They are your future employees

Jon Husband offers a translation of Ils sont vos futurs employés relating to an article in English now behind the FT paywall. (FT take note: information wants to be free and will go through 2 iterations of language to get out into the world!). It's a fascinating look at the cultural shift likely to arise from the arrival of digital natives in the workplace. Apparently, according to Mark Prensky's study

the life arc of a typical 21-year-old entering the workforce today has, on average, included 5,000 hours of video game playing, exchange of 250,000 e-mails, instant messages, and phone text messages, 10,000 hours of mobile phone use. To that you can add 3,500 hours of time online

... which has a profound impact on their approach to work...

The social life of entrepreneurs...

For many decades, first in the Tatler and then Harpers & Queen, there was a regular column called Jennifer's Diary, a cut-glass chronicle of the author's continuous social whirl among Britain's Upper Classes.

My good friend, Oli Barrett, has started a sort of Jennifer's dairy of Britain's Entreprenurial class at his blog, The Daily Networker. If you want to keep in touch with what's being invented and who's inventing it, I think you should subscribe. I have taken to introducing Oli to people as Britain's most sociable entrepreneur. You're unlikely to meet anyone with brighter eyes or bushier tail.

Here's how he explains his blog:

When I meet people face to face, Ill often suggest something they should check out or someone they should meet. Thats great but it only works when we meet up.

By broadcasting my most interesting meetings and discoveries, we can keep in touch all year round, and everytime you see something which appeals, just drop me a note.
If youre seeking a particular oppportunity, write in and Ill try to help out too.

Daily Networker is dedicated to connecting people and opportunities. Its the thing that connects me to my network.

And whereas I think Jennifer was just a chronicler, Oli is a doer too, an active participant in some very interesting startups.

Participation

I'm giving a talk next week in Copenhagen for a conference organised by Post Danmark on Participation Marketing. I'll be covering a theme familiar to many foks reading this... how the internet, improved educational standards and a general decline in respect for authority combine to change the way organisations should market themselves. How we're moving a more colloquial model of engagement, in which its possible for things like Linux to emerge to challenge the big boys.

Participation takes many forms and I'll use some improv activities as well as a few case studies and things to explore the territory. I thought I'd do a tiny experiment in shallow-end participation in developing my talk by inviting a bit of feedback on a couple of things I'm working on.

A lot of people attending are interested in Direct Marketing, specifically stuff that comes through our letterboxes, and how this is going to change in the future. I don't get a lot of memorable things in my postbox and I'd be fascinated if anyone reading this has some examples of things they've received (or indeed sent) that reflect the new paradigm.

Also, I was going to quote some data I picked up from Steve Yastrow on the Tom Peters' site from a while back, showing that trust in things like advertising declined, but trust in ourselves has remained the same. The only data points I've got are 1987 and 2001 so if anyone has comparative data with an end point nearer to 2006 I would love to hear from you!

What other examples of really engaging marketing have you experienced? I'm especially interested in smaller scale examples, away from the big names.

Any other questions or ideas on the theme would also be most welcome. I'll be happy to share the slides of my presentation when I'm done.

One

A couple of weeks ago, I met Stefan Engeseth, author of the recently published One. (There's a free download of the first chapter there). One is Stefan's riff on the future of marketing where the boundaries between brands and their customers become more permeable, with customers seeing more and participating more in the creation of what some might call (slightly squirmily) "branded experiences". I only had a brief chat with Stefan and realised how much work he has put into this book. For a serious guy, Stefan writes a very engaging book, full of wit and provocation, puncutated with great quotes, funny stories and punchy graphics. It is chock full of ooze.

Stefan says companies should worry less about being number one in their market and more about being one with their customers.

Try going to a (hair) salon and having your hair done without a mirror and you'll understand how today's customers feel when they have to live with the hairdos today's brands force upon them.

I'm not very good at reading non-fiction but Stefan's book gets an easy recommendation from me: it's very easy to dip in and out, it delivers serious ideas with a sense of mischief and it makes me think. If I were a marketing director, it's the sort of book I'd dish out to my colleagues on a Friday night and say, "Let's talk about this on Monday."

Bricking It

Yesterday I facilitated an Open Space for the Bricking It conference, held at Channel 4 in London. With my friends at Policy Unplugged, I've developed a stripped down version of the Open Space format to work in 3 hours.

Feedback has been very good and I really enjoyed myself.

One fun thing we did was asked all participants to fill in a form saying what, as a child, they wanted to be when they grew up, and what careers advice they'd give a youngster today. We papered a wall with all the answers...

and it gave a perspective on the fabulous variety of minds present in the room. I looked at this and thought, why would you take all this brainpower and constrain it in a conventional top-down format? Yay for Open Space.

Here are David Wilcox's pictures of the event.

An inside view on phone Spam

I was fascinated by the latest comment added to my post about phone spam. This is by a large margin the most commented-on thing on my site, though it's not really a big fascination of mine. It's one of these posts that has taken on a life of its own. Here's how it starts...

your gonna h8 me but I work for a marketing company, phoning you guys up and trying to pester you in to buying my useless insurance crap.

