Author: Aden Davies

Social Networks or Data Repositories?

Last.FM, Flickr and Delicious. Three of my favourite sites that I use weekly if not daily. Use being an interesting word. I have scrobbled over 17,000 tracks into Last.FM, I have bookmarked over 5,000 URLs in Delicious and I have uploaded around 8,500 photos into Flickr. My usage of these actual sites though seems to be dumping and storing data. These once shining beacons of web 2.0 have been tarnished a little recently as they are surpassed by newcomers and/or left to stagnate by their corporate overlords. Maybe the reason for their lack of buzz/so called demise is that they are no longer really social networks but are becoming data repositories.  Maybe that is just the way I use them but I have a feeling I am not alone. Also is that a bad thing?

Each of these sites have social features built in to varying degrees;

Last.FM – Friends – people you follow, Groups – communities of users with similar tastes this then powers a radio station of those choices, Neighbours – People with similar musical tastes to you, Liked tracks allow you to share your love of a single track both inside and outside of Last.FM (strangely you can’t like an album but can share the album with social networks). With music what you really want is recommendations for new music and Last.FM does a pretty good job of this with its radio and recommended bands features.

Delicious – Allows me to see what the hottest bookmarks are right now, See which users saved the link, from a social point of view I can build up a network of users and then view what they are reading, I can also make bundles from that network (like Google+ Circles). I can notify my network about specific links but apart from that not much else from either a social or a discovery point of view.

Flickr – The Explore section has a rich source of content based on what Flickr decides is interesting to photos from specific places in the world. You can also create a network of contacts and see what they have been uploading at the Your Contacts page. There are also groups that can be created that typically bring together similar types of photos/photography.

Now I will admit that I hardly use any of the basic social features listed above.  I have had a little play but they fail to grab me. I have a small network of contacts on all three services but I rarely look what they have been listening to, photographing or reading. Not because of a lack of interest but due to the fact it is so hidden away.  I think there needs to be a specific call to action or event to visit these places. These networks don’t provide those either. They are just dumping grounds for data.

Timoni West, A designer at Flickr, wrote a wonderful post on how the most important page, the uploads from your contacts, on Flickr is failing. It lists some of the major problems with the page e.g. Inability to see all a contacts recent uploads, you have to visit a users photostream to see if you have seen all their recent photos.  There is a wonderful line in the post that I think sums up the missing social elements from all the services I have mentioned above:

‘The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away.’

When you return to a network/service you want to know what you have missed. You want to see what your friends have been doing while you were away. ‘What your friends are doing while your away’ can easily be curated and aggregated and displayed or shared on a network that you visit more frequently.

Another element that I think is missing from all three of these services are social objects. No great sharing elements exist from these sites to link activity to other more social spaces such as Twitter/Facebook/Google+. You can manually share a single or set of photos, like a track and share it wider or share a link from Delicious. The problem being that these things are again manual and the sharing of these things have been improved on by other services. Link sharing is obviously an integral part of Facebook and Twitter and as such sharing directly from source will win over sharing via Delicious as it adds a needless step. Sharing photos from Flickr is fine but other services are surpassing it. Facebook is the biggest photo repository in the world simply because you can tag your friends. They are all on Facebook they are not on Flickr. This is then shared into the users news feed. The fact you can’t tag Facebook friends on Flickr is a failing of the federated social web rather than Flickr but a problem for Flickr none the less. The most used camera on Flickr is the iPhone. The most used app on the iPhone is Facebook. You also have so many photo sharing services designed for mobile and designed to link straight back to Twitter e.g.  TwitPic, yFrog and Instagram being just a few examples.  All these things mentioned above are single entities, a photo, a link or a track.

Can these repositories offer something unique worth sharing? A call to action tailored to that user? The thing that data repositories can easily generate are stats. Everyone loves stats. Especially if they are in pretty graphs or in small digestible formats.  I think Last.FM are really missing a trick with stats. I use a service called tweekly.FM. This simple service looks at what I have listened to on Last.FM then tweets once a week my top 3 artists. It has lead to quite a few conversations about music. Many more than I have had because of Last.FM. How easily could Last.FM implement this service? Very. Could they offer much more detailed weekly/monthly/yearly stats pages? Yes. Look at their blog for some of the great things they can do with data? They just need to make that more personal and shareable. Another favourite Last.FM related service is LastGraph. This service creates a visualisation based on your listening history. Here is what I have listened to in the last 6 months.

LastGraph

Last.FM have some wonderful data as they cover on their blog but again it is hidden away (http://blog.last.fm/) Finally to get people visiting a music site how about giving people the option to DJ. Turntable.FM have done just that. A bit more interactive than the radio channels i.e. the person is on the site now spinning their favourite songs. Go and listen.

What about the photos? Well the current hot photo site is Instagram. An iPhone only social network built around sharing photos. They have 4 employees and 6 million users. The close integration with the service and Twitter has certainly helped it grow.  It has made photos social objects and I must admit I find myself visiting multiple times a day unlike Flickr where I only go when I have something to upload.  instagram recently launched an API and now we are seeing lots of interesting things being built on top. Just like Flickr when they launched their API. One great use of the Instagram API is Statigram. A beautiful set of stats/graphs about your Instagram usage. Shows data on your photos but also who you interact with the most. Instagram would do well to implment these kinds of features into their web app if it ever appears.  Flickr would do well to emulate this to beef up their own stats pages and make them more useful and shareable.

Statigram

These sites have all this interesting data about a person. Show them what you make of that data. Allow them to share what you have shown them about themselves.  Why not go one step further and allow them to create something physical based on all this data like the lovely Xmas Decorations that RIG made a couple of years ago.

I think these three sites have to accept the fact they are data repositories for most people. They have hardcore users who are highly active in groups. What they need is to convert more of the packrats into more engaged users. Allow the engaged (and the packrats) to link outwards to the areas of the web designed for social e.g. Twitter, Google+, Facebook. Bring people in and design rabbit holes to allow people to truly explore and decide how far they want to go.

I am not sure if being a data repository is necessarily a bad thing, there are plenty of business models around that. Some sites should just realise what they are and make the most of that fact.

Not really sure where this post came from it was just bumbling around in my head. It took me a while to finish and it made me think that my superficial use of these sites is not really the fault of the site but more my laziness. I want to get more out of these sites but they seem to make it difficult or is it the classic case of you get out what you put in (as long as you put in more than just data). The other thought that bumbled around was how does this apply to online banking. They are certainly data repositories and they certainly don’t design for sharing, discovery or making new connections. Along with Flickr, Last.FM and Delicious should they be doing more or are they fine as they are?

July 27, 2011 Add Comment

Social CRM – I still don’t know what it is

Way back at the beginning of May I was lucky enough to attend yet another conference. This time Social CRM 2011 in London. A day of talks on the burgeoning topic that is a bringing together of the almost ubiquitous word social and the ever so exciting acronym for Customer Relationship Management. It replaced the previous moniker of CRM2.0. Neither of these tags define exactly what it is (just like web2.0 and social media never have and never will).  It is widely regarded that Paul Greenberg has provided the most complete definitions of Social CRM. I hoped that a day of excellent talks on the topic would help clarify things for me. it did not. It did however give me some great insight on what it might be and how the term does not matter one bit.

I find the main lure for conferences is the people speaking i.e. the people I have heard of/follow/am inspired by irrespective of the topic. Sometimes a conference manages to align with speakers and topic but most of the time it does not matter (especially in banking as the conferences on that topic are few and far between).  Social CRM had a pretty strong line up of speakers I wanted to hear on a topic I want to know more about.

