digital art science

Never has the individual had so much power at their disposal as they do online today. What started as a ‘get back in touch with’ or stalk your old classmates and colleagues phenomena, has evolved into… well, basically millions of individual digital PR agencies, servicing one demanding client, themselves. And it’s being powered further by Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed, Plurk, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc, etc. It’s called, whether you like it or not, Social Media (pfui).

The amazing thing is, most businesses and brands have yet to break into it with any real or lasting success.

Some would argue that they missed the boat. I advised my clients to jump in at the start and ride the wave while it was going up. Brands were the catalysts for people signing up to services like Twitter, before they were splashed all over every newspaper, every day. The logic being that the users are going to sign up eventually anyway, so why not give them a push and be their first pleasant memory of web 3.0 (sorry).

I haven’t seen anyone really jump in yet, with the exception of Skittles, but that was just weird.

Perhaps it was the pool of clients active at the time, or a general sense of wwworld weariness that surrounds anything online. The fear that it may be just a fad (Hello, Second Life!)

In my book they missed an absolutely stellar opportunity. I hope that some client-side marketing people have learned, and are willing to take a little risk with something different next time. Oh well, that’s my personal beef out of the way. Onto something more meaningful…

Businesses, small, medium but potentially not so much large, can reap some real benefit from the Social Media phenomenon and earn brownie points for partaking in the spirit that it is intended.

I’m talking about personal profile management. Anyone on a social network, or dabbling in social media has a profile of some description. A physical one (for want of a better word) that contains personal information and links, photos, videos, quizzes (gggaaarrrggghhhh, just stop it Facebook friends! If the data and results are not qualitative, quantitative, justifiable or pretty damned funny, I just don’t care!). Then there is the broader definition of ‘profile’, meaning what that persons connections think of them. Or put simply, what kind of recall and memorability their personal brand inspires in their ‘audience’.

Businesses could really benefit by putting in place some soft social media policy, and encouraging their employees to generate, propagate, discuss and engage with content and connections about their place of employment.

So often a company, particularly SME’s, are built around the personality, passion and skill of one, or a small handful (a pinch?) of people, who inevitably become the company’s directors. These guys are the magnets for referrals and new business and often the lonely advocates out there networking and spruiking.

All I am saying is give employees the scope to build their own ‘profile’ by hitching it firmly to the wagon of the company’s profile, and vice versa. Share the responsibility for letting everyone know what a company does and why its the best. I’d certainly be inclined to approach a company if I knew a handful of their heroes through Social Media.

There’s some risk about disgruntled grunts despoiling your brand image (and theirs too), but I always sanity check tweets, status updates and the like by asking myself, ‘Would I stand up on my desk and shout this to the office?’ If the answer is no, don’t post it. If the answer is yes, post it, and if you work in an office where all sorts of off-colour things are screamed from atop the desks…there’s quite often a delete button.

There’s lots of talk about innovation, and digital and digital innovation and innovating digitally, but how much does it really achieve? Tweeters, Bloggers, Facebook junkies and technology advocates, the Web 3.0 harbingers, 2.0 monkeys and social media specialists… most of what I see makes life easier for people that have spent a lot of time complicating their digital engagements (myself included). How much use is a tool like Ping to someone who doesn’t even use one of the channels it aggregates? UnHub is awesome, but if it only links to one page, what USE is it?

The train of thought I’m on at the moment is all about applying this stuff to something other than marketing and keeping my browser tabs to a minimum.  The power of the tools we boffins use every day is largely unrealised, and in order to take best advantage of it, we need to roll things back a bit and really look at the core functions these tools carry out.

What better way to introduce new users and audiences to a tool than by integrating it into their lives to solve a problem that they already actually have?

I am finding blogs to be the hub of this, and they are super-awesomely useful.

I run blogs as the central portal for projects, with key milestones and documents hosted there-on. Nice, hey? Means that the stakeholders and influencers can log on any time and check progress, even comment on it and feedback. And if they’re up for it, I can make users ‘admins’ so they can post and edit along with me.

From a blog you can run a plain old RSS feed and use it to update people wherever they like, ping, Facebook, twitter, the lot.

And running multiple projects can get complicated, so I feed the RSS from all these blogs into one blog (and my feedreader) and I generate a to do list. Well, I say I, but it’s really the internets doing it all for me.

