People are often mourning the loss of a way of life in which they were part of a community that had grown organically over the generations… Unlike the planners and architects who moved them around as if they were pawns in a chess game, they understand that communities are not created by ordering removal vans simply to transplant people from one location to another – not if they are to have a cohesiveness that makes sense to those who live within in them.

So wrote Gilda O’Neill, who is sadly no longer with us. She was referencing her life experience growing up in the East End of London.

In the Miracle of Hudson Street by Malcolm Gladwell he talks about Jane Jacobs,

In the early nineteen-sixties, Jane Jacobs lived on Hudson Street, in Greenwich Village, near the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Bleecker Street. It was then, as now, a charming district of nineteenth-century tenements and town houses, bars and shops, laid out over an irregular grid, and Jacobs loved the neighborhood. In her 1961 masterpiece, “ The Death and Life of Great American Cities ,” she rhapsodized about the White Horse Tavern down the block, home to Irish longshoremen and writers and intellectuals – a place where, on a winter’s night, as “the doors open, a solid wave of conversation and animation surges out and hits you.”

Her Hudson Street had Mr. Slube, at the cigar store, and Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, and Bernie, the candy-store owner, who, in the course of a typical day, supervised the children crossing the street, lent an umbrella or a dollar to a customer, held on to some keys or packages for people in the neighborhood, and “lectured two youngsters who asked for cigarettes.” The street had “bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher’s,” and “teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips show or their collars look right.” It was, she said, an urban ballet.

And why was it a miracle?

The miracle of Hudson Street, according to Jacobs, was created by the particular configuration of the streets and buildings of the neighborhood. Jacobs argued that when a neighborhood is oriented toward the street, when sidewalks are used for socializing and play and commerce, the users of that street are transformed by the resulting stimulation: they form relationships and casual contacts they would never have otherwise.

And going further Gladwell expands

The West Village, she pointed out, was blessed with a mixture of houses and apartments and shops and offices and industry, which meant that there were always people “outdoors on different schedules and… in the place for different purposes.” It had short blocks, and short blocks create the greatest variety in foot traffic. It had lots of old buildings, and old buildings have the low rents that permit individualized and creative uses. And, most of all, it had people, cheek by jowl, from every conceivable walk of life. Sparely populated suburbs may look appealing, she said, but without an active sidewalk life, without the frequent, serendipitous interactions of many different people, “there is no public acquaintanceship, no foundation of public trust, no cross-connections with the necessary people–and no practice or ease in applying the most ordinary techniques of city public life at lowly levels.”

Gladwell’s point is about space, proximity, communication and trust in the context of the failure of the office vs. the success of Hudson Street.

From Interruption to Engagement – the journey to truly engaging in the networked world from Alan Moore on Vimeo.

For over 150 years our economies, culture and society have been shaped by astraight-line logic producing considerable economic success. However, in the dawn of the Networked-Society, a straight-line logic of getting stuff done becomes a barrier to progress. Why? Because, the change wrought by the
networked society is structural ­ challenging how markets and organisations have co-evolved over the last 150 years.

This creates a dilemma. And the dilemma is this ­ How can firms and the people that work in those firms, develop coherent marketing strategies/products and services that are premised upon No-Straight-Line principles ­ when they have been versed only in Straight-Line thinking ­ at
least for the over 35¹s ­ from birth? So if the 20th Century was about straight line thinking around commerce, media and communications, the 21st Century will be about a no straight line approach defined as Engagement.

And to bring some sharper focus to what we do here is a film made by the Dutch Think Tank Freedom Lab that explores the central themes of my current research.

