After a lengthy (five month?) break from blogging, I'm back. With the news that I think there might be a virus on Facebook. I don't know these people and they've infiltrated my group of friends. Names hidden to protect the possibly not fictional.
Either that or someone's hacked my account and invited the whole world... I really hope it doesn't go the way of myspace.
Anyway, it feels good to be posting again.
i enjoyed Russell's post about weasel words yesterday. Which led me to notice this non-commital bus timetable this morning. They're not even willing to commit to saying that buses run every 6 - 10 minutes (surely a wide enough timeframe?), they have to hedge their bets with an 'about'.
Pleasingly though, Hackney residents have a pleasing habit of taking the weasels to task via the people's medium of graffiti.
This one from a while ago is still my favourite.
I'll probably get into trouble for this, but here goes...
A mischievous dilemma has been floated by the BBC in the wake of the the pope's recent apology for his ill-advised comments about Islam. It goes like this:
If the pope's infallible, how can he make a mistake?
Wouldn't it be interesting to explore ideas for a new positioning for The Pope, seeing as his incumbent 'Infallible Leader' role seems a bit too demanding to live up to these days.
So the question is, what do you think the ingredients of the refreshed Pope brand should be if he is to regain his once-unchallenged credibility?
Here's my starter for 10:
The people's Pope. Where the Pope encourages an organisational shift away from his top-down, bureaucratic approach to religion towards a more social, collaborative conversation about beliefs, moral codes and all that. Repositioning Popey as the people's representative / mouthpiece to God, rather than vice versa. He could start blogging and everything.
Any better ideas?
I had a package not delivered this week, because the sender forgot to pay the postage.
The slip the postman left gave me two unappealing options if I wanted to get hold of the package:
1. Inconvenience yourself by coming to our depot in Euston to pay and pick it up.
2. Inconvenience yourself by buying stamps to the value of the postage, sticking them to this form, walking to the postbox to send the payment back to us. Then in three days, we'll resend it.
It also gave me no clue to who sent it. I hadn't ordered anything, so I chose to let it rot at the depot.
Why is this still acceptable behaviour by a brand / service provider when everything's done online these days (it is, isn't it?)? Is this trade union protectionism at work?
It would be great to be able to log on to the Royal Mail website and pay via Paypal or Visa or something. It would be far quicker for everyone, and cheaper for them on a transactional level (nobody has to deal with me directly to collect my £2.18).
Royal Mail are missing a valuable opportunity to engage their customers online here. They could collect rich data to make their service far more useful to people. For exmaple, in future, it would even be nice if they could let people know there's a fee to pay via some other means than snail mail - via text perhaps...
I was trying to avoid posting about this, but word seems to have got out online, so I might as well roll with the punches and talk about it a bit. Such is life in the new, open world.
You may have seen quite a few of these around if you live in or around E2. Several fellow bloggers certainly have. I have a feeling that some of them have quite a lot of readers too. Thanks to John, Will, Kate, czechOUT for picking up on it. Katcha's is my favourite though.
I should admit that I kind of deserved the posters. I did a bad thing, that nobody should ever do in a relationship, although I can't pretend I wasn't stunned by the 'shock and awe' response. You can probably guess what it was that I did wrong. I'm very sorry for hurting her feelings, and not just because of all the unwanted publicity either.
In case you've taken the posters a bit too literally, I should stress that as well as being a liar and a cheat (more one-offs than actual character traits), I'm quite a nice guy really.
It feels quite weird being the subject of what's shaping up to be a promising viral campaign. I'm told that 400 posters went up, although on the afternoon I spent scooting round Shoreditch and surrounding areas tearing them all down, I could only find about 100. Friends have been helpfully assisting in the 'de-advertising', but I gave up trying to supress it once the story hit the radio here and here. The ubiquity of cameraphones is giving the posters a second life online, which is interesting.
Assuming my ex used a photocopy shop, I reckon her media spend was about £6. She should win an IPA Effectiveness Award or something.
Would any communications strategy types care to do a quick analysis on reach, frequency / pairs of eyeballs or have any other plannerly metrics we could use to work out the campaign's effectiveness? Faris, I'm thinking of you!
That's all for now. More updates if / when the 'campaign' progresses...
Yesterday a few of us from work took some clients to the Changing Lives conference, hosted by the Future Foundation. You can read the programme here (pdf link).
The Future Foundation have a great name - it evokes trust that they are the people who can provide fresh insight into the way the world's going. Sadly, this means that they set the bar of expectation pretty high for themselves.
I enjoyed the talk on 'ethical consumers - do they really exist?', but was disappointed by 'technology - what's next?'. I didn't feel it contained any new insights into the way the world was going, nor did it make any pointed conclusions about the reasons behind the exciting way technology is fundamentally transforming society and business (Life 2.0? No chance - there wasn't even a mention of Web 2.0). The best they could manage was a bad photo showing a guy in their office watching football on his computer, with another guy watching over his shoulder. The intended take-out: the internet is great because it enables shared experiences like this. It felt a bit superficial.
Overall it was a mixed bag. But we did get some great questions from audience members challenging the thinking in a lot of the presentations. From the questions people were asking, I got the impression that the audience, made up of brand people, media planners and client side marketers, were better informed than the people presenting.
The excellent James Woudhuysen waded in with some great awkward questions, too.
The general vibe felt more like reportage than forecasting, nobody bothered to paint really compelling scenarios about what's in store for us.
All this got me thinking about the role of organisations like the Future Foundation in today's discover-anything age. These days, we can find out almost anything online as it happens, thanks to blogs, RSS, and our ability to aggregate many news sources to build our own information ecosystem.
This means that for an audience of people concerned with staying up to date with what consumers are doing, they are already bang up to date with what is happening in their particular field of interest. So why hold a £250 per head conference to tell them this? Shouldn't they be learning something new?
Perhaps it would be more useful to put more firepower into interpreting what all this means, or taking a longer view (beyond the next year or two)
I was frustrated by several things:
The determined lack of any opinion (These days, we get this when we're finding out what's going on - in blogs. I think it should be allowed when talking about research. The not-very-interesting alternative seems to be 'paralysis by analysis'
The poor visual quality of the presentations (endless charts and 'top 10' style lists that you can read ahead of the speaker, don't make for interesting viewing. Powerpoint videos that don't work provide entertainment for the audience as the speaker panics, though)
The lack of passion of some of the presenters.
The venue - the Millennium Gloucester Hotel is dull. Very dull. (For me, this bit's a really important measure of how much an event host 'gets it'. And they could have done better.)
Perhaps the Future Foundation should stop trying to do it all themselves. The lady giving the presentation about technology began with the baffling caveat, "I should start by saying that technology isn't my specialist subject. I'm not even that interested in it...! Why the hell are you talking to us about it then?) and go 'open source', bringing together expert practitioners from the fields they're talking about to talk about the trends that are happening. That would have real value.
New conference concepts are emerging like Pecha Kucha, which focuses more on the opinions of presenters (briefly, too - the rules only allow them six minutes and 20 slides each) and a richness of viewpoints rather than laboured analysis. I'm going to the one on 25th June. It should be interesting.
Or how about tapping into the vast collective knowledge sitting in the audience? Telco 2.0 are trying this with a new approach to conferences - the event serves as a forum for new ideas and debate. The host simply acts as a provider of stimulus, and a marshal guiding the direction of the meeting. A bit like Jerry Springer. The interesting content comes straight from the audience. Who'll get to know each other better as a result. Great.
That's it for now - I'm going to think about this a bit more and maybe try to outline some principles for Conference 2.0. After I get back from the beach, though.
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