Take one measure of very enthusiastic blogger, a splash of voyeurism and pour liberally into glass rimmed with the frosting of Social Media du jour and voila, Dan 3.0′s latest “crowd-sourced social project”.
In case you don’t know, Dan 3.0 is a videoblogger from some off-the-map town in the States. Scruffy hair, witty retort and it seems, a significant number of followers on his YouTube channel. Now, there are many videobloggers out there, some are producing interesting content and others are just one of many annoying and pointless entities in the Social Media universe. I find Dan 3.0 both interesting and annoying. Watch the vid above to hear it straight from the horses mouth.
Got it?
So.. he’s planning to let the Internet browsing public determine what he is to do in his day-to-day life, for a whole year. And whilst there’s some ground rules (he won’t do anything illegal or morally reprehensible) the public are supposedly to have total authority on his everyday actions. He is essentially, relinquishing his free-will and crowdsourcing his own life . Exciting as this seems, this is nothing new -- this has been happening in marriages since time incarnate. But with Dan 3.0 this is more fascinating than predictable.
Dan 3.0 makes some valid points about the Internet which I find comfortable acquiescence with. One thing the Internet has managed to do incredibly convincingly has drastically altered how information between communities is created, organised and transferred. The Internet has become a very productive environment where collaboration has driven major changes in productivity. For a great view on things like this I highly recommend reading anything by Clay Shirky and if you’re feeling averse to paper -- watch his TED talk. He’s got some wonderfully elegant and optimistic techno-social ideas about the future of society in a connected age; the Internet connects people, people are social, so in essence the Internet IS social. This sociability coupled with an assumption that humans are fundamentally altruistic is cited by Clay as precursors to how we can make the world a better place by using the technology that the digital revolution has precipitated. It sounds extremely fluffy and before I go and admire my iPad over a latté trust me -- it’s a nice concept. Go read it. Anyway, we digress..
So, Dan 3.0 and his crowdsourced life. Yes, crowd-sourcing in a digital age has worked before, and continues to do so. And better than working, we could argue that it has in some ways made the world a better place. Some points in case? Wikipedia - created by knowledgeable people, for knowledge seeking people. Linux - created by techy minded people for, techy seeking people etc… the list goes on.
So what is this crowdsourced social experiment from Dan 3.0? Is this for his followers, for a greater good or even heaven forbid… for himself?
Remember what happened to David Blaine when he decided to make a perspex box his home by Tower Bridge? He was baited, teased with burgers and even had golf balls pitched at him. More often than not, anyone that indulges in wild and public gestures of ‘self’ deprivation, will often find themselves subject to backlash. Or maybe this is just a British tendency?
Anyway, I’m trying hard to see what will come of Dan’s latest adventure in Social Media. He mentions ‘cool’ a lot. This is fine, but I can’t help but feel that the ‘coolness’ of it all and its veneer of ‘social exploration’ is a rather unsubtle attempt to disguise an elaborate attention seeking campaign -- and with this number of potential viewers -- commercial attention is more actual than probable. If we do end up seeing him engage in something out of the ordinary or socially constructive then this might become a successful and potentially insightful excerise both in terms of social media and in terms of what it is to be human. However, all I can fathom is that we ‘ll be seeing him fry some more eggs on his hob.
Am I going to watch him time to time?
Maybe.
Am I going to submit a wildly outlandish suggestion that involves pliers and his genitals?
One week on and its been a busy week of argumentation and exposition over England’s doomed journey in South Africa, culminating in our comprehensive spanking from Germany. For a read, check out the Guardian‘s article on the travesty.
Of course, I’m absolutely gutted (as always). I’ve experienced England’s failure for most of my formative years but I find this year to be particularly interesting. Whilst no football statistician, I do know that on paper we have some pretty good players -- but as a team something just didn’t work together. The performance as a whole didn’t tally up with the performance of the individuals and in some sadly perverse way, they played even worse. What we would have wanted was to see some teamwork, some play that was greater than the sum of its parts…in other words, some magic. But magical play isn’t something you can conjure at will unfortunately, it’s somewhat more elusive than that. But some thinking about networks might provide some insight..
