Usable Interfaces

Damien Mulley is a fabulous Irish blogger who came over to London to attend Interesting 2008 recently. On his way there, he stopped off at Conchango (where I work)  to talk to us about the effect blogging was having on newspapers in Ireland. It was an interesting presentation, although - for me at least - the most interesting thing was Damien’s passion for what he’s doing (as a hobby) and his disdain for the laziness of journalists, and the speed at which they appear to descend into a very cynical approach to news gathering.

So far, so 2.0. I have absolutely no doubt that journalists will come to use bloggers as primary sources, just before their jobs vanish completely in a puff of disintermediation. That’s not to say we don’t need guides and editors. If anything we’re seeing a rise in the need for curation. But that curation can and will come from different mechanics. Anyone who is close to a national newspaper these days will see this trend being enacted inside their walls as well as outside.

But the thing that Damien said which really intrigued me - shortly before I left him to a predictable fate with Conchango’s harder-core of drinkers - was about the future of internet content after the author’s demise.

Sorry, it’s not cheery, but it’s also not something that I’ve ever really heard discussed. And it’s going to become a big question very soon.

In the old days, when a famous author would pass away, his or her editor and publisher would have decisions to make, as might benefactors, as the intellectual property of the work may be vested to future generations. Time for a retrospective perhaps, or - for the Presleys - some serious consideration about what rights must be reserved.

Damien’s comment was that he had been asked to will his (Google) page rank to another company. Damien is - I believe - a top 20 blogger in Ireland, and his site has a lot of Google juice. That juice is worth a lot of money in the right hands.

But a wider point also exists for those of us who don’t have top-flight blogs (which certainly includes me). What about all those bits of content we’re all chucking up on the web nowadays: Flickr albums, Facebook profiles, Ugly MySpace pages, blogs, twitter statuses, all that. What will happen to those when we’re no longer sucking in our breath? Should Google, WordPress etc delete them, conceal them, mark them ‘deceased’, keep them forever? Will it become part of an executor’s job to edit the ‘about us’ pages of blogs to amend ‘Tom is no longer with us’?

Who owns the page rank? Can my next of kin add loads of Viagra CPC ads to my blog?

And more to the point. When we have 5 generations of bloggers who are no longer on this mortal coil, how will Google manage to tell apart content from the living?

Today was interesting. It was Interesting 2008, the Russell Davies ‘unconference’; in its second year and continuing rude health. The underlying thought appears to be the same: the first step in being interesting is being interested. Accordingly a very large bunch (maybe 400) cogniscati gathered in an incredible (and extremely well buntinged) hall – Conway Hall in Red Lion Square - to hear some of the best presenters in the UK talk about their pet subjects.

If you were being satirical, you would say it was the world’s best people on branding, advertising, etc talking about their favourite colours, shoes, fashions, music or whatever. Of course, what it was actually about was people talking about things that were close to their own hearts, they thought would be interesting for 10 minutes (i.e. not their jobs) and where they’d found some interesting material.

We had Winston Churchill, Why horses are afraid of crisp packets, the extent to which we can really understand the second world war with only 60 years’ perspective, the relative density of World of Warcraft, the rise and fall of Patagonia, and why a lego fetish is a good thing.

I honestly don’t think there was a bad presenter all day. Although, this last bit – the selection of speakers – is really where Russell Davies showed his hand (despite very amusing and scene-setting opening- and closing- remarks).

Was it middle-class -bourgeoisie guardian-reading nonsense? Absolutely. At one point half the speakers joined together for a Guardaian sponsored recorder playing session.

Was it brilliant? Absolutely. A room in London was filled with some of the cleverest and most critical people of their generation, who allowed and understood their peers to do the most difficult presentation of their lives. We were a good audience – of course – but only for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, intense acts of bravery were conducted on stage as people with a lot to lose tried to be interesting to this dragons’ den.

