Hello, my faithful few. Just a quick note to inform you as to why the posts to Pop Social Blog have stopped recently. Starting up a business is no small task and that is exactly what I’ve been up to. It’s a London based strategy/branding/design studio and all will be relieved soon. But for the moment things will remain quiet on this wee blog

Here’s a nice presentation from FutureLab titled Change Marketing v01 that lays out some of the floors in traditional strategies and the advantages of the concept of treating customers like real people. Growing up in this new climate I find is difficult to understand how this is not obvious… but alas that is the case as so many business look to ailing methods and bad metrics to measure brand success.

Specifically mentioned:
– Relevance
– Engagement
– Reputation

Have a look over the presentation here and let me know your thoughts.

Here’s the presentation bio:

The world has changed, but marketing is still applying the principles I learned in business school. This needs to change and this presentation is an “open source” call to help achieve this change.

I have given it on April 23, 2009 in Helsinki at the F Word event. It is an unfinished piece of work in which we don’t have all the answers either. So I invite you to join us at www.futurelab.net to help make it better.

No matter what your role, you undoubtedly have to explain what your organization does several times a week (even if it’s just at a cocktail party). This “elevator pitch” can be a critical tool in securing backing for your organization, forging a productive new partnership or winning a new customer. Start by explaining the problem your company aims to solve. Follow with a brief overview of what your company offers to your customers and why it is helpful to them. Share any successes or traction in the market you’ve had to date. Don’t forget to express what you find personally compelling about your company’s mission before the elevator reaches your floor. – Harvard Business Review dot org.
Read the full post, with an example, here

This campaign for the new BMW Z4 has been in my thoughts of late, so I thought I’d just mention is here. Firstly I’d like to say well done BMW.

Traditional advertising and marketing has just been about talking at potential customers for too long. The BMW Z4 3-D plugin is a good example of raising the level of engagement people are able to have with a brand.

However, if BMW are only to use pure traditional advertising and a full-on download/install computer plugin it would not be taking notice of the full spectrum of potential users.  To maximise conversation possibilities careful consideration to levels of participation is crucial.

I’ll use this BMW campaign to illustrate:

1. Indifferent: for these folks this campaign is simply billboards, magazine ads, TVCs just like always (I am fond of the effectiveness of traditional media; long may it live on)
2. Viewers: look at things online, good deeper if there’s the need (eg. start with ad, move to making of, move to app demo)
3. Joiners: you can join the fb group and share with friends (and interact with BMW as a ‘real person’ (questions answered etc)
4. Participants: download the app, have a play
5. Creators: play with app save, create patterns and upload their user-generated content.

The direct correlation between each of these mediums of engagement with their direct car sales figures can tough to measure. But the positive results of brand perception in consumer minds is maximised by their ability to interact with BMW to their personal level of comfort and/or interest. Marketing and brand building needs to look long term… those ‘younger tech-savvi’ users who play with the app today may not have the money for a new car now… but it is building brand relevance foundation in them as a future market.

In the meantime the traditional media is still doing its thing (however even the efficacy of a billboard difficult to quantify, but that’s the way it’s been done for years and companies do have faith in it).

Deff keen for your thoughts and discussion. Add your thought to the comment section.

An interesting and helpful presentation there by Gerd Leonhard @gleonhard (follow him and his friends @futurefeed). If you’ve got the time there’s a few videos from the Miden 09 Conference.

This is more of an exploratory post; to gather my current thoughts and, hopefully, generate come conversation around the fairly hot topic of current Internet evolutions: Content.

I remember marveling at some amazing views of the Olympic 2008 opening ceremony on a blog post. After some digging around I found the images were screen captures from a news site who’d refused to make their slideshow embeddable… therefore they been stolen (with no link to the news site)… thus a loss of any traffic attention that would have resulted in my clicking through to their site. The music industry have been experiencing this sort of theft for the better part of this past century.

Last year I attended a conference where one record executive essentially said imagine if you had a product you’d invested a substantial amount of money into on the store shelf. A product anybody can just walk in and take… and then proceed to produce virtually identical copies and distribute it themselves, all for free. That’s what it’s like for the music industry… I can understand their initial reactions to peer-to-peer services like Napster. But this sort of activity is only going to spread to virtually anything that can be digitised. So we are certainly standing on the edge of a precipice where some choices and financial strategies need to be made.

I feel creativity must be rewarded. Musicians, journalists and writers, film makers and inventors need renumaration for their efforts. So how? New models need to be made. One quote I heard today from Jim Balsillie of BlackBerry/RIM “…you won’t recognise the music industry in a couple year from now”. So let’s get imaginative for content in general… what might it look like? What new opportunities will this bring?

I genuinely believe the evangelist’s ideas when I read/hear/see them preach on the glorious future of free content. But I’m still finding it difficult to completely grasp making money from providing free content (other than via advertising, freemium/premium or data mining). Kevin Kelly summarizes this new economy with “Where ever attention flows, money will follow”. Also to paraphrase Kelly; Ten years ago we thought the Internet was TV; only better. But it’s so much more. So it would be presumptive and wrong to believe that ten years from now the Internet will be like today; only better. It’s going to be completely different…. and so much better!

