The train to Kony Island

By now most of the hype around Kony 2012 has burnt and we are left to assess the ashes of social mania symmetry: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The brighter a flame burns, the faster it will fade.

One thing is for certain, no one will be able to talk social media strategy again, without referring to the massive blip created by the folks at Invisible Children. But what exactly did we learn? That Photoshop is now an essential element for unlocking emotions? Without the slick faux 3D layers, would the images of children and conflict feel as real and in need of immediate action? Do the saturated jungle scenes and sweaty Kony snapshots evoke a greater sense of immediacy and evil? That in this fast paced attention scan, the "How it looks" of the message trumps the "what is being said?"

Eye candy aside, the simple mechanism of turning guilt from ignorance into a simple serotonin click strikes at the core of the fauxtivisms appeal. Moralising and politics of aid aside, the fact is though that Invisible Children got a lot of things right. They connected the dots of our collective connected conversations and brought their message to consciousness at unprecedented speed. It struck just the right emotional balance between disgust and accessibility, to make promotion seem socially right. The mix of celebrity, an aspirational currency that kids are well familiar with, and a limited time offer is potent stuff.

The fact that their message did not stand up to scrutiny is only a minor hindrance. Pretty soon someone will crack it. My expectation is that only two things need to be fixed:
1. The outcome will focus on a positive (integrate kids with real solutions), rather than a negative (remove Kony)
2. The clicks will translate into a mechanism for real impact. Awareness is not enough. The business model behind this could be exciting. Not quite Ecosia but something similar.

With $5million in donations from just 48 hours Invisible Children almost met their entire budget for the previous year. How much did Facebook and Google make from the 40-70 million plus clicks and views?

The next Kony will anticipate the whole awareness cycle and incorporate the mechanisms of resistance into their marketing planning.

Economic metabolism

We live, we eat, we procreate, we die, and it seems the rate at which we can these things faster and more, creates economic value. After hurricane Irene I had the benefit of seeing the slow decay of preparations made in haste. Duct tape crosses on windows lingered for months in Harlem as the speed at which they were applied did not match the speed at which they were removed. Quickly becoming the new default, anchored and too stubborn to be moved.
But how do we apply this observation to the broader context. The concept of economic metabolism becomes most tangible in the every day sense when companies have to deal with crisis in the same way. The speed at which accenture responded to their own PR hurricane, removing Tiger Woods billboards after a scandal, says as much about their vitality and responsiveness as the fading duct tape in Harlem says about economic decay (personally I still saw Tiger Woods posters 3 weeks after the affair in Oslo airports, the Munich ones disapeared over night).

Surely this must have some bearing on the prospects of brands and organisations. If the organisation is able to metabolise new data, be it threats or opportunities faster than its foe, there must be a sustained footprint on the overall competitiveness. Should we be measuring channel response time in the same way that a terrorist tests potential hit sites? How long does Unilever take to respond to a complaint letter? How long till one company can install that broadband, versus another. The basic pace of economic activity hardly features as a metric in stock valuation, yet the ability of a company to respond is one of the most obvious ways to assert its core dynamism.
Traditionally the key moving metric the market would assess are things like days of cover/inventory days or burn rate. This just expresses the need of financial markets to assume the world is linear and predictable (like a sparkline fitting between a known upper and lower border).

The web has somewhat moderated this impulse by talking the language of bounce rates and clicks to target. The half life of links are now showing the inherent value of social media conduits, essentially bringing the concept of economic metabolism closer to the fore. Can we start using the half-life of customer complaints too as a leading indicator of brand share growth? And should the usefulness of technologies be redefined (like trans fats) according to their impact on economic metabolism? This will have a profound effect on development aid!

Absolution and activity

Today I had a great lunch with Cordy and Florian, which got me thinking about the marketer's need for absolution through activity. Feeling safe in the illusion that you have done enough to be safe from reprimand.

