technogoggles

Utility

My Tool Box April 2006, originally uploaded by geishaboy500.
Link: marktd: Brands 2.0: Branded Utility - Jack Cheng

There seems to be a belated realisation that comms planning is all well and good but you need to have something decent to communicate and that over time it gets harder and harder to be interesting and communicate well and to enter the world of the individual.  Brands just inherently struggle to find things to talk about in a way that is interesting and believable.  I think this is where some of John Grant's work on brands as cultural concepts, looking outward rather than than closing down and defining can be useful.  But the digital age requires brands to up the frequency with which they engage and of course engage in a more well, engaging way to cut through to the fragmented groups that come together often only to disperse again as quickly as they formed.  That, combined with peoples ability to 'read' marketing's referential system in more sophisticated ways and of course more cynical ways seems to have led to this "branded utility" meme.  Provide some *value*.  Deliver. Don't talk, *do*.  Which of course all seems so right for today's [primarily younger] 'audiences as co-creators'.  This isn't of course to the exclusion of other more emotive, 'fluffier' stuff :-) as Katie mentions with reference to Aristotle's thoughts on friendship:

Take Aristotle’s concept of friendship. He proposed three models: friendship based on utility (a friend who provides something useful to us); friendship based on pleasure (we enjoy a friend’s company); and friendship based on virtue or mutual admiration (we find a friend who shares our values).

Whilst the latter are according to Aristotle the most enduring friendships, utility had the least longevity as it was based on a very functional relationship.  And you do need all three.  But from my experience of using Google's GTD product suite [and I think it can be called that now], wordpress, AIM in different guises, flickr, del.icio.us  [god and the list goes on.. magnolia, twitter - dammit!, the various extensions to firefox inc performancing and of course the myriad of widgets]... I'm far more likely to develop pleasure and admiration as a result of using those services and consequently utility for me is the driving force in brand engagement.  Services themselves enable a more emotive connection in the social web of things.  So why have we not seen much in the way of branded utility in practice?  I can only really think of the BA Google Earth mashup by agency.com as truly deserving of the name by a non-web business.  I'd love to know why it's such a struggle to push utility / services through a marketing budget.  I'm imagining that it's to do with the fact that:

1. you can't present the outcomes easily and prototyping to pitch to a client is an expensive risk


2. large organisations tend to have strict budget allocations and 'utility' probably falls in product areas or even worse between the gaps


3. and of course a lot of clients still don't "get it".  yadda. though how long have we been hearing that for now?

You seen any good utilities from non-web businesses? Why are they slow to come through? 

And on a similar note I;m going to try to post less stuff that adds little or no value to a conversation and do more stuff that does add value.  The noise may be the signal in development but I'm sensing in planning it's still mostly noise. With that in mind perhaps we should propose "planning utility" with  the strap-line "more than just words"?  Mr. Richard Reynolds always seemed to me to be that kind of planner.  A do-er planner.

Al Jazeera as blog broadcaster?

Link: FT.com / World / Middle East & Africa - Al Jazeera launches news channel in English.

It's kind of a reverse colnialism isn't it?  Al Jazeera is now colonising the airwaves with a move to start an English language news channel, having done deals with 83 distributers including Sky, but not it seems Freeview.

Al Jazeera intrigues me.  They had an interview with a senior Al-J rep on the Today programme today - which does not seem to be included on their interview download - where he was quite open about Al-J trying to re-balance the news agenda with news from the South to the North.  And it's opinionated stuff too with the 'editorial' line being openly sympathetic to some of the concerns in the South - not least an aggressive western foreign policy, inequitable GATT terms etc.  That shouldn't take away from the some of the great 'objective' reporting they do do [but i think it probably does at least in the minds of the white middle classes in the West!].

