Steve Jobs back in 1996

Steve Jobs in an interview with Wired (prior to his return to Apple) talking about the Web, computing and creativity. 

Wired - The Macintosh computer set the tone for 10 years. Do you think the Web may be setting the tone today?

Steve Jobs - The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased… The most exciting things happening today are objects and the Web. The Web is exciting for two reasons. One, it's ubiquitous... and anything that's ubiquitous gets interesting. Two, I don't think Microsoft will figure out a way to own it. There's going to be a lot more innovation, and that will create a place where there isn't this dark cloud of dominance.

W - If you go back five years, the Web was hardly on anybody's horizon. Maybe even three years ago, it wasn't really being taken seriously by many people. Why is the sudden rise of the Web so surprising?

SJ - Isn't it great? That's exactly what's not happening in the desktop market.

W - Why was everyone, including NeXT, surprised, though?

SJ - It's a little like the telephone. When you have two telephones, it's not very interesting. And three is not very interesting. And four. And, well, a hundred telephones perhaps becomes slightly interesting. A thousand, a little more. It's probably not until you get to around ten thousand telephones that it really gets interesting.

Many people didn't foresee, couldn't imagine, what it would be like to have a million, or a few tens of thousands of Web sites. And when there were only a hundred, or two hundred, or when they were all university ones, it just wasn't very interesting. Eventually, it went beyond this critical mass and got very interesting very fast. You could see it. And people said, "Wow! This is incredible."

The Web reminds me of the early days of the PC industry. No one really knows anything. There are no experts. All the experts have been wrong. There's a tremendous open possibility to the whole thing. And it hasn't been confined, or defined, in too many ways. That's wonderful.

There's a phrase in Buddhism, "Beginner's mind." It's wonderful to have a beginner's mind.

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

You can read the rest of it here. 

Coming to America

'Progress' in question. Especially so when you have 3 young men who've fled wars in Sudan to get to the US who find it so unfriendly and the food so bad (from a film, God Grew Tired of Us, from 2006).

So you're mad about something on the Internet

Great reminder of the futility of online ranting...

Janelle Monae

Probably the performance from this years Galstonbury. Amazing.

History of Marketing Channels

Useful timeline of marketing channels through the history. Probably slightly simplified but does show nicely the huge growth in marketing opportunities now...

From here.

Everything's connected

I can't remember where this is from but I really like it...

In a world where everyone is connected and constantly flowing information feeds back on itself, linear comms are becoming redundant. Brands need to be actively interesting (creating media) or useful (creating software) to be picked up and transmitted in this conversational flow. Agencies need to help brands generate a stream of marketing and retail innovations that connect with the individual passions of consumers in fluid and fragmented communities. 

Marketing has always needed media technology skills (radio, TV, film, print, etc); new digital channels and media technologies with radically different characteristics to traditional media (immersive, interactive, connected) are exploding so marketers need new skills. Agencies need to build, buy or partner to get interactive content and software development skills which can help brands be engines of culture – creating it, transforming it, constantly working with the flow of it. E.g. product placement, active sponsorship, ad-funded applications, in-game marketing, new branded media or products and services. 

OMGWTFBBQ

Great site that takes definitions from urbandictionary.com and places them over a Google image result. The results can be quite random... I had no idea about this. Pronounced sp-a-rk-E, must always look sparkled, the E stands 4 EnErGy. Time to spark this event up Sparke. This party is Sparke-licious. Sparke is planning this event? 

Apple, the iCloud & Google

Yesterday, Apple launched the future of iTunes, iCloud a hub which stores all your media, email, calendars etc. The service will provide a long necessary response to Google's great web services. In both cases, your data will be in the cloud, accessible from anywhere with a network connection. Beyond that there are some quite noticeable differences about the companies 2 visions: 

Google’s vision is about software you run in a web browser.

Apple’s is about native apps you run on devices. 

Google’s frame is the browser window. Apple’s frame is the screen. That’s what we’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now. 

What Apple is also offering is access from the cloud alongside downloads to your devices. Everything will be available even if you don't have network access. I have a hunch this will be what most consumers would prefer.  

The BBC has a good summary of Apple's announcements here. 

The Internet changes everything (apart from 4 things)

Super post on what's changing and what's not changing about business when it comes to the Internet.

In brief: A McKinsey study estimates that Internet economic output is bigger than Spain and growing faster than Brazil. Web-intensive SMEs grow twice as fast, export twice as much, and are more profitable than non-Web-enabled, the McKinsey study concluded. eBay employs 17,000 people but 1.3 million earn a living from it.  

