Creative Agency Secrets

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. 

Peter Eckert, projekt202

Chris Bernard, Microsoft

Kevin Flatt – Tribal DBB [agency of the year]
Brooke Nonberg – Pixel
Garrick Schmitt -Avenue A Razorfish
[I came because this session is supposed to be about the intersection of the traditional agency and the new online agency and how they and clients transition].

PE - if you are nimble it’ll be easy to move to this new paradigm.  The culture is changing and the internet is becoming mainstream and so this is the key for agencies with specialisations that fill a niche but others will find it hard to move out to this space.

CB – Any creative route or client if you don’t understand it you will risk falling behind and your voice stops being heard.  Step out and learn – recipe for continued evolutionary success.  

PE -it is going to be very hard to stay up with all the new social media outlets / trends…
BN – it comes down to ideas, she has seen powerful things from unexpected agencies.  There are wonderful things out there.  Either you have the client relationships and ideas or you let politics get in the way.   The team works hard together.
KF – Tribal was born out of DBB and the changing environment.  Because it is part of an organisation with a long history there was a lot of learning, transferred over.  Our medium is digital but we aren’t ignorant of the wider world of advertising.  Across all our offices we can see digital and all forms of communication.    The most interesting are the agencies that forget about the medium but focus on the communication and the engagement you seek.
GS – Creative ideas – you need a mastery of the data and the understanding of a user interacts with touchpoints and the influence of each.  How to change message and campaign structure to adapt to each one, and what people are saying online and on Facebook etc.  This medium is still evolving, data and how to make the judgements against it is native to the net and this platform and it will be harder for traditional agencies to apply their skills over to it.

BN – the net is just one channel not ALL the digital channels – there is so much.  The blood will be where people think it’s just about email or a website…. the consumer is moving through all these things all the time, they don’t stop.  There won’t be one single answer.  Authentic conversations within social media channels?  It is a dangerous space to push inappropriately into these channels – social media is something that you need to have a reason to be in… Insights come also from watching what they do as well as data and conversations with real people.   Take the tone and attitude and recognise it’s about sharing freedom of speech not pushing adverts.  

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The dark underside of the internet - picking up all the things said about your brand online.  Within a short period of time things can go wrong and the internet can change.  But we can harness that open-ness for good.A future that is basically here, the near future.  If we all have access to all the photos and live video of ourselves this protects our privacy more.  Many of the tools are already available.  The unbridled stream of information “ the new superpowers”.  The great shift – we are used to small communities and cultivating reputations there but it is now moving wider.  The networks can build a very complex reputation.  It requires the viewer to do more interpretation for themselves.   You work out which are the extreme viewpoints and discount them from your overall opinion.  

How can you control your reputation? the site reputationdefender.com – they sell the lie that you can control your reputation…. Not true, you can curate it.  
Five acts
1.    Six judo moves
2.    Griefer madness
3.    A tale of two lawyers
4.    Lane Hartwell
5.    Arin Crumley

The challenge: Reputation versus privacy versus free speech.  The management of reputation often had headlong collisions with  these other needs.  
Thor runs get satisfaction.com concept if you are a company you are vulnerable to what other people can say about you…When they respond to blog posts companies can be perceived as being over-protective.  This site invites the companies and customers to participate.

Judo moves

1.     Cast a long shadow.  In a world where anyone can bear false witness, try to make sure there are lots of witnesses!  Accrue more positive content about you to inoculate yourself against bad stuff.  This is a baseline plan.  There is a context for any comment.

2.    Tell your side of the story.  Julie Melton valleywag. Record your position online and send your version to your key audience, selectively.  Be engaging and non-defensive.  Use terms like proactive, nip in the bud.  Post a reply before they have the chance to strike.

3.    A heartfelt apology.  SW Airlines has a chief apology officer!  JetBlue apologised in a third party space and left comments open.  His criticism was in the context of the apology.

4.    Sarah Lacy: no apologies.  She apologies by blaming the audience.  Google results for today and an apology video showing above the critical bloggers.

5.    Inspire an Army.  Sometimes it isn’t enough just to tell your side of the story alone – get others to tell it for you.  Mike Brown of Foundation Capital’s clients used the Funded to say how well he’d treated them and what it was like working with him.

6.    Stand for something.  Patti of Timbuk2 started using get satisfaction – free advertising on the home page we used to have a strong point of view and being ‘snarky and opinionated’ and when she rejoined the company.  “here today, gone tomorrow just like that guy who stole your virginity”  an email campaign she wrote.  Her opt in list was 110k but the concentric reverberation from the womens rape advocacy group got their teeth into it.   She took a lot of direct correspondence back to their blogs.  But other evangelists started picking it up and responding to the bloggers.  Defence from outside the employee base.  She is still trying to be amusing, funny and opinionated but a lot more careful!
7.    Celebrate your critics.  Brian Shaler BitGravity videos people criticising himself!  Celebrate the worst of the haters in your life!  
Griefer madness – people who exist to make life hell for others.  Michael Crook (got a name change), A man who exists to destroy his own reputation.   You cannot control your image online.  He used the DMCA even though he was a ‘true villain’.

[not sure how I managed to write 7 down….. time-space-continuum issues, clearly!] 

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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.  

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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…)

[I only caught the end of this talk because I got lost trying to find a way up to the 4th level from the 3rd (don't ask it really did happen!) and Dierdre Walsh was sitting by the door and sent me her notes. Cheers, Dierdre]

Overview: Marketers can no longer interrupt users with advertisements and other materials thanks to technology advancements like TIVO. Now, we need to engage users.

Here are some helpful guidelines:
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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!

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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?

| View | Upload your own

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

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