Communities Archives

Bonfire of the Metaphwoars

John V Willshire on October 28, 2010

Are you sitting comfortably? Good-oh.

A lot of this might be familiar to you, but if you’re going to Metaphwoar on the 9th November, please do read to the end… I need your help.

Last summer, whilst sitting on the train up from Brighton one morning, I was writing a short piece for the IPA Social Collective… we wanted to change how people think about “social”…

…you know, how to get the folks in the media & advertising game out of the notion of just thinking ‘big, immediate, shiny’, and think more along the lines of starting small, interesting social things, that are built collaboratively with people to become big, interesting social things.

Just then, a wandering metaphor pixie happened upon me, leapt into my head through the right aural passage, sprinkled some magic dust, and watched as a metaphor formed.

I think I felt her dance a little jig on her way out, as what she’d left me with was this…

“If advertising is firework, then social media is a bonfire”.

Being one of those people, I shared it on twitter.

(Of course, being ‘one of those people’, I share quite a lot on twitter, mostly not as funny or smart or interesting as perhaps I think it is whilst writing it, and regret it a little afterwards just about every time…).

Twitter liked it. It liked it a lot.

Maybe it was something to do with putting fire in a metaphor. Maybe it was because everyone loves making bonfires, and lighting fireworks. Maybe it takes us back to our childhood. It might be all of the above, it might be none of the above. But there was appetite for more…

So I started to expand it a bit with some reasons why; stuff like “advertising burns very brightly, but dies very quickly” and “social media takes time to start, but with attention and dedication, as you fuel the bonfire it will only ever burn brighter”

Then, the best thing happened; people started joining in…

Dan – “What about if we notice people are building a bonfire for themselves? How could we help them make it even better?”

Chris – “your bonfire maintains interest and builds advocacy once the bright lights of the works have long gone”

David – “people tend to remember really good bonfires that let off loads of heat but for every one of those there are loads that don’t light”

…and it’s the thing that happens every time the bonfires & fireworks metaphor is repeated by anyone, really; in meetings or talks or blogs, people love to join in.

Which brings us to Metaphwoar…

It’s an evening Andy Whitlock from Poke has created as part of Internet Week, and he kindly invited me to be part of it. The fool.

Anyway, here’s the thing; I have accumulated lots of slides and thoughts and examples of the bonfires/social thing. I could pick the best, speak fast and Scottish, and get through the ten minutes.

But it occurred that it’s not true to the spirit of the original bonfires metaphor. It’s always been a collaborative thing. It started small, and people joined in. It’s a bonfire in it’s own right.

So we’re going to do something collaborative. I’m not going to tell you exactly what yet*. But I am going to set you some homework.

If you are coming to Metaphwoar, please think about how would you complete this sentence:

“Social projects are like bonfires because…”

See you on the 9th…

*Partly because of some misguided sense of mystery, and partly because the idea I have is still only half-baked. Hey, there’s plenty time. Anyway, I’m on last, we’ll all be a bit tipsy, and if it goes wrong I’ll sing a song or something. Or fall over.

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Apple, Ping, Douglas Adams… and #cheeseandpicklefail

John V Willshire on October 25, 2010

I was asked by Campaign to write a piece on Apple’s Ping social network, which was in the magazine last week. I thought I’d post it here too.

So, it turns out that Apple’s Ping is rubbish. Is it rubbish? Well, yes, it must be rubbish.

Lots of people have been saying Ping is rubbish, and sharing their thoughts on its unequivocal rubbishness. They’ve rubbished it on twitter, they’ve rubbished it on blogs, they’ve rubbished it in forums. Some people have even gone to the bother to make films to upload to Youtube rubbishing Ping.

It’s like a new kid arrived at social network school, and the bigger kids nicked his lunch money, flushed his head down the loo and wrote ‘rubbish’ across his forehead in permanent marker.

OK, so perhaps it’s not surprising. If I asked you what you’d want from a music social network in 2010, a closed network locked inside a walled garden might not have been top of your list. To paraphrase The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s a social network hosted “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’…”

We’ll come back to Douglas Adams later though.

However, in a world that’s evolving so, so quickly (Youtube is only five years old, remember), I’m inclined to think that the one thing we mustn’t rush to do is judge. To try and make more sense of this, it’s worth stepping back a bit to see the big picture.

The past year has seen both Apple and Google start to make plays in the social space – Apple with Ping and Game Centre, and Google with Wave and Buzz.

