Creative thinking

Here's a bit of er... creative thinking from NatWest bank, as reported by the excellent Zopa blog.

NatWest customers were complaining about the length of time they had to wait in queues….so NatWest have decided to remove clocks from the branches

Full story in The Sun. Secondary hat tip: BoingBoing.

Alaska Airlines

David Burn at AdPulp spots what looks like some unwise, unofficial blog activity by someone at Alaska Airlines, having a go at Jeremy Hermanns' blog account of an unfortunate problem on one of the airline's flights. Another reason why companies can't ignore blogging... if you don't take it reasonably seriously, you - or one of your employees - will start to make you look inept.

Stormhoek and disruption

Hugh reports "blogging doubled stormhoek sales". His analysis really resonated with me:

What happened is that by interfacing with the blogosphere, it fundementally changed how Stormhoek looked at treating their primary customers (the supermarket chains) and the end-users (the supermarkets' customers).

i.e. It caused an internal disruption, both within the company and the actual trade. Wine drinkers' basic purchasing habits didn't change because of the meme, but the meme allowed Stormhoek to align itself more closely with said habits...

The Stormhoek wine meme didn't sell more bottles, any more than Scoble's blog increased sales of Dell computers. That's not what this game is about. What matters is "The Porous Membrane". What matters is the internal disruption...

And the best stories have market disruption baked-in.

With the disruption, came a new and different story that the supermarket buyers and the importers wanted to hear. Telling the story made the sales process easier. With easier sales, the curve was raised.

There's a great principle in improv, that of letting yourself be changed. This encourages the actors to invest less energy in formulating a witity riposte, and more on joining their fellow actors and allowing their "feed line" to impact on them.

There's a parallel at work for bloggers - the value may not be the immediate impact of their words on the market, but how the conversation changes the blogger. As Hugh says, it may be a mistake to focus on using blogs to sell things; it's more about creating real engagement - where you are changed too.

And the thing about good conversations is that more goes on than just an exchange of information. Something more energising takes place. I think that's the deeper insight of the whole "markets are conversations" meme.

Likewise, Hugh highlights the impact on conversations inside blogging companies, whether a giant like Microsoft or a relative minnow like Stormhoek. It seems to be that when you start down the road of open conversations, the impact can be highly generative.

LinkedIn to better service?

Jack Yan spots an interesting post by Ismael Ghalimi. He used LinkedIn to find someone at United Airlines who was able to resolve a problem for a group of his friends.

Jack sees this is a sign of a return to better customer service at United. For me, it says a little more about the value of LinkedIn, a service that up until now I've valued very little. I might need to think again.

Price drop policy at Amazon

Rob at BusinessPundit (via Mario) highlights a price drop policy at Amazon.

Did you know that if the price on something you buy drops, within 30 days of your purchase date, Amazon.com will credit you the difference if you ask for it? It’s a not-advertised price drop policy that most people don’t know about and it’s saved me tons of money over the last few years.

Rob comments

I'm sure the reason they don't hype it is that they don't want people to use it. But I think it's a big reason to buy from Amazon and they should promote it

Sounds to me like the promotion is being done for them... it's not so easy to keep secrets like this anymore.

Optimism

Spotted last week at the Nike store in Melbourne: this optimistic team strip for the Socceroos going to the 2006 World Cup.

People's media

Over at Brand Autopsy, johnmoore reports

Now a crew of Star Trek evangelists ranging from an urologist to an Elvis Presley impersonator are resurrecting the original series and completing the mission by filming new episodes playing off the original timeline.

An extreme case of customer evangelism... but another clue about the future of marketing - co-creation with customers.