First talk of the day was by Brent Leary.  Someone whose work I have followed for a few years now and as well as being an expert on Social CRM he also has pretty good taste in music as evidenced by his regular weekend mixes which feature some of the finest old skool Hip Hop known to man. He began by using the example of Norton (makers of fine computer security products) who have moved pretty much all of their website to Facebook. They feel they will get more engagement from users on THE social platform (750,000,000 users etc) built on top of the web (Will Facebook.com/ replace http://www.? God I hope not). His other starting example was the beer seller at the Seattle Mariners baseball team. Instead of walking up and down the steps of the ballpark looking for people who want beer he has set up a Twitter account so people can tweet their beer orders. The two examples showing Hyperlocal vs Hyperglobal which JP Rangaswami covered recently when I saw him speak ‘There is no ‘National’ anymore just hyperlocal or hyperglobal if you fall between those then you will fail’. Brent covered a hell of a lot more and his (90s style 😉 slides can be viewed here

For me the best speaker of the day and the one who most looked like comedian Simon Day was Esteban Kolsky.  He started strongly by sharing some analysis he had done with the people tweeting in the room. Apparently their was only one Brazilian currently doing a Masters degree present. He shared the 90s style slide design that Brent had shown to great effect earlier but a passionate and knowledgeable talker will always make up for that.  Esteban focused on the data. The amount of data available is only going to grow. Huge torrents of data from social channels of which 98% is probably going to be noise. There will be an even greater need for smart analytics tools and humans to operate them/make sense of them.  The other thing Esteban was keen to point out was the need for social tools i.e. to allow conversations to take place to be used both inside and outside and to also where possible move towards a hybrid model allow internal and external to meet.  This ties in perfectly with the classic ‘If you are 1.0 on the inside then don’t try to be 2.0 on the outside’ which was excellently covered by Lee Bryant a while back.  Esteban’s beautiful slides are here

Esteban/Angel
Esteban on the right obviously

The prettiest slides and most intriguing use cases of the day came from Catriona Oldershaw of Synthesio. This was not your usual event sponsor presentation it did feature the product quite heavily but did so with very relevant and interesting case studies while not being too gratuitous. Take note dull sponsors/vendors *cough* Salesforce *cough*. Catriona also go the biggest laugh of the day be referring to the Pippa Middletons Bum Twitter account which sprang up after the Royal Wedding. One of Synthesio’s clients is Regaine (the hair growth product) as such they were monitoring social media around the Royal Wedding and they had serious chat with Regaine about doing some adverts relating to the wedding because there was so much chatter about Prince William needing some! In the end they decided they could not react in time and that the brand mentions they were getting were good enough. It did highlight how monitoring needs to be treated with importance in an enterprise  and not just a couple of people watching. If it was built into their processes could Regaine have got an advert out in time e.g. 12-24 hours?

Another interesting case study shared was around the use of Synthesio by a certain hotel chain who were trying to link comments made online via Twitter/Trip Advisor and through their feedback channels to actual rooms in the hotel. So if customer x commented on the cleanliness of their room (room 316) on Saturday the 2nd of July they could check the room, work out cleaning rotas etc. Real actionable feedback. Catriona’s slides are here

My final favourite from the day was a talk by Richard Hughes on ‘Why your company needs a managed Social CRM platform’. Now this presentation was for a vendor selling products that allow you to host your own community instead of using all the free(ish) ones out there such as Facebook & Linked In so I was not expecting much. My scepticism however was short lived as Richard made a very well reasoned and entertaining argument. He used a classic quote to exemplify his thoughts ‘It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.’ Lynden B. Johnson famously said this of J. Edgar Hooover and the point being that it may be worthwhile providing a platform for conversation in areas that you own to help you at least have some control of the situation. Although you can’t exert too much control. Richard gave excellent examples of Apple and how they exert a little too much grip around their online community (banning people from talking about beta fixes/releases, responding as little as possible etc.) leading to people seeking other forums to get richer sources of information. I would love to see banks have open support forums on their sites but would they be able/willing to let users talk freely? Richards slides are here

Should we have our own communities or use those outside our control?

My takeaway from the day was that the main focus for Social CRM is customer service via so called social media channels. I think this is the obvious starting place but it is what comes next that is of real interest. The linking into existing operational systems and business processes is where the cool stuff should happen providing it is changing those systems and processes for the better. There must be a view to two way dialogue not just broadcast marketing. It is still very early days for Social CRM and I am not sure a useful definition of the term will arrive. The one I am working towards is around actually talking and listening online to customers because that is what will get things moving and make change happen. Paul Greenberg managed to boil down his definition from 18 paragraphs to 71 characters ‘The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation’. Companies will increasingly be measured based on the types of response they make. Let’s see how that pans out.

July 14, 2011 Add Comment

What are the social objects of banking?

I am on a train, I am not a fan of trains. Many people think the same. This is a very basic example of a social object. A simple yet powerful concept that can bring two or more people together to share and discuss their thoughts and experiences.  To make connections with people we try and put some context around the person to enable the conversation to start and hopefully flow  ‘Where do you live? I know someone who lives there. What football team do you support? I prefer the other team in that city.’ These are social objects and they bring people together. The concept of the social object was brought to my attention a while ago by Hugh Macleod who produces social objects in the form of his artwork. He also writes about them and I urge you to check out his work.

You will no doubt have seen his work in countless social media presentations ‘If you talked to people the way advertising talks to them they would punch you in the face’ and his most famous piece is probably Blue Monster where he challenged Microsoft to ‘change the world or go home’. His work is designed to be used in presentations and Hugh encourages people to print out his work and display them in their work space. He has a name for these things ‘Cube Grenades‘ little messages designed to say something about your attitude to work, life what ever to maybe act as a conversation starter (or killer). If you are richer than I then you can even order a nice print of them or if you are really rich/less of skinflint than me you could even commission your own work from Hugh.  I myself have had a few (unpaid printouts) displayed on my desk to give me a smile/little bit of reassurance on those dark days.  These social objects got me thinking about what the social objects of banking are?

Banking as it stands is a fairly private and solitary experience. Your financial situation is discussed with your nearest and dearest and maybe some experts on financial issues e.g. branch staff, an IFA etc.  Data about your financial life seems to be as private for some as your health records. Should this be the case? For some it will always be the case for others I am not so sure. We may discuss at a high level some of our financial lives down at the pub or over dinner. We may get given a great stock tip from one of our savvy friends or an in the know cab driver. At first glance there may not be much else.

Without a doubt the biggest social object in the world of banking at the moment is banker bashing. The financial crisis and its ongoing ramifications have made banks and bankers figures of hate. From constant coverage in the media of the bonuses handed out to ‘Those bloody bankers’ to the protests against them by groups like UK Uncut. The world can come together and discuss how and why they hate banks very easily.  While a lot of the action around the financial crisis is justified and needed to ensure changes and cuts do not go too far it needs to be made clear that not every banker is the same! Certainly when I tell people what my bonus was this year they are somewhat confused when they realise it is barely enough to take my family on holiday and that I am not ordering a new Lamborghini and buying a holiday home in the south of France. Another concept of Hugh’s is the social marker a way of adding context to certain social objects. It could be thought of as a statement that defines in its purest terms what the object is about. The financial crisis has a very powerful social a social marker which frames the conversation by realting it very closely to a person. That person is Sir Fred Goodwin. Fred the Shred. He is the ultimate social marker in this regard but do some social markers add too much context to an argument or frame it in a closed way e.g. tar us poor bankers with the same brush?

