iPlot

Mad Men Finale: So You Like Being in Advertising After All?

2009-11-10T22:49:49-08:00

What a season finale it was. ‘Shut the Door. Have a Seat’ was a “tight balance of emotionally pungent drama and company coup d’etat,” the LA Times wrote. And indeed, Mad Men came through in the end. And all the mad men and women came through: Sterling, Cooper, Pryce, Pete, Peggy, Joan, and, more than anyone else of course, Don Draper.

He took Conrad Hiltons’s advice to heart and instead of “crying and relying on other people’s moves” he became the master of his fortune and finally did something meaningful. You could see the glow in his eyes, the pride, and the deep satisfaction of someone who has found (or accepted) his calling. “So you like being in advertising after all?” Sterling asked (a rhetorical question). Facing a divorce from his wife and separation from his kids, Draper, for the first time, gained the stature of a man who has a moral compass. With faith both in himself and in others, the boss turned into a leader.

The final scene with the new agency crew gathered in the makeshift hotel room office poignantly displayed that Draper’s evolution mirrored the dramatic changes a whole society was undergoing at the time: Gender equality, democratization of ideas, flat(ter) hierarchies, and employee empowerment, and an angst, underlying all this progress, triggered by JFK’s assassination. “People used to buy things. Then something terrible happened. And people changed. They want different things now. No one really knows how everything’s changed. But you do,” Draper says in his pitch to Peggy, as he’s trying to convince her to join the new venture rising out of the ashes of the firm formerly known as Sterling Cooper. Although set against the backdrop of the early sixties, the Mad Men finale could be read as commentary on the current cultural climate. Times are as transformative as they were back then. The sentiment is equally nervous, and after 9/11 and the Great Recession people are looking for new meaning in a post-materialistic and, sorry Don, post-advertising world.

And yet, Mad Men’s finale represented both swan song and rebirth of an industry. It may be very American to consider every crisis an opportunity, and in this sense, the end of Mad Men season III was a genuinely American happy ending, or better, an ending with the happiest possible departure – the beginning of a whole new story.Peggy, the empathizer and Pete, the innovator, both had tears in their eyes when they were asked to join the new firm, because, at last, they were given the recognition they deserved, and the opportunity to “build something.” Happiness lies in its pursuit, as we all know, and the Mad Men finale reminded us of a great national pastime: If we throw all our talent and passion together, we can build something great. It can be an advertising firm, a movement, or an entire nation.

TED and Others to Unveil Charter for Compassion

2009-11-08T22:57:41-08:00

TED India just ended, and the TED team is already off to the next exhilarating project. On November 12, 2009, TED and others will be unveiling the Charter for Compassion, a document about the core shared values and moral code of every world religion, the “Golden Rule.” The Charter is the result of 2008 TED Prize winner Karen Armstrong’s “wish” (if you haven’t read Armstrong’s latest book, The Case for God, I highly recommend it – even, or especially, if you consider yourself an atheist and usually side with Richard Dawkins et al).

More than 75 events are currently planned around the globe to launch the Charter for Compassion on November 12. Everyone can become a part of it by attending one of these events or hosting their own; by emailing, blogging, writing, broadcasting, or offering media space for Charter banners, widgets, and videos. TED says it hopes that in the week following the launch, “thousands of sermons on the nature of compassion will be preached all over the world ... thousands of discussions will be held around dinner tables ... thousands of ideas will be shared.” Because, at the end of the day, “compassion is the best idea humanity ever had.”

The World's First Crowdsourced Creative Agency

2009-11-02T20:49:05-08:00

It’s always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alumns, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), “the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle.”

V&S says it will “provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world’s most talented creatives.” The press release promises that “perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd” but stays mum on how exactly the crowdsourced creative department will operate.

In any event, V & S is eating its own dog food. The first line you notice on its web site (after the humble “Welcome To Victors & Spoils. Let’s Change An Industry”) is “Why does this site look so plain, Jane?” and the answer is: because the site design, the look and feel, and even the logo are being crowdsourced.

