I have tended not to go to conferences or events in the last year unless I am speaking at them. I used to go with high expectations- hoping to be provoked, dislocated in some way. The reality is that all too often, I was hearing the same old stuff (albeit with a new flickr image) said by the same old people (mostly 40 something men), done in the same old way (one way broadcast). And if I am going to sacrifice putting my children to bed, I want to feel a connection.

Last night was a real exception.

It was The Next Women Funding and Pitching event. The first part of the night was inspiring female entrepreneurs such as Sarah McVittie (founder of Texperts) and Karin Loeffen (founder of Libersy) who told their story from the heart. The mistakes they made. The challenges they faced. The lessons they learnt. The hard way. And the sacrifices and trade offs they had to endure.

It was real. It was from the heart as well as the head. No ‘commandments’. No ’5 principles’. No ‘long lists.’ Real stories. From real women.

And just when I started to feel guilty about the bedtime story I should have told my children, things hotted up where ‘Pitch-Preneurs’ who did a 3 min pitch for funding in front of angel investors. I watched in awe at some of the great ideas presented.

I felt empowered.

I felt part of something.

I felt a connection.

Innovation is thriving. Its an exciting time to be in business.

I was chatting to a smart single twenty-something about dating. She wants a boyfriend but is too shy to go onto a dating site and feels uncomfortable touting her wares and telling everyone how beautiful she is (interestingly even the most unattractive men do not seem to suffer from this fear).

She told me that she’d been using a site called datemyfriend.net: The idea is that your friends write your profile. Instead of having to blow your own trumpet, your friends showcase your talents and acts as your honest-broker. This is a much more comfortable way of approaching the dating scene because your friends can take care of the most frightening bits leaving you to focus on the pleasure.

This aligns to how many women I meet have a fear of technology: There is an embarrassment and guilt that surrounds not knowing the difference between a megabyte and megabit. Between not knowing if you are connecting via a network, Wi Fi or 3G. The tech companies have been confusing and bamboozling us for decades. There is an opportunity to take the fear out of technology for those women who are not technology-literate and dread buying technology.

What if you could go to a neutral broker and give her your requirements online? She could come back with a series of recommendations as to what most suits you. What if you could have a planning meeting once a year with someone who would come to your home and assess your current network and requirements, and make you a “technology roadmap”? This person would be like a “personal shopper” for technology. An ITA, sort of like an IFA but for technology.

Whilst technology companies are realising the advantages of post-sales support such as the Apple Genius-bar and Carphone Warehouse’s Geek Squad, no-one is taking the fear out of the pre-sales process, certainly nobody who can offer independent strategic advice.

With women spending more on technology than ever before, it might be a good place to start.

Awesomeness is the new innovation.  Well that’s according to Umair Haque – Director of Havas Media Lab.  And I couldn’t agree more.  

I was super excited when I came across Umair’s piece in the Harvard Business Blog titled “the Awesomeness Manifesto” as we at Rubber towers have also been working on our own bit of awesomeness theory – but rather than vanilla awesomeness we’ve been developing up ideas around “social awesomeness”.

In his Awesomeness Manifesto Umair charts out four basic pillars of what awesomeness is based around:
- Ethical production
- Insanely great stuff
- Love
- Thick value

Ultimately, Umair’s sentiment around awesomeness could be summed up in one phrase “Do epic shit” (and love doing it!) – a phrase coined by the CEO of Zappos.com – Tony Hsieh – at this year’s SXSW.

Within the context of Umair’s pillars of awesomeness, our concept of “social awesomeness” could be seen as the social comms framework to communicate the inner awesomeness of a business.

I won’t give away our full socially awesome manifesto yet – as we’re putting the finishing touches to it – but, to add to Umair’s pillars, when it comes to additional values I think you need to be looking at:
- Be nice
- Give
- Be useful
- Be fun
- Engage not interrupt
- Be open

What excites me most about the idea of awesomeness is that it makes me smile and makes me want to do stuff – awesome stuff – epic shit.  That’s something that concepts like innovation could never do.

 Welcome to eModeration’s social media/community roundup of last week’s events, compiled by our Research Consultant Kate Williams. All the good stuff you missed on Twitter, and the newsletters you were too busy to open!