Probablistic systems

There's a thought provoking post by Chris Anderson on probablistic systems - and some good debate in the comments and trackbacks. One of those led me to this post by Wiggy:

This is a battle. Wikipedia is under attack by those who wish to discredit it, and show it to be a flawed model. If they win, the Internet effectively loses the one thing that makes it so powerful and those who wish to drip-feed us their opinion, their agendas and their media whilst at the same time prohibiting our own, well, they win. They win, the rest of us lose. This war is going to last for decades. Those dealing with it right now have my ultimate respect, and it should go without saying I'm fighting for the Wikipedians. I hope you do too.

Digital rights

I'm enjoying my holiday in New Zealand with very little internet access. But I found time to appreciate Earl Mardle's latest post: You have to admire the transparency.

Melbourne

Here in Melbourne I am just about over the jet lag and the pleasant shock of being plunged into high summer after the British winter. The flights with Sinagpore Airlines were great, somehow they manage to create a more civilised atmopshere than many European or American airlines.

I'm off to lunch with the chaps at Anecdote, who I've only met in cyberspace via blogging... I'm looking forward to some good stories of course.

Bruised guide to facilitation

I got a great email last week from my friend Kay Scorah, which I thought I'd share here, verbatim.

This week, I have been on a contact improvisation course with Wolfgang Hoffman. (Amongst other credits, co-founder of Fabrik Potsdam dance company). It has been an absolutely delightful and extraordinary experience, and one that I find hard to express in words. But here are 2 things that I have realised.

For me....

1) ...a really fine teacher (or facilitator) is not attached to a programme, a structure or even an idea of their own role. A really fine teacher dances with the class. (Both literally and figuratively in the case of Wolfgang. )They change according the abilities of the least and the most talented student. They stop and pause, taking the time to think about what's best to do next. They try things, and if those things don't work, they try something else. In summary, a really fine teacher is learning all the time, and makes that learning visible.

2) ...there is a huge difference between asking for feedback THROUGHOUT a session or a course, and asking for feedback at the end. Asking for feedback on an ongoing basis gives you a chance to act on that feedback to the benefit of the people in the room. It lets the group know that you are serious about helping THEM. Asking at the end is only going to help the next group, or the teacher. If we call ourselves improvisers, we should be able to take the feedback and do something about it right then and there. Also, asking for SPECIFICS in feedback is essential if you are serious about using it.

Makes sense to me!

Note for geeks: Blogged from 11,000 metres over Western Australia courtesy of Singapore Airlines' onboard wifi.

Community

Another good post from Alan Moore, highlighting several interesting articles.

The Guardian's Aleks Krotoski says With the public in charge, reality rules.

A few months ago, I was dumbstruck when a deity in the UK games business suggested that the future of computer gaming was community, not content. This man's plot structures, characters and dialogue have won accolades and legions of fans. His games are the epitome of designer-generated content through which players trip, dazed at its digital perfection. So what's this about community superiority?

Well, he's also very insightful. The static content that arrives in a packaged game is becoming passé. Instead, community and community-created content are the keys to courting and keeping players, as games technology becomes a testbed for self-expression.

Kevin Kelly in Wired writes a good post about how the internet has trumped expectations and empowered millions of end users in creating, not just consuming entertainment. (I loved his discovery that the Amish, who eschew electricity, television and cars still have websites, created using the terminal in the public library, to sell their wares.)

Alan also digs up this quote from German media magnate Hubert Burda in the IHT:

We now concentrate on using social software to build closer relations with the communities of readers around our magazines. News has now become a commodity, thanks to the Internet, so we must differentiate ourselves in other ways. Content alone can no longer win. You must build and interact with audiences.

All of which (and more) inspires Alan to say

Everything you thought you knew about business, marketing and communications you can forget. What we are witnessing is nothing short of the beginnings a cultural revolution that within 10 years will have replaced the fixed orthodoxies of government, business and marketing forever.

Communities will have become the primary medium by which government, businesses and their brands will successfully engage with their customers/stakeholders/voters

That may be a bit extreme... but then again, maybe not...

