By Will McInnes

Themes from today's Wired Sussex board meeting

• The number of new jobs being posted to the Wired Sussex jobs board has picked up in the last two months, possibly indicating a pick up in the digital community
• There has also been a substantial growth in our already massive membership base - particularly in 1-5 people web design/development firms (probably those made redundant from elsewhere - one thing we discussed is how might we put together a nurturing and growth programme to turn these opportunistic small startups into the next generation of Brighton digital talent)
• The Sussex Internships Programme, which exists to provide established members with fresh talent, was massively over-subscribed (something like 550 submissions for 40 places) and with high-quality submissions too - good to see this programme building in potential and scale each year. This exists to help get graduates into the digital business community quicker and out of 'bottlenecking' other student-friendly jobs where they stop other people who might only have those options getting the same job
• Wired Sussex continues to help Brighton University to evolve its courses to be as business-ready as possible and is doing some guest lecturing their, which is good I reckon
• Exciting early-stage plans are being tabled with New England House but these are confidential for now - hopefully not for long - really cool and ambitious
• We again made it very clear to the partners in the room, especially Paula Murray, Head of Culture & Economy, Brighton & Hove City Council, that lack of suitable space is still a big issue for many of the Brighton digital community - this is a slow-burner unfortunately but even if it takes 10 years to work out it will have been worth it! I do believe the Council is aware of it (and Paula certainly is and understands), and at a previous dinner we mentioned it to Mary Mears, current leader of the council.
• Andrew Eades from Relentless Software, wicked Brighton company making videogames mainly for Sony Playstation, joined the board this month as an observer with a view to becoming a full member to give some representation to the thriving games community here in Brighton
• Paula from the Council highlighted the newly appointed Chief Exec John Barradale and updated us on some interesting forthcoming opportunities to help with the mission of ever-building Brighton's reputation as a creative city - more soon hopefully. This was the first time I'd met Paula and I thought she was smart and really clear about her work and the city's priorities.
• Gilly Bartrip from SEEDA updated on their changing focus and priorities (which really has changed since the 'changing economic situation') and I'd paraphrase it as changing from 'people and pounds' to 'people' by which I mean that they used to invest very large amounts of cash from government in big capital investment projects (like building stuff) and provide people to help with important programmes but now their main focus is helping business by using their people - especially focusing on 5 specific sectors in the South East region. Luckily Wired Sussex hasn't been counting on some big wedge from the well-connected people at SEEDA but can benefit from some of their people in developing skills, workspaces and the Brighton brand.

The backstory for those who have no idea what this is about:
I am a board member and non-executive director at Wired Sussex. I am writing these notes to share hard-earnt progress with the local digital community who often don't understand what Wired Sussex is doing for the community.

Wired Sussex is interesting because it is a progressive not-for-profit organisation that exists to develop the digital community in Brighton and basically gets on with that job, funded by a thriving jobs board, project revenues and stuff, without any interference from anywhere but the Brighton digital community.

No man is an island, and if Wired Sussex were an island it would be very small, very creative, very plugged in and would be very lost on the high seas of government, the ever-changing tides of policy, utterly lost in a giant-scale world.

So what Wired Sussex does do extremely well is partner with lots of big resource-rich ambitious regional players - like Brighton & Hove City Council, the University of Sussex, Brighton University and SEEDA. In my opinion this group is working extremely effectively together now, though there are those that will continue to ask challenging questions of Wired Sussex.

Trust me when I say that it's quite a marvel to witness these partners who could be so diluted and blunted by bureaucracy and tribal priorities doing what they do so effectively together. The power of smart, clear people in a room with aligned goals and common interests. That, and the frankly amazing bridge-building talents of Wired Sussex CEO Phil Jones and his team.

Wired Sussex's model is unusual and successful enough to have been investigated, copied and learnt about by people near and far - across the UK, at a recent Digital City conference in Paris, interest now coming from Doha and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Work continues :)

6 reasons why Brighton & Hove Council are right to hire a social media specialist

Disclosure: Our social media agency is currently conducting a piece of social media research for Brighton & Hove City Council, who we are proud to have as a client. We work with them primarily because we care about this city and because we believe this work and this movement matters.

So the background is that our local council is hiring for a new role to join the communications department to "increase visibility, build our brand and learn about our audiences by utilising social media".

The local newspaper, The Argus, took a disappointingly critical viewpoint in my opinion so I felt I had to chip in with a different perspective - one passionately for Brighton, but tempered with experiences in how large organisations are changing with the new digital era.

There are 6 reasons why I think this is a significant and smart step for the citizens of Brighton & Hove, who the council must serve:

1. We are there

The council works for us.
We are spending more time in social spaces and less time consuming and paying attention to traditional media.
To work for us, they must communicate with us.
Simply, they must be where we are - and we are in these new social spaces.

