Social media and mobile bootcamp

Get your boots on and come on over to the Hospital on 16th Feb for an intimate and proactive session on how mobile plays, or should play a key role in any marketing communications strategy vs. being a peripheral addendum.

I will run the day and we will use case histories and the information presented in the day to reflect on your current marketing and business challenges where you can begin to identify previously unidentified opportunities.

The case histories are wide and diverse, and are a means by which we can collectively work through new solutions for all attendees. I promise it will be a fun day. And whether you know a little or a lot – you are all welcome. And remember when mobile does a play a role in marketing and you get it right a 29% response rate is not unusual.

Don’t expect to be passive

More information here

This is what you will get out of the day

1. Achieve a comprehensive understanding of how to drive business success – by better understanding; the logic and the language of the networked society, and how that effects the ways in which we connect, communicate, share knowledge and information, and how that fundamentally changes the way you think about marketing strategies are conceived and executed .

2.Open up your collective minds towards the possibilities of mobile marketing and, in particular, help to develop solutions on what relevant mobile marketing looks like.

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Advertising, Data, Economics, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Generation C, Marketing, Mobile

System failure – agriculture

Part of the premise of No Straight Lines (video), is that there is an entire system failure of an industrial approach to everything that we do. Part of that failure relates to agriculture. Patrick Holden spoke about it very eloquently at the DO Lectures last year.

Photograph:Mike McGregor

Joel Salatin is America’s most celebrated pioneer of chemical-free farming and the Observer article about him provided much food for thought. Food Inc. comes up almost immediately…

Food, Inc suggests some shocking links between big government and big business in the food industry, along with some appalling statistics. For instance, in the 1970s, the top five beef packers controlled 25% of the market; now the top four control more than 80% – meaning that if ever meat is tainted by bacteria or chemicals it has the potential to reach vast numbers of people; in 1972, 50,000 food safety inspections were conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration, and three decades later that number had gone down to 9,164; 70% of all processed foods have some genetically modified ingredient; in 2007, E coli from food affected 73,000 Americans – something the film correlates directly with the increase in consumption of processed foods and the scale and cleanliness of the country’s huge industrial slaughterhouses. But beyond the statistics, the sheer sight of carcasses being dunked in ammonia, endlessly and mechanically, would make any meat eater want to stop eating meat. The very banality of it – the fact that we could, the filmmakers suggest, change the world with every bite yet somehow refuse to – is horrifying.

Salatin discusses the “people-are-animals movement” – he says that [1] the industrial farming of animals is nothing short of horrific never being concerned, as he calls it with, “the pigness of a pig” – [2] he says we have become so urbanised many many people have lost all sight and context of how food is produced. And, that he says,

really gives you a very jaundiced view of cycles of life – death, regeneration.

Tools for annihilation

He makes a direct correlation between the type of food people eat and the chronic illnesses people are suffering especially in the US – though frankly the UK is not far behind. “With industrial meat”, he says, “you’re drugging yourself at dinner everyday.” Salatin also points to the Rajputana desert in India, a desert handmade by man by the overgrazing of cattle. And in today’s world, in our time, words like Bovine spongiform encephalopathy he suggests is nature’s language screaming to us: ENOUGH!

It is well worth a read and asks the big question of how one might reprogram systems and processes that are kinder to us all and are therefore more sustainable. Of course the big agri-companies that have a vested interest in extracting cash from your pocket, and, ultimately it seems, the very air from your lungs are not really interested in that do-goody nonsense. But that’s ok as the tobacco industry also thought it had got away scott free too.

Salatin says we can feed the world but not by industrial methods. Its again about people, and in this instance, hyperlocal networks.

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Ethics, Government & Politics, Law, Marketing, Philosophy, Society, Strategy, Trends

The story of txtEagle and the networked organisation

We posted about txtEagle recently here Nathan Eagle, explains his extraordinary story, and, the extraordinary story of how our world is being transformed by mobile communications. Nathan’s personal fascination is the African continent he talks about how Mpesa and SMS Media are transforming society. 30% of Rawandians pay for their electricity by the mobile device, and many more water pumps can be bought as they can be bought via the mobile. And he then goes onto talk about his compamy txtEagle.

