Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

Eyes down for the Copying Quiz

In advance of my Sermon on Copying and Originality at The School of Life (Sept 9th), we've put together at little quiz on copying on Facetube

Let's play along...!

And another thing about the Olympics and what it tells us about us.

Probably the smartest thing that LOCOG have done in seeking to engage the UK population is to go local.

By that I mean going 8000 miles over 70 days and visiting countless "locales" - i.e. places where real people live and thrive with other people. The hard yards, you might call it.

And to create the sense of shared excitement for those on the route - offering the chance to thousands of people to participate (and compete to do so) each of which is recognisable in their own locale - it seems to have followed all the rules of the modern engagement strategy.

The torch relay isn't a new idea but nor is it "authentically" Olympian (as the London2012 site tries to suggest) but as this piece shows, it has [ahem] interesting German roots

But it is a fantastic social diffusion idea: gathering crowds of people familiar to each other - or from the same place, at least - getting them excited with anticipation and getting them to see and feel each others' excitement. Flags, cheering, crowds, epic journey - all of these help.

Simple stuff, you might think but not something marketers today can be bothered with doing.

Go where the people are (rather than just shout at them).

Give them something (interesting & fun) to do together.

Help them see the excitement of those around them and those before and after them.

And start well ahead of time (building your audience's excitement well before you need it).

Not tricky, is it?

Key learning is this: audiences are not individuals acting independently - pairs of eyeballs or whatever the media measurement guys count.

Audiences are individuals interacting with each other around your activities. The more you encourage this further things spread.

You're building networks not sending information to individual agents.

 

More on the purpose driven-organisation

Nice article here by Rosabeth Moss Kanter in HBR  which restates much of what we wrote about nearly a decade ago in Creative Age and again half a decade ago in HERD. Also, Hugh has written even more thoroughly and compellingly about the same stuff over the whole of that period [just have a good wade through his back catalogue].

Nice to see that more folk at HBR are finally joining the party....

Hat tip Eoan Pritchard

Transmedia Cricket

I spent Friday and Saturday in a way that's hard to beat (IMHO) - sitting in the stands at Lord's, watching a hugely competitive cricket match between a much improved England and the batting talent of India.

I first got entangled in cricket by my paternal grandfather - he even took me to @homeofcricket - back in the late 1960s and early 70s. I've spent a great deal of my life either glued to the radio (entranced by the poetry of magical place names like "Bangalore"), transfixed by the play on TV or - when I've been particularly lucky - sitting as I did at the weekend in the stands (various in cities around the world ditto). England, oh my England...

But what struck me in my most recent visit is how easily cricket fans of all ages (not just the digerati) have taken to Transmedia Cricket.

You sit inside the ground with a beer or glass of wine in your hand: you watch the play, occasionally enhanced by big screen replays and your fellow fans (conversation buzzes around the seats in the stands like wasps around the bins bellow). But nowadays, there's also the radio earpieces (featuring both Sky and TMS commentaries) and nowadays smart phones aplenty, with Twitter and newspaper OBOs (I have loved the Guardian one since 2005's Ashes escapade) to enhance our engagement with both what is front of us and those we're sharing it with. Old media abounds, too (the day's newspaper recycling must be enormous).

Next time someone tries to b-s you with "transmedia" think of the sun on the pitch at Lords. Now back to the game...

 

 

 

 

Botox and social objects

Looking forward to the soiree tonight with my old buddy Hugh Macleod AKA Gapingvoid discussing Social Objects (various)

But while you prepare for that and try to look your best, consider this fab little piece on how the use of Botox reduces social interaction (smile lines or frown lines, their social lines at the end of the day). 

See you later

 

Purpose ideas, Social Objects: Lolcats or changing the world

Pic (probably my all time fave of Hugh's cartoons) c/o Gapingvoid.com

There's been a great conversation stimulated over the last couple of days by the ever thoughtful Hugh who's being trying to explain the connection between Purpose Ideas and Social Objects and why it needs to be tight. I love the way he's always teasing at the theory to really make sense of it for practitioners.

