Monetising relationships...

I'm loving David Weinberger's witty take on various schemes for making money out of social media etc.

Now the panel of experts gets up. Unfortunately, the first one says "Advertising and content, what's the difference? Ads and content are all mixed up in the traditional media, so why not on the Web?" [A: Because the Web is ours and we're trying to build something better.]

Prizing innovation

A tip of the hat to John Winsor for pointing me to this NY TImes article: You Want Innovation? Offer a Prize It charts the extraordinary amount of intelligence Netflix has tapped by offering a big prize for inventing a better system for matching movie recommendations to customers. I also love the bizarre finding that most people who like The Wizard of Oz also like... The Silence of the Lambs. Go figure.

Bonus Link: To appreciate the shadow side of rewards, I recommend Punished by Rewards.

Enthusiasm better than confidence

I rather liked Mark McGuinness' thought: 5 Reasons Why Enthusiasm is Better than Confidence He says

As long as you’re focused on ‘being confident’, you are the focus of attention. And when it’s all about you, it’s very easy to get caught up in self-doubt (”Am I really up to this? Will I be able to do it?”).

I like the irony there.

Update: I also enjoyed Mark's podcast interview with Mark Earls This led me to look up references to tacit interactions: essentially, a McKinsey idea that focusses on the complexity of knowledge work and confirms the danger of pursuing efficiency in many contexts. (See this CIO magazine article for more on that). Mark's very keen on people getting clear about the purpose and beliefs driving a business. He's also a big advocate of treating the people who work for you as volunteers, and following the principle of invitation rather than compulsion.

That notion of invitation is a key principle in open space facilitation.

The language of facilitation

Last week I recorded a conversation with Tom Guarriello and Andrew Rixon about the language of facilitation. This was prompted by the research Andrew has published on this subject.

It's a suitably non-linear conversation touching on lots of themes - the power of metaphor, the role of narrative, and the impact of body language and silence. We talk about how in using language we often miss how it shapes our experience and how easily it can both unite and divide us. Is there something going on in groups of people that is beyond language? How does the institutional language of organisations constrain their behaviour? I also get to sound off about the dangers of premature encapsulation.

Enjoy.

Download the Podcast - 44m - MP3 (15.1 MB)

Podcast RSS feed for iPodder etc.

Adding comments for someone

Jackie Huba explains how someone has created a comments site for a blogger (Jason Kottke) who doesn't allow comments. Fascinating - another straw in the wind suggesting the conversation will happen whether you support it or not.

Pulsation in meetings

Over in Denmark, my friend Jesper Bindslev has been trying a new approach to meetings.

Today I introduced the frame "quick and dirty" at work to introduce a practice I would like us to use in our meetings. We tend to have quite a number of interesting longer talks and over elaborations around subject. Though these talks are interesting, I had noted through many conversations and hallway meetings that we all seemed interested in some more decisiveness and action. "Quick and dirty" points towards that our meeting periods needs more action and decisiveness. In practice it simply involved to have small breaks every 30 minutes or when people felt like it, for example if a lot of friction emerged in a discussion. Silences and shift in posture (by standing up and walking outside) can often remove these.

This produced good results. What interested me is the subtlety of Jesper's approach, not what you might expect from a phrase like quick and dirty. You might have expected him to say that meetings would be time limited and we'd just make a decision and get on with it. Instead, he introduces breaks - in theory threatening to lengthen the time taken to reach a decision - but gets the results he wanted.

I think we easily neglect the primal human need for pulsation, the coming and going built into processes like the beating of our hearts of the breathing of our lungs. By incorporating pauses and breaks into the meetings, Jesper allows a kind of pulsation, acknowledges the humanness of the process, and gets better results.

Thought for the day

Evelyn Rodriquez:

If one could honestly assess the root cause of many business problems - it'd be these intimately related concepts: being open is dangerous and being guided by the echoing fear in our heads is safe.

Highlighted to me by Jon Husband

Whose language?

Andrew Sullivan spotted this extraordinary video on YouTube: In my language.

