Let's call the whole thing off

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="134" caption="What's wrong with this picture?"][/caption]

Australian music manager Glen Wheatley's latest project Stripe is set to launch. It is a digital radio service which will have 40 stations up by Christmas playing over the 3G network to any 3G enabled phone, and 100 by the end of 2009. Those wanting to have ad-free radio on their phones will apparently part with a little less than $10 a month for the privilege.

This would be funny if it wasn't so painfully short-sighted. All together now: the epic, epic lulz.

It betrays just how deeply bereft of real strategic insight media is - and how sorely the media industry needs fresh DNA, instead of old dudes with the same old lame ideas.

Thanks Umair. Mind you he didn't write that about Stripe, he wrote that about a misguided Wired article where old media guy #1 was berating new media guy #2 for spending time in Second Life as it wouldn't help him sell more Coke. The point remains though.

Let's do the why's together so we all take something away:

1. Why would I pay $10 a month for radio on my phone?


2. Particularly me who does not listen to radio at all?


3. Why in an age of increased personalisation will I believe you can satisfy me with someone else's taste-making?


4. Why create a service that relies on early-adopter up-take when the early-adopters do not listen to radio or value music in pure ones-and-zeroes terms?

Now, I imagine much of the VC money has already been sunk, unfortunate for those involved. If you guys with the money could just begin to understand that broadcasting in a one-to-many model is dying and being replaced with niche-casting and many-to-many, you might have a hope of creating something with lasting value.

This last quote from Programming Director Jarrod Graetz is killer:

“A great advantage of our service is that you don't need a new device or gadget to hear us. If you've got 3G coverage, you can access your favourite music and programs from your (3G) mobile phone, and of course on broadband internet. No ad breaks, less interruptions, more music. We position ourselves as "What you want on radio" because we believe Stripe delivers what Australia wants."

The bolding is mine (the lack of vision entirely their's). I may not need a device to hear you, but I have a device anyway, it is called an iPod. It comes with NO interruptions and ONLY my favourite music and programs. See, it doesn't actually matter if you do serve up what I want on radio, because I don't want radio.

Ever.

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Image courtesy of Dave Goodman, with thanks to compfight.

What I be is what I be

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Some things just change you"][/caption]

I've had this idea for a while around customised experiences, specifically driven by the increasingly tailored existence we live in our online lives; everything we want, nothing that we don't. This of course stems back into offline notions of luxury and living life the way you wish, but I've been telling a few people that, more and more, people are going to expect those tailored services in every facet of their lives because, well, once you've had it, there's no going back.

There's a natural barrier that exists when you stop dealing in ones and zeroes, so the challenge is on to find ways of delivering customised experiences on a mass scale. "Remember you're unique," as the saying goes. "Just like everyone else."

This thought came to mind as I watched a TED talk, Reed Kroloff on movements in architecture and the falling cost of building stranger and stranger shapes due to the increased ability to automate the construction of materials and parts of the structure. It's always exciting to see your own ideas echoed elsewhere in the world, and even more so to sit here connecting seemingly random dots and pieces of information into a much larger whole.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=H682jmofwZs]

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Image courtesy of pulpolux, with thanks to compfight.

Am I not your girl?

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="...talk about wide open spaces..."][/caption]

In almost the only thing I do that can be classed as "fiscally responsible", I have an ING savings account. Money goes in and it doesn't come out for any reason (except maybe the Galapagos Islands which a friend recently suggested we visit...).

One of the things I like(d) about ING was the lack of correspondence - their involvement in my life is at exactly the level I wish it to be. They haven't pushed for a single thing more, content to hold my money while it earns a little interest and leave me be. I thought we had an understanding.

A few days back I got hit with the "latest" issue of their newsletter called The Juice. I say "latest" because I don't remember them ever sending me one before. There's a brief note from Vic Wolff Executive Director, Marketing and Communications who gives me the only thing remotely interesting to me: the interest rate has gone form 6.90% or 7%. Great - if that means what I think it means, truth be told I have no idea how that impacts my savings day to day, it's like telling a homeless person they could offset their carbon emissions by 25% if they begged on the sunny side of the street.

• They tell me they've paid out $5 billion dollars in interest since starting. Not to me. So I don't care.


