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johnny be good: insights, condoms and comedy

22 Dec

I love the Condom08 campaign – the perfect marriage of real insight, a creative idea and seamless cross platform execution driven by data and user stories. And it’s about sex, and everyone loves talking about sex. Particularly Swedish people having sex.

I’ve been having a bit of discussion about this with perennial provocateur Mister Corbett. His view is that it’s a great idea but it’s not founded on an insight.

“The only disappointment for me is that only 4 out of 10 people felt more positive about condoms. The campaign deserved better than that I think. However the truth is though that, while it is great, it actually doesn’t in anyway actually address the real issues with condoms – that being that they interrupt the experience. It is wonderful creative thinking – but not based around any true insight.  I love the campaign – I just don’t think it is based on an insight, I think it is based on a great idea. That’s not a crime – far from it, it’s fucking great”

I disagree – I think it’s genuinely insightful; it comes from the idea that yes, condom use is interruptive, but if you flip it,  make that moment of interruption positive (you stop to put on a condom and load the app, perhaps while boasting about how great your graphs are going to look, baby) you change it from being an awkward moment to a fun and possibly sexy one.

That, coupled with the insight that people are desperately curious to know what other people get up to in bed – for all we have access to more porn and sex blogs than can possibly be consumed in a lifetime, there’s a little part of every adult that still wonders on some level  ”am I normal...?”* And nothing tells you what’s normal like some mathmatically vague graphs and stats.

(*FYI: you’re a freak. Embrace it. Life is short.) 

So is using the disruption of putting a condom on to feed our prurient interest in what other people do in bed – and secret desire to brag about our own prowess – genuinely insightful?

Is that truly an insight, or is it rather just an observation?

I think a handy way of checking if what you’ve got your hands on is an insight, or rather, a glibly stated fact is to imagine you’re a stand up comedian.

Will what you’re saying make people gasp, turn to their friend and say sotto voce with a delighted squeal   “I do that!”, or “my mum always…”, or are you more like that awkward stand-up whose set is a series of banal observations prefaced with “Have you ever noticed the way that…?”

An insight is the “oh em gee, that’s so me!” moment, the prod to the solar plexus, not the intellectually driven head nod. As Simon Law says,

An insight is a revelation that produces great work
(there should be a degree of “Fuck me. I never thought of it like that!”)

Peter Kay is a fine example. If you’re from the UK and have seen him talking about “the big light”, you’ll know what I mean. He presents the everyday in a way that feels like you’ve never seen it before, but with that telling jolt of recognition.

I’m here all week. Try the veal.

the dead social media practitioners society

9 Mar

I’m at Ad:Tech today and I just learned a valuable lesson. Not, in fact, from any of the speakers, though a few have had interesting things to say.carpe diem adland

Last night I went to the AdTech sponsored Social Media Club, and this morning I presented at a session called “next generation social media strategy.”

Thinking about what that might really mean, I settled on what seemed to me a fairly conceptual, challenging (but ultimately rooted in common sense) combination of things I’ve learned over the past year or two. I thought about what the audience might already know, and tried to build upon that.

Admittedly in a 45 minutes session comprising six speakers, there was limited scope, but I thought I might have have shared some ideas that might spark debate and other ideas in turn. I had a solid case study with some excellent results to talk about, and I was feeling alright.

Then I wandered about the expo with the post-presentation adrenalin crash blues and realised I was utterly, utterly sick to the back teeth of the words “social media” and conversations about what might be done with it. And then I confess, dear reader, I fell into a bit of a funk.

Luckily I’m such a Zen-like hepcat these days it didn’t last too long.

I had the revelation -and this comes, Sheen-like – directly from the power of my mind, that I had committed the cardinal sin of believing things about my users (the Adtech audience) based on pure assumption, not data.

I sat in a couple of sessions and listened to the questions from the audience and came to the understanding that actually very few people here seem to have any real world professional experience of using social media. Even now, even after several years, and successive presentations and millions of blog posts, there seem to be a small cabal of practitioners, a still smaller cabal of decent practitioners,  a massive gulf and then  – everybody else*.

And I think it’s our fault. At a session this afternoon, an audience member asked what kind of agency social media belonged in. There was dissent.  We’re still talking about one platform versus another and how to measure stuff, and whether engagement is more important than the number of people on your social database (does anyone recognise this exact scenario from, say, email marketing?) and all the kinds of conversations that nobody has about other disciplines or channels…. and all this simply makes it seems like a difficult and arcane business and somehow exempt from the rules that apply to every other aspect of marketing activity.

Let’s stop fucking talking about it and just build it, from the outset, into the way we communicate. Let’s do it well, let’s do it creatively and effectively and in a way that seizes the immense opportunity the social web offers us all, but let’s, please, stop talking about it and just fucking do it.

Think of the children. If for no other reason than that they’ll be massively contemptuous of all this dithering.

*everyone who works in media, advertising, publishing etc. Not normal people. They don’t care; they’d just like you to delight or inspire them, or at least not to waste their time.