In it, an autistic woman lets us into her world. In the first half, we see her engaging with life in a way, I would say in a language, of her own. This footage will probably trigger a variety of reactions in you - it did in me. In the second half, she chooses to communicate with us in what we might think of us our normal language. I found it astonishing, humbling and deeply provocative.

Oversleeping?

I missed an early morning phone meeting with Chris Corrigan, so sent my apologies. I appreciated this in his reply

I am happy to forgive you completely for "oversleeping" (in fact the correct term is just "sleeping")...

Buttons pressed?

One of my friends from the world of Improv, Andrew Burnham has sent me a nice little thought piece on being in the moment(pdf). It's about how our buttons get pressed and a way of dealing with this.

If a golf ball hits you on the head is the pain in the golf ball or is the pain in you? Of course the pain is in me, you say. It's easy to see that our reactions are not in the difficult people or challenging situations. Our reactions are clearly in us so why not look for solutions where they really are and not where we are unlikely to find them?

Controlling/controlled

Wise words from David Weinberger:

When a candidate controls her campaign, that means she in fact is being controlled. One coin, two sides. To control is to be controlled.

David's written a delightful piece for the Harvard Business Review on the perils of accountabilism. Here's the start; I heartily recommend the whole thing before it goes behind a paywall on Feb 26th.

Accountability has gone horribly wrong. It has become “accountabalism,” the practice of eating sacrificial victims in an attempt to magically ward off evil.

The emphasis on accountability was an understandable response to some god-awful bookkeeping-based scandals. But the notion would never have evolved from a buzzword into the focus of voluminous legislation if we hadn’t also been lured by the myth of precision: Because accountability suggests that there is a right and a wrong answer to every question, it flourishes where we can measure results exactly. It spread to schools—where it is eating our young—as a result of our recent irrational exuberance about testing, which forces education to become something that can be measured precisely.

When such disincentives as the threat of having to wear an orange jumpsuit for eight to ten years didn’t stop the Enron nightmare and other bad things from happening, accountabalism whispered two seductive lies to us: Systems go wrong because of individuals; and the right set of controls will enable us to prevent individuals from creating disasters. Accountabalism is a type of superstitious thinking that allows us to live in a state of denial about just how little control we individuals have over our environment.

A naturalistic approach to branding

I so agree with Dave Snowden's post: Branding: service is not a commodity

He recounts his experience as an ad agency client, whilst he worked at IBM.

What would happen is that meetings would take place with O&M following detailed market research into customer needs. An image would then be created using some brilliant creatives which would result in a sophisticated advertising campaign. Staff would then be informed of the new image, there might be some powerpoint briefings and a communication campaign, but it was always an after thought. I also found it interesting that very senior managers would get wrapped up in the vision of the ideal and none of their direct, or indirect reports were prepared to say that the emperor has no clothes.

That's exactly how a lot of advertising operates... by setting up ideals and absolutely not recognising how things are. It's a failing not only of advertising, but of an awful lot of "change processes". If we don't recognise where we are, I believe we become alienated and less able to function well. We become courtiers to Mad King George addressing an oak tree as the King of Prussia.

Dave goes on to suggest a few dos and don'ts for how a service organisation might brand in a more naturalistic way. For some reason, this morning these don'ts resonate quite strongly for me:

DO NOT find examples of ideal behaviour and promulgate them as best practice. people will either thing you set them up, have not told the full story or will just say I couldn’t do that

DO NOT identify the three main obstacles to customer satisfaction and institute an organisational wide campaign to overcome them

DO NOT create a list of values and behaviours that you want staff to adopt and institute a training programme to install those routines in your employees. It will produce camouflage behaviour at best.

I'm not a fan of best practice and I'm very wary of any approach that appears to frame human beings as some kind of computers to be programmed with routines. Which may put me somewhat at odds with a lot of change programmes.

Coincidence, correlation and chance

Andrew Stickland writes entertainingly about coincidence, correlation, chance and the downsides of human's ability to see patterns. Well spotted, Jon Howard. Like Jon, I enjoyed Andrew's ingenious idea for an email scam around predicting football results...

