Get Shouty

Marrakesh is one of the darkest cities that I’ve ever flown into- 10 o’clock and almost nothing to see. Once you get out of the airport it’s an entirely different story, a hive of activity that you can spend hours trying to decipher.

I’m staying in a riad right in the medina, deep in the Souks about a 15 minute walk away from the main square- the Jemaa El Fna. And right now I’m tapping away on a non qwerty keyboard and across the little alley way from the internet cafe is a chicken butcher with live chickens, a beef butcher with body parts hanging from hooks. Morocco is no place for vegetarians. The alleyway itself is filled with crazy two stroke motor cycles, donkey carts, veiled women, a million cats and the call to prayer.

Must dash- more soon.

 The cathedral in Seville is the largest medieval Gothic building in the world and the view from the belltower, once a minaret, brings to life the differences between the Spain of Al-Andalus and the Spain of the Inquisition.

The courtyard, the Patio de los Naranjos was once where Muslims cleansed themselves before entering the Mosque when it was built in the 12th century. Central fountains feed an ingenious reticulation system. It is a celebration of symmetry, balance and harmony, light and order. The cathedral which now covers the site is decorated in gargoyles and inside is very dark and full of glorified images of misery and pain.

I was very glad indeed to get out in the the winter sun and see it from this distance and get this perspective- the place chilled my bones.
 

It´s a very strange beast, travelling from the third world to the first world.

I´m sitting in the VIP lounge at the Madrid train station waiting to catch the AVE train (Alta Velocidad Española,literally, “Spanish High Speed,” but also a play on the word ave, meaning “bird”)  to Seville . It can achieve speeds of up to 300 km/h (186 mph) on dedicated track. But I´m w.a.i.t.i.n.g. to get on it.

I remember that some of the first words I learned in South America was ‘form a line’ and this tradition of patiently waiting to be served holds in Spain too. Everywhere I walked today people were lined up to buy lottery tickets.

In Thailand, if you´re Hiso, you neither walk nor wait. At the end of any street you will find a phalanx of motorcycles waiting to take you any distance  more than 20 meters and it is a super fun way of cooling down in the Bangkok heat. My colleague, Ceri, tells me that this is the way she dries her hair in the morning. You can also  get to your destination much faster by these mad cutting through traffic antics as  it usually doesn´t moove much more than 7km an hour .

Today is the first day I´ve eaten in ages. I got a noxious bout of something or other in Bangkok and the 20 hours of travelling to get to Madrid didn´t help. Neither did the fact that, while I arrived, my bags didn´t. By the time I arrived at my hotel all I wanted to do was sleep, horizontally, in clean sheets, alone and not in the company of 400 people. Which I did- for about 18 hours. I guess I needed that. Thank you Hotel Urban- you were a very soft place to land.

But back to the eating. In Thailand while I love to eat like a native, it might have been the source of my troubles. In Spain I´m going there too- and I’m sure that’s why I feel so fabulous right now. Hot chocolate that really just chocolate liquidy goodness for breakfast. Lunch at a place called ‘Mueso de Jamon’ which is, you guessed it Ham Museum evidenced by hundreds of different kinds of Jamon Iberico. In Australia this stuff sells for over $350 a kilo. Here they stuff it into crunchy rolls by the handful and chuck in a cafe con laite and a freshly squeezed oj for 3 euros. I could get used to this. 

Well Interesting South is finally here. A team have put together a conference, not about brands, advertising, blogging or twitter but a wide variety of interesting, unexpected, original things. We’ve found 19 fascinating people and asked them speak for 3 or 10 minutes about something they care about. We want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, music, jokes and whatever. The idea is to be informal and fast paced.

I´m in Madrid right now and have had to put together my presentation remotely- a strange scenario of very late nights in a Bangkok hotel, food poisoning, Skype phone calls and the very kind help of my friend Tim.

It´s completely sold out which is great and we´ve also just got an email from the guy who runs TED and they may want to post some of the videos to their site which is pretty cool too.

I won´t be able to be there and see it live, but I will be able to see the night through the eyes of all of my friends, which just might mean that I get a more accurate 360 degree view of proceedings . Running events means that you´re ‘on duty’ all night and that, in combination with having a speaker slot would colour my own perceptions considerably. Now I get to see the night through a friend’s eyes, a colleague’s eyes, a speaker’s eyes, a sponsor’s eyes and through fantastic Emily’s eyes.