As a crude yardstick the Brighton network on Facebook is marginally larger than the population of Brighton so there is some substantial engagement or opportunity available (though many sections of our population will not be represented there). At the other end of the mass to niche continuum, the work of SCIP and the rest of our digital community has created little clusters of very niche community sites such as Prestonville Postblog and Coldean Residents Association.

We are there. They (BHCC) must be too.

2. Getting value for money

All large organisations carry an overhead in communicating (just internal communications, for anyone that's come across it in a team larger than 20, is gigantic, let alone external comms).

Most organisations are adapting their communications spend from how we used to consume media to how we do today. In our work with our client base we know that the sparkliest, bravest blue-chip brands are only part-way on this journey.

What drives all of these organisations is the knowledge that if they spend more money where we are, and less where we aren't, then they will get higher levels of engagement, better results, and at less wasted communication £££.

Brighton & Hove City Council, like all major organisations, can get better value for money and free up more resources for elsewhere in the city by improving its communications mix.

As citizens, it makes sense to support them in this.

3. Leading the digital way

For me personally this is huge, as someone that grew up here, and who passionately understands the quality and potential of what we have in Brighton and wants to see it succeed.

Brighton is leading, digitally.

Economically, my understanding is that our biggest sectors in the city are public sector, followed by health and financial (a significant chunk of the latter being American Express) and then it is Creative Industries. Our digital community is the biggest chunk of Creative Industries.

Our sector is growing fast. We have more than 800 companies employing more than 8,000 people in digital.

A BBC journalist recently commented to Phil Jones, CEO of Wired Sussex and the man that gave me this information, that he reckoned proportionally we have the biggest digital community in the UK. I agree and hope somehow we can prove this.

We have talent in so many different flavours of digital:

• In mobile
• In search
• In virtual worlds - both of whom's only HQs outside of California are HERE in Brighton
• In user experience
• In social media
• In web development
• In e-learning
• In video games (or is that another sector - I dunno)

Talent enough that in the recent HSBC 'Super Cities' report, which speculated about the tier of cities that would emerge as power-players in the knowledge economy, Brighton was selected as one of the five in the UK.

The work of Wired Sussex and its committed team and board* is all about helping that happen. This is an active work in progress. (* Another disclosure: I am a board member at Wired Sussex).

So we need more attention and recognition from the big policy makers and funders to support this upstart community. To recognise its value now, but its significant strategic value tomorrow.

Gradually that is happening.

To speed that up we need momentum: momentum that is powered by an understanding of the new digital age within our council - a big player in this; within our local media community; within central government.

And across the board, at every 'touchpoint' we need to lead - to demonstrate how the Internet can be harnessed to make real differences to the real world. For me, that absolutely includes excellence and pioneering with Brighton & Hove City Council. It transcends. In fact, it reminds me of how Curtis James invested his time speaking with the management of Brighton Station to see if they could improve their appearance and customer experience, given that it was the moment of arrival for so many visiting our city. It all matters.

Personally, as a citizen, I buy the very smallest riskiest tiniest seed of that for 24,402 - £ 28,353.

4. Change is very hard in big organisations

Other than our work with Brighton & Hove City Council, our work is exclusively for much bigger organisations: from Coca-Cola through to Department of Health, WWF to HSBC.

Working with them, we see how hard change is. The barriers to change are significant.

Even our most pioneering clients find it hard to transition to a social online world. They must bring their legal people along on the journey, their HR folk, their customer service people, their product managers (funnily enough, sometimes the hardest to convince - can be harder than legal). It's not easy.

So what they tend to do is invest in both advancement across the board - where we train their whole press team, their whole marketing organisation, create policies for all employees, encourage participation broadly - and invest in advancement in concentrated ways. During our time working with them both BMW and Channel 4 have created dedicated roles to address social media.

This isn't saying 'oh my, if we hire this one egg-headed Facebook fiend all of our woes will fly away'.

This is saying 'one way to make these changes might be to create an internal expert and ambassador that has the time and space to focus on this and get results by working with their colleagues'.

Although I wasn't involved in BHCC's thinking on the matter, I'd guess this was part of their plan. Not to silo and ghettoize Social Media, but to appoint a gardener-in-chief to help others with their nurturing and growing.

Again, I buy that as a citizen.

5. Supporting change within the council

In my contact with the council I have found that they understand the possibilities of the social web, and have the appetite to harness them as much as any of our clients.

These are the people I have personally met and talked with that seem to get the opportunity that social media presents them to engage and do the Council's work better:

• Council leader Mary Mears (who mentioned her 'much more au fait' colleague Counciller Ayas Fallon-Khan, who is I have heard a big digital advocate)
• John Shewell, Head of Corporate Communications
• Jake Barlow, Head of Marketing
• Yvette Bordley, Senior Marketing Officer
• then Acting Chief Executive Alex Bailey
• Anthony Zacharzewski, Acting Director of Strategy & Governance

If these guys, a tiny cross-section representing the leadership and the communications team, can lead the vanguard and help their organisation listen and engage and empower other parts of the council to also move with the times, then I buy that.

