All about everyonea blog about engagement

IdeaTag: An open freesource for developing ideas

So, I kind of like the idea of Follow Friday, on Twitter, but it led me to think that what would be quite cool would be to see the same mechanism of forwarding being used to crowdsource the development of specific ideas.

Then I realised that Twitter is not going to be enough on it’s own to explain some ideas, so I am going to combine the mechanism of using hashtags and forwarding on Twitter, with the use of an open, threaded stream on FriendFeed, to create an open platform for developing ideas.

Here’s how it works:

• You have an idea, you post it to FriendFeed, adding a name for your idea and a short description, as well as ‘#ideatag’. At this point, that’s all it may be.
• Now, others can respond to your idea, adding their own thoughts and helping the idea develop.
• Um, that’s it. Oh, except for the fact that there is a Twitter account too, but I haven’t been able to get this to pick up posts and comments from the FriendFeed group meh…

Who knows, it might work, it might not, but to kick it off, I’ve added a few of my own, not-really-100%-thought-through ideas, with a little trepidation, I might add. It’s slightly uncomfortable revealing an idea, even if (heavily) caveated with the fact that it’s not really been that well thought through yet, but the point with this is to do just that, moot ideas to see if anyone can help develop them.

I’m just seeing whether this could work, in the simple way that I’ve set it up. The platforms I’m using may be too limiting and others might be better suited. I’d love suggestions about how this might work better, so please email me at will_at_allabouteveryone_dot_com if you have any suggestions.

IdeaTag on Twitter |    IdeaTag on FriendFeed

How to get the best ideas

It’s often we hear that the advent of digital advertising and new media has changed the advertising industry. However the root of change in the industry can be traced back beyond the obvious technical changes brought about by the internet and broadband, these are today’s means, yes, but not the sole driving force. The largess of the 80’s and 90’s, 3 martini lunches, flashy sports cars, and telephone number salaries has all but vanished. The talk now is of utilization rates and staff to income ratios: the Mad Men of today are the accountants.

All this corporate drive to trim fat, bolster profit margins, and deliver return on investment has forced agencies to rethink how they do business. The advent of the internet, and the availability of new and more tangible measurement techniques means the brands have more control and more visibility than ever before in the creation of advertising.

In order to truly take advantage of new media it’s necessary to reinvent the way agencies work and how they work with their clients. It is no longer enough to simply lock away a copy writer and a designer and wait for the big idea, it doesn’t work and it increasingly produces work that is less interesting and with less engagement than the school kid who video’s himself waving a light saber.

Agencies need to put back together the pieces that have been separated in the strive to build vertical markets. Even now the best digital agencies are producing content that can be consumed via multiple channels, yet the ideas are still expected to come from the feted few who desperately cling on to their ivory towers.

By bringing all parts of the process of idea creation together it will be possible to produce ideas that truly capture the zeitgeist and deliver the oft touted ROI that brands want. It’s great to measure, but to make the most of New Media and deliver great work it’s not only metrics that you need to worry about, but the people and skills that exist in the community in which you work.

The importance of community in the work place cannot be overestimated however it is more often overlooked, particularly within the traditional agency model where ego is king. Social networking software within the work place can allow a fluid exchange of ideas, where ever you are, that can enable even the humblest employee to have a voice .

Often the barrier to participation in idea generation is a perception amongst employees that their voice doesn’t count; or worse doesn’t get listened to. When I off handedly mentioned that I wasn’t strong on networking to a friend the other day, his response was ‘hide behind twitter’ – this off the cuff remark completely encapsulated the idea that social networking tools can allow even the most shy and retiring person the opportunity to engage with others and to get themselves and their ideas heard.

To be able to truly harness the people that work for an agency, who, let’s face it, joined because they wanted to get involved in the business of ideas, is to truly listen to everyone’s ideas. By employing carefully thought out virtual communities, encouraging participation and rewarding good ideas when they come (wherever they come from) an agency can get the best ideas and create a workforce that is truly ‘creative’, add enormous value for clients and foster talent where it is found.

Dreaming in montage and why we have always made non-linear sense

When you stop to think about it, storytelling surely must be embedded into our DNA. I am no neuro scientist or genome specialist (in case you were wondering), but I find the idea utterly compelling.

Each moment of every minute of every hour of every day is a continuation of our own, self-told story. We understand our lives and the lives of others by continually building our feelings, ideas, impressions into a system of interconnecting narrative structures. Time is at the heart of this. Without time we would have no stories. Everything would happen at once, in one massive, amorphous rush. But because we live our lives within a construct of time, we are able to use memory to create meaning, stories.

When we give someone directions, we give them in a linear order, because that is how we travel, linearly. But our memories and impressions of our own lives, although created along the linear trajectory of time, are not recalled and used in a linear way. The stories we tell ourselves are not linear.