This of course is something that Tomi Ahonen has discussed for many years @ Communities Dominate Brands.

For me also there is a connection in Nathans work and that of Local Motors and also Company Command where the business, organisational and marketing process is designed from a participatory networked context vs an linear industrial context.

Read The Glittering Allure of the Mobile Society (download here)

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Convergence, Data, Distribution, Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Mobile, Engagement Organisations, Engagement Research, Government & Politics, Marketing, Media, Mobile, Social Marketing Intelligence, Social Networks, Society, Strategy, Trends, Uncategorized

Cambridge technology cooler than the Apple tablet?

Cambridge produces some extraordinary technology. So I am glad to celebrate that.

Its engagement as technology even into the automotive industry. Is it a disruptive technology? Minority Report springs to mind. And its twitter and wifi enabled.

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Posted in: Engagement Marketing, Engagement Research, Engagement Sciences, Media, Trends, Web/Tech

Networked government – could reboot Britain

CFA is the latest wave in the growing government 2.0 movement, joining the ranks of Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s Data.gov site and innovation contests like Apps for Democracy and Apps for America, where citizens can create shared applications using public-sector data and win prizes.

Like these Gov 2.0 models and other open government initiatives, CFA seeks to build a platform that demolishes the wall between governments and the people they serve. But a key difference with CFA is that Pahlka hopes to develop solutions that allow citizens to create their own data rather than build applications from government-generated data.

And does that make sense?

Pahlka says people should think of government as a platform for interactivity, where the citizens personally affected by the city’s problems can help create the solutions.

Via government technology

Rebooting Britain (here) and (here) and (here).

But you could say it is already happening

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Posted in: Convergence, Darwin, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Education, Engagement Organisations, Engagement Politics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Mobile, Participation, Politics, Society, Strategy, Trends, Web/Tech

GSK and the exporting of mental illness

After writing about Naomi Klein yesterday and the superbranding of politics. I came across a thought piece in New Scientist called Invasion of the mind snatchers by Ethan Watters.

His story is one that around the world in different cultures, we experience depression, and describe mental trauma in a rich variety of ways, for example a,

Nigerian man might experience a culturally distinct form of depression by describing a “peppery” feeling in his head, while a Chinese farmer might speak only of shoulder or stomach aches. Salvadorean women refugees suffering psychological trauma after a long civil war, on the other hand, often experience something called calorias, a feeling of intense body heat.

For a long time, psychiatrists and medical anthropologists studying mental illness in different cultures found that mental illnesses are not evenly distributed globally, and do not take the same form from place to place. Unfortunately, mental health professionals in the US, who dominate the global discussion about how mental illnesses are categorised and treated, have often ignored or dismissed these differences.

Watters argues that what big pharma is doing is reaching to the world and describing peoples well-being in their own terms for their own benefit.

local versions of mental illnesses are now being homogenised into American versions at an extraordinary rate.

This for me is when one can refer to the dysfunctional nature of an industrial system – mass markets no longer defined by ones territory, and that’s OK – but when the corporation becomes more important then those that it is meant to serve you kind of think the game is up. Watters expands his thinking in Crazy Like US. Laurence Kirmayer wrote

The clinical presentation of depression and anxiety is a function not only of patients’ ethnocultural backgrounds, but of the structure of the healthcare system they find themselves in and the diagnostic categories and concepts they encounter in mass media and in dialogue with family, friends and clinicians,” Kirmayer wrote later in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

In other words, there is a great deal here about the context of identity, in relation to the culture one lives in etc., All a bit of a pain in the backside when all one wants to do is shift vary large quantities of something. Watters tells to the story of how the pharmaceutical giant GSK redefined mental health issues in Japan to sell its drug Paroxetine. The result, as reported by Watters and Kirmayer was,

“What I was witnessing was a multinational pharmaceutical corporation working hard to redefine narratives about mental health,” Kirmayer said. “These changes have far-reaching effects, informing the cultural conceptions of personhood and how people conduct their everyday lives. And this is happening on a global scale. These companies are upending long-held cultural beliefs about the meaning of illness and healing.”