• Why using Billy Connolly in their commercials is such a good fit for their brand. I do not care.


• A note about donating $50k to a research project to better understand the snubfin dolphin. I do not care - understand I'm all for marine conservation, I'm just a bit more concerned making some fundamental alterations to the way we live in order to make sure my kids (when I have them) can see any dolphin somewhere other than a textbook.

ING, know you want to have a chat with your customers, but your opening salvo was a bunch of stuff you wanted me to know about you. And I don't care what you look like, that doesn't get a drink bought, and it certainly doesn't get a conversation started.

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Image courtesy of refractionless, with thanks to compfight.

This is something we gotta get used to

One of the best quotes I've heard in a while is the following (which I've already talked a little bit about before)

“A great brand is a story that is never completely told.”

Absolutely true. 100%. The question though is this: how is your brand's story being told? If, like me, you believe markets are conversations, then your story is being told by the people you're selling to. This inevitably requires products and services worth talking about.

I'm seeing a lot of companies touting themselves as creators of brand strategies for their clients; this is short-term thinking at its best. Brand strategy is pointless (and by pointless I mean it does not create lasting value, those of you creating value simply for your numbers this quarter can exit stage left, you're not needed) if you do not have anything valuable to offer.

Maybe if we as marketers got a little more brave and told our clients when they didn't have a product worth marketing, it might raise the bar of the goods we were brought. Better yet, I want to get inside people's businesses and help them create products and services worth talking about.

Do that and you can dole out the marketing budget into the product team's Christmas bonuses. Smiles all around then.

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Image courtesy of Steve Wampler, with thanks to compfight.

Games that never amount to more than they're worth

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="No use crying over...never mind."][/caption]

Having to play catch-up on the myriad of feeds I subscribe to is occasionally a little over-whelming, as I'm sure it is for most folk. I'm increasingly spending more time on weekends catching up though rather than reading the paper, a strategy I think I'll alter somewhat and just seek out the insight, after all, news is news, right? Unless of course it is "news".

Reading through this piece from Seth on low-hanging fruit reminded me of a client I was with just recently. I obviously can't talk about the particulars of their business, so we're going to go with an analogy.

• Mary makes a dollar on every scoop of ice-cream


• She also makes fifty cents on every cone she sells it in.


• Lastly, she also sells hot dogs, where she makes three dollars on each one

The ice cream and the hot dogs (note: not hot dogs) cost the same for Mary to make, so there is no important difference there. Mary's customers are quite interesting. They live in a world where the sun is always shining, and it never gets cold, so people always want ice cream. They love their hot dogs too, but they represent just 5% of her business. Understand, Mary's hot dogs are great, as good as any you'll find in her neighbourhood.

What people do though is go to Joe's for a hot dog, and they come to Mary's shop for ice-cream afterwards.

The problem is Mary's shop is called The Ice-Creamery, and down the other end of the street is Joe's Snack Shop which has a sign out the front, a big picture of a hot dog. People don't know they can get hot dogs from Mary, they got there for ice-cream.

Mary asked me to help her sell more ice cream. What I'm actually doing is helping her sell more hot dogs, and we're doing this by simple word of mouth; turns out nobody knew Mary sold hot dogs in the first place.

I say the above to make this point: what is it you ("you" can be you as an individual, a business, whatever you like) are known for? Are there other things you do? Do you do them as well as your competitors do? Do you wish you had that extra piece of business?

Sometimes just telling them can make all the difference in the world.

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Image courtesy of Caro Wallis, with thanks to compfight.

Every day is a winding road

So I had a point, somewhere in there I had a point, and there's a gem of a good idea but it will take a while to deliver it a little more succinctly. But that's OK, I don't mind taking a little extra time being largely right.

The point is, the more interested you are in the world around you, the more likely it is you'll share common interests with the people you meet. If your world view fails to grasp interests beyond yourself, then you had better hope you come into contact with people who are at least as interested in you as you are, or else you're in trouble.

This is the crux of my latest online piece over at Marketing Magazine.

The conversation [focusing on an individual's fashion] only extends to that moment, to the outfit which is noticed and commented on. The conversation about others involves the designer (say Chistopher Bailey at Burberry), their own path to where they are (working under Tom Ford at Gucci), the campaigns around the revitalisation of that brand (Kate Moss), how it ties in to classic British fashion and the campaigns hark back to great David Bailey photographs of British icons. It extends to the quintessentially British elements of fashion, the things unique to that most unique of isles.