Now, the social phenomenon has caught them both napping a bit, and large companies find it harder than small ones to move quickly. But they’re trying to work out how to build it in to what they do already. They’re preparing for the future.

The problem is the media glare (both traditional and ‘social’) they both operate under. When you’re a start-up trying to build something new, nobody is watching.

When you’re Apple or Google and you announce you’re going to the canteen to see what’s for lunch, there’s a press conference at the till and a three day post-mortem across the world on #cheeseandpickleFAIL.

We saw it last month when Eric Schimdt announced at Zeitgeist that they’re “trying to take Google’s core products and add a social component”. Press coverage went through the roof, and commentators across the world offer a hundred and one thousand different interpretations of what this could mean for users, competitors, regulators, advertisers and so on. Everyone is always watching.

Which is hardly the ideal climate for innovation. If either Apple or Google had launched the first version of Facebook, we’d have probably laughed too. It’s easy to knock people nowadays. They always said that ‘everyone’s a critic’. Thanks to technology, they’re now all published critics too.

But rather than poking fun at those who’ve started down the social path and have taken a few wrong steps here and there, it’s much more important to look at who isn’t “trying to take core products and add a social component”. And I’m not just thinking about technology companies. I’m thinking about every sort of company.

We’re on the cusp of a world where everything is “social”, from the car you drive to the toys your kids play with.

Ready for the slightly geeky bit? Good.

You may have heard of the ‘internet of things’. It describes a world in which every machine, product and object is connected to the internet, and the interaction between them produces a myriad of weird and wonderful services and experiences for us.

Dave Evans, Chief Futurist at Cisco Systems, recently stated that there already 35 billion devices that through some form or other are connected to the internet, and there over a trillion ‘devices’ by his estimate that could be hooked up; cars, livestock, kitchen appliances, pets… the list is endless.

The important bit is that when they’re connected, they’ll talk to each other.

Let’s take the car example. This year Ford announced MyFord Touch, the next generation of the Ford Sync program (powered by the Microsoft Auto platform). Amongst many other features, it has its own cellular modem built in. In tandem with the GPS navigation device, you’ve now got a car that knows exactly where it is… and can talk to other things around it.

Want to know where the cheapest petrol is, or which restaurants are still serving breakfast? No problem. Want to see what songs others listen to most along your favourite drives? Easy peasy.

Then we’ve got toys; Disney recently proposed that all toy manufacturers set out ‘to establish a set of industry development and technology standards for web-connected toys’. They’re looking to prevent a format war, and through making one standard for any toy that connects to the internet, decrease the costs of implementation for everyone whilst at the same time increasingly playability for kids.

Think back to when you were a kid. It often irritated me when playing with two different toy types they didn’t ‘work’ together; Star Wars figures, for example, couldn’t hold pieces of Lego. Copious amounts of Blu-tack solved that problem of course, though in doing so it created another carpet cleaning based one for Mum. Sorry Mum.

Anyway, one industry standard that means any toys can talk to each other, whether to form alliances against the Evil Emperor Grrh’AAttH’TTh or to see how often they’ve taken tea together. No doubt it’ll connect to your Club Penguin account and earn you Coins for playing in the real world too.

All this will be natural for a generation who will grow up knowing that everyone and everything can talk to everyone and everything else; ‘playing nicely together’ takes on a whole new meaning.

It will be so natural, in fact, that they won’t have a name for it. Which brings us round again to Douglas Adams, who in a 1999 essay despaired of the term ‘interactivity’ and its emergence as a fashionable term to use when talking about the new medium of ‘the web’. He pointed out that back before broadcast media…

“…we didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.”

Everything was ‘interactive’. And in much the same way, when everything has ‘social layers’ built into it, so it will be that nobody will talk about ‘social this’ and ‘social that’. Because why would you make something that didn’t have ‘social’ embedded?

So then, back to Ping; it’s just the first attempt to build a social layer into iTunes. It had over a million members in the first 48 hours. Would you bet against it evolving inside iTunes until its useful and fun? There’s not many folk have made money betting against Apple.

But maybe by then ‘social’ will be so naturally embedded into everything we’ll forget what all the fuss was about…

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Physical stuff. It matters. In Matter.

John V Willshire on September 10, 2010

A quick ‘un…

We love all the digital malarkey. It’s ace, and new, and exciting, and so on and so forth.

As a result, we spend less time thinking about the physical stuff. And as Ed points out here, physical connections for brands & companies can be phenomenally powerful.