Now is that a good thing? As we have witnessed when people are cut adrift from culture (here) and (here) that they can identify with, when they face a world in which they are unsure and uncertain – terrible things can happen, as people struggle to make sense of a world in which they are fearful. For example until postmodern times, we dealt with problems that had their origins in relation to the other or the outside in a concrete way and in imagination problems tended to come from people with psychosis or personality disorders. A friend of mine, a clinical psychologist, says, we are still getting those problems but what has changed for some people are the triggers to illness, in so much as people who do not have a strong inner sense of self tend to feel more fragmented more easily and the idea of self construction is very threatening to these types of people. She goes on

These people seem to need more direct human contact to help them to define themselves and years ago would have been defined and lived within the confines of their families, villages, social classes or friends, with daily personal interaction reinforcing that. So, for instance, we see a lot of phobias and depressions, particularly problems such as social phobia that are linked to this fearfulness of how to be in the world and whether one is acceptable or not.

So I wonder what makes it a good idea to help other cultures be more like us – its appears that we have enough problems of our own?

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Posted in: Culture, Economics, Ethics, Government & Politics, Health, Identity, Marketing, Science, Society, Sociology

Obama and the superbranding of politics

My god Naomi Klein takes me back – No Logo is up there for anyone who is remotely interested in brands. And were I to draw up a time line of books I have read and how each book subsequently shaped my thinking – No Logo is at the start.

Here in this powerful piece on brands, marketing and politics Klein forces us to consider once again the power of brands, and their intersection with; truth, trust and ethics. The ability for a brand to shape a message to create a perspective and desire and then treat that as a ‘truth’ is well documented here. For me, Tony Blair and the branding of the Iraq War springs to mind.

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his “Yes We Can!” slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is “big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy”. And then their highest compliment: “Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player.”

And, this may not be popular – in fact I hope its not true.

Yet rereading No Logo after 10 years provides many reminders that success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting than the quality of being cool. Many of the superbrands and branded celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or are in deep crisis today. The Obama brand could well suffer a similar fate. Of course many people supported Obama for straightforward strategic reasons: they rightly wanted the Republicans out and he was the best candidate. But what will happen when the throngs of Obama faithful realise that they gave their hearts not to a movement that shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political party, one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for affordable health care, and Wall Street’s addiction to financial bubbles before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have been saved with a better bailout?

But can you fix a broken system? In No Straight Lines I argue that we are indeed in the toxic tail end of the industrial society. The breakdown is systemic. Klein worries deeply that the biggest risk is that people respond with deep cynicism particularly she writes, ‘among the young people for whom the Obama campaign was their first taste of politics.’

But perhaps she concludes, ‘Obamamania will end up being what the US president’s advisers like to call “a teachable moment”. The moment when The Prez and his staff realise the system is broken – and then someone has to press the Reboot button. Then Klein touches on a point that I have obsessed over in the last 15 months – that we are in fact in the process of rebooting the system. Which is what No Straight Lines explores, how do we reboot the system? What is the framework by which we need to rebuild this world? Where do we look? How do you design a world around the needs of people and humanity rather than the corporation? Making good commerce is not a sin, but there is a way that we can do this that does not consume and subsume everything else in its path.

In fact I am reminded of the Chairman of Cadbury being interviewed last week, after the announcement that the board had accepted Krafts bid for the company. The chairman said this is a bitter sweet moment for me. Sweet because as a chairman to the board I must maximise shareholder return and my shareholders are very happy. But we never did get onto the bitter part, I wonder why?

She writes,

What the election and the global embrace of Obama’s brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous appetite for progressive change – that many, many people do not want markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe passionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part of a political project larger than themselves.

