‘Cross The Breeze

I’ve just started reading ‘Round Ireland with a fridge‘ a few days ago and (apart from being a good funny book) there was this one part that reminded me so much of advertising that I had to copy it right here. And yes, not all advertising is bad ;)

“The taxi driver helped me with the fridge but had failed to see anything in it worthy of conversation. He has his own agenda and he wanted to chat about traffic congestion in the city, unnecessary roundabouts and the mindless introduction of one-way systems. Taxi drivers are the same throughout the world - great levellers. Never mind that Nelson Mandela, President Clinton or Michelle Pfeiffer has jumped into the cab, they’ll get no specialist treatment, none whatsoever. The driver will bore them just as shitless as you and me”

For those who don’t know the book, it’s basically about Tony Hawks who hitchhiked around Ireland with a fridge after a bet he did with one of his friends.

I just stumbled upon an interesting presentation that was made by a Belgian friend of mine who works for Naked Communications in London. The presentation is named: “Great Quotes to Use and Repeat When You Can’t Find a Better Way of Saying It” … and that’s exactly what it is. Maybe you had noticed it already since it’s 5 months old by now, if not check it out. I suggest you download it as well, might come in handy one day… when you can’t find a better way of saying it ;)

And allow me to add a nice one from our chairman Bill Gates:

”We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Technorati Tags: presentation, quotes, tomhimpe

There’s a very good post about ‘understanding web design‘ on A LIST apart that you should definitely read:

"Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity."

[Via VisitMIX]

Powerpoint, Keynote, … as I said before I don’t think of these at the reason for a good or bad presentation. This was also the reason why I didn’t see the purpose of Slideshare’s World’s Best Presentation Contest. This week I found something that is valuable information for creating better presentations.

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” - Jerry Seinfeld

Brett Tabke at the PubCon conference blog posts a long list of tips on giving better presentations and it’s quite a long but good list. How to start the presentation, how to work around one theme, how to be prepared, … definitely something you should check out. Whether you think about internal 5 people presentations, a presentation for your board or clients, a conference presentation, … these are all good tips.

At the last line they say everyone should take all speaking opportunities they can and that’s exactly what I do. Here’s my next ‘gig’ by the way: The Social Media Forum for Communicators Europe. Don’t judge me too hard ok ;)

Technorati Tags: presentation, powerpoint, keynote, tips, hints, pubcon, presenter

Last week Philippe made a great post on the (not so) global conversation, talking about the still rather limited reach numbers of most of the web2.0 services out there. Before looking at the number he quotes from a blog called Gaping Silence which I found rather interesting:

“You get a myth which diverges radically from the reality. The myth is that this is where the Web-for-everyone comes into its own, where millions of users of what was built as a broadcast Web with walled-garden interactive features start talking back to the broadcasters and breaking out of their walled gardens. The reality is that the voices of the geeks are heard even more loudly - and even more disproportionately - than before”

Now we do forget sometimes but this is very true, especially the comment about the disproportionate loud voices of the geeks. I do sometimes as well get sucked into the web, reading blogs, twittering, etc… but this is definitely not what the vast majority of the global audience is into.

Looking at some of the numbers, this strikes me even more. Youtube, Wikipedia, MySpace all have very decent reach and that is not suprise, but they’re only the top of the iceberg. It’s when you look at Delicious (0.5% global reach), Twitter (less than 0.1%). And we could go on for a while…

That said, this doesn’t mean at all the whole movement is insignificant of course. Only 2 days before Philippe’s post about this, I saw a presentation of Marc Bresseel that seemed like a perfect extension to this story. That presentation was given at the IAB Interact European congress in Brussels and started with a quote:

”We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

That is also were Marc used the words ‘overhyped and undervalued’ and that resonated very well with me I must say. I think we many of the web2.0 services that are out there are indeed overhyped for now, which doesn’t mean they are not valuable, they’re just made bigger than they really are. But nevertheless, all of this will have a big impact on how this industry is going to evolve, on how we will all interact with each other in the future. I like that. That last quote is from Bill Gates by the way. Here’s the video from Marc’s presentation:

Technorati Tags: microsoft, web2.0, presentation, quote, hype, trend, value, technology, future, interact

“Big ideas are so hard to recognize, so fragile, so easy to kill.
Don’t forget that, all of you who don’t have them.”
- John Elliott Jr.

[Via Brand DNA found on Ewan McIntosh's del.icio.us]

This weekend I flipped through the pages of this new book I got (Whatever you think, think the opposite) I stumbled upon this funny (but true) quote:

“When I was Creative Director at Saatchi’s I gave a young man a grilling for production an underwhelming piece of work. Later in the day, somebody told me he was in his office crying. I went along to console him. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I was useless at your age too.’”

An IM conversation earlier tonight reminded me of the quote and made me blog it, so this one’s for all the ‘interns’ out there.

