Facebook: Do Not Want revisited

A while back I took Facebook to task for constantly displaying ads telling me how I could meet women.



So I engaged in a bit of profile altering in order to see how Facebook changed the kinds of ads it displayed. Now that my profile shows I am in a relationship, Facebook has gone from showing me how I can meet women to displaying ads on leasing cars and hangover cures.

Because obviously now that I am in a relationship I have turned to hard living in an effort to self-destruct (as this is easier than actually going through a break-up). Switching to married gives me...go-karting. And an offer to complete market research surveys. Microsoft paid how much to be able to serve Facebook's ads?

Now I'm on It's complicated, seems to be serving me ads for a swinger's club. Trouble in your relationship? Why not restore the trust and dedication you so sorely need by...hooking up with complete strangers.

I'm back to being single now, which feels about right. Of course the rawest example I've seen of Facebook's ad serving hitting the nail on the head is this example from Charlie O'Donnell's blog earlier this year. Fresh out of a relationship, wound still gaping wide, Facebook delivered this gem:

Facebook lands buttered side down

One of the joys of now being a columnist is having the editor of the magazine call up and berate you for over-due pieces. Picture any actor who has played a journalist (I'm thinking Clooney personally) called by his very attractive but somewhat neurotic editor who has told he has until the end of the day to get his story in or he is fired. Note how cool he plays it, how he has arranged to discuss his column over dinner with her (and probably breakfast too). Got that image in your head?

Right. My life is nothing like that.

Still, I was called today because my latest piece was over-due. I said I had nothing to say, she said not to worry, that I could write about butter and it would be interesting.

So that's what I did. Spurred on by the recent hoopla surrounding their blocking Google's Friend Connect, I explain why butter is a crock, why Facebook is butter, and why, for me, it starts to spell the end of this media darling.

...trying to control what people do with (their own information) is the digital equivalent of telling rain which way to fall in a thunderstorm. Facebook eschewed a bunch of good stuff to get to where it is, using ingredients that were good for a whole lot of other, better, products and services. Now they’re desperately trying to maintain hold on user data, under the daft assumption it was somehow theirs to play with in the first place.

It's already been suggested I'm wrong on this, I'm not so sure...

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Image courtesy of bezmyaso, with thanks to Flickr Storm.

Bluefreeway request extension to voluntary suspension

Bluefreeway today extended their suspension from trading while investigations continue internally. Simon Chen does a decent breakdown of the situation in his own inimitable style.

I really feel sorry for all those local companies who did a 50/50 deal for cash and stock when the fast talking Bluefreeway guys came along. There’s not one who wouldn’t be regretting their decision to sell.

Because if the core group goes pear shaped when they do finally make an announcement to the market, each and every company won’t be able to do anything. Potential buyers of the carcass (or carcasses) will be negotiating with someone from Ferrier Hodgson rather than the founders of the individual brands.

I read a great piece recently which I'll try to dig up on matching your development cycle with your sales cycle to make sure one doesn't sink the other. 20/20 hindsight for Bluefreeway, hopefully it will serve as a lesson to others. For those interested in the history of the "train wreck"...

This just in: People tend to agree with me

I am guilty of opening far more tabs in Firefox than is perhaps advised, I just got to one opened earlier this week. The page loaded is a post from Laurel Papworth taking to task a piece penned by Douglas A. McIntyre titled "Web 2.0 is a bust". By that, he means his ill-informed view of how it should operate.

Laurel makes a few good points in her piece, it is definitely worth checking out. It also echoes my own thoughts from back in February, where I said the following:

Ever see teenagers at a shopping centre, hanging out and not buying anything? Look for this behaviour to continue (funnily enough). Marketers looking to capture that intention are going about it in the wrong capacity. Yes, a person is a fan of the TV show Lost. Yes, you have that on DVD and you can sell it to them. No, they do not want to buy that now. They want to buy it when they want to watch it, so you had better make sure you know enough about your audience to be in the right place at the right time.

Rumours abound; Facebook and MS and Yahoo! Oh my!