They are non-linear and, in some ways, are much like what we sometimes refer to as a ’stream’ when we talk about digital communication (friend feed being an obvious example). Other peoples lives intersect ours, some people frequently and repeatedly, others in more random ways. Each of those others has their own life streams, intersected by others. When we meet someone for the first time, we immediately set about placing them within the context of our own lives, our own perceptions based upon our own experiences. Through time, we build a constantly changing story of the people we meet. We tell this story back to ourselves every time we meet them, every time we think about them. And it’s not just people, but also events, places, objects. We tell ourselves stories in order to understand the things we pick up and hold as well as the places we visit and the environements that surround us and all the time, each little story, each new or repeated encounter, adds another short story to the stream.

We recall these short stories; the trip to the seaside, the walk through the city, not in a linear way. These are not stories that exist linearly, we only believe they do because we see them refracted through the notion of time. they come to us in flashes, get spliced together in new ways, to create new meaning, get recalled and reused.

When we dream, we don’t dream in a linear way. Our dreams are a montage of emotion, imagery, sense, pushed through the metaphor of language. Our fears and hopes created into a stream of memory. Memory of places, faces, sometimes colours, feelings. Sometimes it’s so chaotic so as to not be fathomable at all but, usually, we are able to recall, a story.

At the turn of the twentieth century film, moving film, became a new looking glass from which we could see reflected the construction of our own dreams. And I mean this very deliberately, because films are only linear because of time, and are completely non-linear because of dreams. Yes, we can record a passage of time and see within it, if there are no edits, no cuts, that people, cars, bikes, clocks, the movement of the sun, these things move linearly. But we do not construct meaning linearly and we do not construct stories linearly.

We create film, with edits, jumping back and forward through time and place and viewpoint. Jumping from one person to another, from one feeling to another, rapidly and abjectly. And why? Because this is precisly the way in which we create stories in our heads. This is the same way we create stories from our own dreams, the constant flux of emotion and recalled imagery forced into meaning. And, importantly, it is not linear. Our understanding of our lives and of each other is not dependent upon linearity, but it is utterly dependent upon stories.

chomón arcade: Gaming echos Silent film

“Early mischief gags and pickpocket reels soon started to work around chases, jumps and visual transformations. As in certain arcade and scroll games, the relation between the main character, his antagonists and the surrounding space constructs a system of vertical and horizontal relations inside the frame. Stairs, connecting floors, holes, diagonals and magic bikes engaged a certain development in early film montage, much as these same devices became key motifs in early video games. The secret of Pathe silent films was a fascination with transformation which invites the viewer to play along with the characters”

Quoted from Henry Jenkins’ blog

If Twitter is about friends, why do you make a thousand then never say hi?

I’ve just unfollowed most of the people I was following on Twitter (if you were one of them, it’s really not personal, in fact, I think that’s my point). It was about two hundred, now it’s 16.

I don’t, can’t, follow friends on Twitter – mainly because most of my friends don’t use it – at all, or if they do, so rarely that it is like waiting for a bus to turn up on Berthnal Green Road.

I use it for finding out information. I use it instead of reading a paper or a magazine. I use it to indirectly connect to people (who are they? I don’t really know) who feed me information, sometimes ideas, all the time a way for me to keep on thinking about, well, communication actually.

So, I am starting afresh, as of today. New rule is: Only follow people that I aim to actually read. Ask yourself: How many times a day do you use Twitter? How many people are you following? How many follow you? How many do you actually connect with?

There is an idea with Twitter. A simple, very evocative, and very necessary idea. The same idea in fact that infuses the internet as a whole and it’s this: Hope. People hope that connecting with a thousand people will bring them better luck, a happier life, more popularity, more influence, whatever. They hope that they will be inspired and actuaolly connect with real and interesting new people. And, why not? Well, no serious reason really, except the fact that this, in part, explains why masses of people sign up to Twitter then never use the service again. We get carried away and distract ourselves from the very real value of the networks and tools that we have created for ourselves, because we are so tied up in the notion of what we wish they could do for us. It’s not about friends. Facebook is about friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I wholeheartedly believe Twitter is useful, even if it is just a means for talking to yourself – which we all do by the way (even you), whether you notice it or not.I believe in what some people describe as meaningless babble, but I, personally, cannot see the point of plugging the light in then putting it in a box, which is what people are effectively doing when they have a hundreds of connections that they never notice.

So, for me, it’s not and never has been about friends. Just information and ideas. But that’s just me, right.

On the subject of currency

This is interesting, not just because of Douglas Rushkoff’s views on the capitalist system we’ve come to live in and what that has meant to the way we live (pertinent mostly to America, but the UK shares a very similar economic outlook), but also because of the way in which he is disseminating the message (or, marketing his book) through the use of video and digital networks. But that’s a lesser point.