Whether crowdsoucing yields better creative results – who knows. It certainly is a differentiator. V&S COO Claudia Batten twittered that she got calls from five Fortune 200 CMOs in the first five days since launch. We will follow this one closely.

Forrester: Adaptive Branding and the New Four P’s of Marketing

2009-11-01T20:47:26-08:00

Forrester is about to release a new report on “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age,” in which it proposes replacing “brand managers” with “brand advocates.” Advertising Age provides a sneak peek at the ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’ presented in the report: permission, proximity, perception, and participation. Other core elements include: “embracing an expanded role for consumer intelligence, focusing on strategic brand platforms, and empowering a federated organization."

A fervent advocate of marketing as a cross-organizational catalyst for change myself, I wholeheartedly agree with BBH Labs which believes the Forrester report points to a potentially larger opportunity for the discipline: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

This view is really becoming a groundswell, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano from the Dachis Group (“Social Business Design”), Francois Gossieaux (Beeline Labs), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

California Artist Rebuilds World Economy With Antimatter

2009-10-28T20:44:35-07:00

The overlap with the title of the blog I write for CNET, Matter/Antimatter, is completely coincidental, but since most meaningful events are coincidental, it makes perfect sense that it prompted San Francisco-based conceptual artist Jonathon Keats to send me a note pointing to his upcoming exhibition "The First Bank of Antimatter."

Keats' previous artistic enterprises include applying string theory to real estate development, and in the wake of global economic collapse, Keats is now introducing a hedge against future catastrophe by creating a mirror economy designed to skyrocket as world markets plummet: the first holistic response to the great recession.

"Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth," explains Keats. "My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets."

Backed by private Swiss funding, his scheme will be implemented beginning on November 12, 2009, when the First Bank of Antimatter opens in San Francisco's Monadnock Building, the location of Modernism Gallery. The bank will serve as a hub for antimatter transactions worldwide, eventually financing the building of antimatter infrastructure and providing the public with a full range of investment opportunities. "But our first order of business will be printing money," says Keats. "Cash is the foundation of any economy, and an anti-economy is no exception."

Issued in three convenient denominations, ranging from 10,000 positrons to 1,000,000 positrons, and initially trading at an exchange rate of $10 to $1,000, the anti-money will be backed by antimatter stored in the bank's vault. Because matter and antimatter annihilate each other on contact, antimatter positrons will be continuously produced on location by decay of the radioactive isotope potassium-40.

"We want our customers to be confident that the antimatter is available on demand, but we're advising clients to conduct transactions strictly in paper currency," says Keats, who has used his artistry to design the money in multiple colors including red, blue and green. "The paper is cotton rag, archival enough to survive economic Armageddon" he promises. "It's an essential asset in any balanced portfolio. Antimatter is a natural haven for wealth when everything becomes worthless."

Like advertising guru Rory Sutherland said at TEDGlobal: "Most of our problems are problems of perception." And: "We need more intangible value." I always knew we could rely on artists (and advertisers!) to (re)-build an anti-economy of meaning, and I am thrilled to see this vision finally materialize.

The White Flash

2009-10-24T19:10:43-07:00

"You have all the time in the world. Don't squander it."

The Twittering’s On The Wall

2009-10-22T04:45:51-07:00

Upon the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city of Berlin has launched a remarkable “living” online memorial: the Berlin Twitter Wall.

Using the hashtag #fotw, people can share their thoughts on the Fall of the Berlin Wall and tell the world “which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place.” The Web site scrolls messages along a backdrop of the East Side Gallery, a famous stretch of the wall still standing and painted with murals. By clicking "stop" and "play", older tweets are shown. A click on the cameras up on the wall displays a selection of the domino-artwork that will fall in a symbolic act on November 9th 2009 at the "Fest der Freiheit" (festival of freedom) at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

I love how the Berlin Twitter Wall intersects history and real-time action, memory and instant gratification, gravitas with graffiti, concrete architecture and virtual realm – and make all of that open and social.

