Some of my favourite links and things from the past week, drawn from delicious, Twitter, Facebook and all of the other nooks and crannies I poke around in.

Nice updated version of the "Did You Know 2.0" video

New Nielsen research on Social Media

I don't think there is any one left that needs to be convinced about social media usage, but still, the numbers are staggering.

Americans have nearly tripled the amount of time they spend at social networking and blog sites such as Facebook and MySpace from a year ago, according to a new report from The Nielsen Company.  In August 2009, 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet was at social networking sites, up from 6 percent in August 2008

Very good presentation on the future of Social Media

Insights on the coming collision of mobile social networks, augmented reality and more. Nice work!

Immersive Storytelling

Two very good recent examples of storytelling done right using digital tools.

HBO Affair

Deep content, a follow up to the much praised "Voyeur" work.

The Mosaic Collective

This is for the show "Flash Forward" (which isn't half bad, judging from the season opener). I like how the website makes the show participatory, like a massive collaborative game. Basically, the site asks you to submit a future vision and compare that vision with others (if you watch the show, it makes a bit more sense!). Good idea, and I like the level of complexity and depth they've aimed for.

Seth Godin Brand Jacking.

I know there was a lot of chatter about Seth Godin's Brands in Public thing this week, but I found the whole thing tedious and boring. 

Cool things from Google

You might have seen this kicking around over the last little while, loads of great examples of Google/You Tube powered digital campaigns

The brand new Augment Reality application for the iPhone is pretty cool. I installed it only a few days ago, and I'm still fiddling with it, but so far, so good! It brings up Twitter posts, Flickr and Bing results. Cool! Here is a screen grab of me looking for a pub from my couch.

Social Media a Central Park of the Mind. (Good analogy)

The New York Times on Coupon Clipping Culture

Great article on strategies for building mobile Apps

Thought provoking article from Adrian on the future of Specialists versus Integrators (in some circles, this is alternately referred to as The Future of The Agency.)

Google and Wharton collaboration on the future of marketing

This infographic keeps popping up on blogs/twitter/facebook this week. It's a great example of what sticks. Compelling information coupled with the visualization to help us see the big picture, that also manages to tweak a little cultural resonance (only 145 miles from the farthest McDonald's?! isn't that sort of sick?).

I want to take a stab at some thoughts about a recent post from Grant McCracken. If you haven't read it, take a few minutes to do so and see if you can help me out here.

So, the topic of the post is Grant's idea of the "Culturematic" machine (is it even a machine? I don't know). The Culturematic is a simple two step process of creating culture that starts with cooking up an interesting premise and then actually, you know, DOING it. Sounds pretty simple. And at the very least, we can agree that the cost of trying stuff out, experimenting, is pretty neglible. I love this slide from the awesome Google presentation, 87 cool things.

This is, of course, nothing new to those of you that have been witnessing the outpouring of creativity and accessibility to the tools of "cultural production" over the last few years. The democratization of creativity and flattening of the means of culture making are pretty clear.

What interests me more about Grant's "Culturematics" is that it gives us a glimpse in to how that democratization and accessibility is subtly but surely changing the types of things we are creating. We aren't just talking about producing the same kind of cultural artifacts and output. Our creative vision is changing. The world is becoming more expansive, more fragmented, we can know everything about any thing, and technology gives us the illusion to dream big and think of the unthinkable. In Grant's words, it starts quite literally with asking, "What if?".

This has massive implications. The ability to ask "What if?" questions, combined with the knowlege and expectation that they can not only be realized but also distributed has been promising to change culture, and in my mind part of that is bestowing the (super) powers of cultural invention to those who want it.

On that note, I love this thought on cultural invention from the Schulze and Webb presentation I posted here a couple of weeks ago.

It establishes "interesting" as the thing that culture does for us. We can release things in to the stream of popular culture, as Grant says, but if they aren't adopted/remixed/used they won't go far. Grant calls the product of "Culturematic" machines "quirky" ("it is the quirkiness of the things produced by the Culturematic that captures our attention. Hmm, we say".

Beyond being interesting and capturing our attention, and beyond the test of interestingness being adoption (which, after all, is the condition dictated by participatory culture), what about the types of thoughts and creative expressions that qualify? How are those being changed?

