Filed under: Digital Strategy
I’ve been working on this campaign for a client…while I don’t t usually do this, I’d love you all to help.
Piece by Piece is way to show our support for breast cancer sufferers by aiding research (through the National Breast Cancer foundation) to help solve the puzzle. The online mosaic is made up of the faces or chosen images of those committed and caring people who want to donate a dollar, or more to breast cancer research.
So here’s the idea….
- I would like to give 10 of you 50 pieces for Christmas.
- I’d love you to share your pieces with family and friends in a pay it forward style and we will their match donations (or yours!) dollar for dollar.
- We’ve got $2000 to give away. And we need to give it away by the end of the year.
- All your readers/followers/friends and family need to do is to include #payitforward with their message in the comments box when they donate.
Let me know if you’d like to be part of this and I’ll set you up.
http://www.piecebypiece.net.au/
1.Go exploring.
Explore ideas, places, and opinions. The inside of the echo chamber is where are all the boring people hang out.
2. Share what you discover.
And be generous when you do. Not everybody went exploring with you. Let them live vicariously through your adventures.
3. Do something. Anything.
Dance. Talk. Build. Network. Play. Help. Create. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you’re doing it. Sitting around and complaining is not an acceptable form of ‘something,’ in case you were wondering.
4. Embrace your innate weirdness.
No one is normal. Everyone has quirks and insights unique to themselves. Don’t hide these things—they are what make you interesting.
5. Have a cause.
If you don’t give a damn about anything, no one will give a damn about you.
6. Minimize the swagger.
Egos get in the way of ideas. If your arrogance is more obvious than your expertise, you are someone other people avoid.
7. Give it a shot.
Try it out. Play around with a new idea. Do something strange. If you never leave your comfort zone, you won’t grow.
8. Hop off the bandwagon.
If everyone else is doing it, you’re already late to the party. Do your own thing, and others will hop onto the spiffy wagon you built yourself. Besides, it’s more fun to drive than it is to get pulled around.
9. Grow a pair.
Bravery is needed to have contrary opinions and to take unexpected paths. If you’re not courageous, you’re going to be hanging around the water cooler, talking about the guy who actually is.
10. Ignore the scolds.
Boring is safe, and you will be told to behave yourself. The scolds could have, would have, should have. But they didn’t. And they resent you for your adventures.
So perfect. Love Jessica Hagy. From here
I like to remind myself that one of the roles of the Creative Strategist is to promote collaboration and innovation, to lead the improv disciplines of “what if’ and “yes and” (and make sure the creativity killing Nupski monster doesn’t get fed too much)
What if’s….
Sydney’s pretty full of ‘what if’s” right now. This year, Art & About Sydney put out a call, asking people across Australia to send their responses, in ten words or less, to that one simple question – what if? – two words that put the power of imagining back on the agenda, and inspire us all to think beyond the here and now.…(see the entire list here).
When it comes to creative and development, improv is critical….
Here’s another way of looking at it: Improvisation is all about viewing your failures (“I don’t like it” or “it doesn’t work they way it should”) as positives that lead you in newer and better directions. The messy, circular paths we have to take in order to reach our goals oftentimes show us things we normally wouldn’t have seen before. And that makes us a lot better at doing our jobs.
Build improvisation into your thinking. Saying “Yes” makes everyone into the good guy and gives you a better chance of delivering what you hoped to. It’s also more fun
Filed under: Digital Strategy
- Is the idea to inform your reader or making him feel like a fucking dunce?
- Al Swearengen, Deadwood
- “But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last. The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.”
- Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”
- The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life. In instructing, be brief in what you say in order that your readers may grasp it quickly and retain it faithfully. Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full. Fiction invented in order to please should remain close to reality.”
- Horace, “The Art of Poetry” (Ars Poetica) from his Epistles
Am loving catching up with Austin Kleon
Filed under: Digital Strategy
A lovely piece of work from the Soap Creative team.
This isn’t the holy grail; but rather a road-tested ’cheat sheet‘ for quick wins on your Facebook page
Click on any of the images to link directly to the Fan pages they’re referencing.
It reminds me of the work of Dr. BJ Fogg of Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab.
They infer that to change human behavior you must merge three factors into one moment: motivation, ability, and triggers—e.g., prompts and calls to action. Essentially:
”Put hot triggers in the path of motivated people”.
Defining a hot trigger as something one can take immediate action on, this concept easily translates to the world of online marketing tactics such as “Click this link, hit this button to share, or enter your information here.”
Or “like” bait.
The trigger is characterized as hot because you can take this action now, versus cold triggers, which are calls to actions you can’t act upon immediately.
