Ben Okri: Starbook Booker prize-winning Ben Okri's first novel in five years stands in the grand tradition of myth-making with a vision and voice uniquely its own. "This is a story my mother began to tell me when I was a child. The rest I gleaned from the book of life among the stars, in which all things are known," says Okri.
John Connolly: Nocturnes Bestselling author John Connolly's first collection of short fiction, Nocturnes, a dark, daring, utterly haunting anthology of lost lovers and missing children, predatory demons, and vengeful ghosts.
Joseph Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces Campbell's unique perspectives examine the world's complex and interwoven mythology, folklore and religion, providing an understanding of the essence and genesis of humanness.
Michael Ondaatje: Anil's Ghost: A Novel “Gorgeously exotic…. As he did in The English Patient, Mr. Ondaatje is able to commingle anguish and seductiveness in fierce, unexpected ways.”–The New York Times
Been having major hassles with Amatomu this week. Seems very buggy. I updated one of my accounts (new feed) and have subsequently not been able to log back into that account. Vince's email addy at M&G is still listed as support for "report a bug" and the only other contact listed on the site - abuse_at_mg.co.za doesn't yield any response. Created a new account at Amatomu which means my blog is listed twice there under the Media&Marketing section - shouldn't be able to do this, but there you go. I sent an email to the addys on Amatomu days ago. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
Imaging my surprise when I was doing some research on mobile apps and I stumbled across Pooosh's press office on ITWeb and saw something familiar. Very familiar. "Sheesh. Those look like my words," I thought. That's because they were. This was a blog that Pooosh chose to reposition as a press release (with my editorial contacts) on their press site.
Fortunately an email to Roy Ingle (marketing director) and Sarah Rice of Sentient who does their PR sorted that out pronto. There response was quick and alluded to the fact that it was a genuine error. They didn't say what happen but my guess is that Pooosh confused content aggregation with PR and that's how my blog ended up on their Press Office site.
Is the Jail4Bail campaign doing more harm the good? That's the question that was raised by Wezzo on BlackNotes (one of my fav blogs) and Muti after he felt that the autism campaign amounted to nothing more than a spam effort. He makes some very valid points which made me think about the 'rules' for social media when used for social change.
1. Context is king - With social causes it is crucial that the content is contextualised. It is the cause that drives the empathy and the message that supports the cause needs to be more important than anything else. Jail4Bail is not a message - it doesn't say what the campaign is. What is needed is a short phrase that supports this that does.
2. The rules still apply - If anything they apply more. Causes rely on public good will and empathy in order to get funds raised. During social marketing campaigns those empathy levels need to be enhanced, not alienated. Spam is an emotional issue because of the spam deluge that faces ordinary individuals online. Spam is still spam no matter whether you're saving lives, healing nations or changing the world as we know it. You have to entice and inspire people, and shoving causes down their throats will not do that.
3. The experience is the brand - Online the total experience is the brand. So people looking from the outside in will take the total experience they have online with the cause as the brand.
4. Enthusiasm can be misconstrued - How you see things is not necessarily the same as how your audience sees things. You're madly in love with your cause - that's why you take up the good fight. But this doesn't mean that your audience does too. Everyone's reality is different and the more evolved you become as a person you more you realise that - the more balanced your subject-object orientation becomes. Other people may not give a rat's ass about what's a life or death issue to you.
I reckon in this case it's a matter of people just caring too much. The people driving this campaign have good hearts and good intent, and perhaps just became over zealous. This is going to be a case study so let's see what happens in the end result, let's see if they have learnt from this exercise and objectively include what worked and what didn't. If they do that (include the good and bad) they could have a living case study of great use to other social causes who need to understand how to use social media.
Lastly, when using social media for social change the rules still apply - if not more - because you have an important brand to nourish. Your job is to up the love factor, make sure people get the message and get them to switch on (not off) to the cause.
Viral expansion loops are part science, part instinct, part engineering alchemy. A phenomenon they enables unstoppable quantum growth or popularity explosions, a viral expansion loop is the holy grail of social marketing need. Supposedly a 'secret' shrouded by silicon valley, viral expansion loops enable you to build a business online from the floor up without extensive marketing or sales resourced. With very little in fact, and they have been touted as the ‘secret sauce’ of big number social marketing brands with huge valuations that venture capitalists are throwing money at.