Bono on "Rebranding America"

2009-10-20T01:11:23-07:00

While 500 thought leaders from the US and abroad are convening at PopTech 2009 to “reimagine America,” Bono, in a much discussed op-ed column in Sunday’s NY Times, reminds the world of the “idea of America” – and defends the president who has set out to reinvigorate it:

“From a development perspective, you couldn’t dream up a better dream team to pursue peace in this way, to rebrand America.“

The re-branding efforts seem to bear fruit: “In the same week that Mr. Obama won the Nobel, the United States was ranked as the most admired country in the world, leapfrogging from seventh to the top of the Nation Brands Index survey — the biggest jump any country has ever made.”

“The Nobel Peace Prize is the rest of the world saying, ‘Don’t blow it.’”

Whatever you may think of Bono, it takes guts to be so flat-out idealistic and make yourself an easy target for cynics. See Andrew Keen’s (“The Cult of the Amateur”) response on Twitter:

“Bono is wrong. America needs to learn to be a country rather than an idea.”

New Perspectives On The Work/(Life) Conundrum

2009-10-19T23:12:33-07:00

My mom always told me “Make your passion your profession, and you’ll be a happy man.” She was right, and I am glad I followed her advice. Yet I appear to be part of a minority. In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”), this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of workers who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%, and the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%. Furthermore, the article refers to a more recent survey by DDI which found that more than half of the respondents described their job as “stagnant,” as in “nothing interesting to do” and “little hope of professional growth" within their current organization. Half of these “stagnators” said they were planning to look for another job as soon as the economy recovered. These survey findings are flanked by several recent cultural events in the US that indicate a shift in the way we negotiate the meaning of work, for example Michael Moore’s “Capitalism – A Love Story” and a whole New York Times Magazine issue on “Anxiety.”

And yet, Americans will be surprised to hear that the most dramatic manifestation of this apparent misery-at-work trend occurred in “socialist” France. A spate of attempted and successful suicides at France Telecom that occured over the past twelve months, many of them explicitly prompted by stress and dissatisfaction at work, forced the deputy CEO to resign and sparked an emotional national debate about life in the modern corporation.

“You are what you do,” German philosopher Immanuel Kant contended long before we started talking about Work/Life balance. Having always been an idealistic concoction most fervently promoted by those biased towards Life, this balance wouldn’t even need to be promoted if it were indeed a battle of equal powers. It isn’t. Work has invaded every single aspect of our lives, and it has infiltrated our society Mafia-style: controlling and demanding every hour of our lives without appearing to do so. Increasingly, Work is no longer visible as such and is instead embedded into Life, which makes its power even more frightening: If you do things that are work but don’t feel like work, then Work has ultimately prevailed.

With the advent of digital media, the relationship between Work and Life has again dramatically changed. Social computing has turned the workplace into the living room and the living room into the workplace. For the digital knowledge workers of the attention economy, it has become harder, if not impossible, to separate Work and Life. The concepts of live-to-work and work-to-live, often pitted against as a clash of American and European cultures, are too one-dimensional to truly capture the reality of most professionals today. Work is Life, and Life is Work, and there is not much in between. The question is no longer how we can balance our digital lifestyle with our professional lives, the question is: How were we able to get any work done before the digital era? And how did we have a life before Twitter?

The new digital work lifestyle has profound implications for one’s (professional) identity: What do you do when everyone else does everything all the time? With everything and everyone connected, the once clear contours of our existence give way to an indistinguishable maelstrom of stimulation: the story of our life is no longer a curriculum, it is a non-linear stream. You can go swimming, fishing, snorkeling, and sailing in it. You can choose to stay on the surface or take a deep dive. But you can never leave. And you can always drown. With Work and Life being the Big Blend, it is shocking but not surprising that for some the only way to take a break from Work is to take a permanent sabbatical from Life, as in the case of the France Telecom workers.

The borderless Work/Life experience creates agoraphobia, an anxiety about an indefinite space of self-actualization possibilities and one’s position within. As Alain de Botton, the philosopher for the knowledge worker, put it: “It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. It’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm and be free of career anxiety.”

