Two geeks nerding out for 46 minutes.

Two geeks who have both founded incredibly successful social start-ups talking about funding, coding, user experience, killer functionality, luck, social networking, scalability, how to define your competition, the difference between building a product and building a company.

Kevin Rose of Digg et al talks to Kevin Systrom, founder and CEO of Instagram.

They obviously enjoy each other’s company and the content is clearly better and more revealing for it.

The interview ends with a deceptively simple piece of advice. Namely to focus on solving problems rather than focus on technology.

“Far too many start-ups are technologies in search of a problem.”

This is 46 minutes well spent.

Social media workshop technique #1 works well as an ice breaker.

This second technique in our occasional series is much more about getting down to brass tacks.

If you’ve read our Universal Social Media Strategy you’ll know that, in the commercial arena, any strategy worthy of the name should match social means to commercial ends. Social media are not ends in their own right.

This exercise is all about identifying commercial ends that might be achieved by social means.

It’s called “What have social media ever done for us?”

It is an homage to the famous scene from Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, in which the leader of resistance group the People’s Front of Judea (played by John Cleese) asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

It is clearly meant to be a rhetorical question but, much to his chagrin, his audience proceeds to rap off a long list of valuable contributions to society made by the allegedly oppressive Romans – roads, aqueducts, education, public order, irrigation, sanitation, wine etc.

This exercise is about projecting forward and collectively, collaboratively defining what success might look like.

With the image above on a projector screen as a prompt, you hand out A4 sheets with empty speech bubbles on them. Then ask the assembled stakeholders to project forward a year or two and imagine themselves faced by a sceptical CEO asking the question “What have social media ever done for us?”

The task is to generate a list of social media successes that would make the People’s Front Of Judea proud.

This exercise has been used a couple of times in anger and has generated some rich, varied, ambitious and sometimes surprising visions for the commercial value of social media activity.

By and large though the responses cluster around Revenue Generation, Cost Reduction, Efficiency Gains, Employee Engagement and Brand Positioning / Reappraisal.

A highly useful by-product of this exercise is that it serves to cement the idea that social = commercial in the minds of influential stakeholders. The project owner (your client) doesn’t need to sell the idea to his or her stakeholders. They sell it to themselves through this exercise.

As with Technique #1, feel free to borrow this and let us know via a comment whether it works for you.

Blonde is delighted to announce the launch of our latest creation – a great new website for Mint Hotel. We earned the opportunity to work with Mint Hotel (formally City Inns) across their extended digital strategy after a competitive pitch at the beginning of the year and have been beavering away creating the best possible boutique hotel website possible. Phase 1 went live yesterday with more nice functionality and content to follow soon. We’re really proud of the site – check it out at www.minthotel.com

As an agency that passionately concerns itself with the human aspects of technology (Human Ends. Digital Means and all that), we couldn’t let this piece of SXSW 2011 pass us and you by. The live tweeting of Gary Vaynerchuck‘s talk on caring as a business model and the humanisation of brands. Themes from his book The Thank You Economy.

It’s also another example of how useful social storytelling application Storify is. The story below took ten minutes tops to pull together and publish.

No further commentary needed. It’s all contained in the story.

We’ve just finished a game of 52 card pick-up with our internal systems.

Out have gone the over-specced electronic trafficking applications that gave people fewer reasons to talk to each other.

In have come a couple of distinctly analogue whiteboards that are the focal points for a weekly meeting involving the entire agency, and which give 100% transparency on who’s doing what for when.

The first board shows what each individual in creative, development, planning and new business is up to for the week ahead, with deadlines and, where appropriate, the number of hours/days due to be spent on a given task. Each individual is responsible for populating their section of the board.

Who's doing what for when.

The second board (aka The Shipping Forecast) focuses on deadlines. What is being “shipped” when. This can be things going live, creative work being delivered for presentations, strategy ready for a client meeting.

The Shipping Forecast

On Monday mornings we all talk through the work that’s going through the agency, plus work which we anticipate coming in over the next couple of weeks. Potential log-jams are identified, discussed, and worked around.

Then we get on with it.

And we talk about it on an ongoing basis. Everyone can see with 100% transparency where the pressure points are and this makes for a constructive, collaborative environment in which to do the day to day tweaking and negotiation around resource allocation.

It’s early days but hopefully we’ll achieve the appropriate balance between robustness and rigour on the one hand, and that start-up feeling on the other.

HP went back to the garage. We’ve gone back to our boards.

Back to the garage.

Reading about the game changing messaging doo-da from Facebook on their rather spiffing blog. This is indeed big news and looks super but I noticed a couple of anomalies.

1. There’s a picture of the Chuckle Brothers on the phone.
2. The people commenting appear to have either been partially lobotomised or are not actually real.

