It’s Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people, and it’s from the 80s, but it’s obviously massively applicable today, so I thought I’d share.

1. Be proactive

2. Begin with the end in mind

3. Put first things first

4. Think win-win

5. First understand, then be understood

6. Synergise [ed. don't laugh, listen]

7. ‘Sharpen the saw’

My favourites are (obviously) one and two.

I’ve been wrestling with this blog post for two weeks now. What began as an argument for complexity in business became a 4,000 word animal on complexity in life, sexuality, politics and ecology. Needless to say I’ve had to drastically edit it for it to be even barely readable. I stress barely.

I may post the sections on life, sexuality and ecology at some point in the future, but for now, here are my thoughts on the importance of complexity and the dangers of simplicity in business. (Also, this is very much a word in progress.)

I’ve always thought that the simplest route to understanding was to break everything into smaller pieces, understand each piece and then slowly put it all back together. Breaking complex systems into manageable, simple blocks. After I failed my maths A-Level (long story) I started to become quite interested in numbers, and in my first job I spent a lot of time looking at how to break down complex systems to create algorithms which produced simple, understandable numbers.

Simplicity out of complexity. That’s what people want, that’s what sells. It’s easy to buy something that’s very neatly packaged and seems simple to operate. In fact, (and I have no research to back this up) it seems the brain functions by filing things into boxes.

Taxonomies for our beliefs, our morals, our looks, our friends, our sexuality, our jobs and our possessions.

Everything in its right place.

The problem with this is that life isn’t simple. And things don’t tend to fit into categories.

“Categorising always produces reduction in true complexity” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.

Anyone that knows me will understand that my whole outlook on life has been shaped a fair bit by the philosophical and economic theory of ‘the black swan’. One of the biggest components of this theory is that we post-rationalise and force things into categories in order for us to be able to understand them within current constructs. Except life is slightly more chaotic and random than our constructs will allow.

There are simply too many variables.

John Maeda is (I think) the father of the simplicity versus complexity debate. His book, The Laws Of Simplicity, is a manifesto for the importance of simplicity. He explains how simplicity is the process of removing the meaningful from a situation and focussing on that. Creating singularity out of complexity and putting the focus on the core, rather than the periphery. Which is fine, except when we look for the singular meaning, we do so with our internal taxonomies in play. We look for meaning in the known knowns and we cast aside everything else. It is this type of template/category approach that (I think) hurts business strategy.

There are very few brands that employ true innovation. We constantly view new ideas through our old experiences. We use empiricism to judge the future, and as Taleb would tell you, just because it has always been, does not make it always so.

The thinking behind the black swan concept comes from David Hume, who said “No amount of observations of a white swan can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan can refute that conclusion”. If we always plan and innovate based on what we’ve always done, we’ll never do anything new. But we look for simple solutions that we can replicate. But there are no templates, because the world is constantly moving.

What works for one brand won’t for the next, and what has worked in one market might not work in the next. There are too many variables. Employee experience, customer base, media, economy, culture – there are simply too many actors on the stage for a one size fits all approach to work. But a one size fits all approach is easy to buy (and sell) because it creates simplicity out of complexity, comfort out of uncertainty.

You can also see this in the way in which many agencies sell themselves too. They’ve forgotten why they set up business in the first place (to help brands either make more money or save more money). A huge multi-national recently said that it was planning on taking ideas from any agency, regardless of what category that agency fell into. It was a revelation. It made the front pages of the trade press  – it made the front pages that any agency can have a good idea. The front page. This is very brave, many brands still define their budgets and work by their agencies, rather than the ideas. And agencies reinforce this in order to stay safe. They carefully edge their way into categories that get them onto rosters in order to hoover up work, and then they become comfortable. “Well we’ve done some great digital campaigns, if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.”

I come back to Taleb. Just because it always has been, does not make it always so. The world is complex and things change. Ideas are here and now, experience was yesterday.