The phenomenon is neatly explained in the Fast Company article which uses Ning as an explanation of viral loops: “Ning grows because each new user begets more users. Every time someone sets up a social network, he has no choice but to invite friends, family, colleagues, and like-minded strangers to sign on as well. The company calculates that each person signed up for a Ning group is worth, on average, 2 people, compounded daily: On day two, that individual brings in 4 group members and on day three, 8; within a week, she has brought in 128 people. Which is how Ning has been able to grow at a daily average of more than .4% and add 500 new groups a day, doubling roughly every 137 days.” The article adds: “Viral loops expand according to what's known as a Power Law Curve, which, for reasons no one can explain seem to accurately describe a dizzying array of natural and unnatural phenomena, from the size of planets to national income distribution to online commerce.”
Basically it’s not rocket science. Just Amway or multi-level marketing taken online. Unlike viral marketing which has a linear progression that loses momentum, viral loops are a multi-level, exponential and predictive. I was intrigued to find out what people make of this idea in South Africa, what with local social media brands squaring up to the big guns.
This is what Vincent Maher had to say: “A viral expansion loop is a descriptor for the phenomenon of exponential growth, via referrals, in a social network or other similar product or service. What this means is that friends invite friends who invite friends and so the growth is exponential. If one continues with the biological analogy, the long-term impact of the resulting infection is largely determined by the lifespan of the virus in the host. A virus like smallpox is devastating but it works fast and 35% of the time the host dies, which is the reason why it could eventually be contained. In marketing terms this means that applications that result in viral expansion loops can burn out quickly if the hosts continuously lose interest. This is why Facebook and other applications are constantly working to bolt on new functionality to extend the period of infection and keep the host alive.”
You can catch the full interview with Maher in Brainstorm which will be on sale in a week. Called “Being Vincent Maher” the article looks at what other people think of Maher, what he thinks of himself, how he thinks, and his thoughts on the re-mediation of the world through digital technologies.
Smart guy Pieterse, he set up to have himself 'detained' and 'imprisoned' in order to show what autism is like. You can read all about this and watch the video by going to Pieterse's Facebook page. This has come in for criticism from the naysayers, but when you do something bold and controversial people will always complain. I reckon as the father to an autistic child Pieterse pretty much knows what the experience of autism is all about, although there are autistic people who object to the campaign creative.
But back to Phillips, Norman and Muti. The first time Phillips got on my radar it was because he was doing some or other thing to help a charity or cause. He's like that. He's a doer. A young guy at the top of his game who's giving back. Growing the world while he's growing himself. Norman's another young mover and shaker who's making a difference.
My view is when people make a difference they need to be applauded. They need to be supported. The tall poppy syndrom that's going on in this social media community is counter productive, disingenous, plain stupid and does nothing to grow the world. It's enough already.
Let's celebrate people who're rocking the world. Let's applaud the doers and and do what we can to help them achieve their dreams, help others and help build a better world.
Other people/sites supporting the initiative include FNB's new online strategist Andy Hadfield, award-winning blogger ChrisM's imod, funky designer Nomad-One, Vincent Hoffman and online creative hot spot MoralFibre, as well as blogs like FeistyFemale (cool coverage here), LavaInk customised clothing, social media maverick Stopforth, Roxilla (some other good causes too), Yasser Buchana. This list will grow and grow and grow thanks to efforts by Phillips, Norman, Muti and Afrigator.
When I first got involved in the Internet (during the space cowboy days when everyone was throwing money at it even before it even had a business model) I worked with a guy called Rowan Brewer (brother to Grant Brewer). We both loved EM Foster and in particular his saying "only connect" which speaks so eloquently to the possibility and pain of the digital medium.
"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." - EM Foster, Howard's End 1910
What the heck has a Victorian drama got to do with the Internet, you might ask?
"Only connect" speaks to the imperative of connecting in a world where connection is confounded by capitalism, politics, religion, commercialism. In a world that accents what is different or unique or divisive about humanity, the internet and other convergent mediums sprawls like an expansive organic viral, connecting without judgement. Social media subverts ideology, educational systems based on categorical (Western scientific) thinking and just connects. Randomly. Beautifully. Seemingly with its own logic and concept of time and space. Social media "only connects".
It is like the rambling collective unconsciousness of a great mind that will not seek to be controlled. That seeks to connect anything and everything without discrimination.
Chris Roper's a crafty devil. Great writer - I'll give him that. But I reckon he's a devious master strategist as well. For a long while I've held the opinion that there's slim pickings on them there blogs over at 24.com. I've even had strong (but highly civilized) exchanges with Elan Lohmann about this as well. My view - up until now - has been that there's not much creativity on that blog engine, and I wondered why Elan was making such a great fuss when I stated as much.