You can't fake genuine curiosity or interest in the world around you, and the best marketers in the coming age will be the ones that draw the parallels across industry and culture, born from their own experience being simply fascinated with the world around them.

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Image courtesy of nobleIgnoble, with thanks to compfight.

If there's somebody callin' me on, she's the one

It's a strange road to walk in advertising for a guy whose dad was gone 2 weeks of every month as a kid, off working with the poorest people he could find, teaching them how to farm and look after their own children Now the middle child of three sons spends part of his day figuring out how to sell confectionery to more people. Marketing can be great fun, but it is such nonsense some of the time.

I've just watched an amazing talk from the TED series about a photographer who found a young girl, a product of the Korean war, and gave her a new life in America. I'm not much for crying, but I have tears streaming down my face as I write this. It's an amazing talk, and a good reminder of how far out of whack our lives can get. Please watch the below video, it is extraordinary.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=bpi6us7wQfE]

Free business plan - SMS Coffee

The lines between marketing and business strategy are, in my mind at least, getting fuzzier and fuzzier. Note I am placing a premium on value over a better campaign to sell a lousy product, but that's just me. If businesses suddenly created nothing but products worth talking about, everyone in the ad industry would need to go and find new jobs (best of luck to them).

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Mmmmmm...coffee....*homer drool*"][/caption]

Friends who know me know I am passionate about coffee. I regularly go to tastings which are held a one of my favourite cafes here in Melbourne, and while I have hauled myself back to a respectable two cups a day, I savour every minute of it and look forward to the next.

So I was thinking about how people could enjoy more coffee, more conveniently. I'm a big believer that the future isn't online, it is mobile, a platform that encompasses everything the internet has brought to us without needing to be tied to a desk. I'm already starting to live that life, but we're only a short way through the wealth of possibilities.

With this in mind, I want it to be easier to buy coffee. Particularly if I'm on the move, I don't like the standing around waiting for it to be made. So here is something I think is a pretty good idea. If someone could go build it I'd really appreciate it.

1. A coffee house does a deal with a micro-billing provider to bill people via their mobile rather than having to fork over cash (further towards a paper-less society - this is a good thing)


2. Sarah, almost at the city train station where she will jump off, sends an SMS to the coffee house with just "1" in the message body


3. This is received by the coffee house. Sarah's number is in the database, 1 is her favourite, a long black.


4. They accept the order and this pushes a message back to Sarah saying her coffee is being made


5. Sarah's train pulls in to the station, she gets up to the coffee shop across the road from the station, finds her coffee waiting for her and off she goes. No lines, no waiting, no fumbling for change.

We have the technology to do this, and the know-how to apply it to hundreds of other industries. Why aren't we people? This doesn't need a 30-second spot; it creates value and is worth talking about. And that is enough.

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Image courtesy of Amit Gupta, with thanks to compfight.

It's hard to say you love someone (and it's hard to say you don't)

I am currently crunching out my latest column for Marketing Magazine's...hmm...September issue I think, I tend to lose track. So my thoughts are preoccupied with telling the offline marketers how to get the conversation started while delivering a few home truths, we'll see how that goes.

But I'm also grinning ear to ear as I type this, so much good work out there this morning, and rather than talk about one thing, I want to point you in a few directions.

1. Gaping Void - a recent post from Hugh Macleod which really hits home for me at the moment:

It's good to be young and full of dreams. Dreams of one day doing something "insanely great". Dreams of love, beauty, achievement and contribution. But understand they have a life of their own, and they're not very good at following instructions. Love them, revere them, nurture them, respect them, but don't ever become a slave to them. Otherwise you'll kill them off prematurely, before they get the chance to come true.

2. My good friend Julian Cole has a social media framework which is a great piece of thinking, it should be read and pondered and then executed. No questions.

3. Lastly, because I'm in a goofy mood, XKCD. It is a regular web comic, often bizarre, rather amusing.



OK, back to the column. Happy Friday everyone, let's go light on the marketing today and put a little bit extra into the stuff that really matters. Deal?

Deal.

Is it me you're looking for?