Firstly, this picture could be the only available evidence of a Facebook conspiracy coverup. Why are the Barry & Paul Chuckle in contact with a senior engineer at Facebook?

Have they given up providing light entertainment for children to run internet powerhouse Facebook and now go by the sole alias of Chris Piro? Both of them. Like Jedward. I’ve not seen them on telly for ages that’s for sure. Have you?

Was Barry’s “motorcycle accident” really a cover up for a disagreement with Paul over the naming of the messaging service. Obviously Barry was vying for ”To me, to you”. Which would have been great.

If you search “facebook chuckle brother conspiracy” you got no results (Well apart from this blog post). They covered this little beauty up good & proper.

How deep does this conspiracy go?

Secondly the comments;

1. this is advance super-highway, it’s good. Lookin foward to seeing that day. Astin joe from Nigeria. Great People, Good People.
2. it’s nice to hear that thing.
3. Nice one then.

…which are all real stoopid but this one in particular interested me.

“great. No more struggling to do things.”

Whit? No more struggling to do things.

I think this will become my default comment when anything ever is invented.

Anyway, none of these people make any sense what so ever, which makes me think they’re not real and most probably robotic minions of Barry & Paul, trying to convince the rest of world that Facebook is real cool.

Just an observation.

Messaging service looks nice though.

Live tweeting from conferences sucks.

It sucks for the presenters, who must be aware that their ‘audience’ is more concerned with writing rather than properly listening.

It double-sucks for presenters if they have to get through their content with the double distraction of seeing the ‘audience’ heads-down in their laptops AND being faced with a Twitterfall of real-time, critical comments projected on the screen behind them.

And it sucks for the audience. You have paid (or more likely you employer has paid) good money in order to learn something. Or to be inspired. Ideally both. Bashing away on Tweetdeck when you should be absorbing slide content, verbal content and hopefully a compelling on-stage performance is a waste of someone’s training budget. You can call me old fashioned about this, but you’d be wrong.

I was mighty glad to see that there was no Twitterfall at MediaGuardian’s Changing Media Summit 2010.

And, as you can see, I vowed not to tweet while people were speaking.

Here, however, is a summary of the high and low points of the day as if I had live tweeted. Tweeting after the event.

I COULD LISTEN TO JIMMY WALES (WIKIPEDIA FOUNDER) ALL DAY. #CMS2010

Jimmy Wales spoke for about 20 minutes and was then interviewed by Rory Cellan-Jones for about another 20 minutes. Neither slot was long enough, a consistent failing of this conference if truth be told. He was eloquent, passionate and candid. He had clearly edited a wealth of material down to 20 minutes, and the audience would clearly have kept him talking in the Q&A had time permitted.

LOVE THE WIKIPEDIA MISSION STATEMENT. LAYERS OF MEANING TO EVERY WORD & PHRASE. #CMS2010

Mr Wales spoke with great conviction about the role and purpose of Wikipedia. This clearly isn’t a bland, vanilla, dust-gathering pronouncement to be laminated, stuck on office walls and ignored. It is an active credo by which the organisation lives and works on a daily basis. Well worth a closer look.

His discourse on the layered meaning of the word ‘free’ (“free as in speech, not as in beer”, “not just no paywall, no wall at all”) led to an interesting examination of the contrasting approaches of Google and Wikipedia in China, which is again a hot topic as I write this.

CHINESE MENUS DEMONSTRATE THE POWER OF WIKIPEDIA. #CMS2010

If I had live tweeted this I would have used Twitpic to illustrate the point. Mr Wales showed several examples of menus from restaurants in China that appear to list Wikipedia as a key ingredient of several dishes. I have included an example below.

The explanation for this appears to be that when looking for English translations of Chinese ingredient names, the corresponding Wikipedia entries were returned first and misinterpreted.

CORPORATE ATTITUDES TO CHINA ARE LIKE THOSE TO SOUTH AFRICA DURING APARTHEID – JIMMY WALES #CMS2010

In that some companies choose not to be associated with the regime, some choose to be there as an active force for positive change, and some are just there to make money regardless of any human rights issues. Despite the differences between their approaches, Mr Wales placed both Wikipedia and Google in the middle category.

WIKIA – END OF THE ROAD FOR NICHE MAGAZINES? JIMMY WALES #CMS2010

Mr Wales is also the founder of Wikia, a “consumer publishing platform that enables passionate communities to collaborate”.

He cited the example of his daughter, an avid user of the Club Penguin platform who, once exposed to the rich depth of (free) content on the Club Penguin wiki, is bitterly disappointed with the mere 100 pages of content that she gets from a $6 niche magazine.

