Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Holidays and Prostitution

I am off on holiday for a week and going to let the blackberry die, turn off the mobile, stop Twittering, Facebooking and blogging and re-charge my batteries properly.

I'm ridiculously excited.

But I wanted to leave you with some food for thought couresty of Stephen Davies at PRblogger.

Last year Stephen and Edelman developed a ranking that scored blogger influence and posted about the 100 most influential UK bloggers. This list featured Tom Coates @ PlasticBag.org

And my god, is he pissed off about this!

Have a read of one of the biggest rants that I have read for a long long time that actually took place on his Flickr account. Have a read, but here is a flavour:
"One of the absolute worst things that has ever happened to my blog was an article last year that named plasticbag.org one of the UK's most influential blogs. I think it was on PRBlogger.com. The amount of crap I received from people who now viewed me as a useful and exploitable commodity put me off writing for months. Longer maybe. Being viewed like a piece of meat by people who wanted somehow to carve off a little of my feeble authenticity. Disgusting...I find it degrading, patronising, cynical. It makes me want to hurl...I'm furious"

It made me think.

The project that we are doing for Cocoon has been met with pretty much universal positivity from bloggers.

I am wondering if it was that the Cocoon program was more like a beta test than a seeding program. We found influential bloggers and started to build a proper relationship and conversation with them about the handset and their experiences of it so that we could begin a process of making the next generation phone even better.  I am not sure, but I wonder if the fact that we are part of a digital ad agency rather than a traditional PR agency made a difference in the way that we approached it?

Not sure.

Anyway, as I said, a bit of food for thought.

See you in just over a week!

- Amelia

(Thank you Insufficient Postage for the image)

O2 Cocoon Blogger Launch

O2 have produced what I think is a fantastic new handset, it's called Cocoon, you can play around with it here. We are working the launch and I'm really excited about it.

I like my Cocoon for some quite girlie reasons, firstly I just think that it looks great and very different from other phones out on the market at the moment. When I take it out in the pub or at a dinner it always draws comments.

I also like the fact that this is what I would term a piece of "insight-led design." By that I mean, strip away the hype about mobiles and the reality is that after talking and texting, the third most used functionality is the alarm feature (in fact in today's Ofcom Report they said just that) Cocoon has a nest which it sits in at night, charging, and it becomes an LED alarm clock.

It also has a cool functionality which allows you to see in-coming texts that scroll via the blue LED lights on the outside of the phone (that has led to many hours with friends texting me rude words just to see the phone light up and effectively swear at us while we giggle like 12 year olds)

That is very...

...and quite funny.

So I believe in in the product which from a Planner's perspective is a good place to start.

We decided to launch the phone in the Blogosphere before any advertising started.  The fact that you're reading this blog probably means that you understand the power of digital advocacy, but if you need any more evidence see the chart below.

We used a proprietary tool called Web Mapping to uncover who we think that key influential UK bloggers. It made me smile that in the category of Thought Leaders, some old London Beersphere mates turned out to rank really highly. So if you see Faris, John, Russell or Henry around ask them to have a look at their Cocoon. I've also found smart bloggers who I was not aware of before, like Techno Kitten, Tom Hume and Di Overton.

You can see some of their thoughts and postings over at the Cocoon Blog. Please drop by and feel free to leave any thoughts that you have there, or on this blog.

We have had some really positive feedback to the way in which O2 is reaching out to the new blogger world in a transparent dialogue  It's quite brave for large clients to do something like this as suddenly control moves out of their hands over to consumers, but the learnings that they are getting for the future are, I think, priceless.

 

“PSFK: The O2 project seems
like a smart one and provides
a potential blueprint for
brands to engage with
bloggers beyond the
sending of press releases.”

Trusted Places

I'm a bit of a Trusted Places newbie but I think that it is brilliant. It's a simple concept, in fact one that I've chatted about setting up with friends in the past (I think that we called the site Tip Top Top Tips) Based out of the insight that we are always looking for top tips for people who we trust, Trusted Places does exactly what it says on the tin.

Why do I like it? Well the suggestions are smart and not always expected, I think that the visual based registration is very cool and it's easy, both to upload and to search.

Then I find out that I am not alone in my admiration,  the Guardian featured Trusted Friends founders Walid and Sokratis in their top 1o UK digital start-ups.

Walid and I connected through my post on the Covent Garden Night Market and he invited me to their beta testing of their new site - you can read all about it on Trusted Places Blog. Odd after being in so many usability labs suddenly having to do it myself, but enjoyable.

Interesting mix of people including Ian Forrester from Backstage at the BBC, who blogs at Cubic Garden, and a girl who sat opposite me who is a food taster for Waitrose and whose life seems to consist of eating her way along Marylebone High Street.

Well worth signing up and having an explore of TrustedPlaces.

The "Marketing Funnel" is broken

I really like this quote a lot.  It's from Forrester Research and talks about the new marketing dynamic that all of us involved in brands, media and communication should be addressing:

 

The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers’ trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach…

 

We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence...Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.

They have a blog on which they talk more about their four phased approach - Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy, Influence. I haven't seen anything like this from a research company before.

The thought of brands starting building reputation through conversation is a fascinating one and one that I have been doing a lot of work recently. It goes back to the good old Cluetrain and the idea that "all markets are conversations."

