all over the world
I'm increasingly convinced that what we'll know most about in a year or so is not brands and communications and that, but how to be a global small business. How to do distributed creativity and collaboration, that kind of thing.
The last post I did on this was inspired by Ryan Freitas's little gawker experiment, and this post, and our recent experiments, have been inspired by his splendid talk at Adaptive Path, available from IT conversations.
First thing, we've cut way back on regular email and started sending video to each other. It's dead easy to fire up iSight and email a video and they're just much more rewarding bits of stuff. They contain all the required factual info (or whatever) but also tons of useful rich context. Like how people might be feeling. How enthused they are. What time it is. The stuff you get when you share an office with someone but that you never pick up from text based stuff.
I would love an application that would extract these videos from our mails and build a single archive video with everything in the order it was made - so you get a sort of linear video version of the conversational thread.
I've also been experimenting with Twitter which is rather excellent. It gives you tiny real time glimpses into what people are up to. You can text your updates or do it via the web or IM and the updates come to you via SMS, IM or direct onto your blog. You can see the 'what am I doing' thing over on the left somewhere. At the moment it's only giving me an insight into the life of DanG which is slightly odd because I've never actually met him.
We're all also very excited by scrybe. We've signed up for the beta but not got invites yet. Seems like it's got a lot of stuff we might use.
freakin awesome
Emily recently spoke at a conference in Singapore. And she asked the rest of us to contribute some video that she could use in her presentation. Jeffre made the best one. It's about brands and interestingness. So here it is (with a little intro from me for the YouTube folks). It'll give you some insight into the quietly twisted genius that is Jeffre Jackson.
interestingness.mov (it's about 27MB. Sorry. I've tried repeatedly to upload it to YouTube but I end up with no sound, and when I adjust it to another format the audio disappears halfway through. Frankly, I'm flummoxed.)
sharing
We're doing lots of thinking at the moment about how to work together across timezones. There are only really two hours a day when we're all awake. We use backpack a lot, and email. And I assumed we'd use all sorts of fancy tools like skype and iChat (we're all on Macs) but they all seem to fall apart when you get to four people in four countries. So we're often falling back on a marvelous technology called the phone. It's great. Everyone has their own unique number and if you call it you can just talk to them using a system called 'voice'. We're also using freeconferencecall.com for weekly meetings.
We've dabbled with Second Life and other virtual environments, but they've not really worked. Apart from anything else I find that Second Life makes every conversation feel like you're flirting, and I'm not sure that's always appropriate. I think Croquet might be the answer, but we need to find someone who'd like to help us create something, and we've not done that yet.
Anyway, I still suspect that our original intention - to build a small global business using off-the-shelf consumer tools is still the right one, and with that in mind I was really drawn to this from Second Verse (found via Matt Jones). It's clearly not actually a useful thing yet, but I think it points at a way of doing asynchronous, rich collaboration - cheaply and easily. (And it uses gawker, which I love but have yet to find a good use for.)
This post will now just tail off with no real conclusion.
See.
plannerware
I never understood the problem with post-rationalisation. (A blog conversation with Rebecca reminded me of that.) I guess it gained its status as a planning sin because of the assumption that strategy should always preceed creativity in a clean and linear way, and that 'the creative' should emerge naturally from the strategy without any need for explanatory fiddling.
Which is palpable nonsense.
Everyone knows that the best work comes out of strategy and creative being part of the same, continual conversation, each informing the other. Post-rationalisation is not a sin, it's a skill - a way of bringing understanding and coherence to an intuitive leap.
So I got Stefan to design us a t-shirt (see above). We've not made them yet, and I'm not sure how many to make so, an indication of numbers would be useful. Anyone want one? I'm thinking they'll be about £20.
moscow anyone?
We're trying to find some thoughts/guidance on Russia for a friend of ours. Someone they can chat with a bit and get a feeling for a particular category there and maybe meet up with on a couple of trips to Moscow. So I guess anyone in the planning/research/brand/marketing world. Is there anyone out there who might be able to help? Please email me if you can.
(How many of these favours do you think I can ask before it starts to irritate the hell out of you all?)
a little help
We are doing a little research project that requires finding some interesting people around the world.
The description and stuff is below, if you fit the bill, or can point us in the direction of someone who does we'd be hugely grateful (and we'll show that gratitude in some way yet to be determined). Any thoughts, please contact jeffre@openintelligenceagency.com
"We're looking for people who are completely at home in the world of digital technology and use it to produce content as well as consume it. They don't have to be supertechie, but probably have a blog or two, know how to upload video, subscribe to various feeds. Maybe they did an art project with a hundred mobile phones. Or vlog news from their school. Or something else.
The two main requirements are that they:
1. have something interesting to say and use digital tools to say it
2. live in China, Germany, Brazil, Korea or India
They'll get 100 pounds for answering 11 questions on webcam or videocamera and uploading their answers to our site. Some creativity is requested."
almost open
Telling the story in this post requires a bit of backstory which is this; I'm going to start a global small business with Jeffre Jackson, Emily Reed and David Nottoli (blog arriving any day). We'll be doing the expected things; brands, globalness, creative industries, managing the tension between art and commerce, agency 3.1, you know, that stuff. (London, Amsterdam, Sydney, New York). I expect I'll be boring you all with it a lot over the next few millennia. It's actually very exciting. But it's very like when you start a band, the most exciting bits are the bits around the edges, logos, names, what you're going to call your first four albums, all that.
We've been getting Stefan of 344 design to do logos and things for us and I just wanted to tell you what a star he's been, and give you a perfect example of everyday, lovely service, and what it takes to be a great person to work with in this new Marketing Ronin world.
So, we gave Stefan a horribly vague brief (we must be terrible clients, four planners? can you imagine?) and he came back with a bunch of great stuff. So good that we decided we wanted all of them, we wouldn't have just one logo, we'll have a family of them, a family of logos and type-treatments and all that. So obviously, doing business cards (the really exciting bit) becomes a logistical nightmare. Stefan sorted it all out for us. Found us a printer. (David Hockney's printer apparently). Advised on paper selection, all that. Then today he sent us this email, these photos and a quicktime movie: "How are you? I'm just home from the business card press check. Everything is looking vibrant. I documented the event for you."
And here's the little movie
(about 3MB).
Now, I don't know if this is normal in the designer/business cards world, but I don't imagine so. And we're planners, we never see this stuff happen and so it's fascinating for us. And it's a huge symbol of love and care that he went down to check everything and sent us pictures and video.
So, this is just to say hurrah and thanks to Stefan and shyly reveal that we're up to something new.
(David, Emily, Jeffre, Stefan - is this OK?)