Paul Isakson - Social Media Presentation

Paul has done a great presentation on social media that has some new points well worth thinking about and some old ground that we all need reminding of; particularly if your business is structured around squeezing out 30-40 second spots of film geared up for the old 20th century broadcast model.

Social Media: It's Not What You Say That Matters

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

Planning Wank

One of the notable disappointments of the plannersphere is the inability to engage with the larger subjects of the day. A herd like mentality (high five Mr Earls) seems to invariably ensue until a breakaway opinion is shared.

I mean really, was it only me who noticed that this economic turmoil would be the single most influential dynamic in our business before I blogged it?

Of course not, it's just that nobody wanted to point out the elephant in the room and this post is all about the elephant in the room.

Thanks btw to Neil who respects his own opinion as much as he welcomes others or I think we'd still be keeping quiet.

So, some months ago I came across a post on the use of a hotmail address which I found to be symptomatic of any London based planner who has yet to sharpen their skills abroad which is an assumption that what seems right in the UK is obviously a more progressive and thus substantial opinion than abroad - wrong. It's all over in London and this post one year down the line is my call on where the action is.

The writer (a friend of friends and thus a friend I might add) asserts that the use of a Hotmail address is either uncool or indicative of age. I'll let you read it but I'd like to state here that a hotmail address in China (the Leviathan of internet populations) is considered more prestigious than a QQ address which most are unaware of and the reason why I'm blogging about this topic.

Why put one's foot in the mouth without qualifying that one is just a local planner and the views expressed commensurate with that? The internet is after all a global media despite our cousins in America failing to understand that we don't all live in a U.S "state" when signing up to try stuff out. One of the perks of planning I might add.

The point is that clearly a snobbery of some kind (at the worst possible time) is intoxicating a large segment of the plannersphere, because while I use all my email address so that I can see who is doing what I use my hotmail address as the oldest and most well known leaving say my Gmail for business or Yahoo for the password options or whatever it is I used Yahoo for while trying to figure out what Yahoo 360 meant to social media some years ago. (Unilever Asia are you listening yet?)

No that isn't the point. The point is that when it comes to Microsoft the plannersphere is tainted. Seemingly jerking off to the latest Skittles work which admittedly punches above its weight and is thus to be welcomed.

When it comes to any discussion of Microsoft, the debate is already in the realms of "I use Apple and they haven't spoiled the world" so let's all break out into Kumbaya, in unison ; after we watch this Coca-cola hill top ad (which hasn't aged as well as we would hope).

Well the thing is Apple wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Microsoft (nor would Google) and as I've shared previously it's time to stop kicking the Grandaddy of Software for just existing (and who would pull it out of existence if their paycheck was not on time as most are?)

Microsoft is way off from perfect, and this post is being written on an Apple MacBook Air which frankly has weathered the single toughest beating I've dished out to a notebook and survived but that doesn't mean we shouldn't aquaint ourselves with some facts:

Microsoft is the de facto operating system of the world. It is as it is and we cannot unwind the clock. We probably need it, more than it needs us (Think about that).

Bitching about Microsoft is like bitching about an incontinent relative who was mopping our own urinary leaks long before reasonably sentient thoughts arrived.

Go to China and, Microsoft or Bill Gates is the ONLY thing that is openly admired about the U.S.

The responsibility of ensuring that the system doesn't freeze up after more than 30 years of solid performance is in itself considerable and while it's easy to see that less is more when considering operating systems, I don't know a single person who hasn't succumbed to feature creep when buying a technology for the first time. Why wouldn't the inventors have succumbed to that line of thinking too?

So people like Tom Rafferty who make a living through liberal pinko commie bashing Microsoft are just that. Blow hards who have never done anything as fundamentally important or profoundly life changing as Bill Gates and Microsoft. Who could deny that here is a man who didn't change the world?

So while it's fashionable to take the piss out of easy targets such as Hotmail ,like this joker over here I'd like to remind people that getting my first mail address outside of University which provided one that was all numbers and letters and @solent.ac.uk was when Hotmail first allowed me to talk to anyone else with an email address back in '95 through the revolutionary interface of what is now called The Cloud. It was brilliant back then and is still a brilliant idea right now.