This is a problem with wider business, too. The majority of businesses are eager to scale, so they build departments. Those departments then contain staff whom each do a specific job (very Adam Smith) and each of those employees is then responsible for their role. Except it’s more complicated than that and as the business starts to grow, more and more cracks appear (read this excellent post from John Willshire). Everyone absolves themselves of responsibility for the bigger picture, “I do my job to deliver my outputs”. There is a culture of micro-business.

But what has caused such a conservative approach to business? In my opinion, it’s a combination of short term thinking and fear of failure. The average tenure of a CMO is currently 18-24 months. Usually less than two years. Two years. There is obviously a mass of pressure to make an impact in a short amount of time, and so the temptation is to ‘short’ your brand – hit short term goals at the expense of long term goals. Then move on with your success to a new job. This is akin to the cartoon strip where the character cross the lake by stepping quickly over crocodiles noses – move fast enough and you won’t get caught out, stand around waiting and someone will get eaten.

One of the things that John Maeda nailed was simplicity in branding and communication (he gives a great TED talk on this too). If human nature prefers to receive information in carefully wrapped packages, then sell them products in the same way. The iPhone. Google. Music. Home insurance. Gym memberships. Everything is made as simple as possible in order to make people feel like they’re empowered and free (regardless of the complexity that lies behind the facade). But this has led to people ‘collecting’ things. Because brands can produce things en masse that appear simple, people want more things. Social media has also accelerated this. “I can have information neatly packaged and handed to me by Wikipedia immediately, so I want more.” Except that information is much more shallow and so we know less about much more.

This short term, aesthetic approach is fine, until we hit a much bigger issue, at which point we try and rationalise complexity in a dangerous way (see the London riots).

One of my favourite examples of ignorance of these types of constructs and categories is children. Children approach life with such a lack of experience that everything is to be wondered at. In his essay Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire said “The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour”. Those annoying moments when a child continuously asks the question “why?” are always massively revealing, because so frequently we don’t have an answer and we answer “because it just is”. At what point do we stop (rightly) questioning the world and give in? When do we simply slip beneath the water and look for simple answers?

I think that (for many people) that moment is the moment that their creativity dies.

Ideas and inspiration come from conflict. It is in clashing ideas that new ideas are born -  when our brains drop all of the boxes of categories on the floor of our mind, we finally see something new. That’s why the best ideas that we have are out of context – on the bus, in the park, in a restaurant – talking or thinking about something completely out of context (listen to Jon Steel for further proof). Foucault said that inspiration came from the self-destruction and convulsion of our minds – so why do we try and force creativity into a process? If Steven Johnson’s idea of the adjacent possible is right, why aren’t we spending more time destroying the categories we’ve built in society (and our minds)?

Process is, in my eyes, the antithesis of action. It’s like organised fun. Nothing new comes from process, because process is built around empirical constructs. “It has worked before, so it will work again.” And it’s probably true, if it’s worked before, it probably will work again. But it won’t achieve the same result, because the world will have moved on since then. Just because it always was doesn’t make it always so.

This also probably goes some way to explain our fear of death. Most  people are afraid of death, they cannot comprehend it (unless they have specific religious leanings, in which case they’ve already simplified death and given it a name) because they haven’t experienced it before and cannot liken it to anything else (or any other category). Why do we fear death? Because it is inevitable. But why do we not question what existed before we were born? Because surely it is the same? We knew nothing of life before we were born, and we will know nothing of it after we die. Empiricism and simplicity falter at death.

I genuinely believe that we should embrace the chaos. We should rely on our ability to navigate complexity. You just have to look at the work of Hans Monderman and his traffic experiments to see the value and benefit of relying on chaos. Chaos and complexity saves lives because they force people to think more. If you cannot buy simplicity, you have to begin to unpick complexity. You have to think (there’s an excellent article on the death of thinking in the NYT).

Once we begin to understand the systems and life more intricately, we can begin to accept our limitations. Umberto Eco had a library full of books he’d never read – why? Because they then became known unknowns, rather than unknown unknowns. And knowing what you don’t know is the biggest part of the battle.

