I've literally just left the salubrious agency environs of JWT NYC where I was chatting with some lovely people about crowdsourcing [see the post below for the illustrious people I got to sit with] for the edification of a larger group of lovely people, and the video of it is already online by the time I get back to my desk.
So, like, the event kind of gets distributed across time and space.
Well, not backwards in time, but you get what I mean.
Enjoy.
ADDENDUM:
[I was just watching a bit of this - because I'm really vain and that - and it reminded me that I repeatedly rail against the idea that crowds are inherently wise, and therefore crowdsourcing is awesome.
As I say up there in video form, I think the fact that Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing and James Surowieki's book The Wisdom of Crowds came out around the same time iun 2004 caused some kind of associative conflation, where by crowds are wise, so if you source crowds, that's wise.
Or something.
Despite my brilliant dismantling of this fallacious idea -
[pointing out that in the book crowds are only wise in VERY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES, usually guessing numeric means, when the crowd can't communicate with itself to cause information cascades, and mostly for guessing the weight of bulls.
Or something.]
- it kept coming back up, not just because no one was listening to me but because it's that kind of idea, one that is ripe for misuse.
It's not that I don't think crowdsourcing can be awesome - of course it can, whatever it actually is, - but the logic flow crowds=wise therfore crowdsourcing = awesome is nonsense.
No one is smarter than everyone, that's definitely true.
[although we really need everyone to CATCH UP and show Steve Jobs that this is true]
But as Agent K in Men In Black says:
A person is smart, people are stupid.
[Also see your high school essay entitled The Role of the Mob in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for more on this idea]
There isn't something intrinsically BETTER about leveraging crowds - like everything it depends on what you are trying to do and other context.
But, if being inclusive, or engagement, or advocacy or other stuff like that is part of what you are trying to achieve, then there is something intrinsically better about crowdsourcing is, because then the process is also the product.
Research done with 1 million Facebook fans is marketing.
As you may already know, it is now officially SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK - so there are lots of interesting events to check out and parties to go to in various different cities.
I sit on the advisory board of SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK in NYC but I've been a bit useless at helping out this time around.
However, I have promised to be on a panel tomorrow morning - and it STARTS at 9am.
[Although I didn't realize that when I agreed to it.]
Regardless, I shall be there bright, early and caffeinated to discuss Crowdsourcing with some truly brilliant people who all know more about this stuff than I do.
The very awesome and lovely John Winsor [CEO of Victors&Spoils] is moderating:
Ty Montague, Co-President and Chief Creative Officer, JWT
North America
Michael Lebowitz, Founder and CEO, Big Spaceship
Saneel
Radia, SVP, Alchemist at Denuo
[and me]
I shall attempt not to embarrass myself more than necessary.
You know how I was saying that social media stuff is easier when you do other stuff as well - because then you have content and others things to talk about and that?
On Sunday some fine people [and I] walked blindfolded from Union Square to Times Square.
So, with a flurry of excited chirrups, pings and liveblogging, the iNet has heralded the launch of the iPad [and iBooks and everything] with equal amounts of awe, confusion and ridicule - ever the attitudinal breakdown of the geeky [especially when it comes to the name - it seems feminine hygiene products still elicit a titter on twitter].
Recently, partially due to tablets [digital not prescription] and partially due to conversations with @KathySierra over twitter and various people in the book industry IRL, I've been thinking a lot about content and media and that.
[OK, so I think about that kind of thing a lot anyway, but more so.]
For a long time now I've been talking about the medium NOT being the message.
With all due to respect to McLuhan of course - because it's never entirely clear what he means - but he was I think suggesting that the characteristics of the medium both delineate the nature of the content [but that we tend to not see the medium's delineating effect because we focus on the content] and that the cultural effect of the medium is distinct and larger than the the effect of the content.
All of which makes sense. I think.
Think about what we call advertising.
Its primary form is essentially an historical accident - the nature of what we call advertisements was delineated by the nature and relative scarcity of the transmission vectors.
To whit: we put films on television, and airtime costs money, so we buy it in 30 seconds chunks, and call those advertisements.
