Creative Agency Secrets

What a disappointment.  I was driven to the O2 website by an advert for their new Bluebook service.

Curious, I watched the demo  and so I signed up.  Seemed a nice idea to keep all you sms updates, photos and phone numbers backed up.  

and then having gone through all the registration process, received a text with a unique code I got the immortal message 

You must be an O2 customer to use this service.

Thanks for your interest in Bluebook. The service is exclusive to O2
customers. The easiest way to become an O2 customer is to visit an O2
shop or click here to shop with O2 on line. (link to http://shop.o2.co.uk/shop/)

You may also try the following options:

• Go back to the previous page
• Go to the O2 Homepage http://www.o2.co.uk/
• Go to the O2 Sitemap http://www.o2.co.uk/sitemap

How blooming irritating is that?  you do the whole registration - they could have told me before that it was only for O2 customers.

I reckon that opening the service up for non-O2 customers would draw a much wider 'net' around potential customers who then might be persuaded to swap carriers because of the fantastic add-on services like Bluebook offered. 

Why is this good?

1. Offer a new service that other providers don't yet offer
2. Show prospective customers the 'inside' line on how wonderful it is to be an O2 customer
3. Create a uniquely receptive audience to switching offers
4. Undermine offers from other carriers by direct communication with their customers

Oh goodness, when will big brands realise that offering something online / digital for free to a wider audience than your own customers gives you an unique opportunity.  But they threw it away. 

And so if you are in a competitive marketplace, can you set up a service to attract new customers who might be persuaded to defect from the competition because of the excellent service you offer (particularly if the net cost to you is low) this could be a winning strategy.

Go for it.

I did a coaching session for Geraldine Grey - who is changing career direction and retraining as a real estate agent.

She has kindly allowed me to write up the key biz dev tools that I recommended to her

1. Create a strong "Brand You".  For her, this is to be 'the English Realtor' [yes she'd in USA!]
2.  Have a short list of golden questions that can help you to firstly find out whether a prospect is serious and secondly to close down sales
3. Have a strong process for keeping track of prospects, leads and follow-ups
4. Get all your customers to write a reference after each job and build a Net Promoter Score scorecard

Good luck, Gerry - hope it all goes well for you.

Read this presentation on the Art of Self-Branding.

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I have blogged before about good and bad conference experiences .  Well have a read of this summary of SXSW from Jeremiah.

He summarised four 'incidents' when the audience moved against what had been planned by the organisers as a groundswell of opinion in a new direction.  

What I found interesting was the concept of a "backchannel" a place online where participants can exchange comments in real time on what they are hearing and what they think.  This is a new move towards a fluid construct in a conference making an almost 3-D experience of evolving sessions and making a link from a traditional conference towards a BarCamp -type experience. 

Kathy Sierra. …. being really gracious talking to 'fans' in a corridor.  She says it's been a year since she blogged and she isn't about to start again… but has some plans do to video online as a producer rather than being in front of the camera. 

And Jonny Goldstein of Par-tay just interviewed me for his blog / TV show.  Cool Dude works with Scott Stead in DC… 

(or five huge egos at one table….)

Chris Heuer   Partner,   The Conversation Group
Tara Hunt   Co-Founder,   Citizen Agency
Jeremiah Owyang  Forrester
Deborah Schultz   Founder/Chief Catalyst,   deborahschultz.com
David Parmet   Owner,   Marketing Begins At Home LLC
Hugh MacLeod   Grand Pooh-Bah,   gapingvoid.com

How to market into community without appearing totally overbearing?
How do you build the community around what you are doing for your company?

TH - the more I gave away my expertise the more expertise I seemed to get.   this giving away stuff led me to give my time to creating new communities (barcamp and co-working). People open up their offices and lives to me when I do this.  Social capital - the value of the relationships and your reputation. We are raising our own social capital with what we are doing. online it is about how much you can give away - the best way to get your own stuff you should give more away to help others.  You need a patronage model of people in large companies who are prepared to pay for it.

CH - you need a way to sustain your life as well as giving things away free.  Tools creating for Web 2.0 is democratising and enabling good to be given back. 

HM - STormhoek - sent out 200 bottles of wine to bloggers who asked for it from Hugh's website.  And then they sponsored the geek dinners.I never thought of the drinkers as 'the stormhoek community' it was just wine drinkers - but the conversations happening around the wine were interesting.  Social gestures beget social objects and these beget social markers.  The new N95 and IPhone are territorial demarcations in the phone geek community.

DS - spend your marketing budget by getting out and meeting customers e.g. go to conferences and see what's happening at the fringe.  Find the customers who love you and talk to them.  In start-ups you have a low ratio of employees: customers don't put up an FAQ, use humans to answer questions.  This is smart marketing and customer support.  FAQs are for big organisations. (more…)

A general theory of creative relativity….. not a universal theory!

