Servant of Chaos

Green Envy - Vibewire Election Coverage Hits Ten News

During last weekend’s election, Vibewire, the not-for-profit youth media organisation, sent their electionWIRE teams out to polling booths to capture the mood of voters at the sharp end of the election campaign. While visiting the seat of Bennelong – the seat where Maxine McKew was ousted by John Alexander – Austin Mackell found Liberal campaigners dressed at the “green army” handing out how to vote cards which preferenced the Liberals rather than Labor as was the Greens’ stated policy.

This story was picked up as part of the Channel Ten news coverage and was also featured on ABC's The Drum.

In the clip from Channel Ten, Austin is interviewed at the Vibewire Enterprise Hub. He explain his surprise at the polling booth activities described by an AEC official as “dirty but legal”.

It is great to see the mainstream media picking up on some of the great stories unearthed by the electionWIRE teams. Be sure to checkout the electionWIRE channel for the type of coverage you just don’t get to see anywhere else. I have a feeling that this won’t be the last time you see these young journalists on your screens.

Oh, and if you are looking to add your voice to the media mix, be sure to get in contact with the Vibewire team.

Have We Taken ‘Participation’ Too Far?

I came across this interesting letter on Katie Chatfield’s blog. It purports to be an open letter from “Brian” to the marketing industry. But whether it actually IS from a real person or not, the sentiment certainly resonates with people.

Now, because I hope/expect/want people to participate in the programs or marketing that I put together, I try to participate where I can. I contribute content and content, I comment and retweet and share. Sometimes I even do a mashup. But I do that out of a sense of reciprocity – not necessarily out of a sense of fun. Unless, of course, someone else puts the fun “in” – a good example being the @oldspice campaign. But I am predisposed towards participation – many people are not. And as “Brian” suggests, sometimes a social activation for your brand is either not relevant or (at worst) lame, but the same can be said of microsites lovingly built for the dozen or so people who actually visit.

So, the question we should ask ourselves is – have we taken participation too far? Is “Brian” right? Or are we just not trying hard enough?

Crowdsourcing the Election - Vibewire and YouTube Combine with electionWIRE to Show How it's Done

The Australian Election for 2010 has, thus far, been a fairly lack lustre affair. The politicians have kept to tightly scripted, rehearsed announcements designed to appeal to minutely targeted swinging voters in marginal electorates. It’s policy without vision and politics without conviction. And it’s largely why non-issues such as the “real Julia Gillard” and the deposing of former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, have generated broad coverage.

Interestingly, given the success of the grass roots, social media activation of the David Cameron and Obama campaigns, the local strategists have largely ignored social media – and the web in almost all its incarnations. As Stephen Collins suggests, it’s not the social media election we were looking for.

But one of the more interesting efforts around the election is coming from an unexpected quarter. Vibewire, the innovative, non-profit youth organisation (disclaimer: I'm a board member) have teamed up with YouTube to cover, debate and shape the political conversation over the next four weeks. They have recruited and trained young, graduate reporters from across the country and are also crowd sourcing comment and commentary through a dedicated electionWIRE channel. Back at the “Vibewire Hub” an editorial team is managing, vetting and promoting the coverage as it comes to hand.

Anyone can get involved. You can submit a video or suggest a story. And judging by the quality of the coverage and perspective already coming through, it seems that Vibewire’s mandate to showcase the skills and expertise of young media professionals is more than delivering for reporters such as Megan Weymes and Elise Worthington, it’s providing insight and new perspectives on an otherwise dull election. Be sure to check it out! 

The Promiscuous Idea

When Drew McLellan and I pulled together the first The Age of Conversation book with 100 of the world’s leading bloggers, social media was still a rough and ready frontier. Two more editions and three years later, many of us are still having the same conversations – partly because more businesses and more people are beginning to see value in the space, but also because innovation is like a spiral, folding back on itself in ever more complex ways.

With this in mind, I thought I’d publish here, my article from the first book – the Promiscuous Idea. To me, it still feels as relevant as it did in 2007. If you haven’t got a copy, consider buying one. It’s a great primer – and all the profits (still) go to a great cause.

The Promiscuous Idea

We are living in a time of proliferation. Never before has the marketplace of ideas been so free, the barriers to entry so low and the willingness to collaborate so powerful. In moments, a concept can be explained, shared and tracked on a single blog — on the other side of the world, this idea can be modified, expanded upon and discussed. Seconds pass and more voices are heard — a version transmutes into new forms … being picked up as a podcast, a video, an older-style presentation deck. From a single creative impulse, a legion of additions, modifications and transmutations can spread in minutes, hours, days and weeks.

Even months later an idea can come full circle. Someone, somewhere can stumble upon a “stale” idea, investing it with new energy, new context and a new perspective and the cycle of proliferation begins again. What this means is that our ideas are constantly in a process of reinvention.