Hats off to Russell, hats off to the speakers, and here’s to Interesting 2009. I’ll definitely try to be there. I’ve been racking my brain all day about what I’d talk about and I’m coming up blank. The best I’ve got is:

• Untranslatable words / words that have never existed
• Object orientated programming and what it can teach you about knowledge and YOUR life
• How education works in other countries
• How the WestWing (the TV show) changed the world
• The Toyato Production Sytem, who nicked it and how it’s changed the world

Hopefully ee you there. And a pleasure to meet a whole bunch of you today, It’s been one of those days that makes it clear the new world isn’t a temporary one.

More: here and here

An interesting comment on the last post came back to a topic which I seem to be asked, or ask myself, more and more often. If social media increasingly leads to closed groups, and tomorrow’s media consumers are increasingly avoiding the mass media, what will happen to mass-participation media events, and don’t we as a culture lose something if we lose common points of reference. What on earth will we talk about around the water cooler?

In particular, I’ve heard this as a strong initial response to Clay Shirky, who argues here that however ’sad’ it is to play World of Warcraft, it’s a better use of the ‘cognitive surplus’ than watching a re-run of Gilligan’s Island for the 100th time. (Incidentally, what was the cognitive heatsink that we had as kids in the UK? Clearly Neighbours later on but before that? Rocketman?).

Of course, this is not a new idea. I remember years ago, a planner explained to me why you couldn’t advertise cars with direct mail - it wasn’t enough for me to know how cool my new Audi is, I need to be certain all my neighbors knew too.

Perhaps the point about ‘mass-participation media events’ isn’t that their power is diminishing (witness Apprentice this year), but rather that they are fewer and more extraordinary.

There also seems to be a point now that whole social groups can have ‘mass-participation’ events which they all know about but which are entirely closed to those outside of the group: that wierd feeling you get when everyone in a room’s been reading the same status’ and knows each others business without having ever discussed it.

It remains worth remembering a serious challenge that has been raised by commentators including Esther Dyson and Andrew Orlowski, about how these groups aren’t necessarily healthy, challenging or participatory. Often preferring to define very strict group rules and mores.

The final point, of course, is just what we mean by participation. By 2012, when the Olympic games is going on in London, what will the experience of watching it be like? If you’ve seen what NBC has planned for Beijing, the mind boggles about what it will be like in 4 1/2 years (three times the gestation period for a standard YouTube) but most certainly there will be opportunities to observe almost everything about the event, to turn the event into a private mass media event for your network, to ‘virtually’ compete and to compile, annotate and share your own coverage. 

With apologies for shoplifting to Hugh MacLeod, mass participation media events have always - of course -been social objects. So in the era of mass media, it’s not a surprise the objects themselves tended to have the same traits. Whilst we may still have global events to built frameworks around, surely local (and group) interpretation and meaning can be added to createsocial object which can be more intimately shared.

The reason, it seems to me, that nobody understands microblogging unless they do it themselves, is that they don’t understand how small social objects can be.

And, to revisit the negativity of small disconnected groups (and ever-decreasing differences of opinion in those groups), technology can take these objects and make them available to huge audiences. Anyone can write a blog, anyone can produce a LOLcat (as Shirky jokes), and by 2012, everyone will be able to participate in our global media event.

It is this access to open social objects which is at the heart of participation in all cases. It’s what got all the bloggers I know addicted, it’s what makes teenagers turn the telly off and Facebook on, and it’s what makes Amelia’s wired retired fall in love with Skype, so they can share the smallest of social objects - not  just their grandchildren’s first words or their first tooth, but their everyday stories about the day at school.

And do I really need to know how many people watched The Apprentice altogether if I know that my family, friends and colleagues watched it. Isn’t that enough?

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago called ‘the structure of advertising revolutions’.

That was all about the way in which we should expect the advertising world to deal with changing paradigms, based on how the scientific community does. It was inspired by Clay Shirky’s video, blog and book, pointing out that the new media don’t have to be an additional load for customers, and that the overall effect can be to free up cognitive function, and to simplify our relationships with brands.

