Feeding the Puppy

Social Production... my 'big idea'

I was invited to take part in yesterday's APG/Campaign Battle of Big Thinking (yes, an honour to be asked, thanks guys), and managed to carry the public vote in the innovation section...

I talked about Social Production... I've put it together as a slidecast here, I'd love to know what you think.

John V Willshire - Battle of Big Thinking 2009

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

Just click the green 'play' button at the bottom to hear the voiceover... 

...it's not the original audio, I quickly rerecorded a track this morning, hence it being longer than the allocated 15 minutes...

Bonfire Builders: Mark Earls

This week's Bonfire Builder is Mark Earls, author of Herd, formerly of St Luke's, BMP & Ogilvy, and "London advertising scene's foremost contrarian"... 

 

What are your thoughts on the social bonfire/advertising fireworks principle of ‘not either/or, but both…’?  A long term proposition, or just a step along the road to something else…

To be honest, I think that you're right about the need for both, but given human nature I also suspect that there'll always be more of a need to encourage businesses to do the hard yards of continuous daily interaction.

"Fireworks" seems so much more appealing if you're in the corner - as does magic, generally - but the real value comes from the daily commitment to the "bonfire" work.  To being open and responsive to the people-what-buy-your-stuff

Equally, I think this plays to the thoughts in my chum John Winsor's latest book: "Baked In".  We've allowed ourselves to believe that somehow the magic of communication can overcome mediocre product and service delivery. 

 


Just get the right ad, the right campaign architecture, optimise the spend etc etc... and it'll be sorted.

The truth is - and always has been, I suspect - that excellent communication can make the best of a bad job but the real value comes from making the job better.

Tesco is a great example here - while advertising has played a role and the strategy is good (though identical to the one that one Safeway received plaudits for in the 90s) the real value is created more in the way they keep on going - working out ways to make things better for the customer.

Bonfire communication enables this kind of approach to business - more two-way, more responsive, more human but much more hard work. By contrast, fireworks communication tends to be prone to the outbound dialling and pointless display!


You speak to a wide variety of folks around the world… who gets it, and who needs to get there quicker?

It's hard to generalise, but I think in the client community the biggest discriminator is probably those who see making communications as a factory function and those who don't.

By this I mean those who by dint of volume have had to professionalise and develop processes for communications development.  This tends to embed really unhelpful practices and ideas in the business (like "what's our message?") and make it harder to envision other kinds of communication.

It's also really hard to unpick the vested interests when budgets are huge - large amounts of money makes marketers conservative; they feel the need to not be seen to be p****** it up the wall.

For those who haven't professionalised communication as a core function of the business, it's easier to show how the bonfires approach can be embraced without entering the world of sharp suits and flower-arranging. 

Smaller, more entrepreneurial businesses tend to fall into this camp.


I guess the agency model we've ended up with doesn't always help.  I kind of see the purpose of a media agency like PHD being reframed as 'connecting companies with people', however that best happens.  It often involves talking to other people in organisations beyond marketing departments though (HR, IT, sales and so on...). 

Is it inevitable that marketing (and agencies) must break out of the 'mass communications silo' to take a much more company-wide role?
 
I suspect you're right here. Part of the problem for all marketing services businesses is that their ability to create value is often limited by the clients they have - by the marketing clients in particular.

It's not just creative agencies who come across as florists and astrologers: marketing people are often seen this way by other business functions.

It's interesting, isn't it: while marketing's big ideas are now everywhere (brand, consumer etc), in most organisations marketing is no closer to real leading the company's activities than it was back in the 1950s and 60s.


One of the central things you talk about in ‘Herd’ is the need to ‘light many fires and see which one(s) take(s)’... 

 

..how’ve you found selling that into marketers who’re used to lighting fast working fireworks?  Any tips?

Boring answer: the place to start is probably by understanding where the marketers are coming from - what the other issues and conversations they are party to which are shaping the context to this particular issue.

