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.

Friction

Oily Bird, originally uploaded by olivander.

 

I'm struggling with the mantra of digital strategists like Seth Godin who argues that we need to make things as simple as possible for people:

We like things that are simple, not complex. Issues where we can take action without changing very much. If a marketer brings us a new idea, it's either ignored or it's a problem. A problem because we have to do something with the idea. Buy the new suit, trade in for the new car, install a new IT solution or change the way we feel about an issue.

The best problems, as far as a consumer is concerned, are those that can be solved quickly and easily, with few side effects.

In other words you keep things lubricated, you reduce the friction of the 'social', you make things easy and value the ease with which you can engender a relationship.  Compare this to the "ethics of inconvenience" put forward by Will Davies, who argues the need for an understanding of friction as social value...

I spoke at this conference earlier this year, discussing what digital technology offered the voluntary sector. One of the things I raised as an anxiety was an advert in the paper from that morning, in which Oxfam were claiming that 'One click. That's the difference between life and death for millions of people' (part of their current I'm In campaign). On the one hand this is a fairly transparent and innocent attempt to ride the wave of the Make Poverty History campaign which ended last year, but on the other, it's just a pack of lies. My medicine is a bit shakey, but I'm fairly convinced that One click is not the difference between life and death for even one person, let alone millions. The dilemma these charities face is how much to see the internet as a way of lowering barriers to entry, and how much to see it as a potential dilution of the issues at stake. And the problem is that barriers to entry tend to be constitutive of the value of action. The fact that it is a pain in the arse to write a letter, attend a meeting, dress up as batman and climb a monument, run for parliament or wage a decades long campaign for recognition, is why these actions are both admirable and effective.

I find both arguments persuasive.  My gripe is not just with the ethics of saving-the-world endeavour being promoted as easy and simplistic but the glut of things that stem from it being easy to join making the attention economy such an issue in the process.  Take Flickr.  Every day I'm offered the opportunity to join a new flickr group - I've already got more groups than I possibly know and rarely use any of them - and am told I'm a new contact for blah blah, who it transpires has 3457 contacts.  And of course it's not just flickr, it's the whole of social media where quantity equates with value. So much so that it undermines the social 'media / 'software' it is predicated on.  In an online world the ease of being social undermines the value of relationships and consequently, over time, you put less effort in and you value the experience / contact / object less.  Consequently, diminishing, if not negative, returns set in [and probably lower than the Dunbar number of 150 which has been identified for a community to be cohesive as you and your contacts do not constitute a community in this sense, more a cohort or sub-set within the community].   

So if it is time we started appreciating quality rather than quality of relationships, friction rather than ease, how do we sell that into people?  How do we make 'social media' that values less rather than more? What does a strategy for 'marketing friction' to create lasting value between people and brands / issues look like? It's clearly not what Oxfam are doing, so who is?

Come, hang out, talk, be my friend, do stuff

It's [tech] conference walla season again.  And people are getting all hippy about it.  Even Metcalfe and Coates [and I single them out because I like offending them and also because I can't be arsed to find other people to back up my flimsy argument rant] are getting into the sandal wearing brotherly love thing and making a big call to meet up with people, to do 'neat' things and generally hang out with the tech people and talk revolution, albeit a corporatised one involving lots of cappucino. 

I thought this kind of "be my friend" posturing was beaten out of people at school.  If not then there's a definite argument for re-introducing it, even formally as part of the curriculum.  The irony is [and I'm sure there are many] that these liberal techy types are the those who've created a whole behavioural language, along with Goths and pubescent teenagers [and the occasional uncle], from their social absurdity, their awkwardness.  And yet put a few together, give them a sniff of someone as socially stiff as themselves and they act like it's a fucking global commune.

You can see it annoys me.  Of course I'd be saying exactly the same thing if I were in the West Coast sipping coffee and pretending to be a player whilst espousing all kinds of profanities about the links between classic Greek philosophy and the concept of friendship [BBC, In Our Time download MP3] and developments in social networking.  <no, really>.  I was actually going to post something serious about this but found myself distracted by bitterness.

