Winter Artefact Cards: Structure, Precision & Steel

To celebrate the launch of the Winter 2013 Artefact Cards, I thought I’d share the story of their development on here, in detail that is perhaps as long as these Winter evenings…

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i – The Structure of Winter


These are the hard yards, these cold January days.

People return from the seemingly never-ending celebrations of December to the what feels like the coldest, longest month imaginable.

Some heap additional misery upon themselves… giving up this, forgoing that, forcing themselves upon literal and metaphorical treadmills.

Yet January has its merits.  It returns us to a sense of order, beginning things again, or starting them anew.  It is an excellent planning month.
“Winter is the time of promise because there is so little to do – or because you can now and then permit yourself the luxury of thinking so.” – Stanley Crawford
January is when a lot of that to-do list falls away.  The festive break seems to wash away the ephemera; tasks which were so urgent in December, yet are forgotten afterwards.

People spend January rediscovering what it is they do.

Or discovering what it is they want to do.
“The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer.  I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.” – John Burroughs
It is a season for creating frameworks, building the scaffolding of the coming year.

So it follows that the this season’s Artefact Cards should be all about structure; helping you capture those delicate, fragile ideas, and bringing them in from the cold.

We are proud to present the Ice Blue Graph, the seasonal special for Winter 2013.

“Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius” – Pietro Aretino

It is in these Winter days that inspiration often strikes, and the structure around ideas and projects begins to form, like ice creeping across the bottom of a window pane.  It is fitting, perhaps, that the possible the finest box of Artefact Cards we’ve created arrives in the season in which the project itself began to properly take form.

 

ii – A Cover Song of a Cover Song

I spent a lot of last winter wandering around with this in my pocket.

It’s one of the Winter 2011 Northerly edition from Field Notes, who are the main inspiration for doing these limited edition seasons with the Artefact Cards.

When you’re starting out doing something new, you look around to see who does it brilliantly.  And Field Notes do seasons brilliantly.  They do a lot of things brilliantly.  I point you, for instance, to their story:

“Inspired by the vanishing sub genre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers, and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list, the Draplin Design Co., Portland, Ore – in conjunction with Coudal Partners, Chicago, Ill. – brings you “Field Notes” in hopes of offering “An honest memo book worth fillin’ up with GOOD INFORMATION.”

On trains and planes, in coffee shops and waiting rooms, I mapped out across the pages of that Northerly notebook the first few sketches of what the Artefact boxes would look like.

How they’d be packaged, how to do a trial pack, refills and so on.  Components, material costs, seasonal ideas.

It began to bring structure to the idea of Artefact Cards – what it looked like as a product, rather than a project.

(There’s that word again, structure.)

That Northerly book became the original repository for all of the ideas that Artefact Cards would become.

I turn back through the pages every so often, and find some great ideas we haven’t done yet, and some rubbish ideas we have.  And vice versa, thankfully.

I now use Artefact Cards offers to keep projects alive within.  Bad ideas are thrown away, good ideas replace them, new shapes and strategies are found by reorganising and rearranging.

But I am still never, never found without a Field Notes book, for moments when I finds me some of that GOOD INFORMATION.

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In tribute, I’m covering my favourite Field Notes song.

Or perhaps it’s this cover of this song that was a cover of that song; the cycle of inspiration that goes on, and on, and on.

But like all cover songs, you’ve got to bring enough of your own thing to make it worth listening to.


Graph paper, the drums of the song.  It screams structure at the subconscious, gently guiding you to find order, precision.  Rather than a perfectly repeating square, I prefer a weightier margin every five lines… a bass drum for ideas, keeping them in line.

I wanted the bass blue to be punchier.  The lead guitar of a black sharpie needs to sit on a bass line that balances it out.

And balance really is important.  When you’re dealing with such a specifically sized object, you want it to be even.  None of that weird Graph paper overhang you used to get at the edge of school books.  If in doubt, cut out a chorus, shorten the guitar solo.

I hope that whether this is a song you’ve heard before, or a song you’re hearing for the first time, you find it says something to you.

 

iii – The Artisan Who’s An Artist

Whilst we’re talking about the structure that these cold winter months offer, let’s look at something else you’ll find in the Winter 2013 box.

It seemed only right to include something that would help guide the conscious and subconscious process of working with precision when you use the cards.

There are some interesting tensions around the idea of precision in the modern age.  Whilst so many more of the things we do are measurable, a lot of the ways of working we set down for ourselves are, when you look at them, ‘by rule of thumb’…

La Pouce, by César Baldaccini
RULE OF THUMB: “A useful principle having wide application but not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable in every situation.  The phrase itself has been in circulation since the 1600s. In 1692, it appeared in print in Sir William Hope’s training manual for aspiring swordsmen, The Compleat Fencing-master: “What he doth, he doth by rule of Thumb, and not by Art.”