I agree with much of what Rushkoff says, although I don’t believe we are quite as slavish to our economic systems as Rushkoff makes out, or that we are any more dehumanised than we would be had we never progressed into our current way of living (there were certainly many brutal forms of society existing before the renaissance).

But, aggressive, free market capitalism has had an overall negative effect on how we engage with one another, and the idea that we should find positive, emotional value through commodification and consumption is being thrown into question increasingly. People do appear to be questioning the value systems they function within more and more, and I think this has, in large part, to do with the way we are increasingly able to communicate in more direct and plural ways.

We live in an era of opportunity, regarding the development of our value systems.  People are trying out new ways to create value, just as they are finding new ways to question what was a very closed society. As old ways of selling things (show and tell) become increasingly dislocated from consumers behaviour, and consumers become more visible and vocal, as people, and not just units of capital, pockets of opportunity are being created for us to think of more, humanely, valuable, ways of creating currency.

Convergence Culture: Henry Jenkins discusses the power of media in a 21 century trans-mediated world

I saw this on We are Social’s site. Henry Jenkins is the director, Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. In this video, he talks about transmedia and the transitory state communication media is in (I would argue is always in, but certainly is rapidly expanding since technology got it’s paws on it) and what it means for our culture. Note the grounding in story telling.

Keepon: Simulating personality to aid social development

“Keepon is a small yellow robot designed to study social development by interacting with children. Keepon was developed by Hideki Kozima (小嶋 秀樹, Kojima Hideki) while at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Kyoto, Japan. Keepon has four motors, a rubber skin, two cameras in its eyes, and a microphone in its nose.” [source: Wikipedia]

Full article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keepon

The Power of expectations

Captivating and profound example of audience participation and how the pentatonic scale is understood intuitively. A great example of how communication can be simple, intuitive, and truly engaging.

[I first saw this here: www.facebook.com/pages/Jawbonetv]

Crowd source your ideas with social software

During the last few years, it’s occurred to me that social software tools, now largely and freely used in the public space, could be well employed within the more private spaces of organisations, and commercial companies.

My work as a digital creative has taken me inside a fair few creative agencies and it now strikes me as downright bizarre that I haven’t once picked up even a whiff of a suggestion that social software tools might be used to improve communication of ideas (discounting my own hand wringing).

Marketing departments are certainly banging on about Twitter as a tool with which to better connect with consumers and target audiences, and creative/communications agencies are too, threading more direct engagement routes into their strategies, but no creative agency that I have worked with during the last 24 months have had more than  a twitter account and a blog, and they were only cursorily used as a form of idea generation.

The proven attraction of more plural, digital forms of (sometimes social) engagement, which brands strive so hard to try to discern and infiltrate, should be looked at as more than another route to a consumer, but as an evolving set of communication models, that are changing the way people not only communicate, but also get things done; how they exchange and develop ideas.

If we took the example of a traditional brainstorm meeting within a digital creative agency, currently, that would involve a few creatives, a project manager or producer, an account handler maybe and possibly a planner/someone with a job title with the word ‘insight’ somewhere in it. Everyone usually arrives without having first had a chance to adequately understand, or even read, the brief, so then sit down and read it, then try to come up with ideas in response.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this model has worked and does work for creative agencies, but what if we were able to get the whole agency potentially involved. In fact, why stop there? What if we were able to get people outside of the agency involved in coming up with ideas? Imagine if you could leverage 100% of your intellectual resources at the point you could do with it, rather than relying upon 5%.

It’s not hard to envisage a friend feed type account, open to everyone inside the agency and then for that agency to equip all of it’s employees (and I mean all) with a mobile phone, then to get every employee to sign up to special interest groups (some more general, some more niche), then to allow them all to be able to feed into an idea feed, or stream, and here’s the crucial bit, BEFORE, a briefing meeting or brainstorm is ever held. People would be ablew to plugin from other open API friendly services (Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Googlemaps, stumble, etc)

Here’s how I see it working (taking the example of a pitch brief):

1. Pitch brief comes in from client

2. Pitch brief is sent out to an ‘idea feed’

3. Feed participants (employee or not – selected by interest/expertise) are notified (email/sms/im/etc)

4. Participants given time to think (quite an important bit)

5. Participants send ideas (any digital media) back to feed

6. (clever bit) Feed allows users to filter, search and group by meta information (tags, categories, etc)

7. Idea feed utilised in a brainstorm meeting

Feed participants whose ideas get promoted (remember, participants can be inside or outside of agency) could potentially get more involvement in the project, as well as credit and possibly even real, live money for their efforts.

Even if you kept this idea to within the boundary of an agency’s salaried workforce, using tools that help an agency marshall ALL of it’s available intellectual resource, in a structured way, surely makes sense and it isn’t hard to see how this could be realised and with a relatively low cost.