It’s what Matter was started to do, over two years ago now.

Here’s a photo of the first box I opened back then. There’s a whole pictorial review on flickr here.

Anyway, Matter is coming back this November, when we put the Pocketgames in it. Woo!

Someone’s dropped out though, so Tim asked if there was anyone else that might want to put something wonderful in Matter to send to people.

I thought I’d post it here, in case anyone who reads it might have something.

But what to put in?

Charlie wrote a good critique of the first matterbox pointing out that…

“Most of the other bits were a bit weak… not really getting me that excited or stimulated.”

I think (and may be wrong) that the trick to getting something that works brilliantly in Matter is to create something physical inside the box that will make people want to do something social outside the box.

It’s not (I repeat, NOT) a sampling exercise.

It’s a box of actual social objects.

Email Tim, he’ll tell you more – tim@artomatic.co.uk

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Inception, MacGuffins, and ideas that spread

John V Willshire on August 27, 2010

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea.

A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules…”

(This is a follow up to the previous post on MacGuffins and so on. It’s worth reading that first.)

Now, I’m very certain I won’t have been the first to seize on this quote from Inception and bend it to fit some hinky marketing theory about social sharing.

I thought the quote had a beautiful simplicity of expression about it. We all know that, at the end of the day, powerful ideas spread. As we navigate the layer upon layer of modern communications though, it’s the how and why we’re increasing trying to unpick.

One of the contributors to the last post, John Dodds, said…

“Think Social Idea”

…and followed up with an explanation…

“Focus on the idea, the belief behind the company – why you’re doing what you’re doing and how you’re hoping to change the world for the better – and focus your efforts on making it social ie spreadable discussable, supportable…”

Beautifully expressed. Of course, the thing is, it all amounts to same thing; Object-Idea, Social Idea, MacGuffin. It doesn’t really matter what you call it.

Why?

Let’s go back to the movies.

I found a post by Douglas J. Eboch, who’s a screenwriter (and a fine fellow I reckon, given he uses his middle initial… that’s always a mark of good character…). It was on MacGuffins.

Douglas writes…

“I define the MacGuffin as the object or goal that the characters’ mission is focused on. For example, in Inception (written by Christopher Nolan) it is the idea that Cobb and his team are trying to implant in Fischer’s dreams. In Casablanca it is the letters of transit. In Sweet Home Alabama, the divorce papers. In Avatar (written by James Cameron) it’s the goofily named Unobtanium.”

The thing that gets people moving, doing things, makes you care about finding out what happens.

Douglas continues…

“Alfred Hitchcock defined the MacGuffin this way: “It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.” Hitchcock believed the more generic the MacGuffin was the better since the audience didn’t really care about it.”

“Inception tells us what the idea that Cobb must implant is, but do we really care? It could be just about anything and the movie would still work as well. It’s simply a device to get Cobb and Arthur and Ariadne and the others into a dangerous dream world that will test their skills and force their characters to undergo internal change.”

It doesn’t matter what it is, or what it’s called. It’s what it does to people.

Back to our MacGuffin. Well, what I called a MacGuffin. John called it a Social Idea. Hugh called it an Object-Idea. You’re maybe thinking of calling it something different, putting your own spin on it, something that works for you to help explain to others.

It is all of these, and it is none of these.

The Macguffin here is a MacGuffin.

It doesn’t matter what it is called, or what diagrams you use to draw it. What matters is what happens to the people who’re talking about it, debating it, remodelling it, chasing the perfect version.

It changes us. It plants an idea, a seed inside our head, which starts to grow. And when we talk about it to others, it starts to change them too. We can express it however we like, and it will take many forms, but that idea will continue to spread.

And that idea is that we’ve got to change the way we do things.

The idea that the future of marketing, branding, advertising, media and so on is very different from the past, and indeed from the present.

The idea that companies whose purpose isn’t an social, spreadable idea actually might not have that much of a future.

It’s an idea that can transform the world and rewrite all the rules…

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Thinking about the MacLeod-Earls MacGuffin

John V Willshire on August 19, 2010

For the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to iron out some wrinkly thoughts that were started off by Hugh MacLeod’s post on ‘Object-Ideas’.

I’m working on various diverse client things that will benefit if I get to an answer, but for now it’s just some thoughts aired in the open to see where it takes me, and what you clever folk think too…

Anyone, this is what I’m netting out at presently…

…The MacLeod-Earls MacGuffin.

