LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST...

Facebook - behind the scenes with Boz

I was lucky enough to spend a sizable chunk of time with Andrew "Boz" Bosworth (Facebook's Director of Product Engineering) and some the US Facebook team last week - firstly at the dinner that Nicola Mendelsohn and the IPA hosted for a small group of digi-folks and then with a larger audience at Facebook's first ever UK "Hack" day in Brick Lane. 

I don't want to get into a pro's and con's of Facebook right now,  but I did think that it was worth sharing some of the nuggets of interestingness that I learnt over those two occasions. It brought to life the Facebook ideology more clearly and made me think hard about where it's heading.

There's a lot that you should be able to throw into conversations about the social web and sounded erudite and informed :-)

FACEBOOK'S MENTALITY/PHILOSOPHY/IDEOLOGY

• "Go Fast and Break Things" - love that. Fail fast and then get back on the track to success.
• "Hacker Culture" - Boz talked a lot about this. How a "hack" is different to a brainstorming where the aim is to spew out as many ideas as possible. A hack, or hackathon, is more about "thinking differently about a problem", moving fast, accepting that not every idea is a good idea, binning the shitty ideas and getting to some kind of working prototype.
• "The journey is 1% finished" - Apparently this is stickered all over Facebook HQ. Constant improvement, constant striving for something bigger and better. Zuckerburg has a kind of professional amnesia according to Boz, so that he has the ability to wake up and look fresh and Facebook like he's never seen it before and make changes again and again and again. When a developer questioned him about the fact that Facebook APIs kept changing and they had to keep changing their approach, Boz refused to apologise and basically said that it was because they were constantly trying to make their site better and that updating APIs was simply part of that. If they weren't updating and making improvements he countered that the developer would be creating apps for another website.
• Only the paranoid survive- Great story about how Facebook worry about being the "AOL of Social Networks", essentially the "play" social network before the real social web appears. Essentially there was a point when AOL = the web and where are they now?
• One killer feature is all it takes - When Facebook launched their photo service they were faced with a host of competitors all of which could far more than their's could (printing calendars, mugs, quasi-photoshopping and retouching services), all that Facebook could do was Tag. And that one killer feature was all that it took to effectively kill off their competition.

Boz is a fascinating character (have a read on Quora on how he got offered a job at Facebook) and Facebook a company that is utterly redefining our experience and expectation of the web.  It falls to us all to really try to understand what drives the Facebook movers and shakers and their philosophy of open connectivity that is having such a profound impact on 750 million of us.

Thoughts?

SOCIAL MEDIA - The IPA step up

Back in January I wrote a post about a rather dire event that the IPA put on. This was what they said it would be: "There’s a revolution in the air that’s transforming society. It’s social networking and it’s empowering the consumer. Agencies must get to grips with this changing marketplace over the next decade or they could face growth of only 1.2% per year by 2016. This is according to the second future of advertising report to be published by the IPA and the Future Foundation. To find out more come along to the next 44 Club where all will be revealed."

Trouble was, it wasn't like that at all.

It was confused. It was old-fashioned in its approach and most bizarrely given that Social Media is a conversation, there was no conversation. The Social Media report cost a lot of money, nothing was shared online and there was no platform or space for dialogue and discussion.

Others in Adland felt the same way as I did. Then the influential Neville Hobson wrote about the situation. And we all sort of sat back waiting to see what the IPA would do. 

To their enormous credit, the IPA contacted each and every person who had blogged or tweeted about the IPA Social Media event and asked them to help them move the conversation on and make it more useful and relevant.  So that's what's been happening over the last few months. It stared out as a big group, which people rapidly discovered meant a lot of talking but not a lot of practical action and useful deliverables. Then it turned into a smaller group: myself; Mark; Neil; Le'Nise; Katy; Jamie; Asi; John, Graeme and a long-distance late addition Faris ( if I was starting an agency tomorrow these guys would be the very first people that I would call!) - all brilliantly chaired by Nigel from the IPA. 

The IPA moved from their traditional role of Expert Authority to a new role of Intelligent (Intelligence?) Facilitator. And they have been brilliant, given this small group the freedom to create and develop what we hope will be useful and provocative thinking in the area of Social Media.

We've defined 10 Social Principles which we are launching online on 23rd September and there's a remarkably cheap seminar (20 for IPA members, 40 for non-members) on Tuesday 6th October. Click here for info and tickets. The site and the seminar have been created to be social experiences, not conferences. So come along expecting to talk, ask questions and answer questions yourself. There are no Social Media experts, there are just people getting their hands dirty and experimenting in this space. There are learnings, there are approaches and there are intelligent questions. 

The Twitter hashtag is #IPAsocial for you to see the discussions to date.

I'll post when the IPAsocial site goes live and hope to see some of you at the 6th.