@BenAS raised the point the of community and content as a method of maintaining attention…. and it’s the longevity of attention that is most likly to lead to gross profit.

In some way the perception of free is as good as free for example introducing a small levy into ISP fees. At a stretch the perception of free can be extended to inexpensive and simple payments demonstrated by the Apple App Store or even the value add we’re willing to hand over our personal and private information for (like signing up to Wii Online). But other than these where does the money come from? Below Chris Anderson depicts four monetisation models for free content.

Okay so let’s get conversational. How can giving away content or services possibly make money? I’ll follow this post (hopefully tomorrow) with some ideas of my own… but lets try to format them like this Observation, Insight, Idea. Either post a comment or for longer thoughts write on your own blog and send a trackback to this post.

• Effective Advertising:
  Observation: People dislike intrusive and irrelevant ads
  Insight: Loud and ill-targeted ads are turn offs
  Idea: Stop making ads and start making content that will be useful for your specific audience [this is cool from BMW – I've watched about five minutes.. what ad would I watch for five minutes!? And I will next go and play with it myself for even longer... but maybe this is off topic. They are making content to promote their car; good. But different than giving their cars away and then finding ways to make money through other channels.]
• Get Attention:
  Observation: Twitter has seen an explosion in growth recently
  Insight: People love to share their thoughts and discoveries, and gather tidbits from trusted sources
  Idea: Either help to facilitate this or become a trusted source

Diagrams: Chris Anderson on The Long Tail blog

Here’s a bunch of NYtimes articles that have popped up in the past few days or so (sorry they’re all from the same source):

• They Pay for Cable, Music and Extra Bags. How About News? Link
• France Tries to Limit Internet Piracy Link
• Google Insists It’s a Friend to Newspapers Link
• Digital Piracy Spreads, and Defies a Fix Link
• A.P. Seeks to Rein in Sites Using Its Content Link

Also, and I’ll look more specifically again at mobiles in a later post: The ease and potential customer comfort with mobile apps and content as a source of pay-to-use income for content producers. And the general nature of a relatively near-future where everything is ubiquitously connected.

BTW; I was listening to the Folk & Proud compilation on Spotify (free account) while writing this post.

Today the Promise of  ‘Fresh Start’ for US-Russia Relations after a G20 meeting of the country’s Presidents. On the home front America’s automotive industry is in shambles and Obama requesting demanding the biggest shake up to business practise the likes of GM and Chrysler have ever seen.

America will remain an enormous player in the world economy; but they’re no longer the sole player sitting in the play box. For the last decade India and particularly China have been gaining momentum on the global economic stage.

With their vast territory and huge population China has relentlessly grown with an ambitious programme of economic reform while developing its infrastructure, army and advanced weaponry through the latter part of last century.  Their foreign trade and foreign reserves have been essential in quadrupling their GDP between 1978 and 1999 (page x1). I conjecture China does not wish to gain significant influence in the world by the bruit force of war; but rather by economic force. And they’ve spent the last thirty years preparing themselves for such a time as this.

So, as we are at this watershed in global history where things that once seemed rock solid now seem rather more malleable, can China continue to project itself on their path to global superpower? Do they have enough momentum and agility to act and take advantage of the worst economic crises since the Great Depression (according to the IMF)?

If the auto industry is any sort of indicator to answer these questions then maybe we have a new symbol. The Space Race was a palpable symbol of the cultural, technological, and ideological rivalry from the Cold War. Though there’s a less finite goal than landing on the moon first, today China has thrown down the gauntlet by announcing their ambition to be the world’s leader in electric cars. At a time when America looking to pour funds into their ailing auto industry this announcement by China hits America where it’s hurting. Wow, this ought to be exciting.

China is making a virtue of a liability. It is behind the United States, Japan and other countries when it comes to making gas-powered vehicles, but by skipping the current technology, China hopes to get a jump on the next. (see the article)

Questions:

1. What are your thoughts and predictions?
2. Does China have what it takes? Do they have enough of (or the access to) the right natural resources and expertise to make this happen?
3. Can the American auto industry find an ambitious programme of their own?
4. Is this only a two horse race? What are European and Japanese auto manufactures ambitions?
5. Maybe I’m thinking too specifically to focus on the auto industry. Is it better to see the whole evolution in environmental, social, technological and economic ideology as the war? If so what are going to be the symbols/icons?

Update: Just came across this tweet from Wired Magazines’ @wiredresearch:

Photo: MyNameIsHarry (Creative Commons license from Flickr)

Sort of following up from my previous post… I’ve recently been thinking about the Cisco Fatty situation when it was doing the rounds; it might be nice to have a simple service that offers a channel to vent – anonymously.  There’s various articles/posts related to the comfort people are exhibiting  their lives and creating a virtual record for all to see all over the web. Some of which may be potentially detrimental to future collage acceptance and job prospects.

