The brand commissioning editor

I wrote some stuff a few weeks ago about the big structural shifts in how people get paid for creating stuff. Quick summary is that twenty years ago if you wanted to make a living writing then you needed to seek employment with a big publisher who could monetise that content by selling ads to brands who wanted their ads to appear next to it. Or you wrote the ads themselves. Nowadays brands are becoming increasingly less bothered about buying ads, and so big publishers are struggling to invest in lots of content (this is why the Times has just laid off another batch of journalists, and why the Observer contains half as many pages as 3 years ago)

The obvious solution for people who want to make their living writing is to cut out this middle man and work directly for a brand. From a marketing perspective this is tried and tested in direct mail departments, who write direct mail copy for the finance and charity sectors. But not in the sense of making a brand culturally relevant by actually becoming part of culture the way that The Sun, Loaded, Heat or Viz did in years gone by, or that ASOS or Drowned In Sound do today. To do that a brand would need to appoint a commissioning editor for their bit of the internet - as ASOS did last week, recruiting Melissa Dick from ElleUK.com

(Slight diversion - 'their bit of the internet' is a pretty ungainly phrase, but it is important to differentiate from 'their website/their Facebook page/their YouTube channel' - if you think of these as separate then you're missing most of the point of internet publishing)

The benefits to a brand in doing this are in two places. Search and Social. So the two places that have any importance to brands who want to make a bit of the internet - as these are the two places that brand can gain new attention.
Writing and filming genuinely interesting content of cultural relevance to the brand and its audience is difficult for brands, as they have rarely thought about long form cultural content before (I realise I'm doing a disserve to customer publishers here - I've become very interested in customer publishing recently), and they don't know where to go to get it.

But as outlined above, there are lots of freelance journalists around with fewer big publisher gigs available. What was missing was the marketplace. Which is where Sabotage Times comes in. Sabotage is the brainchild of Loaded founder James Brown - and while at first glance it looks like a rich and interesting website, that is really a facade for a new media model - the website is basically a shop window for writers to sell archive material or take new commissions. Initially this has been from publishers - who are used to shopping for archive material. Increasingly it will be for brands who understand to role of cultural relevance in how they optimise and promote their internet presences.

I'd suggest that most brands ought to be thinking along the ASOS route of appointing someone to run a content strategy - someone who starts to move towards a Chief Culture Officer role - but anyone in this position will still need the resources available through market like Sabotage Times, and the way that the site and the syndication agency is structured make it easy for brands to start taking their first steps towards commissioning content.

(Full disclosure - I used to work for James a long time ago at IFG)

Technology is a means not an end (slideshare deck)

Social ideas

View more presentations from Graeme Wood.

Technology isn’t changing consumer behaviour, it is just amplifying different bits of it: technology changes, people don’t. We are still super-social creatures (that’s how we developed language, learned to hunt, out competed rival species) – our evolution has favoured sociability over most other traits, so we still gain most self-esteem from interaction with other people (in the same way as we have evolved to prefer sweet foods, as sugar is the purest form of energy in a food-scarce world.

So we form tribes around shared interests, we change behaviour by copying others, & we rely on other opinions to guide our own. All that has changed is that none of this used to be the domain of mass media. Once the cost of producing media fall away to zero as has happened in the last 15 years, those shared interests and other opinions are no longer limited by geography – they are instant, global and free – and so virtually infinite

This is important for understanding media, as it means that there social networks are not just a trend away from content-centric sites, they are a natural evolution into something that is intrinsically more interesting to human beings – each other. Facebook differs from any media property of the 20th century because people don’t go there first and foremost to consume content – they go there because their friends are there. The fact that content is involved is just something to talk about. Content that spreads through networks does so because of how it connects people, not because of any aesthetic value intrinsic to it as content. Example: if someone tells you a funny joke, you are much more likely to remember who told you the joke than the joke itself – jokes are a form of social currency, where the actual content is less important than the values it conveys on the person who told the joke. If it was funny, you think of them as funny. The subconscious decision-making process that goes on when sending something on to friends is ‘what does this say about me – does it make me look witty, attractive, intelligent?’

So that doesn't help brands think about technology, but I think that it is far more important to think about what is actually changing and how it affects human behaviour. That means we can develop comms products that inspire people to participate, becuase they are grounded in human behaviour. And the technology used is a means, rather than an end.