More importantly, we should support them. Change is horrifically hard. Change inside public organisations is generally thought to be even harder. More power to their digital elbows I say.

Our public servants are trying to move with the times. I want to help them with that.

6. To rise above the one-eyed perspective of The Argus

My intent has been to keep this as positive as possible. As a supplier to the council I am very badly placed to provide a credible riposte to one of their challengers. I also believe in the role and duty of the media to interrogate society's organisations and keep us all on our toes. We need more of that - not less.

But I wanted more from The Argus on this story, especially given that their Web Editor Jo Waddsworth has done such good work bringing their content to social spaces...

You'd have thought it would be hypocritical to criticise the very same investment of resources and decision-making, but not this time. Irritating and disappointing, given this context.

Some kinda positive summary :-)

This matters.

Brighton has an incredible opportunity. It has a magnificent digitally-enhanced future available to it. Let's pull together and have a group hug and get behind it. If the City Council are up for it, it's one more force for good, and one less barrier in the way.

SUPERRRRR CITY.

Scorn

Sit in your ivory tower, and marvel at the scum toiling for the man.
Kick back and philosophise, guru.
Know it all and know it good.
You remember back then with purity and misty-eyed fondness. Bless!
Espouse, pontificate, critique, bandy.
What fools are they toiling for the man? What fools! How could it have been, this thing of ours?
How good, how dignified, how brilliant?
If only the bad man and his two-backed agents hadn't stuck their grubby mitts in. Eh?
Spoilt, spoilt by spoilers. Bah.
Muddied by suits, shammers, spivs and snake-oil fakers. They don't remember back when, the shits.
And now look! The picnic is ruined, and instead, the world has moved on.

London MeasurementCamp feedback

The goal of the survey was to get feedback on how to develop MeasurementCamp based on user feedback. (You dirty users).

The caveat is that it is deeply flawed from a market research perspective, which has something achingly wrong about it, given this is MeasurementCamp, but hey ho. From my POV, any input is better than guesswork and intuition alone.

The goal of this post is to synthesize the feedback into some meaningful actions.

How many times have you been to zis MeasurementCamping?

Insights:

• Most people have been a few times
• There are 2 idiots corrupting the quality of our results :)

What do you enjoy?

Insights:

• Most important: 'Meeting people' and 'Learning'
• 2nd: 'Sharing' and 'Keeping up to date'

Interestingly 'Solving practical problems' was marginally more important than 'Looking at opposite sex'...whoddathunkit. Perverts.

How shall we structure future sessions?

Insights:

• Most wanted: 'Show 'n' tell presentations from individuals'
• 2nd: 'Solving real-world client scenarios' and 'Creating industry best practices'
• 3rd: 'Presentations from vendors and experts' surprisingly high

I found this helpful. Discussions below though please.

Best thing about MeasurementCamp?

Insights:

• The power of the collective: 'people from different fields', 'collective thought, very wise crowd', 'sharing'

Worst thing about MeasurementCamp?

Insights:

• No one single thing, but lots of understandable comments
• The booze at 10 am sounds like a great plan

General comments and ideas

• Some excellent suggestions
• Structure is a bit of a theme - I need help with that :)

Suggestions:

1. We immediately work towards having mini-presentations at each and every 'camp from now on - from our own 'Campers and from vendors/experts
2. We explore structure, based on the above, and generally run a tighter ship in terms of what we plan to do at each session
3. We structure how our work contributes to shareable best practices
4. We don't lose all of the humanity and character of this thing (cheesy I know)
   

Big questions that I'd like some help with please:

1. How do we deal with 'meeting people' being a massive part of this without over-egging the morning's intros - I feel the per-person introductions take ages but actually give us each value, even the repetitions? Do we have coffee time after or between to give time for chats? Do we have regular social sessions - afternoons followed by beers? Name badges? Social network on Ning (ugh!)? Other ideas?
2. I've liked the embeddedness and no-cost of hosting by camping at people's offices, but are we saying a constant venue would be better suited now?
3. If we introduce costs like a permanent venue, then we introduce an overhead around sponsors - finding them, billing them, feels ugly hassley.
4. What do you take from this - tell me what to do!

Join in: Transitions Online bridgecamp, Riga 5th & 6th February

1. Social media can be navel-gazing pseudo-intellectual boosheet.
2. Social media can also enable significant REAL change in the world.

Most of us spend too much doing too much #1.
But here is a brilliant, interesting, international opportunity to have a crack at #2.

