Worky

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15
Feb 10

Where’s the proof? Google, the luge and the reliability of online news sources

Over the week­end, the social web has been rife with news that Google decided to with­draw a homepage illus­tra­tion depict­ing a luge com­pet­itor, which was pub­lished within hours of the tragic death of Geor­gian luge ath­lete, Nodar Kumaritashvili, during train­ing for the Van­couver 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Accord­ing to the New York Daily News, Google made the decision fol­low­ing a ‘tor­rent of slams’ from Twit­ter users while Mash­able pub­lished its own post citing the NY Daily News’ story - ‘Google Pulls Olympic Luge Logo After Back­lash’. So far, Mashable’s post has been retweeted almost 1,000 times.

To a less sen­sa­tion­al­ist extent, ZDNet was also in on the act.

The prob­lem is, I am not con­vinced that the story is true.

By coincidence, I’d planned to write a post about the fine edit­or­ial line between what public taste con­siders ‘OK’ and ‘Not so OK’ based on the alleged ‘back­lash’ against Google’s choice of homepage image.

So I was scour­ing web tools like  Social Men­tion, Topsy, Tweetm­eme, Bing and Google to trace the timeline of the story.

Having tried to dis­cover all the tweets I can — and I admit that I’m not neces­sar­ily using all-singing-all-dancing ana­lyt­ics applic­a­tions here — there is pre­cious little evid­ence of an alleged  ‘back­lash’ against the Google homepage at all; cer­tainly not enough to claim Google had cracked under pressure.

Yes there were plenty of exclam­a­tions of sur­prise at the choice of illus­tra­tion, but retweets of Mashable’s story out­strips these rel­at­ively neut­ral men­tions by at least 10 to 1.

So I am not con­vinced that Google did make a decision to with­draw the image as the NY Daily News — and sub­sequently Mash­able — claim in their headlines.

I am all the more uncer­tain because of the final para­graph in the New York Daily News art­icle which reads:

“Google did not respond to an e-mail about the logo on Sat­urday, when the search engine turned up 121,000 matches for the late luger’s name.”

Put that state­ment at the top of the story and the story should fall flat on its face.

So this appears to be a claim by the New York Daily News citing a hand­ful of tweets and with no state­ment from Google to either con­firm or deny that they made a decision to with­draw the homepage image. The claim has been repeated by Mash­able and — sube­sequently — by close to 1,000 people on Twitter.

Why am I so bothered about it?

Just ima­gine if it was an individual’s repu­ta­tion — your repu­ta­tion — that was sub­ject to the same exper­i­ence rather than a huge brand like Google.

Maybe Google did make a decision. But where is evidence?

I’ve no idea about the repu­ta­tion of New York Daily News, but Mash­able — which is gen­er­ally good at labelling rumours rumours — is an import­ant source of news for the social web com­munity. It is import­ant that edit­or­ial brands like these safe­guard their own repu­ta­tions by respect­ing the repu­ta­tion of others — no matter how newsworthy.

Both should for­feit the clicks by stick­ing to the prin­ciple that com­ment is free, but facts are sacred.

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10
Feb 10

Bud Caddell: Who says the future needs ad agencies?

I love a bit of heretical thought and Bud Cad­dell has delivered a blog-post with spades of the stuff by posing the ques­tion: ‘Who says the future needs an advert­ising agency?’

Craft­ily con­tro­ver­sial head­lines often dis­ap­point with their dry status quo con­clu­sions — but not Bud’s. This is a really sharp opin­ion piece about the future of the ad agency model and its rel­ev­ance in a frag­ment­ing media world. Well worth a read.

Err. That’s it.

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9
Feb 10

Pick of the week: Ikeler on advertising trends

Des­pite its title, I’d argue that Marci Ikeler’s slide­deck on trends in advert­ising — a pick of the day at Slide­share last week - artic­u­lately makes the case for the pro­sec­u­tion on the future of mar­ket­ing com­mu­nic­a­tion in gen­eral — for any busi­ness of any size.