But what intrigues me most is that Al-J is a news broadcaster, a cultural concept, which is becoming increasingly popular at a time when news is struggling to engage people.  Opinions, passion, a POV and a specialism [geography, an 'angle' etc], mark  it out as distinctive which in many ways is what other broadcasters are so unable to do.  Other broadcasters - and I'm thinking primarily of BBC and SKY - tinker with style [sets, to sit on the desk or not?], the 'metadata' around the content which allows you to follow a story and see the context to a story but the story, the objectivity if you like, itself remains sacrosanct, untouchable.  Yet here we have a news channel breaking the rules and doing well, selling its stories back into the North. 

In terms of strategy, the Al-J approach it could be argued is on some parallel editorial line to user generated content in general, opinions rather than facts, personality, point-of-view etc.  And blogs are viewed sceptically by hacks because of their subjective, undisciplined style but ultimately that's what makes good blogs stand out. Is Al-Jazeera the blog broadcaster, the Southern citizen news agency, always destined to be relatively niche, but punch above its weight, be far more engaging to it's core audience and  innovate editorially?  Maybe the analogy is misplaced, after all in many ways it's a very traditional broadcaster  [addendum - in fact it seems to be even more traditional then the others in trying to gain a foothold in the English speaking world], but it's a great challenger 'brand'.  Must scare the shit out of senior broadcasters here and those that are tied to old [Western ideals] of the Fourth Estate. 

Gaming the event

The 'life beyond the broadcast' for BBC Weekenders seems quite healthy.

Moylesy taken from kc_mcfen's on flickr.  See the pool which with 222 members and over 2300 pics as of today is up there with the Japanology pool!  Woohoo.  See also the weekender tags and a rather wonderful set of from ruu as well as Radio 1's own polished yet somehow dull set [perhaps because it feels more 'produced' amidst the more edgy images from the audience].

The distributed media malarky allows us to experience and engage with the event in so many different ways as they 'folded' back into the event and then existed as a life beyond it.   Of course that brings some teething problems, not least is distributing resources to the edges where the communities have distributed to! Following conversations to manage any potential problems is one of the key issues with an 'open' and inclusive media strategy like the one the BBC employed here.    This open approach was exposed somewhat by the use of flickr discussion groups to get answers when the postie scam hit .  It would seem that flickr is the pre-eminent platform for  extending mainstream social experiences online.  Perhaps Flickr's move from 'beta' to 'gamma'  [lol] is recognition of this fact, that and their re-design.

It's not just flickr of course.  The big news from the Weekend was simulcasting the event in Second Life.  Despite the PR, actually perhaps because of the PR from the Second Life experiment I'm left a little disappointed by the fact that it seemed so, well, er, dull.  Am I allowed to say that?  The seeming adulation afforded MMOGs is almost cult like and as an outsider looking in it can't match the hype.  Innovative, sure in the sense that it utilises a different platform to showcase the event.  But where's the playout from the 'event' in game? The 'ripples' don't seem to have a different 'life'.  And where's the social innovation in game?  Perhaps I've missed something.  Oh. No. There it is, there's the Daleks! :-)

BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend VirtualFestival uploaded by Louise from the makers of the BBC Second Life event RiversRunRed.   

Perhaps I'm expecting too much but it would have been great if there had been some offline playout of the game at the event [there was a screen apparently].  This could have simply been in the form of  a conversation to develop between those at the offline event and those in game, so that the 'tension' between the experiences were exposed introducing a reason for dialogue.  It wouldn't be easy but a rather crude model like the subservient chicken shows how calls to action from both communities could be initiated.  The big screen relaying the Second Life event exposes messages to the people watching at the offline event "dance like a dalek" etc etc.  There's a level of sophistication in the creation of the experience that I clearly haven't had time to work through :-) but you get my gist.  Shortcodes to txt back into the game and send images of "dancing like a dalek" could all work.  It's just one very simplified thought.  More interesting ideas start to come through in gaming an event itself... cues set in game that people have to solve in the physical environment of the event to determine which acts perform, when, what etc... or making a mainstream viscereal experience akin to that shown by Blast Theory  in Uncle Roy All Around You early last year.  Experience design on that level gets really really exciting. 

<75 years of metaBBC>

spies, originally uploaded by JamesB.