The following is written by the excellent Dan McQuillan who is the lead digital guy at The Make Your Mark Campaign (a NixonMcInnes client) and who spends his spare time doing cool stuff like Social Innovation Camp.

If I didn't already have of worky time away from home already booked for Feb and March, I'd be on this quicker than you can say 'oh, look there's another celebrity broadcasting himself through Twitter'.

Over to Dan:

i'm helping organise a bridgecamp (a techs + NGOs
barcamp) in riga on 5th + 6th Feb, run by Transitions Online
(http://www.tol.cz/) and i'm looking for a few folk who'd like to come
& contribute. It'd be on a voluntary basis, but Transitions Online
would cover travel and accomodation.

It's a wrap-up for a 12 month project to boost web tools and
strategies for NGOs in the new member states of the EU, especially
around transparency, anti-corruption etc.

i did a session at their seminar in prague last year (the blog post
has some details:
http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/crowdsourcing_for_transparency) and
it was an inspiring experience. some of these folk are really on the
frontline. On the other hand, they're not that savvy about how to make
the most impact with digital.

part of the feb event will be trying to accelerate some of the project
ideas generated from last year (http://techtools.tol.org/marketplace).
four of the projects have had some developer time over the last couple
of months but i'm not too sure how much has been achieved.

but basically they've left it up to me to propose the shape of the two
days and i'm keen to expose them to some experienced developers,
digital marketers and social media campaigners. i'm sure that if they can 'get' a few key ideas, they could make a real difference in their countries.

i'm especially interested in social media marketing / buzz monitoring / user experience types.

people can contact me via http://www.internetartizans.co.uk/contact or
dm me @danmcquillan

So if you'd like to kick up a level from navel-gazing and selling handbags to spending a weekend in Riga (cool, cool city) helping real people make a real difference to their real world, get involved :)

Imagine abundance

Imagine if all of the electricity soaked up on 'standby' by the electrical goods that light up my house and yours at night, blinking, was stored or re-distributed or somehow put to good use.

Imagine if all of those pedals on exercise bikes in gyms actually re-generated power so that gyms 'broke even' in their electricty consumption.

Imagine if all of the kettles that are boiling right now only had just enough water in them and so used an optimal amount of electricity.

Imagine if all of the money sat in old people's bank accounts could be underwritten (properly) and then mobilised in the form of microloans in both the developing world and in underinvested areas in the UK.

Imagine if all of that cardboard and plastic that we fill our recycling bins with every day never got to our door, never got to the shop, was never created in the first place.

Imagine if every white van, lorry and taxi found a productive return trip for each outbound job.

Imagine if car-sharing was the norm and that the average number of passengers in a car was not one but two.

Imagine if every child in a neighbourhood was part of a toy-sharing scheme and rotated through a never-ending carousel of toys.

Imagine if all of this fat on my body was re-distributed to people that needed it (weird thought, I know).

Imagine all of those tickets going spare at events every night, every city, every country.

Imagine if we charged our ridiculously crappy mobile phone batteries by walking, and our laptops by tapping the keyboard.

When we started composting I thought nothing of it. Now by the end of the week there is a full builder's sized bucket of organic matter ready to go from our fridge and cupboards - mostly via our plates - into our garden. For that one bucket's worth: no rubbish truck capacity; no bin liner; no landfill dug. (It's still not good enough, but it's definitely one step better).

What if we could transfer similarly simple practices to similarly gigantic sources of abundant waste?

I am not talking about communism (I don't think).

I am talking about self-organising stuff, internet-enabled-marketplace stuff, helpful technology stuff.

I know these aren't revolutionary thoughts. But can you imagine the abundance of everything? Not tomorrow, but today? Can you imagine how much stuff there already is?

Some NixonMcInnes news: Chairman Burden and C4 cool job

Feeling the need to point out two interestingish nuggets of news for those that don't subscribe to our company blog.

1. Chairman Burden
Like Chairman Mao, except from Lewes, it's actually pretty big news for us that we've appointed our long-time business coach Peter Burden as chairman of NixonMcInnes.
Pete is fantastic, and different, and has been vital to lots of good things that have happened in the last 2 or 3 years. He's humble to the point of secretive, and when you actually look at his track record (which he only really let on to us in the last few months, i kid you not) it's pretty cool - including playing a key role in the setting up of BBC News Online.
This is part of a range of actions we're taking to accelerate the pace of development at NM HQ, along with developing a new management team and redefining our vision, mission and business strategy. Please note: this stuff isn't about growth in size - we don't care about being big, or even much bigger at all than we are now: this is about growth in cleverness, resilience and impact, that's what we care about (most of the time - the grass is, of course, always greener and one can easily slip into thinking about world domination from time to time... :). Full blog post.

