unknown unknowns

Content formats for the social web

I've spent the last couple of months obsessing about the potential benefits of content formats.

In much the same way that successful TV or magazine content is formatted - either the whole publication or show (Come Dine With Me, Britain's Got Talent...) or a section within it (think "Relative Values"...) so too is some of the most popular content on the social web. At least that's the thinking.

And there are loads of examples, from Phil DeFranco's monologues to the apparently throwaway remarks of Shit My Dad Says and the simplicity of What's in your bag?

But RSA Animate has to be one of the the best illustrations of the power of a format. And the reason that it's such a powerful demonstration is that we can compare the same content in different formats, because Dan Pink's talk about Drive has been uploaded as a straight-to-camera piece and as part of the RSA Animate series.

So here's the basic version (c. 40k views at time of writing):

And here's a chunk of the same talk with added animated doodling (c. 2.5m views at time of writing):

Admittedly, the Animate version has enjoyed and benefited from a lot of attention on the interwebs. And you might argue that it's shorter and therefore more accessible. But beyond this one direct comparison, a broadly similar pattern can be seen across all the RSA's straight-to-camera videos (views in the hundreds and low thousands) and the RSA Animate videos (which tend to have views in the hundreds of thousands). Clearly, the Animate format is adding something to the viewing experience so that these videos are being enjoyed and shared more than the non-formatted talks.

Now that's what I call a world class content format (in the style of the bald one in Masterchef).

Brand planning for the social web

By that I don't mean brand planning for social web brands. I'm talking about the way we describe and define brands in general and how that plays out on the social web.

Onions, triangles, keys, whatever shape you want to use: if we're honest, these frameworks often end up containing sets of words which don't always make complete sense.

Or rather, they make sense in a hyperbolic context like advertising. The words "more refreshing than any other beer" are understandable and make sense within the confines of the sentence. But many people would - in a conversation in the pub, for example - challenge the idea that one weak, watery lager could be more refreshing than one of the many other weak, watery lagers. But wrap that idea up in some advertising that claims the said beer "refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach", and suddenly the tenuousness of that original idea no longer matters because the ad is funny.

However, when we come to think about how the same brand might behave on the social web, that model tends to fall down. We're not creating a dramatisation of a thought that we then fire at people. We're talking to people. And that means you have to make sense. At least it does if you want people to listen and respond with something vaguely relevant or connected to what you've just said.

It's a waifer thin observation but one that is potentially quite useful because it helps answer the question: should my brand be actively using social platforms? If your brand is based on an opinion, such as dirt is good, that people can talk about and debate, then chances are social stuff will work for you. If your brand believes it's so good you'll have magical powers over the opposite sex, then it probably makes sense to stick to translating your advertising hyperbole into digital things for people to play with and share.

And, by extension, if you're developing a new brand that you hope will live in the always-on social web, then consider defining it in terms that people can understand and talk about.

Campaigns and Conversations

I'm currently doing lots of thinking about taking FMCG brands into the digital world. Which is not as clear cut as it sounds, given the brands in question are laundry and household cleaning products. Not, on the face of it, the kind of brands people gravitate towards when surfing the interweb.

The received wisdom - at least, received within the digital marketing world - is that we all need to get off the campaign trail and demonstrate our commitment to the people who buy our brands by engaging them in an always-on, conversational, [insert your favoured buzz phrase here], relationship.

The weakness in this commitment not campaigns thesis is that not everyone wants to have a conversation with your brand. Many people don't want a conversation with any brand. So why throw away a form of marketing that has worked very well (though not without fault) for many years and that is still relevant for large numbers of your audience?

What we need is a bit of both. Or rather, we need to work out if our particular brands are best suited to one or the other or whether they can do both.

posterous as remembering machine

I've been experimenting with posterous.

Having pushed my slouching round the interweb up another notch, I was beginning to realise I was losing touch with things I was saving to delicious. Over the years, it has become the digital equivalent of the drawer in which you stuff everything that will be useful one day. Only infinitely bigger.

The problem is, I only turn to it when I know what I'm looking for. I tend not to look through it for inspiration, which it clearly could be really good for, being crammed with everything I've found interesting for the last three or so years. Instead, I tend to use it like I use the drawer: when I'm looking for something I know exists (that power adapter for India, the MOT certificate...), not when I don't know what I'm looking for.

I concluded that if I haven't developed the habit of using it like google by now (after three or so years of use), I never would. So I wondered if a visual record of everything, rather than the text record that delicious gives you, might at least help me remember more of the stuff I'd saved.

Enter posterous.

I'm using it in much the same way I would delicious. With the bookmarklet installed in my browser, it's no slower than saving to delicious, but you get a far richer record of everything you've saved. One that I feel much more inclined to browse through as it builds. I'm guessing that that alone will help my feeble mind recollect more of the stuff that's buried in there. 

It's slowly filling up with a somewhat random collection of weird videos from YouTube, social web stats, and bicycle related nonsense. It will probably mean nothing to you but if you fancy having a gawp and a rummage, you can find it here.

PPP

The Content Factor of movies

As I mentioned before, some content factors are likely to wither in the evolving technology ecosystem. And some are refusing to die, despite huge changes in the way that they are produced, distributed and consumed.

Movies are a case in point. Just look at the technological developments since the introduction of sound in The Jazz Singer in 1927. (And, yes, I know that it wasn't the first film to use synchronous sound and that it employed sound in only a handful of places. But it is widely regarded as a landmark in the development of filmmaking for the first use of sound, so I'm not going to get pedantic about it.)

