Me and Shel Israel

So, there I was chatting away to a nice lady (Orla) next to the toilets of the the Lewis Media Centre (there is a relevance)  explaining (rather loudly) why I was so excited to hear Shel Israel talk when - *TAP* (on the shoulder) - and there was the great man himself introducing himself to me.

Well - introduce himself wasn't exactly what he did (as he kinda expected me to recognise him - which I didn't immediately) - it was more like "Oh my Gawd [he's got a great Noo Yawk drawl] I'm pleased I've got at least ONE fan!".

So that was it.  My introduction to the great Mr. Israel.  Blogger.  Marketer.  Writer.  And Twitterer extraordinaire.  The introduction, though, was pretty short lived - and was swiftly followed by a "Do you know where the men's is?"

Shel is one of those guys who you wish was your uncle.  And if he was your uncle then he'd be your favourite uncle - the one that isn't overly enthusiastic about you (as he's got better things to be interested in), however he's the one that is unashamedly wise (but quite often openly wrong in a humanising way) and says off the cuff remarks that make SO MUCH SENSE.

And the things that made SO MUCH SENSE in his talk were:

- "I'm a story-teller": I've heard this from other people too, but being a story-teller is what every marketer (self-marketer) and brand should be like.  We all need to tell stories better.  As stories engage and entertain.  They give.

- "Buzz is what you hear before you get stung": am not 100% sure what this means - though it sounds kinda profound.  I guess it's to do with hype and reality.  Reality bites once the hype dust has settled.

- "Every business should have a 17 year old on their board": I like this. Getting different perspectives in business is essential.  Bring on the teenager non-execs . . . (this actually came from Peter Whitehead from the FT)

Social networks + smart phones = perfect harmony

Did you start using social networks more after buying an iPhone or one of its smart phone rivals? Before I joined the iPhone bandwagon I interacted with Facebook in fits and starts.

However, since being inducted into the iPhone cult, I've become a more active user. It's especially good for uploading photos on the move that you want to share and if you ever find yourself in an office where Facebook is banned (a surprisingly high number of workplaces do) it's great for getting around this inconvenience.

A US-centric report by Openwave has backed up this anecdotal evidence with some stats, in which it found that four of the top 10 mobile domains by page impressions are social networks including Facebook.

Perhaps more surprising though is the absence of Google although this can be explained by most people accessing Google via their tool bar rather than google.com. Given that Twitter's short, quick updates are perfect for mobile users, this trend is only set to grow.

Balls out brand borrowing

I've been over in NYC for the last couple of days, and whilst out in Soho spotted an overly enthusiastic girl selling Obama Condoms.  Her pitch was pretty tight - buy one for $5 or go for the ultimate triple stimulus package for $10.  I went all out for the $10 stimulus deal.  Bang!

Beyond the amusing concept of politically themed condoms, I'm kinda intrigued as to whether they've had any law-suits / threats from Obama / the government lawyers. If someone had launched Beckham branded condoms, the Beckham's legal-eagle(s) would swoop within seconds, however politicians seem to have a lighter legal touch.

Anyone for the "Brown French-tickler" (a favorite amongst the gay community) or  the "Cameron CONdom" (one for the Notting Hill set)??? 

Supermodels strip off for climate change

If the idea behind a viral campaign for climate change group 350.org is to make people take the threat more seriously having nine supermodels strip to their smalls is perhaps not the best way to persuade people it's a bad thing.

If a warmer planet results in scantily dressed supermodels, some might conclude climate change is a good thing. Notwithstanding that the ad trivialises a serious subject; we learn nothing about climate change and it might alienate a large part of the female audience, some of us at Rubber Towers quite like this new viral. We can't think why.

On a positive note, if the viral campaign is designed purely to generate a bit of PR and easy headlines with a bit of harmless titillation, it's bang on the money. See what you think (thanks to Rev for bringing this to our attention) ...

Bono boost for YouTube

YouTube is on a roll at the moment, which looks like being a good thing for users, advertisers and agencies alike after a period of what felt like continual negative press.

The video-sharing website has revealed it got close to 10m streams for a live broadcast of a U2's Rosebowl concert on Sunday, meaning it was the single largest event the site has streamed to date.

Given that the 20th most watched show in the US last week attracted 11.8m viewers (The Mentalist), the U2 YouTube audience gives you an idea of the site's enormous reach and the type of league it is now playing in. Admittedly, the 10m figure, which was spread over 2+ hours, doesn't drill down to how many people actually watched the broadcast.