Anyway, should any non-techy pretty people want to meet up, I'll be on the Jamestrain from Sheffield to Manchester tomorrow then wandering around looking for a purpose for a while then I'll be back in Sheffield in a really far out steel mill industrial area til 6ish and then doing some real crazy shit whilst I commute home to watch linear TV.  Come on let's hang out, do stuff.  Email me.  Cool.  Yeah!

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....?

Big supermarkets are bad for your health - official

Sainsburys is to open GPs [doctors] surgeries in its stores.  Are supermarkets taking their responsibility for creating a nation of lard-arses really seriously?  This hasn't been picked up much and I'm quite surprised it hasn't.  The move to incorporate Doctor's surgery's in store is obviously part of Sainsburys desperate attempt to make its stores competitive again [after failing against Tesco] and pick up custom by making its stores multi-use; spaces for a variety of tasks not just retail consumption. It's a logical if not particularly welcome move on from coffee stores in books shops and banks and marks another nail in the coffin of the small retailer in Britain's high streets. 

What next?  Hospitals with leisure facilities?  Nurseries in supermarkets?  Police surgeries in supermarkets - [done - this time at a Tesco's]? And what of the social exclusion such policies entail?  The cost of public transport or private transport means that actually getting to these retail spaces that will cater for our needs is going to be relatively more costly for those from poorer areas who will often have further to travel. 

It'll be interesting to see if the move to small being the new big online will affect our consumption patterns and use of larger offline stores.  Will we be more likely to want smaller, niche offline suppliers?  Or are these monolithic supermarkets, above, going to further drive out smaller suppliers through price competition and economies of scale, in all but 'boutique' retail areas of larger cities.   How will the nature of the products they sell determine their dynamics? For example commoditised products compete mainly on price and to a lesser extent customer service whereas service-based and niche products compete on the basis of provenance and knowledge of supplier. 

Another innovation recently, this one in time rather than space: a surgery marketing plastic surgery you can have in your lunch hour.  Needles to say it's been lambasted by all the health pros and policy wonks and needless to say it will be hugely successful and copied by all.

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Half-baked apology

Apologies for the half-baked posts of late.  I'm finding Ecto is publishing the drafts I half-heartedly write.  In fact I only ever write half heartedly so maybe I should just sack the attempt to crap-filter  out what I write and just publish everything in the hope that the signal really is the noise...   

Time Stuff

I haven't been able to shit straight lately for work pressure and family life.  I'm a kinda of believer that you make your own time... you have the ability to slow down and speed up according to the activities you are undertaking.  Quite what that means practically I'm not too sure.  Quite how I convey that to my employers I'm even less sure.

Rather belatedly I've found use in David Allen's book Getting Things Done [so popular it seems to have coined it's own verb acronym - "to GTD"].  Which allows you to do what it says on the book cover.  Mr Allen has got a lot of cred from the blogger world - which makes me wonder to what extent most blogger types are not actually hopeless organisers and ENTP types [like me].  But David's book works.  If you can spare the time to read it then do.  If you can't then take note - the big things to remember are:

1. List all the jobs you have to do
2. For every job describe each task needed to complete that job
3. For each task see if there are any actions that you are unable to do for any reason or which require other resources to complete - list them.
4. When you've finished a task / action then tick it off.

By identifying and then writing down specific actions you put things in the "hard drive" of your memory [allen's metaphor not mine] and are better able to concentrate on the actions in the uncluttered RAM of your head.  Simple stuff with potentially profound implications for your whole work / life balance.  Unless you get complacent after week one and go back to the world of cramming everything into RAM and going into meltdown again.  The book should come with electro-shock treatment to condition you into following his process.

And whilst I'm on the topic of organisation and time management I've been trying out Backpack and Basecamp [and all that clever 37 signals stuff] lately.  These products and ones like them sell you the potential to organise your life.  But from my experience they can't deliver on it.  Only you can do that.. Basecamp merely helps you to move things around more efficiently - it doesn't help you with what you're  actually moving around, mores the pity. 

