I love it when we do what we do because we do what we do until it's done

Can I get an "Amen!"?

Found via the lovely Conversation Agent.

Tell the whole world the truth is back

Image via Wikipedia

I've spent the last couple years talking about intent in various guises. Sometimes related to marketing, sometimes to business, but always, always at the heart of what anyone is doing. It has become an intrinsic part of what I write about, as anyone who has been with me for a little while will attest.

In February 2008 I penned a piece looking at Facebook's advertising ecosystem (things have changed dramatically since) and referenced a piece by your friend and mine Doc Searls on The Intention Economy. This phrase showed up again in a presentation I did called Digital Strangelove, and I realised just today, after stumbling across Doc referencing that presentation (tremendous honour and incredibly humbling) that despite spending a long time making sure the appropriate references were in place and credits given, I had not tipped my hat to Doc and his original article which clearly made an impression on me.

Thankfully the medium within which we work allows for easy retraction, correction and re-dissemination of correct information - if we choose to take advantage of it. I have updated my deck with a link to Doc's original piece in the credits, and wanted to take the time to acknowledge the source of that phrase. Additional credit I can only add by stealing from Sir Isaac Newton: if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Thanks Doc.

On the road again

Cover of On The Road

I have had Jack Kerouac's On The Road given to me a gift to keep at least three times. I imagine some combination of traits my friends spotted in me (wannabe-philosopher mixed with restless-and-easily-distracted) focused their attention on this book. When people visit, they remark on the copies that line my shelf:

"You liked it enough to buy it twice?"

"No. I ignored it long enough to be given another."

This is not about that book though. This is about perception (and a little intent).

Your friend and mine Mark Earls referenced a piece from Lynne Truss in the UK's Sunday Times in which she states:

...I like to see what other people are reading on the bus or the train; how far they’ve got; whether they’re enjoying it. It seems to me that such information needs to be public for the good of us all and I’m sad to think of reading in public places ultimately becoming so private...

Lynne was lamenting the arrival of E-Readers and the disappearance of actual book and magazine covers from the parks and cafes and public transport systems of the world, along with the loss of a shared look or a fleeting conversation about the work at hand.

Lynne Truss' worry stems from the removal of social identifiers in public spaces; it seems we don't just judge a book by its cover, but the reader as well. I smile whenever I see another grown-up reading Harry Potter in public, because I remember being consumed by those books and also embarrassed to have them out in public without an 8 year old in sight. We use these things (and clothes, iPods, cars and holidays) to signal via the perceptions we assume others will have. My intent given my office wardrobe today of boho-cardigan and falling apart at the seams (but limited edition John Varvatos-collaboration) Converse sneakers, is to signal something true about myself; unfortunately that truth is little more than the clothing equivalent of the never opened copies of Kerouac's masterpiece, or as I wrote in Everyone 2.0, you're unique.

Just like everyone else.

I have friends (they shall remain nameless because I love them dearly) who have taken great pleasure in displaying tomes they have conquered in the name of enlightenment. These friends drew more pleasure from others seeing they had read (or at least bought) the appropriate books than perhaps they did from the work itself. On The Road is a book a selection of my friends feel I am supposed to have read, and as anyone who knows me will tell you, something someone says I am supposed to do instantly defaults to the thing I am least likely to do. Their intent is to help me appear a culturally astute and well-rounded individual; my intent is the equally pretentious attempt to thumb my nose at convention simply for the sake of it.

Now, my favourite magazine is British GQ as its collection of columnists is a veritable who's who of the UK's newspapers. They are regularly funny and insightful and it pains me when the publisher stoops to putting a scantily clad woman on the front cover, partly because the writing is better than that suggests but also because I then feel the need to explain to others, much as the joke about Playboy goes, "I read it for the articles." Perception reveals, or so we would assume, intent. Perception is also said to be reality, and so given the option of tangling with the looks I imagine women might give me on the subway in the mornings, I opt for Wired and instead leave Heidi Klum in her various states of undress on my coffee table for next Sunday (sorry dear, you know how it is).

Back to the Kindle, on one hand I like where we're heading as I could potentially just read A.A. Gill's column without wondering if someone's nipple is slipping out on the other side for the rest of the train to see.

On the other hand I'm envisioning a birthday not too long from now, where a gift arrives as a download along with a note "Didn't see it in your "Read Items" list on Amazon and thought to myself David is supposed to have read books like this!!"