I've been watching something. I seen how social media and the ability to share common interests or even share uncommon ones thus providing a learning platform is the single biggest revolution on the planet since Microsoft increased the market for computers from about five as IBM predicted (and is in the seven worst tech predictions of all time) to just about the entire planet.

Big organisational goal I might add.

I've watched as one memorable evening the Microsoft Live (call it 'we're not buying Facebook' statement if you will) has rolled out and quite hard work for me as one one who has thousands of emails scattered all over the show, took about an hour to consolidate what up till then was in my opinion a reasonably slow and poor blogging/messaging platform by Microsoft.

It isn't now, it's one of the best and most seamless integrated roll outs I've witnessed and here is a question to my peers in digital agencies, planners all over and anyone interested in what can only be classified as a revolution in communication. Why haven't any of you deemed it important to record that the largest adoption of or invitation to social media is occurring as we speak and is based on a platform that has been around for years?

Maybe it's the Asian numbers that are missing so here's some quick cut and paste to help me get to the final sentence before I pass out with faux rage and delicious tropical heat.

Windows Live reaches 142 million users a month in Asia Pacific and that number is about to get bigger. Microsoft and Windows is a large, healthy, growing, prestigious brand in Asia from a population that appreciates the sheer ability to connect through web cams to messengers but don't take my word for it here's a presentation from Geert who I met in LA last year and is responsible for that fab brand consumer ad we all loved so much.

Windows Live Trade Launch

View more presentations from Geert Desager.

There's more facts to appreciate what is going on with the QUIET launch of Windows Live.

If the Windows Live user community were its own country it would be the third largest in the world. 8.2 billion messages are sent via Messenger daily - that's 14 times the amount of snail mail sent via the US Postal Service on a daily basis and 17 times the number of comments posted daily on MySpace. Look even in the UK Microsoft Live fares unexpectedly well on the visitor stats as you can see over here.

So really my irritation is that because something is fashionable we, the planning community, seem to invest it with magical powers of efficacy that simply aren't there. Because we the planning community are by and large appreciators of Apple products we've lost the respect and the impartiality to judge what is unquestionably the de facto operating system of the world that churns out our payslips and which we are asymmetrically unprepared to talk about in the same way we are so keen to give Microsoft a good kicking at the first opportunity like their recent Global Advertising (On a local budget if you think about it) for pointing out what heaven forbid in this world of truth rejection is easily the hardest factoid in the universe.

MS is a cheaper operating system to run. Christ I'd like to have that in a brief. I'd send the creatives down to Four Bucks and get them to pay the agencies Macchiato coffees while explaining that this is what the cost of living means to most people in the real world.

So there you have it. Microsoft is huge, they're in business, they just rolled out some pretty awesome integrated social media shit and we the planning wank community pretty much ignored it preferring to waffle on like "let's not talk business or profit or communications efficacy" and continued with our specialist subject of "let's talk about what's hip" what's yoof or anything that has diminished our client's ability to believe in us. Because frankly they don't really and who could blame them, given the silence on something so large that just rolled out. Most planners probably don't even know because they're too sniffy to have a Hotmail address. Go figure that one out in ethnographic field studies.

My only real gripe with Microsoft is that somewhere back in the day, they changed the world and I believe they could do it again if they really really thought about it. Now that is awesomeness. My latest fave word.


I'll try to clean up this post later when I've cooled down from the rant. Formatting is all over the shop in Draft blogger but little I can do till they fix things.

Social Media Leprosy

Plurk.com

Are You Tooled Up?

I did bookmark this a day or so ago on delicious and subsequently discovered that Katie has done an excellent presentation which we can now share. It's great if only for further stimulating the debate on social media metrics but equally opens up the increasingly important conclusion that the elusive measurement methodology we seek, may well not be the cast iron approach we've been used to in the past with frequency and reach.