In loo of a proper post the other things of late that have been stored in my off-site memory to come back to later are:

1. Time, again.  A discussion on Radio 4 the other day on short-termism got me wondering whether we could plan for generational change.  One comment about the way Daoism and its generational, long-term view has helped to culturally move some Asian economies to think about improving things for their children's children was quite profound.  Or I thought it was.  Could we do that?  Could we sacrifice our relative affluence and luxury knowing we were building the foundations for a better society?  I think it's unlikely but part of me believes that we can be sold the idea of hard work to make things better in this country and to move away from a privatised, individualised nation.  But it's a vision that lasts longer than a government term of office so it would require the political will which is quite another matter.  Some brands have managed to create a long term plan by clinging to a vision - perhaps politics and nationhood can learn from them?

2. A mish-mash [with apologies to Things mag].  Peta getting a lot of viral attention for their milk ad which had me really weirded out [i can think of no  English equivalent to sum my feelings up] / Business 2.0 talking about how Google will never conquer local search because small businesses need to be sold to, but I think this ignores the fact that readers are migrating away from bigs books in droves so local companies will have to adapt /  Awards - with Saatchi and Saatchi annoucing their world changing innovation awards - which were actually pretty cool - and Yahoo! annoucing their not as cool best websites award - which seems so lame now, so 90s - why not let users decide? / And I guess I'm also kind of miffed because Etsy didn't get into either award - I think they're quite brilliant - not least because they've cracked the problem of ordering handmade goods online: if you can't guarantee what you want is what you'll get from handmade goods - then package it and conceptualise it as magic - Alchemy. Surprise! Genius.   

The Smith-Nietzsche Method

Most of the stuff written about creativity is guff. I want to contend that being creative is not about learning processes or ways of doing so much as unlearning them and being systematically unsettled. The Creating Passionate Users people write instructively on how we can all be more 'innovate' in the way we make for others, but for a true creative 'state' or 'approach' there are few examples to draw upon.  One, and I think in terms of attitude this is the only one, is The Fall.   It  involves ME Smith taking his band members 'unlearn', keeping them from feeling comfortable with the way they work.  Dave Simpson in the Guardian gives us examples through the vast array of past members.  Unplugging amplifiers on stage, dismantling drumkits, taking on amateur members at a moments notice and employing classically trained musicians to unsettle existing members.  And sacking people.  A lot.  Smith explains it such: "It's a bit like a football team," he said. "Every so often you have to get rid of the centre-forward."  This isn't squad rotation so much as a new team every season.  But despite this Smith inspires idolatry.  It's like the Stockholm syndrome - once in people love him despite his aggressive and bully boy manner.  His 'method' is never to let inertia get hold: make them question what they do, make them be spontaneous.  To constantly undermine practices and even peoples psyche.  This 'method' seems quite Nietzschean for 3 reasons [and this is borrowing from my sketchy memory of studying Nietzsche years ago so give me some 'interpretive licence':
1. Smith shares Nietzsche's productively nihilistic outlook   
2. The concept of the 'overman' [superman] who can move beyond existing cultural and social norms 'fits' with Smith's  own sense of  identity 
3. The "will to power" as Nietzsche's  main social force - a creative desire to extend oneself  and exert control.  This wanting to maintain power over others bands and band members is a driving force of creative endeavour for Smith and The Fall.

It's not going to win over the 'innovation' agencies as a corporate service but I like this Smith-Nietzschean approach to thinking about innovation and creativity [much as I don't like to be seen to like people being uncomfortable and being sacked].  It's radical.  It flies in the face of a lot of modern thinking on innovation. It involves pain and a sense of tension and apprehension, of doing things differently, of never being settled, in fact of being unsettled and never allowing people to get comfortable.  Oh what a beautiful thing it would be to have Smith as arch innovation conspirator barking orders to a bunch of blue-chip suits.