The basic outline is this… “I needs we, to truly be I,” wrote Carl Jung, and that is why we as a species are on a quest to rediscover our role in society. Humanity, deconstructed, over the last 150 years, to the point of deconstruction is now deploying communication technologies to regain its true identity. The rise of the networked society is no accident, and a new philosophy is needed to help us with our quest. The core areas are these:

1. System breakdown: We are witness to a structural and transformational change in society.

2. The wholesale pursuit of material wealth has in fact come at a terrible cost for society

3. Threat: the current unsustainability of humanity

4. The true nature of humans and the technology of man: their intimate relationship

5. Liberation Day: We need to examine the various solutions and tools that can enable us to thrive and survive, to take back that which makes us whole as people, individually and collectively.

6. Simplexity: The digital and highly networked world seems to have created a more complex way of living. We need to learn to deal with this complexity, by understanding how it works.

7. Deschoolling: Our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy that has driven us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac.

8. New Philosophy: We need a new language to help us understand the deep context of the change we are in

9. The no straight line universe: We need to explore its shape we need to feel it; physically, intellectually, and emotionally

learning to manage communities can be a tricky business

I picked this up from a Jay Rosen tweet

Managing Online Communities: What Computer Games Can Teach Journalists

What does MMORG’s have to do with journalism? The answer according to the article is, everything.

MMORPGs don’t have much to offer in terms of developing the traditional journalism skills. These games can’t teach students how to vet sources, how to interview, how to copy edit, how to hit the streets and find stories.

What they can teach journalists is how to build, foster and interact with an online community. As news organizations and journalism schools struggle to find their way in the shifting, interactive landscape that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, the answers to many of their questions lie in the history of computer gaming.

The article mentions Richard Bartle, (website), (blog) one of the foremost experts on gaming and players. The article argues that it’s Bartle’s expertise where we can begin to learn about communities. Importantly Bartle made some key observations on player types,

The player types — Achievers, Explorers, Socializers and Killers — lay the foundation for not only what elements need to be present within a game community (although this can easily be extrapolated for any community) but also what precautions and rules need to be in place in order for these communities to thrive.

This “simple taxonomy”, as Bartle refers to it, enables community managers to begin to quantify the actions within any system and subtly shift the environment to encourage different actions, ones that are more conducive to community building. Community designers could, as Bartle said, tinker with what the players could do, change the rules of the world, create a more interactive environment or build more direct action. (Bartle, 1996)

The article goes on to mention the seminal work of Dave Weinbrger, Lawrence Lessig and Howard Rheingold

While each of those works examines communities ranging far outside the basic taxonomies, they each seem to agree on four basic principles for building communities and four basic rules for managing those communities. And that though these key thinkers were looking at different aspects of community, engagement, communication, technology etc., They did seem to come to a common point of view on some fundamental principals,

The four principles — Good Content, Simple Navigation, Simple Interfaces, Decentralized Controls (King, 2008) — align themselves with the Bartle’s Taxonomy in this way: The content is for achievers and explores, the navigation is for achievers, the interface is for socializers and the decentralized controls allows for the thwarting of killers.

The four rules — No Free Riding, Rules Compliance, Rewards, Ad-Hoc Growth (King, 2008) — not only offer guidelines for punishing Killers, but also for encouraging Achievers, Explorers and Socializers.

Which brings us onto community management – the community, a community, needs rules and it needs managing, the interface needs to be designed to encourage persistent interaction, for all key game player types. Just shoving stuff up online and hoping for the best, will not deliver the results one hopes for, I think is the key observation here.

Brad King author of the article makes therefore his summary,

In other words, the company treated the players as equal partners in the game process. They weren’t considered as an afterthought. They weren’t considered incidental to the process. They weren’t there to be the recipient of corporate-speak. They had a voice within the organization, a way to redress concerns and a way to provide constructive feedback that changed the way the developers upgraded the system.

That the game still continues, 12 years later, with more than 100,000 players is a testament to this system.

I rate this article highly, it has certainly helped me. It also in my opinion should be read by anyone wanting to study how to truly engage, one audience. All the hype about Social Media is such a poor substitute, to the key insights which underpin how and why people interact with each other in the networked participatory society.

