Mate! Big issue this. One that I have a very clear view on conveniently

I firmly believe that specialists will ALWAYS be needed at an execution level. Will ‘idea’ agencies ever be able to advise on the best paid search strategies past a fluffy idea of “Let’s advertise against this guy’s name – so if he Google’s himself we can get a message directly to him!”. That kind of thing is definitely awesome etc, but the fact of the matter is businesses generate billions in revenue from this single execution discipline and the same will be true for many other disciplines.

What you’re talking about is business consultancy with a heavy background in creative and lateral thinking planners. Ad agencies, brand consultancies, idea agencies, whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it agencies, have just started to wake up to the fact that they can make really fundamental changes (read improvements) to their clients’ businesses.

This is a side affect of digital culture as we know it; the way a large brand communicates must be grounded in how it behaves and in its beliefs. If they don’t, then their underdog competitors which DO will very quickly eat away at their market share and bottom line as consumers flock to the authentic and nice brands which walk the talk.

For the past few years, businesses have seen this shift as something concerning their communications only which is exactly why and how communications agencies have worked themselves into a much more influential position than has ever been possible. Smart agency people, slowly, over time enlightened those clients into realising that the core problem wasn’t a communication problem at all, but a much deeper issue closer to the heart of the core business. It was purely luck that clients were daft enough to initially think it was a communication problem first which let us communication folks get our foot in the door.

What we’re seeing is agencies morphing into business consultants with a very strong background in creativity and strategic thinking. The business consultancy being provided will naturally extend to communications, but won’t be exclusively around communications.

This high level strategic thinking and creative however doesn’t affect skill specific disciplines – it just changes the nomenclature. A digital agency in 5 years will be a digital production agency. A social media company will be basically a company of community managers and social media managers who understand the intricacies of online communities to a very high level of detail.

And so on.

The only part of the industry that is contracting is the PowerPoint end of the industry. So yes – agencies founded on PowerPoint  will “turn into idea shops (weren’t they always?) and the best ideas will win the business (didn’t they always?)”. The people who actually make shit / do shit will always be needed.

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Since the new Kindles were announced, Amazon UK’s homepage has had what looks like a full 60% of the on-page real estate dedicated to it’s own brand products. Isn’t this a really shady thing to be doing considering they sell e-readers from other brands who don’t quite get the same privileges? They’ve done this for every major Kindle launch… just feels a bit wrong to me.

#justsayin

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The same day that Facebook announced details of ‘Open Graph’ I wrote a post about how it could fundamentally improve the web user experience. One of the potential applications I mentioned was good implementation of ‘social search’.

Back in the day (2008) I remember the handy Forrester Research graph which showed that search engines were considered to be a highly trusted source of information (relatively speaking), but of course the most trusted being information from people you actually know. There are many graphs / tables like this out there on the web all showing pretty similar data, so the exact graph chosen was irrelevant.

The important thing is – with the introduction of Facebook’s Open Graph, it has never been easier to integrate 2 of the most trusted sources of information to create an incredibly powerful ‘Trust engine’… and yet it hasn’t been done? What I can’t understand is… why not? The image above is an artist’s representation of how you could easily create a powerful search engine that incorporates quality results, powered by complex algorithms & the power of relationship based P2P recommendations. Of course this is very basic – a better way would be to have a piece of result, on-screen ‘real estate’ dedicated to these recommended results to make it very easy for people to see which results their friends thought were good.

People have a habit of finding immediate peer groups who have similar interests to themselves, and this will naturally lead to sharing similar behaviours, including their search behaviour. It stands to reason that if myself and all of my friends are big fans of Metallica, that there’s a good chance that at some point we’ll type ‘Metallica’ into a search engine – for news, tickets, merch … whatever. This also extends to people who are working in the same industry, or students who are reading the same subjects and are doing the same course work.

If my friends have been researching a topic that we’re writing an essay on, and have found brilliant resources through a search engine that have helped them with their work; ‘liking’ a result will immediately bring it to my attention if I search for the same thing. The image above highlights what it might look like if a Biology student is doing some research on Sonic Hedgehog proteins (seriously… there are a class of proteins called this).

People already share links with each other over e-mail, IM, SMS, Twitter, Facebook etc but these require active consideration from the person making the recommendation as well as involved effort to transmit the information. The idea of ‘liking’ search results takes this out of the equation and simply reduces the transaction and opportunity cost of making the recommendation. Instead, you could broadcasting that recommendation to everyone in your immediate peer group with a single click and even in situations where you wouldn’t normally send links to people, the simple inclusion of a like button next to search results will prompt people to use it meaning that people will end up recommending dozens if not hundreds of search results on a weekly basis instead of the 2 or 3 they might send around by e-mail usually.

In my opinion, this extremely simple implementation of social search is enough to massively improve the experience of a search engine. Considering Bing is scrabbling for market share, and already owns almost 2% of Facebook – I can’t understand what is standing in their way from doing something this. Tiny change, massive impact. In terms of business decisions, it seems like a no-brainer to me. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it in the comments.