[But, as Jim Carrol from BBH has endlessly pointed out, advertising comes from advetere: to draw attention to [literally to turn towards] - so advertising should really be considered to be anything which draws attention to a company. We have tended to conflate the expressions with the intention. Possibly.]
Up until recently however, what we called media were themselves assemblages of a number of different things.
[McLuhan had an extended definition of medium - he included light bulbs - but the point will hold for the primary 'media']
So 'television' isn't actually a clearly defined thing as such - it's a socio-cultural construct of at least two things: content and a distribution platform - the medium.
Books, magazines, radio all work the same way. A 'book' is a bunch of words printed on paper, with a certain set of culturally defined ideas that float around it.
Up until digitalness, you couldn't separate the content from the distribution platform.
But digital 'content' can be unbundled from its distribution platform.
And the iPad made me realise that it's not just distribution and content - there is a third piece: the consumption platform.
When IBM started talking about the brave new 'world of platform agnostic content and the fluid mobility of media experiences' in 2006, we weren't really there yet.
Language, as usual, helps us see where changes are occuring.
When you are watching 30Rock on Netflix via your Xbox360, or on Hulu, on a laptop, or screen, or projector, or iPad - are you watching television?
If so - why? If not - why not?
When you are reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on your Kindle [or iPad] - are you reading a book?
If so - why? If not - why not?
What about books like Pride and Prejudice? Because they are no longer under copyright, they are free on the Kindle. Previously you would pay for the consumption vehicle, now you don't need to.
A Kindle is clearly not a book, and yet it is all books, kind of.
The words don't quite fit properly anymore - because they are bundled constructs.
You have the distribution platform - in pre-digital media these were closed networks: book distributors, magazine distributors, cables, satellites, mobile phone networks.
With digitalness you just need an IP network that you can access anywhere.
Then you have content.
Digital content can take any form: text, audio, video, experience, game and so on.
Then you have consumption platforms: screens basically. Lots of different kinds of screens, that are good in different contexts.
Previously you had 'computers' that were bundled devices for content consumption and creation [and communication and spreadsheets and stuff] - but the iPad seems like it is focused primarily on being a content consumption device for the time being.
[Although the touchscreen only iPad Keynote does sound interesting, from a very personal point of view]
And you have emerging economic ecosystems that plug these things together: things like iTunes and iBooks and app stores and that.
[And yes they are walled gardens, just like when phone networks started doing content for mobiles, because that's how you make the most money from new platforms, manufacturing scarcity and exclusivity - but they will hopefully all become more webby eventually, assuming Google gets its way.]
Returning for a second to the iPad - it's been much discussed as the saviour of PRINT [although of course that word doesn't make sense in a digital context].
But how is an enewspaper any different from a news website, on an iPad? In fact, what do these distinctions even mean in an unbundled media world?
You have text, sounds, images, moving images, interactive experiences, and blends of all these.
What constitutes an unbundled newsPAPER, magazine, tv channel?
Content> distribtution> consumption - the new 'unbundled' mediascape is emerging.
When [some of] the world bifurcated around a line, those that came on found a new social space to create themselves anew.
A division was articifically introduced, because one of the inital effects of computer mediated interaction was the draw of anonymity or the appeal of being someone else, leveraging the space between who you were IRL and your forum handle.
Initially, it was assumed that anonymity was a fundamental aspect of Computer Mediated Communication:
The issue of anonymity is often privileged in CMC scholarship (e.g.,
Etzioni & Etzioni, 1999; McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Postmes,
Spears, Sakhel, & de Groot, 2001; Turkle, 1995).
Some studies have
attributed anti-social online behaviors to anonymity (Davis, 2002;
Suler & Philips, 1998).
Others have shown that it may foster group
norm violations (Jessup, Connolly, & Galegher, 1990; Postmes &
Spears, 2000).
Communication online is also characterized as
"hyperpersonal" due in part to anonymity (Nowak, Watt, & Walther,
2005; Walther, 1996). That is, the lack of visual cues allows people to
selectively self-present for better impression management.