However, after repeated questions being asked about YouTube's ability to monetise its huge popularity, it's nice to see things moving in a positive direction.

The U2 concert comes hot on the heels of the Google-owned site announcing earlier this month that it now serving up more than 1bn streams per day. And don't forget Channel 4's  recent decision to put its entire programming output on YouTube free of charge and the introduction of Google's AdSense for YouTube's search.

With sites like Hulu breathing down YouTube's neck, it's great to see YouTube fighting fit. Healthy competition between these sites - unlike the search arena where Google has a far easier ride - is proving beneficial for everyone.

Twitter is like word of mouth on crack, the Peperami Animal and other tales from Media140

The breakfast of choice for the social media crowd is a healthy, humble bowl of Shredded Wheat. This was one of the Twitter generated insights Rubber Republic picked up at Media140 today. The one-day conference in London kicked off Media140’s ‘Around the world in 140 days tour’, which is set to rock up in all sorts of far flung places including Bangalore, Italy, Sydney, Perth, Mumbai and the Middle East.

The Media140 movement is all about exploring the future of real-time web and its impact or to put it simply … Twitter. The audience was mainly comprised of agencies and brands, with a smattering of publishers. The day began with a talk from Tom Bedecarre, the San Francisco-based CEO of AKQA, who was battling the effects of flying overnight. Tom’s agency has just launched a new Volkswagen model solely through an iPhone app, which carries over to Twitter and gives users who play a virtual racing game the chance to win cars.

Tom revealed that social media is the number one requirement clients are coming to the agency’s door with. He said: “It’s taking over the conversation”, and added “everything we do whether it’s a website build or mobile has a social media element”. Although Tom admitted the biggest FMCG advertisers were only “tipping their toes” in social media, he was in doubt that this nascent market will lead to more robust business opportunities than it is at the moment. Why? Tom cited the reaction of established players, Google, and Facebook, to Twitter’s arrival. “Google and Facebook are scared shitless of Twitter,” he said. What else happened?

A panel wrestled with the question ‘Can you change a brand in 140 characters?’ But for some, there was too much intellectualising and not enough in the way of successful case studies, according to questions from the floor and tweets on the live Media140 twitter feed. However, Scott Seaborn, head of mobile at Oglivy Group UK, suggested the agency has been forced to completely rethink its creative approach.“The paradigm shift in the media landscape means that consumers have all the power,” he said. “Creative has to come from the heart – social media acknowledges consumers have the power and gives them the tools to use that power.” Seaborn’s fellow panelist, Mel Exon, managing partner at BBH Labs, agreed: “We are witnessing a huge shift from short campaigns to platforms and programmes. Fundamentally, we are having to rethink everything we do in the social media space.”

Quote of the day came from Seaborn, who contributed the following gem: “Social media is word of mouth on crack”. Given that some of the audience were getting testy at the lack of examples to back up the eulogising, it was a good thing that Unilever was up next to talk about its crowd sourcing initiative for the new global campaign for Peperami. In short, the brand has ditched the traditional creative agency approach for a wiki-style route that has generated 1,200 ideas from the creative community. The FMCG is currently in the process of whittling those ideas down to 20 as it nears one big idea for a TV and print campaign. The creative will feature the suicidal Peperami Animal character, which has been experiencing endless gory slapstick deaths since the mid-nineties. Noam Buchalter, marketing manager at Peperami, Unilever, said the main benefits were cost and “gaining an insight into customer ideas through listening”.

A panel that debated the dos and don’ts of social media debated lots of different methods but basically arrived at two conclusions: be honest and transparent and don’t lie and fake it. Or as George Nimeh, managing director at Iris Digital, said: “Be nice, don’t be an ***!” Other gems included “Be the rapper, don’t be the wrapper” (also George) and “Twitter is earnt media – it takes time to earn trust and build reputation” (Daren Forsyth, founder of 140characters).

Ciaran Norris, head of social marketing at Mindshare, offered a whistle stop tour of social media, crammed with amusing anecdotes, case studies from across the pond and those at his own agency. Norris said that one of the lessons he has picked up from working on a football campaign for a client is to engage consumers with precise questions. “You need to share the debate – frame questions rather than ask open questions,” he said. And on the note, it seems only right to ask ‘what have you learnt from social media?’ It’s over to you.

More on Media140 from BR - Gordon MacMillan on Personality and social media – do you need one?

We are all connected

 Some things are just plain clever (interesting) and beautiful.  And this is one of them.  He's a formula: clever + beautiful = I WANT TO SHARE!

 Not enough things online are beautiful . . .