Sometimes there's already a willingness to accept the relative ineffectiveness of past firework activity; sometimes not. Sometimes there's a willingness to accept the world is complex and inherently unpredictable so you'd better; other times this just scares the bejeezus out of clients.

Find out this kind of stuff and adjust your pitch accordingly.


HERD answer: seeing what other companies are doing always helps. Particularly successful ones.


Finally, what do you foresee in the future for the bonfires and fireworks?

I rather suspect that the future for fireworks advertising is going to be rather less rosy than many imagine.

Of course, we'll need these gunpowder-fuelled punctuation marks (and shows of corporate virility) but increasingly a combination of the bonfires model and the Baked-In idea (making things better and making better things) are going to prevail.

Less glamorous but rather more valuable to our clients - and for those agencies who do it well, too.

Bonfire Builders: Jake McKee

I had a thought a couple of weeks ago about the Bonfires & Fireworks analogy...

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.


Thanks Jake :)

IPAsocial 03 - If advertising is a firework, social media is a bonfire

"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

(Source: http://www.engagementdb.com/)

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So, what's next?

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...)

The Future, Xplane'd

I'd seen this video around in a few places (including Rosie's, Fiona's and Simon's blogs), and I wasn't going to re-post it here... but I now have:

It's promoting the Economist's Media Convergence Forum in October in NYC, and it's a treasure trove of facts, stats and info on the things that, when you piece them altogether, help build a picture of how the world is changing. 

(Steve, in his endearingly grumpy way, points out that some of the stats might be a little shaky...)

So, why did I repost when I wasn't going to? 

I saw that it was actually created by Xplane, the visual thinking company.  Their mission is to 'create understanding' by helping their clients find simple, clear ways to visualise things

I've got a book written by founder Dave Gray called Marks and Meanings I'm a big fan of, and generally think they've got a great approach to simplifying complicated things to explain them well.

So the Xplane video above is a great example of using a mix on minimal words and illustrative visuals to make points quickly and simply.  Make one simple point at a time, and build up the story sequentially.

It's something I try to do with my own work, and encourage a culture of at PHD.  

I guess I'm on the right track; Ted at The Conversation Group took the first half of this 'Future of Advertising' presentation (didn't listen to the audio) and presented it to a University class over in California... which I guess means it must be pretty self explanatory.

The Future of Advertising, APA, 17/02/09

View more presentations from John V Willshire.

So yes, I think we've all slept through enough presentations where people read the 50 words they've written on a chart off the screen. 

Let's keep it simple.

Social media as speed dating

Guest puppy feeder... Jason Spencer

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...

----------------------------

2. Social media as speed dating

If you are going to go speed dating, don’t just talk about yourself. The same goes for brands.

Daniel Goleman cited the greatest Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, and his I and Thou Theory that there are 2 types of human relationship:

I/it relationships, where the I considers the person they are interacting with as an object and talks at them;

I/you relationships, where the I empathises and listens to the other person.

Now it does not take a genius to work out which strategy will yield the most success if you go speed dating, as Goleman pointed out.

But this got me thinking that social media is maybe just like speed dating.

If you are inundated with lots of brands vying for your attention, you will be drawn towards the brand that treats you as an individual not an object. The brand that stands out because it listens rather than just talks.

Without social media, every brand would be engaging in an I/it strategy and whilst they would get through the highest number of its, they would make the least “connections”.

If we want to get phone numbers and meet again, hey maybe even go out on a few dates and have some sort of meaningful relationship, we must listen and ask questions from the very start.

So I/you beats I/it every time.

For the record, I have never been speed dating. But I have a friend who has.

If you have been speed dating, it would be great to know if this analogy works for you (and if we can stretch it a little further)…

 

(Read Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence for more on all this)

TwitterSheep; Flock and Roll

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...

...and this is the one for @feedingthepuppy (which is a bunch of us from PHD):

The differences make sense to me, at first glance.  I talk more about social malarkey, and so obviously more people who include 'social' in their bios follow me.  The general 'feedingthepuppy' one looks more like the agency as a whole.

