New ways of consuming and learning (through transmedia and a broadening education model)

If necessity is the mother on invention, then demand must surely be the foreplay.

Through a convergence of a number of ways of thinking I'm slowly putting together the story about how the future of learning and consuming will take place. Let me begin with a quote:

As more of our basic needs are met, we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful. These experiences will not simply be products. They will be complex combinations of products, services, spaces, and information.

This is Tim Brown of IDEO in his June 2008 Harvard Business Review article on design thinking. The quote encompasses a lot of what I also view the future to be and the demand for this way of thinking is permeating our entire society.

Two examples to kick-off, what I believe will be a fair amount of future blogposts, are transmedia and the broadening of the education model.

Transmedia (here's the wikipedia entry) roughly is the creation and delivery of a story across multiple forms of media. Here's a nice and thorough history to get you started on cross/trans-media from transmedia creator and chronicler Christy Dena.

While from Christy's preso you'll see that transmedia story telling is nothing new, especially in the world of fiction and film production, I think that it is getting more and more common. We are not surprised to see a computer game released at the same time as the latest Marvel cinema release, we expect it. Or when District 9 was promoted at Comic-con in the US, it wasn't mind-blowing that a team of MNU trucks locked down San Diego and a series of pre-graffitid posters sprung up over night. This is just how we demand movies to be sold to us now.

Some might say its all about eye-balls, that if consumers are switching off the TV in favour of the Web then naturally the dollars will follow where the eye-balls go. And this is right, but at the same time there is another aspect to transmedia that we are demanding and its that of reciprocity and co-creation.

Reciprocity in that if I am going to follow a story across media (chase the rabbit down the hole as it were) then I'm going to want reward in return. Mindless consumption via the idiot-box is over, mindful consumption through multiple media now commands respect. In as much, free downloads now act as rewards for following story-lines, prizes via ARGs go to those who dig the deepest into a story and online games attached to stories act as town-squares where consumers consume together.

And consuming together brings me onto my next point about co-creation. That a story is filmed/written, edited and distributed was once a nice process that meant everyone could play their part, received a cheque and go home to bed. Unfortunately for producers it isn't that simple any more. Consumers are now talking back, they're asking for more, wanting to get involved even. Which is where co-creation is creeping in. We see this now with characters jumping from pre-recorded episodes to live and interactive Twitter accounts (see the current Girl Number 9 web-series).

And of course, this brings me to an article I spotted in today's The Age about beating boredom in the school classroom. The article recounts the experiences and parents and teachers where students are skipping school due to boredom and some of the tactics schools are implementing to confront this problem. Not surprisingly transmedia story telling and co-creation play a large part in turning the problem around:

At Balwyn, students in years 7 to 9 start a program by watching a DVD that acts as a springboard for activities that are integrated across their subjects ...

... Resolving conflict — a theme of the movie — would be discussed in tutorial groups, with each group creating a movie to be presented at the final school assembly.

In turn, year 8 students will film news broadcasts as part of their sustainability program and year 9 students will enter into a music video competition as part of their program.

At my own work, we've been trying to extend the experience of our annual CPA Congress and broaden learning opportunities through changing what's expected (like conferences and training seminars) to providing the new and un-expected (like Second Life conference sessions and made-for-YouTube histories of members experiences).

Transmedia storytelling and the broadening of the education model are to me just two observations of how demand for a more sophisticated and communal way of consumption are mutating the old model of thinking.

So to those who still see this as an experiment or something that 'those' people do not us, all I can say is that it's too late already. The lines of communication will continue to blur. Teachers, soon your students will talk directly to you textbook author and bypass your meagre thoughts. Movie producers, make sure you keep your writers on the payroll because the writing doesn't end when the movie studio commissions your movie. I want to talk to your characters, and I expect them to listen. Between how it was and how it is now is a pretty big pill to take and takes a hell of a lot of effort, but as Tim Brown said, "we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful."

Continued rise of online video for work and play

From my posts you've probably realised that this year I've really fallen in love with online video and the various ways it can be used for business.

A couple of things have happened in the past few months that I think have strengthened my argument for an increased focus for online video for information dissemination and broader learning goals.

Firstly, Cisco, the behemoth that provides much of the infrastructure the Web lives on, has puts its money behind online video with the purchases of Flip Video maker, Pure Digital Technologies in March, and now video conferencing company, Tandberg, in October.

Supporting this strategy of pushing money and effort into online video collaboration is a report released by US Internet Network Management company, Sandvine, that online streaming video like YouTube and Hulu now accounts for up to 27 per cent of global Internet traffic. This is up from 13 per cent in 2008.

The Sandvine report has some great insights into the growth of "experience now" entertainment like streaming media and the decline of "experience later" applications such as peer-to-peer downloading.

