Simon Mustoe
In one place
Updates
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@greenwellys I would LOVE to know the answer to that question if you ever find out.
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@SouthernRailUK Can you follow me so that I DM you?
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@SouthernRailUK Thanks for replying. I can't get a fare anywhere near that cheap using your booking engine. It's for travel in March.
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Good read > Is Facebook an echo chamber or a source of plentiful new information? http://t.co/DCRxOjDO via @IfYouOnly
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Anyone know how I get hold of those super-cheap £1-odd advance tickets for Southern Rail to London that I keep hearing about?
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@twdhughes I didn't, but I do now. Thanks. That piano riff - it's contagious.
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So good it brings on the tingles. Lose yourself in the full version > Nina Simone, Sinnerman http://t.co/zCto4tVl @Spotify
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Spotify error message "You can't go forward from where you are right now." Didn't know I was 'on the couch', but thanks.3 weeks ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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Lost in music: a map entirely made up of famous streets from songs http://t.co/QcF6mjjT via @fastcodesign
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@tamsinbishton If you want further fittingly festively Spiritualized then try disc 2 of this http://t.co/JxIOEUSc
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@tamsinbishton @niceyeahnice Not just you. It sounds contemplative, and a bit like a spiritual.
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@tamsinbishton @niceyeahnice I remember this one from the Royal Albert Hall http://t.co/yPMgzqP1 #Spiritualized
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The Beach Boys play "Don't Go Near The Water" on Brighton bandstand, circa 1972 http://t.co/4PlVmSVM via @youtube
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RT @howardbowden: he's probably right... RT @msnuksport_rob: THE best own goal of all time. http://t.co/YLvGrcOO
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Cowbird: a place for storytelling | Co.Design > at last, a web concept that pauses for breath http://t.co/IDRlkTx47 weeks ago from web | Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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RT @sparksheet: Slow Content: Lessons from the APA's International Content Summit http://t.co/Brd8TF01 > Relax, slow down, do good things.
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Mental modeling for content strategy | Daniel Eizans: http://t.co/2CcLbT6O
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@jeremyhead I get the theory. But practically, we're relying on the scruples of the 'messenger'. Do they REALLY like it? Too grey for me.
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@jeremyhead But if you were being paid to say it then that would be weird. How would I know if I was talking to real you or paid you?
Recent tracks
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Hejira by Joni Mitchell2 days ago
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A Strange Boy by Joni Mitchell2 days ago
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Furry Sings the Blues by Joni Mitchell2 days ago
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Amelia by Joni Mitchell2 days ago
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Coyote by Joni Mitchell2 days ago
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Riot In My House by Mark Lanegan Band2 days ago
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St Louis Elegy by Mark Lanegan Band2 days ago
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Gray Goes Black by Mark Lanegan Band2 days ago
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Bleeding Muddy Water by Mark Lanegan Band2 days ago
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The Gravedigger’s Song by Mark Lanegan Band2 days ago
Top artists
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Photos
Posts
I love the look of this Flipboard iPad application. I don't have an iPad, so am going purely by the demonstration video you see here, but it appears to achieve a simple utility where others have failed - namely in collecting and displaying articles shared amongst your online contacts (friends/followers) in a user-friendly format.
I gave up on Google Reader and Bloglines. They are clunky to use and strip away the pleasure we would normally feel at discovering and reading about new and interesting things. Twitter and Facebook interfaces are little better, and the same goes for most clients (Tweetdeck et al). Part of the problem might be that 'lists' of information feel like tasks that you have to plough through.
Its creators describe Flipboard as a personal magazine. If it has indeed succeeded in simplifying how we receive and view content shared through our online networks then I for one will be delighted. If I ever get an iPad that is.
Where wine lovers can take pleasure in using beautifully designed, high-end corkscrews, for beer drinkers utility still rules the roost. Bottle openers tend towards the functional and are more likely to be found on a key ring than stored carefully in a drinks cabinet.
The Erik Bagger bottle opener, available at ScandinavianDesignCenter, goes a long way towards redressing the balance. It's still utilitarian, but with a flourish. A pleasingly long handle is clearly designed to improve leverage and reduce effort. The stainless steel finish is understated and there's not a groove or engraving in site.
Strangely, the sophisticated beer drinker sounds like a contradiction in terms - they add the oxy to the traditionally moronic. But if this sounds like you then the Erik Bagger bottle opener is the perfect partner for your organic, local micro brewery, limited edition pale ale.
