I'm Faris

Wilsh has just posted this excellent deck.

You should read it.

Some it flows nicely from some of the thinking in the post below about opening up user data to users to help users help you, marketing as enablement, not image, which was pleasing.

But is far more briliant. 

[HT @Rosiesiman] 

[Source: Fish2000]

In the wake of the Nike Fuelband launching, it seemed a good time to publish this paper I wrote for Canvas8 in its entirety. 

Precis [not part of original paper] 

The Hawthorne Effect is a much quoted..effect...about observation changing behavior.

It comes from a productivity experiment run in 1920s at a factory called the Hawthorne Works, near Chicago. 

They were trying to understand if environmental changes could enhance productivity - they changed the lighting levels up and down, moved workstations, moved obstables and so on - and found that productivity increased in ALL cases, but dropped again after the experiments ended.

This led them to the conclusion that it was the act of being observed that changed the behavior. 

In research, there is also the well established 'demand effect' - where participants form an interpretation of the purpose of the experiement and then, unconsciously, change their behavior to suit that interpretation.

Another explanation is that they were getting direct feedback about productivity rates for the first time, and this feedback caused the increase, which then stopped when the feedback stopped.

[This is why it might be relevant to the paper below.]

Nothing about behavior is simple.

And, as Duncan Watts points out in the excellent Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer), one of the challenges of social science is that different, even conflicting, explanations of human behavior, can often both seem to 'make sense', which makes common sense interpretations of behaviour useless in predicting it.

One of the things that seems to typify companies that 'get' the web intuitively is that they tend to expose their data about users back to users to help users. 

Clay Shirky points this out.

Thanks to Foursquare stats, we now know more about our drinking habits that our work habits. 

Kickstarter turns over its data to the users to help them use the platform better [the insight that projects that hit 30% usually get all the way home, so putting in more effort at the beginning is the way to go, is invaluable.]

Etsy does the same with its Seller Handbook.

Show us, help us, empower us, market with us and we will like you. 

Target us, stalk us, hide from us, market at us and we won't. 

Download Canvas8 - Proximity is a virtue

Scope/

Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism 'the medium is the message' highlights the communication effect of the medium itself, which our brains filter out, rendering the wrapper invisible.

McLuhan understood a medium to be an extension of the senses, but increasingly our location can be understood as a medium – a channel that can be used to communicate and contextualise.

But, while where you are is interesting, what you are near is crucial.

----

Accelerometers and GPS now come as standard inside many of those personal computers we call mobile phones. They are Bruce Sterling’s 'SPIMES' – objects that know where they are in SPace and tIME – wagged to life by the trail of digital fumes they create.

The 'digital exhaust' of our personal and collective lives, largely invisible through nascent stages of the web and mobile, is revealing itself to be more natural resource than pollution.

By leaving behind traces of the past, they offer clues to our future, especially in terms of spotting data patterns which can lead to accurate and useful predictions.

Everything creates data, and now we can give this airy nothing shapes and names.

Through applications built to harness the geographies of our lives, we can see ourselves through the prism of our social life (Foursquare), real or virtual spaces (voyurl), meals (FoodSpotting), drives (BMW’s EVolve) and emotions (Mappiness). The mainstream interest in this previously invisible undercurrent of data can be seen through the data visualisation explosion.

This has changed the narratives of journalism and is painting new pictures of our lives.

However, when we go beyond simply painting pretty pictures of our fumes, you begin to realise something musicians have always known – feedback creates loops.

Seeing behaviour changes behaviour

What starts out as a way to capture and track what you are doing begins to change what you are doing, as you look to 'play the system'.

Feedback loops are how we learn.(1)

We now mesh our personal exhaust with that which is aggregated from the world around us, allowing discovery of new and better ways to navigate our reality as we move through space and time. The Fitbit personal activity monitor and Nike+ both feed, and feed off, these fumes.

Our digital exhaust is not limited to how we can view our own individual worlds.

Human beings don’t scale in a linear fashion – a crowd does not behave like a lot of individuals, because the dynamic interactions between individuals create a system with emergent properties.

Now that three quarters of the world’s population has a mobile, we can begin to look at some of these emergent behaviours with a bird’s-eye view.

This view may provide a greater extension to our collective senses than anything McLuhan dreamt of.

“It is not just about observing what is happening; it is about shaping what is happening,”

says Dr Johan Bollen, a network scientist at Indiana University.

“The patterns are allowing us to learn how to better manipulate trends, opinions and mass psychology.”(2)

Epidemics can be predicted, influence lines identified – all from looking at the patterns we are unconsciously creating.