The BBC has opened up its catalogue going back to 1937. Well Done MattB and Tom. It's a wonderful thing.

I worked in TV as a researcher/AP for the BBC between 1999 and 2002 first on Timewatch [for  a lovely bloke called Tilman Remme] and then in Current Affairs [and much later a short stint at Newsnight]. It's great to be able to get the info. Though I don't remember getting contributions from Hitler, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt for this film - my favourite ;-) [methinks the 'contributors descriptor is a little generous as it covers production staff, historical figures and interviewees]. I had 3 glorious months at the National Archives in Kew researching this one, my first job for the beeb.   Uncovering the many great stories that came out of the IIWW.  The film couldn't do justice to the richness of what we found.   Of course there are bound to be issues with the cataloging - not least of which is that I don't get a credit here grr... Still, you got to love those librarians.  Working diligently, without any of the glamour that most people see as a perk of working at the beeb.  They're kinda machinic in the way they construct and adhere to strict data protocols.  I suppose in that sense they're very high level code really.  Respect!

So the BBC is plugging into the world.   It's all been said before but how great it is to be able to pull out and aggregate content by contributor, date, series, episode, channel etc and work that into bottom up data from other sources like wikipedia entries for shows, presenters, events. 

I see a useful application in this as a social documenting tool.  To be able to visualise the key 'memes' in broadcast by the BBC by year and see how that correlated with wider events.  Is the BBC a useful barometer for the zeitgeist?  Does it lead or follow?  Could be quite fascinating...

Unearthing the world's talent

I must be the last person to see this... but my God am I pleased i did; Google Idol - rating Hot or Not style people miming to songs.   This is where all the talk of distributed media, users as producers and associated hot air starts to come together and mean something for people everywhere.  This is the social web-of-things.  Pomme and Kelly get my vote.  Rock. Out.   

In Memoriam

A few things have come together lately.  Thinking about public and private, speed and memory has got me thinking about death.  I tend to read the obituaries of the Daily Telegraph when I'm cutting my hair - I'm practically bald and use clippers and the paper catches the bits, catches my own deadness.   I love reading obituaries and particularly those in the Telegraph, which immortalises those people who have lived quite extraordinary lives as opposed to many newspapers which tend to just 'do' people in the news.   The Telegraph has its fair range of military characters from WWII but also now those from the Korean War and after, people who achieved some amazing feats and then more-often-than-not sunk to relative obscurity as FD's of lawnmower manufaturers.  I find this disjunture - this mixing of the extraordinary and the mundane quite facinating.  Patt Gyddes, of whom I read the other day is a good case-in-point.  Born in Bergen, Norway she was involved in the resistance movement, distributing BBC pamphlets for which she was hunted down by the Gestapo:

She then went underground, hiding for weeks in various cellars while her escape could be organised. Waiting in the snow-covered woods outside Oslo, she heard her first escape posse being captured and shot.

On the second attempt Pytt was concealed beneath a pile of logs on a timber lorry heading for Sweden; she was accompanied by a lame old judge and a dangerously noisy baby. The final stage of the journey was a long night's ski across the border. All those in the next group to use the route were captured and killed.

She then went on to be a widely respected dancer and the first Westerner to be taught Tai Chi by a master and bring the art to the UK.  Remarkable, fascinating stuff made all the more wonderful because it is real and because these people, you feel were relatively forgotten, 'ordinary' and only 'extraordinary' in death.   It makes me extremely humble in these consumerist and often immoral times to read about great lives; the power of the story just makes you feel less of a person but determind to be more.   Radio 4 has cottoned on to this endless source of allegory and memory with Last Word it's excellent obituaries programme and I'm sure there's even more that can be made of the genre.  As an aside, it's slightly ironic and quite sad that we seem to value old age and the physicality of death less than ever, with cemeteries short of space and becoming temporary spaces and more and more 'retirement'  accomodation being built to remove the aged from  our sight and therefore out of our collective minds. 