No sooner am I cracking jokes about not following Scoble than I clock an interesting breakdown of rumours swirling regarding Microsoft taking search off of Yahoo!'s hands and buying Facebook at the same time for somewhere between $15 & $20 billion. Robert is running around saying the sky will fall if this happens, I say you'll see first an uproar and then an exodus from Facebook, the kind of thing that will make the hassles with the news feed and Beacon look like the good ol' days.

I'll be leading the charge.

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*Update* David J Hinson hit me up on Twitter suggesting I may be over-reacting a touch. Me? Noooooo...*ahem* I seriously value the ability of the web to keep moving towards a completely open future, and my instinct says a deal between MS and Facebook would not take is closer. I have nothing against Microsoft (hi to Tom and Adam at Redmond, we miss you guys), but as Andy Grove once said, only the paranoid survive.

Tweetwheel; the hits keep on coming

Turned onto a cute little Twitter visualisation via Iain Tait called Tweetwheel which lays out up to 100 of your followers then shows you who among the people you know are also connected.

I was just about to close the window when I noticed Robert Scoble sitting on the page with no connections. You may say odd that Scoble showed up with no connections (surely a first..har), but the mystery for me lies in the fact that I don't follow Robert.

Perhaps the creators got so used to loading up his name he just defaults? Who knows =]

Why Australian GQ sucks - part 5: Online

Do me a favour, open a new tab or window in your browser and punch in www.gq.com.au. What happens? It re-directs to the Vogue website where we’re given a token sampling of the current issue in the midst of the Australian Vogue website.

Hold up (wait a minute).

Vogue. We’re not Vogue, we’re GQ! Since when is the GQ man subservient to the Vogue woman? Understand, this isn’t gender politics, this is branding 101. The GQ man is strong and independent, he is a law unto his own stylish self. He can have epic, swinging-from-the-chandeliers-sex with the Vogue woman, but he is in no way beholden to her, certainly not a subset of her environment.

Contrast this with British GQ. Being the digital guy that I am, I’m going to call a spade a bloody shovel (thanks Grandpa), the British GQ site isn’t much better, but it is its own beast. Girls, gadgets, films, music, motors, style, grooming, bars, restaurants and only right at the end is the magazine mentioned – which makes me think, nay, hope Conde Nast’s UK operations have an inkling that print still has a role to play but its digital offering needs to have its own legs.

(I am however biased...moving on...)

GQ.com.au should be something the magazine is not. Nobody is going to read a printed page’s worth of content online, pieces are shorter, they’re a single idea (or they should be). You have people’s attention in a place where they’re willingly engaged by your brand. Not only that, you probably have the attention of some fairly articulate and intelligent people (and then me) who are in a medium where they’re familiar with exchanging ideas in public forums; why not give them an appropriate space to do that?

What about a showcase for Australia’s best menswear designers? You have such limited inventory in the magazine, online is as good as limitless. We’re all guilty of salivating over the same foreign labels, though I was in a bar Saturday night and a guy in Zegna asked where I got my coat – it was Saba, home grown. If a site conveniently put together a shopping list of Australian labels I would seek them out and wear them proudly.

Let’s recognise there’s a whole audience around men’s grooming and fashion that is unique to Australian culture, why is Australian GQ not the epicentre of that the way GQ is in every other territory? Because we still all aspire to Paul Smith suits anyway? Perhaps. But if we don’t back our own nobody else will, and GQ Australia is in a privileged position where it can and should make that happen.

In conclusion...

I'm a huge fan of the GQ brand - to me it perfectly nails a combination of aspiration and accessibility. The GQ man is James Bond without the inconvenience of having to save the world (though he probably could...), it is working hard and playing much, much harder. We all have brands or products we love that have somehow fallen by the wayside, as consumers we can demand they do better, and we should! If they do better, then everyone wins, if they don't, it is a one-sided victory that isn't even ours - it goes to that brand's competitors.

For now though, I'm going back to work, There's a new British GQ out on the shelves of Borders, and I'm stuck back in March. I suppose in the absence of Australian GQ, I'd at least have more time...

...something the GQ man can never get enough of.

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Image courtesy of Stabilo Boss with thanks to Flickr Storm.

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Update: I wanted to link all five posts together for easy reference, so here they are.

1. The Editor


2. The Writers


3. The Art Direction


4. Audience & Competitors


5. Online (you are here)

More on being wrong...