Even in a world made smaller by the internet, things that are nearby tend to be more valuable, useful and more important to us.

E-commerce, important and convenient as it is, still only represents about 7% of total retail sales in the U.S.(3) – most buying is done the old-fashioned way, in shops.

That’s not to say the fingers of the digital age aren’t changing the dynamics of locality; 20% of all Google searches are local – that number doubles if you only look at searches from mobile devices.(4)

Examples of this in action include Stella Artois' Le Bar Guide, an iPhone application that uses GPS and augmented reality to help you find the nearest bars that serve their brew.

It will even help you call a nearby cab company when it’s closing time.

Uber also makes use of part of this idea: just request a cab and the nearest one is dispatched to you.

Neighborgoods.net lets you save money and resources by sharing your stuff with nearby friends.

Whipcar.com lets you utilise the untapped capacity of your car by renting it to people around you when you don't need it.

Insights and opportunities

Proximity is a virtue for marketers because what’s around an individual can tell brands a lot about them. Experian has long traded in data that profiles consumers based on where they live.

The biggest influences on you are the people you spend the most time with – usually the people you work with.

Behaviour is socially contagious within certain parameters.

A Harvard study analysed 50 years of lifestyle data to uncover the fact that things like obesity and happiness spread through association – so choose your friends and colleagues wisely.

The environment you are in is itself both a powerful driver of influence and a good indicator of context.

Being a consumer of a particular brand is a kind of context, establishing as it does a symbiotic relationship between the individual and the organisation.

For the majority of marketing, it may be better not to think of customers as people;

Customers are to people as waves are to water.

‘Customers’ are a repeating pattern of behaviour that expresses itself in people – from the point of view of a company, it doesn’t really matter who that person is when they walk into a store.

Throughout the marketing process, we spend a lot of time trying to understand the kind of people who are most likely to buy, but behavioural economics and decision research all suggest that 'where', 'what' and 'when' are at least as important as 'who'.

The Social Currency application from American Express intended to do just that – using Foursquare's engine, it establishes location and intention by encouraging you to check in to retailers, and share what you bought and what you want with your social network.

So now we know where you are and what you want to buy – intention and location, very useful context to market to.

So we can look to market to contexts, instead of people, now that we have access to proximity and intention data that can suggest context.

For people, business and the behaviour that is customers, it’s not just where you're at that’s important, it’s what’s around you.

Sources

1. Thomas Goetz, 'Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops', Wired, 19 June, 2011.

2. Mack Hicks, 'Has the Era of Big Brother Finally Arrived?', Psychology Today, 14 June, 2011. 

3. Erick Schonfeld, 'Forrester Forecast: Online Retail Sales Will Grow to $250bn by 2014', Techcrunch, 8 March 2011. A

4. Mike Boland, '20% of Google Searches are Local', Kelsey Group, 25 May, 2011.

A thing I wrote for the PSFK magazine - available here.

PDF here: Download Need to Know PSFK Magazine Faris On Creative Processes NEW

[Title of this post is stolen from Homer the Heretic, who, it turns out, lives in Oregon.] 

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benterrett/7041509709/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Putting the public [user] first, in delivering digital public services.

• Digital by Default
• Putting Users First
• Learning from the Journey
• Building a Network of Trust
• Moving Barriers Aside
• Creating an Environment for Technology Leaders to Flourish
• Don't Do Everything Yourself (You Can't)

It sounds delightful, doesn't it?

An open government with clearly stated principles? [digital or otherwise]

Like the opposite of Brasil [the movie, not the country.] 

My mate Ben is giving it a go - he's the new Head of Design at the UK's Government Digital Services [GDS].

[congrats btw mate. That's really, really awesome.] 

[Ben once won me in a competition.

It's true.

His old agency won the best branding idea for the Orange Business awards and we were their agency and they won an ideas workshop with me.

I suspect they liked the money they got more.

But I think it was a fun workshop because, well, we're still friends.] 

He's precipating a bit of a revolution, taking some of thinking about beta and transparency and openness and collaboration and all that lovely stuff we've been cluetraining at clients for the last decade or so, and applying straight to the government.

And it's looking rather lovely so far.

After the digtial principles above, they published these design principles a few days ago:

1. Start with needs*
2. Do less
3. Design with data
4. Do the hard work to make it simple
5. Iterate. Then iterate again.
6. Build for inclusion
7. Understand context
8. Build digital services, not websites
9. Be consistent, not uniform
10. Make things open: it makes things better

You can almost certainly apply these to whatever it is you do [Advertising for example. Or anything. Probably.] - so why not go have a look at the full explanation of each. 

Go read this blog post Ben wrote explaining what they are doing too. It's great. 

