Ideas have a life of their own

My friend Steve Moore was chatting to me today about how football fans marked the death of George Best at games over the weekend.

Manchester City (the local rival to Best's former club Manchester United) were a bit concerned that the planned minute's silence would be marred by a small number of diehard fans who wouldn't show respect for a rival team's player. So they approached the Football Assocation with a simple idea: let's instead have a minute's applause, led by a former fellow player of Best's. That way, the malcontents would be drowned out.

Word came back from the FA. Absolutely not, that's not the appropriate thing blah blah. The result: At Man City's ground, the silence was ruined by the diehards and referee ended it early.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Britain, some grounds spontaneously went down the applause route. And now it seems likely that this will be the new orthodoxy for marking Best's passing.

I sometimes think ideas have a life of their own and when their time has come, it has come, regardless of what those in authority like to think.

I also wonder if this is another straw in the wind: that this sort of solemn silence belongs to a more deferential era... and that these days people want to be more expressive ?

Google as Swiss Army Knife

Nice quote by Marissa Mayer of Google, from this article in Fast Company: The Beauty of Simplicity

Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open--and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful.

The article's notion of just enough reminded me of Tom Guarriello's thoughts on the subject.

Hat tip: Zopa blog.

Boost

Declan Elliott highlights the launch of Boost Digital, a distribution platform for independent filmmakers:

A platform where the work stands and falls on the individual talent of the artist, not on who they happen to know, where they happen to live, or which parties they happen to be lucky enough to attend.

Declan's view:

Knowing how the entertainment industry has traditionally operated Boost Digital is a glimpse of the bright future which lies ahead in a digital world. It makes me wonder how many more years hopefuls will continue to attend events such as the Screenwriting Expo for a shot at making it in the entertainment industry. The days of Hollywood remaining the gatekeeper and center of the entertainment universe are numbered.

Millie the 80-year-old videoblogger

Good post by Jackie Huba about an 80-year-old videoblogger.

Market researchers pay handsomely for this kind of research, yet it's unclear how many companies scan the web for free Millie research. We know Coca-Cola Company doesn't.

Here's an idea: Send customers webcams to record video diaries about them and your product. Encourage honest, open and transparent feedback to post on their blogs. Not only do you receive free market research, you enhance the ever-important Google juice.

Gervais Podcasts

Ricky Gervais is creating a new show that is being released as a podcast via The Guardian. He says

I want to do a radio show where I can say what I want, when I want for as long as I want and that's free for anybody who can be bothered to listen anywhere in the world

Good for him. Tony Goodson says Cameron Reilly better look out.

Corante Marketing Hub

Corante's new Marketing Hub features "the best writing and thinking on marketing across the blogosphere and beyond"... plus, er, me! Corante provide a digest of posts about marketing, from a variety of sources, edited by Renee Hopkins Callahan.

I'm flattered to be part of this network... though I notice that it's a bit like when a get a flood of extra traffic from a link: I start to worry about needing to write more intelligently. Don't worry, the effect won't last long and my normal erratic standard will resume shortly.

Chris Carfi has posted some of the highlights.

Complicated ?

On a whim, I dug up this long article on the science of how the likes of David Beckham do such clever free kicks: Engineers Discover Secrets of Soccer Free Kicks.

Eminent scientists have gone to some trouble with this.

And you'll be pleased to understand that

A combination of wind tunnel experiments, high-speed video camera analysis, trajectory simulations and computer modelling techniques like Computational Fluid Dynamics is a very potent way of explaining what is happening.

There are a few people around who might argue, in light of this very complicated information, that in future only fully qualified scientists, or those deemed by human resource professionals to have the appropriate "competences", should be allowed to attempt free kicks. No doubt this would increase vastly the productivity of many adolescent boys, liberated from the pointless activity of enjoying a kick around in the park.