If you take a look at how the typical positioning maps work, it is all about 'attribute' or 'brand equity' associations by brands in a relevant set.
I wonder how this would change if you had both the internal and external views of the situation on one map. What would happen if we could see the company's 'attitudes' and 'feelings' towards a brand, mapped in the same way that we map consumer beliefs.

The missing link between how we feel about our brands as an organism, and how our consumers feel means that it is often difficult to make the link between actions and outcomes, or more importantly, what the right type of action really is. Should I spend half my day working through a media schedule to get the best value from my plan, or should I take the sales guy out to lunch to get him to lobby for more budget?

Does the mindspace dictated by externalizing the problem distract us from taking the right team actions to be successful? Being focused on the market(ing) activities needed, creates a kind of safe haven discussion forum whereby the enemy is out there. If we turned the looking glass around we might end up with a very different set of brand behaviours. Just "doing stuff" does not absolve one from the responsibility to engage minds and hearts.

Why climate crisis is not bad.

The world is changing and so shouldn’t we. That seems to be the basic argument behind the concerns that climate change is not part of our natural evolution.
Who says that humans have to keep living the same way they have done for the last 14 000 years? The delicate balance that has fed our ravenous appetite for resources is breading a new sensitivity as the system that sustains it, veers violently out of balance. The challenge: change. But at which level?

One of the key restraints to our evolution on a broader level has been humans’ obsession with events. Living in the here and now we seem hardly to have escaped the cave man looking over his (sic) shoulder for that saber toothed attack. We urgently need to break out of this way of seeing the world if we are to progress. The biggest challenges the world faces now are processes, not events. Poverty, climate, pollution and obesity are process issues, that need to be approached systematically rather than with point solutions. By becoming such a clear and present danger through devastating climate events (ironically) we are finally appreciating the process view of the world. The way things link together is the key to how we can improve them. A better understanding of the processes involved in managing any system leads to far greater energy efficiency, more so than any pointial intervention could ever hope to achieve. In understanding our cultural and economic evolution as an ongoing process that does not consider the status quo as the holy grail of genetic destiny we can see that the current “climate crisis” is providing a stimulus in the right direction: the ability to sustain human progress at a lower level of energy consumption. Why is this important?

Life fights entropy. As living organism we constantly use energy to maintain order in a chaotic universe. Like ice crystals fighting in the sunshine we fight and consume within the universe to keep our order in tact. It would be far more interesting however if we could reorganize at a lower level of energy.
This is the fundamental learning challenge that Climate Crisis poses to us as a species; how do we live, love and prosper, at a lower level of energy? How do we sustain the memes and genes that have such an amazing ability to build information exponentially, without giving in to there selfish and mean nature.

A number of trends are developing. The first and most prominent is moving from individualistic action, to coordinated action. Exposing humans to the soul of the ant as Eugene Marais would say. Network economies are begetting network people. Robert Scoble as a node in the twitter network becomes no more than a nerve cell in a super brain that is constantly charging information back and forth. And doing so far more efficiently than ever before. In it we see the first glimmer of ego becoming subsumed into a large distributed learning organism.
How long until this sentience break free from the carbon based life forms that feed it? This could potentially be this round of advanced intelligence on earth’s greatest achievement: surviving the big long freeze as pure information, only to emerge in a new Eden when the sun has charged it’s batteries again. Puts a new perspective on the tree of knowledge.
This aspect of how the internet is beginning to make us immortal and creating a new form of what it means to be human, is being studied in great detail by Derrick de Kerckhove.

The second is the reduction of complexity. Climate crisis is forcing designers to be more effective with less resources. Less packaging, less paper, less widgets gadgets and whatever are now required to make things work. And they work for longer with less. Just look at the difference between the LED and the light build for an example of how we are achieving higher levels of organization with lower levels of energy. In effect we have taken on entropy and we are winning. And is the same happening on a global scale? Less languages, less species, less seasons? The big business challenge will be our ability to sustain markets with falling populations.