 ”No amount of observations of a white swan can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan can refute that conclusion.”

David Hume, 1711-76.

“It is often said that he “is wise who can see things coming”. Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.

“I don’t care what the future holds,
‘Cause I’m right here and I’m today,
With your fingers you can touch me.
I am your black swan, black swan.”

Thom Yorke, Black Swan.

“Perfection is not just about control. It’s also about letting go.”

Thomas Leroy, Black Swan.

Thom Yorke – Black Swan

The “madding crowd’s ignoble strife”; the cry of “#FAIL”.

The major and minor social media backlash when we don’t like something that someone else (usually a brand, but not limited to) has done.

I hate it.

When did we become the judge, jury and executioner? Maybe, just maybe, we’re not the target demographic for the latest social media campaign by FMCG brand X? This type of negativity helps no one. The internet is a big place, and we have to share it with other people, other people that might not be just like us. Our sense of entitlement seems to be skyrocketing well beyond our freedom of speech.

This is part of two much wider problems; 1) the expectation brigade (which Paul Carr, Charlie Brooker and Becca have written about fairly extensively) and 2) the speed at which we want to criticise others. We’ve been empowered by access to information, people and brands, but it’s gone too far and people are demanding, not collaborating or talking.

I am in no way exonerated from this. In fact a few years ago I caused a storm in a tea cup when I publicly criticised a telecomm brand’s social media agency – so my hands are just as dirty. Except I learnt two things pretty quickly; 1) my opinions are my own and it isn’t always necessary to share them in a very public way and 2) the #FAIL brigade can work against people (after the blog post went up, there were about 500 tweets about why I was an idiot for sharing my opinion – you can see that there was a certain irony ).

As marketers, we spend hours and hours advising brands on how to become more human and more collaborative, yet a lot of the time we’re criticising other brands for putting a foot wrong. The human interaction works both ways and if we want brands to become better at interacting, we need to stop burning their fingers with flippant remarks and snarkiness.

The first post was my thoughts on how the social media industry has evolved and where the market may or may not lead. This post will look at the developing social business market and the next post will look at how brands might start to actually implement this stuff. You know, the ‘how we make money out of all of this’ post.

Every business is, in some shape or form, a social business. It relies on a simple process of creating a product or service and then selling it. To sell that product or service, you need to communicate what it is to the people that might buy it. You also need to communicate with everyone in the organisation to ensure that they understand what the product or service is and why people might buy it. So in this sense, communication is a fundamental part of business, as it’s a fundamental part of being a human. So every business is social.

But however social the principles of businesses are, organisations are still slow to move and in a hyper-connected world, this is presenting a series of issues;

• Increasingly empowered consumers
• Geographically disparate and departmentalised employees
• A lack of organisational agility or adaptiveness

In my (humble) opinion, many organisations could resolve these issues by using social technologies and processes.

The modern consumer has changed – prior to digital technology, our network of friends would be fairly local and our experiences would be shaped by that network. Robin Dunbar proposed that the number of meaningful relationships that we could hold at any time was around 150, it would be easy to suggest that with the rise of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter that this number has increased, but I would argue that it hasn’t. We still maintain a similar number of meaningful relationships, but what has changed is the dynamics of these relationships and our number of ‘weak tie’ relationships has increased, giving us greater access to wider networks that transcend geography. Where my network used to be contained by Nottinghamshire, it is now global. (Of course the convex of this argument is that by spreading our network wider we become less intimately connected, but I would seriously challenge this as social media allows us to connect on a more frequent – and often more intimate – basis.)

Over the past ten years networks of people have become much more dynamic but it seems to be only recently that people are beginning to realise the effect that this change has on their lives. The scale for the potential reach of word of mouth has dramatically increased because we’ve become hyper-connected and our networks have widened.

The effect that this has on business is that a negative or positive brand experience used to be passed around in the village church or the pub and it would reach a single (but strong) network. However, the rise of communications technologies and weak-tie networks means that that experience can have travelled across the globe in a matter of minutes.  And this power-shift hasn’t gone unnoticed.

