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Tag Archives: social brand

#voom, voices & the murmurations of the twitterati

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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#voom, A.I., beauty, Communications, desire, dynamic data, ecosystems, entrepreneurship, flocking, geolocation, mobile, murmurations, nature, Old Street, ornithology, phenomena, pitch to rich, recognition, Social, social brand, social mapping, Social Purpose, starlings, Twitterati, Virgin Media Business, voice

Screen Shot 2015-03-31 at 10.11.37

There’s something rather magical about the fluid shape shifting phenomena of social media.

And it has reached far beyond the slangy codified data dynamics and scale numbers thrown around Old Street hot desks of doing.

Dependent on the context and the lens through which you view them, there is something truly phenomenal in the surges swoops and sweeps of the numbers and the geophysics of how where and when they occur

Having just launched the Virgin #voom/Pitch to Rich campaign (not personally of course but as one of a very large team) I have started to view social phenomena through this lens and things are looking quite beautiful. And revelatory.

The staggering social reach and the dynamics of flocking in the social media networks around the campaign and some of the numbers being achieved (45.2 Million social media reach in 6 days-ish) has for me stretched far beyond the need for collective nouns.

(How the #voom/pitchtorich campaign reached this scale of impact is a much larger thing to consider. But the finger points to the spirit, mood, exceptional impact and revelatory nature of the Branson films Bruce Goodison of Sundog Pictures created from the various pieces of paper and email chains – supported by some leading media thinking and doing across a substantial number of interrelated and interdependent media channels, partners and audiences)

The wave of furious activity #voom/pitchtorich has inspired in the social networks bears a closer look. The irony is that the further back you stand the closer you can observe the ‘nature’ – the physical virtual dynamics – of its social phenomena.

Originating in a clumsy joke of mine about twitter and birds flocking – I slowly came to the quieter joke of murmurations of twitterati. I am always astonished and in awe of murmurations of starlings. There is an ‘otherness’ to them – as if they are in thrall to a different dimension of existence – to the magnetic turbulences and older forces at work in the world that remain otherwise unseen.

It is also incredible to think that we as humans get to observe them in ways they will never know from the white heat heart of their furious purpose.

Perhaps the same is true of ourselves in relation to our virtual otherness and the collective behaviours and actions in which our virtual selves participate.

I have always sensed that the shape shifting mass of a murmuration carries its own ‘voice’ within it; a relentlessly changing imprint of cadences, inflections; sharp punctuations and sublime emphasis – an ornithological oratory written across the sky.

It then occurred to me that if we mapped our social murmurations – by numbers and actions across time and space we could perhaps visualise our own greater voice carried within them.

For example if there was a social campaign that could be plotted not only by number of participants (flock) but by intensity (altitude) geolocation (topography) and time (horizon) – perhaps we could create animated murmurations of social phenomena.

If we could do that we could then perhaps study the patterns and nature of them in much the same way that we study sound waves and voice recognition patterns.

And perhaps with the wider ambition of attribution, we could begin to recognize traits and characteristics in each pattern that helps us to define the real voice at work and its source and integrity.

Just a thought that I would love to explore a little more.

Complexity, simplicity & the craft of resilient brand story making

30 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Adaptive Governance, brand futures, Brand Identities, Brand people, brand Stories, Complexity, Corporate PR, Economies & Efficiencies, Identity, rare air, resilience, Rigour, Risk Mitigation, Shared Value, Simplicity, social brand, Story Ladders & Arcs, Substance, Sustainability, Ugly face of Beauty, Unilever

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The story goes that in a recent conversation with a large multinational client, yet again, at the mention of the S word, the brand people did everything from polite wincing to effectively spitting their coffee across the room.

Now to be fair, it was mentioned not in splendid isolation, elevated as some false god, the hero of the day, but in context to Shared Value and Social Brand, seen as a set of three pillars on which to build a more resilient, inclusive and adaptive Brand Story.

So, no Sustainable evangelism: just an eye to rigour and a wish to build something of substance; built to absorb whatever turbulence and volatility our fluid and accelerating world might throw at it without losing its shape.