We will be giving you all an opportunity to check out the interestingness in the very near future as we´ve arranged a sponsor for hosting. I´ll let you know when it’s live.

UPDATE ME PLEASE! Gavin? Emily? Matt? Tim? I need the goss!

One of the fundamentals of connections planning is that all audiences are not the same. For maximum effectiveness messages and experiences should be tailored to cater to the needs and expectations of different types of people. 

The Roundtable

I’ve been asked to contribute to a Marketing Magazine roundtable discussion. The question is: “Should there be one standard measure for online audiences?”

But if all audiences are unique and granular can any interaction measurement be standardised? And would this build any actionable business intelligence for a brand?

The Knights

I have my own roundtable: Facebook, Twitter and this blog. And in the spirit of ‘it’s not what you know it’s who you know to ask’ I sent out an invitation to participate and a few of my favourite knights got back to me straight away:

Mike (via Facebook): Do you mean quantitative or qualitative? Surely you can’t have a standard with out knowing who you are measuring first? Also, not all traffic is created equal…..
http://publishing2.com/2007/01/25/not-all-traffic-is-created-equal/

Todd: Sure. There should also be a Unified Theory of Everything but they haven’t cracked it yet either. Web is complex, can’t over simplify it.

katiechatfield @Todd: better questions might be :What is important to measure? What does success look like? What’s your answer then?

Todd: Depends what the problem is. Do you ask a doctor to give you a single answer re your wellbeing? Success can mean many things depending on your market position

servantofchaos @katiechatfield you may want to achieve different things with different niches

Sara The Bargain Queen (via Facebook) :Absolutely not! 100,000 one-time readers is worth far less than 10,000 devoted regulars…

Ian (via Facebook):  Online tends to mean interactive so it’s magnitudes more difficult to measure than views/impressions/clicks. We’d have to create a set of engagement metrics - perhaps weighted to the context of the interaction & value of the individual participating

bh_Todd It’s in the interests of media / content owners to do so, but it might not mean too much for marketers.

The Holy Grail 

And that’s the sticking point of the question really- what is the value offering of online publishers? As Doug Anderson  from Neilsen  so neatly puts it:

In order for the marketplace between advertisers and sellers of media to function, both sides must agree on the key metrics that are used to measure and value audiences

So my answer is that we don’t need one standard measure, we need a matrix of measures that maps needs, goals and audiences to outcomes.

I’ve chanted and welcomed prosperity, lit incense and been very careful not to touch. I’ve ridden side saddle on a motor bike, work-shopped Thai connections ideas and am finally in front of a screen again.

All part of a day’s work. A long day.

The monk’s blessing I’m told took about 2 hours. It didn’t seem that long at the time. The round-eye farang only noticed the passage of time when our muscles had a bit of a whinge but it really just passed in the blink of an eye.

I’ve spoken before what a relief it is to be in a land where you don’t speak the language and can’t read the signs. You don’t have to engage with all of the messaging that crowds in as you pass through. You can just witness and be free from having to interpret- you can just experience the moment.

And when you loose the imperative to have to understand, you can just be. And for that lesson I’m feeling pretty grateful right now. 

I wouldn’t have thought that after a 9 hour flight to get to Bangkok that I would be quite so energised on arriving at my destination. And I wouldn’t have thought that I would have an anecdote quite so soon, but here you go…

It’s about 4 am in Sydney. It’s been a long day but I’ve finally arrived in Thailand and was having a chuckle at how easy it is to get me to follow a total stranger and get me into a car. All you need to do is hold up a print out with my name on it pretty soon after I get through the arrival gate at an airport. It doesn’t even matter if the sign implies that I somehow got married on the flight without knowing- I will still hand over my suitcase to someone who says they’re here to collect me.

Sam, the lovely driver in question, had more delights waiting for me in the car than a bottle of water and a frosty hand towel (it’s way past midnight and waaaaay hot).

Karaoke. Yep, in car karaoke. With a list of AM radio sing-a-long hits, a microphone and a video screen with follow the bouncing ball lyrics and cheesy videos. What a hilarious way to be the midnight traffic jam in Bangkok.

You see Sam and I can’t really chat about our day and fill time in what (if you let it) could be stressy circumstances. So we don’t let it. Delightfully, we both know all the words to ridiculous girl pop anthems: Dancing Queen, Material Girl, Physical…. And we sing them. Loudly.

