Get Shouty

Let’s get things straight here. They live on an island in Fiji. They (spear) fish, grow fruit and veg, compost their crap and drink a muddy narcotic and play guitars under the stars. That’s what they like to do.

And they won a big shiney silver wedge of a trophy. One that declares that Tribewanted is a more innovative and impactful social networking site than Skins on E4, and hold your breath…MySpace. Yes, MySpace, the world’s biggest online network, in a social networking competition. Bloody hell – how did that happen?

The team try to explain it here:

I think its hard to see it from the inside looking out – but here are the reasons the tribe members gave when we entered . I think it happened because we’re trying something different. And its starting to work. Very simply its about using a new and exciting way of communicating to make life better. And we’re not the only ones doing it either.

Not everyone can work on a project that is about building a sustainable island paradise. But we can all take inspiration in this vigorous enlistment of a community, the cleverness of building context in the clear signposts of their distributed messaging and consistently compelling stories.

John Dodds shared the American Marketing Association new definition of marketing:

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

It’s a big ask to educate our clients on the ever changing world, but if Apenisa Bogiso (Tui Mali) the Chief of Vorovoro can understand it I’m pretty sure I can help my clients get it too.

*thanks Kris Hoet and Kneale Mann

Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.
I have a passion for great leadership….and he manages to cover that off as well.
Beware. You might need tissues.

Strategy
When the brief’s all wrong and you can’t go on
Its Stragedy
When the planner cries and you don’t know why
It’s Stragedy
It’s so hard to care
When no-one gets that it’s goin’ nowhere
Stragedy
When you lose control and the insight has no soul
Its stragedy
When the reason flies and the goals just die
Plan! It’s a dare!
With no-one to guide you you’re goin’ nowhere……

Blogger Joseph Jaffe jabs big marketers.

Nothing aggravates bloggers like Joseph Jaffe more than marketers that employ fakery, manipulation and heavy-handed lawyers in their social-media interactions with consumers. He recently spoke at ANA’s Integrated Marketing conference in New York City. Ad Age was there to cover the conference and was nice enough to put this edit together. This video contains eight minutes of his remarks at the recent Association of National Advertisers’ Integrated Marketing Conference.

Do not think that Australian marketers have learned their lessons from overseas mistakes. Recently every single one of the Top 100 Australian Women Bloggers lists was pitch slapped by Naprogesic.

Sara Goldstein, creator of many successful enterprises including the Bargain Queen and Laurel Papworth (creator of trouble and wonderful mischief… oh and the very readable Silkcharm) were both sent this letter:

[Insert Auto generated header here]

We would like to invite you to join our new site: A Pampered Life (“APL”) which is an online community, where you can share your knowledge, experiences, tips and advice.

A Pampered Life is brought to you by Naprogesic. There are many great blog articles to read and to comment on such as: health, fashion, travel, relationships and much more. A Pampered Life also features the latest events. You can also add your own events, upload photos and enter great competitions.

Each month there is a new theme. The theme for June is financing for women in relation to financial year end. There are great articles on budgeting, financial goal setting, and much more.

We would love your contributions and stories to A Pampered Life. Please find below an editorial calendar for the next six months and a consumer press release.

By joining our community you will be able to gain further exposure for [insert URL of women blogger here] via links to your site from A Pampered Life. You will also have the opportunity to share your thoughts and advice with like-minded women.

As one of the top 100 female bloggers in the country, we would greatly value your contribution to our new community. Similarly, if you like some of the articles we have on our site, feel free to reference our content on your blog with a link back to APL.

To join our online community visit www.apamperedlife.com.au.

If you have any questions regarding A Pampered Life please forward them to the Editor Candice Steffensen editorial@apamperedlife.com.au

With warm regards,
Candice Steffensen
Editor

Sara responds here and Laurel here….(where there’s quite a shouty comment from me).

How much money is appropriate for brand to spend to make connected content creators, who are influencers and their target market, to achieve a negative swing on brand preference . What’s the ROI on dumbass?

A community is built on value exchange. The reason you’d contact bloggers is to promote this between the communities held in trust by the authors and the site you’re building-have a bloody good reason why the blogger should shill what they’ve built over years for your brand.

And remember if you don’t they will call shennanigans on you. And every dollar you’ve spent is a lost opportunity and an increase in brand aversion.

I presented this to the APG last night as part of their Ideas Exchange sessions.

It’s a love story, an ode to my favourite digital story teller Marcus Brown.

04/06/2008, originally uploaded by katie_chatfield.

Paris is just beautiful. If you’re coming for a wedding it would be quite rude not to stay in this hotel- could it be more perfect?

The extremely entertaining Mark Pesce presenting at the Next Wave festival.

More of his thinking on the 3.4 billionth phone, hisMAD twitter army and a social experience of the China earthquake.

I’m reading Stumbling on Happiness at the moment and it’s introducing me to some great ideas, and prompting journeys where I’m meeting new people. I’m loving Jane McGonigal who says in this presentation that ‘happiness is the new capital”. Check out her Year In Review for more  o-my-gosh  ‘helping to forge the new future’ type out takes.

She has a new mission statement in her work as a game designer — the goal of using new scientific research on well-being to develop technological systems that actually improve quality of life. If you need a quick crash course in well-being research, she recommends two places: All of the great field-building positive psychology work done by Martin Seligman at U Penn, and the work by Allister McGregor and other to look at well-being in developing countries at the ESRC Research Group.