Even though there is no intention to use the S word in the everyday brand world, we do have to use the S word in some rooms and in some circumstances – and hope that the brand people will not respond like someone just broke wind in the halls of the Brand Almighty.

Because, whether brand people like it (or understand it) or not, currently Sustainability is the corporate, operational and consulting nom de jour to describe a set of operational, systemic and social actions, processes and behaviours which deliver positive impacts, economies and efficiencies which in turn create enormous sources of value.

They construct the proofs of quality and responsibility that any self respecting brand story should leap to embrace.

It’s these very actions that will keep a brand still punting its wares long into the future.

They are what underwrite a brand’s ability to exist with integrity and confidence in a world of heavy and public scrutiny.

The scrutiny is not something to be ignored – the turbulence and volatility generated by the average angry consumer or activist is a sight to behold.

The problem for the average brand person still is the language that comes with these initiatives and actions.

For example, I don’t think the idea of creating a Sustainable Living Plan is going to have anyone in the pub punching the air, popping on some ‘lippy’, kicking up their heels and rushing into the street to evangelise to the kids at the bus stop drinking offer-price WKD.

Unliever have done extraordinary things to move the sustainability agenda forwards and the courage of the Exec and their leading light is both staggering and audacious.

But the Sustainability community is still speaking in tongues as far as most people’s grannie is concerned.

The complexity of detail and systemic language – what the engineers and scientists might call the language of sustainability truths – is not exactly the kind that makes for a breezy chat with a mate over some Big D nuts and a pint of lager top.

So a huge amount of every day people powered interpretation is needed. But it must be based upon the full picture, which means we have to dive into the choppy seas of complexity before we can possibly pop up the other side, gasping for breath sporting a stupendous thong of Simplicity ready for the brand beach.

Just setting Sustainability aside as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘irrelevant’ is at best lazy and at worst just cowardice.

When considering what makes a resilient brand story, we can’t honestly say that it’s ever acceptable to just shelve all of this stuff because we don’t like the way it speaks.

If we remove, ignore or ‘duck’ anything to do with S word, the danger is that we remove the need to account for its value at all in the architecture and truths of the brand story.

For my own part, I have stated very clearly that I never want to hear S language used in everyday parlance – especially that designed to try and convince any normal human being to embrace a more enduring lifestyle.

But it must be woven into the foundational layers of the story we tell them; or we’re just spoofing the conversation.

The Brand Story must capture the value the operational and systemic innovations and improvements the Sustainability initiatives create.

So were to start? At the bottom is as good a place as any.

Every story of any substance and meaning has a ladder of detail, information, meaning and context: actors and agents woven together with threads of insight and converging lines of circumstance, action, feeling and consequence.

The bottom rung creates the dense, immutable foundation of the story, the top rung its clearest and most uncluttered vantage point.

That most people tend to read from the vantage point of the top rung isn’t a reason to bin the rest of them though.

If you did, the ladder would weaken and eventually fall apart. It would also prove impossible to climb.

We’ve all read a story where we become aware at some point of the absence of some of the lower rungs – the character feels a little ‘thin’, some of the detail feels over stated or under represented: the story loses energy at some points: it is confused or its reasoning fails or falters, or simply that the narrative thread runs out of steam.

The Complexity invested in those bottom rungs is what allows the top rung to remain both so strong and so effortlessly simple.

We simply cannot get to the simple vantage point of the top rung without them.

Setting aside all the slightly uncomfortable detail and complexity of the sustainable world when considering writing our shiny brand story is simply foolish.

So my issue with the brand people (whom I understand entirely, as I am one myself) is not with their dislike of anything that cannot be said in a simple everyday language.

My concern is this: in their rush to remove any explicit trace of strategic and systemic Sustainability thinking & doing and its accompanying language from their narrative world, they inadvertently remove the need to account for any of it at all.

And that is bad.

Because in trying to shape a brand story, its truths, reasons to believe and its dynamic rhythm, everything must be considered. This is the juncture when the chinks in its armour, its weak points and its fragile links over time are exposed.

If you are supposedly building a resilient brand story that can account for them; that can reengineer the weak spots, inspire every stakeholder and innovate around the real differences, you need to uncover the ugly first.