I'm often reminded of this when I read a lot of how-to books and websites, claiming to reveal the expensively-researched "secrets" of various forms of success. I also get the same feeling when I see most diagrams purporting to explain ways of managing people. I don't doubt that producing such artifacts is a source of great comfort to the authors... but perhaps I can be forgiven for questioning their value to anyone else.

Bonus link: When too may variables exist in decision-making
Self-referential link: Pitfalls of explicit learning

Consultation?

Andrew Rixon writes:

This comes from yesterday's Australian Financial Review regarding a contentious desalination plant which Sydney is planning for.

The key points which the paper reported were:

Plans for a desalination plant in Sydney have been released for public consultation.

The decision to build the plant is final, says the minister.

Andrew goes on to reflect on different notions of what constitutes "consultation".

Education unplugged

I spent yesterday in Birmingham, facilitating the morning session of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust Annual Conference. This session was sponsored by Policy Unplugged and Channel 4 - they're working to support bottom-up innovation in education.

I used a hybrid version of Open Space, and we had some great conversations about the future of education. I'm used to thinking about how marketing is being changed by the twin forces of the internet and the long-term decline of deference and respect for traditional authority - it was good to hear teachers talking about the impact on their world, and what they are doing about it. We also had a live feed from a parallel session in Hong Kong, which added an interesting dimension.

The Open Space format felt especially appropriate for an event where much of the focus was on breaking away from traditional models of education ("open head, insert expert knowledge") toward more exploratory and organic approaches.

Reviews of More Space

Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer has nice things to say about More Space

The best business books are those that cause us to think differently and if they're good, inspire action; this book passes that test.

She also points to approving comments by Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, no less.

There is a passion for work and business that comes through in each essay... Yes, some of the writing here is self-absorbed—the most used letter in the More Space alphabet is “I.” But the risk-taking with form and content ultimately pays off in a very readable, fresh, and insightful collection.

Hmm, mea maxima culpa on the I thing.

IF interview

Piers Fawkes interviewed James Cherkoff and me for IF. James and I are doing lots of interesting things together these days.

Is facilitation a fat word?

Andrew Rixon reckons facilitation is a Fat Word.

That is, a word overused and abused and one which seems to hold way too much meaning for its own good.

Yeah, I think I know what he means. He reports that some folks wanted to call themselves Passionistas, but Andrew's not convinced. Nor am I, though I think it does help get away from the illusion of neutrality that sometimes hamstrings facilitation.

What if financial services are interesting?

Financial services is arguably the lamest category when it comes to marketing.

One reason is the widespread notion that financial services are boring, so a lot of branding and advertising avoids talking about reality, and instead distracts with wacky creative treatments.

Zopa - which I've written and podcast about before - actually treat their subject (borrowing or lending) as if it is interesting. Their blog shares lots of insights to the subject. And they uncover that beneath the sweeping generalities are lots of details... including the human stories behind their borrowers.

Sure, they may be a market for the entertainers. I'm just glad to have Zopa offering something with a bit more intelligence.

Barking?

Thanks to Sue Pelletier for sharing this.

Six Apart Rock

Katherine Stone has a great post about the response of Six Apart, the folks behind the TypePad blogging package, to some problems in the last few weeks. They ask their users to choose for themselves (from several options) how much compensation they think is appropriate. Brilliant.

PS Sue Pelletier has a nice riff on this: "Wouldnt it be an interesting experiment to offer a conference, and people paid afterward for the amount it was worth to them?"

Lost in translation?

Rob May notices that a German court prevents WalMart from banning office romances.

Wal-Mart has lost a court appeal to try to legally ban its employees in Germany from having office romances.

The regional industrial tribunal in Dusseldorf upheld an earlier verdict by the local Wuppertal industrial tribunal that the company's "ethics rules" were in breach of German law.

Wal-mart tried to introduce a 28-page ethical code that forbids "lustful glances and ambiguous jokes" as well as "sexually meaningful communication of any type".

That's pretty bizarre. Next thing WalMart will be doing a Queen Victoria and insisting that table legs get covered up.