Just saw this, what a great quote:

Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point… Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

Can I get an amen? The quote comes from Robert Rauschenberg, which I picked up reading a great blog Stu put me onto, Indie Breakfast Club. I've been thinking and writing a lot lately about being wrong, great to see I'm not alone.



...

What are you still doing here? The post is over! Go check out Indie Breakfast Club, tell 'em I sent you.

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Image courtesy of wernerchen, first spotted on and shamelessly copied from Indie Breakfast Club.

Why Australian GQ sucks - part 4: Audience & Competitors

I may very well be the only straight man in Australia with this opinion, but I’m not interested in buying magazines with girls flaunting themselves on the front cover. If I want that, I can go to almost any bar on a Friday night and see pretty young things who can’t hold their pre-mixed vodka. And if for some bizarre reason I’m really desperate to see girls tarted up and air-brushed to within an inch of their cosmetically enhanced lives, I’ll google “porn star” and see what I find. In fairness, British GQ are as guilty of this as anyone, and Australian GQ actually have Guy Pearce on the cover for their April/May issue.

Regardless, put a stunning David Bailey portrait on the cover (better yet, an Australian photographer - Robert Paul Mee has a lousy website but is brilliant) and I’m 10 times more likely to buy than a bikini-clad actress. I realise I have now put myself in an even smaller subset of beings who know a David Bailey photograph on sight, but nobody said this was going to be easy.

The first part of this is something I don’t have an easy answer to, but I think about it a lot, and that’s we need a new definition of masculinity because the old one isn’t working, and while that is something that informs this argument, it is itself a separate post (and one I look forward to).

The second part of this is looking at the space GQ exists in. Australian GQ competes on the shelves of newsagents and Borders against British GQ, American GQ (only marginally better than ours, but full of white-bread Hilfiger and Polo ads, therefore beyond saving) and Esquire (here the US version is actually better than the English one) among others.

It does not compete (or at least it shouldn’t) with Ralph, FHM or any other “lad” magazine purporting to appeal to stereotypical male culture. Who writes this drivel? Who sees enough value in its pages to shell out for it? FHM are certainly aware of how low-brow they are, to the extent that they’ve started releasing dedicated Style issues in an attempt to reach people like me. Sorry guys, your brand doesn’t stretch in that direction, no matter how hard you pull (pun intended).

Does the GQ man lust after models in magazines or does the GQ man party with them on his private yacht? Right. So get them off the cover and let’s replace it with some men we can actually respect and who have earned the spot. British GQ used to run “Britain’s leading quality men’s monthly” across their masthead, and while you could argue you shouldn’t have to say it, they at least knew where they were headed.

Tomorrow, we’ll finish up by looking at online.

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Image courtesy of Proserpina with thanks to Flickr Storm.

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Update: I wanted to link all five posts together for easy reference, so here they are.

1. The Editor


2. The Writers


3. The Art Direction


4. Audience & Competitors (you are here)


5. Online

Why Australian GQ sucks - part 3: Art direction

I’ll raise a hand here and say this is a subjective one, everyone likes something different. So, be something different! The art direction on Australian GQ is so clinical as to give the appearance of robotic overlords having taken control, operating on a paint by numbers basis.

In fairness though, British GQ has an ace up its sleeve; it’s called Jo Levin. Jo has been the magazine’s director of chic for a long time, and does it so well a book called GQ Cool was published a couple years ago, highlighting her best work which went a long way to making every person in the pages look like a bonafide superstar, even when all the person staring back at the camera had managed was an ungraceful early exit on Pop Idol. British GQ’s writers are extraordinary, but, with a picture being worth a thousand words and all, Jo Levin gives the magazine a hundred thousand more each issue.

Overall, the layout and art direction in GQ OZ seems more an after-thought than a seized opportunity to extend the brand’s visual identity. I don’t know GQ’s circulation, maybe it does indeed lose money each issue and is actually the poor cousin of the rest of the publisher’s stable. If that is the case then there’s no attempt going on right now to hide that, but I don’t think anyone is capable of mounting an argument that GQ should ever appear second best to anything.