Filed under: Digital Strategy
click through to Visual Loop for full size
Filed under: Digital Strategy
Last night at Digital Citizens I asked the panelists who presented three responses to briefs:
#digicitz with respect my q to all is: what is the difference between a list of tactics and a strategy
Check out the live stream to find the responses
My call is (in this context)
a list of tactics is what could be done, the strategy is what should be done
Filed under: Digital Strategy
Jye has asked me to recreate a Coffee Morning rant. I’ll do my best….
We were talking about ‘social media experts’.
Now I no opinion on what people to choose to call themselves in the workplace. I’m no big fan of titles or labels but do agree that it would be very nice if people would curtsy when they’re introduced to you…anyhoo.
The notion I want to explore here is: “Is it possible to be an expert in social media?’
We’re trying to talk about an emergent discipline. We’re all still making up the language as we go. This means there’s a lot of new nonsense, heaps of obscure semantics, and quite a bit of confusion as our taxonomy is not set, we haven’t agreed on the discourse…we’re all still a bit muddled and unordered in our thinking because what (I think) we’re doing is in the Complex and Chaotic realms.
In the light of this my answer on the possibility of expertise is: No.
To add to the verbiage mentioned above, here’s my supporting case. I’m a huge fan of Dave Snowdon’s Cynefin framework which puts forward some really interesting thinking on how to make sense of complex environments
- It would seem to me that you could only be an expert in systems that are ordered, where cause and effect are repeatable and the relationship between cause and effect can be known
- This is better explained by Dave himself in his story about how expert fought against the idea of Longitude
- It would further seem to me that social media sits in the unordered realm, where cause and effect are coherent only in retrospect and where results are unpredictable
- You couldn’t be an expert in a Complex environment as no good or best practice documentation can be handed over to another practitioner with the guarantee that they will get the same results for any tactic/experiment
- What I believe you can be is a ‘practitioner with experience’, someone who understands the ‘probe-sense-respond’ agility that is required in this non-linear unpredictable (superfun!) environment
- There is no frickin’ spoon- try it it will make your life quite a bit easier.
Filed under: Digital Strategy
from i love charts- mmm daily goodness
Was reading William Gibson Talks Zero History, Paranoia and the Awesome Power of Twitter over at Wired and loved this…
Gibson: Well, I discovered Twitter while I was writing the novel, and I immediately saw its odd potential for being a tiny, private darknet that no one else can access. I’m always interested in the spooky repurposing of everyday things. After a few days on Twitter, what was most evident to me is that, if you set it up right, it’s probably the most powerful novelty aggregator that has ever existed. Magazines have always been novelty aggregators, and people who work for them find and assemble new and interesting stuff, and people like me buy them. Or used to buy them, when magazines were the most efficient way to find novel things.
But now with Twitter, after following people who have proven themselves to be extremely adroit and active novelty aggregators, I get more random novelty every day that I can actually use. A lot of it just slides by, but a lot of it is stuff that I used to have to go through considerable trouble to find. And a lot of it is so beyond the stuff I used to be able to find, which is good.
Jonah Lehrer reports why thinking too much causes us to focus on variables that don’t matter:
When it comes to judging jam [the focus of the studies], we are all natural experts. We can automatically pick out the products that provide us with the most pleasure.
When researchers added extra analysis to the study, asking participants to explain the why of their jam preference and justify their decisions, the “extra analysis seriously warped their jam judgment:”
“[T]hinking too much” about strawberry jam causes us to focus on all sorts of variables that don’t actually matter. Instead of just listening to our instinctive preferences, we start searching for reasons to prefer one jam over another.
And it’s not just jam:The new science of morality
[The researchers] have since demonstrated that the same effect can interfere with our choice of posters, jelly beans, cars, IKEA couches and apartments. We assume that more rational analysis leads to better choices but, in many instances, that assumption is exactly backwards.
The larger moral:
[O]ur metaphors for reasoning are all wrong. We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist — it’s a talk radio host.
As Howard Moskowitz, expert researcher on Prego spaghetti sauce and other foodstuffs once declared, “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.”
I’m liking the space in between novelty aggregator and “extra analysis seriously warped their jam judgment”. We don’t know why we like what we do, or even what we’ll like but tasty new stuff is what we’re after….
Filed under: Digital Strategy
Love the Soap guys:
After the success of the 6 Principles of Digital Creative and our 2010 Predictions for Digital we now bring you 10 Facebook Myths Busted.
Paul? Julian? Heather? Jye? anything to add?