The other classic social object for banking is charges. People love charges. Love them. OK maybe not. The sharing of charges made by banks is again something that is needed to ensure what the banks do remains fair. Some charges are justified some are not and are onerous. Sharing publicly more about these charges can help people see which organisations charge fairly and which do not. This maybe an area that banks are not keen to get involved with but the world is a place designed for sharing so they need to get used to it and behave accordingly. The bank that most openly shares their charges may well be seen as the most thoughtful and caring bank.

The sharing of financial data from financial systems is notoriously difficult for various reasons such as it is deemed to be risky (rightly so) and organisations might not be so keen to share it with other organisations. In my opinion at some point the ability to do so will become common place if not even a regulatory requirement, as it is in Germany.  If we can make sharing of this data safer for both the customer and the organisation then the creation of social objects around banking will become much more widespread. So here are a few real world examples I have found on my online travels.

Blippy, a social network built around sharing what you had bought, recently declared they were on life support and were close to pulling the plug.  Sharing what you have bought is a classic social object ‘Oooh I love it I must also buy one! Dear God you paid how much for that?!’. I personally think Blippy died not because people were not keen to share what they had bought but because there was no safe way to do it (I have spoken before about the anti-password problem in banking) and because no one wants a social network just to talk about that one thing but if you input ‘I just bought’ into Twitter search I bet you get a high number of results.

BillGuard is another startup looking to get people to share what they have bought but instead of to discuss the item this time they want people to crowdsource safe/bogus transaction. Post a worrying looking charge on your credit card and people in the community can confirm whether they have also had this charge and are worried or other people can confirm what it is.

Instead of focusing on what you have bought the opposite is also a perfect social object, what you are saving for. SmartyPig in the US have implemented this perfectly.  A quick search for #SmartyPigGoal on Twitter reveals what people are saving their hard earned cash for. A list of dreams, desires etc. etc. Saving for my dream wedding or 2013 Glastonbury tickets. If you so desire you can contribute to your friends savings goals to help them on their way of reaching their goal. Now if that is not a conversation starter I don’t know what is. Or how about eToro Open Book a community that shows what currencies people are buying and selling the act of trading becomes a social object.

What about those in financial difficulty? The natural reaction maybe shame at getting into such a state but by hiding this away it can only make things worse. A problem shared is a problem halved. Money Saving Expert have created a fertile safe haven for people to share their debt situations and get advice from a community of strangers to help them out. By building a community around the saving of money from vouchers for money off to detailed guides on how to batter down the cost of your mobile contract or car insurance, Martin Lewis and staff have created the biggest, and most viewed financial community in the UK. The website alone is the most viewed site in the UK about financial matters. The forum is second. Third is the Financial Times. His weekly deals email is subscribed to by over a million and a half people. It is full of social objects. it is itself a social object.

Another form of social object is the person to person loan. Kiva provides a platform for people to request funding for small businesses in remote places. The social object is the desire for someone half way round the world to start a business. The other side of that social object is the desire to help someone out. I think the successful social objects around banking need to engender that desire to help or offer advice based on your own experiences.

HSBC ran a huge global campaign back in 2007 called Your point of view. Adverts splashed across the worlds airports, global press etc. featuring a set of images and a caption that worked on both images. Perfect conversation/thought provoking fodder.  It was backed up by the usual microsite (now sadly closed) but did not really capitalise on the social objects it had created in the fact that they were not easily shared and there was no easy way to have a discussion around them. That being said the campaign managed to be excellently parodied as part of a spoof edition of the New York Times to commemorate the end of the Iraq War so it was obviously shareable enough.  The Financial Brand did a nice writeup on the your points of view campaign.

Another example of things that organisations could make more of by making them social objects is the PDF report. Usually the byproduct of some glossy brochure/report that has been created with the primary function of being printed and sent to corporate or premium customers. Some of these are published online but just as PDFs and as such are not that shareable. A perfect example would be the recently published (and updated from 2009)  future of business report by my employers. You can find the document along with others on the HSBC Business Publications page. What more could this have been? What elements that make up this report could be social objects in their own right? What about the raw data could it be published and shared? And what about the interviews that made up this report? Surely the super cities definition and how they were chosen could be a great source of debate, I mean it does not have Sheffield down as a super city and as everyone knows this is incorrect. (Disclaimer: I may be a tad biased on the Sheffield front)

These are just a few examples of the kinds of social objects I have seen but I am interested in what social objects will continue to arise and what social objects people would like to see from banks? The advice given in Hugh’s piece is to be able to clearly define what your social object is. I am not really sure there is a definite social object for banking but looking at the verbs most readily associated with banking (spend, save, earn, invest, sell, advise, transact etc.) we can see where they might appear. So what do you see as the social objects in banking? Should there be more or should there be less? Should finance be a private thing best left to experts or something that should be shared and discussed on a global scale? Let’s see if this social object can lubricate some conversations.

July 5, 2011 5 Comments

Please Give Feedback

How much data do you think a bank captures about you?  A digital trail is left by each and every interaction with an institution e.g. payment over a branch counter, phone call to check the status of a mortgage application or a cash withdrawal from an ATM but just how much?  There’s the obvious things such as transaction records (I took £10 out of the ATM which debited my account) but banks actually capture much, much more information about your activity (where the ATM was located, which organisation owned the ATM, whether you got your PIN right first time etc.).  A phone call generates even more information ‘This call may be recorded for training purposes’ is a familiar start to calls with most service organisations but what is recorded?  More importantly, what is done with all this data?

The vast majority of the captured data is used by the organisation. Fed into huge CRM systems to track your relationship, into data warehouses for all manner of analytic purposes such as calculating your propensity to buy the hot new product, fuel for anti fraud systems looking for strange patterns of behaviour.  This data is very valuable to an organisation. This data is also very valuable to an individual. How many organisations feed back the value of this data to their customers? How many feed back the behaviours this data is showing? How many feed back the changes you could make if you did things slightly differently? I think that data is very thin on the ground…

Here are a few examples of the value of feedback. From one of my favourite forms of transport, trains. Take a look at this tube information display from London Underground. Notice anything missing?

Let’s see what it looks like with the missing piece added.

How does that piece of extra feedback change the whole context of the display? Before it just displayed the ‘what’. The ‘when’ adds so much more value.

Another train based scenario. You are sat on a stationary train admiring a beautiful hedgerow your mind wonders to why have you stopped? When will we be moving again? And what is the impact on the time I will arrive at my destination.  Think how many times the train guard has given you all those bits of information during one of their oh so eloquent Tannoy announcements. Ever had to ask a guard for a bit more information?

Final feedback lesson from trains. Timeliness. On the more modern trains in the East Midlands fleet that operate between Sheffield and London the seat reservations are displayed on small digital screens above the seat. At busy times (it seems) the reservation notices are not enabled when you first get on the train. Only once the train is 10 minutes out of the station do they get switched on causing a nightmare domino effect as people move seats, other people end up standing and generally the atmosphere on the train plummets to levels below the normal disdain laden malaise to outright annoyance. Provide the feedback on time and the problem would be avoided.

So what about an example from banking. Here is a line showing charges are due to be applied to an account.

What is missing from this information? The why...the what....the WTF?!

