Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • HSBC PMI + more things

    HSBC PMI

    HSBC will no longer provide one of the best gauges of China’s economy – Quartz – but hopefully someone else will step up to do the sponsorship instead. The HSBC PMI measure was the most reliable economic measure coming out of China that was wasn’t skewed by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs get easy state bank loans where as the private SMEs that the HSBC PMI looks at don’t have that advantage and so provide a ‘truer’ picture of what is actually going on. Does this mean a longer term difficult position for HSBC as well as transparent economic data like the HSBC PMI?

    China

    Born Red – The New Yorker – interesting profile of Xi Jinping

    Culture

    Check out MelodySheep’s album on Bandcamp. More culture related content here.

    483 lines by Seoul-based Kimchi and Chips is a welcome break from 3d projection mapping for interesting visualisations. It reminds me of the work Troika turn out

    Economics

    A generation from now, most of the world’s GDP will come from Asia | Quartz – get ready for the new order of things

    FMCG

    I was doing some research and came across the collaboration between MelodySheep and General Mills to remix Lucky Charms adverts. His interpretation shows a darker side to the kids hunting for Lucky Charms

    Innovation

    SoftBank Robot Pepper Sells Out in a Minute – Japan Real Time – WSJ – via Aldebaran Robotics (paywall) – much of this is about Japanese culture’s positive reception to robots as it is to the quality of Pepper itself. There are other robots that can fill a similar kind of customer service role. Its really worth reading about how Japanese consumers interacted with their Sony Aibo

    Japan

    This wonderful film of Tokyo by Brandon Li which somehow feels as if it should be a Guinness advert, partly due to the narration by Tom O’Bedlam

    It is interesting how the Guinness brand has came to own strong storytelling in advertising.

    Media

    Cannes: Google’s agency-sales head wants to push creativity – Campaign Asia – ZOO – Google’s creative agency butts up against agencies to get creative briefs (paywall)

    Online

    2015/16 Fixture List Released | Barclays Premier League – interesting that the FA are recommending match-by-match hashtags to build conversations on Twitter

    I have been using Ben Haller‘s Fracture fractal screensaver for almost as long as I have used Mac OS X (back when it was called Puma). Michael Clark has a site for images used creating Fracture called Fractal of the Day with achingly beautiful tripped out abstract images. The Mac has traditionally been a home to lots of passionate small software development companies who code thoughtful apps. These apps then build a passionate user community around them.  
    mandelbroitset

    Security

    GCHQ spies discredit targets on the internet – Business Insider – about what I would expect them to be doing. More security related posts here.

    Technology

    I, Cringely The U.S. computer industry is dying and I’ll tell you exactly who is killing it and why – I, Cringely – cloud computing is economics not innovation

  • Quibb + more things

    Why aren’t App Constellations working? Quibb members share some diverse opinions | Quibb – interesting that there are only US examples used in the Quibb research. There are wider issues with some of the companies mentioned especially Foursquare and the app constellations that they are building according to Quibb

    Beware the Listening Machines – The Atlantic – Orwell was only a few decades out?

    Royal Mail to deliver junk mail to shoppers after clicking on a product online | Daily Mail Online – offline retargeting

    Oculus Rift Inventor Palmer Luckey: Virtual Reality Will Make Distance Irrelevant (Q&A) | Re/code – better video conferencing and gaming sound like initial big applications

    Amazon’s New Plan to Pay Authors Every Time Someone Turns a Page – The Atlantic – novelists go with Gawker Media-esque model

    Apple Pay Coming to MBNA Customers in the UK | MBNA – interesting that MBNA is pushing this release directly out to consumers via email marketing

    Google’s DeepMind uses Daily Mail to teach computers how to read human language | Daily Mail Online – its actually about the bullet point summaries, but I can’t help feeling we are about to get screwed over by terminators with a fascist political outlook

    A Robotic Dog’s Mortality – The New York Times – dealing with loss as your Aibo no longer works and can’t be serviced (paywall)

    Kids like to beat up robots | Fusion – Half of the devil-children said they perceived that the robot seemed pained and stressed out by what they were doing to it. But they were unbothered by this, because children are evil.

    6 reasons killing off Yahoo Pipes was a bad idea | VentureBeat – interesting piece on the pervasive influence of Yahoo!’s shuttered Pipes product. More online related content here.

    China Inc is leaving Wall Street for wrong reason | SCMP – market arbitrage play, privatise in the US, sell at a higher price on the Chinese stock markets (paywall)

  • The silent majority of social

    The silent majority as a concept was introduced to the world by Richard Nixon in a speech about America’s position in Vietnam on November 3, 1969.

    1969 Official Visit Of President Richard Nixon To Saigon


    The portion of the speech that featured it is below:

    Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

    And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans-I ask for your support.

    I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.

    Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ reference tapped into a tenet of common wisdom, that the majority of the population is generally passive in actions and discussions; a positive spin on Juvenal’s concept of bread and circuses or panem et circenses. He used the phrase to decry the selfishness of ordinary Roman citizens, their neglect of wider concerns and likely lack of civic duty.

    There is a similarly silent majority today online, in spite of the democratisation of publication via social channels. A small proportion of us publish. I got the model below from Bradley Horowitz at Yahoo! but I am sure it came from someone earlier and it still holds true today
    hierarchyofsocialmediaengagement
    What this means is essentially two things:

    • Whilst the volume of social postings continues to go up, it still represents a small amount of the general population and even the online population. Most of the people, most of the time are passive consumers of social content
    • When people do post content, it isn’t generally about brands or important issues, but about being with their friends or family. They look inwardly on their lives

    Social conversation is often the province of the highly connected, the verbose and of polarised opinions (complaining about a product that really got under their skin with poor performance or fanboydom).

    Ironically search data probably tells us more about the population in general, the problem that search presents marketers with is quality of data. The major search engines (Google, Bing/Yahoo!, Yandex) no longer provide web sites with the details of the search term used to arrive on a given site as they have defaulted to HTTPS.

    Google Trends has decided to give ‘real-time’ data rather than the few days delay it previously provided on search terms. Google Trends doesn’t provide search volumes, but search ‘rate of change’ which means that static low or high search volumes won’t register. But its the closest we have online into easily understanding the nature of the silent majority of social; what they are interested in and care about.

    More online related content.

    More information
    Nixon’s ‘Silent Majority’ Speech
    Google Trends Now Shows the Web’s Obsessions in Real Time | WIRED

  • China bubble + more things

    Stand Back: China Bubble Will Burst – Bloomberg View – I don’t think it will go pop, though it will correct, probably not this year. The China bubble has become an existential threat to global markets, because of the scale of the China bubble. At the end of the day, China’s retail investors are starved of investment opportunities, that is one of the factors driving the China bubble and it won’t change suddenly. More finance related content here.

    Apple News curation will have human editors and that will raise important questions | 9to5Mac – big implications for PR news stories and media exposure

    Western Firms Caught Off Guard as Chinese Shoppers Flock to Web – WSJ – over estimated bricks and mortar sales, but also resurgent local brands utilising online channels

    WSJ moves to a single global edition | Marketing Interactive – higher stakes for PR people and advertisers

    White hackers in China young and underpaid | WantChinaTimes.com – explains motivation for black hat activity beyond the intellectual challenge

    [WATCH] Google’s Amazing Location-Aware Search Finds Answers About Nearby Places – not terribly surprising definitely the direction that Google and others have been looking to go with location as a context to user intent in search for a good while

    8 Smart Folders You Need on Your Mac & How to Set Them Up | Makeuseof – handy way of getting organised on the Mac

    Alice Rawsthorn on the pros and cons of new digital interface design | Putting People First – interesting as it touches tangentially on dedicated purpose design and the faults of icons under glass and digital menu driven design

    Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg – interesting long form article

    Exclusive: Facebook earns 51 percent of ad revenue overseas – executives | Reuters – Facebook using specific methods tailored to the country including optimizing video and pictures for slower connections in India, where an ad product called “missed call” also helps customers avoid phone call charges. Many people in India dial a friend and hang up to send a signal without incurring charges. Facebook incorporated this system into its ads. A person can place a “missed call” by clicking on a mobile ad from Facebook and receive a return call with information, for example the score of a cricket game, sponsored by a brand.

    LG G4 Teardown – iFixit – beautiful inside and out reminds me of the Mac design approach

  • Brand storytelling: a bitter pill to swallow?

    I have been thinking about brand storytelling after watching Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake over the weekend which is ostensibly trying to tell the story of Afghanistan from then end of the second world war to today. But it is also a parable on how the simplicity of storytelling used by the political classes to get the populace on side in the west has been ultimately counterproductive. This counterproductive nature of it, made me think about brand storytelling, that is often simple to aid both delivery and effectiveness.

    I have worked for businesses since the mid-noughties that put brand storytelling at the centre of offerings – often using simple mono-myths as models. In addition, my colleagues at one agency took this a stage further and sold their services as building on the ‘best practice’ of winning political campaigns – if you like Ogilvy on Advertising but written by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and George W Bush.

    The truth is that our relationships with brand is often more complex and shifting than we has marketers let on. Brands have symbolic and status power which changes over time. The question that Bitter Lake seeded in my mind, is brand storytelling actually going to breed a future set of consumers with little to know brand engagement? Where brand values become a mill stone rather than a touch stone? It’s too early to tell and I don’t know the answers if it did happen, though my gut says going to an approach of radical honesty. More branding related content here.

    More information
    Bitter Lake | Wikipedia