Bada-bing-bada-boom... The Roper emails to ask if will I judge the blog competition at 24.com. I smell a rat and gently enquire whether it involves my wearing cement shoes. Before I can say "cry me a river" I'm a judge and wondering how the hell I am going to wade through all those half baked blogs they will send me to peruse.
Now for the bit about me eating humble pie.Damn. The first round of entries were good. This is not the "cash for friends voting for you" or number pumping competitions that 24.com has had in the past to drive up blog counts. This is an editorial competition where quality content is selected in an effort to up the game at the social media hub. I was hugely surprised when I went through the shortlist this week, which was a search for the best photo blog. (I'm kind of hoping it's all downhill from here or else I'm in for week after week of eating humble pie. Saying: "Sorry. You okes were right. I was wrong." Damn. Did I tell you that Roper fella is as crafty as a fox?)
My personal favourite for this week didn't win - but my second pick did. There are three judges - the other two being Charl Norman and Lauren Beukes. I've written about Charl before - he's an incredible social media entrepreneur who's barely skidded past twenty and is already taking co.za by storm. In my books, he's one to watch. If I was an investor (of the Buffet school - it's the people not the company that counts) I'd certainly be in talks with him. Then Lauren is a great writer who completed her MA in Creative Writing at UCT and has just published Moxyland - a refreshing break from the normal genre you get from South African writers. But then Beukes is anyting but 'run of the mill'. Can't wait for my review copy to arrive - I'll be doing a piece on her for MoneywebLIFE.
But back to the blogs at 24.com. Do yourself a favour. Go look at James Nel's blog "Capturing the moment". It is inspired.
Caveat
lector: This piece has as much substance as cuppacino froth. It is,
after all a blog about bloggers. Please bear that in mind before you
get your Y-Fronts in a wrangle.
There was a flurry of debate before and after the MoneywebLIFE story I did about “SA’s Ten Most Influential Bloggers.” Much of it had to do with the subject of influence and whether local bloggers wield influence.
I am a great believe in innovation and the ability of imagination to change the world. After all how did Skype, Twitter, Word Press, FaceBook or Google start? Simply with an idea that turned into a disruptive technology or morphed into a viral sensation or took something that existed and made it infinitely simpler, better and speedier. It all started with a thought.
And blogging is the battlefield of ideas. That place where the cerebellum meets the cyber. It is nothing but ideas given form by virtue of words or pictures or videos. And what surrounds that is complete freedom. There are no editorial pressures, little legislative pressure, the liberation of anonymity for those who want that, freedom of speech and the ability to blog at your own frequency on the exact topic you desire. From love to lunchboxes, tyranny to titillation, politics to polony, design to deckchairs, the subject matter is whatever you want it to be. Then the audience is everyone. Your audience can be as big as the world or as solitary as a journal for one. All you need are the means - an internet connection and a device to blog from.
Give the liberation and democratization of publishing why hasn’t South Africa rushed headlong into the opportunities offered by blogging and citizen journalism? There’s money to be had in those there free blog engines – if so why aren’t we making it. More so why do local bloggers wield such minor influence. Why aren’t we taking on corrupt politicians, bad business deals, becoming online advisors to the world, story tellers to the globe?
The first answer is of course access. Telkom should be the most reviled brand in South Africa largely because their selfish and myopic stance robbed this country of the benefits of bandwidth. If we were a bandwidth rich country, things might be different. That said, the tide is turning and in two years we’ll be in another country from an access perspective. It will take a while for prices to level but the infrastructure investment for 2010, liberalization of the telecoms industry and laying of three more sea cables will bring a boom.
My intuitive answer to why we’re not on the global stage is that we are myopic. We are fools to the inward stroke. By this I mean that we are a nation of whingers and whiners who spend our time berating our lot, waiting for hand outs, and being blinded by our own reflection. That’s when we’re not serving self-interest or back slapping co-admirers in the legendary digital circle jerk.
Our sight has become so myopic we see nothing but our selves, and because of this we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture. There is a whole world out there that is our market place. That is our audience. That we can switch on to if we merely adjust our focus.
But back to blogging. There’s no empirical measure of influence for local blogging (how do you measure the density of froth?), so I devised my own. I did because my last blog was gut. I wanted something more. I wanted to crunch a few numbers. I took the Google result (name) score for most of the bloggers mentioned in the last article, added a few more I noticed were missing. If I missed you or left you out, please let me know so I can post you a box of Kleenex. Then I took the Google News result (name) count, and the Google Blog (name) result count. I gave the news count a factor of 100 (x100) and the blog a factor of 10 (x10). This because the ability to affect the media agenda or get the media to talk about you indicates great influence. Then blog word of mouth is powerful, but much less so than the media.