Much like the Editor, the Art Director needs to take that vision of GQ and wash that through the magazine. If you need glasses to read and don’t have them handy, then the colours and shapes on the page should still feel like GQ, and currently it has all the passion of of a senior’s pharmaceutical brochure. All the words used to describe the clothes on display (crisp, fresh, modern) should be employed for the layout. This will forever remain subjective, but if I may employ the words of Malcolm X on a far more trivial matter than he had in mind, "If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything."

Still to come: audience & competitors.

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Image courtesy of Simon Pais-Thomas, with thanks to Flickr Storm.

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Update: I wanted to link all five posts together for easy reference, so here they are.

1. The Editor


2. The Writers


3. The Art Direction (you are here)


4. Audience & Competitors


5. Online

Stemming from the Editor are the people who fill the pages with wit and wisdom. British GQ boasts Simon Kelner, Matthew d’Ancona, Will Self, AA Gill, Tony Parsons, Jeremy Clarkson, Naomi Campbell, Martin Deeson, Alex Petrides, Rod Liddle, Alex Blimes and Piers Morgan – note: that is not an exhaustive list! It is however a who’s who of the British writing fraternity. Dylan Jones (the Editor of British GQ) could fall asleep for 4 weeks straight in a champagne-and-coke induced coma and be fairly confident, upon waking, that he still had a highly readable offering for the newsstands in a few days time.

Contrast that with the Australian offering, who provide almost nothing in the way of regular columns beyond an editorial, leaving the magazine to deliver informative if dry pieces that fail to hold attention (or at least do not hold mine). We have such a wealth of quality writers and thinkers in this country, and the irony is we don’t need to mine corners further than the ones Mr. Jones went to.

The Australian media landscape is so bloody territorial I get strange looks when I purchase The Australian on a Saturday from my Melbournian newsagent, I can’t imagine how many people there are residing here who’ve never heard of Philip Adams. But it goes both ways, I had no idea who Danny Katz was before I ventured south, and he’s great! What about Adam Spencer? Steve Biddulph? Andrew Denton? A music writer who is not Iain Sheddan, Molly Meldrum, Richard Wilkins or a staff member of Channel V or Triple J (personally I’m thinking Zolton Zavos who heads up Lost At E Minor)?

It only takes a few minutes of thinking to expand that list into dozens of names who I would gladly pay $10 a month to read all in one place, and in a market like print where content is the only thing you have going for you, you have to stand out. If you don't, if you're an also-ran, why bother in the first place? Quit that game and go do what you're actually good at, stop wasting yours and everyone else's time.

Tomorrow: art direction.

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Image courtesy of bitzi, with thanks to Flickr Storm.

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Update: I wanted to link all five posts together for easy reference, so here they are.

1. The Editor


2. The Writers (you are here)


3. The Art Direction


4. Audience & Competitors


5. Online

Why Australian GQ sucks (and what it can do to fix itself - Part 1)

My favourite magazine on this planet you humans call Earth is GQ. British GQ. The writing is top notch, bringing in the UK’s best columnists, novelists, satirists and stylists and culminating each month in a snap shot of lifestyle that is accessible, aspirational and a fun bit of escapism.

Then there’s the Australian version of GQ. This is an entirely different beast. It is so unrecognisable from its English counterpart as to be a completely different publication, one of dubious origin and so sub-par I can only hope the name was stolen well in advance of antipodean plans hatched in the UK/US Conde Nast offices...alas I’m probably wrong.

One issue I remember going through with a red pen, highlighting each typo, each page layout that didn’t sit quite right. I got bored a third of the way through, scowling down at pages covered in red pen. Not being one to take a dump on someone else’s effort without offering up some advice, over the next few days I am going to offer up five ways Australian GQ can improve itself, and make me buy it again.

We’ll do the first one now, which is...

The Editor

The aesthetic and spirit of the publication begins and ends with the editor. In the British corner we have Dylan Jones, bless. Dylan is self-deprecating, articulate, passionate about more than his wardrobe and the next party he’s throwing, a published author, the kind of guy who is as comfortable getting a pint as a pinot. Or at least gives that impression – and therein lies the trick.

His Australian counter-part is Grant Pearce, oh dear. Twatty McTwat. I don’t get a sense of the editor’s personality in Australian GQ, unless the editor is in fact bland, shallow and all dollars no sense. Grant is actually Group Executive Editor at News Magazines, overseeing several titles including Australian Vogue. So, he’s clearly smart and hard working, where do we get let down?