Mel Exon shared this fab presentation over at BBH LAbs
“… my presentation focused primarily on what brands and their agencies are learning about integration, interaction and new partnerships in the hypersocial environment we find ourselves in. I also attempted to explain why brands may be reticent about taking a step further into building deep, immersive, narrative worlds. Along the way, telling the story of a (failed) BBH Labs joint venture and what we took from it… and finally, ending with a proposal.
That proposal was simply this: that producers should look beyond viewing brands as “promoters” (cf the current raft of Toy Story 3 and The A-Team tie-ups) and consider them as partners instead. Develop stories together that add value to the overarching narrative (think Jeep for Lost Experience) AND stay open-minded to the idea of engaging audiences through collective creativity.
Love the thinking here:
- Thinking about it, the one thing I feel like we’re tasked with daily is to ‘change behaviour’. To get people to ‘do something that they’re currently not doing’.
- Organisations spend a lot of energy trying to get people to spend their energy differently.
- Let’s look at consumer energy first
- Is it worth it? Is what they’re getting out of it worth the effort needed to participate?
- That’s what it all comes down to… Reward vs effort what are we giving what do they have them? To do to get it?
- Every day, billions of people do things whether you ask them to or not
- How do you take advantage of the waves of human energy already out there
- Eco-systems re-channeling existing energy
- “When millions of people are tapping away at computers every day: filling in forms, clicking links, forwarding emails, there is energy and effort that can easily be re-used if we’re smart about it.”
- Why fight against the current?
- You shouldn’t have to… Persuade people to do things they don’t want to do waste energy when you can borrow it invest in something temporary, when you can build things that run themselves
- Disrupt. Persuade. Help
- It’s getting easier… To help people do the things they already love to help people see the relevance and value of new ideas to match products and experiences to the people that want them
I’m thinking about agency agility and crack content creation teams that have a newsroom editorial structure and publishing discipline.
This work by Chet- it’s a couple of years old, but its’ still pretty clever clogs.
I can’t help but think that all those notions of finding the story, getting the angle, getting it out the door in a day in a way that’s going to build an audience and get people watching as it all unfolds is an intriguing model to bring to our agency skill set.
When you combine the ultra topical with easily findable you might be onto a good thing.
I’m liking the question ‘what’s newsworthy?‘ as a thought starter. It’s more than ‘what will generate Word of Mouth?’ ’cause it takes me to places where I think about: what can we report on? what will get us coverage? what’s the photo op? what wires will pick it up?
More later..
Filed under: Digital Strategy
The baker’s dozen of posts that you all really liked in the last year:
- Social media measurement notes
- Where did the future go?
- everyday acts of innovation
- curating resonant agents
- The future belongs to the few of us still willing to get our hands dirty
- more = betterer
- Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.
- How frickin’ awesome are cardboard boxes…
- Plan, Flow and Discover
- foundations of taxonomy
- how do you describe what you do?
- people and stories
- user pays
My favourite, one of the most important things I’ve ever done and one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to share:
And so what’s the outtake from this year? This blogging thing, this tweeting thing – it’s not about technology.
If you’re not using it to fundamentally try to understand all that what being human is like you’re missing the point.
You can make the invisible visible.
You can preserve and protect the fragile and ephemeral from disappearing.
You can inspire people to do things.
You can create places where people can listen and share; laugh, collaborate and hope; and support and grieve.
My lessons in this fourth year of Get Shouty have been about the real costs of committing to real communities.
And the real value of participating in them.
Thanks everyone.
So many thinkering Sydney events this week. It’s always great to get away from behind your desk and fill up the inspiration tanks a little.
While I usually broadcast my experiences of these things while I’m out and about, I’m starting to become very much aligned with Tim Burrows thinking outlined in Why I’m over live blogging (and I’m not sure about live tweeting either) as I believe it reduces your ability to absorb what’s actually going on in the room, or as Tim puts it:
Often, the temptation to be first, or even instantaneous, is at the expense of proper thought…often, I don’t think the process does anyone much justice.
I attended some Adtech keynotes and Breakfast sessions as well as a new event put on by the APG this week. My focus was not only to get information and inspiration, I was trying to see the value of ‘being in the room’. Seeing people do their stuff and chatting in between sessions is a great way to get a sense check of the barometer of the industry and the strength of your personal network.
With so much digital content and opinion being generated swirling around the live moment and the speaker I think that, if you can’t be present yourself, you need to have a rock in the audience. Someone you know, someone you trust, someone who can make you think and put their own ego aside to contextualize what’s going on.
