I have in the past, made grandiose promises to blog regularly. Only to be mocked by my friends and revealed to be a hollow braggart by history.

So I am going to try a new approach (s).

• I am  a great admirer of Katy Lindeman’s Week Notes. So there’s a template to copy.
• And I find that I often do a bit of structured thinking in emails. So that’s another source.
• And finally I get on certain jags about things and start collecting them in delicious. So I could always look back at that and see if there’s a nascent post lurking.
• And sometimes I give talks and write articles for other people. So surely the elements of that should provide all kinds of blog-posty goodness.

Yes indeed there is no shortage of opportunities to collate a bit of knowledge and experinece and stick it on the internet.

So why don’t I?

Not Enough Bloody Time. Or at least a perception that there is Not Enough Bloody Time.

But that’s a bit like collecting all of the things I need to make a meal, but never actually cooking. Not that blogging is the ultimate output of my reading, thinking and working. Rather structured ideas and increased knowledge are. And there is nothing like structuring a post, thinking through the links and imaging the critique of a few select audience members to sharpen up an idea or approach to something.

I was supposed to be in Paris all of next week for an internal Ogilvy conference and then Le Web. Instead I recently learned that I need to come back for a meeting on Thursday afternoon. The net result being that I have a meeting on Thursday and my diary on Friday is completely empty. As I went to go and fill it with internal meetings and vendor chats and reviews of one thing and another I stopped. I stopped and realised that I had gifted myself a day of free time.

So that day is going to be spent organsing myself so that I can have a regular day of free time.

Tools that I currently have but don’t use properly and guides to using them better.

Info management

Google mail: become a Gmail Ninja

Google Reader: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/get-more-out-of-google-reader.html

Delicious: Specifically using Stacks like this one I made of these links

Evernote: Random things to do with Evernote and a more introductory ‘Getting Started’ post. Oh, and a really basic intro YouTube video with an awesome voice over!

Task Management

Omni focus: http://www.asianefficiency.com/omnifocus/

Network management

Linkedin: From Guy Kawasaki

Facebook: the new features

And finally Twitter, especially lists.

And my One Tool to Rule Them All: Hootsuite

So Wired is predicting The End of The Web.

Using data from Cisco the Wired graph shows not just a decline in Web based traffic and email but also a concurrent phenomena of traffic going to apps and other off web locations. As various commentators have pointed out, and Boing Boing graphically illustrate, the story is not as straight forward as the Wired article and graph make it seem; there are different ways of illustrating the data and the idea of many environments is not new. There are similar sorts of thoughts expressed in Forrester’s Splinternet view of the internet back in January this year.

But to paraphrase lots of other people; an exaggerated data point is a terrible thing to waste, and if all this does is gets us thinking about the non-web internet, then its a good thing.

So what implications does this have for how brands communicate with their audiences?

4 threats:

* Less contact through traditional owned media of email and brand web sites
* Less exposures (really can it get any smaller?) to audiences through online (web) ads
* Questions around the role of search in all of this; if audiences are not on the web as much how are they finding brand’s content and services?
* More reliance on user recommendations, not on searched discoveries

4 opportunities:

* Mobile and desktop apps and advertising (not new news but perhaps a bit more urgent)
* Content feeds via twitter / rss / podcast (really not new, but perhaps renewed relevance)
* Internet services to mobiles, tablets, social networks, fridges and in-car? (the day of the networked toaster is coming and you know it)
* Built in sociability: not just ‘share this‘, but real (compelling) reasons to invite others to use / subscribe / view

Stimulated

We received a brief at DraftFCB recently that asked for advice on using all three areas of search; SEO, SEM and “stimulated”. I think this is a really useful distinction and an obvious corollary to the oft quoted “three types of media”; paid, owned and earned which is neatly summarised by Forrester here.

What does it mean? If SEM is paid search and SEO is what you can do to optimise your own web site in search then to my mind stimulated is what you can do to activate both of those. In this interpretation, stimulating SEM would be driving users to a search engine with a specific search in mind, against which you have bought specific terms; Compare the Meerkat comes to mind as an example.

But it is the stimulation of SEO that is really emerging as an area of interest; how to harness the growing tendency of users to link to sites they like (which builds you-in bound links) and to write descriptions of them, which contributes to the meta data that search engines use to understand what your site is about.

I first noticed the impact of inbound links working on the Sony BRAVIA Balls campaign when one of the unintended consequences of creating the BRAVIA blog and the associated distribution of blog assets was that lots of high ranking blogs linked to the campaign site bravia-advert.com. The net result of this was that the site was the number one result in Google for the search term “advert”. For two years. Genius. If what Sony sold was adverts…so be careful what you optimse for.

As often seems to be the case whenever you get into the murky world of search there are myriad issues to consider including the follow / nofollow; the practice of marking links as ‘nofollow’ to exclude them from various search engine processes. This varies on different bookmarking sites and so can impact on their contribution to your SEO. With the rise of twitter and other mocroblogging platforms there has also been a huge increase in the use of URL shortening servcies like Bit.ly and TinyURL. Again these vary in the way that hey attributte links, although it seems most of them do fact act as stimulus to your SEO.

Putting these areas of pernickety technical detail aside it seems that overall social media links help browsers find your content and they contribute to your SEO to help serchers find your content. Both good things. So to get a handle on what kinds of social links you’ve got going on go and play with some of the tools that Lee Odden profiles on Social Media Today here. Or simply put your latest blog post into Yahoo’s Site Explorer.