Red or Blue

Jeff Risley blogs about his agency launching The Red Blue Project. Looking at the state of politics in the US, the project is trying to get past polarisation. The agency says, "The project is politically neutral. The goal is not to move anyone to one side or the other, but just to encourage more thoughtful, open-minded discussion rather than just throwing rocks at the other side"

I like this idea. And I marvel at the thought of an ad agency championing the avoidance of logical fallacies. Rock on, as Hugh would say.

Now or Never

I got quite excited when I found out that Islington is going to get wireless broadband at what seemed like good rates.

The company providing this is called Now. Over the last four weeks, they've been enthusiastically mailing me to announce that it's now available on my street and they're dying to connect me. In fact, they can do it in less than 24 hours.

I got another very intrusive and jolly mailing yesterday. They must be wondering what's stopping me from signing up.

Well, only one trifling detail in fact. Every time I go to their website and put in my postcode, it tells me sadly Now is not yet available. And when I ring them up, they say their customer service is overwhelmed and they'll have to call me back. Which they don't. They're probably too busy designing another exciting mailing to overcome my inexplicable obstinancy about signing up.

What is about companies that deliver these brillant communications technologies that their left and right hands have no idea what each other are doing?

A post about postmodernism

Believe it or not, I have a piece of paper from Oxford University saying I hold a degree in Philosophy and Politics. Actually, I have a hard time believing it as I really struggled with Philosophy. I was particularly hopeless at the jargon. To win a philosophical argument with me, all you had to do was to suggest that I was being solipsistic (or pretty much any such term). I'd stare at you blankly, because I had no idea what it meant but didn't want to admit to such professional ignorance. Secretly, I'd sneer at your pretentious use of language, but you'd never know that. It was only 18 months ago that I learnt from David Weinberger about Ordinary Langauge Philosophy, which is more my cup of tea.

I really do try to avoid using jargon, but occasionally I make an exception. For instance, I'm quite fond of the fundamental attribution error , because the phenomenon it describes is so fascinating to me.

Today, I'm making another exception for the term postmodernism. I've heard this bandied about for decades but never really had a clue what it meant, though it seemed to be associated with other phrases like avant garde and smacked vaguely of rebelliousness.

Well, I recently went to a conference where the term was used so often that I had to look up postmodernism in wikipedia. Postmodernists don't go in for universal truths, or as wikipedia puts it

According to postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernity is characterized as an "incredulity toward metanarratives", meaning that in the era of postmodern culture, people have rejected the grand, supposedly universal stories and paradigms such as religion, conventional philosophy, capitalism and gender that have defined culture and behavior in the past, and have instead begun to organize their cultural life around a variety of more local and subcultural ideologies, myths and stories.

That sounds quite attractive to me - and fits very nicely with my experience of what folks are using the internet for. And it strikes me that a lot of branding is stuck trying to create grand universal stories, instead of embracing multiple narratives. So maybe I'm a branding postmodernist! How pretentious is that?

PS Am I alone in finding this note at top of the wikipedia entry a little ironic? "This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality"

UPDATE Dan at Headshift also gets into postmodernism:

The history of the 20th century has been one of grand narratives, big life stories that affect everyone, two world wars, recoveries, depressions, cold wars. The media as it has existed over the last 100 years and political institutions have played an important part in telling these stories. These have all been simple stories and the media and politics have evolved to tell these simple stories. Maybe the media shaped the perception of world events, or the world events shaped the media but I'll not get into cause and effect in meta-technologies right now.

However life is more complicated now. For a variety of reasons events, opinions, sides, religions and lifestyles are all more nuanced and intermixed, they don't fit nicely into grand narratives.

Is authenticity hyped?

Tom Asacker quotes Ionesco

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."

and goes on to set some challenging questions for folks (like me) who opine from time-to-time in favour of authenticity in branding. Here's a taster but read the whole thing if you can find the time.