£££'s of social media monitoring for FREE

Geeks (*clever people*) are always right when it comes to technology.  And increasingly I'm thinking they're also right when it comes to social media.  

For the last few weeks, we've been reviewing a whole host of different social media monitoring services in the run up to the Monitoring Social Media event (November 17th) which I'm due to speak at and give some insights into the subject at (Buy tickets here @ special early bird discount here! PLUG OVER)

I won't go into our full analysis of the highs and lows of social media monitoring services, however one of my colleagues (king of the rubber geeks) made the following comment off the back of us testing a whole bunch of social media monitoring services (who charge £££'s a month).

N.B. this is word-for-word taken from his email to me:

"Out of interest, this is what I do (written very verbosely). It took me under a minute to do this:

(e.g. to look for news about Apple the computer company)

Go to Google and make an advanced search:
http://www.google.co.uk/advanced_search

Enter :
* "apple", "macintosh" and "mac" in the section "one or more of these words"
* "fruit raincoat jacket" in the "But don't show pages that have..." section.

Copy the search that's generated at the top ("apple OR iphone OR mac -fruit -raincoat -jacket")

then go to:
http://www.google.com/alerts/

paste the search term into the "Search Terms" box, and select "feed" in the "Deliver To" section.

That generates a nice RSS feed that I can use with my RSS reader (e.g. Google Reader) that will be updated with any blogs, videos, images, websites, new articles etc posted.

(here's a feed: http://www.google.com/alerts/feeds/09809255641325574415/3486854838285467889)

And if I want to see "buzz" over time I go to Google Insights for search
http://www.google.com/insights/search

and paste the same search term in...
e.g.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=apple%20OR%20macintosh%20OR%20mac%20-fruit%20-raincoat%20-jacket&cmpt=q

To see all the information in one dashboard, I add the google reader gadget to iGoogle ( http://www.google.com/ig ) so I see the alerts on my homepage, and also add the google search trends chart (each chart can be added as a separate gadget).
(obviously I could have configured the chart to compare apple to microsoft, or anything else like that)"

There you go.  Give it a go.  It's the equivalent of £7000 a year's worth of social media monitoring for free . . .
(I suggest you spend your savings on the upcoming Monitoring social media event! PLUG OVER (AGAIN!))

Social awesomeness (part 1)

Awesomeness is the new innovation.  Well that's according to Umair Haque - Director of Havas Media Lab.  And I couldn't agree more.  

I was super excited when I came across Umair's piece in the Harvard Business Blog titled "the Awesomeness Manifesto" as we at Rubber towers have also been working on our own bit of awesomeness theory - but rather than vanilla awesomeness we've been developing up ideas around "social awesomeness".

In his Awesomeness Manifesto Umair charts out four basic pillars of what awesomeness is based around:
- Ethical production
- Insanely great stuff
- Love
- Thick value

Ultimately, Umair's sentiment around awesomeness could be summed up in one phrase "Do epic ***" (and love doing it!) - a phrase coined by the CEO of Zappos.com - Tony Hsieh - at this year's SXSW.

Within the context of Umair's pillars of awesomeness, our concept of "social awesomeness" could be seen as the social comms framework to communicate the inner awesomeness of a business.

I won't give away our full socially awesome manifesto yet - as we're putting the finishing touches to it - but, to add to Umair's pillars, when it comes to additional values I think you need to be looking at:
- Be nice
- Give
- Be useful
- Be fun
- Engage not interrupt
- Be open

What excites me most about the idea of awesomeness is that it makes me smile and makes me want to do stuff - awesome stuff - epic ***.  That's something that concepts like innovation could never do.

Aristotle's rhetoric - the art of persuasion

I've been reading Aristotle's "ars rhetorica" recently, and  thought I'd share some bits I've learnt from my (quasi) intellectual musings - as a book titled "the art of rhetoric" is  a subject which is (obviously) v.relevant to the advertising industry.

In "the art of rhetoric" Aristotle identified 3 key characteristics of a good persuader / or good arguer.  These were:
    * Pathos: appeal to the emotion of the audience

    * Ethos: a sense of credibility and “moral competence”

    * Logos: good logical structure

I always find it interesting to apply these three characteristics to advertising campaigns to see how they stand up.  And increasingly I'd argue that these Aristotlean characteristics are becoming ever important, as social media and the art of conversation dominate.  In particular I think it's interesting to look at how the different characteristics can be used most effectively in different social media contexts.

So there you go.  Some brief (but interesting I hope) musings from ancient philosophy.