Posterous (where you might well be reading this) is worthy of a place on any list of simple things. What it does - namely, simplify the experience of publishing content to the web - it does beautifully. Much like Apple's products, using Posterous doesn't feel like you are dealing with something that is technical, even though you are.
In this video interview with Robert Scoble and its founders, Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal, it soon becomes clear that the design philosophy behind Posterous is what makes it so successful, and that the similarity to Apple is no coincidence.
At one point they make a series of comparisons with the iPhone:
- You can use Posterous right out of the box
- Greate things don't have to be complete from the off.
- Start simple and build on it
I also completely agree with their point that great design comes through decisions about what to remove, not what to add. Pared down beats padded out every time.
The Mañana lamp by Marie-Louise Gustafsson for Design House Stockholm is one of the most laid back-looking pieces of product design I've seen. It's a floorlamp that makes itself comfortable in its surroundings by leaning louchely against the wall. So much so that it might as well be smoking a cigar and regaling you with stories of past escapades and adventures in exotic locations.
Inspired by a sketched portrait Gustaffson found herself doing, it's beautifully simple in form, consisting of an uncluttered steel frame and free from head to toe of any unnecessary detail. I also like the relationship between the size of the shade and the slender body which, for me, too many lamp designs fail to achieve.
I love the raw simplicity of these beautifully designed speakers from Joey Roth. The speakers themselves are made from porcelain, cork and Baltic birch all left in their natural state. This gives them a sense of warmth and personality and establishes a reassuring connection between technology and the natural world.
The amp in the middle of the picture is incredibly utilitarian in form, but all the better for it. I find the exposed phono plugs particularly pleasing; rather than being hidden away, they have been made an integral part of the design.
Plastic has been kept to a minimum throughout, appearing only in the electronic components.
Home audio is getting sleeker. For a while, I've been weighing up whether to dispense with hefty separates and speakers, which are great for sound but not so great spatially or aesthetically. Trouble is, whilst I listen to an increasing amount of MP3 these days, I still want to listen to CDs too. Which means that beautiful looking iPod-only docks like the Bose SoundDock and the B&W Zeppelin are out of the running.
This little beauty from Vita has been out for a while now and covers both bases, as well as adding DAB and FM radio into the mix. And it's a bit of a showstopper in the looks department too. I love the walnut veneer casing (it looks like it's a single mould, or certainly close to it) and the almost perfect symetry of the front display. An inset space on the top for the detachable remote control maintains its clean form.
If I finally decide to make the move from separates to an all-in-one system, then the Vita R4 would be my choice.
Each year, for one week our attentions are drawn towards the night. It starts with Halloween and ends with Bonfire night (tonight). Illuminated pumpkins and fireworks are activities that demand the night. Once, before we created 24-hour light, the night was our natural antidote to the day, every day. It offered reflection after action. It was the unknown that interrupted the known.
The night is elemental. Living according to day and night gives us a natural rhythm, which we now interrupt. It also has a simplicity that the day does not. We should all give more of ourselves to the night because it balances us.
ES cutting board. Apart from the incredibly clean form and colour (white works for me every time) I like the slope, which provides run off for liquids into a collection drain rather than on to your work surface.
Preparing food on a cutting board can be a a bit messy but ultimately we still need to have a surface to cut things on. It's an imperfect compromise we make each day. The designer has identified this trade-off and resolved it with this design.
Sascha Bischoff's 0909 stools. Beautifully simple. Clean lines, solid oak and stackable to save space. I love the way the edges remain unpainted on the white version.
Posts
I wrote this for iCrossing (where I work) a few weeks ago. Now it has had a bit of time to run on that blog, I'm publishing it here too.
“You can’t tell how people are going to behave based on how they have behaved”
(Don Draper, Mad Men)
“You can’t make any sense of the facts until you’ve had an idea”
(Stephen King, A Masterclass in Brand Planning)
“Journalists have to balance their role in responding to events with their role as an active seeker of stories”
(Paul Bradshaw, The Guardian)
For ten years, from my mid-teens to mid-twentysomethings I had a monthly appointment that I never ever missed. It was with the nearest newsagent so that I could buy the latest copy of The Face magazine. As a pop-culture obsessive I loved The Face. I loved it because it introduced me to new people, ideas, labels, fashion, movies and music. It kept my world moving forwards by giving me new information that led to new experiences. I loved it so much that I ended up working there – my first proper job out of university. And I still have all my copies stacked together at home as a compendium of times past, the new has become the old. So now I am a curator, a caretaker, of a decade of pop culture, of things I once liked.
