I have just discovered Rory Sutherland’s most excellent blog and have been devouring post after post like a ravenous escapee from Lost Island.
In one post, Rory talks about the difference between brands from the US and brands from France (particularly from the way that the brand promise is perceived. I love this quote:
I am much taken with an Andy Warhol quotation along the lines of “what I like about Coke is that the President of the United States can’t get a better Coke than the bum on the street.” Really great brands should be universal. (When you think about it, the huge explosion in the value of luxury goods brands is evidence of a social malaise).
The way that I found Rory is through a comment he left here. Rory is talking about the need to address your audience based on their need state not demographics. This is exactly the reason that a raft of consulting companies like McKinseys and Forrester are making rapid headway in the advertising/metrics space. As Alain Thys says over at MarketingProfs, by using technology and business logic, these consultants are going to revolutionise the way that creative and advertising agencies operate. And may, in fact, redetermine the role and prestige of agencies in the brand building stakes. Now that is a universal brand revolution!
Tim has tagged me — so now it is my turn to give five reasons why I blog (ok five may be hard to stick to):
Community — If you want to play in the community space, if you want to understand what online communities and social media is all about, then you have to DO IT. Not only that, you have to understand how LONG it can take to build a community (months not days), the tools you need, the way to measure and chart your growth and, importantly, how to create the stories that work for your audience.
Gals and Guys — You get to meet some great people blogging. You quickly find that there are a LOT of people out there who are smarter, funnier, prettier and altogether far more groovy than you. But if you are careful, and respectful (ok … sometimes you have to grovel), then sometimes they will play with you.
Writing Strategy — I think this is one of Russell’s … but I believe that writing is strategy. If you work in strategy (or would like to), then writing is one of the best ways of creating strategy … and blogs are a perfect way to TEST IDEAS, challenge beliefs and give you the chance to put your money where your mouth is. Got a great idea? Put it online and let it be picked apart. If you have thick skin, you can learn from the best minds in the biz.
Shoot Your Mouth Off — This is part of the chaotic approach. There are days when you just need to vent … you will see something and be outraged. You will read something and be disgusted. On those days, it is just not good form to rant on other people’s blogs — so having your own blog is perfect. I used to rant a lot more often than I do now, but I remember that it felt good. Actually, I am sure I am OVERDUE for the sin bin any day now.
Pleasure — I actually enjoy blogging. If I am away from it for too long I feel like I am missing out on something. And I find myself brimming over with ideas that are all too easily forgotten — at least with blogging I have a way of keeping track of them all.
OK … now the fun part! I get to choose five other bloggers:
Seb — because he has a great way of looking at the world and a fascinating ability to thin slice culture and society.
Sacrum — well because he is Sacrum. And because he sends warmness.
Diana — because she writes such lovely e-mails and has such fascinating stories, insights and personal pictures on her site.
Stan — because his blog cloud highlights the words LOVE and ADVERTISING and because he can’t get to Sydney for coffee mornings so we need another way to meet him.
David — because he has just started blogging and I am keen to know what prompted him and whether he has picked up the addiction as yet.
You know, I have been a real fan of Typepad. When I decided to switch from WordPress and hosting my own server to using Typepad, I took some time to research the different blog systems, investigate their benefits and features … and one of the things that I liked about Typepad was that it was HASSLE FREE. It just worked. I didn’t need to work on the system or manage it. I didn’t have to back it up. And it came with plenty of ready-made functions and widgets.
But over the last couple of weeks I have been experiencing a great deal of frustration with the Typepad platform. This time, however, it is not just about MY blog, it is about the blogs of OTHERS. You see, my interest in blogging is mostly about conversation and about learning, so as soon as I cannot comment on other blogs I feel like I am being excommunicated. When I cannot PARTICIPATE in the discussions flowing in, around and through the online communities, I feel DISCONNECTED.
So eventhough I cannot comment on many blogs, here are my thoughts on some of the interesting conversations circulating at the moment:
Branding for the brave — During this great podcast, Drew talks about branding being for the brave. He also reminds us that you don’t necessarily BUILD a brand online, but that you use the Internet to COMMUNICATE your brand. This podcast takes a little time to get going, but is one of the best podcasts that I have heard (as it should be with Drew McLellan, John Moore, Valeria Maltoni, Mike Wagner, Mike Sansone and David Koopmans all firing on all cylinders).
