Out of the trough of waffle: Interest graphs and social business

Image: a ray of meaning breaking through the cloud layer of neologisms :)

Social business and the interest graph are both really important subjects, useful phrases, ones which may deserve to last. I realise though that I’ve been filtering them out of late, basically because they began to bore me.

Blame it on my being a neophile – too ready to move on to the next idea – or just a realist when it comes to neologisms: most of them won’t last, won’t leave much in the way of meaning or memory – gameify, phygital, blahblahnomics – so best not get attached, not to invest too much.

We have now passed through the trough of waffle with social business and interest graphs. They have stuck.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a mound of waffle or digital churnalism being hacked out on them, just that meaning seems to have attached to both, they have taken somehow, and interesting things are being written about both.

In an “ideas stand up” session in a Hoxton basement the other day I blurted out as much on stage. Social business had been in danger of being overused beyond the point of usefulness”, butthere is a useful point to it in my line of work: it describes the value, the discussion and the action in social media projects – they happen just adjacent to to marketing functions, in the bits where comms connects with rest of the organisation.

So, I like this from David Armano on social business: Social business: where it’s been and where it’s going

And the interest graph? Well that’s becoming very, very important indeed, isn’t it?

On that subject, I like this on the interest graph from Patricia McDonald at The Social Practice: The interest graph is the future of social commerce.

: : BTW this blog post was by way of testing out Blogsy, the iPad blog editor – it seems so good, I wish the did a Mac version. Hat tip to Adam Tinworth.

 

 

 

Long term trends: The Ngrams Viewer

“A database of intentions” is how John Battelle described Google. It is a thrilling concept, at times unsettling, that you can see into the searching soul of the connected populace by seeing the words they use t find things.

Google Trends is one of those miraculous tools of the web that has quickly become commonplace. With a prophylactic time-lapse to keep its powerful advantage of insight, Google lets us see what people were search for by year and by region.

The other day I came across the Google Ngrams Viewer for the first time. This gives a slightly longer trends view in language, taking all the books since 1800 as its data set (actually up to 2008, I think).

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To screen or not to screen

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While the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon that cried “verbing weirds language” made a startement both wry and true, there are times when we can legitimately make the case for a new verb.

I’m not thinking of an unwanted and uninvited new word like “medalled”. That awkward verb will be said over and over this summer during London 2012, and I will feel a little pang of loss for our language every time. “Medalled” serves no new purpose – the nature of winning medals in sporting events has not changed noticeably – but it has manage to settle itself in to the vocabulary of our journalists and commentators almost unchallenged.

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Blogged elsewhere

 

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Image: The Rosetta Stone replica at the British Museum

The good news is… I’m blogging more. This is, I appreciate, mostly good news for me – as I’ve often noted, blogging works really well as a way of thinking and exploring ideas for me.

However, slightly confusingly, I am blogging a fair bit over at my digital strategy and earned media agency, Brilliant Noise.

I’ve not quite worked out which blog posts go where. Part of me thinks the more contentious ones should live here, but then I went and published a state-of-my-brain rant over at Brilliant Noise, and maybe that’s no bad thing.

This blog remains my public notebook, but I will post links to new posts here, but not re-posts as I’m reliably told this is frowned on by the Google.

Anyway, if you’re interested, here are my two most recent efforts:

  • Earned Media Marketers Unite! – In which I talk about earned media and the need for leadership and integration rather than competition between PR/SEO/social/content/UX.
  • Language, insight and luxury – Taking a look at some ideas from networks-focused research firm scenarioDNA about luxury brands and the need for brand taxonomies to use more appropriate and effective language in communications.

Pinterest can actually be useful, shock

Feeling a bit queasy from the over-chatter about Pinterest, I had it relegated to my list of “wait and see” web services (which Fourquare still sits on, while other less fortunate services have since faded into obsolesence).

Today, though, I actually found a use for the thing. Putting together some thoughts and a presentation around a metaphor about engines I developed a strong but powerful desire to collate a lot of images of Victorian engineering (this is not unusual, I could probably describe atavistic frenetic gathering as part of “my process”).

Once I would have dragged and dropped these into Curio, or perhaps saved them to a Posterous blog (well done them, by the way – couldn’t think of a better buyer than Twitter).

But Pinterest is absolutely perfect for that task. Love it. Maybe even finally understand it a little…

Now if you have any favourite Victorian machine images you’d like to drop in there for me, I’d be most grateful…

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The fog of revolution: social media trends 2006 & 2012

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Thanks to the brevity and immediacy of Twitter I have already Tweeted saying everyone needs to read the sources of inspiration for this post. So you’ll forgive me for opening with some tangentilish thoughts…

Or maybe you won’t.

One of my favourite observations about change and the web is what I call “the fog of revolution”, a phrase that became very popular last year in a different context. When you’re in the middle of a revolution it is very hard to know what’s going on, not least when there are so many voices close by telling you exactly what is going on, and generally being very wrong. Continue reading

Hiut: Jeans that write history

The last thing the world needs is another jeans brand. Isn’t it? With so many companies competing in so many different ways – price, name, heritage, exclusivity  - you better have something pretty special to bring to the market…

When David Hieatt opened the proceedings at the Firestarters event at Google the other evening, he told us that a new jeans brand was exactly what he was building.

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