It should involve some common sense, creative problem solving and untried combinations of quantitative data, with in my mind, qualitative classification of engagement too.

I think one of the Tweets that Gavin or Katie gave out was something about social media measurement being as "easy or as difficult as you want". This sounds eminently sensible to a creative planner more interested in execution than spreadsheets of what are invariably inconclusive and contradictory data (That we often see nervous clients can never get enough off).

I've been mulling over an approach that any day now is threatening to materialize into a seminal (and wildly popular) post about the topic and which I've mentioned, here and here in the comments.

It might well include an unusual methodology for combining pre-billing and post communications efficacy measurement. Recombinant invoicing if you will.

This of course is a wild and probably foolhardy attempt at publicly committing myself to actually spilling some of the stuff that has been going on in my head apart from the the notion that scarcity of disposable income theoretically shreds the need to advertise in the ways we have been programmed to accept as the norm during the 20th and early 21st century.

In the mean time check out the presentation that Katie has done for us.

Social Media Monitoring Tools Evaluation

View more presentations from RCM77.

AnD aS IF yb ChAos

Stunning work by Marcus who now has started his own business with Patrick. Germany has easily got some of the best people in the business down there in Munich.

Brands in Social Media

This morning I was added on Twitter by millercoors. My first thought, because it helps me clarify how brands should behave in social media was, what would that mean if I was on the program with Alcoholics Anonymous?

It's a good question because I didn't invite Miller Coors and I think any alcohol brand that wants to engage in social media should think about this. The broadcast model also tries to play as fair as possible by not advertising at certain times and avoiding the use of young and sexy people in their communications. Miller Coors didn't do any of this, they added me because they thought I was an interesting person..... So they say.

In any case, given that no attempt at dialogue was made, my first tweet was as follows:

To which Miller Coors (or Tyler as I later learned) responded with the tweet at the bottom of this screenshot.

I thought the idea of being dragged around by a beer wasn't funny and I made that clear. But Miller Coors, or Tyler made a Tweet that he deleted pretty quickly. Fortunately I have a Tweetdeck screen grab for you. Here it is.

Now I don't know if Tyler really is the social media representative for Miller Coors but I think it goes without saying that for a person who had been on Twitter for all of five minutes that it might have been a good idea to learn the rules of engagement. Particularly this post over here that I wrote a few months back and which contributed towards Gavin's best practices in social media.

I'll leave it to you to work out what the implications of all this are, but I do like to learn from experiences, and so this is what mattered most once Miller Coors had really stepped over the line.

You can read my full responses over here in sequential order but I think the most important point to understand is that Tyler has deleted his account. Now all I need to know is did Miller Coors hire him or was he pretending to be a beer all on his own? Can anyone help?

LEAVE ME ALONE

You may have noticed the new panel I'm sporting on the side of this blog called Google Friend Connect. Well that's there because I've been "Whitelisted" by Google who think I'm a big enough social meeja kahuna to invite me on board.

Yeah, check me out! *throws meaningless gang signs*

So if I haven't spammed the life out of you yet by joining Plaxo (who've allied with Google) and Google Friend Connect, don't feel shy to click on something over there, and join in because it's not like you actually have to really like me loads and loads to be my fwend.

I'm particularly interested in the open social platform as it develops and hey you get to come along for the ride too. Carrying our own social network data around has to be the future for some sort of transactional value relationships with the world of commerce and brands. It's pretty radical but will make a lot of sense when giving permission for interruptive or distractive marketing communications as the quid pro quo for utility or content.

Well something like that anyway, but the reason for this post is also to see if I've managed to get the Disqus comment system finally integrated. The last attempt was a template and commenting form disaster. And now that even Craig, Peggy and Eaon are Disqus'd up I feel I'm on the back foot for my geek creds.

I'd be most appreciative if one or two of you could attempt a comment but don't try too hard as I've probably buggered it up and will have to reinstall that scary .xml file now lurking on my desktop to get back to normal.