The impression I get is he’s delivering a magazine he thinks other people would like to read, not really being interested in it himself - or simply too busy to give it its due. Dylan lives and breathes his offering, and marks every page with his stamp. Grant’s effort on the other hand seems to do its best not to offend, and in the end that means nothing really grabs you. I don’t feel anyone’s personality when I see Australian GQ, assuming that is that it isn’t put together by senior partners at Ernst & Young. Apologies to my friends who work at EY, obviously I mean other people.

So, first off, Grant, let's see some personality. I don't want editorials that sound like they should be in GQ, I want a magazine with its own sense of style and purpose. Show me some life, show me a sense of humour, show me a magazine that is more than the sum of its freshly-pressed, Bollinger-swilling parts. The same way you spit out the virtues of Vogue in this month's Marketing Magazine, you should be the one driving GQ to its proper place.

By all means though, keep swilling the Bollinger. There's got to be some perk to being GQ after all...

In the next installment: the writers.

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Update: I wanted to link all five posts together for easy reference, so here they are.

1. The Editor (you are here)
   


2. The Writers


3. The Art Direction


4. Audience & Competitors


5. Online

They don't call it the bleeding edge for nothing...

Oh for simpler days, days when a single phone charge lasted the best part of a week before needing to plug it in again, before ring-tones and the need to update an OS because of a memory leak which manifests itself by deleting my call lists and text messages. I went to the Blackberry website to get information on upgrading the OS, only to find the link to the Software page entirely in French.

I clicked skip intro on the flash landing page for the recently announced Bold, and then software down in the footer, which brought up this.


Now, I’m actually learning French at the moment, so either my teacher has conspired with Research-In-Motion on account of me never doing my homework, or this is one single epic fail.

I’m going with the latter…

The joy of being wrong

Some people have a love-hate relationship with their own fallibility. Not me. I revel in it.  I was talking earlier today about widening the range of ideas you let in to your head so as to stimulate your own thinking from a different perspective.

I was thinking about this a bit more today after posting over at the Marketing Magazine forums on the subject of being wrong in a digital space. We should be embracing the rapid pace at which everything is changing; every error, every out and out mistake is a lesson learned and a rule formed in a space where so few exist.



I wrote at the beginning of the year I was spending more time thinking about what was least wrong as opposed to most right. Semantics sure, but the point is we don't know right now, and nor should we. If everyone could for just one day check their egos at the door and revel in the fact we're still figuring this out, we'd get a lot more done.

Image from Paul Arden's It's not how good you are... - found via Andrew Cafourek's Tumblog.

"And that's what MySpace is all about!"

This is a great parody of the social networking scene, featuring a guy trying to escape from them all.

Via Andrew Cafourek's Tumblr.

Context of text in the next generation

I read two unrelated posts this morning which both said the same thing; the generation of children who aren't yet teenagers have an interesting relationship with and approach to communication.

The first was from Fred Wilson who was after a new phone for his daughter to replace a broken iPhone. Funnily enough, she didn't want it replaced with an iPhone, 2007's must have toy.

She wants the new crimson red Blackberry Curve.

Fortunately, it looks like I can get an unlocked one on eBay for between $100 and $200.

I wonder what this says? I realize it's a sample size of one, but I've heard that a bunch of her friends have also given up their iPhones in search of a better texting device which seems to be the one feature they value most.

The second was from Simon Chen who said exactly the same thing:

Ask a teenager to give up their mobile phone and see what happens. Actually, I bet if you told any kid today that the new rule of the house is their phones would be restricted to voice calls only (and that the text or SMS function would be disabled), there would be a global revolt. Parents would be locked in cars and basements and all manner of threats would be shouted from every rooftop.

Kids don’t talk on phones anymore. They grunt. But the little f@#ckers can text. Man, can they text.

I am loathe to carry out a conversation via text, I flat out refuse and don't respond, or else I call if it is really important*. But I've seen this behaviour in my younger cousins, and being somewhat pedantic about grammar and punctuation, have certainly seen it carried out in the way sentences are constructed - or rather abbreviated into forms that begin to border on unrecognisable.