Beyond advertising, I thought it would be fun to do a quick analysis of how our political leaders (Gordon and Dave) would fair in a public debate when it comes to election time.  Here we go:

- Gordon is strong on Ethos and Logos.  He carries Ethos due to the gravitas of his economic wisdom and greying hair.  His Logos comes from years of crafting arguments in the Commons debating Chamber.

- Dave's strong on Logos, and brings some Pathos, but is weak on Ethos.  His Pathos comes from a connection with a certain audience – i.e. the middle classes – however, this isn’t particularly strong.  And he’s certainly weak on Ethos.  His baby-face, and evident lack of experience doesn’t go down well at all with a large tranche of voters.

On the face of it, when analysing the skills of each persuader, I’d say Gordon has the upper-hand – and is likely to win a public debate.  Unless, that is, Dave greys up a little, and suddenly finds 20 years of life experience.

Finally - PLUG ALERT - if you're interested in all of the above you should check out my personal side project aMap - a series of pocket argument guides partly based around Aristotle's rhetoric (and informal logic).

Some intriguing YouTube stats

According to some recent YouTube research, your video has:
- a 3.1% chance of getting over 1000 views
- 0.3 percent chance of getting over 10,000 views.
- 0.001% of getting over 100,000 views

On the flip side, you've got more chance of getting over 1000 views (3.1%), than you have of getting 0 views (2.8%).  Just.  Interestingly, the mode average for a YouTube clip is less than 50, with a staggering 65% of videos failing to get more than 50 views.

Of course, these stats cover all videos across YouTube - so you'd guess that a professionally created viral ad would fair significantly better than a bedroom video.

Additionally, these stats don't take into account the unfair advantages of seeding - using something like the Viral Ad Network and the "big seed" seeding strategy that increases the chances of getting over 100,000 by literally factors x10,000's.

Why pathetic campaigns always go viral

Whenever we're given a viral campaign to seed we have a bit of internal banter as how well we think it will do.  And as a rule, opinion is always divided.  Kirk'll like it.  Ian won't.  Rory will think it's a viral turd.  Chris will think it's a viral work of genius . . .

And someone's always wrong.  They're wrong because in each case we'll be judging it on our personal preferences.  What one person likes isn't necessarily what another likes.  And when it comes to the internet, there maybe a whole of community of "Kirks" out there - a tight-knit highly internet active community of (for example) dog lovers who like nothing better than seeing a dog dance to Gangster's Paradise.

Luckily we developed processes not to judge campaigns on personal preference.  Three key factors in objectively predicting the virality of a campaign are understanding:
1) Does the campaign "have an audience"?
2) Is this audience also an active community online?
3) Is the content relevant community in a "pathetic" way (i.e. does it have pathos / does it connect in some way)

And once these three factors have been judged, we can plan our seeding strategy - making sure we approach the relevant audiences with the right "pathetic approach".  

Sounds simple.  Well, the theory is.  However, the execution is a little more challenging - mainly due to the fact that you never 100% know where all these "community influencers" are hanging out.  So for that reason our execution strategies normally include using our Viral Ad Network - which allows us to reach out to broad communities (and niche communities) at the click of a button, allowing us to flush out the lurking relevant influencer gorilla's in the mist.  Pathos is a strangely unpredictable thing to judge correctly, and the unobvious route is often the best route to viral nirvana. (more on that later)

(+ N.B. I apologise for that terrible last gorilla in the mist mention.  It's cheap I know.  No more gorilla mentions I promise).

Obama's democracy 2.0

In the context of Senator Obama's radical and successful use of the internet to win the Presidency, commentators wildly speculated about how President Obama would then use the internet to govern.  Having amassed 1 million+ followers, would he run the first ever Twit-ocracy and use Twitter to solve his country's problems?  Would he run an enlarged collaborative People's Cabinet via Facebook?

Months into President Obama's period of governance, we now have a good sense of democracy under Obama looks like.  And both government policy wonks and web 2.0 geeks have reasons to be pleased with the direction Obama's taking American democracy.

Policy wonks should be excited about his declaration, on day two of being in office, that he was dedicated to transparent, participative and collaborative governance:

"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration.  Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

Cue excitement from 2.0 geeks too - as obviously public participation and collaboration are values at the heart of the web 2.0 movement.  So the next question from the 2.0 community was "so what's the big man going to do?"  Given the precedent of Obama's election campaign, and the fact that the US are the richest and most tech-savvy nation (inventors of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Amazon . . .), the expectations were certainly set high.

The reality has certainly been a lot more muted than most geeks would have liked.  Nothing overly glam and technologically ground-breaking, but instead a steady stream of pilot e-democracy projects and iterative improvements using an array of different web 2.0 tools.

