Pattern Recognition

WebMapping and the FTSE 100

My old colleague Antony Mayfield who now works at SpannerWorks has, rather inevitably, launched a rival service to our own WebMapping service.

They say they are targeting the FTSE 100 and I think they will do well there. Good luck to them, in any case.

I expected our first clients to be "challenger brands" looking for a way to steal a march on the market leaders.  But what happened was proper Blue Chip clients from the upper echelons of the FTSE 100 were/are the early adopters in this market.

This may because we at Bell Pottinger have some very Blue Chip clients in general but I think that there are a number of other reasons why the FTSE 100 is buying WebMaps so eagerly.

1.  They have people who think they are specifically responsible for all this.  Either the Head of Comms or Head of PR feels they need to know about on-line conversations.  Smaller companies may be aware of the issue but not have someone who has it towards the top of their agenda.

2.  They have the money.  Related to the above, Heads of Comms seem to have a pot of money available for this area whereas shoe-string based start-ups may not.

3.  They have more to lose.  Although no one is panicking, the big boys know that the world might be changing and they feel they need to keep a watch on this part of their empire. Although no one has put it quite like this perhaps the main reason the Blue Bloods need our maps is because "we hear the customer is revolting these days, do tell us where"

Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. Tres blogosphere, mais oui?

How to be creative : be very

Saw this at whistlethroughyourcomb who in turn found it at scamp who is that rare thing - a blogging creative.

Quick aside - I think it was the waspish Adliterate that suggested that the reason that only the planners blogged is because the creatives have already expressed themselves and the account people have nothing to say. Prove him wrong, I say.

Anyhow - I will be using the creative brilliance of "be very" the next time I am training clients or management consultants on "how to be creative".  Maybe they need to loosen up a bit and "be very".

The other thing this phrase reminds me of is that very "be very" agency HHCL whose innovations have been catalogued here.  Perhaps the reason HHCL collapsed was it's whole raison d'etre was to "be very".  At some point it started being "quite" and the game was up.

Why did it start being "quite"?

Well being part of a plc forces you to deliver 15% compound.  We used to think that was hard work.  Maybe the problem was that it was just quite demanding.  We should have set goals that were very demanding (but that's hard to do in a plc that wants smooth profit increases)

Or maybe it was a second/third generation thing?  Both at a management level (having a "quite" strategy not a "very" strategy) or at a staff level (producing work that was quite-hhcl but not very-hhcl) it was hard to keep the intensity up. But all this is easy to say in retrospect. And - full disclosure - I was part of that management team.

Quite.

Final thought : as ever it takes a creative to do in two words what even a group of planners could only do in a thousand.

So, be very.

Is Web 2.0 a Puzzle or a Mystery?

I was reading a great piece by Malcolm Gladwell - we are not worthy - over here at the New Yorker where he manages to pull together the Enron trial, the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, cancer diagnosis, the hunt for Nazi super weapons, Watergate and more besides into one enquiry.

His key distinction is between puzzles and mysteries.  Puzzles - like where is Osama? - have clear solutions, where new data (e.g. "he's in Slough") help narrow down the search until you find the single answer ("the male grooming section in Superdrug").

Mysteries - like how come Iraq went wrong? - are less clear, may never be solved (perhaps they can only be better understood) and sometimes more data (anyone fancy a quantitative survey of the various conflicting groups to help move things on?) can often make the mystery deeper.

He hints that some people are particularly good at solving mysteries. As one of his sources puts it when referring to improving the USA's intelligence capability "we needed fewer spies and more slightly batty geniuses".

I think this is what planners are : slightly batty geniuses.

I'm getting the t-shirts done.

Rambling side query : are planners rubbish at Cryptic Crossword and Sudoku? I for one, have always been rubbish at these (and Chess, come to that) despite having a brain trained by the finest institutions that this country can provide.  And if a crossword isn't "Pattern Recognition" then what is?!  What's going on, Doc?

I am wondering if I am rubbish at solving puzzles because I am quite good at handling mysteries.