The Face is sadly long-gone but the social need it tapped into – the provision of new information and experiences – remains as relevant and necessary today as it has always been. But we are in a dangerous place where the value of taking people somewhere new is in danger of becoming undervalued and, worst case, forgotten completely.
In media and marketing we talk a lot about competing in attention markets – by this we mean the ebb and flow of information that the online ‘crowd’ is interested in at any given time. We believe that the best way to be noticed is to appeal to people based on what they are currently interested in. This is because the internet has created an environment where near-real-time data about people’s likes and dislikes is at our fingertips. Of course, if you are interested in something, it means you already know about it.
The increasing centrality of attention markets in business strategy affects two established professional disciplines – journalism and marketing. For both, the internet is changing how we think about the content we produce. But we have a choice to make. Should we really be writing about and creating things based predominantly on what we know people already like, or should we be giving people new ideas and experiences?
The route we choose has repercussions at a more profound level than the media or marketing industries. It’s an issue for society. New information, ideas and experiences are the very things that have always powered human progress. But how do we move the world on if we are only interested in what people liked yesterday?
Attention markets and journalism
Online, a publisher can 'play' the attention markets by monitoring what people are talking about, searching for and reading at any given time, and publish stories with great speed and at great volume in order to meet this need.
Gawker is a reactive media model that is a world away from the role journalism has historically played in seeking out and breaking new stories in order to attract readers. The Daily Telegraph, one of the UK’s broadsheet newspapers, has arranged its newsroom so that it can constantly monitor the relative popularity of news stories and feed this into editorial planning. It has the attention market at the heart of its approach. That said, this is also the paper that had its biggest scoop in years with the MPs expenses scandal. There wasn’t much of an attention market around that until the Telegraph created it. I wonder if its editorial approach has shifted back in the direction of breaking news as a result.
When I think of journalistic practice, I think of Sid Hudgens, the journalist in the film L.A. Confidential, played by Danny De Vito. He’s out there in the shadows of the Hollywood night getting the scoops. It was dirty work, but the guy was breaking news, working contacts to get the inside story. Turn on the television for any UK national news programme and still see political journalists referring to a tip-off or an important bit of information given to them by a senior Westminster village source that they’re plugged into.
In one of the quotes at the top of this post, Paul Bradshaw says that journalists need to balance responding to events with seeking new stories. And he’s right. There is a responsibility for journalism and, frankly, for anyone creating content on- and off-line to push us onwards, to educate, entertain and surprise.
Attention markets and marketing
In digital marketing, attention markets are central to how we have come to think about and interpret user behaviour. It has become industry gospel that brands should understand where online audience attention around their product, service or sector currently resides. And it is indeed good practice to do so. But, just like journalism, if we place too much emphasis on this type of knowledge we risk only ever providing experiences that people already know they like. How does this inspire people?
Of course, the tension in marketing between audience research and creativity is nothing new. What is new today is the accessibility of data about user behaviour that the internet gives us, the potential that attention markets have to change the way we research and plan activity, and how easy and tempting it is to use it as the sole basis for creating new ideas and information.
As long ago as 1983, at a Market Research Society Conference, one of the great UK advertising men, Stephen King, warned against marketers planning activity based on a “here-and-now, action-oriented description of what happened yesterday”. The internet encourages this sort of immediate, literal interpretation of user behaviour because it speeds things up. We can now get information and act on it in quick succession. It is reactive, not proactive. By contrast, Stephen King believed that these facts were only useful when placed against an interesting idea, with research effectively used as a way to test it.
What we need to do
The purpose of this post is not to question whether there is a role for attention markets in journalism or marketing. They have an important role to play. But so do new ideas. We need to work harder at tying these two elements together more effectively. We need to use attention markets not as a literal guide to what to do and say but as a way of judging where people might be interested in going next – as information that stimulates ideas not responses. I believe that journalists and marketing professionals should be a bridge between what people know and like now and what they will know and like next. They should keep moving us forward. After all, it’s hard to see where you’re going if you’re always looking back.
I like this. It's ethereal and technical; playful and sinister; light and dark. It's by Dentsu London and BERG.
An interesting presentation that reached me via Fiona Grantham (thanks for sharing). I like the philosophy and it's a great way of communicating the possible relationships between brands and people. But I also wonder whether it is a little optimistic in how it frames the role of brands in modern marketing. I got the sense that at its heart is the idea that people need brands. I'm more comfortable with this relationship being the other way round.