Personal Financial Management Tools such as Mint, Strands etc. Have been showing users more about their money for several years now. Pretty graphs showing your spending in a more usable way than a list of transactions. Allowing customers to see if they made a change to the amount of coffee they buy they could save an extra £x a year which could be used to pay off their mortgage x years earlier. Banks in the UK seem to be finally catching on. Lloyds recently launched their Money Manager platform. Rumours suggest Barclays will do something similar at some point this year.

Pretty feedback graphs from Lloyds MoneyManager

Natwest have been sending out an annual statement. A paper based PFM if you like that shows your annual expenditure highlighting where you spent the most money e.g. Tesco. To me these things feels very much like stage one. This is what you spend. This is where you spend it. This is what will happen if you change this behaviour. The quicker stage one becomes the normal functionality level for all banks the better. What interests me is what comes next. Feedback on your financial behaviour is only one element of a banking relationship and while it may be the most important, what insights can be gleaned from all the other forms of interaction?

The telephone call. So much information related to the act of dialing a beloved call center. Where you dialed from, the menu options you chose, did you correctly enter your security details, the length of time spent in a queue, the length of time on a call, the number of times you were passed around departments, what those departments were, who you spoke to, call reference numbers, the actions of what you actually called up to do, the entries on the various systems those actions incurred…oh and of course the audio of your call that was recorded for training purposes. All that information is captured. Next to none of it is fed back. You get the call length on your phone bill and if the actions were transactional ones i.e. move some money, you will see that in your online banking. But what is the value of feedback from the rest?

Relaying the menu options you chose might make the route easier next time you call, who you actually spoke with and your call reference number at hand online instead of scribbled on the back of an envelope, the time it took you to complete your transaction or the number of times you have called to try to get something resolved, call information could be linked to transactions/complaints and show you the trail of activity and if you do not remember what the operator said you can even listen back to your call to jog your memory.

Another area where I feel banks are poor is around security, or rather feedback to customers about security. Let me explain. Today I have no record of who and when someone logged onto my internet banking or accessed my account via telephone banking or wondered into a branch and tried to do something, even if it is me doing the accessing. Now hopefully strangers attempting to access my accounts does not occur too often but this data is most certainly captured by a bank and if something strange is noticed let me know (and not just by suspending my accounts). Why not play it back? Show logon/call/visit times, show IP/Mac Address of the device used to access (in fact why don’t banks certify devices you might use to access Internet banking? home laptop, work laptop, my mobile etc.). Modern browsers can send location data as well. Why not ask if users would like this information saved and shown to them in their logon activity records? Any suspicious logons (or attempts) could be highlighted to the customer as well as being flagged internally.  Yes  this might scare some people and generate calls but it should also act as a reassuring log to check.  Data already captured, fed back to people for their benefit. Feedback.

The Facebook attempted logon warning is an excellent piece of user security feedback.

As well as logon activity why not show a record of my actions undertaken online. Clicked on this advert, transferred this money, canceled a standing order,  called the mortgage helpline, placed a complaint. Show me what my relationship with your organisation looks like. Which leads onto how my relationship with your organisation is perceived. The above data is captured, stored in huge data warehouses and is fed into analytic engines to work out things about you based on your activity. Calculations are undertaken and you may get fed into a marketing campaign based on not only your demographics but your interactions with the bank. Scores may be calculated on your behaviours and applied to your profile showing what your actions mean today and what they may mean for the future.  If you make a decision about me why not feed that back to me. Show me how you worked it out and why. Honesty is the best policy isn’t it?

Applying for a product. The sales process of some banking products is less than straight forward. The mortgage is an especially complex process and one that is distinctly lacking in feedback, especially online feedback. Moving house is stressful. The complexity in arranging the mortgage adds to that. The amount of chasing that needs to be done between solicitor and bank. Chasing up to find out where the mortgage process is up to. Who or what is holding it up? When will my money be available. Today a lot of that information can only be gleaned by telephone calls or face to face meetings. Let us switch tangents wildly and consider Dominos Pizzas. Today I can order a pizza of my choice, personalised to the nth degree, I can see who is making it, I can see when it goes in the oven and I can see when it is ready for collection or where the delivery boy is in relation to my house. I can track a £15 pizza to this extent, all via my mobile, but I can’t track a £250,000 mortgage to anything like this level. The milestones/progress of this application must be captured but is not fed back. Something is wrong here.

Ever since I first set eyes on Friendfeed about 3/4 years ago it was obvious to me that banking relationships are very much like activity streams. Today the activity feedback is almost entirely transactional, one way broadcast i.e. marketing messages and customer service issues. This needs to change. So much more happens and is captured but it is not fed back. It would seem our enlightened government also agrees.

A recent publication called Better Choices, Better Deals, sets out ‘To put consumers in charge so that they are better able to get the best deals for themselves individually and collectively as well as looking at ways to empower the most vulnerable who may not otherwise benefit from these exciting developments.‘ On of the key themes of this piece is ‘A shift away from a world in which certain businesses tightly control the information they hold about consumers, towards one in which individuals, acting alone or in groups, can use their data or feedback for their own or mutual benefit.’ It will be interesting to see where this goes.

We are also seeing tighter regulation on what kind of tracking companies can take online. The new EU tracking cookie directives are making companies think about how they track what customers do online. Why not ask permission and show them what you are doing and why? The recent Apple location tracking furor shows what happens when companies are sneaky/negligent but look at how many people then went and visualised the data Apple captured. If they had asked and fed back would their have been an in issue and would it just have been another case of Apple doing something cool?

This stance also aligns with the work by Doc Searls on Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), Which aims to make customer data available to the people who create and allow them to take it where ever they want and to use how ever they want.

Is this just some Utopian pipe dream? Or do we need to see a shift in the way data is fed back to people? What implications have I avoided/glossed over? What compliance/legal issues have I willfully disregarded? What customer needs have I failed to take into account? Please give feedback.

May 23, 2011 Add Comment

The only Jobsworth worth listening to

Thursday the 5th of May saw a few folks from the organisation I work for head off to the Institure of Directors Hub near Liverpool Street to hear a Jobsworth speak at the Financial Services Club. Not just any old Jobsworth though, and not really a Jobsworth at all. The Jobsworth in question was actually JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce and the man behind the Twitter account @Jobsworth. I had been looking forward to this event for a long time, in fact a very long time as it had been cancelled 3 times due to JP’s hectic travel schedule and this event was almost cancelled as well. Thankfully JP agreed to speak even though he was suffering from jet lag having just returned that day from San Francisco.

The evenings host, Chris Skinner, gave JP a warm introduction and provided an overview of his background (Used to be CIO at Dresdner bank, ex Chief Scientist at BT and now of Salesforce) and why he was here this evening (because he has been providing fantastic insight and thinking around innovation, collaboration and communication for the past 20-30 or so years and he has a few things to share…he has a lot to share actually and is a big advocate of sharing as much as possible).

He began with a rather stark statement ‘People have the lowest expectation of valuable output in innovation terms from the banking industry’. JP was very sympathetic to the bankers plight around innovation saying that the ‘conditions inside the financial industry are very adverse’. I found myself nodding along wistfully…

The cheery tone continued as he discussed Clay Shirky’s thinking around the collapse of civilised societies and the causes.

1. Act of God
2. Overfarm the envionment – Strip it of all the natural resources
3. Ecological balance – The failed introduction of a new species making another extinct.
4. Collapse due to the society becoming so complex it would no longer function. The one most likely to happen to banks? Surely not…they are such simple and straight forward organisations? 😉

A great quote from Clay’s piece rings a few alarm bells

‘Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.’