Fortunately we are also developing the ability to be more flexible. Meshing and mashing our way through complexity without the requirement for big complex and energy intensive infrastructure to sustain us. This ability links supply and demand more intimately than it has been at any stage of our development. The next step will be to move from engineering and heavy industry to biology as we produce custom CO2 feeders on demand. Or the way in which we have addressed the mortgage crisis with global efficiency. The correction was not as disruptive and energy intensive as in the past.

So just exactly why are so many people concerned about climate crisis? In one sense it is a lack of trust. In another it may be that people are still too comfortable with simplistic causal explanations of what is happening. In a sense this is what Marcus Fairs calls “Narrowism”. Is that extra flight to Tokyo bad? I don’t know, because it may be saving our ability as a species to communicate, and that is how we are beating entropy. We should have faith that we have provoked exactly the kind of response from the planet that we need to learn and grow in order to evolve from this form of speciest adolescence.

Flying with roots

Besides the fact that the hauntingly beautiful music of Sigur Ros opens wonderful landscapes of emotion in sound, I recently discovered their provocative cover art.
In particular this image by Pedro Landeiro seems exceptionally pertinent for our complex lives.

My first reaction was to think of it not as Odin with lightning bolts bristling over the skin but rather, an angel taking flight, with roots, dangling from its fingers and toes.

Dopplr, facebook and the cohort of communal experiences on the web do this for us. Just take a look at the way that you can take flight to the remotest parts of our avian landscape and land safely in a network of references and connections. In a sense you have never left home because you are traveling with your roots intact. While at the same time drawing nourishment from your new environment!

This really does change the dynamics of social integration as the linear advantage of age in location does not apply any more. The new kid on the block can have far more insight about and connection to the neighborhood that the old man who has in fifty years never met his fellow inhabitants. Or virtual friendships can thrive as we are more connected to friends living half a world away than the commuters on the train next to us.

So how does this make us a happier species? Strangely the only non-dietary tip that Dr. Gary Fraser give to a long life is to live a religious life. This observation is expanded by other scientists to living a life with purpose or connected to a greater whole.
If we become a predominantly migratory species, do we regain our sense of connectedness by flying with roots?
The opportunity lies in making the interface truly non-intrusive so that we may experience the here and now, as intensely as the emotional bond that keeps us rooted in friendships and love.

True insight or the myth of experience

Tufte long ago shaped my belief that the way in which we present data is more important in shaping the way we think about it, than the data itself. This belief was taken to a new level when I saw this illustration representing research findings (Courtesy of Bob Waddington).

At stake here is the myth that direct experience leads to knowledge. The graph is simple enough. It represents the effects of various experimental treatments on a sequence of different crops (black represents an improvement, white represents "no-imporvement"). This is not dissimilar from the brand manager's experience of sitting through focus groups and looking at the impact of different concepts on various sample groups.
The key organising factor of the data is time sequence. This is how we as humans remember things; "this happened before that", "this caused that to happen". The fact is that by looking at things this way makes it really hard to develop any insight into the nature of either the crops or the treatments!

A simple reorganisation of the data reveals a truly stunning new interpretation of the results. By clustering the data around the response of the crops to the treatments, rather than by the sequence in which they were administered we get a completely new pattern. We can see that there are roughly three groups of responses to the treatments.

This is true insight. And as is always the case with true insight, it looks obvious once revealed.
True insight penetrates the substance of what we are observing rather than following the random path of observation and experience.
Most people find it hard to break free from the illusion that what we see is real. Think about how a typical brand manager "learns" through her/his career.
Step 1: Get new job
Step 2: Flurry of activity to prove that the company made the right choice
Step 3: Brand share and performance improves
Step 4: Promotion
Step 5: Product share starts to decline reinforcing the belief that the brand manager did a good job
Step 6: New brand manager, new logo, new agency
Step 7: Cycle repeats until brand dies

The consequences of our actions are usually removed in time and space from the decisions we make. Things take time. Most people are more engaged with managing their emotional state in a meeting than making links to distant consequences.