Coudal Partners

Part One – when we evaluate a work of art it is difficult to get to the heart of the creative process because there are many moving pieces….. e.g. film includes many people’s contributions. 

Booking Bands – a word game to combine the title of a book with the name of a band and try to make it fun.  “the Who moved my cheese” “Dexy’s midnight typerunners” “the old man and the seedcake” “ET Rex” . Try this for yourself - it is really entertaining…

This is the 'quantum mechanics' of creativity because it represents the most elemental particle of creativity.  I know HOW you are thinking about it… you are either holding a book title and reeling through band titles trying to find one to match – or the reverse.  You are not randomly picking one of each because the chances of any one fitting in an entertaining way are too slim.  There is a variable and a constant and the association makes it work.  The known and the unknown and association is the action (creative event).

Part Two – the ignition (big bang).  Sometimes you may find it hard to price your services – when you have the inspiration and it just happens versus one where you really have to slog out an answer.  how do you value the first versus the second event?

The initial moment of enthusiasm about a new idea – this is the juice that amplifies the unknown/known.  The creative process comes from inside and the moment of ‘divine’ intervention comes with great curiosity and enthusiasm.  The moment of ‘falling in love’.  This amplifies the association make in part one of the theory.  Blow up the association and amplify it.

Part Three – now we need to communicate the ‘thing’ and it’s powerful but unformed.   Light to the power of 3 gives a blast under it. 

Light to power of 1 = the art of metaphor… easy to explain.  

Light to the power of 2 = executive summary a powerful shorthand. 

Light to the power of 3 – judgment and aesthetic decisions (taste?).

The association between the known and the unknown amplified by the enthusiasm we feel for a new idea divided by light to the power of 3 to give it energy.  

(more…)

Heath Row - Doubleclick - as a blogger he wants to do more for small companies

Darren Rowse – ProBlogger has a book coming out “ProBlogger Secrets for Blogging”

Wendy Piersal – E Moms at Home, an internet magazine

Jim Benton – VP sales for AdBrite

Rett Clevenger – Backcountry.com online marketing mgr incl affiliate marketing
Focus on Monetisation for Blogging and small publishers – affiliate, display, affiliate, sponsorship

Ads are only one piece of monetisation for blogs:
DR – two areas you can make money directly by ads or affiliates or indirect revenues by selling yourself.  Direct ways – advertising esp cost per click contextual e.g. Google Adsense (biggest money maker for most of his readers), Affiliate programme like Amazon where referrals get a small fee.  Advertising, as your blog grows you may get approached directly and selling display ads, sponsorships – a banner per month to align brands with yours, pop-0ups, RSS advertising in the feed, text links can also be sold (google doesn’t like this).  Affiliate programmes, writing reviews and being paid, selling classifieds e.g. job boards, merchandise, donations or tips (doesn’t work well for most), membership areas – secret bonus areas.

Indirectly – sell yourself as a consultant, book deal, selling a product, training, workshops, conference.  (more…)

Key learnings:  Old media is giving out a strongly negative message about new media.  Learning teamworking and collaboration are key skills for work in the future.  TV in future where online has more depth than the broadcast show. Why Obama uses the language of 'we' versus Hillary's language of 'I'.  Video games may be the central civic force for this generation.

Is there a further wave of backlash against US youth culture for the current generation?  We are overdue a backlash – studying informal learning by Macarthur Foundation.  Parents want to think their children are dumb – because they go into areas that weren’t part of our childhood.  Children are looking for a space to exert autonomy and exert identity beyond the watchful eyes of parents.  Parents see the engagement with technology and seeing fear.   A conservative reaction to alien experience leading to moral panic.
New literacies are emerging that are powerful and not understood.  E.g. WoW, Second Life.  Parents want to be told that this is OK - but in print media the dominant message is that this is worrying.  [link back to ]

Can we develop empirical measures for these new skills / literacies.  Not reading skills but usability and mastery of new technology adoption. School skills are assessed on the basis of the autonomous individual learner not today’s collective intelligence, processing collaboratively.  Everyone has some expertise that they can contribute.  You can’t know everything that is in the textbook…. and this lack leads to disappointing scores on a traditional model.    

Future – teamworking, pooling knowledge.. this is how we play and work but not about how we teach students today.  A fundamental shift between learning and knowing.  Jenkins was trained in cultural studies….. some new technologies and online stuff seems to be rubbish but the challenge is to find out why it has meaning to the people who engage in it.  What I think is not relevant.  What does it mean to engagement that is alien to me?  People are usually doing things for a reason… find it.

Quick aside vote for The Wire versus Lost…. but I watch Heroes!

(more…)

Key learning:
Community is Grown not built. “building community” is for architects not online. Read the wisdom of crowds. And build the tools people can use and trust them to use appropriately.