 

Here’s the thing; if ‘rule of thumb’ is to mean ‘not strictly accurate’, as in the fencing example, it implies that precision and accuracy lies in the domain of the artist.  Where perhaps today numbers and measurement are seen as strictly the domain of the scientist and empiricist, it’s perhaps not so cut and dried.

There has always been, and will always be room in an artist’s hand for a ruler.

So we set out to find you one.

After much searching amongst the bric-a-brac and back alleys of the internet, we found just the thing.

 

It’s a Rolson rigid spring tempered stainless steel 150mm (6in) ruler.

– metric and imperial scales.

– ink black figures and graduations

– subdivided down to 0.5mm and 1/64 inch

– conversion table on the reverse side (inches to mm)

– a very handy wee hanging hole

 

Not one of those rubbish ‘shatterproof’ school ones that’d last half a term if you were lucky.

This is a workman’s ruler, a joiner’s ruler.  But here’s the strange thing; it’s quite small, especially in the context of putting up buildings and extensions and making tables.

 

Which leads me to concur, simply, that this ruler is a tool for those who want to make things well.

Those who leave nothing to chance.

Those who measure twice, and cut once.

This is a ruler for the artisans who are artists.

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The Winter 2013 Edition is on sale now – click here to visit the shop

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Bonfire of the Metaphwoars

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.

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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”

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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

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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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Physical stuff. It matters. In Matter.

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

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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

“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…”

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(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

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

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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).

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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…

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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

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“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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Pocketgame… the story so far

I mentioned before that I was working on something with Cadbury called ‘pocketgame‘… a crowdsourcey open game design competition thingy.  Which has been tremendous fun so far, as this video shows:

Anyway, there are now 10 shortlisted pocketgames up for public vote; the most popular two we will make 25,000 of to send out in Matterbox in October, and people who play the games will decide on the winner.

Please have a look at the ten entries at www.pocketgamecompetition.co.uk and vote for your favourite; we’ve been blown away by both the ingenuity and quality of the entries we’ve had, and I know you will too.

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"Making communications products, not just communicating products"

Via the House of Yakob comes this brilliant 5 minute talk from Gareth Kay of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners… it’s excellent, please do watch it now…


The notion of ‘doing things for people’ rather than just ‘advertising at people’ has been something that smart people like Gareth have been saying, repeatedly, for a while… I picked up on an Ed Cotton post in Oct 08 and turned it into a little mantra for PHD

…do things for people that are useful, educational, entertaining, connective… or ideally a combination of as many of them as you can…

 

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Is hiring social media 'voices' like renting a TV?

There’s something I’ve been struggling with over the past few weeks, just in my own head…

…is hiring in social media folks to talk to your customers (from specialist social agencies, or indeed media/PR/advertising/digital agencies) a bit like renting a television set?

 

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In the short term, with a constrained budget, it makes a lot of sense.  You get the thing you need instantly, there’s no massive up front investment, you can see how it pans out for you in your circumstances, and after a month, you can give it back.

In the long term though, it makes no sense.  It’s a really expensive way to get television.  12 months later, and you’ve paid enough money to have bought a set outright in the first place.  With a little careful budgeting, and diversion of funds in the first place, you could have had your very own telly.

How is this like ‘social media’?

Well, rather than ‘renting’ the time of agency staff to deal with the ins and outs of their own social media interactions, should clients just bite the bullet and…

a) invest in their own specialist people to do it, or even…

b) just make it a little part of various people’s jobs in the company?

Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about the strategy behind the social media, driving awareness of the social channels, the analytical analysis and tool development and so on… I think there’s a lot of valuable experience, insight & ability that agencies can bring to this process.

I’m thinking more of the people at the other end of the social tools…

I’ve got a belief in my head that I can’t quite shake about the importance of ‘who’ people talk to on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, forums or wherever. 

If they want to talk to someone from ‘company X’, it should be someone from ‘company X’ they speak to (for various reasons of transparency, cultural response, ability to action things internally and the like).  

The ability to talk directly to a person in a company is something that I think people are getting increasingly used to (and will demand more of, I think).

I talked about it a lot in The Communis Manifesto.

 
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Everything I’ve seen of late makes me think that the need for companies to have internal people available who are adept in conversing like this will only increase.  

Getting in agency staff who do this (and no doubt do it across three, four, five different accounts) strikes me as a little… short term, maybe? 

Renting the TV, not buying your own.

Yes, agencies will still help with the ideas, amplification, analysis… but I think companies will increasingly have to have the people internally who do the talking themselves.

