilities around social media, both for companies and the people they wish to connect with.
If you're connecting to a really web savvy, passionate audience you could build a Ning site to set up your own social network. If you're connecting to my mum, you may be better off with a simple Facebook group. But bear in mind technology is just the means to an end... unless there's something there that people actually want to do, no matter how suitable the technology they won't join in.
From Clare de Burca...
CdB: "No kid I know has the patience / skills to do lego on their own. As such it gets used as a joint activity - eg a friend of mine recently gave his 7 year old a model of the death star for xmas and spent a few hours each weekend working through it with him. They finished it in march. Its a very cool thing but 90% of the point was the time spent together doing it."
Collaboration is a huge lesson from Lego, thanks Clare. If you build things together, you all learn faster. You all believe in the models and projects you build, so don't tear each other's stuff down. And the more you do together, the faster and more impressive it gets. And if one person gets too dominant and controlling, it damages the project, and everyone starts to drift away...
NOW IT'S YOUR TURN...
Start contributing in the comments below, and I'll start pulling them up into the main body of the post here. Then I'll compile as a slideshare deck when we're done...
...we're obviously missing principles on collaboration, sharing, combining platforms and more besides... if you want a spot more inspiration to get you started, then you can do infinitely worse than look through Mashable's newly collated Twitter Guidebook...
Kids don't stop to ask things like 'but why would people join in?', 'how long will it take?', and especially not 'what's the ROI likely to be?'. Kids build lots of things, and they build them because, well, it looks fun to do. Some work, some don't, but they learn lessons quickly and move on.
If you can tap into that mindset, and involve your customers and fans, where you're building things in social media, you're more likely to build something that other people want to play with too.