Just added two friends to my blog roll.
Joey Caspersz’s Monday Morning Blues is a riot –if you are a Sri Lankan.
Fazli Sameer’s obersevations here of Colombo, and Bambalapitiya are so good, it’s as if he had been walking down the streets with a video camera and zooming in on the details.
In the past 2 days, I was asked what Hoi Polloi means. I mentoned the Greek definition, about the ‘masses.’ If I may reiterate, since this web log has been around for over a year, it is based on my marcom philosophy that ordinary people –and not ‘brand managers’ have more control over the messages. Hoi Polloi is about intelligent end-users who are participants –not ‘targets.’
So it was serendipitous that I got a link from Monty Metzger of CScout reporting from a conference on Swarm Inteligence, in Germany. It seems like an extension of Howard Rheinghold’s ideas. Rheingold, is the man behind the concept of ‘smart mobs’ as outlined in his brilliant book on the subject, published a few years back.
The 10th German Trend Day featured topics on knowledge management, advertising, word-of-mouth communication, teen culture, and social networks.
Swarm Intelligence holds that "The majority is cleverer than each of its members." My favorite example, is podcasting. I am writing an article for IABC magazine on the subjest, so if anyone has some really good examples of podcasts being used for branding, guerilla marketing, or something truly innovative, send me a link, or post your message here.
Podcasting is coming of age, and is poised to become the authentic voice of an organization. It’s the age of radio, rediscovered for a good reason –a communicator’s ability to talk with, not to, the audience. It’s going to be an enormous force in marketing communications, and for internal communications, whether we are targeted as employees or customers. Why? Because (1) audio is one of the more efficient ways to distribute content. Not just marketing content, but news about a particular topic whether it is your 401K, a company policy, a product recall, or an event. HR managers better listen up! Also, (2) we have all got weary of the flashy marketing web sites and politically correct prose of email from the upper atmospheres of the organization.
Podcasting is primed to become less and less a one-way broadcast, and more of a conversation. For the moment we need to download a program or click on something to listen. What would happen when we are able to participate live in a podcast, via a private network? What if we could call in, or text the host, via a mesh network?
Speaking of conversations, if you haven’t been there already, go to IT Conversations, the leading light in podcasting, a brainchild of Doug Kaye. It’s not just for IT folk. You can listen to folks like Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, and Tipping Point fame, Larry Lessig, and Steve Wozniak)
I feel humbled. It was nearly a 103 degrees on Sunday, but a Girl Scouts (Troop 1211) in Chandler, Arizona decided to go ahead with a previously planned car wash and garage sale for our Sri Lanka Tsunami relief project, Wave of Hope.
For more details, check the official site.
I love this topic, not because it is a recurring, provocative, adrenalin-pumping one that gets people across the room all fired up, but because it makes us all pay attention to how we conduct our business, whether or not we are in advertising.
Whenever I speak to people in advertising –meaning the ad agency crowd– they tell me how the shake up in the message creation and media targeting isn’t reflected in the way their agencies are run. The specializations that these ad/communications agencies have brought in, still operate as semi-independent camps.
It therefore comes as a pleasant surprise to hear an established ad man, Jack Klues (from Starcom Media Vest) say that the process of generating Creative work (that which moves from a client service brief, to ‘Creative,’ to Production, to Media) is obsolete. We all know that ideas don’t need to be generated by the idea chiefs, so why do ad agencies only deem a small clutch of people ‘Creatives?’
Break the silos! Dismantle the assembly line! Let creative ideas flow through every pore of the agency! That’s essentially what Klues said in his address to the 4As conference this month.
“The ability to conceive a great idea isn’t limited to someone who has the words ‘creative’ or ‘copy’ or ‘art’ in their title.”
He goes on to say that “an office relocation won’t improve our ability to find the consumer.”
How does this apply to marketing communications? Not too long ago I heard someone ‘remind’ an account manager to leave the marketing decisions to the marketing people. The manager backed off. It sounded so eighties, and so presumptuous –almost as if only those with brains outfitted with a special chip could even begin to understand the consumer.
Having been on both sides of the fence –and had those dubious ‘creative,’ ‘copy’ and ‘creative’ prefixes to my title, I often jump in to undo the damage, telling everyone in the organization that they have a the same ‘right’ as me to contribute to the branding, or to the campaign. But I don’t hear it said enough, as I evangelize the idea of branding as something you do from the inside-out rather than the other way around.
MarCom people can tap the creative energy of everyone, if they would only break out of their own assembly-line mentality. Marketing Communications is about finding and implementing creative solutions across a wide range of communication channels. If we recognize that ‘Everything Communicates’ then we have to empower everyone to communicate, too, no matter what silo they (still) work in.
Remember the much hyped Iridium project in the late nineties? The original Motorola project, with 66 low-earth-orbit satellites, seemed like the future of cellphones, communications and even globalization. Wired Magazine ran several stories about it, and I remember being all excited by this, especially since the concept was designed a few miles from where I live, in Chandler, Arizona.
But the idea didn’t fly, for several reasons, and the 77 birds (there were spare satellites in the constellation) were supposed to be taken down. But the project survived. Today, the sat-phone is still around, in a new skin. It is appearing in cabin systems, as modems, and with specialized push-to-talk features for first responders.