There, I just circumvented email as the core contact channel and made a trackable, time based, version controlled project management sytem.

That’s enough for this afternoon, I have a lot of coffee to get through yet.

I was consulting for the DSE the other day on new digital technologies and it set off a fruitful train of thought.

Much is said about the democratisation and freedom offered by the internet. Freedom of speech and the possibility for real, human voices to tunnel their way out from beneath oppressive regimes of violence, fear and censorship (Hi Stephen Conroy and your blasted internet filter). I’m not questioning the opportunities for expression, growth and freedom. That would be silly.

What I’m wondering about is a little more rooted in technology and levels of understanding and engagement achieved and achievable from various groups and individuals.

In my musings on web 3.0 I often refer to aggregation and personalisation. Tools like Twitter, Yahoo pipes, RSS and the like. They make it easier to filter rubbish, or just the stuff that I’m not interested in, so that it never even reaches my eyeballs. I like it, it saves me time and makes me look and feel smart. But what I realised is that in order for web 3.0 to exist, there has to be hordes of peeps still languishing in web 2.0 creating the content that I am filtering. Does that put us web 3.0 users at the pointy end? Or the ‘early-adopter’ end of a bell-curve? And what of our attitudes to the stragglers?

Like it or not, and much to the chagrin of innovators, there’s still a lot of Web 1.0 content and attitudes around. And what happens when a brand, individual or government body tries to bring itself up to date? More often than not, they’re subjected to a hail of vitriol from innovators who ‘could’ve done it so much better’ (but let’s face it, didn’t).

So I’m going to apply a mental filter of a simple capitalist ’social class’ system over use of the web today and see what jumps out.

I’d argue that there is a three tiered system in place. Obviously, within each class there are varying degrees of cross-over and grey areas, but hey, this is only a blog, not a sociological study.

The Underclass and Working classes are still wallowing in Web 1.0. How often do you come across a site that was developed in 1997 and still serves as the hub for a business, individual or government/administrative department? Heaps. It’s all still out there, and heck, it’s enough for some people. Why would they need to innovate and bring themselves up to date? A lot of stuff happens in the real world that doesn’t need a widget, iPhone app or blog (although it pains me to admit that). So your common, garden variety luddite could be that way by choice, ignorance of anything different, or by an inability/lack of skills and resources to drag themselves up. Content with their ‘lot’, or unable to struggle out of it… sounds both apt and clear to me…

Which brings us to the Middle classes. The lower echelons still may dip a toe in Web 1.0, while the upper may have a grasp of 3.0, heck, they might even be silently following us on Twitter. These guys get blogs, maybe make them, they understand and use google and search and are prolific creators of content. Thrashing about in the fertile grounds of Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, free Wordpress/Blogger/Blogspot accounts and the like, these are the guys at the butt of the Web 3.0 joke (being that 3.0 is filtering the crap out of 2.0). They’re happy and connected. They spend a lot of time on Facebook, today’s suburbian garden party (they might refer to it as a soiree). They aspire to improve themselves and attempt to get ahead of the curve. Again, if they innovate or update, the 3.0 pundits look down their collective noses at them and shun (filter out) 99.9% of the content these little battlers put their hearts and souls into. Comfortable, competent, striving for improvement, but always that little bit behind… I give you, the sprawling middle class that is Web 2.0.

And now on to that envied and enviable group. The Digital Nobility. They take what they want, like and need from the classes below, and leave what they don’t. Lording it over everyone. Headpatting, golf-clapping and hand-shaking occasionally, but more often snickering behind velvet gloved hands at the attempts to be web-savvy and digitally hip. Internet A-listers that are whispered about by the lower classes for their celebrity (real, imagined or digital) activity, visibility and their apparent propensity to not actually do much of anything except sit in ivory towers mocking or applauding the sound and fury taking place ‘down there’ in areas they’re too good to tread. Prime targets as the subject of the question, ‘What are they for, anyway?’.

Sorry, boffins.  That was a little harsh, but in exaggeration you get to the nuts of a theory, and by and large it works.

As for the Hardcore, who actually create the tools, portals and technologies that all classes interact with the web and each other through? They’re , um, like, Wizards or Magicians or something.  They’ll love that, the Dungeons and Dragons playing nerds.