They even published a colophon of the technology stack.

[Do you know what a colophon is?

I didn't.

In publishing it's a little note in the book that tells you about how it was printed or made, what fonts were used and that.

So, in this instance, it's the people behind the Government Digital Service, showing us what technologies were used to make the Government Digital Service.] 

This is really lovely stuff, good work Great Britain, a digital initiative to be proud of. 

The entries have been culled down to the top 30 in our very short film festival for BMW. 

That means, since they are all 5.9 seconds long, you could watch them all in 2.95 minutes.

[Assuming perfect bandwidth and very fast clicking...tell you what round it up, say 3 minutes.]

In a world of diminished cultural latency, where speed is of the essence, alacrity the key, we hoped this intense constraint would reflect the culture and mediascape we operate in but, also, lead to some really interesting entries as people struggle against the clock.

{Constraints are the soul of the brief}

So, why not pop over, have a look, and vote for your favorite and help someone win a BMW 3 Series? 

Next week I'm in Sydney doing the opening keynote at teh awesome Creative Circus conference, where I shall be talking about awesomeness and its importance in world driven by consumer controlled media.

I'm also doing a 4-part workshop 'Masterclass', with @RosieSiman, under the Genius Steals banner, where we wil be looking at a structured theory of creativity and ideas and that, trying to evolve the brief and briefing for a complex world, a workshop about running Genius Steals workshops and brainstorms, and how to curate, aggregate and steal ideas like a genius.

Should be big fun. There might even be prizes. 

If you are going to be there, come say hi, and sign up for the 'Masterclass'. If you want. 

I lived in Sydney for a while about 6 years ago - it's insanely beautiful - and I'm excited to be going back.

[I even wrote a very personal rambling guide to Sydney for a travel site which you can read here.] 

I may have a cheeky beersphere like thing on Tuesday 7th March. Or a drink anyway. 

I'll update this post once I know where, in case you fancy popping by. 

[It's looking like Passage bar 8pmish - hit me up on twitter @faris] 

I wrote this piece about engagement for the very nice people at Hall&Partners, for their new magazine. 

[Have a look if you get a chance, it has excellent contributions from Lawrence Green, Mark Earls, John Hegarty, and Sarah Morning among others.] 

You can get the PDF here to peruse later, or read it below.

Download Engager Article Faris

But, if you'll forgive the auto-exegesis, I wanted to add a little something. 

My hope was to explore the nature of engagement, as approach and objective and measurement, as currently used term in the industry.

The metaphors we use subtly change how we think. 

[In fact, metaphors are part of how we think. Thinking is a recombinant act.] 

The relationship metaphor is increasingly prominent in a social age of networked relationships being made visible.

However, I think it's important to understand that the nature of relationships between human beings and brands is of a qualatitively different nature than one between human beings.

Let's use Immanual Kant to help explain. 

In his Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, where he looks to establish a morality free from the idea of God, he says: 

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.

Human beings in real relationships treat the relationships itself, and the people, as ENDS, not simply MEANS.

Relationships with brands DO NOT have this quality. 

For a brand, a relationship with a consumer is a mechanism to make money in various ways.

This is obvious, since the reason companies exist is to make money, not to make friends.

The 'relationship' is a MEANS.

I thought it worth pointing out that the converse is also true - people want relationships with brands only if they derive value from them beyond the value of the relationship itself.

This may not be monetary, of course, but the relationship itself is not sufficient. 

The relationship is inherently a MEANS, not an END.

[People may want to argue that certain passion brands are different in this regard.

Let's discuss it but my sense is that actually even if you tattoo the brand on your arm [or forehead] you are using the semiotics of that sign for your own purposes, to establish, reinforce, communicate, your own identity.]

So, if we want people to engage with our brands, we need to give them compelling reasons to do so.

-----------------

Are you Engaged?

“Engagement's the thing wherein I'll catch the attention of the consumer!

So goes the current thinking.

Forget all that push stuff we can't break through. There's too much clutter, too many channels, too many brands, and 30-second spots don't work anymore anyway.

Everyone either gets up for snacks during commercials or screens them out with TiVo. I'll use the Web instead, and then consumers will seek me out and bathe in my brand to their hearts' content.

Well, maybe.

But with more than 80 million Web sites out there and a new blog created every second, the Web has become more cluttered and fragmented than any other medium.

It's no longer enough for a brand to use digital communications merely as a platform to deliver a message or create an experience.

Now smart brands take it a giant step further: They strive to make their communication channels provide a service value, too.”

-------

Or so I co-wrote for an article in Media Magazine that was published on September 1^st 2006, 25 days before Facebook was opened to people outside of academic institutions with an email address and 3 months before the iPhone was announced.

