Only Dead Fish

Being 40

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Cripes. Today I turned 40. I don't know what being 40 should feel like but I'm pretty sure I don't feel it. Maybe I should be mid mid-life-crisis or something (or maybe I've already had it). Anyway, I still get as excited and enthused as ever about the possibilities of what is around me so that can't be bad. So, just for the hell of it, here's 10 things that happened on this day in history...

• 1756 - The Seven Years' War begins when England declares war on France.
• 1776 - American Revolution: the Virginia Convention instructs its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States Declaration of Independence
• 1905 - Las Vegas, Nevada, is founded when 110 acres are auctioned off
• 1909 - James Mason (English actor) is born
• 1940 - McDonald's opened its first restaurant in San Bernardino, California
• 1945 - Last skirmish of the Second World War in Europe fought near Prevalje, Slovenia.
• 1957 -  Britain drops its first H-Bomb over Christmas Island
• 1963 - Gordon Cooper becomes the first American to spend more than a day in space
• 1988 - After more than eight years of fighting, the Red Army begins its withdrawal from Afghanistan
• 2007 - Neil Perkin starts to worry unnecessarily about hitting 40

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(Not So) Hidden Assets

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I've been doing a lot of evangelising about the power of social media lately. I believe that unless you actively participate in it (and I don't just mean having a Facebook profile) it is very difficult to grasp the subtleties that characterise it. More than that, social media comes from an entirely different place to communications media. Social dimensions lie at the heart of the human experience. Whatever people do, it is more fun if it is shared, and that applies to all forms of content. It is increasingly expected. More than that, I believe the changes are so fundamental that social media thinking needs to run through the entire organisation.

When I talk about blogging, the number one question I get asked by non-bloggers is where do you find the time? I think this is the wrong question about the wrong thing. I find the time because I believe it is important enough to do so. More than that, I think the question  misses the point that being part of a network, a community, means that the good stuff now comes to me. Think about the good blogs you read on your RSS reader, think about the links you look at via your Delicious network, think about the comments, the Tweets, the stuff you get sent. Social Media helps me be far more efficent. It really isn't that difficult.

I'm not saying everyone should blog - it's not right for everyone - but I am saying that bloggers get social media because they are already active participants. So my advice would be if you have bloggers in your organisation, go talk to them. Understand what they are doing, how they are doing it, what they are getting from it. They are the best source of consultancy you've got - and best of all, it's free.

Everything Is Interesting

Funny - whenever I hear people talking about Google's 20 percent time policy the focus is always on the time (it is after all, 20% of someone's time - one day a week to work on whatever company-related project they like - imagine that). But important though the time element is, this probably misses the point entirely. Innovation thrives in cultures which allow it to thrive. Innovation happens when managers get out of the way, listen a bit harder to their people, accept that the really great idea will probably come from somewhere you least expected. Somewhat of a theme in this interview with Eric Schmidt:

"The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives."

It's something we intuitively know but which few companies actually live by. Somebody said to me today that we are moving from a business culture based on "time is money" to one where "knowledge is money". I think she was right. And if knowledge is the raw material, then this gem from Stan (originally via), which he rightly says applies to all forms of creativity, is what it's all about. Because in some way, everything really is interesting.

The Cloud

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Boy the world is changing fast. A couple of months ago I wrote about distributed computing models (so called Cloud Computing). Amazon are very serious about it, and at the beginning of the month Google and IBM announced a partnership to deliver massively scalable networked cloud services. Initiated by an informal call from Sam to Eric (isn't that just the way these days?)

The shift has been quite fundamental, described here by Colleen DeCourcy as one "from Main Frame (many people sharing a computer) to Personal (one computer, one person) transitioning through Networked Internet (widespread distributed computing) to Ubiquitous Computing (where many computers share each of us)".

Distributed, networked models are disrupting everywhere. Function increasingly comes from the cloud. Colleen makes a related point about how "if we were accessing information and culture through many lenses and devices, our interfaces had to get out of the way and just facilitate". Which is the real point here. As things get more distributed, keeping stuff connected and putting new stuff together needs to be as easy as possible. The web is the web. It will become invisible. After all, it's only ad people that think in channels.

Eric Zener

Wow. I'm loving these paintings of swimmers by Eric Zener. Part of a collection of his newest works which is currently on show (in its last days) at the Gallery Henoch in New York if you're lucky enough to be there...

The Unbundling of Advertising

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I'm constantly reminded of the similarities in the challenges faced by the music industry and the communications industry. Both are in transformation, both are learning that it's not about trying to dictate the customer experience, both are looking for new ways to create value. Both are moving from models that leverage scarcity to a place where they derive value by what Ian Rogers calls leveraging the scale of the web. Or what News Corp COO Peter Chernin has called 'content ubiquity' - making it as easy as possible for people to find your good stuff (and pass it on), facilitating the conversation, helping the community do what it wants to do.

And this is similar to the unbundling of music. In a transmedia-planning sort-of-way we have to get more comfortable with moving from packaging up communications in neatly defined entities to allowing the end users to construct their own experience from tools, pieces of content, applications, useful stuff that is out there. In this way good social media campaigns do not have a defined end point but build value over time. In this way we enable healthy ecosystems, the loosely-coupled value chains that generate value right across the network - value for all the parties that participate, contribute, create stuff. None of this is entirely new but I just needed to get that straight in my head. Thoughts, feedback, comments, very welcome.

Free Range

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I've been having a bit of healthy discussion over here about whether businesses should embrace the new culture of openness or whether, to quote David "opening up a network only makes sense for the losers, not the winners," and instead "it is right to figure out which areas will be strategic to retaining users, and keep those closed at all costs."  I guess readers of this blog will know already where I stand on this, but for the record here's what I think.