THE HEADLINES…

The social media beach was afroth with anticipation this week, as excitement over Google Wave’s beta roll-out reached Point Break. Mashable provided a vital ‘how to’
for the lucky 100,000 who’d received an invite for the real-time tool,
which combines elements of email, IM and wiki-style editing. Only Robert Scoble refused to get his swimming trunks on, warning that “all this real time noise [is] an attention dump and will kill your productivity”.

And there were more Google-y eyes this week, as commentators peered into the future to assess the impact of Google
Sidewiki, the sidebar which allows any user to leave permanent comments
on any web-page. Vizion Interactive reminded brands to claim their Sidewiki space in order to grab the top spot on the bar. And AdAge urged brands to make sure the really interesting conversation goes on on the page itself – diminishing Sidewiki’s potential.

The US secret service was mobilized after a Facebook Poll asked “Should Obama be killed?”. Users were offered a choice of “Yes”,
“No”, “Maybe” and “If he cuts my health care”. The culprit
turned out to be a teen (bet that was a fun family pow-wow: Mom, Dad,
Junior – and six guys in shades) but the incident raised questions over
whether Facebook should increase its policing of user-generated content.

ON TWITTER…

Twitter’s back-and-forth over the small matter of advertising might be resolved sooner, rather than later. An Interpret survey just revealed that Twitter users were twice as likely to click on ads, to visit company profiles, and to review products online than non-Twitterers.

But the microblogging service shouldn’t rest on its laurels – it might be staring at a growth ceiling. Despite
last week’s massive injection of $100m capital, there’s been a
‘significant’ slump in new users: looks like a resistance point been
reached.

SOME SOCIAL STATS…

Smug smiles in online marketing circles this week, as UK internet ad spend made history by knocking TV sales into the proverbial cocked hat. But it wasn’t all unmitigated hilarity – the overall market plummeted 16.6%, and 60% of the internet spend went to search, for which we can probably read ‘Google’.

Americans have tripled the time they spend on social networks to 17% of all their internet time, according to Nielsen. What’s more, US users are likely to be more affluent, and more urban, than average – and to place social networking at the centre of their lives, higher than game-play, TV, and reading.

Advertisers have been quick to act – the spend on top social networks and blogs rocketed by 119% to $108m in August. And according to eMarketer, nearly all online retailers will soon have Facebook Fan Pages, and 91% will be using Twitter by 2011.

This despite the fact that ads on social media are achieving lower click-through than other ads – although it’s not all bad news: engagement is higher, with users more likely to use ad’s interactive features (but see our recently published White Paper for the full lowdown on interactive advertising.)

BRANDS ON SOCIAL…

Asda is harnessing social media to take a giant leap towards transparency, with the launch of a ‘new era of democratic consumerism‘. The supermarket giant is placing webcams in factories and offices, launching a new blog called Aisle Spy, and tapping its 18,000-strong online community to crowdsource product launches.

Nokia this week took aim at Google Maps, and introduced Good Things via its Ovi ecosystem: the new interactive map feature allows users to let others know about the local things they love.

And cinema chain Cineworld is promoting Disney Pixar’s new release ‘Up’, encouraging users to compete to get the most digital balloons ‘attached’ to their home, on Google Maps.

AND VIRTUAL…

Electronic Arts launched the long-awaited Littlest Pet Shop Online,
a girltastic world of virtual pets and customization. Key features
include parental consent–based access to the game, anonymity of child
accounts, and “safe chat” – meaning only approved words can be typed.

And Massively launches MMO Family,
a resource for “leveling a gaming-specced family”. Offering tips on
balancing gaming with family life to finding age-appropriate niches for
every family member, MMO Family is written by the mother in an
all-gamer family that’s growing up on MMOs.

COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT SNIPPETS…

Naming and shaming? Massively thinks about naming and shaming people who behave badly -  useful tool, or food for the drama llamas?

Inside the mind of an online community lurker Getting more lurkers active can be one of the most frustrating and challenging aspects of online community building..

 We’ve just published our latest white paper, Interaction in Advertising,
which is summarised below. The paper examines how advertising is
evolving from a one-way communicative process (the advertiser telling
the consumer what they should be thinking), to a more collaborative,
engaging format where brand and consumer communicate with an open
dialogue.

The paper discusses examples of campaigns that are
putting interaction in advertising into practice and highlights the
risks and benefits of the developing trend.

