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What I’m hoping for from SXSW
I’ve been to loads of conferences over the years. Most of them have left me feeling ‘whelmed’ at best and at most other times frustrated.
I blogged last year about one conference I attended in London last May. There was a general feeling that the speakers offered nothing new, virtually no excitement or insight and most of the talks boiled down to a personal retrospective. That’s fair enough you may say, but the conference was billed as being about the future of the industry.
It felt as if the speakers had just been asked to turn up and speak about anything they wanted. No vetting by the organiser and seemingly very little brief to the speakers.
As such I’ve given up on any conferences this year. Apart, obviously, from the biggy. The one we’re all off to.
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Going to SXSW? Come for a drink first
We’re inviting all SXSW-bound Londoners for a drink on Monday 8 March.
Freelancers, agency folk, designers, planners, developers and general rabble-rousers… all are welcome. In fact, even if you’re not actually based in or near London, if you’re going to be in the neighbourhood and you’re headed to Texas soon after, please stop by!
Top 3 reasons to come to Made by Many’s pre-SXSW meet-up:
- Knowledge is power. If you’re a first-timer, this is your chance to corner some people who have gone before and get the skinny on SXSW.
- It’s cool to know people. If you’re headed over on a solo mission or don’t know that many other attendees, this is a prime opportunity to make some connections beforehand.
- It’s Monday — what else are you doing?!
We’ve got some space at Two Floors in Kingly Street and we’ll be there from 6:00pm. Depending on how big a crowd we’re expecting, we might just book out the whole of the first floor, so if you are coming, please let us know (comment on this post, DM or @madebymany us).
Please feel free to share this post and invitation with anyone who might be interested.
Photo by sidewalk flying used under a Creative Commons Licence.
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How Would A Robot Read a Novel?
Last week, I went to a rather interesting talk at the LSE titled ‘How Would a Robot Read a Novel?’. I was introduced to a software, primarily used in the social sciences, called Alceste (note: this, and many other sites I’ve linked to in this post, are Google-translated pages, from the originals which are in French. There seems to be surprisingly little about it on the web in English). What Alceste does is look for repetitions of co-occurrences of words over a large volume of text to assess patterns. In the social sciences, it is used (still in only a few places, and in a limited number of cases at that) to detect instances of bias in surveys. Research has apparently shown that when words occur in the same pattern repeatedly, it is rarely random.
Alceste doesn’t understand meaning, and makes no pretenses about trying to do so. It was created by Max Reinert of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, and is now marketed by a company called Image that holds all rights to it, from what we were given to understand.
Anyway, now that I’ve given you the context, let me move on to explaining what was really interesting about the talk. Dr. Kavita Abraham, a researcher at the LSE’s Methodology Institute, used Alceste to analyse a novel called the Kilburn Social Club by Robert Hudson. It is worth noting here that when Alceste was introduced as having been used to assess some literary works earlier as an experiment, members of the audience were easily able to identify the books as being Oliver Twist and Moby Dick. With the Kilburn Social Club, Dr. Robert Hudson (a history academic-turned-author) admitted that Alceste’s analysis matched the pattern of the story he started out intending to write, in that the words used were seen as generally being grouped around 4 themes (16% descriptive, 12% football, 22% finance and 50% relationships). So it could be used, hypothetically, during the process of writing to ensure that a book wasn’t skewed heavily in one or the other direction.
Dr. Hudson clearly meant ‘hypothetically’, though, because the truth is, as we discussed after the talk, we don’t really need Alceste to tell readers about patterns in books. Why would you want to reduce a work of art to a mere jumble of statistically co-relating groups of words? People read literary works FOR that element of bias (I think James is writing a post about how opinion – bias, if you must – is in fact often not given the respect it deserves in today’s world). A quote of Mark Twain’s was proffered by one of the panel members: ‘A classic is something that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read’, but I’d argue that at a stretch you can extend it to summarizing business books – the way Kevin Duncan does on his blog, for example. It’s useful to time-starved people who want to be able to speak intelligently about a book and learn the distilled lessons from it, but who don’t have the time to wade through it in its entirety. You just can’t do that with novels, though! Here’s an example of how Alceste summarized that potboiler of potboilers, The Da Vinci Code. It’s quite a laugh.