Klein’s piece asks this question – Is it so that, Obama is not the first, but is in fact, the last of a kind? Is he our bridge, Our gateway to something different. We don’t want to go back to the way things used to be, we are in need of something else, a return to the Enlightenment on terms that are relevant and specific to our time – a view espoused by Richard Sennett. And for those that believe this is a recent development, outside of the 2 world wars, humanity has struggled for identity in a modern and then post modern world. We have worked it out for ourselves this dirty little secret that bling, and shopping does not make us happy, inevitably, something’s gotta give. And the “anti-globalisation movement”, which in fact was a voice far more subtle and complex as regards its issues than its nom de guerre suggested. Was only snuffed out, as the War on Terror got underway, crushing any form of dissent in its path. But as Klein’s final conclusion is telling as we are in the process of inverting the hierarchical process. Communication technologies can be wielded as powerful political agents of change.

As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: “Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.”

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Posted in: Advertising, Books, Darwin, Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Education, Engagement Marketing, Engagement Politics, Ethics, Government & Politics, Law, Marketing, Media, Participation, Philosophy, Politics, Trends

I get a 70% royalty for publishing my book

Quite extraordinary, I thought when reading about how Amazon is reaching out to authors in a manner that completely disintermediates publishing companies. And publishers as we know them are not happy campers at the moment.

Arjan from Freedom Lab linked to this fascinating story about Amazon. For me in fact, it seems every single business model, built around controlled distribution by a toll road approach to content, knowledge and information that is done in a linear context is – done for.

Few will survive.

http://www.richardross.net/

The crux of the matter,

Amazon will pay authors and publishers a royalty of 70% of the list price of Kindle books, which is a far higher per-copy royalty than most authors receive on physical book sales (including the standard Kindle book royalties).

Recently I was down to some short strokes with a publisher, but the entire conversation handled over email – was – WHAT are YOU going to do for US? HOW are YOU going to market the book, how many books will YOU sell etc.? There was NO conversation about their editorial approach, etc.,

Why would I even bother continuing such a painful conversation? Communities Dominate Brands – the first book I published was marketed purely through blogging and speaking engagements. And yes Tomi we would have sold many more copies had we made a paperback version, and an audio version and a free version. Which would have = more other work$$$ not from publishing – but that is an aside.

The networked society and the economics of that society is underpinned by [1] velocity, [2] reach and [3] penetration of ideas that others find; attractive, compelling and useful. Good work, good ideas in the end – succeed. Although the Victor Meldrews of this world moan about the crap spewed forth by twitter and blogs and everything 2.0, one can’t find much room for maneuver with publishing that outputs a staggering amount of material per year in the hope that somewhere in all of that is, a blockbuster. Good work gets destroyed in the vain hope of commercial glory, and the entire reason why individuals exercise their minds and often, a great deal of time to; tell a story, deliver insight, value, knowledge, joy is forgotten by the over riding desire for Harry Potter scale profits.

Whereas the Amazon offer is about velocity, reach and the penetration/adoption of good ideas that plug into immediate and available translation technologies like say: Slavic, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese and Mandarin, and then we are off to the races. `but if your work is rubbish it fails then you have no-one but yourself to blame. Forests have not been felled needlesly for epic failures and we could save that precious carbon. But if you hit the WE REALLY LIKE IT BUTTON. Then its G&T’s all the way to the bank. This is how it works,

* The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99. This is designed to force a big difference between the physical-book price and the Kindle price, which traditional publishers are currently desperate to avoid (good luck).

* This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book. Ditto.

* The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights. This gets around the typical regional royalty deals, putting pressure on publishers worldwide.

* Books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. This one is aimed at other e-readers, a slew of which have recently hit the market.

Kindle does scare me in many ways, because of the issues around data, and because of privacy but it also is a potential leveler of good vs poor and helps me make the decision that the £26.50 price tag that lingers next to the ISBN number that promises value is not worth the money.

This does not stop me with my limited edition book printed in cold metal and the mp3 version. What it does stop is others meddling with your creativity and your product.