A critical part of developing a more resilient brand story lies in rigorously interrogating the brand’s resilient nature – its systemic, cultural and social integrity, inclusiveness and adaptability.

Without this, simplicity is an illusion and potentially an expensive one.

While everything’s dandy in your brand world and there are no NGOs, competitors or horror of horrors, customer’s or consumers taking pot shots at you, you’re laughing.

Life is simple. Create great campaigns. Don’t sweat the ugly stuff. No ones interested.

Until they suddenly get interested.

Your supply chain messes up. A Labour Rights issue. Another dead orangutan. Your pre-packed beef meat lasagna turns out the be horse-shit.

Usually at this point, you call Corporate Affairs, drop off the file, and hope it’ll be OK in the end.

The one thing that the brand people seem not to have noticed is that they are in a rare position – and if they chose to plumb the complexity of all that ‘S’ stuff, they could create a far more resilient brand story and generate value for the business far far beyond the usual horizons of the CMO and Brand Director.

The gift: that they view the world through brand eyes and sensibilities. If they view the operational and systemic nature of the business through the same lens, they may well highlight a flaw in the model of the business that may not have occurred to anyone else – one that could cause expensive or irreparable damage to the brand.

There is an economic benefit to this: if you account for the sustainability truths and ambitions of the business that delivers the brand, you are far more likely to have spotted the trip wires.

Given that the reflex position currently seems to be “why would I invest brand budgets in making this stuff a priority when it isn’t for my consumer? – it is sometimes worth doing a quick sum for fun. Try assessing how much money a business or brand has invested in Corporate PR reactions hastily and expensively constructed to mitigate damage to reputation because they missed something that hindsight cruelly points to a quite glaringly obvious.

Two examples – Foxconn & Apple. Palm Oil & Dove.

If the architects of the both the Apple and the Dove brand stories had been compelled to include, scrutinize and account for every operational, systemic and social dimension of the brand, they would have realized that, in Apple’s case, Labour Abuses (however distant) don’t sit well on the consciences of the Millennials and Gen Xers you are inspiring to Go Create. Nothing dries up the creative juices faster than feeling that you are pouring them into a machine that sanctions labour tyrannies and tries to cover them up when they’re busted.

They would also have notices that The Real Beauty Campaign was carrying an ugly secret – that it takes a shed load of Palm oil to grease the wheels of the Ugly World of beauty. And that sadly all to often means depleting forests and dead orangutans. Nothing pretty about that. And if you’re spouting Real as your mantra, the first person to get real should really be you.

This is not to say that both companies haven’t made enormous amends and changed the operational world of sourcing both human labour and palm oil in the process.

The point is they could have saved themselves a lot of Corporate PR money if they had just lifted up a few inconvenient stones and rummaged under some complex bushes.

The Solution?

There are many solutions and methods to help and enable Brand People to shape a simple top rung brand story without simply shelving the detail.

In the process of developing an approach designed originally to simplify the complex world of the circular economy and used more recently on a project I am undertaking to socialize the Genome, I have created a simple laddering model.

The example shows how one can create a simple and everyday mantra to represent a deep and impenetrably complex topic – in this case the Circular Economy – in 4 simple steps from Complexity To Simplicity.

Screen Shot 2014-11-30 at 14.49.00

It demonstrates that, as you climb the ladder, the simple use of human insight and a more creative strategic approach to populist territories and topics enables you to shift from the complexity of the Circular Economy towards a more general embracing life style framing in 4 simple steps.

Complexity. Insight. Territory. Simplicity

There is no reason why a model designed to mine and shape simple yet inclusive story telling from even the most complex subjects such as Sustainability and Genomic Science should and could not be applied to the average brand out there.

As the average consumer’s ability to scratch the shiny brand surface and plumb the depths of what happens beneath it increases, along with their ability to act against or delist at the click of button or the swipe of a touchscreen, its worth more than light consideration.

Be sure that your brand story isn’t pretending to be something it isn’t.

Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned.

SUPERDIGICALORIFICTXTMEAPPITROCIOUS! Supersize living &; the rise of digital obesity.