Clearly it hasn't been as long for everyone.

As Twitter's Chief Architect, Blaine Cook caught the brunt of the Twitter community's frustrations over the micro-blogging service's frequent downtime. He left the company earlier this year and has now joined Yahoo! to work on a service called FireEagle, apparently similar to Twitter but focussed on user-location.

Twitter's issue was a popular service which struggled to scale. Yahoo! already has scale, but struggles with services that offer value. Perhaps this is a perfect fit?

(By the by, if you're on Twitter, so am I)

Tried in vain to breathe the fire we were born in

I can't seem to breathe this week for all the meetings I've been in, every day lunch somewhere else followed by lock-ups at gun point and hour after hour of discussions and planning and talking into the early evening, and sometimes not-so-early evening

I was in one such meeting a few days ago dealing with the Head of Interactive for a company I do some work with. He was proposing an idea whereby a community site get setup and funded by a company and then quietly monitor it making sure nothing bad get said. In that one instance, the good will I had rushed out of the room, it was tanatmount to him standing up and saying "I do not understand my chosen medium so I am going to employ some old school rules to get me by."

Now, this scares me, but more than that, it makes me angry. The people on the digital side of the fence are supposed to get this stuff, and get it intrinsically. As it turns out the barbarians are not only at the gate, they are walking among us. How many companies out there are sinking millions into advice that is patently and historically flawed?

People, help me out here:

1. Nobody, but nobody can control the market.


2. The market is conversation.


3. The conversation doesn't care if you join it or if you remain silent, it exists without you (and always has).


4. The conversation will sometimes be about things you do not like, that do not paint your brand, product or service in a favourable light.


5. If you try to stop that conversation, it will move to a place where you cannot touch it, and you will not be invited to join.

Just in case any bright spark out there thinks they know better and can game the system, take a look at this list of brands that tried and failed big time. If you think you are smarter and better funded than Johnson & Johnson, Marvel, Target and Louis Vuitton, by all means, be my guest.

What's that Umair? Oh yes, I forgot.

The epic, epic lulz.

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Image courtesy of Photograham, with thanks to compfight.

When was the last time you went Yahoo!?

Paraphrased from this film.

You know, I can't remember what I did before I googled (by the way, can we agree Google is the company name, google is what you do? Noun, verb, cool?). I think I used Alta Vista, but I really can't be sure. Regardless, I have never been a Yahoo-er, it never grabbed me.

A friend sent this to me the other day, and all I can say is I feel sorry for the team who had to produce the below, it is such an obvious goal to kick. No doubt directives were ordered from on high, "the focus groups said we need 45% more wonder in our offering", not realising if that if they just provided value and a campaign based on relevance they would likely grab more market share by simply executing their core properties in an effective manner.

One thing I do find curious is in the hierarchy of dot points the home page design is up top. Yahoo! came to life as a portal where your online experience began, but I don't know anyone who browses the web that way. There's an interesting notion here around destination entertainment, of having to go somewhere to experience a certain thing, but without a compelling pull, the traffic just doesn't show up.

Other points of note:

• Australia's most extensive online news provider - don't tell me you're extensive, show me! Give me service names and validate that claim, I won't believe you otherwise.


• A new search giving me a better answer the first time. Again, better than what? Yahoo!'s last search offering?


• By the world's no. 1 email, they mean the most popular over all.

Email in particular is a funny thing, a good friend who is in a position to know remarked to me recently that Google knows a lot more about email and your inbox than they are letting on. The below data from Hitwise (dated April '07) paints an interesting picture.



Google popular among middle and upper-class Gen Ys? That isn't exactly the kind of news that makes you shout "Stop the press!", it does lay out an interesting road map for the coming years if you make some assumptions about user behaviour -but this is already a long post, so we'll save that for another day.

Back to the question in my title though; when was the last time you went Yahoo!?

It's in the way that you use it

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="New media trumps the old guard"][/caption]

In thinking about switching jobs recently, one move that was suggested to me by a few people a sought advice from was to get into bed with companies in traditional media (in order to further the night job). I didn't go for it though, I didn't even breathe in that direction, largely because I don't believe traditional media is going to get any of us where we need to go. Blame it on too much time spent playing video games if you want, but I don't like media I can't engage in and interact with, a steadfast rule, the only exception coming in the form of Saturday afternoon, a magazine or newspaper, and my couch.