Palaeolithic wisdom

Ken Thompson enthuses about a Harvard report, Virtual Teams: Palaeolithic Insights About the Art of Cyber-Managing.

Ken summarises:

Three instincts in particular have to be excavated from our caveman days and brought back into our organizational teams...

1. Purpose shapes function and structure. “Purpose is the campfire around which virtual team members gather.” Without a good sense of purpose, mission and goals you may have a group but not a team.

2. Leadership rotates according to the task at hand "Palaeolithic societies pooled their human capital simply to survive." The single leader model of teams will not meet the challenges of a modern high-pressure virtual team - distributed leadership is key.

3. Constant communication fosters a sense of identity. Sometimes the technology makes it too easy for a new team member to find-out all the important team information without the need to invest in the human conversations to acquire it. What we gain in information efficiency we can more than lose in missed opportunity for trust building.

This seems pretty on-the-money to me, capturing a lot about what's different about projects that emerge online. The third point created a particular "ah ha" moment for me, and I think connects to Euan Semple's metaphor about preferring the Cotswolds to Milton Keynes. It also relates to what I posted about the downside of efficiency.

I'd probably want to caveat what Ken says about point 1, as I feel anxious when anyone alludes to setting missions and goals. That's probably because I find most conversations around this subject completely lack the immediacy and excitement evoked by the image of sitting round a campfire.

Purpose is something I feel more comfortable about, it sounds down-to-earth and present-moment. Great projects sometimes arise from small talk about small niggles.

(I'm also fond of Eckhart Tolle's notion that our most important purpose is to be present to whatever it is we are doing right now. I think that can work for groups; if we step off the anxiety bus and take a break from agonising about our long-term meaning, we might connect to something more profound that holds us together right now.)

(Ooh, synchronicity. Chris Corrigan has just blogged something very interesting about purpose, and how we might all find purpose in any meeting we attend...)

Wikis work for corporates

Hemma at Headshift spots a survey confirming that wikis work for corporates, at least in certain circumstances.

Trust: facilitation or training?

Craig Newmark, writing in the Neiman Foundation's new report, has lots of interesting things to say about how journalism and "citizen journalism" might develop. However, I wanted to highlight this almost throwaway comment he makes near the start.

Somehow, the craigslist community—its users and company—has constructed a culture of trust. Basically people feel they should treat others as they want to be treated. Where we start from on craigslist is in trusting people; then we give those who come into our community real power to self-police. We do light management but, mostly, we stay out of the way and let people set the tone of the site. Somehow this approach works.

Sounds like a pretty good definition of facilitation to me.

I've been thinking for some time that marketing 2.0 could be more like facilitation. Marketing 1.0 is more like training. So when Hugh says don't use the blogosphere to push corporate messages, it's a bit like saying, hey, we're not here to be trained by you.

Hat tip: David Weinberger

Stillness

I enjoyed Nick Smith's latest post, Don't just do Something, Stand there! Here's the nub of it, but I recommend the whole thing.

By valuing thinking over awareness we mistake knowledge for understanding, and therein lies our downfall. It is thinking that gets us so fixated on the world of form that we mistake it for reality - we see the surface form and overlook the energetic wholeness that animates the whole show. We see effects and become blind to causes. Not knowing any better we try to fix what we see, but we keep failing because what we see is merely the effect of a process that starts with us. Our frustration at our inability to fix our world just drives up the anxiety and fear as we feel more and more like powerless victims, and then this grotesque self-image becomes the breeding ground for yet more fearful thoughts which then just add to the chaos and confusion we seem to see 'out there'.

But when we embrace stillness a miracle starts to happen. We begin to feel and recognise the connection that exists between us - some call it Presence.

I like the connection Nick makes between stillness and presence. What Nick says here also goes to the heart of something I've become increasingly aware of... that there are important aspects of our experience, I might say of life itself, that cannot be put into language. We can sense them, but when we attempt to verbalise them we lose the connection. As Nick describes, if you find yourself in a state of flow, the moment you start thinking "this is great", you break the flow.

