Only Dead Fish

How You Use Twitter Favourites

I promised I'd share the results of the quick poll on how you use Twitter favourites so here they are (click image to enlarge). A clear preference (61%) it seems for people using it for bookmarking/read-it-later, with a minority (30%) doing that and also using it to also give a Twitter 'Like' to something, but very few (7%) doing just the latter. There were some interesting comments (both here and on Twitter) about how people use them in their reading/sharing routines, including using IFTT to funnel favourited content through to Pocket or Instapaper which makes sense. Thanks everyone for voting and contributing.

How Do You Use Twitter Favourites?

I have a question. SAI recently featured the graph above in their 'Chart Of The Day' feature showing the way in which favouriting of Tweets has taken off since interactions were included in the '@' section and incorporated under the 'Discover' tab. Since this had made favouriting more of a public thing, they suggest that the activity has quickly developed into a kind of Twitter 'fist-bump', or their answer to Facebook's or Instagram's 'Like'. 

Since the changes I've found myself using Twitter favourites a lot more and if the number of people favouriting my own tweets is anything to go by, so have many others. Except I don't use it in the way that SAI suggest. I use it instead to bookmark tweets in situations where I think it looks interesting but don't have time now to click through and read the piece that is being shared (often when I'm on the move or have poor connection). So for me, it's more akin to Instapaper functionality than Facebook. My hunch is that this is a very common behaviour but I'm genuinely curious to understand if I'm right or wrong in thinking that. So I thought I'd do a quick poll to find out. I'd really appreciate your view (if there is a different way in which you use the functionality, please tick 'other' and feel free to explain more in the comments) and will of-course share the results. So my question is: how do you use Twitter favourites?

Slow

A few things about slowness.

A while back Matt Steel wrote a powerful post about how easy it is, in the rush of life, to lose perspective and forget that when we slow down, priorities often become clearer:

"The story I told myself was that slowness and emptiness were the same thing. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I’ve found recently that when the time is used well, slowness can actually be one of the most profound sources of abundance."

Seth Godin writes about how easy it is, in an age of real-time information, unlimited digital shelf space, and sharp spikes of attention, to forget that we are also living in the golden age of 'Slow Media'. Media and content where the goal isn't always to get it out there quicker (or make it noisier) than everyone else, but to simply say something worth saying and do it in a way that's worth waiting for:

"It might not be obvious media, or easy to understand media, or easily digested media, but that's okay, because slow media is not mass media. Slow media is not for the distracted masses, it's for the focused few."

Antony Mayfield writes about working fast and slow, and the temptation to constantly work as fast as possible through ever-expanding to-do lists and sometimes missing the benefits that might come from slower activities:

"Reading and reflection – and blogging, for me – are slower modes. They aren’t execution, though. People engaged in reading and reflection look more leisurely than industrious. It feels hard to give time to these slow activities – we want to feel the heartening rush of momentum and be seen to be in the process of moving forward. It feels like progress. Even if it is slightly mindless, lacking in insights and depth that would have been added by spending time working slowly."

I'm not really big on new year resolutions but one of the things I promised myself that I'd try and do for last year was to create a bit more space. Whilst I worked pretty hard at it, I have to say that I found it tougher than expected and that, on balance, I think I was less than successful. So it continues to be an objective of mine. And it's good to be reminded of how important being slow, as well as being fast, really is.

Photo Credit: slimmer_jimmer via Compfight cc

How Stuff Spreads

Phil at Blonde and Fran at Face Group have created a visualisation of the spread of a piece of video content from their client IRN BRU that tells a fascinating story of how it was shared on Twitter and clocked up a million views over four weeks. The tracking revealed three key sharing dynamics: a few high influence accounts that kick-started the initial 100,000 views in the first 24 hours, followed by sharing amongst lots of small, connected groups that took it from 100,000 to 650,000, and then another 300,000 views prompted by broadcast media and accompanying isolated mentions.

Their conclusions make a lot of sense: It helps if you have awesome content; influencer theory is useful but only up to a point; lots of small networks are more important than a few individuals with lots of followers; social and broadcast channels play complementary roles. Every case will no doubt have its own differences and subtleties but this neatly shows the limitations of oversimplified thinking about 'influencers' and considering vertical channels in isolation.

There's something else interesting about it as well. Conventional campaigning wisdom sees heavy spend front loaded and designed to generate high awareness, reach or impact in the first days of a campaign. This IRN BRU activity started with just one person being given the link. It reminded me of the way in which The XX launched Coexist by sharing a link (to a site where you could stream it before its official release) with a single fan. That ended up with fan-driven campaigns on Reddit and the site crashing from the millions of streams.