In light of this trend and having the chance to big-note myself, here are some vox-pops videos that our team at work created for our annual CPA Congress event that takes place across Australia. As a team we filmed, edited and uploaded the videos to our YouTube channel and CPA Congress blog all within 48 hours of each event. I think it shows a really positive vibe for the conferences and is a really great promo for anyone considering going to other CPA Australia events or to CPA Congress next year.

I hope you enjoy!

Has the real-time web killed TV programming?

Never has the television industry been more hap-hazard in its programming than right now.

We have seen it coming for a few years now and I suspect that, in Australia at least, we may have seen a watershed in the industry with the phoenix-like rise and Icarus-like fall of Hey-Hey it's Saturday, all within one week.

But to truly get a grip on how a show of such historic proportions can rise and fall in a single week we must back-track a couple of years. We're going to a time after live debates and the 'worm' but before the real-time Internet. Let's go to the late-late night time slots that were once inhabited by a motley band of money-bag grabbers that were the late-night quiz shows.

These pre-real-time-interwebz quiz shows, of which Quizmania and Midnight Zoo were poster-childs, relied on the interaction of at-home participants ringing in to try and solve puzzles to win money. Masses of calls would flood the TV shows with ample amounts of would-be contestants queuing to win.

The biggest insight TV stations gained from these shows was that the real-time nature of viewers calling in allowed TV show directors to know what was popular and what was un-popular AT HOME based on the levels of calls coming into the show. An example could be that the host of the quiz waves his arms around and yells out 'money, money, money', from this the person monitoring the caller dashboard sees a spike in calls to the show. The director then tells the host through an earpiece mic to wave his arms again and ta-da another spike in calls. Real-time TV production.

Fast forward to October 2009. The real-time Internet is in full swing. TV shows no longer rely on viewers calling in because the viewers are already swarming with conversation on Twitter, Facebook, and other social websites. Enter stage left, Daryl Somers and Hey-Hey it's Saturday the Reunion.

It's a gamble for Channel Nine, a live TV show in prime-time and we haven't seen this show in over a decade. But they had an ace up their sleeve. Real-time monitoring. Just as Quizmania and Midnight Zoo used real-time monitoring of phone calls to judge the shows success, so too would Hey-Hey use real-time monitoring of the social web to measure the performance of the show.

And it worked. The Facebook fan page was a-buzz, Twitter went off the hook and got a little-known TV show trending with the US big guns. Results were in, it was a hit again.

One week on, take-two. This time the producers were confident they knew the forumla. The host announced the Twitter hash-tags they would monitor and kept the audience updated with a Facebook fan tally. The real-time show and the real-time web were in synch.

Here comes the sun, the programming pot of gold, it was in their reach. But alas, Hey-Hey flew too close to the sun and the popular tale of Icarus was played out all over again for the world to watch. It was a curious choice of skits for the carefully planned return of this much loved show. A group of men doing Michael Jackson in Minstrel Show style. Unsurprisingly it didn't go off well. The show's big name guest didn't like it, the audience was a little awry and the response was probably closer to absolute zero than a scientist has ever seen.

Real-time show, real-time web: press play. I bet the producer monitoring the real-time sentiment graphs was already on the phone to a recruitment agency before the show was even over.

For a full report on the crash landing of Hey-Hey it's Saturday view the Crikey dishonour board. I suspect we will not see week three of the reunion.

The lesson learnt from this saga is, as we have known for a little while now, that TV lives and dies by the audience. Pre-social-web a TV station could sell ads for a whole season of a TV show. Then it was months at a time. Now, unfortunately TV programmers have the inglorious task of trying to program on a week-by-week basis and the sales team have the even worse job of trying to sell ads to a show that might not even exist in a week.

TV programming is dead.

I think marketers need to think hard about where they put their dollars, stop planning above-the-line spend annually, and generally agree that TV, once the bastion of marketing spend, is now a risky investment.

The multiple personalities of Apple

I'm only a new convert to Apple. My MacBook Pro (my first) is only a couple of months old. I don't have an iPhone.

Apple is all colours and glitz; is joyful; is easy; one-click; two-finger scroll.

I love its usability, Apple instinctively knows how things are connected, that iPhoto and Flickr are a great match, that iMovie should upload to YouTube.

But then there are those updates that come through all the time. iTunes 9.0 is available (that'll be 90mb thanks), QuickTime has an updated (55mb, cheers), we took out all the printer drivers to make Snow Leopard lighter (great!) but if you want your printer driver back you can download the drivers (274mb, not great).

I also haven't had the best customer service when something came unstuck with my MacBook Pro. Apple stores and their licensed dealers seem to be stocked full of hipsters that don't have a lot of 'can I help you?' about them (having said that I have found one guy that is great, pity he can't solve all my problems).