There are a lot of present­a­tions and opin­ions swirl­ing around the web that bang on about the tech­no­logy, but not that many which are suf­fi­ciently insight­ful to help you under­stand the con­sequences. For me, that’s what dis­tin­guishes a strategist who ‘gets’ the tac­tics from the rest. (But then, that’s why Marci Ikeler is dir­ector of digital strategy at Pub­li­cis New York isn’t it?)

Marci neatly dis­tills the issues down to three areas for con­cen­tra­tion: soci­ab­il­ity, con­tent and inter­activ­ity. What’s more, she amp­li­fies her point by point­ing out trends that are illus­trat­ive of each — hence, this really inter­est­ing presentation.
Anyway, take a look. And follow Marci on Twit­ter.
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13
Jan 10

Google, China and my ‘I told you so’ moment

Pic­ture: Geoff Sowery

The polit­ical effect — as well as the effect upon brands — of social­ised media has been a source of con­stant fas­cin­a­tion for me over the course of the past 18 months. I’ve pasted below an excerpt from a post I pub­lished last July that alluded to the topic.

The post’s con­tent is rel­ev­ant because, today, Google has delivered an abso­lute blinder of a case study, the con­sequences of which may be pored over by gen­er­a­tions to come.

By declar­ing that it will no longer censor search res­ults Google (a ‘vir­tual’ state) and China (a ‘nation’ state) are at log­ger­heads over ter­rit­orial encroachment.

If you read Google’s state­ment, just note its tone.

This isn’t a brand speak­ing; it’s a supra-national organ­isa­tion that is lever­aging its power to make a dip­lo­matic point by rap­ping the civil liberty and polit­ical con­duct knuckles of a global mil­it­ary and eco­nomic superpower.

Des­pite the fact that Google is dwarfed by the per­ceived scale and power of the Chinese state, that doesn’t pre­vent it from trying out its devel­op­ing dip­lo­matic muscles, and nor does it lessen its chances of bring­ing its dip­lo­matic influ­ence to bear. (After all, the United King­dom has been dis­pro­por­tion­ately influ­en­tial in global dip­lomacy for gen­er­a­tions des­pite it being a small island without an empire as per­vas­ive as Google’s.)

That’s the point I made in my ori­ginal post excerpt; and that’s the the sig­ni­fic­ance of Google’s move today. ‘States’ are ‘ima­gined com­munit­ies’ with pop­u­la­tions. In China’s case, it’s inhab­it­ants of a phys­ical area; in Google’s its users — and not ‘consumers’ — in an ima­gined space. What’s more, Google’s pop­u­la­tion of users is likely to be con­sid­er­ably higher than China’s.

Nat­ur­ally, Google will bene­fit from the back­ing of world gov­ern­ments over its stance, but it won’t be rep­res­en­ted by them.

That is because Google’s cur­rency is real­is­able know­ledge which tran­scends national bound­ar­ies in a way that phys­ical branded products simply cannot. So, while Google may have been foun­ded in the United States, its cul­tural roots and pop­u­la­tion is world­wide. If Coca Cola made a sim­ilar stand, it just wouldn’t muster a frac­tion of the global gasp that Google’s announce­ment has caused.

Here’s what I wrote back in July:

What’s really going on: The new socialism

What’s really hap­pen­ing, though, is fas­cin­at­ing and takes me back to one of the few books I read at uni­ver­sity which struck me as interesting.

It was called ‘Ima­gined Com­munit­ies’ by a guy called Bene­dict Ander­son. It was about polit­ical nation­al­ism, but his thesis still stands today  –  in fact, it’s prob­ably more per­tin­ent  –  because he sug­ges­ted that the media (print) had been the primary dynamic enabling the concept of ‘nations’ to thrive. It fol­lows that, if the media becomes frag­men­ted but easily access­ible to most people, then there’s a cor­res­pond­ing frag­ment­a­tion and pro­lif­er­a­tion of ‘ima­gined communities’.

It’s why nations like China are para­noid about the power of Google to spread ideas that have the poten­tial to create dis­son­ance between compli­ance to the state and pur­suit of per­sonal ambi­tion  –  Uighurs/Han Chinese unrest may be an early indic­a­tion of this.

It’s also why sects do weird things  –  because their ima­gined com­munity tran­scends the con­sen­sual ima­gined com­munity of most of the people around them.

