Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Humans R Us

Pic c/o NYT

Very excited about next week - in NYC Monday-Friday

Tuesday is my time in the spotlight at the ARF: talking with a great panel about how to put the human back in to marketing. The ARF have really made a huge effort to rethink the conference to encourage the delegates (participants, more like) to rethink the industry, so props to Bob & Joel in particular for that.

So what am I going to say?

Well, not quite sure yet but I've got some stuff in my head about using the insights we discuss here (the unimportance of thinking and oh, yes...that HERD thing again) to redraw the map of people. Of how we repurpose our tools to work in this map ('we-research' is my current obsession). And so on...

You read this stuff I write: what would you highlight?

Today's internet sensation

A number of news sites have picked up on this unlikely political micro-celebrity, MEP Daniel Hannan whose anti-Gordon Brown speech has garnered a huge amount of views on Youtube

So I think it's interesting to see the ways we are explaining how has it become such a "success"? Even he's a bit bemused by it all

A lot of the (politically) sympathetic commentators want to to trace something about the content itself to explain the popularity. I'm sure he's a very nice fella, but let's be clear neither he nor the speech is particularly insightful, novel or compelling in itself. And that's being nice about him* and it, too.

No, the 'thing' itself is not a great explanation.

Nor is the closely related 'spirit of the age' explanation much cop - that this is what we all (more or less secretly) feel about the British PM and that's what this film is saying on our behalf. Again, it's hardly the first time these kind of arguments have been aired and hardly the best, most authentic or compelling version.

The truth is the film has been re-broadcast and endorsed by the likes of Limbaugh and the Drudge report - this helps deliver the kind of numbers of first timers (and broadcast is the word, here)

But more profoundly - as with much online stuff - it seems to be just one of those things: something had to be popular; as with all things that spread through random copying, what gets to be popular is very much a lottery. (What we don't bother thinking about - as the Black Swan would chastise us for - is all the other speeches that didn't become successful)

Ask yourself this: if you were to try to replicate the success of this rather banal piece of political speechifying, which features would you try to replicate? The casting, the argument and the delivery or the links and the luck that's clear after the fact?

I know where my money is!


*He has some dodgy previous, it must be said

Ada and Adriana

 

All too often, we let the tech world become dominated by the boys.

Sad but true. And to our shared cost.

Ada Lovelace day is a bit of a counterbalance: it's a chance to celebrate those female practitioners (props to Suw & co who've set this up). Ada herself was a collaborator of Charles Babbage

I won't repeat Ada's biog, nor the unsung story of women's role in technology but simply get to what I've pledged to do: blog about a women in tech who I admire.

Sparing her blushes, my choice is an extraordinary blend of energy, intelligence and prinicpled commitment. Someone to look up to in all kinds of ways

From the early days of blogging to sorting out tomorrow's biggest issues (e.g. VRM), Adriana is one of the few folks in the web world that I absolutely trust and whose opinion on the big stuff I absolutely want to know. You should, too (IMHO)

For this we can forgive her: Balliol, management consultancy and a sojourn in the Square Mile.

Faris recombines poetically

Pic c/o Marcus

Go here to see what Faris what made out of what we had previously made separately.

Recombinant Hyperpoem, indeed

Oh, how we love the small hirsuite one...

Fireside chat @MRS

I can hardly believe I'm saying this but I'm really looking forward to MRS conference this week.

Lots of good stuff - from Robert Winston tomorrow - to Charlie Leadbetter and Matt Taylor on Wednesday

The organisers have tried to programme an event which mixes the voices of the community around our immediate interests with those of the world beyond, to encourage us to raise our sights a little.

I'm particularly excited about the session I've been asked to put together with 3 behavioural scientists, sharing some highlights of their recent work:

My chum Alex Bentley (an anthropologist doing amazing stuff at Durham in the field of cultural evolution) will be talking about what he's learned about how behaviours and ideas spread through populations

Biologist Jens Krause will talk about his experiments in crowd and shoaling behaviour (watch out for his robofish!)

Paul Ormerod (one of the most important economists writing today) who's been doing some amazing stuff on understanding underlying network structures

I hope by sharing these little tasters of some of the more important stuff going on out there in the behavioral sciences will help stimulate some rethinking of the community's assumptions about human behaviour that are embedded in our practices.

We've not got a whole heap of time but I''ll try to manage it so that the audience can help us put together a revised set of assumptions - not a definitive one but maybe it'll spark something for you?

Props to Marc B and the MRS conference committee for encouraging this kind of experiment.

See you at 1130 on Thursday?

Download Research2009__day1(2) Download Research2009_day_2

Forcing old pegs into new holes

 At the moment I keep finding myself using that Old Macluhan adage about how we see new technologies through the lens of those that they eventually replace. Forcing old/square pegs into new/round holes, maybe?