With the scene set somewhere between depressing and suicidal, if you work in a bank, it was on with the show. JP had three themes weaved into his talk that I think were roughly broken down as disruption, communication evolution and designing for the loss of control.

Incumbents vs Disruptors. We started with communications disruptions. When ISPs began causing AT&T a major problem in the United States was when they started charging $20 a month for access to the Internet. AT&T the dominant market player, the one with unrivalled scale, owner of the majority of the actual network infrastructure found their actual cost to provide internet access was $28 dollars and that was without any profit for them.

Clayton Christensen’s work on incumbents was mentioned, specifically his study on the the fixed disk drive market. A classic case of a technology that the incumbents wanted to make cheaper, better, faster. A technology the disruptors wanted to in some ways destroy.

Incumbents are at a disadvantage in as many ways as they are at an advantage. With AT&T is was the layers and layers of business process, infrastructure that had built up over time and meant they had no way of reducing the margins. With the disk industry it was clinging onto a dying technology or sacred tenet. Disruptors may have high innovation levels with low performance/takeup/scale. This must still be seen as a danger. Hanging on to dying business models is just dumb but how many organisations are smart enough to see they are dying let alone that they should not be so sacred and are willing to kill them off? To truly innovate you have to challenge those sacred things. In big organisations this is near to impossible (especially in banks) ‘You can innovate over there in that area we don’t care about’ was direction that JP had been given in the past.

The word Bankrupt literally means a failure of trust, at what point does the lack of progress or innovation start to effect how much customers trust you? He finished with some scant crumbs of comfort ‘I have a great deal of sympathy for the people in this room’.


Communication Evolution. JP began by rolling out the fact that social media messaging volumes overtook email in September 09 (not sure of the source? Or what denotes social media messaging but the point still works). His youngest child has owned a Blackberry for 2 years. She does not subscribe to any email provider on the device. The Blackberry that most bankers carry almost singularly for the purpose of corporate email is being used by different groups in a completely different way. For his daughter it was all about group broadcast and presence provided by the Blackberry Messenger Service.

Half way through next year sales of smartphones & tablets will outsell both desktop and laptop PCs combined. Facebook continues to grow at a never before seen rate and only a fool would think it will not overtake the population of China (1.3 Billion) by 2020. How long have smart phones been on sale vs PCs? These forms of communication are growing at a rapid rate they are changing how we communicate and the language we use. How long did it take to stop using ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and revert to ‘you’? How long to switch from you to ‘U’?


The iPad is only 13 months old, iPhone 4 years (and I think the Nintendo DS should be included in this) and a ‘2-3 year old child now touches a TV screen, not to put their sticky paw prints on it but becuase they expect some feedback/interaction.’ The physical household is no longer 4 or 5 people gathered around a TV. It is more like 6-8 communities. The average household has 6 Tvs, 3 PCs and 4 smartphones…

As technology becomes more advanced and available to ever greater numbers of people it becomes a means of speeding up evolution. With the continued compression of analog tools into smaller digital form factors such as the iPhone with its ever growing Swiss army knife of sensors such as the compass and gyroscope. The fact these devices are getting ever cheaper helps to accelerate the growth of innovation due to the nature of a reduced cost of entry.

‘Technology allows you to have claws or armour before you have evolved to have them yourself.’

Designing for the loss of control. This was the topic I was most looking forward to. It ties in to a lot of things that I believe and as such I was keen to hear JP talk after reading many of his posts on the subject. Designing for the loss of control for many still working in an environment that is locked down to the nth degree via things like the corporate desktop which JP likened to being the equivalent of being stuck with a bakelite rotary dial phone. He continued ‘God help you if you have to deliver to/from a locked desktop’ at this point I think quite a few people in the room were fighting back tears and reaching for the sleeping pills.

JP had recently visited Salesforce new acquisition, Heroku. The office environment was not your traditional one. ‘There were no desks, how do you design for a workplace with no desks? or no fixed wires?’ Do these locked down restrictive environments of banks lead to locked down and restrictive solutions being developed inside them? ‘If you design things that work only in a narrow alleyway then customers won’t go there’ or they will hate you if you make them go there.

Inside the banking world there are so many conversations around innovation. Meeting after meeting on innovation. Outside the traditional banking world innovation is just happening as people are just building, building, building. They don’t have the layers of process and bureaucracy. They also don’t have the other intrusions that bankers face…

‘Have you thought of the compliance implications?’ ‘No I have not thought about them at all…what do you take me for?’ A familiar sounding story from JP’s time at Dresdner.

To truly innovate you need to challenge these rules, barriers and constraints because innovation happens outside them. You will fail but you need to store those failures and use again in the future.

‘That’s not the way it works at our bank’ ‘Well good luck to you and see you in 10 years when your bank fails.’

And that is my recollection (limited by my note taking) of the event but there was so much more (Google prediction API used to see which employees work best next to each other and the work of George Gilder to name a couple). If you get the chance to see JP speak then take it. That being said for all the wit and wisdom of JP the best quote of the night actually came from my colleague Darren after the event ‘One of the best talks I have ever heard and also one of the most depressing’ said because he agreed with pretty much everything JP said and he knew we were pretty much powerless to do very much about the things that needed to change. Mr Rangaswami was right to have sympathy for us.

Thanks very much to Chris Skinner and all at the Financial Services Club for putting on the event (if you are interested in banking events like this you should probably join the FS Club). You should of course subscribe to the feed from JP’s blog and read it as often as possible as it just might stop you being such a jobsworth.

May 19, 2011 Add Comment

A Gamification Conference you say? Surely not.

Yes indeed, a whole day in deepest darkest Shoreditch dedicated to that most questionable of neologisms, Gamification. The bastardised term used primarily to describe to Venture Capitalists what marketers are up to or more often the addition of so called gaming mechanics or elements to all manner of things such as what TV programs you watch and how you brush your teeth.  As this trend has grown off the back of successful implementations such as Foursquare and Stack Overflow then more and more people have been keen to add a dose of gaming ‘magic’ to their products. This has lead to a backlash from the game design community, as they cry ‘rewards and scoreboards are not games’ and ‘gamification is actually just pointsification’ and the marketers largely ignore them and carry on regardless.

I have been interested in game mechanics and theory for a few years now. I certainly had thoughts early on around how these seemingly simple rewards and interactions could potentially alter or promote different behaviours in the banking world. On the other hand I have also played a lot of computer games throughout my life from my humble Commodore 64 up to my current games machine of choice the Xbox 360 and as such they hold a special place in my heart.  I have talked in the past about the lack of meaning these gamification rewards have outside of the system or platform of play that you have chosen and my thoughts have still not changed on that point. So why on earth would I go to a gamification conference?

Because the salesman are circling. Because the term gamification is being uttered inside the organisation that I work by people other than me (how dare they). I want to ensure that if it is something that is seriously investigated it is done so with as much knowledge as possible on the pitfalls as well as the potential positives and that points and badges don’t get handed out for all manner of dull things. Like banking.

There was also two other very good reasons to attend the conference. Sebastian Deterding and Dr. Richard Bartle. Without a doubt the people I was most looking forward to hearing speak and neither disappointed.