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)

Social is as #ipasocial does

In the beginning, there was a report.

The report was hewn by the hands of the IPA.  It promised much.  It delivered a bit less.

There was a launch evening.  It was dark, cold and wet, for it was in January in London.

There was a presentation.  And there was a panel at the end.  And on that panel there was a Scottish fellow feeling increasingly uncomfortable as the evening progressed...

...because the report was on 'Social Media'.  It sang the praises of social.  It claimed social would change the world.  The report would demand new thinking, new revenue models, new open approaches.

Yet it would also demand £75 per hard copy. 

And there was no electronic copy, no doubt because there was piracy, and sharing, and so on... things must be paid for, after all, not just shared willy nilly...

The social report was inherently unsocial.  Antisocial. 

Of course, there was an audience there too.  But it was a quiet one.  On the face of it, at least. 

A quiet audience in this day and age is no doubt quiet for one reason; they're all talking about you.  On twitter.  There was silent, hidden uproar.

The event ended.  The audience left, to be social elsewhere no doubt; with friends, colleagues, families...

The report remained, antisocially sitting in a hypothetical cupboard somewhere.

The story could have ended there.



But then... some folk had a thought.  How do we make it social?  Or make a better version social.  Make something for people to share, spread, use, talk about, contribute to...

Those people, from across media, advertising, digital, communications, and the IPA itself, began to gather, mainly in coffee shops. 

They talked, thought, shared.  They began to build a social bonfire.  A metaphorical one, of course; coffee shops aren't keen on bonfires.  They melt the frappuccinos.

They thought about two things;

i) what, really, is this whole social thing about, if you're the IPA, agency or client?

ii) how do we create something based on this that's actually social?

Then they began to write down ten principles...

...no, no, not COMMANDMENTS...

...PRINCIPLES; general things they believed to be true about this brave new social world.

The principles they started were as such...

1. People not consumers  -  Mark Earls

2. Social agenda not business agenda  -  Le’Nise Brothers

3. Continuous conversation not campaigning  -  John V Willshire

4. Long term impacts not quick fixes  -  Faris Yakob

5. Marketing with people not to people  -  Katy Lindemann

6. Being authentic not persuasive  -  Neil Perkin

7. Perpetual beta  -  Jamie Coomber

8. Technology changes, people don't  -  Amelia Torode

9. Change will never be this slow again  -  Graeme Wood

10. Measurement  -  Asi Sharabi

...and now, they want your help.

Yes, you.

Next week, there will be a mass posting; each of people above will post their principle, and the initial thoughts around it, to their blogs.  Have a read, a think, and let them know what you think.

There will be one on here, linked to the others, and it'll all be pulled together in the main IPA site too; open, social, and shared.

When the principles go up there will be debate, ideas, agreement, disagreement, revision and retraction... and you will be there, adding in interesting and provocative things to the mix.

There won't be an easy, clean answer.  There won't be instant harmony and dancing in the streets.

But there will be conversation, and collaboration, and it will be very social indeed...

Keep your disposable razor sharp... with a pair of jeans

I put a post up the other day about how RichyRich7777's youtube video helped me fix my iPhone.

Well, some people's top tips about products won't be as helpful to a company...

...take Jake Robinson's video, which he's entered into the Instructibles 'Teach me fast' competition (run by Forbes.com) for the most useful 30 second video clip.

Jake's tip is this; don't throw away your disposable razor.  Keep it sharp... on a pair of jeans:

I've not tried it, but assuming it works... well, the folks at Gillette must be spitting feathers... especially given their whole business model is built on selling razors that get blunt so you have to buy new ones.

It's the most viewed video in the competition so far, it seems.

Cricket and Transmedia Storytelling

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

What's really interesting is that cricket is now big in the UK by accident; the variety of access points which have emerged have not emerged by design.

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.