This is no time to be cool.

Best. Cab ride. Ever.

The Kaiser knows.

What does digital strategy offer?

• an opportunity to understand the people who buy and might like to buy your product better
• a business process that will increase the effectiveness of your marketing spend
• a architectural plan of the places and experiences required to unpack the offer of a brand and connect it to people that increases value

Why do you need it?

• because you need to know the right questions to get the right answers
• because simply knowing the highest traffic-ed sites of your target audience might not solve any of the brand’s business problems
• because designing response and prompting interaction is more than media placement pointing to destination websites.

My unfavorite ‘briefs’

• What can I get for $50K? Quickly.
• What sites match our magazine strategy?
• Increase site visitation 650% and triple our subscribers. Tell us how much money we can make from serving ads to our database afterwards.

Great digital experiences that build brands and grow audiences are all about connections planning

• What are we trying to achieve? 
• What’s the core idea that makes the brand and people lean into each other?
• How can we create romance, a series of interactions, to achieve the first two ideas?

This is not technology dependant: it’s idea dependant, it’s insight dependant.

It’s just good business.

I’m writing my piece for Interesting South which examines a bit of personal insight around the barriers to really becoming fluent in a language.

Common barriers to fluency are:
- self-consciousness
- anxiety and self-censorship
- fear of making a mistake rather than getting the message across

I can’t help but thinking that these are also barriers for brands in the digital environment- that there isn’t fluency in this ‘new’ language and so people just aren’t speaking it.

The only real way to address this lack of fluency, to speak that language of your target people, is to have the discipline to give their language a go and the fortitude and resilience required to make mistakes.

You might feel exposed at first, but it’s the only way you will be able to join in the conversation later.

Tired of losing your audience due to toilet breaks? The  I Need To Go Campaign poses this question for ING- you can pick up this widget. The promise:

Paste this code into a blog post, your readers will be delighted at this convenience. Works on most blogs as well as MySpace and Facebook!

 Okaaaay.

The announcement and resulting activity (which I’ve been following here) of Google’s Open Social platform last week (and the ‘don’t track me’ movement) has got me thinking about online privacy. About how much you want people to know about your life, how much you want to know about friends and colleagues lives. Do I really want to know when anyone goes to the bathroom? Do I really want anyone else to know when I do?

What happens when we can aggregate and understand behaviour (as well as serve information) through an App?

As my friend Tim would say: What would happen to social networking if you could write a widget that would tell you how often your girlfriend visited any of her ex’s profiles?

Differentiating layers of intimacy describes degrees of trust and discretion around information. The closer you are the more access you have. Permission to access also gives permission to know and also conveys the ability to share.

As we take down the walled gardens we’re going to need some privacy screens!

 UPDATE: Nice piece of work from Colin

Paul McEnany, Gavin Heaton and Sean Howard are back with another episode.  This time they invited me to talk about the Mountain Dew brand campaign in New Zealand. 

Here are the highlights from Gavin:

• Sean leads us out and straight into trouble — man-style trouble. Well, you will see what I mean. (0:00)
• The Grim Reaper’s ugly assistant drops by (2:55) to introduce our special guest star, Katie Chatfield (3:45), talking about some of the great recent work for Mountain Dew
  • the Mountain Dew Ambassador Programme and Sponsorships are developed and managed by Brand Spanking
  • the brilliant web work done by Marker Studio
  • the behind the scenes interview shown and TVC shot by Three Drunk Monkeys
  • the MDTV episodes can be seen here
• Paul unpacks his thinking around extreme sports, brand association and niche marketing without swearing once. True (7:02)! But then, he was the one who brought up paedophiles in the first place.
• Sean gets the chance to imagine himself in Captain Kirk’s tight fitting velour sweater and showcase the great William Shattner’s efforts at hawking Commodore 64s way back when home computers were a revolution (8:43).

Social networking is not a platform, it’s not a destination, it’s a behaviour.

As people explore the benefits of increased connectivity, opportunities to enhance their social lives and find new interests the platform that they choose to do this on becomes more and more irrelevant.

The question is not- how do I put my brand on MySpace? or How do I put my brand on Facebook?

 The question is, as Bruce Mau might say, how do I “create utility and delight in interesting sustainable ways”.