But the draw to disclose who we are, at least partially, is too strong for a social creature whose unique identity as part of a group, is core to our sense of self and self worth.
Our ability to empathize from our own experience is the emotional medium through which we can communicate with other minds.
Then the whole social thing enabled a generation to mediate itself, and identity online became more about self-restraint than self disclosure.
Platform by platform, what used to be a profile or homepage became a footprint, a distributed identity that expressed itself in different ways in different places.
Content syndicates itself automatically, cross pollinating from the blog to twitter and facebook and back again.
Mapping out a social ecosystem for brands came naturally to those who had seen their own social ecosystem develop and grow, and so intuitively knew how to use these emerging tools and platforms.
To understand the ebbs and flows of attention one really needs to live in the stream.
[I remember when I first put a URL on my curriculum vitae. Now if you don't have some web presence on there it suggests you have opted out, and you need to be ready to discuss why.]
New aggregation platforms like Flavors.Me use the magic of RSS to stitch your distributed digital identity back together.
But sometimes it can seem daunting, trying to keep up with an accelerated culture, maintaining the constant stream of phatic pings [and re-pings] that constitute networked relationships.
Jake from Zoomdoggle hired help:
Seriously, I have a problem:
- I have 642 unopened messages on Facebook and haven’t posted a status update since October 1st.
- I have 3,639 followers on Twitter and, though I tweeted 4 times yesterday, each one was a struggle.
- I try to post 6-8 times per day here on Zoomdoggle, but somehow talking about fun is keeping me from having any.
- My primary email account (gmail) currently has 29,568 unread
messages. Admittedly most are newsletters I’ve signed up for, or notes
from my mom who’s currently bedridden with little more than a laptop to
entertain her, still, it’s hard to keep up.
I need a break. Just for a week.
I need someone to take over my
Facebook correspondence, picture posting, and commenting. I need
someone to blog for me. I need someone to twitter, thumb things up and
down on Stumbleupon, and vote things “cute” or “wtf” on Buzzfeed.
Companies are being forced to reconsider how they communicated with customers - from promotional campaigns and customer service bottlenecks, to ongoing monitoring and resolution in real time across whichever engagement space the customer wants to reach out on.
They are also reaching out for assistance, recruiting new staff and agencies to help manage the tasks.
Whilst 'Google Xistence' is clearly not real and not really from Google, it nevertheless highlights a tension that applies to both individuals and companies.
A year or so ago I went down the rabbit hole and an excellent time I had too - you can read about that here.
The mistressmind behind the hole is the lovely Samina Virani - culture journalist and women about towns.
[I found out later that I went to 'high'school with her brother. Small world, right?]
She says:
As the repertoire of global icons across all infrastructures and systems – politics, religion, finance, to name of a few – has gone rather topsy turvy, an enormous space is emerging where every discourse is called to attention. Things are not what they seemed, or rather, perhaps they were never what they were.
Traditional signifiers that connote value, identity and to which we attribute meaning have gone rather topsy turvy.Forget crumply bank notes, oil reserves, and platinum credit cards; now value is attributed to saving the planet from peril.
The rabbit hole dives into the topsy turvy nature of this marvelous current predicament - value shifting and open questioning - inviting imagination and creative consciousness to playfully embrace the unique dialogue that is emerging, and to propela new and spirited freedom of interpretation."
Which is hard to argue with.
Her newest curated experience costume liminal bacchanalian mystery tour excursion type thing is next weekend and you may still be able to sign up:
To sign up to smoke’s limited capacity costume event, go to www.404251n.com/smokeand pending approval from their madhatter, you will be sent a confirmation email with all event details.
Grant is creating transmedia extensions of his lovely book Chief Culture Officer, as of course he should.
On Feburary 13th he is hosting a Boot Camp for aspiring CCOs.
I've seen Grant present many times and he's great - plus this time you get a whole day of Harvard approved business tools and that. [Don't forget Grant teaches at Harvard Business School].
You should go. I don't think I can make it but I shall be planting spies in the audience.