So. Are we there yet. Will we reach this post-marketing-apocalypse-techno-babble-euphoria? Or, is this quasi-Marxist ‘perfect distribution of information’ vision just so much more dungaree wearing nonsense?

And perhaps here we are starting to see some evidence that we’ve reached nearly the top of the hill. Whilst the advertising agencies keep trying to repurpose their wares to suit prevailing circumstances - W&K in particular making a spectacular advert which people actually tuned in to see - many firms seem to be reconsidering their position in networks, understand how influence and reputation is distributed, and at least starting to listen closely to what their customers are telling them.

If you’d told me five years ago that high-street banks would be considering allowing their staff to speak directly to customers using blogs or that Cannes Gold winners would be a website which was supported with advertising - not the other way around - I would have assumed you were still drunk on the Kool Aid of 99/2000.

But what’s happening in every marketing department company in the world (from the guy who also does sales, to the multinational with teams in every country) is new, and exciting stuff. Of course there’s been some goofy failures. When, precisely, was marketing immune from huge, public and embarrassing mistakes. But for every bit of fake user-generated content, or every time the Playstation boys trips over their skateboarding trousers, we see an attempt to really try and do something new.

Perhaps it isn’t any more than the rephrasing of an age old phenomenon (as Leo says in West Wing, the internet turned out to be ‘no more than an efficient distribution mechanism for gossip and pornography’). Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun when it comes to human nature, but we cannot deny that the world has changed recently - if only to revert to a pre-TV, pre-media monopoly time.

So, should we go a bury our TVs in the garden? Well not quite yet. Mass media events will still exist, like the Olympics or the Apprentice. We need common points of social reference. But don’t expect your kids to feel the same way. And what are you going to say to them… it would be hard to make a case for our older fashioned ways being more healthy or intelligent.

Remember the first website you built. I remember doing them at university a bit but they were really awful. And then I did one for the company I worked in. And then, rather suddenly I was running a company that made them. And in the start people would argue about everything. Should there be persistent navigation? were all-flash sites bad? how about skip-intros? What about those ticker things that used to flash across the page?

And how should you do the coding? Make sure all your fonts are fixed size, and be brilliant with tables. Remember: It’s all about the home page.

And then accessibility was a thing, and then standards. And then we started sneering at people that couldn’t build a website without using tables, or who used fixed fonts. And then it was all about buttons and big fonts. And for a while there, it all seemed to be about being ugly, and then simple, and should it even have a logo any more? And wasn’t persistent navigation a bit tired, and surely users are now clever enough to navigate more complex interfaces.

Every year we think we’ve codified one more chunk, got closer to having all the design patterns sorted out. And every year we get new and - it has to be said - interesting challenges to think about. Does save make sense any more? Do we even care about the home page any more? Is Google your most important user?

Well I think the next one’s going to be bigger, more conceptually difficult, require more complex teams to figure out, and be the beginning of the end of the period where you can work out what to do by just looking at your competitors. It will also be a bitter showdown between the big web agencies (who build where the user ends up) and the digital marketing agencies (who try to get them there), finally standing squarely on each others’ turf.

Because the next phase is where we let go of the concept of domain. It’s about thinking about the users’ lifecycle as needing managing before they even get to you. It’s a question about thinking about the opportunities to capture intent in more than search engine landing pages. And it’s going to be a question of becoming a lot more sophisticated in thinking about what content you will share, how you will consume and repurpose content, and how your users will see your brand.

Possibly my favorite factoid about the internet is that 50% of all searches on Yahoo! (and they must love this) are for the word ‘Google’. In a world where the average punter doesn’t know - or doesn’t care - to this extent, but they are willing to tell Google or all of their facebook friends that they’re looking for a new car or interested in a boob job, the way in which we concieve of capturing and converting intent just became a whole lot more interesting. And so did CRM (or rather the management of a users lifetime value), and so did sales and service.