BAKERS SELL FRESH BREAD AND GIVE AWAY STALE AT THE END OF THE DAY. NEWSPAPERS DO THE OPPOSITE. #CMS2010

An interesting parting shot from Mr Wales. He attributed the stale bread/fresh analogy to Matthew Freud, whom he had met the previous day.

SHIFTING CULTURE AT THE BBC. TECHNOLOGY AND EDITORIAL ON EQUAL FOOTING. ERIK HUGGERS. #CMS2010

Erik Huggers is Director, BBC Future Media & Technology at the BBC. His presentation (deliberately?) took the entire 20 minutes allocated to this slot, leaving no time for questions from what, judging by the murmurs, was not an entirely friendly audience.

He talked about how the creation of “products” at the BBC (things like the iPlayer, the news website, C Beebies etc) was a collaboration of equals between technologists and editorial staff. This is a common theme right now, with people like Mike Arauz posting recently about the magic that happens when technological ‘tricks’ and great storytelling work hand in hand.

IS IT IRONIC, UNLUCKY OR JUST INEVITABLE THAT TECHNOLOGY HAS FAILED FOR THE DIGITAL BRITAIN PRESENTATION? #CMS2010

Oh dear. Least said soonest mended I think.

IN SWEDEN 20-30 YEAR OLD MEN SPEND MORE TIME ON SPOTIFY THAN WATCHING TV. #CMS2010

A comment made during a panel session on “The New Economics of Content” and the different business models currently being explored by Condé Nast, CNBC, Spotify and Pearson. The above observation was made by Jonathan Forster, Global Sales Director of Spotify, as he opined that the agency mindset needed to work harder to keep up with changing content consumption behaviour.

Some interesting stuff in this session about combining various business models (freemium, micropayments, virtual goods, oh yeah and advertising) rather than relying on one.

USEFUL, USABLE, DELIGHTFUL – THE AKQA RECIPE FOR CREATIVE SUCCESS. #CMS2010

This was from a pre-lunch panel session on “Quality creative control”. Once again the format wasn’t ideal. The panelists were potentially awesome (from Contagious, Nokia, Ogilvy Labs, DDB Stockholm, AKQA and BERG) but none of them really had enough time on their feet to get into any kind of stride. Some interesting bits and pieces like the AKQA philosophy on digital creativity, but I was left wanting much more.

MEDIA COMPANIES CAN’T HOLD AN AUDIENCE BECAUSE WHAT THEY PRODUCE IS SHIT – MICHAEL WOLFF. #CMS2010

Michael Wolff is the founder of Newser.com, a news aggregation site with the mantra “read less, know more.” He also wrote The Man Who Owns The News, a biography of Rupert Murdoch.

The quote above refers to his opinion that US newspapers in particular are rapidly becoming victims of their “over-supply of inconsequential content”.

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY IN THE U.S. IS OVER – MICHAEL WOLFF. #CMS2010

Michael Wolff continuing his candid and thus highly entertaining tirade against traditional media owners.

And against Mr Murdoch…

UNTIL A YEAR AGO RUPERT HAD NEVER BEEN ON THE WEB UNACCOMPANIED – MICHAEL WOLFF. #CMS2010

Michael Wolff and Jimmy Wales were the undoubted highlights of this conference.

ENFORCING CONTROL DOESN’T WORK WHEN YOU NEED TRUST. PARENTS GET IT. MEDIA DON’T – GERD LEONHARD. #CMS2010

Gerd Leonhard describes himself as a media futurist. I don’t know about that but I do know that he’s a complete nutter on his feet. A flamboyant presenter with even more flamboyant slides. I have never seen so much animated giffery in one place. Literally every component of every chart moved in some way, usually all at the same time. His conference slides can be found here but they’re static and so really don’t capture what it was like on the day. Maybe if you close your eyes, spin rapidly on the spot several times until you’re giddy and lose any sense of balance, then look at the charts, you might get close. All he needed were big shoes and an exploding car for the full clown effect. It was a shame because he made some interesting points but you had to not be laughing (at not with) in order to hear them.

IT’S ALL KICKING OFF HERE. YOUNG TURKS FOUNDER HAVING A RIGHT OLD GO AT NBC. #CMS2010

Cenk Uygur, founder of The Young Turks basically accused most American journalists of being liars who are in the pockets of big business and the US political machine. This incurred the wrath of a heckler in the audience and it all kicked off from there. To describe Cenk as “cocksure” would be a massive understatement but you only have to look at some of the engagement stats on his YouTube channel to see that this confidence is not entirely without foundation.

This closing panel was moderated by Rory Cellan-Jones who was clearly enjoying it. Equally clear was his frustration at not having more time to develop and milk the debate further. And that, as you may have gathered, was the story of the conference.

