Struggling to write

For the last two weeks I’ve been struggling to come to terms with the subject matter for my MA.

Social media is the subject, its a bit like saying marketing.  Huge subject.  So have to drill down.

And that is where my mind just takes off – blogs, forums, social networks, chat, microblogging, conversations, widgets, applications, case studies ….every blog I read, every article I skim through fuels a 1000 eletrons in my brain and more connections go off.

The dinner with my MA class was really good fun and helpful a couple of nights ago – a) because it was great to put names to face and also b) having the chance to meet Richard and Jonathan and express to them my frozen state of mind was strangely reassuring.

Suddenly I think I’m thinking my way through and narrowing down to the subject line for my first essay.

Now we’re talking.  In face we always have been.

The age of monologue is coming to an end and the two way conversation has begun.  (And how!)

So the outline coming together in my mind goes something along the lines of:

Why do we as humans chat:

- because we are social creatures

- nature

- because we seek reassurance

- because we want to feel we are not alone

How has this converstation evolved over the years?

Did the start of popular media shut us up?

Are society’s characteristics mirrored in the online world? if so – how?

How have been people been moved before by the spoken word, how did messages get across nations and ideologies spread?

What are the tools of social media media that enable people to chat

What are the tools of social media that allow people to engage

Is this a space brands can enter or should they even try?

Critical incidents:

Ghandi and the liberation of India (spreading the word)

Telephone

Computers, Tim Berners Lee and the Internet

Social media tools – blogs, social networks (not new but they are in the way they worK)

Tomorrow I hope to finally pin down what I am going to write and then its head down for December and early January.

I think Richard might well be getting a couple of calls for help as I’m still struggling to get to grips with theortical framework.

War memories

The best place to learn about the future is to look at the past and the best place for that is almost always a museums.  It’s only after all by looking at past mistakes that one can learn from them.  Or at least that is the hope … the IWM is an extraordinary museum and one that you would think celebrates war by being the War museum.  On the contrary, as Jeffrey said as we headed up to Kings Lynn on the train ‘to understand peace you have to know about war’.  Very well said I thought as the train thundered onto Norfolk..

We were on our way to see my godmother in Norfolk with one of the curators from the Imperial War Museum to see her collection of keep sakes from the second world war.  She was 17 years old when the war first broke out and being Diana she signed up pretty much straight away to help.

She already knew how to ride a motorbike, drive cars and how to service them so into the Red Cross transport division she went.

Let’s say she had an interesting viewpoint of the war.  She followed behind the troops after D-Day plus 30 ferrying the injured soliders to trains to take them back to the UK, transporting POW’s, being one of the first non military people to go across Europe and see for herself the absolute devastation of the war.

The collection she had which she wanted to give to the IWM included a map of Europe (with roads) printed on a silk handkerchief, a red waistcoat that was part of her Red Cross uniform, an extra ordinary collection of photographs including german submarines scuppered by the Allied troops in their docks, pictures of Pegasus Bridge and the gliders the english troops had landed in ….

It was quite something to see the memories flooding back to her as she went through each keepsake with Jeffrey to explain how she has got it, what it had been used for ..  tying the story into the objects so that he could write them up at the museum.

And at the end of it you could see the joy that he was accepting them on  behalf of the IMW and thanked her for her kindess in donating them to the IWM.  On the contrary I thought, you have made her so happy as now she knows they are going to a safe place where they will tell a part of the story of the war, and the roles every day people had in supporting their country.

I know she slept well that night and whatever happens in the future a part of her will live forever.

It was an honour to help her and to help keep her memories safe.

We all have a responsibility to look after the memories of the previous generation because they fought and died for us to have this world.  They also did not have access to the internet and the different tools to record their memories that we have access too….  and like most people – they too want to be remembered when they have left this earth.

Our online connected world has given us the chance to do it for ourselves..

Hunstanton – ahoy!

Today the plan is to go up to Hunstanton to see my godmother Diana for the day bringing with me a lovely person called Jeffrey who is a curator at the Imperial War Museum .  Diana you see is an amazing lady, quite formidable who drove an ambulance behind the front line in WW2.  She also rode a motorbike and was a courier for the army and secret intelligence …

The great concern she has is when she dies her keep sakes from the war will end up in landfill.

So today IMP here we go to talk to her and for them to review her collection.

Will report in later on how it went..

Where does one find time?

A lot of my friends are bloggers and I have to admit loving reading their blogs and when I do read them start feeling as if I should pull my finger out and get on with mine.

But how to make it interesting enough for people to read and for one day this blog to be linked to my friends blogs…  blimey, well having thought about it – for a few days and then some more – decided the only thing to do is to get on it and start writing.

So news today..  well it’s been a long couple of weeks.   Part of me is seething about my colleague dumping a tender propiosal document on me and then announcing on the Friday evening he was going away on holiday so your muppet truly ended up having to write it the next week.