Suggested reading:

Advice for regional news groups in the networked economy

Newsbrands of the 21st Century [1]

citizen journalism: truth, trust and power

SMLXL newsbrand / journalism archive

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21782644@N04/3191535692

This is the basis for my presentation @ Monitoring Social Information

In the near future wars will be fought over scarce resources; water, oil, and food. The other war that will be fought will be over data. Especially data that enables people and businesses to find each other when they need each other the most.

Today in the networked society we leave data trails; plumes of information, the personal exhaust from our digital interactions, these are the shadows and footprints of our daily lives. Which companies are so desperate to harvest, aggregate and refine into valuable social intelligence, which they hope will offer them significant commercial returns in revenues and competitive advantage.

Data is the exhaust of our personal interactions, leaving trails, shadows and footprints

Data is moving centre stage in the highly competitive world of marketing and commerce. Yet, your destiny with data is complex. Because, there are legitimate concerns raised about who actually owns that information. Privacy issues become a key battleground when our identities can be pieced together via data flows. Our presence, proximity, and identities all become part of the massive flows of communication data that are awash in the world.

But data can also deliver products and services that really enable us as people to make better transactions and decisions. People might be prepared to make their data available to certain companies changing the relationship between business and customer – trust could be built by ensuring one is delivering the most appropriate message to the most appropriate audience. On the Harvard VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) site, they write,

1. Relationships are voluntary.
2. Customers are born free and independent of vendors.
3. Customers control their own data. They can share data selectively and control the terms of its use.
4. Customers are points of integration and origination for their own data.
5. Customers can assert their own terms of engagement and service.
6. Customers are free to express their demands and intentions outside any company’s control.

These can all be summed up in the statement Free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

Dataportability (here) and (here) will also a word that will be used as frequently as Social Media – believe me.

This means companies interested in marketing to drive commercial success, or companies using data to enhance their business models must rethink how they create value. Because in the search economy, where we are pulling on information, actively seeking it to enable us to make and take better decisions and transactions. The old way of doing things just wont do.

There are some white papers on data and marketing here

After posting about mobile augmented reality here and here I came across an article in New Scientist

I disagree, with the wobbly start headline, but I liked the reality check. Something that was reinforced recently by AR specialist Robert Rice, he posted,

We have some time to build all the neat stuff and eventually get to the contact lens displays (which are not coming soon, press to the contrary notwithstanding). We need to keep people focused on what is coming, how it will be useful, and how we will get there. This will all directly relate to early user adoption, funding, R&D, etc.

the risk of over hyping, unrealistic expectations, marketing saturation, and everything else along those lines is still a big risk factor. Already I’m seeing people on twitter complaining about seeing too much about augmented reality. I’ve certainly been critical of a number of things that I thought were over hyped, or make claims that are easily misunderstood and represented (I’m looking at you, contact lens display guys!).

And New Scientist, concurred

But while some who back the technology think its time has now come, after more than a decade in development, others warn that undercooked applications or “apps” are set to disappoint users, potentially damaging the market.

The momentum building behind AR has been fuelled by the growing sophistication of cellphones. With the right software, devices like the iPhone can now overlay reviews of local services or navigation information onto scenes from the phone’s camera.

I looking at Yelps recent Monocle App, New Scientist wrote,

Amid all the hype, however, there is a big problem: the sensors that the apps depend on are not always up to the job. When New Scientist tested an iPhone in downtown San Francisco, the error reported by the GPS sensor was as great as 70 metres, and the compass leapt through 180 degrees as the phone moved past a metal sculpture. Indeed, the Yelp app often displayed links to businesses directly behind the one the camera was pointing at.

“These sensors are astonishingly bad at what people are trying to do with them,” says Blair MacIntyre, who studies AR at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Yelp says the app’s AR features are a “very early iteration” that the company will improve as it gets feedback.