One particularly persistent and annoying example is the whole social media scam - thinking about influence as human-scale persuasion, looking for 'influentials' as high rating tv spots and so on.

Another is this nonsense: CRM is one of the worst examples of the old ways of thinking about the relationship between business and its customers because fundamentally it assumes that the business' agenda is what matters (rather than customers' relationship with each other). Not to mention the misreading of Pareto...oh, and the paucity of its evidence base...

Oh, and another thing: not everything is or should be a marketing tool.

Pay attention, I don't want to be telling you again...

My new BF

Have been enjoying the 1000 songs format the Guardian have been working with this week: we all love a list, don't we?

Lot's of social object stuff here: stuff to debate and argue about. Who and what's not included that should be & who's on the list but shouldn't be...

And I've only just spotted that they've woven Spotify into the listings for you to listen to the list

Spotify - my new BF. And the future of all things musical.

It's gone from 0 to 500,000 subscribers in less than 6 months in the UK alone

Nice people, too (thanks for the cuppa, Jon!)

Go try it!

When sheep, people and technology interact

Pic c/o folly.co.uk

HT Mike Harris

I've been whanging on for ever about how people are the thing and how it's what technology enables us to do with technology

Here's an example of what happens when sheep, people and technology interact

Can't help feeling that Alfie must be involved in this somehow...

Best thing on the Telegraph site for ages, IMHO

Use more

 

HT Gareth

Bravo to Zeus Jones for this great idea and the way they pitch it....

More here

Walking the talk, gentlemen, walking the talk...

How to reduce your water footprint

C/o Good Magazine via ZME Science

Your old briefs, please

Your old briefs, please

This is an urgent request to planning & strategy folk (responses needed by monday night)

Can you help us help the Ideas Foundation? [http://www.ideasfoundation.org.uk/]

It's a UK charity that is committed to championing creativity in young people

"We  broker projects between industry and education.
We  spot & develop young people’s creativity.
We  pilot creative education projects and champion transferable skills within the  creative industries and beyond.
We provide effective work experience, internship and apprenticeship opportunities. We signpost further & higher education routes to creative employment and enterprise.
And  having done all that, we encourage our creativity scholars to stay in touch and  get involved"

So here's the shout out to Planning for Good types - do you have a social policy brief that you've written that these kids can do work from?

Maybe the client didn't buy it? Maybe the suits or the CD didn't like it? Or your boss? Or you?

So what are we after?

A brief to target a youth audience on a social policy area

It could be in areas such as smoking cessation, sexual health, knife or gun crime, drug or alchohol abuse, bullying, internet safety etc.

We'd just like your old briefs. Or, if you really want to write a new one, please feel free to do so but just make sure you include the usual information (the problem defined, the audience, etc) and try to ground it in reality and evidence...

Thanks very much in advance on behalf of the Ideas Foundation - we promise to keep you in touch with what folk send in and what they do with them

Pls send your briefs to me at markearls [at] hotmail [dot] com by Monday night

Papal infallibility and Cochrane reviews

Pic c/o nomad4ever

Been a long time since I found myself shouting at the radio but this morning the silly ol' fella who sits in St Peter's chair really got me going (almost as much as his apologist here, Dr Oddie, did - no, don't laugh at his name; that's not going to help)

Ok so here's what Der Papst says about combatting HIV/Aids in Africa: "Condom distribution only makes matters worse"

Here's what his humourously named champion apologist says: "Condoms increase promiscuity which is the real cause of the problem."

Do what? Ok, again.

"Condoms increase promiscuity which is the real cause of the problem."

So what do you think the scientific evidence says (according to a proper literature review):

"This review indicates that consistent use of condoms results in 80% reduction in HIV incidence. Consistent use is defined as using a condom for all acts of penetrative vaginal intercourse. Because the studies used in this review did not report on the "correctness" of use, namely whether condoms were used correctly and perfectly for each and every act of intercourse, effectiveness and not efficacy is estimated. Also, this estimate refers in general to the male condom and not specifically to the latex condom, since studies also tended not to specify the type of condom that was used. Thus, condom effectiveness is similar to, although lower than, that for contraception".
 
So while it doesn't solve the problem on it's own, it seems a useful part of the armoury

Here's what the UNAIDs gang say: "With more than 7,400 new infections each day, the world cannot stop the AIDS epidemic without stopping new HIV infections. Condoms are an essential part of combination prevention"

From the people who brought you the Inquisition...oh, and the right to...?

HT Annabel for the link to Cochrane

Digital Britain Interim REDUX

Thanks to all those who commented last week - made it much easier to make something semi-coherent

Here's the piece I submitted in the end. Download A Different Kind of Digital

Nice feedback already from some folk I talked to but...

Usual deal: your thoughts welcome as ever...and that will only make it better

The best policy recommendation I heard in the discussion around the report was this: don't annoy Cory

NB Check out what Jamie and Amanda did with the AMP09 output...