It takes between 18 months and two years for the consequences of management decisions to be evident in a complex organisation. The feedback cycles, lags and unintended consequences need to take shape before we can really call something a success or failure.
Ask yourself if you can remember a decision you took 18 months ago. Ask yourself if you can see how that decision is playing a role right now. Can you see how the excess marketing materials you ordered are piling up in the warehouse or lie around unused in shops around the world. Are you dealing with cleaning up the the messes you made or the ones of your predecessor. If you are cleaning up their mess, ask yourself how they can learn from something they will never see and then ask that question about yourself.

Because we do not experience the consequences of decisions, we cannot learn from them.

Our learning experiences are mostly structured like the chart on the left. Building up a Boolean model for predicting the outcome of future decisions based on the sequence of our personal narrative. As long as everything in our immediate vicinity looks good, we'll keep operating on these assumptions.

To get true insight though, we need to break free from the filter of immediate experience.

So how do we counter the effect of short-termist thinking?
1. Cultural diversity: By bringing in different ways of experiencing the situation you reduce the dependency on one set of assumptions. This should bring us closer to experiencing the true nature of things.
2. The wisdom of crowds: Brainjuicer are doing really good work at allowing us to see a view of things less biased by personal prejudice.
3. Systemic thinking: Linking events in a system allows us to break free from the school ground logic of "he hit me"/"she hit me". Making dependencies visible to the group allows the team to think about the problem more completely.
4. Stretching the time frame: Quarterly thinking, chasing analyst reports is the wrong model for building value. Instinctively people know this but few people are bold enough to stand up against this wrong-headedness. Nothing of value was ever created in a quarter.

These methods allow us to re-present experience in a way that aids insight.

As we head into 2008 the challenge for business is increasingly to understand the true nature of things and to separate truly strategic action from reactionary busyness. The impact of pollution on China's ability to maintain growth will impact your outsourcing strategy. The cost crunch on India's IT outsourcing will impact political stability. But how?
The result of long term trends, these and other factors will be accelerated by a tipping point in human history. In 2007 we reached the historic moment where more than 50% of the human population became urban. We are living in a new world that requires new ways of thinking and acting.

The solution as always starts with challenging our own assumptions about what we know, versus what we think we know. Most importantly we need to break free from the notion that experience leads to knowledge.

Context is king

I suppose that is the only way you can excuse a two month gap in posting! the content was there, really, just waiting for the right moment to arrive.

So are we moving to a world where context is king? When I can see the same content, served up in any manor of business models, the endorsement of context starts playing a new role. In the web 2.0 world, you are known by your references. The biggest challenge for wikipedia is to maintain the quality of content as context starts to override.
The scary thought is that fact becomes a matter of persistence. If we get them to repeat the same story with enough references it must be true. This obviously rewards the ones with the biggest networks, but does it support the development of fact?

Content is becoming ever more context dependent. The read/write devices we use to access information become more sentient to geographic and contextual location. I need different information about the little chapel in Valletta when I am actually in Malta. I need different product information when I have skimmed through 15 sites about it in the last 20 minutes.

How are we building this contextual knowledge into the way we slice and dice content?
- references; who endorses a product may mean completely different things to different people. If my uncle endorses a game it may mean something different than when a 14 year old endorses it. The role of social networking in terms of product endorsement is becoming ever more clear as marketers try and latch onto the key references.
- history; already airlines are changing pricing information based on how regularly you search a specific route. As the man said: "Polly want a cookie?" The key to so much contextual adaptation.
- interface; device dependent content shapes the richness of the experience. How this moves forward becomes a challenge to developers. iPhone has shown that device dependent content can also be handled at the device end..... interesting mr watson, how do we adapt the device to context? Ask samsung I suppose?

Fact is, context is playing a bigger role in determining relevance, access and engagement. This challenges the basic strategic models of (message/medium)Xfrequency=impact.
What would you suggest as the new model?