In contrast to all the Sudoku's my recent plane companions were devouring on monday night (all client side folk - hmm, that adds to the mystery...) I have returned to my game of Medieval Total War 2 and am currently lost in a wonderful mystery that I will summarise as follows...

My Spanish nation has grown from its humble roots in Leon and having crushed the Portugese and Almohads (although not entirely in the case of the latter who may be regrouping in Algiers beyond my Tunisian outpost) I am still in a Phony War with the French, I have some vague alliances with the English and the Germans (who in turn are a bit cross with the French, but i don't know if they are actually fighting them).  The Mongols are invading in massive force in the Far East and the whole of Islam has launched a Jihad on Constantinople, but this is a long way away. At the moment. My Catholic piety is quite high and I have a fair relationship with the Pope but he may take a dim view if i start actually exchanging blows with my fellow Catholics, the French. Mind you the previous Pope (who used to be one of my own Cardinals, as it happens, so he probably owed me a favour) excommunicated the Portugese and occasionally let me have a pop at them.  I am currently "spreading the faith" in North Africa to smooth relations. On the domestic front, budgets are tight, the cities are over-crowded and my now under-employed armies are using up most of my spare cash on wages. Off to the East the Egyptians are reputed to be the the strongest all round country and the more proximal Milanese are allegedly the richest.  My economy seems to not quite pay for itself unless I continually conquer new territories and use the spoils to give my people bread.

This is naturally just a basic outline - If you've got a full hour I'll talk you through the details - but the mystery is : what to do next?

Bliss...

All my favourite computer games - Civilization, Railroad Tycoon - have this quality - the number of variables are so high and so interlocking that there can be no clear cut solution. All you can do is grapple with the mystery and try to make progress. 

That I can do. 

But puzzles I can't.

Which brings me back to the original question - look, if you want polished, cogent pieces go back to Gladwell at the New Yorker, he's a  professional - is the web a puzzle or a mystery?

A lot of my clients are looking for us to use our webmapping tool to bring in some new clues that will enable them so solve the newly arrived puzzle of "web 2.0", (or "blogs" or "UGC" or whatever they are calling it).  Maybe they see it as a Sudoku?  They often seem to want one map that is "it",  like a filled in grid.

I am starting to wonder if the "what should we do about the web (2.0)" is a Mystery  not a Puzzle.  It has many variables (its not just about "blogs", for example) all of whom interact in complex ways to produce deep mysteries (how do on-line and off-line media interact, for example).

Perhaps the real value we provide to clients - perhaps like all planners, in all fields - is to bring insight to the mystery and show a way ahead.

Final question - but maybe not one for you crossword fans - is life a "mystery or a puzzle" (anag. 5,3)?

Richard Huntington, Rory Sutherland and Karl Rove compare notes on CRM

You'll find it at adliterate, the site that not only has great provocative content but attracts extremely erudite replies.

Things I don't know as a Knowledge Worker

Obviously you're expecting a very short list.

But seriously folks, i was reading Richard's post about things we know we don't know (and more importantly, things we don't know we don't know) as it pertained to the exploding digital communications world and later on bumped into the following from infosthetics.

So if you are feeling cocky about your scientific knowledge check this out.

And if you can bluff on all of those topics try the detailed view here.

So much to learn, so little time....

I think this is why the key "knowledge worker" skill in the future is not to know "everything" but rather to know a little bit about everything and to know how to find a place or a person who knows everything on one thing.

My favourites are Google, Wikipedia, Google Images and a handful of people who always seem to know someone who knows anything.  Someone once called the latter "the social search engine system".

So now you know.

Or probably don't.

HHCL Innovations

Welcome Independent readers!  For those who read Claire Beale's piece in the Media Section and are looking for the info on HHCL and Partners, there are two lists buried in the archive here and here.

What colour is advocacy?

No, not advocaat, which I know is yellow.

I mean advocacy as in influence, opinion formers, mavens and connectors, word of mouth etc.

Russell found someone asking "what colour is news?" so I'm not the only one interested in daft questions.

I think the answer is contained in my old favourite Spiral Dynamics so I'll get back to you after my current pitch. 

But all help gratefully accepted.