In the meantime here's a picture of Sam who has joined forces with Eaon at Geronimo which is where he's going to kick ass in the marketing communications industry. Yesterday on Skype, I made him swear on the baby Jesus and U.S. Supreme court justices not to release a certain "sensitive" file I've graciously shared with him but I have given him permission to show you the screen if you're ever around. Word is bond Sam!

On a more sober note, thanks all of you for the positive response to yesterday's post. I'll respond more fully but I'm really pleased that I can kind of throw that stuff out there and not be cut down in flames. The motivation for writing it was to hopefully encourage the idea of a back up plan. If that has worked then I'm a happy camper :)

Clay Parker Jones

The Interwebs

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: hoffman_york web_design)

If it all seems a bit complicated for you then it's 20th century marketing that has probably messed you up. This is a sweet but precise presentation from Clay Parker Jones

Social Causes

It's interesting isn't it that social causes like political movements appear to have more traction in social media than plain selling (i.e Not what's in it for me, What's in it for us?) James pitched in here about social value as more important than brand value though they could be the same thing sometimes in the future, and I wrote back here and here and God knows elsewhere, that this is the time for brand's to live with real values. It's not important whether they're left or right with their politics or their social causes, but whether they have a standpoint at all. The days of placing wealth creation at the centre of the wealth creation model seem to be diminishing when I see great creative ideas like this don't you think?

Couple that with a tweet I picked(nicked) off Faris early this Sunday morning, which single handedly redefines the academic definition of marketing, and I think we might see a valuable role for brands in social media. Only thing is they need to have some values and a standpoint in the first place. Not many yet are there? But surely it's only a matter of time before a global FMCG brand becomes the first to really stand behind say a powerful idea like 'campaign for real beauty' across all it's products and not just be cynical about one while pushing another message with others.

C'mon what are you waiting for? It's a mini depression and you all look and sell the same things. Stand for something.

Hat Tip to Mark Earls for spotting this even if we're having a wee squabble over the potential for neuro-ideas over at the deviant's place. You will have to go visit Marks to see the idea anyway as the object embedding is not working with Blogger.

Best Practices in Social Media

 

Gavin over at Servant of Chaos has kindly tagged me for my view on best practises in Social Media.

I'd really like to talk about some of the ways I think brands could be behaving and talking to customers in social media because there's a valuable contribution for business entitites to sometimes (not always) get involved with the emerging media topography, but it's mainly theoretical stuff at the moment as I've not persuaded any clients to put some money and action into where I think they should, or even recommend how to conduct themselves in this enviroment but that will come in due course and I think some new legal entities might need to be established for that because the existing corporate structure doesn't allow for making mistakes and yet humans do that all the time, so unless we want brands to sound artificial we're going to need some human contribution at some point.... As I say, more on that later.

In the mean time I really think it's important to share one golden rule that I learnt the hard way with mIRC (early Twitter I like to say)  back in the mid 90's and through to a couple of years ago. It's crucial in social media to be unfailingly polite and for most people this is the opposite to how they feel behind the security (and often the anonymity and distance) of a keyboard.

Those who know me in real life are fully aware the only power I respect is that which is earnt. I've no hesitation in telling anyone what I think if I believe they are being innapropriate and that's because nobody owns me - It's a two way street though for mutual respect. One has to take it to give it.

However in social media I take a different approach. Despite sometimes wanting to be more combative or plain speaking I try hard to be polite, courteous and silent under criticism in social media. I'm not like that in real life particuarly when I lose respect for people and it's interesting that even those who know me through my blog can sense that. My temper has got me into more trouble than I know where to begin, in the past but it's also saved my life too in violent encounters.

Aside from that, the usual authenticity, transparency and honesty are very important. As indeed they are in real life but the internet is a different media from real life and requires different rules. Capiche?

Anyway now that I've got that out the way I think you should all know that Gavin has made a really smart move and started a social media jobs website which is going to keep him comfy during his retirment years because he just got on with it. The widget isn't working for me on this post but you can go check it out over here.