With this in mind, I've begun thinking aloud (and with no real clarity yet) about what this means for the way the next generation will communicate, particularly how they will expected to be communicated to and how this will impact their interactions with the rest of the world.

For example, is it reasonable to expect "correct" grammar to be taught if it ceases to apply to their daily lives the way it does to mine? Will an essay in SMS or l33t speak be admissable in new communications courses once they at university? More applicable to me, how does that change the nature of text in ads? How do you affect the tone of a piece if not just punctuation but vowels themselves cease to play a part? Srlsy?

I'd dismiss the above as nonsense, except I already see my own generation with hard and fast mind sets on certain things nobody had to teach us, we just knew. The notion of respecting someone because of their title never even entered our minds; what do I take for granted that the next batch won't bat an eyelid at?

The changing nature of communication is something I find endlessly interesting, even if there are no easy answers.

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*Things that are important:

1. A guitar I simply must have


2. The girl I'm seeing accidentally meeting the girl I'm seeing


3. Confusion over which bar we will begin the evening's festivities in


4. A Springsteen tour being announced


5. More as I think of them...

Seven worlds will collide

This morning I drove one of my best friends to the airport. He was jumping on a plane back to Germany, he was heading home.


I've been lucky to have an extraordinary bunch of friends here in Melbourne from all over the world. Canada, Wales, Germany, England, Switzerland, France, South Africa, Singapore - even the odd Australian from time to time. Having grown up in Hong Kong, I've really responded to the variety of culture and influence around me, not to mention the fact that they're all incredibly passionate, intelligent and entertaining folk.

This got me thinking about the places we draw our influences from, the points we call on to stimulate thought processes and new ideas. Purely a coincidence, but my set of Method Cards from Ideo just arrived which I'm quite excited about. I'm not even sure what I will use them for, but if even a single insight is there to be garnered from them then it is worth the investment. If nothing else, it is a series of thought exercises from a completely different point of view to my own.

I'm a big fan of unconventional ports of call to find ideas that change the game. Speaking of games, when I was in the video game industry in the midst of ord of the Rings knock-offs, I was pitching ideas based on Shakespear - funnily enough none of those games got off the ground (yet).

The point is the games industry subsists on mediocre sequels and plenty of "me too" titles. So much so that when something like The Sims or Nintendo's Wii comes along, it completely flips the industry on its head and changes everything we held to be true.

The same can be said for consumer products and marketing. Which is why Microsoft buy their way into the game each generation instead of being the innovator, and why the necessary changes to mass media won't be brought about by News Corp or Viacom or the BBC. Corporations are more human than we give them credit for, they're the sum of their parts and history just like us; thus they're looking at what they already know in order to innovate.

We're drawn to the familiar, to what's comfortable. We're naturally averse to change. But if we want to change the game for our clients, products, services and even ourselves, we've got to constantly find stimulation from a place we don't natively have inside. The people I'm lucky enough to have in my life have made me a much better human being and a hell of a lot smarter.

Don't get me wrong, a lot of people make a great living out of keeping the wheels turning. But if you want a whole new way of getting around, you're going to have to re-think a few things...

Photo credit: Timothy K Hamilton, with thanks to Flickr Storm.

Say what you need to say

Charlie O'Donnell heads a start-up called Path 101 out of New York I've blogged about before. Path 101 exists to help people figure out what it is they really want to do with their careers which, given I worked at Hippo, was a subject near and dear to my heart.

His recent post "10 things you're not supposed to say in the Echo Chamber" made me smile; it may enrich your life, it will most likely just give you two minutes of pleasure in between this and whatever the next thing you're doing is. Given he is CEO of his own start-up, this one (a bonus at number 11) was a surprise:

3/4 of founding CEO's should not be the CEO after the first 18 months of the life of the company. Unfortunately most of them have too much pride to step aside and focus on whatever it is they do best.

His blog, This is going to be BIG! is worth subscribing to.

Bluefreeway receives voluntary suspension

Bluefreeway requested and received a voluntary suspension from trading today. Their shares had been on hold since last Friday after a request for a temporary trading halt was approved Monday. The halt was due to expire this morning, the shares have now been suspended with no date attached to it.