She taps in to the cognitive surplus and the connectivity that can be built into games to generate some inspiring experiences:

Thanks Mister Hippity

I’ve heard this term spoken so many times in the last fortnight it deserves exploring: Clay Shirky’s “cognitive surplus” theory (expanded in an article here)

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

I love a good pitch.

It’s more than the energy and enthusiasm, the divergence and convergence of strategy, the caffeine, the late nights and the whole process of vividly imagining an idea into being.

I love it because it give you permission to be bold.

The Kaiser tells the wonderful story of what happens when a creative team (top chefs- Gorden Ramsey style) tackled a problem regardless:

They didn’t seek a compromise. They didn’t pander to their client. They weren’t chasing the money. They knew what was right and they just bloody well got on and did it. And the results proved that they were right. The resident cook said they were right, the customers were over the moon, hell even the management (to use British PR speak) were “delighted”.

As Bill S would say “boldness be my friend”. Have it as your compass. Both your team and your clients will benefit. Genius, Power and Magic….bring it on:

Moderation is a fatal thing; nothing succeeds like excess.  ~Oscar Wilde

Just teriffic! 10 Steps to Building Your Personal Brand via blogging, using nationally-recognized fashion blog Omiru: Style for All (www.omiru.com) as a case study. Omiru has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Lucky Magazine, and Real Simple Magazine.

press people consider me an outlet to push their marketing messages. It upsets me that people in the world can look at me and only see ways that they can scavenge some limited advantage through which to push their agendas. They see my personal expression, my unadulterated opinion and they think they can use it as a host for their parasitic bullshit.

never NEVER without my permission

Lovely storytelling

Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller author Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. We Tell Stories begins with Charles Cumming’s Google Maps adventure. ‘He was the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time’. Now you can follow his adventures across the nation and across the world, step by step.

But somewhere on the internet is a seventh story, a mysterious tale involving a vaguely familiar girl called Alice. Readers who follow this story will discover clues that will shape Alice’s journey and help her on her way. These clues will appear online and in the real world and will drive readers to the other six stories where they will have the chance to win prizes, including The Penguin Complete Classics Library.

The gaming community has been awaiting the first project from SixtoStart and the next digital publishing initiative from Penguin whose last project, the wikinovel (http://amillionpenguins.com) generated 85,000 unique visitors in five weeks, arriving at a rate of 10 per second at one point.

New York must be a small town- I keep running into Mike Arauz, which reminded me that I needed to share this piece promoting a new book by Charles Leadbeater, ‘We Think’ which says it explores the potential of the latest developments of the internet.

For me one of the most interesting questions posed is: How do we earn a living when everyone is freely sharing their ideas? In the was you were what you owned. Now you are what you share.

One of my favourite quotes about our current gift economy is: ‘the more information your organization has outside of it’s firewall the stronger you become”

Information is particularly suited to gift economics, as information can be copied and transmitted at practically no cost. It can be treated as a nonrival good: when you share information, you do not deprive yourself of the information (although you may deprive yourself of certain revenues that could be gained in the market economy from the intellectual property rights).

Traditional scientific research is an information gift economy. Scientists produce research papers and give them away through journals and conferences. Other scientists freely refer to such papers. The more citations a scientist has, the more prestige and respect he or she has, which can attract funding and positions. All scientists therefore benefit from the increased pool of knowledge.

 Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance.  In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

You see when everyone is giving away their ideas- how can your client tell tell when your idea is a good one? What can communicate that you might have the right idea, the right approach- that’s where authority and reputation comes in. It proves that you have been able to have ideas worth sharing and prompted valuable conversations. So it’s economically worthwhile to build this reputation.

The ideas you share can only be a contemporary reflection (often campaigns are planned more than six months in advance)- and so relatively useless in the rapidly changing environment in which we are trying to create brand experiences. And I’d like to think that the experiences that we make for brands, because they are designed to differentiate, are not replicable by anyone else anyway after the fact.

Our ideas will earn us a living when they are consultative, forward facing, built on strategic insights and anthropological rigour. We need to share our ideas so that the work we do can stand out from the crowd and so we can create fascinating and delightful experiences in the future.

Madison Avenue Journal has invited me to Ad:Tech San Francisco April 15th to 17th, 2008- and I’m looking forward to getting pretty inspired as the theme of the conference is : “brand strategy and the expanding world of digital marketing”

Jonah Bloom over at Ad Age invited the the Power 150 bloggers to ponder:

“I see a lot of chatter on the Power 150 about different digital technologies, websites and web applications, but which single technology, site or application do you think is most deserving of marketers’ attention in 2008 and why?” 

and published the results in the article Crystal Ball 2.0. The responses are a trend map of the latest and greatest bits and pieces of technology.

 And here is where I’ll stick my neck out: great digital marketing is not about a single piece of technology. It will never be delivered by one site. It cannot be experienced through one application:

• Great brand strategy is delivered by utilizing the world of digital marketing opportunities.
• Digital marketing opportunities naturally articulate from great brand strategy.

I’d have to say that both great band strategy and brilliant digital marketing are fed by insight and the online landscape is providing amazing opportunities to listen and learn and grow stronger relationships as a result.