Geotility & Cerambycidae Lamiinae Aristolobia Horridula

There's a long and funny (with hindsight) story about how this creature managed to become part of my life for about 12 hours but the reason for putting it out there again is Faris has come up with a really nice term for a concept that I've loosely talked about for a while in a slightly different context and I've been using this picture to explain it. Faris calls it Geotility and its the linking of geographical or location based data with pretty much everything else. I'm particularly interested in the information that is accumulated through social media sites although as I've also indicated elsewhere, it's us who should be in control of that information not the social networking sites who should really act as a broker in any transactional exchange model rather than message pusher. More pull than push (Fuzzy logic?)

So the insect CerambycidaeLamiinae Aristolobia Horridula above came into my life unexpectedly a couple of years back in the Tropics and managed to turn it upside down in such a way that really freaked me at the time but the remaining question I had once it had gone away is, what was it? I showed it to a few knowledgeable people who have lived in Thailand for years but no one recognised it and so I was left mystified as to how I could find out apart from emailing it to entomologists and hoping they might know.

It was only later I realised what could be the future of social media and networking when I saw this guy crouched on the ground taking photographs of insects. I didn't actually know what he was up to at first but once I'd asked (he was cataloguing the decline and fall of insect populations on Wimbledon common from climate change) it became clear that he could help me. I might have missed this guy if he'd just been walking by but what occurred to me as a really useful utility for social media is that if I could have a status update on anyone of my social media sites that I was looking for an entomologist and this chap belonged to one, albeit willing to share information as his status too, then it might prove to be a useful connection builder. What if I could exchange my status as a blogger with some traffic to promote his activities in return for some professional help on bug finding?

Where I think Geotility gets really interesting though are the day to day needs of for example people like students at school. I can envisage a situation whereby a student who is poor at maths may well benefit from seeking advice from a maths student who is weaker at literature, a subject the first student is stronger at. Wouldn't it be great to put those people together in places where time is traditionally wasted like train stations, parks, bus stops or any one of the places that we travel through and are now able to broadcast our location along with needs and wants?

There are thousands of examples I can think of that would particularly be useful for those who would prefer to borrow items than buy wasteful and damaging products to the environment and climate. I'm thinking about John Grant's power drill library that he talks about in his book The Green Marketing Manifesto (a book every planner should read) . Anyway hats off to to Faris for giving it a terrific name. I think it will be a massive concept. Particularly when oil hits 200 bucks a barrel.

Which it will.

Fink about the money!

I was over at Zeus Jones blog a few days ago, and Adrian’s post on monetization of social media got me thinking about digital again, and whereas I usually fire off a long comment when that happens, I reckon it’s time to write some thoughts down over here.

Firstly I can’t bear that word monetization. It’s the English part of me I guess, but it just feels crass that everything has to be monetized. I’m reminded of this each time I watch Fox News, because all the bullying of any (pinko Commie bastard) liberal guests they bring on to bait is won by their vulgar but implicit idea that if profit is not made then its not of worth. This is the point where I think the United States has gone slowly wrong in the last 50 years because the values it was built on are not about profit to the detriment of all else. OK I got that off my chest. Back to making money! We’ve also all got bills to pay. The environment of course being the biggest!

Yes of course there should be some sort of transactional value exchange model between social media platform providers and the people who frequent them. It does however feel like the old media model of huge profits and mass market broadcasting persuasive powers has disintegrated.

Micro-transactions work very well here in China for the most popular platform QQ using a virtual currency that is paid for in hard cash. (Kind of like a Second Life model) but this is where I like to think social media should embrace a number of revenue streams and think about revenue diversity because it’s obvious (to me) that good old fashioned bread and butter banner advertising works very effectively in Facebook. I generally love the ad to the left of their pages because they are eerily effective and are mainly China location based services making them highly relevant. In short they work. I like them even.