One of the issues that was left simmering in my mind as I left the venue is that there are so many technologies we’re introduced to on a daily basis that many of us perhaps do not really question the need for – probably even more common in the case of clients. Is ‘I want a social media’ really still an accepted statement?
Google Buzz is being debated upon as either a highly intrusive or potentially highly social application, while right here at Made by Many we’re arguing the benefits of using Yammer at work versus plain old Twitter. The question isn’t what we can do with it, as in the case of Alceste, where it has been accepted that it is really only useful to the social sciences because that discipline is based on the removal of bias. The question is do we need it at all?
(A PDF of the talk, for those interested, is now available here).
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Engagement vs. measurement
I went to a talk on measuring social media earlier this week, and was thoroughly disappointed. One of the things mentioned was that measurement should be built into the strategy of a social media campaign, to which my immediate thought was: you can have success metrics, but will people come to your site once it’s built? And then what happens to your forecast? I’m reading Groundswell at the moment so it may be a sort of ‘Groundswell hangover’, but the truth is that a project or campaign that is built for the client and not the people is looking at failure even before it launches. It may be the most beautiful Flash application ever created, but unless it brings value to the user, will they come the second time around, after looking at it once and murmuring ‘Oh, beautiful site’? So considering the metrics and having them as a guideline is good, but it is best not to have that as a benchmark of success.
Another issue that was mentioned was measuring interaction with a brand if it was not on the brand’s social media landing page. I’m not sure that’s even relevant. You may upload a video on your site, but you need to face the fact that thousands of people will find it on YouTube, and they may not visit your home site. If keeping it off YouTube is your solution, then think of all the lost opportunity. You cannot control what people do on the web. If they want to watch your video on YouTube or your presentation on Slideshare, then that’s where they will look for it.
Two thought-provoking things were mentioned though: one, that we need to be careful that measurement (or our obsession with it) does not kill innovation, and the second, that the language of digital measurement is quickly becoming the language of all measurement. I’m not quite sure about that last bit but I’ll leave it to bubble in my mind a bit.
I was interested when the panel discussed the 2 criteria that are important to consider while measuring the success of a social media campaign – the overall health of the brand it was created for (which is a long-term issue), and the effectiveness of the campaign itself (which is short-term). The overall health bit ties into what I said about benchmarking success earlier – overall health to a large extent is about engagement. I just heard about the Altimeter Group’s EngagementDB report, which effectively helps to measure the health of a brand (edit): via its engagement with consumers (thanks Mike!). It takes into consideration the number of digital touch-points with a consumer and the respective level of engagement within each channel. Bonus points were awarded for corporate/executive involvement because it meant that conversation with customers was a priority for the company.
Google Analytics will get us only so far. (Edit): Engagement will take over from there – and I’ll wager engagement is way more important an indicator of brand health than Google Analytics, which is probably a decent indicator of existence.
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RSA talk: Connected Minds, Loneliness & Social Brains
Some time back, I wrote a very frustrated post on how experts from the field of psychology make sweeping generalizations of what it means to use online services like twitter, facebook and other social networking sites.
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Made By Many at 2010 SXSWi? You Can Make It Happen!
So it’s that time of the year again when those 4 letters of the alphabet start popping up on every geek’s radar with a frequency that probably makes them spin around like a top with excitement or scream at pitches that allow only bats to listen. The latter of which probably wouldn’t help their (our??) cause, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
SXSW. South by South-West. Essexessdoubleyou.