Skipping back to that Berg presentation for a second, consider the idea of a "macroscope", as the tool with which designers see culture. 

Designers, in order to see the very big, in order to see culture, which is much bigger than any one of us personally, have macroscopes.

The way I think of a macroscope is as something that shows you where you are, and where you are within something much bigger — simultaneously, so you can comprehend something much vaster than you suddenly in a human way, at a human scale, in the heart.

I love this, and it really ties in nicely with Grant's idea. Ideas can be macroscopes, and ideas that "put us in our place and let us see a much larger world" are especially powerful macroscopes. Likewise, the "What if?" questions start with me and my experience but expand to reveal a bigger, broader picture. In a way, they lift our creative gaze upward, even as they focus on an individual experience (like, "What if I visited every Grant McCracken in the tri state area"?).

I think of these kinds of ideas as types of "super" powers, in the sense that the Berg folks talk about. The world has changed so much that we need "macroscopic" ideas that help us see the bigger picture. This Twitter visualization tool has made the rounds this week, and I think it's a good example of a macroscope

It maps trending topics across a map, and if you read the description of the project you get a sense of how audacious, bold and ambitious the thinking is

Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. See what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing right now.

This is amazing to me. When did we start to believe that we can really see what the "collective mass of humanity" are discussing RIGHT NOW? It may be unrealistic and verging on nuts, but yet it's interesting and compelling.

This, to me, is the really exciting possibility of cultural invention in the digital space that we are seeing. It might just be a conceit, and we might just be fooling ourselves, but the ability of technology to offer us the dream of creating the macroscopes that help us see the world differently is pretty amazing. To take the wildest "What if?" question and release it in to the world is a beautiful thing.

And when I think about it, the surge of creativity and cultural invention that the "Culturematic" notion represents suggests that we are all getting a little closer to having the ability to "touch the moon with one's finger tip", in the words of those Berg fellows). However, in contrast to the John F. Kennedy example cited in their presentation (please check it out if you haven't done so already!), which was based on will and determination, I think that the Culturematic is brilliant precisely because it produces, in Grant's words, "frothy" culture. This is more realistic, more attainable and, taken together, it is all the "frothy" small stuff that creates culture (and occassionally creates larger "resonance", love that idea).

In just a few short years, I think our focus is evolving from sheer awe at the ability to imagine things and put them out there to what is beginning to look like a more ambitious cultural vision. Less about cat videos, more about macroscopic ideas, projects and cultural invention. But I'm curious to hear your take on it.

I want to avoid posting too many presentations and slideshows, but this is my favourite of the year. A very inspirational and visionary way to think about the role of design.

Here is just a small tidbit, a particularly powerful challenge to see the world differently and INVENT culture.

So I think, you know, we need macroscope ideas – like the dandelions which are like MP3s, and like the tomato which happens outside Spaceship Earth – we need macroscope ideas because when the world changes, what we invent – as designers – needs to change too, or it won’t be relevant.

Especially this year, you know. The world has changed in bigger ways than we can really see or comprehend. The financial system came close to complete collapse. Even the cleverest people in the world – literally, seriously, the cleverest people, by any measure you can think of – the cleverest people in the world can’t tell us a cohesive story about the collapse of the banks. So what do we do? It’s too big.

A few recently released music related applications/games demonstrate how quickly the consumption of content is being changed by digital technology. What's particularly interesting about each of these is that they all use the design of artist brand "experiences" as a way to invent new business models. They are changing culture and changing business.

With digital experiences becoming more central to how people interact with brands (and each other) we often talk about the importance of planning for experiences, not just planning for "messages". I feel that there is so much to learn about this, particularlyl as those experiences take the form of networked platforms. We need to think of how things take shape in a social context. Planning for individual experiences is not enough.

I found this to be a nice primer/introduction to Interaction Design. If you know of other good resources, please leave a comment, if you would be so kind.

I like seeing interesting new ways of designing media experiences that blend the old with the new. I think there is a lot of potential to use digital media/tools to enhance and augment the consumption of (old) media (that's what I love about the Dub Siren application that I wrote about yesterday).