Much of our thinking about how groups of people work together deals in the things we can make explicit. So, for instance, it's accepted as a truism that a group of people can only function effectively if they agree on a common goal. That's why we hear so much about the value of mission statements/visions/values and so forth.

But I don't think that notion is actually all that true. Scratch most groups of people, high or low functioning, and I doubt you'll find more than a superficial degree of agreement about the group's explicit goals, values etc. I question the impact of laboured efforts to get folks to agree to those statements.*

I'm rather more intrigued by what I suspect is the real agreement, which is essentially the one to go on together, at least for the time being. Loads of organisations carry on working with staff who spend time thinking about leaving... but for the time being, have made the choice to stay. I actually don't think that is such a terrible thing. I'm not a huge believer in alignment; I think diversity is more interesting and healthy.

Working with groups, I sometimes experience a kind of stillness where I think people become more present to that subtler and deeper sense of connection and belonging. It's the sort of silence that transcends the efforts of efficiency experts.

(I've written a few other posts that relate to this, referencing the notion of the tyranny of the explicit).

* That's not to say that well-written statements of intent or belief are without value; I know they can often be inspiring... so I'd say, let them inspire people without turning them into contracts.

UPDATE: I love Chris Corrigan's visual response to this post:

Secrets

Annette Clancy likes Post Secret. So do I.

The perils of efficiency

When I'm talking about facilitation, I often find myself saying that the effort to be efficient is what makes meetings inefficient.

By setting agendas which assume that groups of people work on issues in a logical, efficient manner, we constrain the kind of complex but non-linear thinking that often gives us the best results. Dave Snowden puts his finger on the problem: Sin, thy name is efficiency

Efficiency is all about stripping away all apparently superfluous functionality so that all that is left is what you really need. It is at the heart of BPR and its modern successor Six Sigma. The problem is that the definition of what is superfluous at any one time is very specific to the context of that time and the knowable future. Focusing on efficiency is great for aspects of an organisation that are process based, but not for the more fluid and complex areas of innovation, service etc etc. There the issue is to be effective which implies a degree of planned inefficiency, the grit in the oyster, that provides adaptive capacity over time. Efficiency is all well and good for stable environments, but for all other context we need to focus on resilience.

When we impose these linear models on our meetings we strangle the expressiveness and the connection of the people in the room. If my mind naturally roves to another interesting aspect of the issue not on the agenda, I can't share what's going on which seems to me to risk depleting the collective intelligence. At worst, we cut ourselves off from our reality; our language is not directly related to our experience so we're not actually present to our experience - which can be a kind of madness.

Reminds me of the post I made a while ago about the waterfall model of problem-solving and its drawbacks.

Thought for the day

I quite often hear people calling for more more action and less talk.

Strangely, they have never done so in mime.

Interesting times

I think we've barely scratched the surface of how networks could change the way we live our lives.

David Weinberger lists a few fascinating projects that use web technologies to enliven our politics. David says

Lots and lots going on, building an infrastructure of facts and relationships that is direclty valuable, but, perhaps even more important, will be the source for mashups and visualizations we haven't yet thought of.

Update: Jake Shapiro has some good coverage too.

It's hard not love a good pirate

According to this Swedish news site,

Swedish file-sharing website The Pirate Bay is planning to buy its own nation in an attempt to circumvent international copyright laws.

The group has set up a campaign to raise money to buy Sealand, a former British naval platform in the North Sea that has been designated a 'micronation', and claims to be outside the jurisdiction of the UK or any other country.

Hat tip: The Trademark Blog, who quips "In a related story, the RIAA has Announced Formation Of Its Own Navy."

Certainty

Thanks to JP for pointing to this:

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth -- Richard Feynmann

Nice boilerplate

I just had an email from Gary Hirsch at On Your Feet, following up on my post below. I liked his boilerplate:

Spelling and Grammar Notice. This e-mail, and any attachments, contains information that is, or may be, partly composed of words spelled incorrectly. While this is not by intent (often the senders brain works faster then his hands), the recipient is granted full permission to use these newly constructed words in future correspondence with anyone they see fit.