Here are some of the more notable advances:

1927 - introduction of synchronous sound in The Jazz Singer
1933 - first drive-in movie theatre
1935 - Becky Sharp, the first feature shot entirely in three-strip Technicolor
1941 - US broadcast TV standardised with the adoption of NTSC
1953 - Cinemascope (widescreen)
1958 - 70mm
1970 - IMAX
1975 - Betamax introduced, followed by VHS in 1976
1978 - Discovision (Laser disc)
1996 - DVD format introduced in Japan by Toshiba
2001 - BitTorrent released
2005 - 5th generation iPod supports video

And at about this point (late 2002) Universal release 8 Mile.

The significant thing here is that despite these seismic changes to the way in which people can and do enjoy movies, the "shape" of movies themselves  - the content factor - has changed very little over the same period. The Jazz Singer and 8 Mile are, despite some superficial differences, very similar stories. And by superficial, I'm not suggesting that those obvious differences are not significant or profoundly important. Simply that on a structural level the narratives of both films share a great deal. Namely, that both movies concern themselves with young ambitious men, driven to succeed performing a music that is not part of the culture they grew up in.

Hence The 8 Mile Jazz Singer.

Content Factors: the shape of media

We're all familiar with the concept of form factors: the shapes that our stuff tends to be, especially consumer electronics like phones, TVs, portable music devices. I'm not sure how useful this is, but it feels like we also see content in the same way; that there are dominant "shapes" to things we like to watch on tv and and listen to on radio, for example, shapes that we could call content factors.

Form factors are as much about what we expect our things to look like as they are about the way those things work. The two are interrelated, of course. Certain shapes work better than others, hence become popular and therefore dominate our perceptions of how those things ought to look.

Clearly, convergence in the means of transmission (everything is digital) and in the devices with which we consume content (more things have screens) means that in most cases the physicality of the object we access stuff on is irrelevant. Or rather, the device has little connection to the stuff we consume on it: I listen to radio on my TV, I read newspaper articles on my phone; I watch movies on my laptop.

Which brings us to what you might call the trinity of media: distribution, device, content. For a long time, those three elements were tied together. When we talked about TV we were talking about a self-contained system in which a wooden box with a screen displayed a certain style of content that was transmitted at a particular wavelength. Separate discrete systems provided access to other types of content that we call radio, movies and so on.

Then those discrete systems began breaking down. Movies were freed from the cinema screen first by broadcast TV then by video, for example. And digitalness completed the process by making everything available everywhere. And enabling me to listen to Smooth FM on my telly.

Except...except, the one element of that media trinity that hasn't yet converged is the content. We - most of us - still have a relatively clear and common understanding of what those types of content should look and feel like. These are the content factors that we expect to experience and demand of the content creators who make movies, tv, ads, news and so on. And, usually, those content factors were shaped by the discrete systems in which they were traditionally distributed and accessed.

The question is: how enduring will these content factors be now that they have been freed from the systems that created them? The movie content factor has been remarkably resilient despite many technological advances in transmission and access over the decades (more on that in another post). This may be driven as much by the fact that movie studios have found new ways to make money from the films they produce as it is by people's desire to watch movies. But, ultimately, the business model is irrelevant if people grow tired of the product. So clearly, we have a deep seated attachment to the movie content factor.

As "the kids" grow up with completely different media consumption habits, which of these old-world content factors will be replaced by new ones? And is there some sort of collective consciousness or memory that will protect and preserve some of them?

The imaginable v. the feasible

The bike project has been a revealing window on the realities of the product development process. The last few month's prototyping has been a constant push and pull between the imagineable and the feasible: what we want to do isn't always physically possible. Or, more accurately, it's either not economically viable or there are no suppliers willing or capable of delivering it.

So even when planning we're constantly thinking about how things will physically be fabricated. Inevitably, and quite rightly, executional considerations inform the planning process.

To force a parallel with the world of communication, this may be an argument for allowing greater creative involvement in strategy development, or greater planning involvement in the creative process. Or even that these silos are increasingly irrelevant.

But really it's just a good excuse to share this great little video from Parker Steel. It shows their computer-controlled laser cutting machine making lace of a couple bits of steel tubing. Call me a geek, but a part of me could watch this all day.

(Please forgive my gonzo coding. Parkers didn't stick the video on YouTube/Vimeo so I've had to cut and paste as best I could. As you can see, I don't really know what I'm doing. But right-clicking will give you some control over the video.)

Misusing products

I love the idea of misusing things. Or rather, using products for a purpose other than the one for which they were invented. I like the DIYness, the contrariness and, in some cases, the utter pointlessness of making something do the illogical.

Which is why I've been working on making a stopframe animation using Excel. It is just so pointless and nonsensical an idea that I couldn't resist it. My intention is to colour the cells to make various shapes and then make the shapes move. Simple. Here's a test I prepared earlier.

Of course, I want the finished article to be somewhat more whizzy than this which means it's getting a little labour intensive. Which takes time. And to complicate matters, I'm very good at procrastinating.

And then in the middle of all my spreadsheet sweating - and procrastinating - Ben went and posted this. Which isn't an animation and mostly uses type rather than shapes. But it could have easily used both. 

And the moral of the story is that when you have an idea, do something about it. Quickly. Because you never know who else might be thinking of exactly the same thing.