Hacking the Good days…

Jake McKee’s presentation made my day, thanks to Jeremy for flagging it up. Jake is a ‘revolutionist’ that led the Lego Mindstorm Programme involving 20 core fans, and literally drove a cultural reform in Lego. From some random marketing handouts I found that mindstorm outsold its predecessors by more than 2 fold and generated significant word-of-mouth (correct me if I am wrong). I have been running around in our company pointing out how ‘cool’ the Lego programme was, but of course, there are usually an avalanches of ‘ROIs’ questions where I’m still trying to deal with.

Flickr image by jurvetson

His personal trajectory gave a hearty account on how he dealt with Lego’s corporate membrane. For those who are working at the forefront on community management in the corp world while still believe in what they are doing (with ’symptoms’ such as strong squeamish reaction towards the word ‘customers’ – well we know that it’s key to view users as as clever, if not more intelligent than the corporate dudes, right?). I filtered the 45 mins presentation and put together my favourite three key points:

1. Org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical

If you have the critical understanding of the market and know what it takes to move your company’s needle, don’t shy from it and make it happen. If you do add value to the business, the chances that key stake-holders will endorse you are really high – but bear in mind that medium-level marketers are the hardest to sell – they have the numbers to sale, which makes them the hardest parties to convince – and the only way you can convince them is to first convince the senior management like VPs and CEOs so that they can do the corporate-membrane breakthrough for you.

Good news for shit-stirrers!

2. There is no secret

‘Tell me why we can’t release it?’ Jake explained how he pushed his colleagues to explain why things are kept secret, while fans are creating the most amazing derivatives from their products and needed their support. The chances is that most people who claim they things should be kept secret can’t articulate why! So – challenge them *grin* (that actually reminded me of my primary-secondary school years asking all the ‘why’ questions, can totally imagine that both Jake and I would be the classic nightmare for oldschool teachers!)

3. Don’t force-build a new community, support and nurture the current ones

This is particularly insightful a lot of business leaders, who randomly decided that communities are the new key and have their company ‘building’ their own. If you are a long-standing company, what is the odd that fans around the world are already involved and engaged in their own means?

The key is to work with what you have, and respect who they are (and are not).

Exciting, now I just need to think of how to break the ice with the figure-driven people…

Doris Salcedo’s art

Originally uploaded by gab113

Tate’s latest installation reminds me again why I love London and it’s a city that cares about its cultural offering:

Here we are looking into how social segregation can be represented visually and artistically:

Doris Salcedo’s art

In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

Until 8 April 2008
I still haven’t been there yet but my colleague was persuaded and taken some cute photos for us to enjoy.

From Ted – Pamelia’s amazing performance – playing instruments in the air.

note: As much as I love TED, it needs to improve the ease on video-embedding – I’ve spent the past hour trying to properly embed the video without screwing up my WP template!

It’s been more than two weeks when close to a thousand of private/sex photos of various female popstars with Edison Chen are released and I have been trying to resist the urge to blog about it – until yesterday, bear with me for the summary of this story before I elaborate why.

International press started chiming into the ’sex scandal incident’ in Hong Kong when the Hong Kong media has been getting absolutely frantic (see EWSN’s brilliant summary here) and the police started arresting and detaining suspects who might have ‘distributed’ indecent materials on the internet without trial,

The police have arrested nine people in connection with photographs and videos on the Internet in the last two weeks. Three suspects have been formally charged, including a 24-year-old man in Kowloon who was charged Tuesday with publishing obscene materials after he was said to have posted two files containing 100 photos.

What’s so indecent of these photos, you have to ask? Basically they are photos of female stars posing and revealing their private parts, as well as various photos of them performing oral sex on Edison Chen. These photos were taken but weren’t meant to be for ‘public consumption’, however when when Mr. Chen took his laptop for repairing, they got stolen and distributed. (that I have to say, it’s simply and utterly inconsiderate and stupid).

The police are looking to capture the ‘cultprit’ and also almost randomly tracking down people who distributed the photos. The reactions from the ‘moralists’, the ‘authority’ and the ‘public’ all reveal issues more than skin-deep in this psuedo ‘Westernised’ society that I have known of. The most apparent issue, is what John Kennedy coined at white terror,

Pornography is openly sold by many street newspaper vendors in Hong Kong and versions of the photographs have been seen on the covers of most Chinese-language dailies every day since the first batch of photos appeared online two weeks ago, despite that under the city’s Obscene and Indecent Articles Ordinance, distribution is prohibited.

The moralists are urging the film star to admit that they are ‘wrong’.