Mark Earls and John Willshire make the point in their excellent Future Of Advertising deck that we need to develop a far better understanding of how stuff spreads through populations. So work like this is, I think, fascinating.

If You’re Not Doing Some Things That are Crazy, Then You’re Doing the Wrong Things.

So says Larry Page. There's been a few interviews published with him of late but this Wired one by Steven Levy is one of the best. Lots to take out but I really liked his answer to a question about ambition and big bets:

"I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we run companies. If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event. But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change."

In an era driven by efficiencies, building in room for the big 'moon shots' isn't easy but that non-incremental change he talks about is surely true of not just the technology industry, but of every industry that technology is changing, impacting, or disrupting. Which is a rapidly increasing number.

The Temporal Bias Of The Web

In this interview Maria Popova talks about how she worries about the temporal bias of the web, and the fact that so much of it is based around a vertical chronology with the latest stuff floating around at the top whilst the older stuff sinks towards the bottom. "It suggests", she says,"that just because something is more recent, it's more relevant; yet, in culture, the best ideas are timeless, they have no expiration date".

Given the emphasis attributed to recency as a factor within both search engine and social network algorithms, and the apparent bias toward the new and the novel in real-time sharing environments, perhaps she has a point. Something like Is It Old, pictured above (currently in stasis - a victim of the Twitter API changes), existed because of our predeliction towards attributing more value to things that are new and unique. 

The opportunity of-course, as Maria goes on to point out, is that the web gives us remarkable access to almost infinite information. As part of a new breed of professional curator, Maria herself is uniquely good at surfacing cultural gems that are not necessarily contemporary. So, as content discovery changes, if much social and algorithmic curation tends toward favouring the recent, perhaps the role of professional curation in surfacing ideas, knowledge and concepts from the past becomes ever greater?

The Strategy Is Delivery

I mentioned this in today's newsletter but I think the recent work of the Government Digital Service is excellent. They've got some smart people working there and are doing great things. This excellent post by Mike Bracken (Director of Digital for the Cabinet Office) talks about how they have shifted the focus to putting user need rather than policy at the centre of strategy and delivery. I particularly like how they seem to have brought agility to what must be a disctinctly complex and rigid environment characterised by multiple stakeholders, politics, competing priorities and an over-reliance on documentation.

It's worth reading the whole post but it's such a good example that I wanted to highlight some points that really resonated. Says Mike:

"One of the many lessons in my 18 months in Government has been to watch the endless policy cycles and revisions accrue – revision upon revision of carefully controlled Word documents, replete with disastrous styling...rarely, if ever, does user need get a look-in. User need, if referenced at all, is self-reinforcing, in that the internal user needs dominate those of users of public services."

There are obvious parallels here with the challenges of being nimble in a large organisation (just think about how most customer service operations are structured to suit the needs of the internal organisation rather than those of the end user via automated menus, siloed teams and lack of joined up data):

"It's usually the way with all large, rules-based organisations: that more time and effort is spent on internal logic and process than on listening to and understanding real user needs."  

Mike talks about how the old process that put policy as the starting point leads to overly detailed input, 'digital versions' of existing practices, lengthy and complex procurement proceedures and inflexible solutions based on analgue thinking:

"Policy led digital service creation closes down responsiveness, builds in long-lead times and results in services which are dictated by legacy IT thinking, not by user needs"

The new process shows the transformative effect of an approach driven from the very beginning by user need. For GOV.UK they created an alpha of the service in 12 weeks based on evident user needs, and designed or re-designed services through rapidly reacting to user feedback from multiple sources (user surveys, A/B testing, summative tests, social media), precluding lengthy procurement proceedures and shrinking the time between feedback and resultant changes to live services.

In the first 10 days after the release of the full version they made over 100 changes to the service at negligible cost. 

"By putting user need first, and then allowing policy to changes to be understood in the context of user needs, we will have responsive digital services."

Mike notes that in many cases, delivery of services (information or transactional) has come before final strategy work is completed:

"In an analogue world policy dictates to delivery, but in a digital world delivery informs policy".

It's a great case-study, I think, for how transformational agile processes and an approach with user-need at its heart can be. And not only to the way in which technology teams work, but in the delivery of services to the end-user. Tim O'Reilly has described their work as the model for other national and local governments to follow, and the UK Government Digital Design Principles (originated by GDS) as "the most significant user interface document since the original Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines". Indeed.

Image courtesy, business cards designed by Ben Terrett

The Biggest Issue In Content Marketing

Suddenly everyone is talking about Content Marketing and perhaps the chart above explains why. When I gave my recent talk to the Content Marketing Association (whose members have been doing this sort of thing in one form or another for many years) I made the point right up front that whilst the vast majority of marketers believe that content marketing is becoming more important and a discipline in its own right, most businesses still lack a defined strategy, dedicated budgets or headcount (source). 