2. Channel 4 Digital Publicity Manager
We're working with Channel 4 in assisting with their mission to lead their industry in embracing online, specifically to begin with helping them work on how that evolves their team structures and skills.
As a clear signal of how seriously they take their mission the guys there are currently looking for a smart, switched-on digital PR person to help co-ordinate cross-departmental activities that push the channel into the digital age.
A seriously cool job for one of your mates or contacts who works in communications and has a digital bent. Check it.

NM family

NM family
Originally uploaded by Anna Carlson

Some of the NixonMcInnes gang at our summer BBQ thingy in Preston Park, Brighton. These people are good people.

MeasurementCamp tomorrow, Dare, London

Hello peeps, just a quick and final reminder that MeasurementCamp is happening tomorrow at digital agency Dare's HQ - details on this blog post from top MeasurementCamper Helen Lawrence / @helenium.

- Photos of MeasurementCamp
- Twitter buzz

See you there!

-------------------------

What is this MeasurementCamp you speak of?

It's a free-to-attend, open event where people from across many different industries get together to discuss the hows and whys of measuring social media.

We meet monthly at a friendly, informal host venue to chew the digital shizzle and make tiny steps and share insights and ideas.

Purpose

* The purpose of this initiative is to create a set of open source resources which allow interested parties to measure their social media communications online and offline.
* These resources may be information in the form of guides, a framework, suggested units of measurement, icons, basic software or tools, or other stuff entirely.
* They may not be measuring devices themselves - our purpose is to develop clarity around 'what' to measure rather than 'how'.
* We are not aiming to develop a 'one-size fits all' approach. The development of the project is based on an understanding that measures will vary greatly on a client-by-client basis and the network in which we are communicating/participating.

Manifesto

1. We believe that social media are about relationships and language. This makes conversations difficult to 'measure' by existing metrics [1]
2. We believe that nonetheless measurement is important and we strive to find clarity in and derive better insights from the work that we do
3. We believe that technologies to measure will probably be proprietary but that to use these technologies effectively we as a community can help one another to develop understanding and resources to fill the yawning gaps in our own education and knowledge
4. We believe that whatever we produce together should be freely available for others to use and improve, and that together we are stronger than apart
5. We believe that whilst every case is different and unique, there are benefits to common standards and approaches around the world and across regional boundaries

Some sidenotes on writing

Sidenote: The benefits of writing (Thinking?)

In writing this I suddenly remembered Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point archetypes. So I guess I'm noising here, rather than creating genuine new intelligence. Oh well :)

In writing this I've also remembered that this is an ecosystem, an interlinked, interdependent world. Thinking gets nowhere without Noising and Executing. We need all colours, all flavours, in the group, to make the thing work - noisy noisers to trigger quiet earnest executors, thinkers to feed the noisers.

In writing this I've also thought that individuals or groups can quickly emerge from one or other groups into another - nothing is forever. Gandhi spent a lot of time sitting around talking to people (so Pete says) - a movement rose up around him. Talkers can coalesce over time and then suddenly propel into action, just as dry grass stiffens and smoulders under the hot sun, crackling and then ripping into wildfire.

In writing this I'm reminded that I want to spend my time evenly distributed between Thinking and Executing, and biased towards Executing if in doubt. Noising is pointless for me.

Noising vs. Thinking vs. Executing

For me the most attractive thing about working in this sweet scented many-petalled flower of the internet plus culture plus business plus everything else is the bees that gather, drawn in inexorably, unstoppably, magnetised by an invisible something.

It's the people, stupid :)

And the people are the most amazing I've ever spent time with.
From across industries. From across national boundaries.
I've met and keep meeting sah-weeeeet people through this Internet thing.

Fortunately we're different enough to not be a bunch of bland, beige generic robots, but there's some shared stuff:

• A love of the new (clearly)
• An associated openness and optimism
• Willingness to get stuck in
• Social conscience too

It's an attitude.
Hunkydory.

What I'm interested to see now, as the tribe grows in strength, size and gelledness, is what we can do together...

To achieve anything I sorta wonder what % of our collective time and energy is distributed across three different time-buckets: Noising, Thinking & Executing at the moment.

Noising -
Noising is the art of making noise.
It's the echoing of the echo chamber - the embellishing and amplifying of someone else's thought or message. Noising is usually higher quantity, lower quality.
It's the continuous partial attention-powered chitter-chatter on Twitter, the blogging, the unconferencing, the making of NOISE.

Thinking -
Thinking is what is says on the tin.
It's quiet time considering, reflecting and generating high quality thoughts, insights and ideas.
It is reinterpreting existing thoughts and concepts - nothing is new, as they say, but it's an attempt to move things forward.
Thinking doesn't 'do' in the operational sense, other than generating and documenting.
Thinking can be collaborative or independently done, and can include workshops, high quality conversations and dialogue, brainstorming and writing.