Made By Many have submitted a proposal for the 2010 SXSWi Festival, and we would love your help. We’re really excited that we may have the chance to speak about one of our passions – Agile Interactive Design. Integrating interaction design into agile development isn’t simple: one is often a linear process and the other an iterative one, leading to a process that can be confused if done wrongly. The merging of both is what we strive for in our work, creating social platforms and applications that keep the quality of user experience at the forefront, and we’d like to talk about how we do this. Simple. More details here.
If you find the kind of stuff we talk about on our blog interesting, please vote for us here. Voting closes on September 4th. Every single vote counts, and all of us at Made By Many would really, really appreciate it. Thanks in advance!
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Some of the best talks at TED Global 2009
Thanks to Graeme Douglas at W+K London, I was able to attend the Nokia-sponsored live-streaming of TED Global’s talks on Thursday afternoon.
I’ve been a big fan of the TED talks for years, and this was as close as I could probably get to actually being there. Some of my favourite talks/performances:
1. Lydia Karvina: Great-niece of Léon Theremin, who invented the Theremin, an electronic music device controlled by a player who does not actually touch it. It was actually difficult for me to comprehend that she was producing music by simply waving her hands in the air. Here’s an old video that shows her performing a couple of years ago elsewhere:
2. Eric Giler: CEO of WiTricity, a company that is researching the production of wireless electricity. Wait. Read that again: w-i-r-e-l-e-s-s e-l-e-c-t-r-i-c-i-t-y. Imagine NEVER having a bunch of messy wires under your desk or behind the TV. Imagine charging your phone on the go without requiring your charger plugged in to a socket nearby. Eric also demonstrated how that could work, and the possibilities really excited me.
3. Bertrand Piccard: OK. So there are some people in whose presence you sort of feel unaccomplished. Piccard is one of them, being one of the men who circumnavigated the earth in a hot air balloon. And his next plan is to do the same in a solar-powered airplane. He spoke of realizing one’s true potential by ‘throwing the ballast overboard’. As he said, it only took a couple of decades for 200 people to cross the Atlantic in an aircraft after Lindbergh did it, so maybe decades from now thousands of people will fly in solar-powered aircraft spreading the message that conserving energy is important for a sustainable planet, and it is possible if we all put our minds to it.
4. Geoff Mulgan: Director of the Young Foundation, who spoke about capitalism becoming more social in the years to come. Quotable quotes from his talk:
‘The only thing worse than being exploited by multinational capitalism is NOT being exploited by multinational capitalism’: attributed to Fidel Castro
“Take ‘no’ as a question, not as an answer” : Mulgan himself.
On another note, I didn’t know about President Obama creating an Office of Social Innovation.
5. Rory Bremner: The guy’s a brilliant comedian. His impressions of Bush, Obama, Clinton and Gordon Brown were hilarious. ‘Nuff said.
Gordon Brown’s talk from Tuesday is already up, but when the rest are up on TED, I’d urge you all to watch the ones above.
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Tim Malbon at the IPA’s Game Changers event
We did tweet about it at the time, but for those who missed it, here is Tim’s talk at the IPA Game Changers event from 2 months ago. Better late than never!
Tim Malbon from Made by Many from The IPA on Vimeo.
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The IPA Free Event
I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that in keeping with the spirit of Chris Anderson’s Free, which was the inspiration for the evening, the IPA had chosen to make its latest event free to attend – something that I don’t think they are accustomed to. In return, attendees had to blog, tweet, take photos or videos of the event and help publicize it. So here I am, doing my duty.
Ian Clark of thelondonpaper spoke about how they use free as an advertising model. I wasn’t quite convinced by what he had to say (“free liberates thelondonpaper to reflect on the priorities of the reader”), but was interested to hear about their Generation Free conference recently which documented what people had to say about the paper. You can see the output from their focus groups, as well as a couple of interesting presentations from the day, here. Ian also played a brilliant clip from the Conan O’Brien show that had him interviewing Louis CK who gave some killer one-liners, the best being “we have some of the most amazing technology in the world but it’s being wasted on the crappiest idiots”, with reference to people who didn’t appreciate technology for how amazing it is. Unfortunately, it’s no longer available on YouTube due to claims of copyright violation by NBC Universal, and unless you’re in the US, you can’t access it at all, even on their site. If you are in the US though, here you go:
So much for free – NBC Universal, you suck (believe me, the clip is EXTREMELY entertaining and deserves way more coverage globally than it probably is getting).