Sebastian told a fantastic tale entitled ‘There Be Dragons’. The title coming from the phrase cartographers would use for unmapped areas in days of yore that were marked with that epitaph.  This was in reference to the fact that gamifaction is so new, we do not know what lies in the unmapped areas and that danger certainly lurks.  He went on to list 9 of these pitfalls (The version on Slideshare is even more danger filled as it contains 10 pitfalls). The pitfalls cover the gamut of issues around this trend from ‘The Crap Crab – Abuse is not a value proposition’ which looks at how the ideal game play area is an equal overlap between user interest and business interest and far too often the business forgets this. Through to ‘The Panacea Python – Looking for a quick-fix, one-size-fits-all wonder potion’ which is of course as mythical as the dragons mentioned in the title. For me this excellent talk highlighted so many reasons why banking needs to think long and hard before getting involved in this especially at the expense of features that need to take precedence. How about concentrating on making a game called ‘Make it is as easy as possible for me to see my balance’ or ‘get me on the phone to a customer service rep in seconds not minutes’ basically don’t go adding extra levels of challenge to processes that might already be challenging enough.

I have followed his work for a while now and he produces the most beautiful slides (the type face alone is a work of art and I am not even a type face nerd). The fact that he speaks so authoritatively and wittily even in a language that is not his mother tongue and you have a killer combo. I urge you to admire the design delight of the slides and the witty insights of the talk.

Dr. Richard Bartle is someone who’s work I am only vaguely familiar with (sorry). His work on the 4 gamer types (he told us there are actually 8 in the more complex version for virtual world games) based on the Bartle Test is mentioned a lot and it is this reason he was actually speaking ‘The reason I speak at these things is because people keep talking about my work’. For someone who is not on Twitter his talk contained so many tweetable gems it highlighted what a shame it is that he is not.  He spoke of how gamification was nothing new indeed people had been turning things into games for years, ‘Scientology turned religion into a game years ago’ e.g. OT IV; the Operating Thetan drug rundown level.  His definition of gamification was the best of the day as he said gamification used to mean turning something that is not a game into a game. Now it means taking a game and turning it into something that is not.

He talked of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and how the playing of an actual game is reward in itself, reaching that next level through challenging and skillful endeavour keeps you entertained. If the so called gaming element is actually you filling in a very dull form for which you are rewarded the ‘badge of paperwork’ people are not going to be too engaged with your ‘game’.

Richard warned that If gamification becomes ubiquitous then it will also become meaningless as people will understand the game, as the mechanics can only be simple and therefore quickly become very repetitive.  He did add that before that happens some people are going to make a lot of money and his tip would be not to tell anymore people about it but get on with it. Can’t recommend his talk enough so just go and watch it instead of reading this tripe (his slides are also available and they have an equally lovely type face although lovely for very different reasons to Sebastian’s).

My other favourite talk of the day was not really about gamification but more about platform design, APIs and separation of data and function. It also happened to be about a games platform and one built by the BBC. Tom Redin introduced the BBC Grid Platform which aims to reduce the overheads on creating games by aiming to have a more service orientated architecture which will allow games built to plug in to high score trackers, login authorisation models etc. The platform design was brought about after a majo tidy up of the BBC’s games and it showed a number of holes in the strategy and also meant that the removal of games lead to a huge loss of data.  The decision cam to separate function and data as much as possible to ensure that if a game was removed the data created was stored and could be used elsewhere.  The platform was designed to be fairly open although you had to have your game commissioned first before being given the keys to it. An interesting look at the way platforms should be designed and how the data should be as separate as possible.  It will be very interesting to see what the BBC do with that data as the Grid expands to cover not just games but other BBC areas such as News & iPlayer etc. More interesting from a data/social CRM type angle, more interesting to me anyway. Watch Tom talk about the grid.

The rest of the talks and panels had a few pearls hidden within. Guy Stevens looked at Gamification in the customer service arena. I felt his talk was much more on the social media side of things, I also think there are some overlaps between gamification and social CRM. He did give some good examples such as one of the key users in the Logitech support forum who had answered 45,000 questions for seemingly little more reward than some badges and ratings against his forum avatar but I feel it is a bit deeper than that. Guy also mentioned a nice idea on QR code usage on specific areas on physical devices such as washing machine seals so you can get a link to the part but also videos on how to fix. Again not really gamification but interesting none the less.

The rest of the talks that I saw, and I missed the first couple, were pretty nondescript, one of them had the word leverage in the title for example. There was one especially bad moment that stood out for me. During a platform demo by Bunchball via Skype (conference organisers if you intend to have people demo via Skype make it clear in your agenda) Bunchball showed their collaboration with Playboy which seemed to be adding a gamification layer to getting girls on Playboy.com.

‘It’s a month-long competition where any woman who aspires to be in Playboy can get her friends to vote for her. If she succeeds, she is crowned Miss Social for a month and can get a pictorial (clothed or not) on Playboy.com.’

Earlier Dr. Bartle had talked about the Overjustification Effect, which shows that if a person has sufficient motivation to achieve the reward they become morally desensitised, Richard used the example of the Art of Persuasion task from World of Warcraft where you need to torture someone to move forward. The Playboy thing seemed to be a perfect example of that as you are essentially playing a game to get young girls to pose naked…different kind of reward I guess and voting for, clothed or not, girls is not quite torture. Maybe my moral code has changed slightly since becoming a father.

An interesting event and one that I am willing to admit I went too with a bit of a closed mind, Why was that? I follow a lot of games designers and people involved in that industry and they are some of the smartest people I know. I think there maybe a touch of snobbishness in their arguments against gamification but I agree with them in the majority of cases. This event did nothing really to change my viewpoint and if anything it strengthened it, the marketers are here and they are going to make money. It certainly made me certain that gamification and banking will be used at some point but I think the focus should be on the actual functionality related to banking. There are areas that it could benefit such as those around financial education and perhaps to a lesser extent customer service and there are also some more interesting use cases for internal use such as the email game etc. but I still feel good design and the concentration on making services as slick and accessible as possible should beat any points and virtual rewards on offer…we will have to wait and see if people agree with me.

May 16, 2011 Add Comment

DellB2B: A Day of Three Parts

Two weeks ago I was invited to the latest Dell B2B huddle. The event was organised by Kerry Bridge, community manager for Dell in the UK and Neville Hobson of FIR. This is the third of these events and I was lucky enough to attend the previous one.  The purpose of the day is to look at social media use for business to business. The day was split into 3 parts. First up was a small lunchtime roundtable which was held at the Thomas Cubbit in Victoria. Four people had been chosen to speak about the progress in social media from a business to business prospective. I was one of them, as were Ruben Govinden from Transport for London, Richard Robinson from Google and Thomas Power from Ecademy. A few journalists were also in attendance which meant I was a bit nervous about saying the wrong thing and leading to me being mocked in the press or even worse, sacked. The lunchtime chat was hosted/refereed by Stuart Handley the head of comms for Dell in Europe.  I won’t talk about what I said you can read about that on Silicon.com (the site that the journalist sat next to me was writing for). I have not been sacked yet so my words cannot have been too controversial.

Ruben Govinden from TFL spoke about how they used social media to deal with crisis comms situations and spoke about the infamous case of an employee who was caught on film being abusive about an elderly passenger. Social media had helped the story spread like wildfire it had also helped TFL contain the story. Ruben told how they had limited the effects of the story in a matter of hours, in relation to identifying the employee, but I got the feeling that consensus on the table was that as people knew exactly what the incident was it was a case of damage limitation. Either way is is an interesting use case and a stark reminder that everyone has a camera these days.