Executing -
Executing is getting things done.
It is the starting the company to exploit the thought or technology or market opportunity.
Executing leads to startups, working groups, new code, new stuff, new connections, teams, revenues.
Executing is concerned only with what gets done, with results and with real-world achievements and milestones.

So where does all of this leave us, as I like to ask?

• I wonder how your time splits out?
• I wonder how mine splits out?
• I wonder how the A-list split out between these groups?
• I wonder if there's an optimal blend for an individual?
• Or whether given personality types and natural strengths and weaknesess a better unit for judging the optimal blend is a team or a network - e.g. how much noise vs. think vs. executing do we need in the ideal project team (a network)?

And in a roundabout way what I'm also saying here, implicitly, is that I believe we spend too much time Noising and chasing breaking non-news and the latest social media handbag (today: Cuil, tomorrow: Crudola), and nowhere near enough time Executing.

Ratings and reviews are considered pedestrian by us strident web types - so why haven't we driven forward services and hubs exposing industries and worlds to this disruptive, brilliant innovation?

Online social networks are like SO 1990s for us - we're into microblogging and mobile social networks - but what about the company selling online social networks for vertical industries for gazillions, where did they spend their time - Noising or Thinking then Executing?

I think our personal characteristics mean we move on too quickly, bored by something as soon as we have a handle on it (I think I'm writing about me here), but too quickly to actually give something back to the world - to see how to broker the new new in a way that provides value to normal people.

Maybe a more powerful loop than constantly learning and updating every day would be getting very deep into a pocket and then exploiting and applying that knowledge for the next 6 months - 2 years, and then starting the loop again? Developing towering epic impactful tools and resources each time, whilst our lacklustre buddies are impeccably up to date on the feature set of the latest latest and still treading water, despite brains crammed with value?

Are we applying what we have to give?
Or are we continually topping it up in 0.5% increments?

Who are the Noisers, Thinkers and Executors?
What are you best at?
How can you leverage and exploit what you already have?

...impact, results, real-world change. Execution is begging you to join her.

Peer to peer spam

Spam used to be broadcast: one-to-many.
An interesting side effect of online social networks and the tools which enable user-generated content is people spamming one another in smaller but equally annoying ways.

I've had two in 2 days on Facebook - one offering me fixes to a problem I don't have (£20) and the other pumping a Facebook Poker app ('it's the best I've seen') which could also be a hacked account.

As social technology permits frictionless communication, our behaviour as technology users will need to catch up with the implications, with new codes of conduct (implicit and explicit) governing what is and isn't cool.

Sending everyone in your Facebook friends a promotional message: Not cool.

The Age of Snark

Click on image to expand

In the old days we only heard customers when we chose to.

We had to decide to listen, and even when we did, to really hear them we had to listen hard.

We heard them when we held expensive, small scale and very tame focus groups.

We heard them when we allowed the call centre operatives to eventually escalate something they and the customer base had known about for weeks or months or years or decades.

We filtered, selected, and avoided.

As organisations we suffered from selective deafness, like that old grandmother in the corner, deaf to everything but the bits she wanted to hear. Smart with it. Deaf to the bad. But noisy.

Inbound, it was all optional.
Our input mechanism was mainly a dumb terminal, a slave to the beast, feedback filtered at every stage on the way to the top: 'everything is fine', the most default finding.

Yet our output was non-optional: we broadcast and blared out. Interruption.

Importantly, they - consumers, clients, buyers - were loyal because it was hard to find alternatives.

That was The Age of 'Control' (in inverted commas).

[It felt like control. And it probably was, of sorts. Consumers were isolated and media channels were intermediated and finite. But real total absolute control never existed. See Ceauşescu, non?]

Flip forward not one but two steps from here, The Age of Control, and we find that in the new world we will have neat, simple, usable tools that flow feedback between supplier and client like stock price data in a live marketplace.

In this happy sunshiney world:

Listening will be a minute-by-minute task, not a daily check, not a monthly clippings report or quarterly customer service review.

Like it is already at the major news organisations websites, where live analytics on what's hot and what's not drive the news agenda and business behaviour.

Like it is already at smart online retailers where merchandising decisions are truly dynamic and flow in realtime.

Like it is already at the fewest of the few digital PR agencies, where the finger really is on the binary pulse.

Blurred organisational edges will permit and even welcome the effortless osmosis of information betwixt and between. Solutions, ideas and innovations marketplaces will be the norm - Dell Ideastorm will look like the simple early prototype it probably is.

APIs, affiliate programmes, widgets and other shades of distributed goodness will be givens, seeding a thousand minnows and cuttlefish around the core service/site, distributing life beyond the original source: the reef, the brand, the site, the centre of that ecosystem.

Importantly, loyalty will return because time poor clients will be happier with mature service-led organisations that truly walk the customer-centred talk.

This will be The Age of Dialogue...