Included in the paper:

From ‘interactive’ to ‘interaction’

- Brands
are switching from paid display advertising to promoting themselves
through branded online communities, virtual worlds/games and social
media
- Advertising campaigns are evolving into an interaction
between brand and consumer, rather than the traditional one-sided
communication.

Opening the dialogue

- Engagement
is all about basic human behaviour. People don’t want to be talked at.
They want to interact, share opinions, be heard.- Advertisers
are naturally gravitating to where their audience can be found, in
communities and social networks. But the way that they engage has to
change. It’s not enough to buy buttons on Facebook: research by Uvizz
has shown how poorly people respond to this. They don’t want to
interact with advertisers on social networks, but with friends.

What a week – if you work in digital media you would have had to have your head buried in the sand to have not heard about this news by about 9:05am on Wednesday this week, let along Friday afternoon. But just in case you missed it: the IAB’s latest spend figures finally brought the news that we’ve all been waiting for – in H1 2009 online advertising spend overtook TV ad spend for the first time, (sort of) giving it a larger share of spend than any other media.

The actual figures then – online ad spend grew by 4.6% but, in the context of a market that saw an overall contraction of 16.6%, this translated into a whopping jump in market share, up from 18.7% for the same period in 2008 to 23.5%!

As soon as the news broke there was much discussion at LBi as to whether the counting was fair – should digital really be lumped all into one or should it be split into display, search, affiliates and beyond?  To me this seemed a bit like the equivalent of saying DRTV, product placement and the sponsorship of X Factor should all be counted separately and I couldn’t help but argue that just because tv is so one dimensional doesn’t mean the rest of us deserve to get a raw deal when the money gets counted.  When you look across the other categories though, it is obvious that by that logic digital still has a way to go if it wants to have the largest share of spend – in the IAB’s number print is actually split into classified and display, despite the fact that no such distinction is made for digital.

At the end of the day of course none of this is particularly important – as an agency or advertiser if you are buying in traditional and digital media (I don’t, thankfully!) it may mean you should reconsider the respective weighting of your team.  What is important is how your channels work together and that’s what advertisers need to be focused on, not which is biggest. The big takeaway though? That 16.6% decline in spend… We’re still in a recession, folks, even if the sun shines on digital.

I’ve been reading Aristotle’s “ars rhetorica” recently, and  thought I’d share some bits I’ve learnt from my (quasi) intellectual musings – as a book titled “the art of rhetoric” is  a subject which is (obviously) v.relevant to the advertising industry.

In “the art of rhetoric” Aristotle identified 3 key characteristics of a good persuader / or good arguer.  These were:
    * Pathos: appeal to the emotion of the audience

    * Ethos: a sense of credibility and “moral competence”

    * Logos: good logical structure

I always find it interesting to apply these three characteristics to advertising campaigns to see how they stand up.  And increasingly I’d argue that these Aristotlean characteristics are becoming ever important, as social media and the art of conversation dominate.  In particular I think it’s interesting to look at how the different characteristics can be used most effectively in different social media contexts.

So there you go.  Some brief (but interesting I hope) musings from ancient philosophy.

Beyond advertising, I thought it would be fun to do a quick analysis of how our political leaders (Gordon and Dave) would fair in a public debate when it comes to election time.  Here we go:

- Gordon is strong on Ethos and Logos.  He carries Ethos due to the gravitas of his economic wisdom and greying hair.  His Logos comes from years of crafting arguments in the Commons debating Chamber.

- Dave’s strong on Logos, and brings some Pathos, but is weak on Ethos.  His Pathos comes from a connection with a certain audience – i.e. the middle classes – however, this isn’t particularly strong.  And he’s certainly weak on Ethos.  His baby-face, and evident lack of experience doesn’t go down well at all with a large tranche of voters.

On the face of it, when analysing the skills of each persuader, I’d say Gordon has the upper-hand – and is likely to win a public debate.  Unless, that is, Dave greys up a little, and suddenly finds 20 years of life experience.

Finally – PLUG ALERT – if you’re interested in all of the above you should check out my personal side project aMap – a series of pocket argument guides partly based around Aristotle’s rhetoric (and informal logic).

Coming soon from Free Scott, the new entertainment venture of Ridley Scott and his brother Tony, is a trippy new sci-fi entertainment project called Purefold that plans to let brand’s sponsor the content, and let the audience drive the plot line using social networking platforms.