With all this talk of revolution, disruption, and really big change, struck by the things that are not changing.

1. A great customer experience differentiates winners from losers. Winners are differentiated not by the technology but by the quality of the experience they offer customers. 

2. The human side is critical to the use of technology. The biggest barrier to the spread of promising technology is the professionals. The same issue was raised about education. Adoption of new tools and incorporating new technologies into business or organizational models requires visionary, responsive leaders willing to change and to use the tools themselves.

3. Money needs to change hands. The Internet spreads faster when content is free but creators need to be paid. For all the freedom and ease of the virtual world, people still need to earn a living from what they produce.

4. The winner-take-all nature of Internet businesses poses risks of new monopolies controlling everything. That was one of many reasons that government officials want to protect citizens from Internet risks, from piracy to child pornography. For every problem — piracy, bandwidth, security — others argued that a private sector technology solution would be better, faster than a government solution. 

According to McKinsey telecoms are capturing most of the wealth being generated from the Internet. For all the new world hype, the old world has a major role to play. And sometimes focusing on what is not changing help us figure out how to best master changes. We still need to find, delight, and excite customers. We need business models that pay people fairly for their work. Businesses must make a credible case to government that they act in the public interest. And the best asset for mastering change is still that old classic: leadership.

Fly me to the Moon

Participation

Technology and social media gives brands the ability to listen to customer feedback better than at any time in history.  This gives companies the ability to listen to and respond to our comments. If they're really smart they can use them as R & D and create products based on our conversations. Listening and responding is one thing, interrupting us on social platforms is another. In a session I was running a few weeks back someone asked 'isn't advertising just a virus? People just don't want brands interrupting them on social media?'. Ignoring the ads that people actively like and share, most of us understand, when we get stuff for free someone or something is paying for it. We become the target and in many senses we become the product being sold.  

Now that brands have a superhero-like ability to listen to everything said about them, how to respond? Listening is a good start and when people are irate it's often worth responding. It's a tricky line to tread and all too often companies take these new open channels as a blueprint for all their new future marketing. Suddenly everything should involve co-creation and every communication has to consist of a dialogue. And  participation (or engagement) marketing becomes the holy grail.

As Tim Malbon said "suddenly digital is *everything* and everyone believes that social media has the power to turn boring crap into gold. Every product and every single brand wants to 'engage' users in a massive participatory experience. Especially if they're utterly dull. Obviously, you've got a Facebook page by now so you can 'be part of the conversation', but by now you've discovered there's very little to say if you're a brand people don't care much about or a product you put on food to make it taste better.

Never mind all that, there must be a way to engage with, by now, billions of web users who love engaging and participating, this is what they've been waiting for, and if you make the experience engaging enough they'll forget you're boring and love you and go out and buy your product instead of your slightly less participatory competition."

There's no point in boring brands trying to engage us on social media. They need a position, a passion, a point of view. Malcolm Gladwell was asked by GQ 'If you had to choose would you rather be interesting or right?" He said it entirely depended on what you do. If he was president of the United States or a CEO, he'd rather be right but he's a journalist so he'd rather be interesting. Advertising's closer to journalism than CEOs and presidents. We have to be interesting. If you're interesting, interesting things tend to happen. Have a position. Ikea's about everyone deserving the right to good design, Dove and the campaign for real beauty, Method about cleaning products which don't harm the environment, Nike wanting to encourage people to stay healthy. Having a position on culture helps them seem less self-obsessed and allows them to build a bridge between what they're good at and what we're interested in. This gives them a natural ability to exist in social spaces.  

So let's consider why people participate in things?

1. To get something useful. Tools, apps, rewards
2. To give something useful. Build communities, get group discounts
3. To bond with others. To improve social context
4. To gain status. Recognition, points, levels and rewards
5. To define themselves. Personalisation

If we are to use participation, we should be realistic about how people engage with brands. Here are two approaches:

1. Mass Participation - where it is so easy, relevant, or product related, that a significant number of people will want to get involved, and every interaction will have a direct positive marketing effect on the person interacting (Walkers Do Us a Flavour).
2. Mass Viewership of Participation - where the content that the few participators produce is of such enormous interest that masses of people will want to see the output and be positively influenced by the marketing message inherent within. (Burberry Art of the Trench).

If Clay Shirky has taught us anything, it's that people want to create primarily for themselves - their ideas, their expressions. Now and again, this might dovetail with the communication or marketing aim of a brand, but it won't most of the time. If you as a brand owner, are going to going down the creative participation route, you need to be damn sure that actually what you're doing is allowing individuals a platform to create.

