But I’ve been busier than ever

I’ve been making stuff over at Sidekick Studios

I’ve even been blogging about the stuff that I’m making

And I’m working on a very special children’s book project which I can’t (f*ing) wait to tell you more about (here’s a sneak preview)

You can find me of course on Twitter and/or on Sidekick blog

See you online yo

I cannot even start to describe how excited I am to tell you that as of late last year I joined the brilliant Sidekick Studios as Strategy Director.

It’s been just under 2 years for me doing all sorts of stuff with Bench & friends (my freelance monicker), I had pretty much the best time ever (choose your own projects, work less, earn more – what’s not to like?). And then like most great things that happend to me in London I bumped into the legendary Adil and Nick (special thanks to Lea Simpson), a rare opportunity presented itself and I realised that it’s time to park the free-floating life and join possibly the most exciting studio in town.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Sidekick Studios take a look here. Now take a look here. Finally take a look here. Now you get what I’m saying? The combination of amazing people, startup culture, solving only problems that matter, exciting ventures & projects – I can’t think of a more stimulating gig for me for 2012 and beyond.

Only stuff that matters. Hello Sidekick

PS: other new stories for the new year:
- I’m starting to teach in a new course on consumer psychology at the LSE
- I’m working on a special children’s book project
- I’ve got new glasses

Ask yourself – how many tweets / updates do you self-censor every day (for whatever reason)? Does it happen to you that you experience something, see something you’d love to instagram but realise it’s probably not a good idea to share with your followers?

Wouldn’t you want to still be able to capture and document whatever that is but just not to share it? Currently this is impossible on most platforms (enlighten me if I’m wrong)

I’ve been writing in the past about the way that social publishing tools are altering not just our behaviour but also our (social) cognition. We’re increasingly experiencing moments of our lives through the mediation of public/social expressions. Our experiences and inner thoughts are being processed, in real time, through the ways we will, or may tell the world about it.

Goffmann famously argued that all of life is performance: we act out a role in every interaction, adapting it based on the nature of the relationship or context at hand. Now, according to common belief “Twitter has extended that metaphor to include aspects of our experience that used to be considered off-set: eating pizza in bed, reading a book in the tub, thinking a thought anywhere, flossing. Effectively, it makes the greasepaint permanent, blurring the lines not only between public and private but also between the authentic and contrived self” (NYTimes)

It’s the latter observation that I’m personally interested in these days. Apart from very few individuals who exhibit zero mediation between a thought and a tweet for the vast majority social media is a fascinating self-management or identity-management tool. Every tweet, every status update, every photo and every link we share tells something about us and contribute to the overall image we want to project to the world. We are what we share etc. We shouldn’t confuse between the mundane and the private/personal. The fact that some of us will tweet about lunch in bed doesn’t make a big shift in our perceptions between the private and the public. I believe we still fiercely protect our private/personal selves.

If we agree that publishing tools alter our cognition, then there is a growing tension between the way we process experiences and thoughts and what we think is suitable for sharing based on the self-image we want to foster and protect. We know very well what is tweetable and what is untweetable but we don’t have two cognitions, we cannot have two different ways to process the information and experiences we come across and this is resulting, depends on who you are, in some level of self-censoring.

Put differently, life-casting is stuck in a weird state whereby the personal diary is actually a public diary and we are prohibited from documenting some significant experience purely because we are aware of the audiences. Now when you’re 87 and reflecting on your life, wouldn’t you want access to the private and the personal as well?

The solution? A simple PRIVATE/PUBLIC to all of our channels. Rather than the existing setting which allow your whole channel to be PRIVATE/PUBLIC we simply need to have the option at the moment of sharing. Do I want this post/tweet/photo to become public or to be strictly private? This will allow us to freely observe, process, reflect and document but will still give us, at the point of sharing the option to decide whether this is going public or private.

And if not for any other reasons, the (hopefully) rare occasion we will confuse PUBLIC/PRIVATE will probably make a bloody good story as well…

Does that make any sense or am I talking complete nonsense??

Fashionably late, yet not a bit less ‘ranty’, I want to chip in, if i may

In short, no. Agencies are too damn busy making what Murat was referring to as branded fluff. They(we) respond to briefs, they make ‘advertising’ and that’s not going to disappear anytime soon. Despite contrary belief, advertising works – it makes our clients feel like their doing they’re job and it helps people in agencies make a living. Occasionally, it does what it’s ultimately meant to be doing – to help brands sell more of their stuff.

As much as we want to believe, and while agency peeps are accountable to 85% of the ‘start-up is the new black’ chatter (people in real start-ups are normally too damn busy running a start up), you need a certain conditions to be met to move any start up idea, small or big, from talking to doing. Even the most motivated, savvy, ingenious, oh-so-digital agencies will find it massively challenging to direct resources from their hectic billable everyday operation to make a start-up idea happen.

I don’t mean to discourage anyone but let’s get real. Ask Noah if he could have made Percolate happen from inside the Barbarian Group, ask Andy what happened to the potentially amazing “we feel earth”, Ask Tim about the time and resource he now puts in BrandFeed. Making most start-up ideas happen takes massive resource that 95% of individuals and agencies can’t afford (there are some small exceptions).

The very clever person that is Tim Malbon wrote an inspiring and sobering respond to Murat and I cannot agree with him more. Expecting agencies to become the next darling start-ups is a bit childish. Most importantly as Tim notes, the ‘makers generation’ is so much bigger and significant than brands and agencies.