In a letter to the ASX this morning, Bluefreeway said it needed to undertake further investigations due to restructuring efforts in order to make an announcement on its expected revenue for the financial year ending June 30, 2008. Stating it would take up to two weeks to conclude investigations, the company expects the subsequent announcement to end the suspension.

What all this means is anyone's guess, though after the spate of resignations they've experienced this year and Mitchells stepping away from buy-out talks, how deep the rabbit hole goes is anyone's guess.

Opted In vs. Engaging In

I was having a chat this morning with Simon Chen, and those readers who've been with me a while know I can't say enough good things about the man - even if he doesn't get Twitter yet. One thing we were talking about was having a large email database vs. a smaller database that was actively engaged by your offering.

I was reminded of this while reading Doc Searl's blog just now, him talking about a piece Chris Anderson (editor at Wired) wrote on recognising a real if untraceable cost that stems from subscription cards placed in magazines:

They fall out of magazines when you pick them up, forcing you to bend over to retrieve them and find a trash can in which to throw them away. This is a real negative cost that hurts our relationship with our readers, but because we can’t measure it directly, it’s an externality and thus mispriced at zero in the economics of the magazine industry.

I find it particularly ironic blogging about this given I've just started writing for a magazine which, like most other publications on the planet employs just such a method for adding subscribers. The example Chris gives above is admittedly minor, but flows on to a brilliant presentation from David Armano on micro-interactions.

In his presentation David argues brands have moved from dictating perception to being the sum of their interactions. In other words, you can no longer tell people how to perceive your work, you will be judged on actions and not words.

So what's the follow on from subscription cards being removed from magazines? Do publishers and editors really think their offering is valid enough to drag people to a news stand once a month? Do they feel the caliber of their contributors (and I'm one of them) is great enough to make that happen?

For a lesson in micro-interactions outside of a marketing space, read this article from Fast Company on the future of TV shows and the branding around them. If there's anyone who understands micro-interactions, its these guys.

Living and learning in a start-up

I recently resigned from my role as Digital Manager at Hippo Jobs, an Australian start-up focussed on the online job space. I've learnt so much in my time there it isn't possible to distill it into one or even multiple blog posts, I can say though it did hammer home a simple truth I went in with, and that's in a start-up, everyone needs to be 100% on board.

One of the first things that struck me about Hippo was its development was outsourced. Call me old-school in this regard, but while I'm a big fan of outsourcing, your ability to innovate on your core offering should never be in the hands of another company. One of my prime objectives from day dot was to get a team established in house that could lead the next phase of development for the company, and thankfully we've begun that process, taking Hippo to a place where its ongoing development is sustainable. When you place your ability to be exceptional in the hands of someone who values that less than you do, you set yourself up for a world of hurt.

Something I completely underestimated was how hard it would be to bring traditional media types around to thinking about digital media in a manner that went beyond headline grabbers like Myspace and Facebook. Talking to friends at larger organisations, it seems more generational than anything else, and only makes me wonder what people will be doing 15 or 20 years from now that I just will not understand. I hope I'll have the presence of mind to recognise it when it happens and embrace the change that will be so very necessary, but a bunch of smart people who should know better don't seem to be able to, and that gives me pause for thought. Thankfully in DMG Hippo now has a partner with a breadth of knowledge about traditional media, and some incredibly savvy digital people to boot.

I'm pretty close to signing a deal for my next move, one that unfortunately doesn't give me the five-album deal I'd like, but never the less ensures I stay surrounded by exceptionally smart folk who will hopefully inform my thinking on ways I can simply play music and not have to worry about the major labels.

For the rest of this month though, I'm committed to helping Hippo shore up its position as the leading job site for Generation Y - of which I call myself a proud member. It remains as good an idea as the day I joined, and with or without my presence can't help but go from strength to strength. Thanks to the people who have informed the conversation around this space in months past, I will continue to watch as Hippo implements the ideas brought forth over the past year, and with a little luck leaves everyone else in its wake.

Authenticity revisited

I'm involved in a discussion over on the Marketing Mag forums. The case centers around an Australian band called The Presets and them involving themselves in a promotion in BMW where a track of theirs gets remixed. The association of brands is obscure at best, but what I don't get is The Presets not owning up to it in the first place. In a recent interview on Triple J (Australia's larges independent radio station), there was no mention of the remix, or of BMW. This says to me The Presets are embarrassed and Triple J, having supported them from day dot even more so.