Thomas Power spoke about his company Ecademy and the difficulties they faced working with so many businesses. The business networking site has around 400k members. Ecademy are present on an ever growing number of sites and their members are all looking for help on these increasingly disparate and seemingly never ending platforms (sounds familiar).

Richard Robinson, Head of Business Markets at Google was also in attendance and he spoke of how social was changing everything.  I asked him, with tongue firmly in cheek, when they would build a really great Twitter search engine and whether or not they had any internal social media monitoring tools, or planned to get into the social media monitoring game (all 3 skillfully unanswered/denied). Having said that, the products they do have in place today are very good e.g. Google Realtime Search, Google Trends etc. I just want something that allows me to search every tweet ever and have the greatest social media dashboard ever created. Is that too much to expect of Google?

The second part of the day saw us head off round the corner to Google for a presentation and Q&A session with Brian Solis followed by 3 unconference sessions on B2B related topics. For those of you who are unaware of the work of Brian Solis then I urge you to check out his blog if you have any interest in social media and its wider implications for businesses.

Brian recently became part of the Altimeter group joining other social media luminaries such as Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang. Here he will focus more on the research side of his work, as he stated ‘Social Media is less about about technology and more about anthropology, psychology and sociology. It is all about human interaction’. Too many people forget this and concentrate on the shiny new thing. Brian gave an example from one such company that he had carried out research for and found a massive 89 mentions on Twitter. Brian found a lot more conversation about their brand on blogs and forums but they were seen as old fashioned and the company wanted a Twitter strategy not a social media one.

His recently revised book Engage covers just that, how companies must engage to remain relevant in the world of the social consumer. If you are not saying anything in social r not adding value to the conversations being held there then you cease to be part of the buying decision. The social consumer will not take the normal sales funnel route. If you are at all interested in social media usage for business to business (or customer) intereactions then I highly recommend taking a look at Brian’s slides and having a listen to his talk which Neville recorded and edited and is available here.

The unconference sessions passed by in a bit of a blur. I missed the first slot (I was chatting to Brian about if he had ever worked with banks, yes he had and he sympathised with me about the complexities involved) but the two I did attend on influence and what it really means, hosted by Luke Brynley-Jones, and digital DNA a look at how growing up digital is altering how the next generations view the world by Andy Piper of IBM were very interesting. The session on influence looked at how social capital is now coming into play with people’s interactions with companies. Awful things like Klout score and peer index rankings are getting certain customers extra perks. I suggested a mortgage linked to your Klout score (the higher the Klout score the lower the mortgage rate). I said that I thought it was a terrible idea but it made for an interesting discussion and a couple of people thought it was a good idea!

Andy’s digital DNA session was a quickfire look at the impacts of growing up as a digital native. He referenced Don Tapscott’s book Growing Up Digital which details how his kids have grown up in a digital age and how he sees that has altered there development compared to his own growing up analogue. An interesting discussion followed around the perception of all Gen Y/Gen 0 etc. being tech savvy but that was not the case. We also had a little chat about white washing, which is where kids are deactivating their Facebook accounts when they are not logged on to prevent anyone from tagging them or making a comment on any of their content while they are offline. Privacy awareness at work.

The third and final part of the day was a ‘Tweetup’ and as it was St Patrick’s Day it seems only right that it was held in a pub and that the pub had a pretty generous free bar tab. It gave me a chance to have a chat with a few people that I follow on Twitter but have never met in real life. Alan Schoenberg who works for the CME Group and is an active financial services Twitter user (a rare but compelling breed).  The aforementioned Andy Piper who is an interesting character from IBM, as well as his day job looking at exciting things like MQ he also creates the Dogear nation podcast as well as being one of their key social advocates. James Whatley of 1000 heads, is a mobile guru and is also doing some interesting work on social CRM. Last but not least was Gabrielle Laine-Peters who had just returned from 3 months in South Africa where she had driven 1300km on her own, swum with penguins and managed to bill a winery for teaching them how to use Tweetdeck, clearly I am in the wrong job.

The event was a very interesting, thought provoking and inspiring (and a little bit of nerve racking) day. Thanks again to Kerry for inviting me and I am really looking forward to the next one. Assuming I am lucky enough to be invited.

Thanks to Benjamin Ellis of redcatco and SocialOptic for allowing me to use his fine photo. You can see more photos of the event by viewing the DellB2B tag on Flickr (Including one of me with a beer in my hand and wearing a green garland…it is called networking I believe)

April 4, 2011 Add Comment

A bank geek goes to The Story

A telephone bell rang in darkness. When it had rung three times bedsprings creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said: “Awreight pal, Taxi’s ‘ere.” (Apologies to Dashiell Hammett for the blatant plagiarism/vandalism)

Friday the 18th of February meant I was awake early for the journey from Sheffield to London to attend The Story. For those unaware The Story is a one day conference about stories and story telling.  I think you will all agree this is something that a banking innovation geek should be attending. If not, let me tell you the tale of the day and try and convince you otherwise.

First up were Ben & Lucy from the Ministry of Stories. They told the tale of the Monster supply shop in Hoxton. Selling fantastic goods for all your monster needs.  The shop is a front though. For something great. The back of the store hides a room used to help kids write creatively. They run free work shops to encourage them to tell marvelous tales and ensure their fertile imaginations are not destroyed by dull things like school.  They are run by local volunteering writers, artists and teachers.  Inspired by the work of Dave Eggers in the US, I found what they were doing to be truly fantastic.  At the end of the talk a little creative exercise was tried. The crowd had to design a monster. Lucy would ask what a part of the monster would look like and how it would feel. People shouted out. The monsters description was written on screen. This was then going to be drawn during the day and auctioned off to the highest bidder. The results are at the bottom of this post. The process made me think of design by committee and how people just shouting things out lead to monsters being designed. The problem being that they did not set out to design a monster…

Adam Curtis of the BBC and the man responsible for the excellent Power of Nightmares documentary, told how the BBC were losing faith in the web as a means of telling stories. He went on to show a clip of an Afghani reporter interviewing a member of the Taliban. The clip showed the Taliban fighter admitting they had burnt down schools but only to stop the infidels doing so first. The short/soundbite clip formed part of a news package. The thing is the story behind the clip was far more interesting. It turned out the reporter had almost been killed by allied forces as they thought him to be a terrorist. he was actually a poet and had fled the Taliban. He became a reporter and was sent into the lions den with men he feared who also threatened to kill him. Adam played the full version of the clip. It showed the reporter asking more questions but you could now see he was visibly terrified. One of the reasons for his terror was that the other, very heavily armed, Taliban fighters were circling the camera (walking in front of shot) in a show of constant intimidation. Very powerful and far more engaging than the soundbite. I don’t have the ability to do justice to Adam’s talk. Check out Antony Mayfield’s much more detailed piece to get a better sense of what he said. The thing I took away though was that giving context to the story is very very important. Sound bites and copy written pieces offer no engagement no sense of awe. That is something that needs to be addressed. How do we add context to our stories? How do we let people delve deeper?

For me the the most effecting talk of the day was by Karl James. He confessed upfront that he was not a story teller just a listener, a facilitator of stories. He explained, with the help of some very powerful audio clips, how people that can truly listen allow people to become more articulate about the story than they ever would for a poor listener. Listening helps them to open up and expand. There was the story of Jane a 38 year old woman who had been raped at the age of 14. She had not let herself become her story but had grown because of it. She was strong, confident but through listening Karl had got to previously unheard elements of the story. As the clip played and Karl quizzed Mary on how it had affected her and then how it affected her family it became clear that the thing she had really lost was her brother who had ceased to be part of the family.

