It’s Film time

Posted on 23 January, 2012 by

I love this time of year.  I know it’s a time of austerity on food, drink and light given that it’s January, but it’s film time!  It’s the time of year where I watch 30 – 40 films and there is always magic.  Some image, some exceptional performance, some compelling story that makes time stand still.  Where being in the dark for that moment in time is like no other place in the world.

I am privileged to be a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Artists (BAFTA) and can’t help but get excited as the awards shows build momentum towards surprises, underdogs, glamour and Hollywood.

There have been some stunning performances this year and already the surprises.  A magical and wonderful black & white silent film with a charismatic dog, who would have predicted that?  I love when I see a small film, made by a passionate director who doesn’t know that it’s not possible, because everything is possible.

A new survey done in Britain by LoveFiLM and Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an international authority in personality and psychological profiling, even suggests that the more films you watch, the more happy and successful you are.  I guess it proves that some escapism is good for the soul.

Neil White lives in the north of England and last year decided to see every film released in Britain in 2011.  Over 600 films.  Even if a film is only screened for 3 days in a far corner of the British Isles, he goes.  His Every Film In 2011 blog with an unbiased and down to earth review on each film is refreshing.  I admire people who undertake a journey and see it through, enjoying where it leads.  He now gets over 75,000 views per month to his blog and is doing it again in 2012 because the experience has been so memorable and presumably, as the survey says, because it makes him happier.  This reminds me of Julie Powell who decided to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and then blog about it.  What a wonderful film about entrepreneurship and the brilliant iconic person of Julia Child who changed history.

I will stop writing now so I can watch a film.

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Game On

Posted on 11 October, 2011 by


I’ve had a couple of weeks to try out the new Facebook features and it’s truly Game On for the evolution of social media platforms.  They have made the types of changes that were needed to move the platform forward as it was becoming too big and unwieldy for easy communication, quick/fun moments and meaningful use.  Although the attrition of users was still small, the signs were there and I believe this will add a nice bump to engagement as well.  It’s still not as easy to use as Google+ which is an elegant interface, but this was a big step up.  Here is a nice recap of the changes from Chris Taylor of Mashable.

The gamechanger for me is that you can watch TV and movies, listen to music, and read news with your friends — all within Facebook.  While there are certainly international rights issues to make this complex as our friends are now spread around the world and may not be able to share the same content at the same time, it also gives us a new level of sharing possibilities in the moment.  Of course, we may not want everyone to see what we are watching as pointed out by Pete Cashmore in Facebook Users Beware.  Auto-sharing can be very dangerous, especially if it’s accidentally made public.  Note to myself:  re-write the company social media policy.

These changes will also dramatically impact the possibilities for commerce through social shopping, driving discovery through friends in real time along with more authentic opportunities for brands.

Game On.

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RIP Steve Jobs

Posted on 6 October, 2011 by

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The Cult of Exceeding Expectations

Posted on 31 August, 2011 by

Game Changers always exceed expectations, but Steve Jobs is the leader of this Cult.  It’s been a brilliant week of commentary and articles about this iconic life which has consistently given consumers the intangible dream made real.  Then so real it’s completely integrated into day to day life.  How did we live without it?  Emotional too – will we still have someone to delight us with the unexpected?

A couple of things make me pause.  From the article ‘What Makes Steve Jobs So Great?‘ recapping when he came back to Apple in 1997:  His tour finally brought him to the workbench of a designer ready to quit after just a year on the job, languishing amid a stack of prototypes. Among them was monolithic monitor with a teardrop swoop, which managed to integrate all of a computer’s guts into a single package. In that basement Jobs saw what middle managers did not. He saw the future. And almost immediately he told the designer, Jonathan Ive, that from here on out they’d be working side-by-side on a new line.

That became the iMac.  His willingness to gamble on things others say are outrageous and ‘why’ – who needs it?  For THAT price?!  Who would ever pay $500 (£300) for a portable music player and $400 (£280) for a mobile phone?

The leader of the Cult has’t always been right, far from it.  But he HATES when he gets it wrong.  He can barely refer to MobileMe without anger, humiliation and embarrassment.

And from the Harvard Business Review article ‘Steve’s Seven Insights for 21st Century Capitalists’:  Steve’s goal in paying obsessive attention to all things Apple wasn’t merely to “listen” but to discern people’s wildest expectations, and then firmly take a quantum leap past them, instead of merely discovering the lowest-common-denominator of what people wanted most today, and then pandering to it. Leapfrogging your customers means creating new markets, not just new products.

For those of us who passionately believe in customer or client centric organisations – can we delight our own customers with these principles?  On the basics?  Too often we do the expected, the minimum, the traditional.  We put up barriers:  too hard, too expensive and doesn’t deliver short term profit.  I detest the terms e-blast, mass mailing, etc. because we aren’t recognising a real person on the other side who is taking precious time to interact with us.  If we took one moment and asked ourselves in a conscious fashion before pushing the button or approving the green light on everything we do, ‘Does this serve our customer?’, we would be on step closer to joining the cult.