I have no idea if these shows are popular enough to have success with this, but I suspect that we will be seeing a lot more of this sort of fusion from the major networks (and not just on the "social" television online environments).

 @MCHammer: With Social Media You don't have to holler at the NEWS !!!..YOU Can Change The NEWS !!!!!

That is well said, Hammer.

But you know what? A few months away from this and I've started to really miss it. As much as anything, I miss the exchange of ideas, which is much different than the exchange of links. Ambient intimacy is cool, but some times it's not enough.
I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope that my resolution to write here won't suffer the same fate as my New Year resolution to lose 15 pounds.

Maybe it's an "end of August, back to school vibe" sort of thing. We'll see. But for now, thank you for checking in, and hanging in. Now please keep me away from those onion rings.

Love this solution that the clever Monty Python crew came up with in response to You Tubers posting old clips online. They took the most popular ones, put together their own You Tube channel and posted high definition versions for fans

In the process, they promoted the Monty Python DVD collection, and saw a huge lift in sales.
It isn't that hard, is it?
Treat your fans like people, co-create value together and everyone's happy.

They make it look easy.

via the recently discovered but much liked propagation planning blog.

You probably have already seen this new work for T Mobile.
I must confess, I heard about it a while ago but kept avoiding actually watching it. I think I was being a bit stubborn, I didn't want to see a commercial that lifted an idea from the Improv Everywhere crew, no matter how well done (it may be the wily underground DJ/producer side of me that cringes at glossy commercial versions of grittier undergound thing.

Iain at Crackunit has written an excellent post about this, so at least I know it's not just me. Thanks Iain, for a very well articulated insight (it had been bothering me trying to figure out why it was bothering me, if you know what I mean).

Perhaps stories of togetherness and collaboration are best told in places where people are together, collaborating. And perhaps they should be told in ways that reflect the brilliance, excitement and usefulness of what doing things together using tools and technologies - not metaphors - is actually all about.

Storytelling and metaphors. Where would advertising be without them?

Love this tweet from Charlie Todd, founder of Improv Everywhere

How do we make the things we put out there (communications, experiences) the start of the process, and not the end of it? How do develop those sparks that lead to further participation, activity and sharing? If you've been reading Faris' recents posts, it's very much about "creating stuff the internet likes" and encouraging the remixing and recombining that leads to sharing. (This could be a record for the number of links to Faris in one post?)
While marketers get very hung up on the fear of "losing control", I am really fascinated with how other media and in particular newspapers are tackling this. Substitute "news" and "content" for "brand" and the parallels are clear. Here is an interesting take on how this thinking is evolving in some circles.

“Networked journalism” means opening up the production process from start to finish - and beyond. It already has the tools: email, mobile-phones, digital cameras, online editing, web-cams, texting, and remote controls. This is channelled through new communication processes like crowd-sourcing, Twitter, YouTube, and wikis as well as blogs and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV).

Networked journalism is a process not a product. The journalist still reports, edits, packages the news. But the process is continually shared. The networked journalist changes from being a gatekeeper who delivers to a facilitator who connects.

It is obviously a huge shift from being authorities and the authors of news PRODUCTS to being nodes in the stream of PROCESS that involves readers and a wider ecosystem. But this is already what has happened with Wikipedia as it has evolved to a living, real time collaborative news source. I guess the point is that these connected ecosystems that facilitate the shaping and reshaping of news/brands/content will emerge whether we like it or not. The question is whether marketers will step up to be the facilitator who connects or not?

Finally there is a Facebook application that is actually good.

Whopper Sacrifice asks you to pick 10 friends to defriend and in exchange you get a free whopper. Yes, a free whopper for ten former friends.

For the first time (I think) someone has bothered to take the time to think about what Facebook users actually do (not much it appears, other than making friends and then periodically reviewing the list to see who you can scratch off) and made a fun sport of it.

Over on Rob Walker's link stream there are a couple of interesting (ok, irritating) links on the "trend" of our new found frugality. Of course, as Rob says, this is no trend.

We will know there has been actual change in the culture if and when people stop referring to an alleged change as "cool," not to mention announcing the new trend coinage, as in: "The new year will be marked by a cultural trend I am calling 'Luxury Shame'." Ridiculous.

