Here is the presentation that I gave.

These are are hands-on explorations of the potential for using the social web to help you get where you want to be.

Is you feel like this is you then, this could be a fun way to get involved

1. have been exposed to the theories about social media but want to get their hands dirty; or
2. have a strategic role but need some practical experience of social tools; or
3. are artists in any medium, looking for ways to expand and extend their creative practice; or
4. know that using social tools is important, but don’t know where to start; or
5. want to be better at having conversations with others inside or outside their organisation; or
6. just feel stuck and are eager to try something new.

They are running every Thursday throughout June. Lloyd Davis who is running the project, is a fabulous human being, you could not ask to be in better hands.

So if you want to follow the No Straight Line rule of doing something. Get over to and get stuck in with Ecotopia.

Become the change you want to see in the world.

Social social everywhere, but why?

The Figaro Social Media conference looks like its going to be a good event, as it blends some interesting topics and issues together. Both commercial and non-commercial. The challenges of understanding how to conduct successful communications in the networked society, which is underpinned by the social relations between people – not companies is of pressing imperative.

There are some great speakers of particular interest to me are:

Anna Rafferty – Managing Director, Penguin Digital: The Importance of Listening

Dorothea Arndt – Head of New Media, British Red Cross: Creating conversations and driving engagement with your brand through social media

Euan Semple – Thought Leader: What’s the point of social media?

Euans’ message is particularly apposite:

The trouble with “the next big thing” is that everyone thinks it’s big, and everyone thinks it is a thing. Social media is neither. What it is a different way of relating to one another adopted by individuals, whether they represent organisations or not, and carried out between individuals. It is low key, direct, and personal – the antithesis of mass media, interruption marketing. And yet can be very powerful.
How can you avoid being yet another “newbie” rushing in and getting it all wrong? How can you work out what to do, where, and why, in such a way as to make the most of your time and energy?

The event takes place @ the Cavendish Conference Centre on the  03.11.2009

Register (here)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sicoactiva/2092062723/in/photostream/

Mobile Marketing is increasingly moving towards the centre stage of the marketing industry. Many claim to hold the elixir of “how to do” mobile marketing, there are however only a few who really have that knowledge and that insight.If there in one Marketing Masterclass on Mobile that you sign up to I would recommend it is this one.

Pekka Ala-Pietilä former ceo Nokia and co-founder of blyk

Welcome to the Big We – that is 3 billion people that have a mobile device, a number that surpasses TV sets and the fixed Internet, by a country mile. Nokia research tells us that 5 billion people will be connected with a mobile device by 2012.

We are inevitably moving towards the Mobile Society, where our mobile devices become the remote control for our daily lives. Because any communications technology that allows us to better connect, communicate, share knowledge and information, and get stuff done will be widely adopted – which it is.  Our mobile devices are so precious to us that; people who lose their wallets statistically take 24 hours+ to discover the loss, for mobile it is 24 minutes.

As mass media struggles to adapt in an evolving media landscape, there is growing interest and great anticipation of how as; marketers, brands, businesses and advertisers we can use this extraordinary mobile medium to meaningfully connect to our audiences.

This one-day session will immerse you in what you need to know and what you need to do. It will enable you to grasp the fundamentals of how you make successful communications campaigns, how you use data, and utilize new metrics, and will demonstrate that mobile already delivers an ROI unheard of in any other medium (when you do it right), and finally how you make money. Anyone that is interested in being a successful marketer over the next 5 years has to book their place on the SMLXL / JMA Mobile Marketing Masterclass presented by Figaro Digital.

28th October 2009 @ The Hospital, Covent Garden

Full programme details (here)

Registration (here)

Figaro Digital have demonstrated an impressive ability to deliver compelling seminars with quality audiences.  With mobile rapidly becoming a hot topic, the ability to learn from the experiences  of major brands is both timely and relevant.

Alex Meisel chairman Sponge & the Mobile Marketing Association

David says this event will cover

the basics of the ‘media’ part of the label – messaging; transmission; how content is created and distributed etc. But it will also open a door on the ‘social’ side of the label – how the formation of groups, communities of purpose, has the potential to disrupt and reconfigure everything we do – from processes within organisations to politics, education, economics and beyond.

Apparently nearly all tickets are sold with people attending from David’s local authority in Huntingdon, business organisations, retail, training, a local engineering firm, marketing and pr teams, seo specialists and a global mobile tech company.

So rather than sitting in on a Friday night go and do something useful

The axeness of an axe? What on earth does that mean I hear you ask? Well it’s about starting with the essence of something, stripping things down and taking away anything that is superfluous. As Gabriel Branby, the Swedish axe manufacturer told us at The Do Lectures last weekend “Less is More”

Leonora however explores the themes of other speakers who brought their own axeness to Do. She mentions Ben Hemmersley editor of Wired magazine

if you are making a magazine, make it the very best magazine you can and make sure it does all the things that only a magazine can do.

Leonora then moves onto Designer Tom Taylor of the Really Interesting Group,

he spoke about the joy of producing your own newspaper and recommended that as his Small Do. He encouraged us to “seize the means of production”, which I took to mean enjoy the process of making things and understand that making a website is different from making a newspaper, which is different from making an axe, but both all equally valuable.

This for me is interesting as DIY culture has been with us for a long time. Whether its people creating culture and food in their allotments, or the more savage DIY culture of Punk – what is extraordinary is Tom’s story about using the mighty capability of a mass scale newspaper printing press connected to low cost production tools integrated into the networked world and the internet.