The identifiers are perhaps moving out of the physical world in some ways, I doubt however this will have much impact on the intentions we have for everyone else's lives.

I feel the earth move under my feet

There's so much talk about platforms - Facebook-this, Twitter-that, more specific but no better than loose conversations about blogging or podcasts. I overheard someone say "It's OK, there's a slide on Twitter in the client deck", which stopped me in my tracks. These tools are not the kinds of things that make sense when being described; who in their right mind would want to tolerate 140-character updates among a sea of people you barely knew? It in no way describes the vibrancy of using Twitter, nor the opportunities inherent in it.

Your friend and mine Tim Beveridge has a great saying: in order to understand change, you have to be part of it (it probably isn't his saying, but I'm not sure where he got it from, so it's his now).

The point is the best way to explain Twitter to somebody is to take 30 seconds to sign them up, another two minutes to follow some people they might be interested in, and then sit back and let them have at it. On the (often false) assumption you have a strategic reason for using Twitter, if your client doesn't already use it then paying it lip service is not going to get you anywhere. Only by engaging  do people actually understand, or as I just commented over at AVC, being heard is not enough, you must also be understood.

Starting a strategy conversation by talking about a platform is a recipe for disaster. It is like deciding what kind of house you are going to be build based whatever hammer you have handy. It needs to begin with intent. Every. Single. Time.

For those who've just joined us here by way of Digital Strangelove, thanks so much for stopping by. We're going to keep talking about intent for a bit, at least until the rest of the world starts to understand the power of it.

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Image courtesy of onkel_wart, with thanks to compfight.

I'm a New York City man

"I am trying to draw every person in New York." - Jason Polan.

A few thoughts:

• I love a big, hairy, audacious goal, and this is exactly that


• Faber Castell, Caran D'ache, Canson, etc. should be all over this


• It's a nice extension of Jason's own brand as an artist


• This feels like a visualisation of Hemingway's "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."


• The trick is going to be in catching the moment rather than the person, the intent rather than the outcome.

Found via Andrew Cafourek's tumblog. I struggle to think of a better way to pass the time.

Intent = stuff white people like

"People have a really good  ability to see through you projects on the Internet that are just done to try and make you famous."



Great quote. This is why I bang on about INTENT!

Watch this Google talk, from Christian Lander, author of brilliant blog Stuff White People Like.

Strategy | Intent | Persistence (and tigers and bears OH MY!)

Digital strategy is a business decision, not a marketing decision. That doesn't mean your marketing team shouldn't be in the room, it means everyone else should be there with them.

Julian Cole wrote a piece a few months back saying "Don't trust an agency with your digital strategy." It does then beg the question (if I may, for a moment, speak client-side) "Then whom shall I trust in your festering cesspool of sharks, narcissists and hopeless egomaniacs?

Good question.

A single unit needs to own a company's strategy, and they need to be able to talk about each channel with authority. That sounds like a no-brainer I know, so I'm going to put this out there and see how it feels: you won't find it anywhere where the last name of an ad giant from yester-year hangs their name on the front door. That isn't because they don't have intelligent folk from all disciplines working for them, that is because their business models and internal practices will not permit the structural changes required to achieve genuine innovation and next-generation creativity for their client's businesses, let alone their own.

If anyone is hearing that for the first time, I promise I'm not the first.

I can't say I know all of the answers, or even any of them. But not enough people are asking the question. Or questions; you can phrase them in a myriad of ways, let's maybe start with something like this: why does Clemenger BBDO in Melbourne now have four people in its planning department, none of them digital natives? Tim, who worked there as a member of the planning team up until a week ago, had this to say:

I’ve been arguing for a long time now that as product, advertising, sales and service, all get closer together, advertising agencies really need to become creative marketing consultancies...some drastic restructuring needs to take place.

Drastic restructuring then did take place, though perhaps not along the lines he was thinking.

David Armano has talked about a move away from the silver bullet, much like Tim has. I took a personality test recently that told me I rated close to 0 when it came to perfectionism, but was a polar opposite when it came to creativity and a love of thinking. Call me biased (I won't argue), but that sounds like something very different to where we're currently at, and given that test it is no wonder I'm a fan of this new direction. I'm also a fan of offering substance, something advertising doesn't do very well at all.

I've talked a lot about intent, and I think this chart speaks to the heart of the same thing I'm on about. It is also the same thing Seth Godin means when he says the following:

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

Persistence is having the same goal over and over.