Now, let’s get two things clear. In many of Hong Kong daily newspapers, there is a PORNOGRAPHIC section where anyone, ANYONE, who can afford 30p can go and get a copy. Where as in this case, these young pop stars were meant to be taking *private* photos in their bedrooms. There is no coercion, no intimidation. What is wrong with that?

As early as the days where Eve Ensler produced the Vagina Monologue, a screenplay about how people were never able to respectfully speak aloud the word ‘vigina’ to where we stand – the conservatism and the hypocrisy is what getting to me. People went into details accusing one of the pop stars as hypocritical and should apologise in the public. Now why does , e.g. Gillian Chung, need to apology – what has she done wrong? EWSN translation of thosewerethedays blog illustrated part of the problem,

In the Hong Kong entertainment industry, some artistes have become upholders of morality. They criticize the media for being very yellow and very violent; they preach morality; they say that this or that magazine should not have published something or the other because corrupts young people; they describe themselves as clean, self-respecting and pure beyond belief.

Grow up, Hong Kong. We freaking need to revamp our sex education starting with a healthy attitude towards sex and relationships. We can never *change* the media – we *are* the media. We are the lowest in the media ecology foodchain and they produce these low-quality, high fuss stories because we are asking for it. I would applaud if the Hong Kong government steps up and announces that they will reform Hong Kong’s liberal and sex education, otherwise just joining the moral [panic] folks and picking up the pitchfork is totally, utterly immature and useless.

Updates: thanks Christian for pointing out that I miss-spelled vagina. Not sure if I was taught to spell that in Hong Kong anyway ;)

Okay my uni’s programme manager has asked me a while ago to share my ‘tips’ on internship hunting. Although I’m in no expert in this, it’s probably worth a blog on my top 6 tips that focus less on the details (e.g. the internship letter) but more on a personal developmental perspective (feel free to comment/add tips):

Step 1: Know who you are, and who you want to become.

This is usually the hardest step and try not be led by opportunities open out there but create your own. My internship with an architecture firm, Fluid, was not included into my programme’s database but I know I am interested in deploying new media in public engagement, which is this company’s expertise.

Step 2: Look for contacts in your network to see who can give you advice on who to approach

‘It’s not who you are, it’s who you know’ – cliche but probably true. I started looking up my own contacts, and asked an architecture professor at my former University for ‘advice’. Never say ‘Oh what do you think I can do?’ because other people are not responsible for your business. Be prepared. Only when you have precise, carefully formulated question then you you get concrete answer, ‘hey i’d like to intern at a company that drives new media technologies in public consultation, will you happen to know any given your previous experience?’

‘come to think of it I know a firm in London that does this!’

Step 3: Don’t wait for someone to initiate the conversation – get the contacts and make it happen!

Instead of waiting for the professor to get back to me with the director’s email (I did wait for a few weeks and then assumed that he must have been buried under an avalanches of work), I google-d and found the company’s email. I mentioned the professor’s title and where they met, and the director eventually got back to me.

Step 4: Persistence, Persistence, Persistence

Eventually over almost 4-5 months of email correspondence, there were frustrating moments of waiting because the company does not know how to postion me (they are all architects and I am sociology/psychology/journalism/new media ‘thing’ by training). I had to push them again until we had a face to face meeting, and they agreed for a ‘testing period’.

Step 5: Back-up plan

During the painful months of waiting, I have been bouncing off emails to other companies. Eventually two got back to me, including the British Urban Regeneration Association and Yahoo! EU. I decided to step out of Fluid at the end of the Internship and check what’s going on in big corporation like Yahoo!. When I left, Fluid offered me a potential position to be their associate, great news, but you never know what’s out there until you venture.

Step 6: Time management

Some of you might want to just work enough to fulfill your course requirement, but if you aim to start a career at the end of the course, it makes sense to do a few internships because this is the only time you can ’shop’ around for different industries. Once you formally start a proper position you will not enjoy the freedom to jot from jobs to jobs. I did my leap in Yahoo! EU and eventually they hired me as their EU Community Manager, where I am now. And I love my work. Moreover, I see this more than just work but also as my career.

Finally don’t forget to deploy online networks if you’re looking for opportunities out there – I got quite a few contacts from linkedin.com and even facebook.

Did i miss any big tips?

Flickr Resistance Against Microsoft Takeover

Originally uploaded by sonicwalker

I heart flickr. period.

Are you curious about world’s kick-a** ads that I just created based on scientific research? Let’s begin with the backdrop illuminated by this Wallstreet article:

As Microsoft Corp. makes a $44.6 billion bet on Internet advertising with its unsolicited offer for Yahoo Inc., there are signs that some of the biggest new places where consumers are flocking on the Web — social networking and video-sharing sites — are yielding advertising revenue slower than some Internet companies had hoped.