The Economist suspects that companies aggravate this anxiety by a new, ill-conceived form of Taylorism: “Giant retailers use ‘workforce management’ software to monitor how many seconds it takes to scan the goods in a grocery cart, and then reward the most diligent workers with prime working hours. The public sector, particularly in Britain, is awash with inspectorates and performance targets. Taylorism, which Charlie Chaplin lampooned so memorably in ‘Modern Times,’ has spread from the industrial to the post-industrial economy. In Japan some firms even monitor whether their employees smile frequently enough at customers.”

These are all measures that will very likely deter Generation Y workers, the digital natives who have grown up with the Internet and expect organizations to provide them with much more ambiguity and empowerment than these were willing to give to their parents. For the Gen Y’ers, Work is no longer just what you do; Work is another way of Life – a meaningful life. It implies a Work-Life package that reconciles passion and profession, meaning and earning, impact and income. A good job is what you believe in – as long as you can abandon it at will. Sure, Work has become invasive, but so has Life, as work performance is being constantly disrupted by the micro-events in one's digital life feed (email, Twitter, blogging, social networks, etc.). Companies need to learn to convert this distraction into productivity. In fact, this might be the biggest management challenge for the next ten years: Learning how to leverage the tools of distraction to increase productivity – and happiness.

No matter where on the Work/Life continuum you’d place yourself, you will acknowledge the one premise that unites us all: how we are going to work in the future will determine how we’re going to live in the future. Consequently, the Berlin-based creative collective Palomar 5 believes that the best way to find out about the future of work is to let people from different backgrounds work together. Palomar 5 has therefore organized a six-week long Innovation Camp in Berlin that gathers, Big Brother-like, 30 handpicked uber-achievers under 30 to explore (and live together) a vision of work in the digital future. The Camp’s agenda and workflow have been carefully crafted and encompass various modules, guest experts (among them a team from the frog studio in Stuttgart), and collaborative creative assignments that tackle Work/Life as one big design challenge.

In a similar vein, The Internet As Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor will be held at the Eugene Lang College of The New School in New York City on November 12-14. An overview Introduction sets out the seminal questions arising “in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media.” The conference is free, with advance registration required.

There’s no dearth of books on the subject either: If I had to pick two, I’d go with Alain de Botton’s The Sorrows and Pleasures of Work (with a poignant chapter on accountants) and Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital which provides a comprehensive overview of the aspirations and habits of the Gen Y workforce.

Oh, and last but not least, our next design mind issue will be dedicated to “Work/Life” – if you would like to contribute or submit ideas for articles and art, please contact us at designmind@frogdesign.com (we love our work so much we’ll even respond on weekends…).

Time Lapsed Typhoon "Nangka" Over Hong Kong

2009-10-17T21:27:23-07:00

This is a timelapse from 7am until 9pm of Typhoon Nangka hitting Hong Kong. Check out the rain walls at 0:50, 1:10, 1:45, 4:10, lights going up at 4:30. It's interesting how the clouds change direction while the typhoon moves from the south to the north-east (camera looking north). ... (hat tip to Chailie Ho)

No Fun: Viral Video Theory

2009-10-13T01:14:57-07:00

Viral videos are one of the vexing mysteries of modern marketing. Using Volkswagen's "Piano Stairs" as a case study (see video below), the Mainwaring Blog takes another stab at suggesting some ground rules - but like all well-intentioned viral video advice, it remains stale: You can know all the rules but what's the point when the whole point is to break them?

NPR and frog design Host Digital Think-In to Explore Future of Public Radio

2009-10-11T23:53:54-07:00

"NPR is a brand to die for," as a colleague of mine said. Enjoying the authority of a well-established public media vanguard with a broad and extremely loyal listenership, it has also managed to become an agile innovator that is embracing (and even pioneering) the new rules of the digital era of broadcasting. NPR's social media footprint is constantly widening, its API much acclaimed, and its recent iPhone app has already surpassed that of the New York Times and other news outlets in terms of popularity.