I was happy to find grouphug.us (thanks to Peppery who let me know about it). So if you just HAVE to let something out… maybe it’s better here than it is where your boss can find it. There’s also a project called PostSecret that allows anyone to get visually creative with their confession and mail in the physical postcard.

Is it unhealthy to harbour secrets? If so these places of collective admission certainly are healthy? But is it enough to actually rehabilitate… or is that not the goal?

Update: An article in the Los Angeles times Mark Cuban fined, Courney Love sued – over tweets You really do need to watch what you tweet.

Arh nice, I was waiting for this. Twistori “this is the first step in an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter. inspired by wefeelfine, hand-crafted by amy hoy and thomas fuchs of slash7“

Nice one guys.

Collective emotion is a beautiful and, sometime, harrowing thing. Humanity experiences feelings that can be fleeting and yet foundational to the decisions we make and the relationships we build. Twitter asks “What are you doing?” Recently facebook has taken it a step further and by prompting with “What’s on your mind?” – the Internet is encouraging us to express not just private information about ourselves but to type in our secret, most personal, inner emotions. And we’re becoming more comfortable at doing it.

Sometimes we can feel isolated and alone, we are a social animal that yearns for community… this can manifest in numerous forms; both influenced by the culture and the individual.

There is some evidence that would suggest externalising emotions allows us to re-frame them in a more rational manner, thereby helping them to be processed more effectively and generally with more positive outcomes. Whether it’s a fleeting emotional tweet, facebook status update or a longer post to your tumblelog the internet changed how we shout tweet our emotions into the ‘darkness’ (it still feels somewhat private but now anyone/everyone can hear us). At least humanity can now see it’s not alone.

Sometimes it breaks my heart when I stumble across some of it… I came across this piece of raw emotion last week:

And this I came across just yesterday:

Would it be out of line to predict that within the next twenty years (and almost certainly by the next generation) the Internet and our connectivity on demand will fundamentally influence the way we work and learn?

Forward thinking businesses already use internal wikis to share knowledge within and between departments as easily in one building as it does with all offices worldwide.

So will schools move to support this new way of collaborative learning? Unlike where information resources were scarce historically the new student of tomorrow (and today) will have all human knowledge only a google search or Tweet away.

To illustrate an influence of technology already; nowadays spelling is taken care of by the spellchecker and even exam markers excuse text language popping up in papers. Calculators have likewise replaced the need for a pupil ever having to learn longhand arithmetic et al.

So, just like spelling and calculation are completely acceptable to be left in the hands of technology will tomorrow’s students be able to move beyond tedious rote learning and rather learn to connect strings of collective knowledge and collaborative learning?

If schools need to teach students about real life then why is it wrong to free students from the shekels of memorising? Why not have them learn how to interpret data and contribute their own findings and have it tested by peers and tutors alike?

Why not have exams that encourages student to search out information and other students online (everyone sits the exam simultaneously nationwide already) who they can work best with to solve set questions… for all subjects from the sciences to the arts.

I feel this sort of system would free people to become who they were born to be. For the future is no longer about being an expert and having one job for life… it’s about a skilled agility to shift and move in any direction to forge and take advantages of new opportunities as the arise.

The story of the lady who choreographed Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats comes to mind. As a child she had always had trouble learning and sitting still. She was sent to a behaviourist for an appraisal (nowadays she would have just been chucked on Rittilan). He stepped out of the room, turning the radio on as he left. She couldn’t help but dance to it. The doctor’s advice to her mother “she’s a dancer, so send her somewhere she can dance”. The girl was enrolled in a dance school and was finally able to be herself and interact with others like her. She’s gone on to be rather successful hasn’t she because she was able to focus on improving what she loved… wouldn’t it be great if cooperative learning could help this for all children.

In conclusion if the future is to be online all the time everywhere are we not better to encourage the skill of gathering, interpreting, testing, and adding… over rote learning? Surely these are better life skills?

Oh and @benzoenator got his answer… (but I’ve got no idea if it’s the correct or not, but I hope he tries to understand why it’s wrong/right):

I LOVE these Microsoft UI and product concepts and this is one the most exciting things I’ve seen for a while (and that’s something coming from an Apple devotee).

The video above was first shown by Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop at the Wharton Business Technology Conference in late February. There’s a longer five minute version and post at I Started Something.

I am a fan of Microsoft Surface… but little else the company releases. If this Microsoft really want to change the way they are perceived they’d be much better investing the tonne of money into this R&D rather than give it to Jerry Sinfield. This kind of thinking (and doing) would have me setting foot inside the Microsoft camp; to at least investigate.

I really do hope that this is a reality by 2020; it will completely change the way we interact with digital information…. and it’s about time; while the desktop computer has shrunk from the size of a room since its inception it is essentially still the same old means of input/output methods.

Come on Microsoft impress me!

(Thanks for the link What’s Next: Top Trends)

UPDATE: Today (17/03/08) I Started Something have posted Behind Vision ‘2019′: Interview with Ian Sands, Microsoft Office Labs Director of Envisioning and it’s well worth a read.