Archive for January, 2009

It’s taken me a while to get down to compile this – we’ve been busy at Made By Many! I was actually contemplating the necessity of this series of posts but then figured it’s a nice way of keeping our readers clued in to the kinds of things that interest us and therefore the kind of company we are. So here goes:

1. I Want You To Want Me: The brilliant team behind We Feel Fine, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, have come up with a visualisation of online dating – a very beautiful one, might I add.

2. TypeDeskRef: Do you know what a ‘historiated letter’ is? If not, you may want to get a copy of Type Desk Ref, which explains typographic terms. 

3. A visual repertoire of Obama’s run for the White House: The biggest event of last week was definitely the swearing-in of the 44th President of the United States. Tim’s written about it in our last post. This is a site that chronicles all the online things to do with Obama since the start of his campaign. 

4. Photosynth of the swearing-in: CNN teamed up with Microsoft to consolidate all the images that people who were present at the inauguration took, and submitted. 

5. Whitehouse.gov before and after: We must give credit to the man of the moment and his team for making the switch-over so quickly. Bush gives way to Obama – and look how the official White House website changed!

6. We are All Gonna Die: There is something eerily beautiful about the ‘100 metres of existence’ screen. Take a look. By Simon Hoegsberg.

7. YouTube videos now embeddable in Slideshare: ReadWriteWeb reports on this rather useful feature. 

8. En Million Historier: Danish site based on the ‘create a story’ idea.

9. Starbucks Pledge 5: Pledge 5 hours of your time to community service, and get a free coffee from Starbucks. Reminiscent of Orange Rock Corps. As Tim said, there’s definitely an Obama effect in terms of ‘doing good’!!

10. The history of the internet: This has been going around for the last week, so now it’s our turn to pop it on our blog! Jokes apart, it’s a great visualisation.

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

11. DiggGraphr: A graphical representation of the stories that are big on Digg.

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That’s the title of an excellent piece in Advertising Age by Reuben Steiger the CEO of Millions Of Us (great name!). Starts off by asking the fascinating question of why ad agencies, with all the client relationships and wherewithal, didn’t get their heads round how to create serious websites back in the day (I’m discounting the ‘product support site’ and interactive advertising.) Reuben relates how surprised he was the first time around that they didn’t ‘get it’ and crush him, and proposes some reasons for this:

He goes on to argue out that as time went on, ad agencies learnt that “the skills and value delivered by interactive agencies are different that those of the lead agency, and the two have learned to play together much better…”, which is all true and brings us bang up to date, to the rise of the “Social Media Agency”.

Reuben’s assertion is that history is repeating itself: the crucible that forged what became the interactive agency (macro-economic catastrophe, technological advances and rapidly changing media habits) is re-invented in today’s economic climate, media culture and technology. He doesn’t quite say this, but clearly the implication of the piece is that the skills and value delivered by social media experts and agencies are in turn different not only to ad agencies but also to the established old-school interactive firms.

We set Made by Many up in September 2007 to help clients create, manage and monetise community for brands. We’ve always shied away from the term “social media agency”, although nearly everything we do has a social dimension. I suppose that’s because we were wary of jumping on a bandwagon, but it’s also because we see the Web itself as the original social software, created by a community and delivering social media since day 1.

In London, we have definitely seen a gulf between “old new media” firms and the new model of smaller, faster, overtly social and more open and agile “new new media” agencies (if we can use that awful term). I wonder if the qualities that got the old model through the dot-bomb wasteland of 2001-3 are now holding them back. For example, one way agencies dealt with the downturn between 2002-4  was to invest much more effort in managing the development process. Because web development was risky and clients change their minds, web development processes at that stage were geared up to limit change (which didn’t work btw). Another example might be that agencies sought projects that were as big as possible. Big was good in that market – even if it made for less agile design and development, and less experimentation.

Today (and I hope I’m not being unfair, I don’t think I am) some of the Web 1.0 agencies seem still to be addicted to the ‘old ways’: monumental projects that take months, a limited palette of “technologies we have in-house”; a reticence to partner and embrace OSS; and an obsession with owning IP. Let’s face it, they have little incentive to call their clients up and say, “guess what, over the past few years it got quicker and cheaper to make even better sites so we’d like to pass that value on…” I think it’s very difficult to go social using ‘the old ways’.