To achieve the sub-metre positioning accuracy that really good AR demands, mobile devices will have to analyse scenes, not just record images, says the article.

Building 3D maps, from multiple data sources can also deliver greater accuracy,

Microsoft’s Photosynth software can create composite 3D images from a bunch of 2D images, while huge public image libraries such as Flickr could provide the raw data. However, such complex mapping schemes inevitably raise data-storage and privacy concerns

The idea that Flickr becomes an extraordinary database mine of visual information gets the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. Where is the value (aka $$$) in these massive aggregated pools of data and information, people ask? Well it just maybe we are only just beginning to learn how to walk economically in the networked economy. Flickr may become extraordinary valuable because of its vast and raw depository of data. Again we get into the data flow wars, who owns, and who has access to that data. How multiple data streams are configured, and mashed and refined will be a new source of revenue for many. Perhaps big media needs to think about that?

The future of pedestrian navigation?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7236030@N03/2106087852

As Jenkins explains,

A transmedia story unfolds across multiple platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the idea form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best – so that a story might be introduced into a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction.

The consequences of such transmedia manifestations is; the creation of deeper context, and a more sustained form of emotional and intellectual engagement that translates into commercial success. What the  Wachowski brothers recognised, was that we experience the world as a blended reality, and that blended reality also embraced a more participatory culture. The success of The Matrix was premised upon the idea of co-creation and collective intelligence. “Echo replies to echo, everything reverberates’” said Braque.

The filmmakers plant clues that won’t make sense until we play the computer game. They draw on the back story revealed through a series of animated shorts, which need to be downloaded off the web of watched off a separate DVD. Fans raced, dazed and confused, from the theatres to plug into Internet discussion lists, where every detail would be dissected and every possible interpretation debated.

The Matrix comic

The Matrix online

Would not such insight inspire brands and businesses to understand how to truly engage their; customers, audiences, stakeholders? The Matrix is a…. Film? A comic? An online game? A…. Brand? And what do great brands do? They tell great stories, and they deliver great customer experience and engagement.

You can live a life or you can live a FantaLife

A few years ago, SMLXL was commissioned by The Coca Cola Company to globally look at their brand Fanta. How would SMLXL re-energise Fanta? How could we use the idea of Engagement and not use just traditional practices of brand communications. Our view was that Fanta had to have a point of view on life for young people. So we created FantaLife: an advanced living course for young people to get more out of life.

You can live a life or you can live a Fanta Life

Which we thought was far more engaging, than the tempting colourful sensations of life. I had not read Henry’s book then, but based on the communications work I had undertaken, and our research of how companies, brands and organisations are able to engage their audiences creating great experiences for them. We could prove such an approach enabled those companies to be highly profitable. This seemed to us @ SMLXL, rather obvious.

Fanta Life Challenge: What are you doing with you life?

From live events, to mobile communications, a TV series, to what we described as Fanta Beach: we created a world in which young people could have a great deal of fun. The premise and promise of Engagement is about deep context achieved through co-creation, collaboration and Transmedia storytelling. It has by default socialbility woven  into the entire fabric of the marketing communications. But its not social media. This is something that Ridley Scott has also understood: Crowdsourcing Blade Runner in a read-write participatory culture

Check out the Purefold project with RSA films

Fanta paid us handsomely for the work, then they made a couple of TV spots and some billboards and ran them internationally. I was somewhat bemused, and I still am, that companies on one level compete so aggressively, and must by law maximise shareholder value, are unable to innovate to do so. And, in so doing they hurt themselves. Social media now becomes another silo of the marketing silo bucket and the cycle continues. OK Fanta is an orange drink that Coke bought off the Germans after the Second World War – but in my view one we were proposing to imbue the brand with real meaning, based upon our deep insight of how young people want to engage, want to co-create, what to explore the world in a more existentialist way. TV ads, on their own, will not crack that code.