Here's how to tell you if it's for you:
Are
you ready to make your way to the C-Suite? Are you already in a senior
position but would like to sharpen your cultural acumen? Are you
already your company's unofficial CCO? As a marketer, planner, media
specialist or manager you are uniquely positioned to bring change to
the corporation as their Chief Culture Officer.
So if that sounds like you - you can buy tickets here
Well,
no, technically I guess they don't, since you need to be born during a
certain arbitrarily defined time period to be X or Y or whatever, but
actually I think they do, if by generation we mean a bunch of people
who are around the same age but have dramatically different habits and
thoughts and behavior to people who are older or younger.
In Being Digital,
Negroponte says that 'each generation will be more digital than the
last'. This is worth remembering. immigrant or native: being native now
isn't what will be native soon. And, if I'm right, I mean very very
soon. You have to run to keep up with an accelerating culture.
But these are also technology tools that children even 10 years older
did not grow up with, and I’ve begun to think that my daughter’s
generation will also be utterly unlike those that preceded it.
Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the
ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series
of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely
influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of
development.
1. Gestures Gestural interfaces are the future of
human computer interaction, at least until we find a way to connect
something straight into your brain. Despite the excitement the first
multi-touchscreens triggered and the seeming ubiquity of the iPhone
touchscreen paradigm it spawned, little has been made of their
potential. Things like FluidTunes – an app which lets you control
iTunes by waving your hand in front of the built-in webcam – and
interactive installations triggered by similar motion detection both
show new ways to interact with content, experiences and brands.
A long, long time ago, in 2004 in fact, I [co]wrote an article for the Financial Times about 'brandals' who had been defacing ads for the then newly minted iPod, complaining about the battery issues the first generation device had.
Later in the piece I suggested that perhaps this willingness to get involved with, or co-create as you would say now, brand communication could be a good thing since it suggested that people were involved and paying attention and that this 'open source communication' might be a way to get advertising back into the cultural conversation.
Then the world turned and consumers got creative and everything.
Later, I suggested that these co-created texts might constitute a pseudo-modern form of communication, where the text itself is collaboratively generated, moving beyond the 'death of the author' into polyphonic, truly heterglossic cultural texts.
This kind of thing has been sped up / helped along by the nature of digitally immersed content consumers, aware of their ability to create, co-create, modulate and propagate: the participatory consumer I went on about in my thesis.
And it now finally seems like the industry has started to accept this point as well - unless there is SOME role for the 'audience' in the creation of the communication, it seems somehow less relevant, and so the top creative award winners all include SOME KIND of participation.
This seems to sit at the convergence of a number of different trends: the interactive nature of digital media; the dismantling of notions of authority the internet has triggered, which leads brands to use their customers to validate their utterances; the need to earn attention and reward it.
But it also seems very pertinent in the question of attitudes and behaviours.
The oldest cogent model of advertising is AIDA: Awareness, Interest, Decision, Action.
This is, of course, grossly simplified but in some form it is still the dominant model the industry ascribes to.
However, behavioural economics, social science and neuroscience all paint a much more complex picture.
Things like Earth Hour, which only happens if people turn their lights off, and all communication that requires people to do anything, hinges on a very specific certainty: people did something.
In fact, let's raise this to a general principle:
The reason consumer collaborative creative is considered so awesome is because IT ONLY WORKS IF THEY DO SOMETHING.
And, since, ultimately, what we are trying to do, is get people to do stuff, that is, change their behaviour, these campaigns, I suspect, strike a chord because, by their very nature, they indicate some degree of success.
Set, as his books usually are, in the almost-now-just-around-the-corner awesomeness of the near future, it charts the tale of a world where people can make stuff.
It begins at point of inflection, the collapse of an economic system, the birth of another - NEW WORK - and its subsequent tribulations, and features exciting co-created theme park rides, an evil Empire [DisneyWorldThemeParks -the fallen star of his first book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom] and cute goth kids and robots and everything.
But the stars of the book are the fabbers - 3D printers.
I've geeked out about these before - because they change everything, once they work properly, which is one of the key struggles in the book - printers that can print components of themselves, and thus create more printers.
Or indeed, anything else. Like products and that.
Which is very much the theme of Willsh's excellent presentation above.