It is thus not surprising (but still absolutely commendable) that NPR is experimenting with further opening its brand and in fact holding a full-blown digital strategy session in the public limelight, as it did this Friday with the NPR Digital Think In in San Francisco. I was priviliged to be involved in the planning and organization of the event, on behalf of my employer, frog design, which co-hosted the event. We facilitated the workshop sessions, provided our studio facilities, and also helped NPR connect with key thought leaders from the Bay Area tech and design communities.

The Digital Think In brought together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants included leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm included: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

Here's how NPR's Kinsey Wilson framed their mission:

"Historic changes in technology and the rapid growth in digital media have had a profoundly disruptive effect on journalism, calling into question the news media's ability to fulfill its time-honored function as civic watchdog. Hardly a week goes by that we don’t hear of yet another major news organization cutting staff, curtailing coverage or closing its doors. As traditional news organizations struggle to adapt, new, non-traditional outlets are beginning to take their place. As a not-for-profit with a distinct business model, National Public Radio has benefited from the disruption and seen its audience grow. Americans now spend more time with NPR than any other news source. But it's hardly immune from the technological challenges of the era. And it's clear that the rise of digital media will ultimately disrupt NPR's business model as well. NPR has responded by recruiting digital leaders to serve the top of the organization, embarking on an unprecedented staff training program and overhauling its digital media strategy. It is poised to take further steps to ensure it remains a vital source of news on every platform."

The Digital Think In explored five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants broke out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational road map.

Closing out the day, NPR's Vivian Schiller suggested to call the next gathering "Open-mic Night," given the stand-up performances of the presenters. She said she was overwhelmed by the ideas that came out of the event and that some of them could be implemented soon. Kinsey Wilson assured everyone that their efforts will not end up tossed in a dusty drawer and forgotten. So be it!

The event was live-blogged on the Think In micro-site which also featured live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees were tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin (and there was a lively conversation going on between on-site and remote participants; also check out the NPR Facebook page for comments).

You can view pictures of the event on Flickr.

frog and Fast Company: The Future of Health Care Is Social

2009-10-06T17:55:24-07:00

Coinciding with the launch of the Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Fast Company.com today published a by-lined article produced by frog:

The Future of Health Care is Social

“In this feature article, frog design uses its people-centered design discipline to show how elegant health and life science technology solutions will one day become a natural part of our behavior and lifestyle. What you see here is the result of frog's ongoing collaboration with health-care providers, insurers, employers, consumers, governments, and technology companies.”

Gizmodo called it “very cool stuff” and further commented:

“The entire article is 9 pages of well-reasoned scenarios involve wireless devices galore, dynamic health monitoring and remote doctor consultation. Some of the technology looks to be lifted from Star Trek, but most of the ideas could be implemented tomorrow, should someone bankroll the cash, time and necessary legislation. (Keep in mind, US healthcare won't even acknowledge devices as practical as the iPhone.)”

You can also download the article as pdf.

This Thursday, Fast Company and frog are going to host a Twitter chat (noon EST) in which we will discuss the piece. Hashtag is #futureofhealthcare.

Goodness on Twitter: From Attention-Sharing to Tweet Fund Drives to Good Mobs

2009-10-04T18:32:04-07:00

Twitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.

Last Friday, Twitter did something remarkable. It added a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and innovators to this list, among them Social Edge, Skoll Foundation, Kiva, Matt Flannery (Kiva co-founder), Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen Fund founder), charity: water, GOOD Magazine, Kjerstin Erickson (FORGE founder), and Room to Read. Not knowing what was going on, Kiva’s Flannery thought there was a spam attack and complained about the 500 new users a minute he was getting. But not for long.

