Pic c/o Gadget
While I was in NYC recently, I did this video with the ChiefJuicer, the delightful and award-winning John Kearon of Brainjuicer - just me and him and a couple of cameras operated by the lovely and talented Sacha of Scribemedia.
Have a look and see what you think - if you're like me you'll find it hard to watch yourself...but I think it shows that at least we enjoyed ourselves
Great new format for a breakfast meeting yesterday - hosted by the redoubtable Steve Moore.
Interesting chats by Jeremy, Kevin and Matt, each attempting to define "what's next?" in their respective worlds. Lots of great insights and ideas. Wish I'd had a tape running.
That said, the story that stays with me is one Matt told of some current work C4 are doing about how teenagers are using media today.
Seems one girl the researchers were following was hanging out online doing amongst other things a spot of the hi-speed Instant Messaging that only the young can really manage for any length of time.
She had sorted all her contacts into 6-7 or seven groups - schoolfriends, family etc but also "bitches" "wankers" and so on. What was striking though was the way in which she switched contacts between the groups in real time. Even if the members of her different social networks remained mostly consistent over the short term, their roles were in constant flux. And those are just the small set of folk she is in regular contact with regularly...
Something to bear in mind the next time you here talk about how stuff spreads through social networks and how there are some folk through whom information and influence flows. If only it was that simple...
In reality, it's like watching the great Tommy Cooper do - in his inimitable shambolic stylee - the trick here.
Things are - or seem to be- constant motion...whenever you lift the cover, the thing you expect is not there. Bottle or glass?
photo by Robert W Klein @ AP photo
...in July make sure you join Piers and his merry band on July 17 2008 at Fort Mason for another PSFK jamboree (not quite a free festival, sorry).
Speakers booked so far: Adrian Ho, Zeus Jones; Andrew Hoppin, NASA; Chris Riley, Apple; Ed Cotton, Influx Insights; Eric Ryan, Method; Jean-Marie Shields, Starbucks; Mark Lewis, DDB; Rohit Bhargava, Ogilvy PR.
Cool peeps, cool topics (where technology, sustainability and start-up culture meet).
Almost worth going all that way just for that, methinks
Just a thought:
Most folk I've worked with are happy to go looking for the new and the emergent and possibly significant from the young and the unspeakably leading edge before it becomes big and popular and yet the same grateful professionals seem to believe that behaviours they see in the mass of the population (in the mainstream, if you like) can only arise arises from what they (marketers, politicians, managers) have done.
We, up here in the Big Chairs, like to think that it's what we do to the little people out there that makes the difference, that without us nothing much will happen.
Like we're actually puppetmasters, pulling the strings.
Just like the popular (and not so popular) press fears.
Oh, if only...
Truth is, most things spread without us and the best that most managers, marketers and politicians can do is work with the underlying dynamics. Understanding and describing these is the real challenge now for folk doing strategy of all sorts - assuming the world works without us and the best we can do is work with
the ordinary folk out there who shape it together.
Of course, the mistake they/we make is claiming responsibility for the good stuff; seems fair that we take the rap for things that are bugger all to do with us, I guess...I suspect this might turn out to be a large part of the Gordon problem.
Whatever you think about the recent election competition for the Mayor of London job and whatever you think of either the winning or losing candidates, the most striking thing of the aftermath is the kneejerk default of spokespeople of the defeated Labour Party:
"we're not getting our message across..."
Again and again I've heard it in the last few days, the same few words.
Bet you've heard this any number of times before though, from disappointed managers, marketers as well as politicians: "The message" and "getting it across".
As if what shaped behaviour was "messages" and their transmission from one person to another.
As if it was just a matter of finding the right information and sending it - like an arrow through the air - to hit the right person...and that'd be enough to change things
What kind of bonkers model of mass behaviour is this?
Oh, yes that's the one that we in the communications world've been using for ever...that presumes we humans are mere information processing units....
As if messages ever changed anything...
As if audiences were passive...
As if it's what we in marketing or politics or management do to people out there...
Today's free gift: go here to hear the original version of the song in the picture, here to here the more famous Two Tone cover featured and here for Shane and the boys' effort
BTW Think Iain's piece on experience has some important clues as how experience might do the job we've been pushing on messages
Say hello to two of my favourite humans on the planet: Arthur and Ben (waves in a rather exaggerated manner)
They live in Merka although their mummy (sic) and daddy are English. Very English.