Fanta beach: a transmedia story

Brands need to be multi-dimensional – like Apple, or The Matrix to survive the participatory culture of the multi-dimensional universe. SMLXL has developed a Masterclass on Engagement – do get in touch if you would like to know how to truly engage your customers in; the physical, the mobile, as well as the virtual life.

In the meantime, Fanta Life is still there waiting to be executed! But perhaps Coke doesn’t want to be as famous as the Matrix?

The Matrix was first released on March 31, 1999. It earned $171 million in North America and over £250 million in the UK and $463 million worldwide,^[10] and later became the first DVD to sell more than three million copies in the U.S.^[11] The Ultimate Matrix Collection was released on HD DVD on May 22, 2007^[12] and on Blu-ray on October 14, 2008.^[13] The movie is also scheduled to be released stand alone in a 10th anniversary edition on Blu-ray in the Digibook format on March 31, 2009, 10 years to the day after the movie was released theatrically.^[14]

Its not that journalism, news and newspapers are redundant in this time of epochal change, but the people that run them are. Because they have failed to truly experiment, they have failed to ask themselves what is advertising in the 21st Century? Because that was the model supporting them. I meet the CEO of the Johnston Press in 2006 and implored him that, JP needed to do 2 things…

1). Think hard about how to create more value for its readers and to invest in that

2). Think harder about how in achieving [1] they delivered greater value for their advertisers

This had to be done as a web/mobile – ergo ‘digital’ strategy. Unfortunately, this did not happen. And the net result is the parlous state of JP today. And frankly I think there is no going back. Which is in fact tragic, because it has significant ramifications.

And the government has also be complicit in its demise, as explained by Claire Enders

Local newspapers refused the suggestion that they should be regulated by Ofcom. Simultaneously, the government started withdrawing public sector advertising and the Royal Mail “eliminated distribution to homes”. The government believes the local press is read by people, middle-aged and older, who live local lives. They are not relevant to the government’s view of itself. Instead of helping local media to stay alive longer, the effect of government action has been to push them over the edge faster. We’re talking about a fourth estate that is facing the future with much fewer resources. The resources on the government side are overwhelming.

Perhaps, this is also why we see the growth of local councils producing their own newspapers

What nearly all traditional media boards have failed to grasp are a number of very important developments. I would say in fact that, there has been a catastrophic failure at board level, to truly engage with the business and marketing challenges presented in the early 21st Century. A VP of a large media company said to me that,

The problem was that we (the company) thought that the problem was technology, so we invested a great deal of money in inappropriate technology. What we failed to see was in fact a bigger and broader picture, as a consequence we are now hamstrung by the massive costs of those investments, twinned with dwindling revenues, with few, if any resources to combat the business environment we are now in. The CFO, hears a huge sucking sound on cashflow, with only a trickle coming back in revenues from ‘digital’. We listened to the wrong people, and now we are facing the consequences of our own myopia.

Its not that the decline of the mass media businesses could be completely averted, however, these companies could have been in a far better position to face a market place defined by what I call networked economics. Instead, these boards have attempted to squeeze more efficiency from the thinning value of their current business models. Though it would be a brave CEO to stand up and say, we are fucked, lets rethink our business model, for the simple reason that he – the CEO must talk up his or her business to the media, shareholders and analysts, and harvest the cash-flow for the quarterly numbers. The wholse-scale tragedy is eventually failure to act in a timely fashion means that the road crash at the end is that more; final and ugly – for everyone. Lost jobs, lost lives, and a big black-hole for institutional investors wondering how they will ever get their pension funds back.

The key points are:

[1] We live in a Read & Write culture

[2] We live in a participatory culture

[3] We live in a search economy and a semantic universe and refined data transforms how brands and people can find each other in more meaningful ways

[4] We live in the networked society Which also encompasses the glittering allure of the mobile society

This transformation Yochai Benkler argued is structural – challenging how businesses and markets will co-evolve over the oncoming decades.

