Just discovered this lovely little site.

5 minutes in and I’d already bought 3 books and signed up to an Amazon Prime free trial.

I’m suggestible, aren’t I?

This popped into my inbox earlier today – a really nice partnership between Swiftcover and Spotify. Much better than the full-screen overlays they’ve been running recently, I might add.

With this and the Tories running ads on the service, I wonder how many more premium memberships Spotify are going to sell?

I guess they need to sell many, many more, just to prove the naysayers wrong.

If anyone wants this offer, let me know and I’ll send it on.

A lot of people have been talking about the book Nudge recently. To quickly sum up, the book is about the irrational ways that people behave and the little things or ‘nudges’ that can be employed to create behavioural change.

I haven’t read the book yet, but it’s on my Amazon wishlist.

At work we’ve recently been having a problem with mice – the cold weather brings them in, apparently. The messiness of the our work kitchen seemed to exacerabate the problem, so two weeks ago, we had at least 10 ‘new’ Rocketeers join us.

The state of the kitchen has always been a pet peeve of mine -  if you make a mess, clean it up.  Anyway, after we got the exterminators in, I decided to run a little experiment in ‘nudging’ my colleagues to be tidier.

Two weeks on, I’m very happy to report that the experiment has been a success, the kitchen is in much less of a state than it was before and our furry friends have found new homes.

courtesy

IPA Social kicked off quite nicely two weeks ago with a big old event / ‘unconference’ at the IPA.

There were about 80 people in attendance and there’s since been a few debates about the event and about the 10 principles.

A few things struck me on the evening of the event and I’ve been mulling over them since.

1) The 90 / 9 / 1 principle is alive and well on the internet as well as in real life

We work in a industry of extremely opinionated, knowledged, curious and interested people. Recently, there’s been a lot of interest in all things social – otherwise the IPA Social launch event would not have completely sold out. The event attendees had a lot to talk about, as seen from the amount of chatter during the ‘unconference’ section of the event and the pub chat afterwards.

What was most interesting and surprising for me was the unwillingness of the attendees to ask questions during the event or to host one of the ‘unconferences’. When James was going around the audience trying to get questions and hosts, it really was like pulling teeth. I was shocked at the shyness of people who (for the most part) are more that happy to share what they think or their ideas in other circumstances. Was it stage fright? Fear of speaking out in a large group of people?

The next day, Graeme launched the IPA Social Facebook page in order to harness some of the questions, comments and thinking that came out of the IPA Social launch event. James gamely put a few questions out on the discussion board to which only a few people responded, despite there being over 100 members of the group.

This lead me to think that…

2) Some people just want the answers handed to them and want to be told what to do

It’s funny how hard it is sometimes to get people to just think for themselves – behaviour that books like Nudge and Herd extensively go into. Some of the feedback from the event was that it was “too fluffy” and “there should’ve been more presentations and less talking”.

Is this one of the reasons why there’s been very little debate on the Facebook group? Have the right questions not been asked? Do people care? I’m happy to be proven wrong, but I have the sense that with this topic, some are just waiting to be given the answers.

What do you think?

This sums it up quite nicely.

Via

Some clever person said that this app is the ultimate Yuppie geek convergence, however I beg to differ. The ultimate Yuppie convergence would be a Zip Car / Ocado / Ikea mash-up that can also somehow pick up Hummingbird cupcakes along the way. But, I digress.

Zip Car have released a truly awesome app and this, alongside this recent news means my resistance to the iPhone is slowly breaking down. Come one, developers, get developing! There’s a big Blackberry app market as well!

The boyfriend and I are big fans of Zip Car, having used their service here in the UK and back in Canada. Cheap membership, no annoying rental offices, local pick-up and drop-off – what’s not to like? And with this app, their service has been taken to the next level.

You can look for cars in your local area and then narrow down by class and by make.

Then once you choose which car’s for you, you can reserve it there and then. That’s right. No print outs, no trips to rental offices in the middle of nowhere.

You just hit ‘Yeah, Book It!’ and you’re good to go.

Then when you’re ready to pick up the car and drive off, hit the drive button and your iPhone turns into a key fob that even beeps like a horn!

Social Media is a conversation. That seems to be the 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 fact, 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 or on-going activity. 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. The second principle is here,  but you can also find all ten in their entirety on the IPA website and on the others’ individual blogs where we will be curating the conversation which we hope they will generate.

