November 2009
14 posts
140 Characters (London) Report →
On Scribd - this is simply an easier-to-read compilation of my 11 posts on the conference the other week.
Climate Sceptics Seize On Leaked Emails →
Reading excerpts from these emails didn’t make me think of a vast conspiracy. It made me think of a market research debrief. A couple of times I’ve encountered the situation where you’ve done some research, and all the data is pointing towards a particular recommendation, except for a couple of glitches that don’t stack up with that interpretation.
Fair enough, you think,...
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10. Being There
Certainly if there was one background note of the conference, it was authenticity: rarely defined, often present. For instance, the most useful service the X-Factor twitter staff provide, one mentioned, was sorting out the multitude of fake Twitter accounts that pop up for even the most transient of nine-day wonders. Chris Brogan put a lot of stress on trust, and one telling quote came from the...
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9. Disintermediation
The risk of confrontation posed by hashtags sits at odds with another great theme of the conference – disintermediation. Stephen Fry, in his keynote, was the first to raise this – his comments became the lead story for most reports on the event. Fry’s point is that Twitter allows celebrities to break away from the journalist/interview cycle. They can communicate directly to their millions of...
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8. A Quick Digression On Hashtags
Twitter of course has evolved a mechanism for creating a breach in your social graph – the hashtag. Hashtags were in one sense a dominant presence at the conference, the #140conf tag creating a wall around the discussion and an impromptu community (who might or might not be physically present). But there was little explicit talk about them.
Boyd Hilton, of HEAT magazine, described how the...
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7. The Graph Is The World
At the root of the Breakfast Barrier is the great problem of Twitter (and by extension other social tools) – there is no such thing as a typical Twitter experience, because one’s experience of it is so determined by one’s social graph: the followers, the followed, and how many of each there are. But people talking about Twitter often talk about their benefits and their experiences as if they were...
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6. Them And Us: The Breakfast Barrier
There is still, in other words, a Breakfast Barrier for Twitter. As in, “It’s just people talking about what they had for breakfast.” This meme – mentioned a few times during the conference - has a double purpose. It’s a shorthand way for the media to dismiss Twitter users as trivial. But it’s also a shorthand way to dismiss the media’s criticisms of the service and site, lumping more nuanced...
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5. Realtime's Growing Pains
(Continuing my series of posts on the 140 Characters Conference)
According to one speaker on the communications panel, the future of realtime – represented by Google Wave – is the end of conversation, replaced by a kind of type-telepathy, a flux of perpetually interrupted and always provisional collaborative thoughts. But Google Wave, its complexity and its stumbling launch also illustrate a...
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4. Meaning In The Stream
Issues of immediacy and agility were in the background whenever the talks turned to using the realtime web as an information source. The Venture Capitalist panel pointed out that extracting meaning from realtime flows was still very hard – a real unresolved problem for real time search. Text and sentiment analysis, meme tracking, social graph searching – these all went some of the way to cracking...
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3. The Thing Is The Idea
A glimpse at the more sustained changes realtime is ringing came from the panel of Venture Capitalists. Five years ago, they said, if someone had a great idea it might be funded. Now? No chance, unless there’s something already launched. In the realtime web, the important thing is presence – doing stuff, getting ideas launched as soon as possible and finessing them later.
This is reflected...
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2. The Process Is The Story
Some of the case studies on offer were more interesting. Kodak, who sponsored the whole event and have put together a free guide to social media practise, talked about how they’d taken a product idea straight from Twitter – implementing specific suggestions, like flexible USB ports and mic jacks, and then crowdsourcing a name. This kind of thing is becoming more common – taking design and...
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1. Social Landfill
I’ll start with the marketing stuff, because I work in that field, though in some ways it seemed the most sluggish of the various criss-crossing streams of thought. There was an awful lot of familiar stuff being trotted out – people have unprecedented power to influence brands, you have to join in the conversation, the customer does the marketing for you, you need to give people something they...
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0. On The Disparate Edge Of Now
I went to the 140 Characters conference on Tuesday and took a lot of notes, expecting to write a quick summary. Once I started on it last night, the quick summary turned into a 3,500 word monster, so I’ve split it into 10 parts, plus this intro, and will be posting them over the course of today.
The 140 Characters conference – tagline: “The State of NOW” - is an exhausting but rich...
The Future Of Research: 10 Odd Ideas
Here are ten things I think might happen in and to market research before too long. As usual, I’m chasing ideas that interest me. They aren’t supposed to be sober predictions. They are not representative of the views of my employer, they are not wholly representative of the views of ME, and some of them contradict one another. Here, in other words, be dragons. I hope you like them.
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