Are Brands Fracking The Social Web?

6th March 2013

are brands
http://rivetin.gs/gasland

fracking
the social web?
john v willshire
http://smithery.co
@willsh

thoughts on marketing, the social web
and collaboration, prepared for...

https://plus.google.com/+WeareSquared

this is
not a
standard
“what’s
the social
web” talk

hopefully it’ll give you interesting
ideas to talk to each other about

I’ve also left lots
of rabbit holes...
http://rivetin.gs/sennett

here’s a great thing
from Monday...

greenpeace home page - 4th March 2013

nobody went
to knutsford
see it, of
course

but the
social web
means
they didn’t
have to

those who go

it’s one of
the classic those
social web who
strategies know

it made me think about
fracking
and not just in the way it was supposed to

“Fracking is an
aggressive, invasive
technique for extracting
valuable raw materials
out of hard to reach
places” phil adams, Blonde digital
(and Chemical Engineer grad)

http://rivetin.gs/storyfracking

attention
is the
most
valuable
raw
material
there is

are brands
fracking the
social web?

I’ve been inadvertently
writing this talk for
the last five years...

today, i run
Smithery

http://rivetin.gs/smithery

the process
and product
of a generalist

studio
for marketing
& product
innovation

before this, I worked at PHD Media for seven years as
“the excitable scottish innovation one”

i wrote this in 2009...
...which just
became a stick
that social and
advertising
zealots used to
beat each
other with...
(sorry)
http://rivetin.gs/bonfires

maybe this is the
start of this talk,
back in 2008...
my IPA Excellence diploma thesis
http://rivetin.gs/communis

if nothing else, it’s an
object lesson in how quickly
social web examples date...

“I believe that the future of
brand communications lies in
finding a way to become part of
communities, and communicate
with them in a way that is shared,
participatory and reciprocal”
me, five years ago

http://rivetin.gs/communis

“Our challenge is that people
really don’t care” martin Weigel, W+K
http://rivetin.gs/realpeople http://rivetin.gs/hownowtofail

so... maybe brands and
the social web don’t mix?

what do you mean by...
brands?

“ we use the word ‘brand’...
We’re careless in the way

...when we mean company,
product, service, idea,
strategic advertising.... ”
Mark earls
http://rivetin.gs/bnard

see, It all gets a bit...
complicated

We need to talk
about talking

I’ve been
reading a
lot of
Richard
Sennett
lately http://rivetin.gs/sennett

working well cooperation

The Craftsman together with “cities”
2008 2012 to follow...

three books about the skills people
need to sustain everyday life
http://rivetin.gs/craftsman

the latest book, ‘together’ is about

cooperation
“an exchange in
which the
participants
benefit from
the encounter”
http://rivetin.gs/together

it contains a
very useful
way to think
about
conversation

“when we speak about
communication skills, we
focus on how to make a clear
presentation, to present
what we think or feel...”
Richard sennett, Together

conversation is
about listening
marketing folks
get that now
( well, for the most part )

but more important
than just listening is
listening well

“ listening carefully
produces conversations
of two sorts...
the dialectic
and the dialogic
”

dialectic
from work of german philosopher GWF Hegel

the interaction
and resolution
between
multiple ideas
http://rivetin.gs/hegel

dialectic
“the verbal play of opposites
should gradually build up to
a synthesis; the aim is to come
eventually to a common
understanding” Richard sennett, Together

C g b AD fAD

Cb AD Gf
AD

bA CD Fe Ge
A b C D E F G H

dialectic wants consensus

C g b AD fAD

...no matter
how good that
consensus is
http://rivetin.gs/camel

it’s telling that
very few
crowdsourced
“winners” are
around for long

dialogic
from work of russian philosopher Mikhail Baktin

“A discussion that
does not resolve
itself by finding
common ground...”

http://rivetin.gs/bakhtin

“through the
process of
exchange people
may become more
aware of their
own views and
expand their
understanding of
one another”
http://rivetin.gs/enlightenment

AC E
in dialogic
G b H conversation,
ideologies
coexist
F D

AC E they
G b H constantly
interact
and inform
F D each other

AC E each ideology
G b H can hold more
salience in
certain
F D circumstances

AC E changes can be
G b H made if a
strategy does
not have the
F D desired effect

this might not just apply to
“conversation”

what if there
are dialectic
and dialogic
structures &
cultures too?

are traditional
marketing
structures
likely to be
more dialectic?

are social web
platforms and
companies more
dialogic in
nature?

it would help
explain the
culture clash

“if we’re used to
seeing the world
through a
centralized lens,
dencentralized
organizations don’t
make much sense”
http://rivetin.gs/starfish

brands aren’t
fracking the
social web

but there’s a definite
cultural divide at play

competition cooperation
simplicity complexity
Compression fragmentation
certainty experimentation

not either / or
a line along
which many
truths lie

big telly clients
are dying!

though to be fair, it’s
hard to sell shoes,
furniture, books,
clothes, entertainment,
cameras, tellys and
stationery on the high
street nowadays

"...to have achieved these
results is testimony to the
strength of the John Lewis
brand and the commitment
of all our partners to give
outstanding service." Andy Street, Jan 2013

social media changes
brands forever!