If you are not the intended recipient, please be advised that legally this doesnt really matter you can use these newly constructed words even if you were not suppose to receive this e-mail (since this probably was sent to you because the sender mistyped the e-mail address).

Note that retaining, using, copying, distributing, or otherwise disclosing this information in any manner or in using any of these so-called typos is completely allowed and encouraged. Thank you in advance for your coooperation.

Notice More, Change Less

Every year, my pals at On Your Feet send me a fun Christmas gift. It tends to arrive in the bleak of January, when I appreciate it even more.

Yesterday, I got their package of goodies built around the theme of noticing more. It includes lots of simple examples of the value of paying more attention. I especially liked the tiny lapelpin... I think that might prove an excellent example of a social object.

I'd build on this and adopt the idea of Notice More, Change Less.

I think that captures what I've been practising in facilitation work. I find it helps me develop a richer sense of connection to what is going on. It's also helps me limit my interventions so that I'm not playing the role of outside expert trying to make stuff happen. I like the notion of supporting what is emerging from within the system, not operating on it as the cold outsider.

James and I talk about a similar idea in our Co-Creation Rules manifesto at Change This. Under the heading of Be Changed, we say

When you set up co-creative relationships the most exciting thing that happens is not that your product or service gets more famous. The most exciting thing is that you are changed by the experience.

In the world of improvised theatre, which inspires a lot of our thinking, the player who tries too hard to drive the narrative is accused of scriptwriting. The one who tries to tell jokes is encouraged to stop gagging. The real skill in performance is to fully take on the offers of the other players and be changed by them. Then what you offer back is likely to develop the drama.

Incidentally, we've taken the text of the manifesto and put it into a wiki. We're slowly adding pictures, YouTubes and links to bring it more to life.

Tracking an errant driver

Jon Husband finds "A fascinating little story about how events in meatspace can get addressed and worked through with the help of hyperlinks, blogs and virtual do-gooder energy." How a road-user community tracks down an errant driver, even getting a live shot of his driveway to see if he made it home yet.

Love it or hate it, it's another straw in the wind showing where technology could take us.

Measurement

Nice provocative thought from Earl Mardle:

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"

Corollary, you end up with a business that only produces measurements. There's no point being up to your ass in KPI's when the original intention was to drill for oil.

Quick thought

Rik at trythisforsize highlights a delightful Ze Frank video about consciousness, free will et al.

The dark side...

Dave Snowden:

Of course, for many years we have known that Dark Matter exists, even though we could not see it, we also have known that only about a sixth of the mass in the Universe is represented by ordinary matter. It’s the same in organisations. The visible stuff that gets management attention is a sixth at most. The underlying narrative structures and unarticulated culture is hidden. we are starting to discover ways to represent it, and gain perspective but it's all about discovery and essential ambiguity. If we limit our vision to the conventional and the acceptable aspects of process and formal structures then we are incomplete, and our actions inadequate.

Making sure spontaneity is organised

Euan picks up on this interesting post on Joining Dots: Do you really want it? It kicks off quoting Larry Bossidy (ex CEO of Honeywell):

Ask a CEO what kind of culture they have and they will describe the kind of culture they want, as if it exists, instead of describing what is really going on

I think that's a common feature of what I'd call a goal-centred model of change, a paradigm that's fairly prevalent in organisations. I think change often happens more organically when we focus on being clearer about where we are now; the setting of ideals often becomes a toxic way of denying the reality of the present.

The post continues with this point about efforts to implement Enterprise 2.0:

.... there is little point starting with a claim that you want one type of system - one that helps people work together and get stuff done - when the requirements suggest you want a very different type of system - one that manages and monitors what people do.

That's a familiar issue for me. There's a kind of creeping bureaucratisation that can stifle more human ways of organising.

This reminds me of a piece by John Naughton: The Old Person's ICT Curriculum, poking fun at the reductionist awfulness of this country's ICT curriculum.

There’s a surreal quality to the QCA’s ICT curriculum. It conjures up images of kids up and down the country trudging into ICT classes and being taught how to use a mouse and click on hyperlinks; receiving solemn instructions in the creation of documents using Microsoft Word and of spreadsheets using Excel; being taught how to create a toy database using Access and a cod PowerPoint presentation; and generally being bored out of their minds.