Jes that was hard, really really hard work – 76 pages in total in three days (give or take an hour or so) – of facts, strategy, reasoning, diagrams, more strategy and reasoning, scheduling and pricing.

The documents ended up being couriered to the delivery company (how fine to the line was that!) – for the Monday am deadline.   Now we have the nail biting wait and see … I can live with the rejection if it doesn’t get selected because being in business development you learn to live with it and develop the skin of a rhino.

What struck me though through the seething was actually how I feel sorry for the colleague because he walked away from the mammoth proposal, he didn’t go on the journey of the tender document and as a consequence he missed out learning some fascinating aspects of online marketing and how the missing parts of the jiggle saw puzzle fitted together to create an deeper understanding and knowledge of how things work.  He didn’t go through the pain, agony and then the silent pride as it all comes together..and the brain exercise that put it together.

In fact my colleague  first comments were when he got back- oh I think you over priced it, followed not too long afterwards by ‘ah there were illterations in the document’.  Well that’s what happens when there is no one to proof read the document – you’re working 12 hours a day and the thing has been dumped on you.

Along the way for this tender I’ve met via the phone some splendid people who came to my rescue when I needed information and who sent it over and I really look forward to meeting with them in the not too distant future…..  for drinks and a thank you and now they are embedded into my network of contacts.

Meantime, life ploughs on – had a huge brainstorm (sorry mind shower) session for a clients social media strategy today.  And guess that means it will be head down again writing these ideas up for a presentation on Friday.

Now I’m committing to writing the blog at least twice a week from now on and with an update on things learned, researched and discovered in the ever changing world of online marketing and the social media aspect of it.

One last thing before finishing off – hands up who knows what Chinwag is ?  An online community for people working in online marketing. Fabulous site and really worth signing up for.  In the social media forum a chap called David came in all guns blazing saying how Facebook was worthless and only for people who wanted to waste time at work.

Er no.  Don’t think so.

He blugedoned his view in to the discussion with the I am right because I do social media and the rest of you don’t know what you’re talking about.  He didn’t bother to look up at the case study he was referred too – the Dell / Facebook case study in which Dell targeted an existing creative group with about 76,000 members to ask them to create an impression of what nature meant to them.  The results are quite outstanding with over 100,000 entries in a week and over one million people voting for them in the ensuing months.   Instead banging on about it being worthless, useless and over-rated.

I’m not saying Facebook is perfect – its not – but its a fascinating site which is different to different people in different ways.   For me its a wonderful tool to keep up to date with friends and at least know how they are and it also allows me to speak my thoughts about causes which I care about such whale hunting or bears in china being farmed for their bile to make chinese medicines. I’m not a chomper, biter, or movie challenge comparer and I consider these aspects of Facebook every bit annoying as anyone else does.

I don’t tend to play the games on it – but then I’m not a game player in the virtual world anyway – its a generation thing.

It struck me that if he is a practises social media marketing – then he’s not terribly good at the listening and the dialogue part of it and in essence that’s what its about.  QED, a lesson for us all that pride can come before a fall and that David someone in Hoxton might well be hitting that floor quite soon…

I

Lunch 2.0

I was reading a jaunty piece recently about a Google employee who wanted to get an idea of what other businesses were like to work for and at the same time get a free lunch. So he gatecrashed a work canteen for a big technology company at lunchtime, met a whole load of interesting people and got a great idea going.

Lunch 2.0’s is the new way for companies to recruit staff – where people can come in, chat with team members, see how the company is from the inside and check out how good the food is.. and yes it does matter! :~)

It makes sense on so many levels – from the recruiters perspective, from the future employees perspective and a great way to show off a company.

I rather like the idea – so will be putting together a list of companies to gatecrash their canteeen and see what they are like from the inside perspective.. and maybe even meet some interesting people along the way.

Any takers?

nothing more boring than colds

Still getting over a really stinking cold…
So far have gone through 20 packets of hand tissues, eaten two blazing hot curries, one dim sum with extra chillies on the side, endured two steaming eucalytpus inhalations, another bowlful of blazing chillies, two packs of lemsips, more lemsips and an absolutely vicious nose spray called First Defence – pack of neruofen, 20 vit c, zinc and hot toddies.

Finally getting better…

phone calls, friends and great ideas

Don’t you just love it when you get a text from a friend who you’ve not spoken too for ages and follow up with a call and you start a discussion of how are things – and whats happening? and oh my god that sounds so interesting and then ………

Well that happened to me yesterday morning and I’ll explain why.

Great friend called to say he and some friends had started their own company called The Believe Collective. The first project they had pitched a broadcaster was about highlighting the increasing violence young people are facing today in their everyday lives and the escalating gun and knife culture which is threatening so many. There is a lot to it than just that I promised not too reveal too much at this point – however for a first project they got funding and it’s well wicked!

I love people who do things for people because they geniunely want to help society and put something back. It was poignant because I heard on Radio Four in the morning that nearly every child in the UK has now experienced violence of some form, whether it be bullying in the school ground or mugged on the streets for their mobiles ….. their culture accepts violence as part of every day.