Challenging drug use

Lots of silliness around in British news media about reducing alcohol abuse by punitive pricing (though I still like this old post from the indie)

Much more thoughtful post by Matt Grist over at the RSA's Social Brain team*. Very much along HERD-lines, I'd say. Be very interested what you HERDies think policymakers should do (if anything)...

Are you listening, Minister?



*Looking forward to participating in this group later on...

Crowdsourcing a book cover

We're gearing up for the launch of the updated paperback version of HERD this Summer but a bit stumped by cover designs TBH. A nice repeat of the debate around the cover 2 years ago, you might remember (though we're now all agreed on the pinkness and the title, aren't we, Nick?)

See what you think

This is a version of the original Download Earls Herd_9(2)

This a text only version Download Earls Herd_8(2)

And this is a new idea which uses a cut-out of a crowd Download Earls Herd_6(4)

Any comments/suggestions gratefully received. Thanks!

Co-operation when you least expect it

HT Alex

Nice piece in PNAS by that man Dirk Helbing (AGAIN) & Wenjian Yu that suggests even in the most unlikely circumstances (i.e. in a population of disloyal selfish agents with poor memories) that cooperation and social order will emerge.

Timely, given the UK Co-op grocery business continues to grow (and the financial services business also). But maybe this kind of mutual sentiment isn't so unexpected, right now.

Maybe we just want to be together...

Stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr Individualist with your Anglo-Saxon cultural assumptions about us humans being independent, self-determining agents...

When (would-be) models panic

Pic c/o Nuria Pelechano and Norman I. Badler
University of Pennsylvania, Center for Human Modeling and Simulation

HT Woody for the model audition story. BBC footage here and here

The comedy value of fashionista panic aside, modelling how any group of people do just this is illustrated either here or in Dirk Helbing's stuff

Meanwhile (yes, I know...) here's some Panic in Detroit for you

It just shows you can't be too careful

Nice piece by David Mitchell about the downside of encouraging comments online here

Thank you, David for giving us something to do together

Read, comment and relax

"It just shows you can't be too careful"

Digital Britain Interim - 'mergency

So there I was having a lovely cuppa and chat with JamieC this avo in Camden's Spring sunshine and we both realised that tomorrow (March 12th) is the deadline for responses to the original report.

Banged my thoughts out here: Download A Different Kind of Digital

I'm sure that much of this has seeped in from conversations with folk over recent weeks - from Amp09 and the like - so thanks to everyone. If there's any particular idea or coinage you feel is rightly yours, please let me know and I will do my best to credit properly...

A bit all over the shop but would appreciate any comments you have in the next 12 hours.

[Almost] Really free

 

Hats off to the Guardian for being really clear about their stance on open content.

PSFK does the story well here so I won't regurgitate it.

So instead, here's Otway singing the tribute song some 30 years ahead of himself...[for you youngsters, that's him on the right]. Also, cause I'm like that, here's Otway famously injuring himself on OGWT...

Why engaging with new ideas matters (the movie)

Here's me at Piers' and co's London Ideas Jamboree...ranting on about ideas and innovation. Not big on watching myself but...

Interested to know what you think!

NB If you're in NYC on 2nd April, their do there looks great (sadly I'm in NYC but with Faris and the Brainjuicer gang that day)

Give folk stuff to do together (again)

Our chums over at Greenpeace have done something fabulous with the Heathrow Expansion programme: giving celebs, activists and their broader supporter base something to do together

Brilliant idea of buying up a plot of land in the path of the proposed expansion and dividing it up into thousands of different micro plots which they then give away to supporters [more on the backstory here]

Also a veritable social object, it seems

Changing mass behaviour and porcine aviation

Pic c/o Photobucket

Sorry to be quiet for a while but been crazy busy.

The big theme of my last week is this: how rare our ability to create substantial and lasting changes to mass behaviour really is.

Interesting seminar a week ago at Involve with Gerry Stoker Download Involve-Seminar-Minutes-Professor-Gerry-Stoker.

Since then, I've had discussions with folk inside & outside government polixy, with those trying to change corporates and individual citizens' behaviour and with those trying to change customers' and consumers'. With practitioners and academics.

Every one seems to agree: it's darn hard to do it.

While case studies (successful cases) are around in advertising effectivenes, they account for a tiny % of all cases. In social policy, the case study pool is narrower, despite government's obsession with evidence-based policy-making and business' equivalent.

Curiously even successes such as this genius one seem to surprise its creators, too.

But at the same time, the explosive popularity of many of the things that we all agree are fundamentally re-shaping our worlds - the connective technologies of social media - seems to have happened without much in the way of external levers. We've largely got each other to blame for the widespread adoption of social media (and those Social Media Specialists).

Time to rethink something, isn't it?