Marketing experts continue to advise getting rid of the hype and, instead, providing more depth. For example, if you're running a business event or meeting, give people content. That's what they want: content and connections, which will help them improve their businesses and their lives. But the information says otherwise. That's why the highest fees go to the biggest celebrities, and not to the most insightful presenters. Don't believe me? Look it up. Halley Berry receives $100 -$500k for corporate appearances. Wal-Mart paid her six figures to appear at its 2004 shareholders meeting. Trying to get paid attendees to your next event? Who do you think will draw more people, the Desperate Housewives or Peter Senge? Be honest.

Tom isn't being cynical here, I think he's noticed a large elephant under the table that needs some attention. In the comments, Michael D Pollock has a pretty good stab at answering Tom's challenge.

I regularly catch myself making predictions that such-and-such an approach won't work. and I'm certainly guilty of insisting hype will fail when there is plenty of evidence that it sometimes succeeds, often for very long periods of time. So I try to qualify my predictions by admitting that I'm influenced by my own preferences. So if I suggest something won't work, I might also say that I'm biased because I'm more comfortable avoiding hype. If you put me against a wall, there are a lot of things I won't do for money and others are less picky or sanctimonious, depending on your worldview.

I suppose that I'm not likely to recommend getting Halle Berry to address your conference, although for some organisations, that might be just what they need. Walmart can easily afford her and she might do something worthwhile with the money.

And there are plenty of examples of businesses that seem to do well without the advertising and the hype, just as there are those that seem to flourish on them.

I'm with Tom in mocking expertise. I'm not an expert.

That Ionesco quote resonates too. Sitting in groups, I see a lot time spent on battling over principles, and sometimes I'm one of the battlers. Battles that often feel like the narcissism of small differences. I think when people talk more about how they feel, rather than saying how the world is, there's a bit more common ground.

Next, I'm gong to post something about postmodernism, which relates to this in some way or other. I'm putting in a separate post cos it's a bit esoteric.

On conversation...

Lisa Haneberg shared this quote with me by email.

Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. Dinah Craik, A Life for a Life, 1859

Antidote

My pal Alan Moore (such a talented family, don't you think?) has a good post about Levi's Antidote programme. This is a rare effort by a big brand to genuinely collaborate with its audience and a step away from top down marketing.

Alan sets the context for this initiative with his customary passion. I liked this bit especially.

..brands in the 21st Century have to give up control to gain control. They have to become facilitators, enablers, life-simplifiers, co-creators, they have to inspire greater C2C interaction and in that way they will get the most precious thing from their customers - personal advocacy.

I tend to talk about losing control to gain engagement, but it's the same idea.

City branding

Katherine Stone is underwhelmed by Atlanta's new tagline (Atlanta: Every day is opening day). Christina Maynard at Ricksticks feels the same about the new logos for Toronto and Atlanta.

I'm yawning too.

My two (maybe five) cents: when people talk about advertising and branding, they often focus on a few examples of stuff that seems to work. Katherine likes Las Vegas' "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas", which has a lot more impact than the Atlanta offering. Most of us can reel off a few TV ads we really love. But let's not forget that most of what we see is achingly mediocre.

So if I were advising a city, I'd ask: what makes us think we're so talented that we're going to be the one in ten thousand cities that comes up with a snappy tagline or clever logo that actually achieves something? And who exactly are we to think we have the ability to summarise the complex virtues of where we live in a few short words?

I can't help thinking this is another manifestation of the tyranny of the explicit: if we don't make explicit, however trivially and boringly, some USP for a location, we're somehow missing a trick. God forbid that we let the people who live here, and those who visit, tell the story in a million more modest, less consistent but much more credible ways? Ah, but that would put a few branding experts out of a job I guess.

Faciliating facilitators

I'm off to Glasgow in a few minutes, to facilitate a team day for a group of facilitators there. Hmmm.... on the one hand, a room full of facilitators ought to be a cinch, oughtn't it? Then again, there's the risk of being scrutinised and found wanting by experts. Time will tell... but I'm looking forward to it.