By doing this I came up with a methodology* I call the “GForce” or the amount of Google influence you have. Here are the results (download the spreadsheet - Download The Google Meister
):
* The
methodology is fraught of course because specific names are at a disadvantage
to generic names. I was more careful about weeding out non relevant results in
the “News” and “Blog” results because these were more manageable. But wading
through Google to see some responses one gets a sense that the heavyweights
deserve their rankings despite the addition of irrelevant results. Then this is
time bound – the figures will change in time.
The gods (Mandela/Huffington)
and demiurges (Mugabe) are added to offer contrast. To show by relativity what
real influence is in terms of numbers.
What is interesting with
the GForce table is how the design heroes have become the gods of the internet
(Adii/Mark Forrester). This picks up on something Simon Dingle tweeted today: “Web 2.0:
transforming web designers into messiahs.” If you look at the local and global
design heavyweights he’s absolutely right, and I bet that the design gurus will
be the first to operate on a global platform. Then there are the suprises like
Skinny LaMinx who achieve the numbers because of the extreme creativity and
value offered. If there’s one person who deserves to be a global guru it’s the
LaMinx because of her extreme smarts.
As expected those who
are the most vocal on public forums are not necessarily the most influential.Those who are influential offer value of some
or other kind – they lead thinking, trends, news, opinion. Be it knowledge,
information or advance sight to niche audiences – they lead content.
Then in
terms of the categories:
The rock stars – these are the people to watch, the thought leaders, the cultists.
The pop icon – they cause waves of influence and attract interest, but don’t have the broad reach or influence of a rock star.
The lead singers – They’re hot but either appeal to a specific niche audience or are still fledgling rock stars.
The audience : Either they don’t give a damn about influence, are on their way up, on their own mission or are a lot less influential than they’d like to think.
Bolton deVenter : A bit player invented by a rock star.
To confirm that the
rock stars lead opinion by adding value I plotted a Blogopticon – which is an
idea I got from VanityFair.
Given I do have a day job I only plotted the top ten, but you can download the
file here if you want to take this further if you’ve got nothing better to do
with your life. Download BlogOpticon
Lastly, I believe
there is huge potential in local blogging (and local Web technology and
services) but that the success of this will be determined by an ability to see
beyond ourselves. By adding value to the audiences we want to reach.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a couple of journalists banded together to get their own back on public relations people and their over-love of meaningless adjectives like "leading"; "cutting edge"; "bleeding edge"; "forward thinking" and other crappy words which basically mean their clients are such boring dead beats they have to use tired, meaningless descriptors to try and buoy their brands. The result was BuzzKiller.
If you are in PR here's a hint. To journalists the word "leading" means "my client is such a loser and their company can't speak for itself so I am resorting to the big PR book of cliches to hopefully make them sound a bit more interesting."
Newsflash - most journalists know every word in the big PR Book of Cliches so don't go there.
Next newsflash - I am resurrecting The Buzz Saw - a brilliant idea started eons ago (well in digital years anyway) to show how journalists suffer at the hands of some PR practitioners. It was created by staffers at Forbes, Fortune et al.
And yeah yeah yeah - I know. I'm like an ex smoker. I was in branding and marketing once. What that means is I know all the tricks.
"Leading"?
Come on guys - that was bad in the 80's. Let it go already.
Today's BUZZ freshly sliced by the saw:
"***** ********* is an interactive full service digital agency that creates, executes and manages marketing campaigns in digital environments that facilitate interaction between leading, forward thinking brands and their audiences. Aiming to push the boundaries of digital communication, ***** ********* have...."
Fleet
Street mourns after Grand Prix boss Max Mosley wins privacy case – but are the
tears for freedom or profit?
There’s
been a prolonged bout of breast beating, wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the
UK
press following Formula One chief, Max
Mosley’s record win in a tabloid privacy case. With damages of 60,000 pound
plus legal costs, the News of the World
(the defendant) lost close on one million pounds. In a titillating tale that
obviously had the tabloid rubbing its hands in glee, the World reported that
Mosley had participated in a five hour ‘Nazi styled’ orgy with a dominatrix.
The ‘deep throat’ in the story was one ‘Woman E’, a call girl who secretly
taped the interlude and then sold her story to the tabloid.