See - so far the social revolution has mostly restricted itself to media because the tools of content production are easier to democratize, and because of the free distribution platform the web provides.
The radical dentralization of the economics of cultural production have not yet really impacted industrial production much.
Of course there are lots of steps towards co-creation of products - but in essence this is the practice of making the industrial production line flexible enough to mass personalize products and let everyone choose the colours they want - which are then sent through the industrial machine to get made - or the crowdsourcing of ideas for products, which are likewise fed into the machine.
But as Wilsh points out, we are moving towards the technologies necessary for social production.
As I said in my first post about fabbers, when you print your own products in a home nanofactory, you might still be buying branded CAD files, or something like that, which is what happens in Makers, as the IP players like Disney license their IP across yet another platform.
But anything that exists digitally can be copied and distributed at zero cost, and once everyone has a fabber, a new type of industrial revolution seems inevitable.
Today's selection from the Nikon Festival, also brought to my attention via some enterprising auteur's outreach.
Here's what he said:
The video shows what can be created in one's own backyard, as opposed to needing special privileges to VIP locations and celebrities, and the video still follows the festival directions - to show what it is like to be you, with high image quality, originality, and ability to capture Nikon's theme.
Normal posting, whatever that may constitute, will probably resume soon.
Today's selection was brought to my attention by its auteur via a little blog outreach, which is good stuff since the onus is very much to spread your content as far and as wide as you can.
This is what he says about it:
The theme of the video is about the inspiration that can be found in unlikely places and that in giving back / sharing to the world – music is created!
A theme that is appropriate for the holiday season!
Today's Nikon Festival selection gets points [from me, which count for nothing] for mentioning and avoiding the more obvious tropes of 'alarm clocks snooze' and 'brushing teeth'.
Today's celeb studded Nikon Festival selection for you.
Also a bit of a tip for those of you who are in the running. Audience voting is done by clicking the star ratings - everyone can indicate how they score each film.
Then, from the Ts&Cs
Limit: Each rater may rate each Finalist Submission one (1) time during the Audience Award Phase. Multiple ratings received from any person or IP address after the first rating will be void and disqualified in Sponsor’s discretion. Finalists are prohibited from obtaining views or ratings by any fraudulent or inappropriate means, including, without limitation, offering prizes or other inducements to members of the public, as determined by Sponsor in its sole discretion. Finalists scores will be determined by multiplying the number of valid views the Submission received by the average rating (out of five (5) stars) it received (the score).
So, basically, any individual as identified by IP address can only RATE each film once - but the final score is a function of the average rating and the total number of views.
So if your film is in there - you need to be doing everything you can to get people to rate your film - and watch it as many times as possible - every valid view counts towards your score!
Being today's Nikon Festival entry that I have picked because I'm heading back to London from New York tomorrow.
[More disclosure: the winning films will be picked by judges and audience votes - nothing to do with me guv - I'm just pulling a few out here for your delectation]
I usually avoid talking about anything I've been involved in my 'professional' life here on TIGS - it feels weird.
But this thing we're doing is about to hit phase 2 where there's social voting and that I thought I'd mention it in case you haven't seen it. [Disclosure - I was involved in this]
Sorry.
I shall refrain from any exegetical exposition - I shall simply say that Nikon is currently running a film festival called the Nikon Festival, which is designed to harness the newly social nature of short film, and appeal to a participatory culture of budding film makers.
It is a chance for the brand to celebrate the creativity of the audience and is a form of content generation engine - an idea that creates lots of content for the brand - something that I think is crucial in a post scarcity media environment.
The brief was to capture what a day was like through your lens in 140 seconds or less - the 140 obviously echoing the character limit on twitter, because brevity is the soul of twit.
Ahem.
Ashton made us a film of a day in his life and launched the contest with a tweet to his nearly 4 million followers, which was cool.
Anyway, it's been going brilliantly, thanks for asking, we got over 1000 entries and as of tomorrow, you can begin to vote on the finalists [one prize is being awarded by judges, one by audience vote].
So, since it's Christmas and I shan't be be doing any regular posting, I shall instead silently proffer up one of the films for your festive delectation.