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Evolution of Social Networks

Posted on 9 August, 2011 by

With the launch of Google +, it’s made us all think about what we post where, to whom and what do each of the communities mean to us.  Did we need another social network?  Has the maturity of the various networks meant we’ve evolved to something else?  My browser now has tabs open for LinkedIn, Facebook and Google +, with Twitter running on Tweetdeck in the background.  A lot of connectedness.  Over the last couple of years, the etiquette has naturally evolved that LinkedIn is a professional network with less frequent, but more compelling business related posts and Facebook is personal, with some crossover.  Most people don’t post their holiday pix on LinkedIn (annoying when they do!) and Facebook is where you do.  I check LinkedIn everyday because I really like the status updates my network posts and I dip in and out of Twitter for a broad brush of the news or industry talk.  Google + is still a wide open space and much less cluttered, but the conversations are real and engaging which is a compelling reason to stay connected.  It’s still early days to see how it matures.

In April 2010, Paul Adams, then UX for Google, wrote the “Real Life Social Network” deck.  Even though a little over a year old, a really terrific presentation about this evolution and a key part of the Google + strategy.  Here are the points I’ve taken away:

  1. Understand sociology, not technology  
  2. Social networks are not new
  3. People do not have one group of friends
  4. People have multiple independent groups of friends
  5. One friend’s group means mixed up conversations
  6. Strong ties are the people you care most about; average Facebook number of friends is 130, but interaction is only consistently with 4 to 6
  7. The word friend is unhelpful
  8. Social networks make it easier to reconnect and catch up with weak ties
  9. Temporary ties are becoming more commonplace online
  10. People have multiple facets of identity
  11. Strong ties decide what we buy
  12. People of all ages care deeply about privacy:  Privacy — Trust

Paul Adams is now with Facebook and on the public launch of Google +, tweeted ‘is like bumping into an ex – girlfriend’.   And added a recent blog post:  This is just the beginning.  I can’t wait to see where it all goes.

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Fanstrapping

Posted on 13 July, 2011 by

I was at the Medialeaders event last night in London and met the Creative Director from Mavo Studio who is also a musician.  Inevitably it comes up in the conversation – what does it take for a band to make it in today’s world?  Digital has forever changed the landscape, music is free or shared in a way never before possible.  What happens now?

Virtually the first thing I read today, from respected author Seth Godin and founder of the Domino Project, answered that question very eloquently through the post Bookstrapping:

“Traditional publishing: “Be famous, build a platform, organize a tribe, then we’ll publish your non-fiction book.”

Self publishing, particularly long-tail digital self-publishing: “Write a book, codify a manifesto, put it into the world and use it attract, organize and build a platform.””

I believe this is now the same for bands: write music, put it into the world and use it to attract, organize and build a fan base.  Then play live as often as you can.  By building a strong fan base, you have many commercial opportunities.   If recorded music is now more of a promotional tool and not the main revenue channel as it was in the past, then attracting sponsors and venues through the fan base will create those opportunities.

At Pleimo, we are developing a marketing bootcamp for bands, a CRM programme for building a fan base.  We hope that these new tools will give artists everywhere the opportunity to thrive and continue to do what they do best:  make music for us to enjoy.

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Out of Love with Facebook?

Posted on 15 June, 2011 by

Out of Love with Facebook?

Everyone seems to have picked up on the story last week that the number of Facebook users has declined in the USA, Canada and the UK during the last couple of months. Almost every commentator suggested it was Facebook fatigue, fears from privacy issues, boredom and random bad experience. With an IPO looming early next year, after a certain period of time – do people just fall out of love with Facebook?

My friend Tyler Tarr from Danucapital says that “Facebook is a ponzi scheme…if you analyze the useage curve over time for their users, after a certain period of time users tire of it and have 0 advertising value, very similar to MySpace. Therefore, Facebook needs new users at an ever increasing rate to offset drop-off and to demonstrate growth. Inevitably they hit the wall and begin to disrupt the user experience in order to generate more revenue, essentially accelerating their decline.” A classic bell shaped curve. While I can’t disagree with that logic, I can say that Facebook still has staggering numbers and is almost at 700 million people worldwide, or 1 in 11 people on the planet. Unbelievably, 50% of the population in the UK is a registered user on Facebook. In Vincos blog, you can graphically see their growth in this fantastic world map of social networks over the last 3 years.

I did a quick Google search this morning on ‘Facebook fatigue’ and not surprisingly, there have been many stories over the last 3 years describing this exact same thing. Users declining, fatigue, boredom, etc.  Yet the actual amount of time spent on Facebook by individuals, along with the number of users, has only continued to increase at hyper growth rates.

The key point is that Facebook has hardly begun to learn how to monetize their platform.  In addition to advertising, there is F-commerce, social commerce type deals, virtual goods and many more options.   Even if users do decline over time in a classic bell shaped curve for whatever reason, there is so much critical mass of dedicated users who will remain, that I expect profitability should continue for many years to come. Unless of course management does disrupt the user experience or meddle with privacy one too many times.

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