But right now we are somewhere betwixt the two.

Not yet in the dreamlike sunny paradise of Dialogue, yet not any more in the similarly comfortable Age of 'Control', instead we are in the turbulent transitory rolling seas of a different age.

A temporary age, thank god.

A painful, confusing changed ocean away from this Utopian destination where instead we are caught with rudimentary and dated Age of Control ways of working, processes, tools, people and expectations from our publics, but where the feedback we receive is entirely different, entirely unmanaged and unmanageable by our current systems, entirely uncontrollable.

Today is pain and confusion, fear and loathing.
Today's business is badly equipped for the world today...

So welcome, friends, to The Age of Snark.

Like boiling bilious lava, white-hot furious consumers vent wherever they find an outlet - spraying burning fluorescent looping lances of aggregated, unified rage.

Customers like me and you are disloyal and resent having to be so for the time and hassle it costs them.

At conferences with an internet savvy gamut, audiences pour into public and private online spaces to poll one another and quickly establish consensus before the speaker has finished, long before she has left the platform, and an age before the tired organiser has collected the lies and gladhanding half-truths scrawled on yellow paper questionnaires.

See Innovation Edge, Future of Web Design or Chinwag Measuring Social Media. All well respected events produced by well loved people. All now exposed to the ruthlessness of public, immediate feedback.

Worse still, our inner cowards prevail in such circumstances: it's easier to leave a nasty review than ask for the manager; to snark at the back of the conference rather than find the organiser and feedback face-to-face.

What will change and when?

My view is that right now we're in a unique point in this transition, at the very fulcrum of change, where the consumer conversations have flooded online but the organisations don't yet have the infrastructure and time to tap into and address those conversations.

Only 10% (at most) of the people in groups I work with at major brands have even Google Alerts set up. Online monitoring, umm, hmmm, ahem, yeahhh.

Very few major brands have yet invested in proper buzz monitoring solutions so they simply don't yet even have an ear to the networked chatter. Or a regular, known presence on places of online congregation (such as consumer forums).

And until they do, they won't think about how to respond, who should respond, and what to do with that new incoming knowledge within the business.

This is The Age of Snark (complete with capital letters).

As those things (the listening devices, the community engagements, the processes and skills, and so on) change my expectation and hope is that we will enter a more harmonious time where the flow of dialogue between the players in every marketplace will be frictionless, will be immediate, will be transparent and open and available.

The truth will out.

And consumers will act more respectfully and more maturely, because service providers will be listening to them (really) and responding to them, often publicly, transparently, and rapidly.

How long will this take? I have no idea. When you look at mature disciplines or principles in online such as usability, accessibility or even search engine optimisation, it is normal to find very patchy awareness let alone regular and consistent use of these core services amongst leading brands. So I must temper my natural optimism with the practical experience gained and guess that this will be years. Years and years, for the laggards.

In the interim, don't expect too much level-headedness, maturity and decency from the great unwashed masses (that's me and you, as consumers) online.

Do expect big-talking anonymous cowards, raging frustrated unheard ex-customers, playground social dynamics with polarised opinions and cosy cliques and gangs, and lots of Godwin's Law.

The Age of Snark is fatiguing, depressing, polluting, childish, unreasonable, bitter, cowardly, and in the main, absolutely deserved.

Thoughts on online advertising and the new age

Advertising is as wedded to its old structures and modes as music is: both, equally flawed and ill-suited to life today.

Advertising is the worst, least, laziest option available to any brand today. It requires the least thought (although ironically, often the most investment).

Most attempts to update advertising are no better than 'crap marketing' - think of 'me me me' type content streamed into a widget that no-one installs.

And the most persistent attempts to update online advertising are - rightly or wrongly - seen as privacy invading pernicious 'trust us' type technologies.

The solution needs to start from consumers needs and brands needs today, not lazy old ways of yesterday clumsily shoehorned into todays' online world. To not be reconfigured, but to be started again.

The future of online advertising will be:
- decentralised
- empower consumers before and above brands
- helpful

I don't hear that from innovators in online advertising today. Am I wrong?

MeasurementCamp II - notes on the goodness

Another interesting and useful session with the MeasurementCampers (ahem) yesterday.

Each time (this was the second session) I really don't expect anyone to turn up: if you've organised a worky type event without tickets then you'll know the fear. Added to this, due to every other priority in life I'm pretty poor at getting the word out there: the odd tweet, maybe a lone blog post! And yet the quality of people joining the conversations is actually upsettingly good.

Relief to see just plain numbers, bodies on the ground, and then delight to see just who turned out!