Undercurrent strategist Mike Arauz discusses how the success of advertising agencies depends on both their ability to tell stories AND their ability to be create tricks, making a great analogy to magic -- read here. In short, you can be an agency that does great tricks or you could be an agency that is particularly adept at story telling but those elements alone will not precipitate a good (and ultimately successful) advertising agency. I really like this idea that a central outcome can only ever be created by two seperate processes and it’s something we can use as a framework on pretty much everything.
Take music for example. I’m a music producer. I use computers and synthesisers to produce music and it is often a very technical process. But after a while of producing something happens that is kind of hard to describe. After a while I no longer hear the musical elements, I no longer hear the percussion, I no longer hear a vocal line…I hear a song. The elements combined in the right way create something that is both unexpected, quite random and entirely dependant on its component processes - it is in essence, magical. The third element if you’d call it that. And something sadly we didn’t get to see in England’s performance.
I read a great book recently -- Connected : Amazing power of social networks and how they shape our lives. If you find networks interesting then you should definitely have a read. It’s not entirely popular science tripe -- they’ve gone in great depth to scientifically model how networks are structured, how they transfer ‘contagion’ and what the implications are for small groups and larger societies. I need to dig back into it a little more but it’s fascinating -- essentially a large part of who you are is not mutually because of you and your actions, you are who you are because of everyone else in your network. Strikes a very similar chord with a campaign for Orange I worked on a few years ago -- they were quite ahead of the game it seems.
Nicholas Christakis spoke earlier this year at a TED conference -- he covers some of the major points in his book so if you don’t have time to read, have a listen here
Here’s a very powerful ‘interactive’ campaign from Denmark -- http://www.hitthebitch.dk/. Although the idea is clear as day, I’d love to know what she/it exactly says -- anyone Danish out there, do get in touch if you feel like doing some translating. Courtesy of Adverblog
With what seems to be some solid social media integration, something as novel as this should get around -- and rightly so.
Here’s something else that we had in the UK quite recently that starred Keira Knightley. Different approach, equally memorable.
Stefana Broadbent is a visiting researcher at the Department of Anthropology at UCL. Between 2004 and 2008 she was responsible for the development of the User Observatory at Swisscom. The Observatory runs ethnographic studies on the evolution of users? practices with information and communication technologies in Switzerland. Previously, she was in the Management Team of IconMedialab a multinational digital consultancy listed in Stockholm and was in charge of the hu-man computer interaction competence. In 1993 she founded CB&J, a company specialized in hu-man factors and user research that was acquired by IconMedialab in 1999.
In the last 15 years of applied research, there have been two main areas of investigation: the evolution of digital activities at home (information, leisure, communication and self expression) and the analysis of complex and highly automated work environments in aviation and process control. All of these projects had in common an ethnographic approach to capture evolving social practices and a design intent to inform and support the conception of new tools and services
Found this really cool slideshow from a company called Socialbees – here’s their blurb:
Socialbees was founded in November 2008 with the mission to provide brilliant and affordable Facebook Fan Pages, social ads and engagement strategy for small to medium sized businesses.
The slideshow from Social bees below outlines some things to think about.
I’ll be honest, I’m yet to really bite at the idea of Facebook Fan pages being a truly useable tactic in consumer/brand social engagement. Although branded content is quite prominent on Facebook (I see people share videos, share experiences, share websites – all the time), I have doubts about the degree of engagement that specific Fan Pages can nurture. My personal experience of joining such pages and groups is that at first – I’m all over it… loving it. But then it all slips by the way side and on my monthly ‘clean out’ (I’m pretty anal with Facebook) I tend to remove myself from groups/pages that have done little to involve or interest me.
There’s a definite challenge for brands with Facebook pages to :
keep people interested
keep peole engaged
keep the likelihood of ‘share this’ / ‘invite a person to join’ – UP.
Furthermore, there’s a need to think about the long term useability of such tactics – granted, people are all over Facebook now, but is this going to be the case in a few years? In a wickedly fast flowing attention economy such as social media – it’s paramount to keep your brand on the radar in up to date, interesting and relevant ways.
I stumbled across this fun presentation from Olivier Blanchard – a brand/business strategist with a sharp eye for interesting visuals. In the slide show below he tackles the sticky ground of social media impact on hard business measures, yet seemingly illuminating the relationship as actually quite simple and workable…
My openess to Social Media as a relevant and powerful force in driving business somewhat leaves me reticent to disagree with this, but the quantitative side of my brain is screaming to see some proven case studies which cover this framework. What do you think?