Early approaches, especially behavioral targeting of advertising have looked like privacy invasions - or as google would have it, ‘increased relevance’. Privacy will be an issue, but skills and dexterity are the main problems and it will be fascinating to see who’s got the most of those. Not advertising agencies, of course, but quite possibly the media agencies, the digital marketing agencies who are a bit more interested in the detail, and of course, the marketing teams in large corporations; not to mention digital media owners like WordPress (scroll down for relevance targeted links!).

Thomas Kuhn wrote and incredible book called ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’. It’s probably the one book I studied at university which I ever think of now.

In the book, Kuhn investigates what really happens in science; how the step changes in understanding really get incorporated into the overall body of knowledge.

The view you might get if you speak to a scientist about all this, or believe what you were told at school, is that the process is essentially rational and evolutionary. As more observations come to light which challenge the conventional thinking, scientists learn to re-examine their theories and come up with better ones.

Kuhn found the truth to be quite different. He created a distinction between ‘normal science’ (in which observations which can’t be fitted into prevailing theories tend to – counter-intuitively - be abandoned), and ‘revolutionary science’ where a new comer will shake the entire foundation of science, leading to a difficult period of change which eventually the entire scientific body takes on board.

Thus we see that scientists will in fact keep adding exceptions and caveats to their experiments and results in order to maintain the status quo of overall thinking. Probably the best example of all this was complex array of assumptions and exceptions (and the invention of a considerable number of planets) needed to explain why, if the earth was indeed at the centre of the solar system, why all the planets’ orbits didn’t seem to fit together. In this phase, it is the scientist’s job to house the new information in the old framework, rather than question anything (the ‘things don’t work like that around here’ school of science).

At this point, a maverick will come along and propose a counter theory which doesn’t need all of these exceptions and caveats to work, and - grudgingly and slowly - the new paradigm will be adopted. This is ‘revolutionary science’. Of course, when I say maverick, I’m referring to Galileo, Einstein and so on.

It’s Kuhn’s book which popularised the idea that science might not be all it was cracked up to be and elevated the phrase and concept of ‘paradigm shift’ to everyday English.

And thus - and I’m sure you’re way ahead of me here - we get to our world: marketing, advertising and communication.

I’m really interested at the moment about trying to pick apart and understand the different social changes that have affected our generation and previous generations. There is a truism that it’s difficult to really remove yourself from the time you’re in - can we really imagine what it was like to live through a time when presidents made promises about going to the moon, or we were engaged in a cold war with the soviets. They’re not small things, and they define their time, but can we understand them now?

The same is true of media and communication. When I was growing up, the thought of TV disappearing was incomprehensible. It would have been the end of my little A-team-obsessed world. For us, TV was part of the evolution of man and we pitied those who went before, not really understanding how they got through the long, cold evenings.

And I think we are long due of a revolution of the size of heliocentricity or relativity in how we feel about that box in the corner of the room and the corporations who pump content into it.

Here (and here if you prefer video), Clay Shirky does a great job of exposing the TV myth for what it really is. In the time before TV, he argues, people had a ‘cognitive surplus’ which TV, with its soap operas and sitcoms filled in nicely. There’s a great Kurt Vonnegut quote on this:

‘TV is … providing artificial friends and relatives to lonely people. What it is… is recurrent families. The same friends and relatives come back week after week after week and they’re wittier, and they’re better looking and they’re richer and they’re more interesting than your real friends and relatives’

Shirky tells the story of being interviewed by a TV producer about Wikipedia and in particular about the evolution of Pluto’s page when it was recently declared to no-longer be classified as a planet, and she said ‘where do people find the time ?’. His response: ‘No one in TV gets to ask that question’.

Now, he argues, people are taking that cognitive surplus back.

Are advertising and communications agencies really understanding what’s happening here? All I hear is TV thinking applied to the web: Let’s put banners here, let’s pay these people to talk to those people; let’s try to ‘do some community’. Or these hideous ideas about getting and managing crowd-sourcing or ‘operating communities of interest’.

As with Kuhn, one paradigm cannot necessarily be understood from inside the other. There’s going to have to be a lot of fresh thinking going on if companies are going to keep paying these agencies all of these dollars.

