Though not blogging , I have been pulling together thinking and training in the digital space – content to help senior marketing and business folks understand the digital landscape.  Here’s an example of our latest long form work: Social Evolution: What’s Next For Social Media Marketing 2011. A collaboration with Graham Saxton, Ipsos Global Insights Director .

Share, steal.. and of course share-and-share alike.  Check out the Open Thinking Exchange blog at www.theopenexchange.org for more.

via whatconsumesme.com

an update of the XKCD classic

Posted via email from reeboot’s posterous

via mashable.com

…a surprising list eh? More over at Mashable.
(http://mashable.com/2010/05/18/social-media-company-employees/)

Posted via web from experiencefreak

Design Fiction has been on my mind as of late. Particularly after hearing Bruce Sterling’s thinking about it’s role in experience design, product innovation and technology as well as other’s speaking from a designers point of view at SXSW 2010.

What follows is a design fiction exercise, wrapping a narrative around thoughts about the weird, wired world we live in and the tremendous social implications it has for possible futures.  William Gibson I’m not, but digest this and tell me what you think it means to us now and possibly what it could mean for the evolution of the web.   Indulge me while I surf through themes of the social web, digital immortality, privacy, an open data world, artificial intelligence and more, not in a blog post commentary but instead in a blurb of storytelling.

I’m Jack Meta and I’m a repo man of the digital conscience.

Let me give you the 30 second update. Life got pretty weird for the bio-brains soon after the AI-Data Flux. Once the open-conscious hippies broke the Googleplex server-farm wall and data burst through the behavioral floodgates, meatspace humanity found itself standing around more naked than a politician post-sex scandal. Funny that nobody saw their personal Peyton Place hidden in all those facebook posts, tweets and ISP logs long ago. Just plain stupid that nobody figured their conscious would get reassembled from all that data, through code lumps that algorithm-geeks created in their hobbyist spare time. You can be damn sure no one would want think about little Bobby and Sue talking to your long “dead”, pixellated great grandood-self in a kitsch retro-quaint Ed Hardy shirt, your abrupt and embarrassing re-entry into the world 70 years into the future. They didn’t think of any of this, not until open-data and uber-AI hit them in the skull like a mallet anyway.

But I’m a bitstream myself, so far be it for me to judge what the bio-cell’s thought about the weird world of digital immortality back in the day. I’m just here to clean up their act once they hit the biological brick wall and surrender their brains and personal lifestream to the meta-sphere.

What’s my game? I’m an identity moving van pulling up to my client’s scattered persona-attics to steal back their life in little bits and bytes. Then I spit polish, metatag and redflag pieces of digital conscience so it ain’t so boring, confusing or just plain dirty once it hits the AI’s. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not much of a combinatorial artist so I leave your final coming out party good-looks to my persona stylist biz partners. It seems the cyberpunk jokers that plugged me into the meta-sphere to do this job secretly watched antique’s roadshow a hundred years back. Surfing through the digital-conscience flea market is in my genes.

Anyhoo, good meeting you mate and welcome to the ‘sphere. I can tell you’ll get the hang of things pretty quick once you shake that linear, cerebral cortex processing hangover. I’ve gotta get back to work to pull this boring experiencefreak.com assignment. Mundane crap I tell ya and a pisser given it hit my approval cue right before the Charlie Sheen assignment of a lifetime hit the market. Just my luck. Now that would’ve been hella more hilarious than this grey haired, tech-fetish archival and family photo-pixel antique show.

See you ‘round. And remember, watch where you leave your digital droppings now that you’re back in action.

More on design fiction:

Near Futures Lab

Interactions Magazine

An Essay on Design Fiction

]]> http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/18/info-agent-man/feed/ 1 http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/ http://experiencefreak.com/blog/2010/04/06/breaking-the-chain-of-busy/#comments Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:13:21 +0000 andyhunter http://experiencefreak.com/blog/?p=1242 I’ve never been a huge Gary Vee follower, but right on for this video.  I think it represents emotions many feel after being so immersed in social media, the info rich web and culture of personal branding world.  The addictive nature, the distractions and the overwhelming opportunity to interact with others can stretch people to extremes.

I see this as a tipping point in culture, not just for Vee but for many early entries into social technology.  Jaron Lanier, Nicholas Carr and others have seen, felt and are worried about how technology is effecting our ability to think, connect and be creative.

Get zen Gary, read, think.  Get at it.

[h/t to @alexknowshtml - dangerouslyawesome.com ]

So here’s a part one in an attempt to wrap the key takeaways into the language of the moment.

Foursquare badges:

SXSW 2010 Badge #1: Storyteller

From Drew and Gavin, curators and lead contributors to the book:

“Age of Conversation III: It’s Time to Get Busy!, the world’s leading practitioners share their stories, ideas, strategies and observations. Each chapter yields practical insight and valuable experience.

The book is broken into a number of sections:

At the coalface, Conversational branding, Influence, Getting to work, Corporate conversations, Measurement, In the boardroom, Pitching social media, Innovation and execution, Identities, friends and trusted strangers

This third book in the Age of Conversation series is crowdsourced, bringing together hundreds of authors from across the world. The diverse perspectives and innovative approaches reflects the global, changing nature of business today. All profits from the sale of the book are donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.”

See the full list of contributors, including Helge Tenno, Aki Spicer, Len Kendall, Rich Nadworny, Joseph Jaffe and Mark Earls after the break.

Posted via web from reeboot’s posterous

Danah Boyd’s Notes from SXSW 2010 Keynote: danah.org

Also thoughts on guard rail definitions for social network typologies here.

Posted via web from reeboot’s posterous

And while I’m very much a participant and believer in social technologies and how they have impacted the business I work within.. I also approach it with a healthy degree of skepticism.  Our own human tendency (and even more so with the marketing, advertising and tech crowd) is to seek a holy grail, chase the bright shiny object, and drink the Kool-Aid that drive’s the hype cycle.  Social Media/Social Business is clearly that latest hype-center for all of our conversations.  But it’s important.. question is how?

My hope was to bring a different point of view to the group, help them peek into the future and channel a bit of Henry Jenkins, Jane McGonigal, Marta Kagan, Russell Davies, Mark Earls and others as they think through social as the context to how they approach marketing.

The conversation revolved around a few simple thoughts:

1. This is not about technology, this is about people. Insight first, platform and content will follow.
2. “Media” (online property/platform) isn’t  the solution.  Building a social experience is.
3. Social experience require multiple mediums, venues and applications to make connections with people.
4. Ultimately, social media doesn’t matter.  People do.  Technology has broken barriers that require “marketing” to be a social experience, something people have always craved in one form or another.  Creating stories and personal connection that engage people with a brand are ultimately where all this is headed – with a focus on experience design.
5. If you are going to be able to make any of this work.. you need a social currency.

The slideware for what was a fun, spirited and open conversation with a really smart group of future marketing leaders follows.  Visual inspiration from Nike, HBO, Come Out & Play Festival as an addendum.

Thanks to Wayne Hoyer and colleague Maury Giles for the opportunity, and to all the Marketing Fellows students for their participation, conversation and thinking during the session.