Then comes the issue of Apple's secrecy. Sure, it might be great for that wow factor in new releases, but is it (allegedly) worth workers lives? For a publicly traded company questions are also being asked about corporate transparency.

For me it seems that the gulf between brand Apple and company Apple is too wide.

Is it possible that a brand can be separated from its company? Is this sustainable? I guess it has worked for Apple for the past decade or so, why shouldn't it continue?

Goin' large from your organisation

Agencies will deride our poor camera work and lack of quality, but this little gem is letting our organisation go large in ways we've never been able to before.

What's in the box is one of the tools that is giving my organisation the opportunity to go out large no only to its members, but also as importantly, to the staff in the offices around the world.

Using a consumer level HD video camera we're now able to record messages from staff and members, stream events live to members in remote regions, and generally be on-call to record important moments in our organisation that otherwise might have been consigned to history.

Here's just a snapshot of what we've been able to achieve in four months:

+ Senior managers recorded a short bio of themselves for members
+ The organisation president recorded a welcome message for members as he was not able to attend an event
+ The CEO and senior managers recorded a warm-up video for a staff event happening overseas
+ A conference session was live-streamed from Perth into Second-Life

... and coming up

+ We'll be recording vox-pops of members attending our annual Congress
+ Live-streaming more conference sessions for regional members
+ And recording many more staff and member stories

Here's what's under the hood:

+ Canon HV30 HD video camera (we chose the HV30 as its firewire out-put allows us to use the camera for live-streaming, something flash memory HD cameras cannot do).
+ Firewire 800 cable
+ Rode VideoMic for awesome sound
+ Plenty of mini DV tapes
+ One really tough case for our travels

You can pick up all that plus a nice tripod for under $1500, that's about one days worth of video from an agency. The biggest cost for our organisation was a Macbook with FinalCut Express as we didn't have one previously, but I'm sure most other organisations have a Mac or two.

One of the greatest things about having a camera inside the organisation is that now for those spur of the moment opportunities we don't need to go to an agency and get a quote, book a time an manage the post-production. Our camera gives us the flexibility to be on-call and record the stories as we need. Sure there's a little additional blood and sweat in editing and encoding the files ourselves, but I'm loving learning a new skill.

As yet none of our Semi-Pro (alright, amateur!) productions have made it to our YouTube channel - all our productions have gone large inside the business. But I'm sure in time you'll be seeing our handy work in the big lights of YouTube. Really, now that you can pick up an HD camera for about $1000 and a studio quality microphone for $150, the (YouTube ready) quality takes care of itself and what we can concentrate on is being on call to capture the best stories we can.

Social media from outside the marketing department

It's been a little over 12 months since I left the marketing department at work. I'm now sitting in a small team that is curiously called Knowledge Exchange and essentially our role is to "help members connect with each other online and share experiences" (that's how I put it).

I've had a fantastic time in the role because it has given me the freedom to voraciously learn about everything that online collaboration/networking/sharing can offer. I've got my million-and-one accounts on every service possible; I'm talking to people I would never have met were it not for the Interwebz and all up I think I've had a bloody educational year.

But one of the biggest things that it has taught me is that doing this stuff just ain't natural to everyone. For the past four or five months I've been having regular catch-ups with my old marketing team to get them on-board as advocates for online collaboration.

While it is true a person's need is the first step in deciding what and indeed if collaboration should be online, in these meetings we've decided to have a bit of a taste-test to learn about the fun things that live online. The team has tasted forums, blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube... the works. And in the end I think that the biggest learning I've had is that for most of these tools and platforms you simply can't explain the benefit - you have to experience the benefit.

And that's a bloody hard sell. The whole "trust me" line just doesn't cut the mustard when a member receives their 4th email for the month.

Deborah Schultz, partner at the emerging tech strategy consultancy Altimeter, also shows in her P&G digital hack night, the 'jump-in' mind-set of a digital native/convert is different from the 'planned' marketing mind-set. Marketing, as creative as it might sound to the outsider, is actually about tangible benefits and direct outputs - $1,000 input gives me 6% return gives me $20,000 sales. It's logical, it's tested, it works. Marketing reads the instructions, figures out how it works and then applies the correct procedures.

Sitting outside the marketing department has given me a new appreciation for the act of marketing, especially in this new world of 'experiences'. The digital native/convert has accepted that the world simply has too many experiences and opportunities to sit down and read the instructions. You simply gotta jump in and go for a ride. If you don't like it get out, get in the next one, try something else. You'll find the one that you get a benefit from soon enough. Try marketing that! And everybody's 'it' is different to the next.

The best I could say is get your story right and tell your story through the experiences that you market. And it doesn't all have to be digital. Red Bull is a great example of a company/brand that has a story to tell through the experiences it markets and I bet their marketing spend is 90% off-line.