Earlier this year, I went on a major rant about the potential 3D could bring to the web, followed up by some musings about what the web might look like in 3D. Clearly, since then it has become obvious that 3D is having a major impact on consumer entertainment and will increasingly do so from a film / TV / video game perspective but so far there has been nothing to hint towards the future of the 3D web. Today, I spotted the above on Wired. Sony making a bold claim that ‘everything is better in 3D’, which of course naturally extends to the web. It could either be a hint at Sony’s vision of the 3D web, or it could just be a flashy Homepage takeover that is trying to sell TV’s. Either way, it looks nice enough to share and is a good go at trying to render a standard website in 3D.

I just watched a bit of my brother Faris talking about strategy from the recent CAT conference in New York. He’s quite smart, I’m proud to say; importantly because his definition of strategy reflects my own very well.

“Strategy, in business terms is very very simple. It’s about how you marshal your finite assets towards certain kinds of predetermined objectives to make money. That’s all that strategy is and can be.”

He’s not wrong. In the context of marketing, whether you’re buying ‘eyeballs’, creating beautiful pieces with the hope that millions of people encounter it, or talk to people on Twitter and Facebook – the underlying business goal is increasing revenue, YOY growth or profit margin. I’m sure there are going to be people with different opinions, and I’ll happily tell anyone who’d like to leave those opinions in the comments why I think you’re wrong.

I recently stumbled upon a lovely art project which challenged people to leave their definition of strategy in the comments. The OP (original poster for anyone not familiar with online community nomenclature) would then pick a few and turn these definitions into beautiful business card size pieces of art.

- (I mean the old skool online communities i.e. bulletin boards / forums)

I decided to leave my 2 cents.

“Strategy stems from the economic concept of “leaving money on the table”. Strategy is the combination of being able to accurately identify whatever is “on the table” paired with the smarts needed to know how to pick it up.”

Faris definitely captured the essence of strategy better than I did. In hindsight, I think what I was describing was arbitrage. Although having said that, and in the context of Faris’ definition – all good strategists should be arbitrageurs anyway so maybe we’re both right? For more information on arbitrage (in an easily digestible pop economics format) I recommend you have a read of Cory Doctorow’s ‘FTW’. I’m currently reading it on my HTC Desire and its a cracker.

]]> http://www.digitalprolixity.com/2010/06/money-on-the-table/feed/ 4 http://www.digitalprolixity.com/2010/05/what-motivates-you/ http://www.digitalprolixity.com/2010/05/what-motivates-you/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 11:11:27 +0000 Ramzi Yakob http://www.digitalprolixity.com/?p=271

Just over a year ago I wrote a book review for Don Tapscott’s “Grown Up Digital” in which I focused on the areas of the book referencing the type of working culture that would attract skilled Net Generation workers. I made a point of saying that awesome examples of companies and places of education which have adapted well to getting the most out the Net Gen were sadly still a minority despite Don’s enthusiasm for the cultural shift he believed was coming (or indeed had already taken place).

Just after I wrote there was quite a lot of noise about the fact that Google wasn’t as awesome a place to work as we all believed (anyone who’s visited a Google office will no doubt remember that experience if for nothing else, the freezers full of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream that staff and visitors are welcome to help themselves to). However up until that point, Google was always used as a famous example of an employer that had nailed corporate culture to get the most out of their staff and to ensure staff were happy and satisfied in their work.

“It is unfortunate… that Google is famous for it(s working culture), because this in itself is proof that it is in the minority..We are still perhaps another decade away from Google’s working environment no longer being newsworthy.”

This is what I said a year ago, and the above video (which is excellent by the way) is perhaps further evidence to support my belief that we’re still a long way away from employers grasping how to really get the best from their employees and actually making the world a little bit better in the process. I wonder how many people will write and speak about the subject before businesses actually start to wake up to the fact that there is a really strong economic incentive to change how they behave towards their workers. Sigh.

(video via Anna Persson)

As I’m sure everyone is aware – Facebook effectively told the world that it planned on taking over the internet with something as simple as a ‘Like’ button. The Levi’s example above really brings to life how it can change your web experience and ultimately make it so much better.

The number of applications for this is insane – but also the amount of data it allows Facebook to collect about you is even worse. The surprising thing is that no one seems to mind (yet), if it were Google that had implemented such a fundamentally game changing bit of functionality to the web – the first thing that would have happened would be them being formally investigated by the DoJ or some such. Don’t worry though – no one seems to mind that Facebook will know how fat your ass is (not hard to tell if you keep ‘liking’ size 14 jeans).

Having said this – lets talk about some other applications here.

• Search results: For any given search, at the top of the results will be results ‘liked’ by your friends for those keywords. Why trust the top results which are engineered by SEO agencies (to some degree) when your friends will tell you which sites they found useful? Especially useful for Students who are studying the same classes – and likely doing the same research. You’d have to just remember to not be a dumbass and ‘like’ your favourite porn sites.

• Gaming: Log into Steam and see which of the latest games your friends enjoy, and easily let you find your real world friends who are currently playing so you can go straight to the server they’re playing on. Currently Steam has similar functionality for ‘game’ friends – but being able to find your real world friends easily would be really useful. Also has broader application of you creating leaderboards that are specific to your real world mates.