But of course, Shirky isn’t really worried about what the big dumb agencies (as George Parker calls them) don’t know. He’s more concerned with the potential upside.

Given the size of the ’surplus’ currently being spent on TV, imagine what they could do with all the time. More LolCats? Five more wikipedia projects? 1000 more? A million?

There is, of course, no law about words you can put together, but that doesn’t mean all combinations make sense.

Well, a recent poll (conducted in my brain) indicates that over 50% of marketing conferences this summer will include the phrase ’social media marketing’.

A couple of excellent posts today teach us the need for a little caution with that particular combination.

Here, e-consultancy takes to pieces the ROI case study for Sea World’s ‘Journey to Atlantis’. Search marketing made everything very boringly mathematical for the traditionally innumerate marketing fraternity. It seems ’social media marketing’ (see how easy it is to say the words), allows them to go back to their old tricks of ‘improving brand image’, and attracting ‘thousands’ of visitors. These marketing dollars, it seems, are not as accountable as they should be.

Incidentally

• How did Forrester end up such zealots for everything social media?
• Why do people refer to social media campaigns as ‘cheap’. The SeaWorld one in particular didn’t sound very cheap to me

A great follow up to that is John Dodds commenting on David Armano’s analysis of web 3.0 words. He goes on to dissemble some of Web 2.0’s finest.

As he witheringly points out of the three most tired and misused words of the last few years:

Conversation - we didn’t actually mean your customers wanted a chat. We meant they wanted companies to listen. They don’t want you to keep starting irrelevant conversations like a drunk on a bus. If you screw up, however, they will talk about it so try not to screw up, and try to listen rather than talk.

Community - this means they can gang up on you when you screw up, not that everyone wants to form a commune, hold hands and exchange daisy chains.

Relationship - but not the modern smug family in the BT adverts. We’re talking about  a one-sided one night stand, entirely on your customers’ terms. And they’ll go for another night of passion with you if and only if you’re still looking saucy in the morning.

Again, here are three words which are easy to bandy around and lots of ’social media marketing’ consultants (see how easy it is!)  thought they understood. But when it comes to the complexity of how messages spread, it’s not as easy as all that.

As Gareth remarks on brand new, the follow up to the Cadbury’s Gorilla advert is underwhelming.

We all spent ages trying to work out if and why the Gorilla worked. The sales figures would seem to suggest it did work (outside of adland) although not in a big way. No one really seems to really know whether it sold more chocolate bars or Phil Collins records.

Clearly that ad made people think. The problem is, did it make them think, ‘I want to buy some chocolate’ or just ‘cute gorilla’?

The new ad has so many faults, I wonder how it got through:

1. The trucks aren’t just being naughty, they’re being destructive. That tone doesn’t seem to fit. The great thing about the Gorilla was a feeling about a slightly guilty but harmless pleasure
2. There’s an apparently deliberate ambiguity about whether the vehicles are real, or toys. That’s ruined when we see a driver in one of the cabs
3. Again the dark, helmeted driver seems at logger-heads with the idea of innocent pleasure: what are the motivations of these shady characters?
4. It just doesn’t seem like a lot of pleasure.
5. Clearly the timing (the same weekend as the T5 baggage fiasco), could work both ways for the brand, but if anything it seems to add the recklessness feeling and send the mind wandering away from chocolate bars.

So the clever subtlety and counterpoint of a very human gorilla acting like a teenager in their bedroom with a dark secret about Phil Collins, gives way to a kind of big boy’s slightly destructive fantasy which seems to fit all the most irrelevant parts of the brief.

I was reminded of this by rewatching the excellent Sir Ken Robinson Ted Talk.

Several lifetimes ago, I worked with a girl who could do a quite amazing thing.

What captivated people about her was that you could give her a couple of ideas: Getting old and rainforests, running the marathon and losing out on a bet, and she would come up with something new; normally something surprising and something which you very rarely would thought of yourself.