So in a little over twelve months a curious thing has happened to me, my walls of data and measures that direct-marketing taught me have started to crumble. Instead I'm now talking about stories and experiences, about failing, collaborating, talking with people not at them.

... I think I have a long way to go to win over the marketing department but I'll keep working at it. Good luck to all you other digitals out there converting the analogue marketing departments of yesterday.

Designed in Australia, Made in China, From Australian Fabric

This is what it says on the tag of Bonds underwear. And I'm still trying to figure out what Pacific Brands, the owner of Bonds, wants us to feel when we read this.

As far as I'm aware the only thing a manufacturer is required to state is the country of manufacture. So it would be that Pacific Brands, has made a conscious decision to tell the customer it's designed in Australia and uses Australian fabric.

To me, a cynical marketer, it says that, "we (Bonds) like to design our garments in Australia and Australian fabric is good quality so we'll use that, but as for manufacturing, well any old shmuck can do that so we'll get it cheap as chips in China."

Pacific Brands has a responsibility to its shareholders, I can't disagree there, but with all the devastating news of textile factories closing continuing, to have this written on the tag of Bonds clothing is a bit of a slap in the face to all the previously employed Australian workers. It says that labour cost savings is the only reason they're out of a job.

I see it happening more and more, brands trying to eek out any bit of Australian connection left in their multi-national businesses. I just wonder if the nationalism is wearing a little thin (sorry about the pun).

What do you think Pacific Brands is trying to say with this tag?

Imagine a subversive world delivered via augmented reality

This just blew my mind with the possibilities.

From the Digital Urban blog...

A new application from Metaio is taking the concept a step forward allowing users to leave tweets, messages, web pages and 3D models in a real space for other users to view or pick up when there are in the vicinity.

An example Digital Urban gives is the opportunity for augmented reality graffiti. Wow, the possibilities for a really subversive world hidden from reality, open only to those with the right key... wow.

Overcoming the dis-embodied brain

Recently a colleague has had to work from home for extended periods. Today's technology is amazing in that it is wholly possible to do this and still work productively. With remote access to work and email applications via Citrix, diversion of office phones to mobile phones, and the use or web based wikis, IM and twitter there is no impediment to seamless remote working.

But there is a down-side. It pyschological more than anything else. It's dis-embodiment.

After a period of working with my colleague in a remote manner, the image of my colleague is fading and being replaced with the direct image I see during our converasations - a conference phone, a computer screen. It's crazy, I know, but he is turning into a dis-embodied brain, a god floating in the ether.

But there is another way. It may be a little data intensive and some options are down-right mind-blowing in their cost, but there should be no restriction in today's technologically capable world from not have visual and audio connections in remote locations.

Here are just a few options organisations can and should consider for employees working remotely:

Online video calls
Google and Skype both offer free one-to-one video calls.

Virtual worlds
Not as silly as it sounds, virtual worlds are promising to deliver the next generation of remote conferencing and offer unlimited flexibility in communicating with life-like representations of colleagues. Workplace virtual world examples include Forterra, Rivers Run Red for Second Life and some organisations are even trialling PS3 Home as a virtual communications medium.

Telepresence
TelePresence is something that Cisco has championed and the innovations coming out of Cisco really do show where remote working is heading. Life-sized imagery broadcast over digital lines is pretty amazing.

Holography
And just to show you there is always something way out there. The video below show's the next next generation of teleconferencing - Princess Leia style - holography in the boardroom.



Home offices and SMEs are perfectly positioned to leverage free online video technologies such as Google video and Skype. Larger organisations should consider distributed telepresence. I say distributed because I believe that having a system locked down to office-to-office video calls misses an opportunity to link in staff at home, customers and suppliers that all have webcams that could link in.

These are our best options for really tangible and meaningful connections via remote locations, we should embrace visual connections as much as possible and shun the dis-embodied soul.

It's baby steps for Sony with online content

Ok, ok. Last post I may have heaped praise on Sony for doing the right thing by Jill and Kevin on YouTube. Maybe it was a little premature.

Today I read in the Guardian Rhodri Marsden has had a take-down notice from Sony slapped on one of his videos. Turns out Sony doesn't like it when their artists are put up in a humorous light.

The video Rhodri describes highlights the somewhat bizarre ramblings of young up-and-comer Ray Gun. I can see why Sony would have slapped the take-down notice on the video if it doesn't show Ray Gun in a good light, but you can't blame Rhodri for trying.

If Sony are going to go ahead and profit off videos such as Jill and Kevin then they should be willing to let others that might be a little left-of-centre go online too. The very least that can be said is that by profiting off a select few user-generated videos Sony has given implicate permission to all online users to use Sony content whenever they want.