This is what I sound like December 9, 2009
Posted by David Gillespie in business strategy, digital strategy, social media.Tags: Apple, Clay Shirky, Digital Strangelove, Foursquare, Microsoft
3 comments
I had the pleasure yesterday of joining Scott Hoffman on his Cliqology podcast to talk about all the madness around Digital Strangelove, and the ideas contained in it.
We talk about the presentation itself, the response it received, and how some of the ideas contained within are going to play out over the next few years, while also looking at some things that are emerging now that weren’t obvious when I first made the deck. WordPress is being difficult and not letting me embed the player, but Tumblr is giving me no such issues, so please go here to listen to it. I’d love to hear what you think, what you thought was on the money and even more so what you think completely missed the mark.
Regardless, I had a great time doing it, and will be rejoining Scott in the new year to do a special look at how small businesses can apply some of the thinking to what they do.
Hope you enjoy it, and thanks again to Scott for having me!
**Update**
I totally forgot to mention Digital Strangelove has been nominated for Slideshare’s Zeitgeist Awards. To vote for my presentation, all you need to do is go to the page, and click the Nominate just next to my picture. Your vote is greatly appreciated, I promise to lower taxes and serve cold beer at a reasonable price.
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On to the next one (Commented on “Gary Vaynerchuk”) September 24, 2009
Posted by David Gillespie in business strategy, digital strategy, social media, technology.Tags: DISQUS, Fred Wilson, Gary Vaynerchuk, social media, Wordpress
1 comment so far
Seems everything is moving so fast right now, I’m finding it hard to take the time to write. So instead I’m trying to read more, comment, and where I can bring those comments back onto this blog. I wish WordPress had a Disqus plug-in for their hosted sites (which is what this one is) as that would mean we could continue the larger conversation wherever we were, unfortunately they bought a Disqus competitor, so that is unlikely.
Your friend and mine Gary Vaynerchuk posted a video saying social media wasn’t the “seasoning” to the changes going on, it was the steak. I have a slightly different take on this, which I commented on. Watch the video then see below.
I feel like the “steak” is made up of so many things though, of which social is a part of.
Or to put it another way, we’ve operated under the guise of the Internet being, well, the Internet, and “social” being a part of that.
The reality is the web is *inherently* social, and given every business must have a presence online, every business is now missing something core if they don’t have a social aspect to what they do.
In the ridiculous growth that we’ve seen the web go through, I think we’ve confused maturity with expansion. We’re still figuring out exactly what this beast is, but I think we can assume bringing people together and giving them something to do is not going to go away.
So, here’s to the steak. I wonder what else it comes with? =]
Originally posted as a comment
by davidgillespie
on Gary Vaynerchuk using DISQUS.
This is an echo of something I said to Fred Wilson last November which he re-blogged here, which is itself an eho of a post I made last October. Social media is not part of the web, it is the web. The sooner we all realise that, the sooner we get onto the next thing.
And as a fan of buzzwords and technology, I always love the next thing.
This is for everyone out in the real world September 3, 2009
Posted by David Gillespie in digital strategy, marketing, social media.Tags: American Idol, Katie Chatfield
2 comments
There was always something about the idea of influencers I didn’t quite get, as if someone interested in being one somehow popularised the term, and it became self-evident based on that. It was easier for me to believe the audience tuning in to American Idol were environmentally pre-disposed to engaging in that type of content than it was to accept mass stupidity had somehow infected the entire known world. Mind you, that may still be the case…
Never the less, your friend and mine Katie Chatfield has a stunning piece up about this, citing research suggesting the important thing is not key influencers changing behaviour en masse but rather easily influenced people influencing each other in an interminable cycle. The main deck she references is below, but go visit her and say hi, she is a bit of a genius after all.
Best digital work this week – June 7th, 2009 June 7, 2009
Posted by David Gillespie in advertising, digital strategy, social media, technology, Video Games.Tags: Augmented reality, flickr, Get Satisfaction, Nokia N95, Twitter, White House
4 comments
Hi,
This is an ongoing series I’m doing rounding up the most interesting digital work I’ve come across in the past week. Sometimes it won’t necessarily be new, it’s amazing what can slip under the radar. If you find something you think is worth checking out, please leave me a note in the comments!
Cheers,
David
P.S. This post is best enjoyed with some Motown on in the background and a glass of wine/ice-cold beer.
—-
This week has been somewhat of an odd one, I’ve been fixated on augmented reality (henceforth referred to as “AR”) and have thus been scouring the web in search of the latest and greatest while trying to concoct ways to foist it on clients. Aside from just geeking out over it though, I really think there’s an opportunity to tell some interesting stories in ways that have previously eluded marketers. Mini started off with a cute but ultimately shallow AR spot, I like what Ray Ban have done though, upping the stakes ever so slightly and making sure to use the medium to do something others can’t (THE rule of ANY advertising: what can we do here that our friends in other disciplines can’t?).
As has been called out in other places however, not offering the option to “BUY NOW!” is a wasted opportunity.
In the interests of pushing things forward, I also came across a mad genius Russian raising the interactivity stakes, creating an environment virtual characters could interact with and makign it accessbile from your mobile (if your mobile happens to be a Nokia N95).
And I couldn’t bring this up without of course pointing you in the direction of a video I found and lost a long time ago, bless the Japanese for all they have brought us:
Experiential markteters: take this and run with it. Please.
Now, as I am a big proponent of brands getting more into the facilitation of experiences and services in more of a sponsor sort of way, I was a big fan of this new webservice, Supercook. The premise is simple: punch in the ingredients you have lying around and let Supercook display recipes that match what you already have in the pantry.
Dear Heinz,
Why are you not all over this?
Hugs and kisses,
Gillespie.