[5] The networked society and the Read & Write culture dramatically alter the power relationships between society the media, and organisations.

“In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomised  but connected ‘up’ to Big Media, but not, across to each other, and now that authority is eroding”, says Journalism Professor Jay Rosen

[6] That communication technology is political

Communication power, says Manuel Castells is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society. By which he means, who has and who wields that power, can transform society. Communication technology is at the very heart of this current transformation of society – because we are seeking meaningful communication with each other, something that traditional media has failed to grasp, or crassly deployed it via Pop Idol and the X-Factor. The reality is that there there are consequences to this evolution.

[7] That interruptive, display, and image advertising is the junk mail of the 21st Century.

[8] There is no online and offline, there is no analogue vs. digital there is only blended reality – the crisis comes when there is No connectivity. Business models must reflect that fact. This has implications for how organisations construct themselves.

[9] The language and therefore the literacy that defines this networked society is different to the straight line, siloed, industrial mass media, mass consumer language and literacy.

[10] Business value is defined by (a) being: life-enabling, life-simplifying and navigational (help me navigate through the complexity of my life), (b) business models are hybrid, (c) the 4C’s: commerce, culture, community, connectivity.

Spotify, World of warcfraft, Apple Apps, Cyworld, enabling mobile services like; Girlswalker or Help Networks in Japan , are all representative of the digital elixiar of networked economics. And all these business models represent the “augmentation of information” plus, the “augmentation of experience.”

Augmented reality

Think about it like this, an ordnance survey map represents multiple layers of information, derived from various studies of an area. The map is valuable to me, as it enables me to navigate to various destinations or to take a number of critical decisions on my journey, whether by foot or otherwise. This is information is ‘augmented,’ and, its value is derived from the unique augmentation of that information. Traditional notions of what constitutes “value” are made redundant, mostly in the 10 points I have outlined. Free, was never going to work, because, media owners never understood that they were on a journey to a new type of society, that perceived value in a different way to them. Media owners failed to understand that the “furniture of advertising” must evolve from display and interruptive (useful in a broadcast mass media society) to an enabling service, in the intention economy, which also has regulatory ramifications.

Which brings me onto Engagement.

Companies have to embrace the idea of engagement – why? Because “what information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention …The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention”, wrote Herbert Simon. How do you as a media brand stay relevant in a fragmented, superglobal networked media eco-system? You have to deeply engage people, especially when we live in a a networked, participatory culture. Businesses need to become part of the fabric of peoples lives, the need for intimacy acheived through high relevancy is key. Blyk as a pioneer in mobile marketing has clearly demonstrated that intimacy is vital in the 21st Century.

Engagement – if the 20th Century was about straight line thinking around commerce, media and communications, the 21st Century will be about a no straight line approach defined as Engagement which creates deeper context and greater meaning.

Engagement is about connecting large or small communities to an idea/task/goal/passion that they want to be part of, and, that they want to share with their friends driven by a commercial or social agenda. Or, deliver information of such unique value, people are prepared to pay for it – like the FT. Or, deliver information that is so highly relevant and contextual and targeted that is starts to deliver response rates of 29%+

Engagement Communications also enables the creation of new business models that make more sense in a participatory culture of no straight lines.

Traditional media must learn to engage with this 10 point plan or they will die.

It has finally sunk in that there will not be one single replacement for the ongoing drop in “physical” music sales – in other words, the perpetual decline in CD buying. Instead, a host of new services will help plug the gap alongside sales of individual digital tracks and albums.

Networked economics is different to analogue economics, in the same way that advertising is also different in the networked society. Where and how we place value on ‘things’ is important; how we package, bundle, filter, point to, link to, enable, are all key components to success.