Produced by Ag8, the concept will see participating brands “…take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.” The project explores transmedia entertainment and will launch off of cross-platform channels.

What?

Purefold just might represent pure gold for brands looking to reach audiences in an extremely interactive format, but as of now, it has a lot of people baffled as to how it will work, what it will be, and if branded content is a good idea or not.

Discussions about Purefold on Friend Feed, the main resource planned to “harvest” story ideas, are already brewing about the question of what it means to be human, the driving theme behind the story that will be loosely based on Blade Runner. Ag8 is getting people to explore the idea of what “transhumanism” is in the Purefold discussion group on Friend Feed, but the project is often met with confusion, with participants trying to understand what is happening, and what role they will play.

For insight as to what people think of Purefold, I’ve been asking around.

A few entertainment insiders were willing to go on the record to share what they think of the project and here is what they had to say:

Jenifer Hanen, a blogger from Los Angeles, was wary of the idea of brand’s sponsoring content based on projects she has seen fail, but likes the DIY media side of the project and the idea to have the plot line driven by the audience. Listen to a conversation I had with Jen about Purefold here.

Film Production Designer Tema L. Staig, who is based in Los Angeles, first reacted to the idea of Purefold saying “The project sounds almost like virtual mad libs for content and advertising.”

She also had this to say:

“Universally, people have always needed to create visual and/or verbal stories and have a cathartic experience through those stories, either through the telling or the viewing. This is what makes us human. This is what connects us across the globe.

Historically, unrelated cultures share similar myths and stories, suggesting that we all have a desire to explain the natural, unnatural, and supernatural. It’s our most primal of needs.

It will be interesting to see how Ag8 takes story telling to humanity’s next level. The idea of us, the greater audience being involved directly in the story is compelling in that it creates (in theory) even more empathy for the characters – those characters are a part of us. It’s our baby, even if just a little bit.

How will it effect society? Will it bring us together around a global campfire? What new brainstorms might it spark? The possibilities are endless.”

Here in London, I asked Mervyn Lyn, who is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Sony Music and often gets involved with branded content for the entertainment company, what he thinks of Purefold. At first reaction, he said it reminds him of MTV’s Dubplate Drama that turned to the audience to drive the story line, a show he enjoyed because it made the viewers feel part of the show. As for letting brand’s sponsor the content, he was cautionary about the idea because so often people are suspicious when a company attempts to sell them something through a new medium.

“It depends how it is done and if it is trying to lean on branded content then they will have to strike a balance between the brand and the content so that each side doesn’t feel they are losing out,” he said.

They need to be very careful in making it driven by advertising because people see this as being railroaded and people will be cynically asking ‘what are they trying to sell me?’”

The approach Purefold is using will be ground breaking in entertainment, according to producers, and it will be distributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving both audiences, brands and platforms equal use rights through their participation.

According to Ag8’s Tom Himpe, Purefold will be broadcast across a variety of media platforms and spread virally across the Internet.

“Most brands are aware of the fact that social media has changed the dynamics of the conversation, and they can’t just spell out their message in the same way as with one-way advertising methods,” he said. “We are giving brands the opportunity to create stories over an extended period of time, in collaboration with their audiences and relying on top industry talent in both writing and directing. That’s quite a unique package, especially in view of the fact that they can use the audiovisual assets freely across all their platforms and channels, from retail to mobile, from cinema to television.”

For now Ag8 is not revealing who the brand sponsors will be, but based on Friend Feed discussions the writers are already compiling what the story line will be, all set in the near future. The question many have is how brands will fit into the discussion, and for that, Himpe had this to say:

“There are two ways in which we are “guiding” the conversation. First of all, the brand is setting up the framework of the conversation, by defining one or multiple brand propositions they want to explore and picking a story line through which they want to explore that proposition. This sets up the framework within which we harvest online conversations.

So we’re not just harvesting random conversations across the entire web, we set out specific parameters with the participating brands. Secondly, while we’re listening to what the audience wants to see within the episodes, the ultimate creative control still resides with our editorial team and the Free Scott Directors, who are making creative sense of the audience’s input. So there is another level of control there. However, it’s very important for brands to understand that Purefold is about creating top quality entertainment, and not about extended the length of their tv commercials.

There’s a different balance here, and sure, that’s something they might have to get used to.”

Still confused, but ready to watch Purefold unfold,

-Lisa