And, most appropriately, the conversation's been picked up and carried on by John, John and Mark here on Feeding the Puppy.

I just wanted to add a couple of things to the debate:

1. Purpose ideas are what really drive brilliant businesses and make them worthwhile engaging with, either as an employee or customer (as per my comment at Feeding the Puppy).

Of course, you can have a business that measures itself purely in terms of financials and many out there are like this BUT (and it's a big BUT) if you want yours to outperform financial businesses you need to build your business on something beyond money, on something that connects with the world outside, on something that really matters to you (and hopefully your customers). For too long we've thought about the world of business merely as an economic sphere when the important piece has always been the connection of the business with a broader public, "society", say. Purpose-ideas help us reforge that connection and rebalance the equation.

2. That's why (Mark, are you listening?) you can build you PI around almost anything - anything that is, except money

3. That said, John's comments (and of course, Hugh's musings, too) point up that the dangers of just having a social object without it being routed in something you really believe in. What they're criticising is, if you like, social object-as-tactic, rather than social object-as-strategy. As we get used to the social thing, I suspect, we're going to need social objects connected back - rooted, maybe - to something that really matters to the brand or company or whatever. This is why the connection Hugh argues for is so important - it goes beyond mere sociality...

4. We need to mean it, maaaaaaan...

Have been re-reading Clay Shirky's latest and am really taken by his distinction between the (merely) social and the civic: the former being summed up by Lolcats or just generating WoM and buzz for the sake of it; the latter being characterised by actually doing something to improve the world in which its users live using social tools and sociality.

At the moment, too much of "social object" schtick that I come across is Lolcats; not enough rooted in a genuine desire to make things better - with a Purpose Idea.

 

 

Purpose ideas, Social Objects: Lolcats or changing the world

Pic (probably my all time fave of Hugh's cartoons) c/o Gapingvoid.com

There's been a great conversation stimulated over the last couple of days by the ever thoughtful Hugh who's being trying to explain the connection between Purpose Ideas and Social Objects and why it needs to be tight. I love the way he's always teasing at the theory to really make sense of it for practitioners.

And, most appropriately, the conversation's been picked up and carried on by John, John and Mark here on Feeding the Puppy.

I just wanted to add a couple of things to the debate:

1. Purpose ideas are what really drive brilliant businesses and make them worthwhile engaging with, either as an employee or customer (as per my comment at Feeding the Puppy).

Of course, you can have a business that measures itself purely in terms of financials and many out there are like this BUT (and it's a big BUT) if you want yours to outperform financial businesses you need to build your business on something beyond money, on something that connects with the world outside, on something that really matters to you (and hopefully your customers). For too long we've thought about the world of business merely as an economic sphere when the important piece has always been the connection of the business with a broader public, "society", say. Purpose-ideas help us reforge that connection and rebalance the equation.

2. That's why (Mark, are you listening?) you can build you PI around almost anything - anything that is, except money

3. That said, John's comments (and of course, Hugh's musings, too) point up that the dangers of just having a social object without it being routed in something you really believe in. What they're criticising is, if you like, social object-as-tactic, rather than social object-as-strategy. As we get used to the social thing, I suspect, we're going to need social objects connected back - rooted, maybe - to something that really matters to the brand or company or whatever. This is why the connection Hugh argues for is so important - it goes beyond mere sociality...

4. We need to mean it, maaaaaaan...

Have been re-reading Clay Shirky's latest and am really taken by his distinction between the (merely) social and the civic: the former being summed up by Lolcats or just generating WoM and buzz for the sake of it; the latter being characterised by actually doing something to improve the world in which its users live using social tools and sociality.

At the moment, too much of "social object" schtick that I come across is Lolcats; not enough rooted in a genuine desire to make things better - with a Purpose Idea.