My eyes have been opened. Web 3.0 is upon us and is rapidly becoming the norm for those of us lucky enough to be at the aforementioned pointy end.
Those of you still wallowing in the quagmire of Web 2.0, prick up thine ears. We on the bleeding edge are filtering out the crap and basking in the bright sun of aggregation and personalisation. And conversely, we are ensuring that our utterings are broadcast to the largest possible audience and reaping the webby benefits. Is there any greater achievement in the golden age of digital narcissism?

For me it all started with UnHub. Briefly, Skittles short web 2.0 campaign saw them replace their brand site with links to their web 2.0 portals, twitter feeds and wiki entries, with varying degrees of success. So, a couple of fellas latched onto the idea and built an interface that allows you to import all your blogs, feeds and websites into a simple toolbar, from whence the user can marvel at your eloquency and intelligence. Nice!

And that simple experience sent me on a little aggregation journey. And I found that there are indeed some very useful and incredible tools out there. Some known, some not so much so.

By spending some time setting up ping, I can update all my statuses, micro-blogs, even blogs and LinkedIn statuses at once.  Gone are the days of 17 browser tabs being open at once and losing myself in a complicated world of, well everything really.

And then there was Triond. It purports to be a portal that can get your content read and viewed by the right people, and pay you for the privelege! I uploaded and article that was plagiarised by The Age recently and it’s already kicking back some returns and hitting eyeballs that I woudl never have the time to go after. Nice. And everytime I get published through that, it sends out a tweet about it.

And you can’t go past Twitter, which I believe sits on the cusp of webs 2.0 and 3.0. the harbinger of aggregation. No longer do I hunt around the web for content to keep me up to speed.  There’s literally millions of people out there doing the job for me.  I just need to follow the right people.

It’s all getting quite fascinating and exciting. But I know you guys have short attention spans. So I’ll leave it at that and say, go and check some of this stuff out, find your own wonders and let me know about them.

It’s a good question, I mean, why did I call my business Digital Art Science? I could just trade under my name. Then I would spend time correcting the spelling of my first name and writing blog posts about its Old Welsh heritage. It’s Morgwn, from before the Welsh discovered the letter y, and after they started shunning a’s…

Anyway, Digital Art Science says a lot more about my approach, and way of thinking and approaching digital strategies for branding and marketing. It also sums up my three passions, my three areas of interest, but there’s my personal blog and rants on atheism to cover that off more thoroughly.

Let’s check off the 3 elements of my business name one by one, starting with the first and easiest.

Digital – what I do, I do on the internet, which is digital. What I do uses technology, systems and software which all manifest themselves digitally. Digital is the channel that brands, consumers and audiences communicate and interact through with increasing levels of frequency and using ever more complicated, engaging and rewarding channels, portals and tools.

Art – Creativity is at the heart of what I do. Basically, art is breaking the rules, or rather thinking without any consideration of the rules. Through this I find new ways to use existing technology and channels, and conceptualise bluesky ideas that extend what’s real into the future, or extend what doesn’t even exist yet. It keeps me awake at night, excited about a new channel or concept, waiting until I can get up, log on and visualise and record it, finding a practical use along the way.

Science – is the rules and technical smarts that I sometimes ignore, sometimes ponder as part of the art process. There’s a lot of technology out there, that’s science. There’s a lot of established fields of research, such as usability and psychology. All of them are useful and can offer an insight that can steer a creative idea into the realms of the real, possible, effective and optimised for success.

And all three rolled into one ensures a considered approach. Bluesky, innovative, ground-breaking thinking paired with practical optimisation, analysis and rationalisation. Makes sense, no?

Either way, it’s how I roll. And it works.

That Skittles campaign the other week seems to have had a number of consequences. 

First and foremost I have bought Skittles at least 3 times since it started. Spooky, no? The other consequence, and hopefully one that will be better for my teeth, is www.unhub.com.
Man, what an awesome idea.

For those that foresee the death of the brand site and are hunkered down in their virtual bunkers awaiting the onset of Web 3.0, break out the tinned goods, it’s here. Unhub is an aggregation site like not much we’ve seen yet, and I for one, love, adore and applaud the development. The sheer length and breadth of the list of sites you can input your profiles from has had me registering madly for Web 2.0 portals at an alarming and un-productive rate…(must…fill…that…toolbar…)

Sign up and give it a shot.  Do you think this kind of thing has a future? My answer; Yeah.