And

The instant labeling of an era is, in itself, a form of commodification, an attempt to brand-name and market a cultural epoch

Well said x 2.

Either you believe that we have turned a corner culturally with respect to our attitudes toward consumption and consumerism, or you don't. Wake up folks!
Calling the circumstances we find ourselves in right now a"trend" is shallow, and a great example of what is wrong with most trend watchers and forecasters.

"So the outlook for 2009 if you're trying to change the world is pretty good. If you're trying to get people to throw virtual sheep at each other, it's going to be a lot tougher than 2008"
(Paul Miller, co-founder of The School of Everything)

He has a point, now might be a good time to discourage virtual sheep applications?

Just want to jot down some links that I've had on the shelf, along with a note or two ;)

• Here is a video from the MIT Future of Entertainment. It's a conversation between Henry Jenkins and Yochai Benkler, and it's great. We are still in early days when it comes to transmedia and the implications of convergence culture, and I found this talk very enlightening as to where we might be headed.

• I mentioned "Transition" as one of the dominant themes of 2009, and this post from Fred Wilson does a very good job of cutting right to the chase. Citing the automobile industry, retail, publishing and media as examples, Fred believes that this year will be remembered as one in which a number of industrial era business models will collapse. Talk about transition! It's a must read (thank Neil for the link)

Reading his post also made me realize that while social media pundits, or experts, chatter endlessly about people not "getting it", real change in business will occur as a result of inevitable forces that demand reinvention or lead to obsolescence. Put another way, the dual forces of radical change in media and networked economies, combined with a tanking economy will make a lot of conversations about media tactics (social or otherwise) irrelevant. The problem for a lot of business is much deeper and beyond the scope of fixing the communications. (Adrian wrote about something similar, from another angle, in his Ad Week piece recently). But that's just my hunch, and I'll get back to this in a future post (when I have more proof!).

• Over at Tim Brown's blog I came across a talk by Paul Saffo, expounding on the theory of a "Creator Economy". If you are interested in how the growth of communications networks impact the future of value creation (of course you are, that was rhetorical), you must check this out. This is the kind of thinking that will guide the emergence of new business models, and it's fascinating stuff. Karl has recently posted some great thoughts on social media and value creation as well. I like the distinction he makes between the two fundamental sources of value creation (platforms, like etsy, and the use of social tools to connect niches, or build personal brands. Smart).

Apart from great acting courtesy of Jimmy Stewart and the Christmas emotion, one of the genius reasons why the story works so well is that it brilliantly exposes some of our deeply held assumptions about human nature. In a word, we assume that the individual hero will deal with the problems they are confronted with. Man against the world, that sort of thing.

When George Bailey gets into the mess that he does, we witness the reaction of a desperate individual as he tries to deal with this (by heading to the bridge to contemplate jumping!). This jives with our very individualistic interpretation of human nature. It is only when George is enlightened as to the degree to which his life impacted the life of others that he (and we) realize that this assumption is wrong. It is only when George appreciates the herd nature of our existence that his life takes on a whole new meaning. In the final scenes of the movie, when George is bailed out by his community, the social and herd nature of life surprises him (and us). George discovers the hidden truth of who he is (as Mark might say), and in the process we're confronted with some of our misconceptions, as well.

While thinking about this, I came across this excellent post from Stowe Boyd, writing about the nature of social contagion and our herd nature. I like his resolutions as well, sounds like great advice to me.

I spent a lot of time catching up with the RSS backlog over the holidays, and it was just packed with great posts that I had missed, so keep the posts coming you less-lazy-bloggers-out-there, because they are very welcomed and very appreciated.

Heading into 2009, it was nice to see a fairly recurring theme in a number of posts, as well. Actually there were two themes. The first is the sense that 2009 will be a year of major transition in our economy, media, politics, society and culture. The other is that marketing and marketers can become a lot more proactive and serious about their contributions to society. To paraphrase Valeria Maltoni, how can we help to create a better world, rather than help to sell one?

Good question, and just one of the things to keep an eye on this year.

Thanks for checking in, and sending everyone very best wishes for 2009.

Let's get on with it!