The old digital agency model is not helpful today. Instead, the industry can learn a lot from social start-ups (like Vimeo – who I am in love with, or SoundCloud) and work as fast as possible, being entrepreneurial, pragmatic, and nimble – and take advantage of the best thing about Web technologies: your ability to make changes if it doesn’t work. We try and use very visual, rapid prototyping techniques to work very very fast and to ‘grow’ an idea into being like a gardener rather than a factory owner. In that sense, we have thousands of stakeholders on a design project – which is a healthier way of thinking about “users” anyway. We try to define just enough to create the scaffolding into which a service can emerge, driven by user behaviour, “made by many”.

People in traditional agencies – ‘old new media’ and our cousins in advertising – say they find all of the above quite challenging – which is weird because these agencies are stuffed with really smart people. So, it does feel as though the new model of online experience, the new ‘norm’ of greater participation and an understanding of community dynamics, does indeed require a specific set of skills and experience to get right (and certainly to get right cost-effectively). I think it’s also very difficult to set out with the ambition of going straight to the ‘doing social’ stage without building on a bedrock of hard-gotten knowledge (the ‘awful truth’ about how shonky and flaky Web technologies are, or how to get the most from people with developer-shaped brains (or even how to communicate with them), and an understanding of the merits of simplicity and how users think). It’s really difficult to get the front of that queue without paying your dues.

Setting out to “do social” or to “be or become a social media agency” seems to me to be the wrong way round. If you create the right conditions for the service to emerge (obviously, within a framework of your own brilliant ideas and a clear grasp of what you’re trying to acheive overall) you will *probably* end up with something social because just because that’s the way people want their Web to work these days.

Right, off to change our name to “Made by Millions”…

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Let’s get straight into it:

1. The Whopper Sacrifice and its sad end: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency famously responsible for the Bill Gates-Jerry Seinfled Microsoft ads, came up with the concept of sacrificing 10 Facebook friends in exchange for a Burger King Whopper. In less than a week, Facebook shut the site down. If you go to the site now, you note that 233,906 friendships were sacrificed for this – kudos to CP+B and some negative press for Facebook. 

2. Tweetbacks by Dan Zarrella: Similar to the ‘blog posts that mention this post’ idea, Dan Zarrella has created Tweet Backs to track where your tweets are being referenced. 

3. Klout: As a sort of addendum to this post of mine earlier, Klout is a service that tracks your social influence across the web. Currently in private beta. Nope, I haven’t tried it yet. 

4. 8tracks: It’s been tweeted multiple times by now, so you must have heard of this (sort of) replacement for Mixtape and Muxtape. Music lovers of the world rejoice. 

5. Twitter Venn Diagrams: This is self-explanatory. 

6. Spotify: Another sort-of replacement for Mix and Muxtapes. Again, currently invitation-only, though I did hear some buzz on Twitter about that changing. 

7. Obama-themed coffee: The 42nd President of the United States takes oath next week, and to celebrate, Krispy Kreme UK are giving out free Obama-themed coffees if you say the secret phrase. 

8. TV.com: This could be Hulu’s identical twin, going by the look of the site anyway. Apparently it is CBS-backed. With Hulu due to be available in the UK in the near future, this will be an interesting space to watch. 

9. TabletPCPost: This is seriously one of the coolest things I’ve seen this week. Watch how Google can recognize your mouse-writing. (handwriting would be the wrong word I think!)

10. Ikea’s Embrace Change campaign: Ikea is looking to wrangle a contract to do up the inside of the Oval Office. What do you think it should look like?

11. Twitter scoops crash pic: It wasn’t good news of course, but this (as far as I know) is the first time Twitter has had the quickest access to photos of an event – and we’re talking even before the traditional press. As a commenter says here: “We were talking about this at 3.31pm on Twitter. It wasn’t even on CNN yet.’

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