One of the best ways to get known is to get your products out there. Meaning you need to have a whole programme of giveaways. And if you have the budget a promotional campaign to tell people about your product. There was once a Tshirt designer who wanted his designs to be better known. He had no money for advertising. Nor could he afford to buy a lot of Tshirts and print them.  So he started very simply. By going to the charity shops where his target customers liked to shop. Buying second hand blank T shirts from the shops, printing his designs on them. THEN PUTING THEM BACK IN THE SHOP.

Lo and behold a lot of people found his designs on second hand gea, bought them, wore them and tried to find new ones. Still more people saw the cool designs worn by the early adopters and tried to find out where they could buy them. Not quite zero budget but near enough. That's waggledancing!

I have been exchanging posts with the creative director and founder of Webjam - (that's two different people) about what a community is and what online environments are best suited for community formation. In his Neuromancer books William Gibson references the Sprawl which is the eastern seaboard of the USA which has turned into one big dysfunctional suburban mess. And in some ways its not a bad description of facebook - not much order and lots of people and groups of people interconnecting. 

The kind of communities I believe my clients will encourage me to put together and pay me to do so are not sprawls with random postings but quite intentional ones. Where there is a clear purpose and we get somewhere. Otherwise is it really work? What does the client get out of it and so on? Clients are accustomed to paying intentional communities for a product whether that is the product itself - outsourced - or a creative product like a campaign. Where the hours are timesheeted and costs are visible or can be deduced.  But the emerging social channels aren't like that at all. Which raises questions about how these channels can attract advertiser funding. 

What needs to change is our measurement methods. We don't rate a rugby team for their efficiency in bal handling. We evaluate by the number of fries and converstions down the far end of the pitch, their ability to keep possession and their ability to move the ball forward towards their opponents touchline. Managing the team better is about managing the ball not micromanaging the players. And in a rolling scrum it is often impossible to figure out who is holding the ball and who is moving it forward - it becomes a case of momentum not individuals standing in the right place or doing the tright thing. 

Social media channels work in exactly the same way.  We need to measure the forward movement of the ball - the message - not the individual movements of the players., Even a great player who reads the game perfectly - its not where he stands but where the ball is that makes the difference.  Half a century ago the equivalent was the jazz ensemble where there was a tune and choruses and people sort of took it in turns - but often played over each other and experiemented with different scales to take harmonies to their absolute limit but the whole thing hung together in a way that was totally compelling. Somehow we need to keep the jamming metaphor central. As a musician I am always worried that a 'jam' will turn into a 'noodle' where there is no discipline, no commonality and people do their own thing. But a jam is worth striving for because to get a completely programmed result you need to write a score - that isn't jamming - that's classical composition.

Measuring productivity is tough because online I may be participating in many different jams at once - which take minutes, hours or even days to play out. But the outcome is never predictable - we know where we're trying to go with it and one of the main goals is to aggregate an audience which if we're interesting enough we can do. And keep them jamming with us.

The biggest change is that it probably means that the marketing client is going to have to change their budgetary planning to something like a casino tale. The marketing budget becomes chips - and they place chips on different games- lots of them.  Which for clients used to spending 5 million with the stroke of a pen must be sheer terror. All that decision making with no idea what you're going to win at the end of it. But what marketing has been missing out in recent years is the gaming element - business leaders have been building global businesses with marketing as a cost centre following in their wake. This is a chance for marketers to get back into the game and to show they can play for high stakes and win.

For the rest of us what we need to learn is how to keep the ball moving and prove we are jamming not noodling. I'm still working on it.

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.

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?  

Here are two versions of a song one original the other a cover. Which one would you say is the original and which the cover version?

Did you get it? Actually Sting wrote it though on youtube you find it far more often credited to Johnny Cash. Who sings the simpler version.  

If you're the type of person who gets given the job of waggledancing chances are that you enjoy thinking and exploring ideas. And you are comfortable with complexity. Which is dangerous.  Effective communication almost always involved distilling and simplifying - art is what you take out not what you put in. I like the Sting version of the track - no way could he play it like a straight country and western song.  The best bit for me is the joy on the face of the late Kenny Kirkland his keyboard player - playing 5 beats to each bar is musically interesting but does it really add to the somg? Turning to Cash's version which I heard before I heard the Sting original - at first I couldn't believe Sting wrote it because Cash sings it as if he wrote it. And the song follows a familiar Cash theme of cowboys, guilt and of course his own death. Stripping it down makes it powerful. Works the same for messaging.

One other thing - it was quite hard to find the Cash version on Youtube because there are so many covers - of people singing what they think is a Cash song. That's because its a simple song to play. But that makes it easy to play badly or cheesily. Making something simple is not dumbing down. Simple is actually difficult. Anybody can play an easy song. Its takes art and practice to sing simply.

 For today I am linking to a blog posting about Waggledancing no less which suggests that there is a conflict of interest. Despite what the waggledancer is telling the other bees - they are still inclined to go whether they last remember finding nectar. Here's the article from NY times March 25th 2008.

 And my point? Well here it is. It is a real possibility that despite whatever you say that your audience will resort to habit instead of taking onboard the new information that you give them. Knowing that what do you do? Don't go onto automatic pilot - think about what you have to do to overcome inertia. Because inertia is real. So anticipate and deal with it. You have to be more persuasive than their inertia. They have to believe there's more nectar where you are pointing than where they last found nectar themselves. That's how good you have to be.

And quote of the day comes from the blog InfiniteBody where I found the piece above written by the New York dance writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Church says: The body is a sin./Science says: The body is a machine./Advertising says: The body is a business./The body says: I am a fiesta.” -- Eduardo Galeano

By far the most commonly used conceptual tool used by strategists (so common we have forgotten it is just a tool) is the humble brief.

Before a brief has been given to anyone it will already have performed a single critical job. It moved knowledge from the tacit to the explicit.  Turning something into written language crystallizes it in a way that little else does. In a strange way it actually creates it. Why? Because it forces you to organise your thoughts and to reduce ambiguity. While you are just talking about ideas ambiguity is a lot harder to pin down. Write it down and it becomes obvious if you haven't thought through what you are trying to do and if it is coherent. 

That's why you should always get a client to write a brief - because when they articulate exactly what they want in writing, it forces them to become explicit. They have to organise their thinking.

At the end of a project all that tacit learning needs to be captured - again in writing. That's why we have contact or call reports. In research this is the importance of the stages of analysis and reporting. If you don't write down what you have learned from the fieldwork- then the result literally disappears - you won't remember any of it within a matter of days. Once you have read a document or been debriefed as the presenter tells the story of the debrief, then the knowledge is arranged in a way that helps you to retain it. 

So don't look on writing as a piece of unavoidable bureacracy. But an essential part of creating knowledge. The graphic comes from a great book called the knowledge creating company - which I am sure I will have cause to mention again. You can buy it from my bookshop on the accountplanning.net website where there are a host of other titles you may find useful each of which I have read and reviewed.