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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brand futures, Digital living, mobile, social brand, supersize me

Image

Speed of Life is a wonderful thing. Progress, and the inexorable march of on line living, technology and the sprawling social networks that have come with it, has slung shot those who can afford it into a 21st century filled with an endless stream of content for the highly emerged and highly demanding Right Here Right Now digital citizen.

It’s not hard to see why Businesses and brands desperate to stitch themselves into the fabric of the new consumer consciousness have come to see leaping into this new digital wonderland as a magic answer, inspiring, resolving and delivering all of their dreams, issues and woes at once.

Digital ‘stuff’ can illuminate and expand brand presence, overcome budgetary and operational challenges and polyfill inadequacies all in one shot. Genius. What’s more the captive audience is awesome. There’s a heaving mass of relentlessly connected creatures out there superglued to one device or another, as brilliant as the 3D graphics on our android touch screen and as unlimited as our mobile package, bound in an electric cat’s cradle of joined-up-ness.

And in a world where People talk to people; machines talk to buildings; homes talk to owners; bus-stops chat to commuters, cams speak to police stations, clouds speak to cables and ideas speak to reality through 3D printing technology, the opportunities for businesses and brands to inveigle themselves are seemingly endless.

Our kaleidoscopic ability to multi-task our multi-life and its many personas, searching a holiday, gaming, booking a table, sending an email, grabbing three music downloads (illegally of course) while txt avoiding a tricky mother and recently downgraded BF between wi-fi hotpots presents a wonderland for every experience, service, product and platform designer, innovator and engineer out there.

For a business looking to:

  • build an authentic meaningful and differentiated social brand
  • Improve Reputation and NPS scores
  • stimulate appropriate and meaningful innovation that creates and captures real value
  • move from a bought media to earned media model
  • embrace the game changer mechanisms and communities of the not for profit social entrepreneurial brands

this new rich dynamic and fluid world with its social networks, causal platforms apps, communities of interest and endless playgrounds of content offers a host of opportunities and an infinite number of occasions at which a business can create added value, improve customer centricity and reach a new audience from a myriad number of angles and directions.

The only issue that faces them seems to be that of deciding which conversations to join, who to love up and where to aim the super rainbow gorgeous gun of digital first.
Even the Newtonian truth of our shiny new gig-enabled universe seems to offer salvation and an opportunity to do a Cloud worth of more Digital ‘stuff’.

The toxic underworld that doesn’t feature in the Unlimited Me brochures – the quite unpalatable opposites to our electric speed of life can be turned into a positive in our newly connected world.
A number of businesses and brands have already seized on aspects of the digital distemper:

  • The loss of real human connection and community
  • The dislocation of the poor and the elderly
  • The rise of cruel digital anonymity – e.g. cyber bullying and sexting
  • The collapsing quality of content at ever increasing speed and volume.
  • The as yet unanswered question heavy mobile use’s potential to micro-wave our brains

turning them into the gift of a higher purpose beyond profit for the brand or business, taking them up as a new causes to fight, using the networks and platforms to play out off set strategies for social cohesion, volunteering schemes and outreach projects, delivering apps that donate and micro-fund community action and real impact, and galvanizing employees on and off line to ‘give back’

 But there is a danger in this Bad Into Good model for me. Because I believe it has the potential to disguise or wholly obscure the exacerbation of a far more insidious malaise – the one thing I believe presents the only truly equal and opposite force to that positive powering our hi-speed digital lives – the condition of digital obesity.
We are, in digital terms, becoming morbidly obese – and businesses and brands asserting their digital persona in the world will only make the condition worse.
To grasp some measure of the potential ‘tonnage’ of digital stuff coming our way in the not too distant future, one only has to look at the seismic budgetary shifts in both marcomms investment from traditional to new media channels and in operational emphasis to online customer retail and service models.
And as with their friends in the fast food retail sector, businesses and brands cannot simply lay the responsibility for healthy levels of consumption at the door of those consuming it.
In our supersize-me digital world they have engineered a plethora of ever greater choice – a curse that we seem incapable of undoing or casting off for fear of not being or being seen to be ‘connected and ON’.
We’re in an endless lock-in at the All You Can Eat big byte buffet and we’ve eaten the key.
We are becoming increasingly immobilised by our mobile selves, screeching to a halt mid stride, sentence, hump or sleep to answer the seductive vibration and ping of another pointless digital missive.