So we’ve got micro-transactions, and then traditional banner advertising. I like to call this distractive (contextual) advertising because if it’s good enough, then it distracts much like print advertising does today, interruptive advertising which is generally disliked but is based on the commercial break and includes pre-roll advertising as well as the hated pop up and even ideas such as “get this digital mobile phone for free as long as we can give you x number of ads a month”

I also think there are more innovative ideas that could be considered such as tiered or rewarded internet activity. Adrian has done a fine post about social media but as he correctly points out most people are hanging out on the net to get away from dull content and patronizing marketing communications. However the tiered subscription or rewarded activity is based on a model that really needs to embrace some ideas that Adam Crowe was, I think, the first to bring my attention to. The notion of data portability. The information accumulated by internet usage should belong to the customer not us.

If we (or Google or the ISPs) do the unthinkable and give our potential customers their own internet usage data to trade with us we then are truly opening up ideas loosely called the free market economy. It’s probably more American/United States than apple pie and fanny packs put together now that I think of it. This then opens up our potential customers to benefit from their data portability in the best way possible. The provider they choose to allow receipt of marketing communications from. It’s a bit like a bazaar. If you don’t like the voice of the trader or the goods they are selling, you can stay clear of them. Imagine a world where in return for premium content we permitted ourselves to exposure of specific marketing models. If the advertising sucks we make a decision about whether we can get by with lower value advertising-free content or not at all.

Either way I think we are moving into a new era of marketing communications because as an advocate of 'the medium is the message' it's clear to me that I never got ‘spammed’ while watching a commercial in a movie theatre, direct mail is lower down the food chain because its so much more cheaper to indiscriminately ‘target’ (using the language of old) with geography or basic demographics acting effectively to the point where a 3% response rate still makes it worthwhile.

But here’s the context. The internet is both a place where I can watch a Cannes winning Youtube clip and also open up my mail to be offered a larger penis or a fake Rolex watch. That never happens on TV or even direct mail and so the value of the internet is diminished by this activity. There are innovative ways around this if advertisers want to raise the perceived value for a short while. Like for example if I was P&G I would buy all the available online advertising space within a specific digital media aperture. Maybe the whole of the NYT or The Guardian for a few days. Just wipe out every ad in the online editions and put one sponsor message on there, advertising some spot removing clean or dandruff clearing shampoo. Something relevant seems appropriate!

There are ways to be creative on the internet, although finding the clients bold enough to do stuff like this is tough. Anyway in principle the point I want to end on is that it's not us who should be targeting the customers, it’s the customers who should be targeting us.

This is after all the 21st century and not the 20th. We had two world wars in that one.

Update: Adam links to this which is just the sort of example I'm talking about with P&G. i.e. buying space that would normally be filled with ads.

Say it again

When I see citizen created content like this I begin to feel that part of the job of an agency 2 point something is to find an innovative brand association rather than write a brief for content.

Why not write a brief for the media companies to use it in such a way that people connect with the authenticity and creativity that is sprouting up on Youtube and elsewhere? This is probably heresy to the creative community, but in my view this piece of content is better than 90% of advertising. A creative media association would be way more effective.

Via Angus who consistently digs up kick ass digital on the net.

Breaking News

Easily the biggest news of the year for Social Media in China is the just announced 430 million dollar investment by Oak Pacific Interactive for Xiaonei the Chinese Facebook. I posted just recently about China 2.0 over here, with inexpensive ways for brands to get involved with social media, but these guys have just thrown an incredible amount of money into this small start up despite a) the Social Media model is unproven in China b) a revenue model is yet to be harvested from that. This is the equivalent of Google's purchase of Youtube in 2006

Whether this proves a sound investment or not (and its hard to see why a way to make it work wont be found) this is another example of the shift from interruptive messaging of the traditional monologue model of advertising to the dialog model we are seeing all round the world. Advertising may not be broken in developing economies as Russell points out quite correctly, but as long as the shift of eyeballs to computer screens continues it's possible that the massive passive is diminishing a lot quicker than us Asian planners may have first anticipated.

For a comprehensive and authoritive analysis check out Kaiser Kuo's blog post on Ogilvy's Digital Watch.