What agencies can do and some of them have been trying for a while with vary degrees of success is to (a) learn from and adopt the culture of start-ups into their process and operation, and (b) make some stuff that is actually useful (yawn, it’s funny how the chatter of 5 years ago is so similar only instead of the darling start-up, we had the darling ‘utility’ with Nike+ as the holy grail – how many of these did agencies end up making?)

There’s loads to do between the branded fluff and the next instagram. And smaller useful platforms that bring value to people is where agencies can realistically innovate for/with their clients. One such idea that got me super excited the other day is Housebite. A simple, clever platform that revolutionises Take Away and makes any foodie and aspiring masterchef a local take away spot. Now if I had someone like Waitrose as a client I’d be bitting the shit out of myself for not coming with this idea for them.

When we’ll get just a bit closer to make some stuff like Housebite for our clients we’ll earn the permission to talk about start-ups.

‘naff said

Take a look around and you get a sense of end of season sales, or just a really lazy, desperate marketing culture. It seems like all mobile carriers have lost their plot in the past few years. You spend millions of pounds on obvious, predictable, meaningless, empty ‘repositioning’ (e.g Vodafone Power to You – how bloody empty is that?) and then spending some more gazilion pounds communicating these new empty ‘strategies’.

But the truth is that people today probably care more about the chewing gum brand they consume than they care about their mobile carrier. You have done everything you can to completely commoditise the market with short term tactics and heavy focus on value and to minimise differentiation to the point that not only that people don’t care they can’t even tell the difference between these companies.

And recently it’s all about the freebies, the final sign of desperation – gig tickets, high-street vouchers, 3 months broadband service – you cannot even remember which one offers you what freebie…

Oh and you probably spend another million pound each on ‘social media’. Paying your social media agencies to do some social media campaigns, you have “increase facebook Likes by X%” or “get more twitter followers” on your briefs and I bet (well, I know) you also write ‘connections, engagement, loyalty and advocacy’ on your internal and external marketing presentations.

But here is the grim reality – just search “(name of company) + customer service” on Twitter and you immediately get the real picture:

[note: yes, there are some positive tweets as well, I noticed. But there are clearly more people pissed off at you than people you made happy. fact.]

Hey here’s a free tip. You’re a SERVICE company. Good service is what people need and want from you. Not freebies.

I know it doesn’t fit your organisational structure and verticals and budget allocation etc, but customer service can and should be your #1 priority and it might as well be your best brand and marketing strategy. I bet you, if you take only 5% of your marketing/media budget and invest it back into your customer service – more staff (so we won’t have to wait 45min on the line), better trained staff (so we will actually get the answers when we finally get someone), trully listening to what people say and acting on it, meaningful innovation in Customer Service – these can make a huge difference – just look around or ask people like Zappos and StreetCar.

Best,

Asi.

It’s a combination of award entry video mentality with ‘viral’ video practice. Or pur differently it’s a new kind of make believe. I find it super interesting because although it is rooted it a new world thinking, it sometimes has the wishful thinking or pretending of the old world.

It’s interesting because it allows not so practical ideas, told in a convincing way, to gain momentum and excite people despite their real lack of impact. Isn’t that the art of storytelling?

It somehow fits to what the Willsh almighty was talking about with loads of equations and stuff.

Here’s how it work:

You create a piece of communication and/or an offline experience that reaches few people. You tell the story in a convincing, compelling way (hence the award entry format). Put it on the web and if the idea is cool enough and you might win.

The mother of all make believe is of course Coke happiness machine. Here are few random others:

This is my current favourite:

I can’t remember when was the last time I was so ambivalent about something.

‘Align around good’. Already sounds a cliche but still is one of the most important sentiments and behavioral shifts in marketing and corporate culture, and digital (platforms and cultures) have massively contributed to this shift. For few years we have proudly been preaching and teaching our clients to ‘do good’ and be creative in the ways you communicate it.

It works 99% of times and it’s almost always the right thing to do but in the case of the Japanese disaster some initiatives as well as the way people marketed these initiatives left me with some weird feeling. I thought about it for few days before writing this post and I realised that it’s mainly the Japanese stoic people, culture and response to the crisis that is in contrast to some of the shouty initiatives taken by brands and agencies.

Perhaps the genuine motivation to help was somewhat, occasionally, overshadowed by being too shouty and salesy about it as if it’s just another exercise in shifting people behaviours or as if there’s a new category in Cannes or Webby’s for ‘best crisis relief initiative’ (you could see the award entry video around some of these initiatives).

Perhaps there are some occasions that the old-school practice of just quietly donating your money without trying to mobilise anyone else, without making a graphic design or branding of it, without shouting all over twitter is the right thing to do.

Take a look at what some big Japanese companies are doing (you’ll have to dig around) and you’ll find out that the money they have contributed quietly (almost discreetly) is way more than some of the crowd-sourced branded stuff.

I don’t really have a conclusion to this – perhaps you do

Because I’m fond of anything that makes people happy and instagram has tons of this rare quality .

Because it makes creating beautiful photos so easy it’s actually ridiculous

Because it’s user experience, attention to detail and simplicity is just great

Why I hate instagram

Because it gives people the illusion of creativity. It can’t be that easy to make beautiful photos and to some extent it dilutes ‘real’ creativity

Because it gives people permission to dial up the noise on my stream (more here)