We are stuffing our faces with gigabytes of links, looks and lazy emotion to the point of nausea.

We are increasingly crippled by the devices sitting in front of us, paralyzed by the mere thought, let alone the actual loss, of power or connection. We sit slumped in bars watching the bars on our mobiles flicker in and out of range. We find ourselves frozen in silhouettes, stupid people holding smart devices to the sky, some half open window or the door in some desperate search for connectedness and meaning.

More and more of us are quietly and invisibly suffocating under the sheer weight of our fabulous unlimited-ness – rolled in fold upon fold of multiple personas, accounts, passwords, profiles and the multitude of screen devices that serve them. For some, digital citizenship is crushing, both physically and spiritually – a crisis of wellbeing.

We are getting less emotional bang for our digital buck – becoming spiritually diminished by the ever increasing and relentless consumption of the over illuminated text of content, connection and correspondence – the Windows to our soul now come with a Microsoft logo seared into the lids.

There is even a nihilistic dimension appearing; with grown adults oppressed by the SKY Plus listings – the endless chore of deleting all the things they will never have time to watch delivering a harsh reminder of their own mortality. There is no 27 Hour Day App you can tap to make it alright

People in business are doing less with a 24/7crackberry habit than they did by walking down the office floor and only answering calls in office hours. We now manage tsunamis of emails playing pass the parcel and administrating the professional persona we want the world to see, not who we are or what we’re really worth.

Even at our current level, If bytes were calories some of us would quickly become the lead feature in a tatty real life story magazine with larger than life pictures of our larger than life body now unable to leave the chat-room other than by crane and low loader HGV once some walls have been removed.
We are indiscriminately consuming supersize portions of content and correspondence at greater speed and greater volume than ever before and to such a degree as to create the very opposite of the nirvana our interconnected togetherness promises.

Both we in our digital neediness, and the brands and providers that serve it are driving a culture of digital consumption that is both overwhelming and unsustainable – and ultimately destructive.

We are becoming immune to massive deliveries of every type of content, our hunger becoming harder to satiate, the digital version of a stomach stapling lying just around the corner for some of us.

And this immunity will only in turns frustrate and further inspire the brands and businesses seeking our favour to double their efforts and outputs.

We need divine editing and de-selection tools, not another shed load of low quality tat shoved down our pipe – a role that businesses and brands could well embrace to amazing effect on both their constituencies and their reputations.

It is the responsibility of any business that is considering or already peddling and utilising the digital fix to authentically embrace to a greater degree the role of divine editor physician and life coach on the behalf of societies they thrive within.

So perhaps, the next time the strategists and consultants both inside and outside your business are assessing the value of wrestling with the muscular ‘cut’ colossus of our godlike digital selves, standing astride the world wrapped in electric pixel pants packed with gigabyte greatness, they should spare a thought for its troubled twin, stuffed into ill fitting velour sports leisure wear, sweating and wheezing, roll after roll of uncontrolled content pouring over the top of its go-faster waistband as it shuffles at a snail’s pace to the supersize fridge of byte-size snacking on its collapsing peta flip-flops.

In pursuit of exploring the edges and impacts of digital obesity I would invite the sharper and more inquisitive brand and business minds out there and the big brains who serve them to get out the weights, measures slide rules and calipers and get to work on a truly transparent assessment of the situation.

Social and digital strategists both on the operational and the brand sides of business must honestly consider the more toxic downsides of our digital brilliance. They should pass a colder eye over the subtler psychiatric impacts of the nihilistic nature of our consumption when plotting a new digital dimension, otherwise they are not representing the potential for impact both good and bad that the digital virtual world has to offer.

Only then could we all leap into this amazing new world with a clear understanding of what we are getting ourselves into and what a sustainable and healthy digital citizen really might look like.

FOOTNOTE

An abridged version of the above featured in the Guardian Sustainable Business last April:

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/digital-obesity-high-tech-health

and featured as a theme in the UK Dream Wellbeing workshop I facilitated. It has subsequently been picked up the University of Surrey as a potential 4 year research piece – Digital Divinity and the search for an enlightened digital life – in search of a top up corporate sponsor.

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