There’s three things encapsualted in this term; one from Mark Earls, one from Hugh, and one from Alfred Hitchcock. I’ll explain…

Firstly, there’s Mark’s Purpose Idea:

“The Purpose-Idea is the “What For?” of a business, or any kind of community. What exists to change (or protect) in the world, why employees get out of bed in the morning, what difference the business seeks to make on behalf of customers and employees and everyone else?”

When I looked back at the little smileys diagrams I made for the Communis Manifesto, I realised I’d drawn it in; it’s this bit; at the heart of the company…

Brilliant companies and communities of course thrive of a communal, shared purpose. So even with no connection to the outside world (the guys around the outside of the diagram), a great company retains its Purpose-Idea

Then, secondly, there’s Hugh’s Social Object:

“The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that “node” in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.”

Again, back to Communis… I’d drawn those in too, but this time more purposefully (I referenced Hugh’s ‘social objects’ in the thesis).

In the diagram, the ‘contexts’ referred too are the social objects where you connect internal to external… encouraging the company to participate in the social world. Make & do things that are of interest to people, form relationships, collaborate and so on and so forth…

So far, so 2008. What’s changed?

Well, Hugh’s point is that the two things, Social Objects & Purpose-Ideas, can be (and most often are) quite distinct from each other.

If you do something amazing in the social space (Whassup, Meerkat, Old Spice etc), then people will like you more for it.

But it’s not really what you’re about. Your Social Objects aren’t really that linked to your Purpose-Idea…

It’s just the things you made to make people talk about you more.

So that, somewhere down the line, they’ll think ‘oh yeah, they’re the guys that did X, maybe I’ll buy their stuff that they also do…’

But as Hugh puts it:

A social object on steroids i.e. an Object-Idea, is far more powerful. Because it’s actually talking about stuff that actually matters to people.

It’s not enough for people to like your product. For them to really LOVE it, somehow they’ve got to connect and empathize with the basic, primal human drives that compelled you create your product in the first place. The Purpose. The Idea.

Which got me thinking about what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin…

“We have a name in the studio, and we call it the ‘MacGuffin’. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers”

It’s the thing in movies that gets everything, well, moving. That which all the protagonists will do anything for.

So if we take it that back into the world of Social Objects and Purpose-Ideas, we can define our MacGuffin here as:

The element that gets people talking about the thing that’s most important to your business

Which, I reckon, has lot of appeal for any company wrestling with modern communications…

For instance, you stop creating limited shelf-life social objects. Things created to simply get attention, and then become leaden relics you don’t know what to do with, but feel you should persevere with because so much time, effort & money has been spent on them. With a great MacGuffin, everything you do socially feeds back into your central Purpose-Idea.

Which also means that what you do socially starts to inform your Purpose-Idea; it leads a company more rapidly and quickly into areas in which they can flourish, because it’s created with people who’re interested in what it is you do, not just what you say.

So, to conclude for now, at the core of the MacGuffin, I’d propose there are two principles:

i) All Social Objects must build to and from the Purpose-Idea
ii) The Purpose-Idea must be compelling enough to breed Social Objects
…which means it’s not just a company’s marketing that changes, it needs to be the company itself.
It’s not about making more interesting and social marketing. It’s about becoming a more interesting and social company.
Otherwise, amongst the rare runaway successes, we’ll keep on seeing lots of sausage companies asking you to make videos.
Now, clearly, I need to think a lot more about the implications & actionable stuff out the back of this. But hey, it’s a first stab. Thoughts?

(as an aside, inspiration for the term comes from an economic device called the Edgeworth-Bowley Box – not a something messrs. Edgeworth & Bowley worked on together concurrently, but thinking that was developed over time, which reflects the continuum of this idea I think)

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Social Projects – The tall and the long of it

John V Willshire on July 28, 2010

Beth asked me if I’d like to contribute a guest post to the Social Collective 2010 blog for the event she’s co-organising on September 30th in London – there’s still tickets available here, too.

The Social Collective conference is rooted in practice rather than theory; finding a better way to pitch social projects to clients, and then run them too.

So I said I’d like to talk about something that’s be brewing for a while, off the back of the ol’ bonfires & fireworks analogy… so here it is…

The tall and the long of it

In one of my favourite traditions of episodic storytelling, I’d like to start with something you should imagine is spoken by a gruff American man…

“PREVIOUSLY, ON FEEDING THE PUPPY…”

(You really heard him too, didn’t you..?)