Kingsmill ‘Sandwich confessions’

wow...
that makes
“scrunch or fold”
look classy...

big telly clients social media changes
are dying! brands forever!

big brand telly social media
stuff works! burns my eyes

keep accepting more than
one idea is true

what happens
when cultures
merge?

social web companies
are heading over here

they want to create safe, attractive
places for brands to place ads
http://rivetin.gs/youradhere

it’s not necessarily
a good thing

it can destroy why
the thing was good
in the first place

“The best minds of my generation
are thinking about how to make
people click ads”
”
Jeff Hammerbacher

It can undermine the
spirit of the social web

“There's a little
meme I've been
hearing recently.
Columnists
repeating it,
"Don't read the
bottom half of
the internet"...”
rob manual
http://rivetin.gs/bottomhalf

it can mean closing
down the social web

when
eyeballs
become
dollar signs,
things get
ugly

“we've abandoned
core values that
used to be
fundamental to
the web world”
Anil Dash,
“The web we lost”

http://rivetin.gs/thewebwelost

i fear the day when you look on
ifttt and there’s only one channel

http://ifttt.com

marketing must head this way
head this way a lot more

if we’d still like a
decent social web in
ten years that is

let’s start from the
dialectic position

The factory makes
an end product...

“we have reached the
best answer”

We have made a thing,
and it is finished

and it was
finished
efficiently

“ really just code for
‘democratising style’ is
squeezing all the costs
and selling it cheap ”
Peter Field
http://rivetin.gs/peterfield

innovation as
incremental
improvement

Six Sigma seeks to improve
the quality of process
outputs by identifying and
removing the causes of
defects and minimizing
variability in manufacturing
and business processes. Wikipedia

http://rivetin.gs/sixsigma

“ too much
innovation is
focussed on cost
reduction rather
than esteem
enhancement ”
Peter Field

“A brand is simply a
collection of perceptions
in the mind of the
consumer”
Paul Feldwick, 1991
http://rivetin.gs/feldwick

( “ I don’t think this deﬁnition
is entirely adequate.”
)
faris yakob, 2010

http://rivetin.gs/farisbrand

hey, let’s find out what
these perceptions are and
put them in an onion...

“ with its lists and diagrams
the brand-as-shape
fails to help anyone
easily, intuitively and
memorably grasp what
your brand is all about ”
martin weigel
http://rivetin.gs/onions

if your brand is a bit shit,
coat it with other stuff too

Oh look, it’s a bruce Lee Nokia N96

“a mechanical
metaphor,
the infamous
transmission model

”
Prof. Mark Hobart

http://rivetin.gs/transmission

make
product
efficiently
make brand
vaguely
interesting
& buy loads
of media

competition
simplicity
Compression
certainty

“The Future of
advertising 2020”
by Mark Earls
& John V Willshire

http://rivetin.gs/future2020

“ I’m really interested in the
making of ‘it’ -where the
making is part of the story of
”
the ‘it’...
thomas heatherwick

http://rivetin.gs/heatherwick

the labour
theory of value
http://rivetin.gs/labourtheory

developed ...and
by adam later by
smith... karl
marx

modern economics:
the value of a thing is
determined by what one
is willing to give up to
obtain the thing

The labour theory of value
the value of something
is determined by the
labour that went
into its production

perhaps there’s a
labour theory of
brand value*
*it might need a better name, mind

£0.99 £3.33
per pad per pad

“marketing is
world building.
With unlimited
bandwidth we
can now show
you the world.”
@TobyBarnes

We’d rather
buy this world...

What if we stitched smaller ideas together to
create a longer idea? What if we stitched
smaller ideas together to create a longer
idea? What if we stitched smaller ideas
together to create a longer idea? What if we
stitched smaller ideas together to create a
longer idea? What if we stitched smaller
ideas together to create a longer idea?
Gareth Kay What if we stitched smaller ideas
together to create a longer idea? What if we
stitched smaller ideas together to create a
http://rivetin.gs/thinksmall

it’s not about the

means
of production

http://rivetin.gs/sneveoslo

it’s about the
meaning
in production

and the stories of the
things you’ve fracked

Labour theory
of brand value:
make everything with
the infinite canvas of
the internet in mind http://rivetin.gs/legoinside

you can’t build a brand
pyramid for that approach

http://rivetin.gs/pyramid

that brand shape would be
like a bittorrent file
complex, distributed,
moving, uncontrollable...

perhaps it
would be
impossible
to conceive

think like this...

cooperation
complexity
fragmentation
experimentation

if you create
together
dialogically...
cooperation
...you can make complexity
dialogical things fragmentation
experimentation

so when you work
together over the
next few weeks

AC E
remember
G b H that your
ideologies
coexist
F D

AC E you will
G b H constantly
interact
and inform
F D each other

AC E each ideology
G b H will hold more
salience in
certain
F D circumstances

AC E if a strategy
H does not have
G b the desired
effect,
F D change tack

“ I firmly believe in the demise
of the traditional campaign,
and the need for constantly
innovating stories around a
core brand meaning
” Field
Peter
(who has studied more campaigns than
all of us together will ever make)


Mark Earls
http://rivetin.gs/future2020

thank you
artefact Cards john v willshire
http://smithery.co
@willsh
john@smithery.co

http://shop.smithery.co

Are Brands Fracking The Social Web?

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (12)

Similar to Are Brands Fracking The Social Web?

Similar to Are Brands Fracking The Social Web? (20)

More from John V Willshire

More from John V Willshire (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Are Brands Fracking The Social Web?