Death is also a subject of Seth Godin's book Purple Cow, whose subtitle is "stop trying to be perfect and start being remarkable".  And while the analogy is a crass one given what i've said, above, I think that we can learn a lot from death in the way that we do business, in the way we conduct our lives.  Certainly Seth has realised the analogy is relevant to brands.  In a chapter on "the remarkability of memories" an author writes that "sometimes being remarkable is about knowing when to move on", like Seinfeld did, in order to preserve a memory.  It's a task I've started to initiate in some workshops now; write you own obituary.  It works to bring a degree of critical reflexivity to a business but also to the people in the room and their own lives.  The general reaction is a desire to be more honest, open and remarkable.  And often to bury something and move on.   

Mapping group activity or, 'community'

I've quickly tried to map some of the dynamics of different 'community' mechanisms, partly inspired by Tom's Model for Mapping Group Activity.  It's basically aimed at clients and intended as a basis for developing 'community strategies' and is a very rough first draft.

What I haven't done is map offline activity or looked to illustrate the specific dynamics of each system via examples.   It'll be interesting to see where the offlineactivity 'sits' with the online activity and what we can learn from looking at them together.

Thoughts?  Comments? Please annotate the flickr image as you see fit...

TV to go... but go where?

Moving image is getting quite exciting isn't it.  I mean we are told it's bad for us but we keep watching more of it via smaller chunks off of smaller devices. The fragmentation of media demand and supply supposedly putting the consumer in charge - though I'm still not sure about this when interoperability is still a huge issue and when revenue models are still not proven.

Anyway, we got to some corporate tipping point now as IBM put forward six recommendations for dealing with this 'regime change' in media. If a 'regime change' is in the offing then Get Democracy is one of the things like youtube, forcing the old guard to shit themselves. Get Democracy is a means through which to make getting moving image content from a variety of sources using different codecs and such like bittorrent all so-easy. It's quite cool. Rather than trying to resolve the technical issues - Get Democracy seems to just present them within a shell so the end user is unaware of the 'messiness'. Their name suggests these guys have an ulterior motive than just allowing the likes of my mum to get her slice of Coronation Street when she wants to.

But ultimately is their drive actually undermining a sensible revenue model from emerging...? What's this going to do the content creators? How are they gonna get their share of that slice that's flying around the tubes? Quality may win out, people may find the stuff they like and be willing to pay for it.  But maybe not. One of the acid tests is Ricky Gervais' move to subscription for his forthcoming podcasts, after wetting our appetites with the first 12 'episodes' free. I won't be buying; at 95p each for 30 mins it's quite steep. It makes the BBC's annual 'subscription' seem incredibly good value.

If we are moving to a micro subscription model for media out at the edges - then this can only become more prevelant in mainstream media.  Like pay-as-you go models on mobile phone.  But what then of the BBC - the 'contract' phone? Can they charge you for all its annual content when you're used to paying for bits and pieces?  And what happens when you're accessing that content on mobiles and other devices?  Steve Hewlett in the Guardian starts to map the issues for a multi-medium landscape :

the Television Licensing Authority (TLA) - responsible for collecting BBC licence fees - last week scotched any notion that mobile phone and computer-based TV viewers might be exempt. It points you to a piece of government business called "Statutory Instrument 2004 No 692. The Communications Act (Television Licensing) Regulations 2004", part three sections 9, 10 and 11. Which amended existing regulations arising from The Wireless Telegraphy Acts 1926, 1949 etc and the Communications Act of 2003. To cut a very long story short, any device that can receive live TV pictures, whether or not originally designed or intended to do so, must be covered by a licence if you use it for that purpose. What is more, the TLA will stress that 98% of households have a TV so they already need a licence.

and...

while the regulations extend beyond traditional broadcasting to cover internet and mobile live streaming, receiving TV programmes on-demand, or say as part of an internet-based catch-up service, appears not to be covered.