Last year I was part of the wonderful IPA Social crew who created a list of principles which would help inform the approach agencies should take to ‘social’…

…rather than just imposing the ‘hey, it worked this way in advertising’ rule to everything.

Ten of us wrote a principle each, and my contribution ran as follows:

In the sense that…

i) Firework = Big, explosive, attracts a crowd immediately, expensive, dies quickly

ii) Bonfire = Small at first, collaborative, draws in a crowd slowly, gains momentum

It helps imagining it using a simple diagram like this…

I’ve found it particularly helpful in giving folk an easy-to-get image of why social projects are different than things like advertising.

(“Social Projects”? Yes, I’ve been trying to stop saying ‘social media’, because sometimes there isn’t really any ‘media’ involved, especially in a media agency sense).

But still all a bit theoretical, which is not what Social Collective is about.

What ‘Bonfires & Fireworks’ has made me realise is this:

Selling in tall potential is easy. We need to get better at selling in long potential.

Think about the firework (advertising, PR etc). The way we (always have) sell in fireworks is talking about the total audience of a television channel, the readership of a newspaper, the unique users of a website.

All of these large numbers are stuffed full of tall potential; no-one expects that nearly everyone in those figures will be affected by what we place there (or even see it, necessarily).

But the comfort of potential makes everyone happier at buying a firework, despite knowing that the ‘actual’ delivery will be considerably less.

Social projects, on the other hand, don’t have that ‘tall potential’. What they have instead is ‘long potential’.

Long potential in social projects is the moment when something big and amazing happens. The world rejoices at the wonderful thing you’re done, all your employees sign new lifetime contracts because the company rocks so much, your customers dance in the streets and set up religions dedicated to you.

Or, more realistically, it’s the bit where the project is successful enough for everyone involved to be really glad they did it, and want to keep doing it.

The problem is, unlike fireworks, it’s really hard to get a handle on when or if the ‘actual’ might tip into ‘potential’, how big that potential might be, or how much it might cost; three questions clients are understandably pretty keen on asking when starting projects.

So how do we need to get better at responding to the ‘when, how big, how much’? Using that wonderful gift of hindsight, here’s three things I’ve found help make everyone, both client and agency, happier and more effective on social projects.

1. Keeping it real

It’s very tempting to use the ‘social media rock star’ examples when selling in social projects… “yeah, Dell made $267 billion using twitter, and they installed the moon on a USB stick as a result…”

However, just using these examples at best sets wildly unrealistic expectations for the client, and at worst you’ll be dismissed as a fantasist and show the door. Scour the web for examples that are a) a lot more like what you’re proposing and b) show results that sound realistic and achievable for what you are proposing to the client. Those examples are out there, just not as hyped, so you’ll have to dig a bit harder.

Then when you’re selling in your project, you’ve got a range from the ‘realistic’ to the ‘fantastic’, which starts to resemble the actual/potential dynamic seen in the firework model.

2. Living one day at a time

I’ll be honest, I’ve nicked this from Omar Little. The only way to be as active and reactive as you need to be when building social bonfires is too fix as few constraining frameworks around yourselves as possible.

Because, unlike fireworks, we don’t know when bonfires start and stop, it’s very hard to phase them into the traditional ‘campaign’ expectations… it makes everything clients might expect really difficult, from estimating how many people will see it, to carrying out research to see how it affected those people.

What’s been more effective for us is creating a loose framework of the stages you think the project will go through, roughly estimating how long each might take, and then setting off. You travel through the project grabbing insights & statistics en route, spotting opportunities and closing down redundant sections, which you present to the client at pitch stage; it overtly becomes part live-project, part experimental research piece.

3. It’s always worth doing

Finally, we get to the ‘money’ question… how much will this cost? With all the preparation you’ve done above, you’ll have an idea of all the elements needed to make a brilliantly successful project… and that’s your job, to think of every angle, and propose it.

Your client will, invariably and reasonably, ask ‘do we really need section x/y/z?’. Things will start dropping off the plan, the project will become leaner and tighter as a result… but there isn’t really a stage where I think you should turn around and say ‘I don’t think this is worth doing with that much money’.

Firstly, no-one’s really qualified to say what will & won’t work with social projects.

Secondly, remember it’s a part-research piece, and if the finding you reach is that social projects don’t work for your client at that price, you’ve all learned something.