“Seizing the means of production” is actually quite a revolutionary, some might say incendiary statement. Frantz Fanon said,

a people will only be free when they control their own communications.

I am not sure Tom sees himself as a revolutionary, but perhaps he just doesn’t know it yet?

Finally Leonora talks about the one and only Geoff McFetridge. Originality is priceless in any medium…

Geoff McFetridge.

I would say there were indeed quite a few originals at Do, and Leonora mentions a few others. She sums up

Do Lectures are simply unafraid of being copied because they all know that what they are doing is completely unique and they are the very best at doing what they do. Everything else is just a pale imitation.

Amen to that.

Do was created by this exceptional person, Dave Hieatt.

Dave Hieatt. Photo by Johnny Moss. http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=do%20lectures&w=67157602%40N00

I have to say, that I don’t think I have ever, been more inspired by so many people – both by those that spoke and those that attended.

It was my friend Howard Rheingold who suggested at a conference recently, that in the networked society, where information flows, that the thing to do is, not to stand @ the back of the queue of information, but to stand in its life enhancing flow. Well, I think that I was standing in a river flowing at full tilt in the green lands of Fforest.

I arrived on the Friday afternoon, and managed to squeeze into the Teepee to hear Patrick Holden (Director of the Soil Association), deliver a compelling and in may ways electrifying presentation on food security. Explaining that our methods of food production, and distribution, combined with the growing concerns over energy presents us all with an acute problem.

Embarrassingly for me, like Hermione Granger, my hand was straight up for questions. In fact I had tons of them. Has food become a deeply political issue? Are the supermarkets actually hollowing out the value and in fact long term viability of food production in this country? Why do people prefer battery farmed chickens over free range in exchange for the life giving properties of lager? Why have the British disconnected from where food comes from, and what can we do about it?

Hilary Benn’s adviser on food policy was there, also asking questions – with a great deal of dignity and understatement, Patrick suggested that perhaps the shadow minister policies were moving deck chairs on the titanic – it was definitely a frank exchange of views.

On Saturday, I got to listen to another extraordinary person  Gabriel Branby, CEO of Gränfors Bruks, a company that makes the best axes in the world – his story was about how one builds a successful company predicated on quality and ethics. In his beautiful Swedish lilt he indulged us in his passion.

Gabriel Granby

Take away unnecessary materials and production processes, and add knowledge, he urged us. We even got a wood chopping class. It was like an hour spent with Yoda, albeit with a Swedish twang.

Small forest axe

Tim Birkenhead inspired us about what we can learn from studying birds, which was hilarious and thought provoking.

Next up, was Rolf Potts talking about Vagabonding, a means of traveling extensively, lightly and in deep context of the cultures that one travels through.

Gregor MacLennan, Campaigner for Amazonian peoples’ rights, I think, not only inspired the audience, he moved them, and I think the words, “I am not worthy” sprang at least to my mind. His story of how he enabled communities that flourished in the rainforests, to resist the avarice of mining companies and the complete lack of ethics of the Lima government in protecting its own people, had the entire Do audience leaning forward. Gregor and his team helped the Atwa, I think was the name of the tribe, to first hand draw maps, from memory of their homelands, noting rivers and where they found food, and raw materials, where they fished etc., And then Gregor helped them to begin to take that implicit knowledge, and build that knowledge into maps  through GPS that clearly demonstrated, how mining concessions were threatening the very existence of the Atwa.

Gregor, also touched on something very close to my heart, the idea that a people will only be free when they control their own communications. The Lima government brutally put down a peaceful protest by the indigenous tribes of the rain forest, which the Lima government claimed was terrorism and initiated by the tribes people. The film and photos that Gregor’s team managed to publish on YouTube demonstrated the power of Franz Fanon’s words, that a people will only be free when they control their own communications. Now armed with mobile devices, laptops and access to the wider world through communications technologies, these people have greater power to expose those that wish to do them harm.

There was a strange sense that, Claire and Dave Hieatt, had rather artfully, aligned speakers from very different worlds and perspectives that made a great deal of sense. As I was on next, talking about my No Straight Lines project. Highlighting that we are in a communications revolution through which we are renegotiating the power relationships between people, communities, society, organisations and even governments and then Tom Taylor spoke about Post Digital Design

Tom Taylor

Printing newspapers, hacking analogue technology and connecting into into the networked society was powerful stuff, and resonated with my talk which argued that we need to use a new language for the networked society. Tom works through the Really Interesting Group, a multi-disciplinary organisation that does ‘post-digital design’, which is sort of about taking the web into the real world is in my view, great. I did not get to see everyone “;+( But I know that many people left that tent @ Fforest with more ideas than they arrived with, more inspiration, that they arrived with and more friends than they arrived with.

Here is a film that Russell Davis made of what happens when you plug the internet into mass industrial printing machines

the most fun Ben’s had all year from russelldavies on Vimeo.

I was also moved by the people who came, who I met over breakfast, lunch, dinner and a few beers. The food was amazing, and so was the entertainment. Katy Carr, being the highlight for me, who led some serious rabble rousing singing on her ukulele in the Fforest pub. We had a lovely chat before she left on Sunday.

So don’t just stand there DO SOMETHING – and become the change that you want to see in the world!!

Thanks Dave and Claire, and thank you James and Sian who run Fforest