Intro to Improv

I ran an evening session on Improv for the Fun Federation last month. Clearly I didn't do enough to put people off as they've asked me back to run another.

This will be on Monday 28 November, 6.30 to 8.30 at The Hub in Islington.

This time playing with movement and singing. This session is for anyone who'd like to move their body and open their mouth and have fun doing it. Believe us, it can be more fun than you think! Its for pros and beginners alike - where no-one will be the last one to be chosen on the team. The emphasis will be on playing together to allow us all to enjoy taking part

It's free but donations to the Federation will be accepted at the end!

If you'd like to come, email Hannah Merriman: hmerriman (AT) funfederation (DOT) com.

Farson revisited

I was searching back through this blog this morning, and stumbled on someting I wrote back in May 2004 about Richard Farson. It's such a great insight that I'm going to shamelessly repeat it and add a new riff. It strikes a deep chord with me.

In Management of the Absurd, Farson fixes on the problem of management training. I don't intend to dismiss training by quoting this, and I think Farson brilliantly points out a giant pitfall.

Training... leads to the development of skills and techniques. Each new technique implicitly reinvents the manager's job by adding a new skill requirement, a new definition of the task, and a new responsibility... but because techniques don't work well in human relations, the manager is often unable to adequately discharge these new-felt responsibilities... when people feel responsible for handling some situation in which they are, in fact, largely helpless, a dangerous combination of feelings is created: responsibility plus helplessness leads to abuse...

When teachers cannot get their students to learn... when parents cannot control their children, they usually do not become compassionate. They become abusive. The same is true for managers.

I remember reading a book last year about Facilitation. It was a thorough guide to best practice at every stage of the process, from contracting and briefing to assessment and follow through. Each time I looked at it, I felt more and more insecure about my ability to facilitate. And I am a pretty good faciliator, with enough third party endorsement to say that without sounding a narcissist. For me, the lists of competences and things to perfect served only to intimidate. They took a process that is implicit and complex and represented it as explicit and complicated. (The complex-complicated distinction is part of the subject of my essay in More Space.) Maybe that approach works for some people, but not for me.

Conversing with customers

Jennifer Rice has just added an interesting post on Talking with Customers. Essentially saying ethnography (ie watching what people do) is great AND talking to folks is also pretty good - even if it's true that sometimes people make predictions about their own behaviour that aren't true.

An important Yes, And by Jennifer.

And my further Yes, And is this: I think conversations are more than an instrument for learning about customers. They are more than a research "tool" to be equated alongside other methods and assessed by reference to their supposed validity. A lot more happens in conversations than the mere exchange of data. Conversations are part of a process of relationship building in which people influence each other, often unconsciously. Sometimes the words exhanged are not the the most important thing going on in a conversation. If we focus only what is explicit in conversation, we may miss something crucial. Conversations are a vital way for people to align with each other, to feel like they know each other - even if the actual information traded is in some way "invalid".

Conversations have the power to build community. Fellowship even. Studying people remotely is not the same thing, even if it also has a role to play to informing us.

New marketing blog

James Cherkoff points to a new UK marketing blog by Robert Dwek - it's good stuff. I'm quietly hoping Robert converts to a full RSS feed soon.

Jory on Authenticity

One of the good things about More Space is that you can listen to each of the chapters as an mp3 (just register at the More Space website for free access). I enjoyed reading Jory des Jardins' chapter in its early draft - and I enjoyed it even more in the audio version over the weekend.

Partly because her theme is "the inevitability of authenticity", partly because it is told as a personal story, it's good to hear her tell it in her own voice.

Jory's talks about the difference between being taken for who you are, warts and all, versus being hired on superficial appearances. Here's how Jory used to see things

To me, getting jobs was tantamount to having a bag of tricks. I could pull any combination of delightful qualifications, based on the hiring manager's need and what I'd read about in the company's culture.

She tells how she made the transition to authenticity with humour and candour.