Christ if its like this on the streets when people are young, what sort of world do they have to look forward too when they get older?

Don’t know about you but it really wasn’t like that when I was growing up. There were no such things as mobile phones or I hate to say it computers in peoples homes – and if we want to speak to our friends in the evening we had to use the phone with our mum’s shouting to us in the background ‘to get off the bloody phone’. No IM, gaming was basic and even I could do it without being looking like a fool with stiff thumbs.

It’s depressing how with progress has come this wave of violence into our culture and society.

Anyway wanted to send them loads of good energy for this project which will make a difference to young people. I know the team involved and they are a really good group of talented, smart and dedicated people.

My friend has promised that once he has everything in place and the research is complete he will be up for being interviewed for my weblog on video …

Open Source Cinema – you’ve got to love it!!!

Morning all,

I’ve spent the last two years working for a technology company specialising in video streaming so my world has been bitrate, compression, CDN’s, bandwidth, VOD, IPTV, gigabytes, firewalls, media players, content distribution platforms. I’ve been involved in debates and sold many a campaign based on the lean back online viewing experience as opposed to the lean forward more webpage based experience.

And so where does all this lead….. well taking a step back and looking at industries in which content plays a role – and there are a quite a few – content producers, agencies and brands, licensing and lest one forget – lawyers – one could say there are some seismic changes coming down the broadband pipes and in the way consumers/viewers/people/the masses are starting to view and think about content.

For this first of my blogs about the content industry, let’s focus on the film industry.

For many years there has been the traditionally held business model – film made, distributed via the cinema with swanky premieres, after six months film is released on DVD and then finally sold to the broadcasters. Yes I am talking about the big blockbuster films here and for a reason as they account for most of the revenues in the industry and they have most of the control in the industry. Independent film makers face bigger challenges in actually getting cinemas (distributors) to screen their films and then worry about whether people are actually going to come and see their films. They rely on a smaller more cinema savvy audience who do make the effort to find out about their films! They are out there but there is a lot of competition for the share of their wallet. It’s a thankless task when the film you’ve slogged your guts out to bring to the cinema and is truly great gets completely ignored for some candyflossed Hollywood blockbuster with huge marketing budgets; that however is a blog for another day.

Meantime the film industry (i.e the big boys) are facing the same challenges the music industry faced with people downloading content and not paying for it. One hopes they are not going to go down the same path as the music industry did and start slapping lawsuits on people for downloading the latest film on bittorrent because that does nothing whatsoever to build future business models or find ways to engage with the public/audience online.

Quite what the film industry is planning to do is an open book at the moment. There are some fascinating people out there who are evangelising about bringing film direct to the public and in doing so opening up so much more choice in the films on offer. One of these is Peter Buckingham who heads up the UK Film Council. Well worth listening to one of his podcasts or reading his lectures. Peter is the man masterminding the Digital Screen Network project in cinemas across the UK. http://www.digimart.org/archives_webdiffusion.php?lang=en&page=videos&year=2006&id=20061018_1_shaping_change_in_distribution

And there are genius and courageous people who seem to really understand how the internet works and what online social networks are about and how to fund films and build business models without alienating audiences.

I’ve recently read about a person called Matt Hanson who is nothing short of visionary. Listed by Forbes.com as one of the ten people who will change the world this year, his idea is simple, audacious and well – brilliant. Quite simply he is recruiting 50,000 people into an online community all of whom pay £25 or $50 to be involved in a film called ‘A Swarm of Angels’. ( http://aswarmofangels.com )The idea is based on the same principles of open source software; i.e collobaration with members forming the social network deciding on the creative decisions such as scripting, editing. The project has attracted a global audience and people from different walks of life; from skilled filmmakers to run-of-the-mill-film-buffs. There are two scripts under production, one Matt has written himself and the other that has been written by the members.

If you think that sounds unwieldy, don’t forget that movie making is already highly collaborative, especially in Hollywood, where productions are subject to endless revisions, hirings and firings, and audience testing. And the result is often lousy. The difference in Hanson’s project is that the investors will be true film buffs, more interested in art than commerce.

Once the project is completed, it will be available for downloading and remixing under a Creative Commons license. For Hanson, it’s an important final step that harks back to the dawn of entertainment. “If you look at the Greek epics,” he says, “the storytellers that were recounting their tales always put their own spin on it.”

Personally I think people like Matt Hanson are brilliant. They are daring to think outside of the box, to explore new ideas and opportunities and develop new business models. The time of UGC (User Generated Content) is well and truly with us and people with a digital camcorder are proving they are more than capable of scripting, filming, editing and posting up videos. The concept of a community based film project is a next step in the evolution taking place online of video content and how people view it.

I for one will be watching and getting involved once they open the community up for more new members to join up.

Journey begins

 …. the journey of a 1000 miles begins with the first step!

Chairman Mao.