What links an idea and draws us to it is the “story”. And the power and gravitational pull of the story brings us back to it time and again. In the Age of Conversation, whether we are marketers, activists, educators, politicians, academics or citizens of the world, we are all becoming the connected storytellers of this new era. This presents new challenges but also significant
opportunities for brands, consumers and communities.

We are now dealing with a different type of story. Where once we had a beginning, middle and end, as readers and storytellers we can fall into a story at any point. We can link into the middle of a raging debate or witness the genesis of an idea that can change the world, and the narrative that we
are dealing with is no longer linear but multi-textual, layered, overlapping and promiscuous. The ideas and stories care not for their creator but freely leap from one mind to the next — sometimes appearing simultaneously across the globe — with storytellers tapping into a powerful worldwide zeitgeist.

The new art of conversation relies not on a sense of ownership but on a willing openness on the part of storytellers of all kinds. In fact, the jealous storyteller may well find that “their” ideas, brands, concepts or other “intellectual property” will laughingly thumb its nose at its creator and walk off, hand-in-hand with the idea-next-door. Whether we like it or not, our brands, ideas and
stories are no longer our own … they are out there promiscuously reinventing themselves word by word.

Lead Generation, Community, ROI and Other Games of Chance

Back in April I had the opportunity to speak at the ConnectNow conference. It was quite a daunting situation as I was the first speaker at the three day event featuring people such as Tara Hunt, Darren Rowse, Brian Solis, Katie Chatfield, Jim Stewart, Debs Shultz, Stephen Johnson, Hau Man Chow, Laurel Papworth and Gary Vaynerchuck, but I saw my role as setting the scene – creating a platform for the following days.

I looked at lead generation, community, ROI, discussing:

• What works
• How to sustain it
• What to expect

Along the way, I pick up on the recurring themes that I write about here on my blog. Topics such as how audiences are changing (the new B2C), the Auchterlonie Effect and why it is the future of your brand, continuous digital strategy, influence and fat value. 

Marketing Briefs and Designing for Collective Action

Often, when it comes to advertising and broader marketing, social media is bolted onto the side of existing programs. There’ll be a request for a “Facebook”, expectations of a Twitter account and maybe even a blog. But if you are serious about creating a successful BUSINESS program, then integration is the way to go.

“Integrated marketing” has been one of the great promises for years – but is notoriously difficult to achieve. There are different silos (and often different agencies) responsible – and budgets are often spread thinly across the campaign architecture. Unfortunately, one agency’s view of the client’s business objective is often different to another’s – and even where there is alignment, the specialty of each silo or agency will dictate a preference for approach, channel and budget.

Creating a collective view of the problem – and a shared commitment to solving it is the end game. That’s partly why I love this great presentation by Mike Arauz. On the one hand, you can read it as-is – a great investigation into the mechanisms behind collective action. So as you are going about the business of building your strategies, think about how you design for the outcome you want to achieve, and consider how the network will play a role in that.

On the other hand, think about collective action from your business or agency management point of view. How do you create the change you need to support your program? What can be designed and orchestrated to transform behaviour? And how do you use the collective intelligence genome (see slides below) to drive this all forward?

Design for Networks

View more presentations from Mike Arauz.

A Big List of Social Media Monitoring Solutions

One of the challenges with social media is simply keeping up with the latest changes, additions and disappearances. It seems that just when you are feeling a level of comfort with one tool, along comes another with better functionality, new features or just better graphs. And one of the hottest, most contestable areas is the areas of social media monitoring.

Now, I use the social web in a quite deliberate way – what I call simple social media. I use social tools to:

• Create user generated content
• Filter the vast amount of knowledge available
• Distribute ideas, links and content
• Provide context for the behaviours that we see every day

But how does this work? Let me give you an example.

Ken Burbary has created a great wiki of social media monitoring solutions. He lists the name of the company and the platform, what the solution monitors and links to the site where you can find more information. I found this via a link on Twitter (the filter in action) and am now publishing this as a record of something useful here on my blog. This post aims to provide the context for Ken’s wiki and why people might find it useful. My blog also feeds through to a number of other sites such as MyVenturePad and Gooruze (amongst others) – so distribution occurs across the web. This publishing process will, in turn, act as a filter for others – providing relevant information is a small, contextual package.

And the best part? By and large all this is freely available. So now, rather than wondering where or how to find the big list of social media monitoring solutions, you can now just keep an eye on Ken’s wiki.

COP16: 16 Journeys from 16 Countries in 16 Weeks - Can I Count You In?