Twitter’s move is huge, not only because it propels social entrepreneurs to enter mainstream but also because the micro-blogging service – THE trading floor for attention on the web – has decided to give away some of the attention it attracts to promote good causes. Consider it the New Socialism: a redistribution of attention, not of material wealth. What’s even more remarkable is the reaction of one of the benefitting organizations, Social Edge, which immediately sent out a message to all its new users pointing them to a list of 100 other social entrepreneurs and innovators on Twitter. Give more than you take: that’s the power of meaningful marketing and exactly the kind of giving that makes companies thrive in the ‘share economy.' Good creates more good.

There are other, even more immediate ways in which Twitter can be used for doing good. My colleague Jacob Zukerman proposed it the other day, and I found the concept instantly compelling: instant social action, enabled by Twitter. Tweet Mobs for collective action. The idea is simple: Convert all the attention on Twitter into real-world action – in real-time. With some twitter users attracting more than a million followers, their social influence is significant – why not use it for social good, especially when you can “eventize” it by creating artificially scarce moments of real-time public collaboration?

The link between tweet and deed is not new on Twitter and exists in various formats (Mashable has provided a great overview): Cause-related fundraising (Tweet fund drives) via Twitter has been made popular by Twestival, Tweetsgiving,12for12k, Tweetathon, and others. An alternate concept is Twollars, a Twitter-based currency with no hard money value that allows users to pledge money to charity using Twitter. Describing itself as “a currency of appreciation for Twitter,” it effectively connects micro-payments with micro-blogging. (Speaking of currencies, PollyTrade links Twitter accounts to E*Trade account and allows brokers to trade stock via Twitter.) And there are Tweet-Ups – offline events initiated and organized via Twitter – but in this case, too, the tweet and the deed are asynchronous. Carrotmob, a congenial social media platform for social activism, uses Twitter, but it still requires a moment of translation as well: good will and a commitment to a cause can be immediately “socialized,” however, the output – the action – still occurs via intermediary.

All these formats do not convert instantly into offline action in the way Flash Mobs do. What if followers not only follow but do (in the best “Here Comes Everybody” style)? What if Blog Action Day became Twitter Action Minute? These Twitter Mobs or Smart Tweets would capitalize on the unique combination of peer pressure, presence, location-based eventization, and of course, sheer reach. The train wreck Sarah Lacy-Mark Zuckerberg interview at SXSW 2008 was a negative example of live-mobbing on Twitter, a disaster unfolding in real-time, amplified through the synchronous meta-conversation on Twitter. The #CNNfail campaign in response to CNN’s deficient coverage of the Iranian election, was another one. The enormous power of these real-time conversations is frightening, but it is also promising. The more optimistic equation goes like this: Attention = social capital = social action. What if a group of Twitter followers all picked up one piece of garbage from the street? What if they all gave food to a homeless person? What if they exchanged money, products, hugged a stranger, etc.? And so on. It’d be a real-time, real-world transaction that would be as swift as the transactions taking place at breathtaking pace every second in the highly virtual realm of international finance. A smart attention-to-action cascade. A Good Mob.

Maybe a fantasy – but a good one.

[image credit: Maple and Leek]

Of Elephants and Planes

2009-10-02T17:55:59-07:00

TED just launched its first-ever short film (30 sec to 3 mins) contest - with winners to be shown at TEDIndia this November. The TED Blog is taking the opportunity to feature some of the short films that played live at the conference in recent years.

Here are two of my favorites: "Flight Patterns," by Aaron Koblin, which uses FAA flight data to create shimmering animations of flight traffic patterns and density. And a PSA produced by the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Brands in Public: The End of the Conversation?

2009-09-30T21:32:43-07:00

It was just a matter of time: “With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf,” I wrote in early July.

And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction business model (a portal for public-facing aggregated customer support) into the broader realm of brand management. It aggregates the aggregation, if you will, and centralizes what Modernista, Skittles, and Crispin Porter Bogusky did on their own sites.

The cost of participation for a brand is US$400 per month, and the incentives are threefold: First, brands can publicly demonstrate their commitment to transparency. Secondly, because the portal presents branded conversations just one click away from each other, brands might benefit from an attention spill-over (while of course also having to fear a cannibalization of their feed). Finally, the aggregated conversation tracking comes with some metrics, kind of like FriendFeed and Google Analytics combined. The dashboard view puts brands in control of the conversation, or at least suggests as much.