In a futile effort to display some semblance of independence, both parties have succeeded in completely dodging an issue. If a band/person/organisation/brand/product/whatever is going to make a move like this, they at least need to have the guts to own it. Triple J love their indie darlings so aren't going to call them on it (that's called selling out, but apparently only when a big corporation is involved), and The Presets - who could justify it as easy as "It paid for our next European tour" - just look shady.

Bad moves all around. This post has more. In particular:

You need to stand for what you stand for. Every. Second. Of. The. Day.

Amen.

Bluefreeway Trading Halt

Beleaguered digital group Bluefreeway today requested a trading halt, its shares having sat at 24 cents since the ASX closed last Friday. The ASX then suspended shares and issued an announcement saying they would remain on halt until Wednesday morning or until the company issued an announcement on its expected earnings for the financial year ending June 30th, 2008, whichever came sooner.

Last month Mitchell Media confirmed speculation it had been looking to buy the group of companies but pulled out after "preliminary" conversations. Bluefreeway had previously told the Australian Stock Exchange it had entered due diligence with a single entity This came on the back of CEO Richard Webb finally stepping away from the group of companies he helped found the month prior.

It has been an extraordinarily unfortunate year for the group, one that shows no signs of improving. The company had already warned markets on the costs of funding the redundancies currently being served to select employees, but we'll know in the next 36 hours where the company actually stands.

For those needing a primer on the Bluefreeway so far this year...

How hard can it be?

I saw a blog recently (I have to start writing this shit down) talking about brands having genuine conversations, people going through stages and relationships with the brands as they move through different phases of their lives and want different things.

It occurred to me that for brands to do this, they have to become human. Some can handle this, others don't survive the transition. The boon for the latter half is that, for a company like Apple, nobody wants to see them become human anyway.

To survive the ups and downs of modern life, brands are going to need to re-think a few things:

1. We're not always right


2. We don't have the best ideas every time we have an idea


3. Some of them are actually quite bad


4. Hell we don't even have ideas all the time, occasionally we're just winging it


5. We make dumb assumptions about a myriad of things, born entirely from not putting ourselves in the same position you're in


6. Subsequently, we don't know best


7. We change our minds almost constantly. No we don't. Yes we do.


8. We fuck up


9. No, I mean we really fuck up


10. When it is warranted, we are genuinely sorry about it

This stuff isn't rocket science, it's common sense. Unfortunately common sense isn't all that common. It's about being human, making brands and companies human, fallible, instilled with humour, full of life and mistakes. Heinz isn't an interesting story, the mothers and fathers working on their baby formula are. It's easy to shoot a company or a brand down when there isn't a human attached to it.

The second they become human, the moment the brand has a face attached to it not borne from a lucrative sponsorship deal, that's when the interesting work begins. I think the answer to the question posed in the headline is "Not very hard at all, it just requires honesty."

Billy Joel sang honesty is hardly ever heard, and mostly what I need from you. As I've said before, truths are invariably harder to swallow than we first make them out to be.

How you doing?

Ubiquitous, and usually flipped off without a moment's notice, saying "How you doing?" to someone is usually met with a myriad of responses designed to elicit as little conversation on the subject as possible, largely because (I think) nobody really believes you're interested in the answer.

Yesterday someone asked me how I was as I stood making coffee at work. "I'm really great, thanks!" was my response. The person in question turned to me a little incredulously and said "Really? Why?".

"Do I need a reason?"

"To be really great? Yeah!"

How odd I thought, I could have sighed and said "Yeah...ok" and it probably would have been met with a knowing oh-we're-at-work-aren't-we glance. Being really great gave pause for thought, and reminded me of a bunch of stuff Seth has written on being exceptional. A mood is enough to stop people in their tracks, to capture their interest.

People want to be part of what is good, what is great, and what is exceptional. You attract others towards you through that attitude, and you attract consumers to your clients brands based on the aspirations they have. Instill the offering with something exceptional (and it can be as simply as being "really great") and the rest will take care of itself.

...that's probably over-simplifying, but the point stands.