Thanks Erdogan for the photo.

we could be heroes…just for one day

15 Sep Coventry

I’m neither English nor a patriot. I’m the daughter of a Scottish man who has a genetic memory of rage against the Highland Clearances, and an English woman who lost her father after he suffered shellshock in WWII and “went Doollally,” in the parlance of the time. He abandoned my mother just after she was born and she never saw him again. I’m from Coventry, a forever ruined city which serves to remind anyone how truly Pyrrhic victory can be. Coventry

So it’s hard for me to identify with the patriotism of the English, and the fervent martial pride people often display on the anniversaries of wars.

Working on the 1940 Chronicle with RAFBF has been surprisingly transformative; I love the campaign, and it’s part of my job to promote it. But as we’ve been planning and strategising to help the wonderfully written words reach their audience, I’ve found that the stories have started to seep into my soul as much as the audience have begun to connect with these fictional characters and their very real situations.

The campaign was created around the idea of bringing historical events to life using new technologies, using the contemporary to make the past relevant; the characters blog and tweet the events of this day in 1940 as though they’d had access to iPhones and pcs and the like.

I’m almost ashamed to admit it’s the tech stuff that’s made these stories so real to me; I’ve heard eyewitness accounts from so many sources, but suddenly pieces fell into place. How very connected we are now, how very fortunate we are to live in a time when it’s both physically and culturally possible for us reach out to one another.

It’s helped me think differently about my grandfather, how terrifying he must have found it being tormented by dreams of explosions and screaming, feeling as though he was alone in the world with those horrors. My grandmother, keeping a stiff upper lip, knowing nothing, unable to imagine the things he’d seen. And my great aunt, tirelessly nursing the wounded, keeping cheerful and busy and waiting all the while for a letter delivered by boat, months late, to tell her he wasn’t coming back from the front.

I’m struck by the realisation of how very lonely I would find a life where my only possible human interactions were face to face; as much as I treasure solitude, it’s always a choice.

Even I draw the line at the idea of social media bringing about world peace, but maybe it’s not so outrageous. I found myself asking if World War Two could even have happened if there had been the possibility of sharing knowledge so widely and so fast? For example, Wikileaks genuinely seems to be affecting the direction of the war in Afghanistan, and a growing diversity of information sources certainly shifts popular opinion on the subject. Forgive my reducing something so large and complex to a dumb question, but can you remain in ignorance of the humanity of your fellow man when you’re connected to him, when you’ve seen what his house looks like, know you share a love of music or making people laugh? Is it simplistic to think that when we connect with something real and meaningful, constructs like nation and religion will begin to seem irrelevant?*

Language constraints and internet snark aside, could you really go to war with and be instructed to kill someone you follow on Twitter?  Could social technologies make conscientious objectors of us all?

Primo Levi said

Meditate che questo è stato Vi comando queste parole. Scolpitele nel vostro cuore
- Never forget that this has happened. Remember these words. Engrave them in your hearts.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. As part of the Day of Action, we’ve asked people to do one small thing to commemorate those heroes. This post is for everyone whose lives were touched by that war, with deepest gratitude and respect to those men and women who fought and suffered and died so that we could be free. And perhaps being a hero for a day will be the catalyst we need to become heroic every day.

*I know it is. But a girl can dream…

Why FourSquare is anything but…

24 Nov

FourSquare. In the immortal words of Thierry Henry, “let me break it down”.

FourSquare defines itself as “part friend finder, part social city guide, part nightlife game’.

The team claim that they “wanted to build something that not only helps you keep up with your friends, but exposes you to new things in and challenges you to explore cities in different ways.”

It’s a geosocial site (and application) which enables you to ‘check in’ at places and share details about your activity. More importantly – and this is what sets it apart from BrightKite et al -  it syncs info about local businesses to enable you to share your favourite places, give people tips about the things and places you love and create a to a to-do list based on the recommendations of friends and neighbours.

The opportunity for business is enormous, allowing brands to reward consumers who are advocates, to monitor, engage with and respond to users and to further cement consumer loyalty, e.g. offering you a free coffee if you check in at your local cafe four days in a row.

The B2C commercial imperative is obvious – can businesses afford not to have a presence on FourSquare?

The reason it’s so addictive – and will, I predict, become massive in Australia – is that it’s framed as a competition, with  just enough hipster credibility not to feel contrived.

You become the Mayor of a certain location by checking in there more frequently than anyone else, are given badges for particular activity (adding new places, spiked activity at night etc.) and user statistics are updated weekly on each city’s leaderboard (currently Likeomg, Warlach and I are amongst Sydney’s biggest hitters) – thus appealing directly to the ego and plugging in to our desire to be seen as influential, in the know, hyperconnected digital douchebags….

Rewarding users by offering them ultimately meaningless and arbitrary trophies demonstrates an extremely sophisticated understanding of the psyche of the early adopter/ digital native on the part of the creators.