This is a hot topic right now.

Mr Murdoch has created more than a bit of a stir with his comments about Google and the ownership of content. This interview with Sky News in Australia is worth watching. It’s 37 minutes long but well worth finding the time for.

It [monetising content] became a hotter topic for me as a result of a conversation with a content provider.

And hotter still as a result of the confluence of a couple of blog posts that I read subsequent to that conversation.

The content provider is The Daily Mash, the UK’s biggest satirical website.

I met up with Paul Stokes, one of the founders of the site and ex Business a.m. client, for a couple of drinks and a chat.

And it was interesting to hear him talk about the monetisation of his content. His site publishes a steady stream of high quality, highly amusing, unique content to a large, loyal, high quality and growing audience.

He also has an open-minded and creative attitude to generating opportunities for brands to engage with that audience. But it appears that getting traditional media agencies to think beyond variations on the display advertising theme isn’t as easy as it should be.

That really chimed with me. Blonde has picked up a couple of really interesting clients recently, based purely on their desire to explore more innovative approaches to achieving online objectives than clickable rectangles (banners). A desire to explore that clearly wasn’t being serviced by existing suppliers.

There is a structural obstacle at play here for any agency whose business model is based on taking a cut of money spent on paid for media. For more and more clients the emphasis is shifting away from bought media to owned and earned. Paying for space is becoming a last resort in digital channels.

Enter this post by Norwegian planner Helge Tennø.

He talks about a book called Business Model Generation, which contends that there are three basic models for business : customer relationship businesses, product innovation businesses, and infrastructure businesses.

Helge argues that “media” has allowed itself to become an infrastructure business in a world that requires it to be developing customer relationships.

“I would suggest media position itself to the relationship business, and be selling completely different, more scarce and more valuable products to brands. What I would like to see is a change of business model focus. From infrastructure destruction, to creating valuable relationships – providing new and interesting products for brands to sponsor in order to increase the value being created between media and the participant.”

That quote from Helge is a pretty good description of the direction in which Paul would like to take The Mash.

We also talked about the potential opportunities afforded by mobile applications.

The Guardian’s iPhone app sold nearly 70,000 downloads at £2.39 each in its first month and is being touted as a potential £2million annual revenue stream.

The Viz Roger’s Profanisaurus application is also apparently doing well at £2.99.

Then on the way home I read this post from Bud Caddell, which contains an idea for an interesting alternative model for monetising content.

Bud suggests a model that is based on rewarding subscribers for sharing your content. The greater the degree and reach of sharing, the greater the level of subscription discount. So loyal subscribers are happy, accessing great content at a reduced price. And you’re happy because you’ve recruited a highly engaged and cost effective sales force to recruit new subscribers on your behalf.

Sorted!

Or maybe not based on this final post by Andy Sernovitz – “Nobody wants to talk about something if everyone is talking about it”.

It’s all about maintaining the perceived value of your content. In Bud’s sharing model the subscribers are very important to business growth. But they also need to feel important, and that means restricting the supply. Think Spotify or Google Wave invitations.

To be continued…

True return on investment is a hard financial measure.

This really, really good presentation by Olivier Blanchard makes the point more eloquently than I’ve seen it made before.

The tone of voice is lovely.

And the content feels like stuff that you should know.

Which it is.

But lots of people still act like it isn’t.

(Isn’t stuff that they know).

What do you do when attention is your currency and making trouble is one of your core values?

Answer : some very interesting things indeed, based on the presentations at Channel 4′s Meet The Commissioners session in London yesterday.

We heard from Louise Brown, Head of Cross Platform, Matt Locke, Commissioning Editor for Education and Tom Loosemore, Head of 4iP.

As well as some impressive examples of digital thinking in action, there were some interesting themes for the afternoon.

Routes to attention

Ideas judged against how they…

Get attention.
Keep attention.
Turn attention into value.

Digital Business Models

This was a major theme from Tom’s presentation. As well as investing in sustainable non-broadcast public service initiatives, 4iP is actively experimenting with alternative business models for online start-ups. As he said, if Channel 4 finds an advertising revenue model challenging with 10 million monthly uniques, 4iP will take some convincing that an ad-only model will work for a start-up.

Accountability

Matt talked about a 9 point (3×3 square) grid against which each project is measured.

The objectives of getting attention, keeping attention and turning attention into value run along one side. Along the other are three types of audience engagement : visitors, fans, contributors/distributors.

Using this grid, objectives and metrics can be entered in each of the nine squares. A simple but highly effective way not only to retrospectively report on a project, but also to run actionable ongoing diagnostics during a project.

All in all a useful and thought-provoking session.

(Thank you to davysims for the photograph.)