You may remember Fray from very old web. Derek started it in 1996 as a live story telling site. Each story ended with the question “when has this happened to you?” . This started his interest in community online and how to invite participation.

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” Hunter S Thompson

Today the web enables people to get exposure that used to the exclusive preserve of adults, authorities and experts. So what can you do if you want crowds on your site?

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Content owners have 3 lies they tell themselves when confronted with free content:

1. Everyone on the net is an idiot.

2 Good stuff is too hard to find

3. You can’t make any money.

1. Everyone on the net is an idiot… for past 10 years the mainstream media only focused on this. But refute it using Google – value based on number of links to pages… proxy for votes and voters are important. Kim Pedersen’s Backyard Monorail – 300 feet of track costing $4000. He shares what he knows for free – created a community of shared interest. Wikipedia because it was the first makes it a bad site to copy, now. But the small community of editors who do the most (0.7% of users) are key to small edits/spell checkers (tend the Drafted Postsgarden) and new users who post substantive new articles.

2. Good stuff is too hard to find. Traditional ways of finding good stuff is human editors (magazines / newspapers), non-traditional editors took this and applied to the web (Amazon where users were reviewers) and moderators. Computers took on the task (text search), Google’s page rank (more sophisticated weighted by incoming link) and technorati. But the middle path of hybrid using both human and computers is where most of the opportunity lies today (Flickr interestingness, community vote and best of both). Flickr algorithm is voting by actions (going to look at photos). Displayed by leader board by day. This created a competition and people trying to gain the system. Later they made a 7 day version, recent randomised of 9 images.

The Wisdom of crowds – the number 1 book to read. It is about how people can use groups to be smart. Summarised as selfish behaviour aggregated for a common good. The interaction is simple – key. Simple questions. “did you like this?”. You need diversity across the spectrum to make this work. But selfishness is important – design for selfishness [we think our products are awesome and anyone who disagrees is an idiot!] High on our own supply. If you can create a desire for the user to put their voice onto something you may succeed. Rewards can be ego or money.

Assignment Zero using wiki software collaboration with Wired Magazine – crowdsouring stories. The crowd didn’t want to participate by writing stories. So they changed to asking for research… asked people to sign up for interviews (instant response!). Doing an interview was a simple task compared to writing something. Read a list of people and decide to take action by asking a few questions… their editors condensed into print-worthy text. Using crowdsourcing as a cost-saving measure doesn’t work. Communities must be cultivated, respected and managed if they are to create economic value” Jeff Howe who coined the phrase crowdsourcing.

3. You can’t make any money. Threadless is a great example – t shirt store with no designers, just an interface. The best get printed, bought. A trusted middle man. Golden tag in 1 shirt per 1000 (Willy Wonker thing), member forum for people who’ve won in the past… cultivating a winner class. Have a plan with good answers ready for when you get ‘busted’!

Derek's new startup Pixish – bringing the threadless happiness to any image based contest. Cautionary tales – Yahoo games Wii site…. create niche sites pulling stories, photos and stuff tagged Wii including a strip of photos from Flickr. They didn't’ give the users any way of opting out… all sorts of things tagged Wii including Yahoo sucks, baby weeing etc… It wasn’t a legal reason. Because there was no clear way to opt out users rebelled. Copious opt ins and opt outs are needed. Need a group opt in. GM Tahoe Apprentice Campaign. User generated content to make an advert…. but users put their own captions on “Waaa? No iPod plug-in??” and you could only use their existing photos and videos… you could add text over the video. “We paved the prairies” and “The ultimate padded cell! “Global warming isn’t a pretty SUV ad”, “The Earth is now your bitch!”. They designed for their own selfishness not the participant. Narrow scope of creativity – text only. Content was greedy – couldn’t export to any other place….YouTube or your site. The audience was wrong – this should have been just GM owners not the entire internet! Cf Saturn owners club. But it worked.. really well. the microsite had 600k visitors in 3 weeks with an average 9 minutes online and many visited Chevvy.com too which was what they wanted.

Community is Grown not built. “building community” is for architects not online.

How to do it. 5 steps

1. Give people tools they want
2. Trust them to do good
3. Reward good contributions
4. Punish bad contributions
5. Expect the unexpected

(more…)

Finding the Brits at SXSW…. so far met two of the Birmingham Crowd at registration (9 am), Pete Ashton and Joanny Geary. Joanna did a brief interview with me on here new toy, the Nokia N95… hope it makes it past the cutting room floor!

1 pm Later….. with Rachel Clarke …at Bloghaus . and Adam Metz who was wearing the coolest union jack cufflinks… read closely "elegant" and "arrogant" Ha.   

Euan Spence

Stef Magdalinski (moo )