(No planners were injured in the making of this deck, although several were heavily borrowed from:

Mark Earls
David Cushman
Gareth Kay
Katy Lindemann
Faris Yakob
and probably some more - apologies if I've missed people
If you like my spin on it, then go and check out more of their stuff

MFlow - incentivised music discovery

Whinging about the music industry..... so I said that I'd stop that and concentrate on the positives. Before I do though the Guardian have gone into a bit more detail on exactly what artists get paid by Spotify, which is important, because Spotify wouldn't be streaming music if the record companies weren't getting paid, so somewhere along the line there's a lot of money not going the way of artists.

anyway, positives....
So MFlow is a social music discovery site. And a social music trading site. But one that the record industry approves of. As you can see from the screengrab it looks a lot like Spotify. Essentially the way it works is that you follow people if you share their taste, and they 'flow' tunes to you to listen to. And you can reflow stuff on to your followers. Or of course create your own flows. This all sounds very Twitterly familiar, but the smart stuff is in the trading bit. MFlow is all built into an interface similar to iTunes that allows one click purchase. 20% of the purchase price is passed on to whoever recommended the tune to you. Likewise you make 20% of the price of anything that your followers buy based on your recommendation. The follower/following dynamic is a little bit hit and miss so far, as you can't import your social graph from anywhere else so you have to do a bit of digging. MFlow is still in private beta though, and Facebook, Twitter and LastFM import functionality are coming soon.

I think this is a very smart system for a few reasons. Firstly rather than penalising fans for being fans, it makes discovery and payment part of one process - sharing music is incentivised. Secondly there is a weird thrill to see your first payment come through - it might only be £0.20 per song, but that is essentially someone handing over hard cash to YOU for YOUR great taste. And thirdly it socialises what what (bizarrely) a very solitary pastime. Music itself (creation of, listening to, talking about, organising life around) is extremely social, but the actual physical act of buying it (or downloading it, or borrowing your mate's hard drive full of it, or whatever) is highly solitary since the demise of the music shop. Services like Spotify (lowering the barriers to access to music) and LastFM (the best social discovery system that has been invented to date) get you only as far as hearing music, not buying it. MFlow makes buying music social.

I'd love to know how the payments are structured on the other side though - are musicians going to see any of the potential revenue? Or is their work only going to be licensed in future keep the unnovation-hungry record companies alive for another year?

I think Mflow launches next week some time, but if you want to try it before give me a shout

Changing behaviour changes how we think

Following on from the Dept of Transport example below, it was great to read someone far smarter than me is thinking along the same lines and explaining to small businesses how social marketing should work. I don't often post slideshare decks here, as most people design slides to illustrate what they are talking about: so there are some case study pictures in here, but the insights are so important that the deck is well worth a read

Apple as a social brand
Changing behaviour changes how we think
Social media is a place to do things for customers
It's not about conversation

#Btvsmb

View more presentations from Zeus Jones.

What he said...

MOG: musical love child of Spotify and Last FM

Or that's what this intro video suggests. According to TechCrunch this launches on the 2nd Dec in the US.


Mog appears to have all the social discovery and customisable radio bits of Last FM but with Spotify style streaming added in. All for $5 per month. I'm currently ok with a mix of iTunes, Spotify and Last FM, each covering the bits of 'listening to music' that they are individually good at. There's no mention of mobile yet, on the MOG site, but I reckon if there was an app for that then I'd pay for one service that can do everything.

(although the price is a clue that I might not be able to: Mog's opportunity is that Spotify STILL isn't live in the US. While this great for Mog, music industry hobbling of any sort of international streaming standards means that we probably won't see this in the UK for ages)

The Mobile Social Computing Explosion

Mike Arauz's ability to cut through the hype surrounding technology and highlight the strategic implications for brands means that his decks are always worth reading. I thought this explanation of the combined impact of social and mobile nails the challenges that marketers and agencies need to get to grips with before next year

Social Network In Your Pocket

View more documents from Mike Arauz.

Nokia N97 - the start of local social?