I said it before, this is a great book and I still think so now I finished reading it. Just like with Naked Conversations a couple of months ago, I first didn’t want to write too much about it since you just have to read it, so I’ll keep it short. Every time I read a book like this, I’ll put a small piece of paper between the pages that I want to re-read later on. Normally I’ll end up with about 3-5 pages ‘bookmarked’ this way, but not this time… the book is full of little pieces of paper (a bit like this). Here’s why.

The whole book is built around SUCCES, where SUCCES is an acronym for Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story, a sort of checklist for creating a idea that sticks. To explain this, Dan & Chip use a whole lot of concrete examples throughout the book that help you understand what they’re talking about. Read on about the Curse of Knowledge in Tappers and Listeners, the definition of a watermelon, the Sinatra test, … and much more interesting stuff.

” Memory is not like a single filing cabinet. It is more like Velcro. If you look at the two sides of Velcro material, you’ll see that one is covered with thousands of tiny hooks and the other is covered with thousands of tiny loops. When you press the two sides together, a huge number of hooks get snagged inside the loops, and that’s what causes Velcro to seal. Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. A new credit card number has one, if it’s lucky.”

Today I notice that when I’m working on a new strategy or creative idea, I remember the key elements in SUCCES and I cross-check to see if I got enough elements in my idea to make it work. The same counts for when I see work/campaigns of others that I like, I’ll go over the list to see why that is indeed a good idea.

I definitely recommend it to everyone, and not just everyone in marketing. This works when you are in education as well as when you are in advertising. Let me know what you think of it.

While reading through the comments on the recent cartoons Hugh has done as part of his Microsoft ‘gig’ I remembered an older post of Hugh (part of The Hughtrain) where he posts his thoughts on smarter conversations. Ok, it’s clear that this post will end in a record number of links to Gapingvoid - so no link here ;)

Part of the conversations are about Microsoft and what needs changing, part of the comments are related to Hugh’s reasons for doing this. First of all, I think so far the result is what Kris and Steve were hoping for, and you can see Steve is very engaged in the conversations as part of that. Karl Long asks why Microsoft needs to do this, if Hugh is a change agent, a conversation starter? I think that’s a very good question indeed, the conversation has long started, but Hugh sure is an enabler of some sort and a way to have different and maybe smarter conversations… and what was that again about smarter conversations?

I also believe that the beauty of this collaboration partially sits in the way it came about, because this happened a lot more naturally than many of you think of it (at least that’s what I make of reading the comments). The Blue Monster really kick-started this out of nowhere.

In one of the comments on Hugh’s thoughts I found this great quote:

“We have two ears and only one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less.” — Diogenes, c.412-323 B.C., Greek Cynic philosopher

It’s fun to see a quote that old pop up in a new conversation, but still very true. Anyway, I enjoy this experiment very much and it is great to have these conversations with Hugh and the community as well. It see all of it as part of Microsoft opening up and engaging more with it’s customers. It’s a big company and a lot of customers so all help is always welcome, but I do believe we’re on the right track.

Finally I wanted to bring up ‘the porous membrane, revisited‘ very briefly. Hugh points to a note from Mario Sundar, community evangelist for LinkedIn on that post:

“I’d like to think of the Community Evangelist as the one who connects the two entities A & B. They are the individuals entrusted with the task of pushing that membrane, aligning A and B and aiming for marketing Nirvana. And did I mention, they also help humanify the company.”

Carman comments that everyone in the organization should be a community evangelist and I couldn’t agree more. It’s also almost literally the theme of a presentation I’ve been giving internally to have more of my colleagues join the conversation. Let’s hope it works.

Technorati tags: blue monster, gapingvoid, steve clayton, enterprise, hugh macleod, evangelists, conversations

I rarely get into any of the ’conversations’ going on over at Techmeme, but this time something really interested me. Peter Rip (a VC) calls out ‘over and out’ on web 2.0, saying:

“We aren’t seeing much. Startup activity remains strong, but the consumer web landscape seems to be populated with the same bodies with different skins.  Another video deal here; another social networking deal there, and social [feature] everywhere”

Maybe it is indeed time to put a fork in it - as Om Malik so beautifully states - and stop calling everything web 2.0. Web 2.0 and innovation are not the same anymore. Paul Kedrosky says:

“It’s long past time to move on folks. While the media, advertising, and technology transformations continue apace, let’s just call them what they are and leave the marketing mumbo-jumbo to others.”

I have to agree. I once read somewhere “web 2.0 is pushing the envelope and Windows Live is merely copying existing sites”. Is web 2.0 (still) pushing the envelope? With the MySpace for Finance, or the Youtube for advertising, … we could go for a long time here. Let’s move on, quoting Peter again:

“Now the hard work begins, again.  The next wave of innovation isn’t going to be as easy.   The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content  creation.  These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be.  Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform.  To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn’t exist today.” 

Let’s indeed just call it innovation, but then really innovate again, whatever the buzz word we’ll be using.