Just spending a little time with them makes it really clear how important copying is to the younger members of our species. Infact it's what they do all day long. They try out words, sounds, expressions and behaviours that they've seen elsewhere (mostly from their immediate family and their playmates but often before they understand what the thing is that they're doing). It's their number 1 learning strategy. They're doing what the NLP gang call "modelling": that is, copying
What they're not doing is considering information from the outside world, processing it, weighing the pros and cons of different courses of action and then acting. No, they're just copying. It's the most brilliant gift to our species: it allows us to learn rapidly from each other, not just as infants but all through our life. In all kinds of situations.
Of course, you might think that it's important only for kids (unfortunately puberty doesn't switch the mechanism off so we all keep it front and centre) or for unimportant or superficial things (Alex has recently showed how terminology/jargon spreads through academic communities on the basis of copying and you will no doubt remember the observation of Thomas Kuhn that the great scientific revolutions spread by folk copying what their peers are doing and seem to be finding useful rather than by weighing the evidence). But it's the same stuff - the same underlying mechanism that the boys are driven by.
This is what drives the spread of ideas, opinions and behaviours: our copycat selves.
Without it we wouldn't have anything like culture or advancement of learning - it'd be really hard for anything to be transmitted across populations and as a result, we'd certainly be a lot more stupid, individually and collectively. But at least we wouldn't have bad trendspotters because nothing would spread.
With it, we get to take advantage of what our neighbours (and their neighbours) have invented or copied themselves; without it, we have to work stuff out from scratch which would tend to favour Ray Mears over you and me: some one who can come up with tricks on the spot....every time
Now, of course when it comes to thinking about own behaviour, none of us likes to see ourselves as copying machines (this seems to be one of those things our minds keep from us and our cultures tend to teach us otherwise also) but that doesn't mean it isn't so...
But out of the mouths of children, eh?
Been thinking about this question quite a lot recently so here's the first in a series of posts to clariy things - one thing at a time.
Ok, the thing is that we assume that it's what
Of course, this is only natural given that's what we get paid for - which politician wants to stand up and say "crime is down - not that our policies have much to do with it"; it's largely due to factors beyond our control.
Which marketer is going to admit that the growth of their brand has bugger all to do with marketing's actions (premium vodkas: discuss). Which manager with a KPI to hit....
The truth is that it's all about them out there: most behaviours and ideas spread through populations because of what the members of the populations do or think or say in response to each other. That's why most big social trends surprise us - why as Freakonomics pointed out, the "broken window" strategy to clean up NYC is probably less important in explaining the 90s reduction in crime in the city than the demographic changes kicking in.
Put simply: as far as how stuff spreads, it's more Pullyou than Pushme (to bastardise the old Dr Doolittles). Folk do what they see around them; believe what their peers do - whatever their individual brains tell them. Our attempts to exert 'exogenous' (extra-system) influence is always going to be much less important than the 'endogenous' (intra-system) factors that shape the propagation of an idea or behaviour through a population.
BTW Think this is what Cluetrain really meant about markets being like conversations
If this is right, then strategy thinking needs to be rooted more in how the underlying mechanics of propagation works (human-human emulation within a given system etc) than in why individual folk do what they do.
Put another way: forget doing stuff TO folk; do stuff WITH them
Cool mashup from the chaps/esses at Scribemedia of the Eames film of same name
Yeah, I know it's for a real live company - a record of some corporate event - but still like it.
Go you crazy NYC types!
PS be honest: how do you know that things with the Eames handle are going to be cool?
Partly because folk like me tell you, but partly because it seems that that's what everyone thinks....
Hat tip to Charles: on Start the Week today, the great Raymond Tallis on how we've misunderstood what lies between our ears. And how much of our nature lies in copying each other - the story of the 2 year laughter epidemic in a small village in Kenya in the 1960s and the social importance of tears. If you want to hear more of Raymond go here or here..
Some interesting stuff about whether each of us knows ourselves better than others do - not sure I agree with the great man, here. Think the tears thing is a big clue for me...
UPDATE yes, this is the same fella giving "neuroaesthetics" a good kicking in the Times last week. Well spotted, Carruthers
And appropriately (if you've been following the debate) you get a free Dan Dennett in the same broadcast also (now when can you say that) talking about what funny is "for"...and how evolutionary mechanisms might explain stuff like this. Go listena
Only on the Beeb, eh? a
Hat tip to Marty/PSFK for this spot on Michael Pollan's ruminations on why it's worth bothering 'setting an example' - why Gandhi's "being the change you want to see in the world" is right (or might turn out to be).
It's a Herd thing...
BTW if you haven't bought a copy of Grant's Green Manifesto (pic) go do it now
Mark Earls: Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature
Mark Earls: Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature
"Like Malcolm Gladwell on speed" The Guardian
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