Split personalities — More insight from Valeria which effectively turns into a “5 Reasons for Blogging” type post. Valeria draws out the way that many of us blog as a way to intellectually and creatively stretch ourselves, eventhough this may not be part of our “work”. It many ways, blogging is like studying — but you learn by doing and participating.
Read the label first — It is one thing to read a label but quite another to comprehend it. Sharon has an interesting post on job titles and it made me smile — I remember trying to explain first job at IBM to my family — they couldn’t imagine it. Ever since that time, my job titles have been a series of non-signifying words, reminiscent of that Far Side cartoon, “What you say, What dogs hear”.
Less is more — Mark asks us to look long and hard at our creative briefing approaches and remember what it is that we are really there for.
I love the way that blogging throws new people into your path!
I was just checking out Stan Lee’s excellent blog, Brand DNA, when I saw this link. The site is called All About Olive and the site is made up of the life stories of 107 year old Olive Riley. While Olive now lives in Sydney, she was born in 1899 and lived in Broken Hill — far to the west of Sydney in what has been predominantly a mining town. It is the birthplace of one of the world’s largest companies, BHP Billiton (the letters BHP standing for "Broken Hill Proprietary").
Olive dictates her posts to a friend, Mike who also asks her questions during each post. And in a short time, Olive has become an Internet success with her witty commentary and suffer no fools (or photographers) approach — I particularly like this line (visit Olive’s blog for the photo!):
Are you going to have something or not? You’re annoying me.
So far, Olive has four posts, with each of them generating a mass of comments. There is something about Olive that really draws the reader in … a nice slice of life and the feeling that she could just, maybe, be your nanna too.
Overall it was fascinating to see how it would evolve. The day started fairly timidly, with very few people volunteering for early sessions. I saw Mick Liubinskas and he said that he was kicking things off in Room 1 and asked whether I was presenting. I said "yes" he said "great, because I had 10 minutes before he was volunteering me anyway."
There seemed to be a large contingent of former UTS students (recent and not so recent) who knew each other and had considered many of the topics emerging during the day (note to self — UTS is fertile ground for new hires). Many of these people had been working now for 10+ years and were involved in entrepreneurial and technology-centric areas which made for plenty of energy and excitement.
What follows are my rushed notes from the presentations. As each session only lasted 15-20 minutes it was rapid fire … and there wasn’t a lot of time available to sit back and not participate.
Ignoring users We were off to a great start with Mick’s talk on ignoring users. The discussion that kicked off was about what you take on from your user base/community and what you ignore. Mick started by looking at Flickr and their decision to make photos public, even though users requested privacy.
The discussion then shifted towards the concept of innovation … and the need to understand your audience and your position within the market. That is, do you decide to take a leadership position or become a fast/slow follower. Many contributed in the conversations, bringing up a range of technologies and ideas from Flickr and online communities through to Yahoo! Pipes.
Timeshifting John Rotenstein talked about "timeshifting" and the way that we now consumer media of all kinds. In his own world he admits he is addicted to World of Warcraft. In the last month or so he has lost 3kg … it is called the WoW Diet. A friend of his has lost a massive amount of weight by playing WoW while also using an exercise book.
John also talked about ozTivo and the way that media is now being consumed. Music on his iPod has also been completely erased and replaced with podcasts. Obviously technology is allowing these timeshifts to take place … and it has all the big media companies running scared. What happens when all ads can be filtered, when the audience become the programming directors and the "local content" is drawn from an ever increasing global pool?
Digital/branded storytelling Then I talked. Sacrum was a big hit — I realise this doesn’t have speaker notes — I just kind of speak off the cuff, but the ideas behind the presentation didn’t change much from here.
Life as an expat Ray Stephenson then talked about being an expatriate. Almost everyone in the room had lived overseas at some point in their lives, so it made for an interesting conversation. This reflected the way that many technologists are highly mobile, finding themselves in foreign countries. This was fascinating, as the topic veered from technology to people to place and back again. One of the best questions was around the point at which you stop being an expat and start being a native. One of the suggestions was to figure out who do you barrack for in the cricket or some other sport.