Clive Dickens from Absolute Radio spoke about their acquisition of Virgin Radio in their quest to become a bigger brand and of their initiatives to make money out of free in the music business, such as the Absolute iAMP for the iPhone app, investing in radio programmes that depend more on content via RJ’s rather than music since most music has a rights issue, and streaming footage of live concerts free online for a limited period like they did the Blur in Hyde Park concert recently. I thought Absolute would actually make an excellent ‘how to make money out of radio via free’ case study and kudos to them for sharing their lessons.
Marc Allera spoke about mobile phone company 3’s experience with free via Skype, and using it as a hook to win over customers who use social networking profusely – he showed how average usage has gone up over the last few months as a result. Again, a good example, I thought.
Finally, Matt Knight, Technical Creative Director at Wieden + Kennedy spoke about free in a completely different, and refreshing sense: he took us through the genesis of the Disposable Memory Project that he started and curates,and the stories he hopes will be told. Matt left a couple of cameras to make their way around the world at the end of the talk. I’m glad to say I managed to lay my hands on one, which I promptly went and dropped off in Dublin last weekend as I was on a holiday there, to play my part in the project.
The IPA has put up most of the presentations on Slideshare, again very proactive of them. I must say that they are quickly going up in my eyes following their not too ancient debacle at their January event.
IPA 'Game Changers' event, 14th July 2009 – Absolute presentationView more presentations from The_IPA.Update: The IPA got in touch with me on Twitter to let me know that Ian Clark’s presentation was on Vimeo, so here it is (and it has the Louis CK video – watch it!!)
IPA Strategy Group ‘Free’ Presentation 14th July 09 from The IPA on Vimeo.
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Taking a look at the social media landscape in China
I was at a talk on how internet word of mouth (iWOM) works in China a couple of weeks ago. There were a few noteworthy things that Sam Flemming, CEO and Co-Founder of CIC, said:
1. Social media is very much existent in China, but it’s like it’s on steroids: 298 million internet users, 105 million bloggers, 91 million members on their Bulletin Board Systems or BBS (discussion forums around different topics), and 58 million people on social networks. It’s all about perspective: Facebook has only 200 million users WORLDWIDE.
2. BBS have a huge influence on consumer purchases – over 80% look at reviews there or go there to ask questions before making a purchase. Much as I like Amazon, that’s not where I go to decide what to buy: but could Amazon or something like it channel prospective buyers in such vast numbers successfully?
3. QQ, China’s largest social network, has a revenue model that surprisingly very few other social networks have replicated: they don’t make money off ads but through digital micro-transactions with their own currency: QQ Coins. In fact, QQ Coins have become so successful that China’s central bank is considering cracking down on it because of its increasing use to buy real-world goods.
4. Group purchases, in the model of Dell Swarm, are on the rise. This has interesting implications for brands, who can easily reach their target audience on BBS.
5. Brands get inspiration for new products by tracking discussions on these forums. When Chinese sports apparel brand Anta wanted to create a new line of products for their ambassador, basketball player Luis Scola, they realised that fans were referring to him as ‘Four Carat’ on the web, so created a line inspired by this which went on to become a success.
6. This is a phenomenon which clearly marks the difference between the East and West: more people access the internet on their mobiles than they do on a PC.
Here is CIC’s White Paper on the role of iWOM in making purchase decisions, which Sam presented:
..and here is another interesting one on the development of iWOM and online communities in China.
There is so much talk about Facebook, Twitter and the like that sometimes we forget there are much more wide-reaching platforms – in a different part of the world. Surely there are lessons there that we’re not taking the time to learn?
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