Innovation feeder


A little more Nike digital goodness
May 8, 2009, 5:40 am
Filed under: Advertising, Emergent media, Geek stuff, Innovative advertising, Nike, creativity | Tags:

Speaking of Nike [see James Jarvis post below] and newfound blogger Bud [see post below], here’s another great example of Nike digital advertising. If other companies took a more considered thoughtful approach to digital conversation rather than literally attempting to “take over” our pages while we’re surfing [hands up who thought the page takeover was ever going to be a positive consumer interaction?]  the digital advertising world might just move towards the personal, interactive, conversational medium it promised to be. Check it out. Bloody great. ps. thanks Bud.



P&G’s social media hack

tide-tee031209It seems that the peeps at P&G realised that this whole ’social media’ thing was something they needed to get their heads across. What better way to do it than invite 40 of the best geeks from the Valley and stage a 4 hour social-media hack-a-thon exercise for charity.

40 executives from the Valley were invited down to meet with a hundred P&G marketers to help them get their heads around social media. They played in teams and competed to see which group could sell the most Tide t-shirts using only a thousand bucks and any social media tool they could get their hands on. All proceeds went to charity.

For those of you who haven’t yet read the story on P&G’s Digital Hack Night here’s a couple of links:

Ad Age

Cincinnati Enquirer



Infomaniac? Check out this aggregator

alltop

If you’re an infomaniac and you haven’t seen Alltop then check it out now.

Started by “two guys and a gal” in a garage—or more accurately, one guy in home office (Will Mayall), one gal on a kitchen table (Kathryn Henkens), and one Guy in United 2B (Guy Kawasaki).

They describe it like this:

We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — “aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the headlines of the latest stories from dozens of sites and blogs.

You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In other words, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation” by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”



A little ditty for your next innovation workshop…
What if...

Another good piece of innovation stimulus from the lovely Lynette Webb,  Insights Manager at Google who created a Flickr site called “Interesting Snippets”. I’ve profiled her before and this is the latest image to her collection. It comes to us with a great quote from Russell Davies’ blog entry about Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Clay’s book is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures. When the traditional obstacles are broken down and we can all connect, engage and speak freely. What does this mean for the way we interact? For the way media publishers direct content? What happens when our unrestricted right to access, to connect and to speak is not only realised, but assumed?

It’s worth checking out Russell’s post on the book here

And if you haven’t read Clay’s blog you should definitely wet your whistle with a little of this



What people are doing online

online.jpg

I tend to take in information best with my peepers, I’m not great at listening [although I try very hard] and I really like to see things mapped out rather than a huge truckload of words. Which is why I love a good model, a good graph, schematic display – anything which represents information in a stimulating visual way. So here’s another one. This one comes courtesy of Business Week, spotted by one of Max’s colleagues & posted on his blog Experience The Message in the middle of last year. It’s a stormer for presentations & workshop stimulus so eat up friend.

You can check out Max’s original post here

The original Business Week article can be found here



Beta goes meta: From innovation to trend in a heartbeat
beta cultr

The idea of being in beta has become a broad cultural phenomenon. Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.

But it’s not only analysts and conference organizers who are switching instantly from micro to macro, picking up nascent trends and elevating them to a must-deal-with core competence that transcends the current fad (just see all the Facebook conferences that are mushrooming right now). What I find even more interesting is how the media and blogosphere deal with it. If everything’s in beta, the public doesn’t have the patience anymore to wait for the alpha. As the media are increasingly forced to immediately widen the scope and view every innovation in a larger context as it occurs, the boundaries between reporters and commentators, bloggers and industry analysts are fading.

Some examples: Not too long ago, Twitter was all the rage, and it was stunning to see that just shortly after the initial coverage during SXSW in March, reporters were already elaborating on the concept of micro-blogging, wondering what the new “radical transparencymeant for business. Nowadays, there is a great chance that you will stumble upon a Facebook story when you open just about any publication: It’s Facebook vs. MySpace, the implications of social networking on the borders between work and personal life, reflections on the “Facebook economy,” Facebook vs. iTunes, and maybe a philosophical piece on Facebook “as a post-modern book” or the future of social networking, which, for TIME, equals the future of the Internet. It is only a small step from MySpace to the “MySpace generation,” and from Facebook to the “Facebook generation” and then to the “Fakebook generation.” Similarly, the recent buzz around Radiohead’s “pay what you want” online release has instantly led to the coining of a “Radiohead Generation” and praise for the band “as a pioneer of the digital revolution.” And there are hundreds of articles discussing if Radiohead’s decision ushers in the definite end of the record industry. The stories about the radical distribution model appear to eclipse the actual music on the album–in this case, too, the reviews are in before the story is told.

Evidently, the media need to cope with the current while also putting forward a vision for the up and coming. The time between observation and conclusion, between description and prediction, however, has shrunk to almost zero. There are no more lapses between news, analysis, background story, industry trend story, and intellectual dissection; they have become one and the same, at the same time. Not only is beta the new alpha–beta has gone meta.




what’s your digital footprint?

bloggermania is here. in fact, you know it’s here because every tom, dick and barry has a blog, according to technorati there’s a new blog being created every second or was that every half second…and then there’s twittermania. for those of you who haven’t succombed to twitter, it combines IM-ing, social networking & mobile technology. twitter members can send short messages to their twitter network about what they’re doing or where they’re at…exciting isn’t it? now you can keep up with what your mates are doing every second of every  day.

whilst twitter seems a little well..time filling & stalker-ish,  think about it in the wider context of communicating online…the average geekhead has videos on youtube, photos on flickr, a blog on blogger, wordpress or typepad, maybe even a moblog, possibly a twitter network, del.ic.ious tags, they’re digg.ing and probably posting palava at myspace. which begs the question….

if a person exists in the world without a digital footprint, do they really exist and how would we know?



The 1% Rule
September 7, 2007, 6:58 am
Filed under: Digital culture, Emergent media, Geek stuff, The 1% rule, Trends stuff

When it comes to talking about uploads and downloads, there is a theory cited in many newspapers and sites called “The 1% rule”.

It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

It’s a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads which translates to
1,538 downloads per one upload.That puts the “creator to consumer” ratio at just 0.5%, but it’s early days yet and mobile blogging is no doubt higher.

Check out the full story here



lifestreaming
September 6, 2007, 5:02 am
Filed under: Digital culture, Emergent media, Geek stuff, lifestreaming

there’s been a lot of chat about ‘lifestreaming’ of late, so what is it? well in its simplest form it’s an aggregated view of all your life activities online. it’s a collection of all the ways you communicate, connect and cache your life online. 

in it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. it is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as del.icio.us (bookmarking), flickr (photos we take) youtube (videos that we make) etc…then you can either find software to host your own, or find sites that provide a platform for you.

these social network aggregators are a relatively new breed of applications which try to consolidate all our various social networking profiles into one, check it out.

source :: lifestream

abrief example of my lifestream can be found at natuba