We also ended up talking about micropayment systems across different countries … and the way that the culture of a country affects the calibre and style of the workforce. This came down to a conversation about cross-cultural values. Unusual topic for a BarCamp! John suggested we follow up a podcast called the Barefoot College on ITconversations.com.
Lean and agile software development Ben Hogan and Jason Yip from ThoughWorks talking about Lean and Agile Software development. Taking Toyota’s production approach and applying the learnings to software development. Toyota was originally a loom manufacturer … and one of the roles that people had to play in the stop-the-line culture. The focus for Toyota was optimising the flow through your manufacturing processes. Another step was learning to find waste — by putting on the customer glasses on — what is considered value from a customer point of view. This drives the overall customer experience. [pic2]
What is clear is that multitasking COSTS YOU.
MUDA — anything that does not add value — should be eradicated. The plan is to look at end-to-end cycle times and whether each of the tasks are creating or adding value.
There are clear lessons here for marketers as well but I need to process it a little more deeply. More to come on this!
OzTivo
John again … this time talking about how you can hack a Tivo for Australian conditions. He gave a step-by-step guide on what you need to do after you "win" a Tivo on eBay. Interesting, though it does sound a little technical for the average person.
The discussion got around to issues of copyright and ownership of digital TV guides. Copyright and ownership keeps coming up again and again.
OpenID Hunter Nield gave a great and energetic presentation on identity and OpenID. OpenID is based around an identifier such as a URL. This means that you can access a website and have it authenticate via OpenID providers such as myopenid.com.
The OpenID standards/specifications are free to use which means you can easily setup your own OpenID provider based on the system. It effectively works in the same way as Open Source or W3C.
The aim of OpenID is to reduce the headache and provide a single sign-on across multiple websites. It is designed to be flexible and some providers also allow profiles so that you can have multiple types of online identities. This means that I could be servantofchaos on my blog and Gavin on another. The choice is yours.
Trust is a major issue and there are many OpenID providers. How can you determine which providers are legitimate? For example, spammers could setup and run their own OpenID providers.
Are these "mum" friendly? Parents ask the questions "What is http:// and why is it different from my email"? And until these barriers can be overcome easily, then there are significant uptake issues.
Adoption — who is using and spreading this? This AOL announced that AOL Accounts are all OpenID enabled. Microsoft are looking to integrate … Digg is aiming to integrate … but these are "coming soon".
From a development point of view it is fairly easy to implement. There are existing libraries out there — Ruby, PHP and .Net etc.
OpenID providers are setting up PUSH — which means you update your account at your provider and it then pushes to all your subscriptions. OpenID 2.0 is coming — see openID.net and identity20.com.
There was a great question — what happens if your OpenID provider shuts down? Hmmm … no satisfactory answer.
Lean Development Again with Ben, this time looking at agile development methodologies.
With traditional development, the focus is on breaking up the waterfall into an iterative framework. If you can break up your work in a different way then you are able to rapidly deploy releases sooner. This provides a return on investment early in the process.
The focus is on organising your work around features. You start with a vertical slice within your system then you need to consider UI, business logic, classes at a domain and enterprise level and data access — all at the same time. By focusing on what you need NOW you are able to minimise complexity and increases speed to market. The question you ask is "what is the smallest possible feature set that you can get away with?". This approach reduces your cycle time and brings money/value back to you earlier.
I am interested in how these methodologies are able to be applied to other areas — what can you do to accelerate product development, how to create strong and focused collaborative teams and how to focus on generating early returns on investment. The focus is on avoiding red-tape — planning frequently rather than following a plan.
"Continuous integration" is an important automation element that allows you make it cheaper in the long run (by finding problems earlier).
Side-by-side peer reviews also seem to accelerate development. So having two developers sitting together means that you get the best result earlier and basically prevent errors before/as the occur. This is called having "pair programming". It is also highly productive because the pairs can become quite powerful/competitive. BUT you can burn out … so you need to only do 3-4 hours per day. Often this is doing two hours in the morning … and then one and a half or two hours later in the afternoon.
Need to do acceptance tests up front and then discuss that with the developers and business up-front.