The empowerment of the consumer now means that businesses need to be more responsive to their audience. Businesses are built on communication and the relationship between supplier and buyer, and that relationship is becoming much more open because they’re communicating more often.

One of the reasons for this is the breakdown of professional and personal lives. As our networks of weak ties become wider and communication across borders increases, it’s much easier for our networks to blur. Where we once had very defined boundaries between who we socialised with at the weekend and who we worked with, we now have merged networks. Or, an alternative way of looking at it is the shift from social networks to interest networks (but that’s a conversation for another post).  What this also means is that every employee of an organisation is now a spokesperson and the ease with which a message can reach a large audience means that internal communications and a singular brand message have never been so important.

Below are two diagrams, each represents the communications flow inside an organisation, but one is pre-social media and one is post-social media. The most important point to take from these diagrams is that where we once used to control the external brand touch points (public relations, advertising, customer service) we now have every department exposed to the outside world in some shape of form.

This breaching of communications barriers means that it has never been as important to create a cohesive brand message. Businesses have attempted to create unified brand messaging for years and struggled because too many external agencies interpret the message and communicate that in their own ways. But now added to external agencies communicating on behalf of an organisation, we now have more employees doing so too.

This is where social technology can play a major role in business. By engaging with all staff in a ‘flat’ way (every member of staff receiving the same brand message at the same time) we can begin to combat the ‘multiple brand message disease’ that confuses consumers too frequently. After all, a consumer sees a brand, not individual departments or external agencies (when was the last time that you heard someone outside of the communications industry say ‘that was a great piece of work from the digital agency’?). We’ve already become more connected on the outside of the business, so now the challenge is to become more connected on the inside, and then we can begin to become more agile and responsive to our customers needs.

I was introduced to the idea of the agile business by Tim Malbon, a co-founder at Made by Many, who got me thinking about the iterative brand and how we can beg, borrow and steal from the software industry to create better, more connected brands. This idea of the agile business has been popular for a long time now, but what social media is doing is forcing the hand of business to become more agile and more responsive.

This is one of the greatest challenges in this changing landscape – businesses have been built with scale in mind rather than innovation or creativity and this makes them very, very slow to move or react to market changes. But the empowerment of the consumer and the employee now means that business needs to react quickly and, as Brian Solis believes, use social media and mobile media to become more adaptive.  Social media and social business doesn’t mean having to have a Twitter stream or using Yammer. It means having an understanding about what this new information and these new communication lines have on a business. Even on a basic level, using the conversations that take place in a forum to help understand brand perceptions and add to existing research is an effective way of becoming more social as a business. The challenge, however, remains the same.

One of the other major challenges to organisations becoming more responsive is that businesses have built departments and these departments have become silos. We no longer work for a brand, we work for our department. I do my job to deliver my outputs, I create this website for this website’s sake, I draft my social media strategy for my department. In an environment where the consumer sees only a single brand, we’ve created a culture of hundreds of ants rather a single millipede…

Over the next few days I’m going to publish three blog posts that are pretty much the same blog post, however, to save your eyes, I’ll break them up into three smaller posts.

The first post is my thoughts on how the social media industry has evolved and where the market may or may not lead. The second post will look at the developing social business market and the third post will look at how brands might start to actually implement this stuff. You know, the ‘how we make money out of all of this’ post.

I’ve always been interested in seeing how business and technology evolve, which has always come in handy as that’s been my job for the last three or four years. Well, about two years ago, I was talking with Tim Hoang about Everett’s Diffusion of Innovations and how you could apply this to network analysis to see how you could track messages moving through a network and how marketers could then unpick the network mechanics to understand the role of influence better. This then lead to me reading a bit more widely into adoption and growth theories and then I found life cycles.

Now, for anyone with a casual interest in business or marketing theory, life cycles will be old hat. But for me, they were a revelation.

Using life cycle graphs, you can begin to predict which services/products/industries/agencies are going to be rising (or declining) in the future – this is obviously incredibly valuable in such a fast moving industry as social media.