Now that's my idea of a schedule

I laughed when I noticed the entire contents of my schedule in Outlook this morning. I am feeling seriously demob happy.

Context is king

An instructive post by Mark Lloyd. His son is warned off using the term "brainstorming" - without being given the context. Mark does his homework and makes a great point.

Inherent qualities

James Cherkoff and I were in the pub yesterday, celebrating a recent success... to say nothing of marking the birth of his first born, daughter Maggie.

James makes me laugh because he seems to take such life changing events in his stride. (He moved house a couple of weeks ago and made that sound like a no-brainer too). Was being a parent daunting? Not really, he explained. He found that when he was 16 he wanted to date (I am being discreet) all the girls in his school. And now he's a parent, he feels like a whole lot of parental instinctive behaviour is simply kicking in.

I find this a refreshing view of life skills... that we have a huge amount of inbuilt talent that is ready to emerge when needed. It reminds me of the story about Michelangelo's David. An admirer asks the artist how he was able to produce such a fine piece of work. "Simple," says Michelangelo, "I just take a large block of stone and chip away anything that's not David."

Kryptoniter blogs..

Jake McKee spots that Donna Tocci, Kryptonite PR person, has started blogging. Though I couldn't actually find any reference to her employer anywhere, which is kinda interesting.

UPDATE: Kevin at Seattleduck clarifies things: Donna is contributing to a group blog at Shut up and drink the Kool-Aid where she is clear about her role at Kryptonite. Thanks, Kevin.

Beyond the TV networks

StefanSteven Safran reflects on the cancellation of a popular US comedy show.

Getting cancelled is the best possible thing that could have happened to Arrested Development.

He puts forward a way to disintermediate the networks, throwing the whole show online and vigorously engaging its fanbase in future episodes. Great provocative thinking.

Thanks to Alan Moore for spotting it. (Alan's Communities Dominate Brands blog is one of my must-reads these days.)

Impartiality?

Thanks to Adriana Cronin Lucas for sharing this quote from G K Chesteron:

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance

That captures something important about facilitation. Although I understand the idea of being neutral between parties in conflict, I think it's bogus to affect objectivity. I see my job as showing up to what's going on, bringing my own subjective responses. Sure, I make choices about how I manage them, but fake neutrality is no use to anyone.

Bonus link: David Weinberger on multi-subjectivity. And see Lloyd Davis' excellent summary of Weinberger's recent speech in Oxford.

Sexism sells

Catherine at The F Word reviews the advertising imagery she encounters travelling around London. It's fascinating. This was spotted by Mike at Londonist who comments

It makes for interesting reading. Of course we knew there were a lot of bikini clad women under the streets of London, but did we notice how many of them were reclining and generally lolling around like pieces of Ikea furniture? And blokes are always acting the fool and generally being adored by the younger cuter bits of fluff that orbit them?

How fucked up.

It'll take a brave advertiser to go against the grain of the widely accepted notion that sex sells, but it would be nice to see a little less gender stereotyping down there wouldn't it?

Self-organising

Sukumar at PSFK reports

Merill Lynch have asked their Financial Advisors (FAs) to organize themselves into teams of 2-4 FAs to manage the client relationship. Interestingly, these teams are formed by the FAs themselves and not by management mandate. Approximately 50% of their 14,500 FAs are already in such teams.

Fun and Simplicity

Andrew Rixon likes Kathy Sierra's latest post - Never Underestimate the Power of Fun. Me too. Andrew says

Earlier this year I completed what was an 8 month long Delphi project investigating facilitators perspectives and practices in natural resource management. One of the questions which we explored was What are the ingredients for successful facilitation in NRM?. What has stuck in my mind since was how one participant replied:

To deal with the complexity, keep it simple and make it fun!

This reminds me of my big theme: realising that there's a world of difference between things that are complicated and those that are complex. When they are complex, you give up on aiming for perfection and aim for simplicity that works ok. All explained at some length in my More Space chapter, which you can download - or listen to as an MP3 - free (or better still buy the book).