Amid all the hype about the unveiling of the N97, which mostly runs along the lines of 'is it a phone that does computing or a laptop that makes calls?' there's one question that I'm a bit unsure of. I obviously want one - full QWERTY keyboard, 32GB, N-GAGE functionality, 5mb camera and all, but the A-GPS integration is being promoted as a social networking tool. It's a great concept - the phone keeps track of your GPS location, and that of all your friends, and lets you know where they are etc. Remember (if you're over 25) how much planning used to go into meeting friends in the days before mobiles - you'd have to specifiy a time and place and all that. And stick to it! Then SMS took over the planning for you. And A-GPS enabled social networking has the potential to take this to a new level - to keep everyone in the loop about where you are. It becomes even more interesting as people move beyond 'real life friends' through networks like Twitter, and will mean that genuinely location-based apps like BrightKite will come of age. It is also potentially the start of a future I've written about before (okay, badly organised post, so look at theory 18!) where devices communicate amongst themselves and only warn you of people or places that might interest you.

We will move towards this, but I'd question the impact that the N97 will have itself.... the power of a network is in the number of connections in it, and A-GPS tracking and social network integration will only be useful when enough people have enabled phones. Which will eventually happen, but proprietry technology surely can't be way to go. In the past, developers needed to protect their early mover R&D-funded advantage. Now, they need to scale it as quickly as possible before Google gets there. As Google is already in the mobile market, and as open, networked and scaleable as everything else Google does, surely the bold move would be to base the next N-series on Android, and make sure that it talks to every other Android phone, no matter who makes it or what network it is on?

Social TV

Following on from Nick's post about CBS social viewing rooms, there's a few more bits of kit out there that are putting conversation at the heart of the viewing experience, to help drag the good ol' tellie back into the forefront of media innovation.

I'd argue that it is user experience rather than distribution speed that is the main thing preventing on demand TV reaching mass appeal. 99% of the population are happy with the big screen in the corner of the room, even if the little one on their lap gives them access to far more content. Once the content can easily move between the two, then we start to see a fully on demand viewing experience available back on the TV screen. I had expected that the hardware that will deliver this will become available (probably iTunes/Apple TV based) and have appeal outside of early adopters once Kangaroo made huge great piles of back catalogue and nostalgia available, and marketed it heavily (using iPlayer as a benchmark for my future guessing).

The obvious problem with mass take-up of on demand is that it takes away the role of TV as a conversation starter - the water cooler moment. This won't happen overnight, but it will slowly eat away at the central role that TV plays in the national psyche. Which is ironic, when brands that have historically relied on TV for advertising are starting to realise that communication might actually be a two-way process.

Gamers on the other hand have been able to converse via the TV set for years, since the launch of XBox Live in 2002. Over 60% of US owners pay the annual subscription for the service. So it is no surprise that the next release is rumoured to include a much wider range of social recommendation tools, for a range of gaming and entertainment content.

And this type of social feature is starting to make its way into the next generation of entertainment hubs - Boxee is a downloadable app that organises all the content on a PC or streamed live from the likes of Hulu. It is designed on the basis that it will be viewed on a big screen and operated via remote, and it has social recommendation at its heart - it can't actually share content with friends, but can recommend. You would expect that the next move from here is along the lines of CBS's ideas about individual groups of friends all being able to start off viewing simultaneously and comment over the TV screen.


This begs the question of whether the big social networks are missing a trick - surely Facebook TV would be a viable option? Again, it depends on having the infrastructure to deliver content to the TV screen (both the broadband distribution and the hardware in the home), but television is inherently social so the readymade friend network and app environment would give this type of application a distinct advantage.

The real trick being really missed though is gaming devices. The social element is already built in, and they already bridge the gap between laptop and TV, and there will be a huge gap in the market in the UK around Kangaroo launch time. 6 months on from Hulu launching in the US the hardware manufacturers are still chasing their tails.

Could XBox or Playstation running Kangaroo on a Facebook app be coming to a living room near you?

More Jeff Clark

More funky stuff by Jeff Clark, who also designed Twitter Streamgraphs. Digg Trends has a really customisable interface, so that by picking on the Auto category, I could concentrate on trends in environmental motoring categories at a keyword level.

Now although data visualisation apps are fun, they aren't much use unless there is something to illustrate, so here I've mashed in the price of oil over the same period (the white trend line).

I think I could get most of this info out of Google Trends, but the interface here is just so much easier