I'm posting this largely in response to the Webjam event I attended briefly last night. I didn't get to see all the presentations but the evening began with a talk by the founder Yann Motte which was an overview of the business model behind Webjam. The idea behind webjam is that allows companies to develop branded communities. So instead of getting developers to construct your own Facebook at immense cost just use the cookie cutter elements on Webjam - add your own CSS stylesheets, point your domains and away you go. Which is great. I buy all that.

Where I started to get concerned was with the argument that this kind of web structure monetizes easily and naturally. The example given was a wedding magazine which would create content and an community context which visitors would want to sign up for (as paying subscribers) and some would create their own webjams using the content from the host weddding magazine webjam and build their own community using that. With revenue coming in from ads and ecommerce.

My problem is this. What kind of community does someone preparing for a wedding actually want to set up.  There's the need for a period of up to a year where you can post lists of things to buy and tasks to do.  There's the need for online present buying for those attending the wedding. But the administration of a wedding doesn't in itself require an online community - what is needed is a transactional site with some editorial. There is the social side - hen nights and all the rest - but do you need a dedicated private community for that. Wouldn't Bebo or Facebook work just as well?  And what of the hobby element - lets say that someone loves weddings or loves to look at wedding photography. Are there enough  hobbyists to get any scale to this? Wedding are transitional.

Bad example you say. Well no it isn't a bad one - weddings are a good example because a ton of money is spent in a short time so for a marketer there are undoubtedly business opportunities. But for the social marketer -is there one?  the point of this is not to attack webjam's business model but to reflect on the way online communities are developing. They are layering - and increasingly applications allow data to be shared across platform. So I don't have to go to Amazon to buy or browse books - I can often do it from a blog or social media site. I can share music from blip, or twitter that I have posted a blog. If anything communities are simplifying according to purpose. We're not putting all our eggs in one community basked. Facebook for all its efforts isn't getting all our online activity.

So the challenge for webjam is to find the killer app the specific purpose I cannot live without. For me at presnt the best use is for online temporary meeting places  where you can assemble with all the paraphernalia - and the people over a period of weeks. Quick to set up and quick to dissolve. Confidential too. I've struggled with online conference meetings which are far too like boardrooms on a computer screen. I think Webjam have discovered something much simpler. Planning a surprise party for a parent which you can keep secret? Set up a webjam. Are you running a squash club? Set up a webjam - you don't want anybody and everybody barging in. Doing any work with children or teenagers? You need a safe environment that can be protected. Set up a webjam. There's huge potential. But community is not a catch all - we use them for specific purposes.     

This is a technique I have developed over several years - it involves writing a movie screenplay with the brand as a hero. Or if time is short writing a movie scene.  I began to use the technique because I was being asked to use brand onions, essences and pyramids to develop elaborate communication strategies. And while they are great for developing advertising they are a pain when it comes to developing anything else which requires you to understand at a very deep level what is unique about your brand and how it is likely to behave. Most brand onions (I call them bunions) borrow shamelessly from the category values. In other words if you put all the brands in a category together - their brand schematics would look identical. Because they have each been developed in isolation from the others. When this never happens in the real world and can't. Worse still they are 2 dimensional because there is no conflict - they are airbrushed snapshots - an orgy of client smugness and aspiration.

So here's how to change that.  First we borrow from Hollywood the rigorous structure of the movie screenplay. Which is formulaic. This doesn't matter because what it will help us to do is to bring the character of our brand to life and separate it from all its key competitors. Who we stick in the movie as other cast members. You can put any characters in their - as long as it doesn't get too crowded. And each character needs to interact with each of the others. This works really well for beer brands because they are often carbon copies of each other - its like a buddy movie - because you are writing for one character, the technique amplifies the differences between your character and the competitors.Next we have to add conflict - lots of it because conflict is what makes a character grow and change to overcome obstacles.  This is pure storytelling - I don't typically put beer brands in a bar - that's predictable - that's why alcohol ads are frequently dull - they are commercials for the entire category - a fun night out.

So how to do it. Well first pick a genre - any genre where the narrative develops and the character develops (Waiting for Godot won't help you much). Next choose your cast and establish a pen portrait of each. Then start to tell the story choosing a disaster which knocks the lead character out of the world they know. And an objective - what is it the character needs to achieve by the end of the movie (or the scene if that's all your doing) . The rest is brainstorming. Once you constructed your story ask yourself the following questions - what qualities made our character successful? What did they have to change in their own lives? What did they change to? Then write down these 4-5 characteristics and use these to go back to the market situation how the brand needs to behave to be different. By virtue of the exercise you have been through you will find that your brand will be distinctive and that its behaviour will be quite distinct from how competitors will behave.

I have used this technique many times now - in FMCG, in financial services, the drinks market, with NGOs and in cross cultural situations. In the UK, elsewhere in Europe and outside. I have even used it in a research context to get respondents to tell stories about brands - with outstanding results. If you want me to come and teach you the technique then I can do that. I can also run a brand screenplay workshop for you.  Or explain how I use the technique to get something out of brand development research you will not easily replicate elsewhere. 

this is something I have had to learn from social theory - in communications we are much more interested in who is making the noise and what kind of noise they are making.  The social theorists are just as interested in silences - blank spaces on the edge of the debate which people skirt around so as not to draw attention to them. Usually they tell you much more about the landscape than the noisy bits.

I spotted 2 silences today. There's a new grouo on facebook called Silence at the Inauguration which concerns the excising of Bishop Gene Robinson form the Inauguration because as the first practicing gay bishop it was to much for the media company to stomach so his contribution simply disappeared from the video record. 

