You may have read here that I recently published an ebook. If you happened to read it (and like it) could I trouble you for a rating/review on Amazon? It apparently (and unsurprisingly) helps with sales.
I know it’s a bit grubby asking like this. Apologies. Next post will be plea-free, I promise.
The Burning House is a popular photography-centric blog based on the following thought:
“If your house was burning, what would you take with you? It’s a conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental. Think of it as an interview condensed into one question.”
We decided to have a go at Poke. Here’s mine:
We exhibited everyone’s photos in one of the Poke loos. Well, on the wall above the loo:
It’s a really fun and interesting exercise. I found myself thinking incredibly practically about it. What became clear quickly was that most sentimental things I own are photos and those photos exist on a hard drive. There are relatively few physical items I would need to take. Above you will see a my phone, a computer, passport, a box of important paperwork (tax; id; insurance etc), my coat (might be stuck outside for a while!) and of course my wife :)
Fascinating Wired article about using open source data to predict the future. I won’t try to paraphrase what is fairly complex, but I will share an anecdote from the article that humanises one of the principals:
“In the 40s the allies routinely bombed rail bridges to disrupt supply lines into Nazi-occupied France. After a raid, though, the Royal Air Force couldn’t fly reconnaissance missions over the targets as they were considered too risky, so it didn’t know if a bridge had been destroyed.”
The article goes on to explain how some very public – and unlikely – data was subsequently used to solve the problem:
“By monitoring the daily prices of oranges on sale at various fruit stalls [they] were able to tell which supply chains had been affected. (Germans embedded in London were doing the same thing; unfortunately for the Nazis, they were under the control of SOE and were fed false information.) This is the difference between information and intelligence: information is the price of oranges, intelligence is knowing which supply chain has been affected.”
Great little behind the scenes from Kickstarter founder, Yancey Strickler. Embed not working for some reason.
Some lovely quotes, my favourite of which is the title of this post. Two more:
“They [the backers of an iPod watch] didn’t just get a watch, they got a story”
“Too much business, not enough passion”
For the last fourteen months (on and off), I’ve been working on a short story called Finkle and the Fish. It’s been a real slog, but today, I’m proud to say you can now buy it in the Amazon Kindle store.
Here’s the opening page, as it looks on Kindle:
Warning: It’s a little… dark.
Update: You can buy the book for other ebook readers, along with six other short stories, over at baddollar.com
It’s a question millions of marketers bore the hell out of each other with every day: How do we use social media to build up a community/following? Especially if we’re not a high-interest product.
Enter Shippam’s Paste. Their Twitter account proclaims to be the voice of their ‘social media EXECUTIVE [capitals] intern’. It’s juvenile, it’s riddled with bad grammar and its devoid of punctuation. And you know what, I find it quite hilarious, as do 6,237 people and counting.
Here’s an example of some of their recent tweets:
And the below tweet – which, by the way is a direct product-based call to action – received over 100 retweets.
Am I saying all brands should try to be irreverent in the hope that it gains followers? No. Because ‘brands’ don’t do things, people do. And it’s hard finding funny people that are capable of making others interested in them. Not to mention that not all brands would benefit from irreverence in the first place.
What I am saying is that this is clearly creating value for the brand (I’ve now heard of it) and yet this would never have been created off the back of any logical conversation. No formula, theory or rationale can ensure this kind of result – more likely it will kill it. No, it comes from creativity, braveness, imagination and an intimate understanding of the culture of social tools.
Thanks for reading why not try the beef paste.
Internet Week Europe is nearly upon us again. And you’ll be pleased/confused to hear that metaphors are still sexy.
Tickets are now available and we’re at almost 50% capacity after just an hour, so if you’re in London on November 9th and want to come, you should reserve a ticket now: rsvp@metaphwoar.org.
It frustrates me when people get seduced by shiny new stuff and ignore the important things. One of the biggest dangers in the digital age is the allure of perpetual novelty. There will never be another day when you can’t do something new. That’s exciting but also distracting.
This thought is captured nicely in a couple of quotes in Rework by the 37 Signals guys. This first one concerns companies’ unhealthy interest in change:
The things that don’t change are people and their motivations; feelings and spirit. Although I’ve never labelled myself such, I’ve always considered myself a ‘brand strategist’ of sorts — Sorry if you hate the word brand — A brand strategist in the sense that I’m interested primarily in finding a company’s soul and then living out its values in whichever forms feel appropriate.
Which is why I enjoyed this other quote from the book:
You can use all the fancy technology you want. But your tone needs to come from you. Technology won’t find your tone or your company’s soul. It might play some important roles in expressing and realising it, but the tone is in your fingers.
