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?

some context...

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

the smithery
principle

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

that sounds
really annoying

yep, really annoying.

“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?

how can
brands
be social?

“ 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

ahem

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 ” Richard sennett, Together

what the f*** does that
mean?

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...” Richard sennett, Together 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” Richard sennett, Together 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

remind
you of
anything?

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!

c l o s ed

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

isn’t it?

big brand telly
stuff works!

"...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!

social media
burns my eyes

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

http://rivetin.gs/nilofer

keep accepting more than one
idea is true

what happens
when cultures
merge?

social web companies are heading
over here

where the money is

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

http://finalbullet.com/

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

how?

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 http://rivetin.gs/peterfield

“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

then shout
at people

“a mechanical metaphor, the infamous
transmission model ” Prof. Mark Hobart http://rivetin.gs/transmission

this is the
hollow
factory

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

competition
simplicity
Compression
certainty

Frack That

“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

some quick
economics

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

Field Notes

£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...

...than
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

maybe Marx
was half
right...

it’s not about the means
of production http://rivetin.gs/sneveoslo

it’s about the meaning in
production

http://rivetin.gs/future2020

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

no, don’t jump...

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) http://rivetin.gs/peterfield

Mark Earls
http://rivetin.gs/future2020

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