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.

To kick it all off, have a look at the wonderful summary of ‘the Big Picture’ by Mark Earls here and all of the ten starter principles here.

As you can see by the title of the blog post, the principle I’ve volunteered to articulate is:

IPA Social principle 02: Social agenda not business agenda

Businesses must understand people’s social agenda by looking at social actions / behaviours that sway purchase

In the age of the shareholder, the agenda of businesses has been orientated around generating maximum profit and consequently, they have focused on engendering behaviour that is centered on the usage / consumption of their products and services. Revenue created from these actions will benefit the business, the share price and the shareholders.

However, this agenda can fundamentally clash with the social agenda of real people, which centers on actions, behaviours and new and old technologies that allow them to share, connect, interact, learn, love, have fun and enjoy new experiences.

For businesses to operate effectively in this new age of communication, it’s fundamental for them to adopt an approach that hinges on understanding the social agenda of real people. They must get amongst the people who use their products / services, not strictly to look at purchase behaviour, but to look at social actions or behaviours that may influence purchase. Inherent in this is a study of the new ways that people connect, socialize, interact and communicate with each other.

Although businesses will never achieve 100% understanding (humans are highly complex creatures, after all), those that succeed in such an approach will then be able to market with people, rather than at them. Ultimately, these businesses will be able to communicate in more meaningful ways and create more evocative experiences that connect with and enhance people’s lives and social agendas.

Unsurprisingly, Nike is a company that has fully embraced this ethos. Simon Pestridge, their UK marketing director said recently that, “advertising is about achieving awareness, and [they] no longer need awareness.” He believes that they “need to become a part of people’s lives,” and that they want to “inspire consumers to seek out their content” and “this is the model [they] will be following from now on.” They believe that they understand their customers much better than anyone else and continue to learn by doing things like “running ideas past a kid on a football pitch. If [we] don’t get laughed at…then they’re probably on the right track.”[1]

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These ten principles are just a starting point; provokers of conversation, thoughts, 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…

So the time is here. On Sunday, I run 13.1 miles in the Great North Run in Newcastle. It’s not the longest distance in the world, but it is the farthest I’ve ever run and it’s all on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Society, who do fantastic work in helping those who’ve been affected by dementia.

This is all part of a challenge I set myself in the run-up to my 30th in November.  I decided to stop chatting about all the things I’ve always wanted to do (like run a half-marathon and a marathon) and actually do them.

I’ll won’t lie to you, the training hasn’t been easy. I now know Notting Hill / Holland Park / Kensington / Hyde Park / Fitzrovia incredibly well and have given myself headaches, shin splits, blisters, sunburns and dehydration in the process.

I’ve also been introduced to the masochism that is sport massage and discovered in the process that a good massage can get rid of tight calves, introduce me to muscles I had no idea I had and set my pain threshold much higher.

If you fancy donating some spare cash, click over to my Just Giving page.

I’ve been involved in a fantastic IPA project with the lovely and talented John, Katy, Amelia, Faris, Neil, Mark, Jamie, Asi and Nigel, which is basically the follow-on from the aftermath of an IPA 44 Club event in January. Willsh has already summarised this nicely here.

We’ve established 10 principles of social media, written them up and will be posting them on our respective blogs next week, to kick-off the conversation and get feedback. The IPA are also putting together a blog that will pull all of this chatter together based on the way things have been tagged (or by magic as I like to think of it.)

All of this great thinking, talking and sharing will then feed into an event the IPA are putting on on 6th October, which I urge you all to attend if you can.

Be social! Have a look at each blog next week and join the conversation.

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

I love getting mail. As I’ve mentioned before, for me, there’s still no digital equivalent to the anticipation I feel whilst opening a piece of mail. No matter how obvious it is, I still think, “Ooh, I wonder what this could be?”.

I was even excited when I received this package from the Economist because the address label was written with what has to be the neatest handwriting on earth.

So when I walked into work this morning and saw this on my desk, my interest was piqued.

“A big, black cardboard tube – what on earth?,” is pretty much what I was thinking as I opened it. So you’ll imagine my disappointment, when all that was inside was a promotional poster for the FT.

Besides being a bit wasteful, I wondered what the point of the poster was. A quick reminder of the FT that I would put in the recycling bin soon after? I’m all for media owner mailouts, but the most memorable ones are things that are fun (like these gold pom poms!), a bit different or useful.