Industry after industry tends to eat itself before it can move forward. Rather than thinking the unthinkable about the veracity and durability of existing business models, and then moving on. There is great resistance to evolution, like Hollywood and the music industry trying to sue everyone, whom they suspect of stealing their content. Whereas a Dutch government survey discovered that sharing drives economic success. I wonder what the bill for lawyers fees is in the music industry? Perhaps that money in most cases would have been better spent on R&D? Just a thought.

Richard Wray goes on to mention Spotify, that has already 2 million users/subscribers in the UK, and apparently double that number in Europe. They have achieved this in less than 6  months. Its success has spurred Microsoft into action.

Following in the wake of Last.fm and We7, Spotify has made it easy for people to get the music they want to hear when they want to hear it, helping to lure people away from illegal file-sharing websites.

And Spotify are working on a mobile enabled service, now this gets interesting. As Nokia’s Comes with Music, must be feeling a little queasy. Why? Because Comes with Music is a shadow of what a music service should be. And in Australia, the handsets that Comes with Music are selling successfully, but few are turning on the service? (Spotify raises a warchest)

music executives hope it will prove to be rather more successful than the attempt by Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, to introduce its own unlimited download service, Comes With Music, last year. Amid widespread confusion about the service – caused by a marketing campaign one music executive criticised by saying “you had to be a real music anorak to understand what they were wittering on about” – it has underperformed the industry’s expectations.

It is in fact very simple why it has underperformed, I always said Comes with Music, would be a success in spite of itself. But, for music executives they must understand Nokia, wants to shift handsets, not music, therefore, its movtivation to produce a world class music service is low. The commercial offering is testament to that, a ‘thin value offering.’ Not that Nokia would admit this. Whereas, Spotify or Last.FM are highly motivated. Steve Jobs approached Nokia when working on the iTunes service, he was shown the door, the rest they say is history – perhaps the iPhone was Jobs response to that encounter.

Last.FM or Spotify have understood that “FREE” is not the kicker, its the quality of the service, that ‘enables’ its users in a rich variety of ways. Playlists, recomendations, presonalisation, discovery, contextualisation, location, sharing are again part of this new vocabulary.

We then move onto ISP’s, and the green shoots of unlimited download music services. Virgin has signed a deal with Universal, and Sky is working on its own masculine offering. It is the ‘mammoth customer bases and marketing muscle, combined with the existence of long term billing relationships that is key in this particular area of the evolution of music, writes Richard Wray. The Isle of Man is considering implementing a plan that allows people to download unlimited music in return for a basic tax to ISP’s of £1.00 per month, in an effort to find a way to solve illegal music piracy.

Back to the digital elixiar of commerce, I would have thought studying Cyworld in Korea might have been a good idea for music exec’s, in understanding how to make music work within the context of digital economics.

The model is hybrid, networked and connected. It must be about being; life enabling, life simplifying and navigational. The model is specialised and it must do one thing; motivate its users of the service to advocate. I wonder how much advocacy Comes with Music gets?

SB: Right now there seems to be a lot of confusion between social media and the definition of community. The idea of community is right now as fairly elusive one and is being bandied about like it’s some sacrosanct term. Community built around consumption is, for me fairly transitory. It reminds of an unruly mob during the time of the Paris Commune. We’re  not going to get a whole lot of sense out of this right now.

Then there’s these dire warnings coming from people like Forrester, that brands will be excluded from consumer choice because somehow they are now being defined by communities and no longer by the brand owners themselves. I think this is both disingenuous and untrue. Forcing brands out of their hands via social media created communities is only part of the story. While even as early as 2005 Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore warned marketers, in their prescient work ‘Communities Dominate Brands‘, that if they didn’t cut loose the shackles of the traditional advertising agency and TV network model they would lose their brands. I’m seeing many of the same warnings again this year, particularly in the wake of the great financial crisis. But what real, if any, changes have we seen to this paradigm? No brands have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t have a social media strategy or because they continued advertising in traditional media.