Last year, as Christmas came around, there was a powerful groundswell around climate change, culminating in the COP15 conference in Copenhagen (COP15 stands for the 15th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). You may remember I was quite excited about “Hopenhagen” and the crowd sourced ambassador program put together by the Huffington Post. But it all felt too rushed. There was not enough time to build momentum outside the web world – we needed businesses on our side, governments to commit and we needed a grass roots, community activation plan that no one could ignore.

Despite the noise generated by Copenhagen, it was clear that the agreements not to agree, had been hammered out well beforehand. The groundswell arrived too late. It was all noise but no movement.

So I want to start early this year. COP16, to be held in Mexico in December, is the next global rallying point. But to make this successful, we need to do a lot more preparation in the lead up. And that means STARTING NOW.

What I am proposing is this …

COP16 - 16 Journeys from 16 Countries in 16 Weeks

I am looking for teams of participants in 16 countries. These teams will travel from their country of origin to Mexico, but they will do so over 16 weeks. They will travel where possible using sustainable technologies – electric or diesel cars, trains, boats, gliders – whatever comes to hand. The teams may hand off to others relay-style or stay the course from beginning to end.

Their task is not just to ARRIVE, but to EDUCATE, HARNESS and MOTIVATE people along the way. The aim is to create awareness and build a movement, town by town, truck stop by truck stop.

But this is not just about people. It’s also about business. We’ll be asking those sustainable businesses around the world how they can help. Who can provide the cars, the support, the transport, the logistics and the planning? Who can help us bridge the world’s oceans? Who can demonstrate their business innovation and global leadership by helping us achieve these aims?

And, of course, this is about stories. About the real stories of people touched already by climate change. It’s about the future stories of generations – that these teams can begin to also tell.

But this is also about YOU. These are only beginning ideas. I need you to rally around. Share your thoughts and best ideas. I need you to think about your NETWORKS – about who you know and how they can help. Share this idea – build on it – and let’s make sure that COP16 is not a cop-out.

Just don’t be silent!

A Perfect Gift from Blurb

Self publishing is one of the amazing developments of the “social web”. Not only can we simply and easily share insights, analysis, stories, poems, movies, music or any other types of creative work – thanks to applications like Blurb.com, we can also turn these into publications – books, calendars and so on.

I have been involved in a number of collaborations that bridge the digital and offline worlds. There has been the marketing focused Age of Conversation books, my own self publishing efforts around blogging, and most recently, The Perfect Gift for a Man.

The Perfect Gift for a Man was a book that Mark Pollard and I edited and published through Blurb. But when it came to promoting the book, there was nothing that made it easy for us to share the book across the web (we ended up creating our own image based widget). Now, Blurb is trialling a new widget that allows you to embed, share, preview and buy books directly from your blog. I think it’s a huge and much needed improvement. Here it is below:

The Perfect Gift for a Man by Mark Pollard and Gavin Heaton

Say Yes to Twitter

I was watching this video from the Kaiser’s Toilet on Twitter and Google’s new Buzz – and it got me thinking. Much of the discussion that we see around social media, marketing and new technologies relates to yes/no decisions. The conversations are framed in terms of scarcity – of time, resources, budget and so on. But one of the fundamental transformations that the social web has driven is that of abundance. Of information, knowledge and connection.

So we are seeing a fundamental disconnect between the way that we VIEW this emerging world and the way that it OPERATES.

Say yes to Twitter from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

The idea of VIEWING a website or social platform is a behaviour that has created a world view. It comes from 50 years of broadcast TV. It places us, “a user” (and therefore a dependent) in a passive mode. The newer, social web places us, the PARTICIPANT at the centre of a hub. It requires choice, it engenders responsibility, and presupposes action. It PLAYS to the concept of abundance and see scarcity as outmoded, traditional, passe.

But as Mark Earl’s Herd has taught us, it is behaviour which changes thinking, not thinking that changes behaviour. So perhaps, surreptitiously, our engagement with the social web may have wider implications. Or maybe the social web is more chaotic, playful and unpredicatable than our marketing and IT “use cases” would suggest.

This interesting article by Alan Wolk shows how the #thuglife meme has made Twitter into a purely experiential platform. More importantly for marketers, perhaps, is the scale of this type of participation – which far exceeds the early adopter circles that characterise much of the social media debate:

It's an interesting use of the medium, and the people participating in these hashtags seem to be getting as much value out of them as the Twitter-Is-a-Serious-Business-Tool types who busily append words like "Genius!" to their retweets of a fellow blogger's "Top 10 Reasons Location-Based Services Are the New Twitter."

What we are seeing is the logical extension of YES. We are seeing the “crowd” embracing abundance and participating in a way which is consciously unselfconscious.

What would happen if we did the same? What if we said YES to Twitter? What would happen if we followed everyone? Would our world change? Maybe not. But maybe WE would.