She was very well educated, she was very bright and very interested in cultural things, but I don’t think any of those facts in their own right were responsible for her ability. It was just something her brain would do, that mine doesn’t, firing off these ideas, not really knowing what to do with them, like a kind of lucky, positive Tourette’s syndrome. The ideas would rarely be commercially useful. You couldn’t really use them for anything. But it didn’t really matter because they would make you think of other ideas, to make new connections you’d not made before.

Of course, what she had was a fairly extreme form of what people mean by ‘creativity’. It means - in part - being able to deconstruct ideas and then put them back together, it means, in part at least, the ability to make imaginative connections, to find new things to put with the old ones. And when it’s used commercially, it also means you need to have the ability to work out which ideas can achieve a business objective. So it’s what a ‘creative’ does in an ad agency, and a little bit of what a planner does.

I’ve been made to think of this by a number of things recently. I live in a world where creative and artistic become extremely blurred terms. Of course there is a very old and broken syllogism I’ve mentioned several times before which confuses necessary and sufficient conditions: my house has a roof, your house has a roof, therefore my house is your house. Or: a lot of artists are creative. I’m an artist, therefore I’m creative.

Some artists aren’t creative, they replicate art, or pastiche art without interpretation. The creative services in most marketing companies are full of artisans like art workers, typesetters or graphic artists, who often produce beautiful work, but in a very synthetic or reductive way. It’s an incredible skill - and another one I don’t have - but I don’t think it’s about making new things from nowhere.

A colleague, again from a previous life had a funny take on this in the agency setting, asking why one team of people were allowed to call themselves ‘the creatives’, although the planning team weren’t allowed to call themselves ‘the clever ones’, or the account men ‘the responsible ones’.

Where do we see creativity in our day-to-day lives. I don’t see that much of it coming out of ad agencies, I see a lot less from digital ad agencies. Old ideas done in new ways is not creative, it’s barely even craft.

Take a trip on Google and follow some of the connections that bloggers are making on various topics. Often rather brutally done, but very creative.

And here I think is where we find the most exciting ideas about creativity. Where brainstorms work, it seems to be because on hearing one idea linked to another, we are able to start constructing new maps of the world, leading to different connection, and new ideas. If two is better than one, and three is better than two. Can we think together on the web in a way which can be harnessed.

Spurred on by a number of posts (Shaun McIlrath as a Scamp guest presenter, Russell Davies on ‘Uncanny Valleys’) and the enormous amount of crap that pours through my door and email inbox daily, I wanted to jot down my views on the myth of direct marketing. It feels funny saying this about an industry that employs so many people, that has such a body of writing behind it, and which impacts our life every single day; but the whole idea seems fundamentally flawed.

I’m not coming at this from the point of view of an industry watcher and analyst. I don’t have any smoothed and exaggerated case studies to make the point. I’m not even proposing to wheel out any of the usual quasi-psychological backing which (a bit like the ’scientific bit’ in cosmetic adverts) typically makes an appearance is arguments over something works or doesn’t.

I’m coming at this from the point of view of being a human being.

The promise of direct is extremely seductive. In its most basic form it is this: if you can really understand each of your audience individually and say things that resonate with that person, they will respond more positively.

This is - of course - true. But is it relevant to any marketer with more than  about 5 customers? No matter how much data and computers you have on hand to analyse and segment your customers, you’re still going to be faking it. The reason you can’t communicate 1:1 is very simple. There is 1 of your and loads of them. Sure, you’d like to talk to your customers as if they were your friends but you can’t because friendships are complex and subtle. For direct marketers, the problem really is that you can’t even FAKE it very well.

Some fashion-related brands will have staff whose job it is to keep their celebrity customers happy - sending them free stuff, finding out what they like, asking them what else they need etc.

If you can afford to do this for all your customers, I guarantee they will love you forever. But direct marketing isn’t this, direct marketing is a huge attempt to fake it. And in the words of one of the comments on the Scamp piece, shit sandwich or shit soufflé, it doesn’t matter, we smell it a mile off.