My friend Michael Hewitt-Gleeson calls it SDNT: Start Do Notice Think.

I call it intent, and when I talk about it, I talk about constanty refining the work we're doing to ensure the outcome is matching the intent; if it isn't we change it until it is.

Intent is at the heart of everything we do, and the group that owns your strategy should have it etched onto their brains, directing nothing less than strategy that delivers the intended result tomorrow better than it did today. Starting here I'm advocating a move away from the single-minded proposition to the statement of intent; it is fluid and flexible, and it ensures the goal is forever just over the horizon. It will keep you and your organisation passionate and motivated and restless.

And that is how it should be.

New businesses reside in the linked economy

 

Image via Wikipedia

I spend a lot of time with friends thinking about where tomorrow's businesses lie, and I'm on the record that great content with good intentions and an open philosophy will be at the heart of the real money-makers in the next decade.

With that in mind, I've just read a fascinating post from Mark Ury who is an Experience Architect at Blast Radius. Mark ties together a few loose strands of thinking and comes out with something entirely his own. I particularly love the below principles he borrows from Jeff Jarvis...

Can applying “link economy” strategies work for “traditional” companies? Here are Jeff Jarvis’ four principles. And below is a modified version, applied to companies in pursuit of innovation:

1. All companies must be transparent. Your talent base and IP must be exposed and connected. They’re not useable unless they’re linked.

2. The recipient of IP and talent is the party responsible for monetizing them. The more you enable the flow of IP and talent AWAY from you, the more it comes BACK—with greater value and skills to monetize. Just watch how Hollywood operates.

3. A porous organization is the key to efficiency. In other words: do what you do best and link to the rest.

4. There are opportunities to add value atop the IP and talent layer. This is where one can find business opportunities: by managing abundance rather than the old model of managing scarcity. The market needs help finding the good stuff; that curation is a business opportunity.

...which he applies to Threadless during the course of the post...

The result: a business that manages abundance (t-shirt ideas), provides value through transparency (the audience becomes both editor and consumer), and values the flow of IP and talent through them—rather than by them. (Doc Searls calls this kind of value “a shift from “making money with” to “making money because.”)

Great piece. And it contains some links to some other fascinating reads on "the linked economy". Mark also takes the time to talk about opportunities that exist around monetising the aggregation of information and content, of which Threadless is a prime example (as is Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc.).

The idea here is this: find the verticles in seemingly well-mined markets, and you will open up doors the rest of us never knew existed.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The imperatives of the link economy


• Digital media, Jeff Jarvis: Let's junk the myths and celebrate what we've got

I know what you're about to say like your hype man

I was going to spend the week talking about story-telling in interactive mediums and the ways brands can leverage it, and I'l get to that, but I've woken up with something on my mind that I want to get to first.

Over the weekend when not lying in the park or dining with friends I was working on my latest (overdue) column for Marketing Magazine. It will be out in their December/January issue and I was talking about brands finding their voice online, which I'm quite excited about, I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts when it comes out.

I feel though like that's the running part, and we're struggling to get the walking right; we're doing that because the fundamentals of success in business and marketing are shifting and we're not keeping pace with it. I harp on about it, but only because I think it is important enough to do so: intent. Intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent.

While you're at your desk this week, in each situation I want you to ask yourself "What's my intent here?". We make sales calls under the guise of building relationships, we dump on other agencies under the guise of offering advice. We put energy into things that distract us from our main purpose in the hopes that people won't really get what we're on about.

And then we go do it with the brands we're supposed to be building.

Let's all agree, week beginning Monday October 13th, 2008 to gut-check what the intent is in the work we do this week. Let's not discuss "new ways to talk to our customers" when the reality is we need email addresses added to a database. By stripping away the stuff we cloak our actions with, we get to the heart of the matter much faster.

And I promise, the campaigns you run are going to be all the more effective for it.

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Image courtesy of The Alieness Gisela Giardino, with thanks to compfight.

One bourbon, one scotch, one beer

Julian Cole and I have been going back and forth a bit lately on social objects offline and some of that chatter is making its way online. He put up a vlog yesterday which Scott from Marketing Magazine chimed in on. Not wanting to be left out, I added my 2 cents. I hadn't actually uploaded anything to YouTube before, brought back some of the initial terrors that come with blogging (the world will see this, oh no!).