And then the same kids go home and log onto Bebo or MySpace to update their profiles, run half a dozen simultaneous Instant Messaging conversations, use Skype to make free phone calls, rip music from CDs they’ve borrowed from friends, twiddle their thumbs to send incomprehensible text messages, view silly videos on YouTube and use BitTorrent to download episodes of ‘Lost’.

And when you ask them what they did at school today they grimace and say ‘We made a PowerPoint presentation, Dad. Yuck!’

This reminds me of one of my favourite little parables (I know I've used it here before):

God created the truth. The Devil took a look at it and said, "That's great, I shall organise that and call it... religion"

Hat tip to James for the Naughton article.

Truth in advertising

I've enjoyed short edits of this video before, and now I've found the full length version on YouTube. Truth in Advertising takes a look at what really goes on in ad agency-client meetings.

Silent Star Wars

Like Antony Mayfield, I loved Silent Star Wars.

Alienation or connection?

Thanks to Tony Goodson for spotting this in The Observer:

When one of Skinner's rats pressed a lever, it was given a food pellet. By experiment Skinner then established that if a pellet was delivered only on the 10th press of the lever, the rat would quickly learn to press the lever 10 times. If, however, a random element was introduced to the lever-pressing, whereby a pellet was still introduced on average one in 10 times, but sometimes delivered twice or three times in a row and sometimes not for 20 or more presses, the rat apparently became obsessed with the lever-operation itself.

I enjoyed the article, a good indictment of our government's flirtation with the gambling industry.

It also connects with my own sense of melancholy about living in London at the moment. I've been feeling this for some time, and it's been accentuated since my return from my Christmas holiday. I had a good chat with Rob Paterson this morning, who said that at the time of the Black Death, a lot of people were living it up. In England, I find two prominent strands in the media: a clear awareness of the massive challenge of climate change and a parallel crazed obsession with property speculation. The government talks seriously about climate change, and excitedly about the benefits of gambling. I find this bizarre. I tried to think of a word to describe how I feel about the tendency to see soaring house prices as a good thing. The word is: alienated.

And when I talk to my circle of friends, many found via blogging, I find many of us share this sense of alienation... and yet also in sharing that fear, a sense of connection that we also feel and value.

I hope we find a way to pull together and not apart when trying to find a way to deal with the challenges we face this year.

Not solving the problem

Mark at Anecote has a good post on not solving the problem.

We generally find with complex issues that once you go into ‘problem solving mode’ you start heading down the wrong path – trying to prove your decision is ‘right’. Much better to encourage debate about the issue and help people to understand it and why a particular path was chosen.

He points to his colleague Shawn's thoughts on the same point:

What is frustrating is hearing professionals talk about issues like culture using metaphors that suggest it’s a mechanical problem. I’m referring here to a presentation I attended two weeks ago by someone using the Human Synergistics diagnostic. The talk was sprinkled with terms like ‘levers’ and ‘drivers’ and asking questions like ‘what is causing your culture?’

Language is vital. When I help clients design interventions I tell them to stop trying to solve the problem. Until people understand the importance of a new language for complex problems we are going to slip back into our old ways. And these old ways are not going to help.

My most powerful experience of this wisdom is when I catch myself worrying about my life, or some aspect of it. It's easy to make myself miserable by trying to figure out all the angles - when these angles are hard to know anyway. I pull myself up by avowing that my life is not a problem to be solved, but an unfolding mystery to be experienced.

I wanted to censor that word mystery as it may sound too kooky. Too bad, maybe it does. I'm not suggesting we spend our days in a kind of naive, wide-eyed wonder. But I find more sanity in accepting that there are lots of things about the future I just don't know, as well as some very simple truths about my own state that I do know.

Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, enjoined people to "lose your minds and come to your senses". His style was provocative that way. I think discussions about complex problems very easily slide into brittle certainties about things that are actually fuzzy and a kind of denial about things that are actually fairly clear but we don't want to own up to.