However, I have a feeling that Brands in Public will fall flat. As with the new Google Sidewiki, one could argue that community dies in the very moment someone tries to “own” it. If it’s true that 'your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room,' how interesting then is what these people say when you’re not only in the same room (any social network feed, i.e. Twitter, Facebook) but actually on the same stage with them (Brands in Public)? The outcome of Godin’s and BuzzAgent’s experiment remains to be seen: It may mark the next stage of the 'conversation economy.' Or the end of the conversation.

(Hat tip to Kristina Loring)

tvChatter - Twitter/Social TV iPhone App, Coming Soon...

2009-09-29T18:37:06-07:00

Tim Leberecht

Are Writers Selling Out to Marketers? Alain de Botton’s “Heathrow Diary”

2009-09-27T19:28:00-07:00

For one week, Swiss author Alain de Botton was living the life I’ve always wanted to live. As the first-ever writer-in-residence of London’s Heathrow Airport, he was working on his new book on site, observing, documenting, and philosophically charging the emotions and motions of the two arguably most interesting things in life – people and planes – in transit, in situ.

My own fascination with airports started at an early age thanks to the location of my parents' house. I grew up with planes taking off and landing at the nearby airport, and as a student I spent one summer vacation working as a baggage handler on the tarmac. Ever since, aircraft noise makes me feel at ease, and if I could, I would become a permanent tenant of Narita’s Star Alliance lounge, where I would watch planes all day.

Airports have also long piqued the interest of artists of course – from Brian Eno’s "Music for Airports," to Steven Spielberg’s "The Terminal," to 747-turned-designer hotels. Exhibiting equally the technical routines and the emotional excesses of 21st century civilization, airports serve as mundane settings for the dramatic and dramatic settings for the mundane – de Botton, as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence, set out to capture both.

The assignment was simple: De Botton was commissioned by the British Airports Authority (BAA) to spend a week in the middle of Heathrow’s bustling Terminal 5 and write about life at the airport. He got his own desk, was awakened by Air Canada every morning, and immersed himself into the airport logistics while living his usual ascetic life (judging from all photos, he wore his signature blue shirt all week). Most of the time he observed and conducted what design researchers would call ethnographic research – knowing that you can best study human behavior, on any given scale, when you’re close enough to the action but not part of the commotion. The personal union of researcher and writer raises some interesting questions: Where exactly do you draw the line between observation and interpretation? Where does research end and authorship start? Is research even possible without storytelling?

But these are technicalities. Of bigger concern for reviewers appears to be the “precarious line between creative independence and commerce,” as the Guardian calls it. Blog site Gawker, among others, was fast in chastising the unconventional book deal as a shameless and rather desperate PR stunt, but the alleged cynicism reflects more poorly on the critics themselves: Isn’t the greatest cynicism of all to look for the cynical in all things? For the record, de Botton insists that BAA gave him complete editorial freedom and that his writing was thoroughly subjective and as unbiased as it can possibly be. He is not the first writer to experiment with commercial book mandates (bestselling author Fay Weldon shocked the arts world in 2001 when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by Bulgari) and smart enough to know that his "Heathrow Diary" project might stir up a controversy. It would have been much safer, from his PR point-of-view, to not pursue it.

Yet de Botton's interest in airports seems genuine: “There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them," he told the Guardian. Moreover, he believes the project is philosophically sound and in fact truly innovative as it revives an old tradition of underwriting: “That one of the largest organizations in the UK should take an interest in a book is almost quaint, like sponsoring a poet,” he said. “On behalf of my fellow beleaguered writers, it’s nice that writers seem to matter.”De Botton already has plans for the next underwritten project: “I’d like to be a writer in residence at a nuclear power station.”