Anyway, the videos are below. Watch them (Scott's alone is priceless for the shots of his afro, little children may turn away in fear, you've been warned) and then leave a comment, or better yet, add your own response! While you're at it, give Julian some stick for the video responses needing to be approved by the owner - Jules I thought the whole point of social media was acknowledging you couldn't control the conversation right!?! :)

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=jhXSR4q1cMY]



[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvFVzSMg2OQ]

As she rises to her apology

Somewhere early Sunday morning (sober, I swear Mum!) I was talking to a friend about intent, and the revelation of intent through actions. She suggested action wasn't enough, that consistency was required. Consistency then perhaps becomes the actual revealer of intent - or at least of priorities.

You can have the best intentions in the world, but your priorities will always one-up you with a slow reveal (or sometimes not so slow) of what your true intentions were.

This is no where more prevalent than corporate intrusion into social media spaces, where increased sales is the intent, revealed by the lack of consistency (which itself a form of consistency I suppose). I've actually been talking clients down from the social media ledge recently on account of so many other aspects of their online being fundamentally flawed. I'm always amazed at an organisation's willingness to drop $50,000 on a "viral" campaign while being happy to ignore things that are fundamentally wrong with their main website.

The fact is we used to call social media "community management", and much the same way that had a dedicated employee playing that role, social media requires the same. Companies who want to get involved have to ask themselves how much they want to get involved, and how much they're willing to invest in it. It will only work if you are consistent, you can only be consistent if it is somebody's job to handle every day.

If you're not willing to hire someone to do the day-to-day on your organisation's social media, to deliver consistency, you need to pick a different game to play.

Tomorrow we'll look at why the barrier to entry is more than a 30-second spot (and why that's a good thing).

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Image courtesy of spud murphy, 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.

More thoughts on intent...

When people talk about campaigns being exposed, what they're seeing is the revelation of the intent behind the activity. Julian Cole talked about a Ford ad last week which summarised this perfectly. Ford had made it reasonably clear their ad was fake and they were just having some fun, prompting Julian to write.

people enjoy...content for what it is...This is a great example of why full disclosure works in the social media space.

The intent here was to entertain, not to fool. The result is engaging and hats off to Ford for having the stones to do this, and not have an intent to deceive at the core of what they were doing. The added bonus here is they get blogged about for All The Right Reasons(TM), and what could be better than that?

So, we'll refer to it as intent, but what is at the core of the campaigns you're building for the brands you work with?

Strangers in the night

Yesterday I got a call from a number I didn't recognise. A few of my friends make a habit of ignoring those calls, but I'm always up for a new conversation (hence my details being freely available). I picked up and said hello in my usual fashion, and then heard some scuffling. I thought perhaps a friend had left her phone unlocked and accidentally dialed it form her hand bag, and then a song started playing.

Quite bemused I sat listening. It was a country-ish sort of tune, pleasant to the ear but I couldn't make out the words. A couple times I heard the phone move, no doubt the caller checking to see if I was still listening. After a few minutes the song finished, and the person hung up.

Maybe I should find the whole thing a little strange, and to a certain extent I do. Whether it was a wrong number or a person trying to convey a message that didn't quite reach me, who knows? They obviously had a fairly definite intent with what they were doing. We all at times make moves that seem so obvious to us, while others stare on completely bewildered.

Intent is a funny thing, and a world away from execution. Some days further than others.

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Image courtesy of estherase, with thanks to compfight.

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.

Facebook; advertising heaven or hell?

I read somewhere recently - I think Seth Godin said it - if you were to set out with the express purpose of creating the worst possible environment online for advertising, you would wind up with something pretty similar to Facebook. I'm not entirely convinced that's accurate, but I'm also not entirely convinced it isn't. While you certainly have millions of pairs of eyeballs, what you need is an intention economy:

The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don't need advertising to make them.

The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets.

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don't have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that.

Thanks Doc. Let's look at that for a second. The Intention Economy grows around buyers, not sellers. Ok, so we need buyers. Are people buyers on Facebook? Have you ever purchased anything from it? I haven't. I'm not in a consumer mindset when I'm there, at least not one that involves me parting with my hard-earned. There's certainly an argument to say Facebook users are consuming any time they are logged on, but I question the notion that can be monetised; I'm consuming social interactions with my friends, I'm not viewing it as a platform for purchases.