For instance, it's easy to say that a colleague is a "difficult person", which is a crude simplification. It may be harder to for instance, that you feel anxious or angry with them. Likewise, I think there is higher status in making predictions about the future than in - more honestly - expressing our feelings of uncertainty about it, or our personal hopes or fears about what may happen. The temptation is to cover up our vulnerability and bolster our status - but this risks cutting ourselves off from our own intelligence and also deterring others from sharing theirs.

Mark's post argues for what could be seen as a lower status, but more honest, approach to tackling complexity. And often the lower status route is the one that actually enlists more engagement and support.

Some other inconvenient truths...

Earl Mardle gives another example of a business suffering from scrutiny of detail. A listener to KSFO in San Francisco compiled highlights of its right wing shock jocks on his her blog (called Spocko) and then wrote to advertisers drawing attention to the kind of ideas they were effectively supporting. The result: advertisers flee from KSFO in droves.

Disney, the ultimate owners of the station, try shooting the messenger: they use legal threats to shut down the blog. Result: that action itself becomes a social object, and a second - perhaps larger - wave of adverse publicity hits the company. Earl says

The real issue here is what Spocko actually did. She did not lie, he did not defame, she just recorded something that is given away free and made sure that the people who pay knew what they buying and asked them to stop.

Like George Felix Allen of Macaca fame during the last US General election, these guys are being slain by their own words. While the so-called professional media get all uppity about the standards that bloggers may or may not stick to, it is time and time again, the corporate media that is being found wanting, both in its ethics and its profesisonalism, by the bloggers.

Posted by Johnnie Moore at 02:57 in Branding
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Rough cuts

Rob Paterson reports on NPR's approach to developing a new morning show for a younger audience.

The traditional stance would be to do their best to design in house the best show they could and then offer it up. The Traditional stance would be to see the web as an interesting adjunct. The Traditional place to host the show would be Washington and the Traditional Host would be a radio pro. Above all the Traditional Process would be to keep it all a secret until the launch.

BUT - they are offering up their space in the Blogosphere to ask for our help in developing the show and they also are seeing the web as being central.

Jake Shapiro also talks about some other developments in public radio, including, as he puts it, the not-so-secret radio project.

(Disclosure - I worked with Rob and NPR last year)

Shedding light in the corners

John Winsor blogs about this story in an email.

A customer was told by Verizon Wireless that his roaming data rate in Canada would be .002 cents, however when he got his bill he was instead charged .002 dollars. After multiple attempts with multiple call center agents none of them could realize the difference between dollars and cents. After a couple of failed calls, the guy recorded his next two phone calls with Verizon, posted them to YouTube and created a Blog. It's pretty funny actually...unless you are Verizon.

In less than 30 days the original YouTube posting of the recorded audio reached the #1 Top Rated in the News and Blogs category. As of today the audio has been heard by nearly 1/2 a million YouTube viewers. The audio is also on a site called PutFile.com and has over 100K listens there. Who knows how many more sites this has been posted to?

John says listening to the audio is painful. It's also hilarious.

I suppose many of us have experienced some version of this kind of argument with customer service. Now that we can so easily put the minutiae of these things on public view, something rather interesting can happen... Another version of "branding by accident".

I also think it's a nice touch that this story is about a tiny quanity, hundredths of a cent, that becomes interesting only when it's multiplied. The same is true of the story itself, a tiny interaction with one little customer, that has become massively amplified. Traditional marketing was all about the big launch and the grand campaign. One of the many delights of this audio is the grotesque irrelevance of the the snatches of broadcast propaganda that are interspersed with the the live conversations. The devil is in the detail.

It's a story that the folks at Disney might need to pay more attention to. Ben McConnell makes an interesting point about their grandiose launch for their new social network.

Quick -- which of these successful social networks was launched with a high-profile media blitz: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube or SecondLife?
The answer: None of them.

That's why Disney's plan to have CEO Robert Iger unveil a revamped Disney.com as a kid-based social network at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday is a bit like taping a kick-me sign to the newest kid in high school.