I ran an Improv session earlier this week and the highlight of the evening was playing Slow Motion Samuarai, a game listed at David C Jone's Learn Improv site. Everyone seemed to love it, and insisted on playing it again. It's about as foolish a game as you could imagine... yet generated incredible levels of engagement. I think that's because we are hard-wired by nature to play together.

Engagement marketing

My friend and former sparring partner, Alan Moore, highlights his article The Twilight of Interruption. It's a good polemic against interruptive marketing.

Introversion

Nice post by Sue Pelletier on culutural biases against introverts. As one of these, I identified with her comment:

Being a hard-core introvert myself, I tend to get pretty drained from the stuff so many planners seem to thrive on, and need down time to regroup and re-energize (I wonder how many closet introverts we have among planners, who like me collapse after a long day of interacting with people?)

L-word audience engaged

Tom Guarriello has a good post on how the makers of the L-word are getting their fans involved in the program.

Control..

My pal and business partner James Cherkoff has a pithy little post on control and dealing with not having it.

But yes, the rules are different and this is - maybe - where the problems and the fears arise.  If you are a stellar brand which has always had the pulling power of a small super nova what do you do when someone says gravity has been reversed and that your satellites are drifting away to a new cosmos?  You boil over and try to change it all back.

Pseudo-productivity

I read this in an email from Greg Hohn, a fellow member of the Applied Improv Network.

I would summarize my approach simply by saying that I try to focus on process rather than result in facilitation and that the results will be what they will be. It's scary and comforting all at the same time. Ideally, a facilitator, like a good parent, makes his or her role essentially obsolete. That can be scary too but it's ultimately better than creating a cult of personality.

I pretty much agree with him. I think it's easy to generate pseudo-results from meetings by going through the SMART goal mantra. You get these pseudo-results by achieving psuedo-agreement, where the silence or half-hearted assent of participants is taken as an endorsement. As a facilitator, it's very tempting to make yourself feel more secure by nudging people into boxes... but much more powerful to resist that urge, make fewer interventions, and live with the uncertainty and chaos.

Here's what Chris Corrigan had to say in a recent post on a similar theme.

Meetings are popularly knocked for being all talk and no action. Business magazines are full of strategies for getting the most out of a meeting, or better yet, determining how important a meeting is, and finding ways to blow it off. This is the result of meetings that are planned and hosted with no attention to the quality of the conversation that is to go on. Most companies and organizations seem to save quality only for the "real work" - producing goods or providing services. For some reason, conversation and the skillful design and conduct of productive conversations aren't seen as work and so they don't get the same attention as "results."

I'm all for productive meetings, but too often the urge to tick boxes excludes the opportunity for reflection, increasing awareness, and the sort of bricolage that often leads to creative insights.

What gets lost when we get pseudo-agreement in meetings is we lose touch with the diversity and richness of participants. In my experience, great teams don't actually agree explicitly about a lot of things. Instead, they seem to make a choice to go on together embracing difference. This notion is very upsetting to some people, who prefer the illusion of control to the reality of life being an unfolding and mysterious process. It's most upsetting to many branding types who are wedded to the idea of the "grand narrative", the unique statement of the brand's identity. It's why the notion of markets as conversations is such a radical shift of paradigm for marketing people.

Abroad thoughts from home

It's a grey day in London, so I'm maintaining my morale by thinking of Cable Bay in New Zealand. That's where I'm spending Christmas and New Year with friends who have just moved there. This holiday feels long overdue, I feel as though I've quite run out of steam here for 2005 - just looking at that picture makes me feel more alive. There is something very special about New Zealand.

I'm heading out on Sunday week, and spending 8 days in Melbourne on the way - which also promises to be fun.

And right now, compared to London on a dreary winter's day, the 24 hours I'll spend on Singapore Airlines sounds pretty fun too.