Spaceships

Science fiction legend Issac Asimov writes to kids on the opening of their new library.

(this is the internet, of course).  

All Change.

I spend lots of time helping brands and agencies cope with the stress of a constantly moving technology landscape. Adapting from broadcast to network communications and the growth of people powered content is a challenge to most organisations out there. I can help people understand what's going on but I know that won't work in isolation. Training's important but to really develop an organisation you need to do far more. Edward Boches has written a great post on this where he identifies five key ingredients required for changing a business:

Pressure from the top

A company-wide vision

An investment of money, time and resources

Actionable steps to be taken

Measures of success

He points out that if you take any one of those 5 away you'll more than likely fail. For years Mullen (his agency) tried to accelerate its digital transformation but only had three or four of the five. They applied pressure, but didn’t have buy-in across the agency. They made investments but weren’t always sure of the specific actionable steps. Eventually they figured it out. Laid out a vision that everyone could buy into; Weeded out the few who wouldn’t. Made investments in people and resources and took specific steps to accelerate change. Moved to Boston, dramatically changed space and redefined the composition of creative teams. And while they’re still not done, it’s been working.

Building on these 5, I think it's worth expanding on 2 areas:

1. Education

2. Partnerships

Education. How to keep people informed of what's technically possible? How to get creative teams inspired by the potential of Google/Twitter APIs? People like me can help naturalise teams to the new landscape, behaviours, interesting platforms and tools. But all this changes fast. What I prefer to do is give people a good understanding of the basics and encourage them to be curious for themselves. Of course it's worth building partnerships with other organisations. Outside speakers are great but over time the best approach is blending this with your own people taking on much of the knowledge sharing.  

Partnerships. Build relationships with the best tech companies to ensure they come in regularly to inspire your teams (and follow the talks with workshops, get people to apply what they've just seen). Consider loaning office space to interesting tech startups or sponsor them in other ways. Ad agencies and tech companies have complementary skill-sets so they should clearly play nicer together. Agencies aren't great at tech projects and tech startups aren't great at marketing what they do. For me it's a no-brainer. It just makes sense for them to work more closely and try to create a mutually beneficial relationships. 

Partnerships are, for me, fundamental to all good businesses in the future. Collaboration is becoming more and more important (both internally and externally). Companies who can create smart, robust ways to work with others (whether it be internal departments, suppliers or customers) will thrive. Those that can't will always struggle. 

The psychology of shopping

Social commerce (the combination of ecommerce & social media) is, in many peoples minds, the future for shopping. A lot of the ideas relate to behavioural economics (how we're not as rational as we like to think). A piece at Social Commerce Today raises some great points on the psychology that drives shopping in general. Using Dan Ariely‘s book, Predictably Irrational they highlight some of the ideas that drive us to consume and how they relate to social commerce. Here are some of the key points:

▪ The Cost of Social Norms: We are happy to do things, but not when we are paid to do them. Financial rewards or penalties create a market norm, a paid-for transaction that legitimises behaviour – even when undesirable. Social norms and market norms (business, financial rules) are not the same – recognise the difference between the two, and don’t attempt to turn a social norm into a market norm.

▪ The High Price of Ownership: We Overvalue What We Have. We don’t like to lose things – so once we own them, we tend to overvalue them. This may explain why influencer strategies can work – once someone owns your product, they’re likelier to advocate it.

▪ The Cost of Zero Cost: We often pay too much when we pay nothing. Consumers will trade-up, wait in line, and pay more just to be able to get a free gift or bonus, such as free shipping. Free is valuable.

▪ The Power of Price: More expensive is perceived and expected to be better and more effective. Price has an effect on experience. Consider how price is presented and how prices are compared in your product presentation/UX strategy.

▪ The Influence of Arousal: In a state of excitement or arousal, people think and behave very differently. Emotional states trump rational thinking; it’s easier to sell to people when they are excited. Potentially you could use social commerce for live event shopping as opposed to simply adding a retail layer to social platforms and a social layer to your retail platform.

Behavioural economics tells us that we're far less rational in our purchase decisions than other models predict, but that those behaviours aren’t random – they are rather systematic and predictable (as is human nature). For instance, we will often sacrifice personal pleasure for public image – sometimes going against the current simply for the sake of being viewed as ‘different’, even if we prefer what most are doing. Behavioural economics can offer insight into consumer behaviour, which should be considered in social commerce strategies and programs to present things in the most desirable, compelling manner.

Shirky on optimism

“The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future.

Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.”

from Clay Shirky in The Guardian