Original Photo by Toby Barnes

Next up was Chris a friend of Karl’s and the father of a young daughter who had become very ill. Karl asked the question ‘What do you wish you had known on day one of finding out your daughter was ill?’ following the question a long pause followed, all that were heard were the noises of thought as Chris tried to pull together an answer. The pause between the question and answer lasted 19 seconds, Karl told us after. That 19 seconds was a long time. A few hundred people in Conway Hall awaited the answer in rapt silence. As a recent father that 19 seconds allowed my thoughts to wander to places I did not want them to go. How would I answer such a question? Would I ever want to be in the position to be asked that question? When Chris finally answered he said that he would tell himself that you can not deal with this alone. You could hear and feel the huge burden he had been subjected to. I was very thankful that it had not been me.

I was not sure how much more I could take of this. Karl began to talk about children at a central London school. I thought if these next clips were about child abuse I would have to make my excuses and leave (‘Something in my eye, *cough cough* must get a drink etc.). Thankfully they were not but were interviews with so called problem kids and how they were totally disengaged from school life. How they had no respect for people who had no respect for them. In the end it was about child abuse just not the kind I worriedly expected but none the less it still had an effect on me. I would highly recommend you take a look at Karl’s slides and listen to the audio of his talk to hear for yourself and see if you agree with me or think I am just a soppy new dad! It certainly made me think about my own listening skills and how they could be so much better. What would the impact be if everyone was such a good listener?

The headline act of the day was creator of Father Ted and the IT Crowd, Graham Linehan. He was interviewed by geek author and copyfighter Cory Doctorow. Graham is a heavy user of Twitter and he has recently started writing with 7 or 8 people he found funny on there. Graham had used to Twitter to facilitate rewrites during filming he gave the example of calling out to his Twitter followers to come up with a term for ‘backside’ that they could use on the show. Bike rack was the one he chose. He was trialling new tools to see if web 2.0 could facilitate collaborative writing. He was using Basecamp to allow the 7 or 8 people from Twitter who were based around the globe to work together on writing a sitcom (global collaboration in action). Some things had worked well others not so much so it was still a work in progress.

Original Photo by Matt Ward

Graham talked of how he was trying ‘systematise goofing off’. Spending hours on social networks can justifiably be called research when you write a sitcom about I.T. Geeks. Graham did have systems in place though. He spoke of his old system of lots of coloured cards filled with stories ideas or situations.  They were colour coded based on character the situation related to. He would set them out on the floor and try to pull together and link the story elements. The internet had unsurprisingly proved a rich vein of situations that could befall Moss, Roy and Jenny. He did a quick bit of Googling and found his favourite photo of all time from the classic, Awkward Pet Photos. He posted the photo to Basecamp and said too his writing colleagues how can we get Roy into the situation? Know where you want to get to. Then find the way there. If only more creative projects stared this way. Especially with guidance from Awkward Family Pet Photos.

The Story was not like the normal conferences I go to. It was all the better for it. I like to attend conferences that stretch my mind and change my thinking. I like conferences that have side stories.  That inspire new forms of story telling. All the while thinking how can I relate this back to the work I do. The story succeeded massively on that front for me.  If you work on Innovation, irrespective of the industry, then getting out of your comfort zone and going to something a bit left field can help expand your thinking greatly. A big thanks to Matt Locke and all the organisers of a fantastic day. Looking forward to the Story 2012…it sounds like a futuristic one. Finally here is the monster that was created on the day and the description (specification?) that defined how it might look.

The photo and description was taken from from JulieBee’s excellent post

March 29, 2011 Add Comment

Seeing ‘my’ ideas in print

Nothing beats seeing your ideas written, visualised, published etc. Plenty beats seeing your ideas written, visualised, published etc. by someone else. Of course your idea is an idea that could have been had by lots of other people but when you have that idea you feel special. You are sure it is a good idea. You are sure it is an innovative idea. When someone else writes it down first you are now very sure it is a good idea.

Of course I am not vain enough to think that I had this idea first. Most, if not all, ideas will be had by more than one person at around the same time. Steven B. Johnson covers ‘idea multiples in his book where good ideas come from. He explains

‘A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year’

For example sun spots were discovered in 1611 by four scientists in four different countries completely independently. My idea is far from the discovery of sun spots.

As you can guess this happened to me recently. I have had this idea in my head for well over a year. I have had grand plans on how to visualise and sell this idea but I have just not got round to doing it. The value of ideas in your head is zero. In fact it is probably a negative number as thoughts in your head occupy areas of your mind, use up valuable processing time and generally get in the way of other stuff.

 

Idea in head =  -£10

Idea written on fag packet = £10

Idea published for others to see = £20

 

I think Brendan Dawes put it best in his great print, which you can buy here.

I wonder if Brendan fancies doing another version that reads ‘Thought – Action = Dumb Shit’ or something like that.

Once the idea is out of your head. It has the chance to evolve and be refined. It can be shared with others to get the idea validated and enhanced (or mocked). It means the idea has a chance of becoming more than just an idea.

The idea in question was written, visualised and published by an agency working with the company I work for. I would love to say what the idea is but I can’t. After getting over the disappointment of not being the one to come up with (or publish it first) this brilliant, in my humble opinion, idea I now feel a need to evangelise this idea and to ensure it is not crushed by the design by committee types or overlooked as just a feature that can be dropped.

The fact it was written, visualised, published by someone external to my company, that have been paid to come up with ideas, might actually help the idea because sometimes external expertise is treated with higher regard, and in this case rightly so. I am not bothered about getting credit for ideas I just want to see ideas that I think are good get built.

The moral of the story is get ideas out of your head. Write them down somewhere. Draw a picture. What ever way you want to represent them. Just do it. Now. Don’t be a dumb shit.

Thanks to Chris Dymond for helping me find the page in Steven’s book featuring Idea Multiples.

March 21, 2011 1 Comment

I just can’t help myself

I have a very dull confession to make. I love playing those lovely little hashtag games on Twitter. You know the ones. Where someone takes a category of culture e.g. film, book, song, band, celebrity and then adds something to the mix such as a witty satirical angle or just links to food or booze.

So you get a random group of people coming up with something very(?) amusing as shown above.  I am not sure why I am so drawn to these things? I think the reason is that I like the little mental challenge they present. They also provide a little moment of joy. They are essentially a task to combine two pieces of existing information that you have e.g. a celebrity name and something related to alcohol, and come up with something new and preferably funny. As you can see from the screen shots I am also not that good at them.

They offer up a little bit of lateral thinking to exercise the connection of neurons.  I wish their were more banking related ones although I can imagine that would quickly descend into banker bashing territory (it is where the laughs are though).  I remember Chris Skinner doing a post which had a banking crisis and films mixed together type list. I even submitted my own rip roaringly funny suggestion of ‘A few dud men’.

What I would also like is someway of replicating a similar thing inside my place of work. A well populated and well used Twitteresque network would make things a bit easier…maybe one day, but I am sure it would work.  Start off playing for fun using project/product names and food to create hilarity. Segue sneakily into making them work related by trying to get people to join two ideas around a central theme to make an innovative (or funny) idea? Yes I agree it is a long shot and I am beginning to think this post is just a vague attempt to justify the time I spend playing hashtag games.  #BankerPlayingGamesJustificationFilms Go…

March 2, 2011 Add Comment