Enjoy and Merry Christmas! Or Holidays, or whatever you prefer.
I wrote this thing for the current issue of Strategy Magazine in Canada.
I've written about the problems of prospection before, so I won't labour the caveat except to say that perhaps it's better to think of these as provocations rather than predictions.
Gestures
Banners
The Socialisation of Media
Content
Hyperconnectivity and Transmedia
Something old, some new, mostly borrowed, hardly blue.
You can read the whole thing online or in handy portable document format:
[There's a line in section 4 that got a bit distorted in the edit - should read:
So the onus in these spaces that advertisers are paying for has been to
communicate what they want to say in a way that is appealing to the
audience, but not necessarily to communicate something the audience
wants to hear.]
It's a special issue that concerns itself with a very important question [for those of us in advertising]:
What do we KNOW about advertising?
If this seems to be an obvious question, ask yourself to define clearly what advertising is, and exactly how it works, in all cases.
See?
It's tricky this business of ours. That's what makes it so interesting.
[PS> If you don't have some kind of model of how you think advertising and brands and that works - go and think about if for a while , because this is important.
If you don't have some idea HOW and WHY things WORK, how can you hope to make things that do?
If you don't have some model in your head about how putting pieces of content into media [without even getting into the more complex world we live in now] can create business value for companies, by which mechanism this process happens, commercially, culturally and psychologically...well you should.
And then you need to recognize that no one model will hold true for everything:
No single theory or
group of theories can explain it all, because advertisements work in such
different ways. There is no point in looking for an overall theory.[1]
[1] Nevill Darby, quoted in Advertising Frameworks, Giep Franzen, Brand
New Brand Thinking
[That was quite an extended parenthesis wasn't it? This one is much shorter.]
One of the research papers I really enjoyed was from measurement masters Les Binet [DDB Matrix] and Peter Fields [my measurement mentor].
It highlights some of the findings from a meta-analysis they undertook for the IPA in the UK, using the IPA DataBANK, which holds all the winning papers for the IPA Effectiveness Awards [one of the few awards which focuses exclusively on the business results of advertising].
The IPA Effectiveness Awards are recognised by agencies and clients as Adlands most rigorous awards scheme because entrants have to prove to a jury of experienced clients that their communications strategies have worked in hard business terms. These awards are open worldwide to agencies, media owners and advertisers.
The analysis looked at 880 winning papers and tried to draw some general conclusions about what seems to correlate strongly with business success.
The paper is called:
Empirical Generalizations about Advertising Campaign Success
You really should read it.
A couple of points they highlight:
"Campaigns that aim to reduce price sensitivity are more effective than campaigns that aim to increase sales or market share."
"Campaigns that focus on customer acquisition are far more effective than campaigns that focus on loyalty."
[Whilst they don't mention this there is an obvious reason for this - loyalty campaigns are forced to compete with direct experience of the customer, whereas acquisition campaigns are not.]
"Campaigns that have the stated aim of getting the brand and the marketing talked about are particularly effective."
But probably my favorite bit is the bit I put up top. With the exception of direct response advertising, which seems to work better with rational messages:
"The most effective advertisements of all are those with little or no rational content." Les Binet/Peter Field
I especially love this because it validates something I posited in a previous post:
"This effect, where commercial grammar overrules social grammar when both are employed is detailed in Predictably Irrational - it further supports Feldwick's viewbelow in the sense that specific product messages would frame communication as commercial and therefore negate the development of social relationship building, or brand preference.
This is probably contentious, but it suggests that if you attempt to employ any rational messaging in brand building communication, you might well be shooting your brand in the foot". From Social Gravity and the Value of Free new emphasis]
So this piece of research, if we hold it to be valid and that, alongside Feldwick's paper, requires those who still hold on to things like Reasons to Believe and USPs to have a good hard think.
I'm not saying this is the answer or anything, but it does really need thinking about.
Culture is one of the those tricky words isn't it?
[ Actually, I find all words quite tricky - they squirm and wriggle and writhe, squeezing different 'meaning' into different 'contexts'...but eventually you have to let it go, once you accept there is no fixed 'meaning' to any of the noises we make beyond what I think it means and what you understand it to - assuming everything is in inverted commas is just easier.]