I then started plotting my own work (developing products and services) against Levitt’s theory of Product Life Cycles (PLC) and trying to understand at which point products and services needed an overhaul. After a weekend of further reading, I saw a reference to Steven Klepper’s work on Industry Life Cycles (ILC) and how it had been applied to various industries for more than fifty years. Things started to click a little bit more with how I could apply these models to social media  (services, agencies and the industry) and using the models to think smarter about how social media would develop as whole.

The graph below is Klepper’s Industry Life Cycle, it’s a simple graph that highlights the four key areas of an industry’s development; birth, growth, maturity and decline.

Klepper probably explains the phases better than I could;

“Three stages of evolution are distinguished. In the initial, exploratory or embryonic stage, market volume is low, uncertainty is high, the product design is primitive, and unspecialized machinery is used to manufacture the product. Many firms enter and competition based on product innovation is intense.

In the second, intermediate or growth stage, output growth is high, the design of the product begins to stabilize, product innovation declines, and the production process becomes more refined as specialized machinery is substituted for labor. Entry slows and a shakeout of producers occurs.

Stage three, the mature stage, corresponds to a mature market. Output growth slows, entry declines further, market share stabilizes, innovations are less significant, and management, marketing and manufacturing techniques become more refined.”

The idea of applying this ILC to the social media industry is a little bit on the fluffy side until you overlay the ILC analysis with Everett’s adoption curve and begin to plot out where certain brands fit within the analysis.

It’s even possible to begin matching dates to the x-axis – the ‘innovators’ period could quite comfortably be around 2000/2001 and it’s fair to say that we’re currently (in 2011) experiencing the late majority/laggards phase. Suggesting that the industry is maturing and we’re (potentially) about to hit a period Hugo Hopenhayn coined ‘The Shakeout’.

‘The Shakeout’ is a simple principle. During the growth period of the ILC many organisations join the market without differentiating factors – the market fattens up because the overall market value is on the rise, so people join to enjoy the spoils – causing an overflow of suppliers once the demand begins to mature and level out. Hopenhayn believes that this ‘The Shakeout’ hasn’t actually happened until the amount of suppliers is less than 70% of the volume at its peak. With this in mind, and given the current state of the social media industry (specifically in the UK), I’d say we’re due to lose about 30% of the suppliers over the next eighteen months or so as the market matures and levels out.

While this sounds terrifying, it’s simply market forces acting naturally. However, there is a way to break the trend of the ILC and access a new market at the bottom of a new curve.

Six months ago I was reading the Harvard Business Review and I stumbled upon an article by Tim Breene and Paul Nunes (both of Accenture) who were promoting a book they’d written calling Jumping the S-Curve. Breene and Nunes are interested in helping their clients to break the cycle of decline and ‘leap’ onto the next s-curve and by providing a methodology for innovation, they hope to help many organisations ‘buck’ the decline of the PLC. After spending a considerable amount of time looking at how Klepper had applied the PLC to the ILC, I began to try and overlay some of my thinking to Breene and Nunes’ model. The results of which are highlighted on the graph below.

Here we see three s-curves, each representing a period of around ten years. For the first curve, I’ve taken the second graph and I’ve begun to look at what and when the next curve could be. Given the last few years has seen the original innovators (Brian Solis, Jeff Dachis, David Armano etc) from curve one begin to discuss social business, it’s a fair guess to say that the next ten years is going to see social business becoming a large part of the industry. It will be the innovation that the industry needs to sustain itself.

It’s a difficult leap, but it will act as a filter and force true innovation amongst suppliers and the potential rewards (i.e. market volume) are, in my opinion, far greater than anything that the industry has seen over the past ten years.

It’s excellent.

Hat tip to @AdlandSuit who tweets here and blogs here.

The report is well worth a read (you can find a PDF here), but I thought it might be useful to quickly write up why it’s important.