The second was the announcement that Agent Provocateur's Kylie ad has won an award for being the utltimate cinema ad. You might have thought that they would name CDP the agency involved - but they didn't. Though they named the creatives who wrote it. Conspiracy theory aside this can be attributed to the fact that the quality of CDP's creative output in its later years didn't amount to much -  in sad contrast to two golden periods in the 1960s and 1970s when it virtually wrote the rules for UK advertising. CDP no longer exists and probably just as well. But as a former employee I just wanted to draw attention to this silence. That in its last shout CDP done good. Take a look at the ad. 

 Silences are an invaluable shorthand - watch for them and profit. Though there will always be someone who wishes you hadn't. 

The kerfuffle over Obama and the Oath II (the remake) is  useful reminder of the significance of flow in the workplace. Don't tell me that Obama didn't know the oath off by heart. But faced with over a billion people watching and led by the Chief Justice with the wrong words - Obama went with the flow while trying to signal that something was wrong. Because he had little choice - if he said the right words he would have created confusion - he would have refused the oath he was being given - he would have in effect taken over - and if he stayed silent waiting for a recovery - the flow would be broken - it would be as if he refused the oath offered - not good. So he took the oath he was given.

 And the following day he did it again - different venue without a bible to place his hand on. And apparently this second oath was a success. Why? Because the right oath was given and taken, the flow restored.

It is little short of extraordinary that so little attention in the workplace is given to flow. When it matters more than anything. You might imagine from contact reports and briefs that what matters is content, what idea won the day and who has agreed to do what when. When these documents are records of meetings which might have taken minutes, hours and days - caused wars to break out or enabled jumps into new territories. When you focus on the flow you are listening deeply to what others are saying - you are responding and shaping what is said not just imposing and repeating your own view. And attention to the flow makes meetings work better and faster.  This isn't about securing consensus quickly. Sometimes deep issues need to be resolved and this takes time.  But it is often the case that meetings lack flow - that there are lots of chopping and changing, and interpersonal disputes that have little or nothing to do with the issues at hand.  

 I am in the process of reading Rob Poynton's book Everything's an Offer - his workshop techniques are drawn from improvisational theatre and applied to business practice - he talks a lot about flow - which is why  it was top of mind when I watched Justice Roberts and Barack Obama stumble and try to get the rhythm back.

 The action point is to watch the flow - and stay with it - it is a lot better than the alternatives - yes the oath had to be taken again but the alternatives were less palatable. Listen hard and when you spot people disrupting or breaking the flow then pay particular attention to restoring it. If they repeatedly  block the flow then you may need to confront them. When I have run workshops sometimess I have been briefed as a facilitator to stop or limit disruption. Once I used yellow and red cards like a football referee to head off an agency who was expected to disrupt a workshop - which enabled me to keep the flow.  I doubt you will ever have to resort to anything that dramatic. But just being more aware of the flow should allow you to run better meetings and to get meetings back on track.

I first applied the term Culture vultures to those who look at markets through the culture end of the telescope: semioticians, anthropologists, discourse analysts culture analysts all. The market researcher works at the sharp end - understanding an individual's motivation and extending this out to segments and market populations. Until yesterday I had not become so aware of the fundamental difference not just between the one and the many but the difference between scavengers and raptors. Not to be rude to my culture vulture brethren - they don't need real people to study them. They can use magazines. TV programmes, social contexts, transcriptions, movies, blogs and websites as quite proper human artefacts to study. Researchers on the other hand always want to ask someone What do you think? Why do you think that? Which makes them raptors - not the Jurassic Park variety but birds of prey who always eat a fresh kill.  

It is a crucial distinction because the world is filling up with human artefacts which has made decision support activity quicker and cheaper - and research is under threat. I would say though that research abandons the principle of live prey at its peril. There are many ways of analysing artefacts many of them mechanical. Research will continue to be time consuming and more expensive than the alternatives. But it will also continue to have a role. There is only so much you can do with artefacts - without a deep understanding of motivation - you just don't know why that blogger chose to express themselves in that particular way.  

Elsewhere I have described offline traditional research as cultivation when online research techniques are closer to hunter gathering. I still think that but would add this corrollary - that researchers will not go out and collect just anything. What they collect needs to be subject to theory and method.  The culture vultures have their theories too but these don't require a living subject. Research does and long may it continue to do so. 

Was reading about emerging search methodologies in the most recent issue of netmagazine. And was introduced to www.picclick.com and www.zoomi.com. Both alas North America oriented so not a lot of use to the rest of us when using Ebay and Amazon. The insight is that the human eye scans images far faster than words - so giving you a screenful of book covers or product pictures is much faster than reading picture and words in a linear sequence. Top tip - this means that when you brief people - add complexity visually rather than verbally - fill the table with competitive products and get people to sort them.  They can process this much faster than a list of words or numbers. 

The irony of zoomii is not lost on me - 10 years after undermining bookshops Amazon is using intermediaries to turn their site back into a bookshop again! 

An interesting way to start 2009. I am indebted to herdmeister Mark Earls for forwarding me to this article. In brief bees get a kick out of waggledancing - it makes them feel valuedby the community. So much so that if you give them illegal substances they carry on waggledancing even if they have no nectar to report. Why and how a research scientist decides that the frontiers of knowledge can be rolled forward by coking up bees I don't intend to speculate on. Nor what the effect on the honey might be!

 But my thought for the day is the danger of signalling that we're onto something when we haven't got a solution yet. Its a reminder that the desire for recognition is strong - stronger than being truthful. Crazed for recognition we can do strange things. So worth doing an internal truth check - am I onto something or am I trying not to rock the boat?