I think it's too late. I think the balance of power has already shifted. And I think it's about your customers not about you. And you know what? This is a good thing.

Data portability between services and networks is already a significant issue. Its a major pain in the butt to be constantly keying in the same information and constructing multiple bespoke profiles. Consumer demand will inevitably drive the undoing of blockers to the free flow of data. Like Charlene Li, I believe that in the future social networks will be "like air...anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be" and that "without that social context in our connected lives, we won't really feel like we are truly living and alive". The socialisation of all content is already happening. If you erect barriers to interaction users will simply migrate to better services.

I'm not suggesting that companies should immediately start posting their balance sheets on the internet. But I am suggesting that in any place where they interact with their consumers they should respect the fact that it is their customer's data they are playing with (or it is at least shared data) and that that requires that the rules of engagement are respect, authenticity, openness. If you treat it like a war against your own customers to desparately try and fence them in it becomes a huge problem. If you treat it like a chance to engage with your customers in a more interesting and rewarding way it becomes a massive opportunity. 

And as far as monetisation is concerned, then I think the equation is very simple, even if the execution is more of a challenge. What ever happens, it will be based on facilitation and not around creating barriers. Success will be premised on interactions with an engaged community, as it always has been. Keep your users happy, you'll make money. Help them do what they are trying to do, you'll make money. Unhappy customers go elsewhere and don't come back.

Hitch Me

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There seems to be a number of marketing-related blog rankings around but this one, run by search and content agency Junta 42, has a unique kind of positioning in that it focuses on 'content marketing' and has a neat capability where visitors can vote for or 'hitch' their favourite blogs. Only Dead Fish has just made the list at number 41, so if you fancy giving the fish a hitch, you can do so here.

Sometimes Easy To Forget

"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."
Albert Schweitzer

Leaving Home

This made me laugh out loud on a Friday morning. A trailer for the award winning short film Goodbye To The Normals (warning to the sensitive: contains a little bad language):

Brilliant

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Twistori

Twistori is a Twitter application inspired by wefeelfine that allows people to follow Twitter updates focused around some particular words: Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Feel and Wish. Like the Digg Labs Swarm, Stack, Big Spy and the more recent pics applications that let you see what's being Dugg (and how many times) right as it's being Dugg, there is something strangely hypnotic about following real-time online social activity. I can't help feeling that there's some grand use for applications like this which is right around the corner but in the meantime, the strength of Twistori is in its selective focus. The words give you a stream of consciousness that is at one and the same time full of information and full of emotion. Amazing.
Hat tip to Nick for the link

Geek Dinner Social Cookbook

Eaon has a great little initiative going on subtitled "the finest brains in media and marketing share their culinary skills" - the thought being that we all have at least one signature dish which we like to roll out when the need arises.

So he's set up a geekdinner blog and is asking for contributions with the aim that if he gets enough content he'll publish it and donate the proceeds to a worthy cause. All you need to do is e-mail in your recipe along with some words on the story behind it, a brief bio, your linkage and a pic of yourself. The latest recipe is the legendary Basque Chicken (heavily based on an old Delia favourite) donated by some bloke with a distinctly dodgy goatee.

Cognitive Surplus

Excellent talk from Clay Shirky at the recent Web 2.0 Expo  (and in many ways relevant to the post below). I like his concept of the 'cognitive surplus' from which social and collaborative ideas will gain share. 16 minutes well spent, if only to hear the great example he uses of the Pluto page on Wikipedia .

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A Tale of Two Stats

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More evidence (if any were needed) of the degree of disruption new technologies and social media are having on some traditional media models from this entertainment media research study conducted at the beginning of the year. Most notable, is that relating to TV advertising, including:

• 27% of people agree or strongly agree that social networks have the potential to be the MAIN way in which they access video and music content
• 17% of people think that social networking has negatively impacted the time they spend watching TV (the most effected medium)
• 18% of people think that video streaming sites have made them watch less 'live' scheduled television
• The majority of people (58%) with the ability to record television digitally watch an equal or higher level of recorded than live programming. Of those who watch recorded programming 46% fast forward past the ads all the time, 79% all or most of the time, and only 2% never do.

Interestingly, according to the AA TV spend rose year on year in 2007 and is forecast to be up again year on year for Q1 2008. Work that one out.

The Brand of 2.0

       

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2.0.  It's become a cliche already hasn't it? But it's a suffix that attempts to express transformational change in many things - the way we work, the way we vote, the way we consume media, the way ideas spread. Enterprise 2.0, Politics 2.0, Publishing 2.0, Advertising 2.0 - it says we have moved on, arrived at a new place, drawn a line in the sand.

But it also suggests definable change. Staged change. I finish 1.0, now I'm in 2.0. When I finish 2.0 I'll be ready for 3.0. In reality of-course life is a whole lot blurrier than that, and things aren't so easily compartmentalised.

And so I think there's a danger with this kind of thing that we assume boundaries where there are none. That we set our objectives against an end point which doesn't exist. That we sell ourselves short instead of realising the fundamental change that needs to happen. Which I why I like this quote from journalist blogger Howard Owens speaking in the context of the changes facing the newspaper industry:

"See, I’m kind of tired of people talking about how newspapers are going through a ‘transition’. As in, ‘we just need to get through this transition.’ Transitions have beginnings, middles and ends. Transitions eventually stop and you get a chance to take a breath and say, ‘cool, we survived.’"

I think that applies right across the communications industry.