When I asked for pieces of culture I wasn't really sure what I would get, but that was the point - to offer something to you, dear reader, and to get some of your interests in return, which can then be shared and so on.
I was a bit surprised that I only received one recombinant entry, considering my predisposition for such, and although it's great - The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody - it's not today's winner.
a fragment of culture that is itself cultural exegesis, using the differences in core myths to unravel the routes of clashing cultures - it seems to be the most 'appropriate' entry.
Devdutt references some very similar points to some of the things I was saying in this paper about brands as modern myths - so I found it very interesting.
"Depending on the context, depending on the outcome, choose your paradigm"
"Understand that you live in the subjective truth, and so does everyone else."
Christmas approaches and the end of the decade comes into view, leaving many people thinking about what they did and what they will do.
So to interrupt this introspection, BeerSphere NYC is back for a SUPER SPECIAL XMAS EDITION.
This year has felt transitional - but then every year does - and, as it draws to a close, now seems a good time to gently remind people that there are lots of nice, smart people in and around our industry that like a drink.
There are lots of very keen super smart young people who understand that the internet isn't a channel its a whole new set of rules, some fresh out of VCU and Miami, looking for the cracks in the hiring freezes to get their first pop at re-inventing the second oldest profession.
There are some really awesome grown ups who are fun and wise and kind and willing to help with a chat, and sometimes know about jobs and that.
Hopefully a few of both will come next week and then they can hang out and have a nice time.
[But don't do anything lame like turn up with resumes - that would be really uncool.]
This SUPER SPECIAL XMAS BEERSPHERE is sponsored by TIGS - Merry Christmas and thank you for your time and attention and comments and votes and everything.
[I'm buying a keg so you can all come and drink strong continental lager, until it runs out.]
[If you want to do keg stands [whatever they are] that's your prerogative.]
Details:
WHAT: Super Special Xmas BEERSPHERE
WHEN: THURSDAY DECEMBER 17th 7pm onwards
WHERE: Superdive - 200 Avenue A between 12th and 13th
Earlier this year I was delighted to receive an unbound pre-print copy of Grant McCracken's new book: Chief Culture Officer - for reasons best known to Grant he decided to solicit a blurb from me.
[Isn't it awesome that blurb is a real word?]
Here's what I said:
“In Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken highlights the increasing
importance of cultural understanding for brands that wish to remain
relevant—and profitable—in the protean flux of the modern marketplace,
as he carves out a new role for the 21st century corporation.
The best
marketers can hope for is to create something that resonates so
strongly it becomes part of our cultural fabric. This book is an
indispensable tool for achieving that goal.”
And I stand by it.
[Especially the bit about the protean flux of the modern marketplace - I liked that, despite the tautology.]
Grant's brilliant and he's pulled together some great ideas, frameworks and case studies - you should go read it - and then see if you don't want to become Chief Culture Officer.
[I may change my job title.]
Being a modern and social book it has a Ning to go along with it.
So - since I got a copy free in exchange for blurbing [real world status uncertain but definitely used] it only seems fair that I buy one for one of YOU.
So - in order to win a copy of Chief Culture Officer by Grant McCracken - please leave me a comment with a link to an interesting fragment of culture - the one I like most gets the book.
Whilst in London I took the opportunity to 'gatecrash' a Yuletide Tea with the IPA Socialites.
[Lovely it was too -high tea with scones and clotted cream and everything - and very nice to see everyone.]
This reminded me that I hadn't posted the collective fruits of our labors - what we came together to do - which was to continue the conversations of social type stuff beyond the static dead tree format of the IPA Social Media Futures report.
And so to that.
Some very nice smart people got together and had a think about this thing we currently call social media and how it might be approached by our industry.
Up top is a video version of Be Nice or Leave - my introduction to social engagement thing, that has been finding its way back into my inbox and onto the web a lot recently - and since I never posted it, I thought I would.
Here is a deck the Neil wrote which introduce the conversational sparks:
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