Music, movies and publishing are all such behemoths taking in so many stakeholders that they're all 5 to 10 years behind their markets (markets being conversations, conversations occurring between the people who buy or engage with their products - or used to any way). For the most part, the people with the power to affect change in those industries won't listen to reason, and so the gradual decline continues.

While comfortable with my decision, we all seek vindication for the choices we make, and it arrived from one of my favourite sources. Readers joining from Wide Open Spaces would be familiar with Umair Haque, I've mentioned him a few times. Fresh into my reader comes a post from him talking about digital media's cannibalisation of traditional media, and how slow they're being to react.

...unless media owners, advertisers, and, yes, agencies get together to engage in meaningful business model and strategic innovation, old business models - especially those dominated by brands - will continue to be “cannibalized” by this shift in consumer behaviour, because consumers are too busy talking to each other to pay much attention to industrial-era brands.

This only serves to re-inforce a talk I saw JJ Abrams give (last night form the comfort of my kitchen as I cooked), talking about how the barrier to entry into creating entertainment is increasingly lower and lower. Abrams is a great speaker and very engaging, his talk is entertaining but also poignant and very, very timely.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=vpjVgF5JDq8]

Happy Monday everyone, and welcome aboard.

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Image courtesy of ktommy, with thanks to compfight.

You are what you are continued...

[caption id="attachment_153" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="The most commonly found words, tags and categories on this site."][/caption]

Just came across a brilliant little tool called Wordle (thanks to Now In Colour). Punch in a URL or a piece of text and it will create a word cloud using the words appearing most often in the text. From the looks of things, we're not where I originally thought this blog was going to go, but I feel like we're moving in the right direction.

The song remains the same

[wp_caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="...a story that is never completely told..."][/wp_caption]

"A great brand is a story that is never completely told."

I just clocked this over at TIGS, what a great quote. I was sitting having breakfast with a good friend yesterday morning and he was wondering aloud why some brands that couldn't possibly have been bigger all of a sudden become tiny before disappearing completely. He was talking about a particular American beer (whose name I can't remember) that was the Budweiser of its day (I couldn't imagine saying anything more insulting about a beer, except maybe this).

This has me thinking about brand extension - do brands therefore extend themselves because they finish the story they set out to tell? Once extended, do they find their story wasn't al that interested in the first place?

Thinking about the uber-brands, Cadbury certainly has story left to tell, as does Apple, Nike, Vogue, who else? Contrast that with brands that we perhaps know too much about, like Microsoft or McDonalds. Those are easy targets though, who else is out there that seems to have run out of things to say?

(This also has me thinking about luxury brands, how open would not beat closed in that situation, and how not knowing the story adds to their appeal...hmmm that's another post entirely.)

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Image courtesy of Mikey G Ottawa, with thanks to compfight.

The Revelation of Intent

My latest column is up over at Marketing Magazine's site. I said a couple days ago I was thinking a lot about intent this week, call it a cosmic quest for something deeper than the window dressing. If I wasn't in advertising, that would actually be a good thing.

There's a lot of talk lately about brands and the voices they speak with. Be it through products or services, conversation is the new currency through which everyone wants to be measured. If what we've been saying for a while now is true, and our brands are to be imbued with human traits and personalities in order to inform the way they speak to their audience, then we need to look at intent...

The rest of the piece is over at Marketing Magazine.

We eagerly await the opportunity to ignore you

• If you tell me you are an expert, I will not seek your advice, let alone believe you.


• If you tell me your product will change my life I will not believe you.


• If you tell me your service is the best thing since sliced bread, I will munch on my sandwich thinking "All in all I have it pretty good" and not budge an inch.

If however, a friend of mine tells me you're an expert, have a product that will change my life, and a service that is the best thing since sliced bread, you will have my attention.

You are not what you say you are (even if you are). Nor is your product, offering or service. It is what others say it is via their experience interacting with you. The web unearths intent, and people strip away the bullshit.

Intent is a funny thing, I'm thinking a lot about that this week. Having said that, I intend to get over this cold, so I'm going to bed.

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Image courtesy of Skate Everything, with thanks to compfight.

Something the boy said

Innovations are just gimmicks you happen to like.

