I send a message

Image via CrunchBase

Those who know me know getting under social media's skin is one of my pet projects, only because the current discussions (I feel) miss the point, which I believe is the democratisation of platforms from which people have the opportunity to speak on a mass scale. More simply put, with the advent of easy blogging tools (like Wordpress which runs this site), I get to spend my time thinking about what i want to say as opposed to how the infrastructure underneath it all works.

I wondered aloud last August when and how this sort of thing might come to impact the creation of music. Along came MelodySphere which had a simple shot at creating loops collaboratively but in a browser. Nice, but awkward to use. While the newest kid on the block (my block anyway) doesn't get us there, it takes us one step closer to the removal of publishing barriers. Posterous allows you to email text, video, music and pictures to an address and then automagivally does the rest. You don't even need to sign-up as you can see from my simply created Posterous page. It gives you a URL (which you can alter later if you wish) and instantly publishes whatever you sent. In my case, I shot them an MP3 of a song of mine and a minute later got a reply with the URL.

I love this, seriously love the removal of yet another barrier to people raising their voices, and while the geeks out there might bemoan the approach of the madding crowds, I believe the revolutions that will lead us out of economic nonsense will be born of the work being done by folk who are trying to make it easier for ideas and thoughts to be spread, and taking down anything that might stand in their way.

Treetop Barbie

On the subway this morning I was watching the below TED talk by Nalini Nadkarni on her work as an ecologist, studying life in the canopies of rainforests. It's a great talk which i recommend you check out, my favourite part though was her institution's appropriation of every girl's favourite doll, Barbie.

They buy them from thrift stores and other cheap outlets then hand-sew costumes for them and send them out. They're also available for purchase which makes me wish I had cousins who were young enough to get one for!

A few thoughts:

• I love the appropriation of a classic symbol, recast with new meaning in this day and age


• Is this brand-jacking? Maybe, but not in a way that casts the original in a bad light


• If I were Mattel I would be all over this. Nalini's group send a booklet out with each Barbie on the work they do, Mattel could release a whole line of eco-warrior Barbie, created entirely from renewable materials in a series of different guises. Sea-Rescue Barbie, Treetop Barbie...Ivory Coast Barbie? (ouch!)

I'm wondering about other campaigns, brands, products, services, whatever. Major symbols like Barbie that can be given new purpose in an eco-aware age. There's a lot of chatter right now on how green issues will be cast aside as people just try to hang on to their homes, I'm hoping initiatives like this might manage to keep it front of mind for people.



This post is also a special dedicatuion to Alex White, one of my best friends and a tireless eco-warrior himself. He gets married to an extraodinary woman (hi Fern!) tomorrow, a wedding I am sadly not in Australia for. Mate, I love you to absolute pieces and am sorry I can't be there to share your special day. I cannot wait to hear about it, watch the videos and catch up when I'm back home at the end of the year.

Marketing quote of the day

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. - Chief Seattle, Amerindian. pg. 10 - The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher.

There's always so much written about how social norms can go out the window when the anonymity of the web or even the simple removal of a human face takes over. I believe it's a temporary state though, and as much as I am loathe to admit it, I think the rise of Facebook has done more to bring about social change over the web than any other service, placing a premium back on the connections we really do have, versus say MySpace, Friendster, or whatever came before which was mass convergency at the expense of  intimacy.

Of course lots of people still choose to use Facebook in that manner, personally I like to keep things a little more closed. But I think we're just about past the idea that what is appropriate social behaviour somehow differs face to face versus online. What we do to the web - or on it - we do to ourselves, and when we reduce the connections we have down to a series of contact details and earning potential, we get nothing more than that in return.

Being DESIGNful...

Cover via Amazon

Working on it anyway.

Earlier this week I finished Dan Roam's Back of the Napkin which, while I would have appreciated more practical application of his ideas, was great none the less, and a good primer for visual thinking applied to business situations.

No sooner had I put that down, I picked up Marty Neumeier's new book, The Designful Company. If his name rings a bell, I've likely told you before about his previous book Zag, and you may even know of the one before that, The Brand Gap, kindly available over on Slideshare in totality. It'll take you 10 minutes, go read it, then come back.

Marty uses the book as a platform to expound the virtues of design thinking, something that has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Something I really believe but perhaps haven't articulated all that well in the past is that in order to bring new ideas to the table there's little value in mining the places everyone else is looking; subsequently I'm more likely to read Fred Wilson than Copyranter when thinking about advertising, though both are great. That's not right or wrong, it's just my take, those of you reading A Big Life In Advertising keep at it, I imagine we want different things anyway.

I'm only part way through but Marty is hitting on a number of memes that have been floating around recently, certainly touching on the territory recently mined by Seth Godin in Tribes. It isn't resonating the way Zag did yet, but it's interesting none the less - I'll let you know whether I really think it is worth the coin when I'm done. It's certainly touching on some things I've thought previously, particularly being willing to be wrong, but I cna hardly say I like the parts of the book that agree with me now can I?

While I'm here, I stumbled across Design Thinking, a blog written by IDEO's CEO Tim Brown, FYI for those interested.

What was that?

Who is IDEO?!??!

GET OUT!!

Value + Hope

In a former life I gave a presentation to the sales team of a company. I was reminded of it after reading this quote from Seth:

What marketers sell is hope.

Hope was part of the thrust of the presentation I gave, the other was value. We would raise hopes, set a price on those raised hopes, and then afterwards the customer decided whether or not they got value. My point was (and is) the seller mitigates value by adjusting the level of hope in the buyer - the price point is almost irrelevant (ok it's not, but humour me here).

So I agree with Seth, marketers sell hope. But once money exchanges hands, hope transforms into value - either good or bad. Hope isn't ever received by the buyer, and if one really wants to get into semantics, you could argue hope never actually existed with the seller in the first place.

There's a link here somewhere to Schrödinger's cat, though I can't quite wrap my head around it. Anyone want to have a go?

Oh, and the (not very good)  presentation is below.

[slideshare id=377623&doc=offsite-prez-1209392828328284-8&w=425]

Thank you to the three people still reading for indulging me :)

Create more value than you capture

Anyone who has been with me for a while (thanks for sticking around, even though the posts have been fewer and further between while I get settled somewhere marginally south of the North Pole) knows I am an avid reader of Fred Wilson's AVC blog. While catching up on his pieces, he had a quote in one post from Tim O'Reilly which I liked so much I stuck up on the door of my office:

[caption id="attachment_587" align="aligncenter" width="450" caption="Create more value than you capture"][/caption]

That struck a chord with me, and reminded me of a piece I posted back in September on treating people's contact details as a new currency, something to be traded in exchange for value. I believe companies need to offer great value in order for my permission to contact me, and for the most part people are far too flippant in this space.



Create more value than you capture. Make it worth me putting in my email address, deliver more entertainment than seems reasonable for my $10. What I'm really saying is show me you value my attention even if the only thing you get out of it is your message being heard. That tells me you believe what you have to offer is worth something, and hopefully more than what you're asking me to give up in exchange.

Go read Tim O'Reilly's piece that the quote is from, entitled Work On Stuff That Matters. There is no better way to start your day.

<3

From DDB New Zealand, via the completely adored Bad Banana Blog.

Andrew, I'm looking for this to show up on your much neglected Tumblog... ;]