A quick list of these innovations in participative and transparent governance include:

• White House Open for questions: an interactive question and answer session with the President.

• Recovery.org dialogue: a crowd-sourcing process designed to tap the IT community for ideas for implementing Recovery.gov.

• Open Government Directive collaboration: a collaborative policy-writing process to openly develop a draft of the Open Government policy.

• Data.gov: a web portal providing access to Federal government data sets.

For policy wonks the most interesting ongoing issue is how to make the concept of participative policy making work in practice - given the practical issues around integrating public crowd-sourcing into the formal policy making process.  Certainly the Recovery.org dialogue indicates that focused "expert-based crowd-sourcing" works, however there's still a question of how to make more broad "citizen-based crowd-sourcing" work effectively.

For geeks the democracy 2.0 money shot is around Obama (via his Federal CIO Vivek Kundra) opening up government data and providing data standards - meaning that government data can be more easily mined and mashed-up, handing power (in the form of structured formatted data) over to the people.

And if I were to rate Obama's democracy 2.0 so far?  Well, I'd probably give him a B+.  A promising positive start, but definitely not the finished article.

N.B. for a more in-depth account of Obama's democracy 2.0, read my briefing paper below:

I'm sorry Dad, but your viral sucks

My dad doesn't really understand what I do.  He's 64 (nearly 65) and no matter how many times explain the nuances of viral marketing, he still struggles.  Or so I thought, until he shocked me by creating his very own viral ad for his company the Alarm Monitoring Company - a company that specialises in "monitored burglar alarms".

Check out his viral efforts here - viral genius, or viral suck?

I think I can say for certain that it's really not very good, and kinda backs up my theory that he doesn't get what viral is (or rather doesn't listen to me - a life-long gripe).  Here's my quick analysis of his efforts:

- OK, so the generally creative conceit isn't too dreadful.  The idea of promoting an alarm by showing it in action (burglars breaking in etc.) makes sense. (that's the positives over and done)

- But, then we come to the narrative.  I mean - sorry - what narrative???  Two blokes jump through a window, rummage around a bit, set the alarm off and run off with the beautifully scripted words "F*ck me, I'm off!."  Come on - I've seen better in episodes of Prisoner Cell Block H  Sunset Beach.

- And then there's the direction.  I'm not quite sure how many takes it took to shoot (I hope one), but if you're gonna allow two of your employees (sorry - actors) to spend time jumping through your home window in a not so convincing I'm-a-burglar-breaking-into-a house-way you may as well shoot it properly - otherwise you're wasting everyone's time - including the people who have to watch your sorry ad (me).

- And to cap it off, there's the music.  A bossa-nova keyboard version of Queen's "Another one bites the dust".  This for me is the final nail in the viral coffin.  I mean, why didn't you go for the pan-pipe version???  Everyone knows Queen sound better in pan-pipe than bossa nova.  

So there you go.  As a founder of a viral marketing agency I'm ashamed of my father.   PLEASE NEXT TIME LISTEN TO ME DAD AND DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME MAKING SUCH PAP IT MAKES ME ANGRY AND MAKES ME WANT TO TYPE IN CAPITALS.  

Rant over.  Back to work.

An agency it's hard not to love

For a while I've been following an industry blog called Brandflakes for breakfast.  I first came across it because they'd written a nice write up about one of our campaigns, and as I kinda liked the sound of their blog I checked them out.

Since liking the Brandflakes blog, I've now fallen in love with the agency behind it - Plaid.

Put simply - Plaid are rad.  On the front-page of their site they describe themselves as the "greatest agency in all the land" - which is good enough for me.  What makes me like them even more is their annual road-trip around the US "Plaidnation", where they visit and interview interesting companies in their branded Plaidmobile.  Of course being social media superstars they tweet, blog and video their trip, ensuring they maximise both their real and virtual social connections.

What Plaid seem to do so effortlessly is make me like them by being nice (and interesting).  Which is rule no.1 of the social media handbook.  As Faris Yacob (another social media superstar) says "be nice or leave".  Plaid seem to nicely extend this sentiment to "be nice and interesting and fun and giving, and stick around and become buddies".  What all agencies (and brands) should be like.

(PS, Plaid - please can I have my T-shirt now!)
(PPS, I didn't write this blog just to get a T-shirt - I've always liked Plaid.  However, what the T-shirt has done is activate my advocacy.)

Plaid Pre-Tour 2009 from Plaid Nation on Vimeo.