So you wanna startup your own company
Now these guys were funny. And very interesting. Mike Cannon-Brooks and Martin Wells made a great tag-team presenting on the lessons learned from starting up their own companies. They talked through funding models (don’t raise capital or you lose control), different types of investors (family, friends — good, angel1 — small, angel2 — larger, VCs — big money) and the challenges of hiring and culture.
One of the more interesting aspects of their presentation was the way that Mike would comment on-the-fly on Martin’s presentation, often contradicting or disagreeing.
By this time my laptop had run out of juice, so I had to content myself to sending myself Twitter messages during the talk. But I did take mental notes so will try to get back to this at some stage soon — they were both very inspiring and had fun with the presentation.
Presentations I missed
Unfortunately you can’t attend all sessions, so there were ones that I missed that I did want to see. These included:
I am starting to think through the presentation that I am giving at BarCamp Sydney on the weekend … I know I should have already started on this, but it really has been a busy couple of weeks! My original plan was to focus on digital storytelling (it seems like there may be a few others talking about this topic too) … This is the first time that a BarCamp has run here in Australia, and I have never been to one, so I don’t know what to expect or how it will work. I am pretty sure that the "pres" will only run for 10-15 minutes, so it is really just a taste.
Procrastinating on this, however, has worked in my favour becauase Richard, Katie and Sean have pulled together a series of posts that have given me a massive head start — all in the last 24 hours. So I am going to talk about HOW you build a foundation story for your brand (I mean brand loosely here — it could be your personal blog, a piece of technology that you are working on, a product or service etc). Feel free to pick holes in my ideas — or add to what I am saying … and when I have it all ready, I will post it back here for you all to see/share.
I want to start with the idea of a story … and the fact that a story doesn’t have to be big to be fantastic (though this one by Luther Blissett certainly is!). But there are, however, expectations of a "story" that we all need to be aware of … there has to be a beginning, a middle and an end.
Sounds basic doesn’t it? But take a look around and you will see dozens of brands who don’t understand how to construct a basic brand narrative. And that means that you have already missed an opportunity to engage your audience.
Some of the best stories are small stories. But even the smallest of stories can contain a big idea. And some small stories contain ideas that are so big they burst out into the minds of the audience.
This "little" book is by Proust and is called On Reading. It reminds us that reading and writing happen in the same emotional space. And you may wonder why I am talking about books when I am interested in digital storytelling — because like anything, when you want to become an expert, you turn to the work of a master.
This is where I bring in Richard’s "four bubbles". You see, once you realise that your idea doesn’t have to be BIG, then you are confronted with a whole series of challenges. How do you take that foundation and move it into a strategic or tactical space? These bubbles help explain the areas that need to be defined and acted upon.
In practical terms, if you have a new technology product, then you have an idea about the problem. That is the reason that you started developing something in the first place. If you have a blog, then it is the reason you started blogging. But the problem is often one of the easiest places to start.
From there you need to sort out some of these other bubbles. You need to understand your own position and your promise. This means a whole lot of brand-oriented thinking and insight. It means understanding your competitors and your customers. And if you think of your customers as providing a central gravitational point (where the + sign is), then as all of the bubbles are attracted to the customers, they begin to cross over and leak across their boundaries like a big Venn Diagram.
This is where the real DIGITAL storytelling begins to take off. Because from this point onwards you have the most incredible opportunity for digital content to begin to be taken up and owned. You are making the promise MANIFEST and the position TANGIBLE — but in a CONTEXT which is controlled by the customer. About now is when I will connect to Michael Wesch’s very interesting The Machine is Us/ing Us (which I love).
And then skip quickly to the Mojiti version of it.
BUT … you see … I am not really finished yet. Because we have talked about taking that foundational brand story and bringing it to life, but we have missed some essential steps. How is it that you think through the elements that are needed in that story? What are the building blocks? Well there are some obvious elements — USP/Core Competency etc. But Sean has yet another great diagram.
You need to drill down and across these. You need to identify and craft your key messages and overall thematics. And then you need to develop a strategy that drives towards ACTIVATION. And that’s a whole NEW presentation.
… and that is about it. Reckon I can get through it in 15? Is there anything I have missed?