I Soooooooooo agree with you guys that this kind of marketing is annoying, intrusive and should be abolished. The sad fact is that i need to make a living and i happen to be quite good at it. The way I justify it to myself is by saying that every person i phone up and irritate is one more person that agrees with me and hates big corperations and telemarketing companies.

Bacteria talking

A friend at NPR pointed me to this fascinatiing story (read or listen): A Biologist's Listening Guide to Bacteria. A scientist discovers how bacteria talk to each other, so they can adapt their behaviour according to whether they are alone or in a group. When you learn that cholera bacteria only create toxins whey the reach a quorum, you glimpse the potential value of the work.

It's also interesting that she believes self doubt is what keeps a scientist sharp.

And that's the best kind of scientist because they're filled with this self-doubt. And if I'm going to be honest, that's who I am. And it's what drives me. It's a terrible part of my personality. Nothing's ever good enough, I'm not smart enough. This is part of my mantra. I need to work harder, and if I were only smarter, I could help them with their struggle better."

Maybe

Rob Paterson has a great post about simplicity, the complicated and the complex.

This is what Emergence looks like. It is the result of a powerful but simple equation being recursed many many times. In effect it is like having a powerful question conversed about many many time. The question and the recursion deliver a new form that has Emerged.

This is why Community is going to be the organization of the future where the Many talk to the Many.

Conversation between the Many and the Many is the Darwinian Creative Process that delivers Emergence. For the right Conversations to happen - you need a Trusted Space. A Trusted Space must be Peer to Peer. Extreme power differences prevent conversation and hence emergence. Hence traditional bureaucracies have profound challenges in coping unless they find ways of opening up the space safely inside to allow for peer to peer.

Rob also mentions a book which I could buy on the strength of its title alone: Getting to Maybe.

Marketing: War or Warcraft?

I've been hopeless about blogging lately, and I apologise for even mentioning it, as this constitutes blogging about blogging.

I've been meaning to write a long and informed post about this theme but I don't seem to be doing it. So I'll write a short one and see if more follows later.

There've been some good posts around the blogosphere about the limits of the analogy of marketing as warfare - where we have campaigns, look for impact, outmanoeuvre the enemy etc. James has chronicled this pretty well.

Well, I've been thinking there might be something to learn from World of Warcraft. What if there is more to learn from WoW than from seeing marketing as war?

OK, this is in part a desperate rationalisation of my own intermittent addiction to this massively multiplayer online game. But WoW is also a great example of a brand that lets the players do a huge amount of the creation of the experience. Part of its allure is that it introduces infinite play by engaging the brains of its participants. There's lots of infrastructure, but it's my fellow players that make it compelling to me. And I'm happy to pay each month for the chance to play with them on WoW's playground.

If I just think about what I learn about management styles just by forming parties to complete WoW quests, I realise how much there is to learn in that playground. And don't get me started on the parallels between the bizarre Pavlovian impact of "levelling up" in WoW and getting the next rung on the ladder in a frequent flyer programme. And what those programmes seem to be missing that WoW seems to get. (Clue: Guilds)

But time is short, so let's consider this a starter for ten. Maybe there's a podcast in it.

Intangibles?

I had an interesting conversation last week about intangibles. I think this word gets used in strange ways.

When businesses talk about "intangibles" it seems to me they mean things that can't really be measured but can be felt. Yet they then attempt to measure them and use this word - intangible - to describe them as if they literally can't be felt.

Which is odd. Mention a person or brand to me with a strong identity and I will have a strong felt reaction. So will most people. We might put some rational words to that reaction, but there will be a feeling at the core of it. The feeling may be disgust, delight, excitement... and it will almost certainly have a physical response that goes with it, a gut feel.

It seems to me that if we can't value - in the minimal sense of actually paying attention to - the felt reactions in our own bodies... we're missing something pretty vital. And as my friend Mark Brady points out, no-one threw themselves on a hand grenade for a spreadsheet.

This is a can of worms I know, but I felt like opening it.

Bricking It

On 14 September I'll be facilitating the Bricking It conference, sponsored by Channel 4 and CFE. You'll find more details at the site, but this is the theme in a nutshell:

As hundreds of millions of new skilled workers join the global labour pool and more and better jobs become outsourced, what are the implications for our young people's education, career choices and well being?

I'll be using a format that is primarily conversational, but including some short provocative speeches from a few of the participants to open proceedings. If this event intrigues you, add a comment or email me and I'll secure you an invitation.

A good space

I've just spent two days on a training course with some colleagues I'll be working with this autumn. It was held at the excellent Wallacespace in Central London.

Training is often done in the dreary basements of hotels or at utilitarian centres. It was great to work somewhere that really makes the effort to create a really good environment. Lots of natural light, very helpful attitude and great catering. Plenty of excellent little touches, such as lots of newspapers in the cafe area, Innocent smoothies free to all, and really nice sweets and fresh nuts to nibble on... not the ghastly standard issue boiled sweets! The lunch on both days was great. I've put up a few little piccies of some of what I liked.