The argument is pretty clear. Social Networking websites are not necessarily making the revenue marketers think they would.

So what went wrong? And how can we rectify this?

Let’s continue with Mohan’s favorite cliches – which might have summarised the mindsets that non-marketing people (i.e. geeks) will nod and smile (with bracketed notes from me),

1. Its about the community (oh dear, we love you, too)
2. Make passionate users of your customers (what? ‘Make’ users? into customers? you mean they are like transformers and can ‘reboot’ into one another? you lost me here…)
3. Communities are built “one person at a time” (Right. So does baby-making i guess.)
4. The web is the biggest social network (what about China?)
5. Email is the best social network (what about women? or men?)
6. The lines of social networks between business and home are blurring (huh?)
7. Keep your community always in the know (of what though?)
8. Get inside your community’s head, but go for their hearts (did they dub this from how to loose a guy in ten days???)
9. Marketing to a community is evil (but making money is not. wait.. huh?)
10. Build a community for the sake of doing good, not profiting from it. (“help! I am attacked by personalised ads!!”)

While Bill’s diagnosis is the problem that advertisers are using old school methods for these websites.

But the main challenge is BANNER BLINDNESS. There are now generations of surfers who have distinctively different styles in web-browing. Yahoo!’s older baby boomers are very different from Google’s yuppies or moms who just redicovered the there is search functions on the internet versus business people who would only log in to check email, banking, and stock prices. How ‘permeable’ they are to advertisement solicits interesting psycho-social research, which I am not sure if ‘marketing people’ will see the value of it.

Nielson’s research illuminates the ‘problem’:

See – we are literally blind to banner ads. And his conclusion is that only ads that are:

• • Plain text
  • Faces
  • Cleavage and other “private” body parts

stand a better chance of being noticed.

How exciting.

So we just need a lot of cleavage then. And probably there will be world peace as well… damn, Freud has been right!

Okay so if I aspire to be a word-class marketer, this is my campaign:

cleavage ‘abstracted’ from Flickr by C.P.Storm

Wonder if gum tree will hire me.

It always sends shiver down my spine when I heard people making a big fuss of online community (as well as ‘web 2.0’; ‘engagement’; and ‘ROI’).  Not that I am against online communities, but when businesses start to consider how can they ‘harness’ ‘online communities’ to drive ‘revenue’, they lost me there.

Not that I am against company making money, either, since after all, I am also a pin of this corporate system.

BUT…

1. Users who CHOOSE to use your services are not just passive consumers of information; they are people who read, and write.  Lawrence Lessig made a clear case of the read-write culture (highly recommend it if you haven’t seen Lessig’s classic presentation yet):

2. Users who CHOOSE to be part of an ‘online communities’ are not necessary air-heads.  In fact, many are not. 

Such as Opensource software development that drives not just the technology, but a manifesto, an ideology, a belief, that information should be open, and we should stand on the shoulders of each other, so that the sum is bigger than the whole.  AND – we are all mini giants.  Don’t you forget that. 

Such as Creative Commons, now built into major commercial search engines (such as google [see user rights] and yahoo), that units little creative minds so that people can share, remix, be creative, be respective, be fun, be global…

Today we talk about myspace, facebook.  But remember what online communities were for at the dawn of the internet – (dark force aside, such as pornography and cracking activities) it’s for sharing knowledge, facilitating innovation, connecting you to the like-minded so that you know that the sky is the limit, and you can make your dream come true if you try hard enough. 

Think firefox – since its launch in it has exceeded 50 million active users with more than 600 MILLION add-on download.  Do they need hiring a ‘marketing department’ – yes, and no.  What they did was to create a kick-ass browser which was so good that users invite all their best friends to try out (and fall in love..) and at one point most IT professional CHOSE to install Firefox as default browser in companies.  And you know the story – Firefox Spreads like wild fire.

Now that’s real ‘marketing’ – not by having fancy ads campaigns, but by creating a product that with USER NEEDS in mind.

3. Finally – only MEANINGFUL communities last.  Such as Opensource, such as creative commons, such as Wikipedia.  Not only do they last, they grow stronger day-by-day, it is because they are driven by people who have strong vision, who believe in precious qualities of humanities. 

Think friendster, think myspace, think bebo, think facebook.  Yes maybe it’s fun to see what your friends are doing, but what happen when you grow out of it?  These ‘social networking websites’ are just tools, an extension to our mobile phones, emails, or weblogs.  But phones get out-dated, better email services emerge, user switch, you switch.

Only meaningful communities with strong visions last – even if someone leaves, other joins, because they are driven by faith, not hype.  And faith doesn’t get outdated.  Remember that. 

M$…