And sure – why not? I think we have to overcome the notion that a distinction between marketing and publishing is still possible. Herman Miller’s See magazine was one of the most artful and best-curated print magazines out there, Strategy + Business by Booz is one of the sharpest business publications, and there are countless other examples of high-quality corporate publishing. What is wrong with the idea that not only marketers need to be good writers, but writers can be good marketers, too – for the common good of public life? Brands, advertisers, and PR agencies shape the cultural fabric of our societies as much as museums, galleries, artists, and writers do – if the mechanics of their complex interactions are more exposed these days, this can only be a good thing. As long as the involved parties’ agendas are transparent – as they were in De Botton’s airport project – readers can judge for themselves how valuable they find the products of such collaborations: there is no free lunch, there is no free content, after all.

Aside from that, it is naïve to assume that PR agencies and brand marketers are all evil and unconditionally push for a lopsided, overwhelmingly positive expression of their brands. By now, most of them are happy to tune into the choir of conversational marketing evangelists who understand that authenticity trumps news which may be good but lacks credibility. In this vein, Dan Glover, creative director at Mischief, BAA’s PR agency, told the NY Times that “If we funded a brochure that said how wonderful the airport was, people would switch off because they’d think they’re being marketed to.” Instead, he added, the Heathrow Diary campaign sought to stimulate “branded conversations” among travelers “through the experience of seeing a top literary figure at the airport — and potentially being a character in the book — and by receiving an exclusive copy to read on your travels. The overarching objective is to make a passenger’s time at Heathrow the best memory of the trip.”

It all goes back to the pillars of "meaningful marketing": Add value, create a (social) event, be a change agent, engage the audience, don’t market products, produce! Clients turning to artists and storytellers to create “meaning” for their brands intend that the return-on-meaning transcends the original assignment – the wealth spreads and generates a “meaning surplus.”

In this case, De Botton wasn’t hired to write an image brochure for an airport whose bad reputation is well known. The “Art of Travel” author took advantage of the opportunity to study one of his favorite subjects first-hand, and rather than just bitching and moaning about the notoriously inhumane experience of having to spend time at Heathrow, he and his client actually did something to make the experience better for travelers. The result of his work, "A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary," was published on September 24, and BAA is distributing 10,000 free copies of the book to Heathrow passengers (it is not devoid of irony to create artificial scarcity by limiting the book’s free distribution to one of the world’s most frequented travel hubs). Afterwards the book will be available for sale through Amazon’s British Web site and traditional bookstores. De Botton’s "Heathrow Diary" benefits the publisher, the writer, BAA, and travelers – a win-win-win-win and a story with a happy landing.

Read excerpts from “Heathrow Diary”

[Image credit: LA Times]

Healthy Language: Pre-Existing Conditions Do Not Exist

2009-09-26T16:19:07-07:00

The language geek that I am, I find it greatly rewarding that the Economist, as one of the few publications, insists on using the term "existing condition" instead of the wonderfully nonsensical "pre-existing condition" – despite its widespread (mis)use in the current US healthcare debate. Note: A conditions exists or it doesn’t. It's a black or white statement. "Pre-existing" is therefore identical with "non-existing" – because when things start to exist they usually exist 100%. But if pre-existing conditions were non-existing conditions, they wouldn't pose a controversial issue for health insurers and consequently not play any role in this debate.

The Science of Re-tweeting

2009-09-25T21:14:05-07:00

Hubspot viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella has examined 5 million tweets and 40 million re-tweets over the course of nine months and just published his study on the factors of re-tweeting success: What does/does not get re-tweeted, and for what reasons?

Some insights: We learn that semicolons are the "the only unretweetable punctuation mark," which I, as an avid semi-colon fan, find deeply disturbing. Speaking of which, emotions and ego-mania are not so popular. Tweets about work, religion, money and media/celebrities are far more re-tweetable than negative emotions, sensations, swear words, and self-reference. The least re-tweetable word is "game," and the most re-tweetable is "you." Time of day matters, and breaking news works, both of which are not too surprising. But "please retweet"? - please...

Read Zarella's Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter on Fast Company or download the full report.