So I’ll let some of my rocks, people who I really respect and admire, to give their opinion and outtakes:
From Ad:tech- which focuses on all aspects of digital marketing and advertising
Mark Pollard’s experience
- Social media campaign vs commitment: short-term or long-term? Ad:tech Sydney
- Reputation management in the digital space: challenges and opportunities – Ad:tech Sydney
- What does ‘return’ mean in today’s digital landscape? Ad:tech Sydney
- How and why CEOs are driving digital media in their businesses – Ad:tech Sydney
- Going beta: What ‘being brave’ can do for your advertising message and medium – Ad:tech Sydney
- Channel Planning: How to weave advertising messages through different platforms – Ad:tech Sydney
- How relevant is the concept of a ‘big idea’ in today’s interactive landscape? Ad:tech Sydney
From the Battle of the Big Thinking- put together by the Australian Planning Group, fifteen people speak for fifteen minutes each in five topics. You can see the whole list here.
- Tim Burrow’s outline of the first section: Big Business Ideas Battle of Big Thinking part 1: Creating unique brands; Changing the world; Perth vs Sydney
- Tim Noonan’s presentation Voices, Relationships, Trust and Time Travel – Notes and Resources
- Richard Sauerman (who won the match) has a YouTube channel where you can see a number of his presentations
Filed under: Digital Strategy
| Michael Jackson 10.3 million fans |
Barack Obama 6.9 million supporters |
Vin Diesel 6.6 million fans |
VIPS | Ashton Kutcher 3.9 million followers |
Ellen DeGeneres 3.6 million followers |
Britney Spears 3.6 million followers |
| Face•book n. 1: A service that “gives people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” — Facebook 2: A “cyberland of rampant narcissism and wasted time.” – Andy Ostroy, The Huffington Post |
Twit•ter n. 1: “A real-time short-messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.” — Twitter 2: “A playground for imbeciles, skeevy marketers, D-list celebrity half-wits, and pathetic attention seekers.” — Daniel Lyons, Newsweek |
|||||
| 300 million users. Valuation: $10 billion. “Cash-flow positive,” in 2009. | STATUS | 20 million users. Valuation: $1 billion. “We spend more money than we make.” | ||||
| Share information with a closed group of friends. | WHAT USERS DO | Broadcast information to the world. | ||||
| Landing page, fan page, custom tabs for support, shopping, and feedback. | TOOLS FOR BRANDS | Live search, direct replies to people tweeting about the brand. | ||||
| Users surf the Best Buy inventory on the store’s fan page, then click “Get Advice” to solicit feedback from all of their friends, via a news-feed post, about the products they’re considering. | DOING IT RIGHT | Gabika99 @Starbucks Is there going to be a mobile app for those of us out here that avoid buying iPhones and iPods? Starbucks @Gabika99 Yes, we’re working on mobile apps on other platforms as well. |
||||
| Procter & Gamble’s Pringles has nearly 3 million fans but hasn’t used any special tools or tabs — and hasn’t posted since July. | MISSING OUT | Dell has more than 30 accounts (@DellOutlet, @StudioDell, @TeamDell, etc.), dividing followers and clogging feeds. | ||||
| Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice app, which had users unfriend 10 people for a free Whopper, set the blogosphere ablaze. Before the app was disabled, more than 230,000 users were sacrificed. | BUILDING BUZZ | For 10 days, Web-site builder Moonfruit offered users who mentioned its name the opportunity to win a MacBook Pro. Its brand was Twitter’s top trending topic for days, beating the Iran election. | ||||
| Hasbro forced the hugely popular Scrabble knockoff app off Facebook and sued its creators. Thousands of users joined protest groups, such as Save Scrabulous and #$@(*& off, hasbro. | BIG-NAME BLUNDER | When Fox aired episodes of Fringe and Glee with a live Twitter-feed overlay, viewers tuned out and bloggers called it “annoying” and “intrusive.” The experiment was discontinued. | ||||
Loving the binary definitions…..
Chart from Fast Company
For crazy amounts of case studies- be sure to explore Peter Kim’s lists, with 500 examples in each Master List 1, Master List 2 and Master List 3.
Dr. Lene Nielsen outlines her approach to developing personas:
Having worked with personas before the method ever came to be known as personas there are, from my research and practical experience, three important areas that have to be considered: the data material, engagement in the personas descriptions, and buy-in from the organization which is part of the development process whether it is redesign or a development from scratch. This is the rationale behind my development of 10 steps to personas, an attempt to cover the entire process from initial data gathering to ongoing development.
You can have a look at the entire article here, and see a larger version of her chart here.
Thank to Ian Lyons for the find.