Interfaces
It’s almost a cliche to talk about the meteoric rise of the iPad, but the facts are simple – the iPad shifted as many units as the iPhone, but in a third of the time. Which is incredible for a device that many people still don’t understand the purpose of. For me, the iPad is all about complementing existing experiences – I use it for reading feeds away from my laptop, talking with people on Twitter while watching TV and watching videos on a Sunday morning. It also has an incredibly intuitive interface; so much so that my four year old sister-in-law had unlocked it, opened up emails and was trying to write an email within about two minutes. She still writes with crayons. It was incredible.

The report looks at how interfaces are becoming more intuitive and more about natural human interfaces (NUI) and how we should design for screen real-estate (which great digital people have always done) and multiple platforms rather than presuming that our content will work across the board. The proliferation of devices designed for different occasions also means that it’s important for us to understand consumer behaviour and design for that (again, which should have always done) – a recipe website for a food brand could be challenging to use in the kitchen, but a kitchen app for the iPad would make total sense. But we know this, good design has always been about behaviour.

This could finally be the year of the handheld device, we’ve been saying it for long enough…

Near Field Communication
When anyone talks about Near Field Communication (NFC) everyone usually thinks about banking – walking into Starbucks, swiping your phone and paying for your coffee. It’ll be great, granted, but there’s a little bit more to NFC than most people know. The patents that Google and Apple have put forward that incorporate NFC have so far included lots of consumer data points – meaning that we’ll be able to collect an incredible amount of data and use this to sharpen our targeting.

One of the best things about NFC is that fact that five billion people already have phones – more people have a phone than a TV – so there’s immediate critical mass. This has massive implications for the developing world and could help the decentralisation of banking – I can’t really do this idea justice, but Jan Chipchase, one of the principle researchers at Nokia, talks about the impact of mobile on banking in this amazing TED talk (absolutely must-watch).

The mass of data and the way in which we’ll be able to manipulate means that we’ll be able to deliver advertising in real-time (Minority Report-style) and it can be completely reactive to the individual, the environment and the conditions.

It seems that we’re finally starting to see data converge between online and offline, and the link is mobile. Mobile bridges our two existences and forces them to become one – and as marketers we can use this data bridge to build social CRM systems, map purchasing behaviour and feed niche targeting. But obviously there’s a flip side, and with all this data there will obviously be massive privacy issues (weirdly, it’s Frankie Boyle that jokes that if we start using biometric recognition and mobile and we lose our wallets, then we’ll need new eyeballs). So we’ll have to be brave, but not too terrifying (looking at you Google Goggles).

Social analytics
One of the biggest questions for the last few years (at least in social media and CRM) has been how do we collect and manipulate this amount of ‘Big Data’ into something vaguely informative. Well the convergence of online and offline data has been paralleled by the convergence of offline and online data agencies (Salesforce.com recently bought Radian6 in a huge deal) and the ability to start mapping sales to conversations will give us the ability to 1) start to show ROI of campaigns, 2) allow us to further personalise our work and 3) we’ll be able to switch this all around and begin to create Single Brand Touchpoints. SBTs (terrible acronym) are one of the biggest challenges to brands in a social, reactive world. Where everyone in the organisation is consumer-facing, how do we ensure there’s a single brand message? Well, with social analytics we’ll be able to track brand impressions (in both senses) and begin to trace back where each impression has been created – basically reverse engineering the perception of a brand and looking at where we need to focus our attention.

The end result of better analytics should be customer-centric strategies. We’ve all been at the receiving end of a client asking for a ‘some of that Facebook’ or ‘a Twitter’, but what better analytics will allow us to do is give clients a much clearer idea of where their audience is and what they do there.

ODS
Almost every brand I’ve worked with has (to an extent) been a brand built on data. Client data helps us develop products. Reviews help us improve them. Conversation data helps shape our marketing. So the idea of ODS (Open Digital Service – it’s a Razorfish product, unsurprisingly) is interesting – open our organisational data streams (by API) and provide access to our data, and in return the community will add to our data and improve our intelligence. In it’s most basic form, APIs and the ODS allow us to crowdsource data – and it will effectively take a brand beyond it’s current audience and into the ‘world as a sample’ territory. One of the important milestones of brands opening up API streams will be the creation of industry standards. For example, if Sony Ericsson and Nokia opened up their market research data streams and shared them with one another, it’d be incredibly important for each organisation to share the same type of information, in the same way. There’s also a huge angle for ODS and the semantic web, but that’s probably best saved for another blog post.