It’s been hit by so much activity in Australia since its launch (in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne) on Friday that the servers needed to be upgraded, and I am still finding much of the functionality within the website is limited and buggy. It works like  a charm on iPhone though, which is after all where the heaviest use will occur.

Scoble says FourSquare is the next big thing, suggesting it’s as significant as the Twitter API release:

“It enhances your experience in each location. Check in at the Half Moon Bay Ritz and you’ll see tons of “tips” that people have left for you. Francine Hardaway, for instance, tells you where the best dog beachis. I tell you how to save $40 on smores. Other people tell you that Tres Amigos is the best Mexican place nearby”

This certainly looks like the first site developed for internet on the move that’s actually going to make it to the mainstream – the execution isn’t quite there yet but it seems to be well thought through at a strategic level, cleverly rationalised and with the key component -monetisation – built in from the beginnning.

FourSquare: pressing the “go viral” button any day now….


Love is the Seventh Wave

26 Oct

I’ve been using Google Wave for a few weeks now and while I’m aware I’m still very much a novice, I’m confident that this is a fair appraisal of its potential and the limitations of the current iteration.

Attending #GWSUG gladdened my heart somewhat as it quickly became apparent that despite being possibly one of the least geeky of those present – and I lean heavily towards the pointy end of the bell curve in geek terms – I was by no means alone in my experience of the Wave.

Helpful and entertaining presentations by Brett Morgan and Pamela Fox certainly deepened my knowledge and understanding but it’s clear that this is a tool very much at the development stage.

My initial impressions haven’t altered substantially three weeks in: in short, it often feels as though one is drowning not waving.

I’ve seen a number of people make the comment that Wave feels very much like IRC: the format is such that it can be inchoate, messy and confusing. The ability to comment on replies, edit existing messages and delete posts at any point in the timeline means that without repeatedly re-playing the wave, it’s nigh on impossible to fathom what’s going on.

However, to dwell on this is to miss the actual purpose of Wave, which is – as Daniel Tenner suggests in his excellent review – for working, not shirking.

The real strength of Wave is all about collaboration in real time. Watching a document or piece of content come to life through a cooperative enables you to see the rationale behind changes as they’re made in an intuitive fashion, make notes, discuss alterations and agree on a final cut. Even for people who aren’t working together in the same time zone, playing back the wave gives a truer understanding and deeper insight into the process and decisions made to date.

Rather than the stilted to-ing and fro-ing of email – potentially dropping people and files along the way – or even the clever but structurally rigid Basecamp from 37 Signals, Wave gives users a fluid conversational tool that keeps everyone, from stakeholder to implementer, involved, clued-up and empowered. Being able to drag and drop files into a conversation feels smooth and logical.

The true hallmark of great design or innovation is when something feels so seamless and obvious that you can’t imagine why it didn’t already exist, and Wave has this in spades.
It won’t be long before we’ll be amazed we ever managed to work before Wave.

Photo by silverxraven

Key drawbacks

Of course Wave is buggy – it’s in a private test environment being battered around and monkey-tested by nerds for this reason. However, there are a few massive holes that will need to be addressed by the developers at the Googleplex fairly promptly.

Firstly, there are currently huge confidentiality and privacy issues: while you can branch off from a group into a private conversation, there’s no ability for users to approve or vet who is added to a Wave. Any user can invite anyone else. That’s great for transparency and accountability, but human nature being what it is, this could be the source of some of the most awkward office gaffes and breaches of commercial confidence ever to exist. Those awkward accidental ‘reply all’ emails pale into insignificance in comparison.

Without some radical re-thinking and added security settings, @ replying a DM on Twitter will come to seem like as quaint an act of indecorousness as using the wrong fork at a dinner party is to Gen KFC, when set against the risks of inappropriate Wave sharing.

Further massive usability failures include the monumental amount of RAM eaten by Wave, the fact the iPhone app is slow and creaky and Chrome is the preferred Wave browser as FireFox “doesn’t like waves with more than 100 blips in them…” more than a little irksome for Mac users.

Version control is also tricky: in order to find the original version, one has to replay the wave, pause when you reach the virgin document and paste it into a new Wave, meanwhile hoping someone else doesn’t alter it subsequently. Perhaps a ‘freeze edit’ function may assist here.

An invaluable – and presumably simple tool that I very much hope is in the pipeline is a desktop app to notify you of updates, new Wave invites and contacts. It would assist in streamlining the process and avoiding situations like the one I found myself in recently: IM-ing my team mate to ask why I still hadn’t received his email containing an urgently needed document, then discovering it had been sitting neglected in Wave for several hours*.

I’d estimate that we’re easily a year away from the release of a robust consumer-friendly version of Wave.

That said, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to be one of the lucky few getting to play in the sandpit and even at this stage the enormous potential of the tool is evident.

Catch you in the tubes….cathie.mcginn@googlewave.com.

Thanks to Warlach,  Commuter_Dirge, Fridley, mUmBRELLA and all on the GWSUG wave for your user experience input and help.

*Full disclosure: we were sitting next to each other at the time. IRL interaction is so passé.

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