• RSS readers: Even with RSS readers, people experience a crazy overload of information – most of which is pretty rubbish. With the ‘like’ function, you can easily find the articles that are probably going to be most relevant to you, allowing you to de-prioritize the rest of the ‘noise’ until you’ve got some proper time to go through them.

These are just a couple off the top of my head – there’s going to be a HUGE number of other ways to improve the existing web using Facebook’s new API. Businesses will be built on it. Let me know if you’ve got any other great ideas for applications – or keep them to yourself if you think they’ll make you a millionaire

The following e-mail I just sent to them explains everything.

I’m contacting you today to complain about my awful buying experience with mobilephonesdirect.

Over a week ago, I order an HTC Desire on T-Mobile PAYG. At the time – the page the phone was advertised on assured me that orders before 3pm would be delivered on the next day, and so I assumed I’d get a speedy delivery.

After a few days, there was no sign of the phone – so I contacted you both via e-mail and through the IM service on site to inquire about my order. I was assured that the hold up was being caused by stock issues, and was apologized to for the miscommunication, and at this point assured that my phone would be dispatched today (Tuesday 20th April).

Then this afternoon I received an e-mail telling me that my order had been cancelled due to issues in establishing proof of my identity. Completely shocked, I called your customer service department to find out what was going, to be told that unfortunately, because I haven’t been living in my current flat for longer than 3 months, I wouldn’t be able to complete the order online. When I asked if I would be able to go in-store to get the phone at the same price I had ordered it for, I was told “No, you’ll have to pay in-store prices”.

At no point in the purchase process on your site is there any mention of such stipulations regarding ordering online – the only thing that comes close to mentioning it is the below:

“We are serious about tackling fraud and in certain circumstances may request clarification of your billing/delivery information and proof of ID in order to safeguard your privacy.”

I’m completely outraged at the lack of communication through the purchase process, and was not told at any point until I received an e-mail telling me that my order had been cancelled that there had been issues regarding the above. At no point did you “request clarification” of my billing/delivery information or proof of my ID – you simply told me that there were stock problems, and then finally that the order was cancelled.

I would like to know how you plan on righting this wrong? I would like an explanation of why I wasn’t contact as suggested in the copy pasted above from your site for clarification. Considering the price of the phone has increased by over £50 since my original order on your site, I have no intention on making a repeat order – I want the phone at the price I bought it and have confirmation of.

I will be referring this matter to the Office of Fair Trading if you are unable to satisfy this complaint. In the mean time I’ll be posting a copy of this e-mail on my blog and inviting my 200+ Twitter followers to see for themselves the level of service to be expected from your oganisation.

Regards, Ramzi Yakob

It looks like a lot of other people have had similarly shit experiences with this company – AVOID THEM.

As soon as I booted up my computer today I saw a lot of noise around Nintendo’s announcement that they’ll be releasing a glasses free 3D handheld console which will be able to play the DS’s back catalogue of games. Within an hour of the story being posted on Engadget, the topic was trending on Twitter (as the image above highlights) and the response to news articles around the web are showing that there’s massive anticipation and excitement for this type of technology.

This announcement from Nintendo has thrown a curve ball in my thinking of how 3D technology adoption would play out – but if for anything then perhaps to speed up adoption and cultural shift to acceptance of 3D. Glasses-less 3D technology has a lot of limitations – but something it is very good at doing is catering for an audience of 1 as you don’t have to take into account a range of viewing angles – by creating a mass audience for home 3D experiences, its possible that Nintendo will help spark an expectation of 3D in-home entertainment which could result in this happening.

Nintendo has a recent history of selling its wares like hot cakes – and if this trend is continued with the 3DS (or whatever it might be called) then how long will it be before Apple sees the value of it and jumps on the wagon by creating a glasses-less 3D iPad experience which will only add to the above theory that it’ll speed up cultural change and expectation.

I’ll throw it out there – expect to see a 3D version on the ipod touch/ipad – even if the tech only kicks in for games in the near future.

Very recently I posted a thought piece about whether or not 3D technology might fundamentally change how people interact with content on the web. One of the big questions that came out of it was:

• How would website navigation work in 3D? Will it be the death of the top and left hand nav bars? If not – will the way these nav bars render change drastically?

Earlier this week I stumbled upon an article which showcased ‘60 Interactive, 3D And Astonishing Webdesigns Created In Flash‘. Although there is already a lot of debate around whether or not Flash will be made redundant in the next 5 years – that doesn’t matter in this context.

Some of these examples are purely inspiration porn to help us change the way we think about web design, stretching our creative capacities to imagine 3D interaction online. As the article says – not all of the examples are 3D, some are just ‘good’ examples of interaction design etc so don’t be disappointed if the first link you click on isn’t popping out at you.

Interestingly – one of the 60 examples is for the ‘Fat Man Collective‘ which showcases a couple of Cadbury projects – namely Jive Brow and B-Brow, both of which were creative ideas which came out of Hyper London (i.e. the place I work) who worked with FMC to bring the ideas to life.

Enjoy.