I thought that was an interesting statement to make. I don't know if I agree with it or not, but that doesn't stop it from being interesting.

Now...as you were.

Rockin' in the free world

I left open beats closed out of my marketing mantra the other day, largely because the 5 points circle around it anyway. On the back of that comes a couple items which illustrate it perfectly.

The first is from Fred Wilson, who writes while vacationing with his family in France:

If you look at this picture of my son Josh catching up on his favorite TV shows this morning before breakfast, you'll see a flat panel display in the upper right of the picture. And yet Josh is watching on his laptop. That's largely because we are in europe right now, where the shows he likes are not available on the local cable channel but are available "on demand" on the Internet.

Yes it's true that Hulu and ABC.com and other web video services block IP addresses outside of the US, but we were able to hack around that pretty easily. Yet another form of DRM that won't work, can't work, and will eventually be removed by content owners.

Couldn't agree more. On the flip side and very open is Garfield Minus Garfield, a comic which appropriates Garfield strips, removing the cat and...well...see for yourself:

[wp_caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Garfield Minus Garfield"][/wp_caption]

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

Happy Monday everyone.

We are the world

Some of you may be familiar with Where The Hell Is Matt? from a few years ago. If not, check it out, it will bring a smile to your face.

The latest video in the series is now online, and to quote Faris Yakob over at Talent Imitates, Genius Steals:

Hell yeah.

Smile.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY]

Happy 4th of July to all the readers in the states. Have a great weekend.

Feed the Animals -or- Girl Talk, open beats closed, every day I'm hustlin'

Yesterday the inimitable Scott Drummond came to my rescue. Scott is my musical educator, always throwing me new tunes and genres to check out, in addition to being an amazing friend and weekend brunch buddy. He hit me with a world of great stuff, but I want to talk about one artist in particular, Girl Talk.

Girl Talk is a DJ who mashes up everything he can get his hands on. It is absolutely not for everyone, but I can't get enough and makes it Saturday night in my heart when the calendar says Tuesday morning, so for this I am grateful. Scott hit me off with a link to a live bootleg which is absolutely off the handle (and on this Friday July 4th exactly what you need to get the party started).

The model he is going with selling his latest album though is perhaps more interesting than hearing Roy Orbison laced over gangsta rap, spun into Nirvana with Salt'n'Pepa over the top (in my ears right now).

Head to his MySpace page and you'll see the below:

So the "pay what you want" thing in music isn't new, agreed. Click-through though and you'll be taken to a page which displays the purchase options:

any price grants the download of the entire album as high-quality 320kbps mp3s
$5 or more adds the options of FLAC files, plus a one-file seamless mix of the album
$10 or more includes all of the above + a packaged CD (when it becomes available)

Additionally below that it says the album is released under a Creative Commons licence, the same licence under which all the images I use on this site are licensed. Attribute the creator, don't profit directly from the work, and you're welcome to do as you please.

Now here's the trick: you punch in the amount you would like to pay on that page, and then the files are available on the next page with a separate link off to PayPal to make a payment. The entire system is based on goodwill and honesty, as I punched in $5 and started downloading the tracks before the payment had gone through. I'm happy to pay as I really like what he does, but I'm wondering how many people will reach that page, grab the tunes and take off?

The ironic thing though is none of it really matters. If someone wants your music for free, they will take it for free. A model of a dollar is better than a model of no money, and by putting your music out under Creative Commons people can remunerate you based on the value you provide while giving them access to your music without the shadow of illegal downloading coming into it.

This goes back to what I was saying in my Life after the dip post:

Exposing what people want to engage with and burying the stuff they’re not interested in is key, and it is only an issue if your business model rests on the viability of the things people don’t like. Digital Rights Management for starters if a zero-sum strategy where nobody wins. I’m a big believer artists should be compensated for the work they do (indeed one day I hope to do nothing but), but in the interim we need new models that are malleable.

Seems to me this model is right on track

Meet me in the middle

Ok everyone, on 3. 1, 2, 3!

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Conversations happen around social objects.

3. Social objects are products or services that are remarkable.

4. Remarkable is not just something special, but something worth being remarked about.

Ok, with this in mind, last night as my house mate and I stalked people on Facebook, my shiny, tiny god was in my room and having been for a run I was feeling very lazy, so I grabbed her obelisk of a laptop and logged in.