We always kick things off with the well-worn and cheesey corporate tradition of introducing ourselves, what we do and why we came to MeasurementCamp. And as the spotlight moved around the room I was blown away by the breadth and intelligence of the contributors: we had reps from some of the best admired 'traditional' (sorry guys :) and Online PR firms in the country; we had reps from some of the leading measurement technology companies in the world; a couple of the smartest clients I've met yet in Dan Macquillan (Make Your Mark) and Helen Aspell (University of Southampton); a gaggle of social media planners and digital strategists;  one shiny podcaster; a smattering of SEO hats and an increasing number of people calling themselves social media agencies (what kinda silly person goes into that business?).

As usual we collaboratively suggested topics for work & discussion, and then hived off in little focused work groups to tackle those topics which motivated us most.

I think this time we had a group of Benchmarks and benchmarking, a group on What to Measure and another group of What to Measure, but with a different angle on it.

In the group I joined, benchmarking, we had aimed to find ways to help the industry benchmark successes in social media communications and marketing.

We quickly acknowledged that, with the help of the Diffusion of Innovation model, this being a new immature and evolving marketplace, those with the precious data on what worked, what didn't work and what some good yardsticks were would understandably be protecting such precious intellectual property, and that whereas in mature markets (say email marketing, or Direct Mail) information sharing was the norm, here, at the pioneering edges, such data was unlikely to be forthcoming.

What we moved onto instead was 'how to benchmark' to describe a simple flow that will allow clients and agencies to at least begin benchmarking themselves and developing their own IP in this area: a valuable asset for any organisation; and an important step towards the eventual goal of sharing such data.

The flow isn't exactly effing rocket science, but nonetheless I believe it'll help my team at least to have a point of reference and an explicit 'way to do this' on each project or campaign we work on.

And it shook out another interesting thread to the conversation: the range of tools available to do the 'snapshot' bit of the per-client-benchmarking exercise. So we then finished by getting down a long list of useful tools for measuring social media. There were some superb suggestions that I'd never heard of (Facebook Lexicon, searches Walls for key words - haven't yet checked it out, but sounds v.v.useful indeedy; a Yahoo Pipes tool developed specifically for this kinda malarkey) - brilliant. So all of this will be wikified. Which is the point of all of this: pooling knowledge; sharing resources; being useful, and so breaking important ground for all.

So what next for MeasurementCamp?

1. Momentum building
2. Wikifying everything
3. Building resilience around a core

1. Momentum building

This is about keeping things rolling.
About making our fancy big talk really *stick* by growing our wider base of contributors and fans of the project (we don't actually need more people at each session, but given that we all have different commitments and demanding work lives we need a certain critical mass to sustain us). And we want this work, this energy, and this collaborative approach to seed into the wider industry - in citations, in awards, whatever, buzz - I believe that's what it's called ;-) All because this will help achieve our goals - our goals of developing ever-better clarity around measuring social media so that we can improve the way organisations communicate with their stakeholders (which develops our businesses too) and accelerate the pace of this inevitable change.

2. Wikifying everything

This is about actually making a difference.
In small, face-to-face groups we create the sparks.
But by wikifying everything useful - processes, lists of resources, case studies - we create the roaring bonfire, the beacon that will help those we want to help. And we're getting better at this. There is a growing recognition that it's only *really* useful if it's comprehensible, meaningful and useful to those that have never sat at a small wooden table in The Coach & Horses, so our role is to contribute to the platform, our wonderful and blossoming wiki. So notes were taken, commitments were made - let's make it happen. (Indeed, hat tip to Helen from Dare, who made wonderful contributions on the day, and has already overhauled the wiki - thanks @helenium :) and also to Simon Quance from Hyperlaunch - thanks man - fuck me it's working!!! The wiki is ALIVE!!!! (Cue stormy music, seaweed on face, howling winds, and the drawn out groan of a very creaky door).

3. Building resilience around a core

This is about sustainability. In their inimicable way Chinwag brought the first conversations together, I suggested the idea whilst sat on the panel, and from there we kinda made it happen, together. To be resilient, to sustain, we need a hardcore, we need our own Wikipedians, the 1%ers that commit. And we've been very fortunate already with the influence and power (!) of our attendees, and I feel particularly grateful for Rachel Clarke, Adrian Moss, Helen Aspell and Anna Carlson who have been involved both sessions so far. (I've racked my brains for any others, if I missed you I'm terribly sorry, I am a little hungover if that helps ease the pain?). What I've suggested and can see happening is a core forming, some people who can help make the good stuff happening so that there isn't a single point of failure: this is a networked organisation, luvvies, ya? YA?!

So I'm running out of time here but I hope you get the idea.

Next event: Weds 4th June, 10 am - 12 pm, Coach and Horses (subject to them having availability)

Be there, or be a clueless big talking hippified no-tangible-proof social media 'it's not about measurement...oooh is that a UFO' muppet.

PS. Any feedback gratefully received on how we can make this even better either from real-world attendees or hidden farway interested parties, or general thoughts and next steps