If you haven't heard about the shitstorm of controversy that erupted because of a recent Motrin advertisement that (some thought) poked fun at the issue of "babywearing", you will.

Regardless of whether or not you think the outrage was warranted, you have to marvel at the speed at which the controversy spread through blogs, and especially the efficiency of Twitter to get the ball rolling in the first place.

Now the motrin.com website is down, e-mails are being sent to apologize on behalf of Motrin and the first page of Google results for "Motrin Moms" is full of blogs coming down hard on Motrin. I told you, it's a big mess! (David summed up more here).

Here is my take. While a lot of Social Media "experts" are lining up to offer unsolicited advice on how to handle the damage control ("buy the right keywords!", "blog back!"), I think one of the important lessons here is that this shouldn't have reached this point to begin with.

You don't have to spend a lot of times on message boards or mom blogs to know that the issue of "attachment parenting" (and many other issues about being a mom) is very controversial. This is a topic that brands need to approach at their own peril, and should make sure that they live in the world of moms online to craft the right communications strategy. In fact, I'm pretty sure that no focus group in the world would have been able to convey the intensity of emotion around this kind of issue. And while moms in the past would have rolled their eyes at this on television, the simple truth is that those days are long gone.

There is no "social media" or PR strategy in the world that will compensate for communication that hasn't been well thought out. Really knowing your audience is more critical than ever.

Alex Bogusky was recently asked to make a prediction on the future of advertising and media, and he said "the only thing I know for sure is that it's going to get a lot rougher out there for brands". That stuck with me because it's simple and true. I think that this Motrin mess is just the kind of thing he was talking about.

(In the spirit of not speaking unless you have something nice to say, I have to say that I do like the infographical treatment on the work. I'm just saying).

At any rate, thanks for checking in, hope you have been enjoying the de.li.cious links, at least.

Hope to see some of you fellow Torontonians at Beersphere. We're kicking off at around 6:30 PM at the Bedford Academy. It will be great to see some friends I haven't seen in some time.

Our behaviour and the technologies we use change faster than the language we use (I'm still "spinning" when I'm DJ'ing, even though the only thing spinning these days is my hard drive).

Similarily, old models trap us into using outdated mental constructs to make sense of a world that no longer really fits those models. I'm fascinated by this, and the process by which we collectively abandon those old models.

Journalism and the "news" is a perfect example. Matt over at the Newsless.org has written a series of brilliant posts over the past couple of months that explore new ways of thinking about journalism. An emerging theme is the assertion that the article is no longer the basic unit of the news

From what I can tell, we inherited this state of affairs from our printed predecessors. When we started news sites, there was just no other plainly obvious way to present news stories, and most of those stories were coming from the newspaper at any rate. So we presented them on the Web the same way we do in print — discrete, self-contained compositions, including whatever context could fit into a paragraph or two, ornamented with photos and graphics.

Parallels to how marketers and brands think about media and communication are pretty clear. For the most part, the discret, self-contained composition has the "creative idea" (or, the television advertisement). Mostly because, well, that's the way it has been, technology packaged it like that, and so on.

Matt has some brilliant thoughts on what the future looks like, starting with the understanding that "every news event represents a data point to another story", and that a richer understanding of the broader topic might generate further interest in that topic. Many of the other data points might not be known to us right away, but it will be the job of journalism to provide that context by using powers of pattern recognition to connect the dots (planners pick up your pencils and get to work, because in marketing that will be you doing the lion's share of pattern recognition).

So, rather than think of articles as compact pieces limited by the physical space they once occupied (in print for instance), and aimed at a target audience of people who knew what the story was all about in the first place because where would you have the luxury to spell out the context?, the job now is to expand our understanding by building richer stories, more layers and a stronger context for the interconnected pieces.

That last point is crucial, especially when thinking about brands and media, since we'll need to make sure that we don't confuse the article (the advertising) from the story (the context, the interconnected ecosystem of nodes that "bubble up" to a something much bigger). For, as Matt says, somewhat echoing a transmedia vision of what the future might look like.

We’ve been wedging our stories into articles for so long, it can be difficult to separate the two. But a big part of the opportunity before us is to start telling grand, complex and unending stories with tools fit for the task.