As soon as the page loaded I was greeted with the below screen - and apologies to anyone whose privacy has been invaded, particularly those who now are forced to acknowledge they know me in real life - advising me the browser I was using was IE 6 and my Facebook experience may be compromised by this fact.

Now, I don't actually log in to Facebook all that often these days, it has worn a tad thin for me. In this though I thought there was a great point to be made about the things you can and should do for the people who use your services or products. It is so easy for Facebook to know what browser I'm using and to suggest upgrades or alternatives (for the record, I use Firefox on my own machine). WHat are the other ways service just happens because people no longer need to ask, they just do?

- The cafe across the road knows I only ever drink long blacks, so they just make them, they don't ask

- My favourite wine bar knows I don't drink sweet wines, so they don't suggest them when I go in

- My favourite record store knows the music I like, but they also know enough to suggest things outside my radar

Those three examples rely on a human remembering and caring enough to act. So if you're in a service industry and there are things you can automate, letting the technology take care of the service so you can do the things requiring a human, what is stopping you? Oh, I just realised I left one of the most important things off my list at the top:

5. Good customer service is the most remarkable thing you can offer.

All I want from tomorrow is to get it better than today

I've recently jumped on a productivity bandwagon called Inbox Zero in an attempt to a) get more things done, b) get the right things done, and c) make myself a little better to work with for the poor folk who have to put up with me. Inbox Zero is a concept created by Merlin Mann who writes the productivity website 43 Folders.

The idea of Inbox Zero is there are only a set number of things you can do with email:

1. You can respond
2. You can delegate
3. You can be reminded of something you need to do
4. You can delete it

It also advocates checking email intermittently, say once an hour. Those of us in service industries may have to check it a little more often, though in the great video below Merlin compares checking it too often to working in Subway and not actually making anything to eat ("Any sandwich orders? Yep good, good to see. How about now? Cool, more sandwiches, excellent..."). It goes for an hour, but he's a funny and engaging speaker, after that you will be primed to make the switch.



I should add I'm a fan of the labyrinthine filing structure he suggests to avoid, something I am eschewing reluctantly. To see my virtual filing cabinet disappear and be replaced with a single folder called "Archive" makes me feel very uneasy. To whom much is given, much is tested...

**Update** I snagged the below image from a friend's laptop, he keeps a piece of paper stick to it to remind him...

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Top image courtesy of Dan Forth, with thanks to compfight.

Life after the dip -or- What happens when you lose everything?

Note: This is a continuation of yesterday's thoughts.

Also note: not The Dip.

In the music industry's case, they've spent the last decade attempting to bend consumer behaviour to their will. All the time and effort put into better encryption, DRM etc. only for it all to be futile, forcing people into a dead model. Think about that. Ten years of lawsuits, of bad ideas, of attempts to stall the forward march of consumer technology. Each writ issued was an extra nail in the coffin of a decrepit business model established to confuse value and price point and foist it upon the unwitting consumer. As one of my favourite writers likes to say, the epic, epic lulz. As a complete aside, anyone know how many lawyers the RIAA has? I'm just curious...

In the games industry's case, budgets and teams are swelling, but this is not where industry growth is coming from. The really booming sectors are taking things back to small teams and games that take hours not days to play. Respecting people's time and attention spans, you can spend five minutes doing something else entirely and then get back to what you are doing. It is a business model that is fluid, moving with the trends of its audience who are not the pimply teenagers with plenty of time on their hands anymore, they are developers themselves, they are in advertising, they're lawyers and doctors and parents whose free time has not grown with their disposable income.

Exposing what people want to engage with and burying the stuff they're not interested in is key, and it is only an issue if your business model rests on the viability of the things people don't like. Digital Rights Management for starters if a zero-sum strategy where nobody wins. I'm a big believer artists should be compensated for the work they do (indeed one day I hope to do nothing but), but in the interim we need new models that are malleable. In the words of Seth Godin:

Persistence isn't using the same tactics over and over. That's just annoying.

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

If your goal is delivering value, then everything will be fine. If your goal is to keep the game unchanged, then we have a problem on our hands.

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Image courtesy of maubrowncow, with thanks to compfight.