JB: Brands may not fall by the wayside as such, but brands will become stronger because of their consumer engagement strategies. For example, the well known Dell Hell scenario certainly impacted on that organisation negatively, but by engaging with the community they came back stronger and more relevant to their client base. If they hadn’t done that who knows where that organisation would have been.

Some brands come to social media like Dell in a ‘reactive’ fashion knowing they now need to engage with consumers due to a negative event/issue. Other brands initiate the online engagement strategy ‘proactively’, understanding it will add value to their knowledge base, understanding the client better, product development and customer service.

SB: Ahonen and Moore predicted the consumer and their connected communities, would select the products and brands that are engaged in the most relevant dialogue with them. Somehow this would become the centre of a new modern and sustainable marketing model. While I think there are some massive shifts occurring,  I don’t think we’re quite there yet with this because I’m not sure anyone understands these kinds of ROIs yet.

Metrics, metrics, metrics. I can’t count so I am unable to help, but the fact is one can see where commerce is to be made, if one digs around a bit. And the big question is what is advertising and marketing in the 21st Century? When we live in a search economy, a participatory culture, where 25% of al media is made by us and there are 3.5 billion mobile phones of the planet. Networked economics?

Some called Tomi and I polemicists – I like to think we highlighted something critically important for brands, business and organisations. Remember our subtitle was, “business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century”. This went way beyond in my view the social media paradigm that so many are so now engaged in.

And here’s an article on education and AR

Slightly different from AR but connected to the education theme is a post Henry Jenkins made in June of this year, he writes

From the Learning Games Network (LGN) comes an interesting inspiration for user-generated content. A recently established 501(c) (3) non-profit organization, established by former MIT CMS Director of Special Projects Alex Chisholm, the MIT Education Arcade’s Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Kurt Squire, LGN was formed to spark innovation in the design and use of video games for learning. In addition to bringing together an integrated network of educators, designers, media producers, and academic researchers who all have a hand in creating and distributing games for learning, they’re also bringing forth opportunities for youth to contribute to conversations, research, and development. It’s a no brainer for today’s students to share their perspectives in a more participatory role as the future of education is shaped.

Henry outlines two intiatiatives that are co-creation and collaboratively based. One is a film project the other called Design Squad, allowing students to work together on gaming design and iteration.

And here is an interview on augemented reality learning Henry conducted with Eric Klopfer, here is an excerpt

In early February, a powerful demonstration of augmented reality took place at Boston’s Museum of Science. Eric Klopfer, an MIT professor of urban studies and planning, along with a team of researchers from the Education Arcade (an MIT-based consortium devoted to promoting the pedagogical use of computer and video games) conducted what they called “a Hi-Tech Who Done It.” The activity was designed for middle-school kids and their parents. Participants were assigned to teams, consisting of three adult-child pairs, and given a handheld. For the next few hours, they would search high and low for clues of the whereabouts and identity of the notorious Pink Flamingo Gang. Thieves have stolen an artifact and substituted a fake in its place. Thanks to museum’s newly installed Wi-Fi network and the players’ location-aware handhelds, each gallery offered the opportunity to interview cyber-suspects, download objects, examine them with virtual equipment, and trade their findings.

Each parent-child unit was assigned a different role–biologists, detectives, or technologists–enabling them to use different tools on the evidence they gathered. As I followed the eager participants about the museum, they used walkie-talkies to share information and to call impromptu meetings to compare notes; at one point, a hyperventilating sixth grade girl lectured some other kid’s parents about what she learned about the modern synthetic material found in the sample picked up near the shattered mummy case. Racing against time and against rival teams, the kids, parents in tow, sprinted from hall to hall.

I was with one of the teams when they solved the puzzle. A young girl thrust her arms in the air and shouted, “We are the smartest people in the whole museum!” What a visceral experience of empowerment! The same girl said that everyone else in her family was smart in science but that on this occasion, she felt like a genius.

Here is an interview with Eric