The Cloud
Previously, the volume of information that we could deal with was limited by how much hardware we’d bought, but with the rise of cloud computing (which has been a ‘rise of’ subject now for more than ten years) the amount of data that a brand can hold is practically limitless. This has two dramatic effects on an organisation; 1) it will make the organisation more agile (think Toyota’s just-in-time strategy) meaning that if there’s a huge spike in traffic to an online store it won’t crash and 2) the cloud is a more cost-effective solution for data, so brands will save cash that they can then invest in marketing and advertising. Hopefully.

And (again), all of this combines to help a brand become more customer-centric and agile.

I’m not sure the way I’ve written this post up will make much sense, but this does all connect together quite neatly. Or at least it did when I was taking notes. So I took a photo of my notes and included them below – it might help, it might make things more confusing

]]> http://jedhallam.com/five-important-technologies-for-business/feed/ 2 http://jedhallam.com/five-important-technologies-for-business/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JedHallam/~3/oIRwskTnKC4/ http://jedhallam.com/london-calling%e2%80%a6/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 06:27:34 +0000 Jed http://jedhallam.com/london-calling%e2%80%a6/

London calling to the faraway towns,

Now that war is declared-and battle come down

I’m sure you’ve heard the news, I’ve left Wolfstar and moved to London to join uber-advertising agency VCCP to help launch VCCP Share.

I’ve been a part of Wolfstar since 2008 and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to launch Wolfstar Labs, work with some incredible people, help fantastic clients and create some brand-altering campaigns.

Tim, Mark, Bailey and Stuart have all been incredible mentors and in my two and a half years with the agency they’ve helped me to grow faster than I would have anywhere else. In particular, Mark helped me to understand what it is that I enjoy about the industry and where I’d like my career to go. I’ve also met some amazing friends in Amy, Mike, Clare, Anthony, Chris, Will and Sam.

I spoke with Amelia and Graham a few months ago and I was immediately excited about their plans, and now is a great time to move on. There feels like there’s a natural transition between where I started and where I’d like to be and VCCP is a huge part of that.

I’ll be joining the newly created VCCP Share as its Communities Director and I’ll be looking at how my new clients can use social media and networks to learn from and connect with their audiences in a new way. I’m ridiculously excited to be working with a brilliant new team, in a new environment and in a new city.

If you’re in London and fancy having a cheeky beer, then please drop me an email, an @ or a text. We’ll be sorting out drinks properly soon, too.

The Clash | London Calling (Live, Sep 1982) courtesy of TheOldJoey

It’s a video created by the amazing agency m ss ng p eces for Intel Visual Life on Michael Wolff and his three muscles for creative design. I’ve been a huge fan of Wolff since finding a profile piece on Wolff Olins a few years ago, it inspired me to buy the seminal Wally Olins book The Brand Handbook (well worth the £6) and since then I’ve tried to find everything and anything on Wolff and Olins (look here too: CreativeReview got Wolff and Olins back together a few years back for an interview).

One of the standout comments from the video below is;

“A brand is really a way of remembering what something is like, for future reference. Something you value, something you feel attracted to.”

On the surface, this comment is purely about the aesthetics of a brand, but I think Wolff is being much broader than design. In a world of increasingly visual communications (not from a design point of view, but from the point of view of being able to see communications) it’s important to realise the impact that this has on the brand – we can see the logo, the marketing materials, the advertising but now we also see the conversations going on around a brand. Krugman’s theory of Effective Frequency now has many more inputs than pre-digital evolution. Conversation is part of the fabric of the brand, and we can see it everywhere.

Watch the video, it’s fantastic.