Hat Tip to Tom who blogs at Usable Interfaces.

Pulverizing our own privacy

At the start of 2007 New York Magazine published a great article called Kids, The Internet and The Death of Privacy by Emily Nussbaum. It's a fascinating article, well worth reading.

Nussbaum says that the fact that teenaged online  behaviour could well be  "the greatest generation gap since rock and roll."

I'm not so sure.

Something has radically changed in our grown-up Web 2.0 world since the publication of the article.

While I totally agree that:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores...loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones...They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

The thing that strikes me is that this description is not simply about American teenagers, it can apply to all of us.

It's not  just the American Teen who is witnessing the Death of Privacy, it is all of us.

Thanks to Facebook, we're happily in the process of pulverizing our privacy.  Our photos are up online, we're being tagged all over the place, we know when people drop a movie from their Favourite list, we know when people join a new group, we know when they get a new friend. Through Twitter, we know their thoughts and whereabouts, through Flickr we see homes, families, trips to the beach and much much more.

We seem to be  sharing everything, with everyone, all the time. 

I wonder where it's all going?

Danah Boyd posted at the weekend about just this: She has been struggling about whether her Facebook world is a world filled with her real friends from High School and beyond, or whether it is a place to hang out and connect with bloggers, conference speakers, journalists. Given that Danah is the global authority on Social Networking, this is really interesting. Danah has tried, and failed, to keep personal life and professional life distinct and separate. In this Radically Transparent world it just doesn't seem to work. 

AdAge had an interesting piece this week :

"And unlike the very serious LinkedIn, the industry's previous network of choice, Facebook is spewing a strange blend of content, part high-minded engagement with marketing topics of the day -- such as consumer-generated media and, natch, social networks -- and part dillydallying with mundane exercises such as the microblog Twitter and games such as Food Fight that are almost Beckettian in their embrace of pointlessness. "

So where next?

As I have posted about before, I think that by the end of this year we will move away from this era of Radical Transparency to one of Refined Privacy. We can't keep sharing on the level that we are doing now. I for one don't think that I want to know the level of detail that Facebook is giving me every time that I log on about my friends.

I wonder whether something like Ning and other micro-Social Networks are the way forward.

Or at least for Facebook to allow many more complex layers of friendship just like real life. At the moment Facebook allows you to have A List friends and B List friends, but life as we know is much more complicated than that. The sooner Facebook technology recognises that, the better for all of us. But I'm still not sure what will happen to our sense of Privacy.

Covent Garden Night Market

In my opinion Covent Garden is usually a fairly hellish tourist trap.

Being a born and bred Londoner, I have tried to avoid the area for as long as I can remember. It tends to be full of annoying fire-eaters, bad mime artists, novelty gifts and hoards of Euro-tweens with bright ruck-sacks.

But...it is a beautiful area and filled with incredible history. It began as a Convent Garden in the  early 13th century under the reign of King John and after the dissolution of the monasteries, became a market. In the time of Samuel Pepys not only was it known as "the larder of London," it was the most important market in the whole country.

In an attempt to move Covent Garden back to its gastronomic heritage, a foodie Night Market is running every Thursday through August. It's great. I went last week with my dad and Francois - between us we managed to eat a vast quantity of wonderful food (Cornish oysters, Ghanaian chicken stew, green chili beef, Burnt Sugar fudge and Vietnamese coffee) and purchased lots more to take home with us, including more french cheese than we could carry.

If only Covent Garden could shift full-time into a foodie heaven like this, I think that it would connect again to the needs of real Londoners not just the needs of Euro-tweens.

Those smart folks over at The Pirate Geek are behind the PR which has been fantastic, everyone I know is talking about it and the press coverage was been amazing.

Just Juice - why would you say this?

I am aware that this whole "why would you say this???" is starting to become a regular feature on this blog, but I seriously am interested.

Now I don't know very much about juce (Innocent Dan, maybe you can help me out here?), but if you say things like No Gunk, No Junk, and then say From Concentrate, doesn't that simply contradict yourself, or actually is concentrate ok?

Can anyone help?

What do Tesco and Miramax have in common?

I was talking to some smart folks yesterday who used to work at Dunnhumby on the enormous Tesco CRM account. We were chatting about Tesco and I asked them if Tesco stood for anything. I assumed it was would the "something"-Company and was interested what the "something" was. Apparently not. According to them the company was named after Jack Cohen's mum, Tessa.

Reminded me of a story that I heard once about the Weinstein brothers, Bob and Harvey. They named their movie company Miramax after Miriam and Max, their mum and dad. Apparently when the company was in deep financial trouble and the rumour was that they were about to sell, the one thing that they cared about was keeping the Miramax name under their control.

The power of parents.

(BTW, Yahoo Answers disputes the fact that Tesco was named after a Tessa Cohen, but until someone tells me otherwise I am believing it -  it makes for a much nicer story)

Introducing the hip Wired Retired

   

The Spectator published "Wired, Retired and so hip it hurts" today. I hope that you enjoy it, I know that I enjoyed writing it (though conscious that it took up a bit of the weekend, so sorry Francois!)

BTW Geriatric1927 is well-worth a watch on YouTube is you haven't already discovered him.

Do let me know if you have any feedback and thoughts on the article.

Fingers crossed, but I hope that this is the start of more journalism...