And thirdly, and most importantly, this brave new world isn’t going away. So the sooner you get some social projects up and running, the better it’ll be for your client and for you…

John V Willshire is Chief Innovation Officer at PHD Media in London

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Why I'm backing Bud's Bucket Brigade (beyond just the lovely alliteration)

John V Willshire on July 13, 2010

After finding out about Bud Caddell’s book project The Bucket Brigade, I decided to back it (rather than, say, spending yet more money on Threadless T-Shirts).

“But what is it?’ I hear you ask, using my special ‘listen to people saying things on the internet app’.

Well, it’s a book. Or rather, it isn’t… yet.

It’s a book that’s still to be written; it’s going to be a guide for people & companies through more nuanced, practical thinking about how all this wonderful technology changes everything for a company beyond just the ‘marketing’ bit…

…as Bud says:

Brands and marketers have a sense that social media are an opening to culture, but a hunger for simple solutions too often means blunt force gimmicks, aimless executions, and an understanding of value that’s still based on media placements.

Let’s help brands and marketers better understand how to court and support existing communities, crowds, and networks; that each is different and that each possesses people seeking unique interests.
Let’s prove to brands that there’s far more value in earning, feeding, and sustaining their own communities, crowds, and networks than a few more repeat purchases.
Let’s prove what a farce it is to measure that value in terms of media impressions.
Let’s set the record straight, there is no free user generated content and there is no magical viral answer to reintroducing the corporation to culture.
Ultimately, let’s teach brands to better structure organizations, create products, distribute meanings, and make money

BANG. That’s brilliant, I thought, how could you not sign up?

But if there’s one thing in particular that made me back the project, it was this sentence…

“Since 1776, when Adam Smith divorced commerce from culture in The Wealth of Nations…”

Personally, since I read The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, and subsequently wrote The Communis Manifesto a couple of years back, it’s been hugely apparent that the problems we’re trying to solve aren’t like anything we, or the generation before us, or the generation before THAT have had to solve.

Subsequently, everything I’ve tried to do at PHD has been rooted in not just superficial marketing change, but organisational change with clients (which has been fantastically hard of course for everyone involved… but terrifically interesting and rewarding as a result).

Which sounds a lot like the approach Bud is taking too. Which is why I’m backing him…

———————-

UPDATE… the cheapest education ever

So, I was thinking earlier about why I was backing Bud, and I think there’s another, more selfish, reason I’m doing it…

…I think I’m doing it to help revisit everything that I think I think, if that makes sense.

Whilst Bud’s doing the research and writing and thinking, he’ll be working with the folk who back him at the ‘editorial’ level to sense check/input/read/think/suggest.

By being part of that part of the project, and given the sorts of folk on the editorial team, it’s a brilliant opportunity to look at the world again, and reorientate my head.

So I guess, in a sense, the $100 for the editorial level is the cheapest course I’ll ever pay for…

——————-

So why don’t you think about backing Bud’s Bucket Brigade too?

Bud has been raising the funds for the book via project funding site Kickstarter; the initial target’s been hit already…

…but the more funding there is, the better the book will be (even I can do those maths).

Even if it’s just for the lovely alliteration it’ll bring into your life…

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The Actimel Allotments

John V Willshire on July 6, 2010

Here’s a brief, maybe interesting observation, made whilst visiting my father-in-law’s allotment at the weekend.

You’re familiar with Actimel, no doubt…

Well, some smart cookie has come up with an ingenious use on his allotment for the empty bottles; put them on top of the garden canes, and you’ll avoid bending down quickly and getting one in the eye, as you’ll see the bottle.

If it’d been on one allotment alone, it wouldn’t have been worth mentioning.

But, yes, you guessed it… it’s on all the surrounding ones too…

Why’s this interesting? Well, for two reasons I think.

Firstly, it’s a great example of the things Mark Earls talks about in Herd; we’re a social animal, and social animals share and copy each other.

On walking past that first allotment, or in conversation with the allotmenteer, other allotment keepers have thought ‘ah, yes, that’s a good idea…’ and gone out to get themselves some Actimel.

Which brings us to the second point.

There’s no brand research, sales data or other study that would tell the Actimel brand team why, at a given moment in time, Actimel sales in Macclesfield spiked.

And, more than likely, even if you asked those people who’d bought Actimel to use the bottles on their allotment, they’d probably just repeat back to you what an ad said about the product, or what was on the packaging.

Just worth remembering we don’t have the full picture by any stretch of the imagination.

But the interwebs in all its glory means that we’ve a better chance of discovery small, interesting things about the products & brands we work on.

Especially if weirdos keep hanging around in allotments taking pictures and posting them up on the web…

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