If correct, this would mean if you only watched programmes on demand via new services - such as the BBC's emerging seven-day catch-up facility, or in any way other than via a live broadcast stream, however delivered, you would not be liable to pay the licence fee even if you used your old-fashioned TV.[my emphasis]

It seems it is not just hapless producers and broadcasters who have under-estimated the true potential significance of new media delivery systems - witness the growing rumble over programme rights - but the government departments who drafted the new regulations may have missed it too. It may be that the statutory underpinning of the BBC's licence-fee funding, rooted in legislation dealing with "wireless telegraphy" from the early part of the last century, could be about to come undone.

Hey, this is serious! Short of a major change in the basis of the BBC's definition in law it's not going to be necessary to pay them for some [all!] of the content you may receive.

And even if it was how could they police payment?  With extreme difficulty and not only because of the technological issues - they would surely lose the Public's 'hearts and minds'.  And that makes me quite sad. Not only because a Public Service Broadcaster like the BBC is truly a Fourth Estate  - that I would contend doesn't exist in the US because of the small PBS system and the 'distributed' and corporatised network broadcasters.  Of course the BBC has to adapt but it would seem that a Public Service Broadcasting service cannot continue to exist on the scale it does in the UK. Like those rather over-enthusiastic neo-cons who went into Iraq, we see a LOT of enthusiasm from people enbracing the massively distributed media landscape as the White Heat of technology that truly offers something useful [lots of cheap or even free content].  But we risk moving forward without a plan for post-Regime Change leading to a fractured and fragmented media mess which could affect the very basis of democracy and Public Service ideals in this country.  Of course we could promote and move to the sort of 'everyday democracy' that Demos have argued for.  But I'm not convinced that bottom up 'guerilla' style political systems work... their are many such initiatives in North America that work well for their 'members' but such a system comes at the cost of a coherent sense of community that covers the nation as a whole.

So,what...?  what are the scenarios we see for a future media landscape....?

Moyles on My Space

Thirty minutes into my daily commute this morning I realised that Edward Stourton wasn't informing me of the news agenda on BBC Radio 4 but rather Chris Moyles was uttering inane gobbledygook.  It took me thirty minutes to realise someone had reset the car radio from Radio 4 to Radio 1.  Thirty minutes!

There was one interesting thing to come out of this babble which was that Moyles is using MySpace to connect to: "... would be happy seeing some hot chicks! Really - only hot people get in" Par for the course with Moyles.  But it's significant in the sense that he really is connecting with his audience on their terms, using their medium of choice, albeit in a rather tongue in cheek way.  You certainly get a better sense of the man on myspace than on Radio1's own site .  Aled, who works on the show [and from what I heard was the best thing about it], seems to be making the most of his position to network - he has 2306 'friends'. 

Urbane Moderne

1950's vespa scooter advertising image #2757(1), originally uploaded by culturesponge.

Culturesponge has a series of Vespa adverts from the 1950s and 1960s which are really compelling.  My favourite are a set of Modern illustrations [as opposed to the iconographic pretty lady posters] of urban and rural life - positioning the scooter very much as a facilitator of freedom and self expression within the 'progressive' discourses of modernity.  I'm surprised scooter manufacturers have not tried to offer a contemporary take on this.... in the way that advertising around urban redevelopment has sought to highlight the sense of "city living" as sophisticated, as the cultural body of existence and the scooter as a way to navigate this space, this 'cultural life'.  No,  the images we get now are perhaps symbolic of the way we see urban life - of machines capable of dominating a space of speed and aggression and that from mostly the 50cc market aimed at late teens.  There is another market though - of people engaging in city living and who can't be arsed to cycle. I'm surprised no-one except Vespa get this.

The image reminds me of Trumpton the kids series from the late 60s and 70s [part of the "Watch with Mother" series] which has recently been re-ssued by the beeb - and from something I overheard on the radio the other day, and corroborated here [in a brief biog of Alison Price - the writer] is that the fire crew of "Pugh, (Pugh), Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grubb!" never put out a fire because they couldn't animate fire at the time!  Excellent - this belief in the 'real' in what was ostensibly a glorified childrens play set is quite charming.