Your ima­gined com­munity shifts and changes through­out the day, depend­ing on con­text. So you might be part of a work-based com­munity right now, or a member of a pro­fes­sion this after­noon, a com­muter at the end of the day, an actor in ama­teur theatre tonight, a father, a sister or brother or friend. If you’re in the UK, its unlikely that you’ll be Eng­lish or Brit­ish, unless events take a remark able turn, but you may well be a towny, vil­la­ger or seasider.

So what’s hap­pen­ing has been described by Kevin Kelly at Wired as a ‘new social­ism’; tech­no­logy is enabling people to real­ise the poten­tial of social con­nec­tions, of whichever hue, for all sorts of dif­fer­ent reas­ons and outcomes.

So we’re living through an ism, but it’s not ideo­lo­gical; it’s sociological.

And I think it’s bril­liant because the desire to apply rational seg­ment­a­tion models to deeply unpre­dict­able human beings is being chal­lenged by the diversity and access­ib­il­ity of media.

Here’s the ori­ginal post (you”ll need to scroll down to see where the excerpt featured)

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4
Jan 10

A dash of Balsamiq broke my resolve

Bal­samiq: Even though it appears to use Comic Sans, I reckon it’s still a ground-breaking innovation

Until now, I’ve res­isted the urge to make any pre­dic­tions for the new decade, but a link posted on Twit­ter yes­ter­day by 37Signals’ Jason Fried just about broke my resolve. (Besides, I’d already made my pre­dic­tions in a post at MRM’s site in Novem­ber last year…)

It’s for a really smart app called Bal­samiq, which allows teams to rap­idly trans­late ideas for soft­ware, web­sites or apps into live mock-ups.

So what’s this got to do with brand building?

Well forget what Bal­samiq does for a moment and think, instead, of the effect of its applic­a­tion: It com­pletely messes up the for­mu­laic, tried and tested, chartered-institute-of-chartered-charterers dogma that has the tend­ency to squeeze the life out of great ideas before they’ve seen the light of day.

An applic­a­tion like this offers a tool for genu­inely agile design of web-based ser­vices; it allows people — espe­cially inten­ded users — to road-test ideas without those count­less meet­ings and doc­u­ments that are inten­ded to fine-tune a spe­cific­a­tion (which prob­ably only works in theory anyway).

Bal­samiq is fur­ther evid­ence of a shift away from the packaged-up-to-perfection pre­scrip­tion of the mass media model.

Why? Because it enables teams to col­lab­or­at­ively har­ness the poten­tial of the social web in order to design, build, test and launch an idea more swiftly than would have been pos­sible only a matter of months ago. It cuts out layer upon layer of unne­ces­sary bur­eau­cracy in order to let people use it and — so — improve it.

Just con­sider how counter-intuitive a tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing approach would seem stacked up against the idea driv­ing Balsamiq.

Last Novem­ber, I pre­dicted that three vital dis­cip­lines would sur­vive the col­lapse of the tra­di­tional mass media model: live events, inter­ac­tion design and con­ver­sa­tion. (I explained why in my ‘How to build a brand…’ presentation).

Like Jason Fried’s own Base­camp, Bal­samiq offers real evid­ence of the emer­ging sig­ni­fic­ance of these dis­cip­lines and the col­lapse of the mass media model (that’s the model that spawned news­pa­pers, radio sta­tions, tele­vi­sion chan­nels, call centres, web­sites, market research­ers, media plan­ners, advert­ising agen­cies, event and hos­pit­al­ity agen­cies, spon­sor­ship agen­cies and public rela­tions consultants).

In the past 12 months signs of the dis­tint­er­me­di­ation of the tra­di­tional mass media model have been remark­able: Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to a mil­lion fol­low­ers on Twit­ter, Carter Ruck dropped an injunc­tion in the face of pop­u­lar dis­sent over its Trafigura gag­ging order and Rage Against The Machine beat the X-Factor’s Joe McEld­erry to the Christ­mas Number 1 in the UK.

Des­pite the effects of the shift — which will only accel­er­ate in 2010 — I’m still left won­der­ing how many people in the mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion have recog­nised the redund­ancy of the tra­di­tional mass media model and, so tra­di­tional pro­mo­tional approaches?

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