And happy stimulation.

Cruelty is always possible later

Although I found Altimeter’s Success Criteria for Facebook self acclaimed ‘heuristic’ approach a little too rough and ready in its conclusions, I did like its approach to research in general;

• Use of a Creative Commons License to encourage non commercial distribution with attribution
• Disclosure of vested interests in using their clients in the research on their web site
• Embeddable report available on Slideshare
• Plenty of opportunity for peer review in the comments; although so far its all been glowing endorsements that seem to suffer from something similar Blurb Insincerity
• And finally their invitation “To make Open Research work, we hope you read it, spread it, and use it to improve.”

But the next step has to be rather than use i tot improve, should be “improve it”. Open it up to peer participation after the fact or to contributions along the way al la wikipedia unless they fear the inevitable cruelty of contributors…

Rant: Social Media is a widely [and wildly] misunderstood and misused phrase.

Antidote: so in lieu of banning / replacing it here are some things to remind ourselves of;

What social media is not

• It is not an alternative to broadcast media (it is slow and starts with small numbers)
• It is not free: it takes great assets and constant execution (and ideally amplification in broadcast media, see Big Seed article from HBR
• It is not a strategy in itself, it is an environment that a strategy and subsequent tactics can exist in
• It is not an objective in itself; don’t just do it for the sake of doing it; for god’s sake have a business / marketing objective in mind
• Facebook, twitter, Youtube, foursquare, flickr and their ilk are NOT social media; they are social media platforms; just putting things on them does not count as social media it is, at best, publishing.

What social media is (and questions to ask ourselves / our clients)

• Social is about developing relationships and having conversations with communities (can the brand spare the time and provide constant attention?)
• Social is about being nice (what does the brand have to offer to the conversation / community?)
• Social is about starting small and growing from a relevant base (who do we already know that is is interested in what we’re doing?)
• But we can use off-social (ATL) to make that base bigger (what other marketing has the brand got that we can leverage?)
• Social is very effective at getting a brand close to its audience (why do we want to be this close? or are we just being a bit creepy?)

It was not what I would have described as an unqualified success.

Things that went well

• Big old desks with carrels, just like at school
• Quiet. Really. Very quiet.
• Old men in tweed grappling with oversized musty reference tomes

Things that went less well

• Free wi-fi (that ran so slowly that I got out my dongle. Yes, I know its free, but I had my hopes raised, and a woman scorned etc.)
• Not enough power points for plugging in laptops
• A strange smelling man who I am pretty sure didn’t work there busted me working in a closed section of the library and insisted that my desk was not a ‘Designated Laptop Position’ and I should therefore interrupt my life’s work and move. (Yes I was in the wrong, but I needed juice and a woman scorned etc).

So I am not going back. Mainly because of the skeevy man, but also because I want to keep trying new places. They need to have electricity and wi-fi or at least a mobile (dongle) signal. They also need to be quiet so I can think and a bit noisy so I can argue with Oli, Mike, Gabby etc. So herewith a list of alternative work locations that I’d love you to add to;

• On a train to Cornwall. Get out at Penzance, have a swim and come back.
• The Waterloo Suset Room at the Haward Gallery
• In Duncan’s cottage in Wiltshire (added feature: send a second team there sepearately by train with the proviso that they have to finish writing / answering the brief by Tisbury. Pick them up have a slap-up meal at the Beckford Arms, sleep at the cottage and return the next morning.
• In another professional work environment; a room in a hospital, an architect’s office, an artist’s studio, a science lab, an engineering workshop…(volunteers?)
• Walking through The National Gallery as I did the other day with Mark Hancock
• On a ferry down the Thames

I also wondered if using different documentation formats might throw up some interesting things;

• Do all of the brief writing correspondence by posting letters
• Paint the response to the client brief (oils not water colours obviously) Some starters here at SXSWi with each keynote being illustrated / interpreted in real time by a different artist / designer.
• Tweet the brief to the creative team
• Only use photos
• Write it all collaboratively on a wiki

And of course working with different people. When we set up RMM we agreed that the three of us would work in planning pairs. Given the very different planners that we were, by personality; experience and interests, this worked so well that we used to joke that between the three of us we were actually quite a decent planner. The pairs idea is also alive and well at Draftfcb but now I have access to an even wider range of planners to pair with. The next thing I am keen to try is working really closely with a creative team; you know, actually sitting with them, kicking ideas around, sharing sandwiches. I am curious to see how that might work given the swan-like relationships that creative teams have. This is not the post for it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the growing interest I have in the creative technologist as another useful way of interrupting the creative pairing process.

Thanks to @wipspace for pointing me to this talk by Filip Nilsson from the agency F&B at Cannes last year;

Filip Nilsson speaks at Cannes Lions 2009 from Jimmy Wulff on Vimeo.

In it, Nilsson observes that agency structures haven’t changed since WWII, so he instigated  a few initiatives. While most of these don’t seem that radical.  consider what impact they might have on your agency; No titles. Seated all mixed in together, not by discipline. Collective, public (within the agency) reviews of work. All creatives as of 8AM on Monday are digital. Owned by the staff. And while each of these initiatives or variations has been tried by different agencies e.g. Mother and no account people between creatives and clients. St Lukes and all staff ownership, I’m not aware of anyone bundling them all up and working in this way so successfully.

Your thoughts on the back of a post card to the usual address. (See what I did there?)