I didn't suddenly decide to be authentic. I had simply given up on my need to be "on", to sell myself. If I went to my computer feeling gross, the gosh darnit, I'd let the scant few who happened to bump into my blog know it. Instead of trying to produce content, I simply translated the thoughts, the impulses that were already there... It was around this time that I generated readers, not traffic.

I like that distinction between traffic and readers. I think it's a nuance that a lot of marketing misses when it gets fixated with metrics for "impacts". Losing some of our "persona" and showing some vulnerability can be a key to creating vibrant relationships. Jory does a nice job of describing her path to this.

Spark

Hard on the heels of More Space, I'm now waxing lyrical in another new book, John Winsor's Spark. The book's subtitle is "Be more innovative through co-creation". John's interviewed innovative people from organisations like Patagonia, Nike and Herman Miller and er... me, and each gets their own chapter. Mine focusses on using improv to co-create ideas.

This is the third book chapter I've produced, and it was by a country mile the easiest. John bascially interviewed me over the phone and then wrote up what I said. I did a quick edit and, bob's your uncle, the chapter was done. John's then added a simple bullet point summary of tools as well as a lost of additional reading resouces. He's repeated this for 16 different authors.

So as well as making it easy to contribute, John has made it very easy to digest.

I bang on about facilitation a lot here, and I want to say that John hasn't so much written this book as facilitated it. He has put the contributors in the spotlight and kept himself in the background. One of the great principles of improv is "make your partner look good" and John exemplifies that here.

PS It was good to see fellow blogger Jake McKee featured too, with a good, down-to-earth perspective on building a community, versus conventional marketing, in his work for Lego.

PPS John has a blog for Spark.

Budget and Blogs

I agree with Evelyn Rodriguez about Budget Car Rental's initial foray into the blogosphere: basically, spare me the promotional flimflam and let's instead talk about you improving your product. Doc Searls said much the same thing a few days earlier.

Here's the good news, from my point of view. If a company starts blogging in a dull way, it's not a big problem. The blogosphere will soon take care of creating a much more interesting conversation. I suspect Budget will be reading these voices and it will learn something. So let's welcome them to blogging and wish them a pleasant climb up the learning curve.

More open source beer

A few months ago I chatted to Liam Mulhall who was doing some Open Source marketing for his Blowfly beer. Now, (via Jake McKee) I see Vores Øl taking it further.

The recipe and the whole brand of Our Beer is published under a Creative Commons license, which basically means that anyone can use our recipe to brew the beer or to create a derivative of our recipe. You are free to earn money from Our Beer, but you have to publish the recipe under the same license (e.g. on your website or on our forum) and credit our work. You can use all our design and branding elements, and are free to change them at will provided you publish your changes under the same license ("Attribution & Share Alike").

Just enough

Tom Guarriello has a nice post on doing just enough facilitation.

Just enough = elegant = the sweet spot. 

That's what I'm looking for whenever I design anything: a meeting experience, a document, a culture.  Just enough excitement, just enough colorful language, just enough structure.

Measuring buzz?

Wise words from johnmoore at Brand Autopsy:

The major reason why word-of-mouth hasn’t taken off is not because marketers lack the metrics to measure it. It’s because most products, services, and businesses simply aren’t worth talking about...

Also marketers need to realize word-of-mouth is more than a marketing issue -- it’s a business issue. Marketers cannot simply sprinkle magical word-of-mouth marketing dust to create long-lasting word of mouth. For endearing and enduring word-of-mouth to happen, the activity must become part of the company’s culture. Sustainable word-of-mouth is much more a way of doing business every day than a component to a two-week heavy-up marketing blitz.

I'd only add my own experience that most boring conversations are only a heartbeat away from being very interesting... all it takes is one participant to take an emotional risk. For example, by talking about his real experience of the conversation and dropping the facade. I think the dullest business can have an interesting conversation, the moment it is willing to take the risk of getting out of bullshit mode.