We were hinting at what became known as ‘branded utility’ – but could perhaps be put under a bigger concept: earning attention – using pieces of brand-created software as the primary examples [we called them ‘advertools’ but the term branded applications is much better]. 

Now, of course, branded apps are commonplaces – but earning attention is increasingly difficult and so we have begun to trade an obsession with awareness for an obsession with engagement.

We live in an oft-heralded age of engagement but we should remind ourselves that brands don’t want engagement, or awareness, or relationships, except as a means.

As Clay Shirky says, “behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity” – and technology has changed the opportunity space dramatically. 

But the motivation ­­remains the same –

to create markets, to stimulate demand, to maintain price inelasticity of demand so that people are happy to pay a premium for products that operate at functional parity.

Engagement simply indicates, perhaps, that those ever-fickle consumers were in fact paying attention to our efforts: the greatest fear of advertising was that in the face of infinite ‘clutter’ [the charming term we use for everyone else’s advertising] was simply that we would be ignored.

Engagement covers a lot if different ideas – as evinced by the various facets of the Engager methodology - but online it most often measured by looking at not how many people had the opportunity to consume our brand in some form, but rather what impact that had on their immediate behavior

[time spent with a site or story or application, comments and approval, RTs and so on]

which is definitely a marked improvement – looking at behavioral intermediate effects in a world where everyone can both consume and produce content seems sensible.

If a piece of branded anything falls in the woods and no one Tweets about it  - did it have any effect?

Speaking of Facebook, engagement there is crucial because of Edgerank – the algorithm that determines what surfaces in your newsfeed, which, in part, is a function of how often you have engaged with the brand page, tabs and content.

Thus, if you want your brand content to accrue socially generated impressions via Facebook, you have to learn how to engage followers on an ongoing basis, a cadence that is very different to the campaign deployments of old.  

Whilst considering how to better engage, despite the fact that consumers are inherently participatory online, this open letter to advertisers [reposted below for convenience] serves well to remind us that many people do not want to engage with us in the creation of branded content unless we provide them reasons to do so.

The onus, as ever, is on us to find compelling ways to earn the attention of the consumer. 

----

[Source: http://johnniemoore.com/blog/images/letter.jpg] 

We put together this very fast film festival as part of the launch for the new BMW 3 Series. 

It's a 5.9 second film contest, to be exact.

[That's amount of time it takes to get from NAUGHT to SIXTY.]

Show us how much you desire a new 3Series, in the most creative, epic, dare I say it awesome, way possible, and win a car. 

Contraints are the soul of any brief, so we're really interested in what will/can happen in films this short. 

Is it enough time to tell a joke? A story? To be beautiful or interesting? Is it a film or a 'moving photo'? [HT flickr, cinegram] 

Whilst the industy has experimented with Blipverts many times, we still tend to think in 30 second chunks, regardless of platform. 

The brevity here feels like it lowers the threshold for participation and so far that does seem to be the case, which is nice.

Head over to the YTChannel and have a look / enter your film. 

...

[My attention threshold online seems to have diminished.

I say online because there seems to be a modality for online lean forward type activity that, for me, lends itself to speed and skimming, surfing to wrench back a metaphor from a distant age, across data and ideas.

Motion feels.. important, online. Moving, leaving an exahust trail, grabbing and storing but never going back.

I don't think I have gone back to my Delicious account more than a handful of times. I still like having it pull all the links from my tweets and storing them.

I'm not entirely sure why, or if this is any different from the tendency to endlessly scroll through channels, or Netflix options. 

But they don't create the same sense of motion.

Or movement.

Not progress, but generating and using momentum.

Maybe it's part of the diminishing cultural latency I've been thinking about for a while - with the feed constantly full of new stuff, why /when go back and look at the old.

A centrifuge of ideas.

Endlessly spinning under its own momentum.] 

I had the privilege of being the chairman for the Contact & Content and the Integrated jury for the Clio Awards last year. 

It was awesome.

The Clios have been hosting some cocktails and chats for the industry where previous jurors give some thoughts on what they saw and some tips on how to make better case study videos.

The case study video is a relatively recent advertising form - a function of the increasingly complexity of the media environment and what constitutes advertising or ideas - and it's only really when you sit in a room for 3-5 days and watch hundreds of them that you begin to see the response that different tropes elicit among the award juries and how rapidly some things have become clichés. 

So, hopefully this will be helpful, should you be looking to make one. 

This is very much a companion piece to / built on the shoulders of Rahul Sabnis' awesome talk on the same topic the week before, which you can see here.