I’m really interested in what other folks (i.e. YOU) think… am I being overly precious? 

Does the average punter not care, as long as they get a response?  Is being part of the agency team on a brand good enough?

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Bonfire Builders – Neil Perkin

I’m delighted that the third in the (frequentish) series of ‘Bonfire Builders‘ is Neil Perkin, of Only Dead Fish fame, with some brilliant, thought provoking stuff on the future of magazine communities…

 

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Let’s start socially… tell us a wee bit about yourself

Well, the most exciting thing going on with me right now is that I’m starting my own thing.

Until very recently I worked at IPC Media heading up several areas of the business including research, insight, planning and commercial strategy.  IPC is a really interesting business in that it has over 80 media brands, mostly born out of magazines, which means it’s an incredibly diverse company.

In the last few years I was at the centre of defining and implementing their digital strategy, which was a brilliant job – but there is so much interesting stuff going on out there that the opportunity to work with new people on new projects was too good to miss.

So I’m going to be doing some consulting on digital content and commercial strategy, overlaid with a healthy dose of social technologies (since I believe that this is now critical to both).  And I’m really excited by the possibility of it all.

Apart from that, I’m a (slow) running, (rubbish) rockclimbing, (dodgy) goatee-wearing, glass-half-full type of bloke.


The social bonfire/advertising fireworks principle works along the lines of ‘not either/or, but both…’  Is there a specific approach for magazines to ‘bonfire building’ with readers?  After all, a lot of them would be eager to participate surely?

Magazines are already strong on community.  Think about it – they’re self-selected, focused around areas of passion, read by similar people.

So there are things that magazines have always done that help to build the community over time – I’m thinking of the visibility they give and the interaction they encourage through some of the editorial product (real-life magazines for example, are all about user generated content), and through events and added services.

The digital realm takes this to another level of-course. The great opportunity that magazine brands have on the web is combining the best of what they have always done (curated content, inspiration, aspiration, passion) with the best of a connected web (interaction, real-time, connection, conversation, collaboration).

Magazine brands can be great facilitators, and so the social web is a huge opportunity. There’s some great stuff happening in this space but in truth, I don’t think we’ve yet seen what’s really possible.


I’m aware that a lot of sales tactics for magazines over the years has focused on the ‘free’ covermount, which I guess is quite ‘fireworky’ in nature.  Do you think more ‘bonfires’ will help build up more consistent and stable sales?

The UK differs from the US in that the majority of magazine sales are newsstand based rather than subscription.  The newsstand is a hugely competitive environment.  Confronted with rows of magazines, readers make their minds up in seconds, so your front cover has to work exceptionally hard.  Given all that, most magazines actually have remarkably consistent and stable sales.

 

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Of-course there’s promotional stuff going on all the time – it’s a highly competitive environment remember – but every magazine will have it’s core base of loyal readers.  But sure, the interaction between the offline product and a magazine brand’s social web presence is an interesting opportunity for them to encourage additional loyalty and new ways of inter-playing offline with on.


We hear a lot about how the trust people have in advertising, and in the media, has been eroded over the years, and now are far more likely to trust other people (even if they’ve not met them).  Do people trust their magazines the way they used to?  And if not, does the collaborative ‘bonfire’ approach help re-engender that trust?

Magazines have always been a hugely trusted medium – I don’t think that has dramatically changed.  But I think what has changed is the expectation people have about being able to access, share and interact with that trusted content whenever and wherever they want, and how they discover that content.

Magazines have strong media brands (you can form a pretty strong picture of a person just by saying they’re an NME reader.  Not sure where that leaves you if you’re ITV 3).

They have long added editorial authority to commercial copy (the ‘advertorial’ approach), but the opportunity that the social web gives to magazine brands is to help provide new solutions through facilitating conversation and collaboration via a trusted brand.


And what of the future?

I think all the stuff going on right now around e-readers and the ipad is really interesting (Mag+ has been by far the best visualisation of its potential), but not for the reason you might think.  Yes, user experience is very important, and it’s really exciting thinking about all the different ways in which people could interact with magazine-type content.

But to repeat one of my most oft-used Henry Jenkins quotes, our focus shouldn’t be on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices.  The media owners that will win in this ever-changing environment will be those that truly understand their communities.

And note – I didn’t say ‘audiences’. The biggest opportunity that magazine (and other media) owners have is to be facilitators.  To get in and really mix it up with the people who are interacting with their content.  To connect people.  With other people.  With great content.  And great information.  With entertainment, inspiration, aspiration, stimulation…fun.

But in order to do that they have get over the destination thinking that still dominates within many content owners.  Life isn’t linear anymore.  In fact it never was.

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