Why am I interested in the future of the Satellite phone? I used to work up the road from where Arthur C. Clarke lives in Sri Lanka. (quite by coincidence my office was down a side street called Cosmos Avenue) This month in LMD magazine, I wrote a feature on Clarke, that you could read here. Clarke has always fascinated us, with his prophetic ideas. Half a century before Iridium –or even modems, for that matter– he conceived of satellites, in an article on Extra Terrestrial Relays. Hard to imagine a world without satellites now.
And here’s a sidebar I should have included in my Clarke article. The use of the Iridium phone for JetMaps. We have all seen the application in use when flying. Now Honeywell, uses a version called JetMap II, that does more than maps, to include headline news, stock reports and sports. See it here.
Speaking of maps, Mark, a colleague at work showed me this site he subscribes to, call keyhole.com (billed as ‘the earth on your desktop.") For the moment it only covers the U.S. but the satellite imagery is remarkably clear. You could zoom in to a neighborhood, and even identify the cars in the parking lot! Definitely worth a visit.
Do we need to be connected to a grid 24/7/365? As much as we celebrate the ability to work from Starbucks, or telecommute from our living room, there are times when we need a bit of space, offline, to free our minds from so much information streaming in.
I have this discipline, where for one day of the week I do not listen to the news in the car or read a newspaper, or check the headlines on landing pages. I call this ‘information purge day.’ So I was glad to see this from Adam Bosworth of Google, who puts this in the context of travel:
Lufthansa has announced that it will support internet on planes. I will not fly on them. I need some periods in my life where I am unreachable. Indeed, every year in August, I vanish for a month from the web, turn off email, and deal with the withdrawal and suddenly I relearn how to think and concentrate. In a world where knowledge and thinking is everything, it is ironic that increasing availability had led to decreasing time in which to reflect, ponder, and just let the mind wander and yet these periods tend to be essential to truly thinking hard.
Truly thinking hard. That’s something of a luxury to many. An airplane is one of those places where you are supposed to be sealed in. Cellphones and Blackberries have punctured that space, so with in-flight Wi-Fi, the cabin-as-sanctuary is not going to last. Bosworth is going to have to dump a lot of planes.
"We have imposed certain criteria in order to keep the network private and exclusive. To join, you need to be invited by a trusted member."
If you’ve been ‘invited’ to be part of someone’s network such as Friendster or Linkedin, you probably wondered what would happen when nearly everyone on earth gets linked up. While the ‘six degrees of Kevin Bacon’ theory makes great speculation, the original Stanley Milgram idea could end up being the most abused part of our connectedness. (If you’ve ever been approached by the MLM folk who try to turn your friends, and friends of friends into your ‘downline’ you’ll know.)
So one has to respect the exclusive network called ‘A Small World’ when it tries to shut out the masses. Of course they intend to connect people from Amsterdam to Zurich, (Note: not Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe) with highbrow interests related to sailing, dining, racing and winter resorts, but if you’re not invited, don’t even think of applying!
As the landing page puts it, "If you have no friends who are members yet, you simply need to be patient." Translated: if you have no friends in high places, find another network, buddy.
In the networked, reverse-globalized world’s there’s a new definition to the ‘ word dictaphone. A service called CopyTalk allows people to dictate e-mail into their phone.
Think of it as hands-free email! You could also listen to your email, and update a contact manager while far away from your desktop, PDA or Web-based calendar.
A CopyTalk subscriber calls a toll-free number in the U.S. and dictates his email, specifies a recipient (from a personalized address book set up in advance), and fires off the message. How is this possible? Using the human interface. CopyTalk uses live customer-service people in Chennai, India, who take dictation, type in message and send it for you. The service reads back email mail to you whether you use Outlook, AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo!
What I like about the service is the human interface in the all things-automated world. Pure techies would scoff at this, saying there’s a way to bypas the human interface. But for the moment, even the best voice-recognition solutions are fraught with problems.
You may have noticed something called VoiceMode quietly making its way into cell phones –the speech-to-text solution for text messaging and email on the road. More on this later, but suffice to say that it is way too time consuming. The few tumb typers I know in Sri Lanka would beat voicemoders to a punch!
Besides, I hate the thought (and the sight) of people in public places talking loudly into their phones -especially the dorks with a bluetooth headset, waving their hands and seemingly talking to themselves. Imagine what Voice Mode would do for this!
If you have been reading Wall Street Journal’s technology columnist Walt Mossberg, you’ll know that he heaps praises on Apple quite a bit. As a former Mac addict, I can see where he comes from. But this week’s Personal Technology piece (April 28, 2005) takes it to a point where I could see the folks in Cupertino in hog heaven.
Mossberg basically calls Microsoft an also-ran in the OS department.
"Overall, Tiger is the best and most advanced personal computer operating system on the market, despite a few drawbacks. It leaves Windows XP in the dust."
The article is all about the advaced Search function, called ‘Spotlight‘. One must envy Mac users who inherited a fabulous operating system. And that’s just under the hood. Macs (and of course iPods) are now the most desirable devices on the planet, with icon and cult status.
It goes to prove that good branding is not just the outer skin of marketing, but something that works from the inside out. To be able to get serious journalists to practically write your body copy takes more than a cool interface.
Hoipolloireport 