Year after year, without fail, the Christmas break temporarily erases my work memory, such that I'm left wondering what I was up to before I went away. But over the last day or so I have been enjoyably eased back into things through a few conversations with my friend and colleague, Charlie (@cpev, Charlie's Posterous). We've been debating content strategy - what the term means, what one should consist of, and how it applies on the social web. We've put together numerous strategies for iCrossing clients over the last two or three years but, as with much of our work, we're dealing with a moving target, which makes re-reading around a subject an enjoyable essential.
As a simple attempt at a little bit of personal content curation (which is, ahem, part of any good content strategy) here are a few articles that I've enjoyed reading on the subject this morning.
The Content Strategist as Digital Curator (from A List Apart)
The Discipline of Content Strategy (from A List Apart)
How Consultant and In-house Content Folks Can Play Nice (from dopeData)
How to Build a Topic Strategy (from dopeData)
Unlike many posts and articles I read online, these selections are well constructed and well written (the authors are content experts after all). This makes them a pleasure to read.
I'm not going to attempt a summation here. That'll be something I might come back to. Unless I end up remembering what I was up to before Christmas first. After all, it might have been incredibly important.
"People choose their brands as they choose their friends"
(Stephen King, 1970). How prescient.
On my way to work this morning I passed two newspaper billboards in quick succession. It was for our local paper, the Brighton Argus, and the relationship between the two boards made me chuckle. Unfortunately, I was on the bus and moving past too quickly to get pictures. Here's the longhand version instead.
Billboard 1: COPPELL FAVOURITE FOR SEAGULLS POST
100 metres further down the road...
Billboard 2: COPPELL SAYS NO TO SEAGULLS
How's that for real-time traditional news publishing!? Twitter eat your heart out.
Yesterday, I was asked for my thoughts on measuring the effectiveness of digital marketing channels at the planning and campaign stages. Now, measurement isn't my area of expertise but I know some stuff all the same. Even so, the question still stumped me a little. After a while, I realised that it was because I felt that it drew an awkward distinction between the planning and execution stages of a project that I don't really feel exists any more. The question is surely more about effective measurement than measuring effectiveness. Here's why.
As a result of the emergence of the modern, conversational web, we are entering an age of iterative planning, where insights inform marketing decisions on a constant basis. This means that distinctions that we have traditionally drawn between planning and execution stages are being erased, with measurement becoming the input not the end output. The volume of user data available to us as a result of a person’s search activity and social media interaction is what has driven this change.
The methods and tools we use are the same at both the planning and campaign stages. Consider the amount of Twitter monitoring and trending tools available to us. Likewise, the emergence of social media monitoring tools like socialmention, which lets us search for brands across a range of platforms and ‘take away’ the data for charting and analysis.
This is how the modern digital planner should be operating – in near-real time, in an agile manner, constantly learning and adapting activity as conversations and spaces develop. Of course, doing this is itself a challenge; it needs constant resource and dedication. It requires an organisation (and its agency) to be incredibly nimble and largely free of long-winded sign-off processes. It needs a digital presence based on a flexible, scalable CMS. This is all tricky stuff to change. But change is good and good change means progress.
Redscout and PSFK are running a two-month series of videos dissecting account planning. Here's the first video. It's short (which is good) and raises some interesting points.
For me, the most interesting elements are:
1. Communicating value
People value the tangible output more than the thinking that led to it.
2. Involvement in the ‘doing’
If you're involved in an idea, why wouldn't you be involved in carrying it out? This is especially relevant given that on the modern web there is no 'end' because content endures and conversations continue. Iterative planning based on ongoing insight is what's required.
3. Strategic vs. tactical
What should a planner's focus be?
4. Not being an a*se
We don't know everything and others know lots of stuff too.
Profile
Summary
Motivated by happiness, balance, new ideas and experiences, being in the company of interesting people and learning from them. And good music.
Experience
- Oct 2011 - PresentDigital Consultant / Freelance
- Jun 2009 - PresentDigital Strategist / iCrossing
- Oct 2008 - Jun 2009Head of Social Media & Content / iCrossing UKDigital marketing, specialising in social media
- Dec 2006 - Oct 2008Content & Media Strategist / iCrossing
- Dec 2005 - Dec 2006Freelance /Freelance copywriting, PR and design
- Sept 2002 - Dec 2005Account Manager / Midnight Communications
- Mar 2000 - Sept 2002Senior Account Executive / Nelson Bostock Communications
- Mar 1999 - Mar 2000Production Assistant, The Face & Arena / Emap
Education
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1995 - 1998University of SussexContemporary History in School of Social Sciences