The real scandal
is the meal those press have made about their so called “loss of media
freedom”. The UK’s
Independent
opined: “Max Mosley's court victory over the News of the World yesterday was
immediately mourned in many sections of the media as heralding an end to the
era of "kiss-and-tell" in British newspapers. As integral to our
popular culture as the saucy seaside postcard and Carry On films, kiss-and-tell
stories have, down the years, often been a force for good – morality tales for
modern times. They have exposed hypocrisy. They have enabled the poor and
powerless to bring down the rich and famous (in return for handsome payment, of
course).”
The Sun called the ruling a "dark day
for British freedom" and vowed to fight on for the public interest, while
The Daily Mail reported that it was a "good day for the grubby and
corrupt" saying that "press freedom and parliamentary democracy in
Britain are significantly diminished."
A sole voice of
sanity in the debate was The
Guardian who put the real issues in perspective. The Guardian pointed out that
the tabloid’s extreme self interest had skewed the apparent ‘public interest’. In a scathing attack on The World its
editorial read: “Since the judgment, there has been much hand-wringing about
the freedom of the press. Most of it is self-serving. The damage to the press
has not been done by Mosley, or the law, but by the practices of the News of
the World.”
There are many
forces shaping the media agenda both locally and abroad, but perhaps the most
fierce
is commercial. In and age of cheque book journalism, the tabloid vulgarly
repositions commercial interest as “public interest”. Are tabloids really interested
in the public right to know, or is their lens focused more closely on the
celebrity skin of privacy to desperately and salaciously surge sales?
Since when did
Britney Spears’ exposed genitalia or the exact manner in which David Beckham
fills out his Y-fronts constitute public interest? The real issue here is a
tabloid that through reckless reporting made the introduction of stringent
privacy laws in the UK
a strong possibility.
While I don’t deny
tabloids have their place in society, they are at times their own worst enemy. Tabloids
that have embraced the crass pursuit of celebrity sensation employ a style of ‘churnalism’
largely devoid of investigation. They have largely lead the march into
commercialism – the new print media compass for finding a way out of the
economic downturn. Together with media selling their souls to the commercial
agenda, celebrity tabloids are helping to replace the religious, cultural,
community and the other values that once held societies together with vacuous
commercial values. And they do so pious in their pursuit of the so called ‘public
interest’.
Thankfully South
African tabloids like The Daily Sun play a more civic role by strongly featuring
community stories. Sure, they’re not everyone’s cup of tea, but they give voice
to the poor and marginalised who struggle against spiralling food prices, lack
of service delivery, crime and other issues our leaders in their comfortable
residences don’t have to deal with.
There’s a real
danger our media are cutting their own Faustian contracts and will be hit with
a double punch. Not only are we seeing increased commercial content as a
strategy for dealing with the economic downturn (look out for more advertorials
alongside editorial and ‘innovative’ ad formats from Naspers print titles) but
political interference is reaching new heights. On the commercial front
compromising ad formats, blurring editorial with advertising, and sacrificing
content integrity to sponsored media is a great seduction for a press squeezed
by an advertising recession. There are local magazines that sell front pages to
CEOs without specifying it is a paid for placement while others parade paid
content as special features, white pages and case studies. If one lesson can be
learnt from the US
newspaper bloodbath it is that people buy newspapers for news and views, not
advertorial or weakened content.
While the one
punch that is hitting local media is commercial, the other is political. According
to Raymond
Louw a SANEF study shows that government has become obstructive in dealing
with the media. While they were falling over themselves to get to the media in
1994, they have now become sullen and withdrawn. The Promotion of Access to
Information Act is used to avoid giving journalists information, phone calls
are not returned, and emails deleted without being answered. It appears
government communicators have harnessed an arsenal of ploys to try squash
stories, kill stories or otherwise influence the media agenda. Then there is
the issue of the media tribunal, Film and Publications
Amendment Bill, National
Key Points Act and the Protection
of Information Bill. Singly and collectively they have a profound impact on
the freedom of the media in South
Africa, and the ability of the media to act
as a fourth estate. If realised, the likes of a Zuma rape trial could not be
reported on, stories on service delivery protests would have to be vetted by a
bureaucratic censor board before being published, and journalists could get 20
years in prison for writing about anything deemed an “official secret”.
At this watershed
moment in our media history perhaps the tabloids do have a crucial role to
play. If they wanted to do something really useful they could forgo one more
story of Amy Winehouse’s drug problem and tell the voting public what would
happen if these repressive media bills do become laws and the South African
press is no longer free.