Nonsense London

I wrote back here that the cost of buying cheap goods is way too high for those people who work hard, are paid inadequately and struggle day in and day out, so we can collectively brag about how cheap T Shirts are made. I've a post about that some day because vintage T Shirts interest me a lot after a spell living on Melrose and snapping up the coolest cheese on the planet. I digress. Rob Mosely who is a bit talented like has client with similar values and has created a sticky viral thing that is a great example of how to make communications slip in neatly with social media. So here is my attempt which was a doddle and fun as well, all done with charming cheekiness I would expect from those chaps at Nonsense London. Who also have a blog now I hear.

Oyez Oyez

iainaitch

Are bloggers the new town criers?

Socialising Media

UKYorkie

What's the point of it all?

I've been asked this time and again by a bunch of folk ranging from London planning honchos who don't have enough time to explore web 2.0 or friends who fired off a volley of concerned emails during a patch when I'd seemingly gone underground. I will however first off make a rough and ready psychographic division because not everybody is the same when I make this case.

A narrator or writer I came across (I'm struggling to remember where) asserted that there are roughly speaking two types of people plodding around the planet at present. Cold war survivors and the ones after, lets call them Post-Coldies. This has only a little to do with age as its a mindset that can easily be absorbed from say parents and different environments. Cold war people have been bombed by mainstream media (MSM) into believing that the world is divided into good and bad, and have trouble dealing with shades of grey or the texture and subtlety between. Go easy on them because its pretty close to a brain washing experience, but in principle a generation of Soviet 'evil empire' rhetoric, contrasted with Western neoliberal capitalist propaganda as saviour of the world leaves them with a sharply divided mindset that is wholly binary and extends to extraordinary statements like communism has failed and only capitalism works. Or "isn't it great the polar caps are melting, let's consume some more refrigerated ice cream".

Cold war survivors are a guarded bunch. MSM and their parents taught them to be that way. They manage their online identity with Stalinist control, feel uncomfortable with online pictures of themselves, default to using very spy-like online monikers, never use 'include message in reply' in their emails and compartmentalize their offline lives with a strict policy of not mixing say work friends, then family, and life friends. They also tend to tell default fibs if different groups happen to enquire about each other, but they are not being malicious.

I guess they're just trying to shore up their separate offline identities that they manage in this increasingly complex and connected world. This was necessary to hold the whole cold war mentality together. People who aren't paranoid or under fear of invasion make for lousy misguided patriots so it's in the interests of the State to make sure a climate of them and us prevails. It's not completely impossible to envisage the current attempt to exchange reds-under-the bed, with the now ubiquitous terrorists of today. But that's probably another post about propaganda's resemblance to heaps of contemporary advertising that I'm saving for later.

Anyway, the point of all this social(ist) media immersion is, in my view, to drive all that online activity offline. The most rewarding experience of virtual friendships is to meet those same people in real life. I started to be convinced of this through hooking up with big chunks of the London plannersphere. But take the argument even further, and the MMORPG or video gaming community is a good example. Its not hard to see that the apex of their digital community experiences are the championships and tournaments they hold in conventions centres from Seoul to South Dakota.

Another good potential example of this might be for Last.FM to create Last.FM bars. These would be bars where the community can have a say over the music, ranging from discovery mode, to play-me-the-classics-I-love. This used to be called a Juke Box but it was quite limited.

I can think of lots more examples.

So all that anthropological primate grooming with pokes, vampire bites, blogging and twitters pretty much self actualises when we get to have something like a cup of coffee or a beer with people of a likemind. Simple isn't it?

I got thinking about this again earlier because I see that PicnicMob are trying to get a large group of people together in one city and have an online picnic. By working out what your interests are they will seat you next to someone similar. Personally I quite like meeting people who are into stuff I haven't come across but I'm sure you see my point. The irony is that the Post Coldies are pretty much trying to create, with all this social(ist) media, what the Coldies have already being doing all their lives; albeit with global reach, greater transparency, less small talk and networking at the speed of light.

Its not for everyone but I am reminded that Marshall McLuhan predicted that electronic technologies would lead us back to an oral culture.