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Posted in: Books, Convergence, Darwin, Distribution, Economics, Engagement Marketing, Generation C, Link Economy, Marketing, Trends, Web/Tech

The future of work=TxtEagle

By the end of the month, a company called txteagle will be the largest employer in Kenya. The firm, started in its original form in 2008 by a young computer engineer named Nathan Eagle and, as of this coming June, based in Boston, will have 10,000 people working for it in Kenya. Txteagle does not rent office space for these workers, nor do the company’s officers interview them, or ever talk to most of them.

And, in a sense, the labor that the Kenyan workforce does hardly seems like work. The jobs – short stretches of speech to be transcribed or translated into a local dialect, search engine results to be checked, images to be labeled, short market research surveys to be completed – come in over a worker’s own cellphone and the worker responds either by speaking into the phone or texting back the answer. The workers can be anyone with a cellphone – a secretary waiting for a bus, a Masai tribesman herding cattle, a student between classes, a security guard on a slow day, or one of Kenya’s tens of millions of unemployed. The jobs take at most a few minutes and pay a few cents each (payment is sent by cellphone as well), but a dedicated worker can earn a few dollars a day in a part of the world where that is a significant sum.

Writes the Boston Globe. I was pleasantly surprised to come across Nathan Eagle as I had come across him when he had been working on his PHD a few years ago. Txteagle say,

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Posted in: 7th Mass Media, Data, Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Mobile, Engagement Organisations, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Health, Link Economy, Media, Participation, Social Networks, Society, Trends

Was the promise made good for society through 2.0?

Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist — he popularized the term “virtual reality” — wonders if the Web’s structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism,” by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity.

Writes the New York Times

It is powerful stuff

He blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract.

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

This is a very thoughtful and insightful. The pendulum always swings equally in two directions. Personally I still believe that we are renegotiating the power relationships between ourselves, organisations, either commercial or political as we have rejected and now have the tools to effectively do so an industrial top down, managerial approach to how we live our lives.

Laniers point is based upon ethics and literacy, there must always be rules of engagement. Transitition is always difficult, protracted, great resistance is met with great energy to change.

The FUCK YOU Brigade meeting up with the FUCK OFF MY LAND incumbents will always result in collateral damage. Innocent bystanders get hurt, whilst others will always unscrupulously take advantage of the misfortune others. Look at loan sharks in poverty stricken areas, because banks will not give loans to certain sectors of society – Great White sharks feed off those on the breadline. And so, in the same way the networked society just scales differently.

So has it all gone Pete Tong? My view is no and I guess it depends on how Utopian you were in the first place?

Lanier does make some interesting points,

In the book Mr. Lanier offers some general proposals for helping content providers, like the establishment of a universal system for micropayments administered by the government. He’d be glad to see the system run privately, he told me, but there are obstacles to PayPal or anyone else establishing a universal system, so it needs to be a government function akin to maintaining paper currency. All of which raises some more questions for you to consider:

1. If there were a simple system of micropayments, would you be willing to pay a little to read the New York Times online? (You can explain what “a little” means to you.)

2. Should such a system of micropayments be run by the government?

3. Would newspaper readers be better off in the long run if newspapers charged online readers directly instead of relying so heavily on advertising revenues?

There is a something relevant here, micropayments for culture and information – as someone once said to me, ‘when civilisations die the only thing left is art,’ so we better work hard at working out what next looks like. In the same way that the sheet ice that scraped and shaped our planet into what it is today, networked and converged communication technologies are doing the same thing to our industrial world, releasing humanity from the frozen wastes of the toxic tail end of the industrial revolution. Pointing us towards a life better lived.

Negotiating the path towards that new place is always a bit dicey – but what I see, if one cares to look hard enough is that there are entirely new ways which are; faster, cheaper, more effective, and, more egalitarian that what had gone before.

Over exuberance is a natural state of affairs when you get a new train set especially when we a migrating to a more participatory, cooperative, reciprocal model of what our society might look like.

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Posted in: Alan Moore Speaking, Convergence, Culture, Darwin, Distribution, Economics, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Education, Engagement Organisations, Ethics, Government & Politics, Identity, Media, Networks, Participation, Philosophy, Society, Trends, Uncategorized