Moving on, in a great example of transparency, however cultivated I’m sure it is, I had no idea the Obama White House was running its own Flickr photostream. All companies who sell people-powered service please take note: putting a human face on what you do will always, always bring your customers closer to what you do. Next thing you know there’ll be a Get Satisfaction feedback form on the official White House page.
Adding another section to platform cold war going on right now, a game called Spymaster has launched a closed beta. “What is so special about a game being in closed beta?” I hear you ask. Well, not much, except it has been built on and is to be played using Twitter. Mashable have a great round-up of it, and while this shouldn’t be all that surprising given the myriad of web services already available, it’s interetsing to see people extend Twitter’s platform into a realm of sheer entertainment.
Last but not least, I couldn’t help but share this Brazillian site encouraging people to…errm…urinate while in the shower as opposed to the toilet. I can’t say it’s a practice I’ll be indulging in, and while I risk exposing myself for the hypocrit I am by including this site even amidst the lack of meaningful interaction between the site and its visitors beyond obligatory links out to various social networks, the execution is lovely and put a smile on my face.
Really, what more can we ask than that?
I send a message March 9, 2009
Posted by David Gillespie in blogging, social media, technology, web 2.0.4 comments
- Image via CrunchBase
Those who know me know getting under social media’s skin is one of my pet projects, only because the current discussions (I feel) miss the point, which I believe is the democratisation of platforms from which people have the opportunity to speak on a mass scale. More simply put, with the advent of easy blogging tools (like WordPress which runs this site), I get to spend my time thinking about what i want to say as opposed to how the infrastructure underneath it all works.
I wondered aloud last August when and how this sort of thing might come to impact the creation of music. Along came MelodySphere which had a simple shot at creating loops collaboratively but in a browser. Nice, but awkward to use. While the newest kid on the block (my block anyway) doesn’t get us there, it takes us one step closer to the removal of publishing barriers. Posterous allows you to email text, video, music and pictures to an address and then automagivally does the rest. You don’t even need to sign-up as you can see from my simply created Posterous page. It gives you a URL (which you can alter later if you wish) and instantly publishes whatever you sent. In my case, I shot them an MP3 of a song of mine and a minute later got a reply with the URL.
I love this, seriously love the removal of yet another barrier to people raising their voices, and while the geeks out there might bemoan the approach of the madding crowds, I believe the revolutions that will lead us out of economic nonsense will be born of the work being done by folk who are trying to make it easier for ideas and thoughts to be spread, and taking down anything that might stand in their way.
Tools for the linked economy November 26, 2008
Posted by David Gillespie in blogging, business strategy, social media.Tags: Adaptive Blue, Fred Wilson, linked economy, Outside.in, Zemanta
3 comments
Last week I was talking about business opportunities that exist around the aggregation and sorting of information, something Fred Wilson just wrote about:
This gets me excited. Because someone could do so much more with this idea. We have a few companies that are trying to extract meaning out of content on the web. Adaptive Blue recognizes pages about things (books, music, film, stocks, wine, people, etc). Outside.in recognizes posts and articles about places (neighborhoods, schools, parks, etc). And Zemanta recognizes concepts in blog posts and recommends content to add to your post.A VC, Nov 2008
I’m digging this notion of building a business around the curation of content right now – not that I’m looking to start one, but there are opportunities to leverage this moment with the right execution and the right brand(s).
Which of course means the race is on to see which ad agency fucks it up first.
(Incidentally, I use Zemanta in regular posts as well as having used it to re-blog the above quote from Fred. It is a fantastic service, any blogger reading this should go check it out – you’ll see the little re-blog image in the bottom-right corner of this post)
Make your problem somebody else’s November 18, 2008
Posted by David Gillespie in digital strategy, marketing, social media, web 2.0.Tags: conversation, David Gillespie, Henry Jenkins, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Seth Godin, social media, Tribes, User-generated content
2 comments
Experiences facilitated by brands but not about brands – David Gillespie (broken record).
Entertainment, content of all shapes and sizes, offline, online, anywhere you like it. The problem could be a lack of conversation, and when you give the community around your offering the tools and platforms to make themselves heard, you take a step towards something much bigger than where you’ve been before. As I said when I called social media out, the exciting thing about where we are in our digital evolution is for the first time in our history it is as easy to create content as it is to produce it.
So what are you doing with this opportunity?
User-generated content was the first ham-fisted attempt to do something creative in this space, but it is only going to get better as organisations get more comfortable with the conversation going on about them. There is no silver bullet when trying to harness the enthusiasm of your tribe and align it with an organisation’s goals, this quote from Henry Jenkins though will steer any effort in the right direction:
The key is to produce something that both pulls people together and gives them something to do…I don’t have to control the conversation to benefit from their interest – Henry Jenkins – MIT
If your problem is nobody knows about you, make that the community’s issue and give them a reason to talk. Rally the tribe and give them purpose, make your anonymity their problem, let them solve it in their way. If you’ve been good to them along the way, they will reward you more than your own efforts ever will.
—
Image courtesy of paf triz, with thanks to compfight.
How simple is Web 2.0? November 11, 2008
Posted by David Gillespie in philosophy, social media, web 2.0.Tags: Alex White, web 2.0
6 comments
I like making sure we draw lines between simple and accessible, but could Web 2.0 really be as easily explained as this?
The only fault I’m thinking is the x100 – connections are still one to one, just on a mass scale.
Image courtesy of my mate Alex – if anyone knows the original source please let me know so I can give proper credit.
**Update** Turns out I thought the image must have come from someone other than Alex, when it did in fact originate with him. This is not because I thought him not capable of extraodinarily insightful cartoons, more so because, much like Jesus having walked the Earth, the idea deities occasionally walk among us is somewhat hard to believe. There you go. Alex White, genius personified!
Creative Is Not A Department 