Fight Club

Floating around London town recently, and talking to a lot of interesting, likable and smart advertising people, it’s plain to see that there’s a need for some input on the whole idea of social(ist) media. Most of the people I talk to simply don’t have the time or the inclination to log on and check out a smattering of the 200+ RSS feeds I have coming in each day. It is an addiction but its not quite the same dedication as working though 300 pages plus of Les Miserables before something cheerful happens.

Along with my daily RSS sprints, I’ve been casually jogging around the latest round of social networks since 2002 when the original Friendster went big Stateside, spread out to Europe and is now a dominant force in Asia. They should realistically relocate their pampered U.S. asses out of San Francisco to Singapore. Its this hubris that led them to having their lead stolen by myspace. I’ve been watching straight faced as the plannersphere piles into Facebook of late but the interesting social sites are in Gaia and Habbo Hotel at one end of the spectrum and Secondlife at the other (Mekong Charlie if you must ask). Yes the first two are for kids but those kids are the first generation virtual world builders/social media networkers on the scene and they’re going to be quite demanding if myspace wants to win them over in just a few years. Anyway News International and Roop Murdoch will probably just buy them when as he knows all too well what the conditioning element(s) of using a media format can be in selecting the next one.

My blogging chum in Singapore, Marina raves on about ecircles which closed down in 1997 and was a little too early for it’s time, but for the real deal on sharing conversation, pictures, mp3’s as well as changing status, quasi tweets and building community with likeminded people it was/is and always will be IRC for Internet Relay Chat or mIRC as it’s better known. Cheap as chips and basic ‘code-monkey’ software mIRC is very usable and easy on the processing power resources.

Want to leap into a conversation with Baghdad and/or Boston? It’s IRC that has the full spectrum of seasoned veterans from the 80’s as well as newbies up for a bit of digital conversation and of course there’s a twitter channel on there too for those who wander why the list of people who follow my twitter twaddle is up in the 90’s.

I do concede that the original BBS people are the Daddy when it comes to practically all shades of early internet life but why would you want to know something about a format that is still only huge in China? OK, I’ll do a post on that another time, what with China having the largest internet and mobile phone market in the world right now and they aren’t even in second gear.

So what’s my point? Well I’d be the first to advocate for social(ist) media, as indeed Fightclub did that there are no rules. Main stream media (MSM) is so obsessed with imposing old revenue models on new media that its in danger of getting out the invoices for the telegraph-wire which kicked off this whole media-at-the-speed-of-light-gig.

Or maybe its just sheer fear that makes MSM want to impose the old rules of interruption in the new environment, which in a way is fine (and part of the ‘no rules’ dictum), because after all it is in precisely this manner that we rather patronisingly conditioned the post war (ahem) ‘consumer’. Rather disconcertingly, there’s a sizable segment that actually like it that way and which Faris did a post on cheekily calling them the passive massive? But anyway it’s looking like not for much longer. We’re on the edge of something new and to bring an old mindset to a new media really is indicative of how uncreative, stuffy (or scared) we have become. After all, if the discovery of the Americas has resulted in a new Europe being built, I doubt if the internet would even exist. Its time to take the gloves off and get stuck into socialist media your own way; make friends, be authentic, honest and useful but ‘monetizing’ socialist media is precisely why nobody has really done it yet. Groundwork needs to be laid, and fortune favours the brave.

Socialist Media

Tony Benn, Durham 2004, originally uploaded by barney britton.

I only really discovered Tony Benn when I found all my understanding of power and production was completely discredited. I never expected losing my politics to ever bother me but in many ways, it cost me more both financially and emotionally than losing my religion ever could have. Tony Benn was my succour during the tail end of this period.

So, earlier today I took a look at some stats for socialist media in the United States and I was surprised to see that imeem, a small media-sharing social-networking site that I stumbled across last week to use for posting the Danwei podcast was beginning to take root. They're at number four in the table below, and means I can now share a brilliant Tony Benn Podcast, plug a new socialist media and lay the groundwork for my Marxist media post which is designed to irritate the living hell out of people who drive gas guzzling Jags like the wonderfully erudite Rory Sutherland who writes beautifully on his blog.

Update: The embedded audio no longers exists. - cfx2020