Contrast that though with businesses who are advertising, are they viewing the Facebook ecosystem as a marketplace? I don't have hard data to back this up but I'm willing to say yes, based on moves a little-known start-up out of Redmond, Washington made last year. Marketers are seeing the numbers and frothing at the mouth to turn that in to revenue. How one does that and even IF one does that aren't being considered at all.

The Intention Economy apparently comes ready made, it doesn't require advertising to manufacture it. What would Facebook be without advertising? Aside of course form hundreds of millions of dollars poorer?  Probably much smaller, since it would have had no way to foot the bill for its massive growth, save for taking on more cash from VCs worried about missing the next Google. And if it was much smaller, how many fewer radars would it be on? You lose the Fast Company, Newsweek, Business Week. You are suddenly still collegiate and walled and not innovating at the pace your market capitalization (suggested or otherwise) allows you to. Facebook's growth is built on the promise of an Intention Economy in spite of the fact all evidence points to the absence of such a thing.

Lets continue: The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don't need marketing to make Intention Markets. This again takes us back to the core issue of how people behave when it comes to commercially consumable goods on Facebook. If I have missed the train on this I look forward to finding out, but I don't see a dip in Amazon's trading, I don't hear about slumps in eBay's number of auctions (not ones that aren't brought about by their own ineptitude anyway). Contrast this with little known but rapidly growing Etsy, a site built around the trade of goods that are 100% hand-made. Commerce is core in its business model, coupled with a feel-good, natural vibe that is hard to come by online. I don't want to talk about it too much, suffice to say the service is brilliant and should be visited (right after we finish here).

Etsy doesn't need to risk disenfranchising its user-base in order to move towards profitability; the inherent small-business nature of its offering allows it to grow organically, improve and expand as it needs to. I was at a wedding recently and a friend was talking about a marketing plan, saying "Give me$20 million and we'll achieve "x", $10 million and we'll achieve "y", but $5 million and we won't even get off the ground." Facebook needs to grow at its current pace in order to achieve its goals, it needs an Intention Economy to be established and fast, lest the rest of the world pick up on the fact that there currently is no profitable business there, at least not on the scale they are currently operating on. Etsy could stay its current size and be a success, and I imagine that's quite alright with everyone involved.

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don't have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. This one goes without saying. Facebook are making moves towards an open platform, surprisingly still sitting out in front of Google who, for the first time perhaps ever, was caught sleeping. The same way Microsoft missed the internet, Google seems to have missed the promise of social networking and what an open playing field can mean. They are of course a little more concerned with owning your phone than your MySpace page, probably because they already have all the access there they need.

Regardless, while Facebook slowly makes moves away from being a silo, they are still being very careful to make sure they remain a focal-point for your interactions. Using an Amazon Facebook application which you've plugged in to your Bebo page isn't a negative for them; continuing to use Amazon as you are, or using an application that runs via someone else's network is. If Facebook's usage levels or visitation starts to decline or even just level off as it eventually must, look for some dramatic moves on their part, particularly if the Intention Economy is still nowhere to be seen.

Lastly, In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that. Right now we don't have that, we have sellers competing simply for the buyer's attention. This seems simply ludicrous when you consider:

• A Facebook user's attention not up for grabs, not by sellers anyway. They are here for social interaction. Before we get into notions of what constitutes a ridiculous notion of "proper" social interaction (which people usually take to be face-to-face), the rules are different now. The key take away though is the rules aren't just different for people under 30, people 50+ are interacting in this way too, ith plenty of them getting married. The web has enabled this sort of interaction, the song however, remains the same.


• There is no intention to buy. 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 (Hint: the right place is not Facebook, the right time is when they are not on Facebook).


• Imagine for a moment that Facebook was actually a readily monetisable and viable market place; sellers would be competing purely with the rest of a user's wall. Vampires, Texas Hold'Em Poker, travel widgets, pokes and haggis being thrown, videos playing and songs streaming from iLike. What could your product possibly offer that competes with all of that?

The ironic pat of it all though, is you cannot afford to not be a part of it, if only because if you're not, your CEO is going to hear about it from his kids and consider that a mandate for action. Social media runs much wider, and there are opportunities inherent in it. But Facebook? Setup a free fan page and see if your audience finds you. If they do, then that's a conversation worth having.

As we all know now, markets are conversations, and you get to fight another day.

(P.S. I would love to hear from some folk who have tried monetising FB and what their experience has been.)