So before we all get completely submerged in the inevitable wave of content marketing list posts, it's worth pausing for a moment to consider some of the questions that are rarely talked about in those kinds of posts, but will be of real, tangible significance to clients who are making this huge transition.

If you take the Paid, Owned and Earned media model as a common default way of looking at the media landscape, then the most interesting places right now (as I've said before) are the areas of overlap and how content and ideas can flow between these different elements. The Altimeter Group neatly described this as 'Converged Media'. But beyond this I think we're seeing all kinds of areas of convergence. Not least in agency remits with huge grey areas and growing spaces of potential conflict. Where's the line, for example, between a PR agency managing a brand's reputation online and a media agency handling social media monitoring and response? Or that between a media agency creating content as a communications solution, and what a creative or digital agency would call their domain? Or for that matter a PR agency creating content around an event, or a media owner generating a content driven solution, or what a content marketing agency does? They may all come from a different place, but we are increasingly seeing at least some assets that look like they could have originated from any one of those places.

The CEO of a very successful content marketing agency said to me recently that it was only a matter of time before a sizeable brief that would have previously gone automatically to a creative agency be given instead to a content marketing agency. There may have been a degree of hubris in that but he may also have a point. With the shift toward always-on platforms and owned media assets there is an increasing requirement for the kind of editorial and operational skills beyond that which is focused on delivering to the requirements and timescales of campaigns.

Perhaps most interesting of all is that brands themselves are now (finally) starting to get in on the act. The kind of questions that a serious commitment to content marketing raises for a client company are pretty fundamental (but again, rarely talked about): issues around compliance, agile sign-off procedures, approaches to strategy and planning, resourcing, organisational structures. But whilst many are still only beginning, there are some notable exemplars of clients who do content really well, and more and more brands are investing in sizeable content teams. This will only become more evident over the coming year. So the demarkation between what the brand content or creative team, the brand's content agency and their creative or digital agency work on is yet another blurred area. 

All this raises a killer question. With just about every part of the media ecosystem converging on a need for content and publishing expertise, where is all that talent going to come from? The challenge of attracting and retaining the best technical and content talent is already a very real problem if you're not Nike and/or your company is at the other end of the scale from a small, trendy digital start-up in Shoreditch (as Ashley Friedlein pointed out in his excellent 2013 trends post). Already we're starting to see some interesting talent transitions, with fashion and culture writing talent moving from large scale publishers to retail and fashion brands who are getting ever more sophisticated as media owners in their own right (ASOS, Gilt, Net-A-Porter, Urban Outfitters et al). The impact of shifts like Google Author Rank, which takes account of authorship in search engine results and ranking, only heightens the competition for the best and right talent to work for you instead of somewhere else. The answer to this very real question is likely to go beyond headhunters and into the need to develope the kind of environment, approaches, mindset, culture, and working practices in which these kinds of talented people can thrive. And that is not going to easy.

Marginal and Breakthrough Innovation

I liked this talk from Tim Harford from the Wired conference a while back. He uses some great examples to talk about the requirement for both types of innovation - that which brings incremental gain and continuous improvement over time, and the kind that involves high risk, different thinking, frequent failure but big potential gain. The former can achieve remarkable things, and I think is naturally far more comfortable and palatable for large, established organisations. The latter is rare and typically avoided. But both, says Tim, are vital: "marginal improvement is all about climbing the hill you're on...longshots are all about finding new mountains to conquer". Absolutely.

HT @jamescaig for the link

Fish Food in 2013

Around two and a half years ago (is it really that long?) I started compiling and sending out a weekly curation of digital goodness - the best links/reads/quotes/things that I've come across on the interwebs over the past week. In truth, it started out as something of an experiment but since that first email the list of subscribers has grown way beyond my expectation, quite a number of good people have said very nice things about it, and it's become quite a thing.

Going into 2013 I've been considering where I should take it. I'd thought about reposting each weekly update here, but if I'm honest I like the idea that subscribing gives you something different/in addition to what I talk about on the blog so for the time being I'm keeping as it is. I have a few plans for things I want to develop but as I mentioned, I've had a lot of positive feedback which leads me to question whether I need to make any significant changes at all, but it's always good to ask. So this is to say two things: 

1. If you're not a subscriber but would like to be you can see some previous updates here, and sign up here.
2. If you are already a subscriber (thank you) and have suggestions for things you'd like to see more of/less of I welcome any feedback you have.

Many thanks.