So, last week, we organised a conference called i-design 08 and a portfolio clinic session of the same name as part of the London Design Festival.

I thoroughly enjoyed all the content, but I don’t want to talk about that in this post, However, my reports from the event will be published over the next couple of weeks and so extensively linked and republished that you will be physically ill at my gauche-itude. You will feel as though you were there, and are still there.

I wanted to talk about my feelings as the person ultimately responsible for the event budget. We’re a modest sort of organisation with modest sort of budgets, so basically, we’re talking about around £10K - the LDF paid for most of the venue hire costs.

Even though that’s a tiny amount of money in event terms, marketing terms, advertising terms, I have to say that my main feeling until the event was over was one of utter horror. There’s been a sick tightness at the bottom of my stomach for four months.

• Would people book?
• Would they turn up even if they’d booked?
• Would the speakers say anything remotely sensible, let-alone groundbreaking?
• Would people complain about the catering/seating/internet/badging arrangements?

But, of course, it all went fine. We’re professional people. We try the best we can and so it all turns out right. At the end of the day I was positively jubilant. Some people said that it was the best conference they’d been to for ages. But I don’t listen to them.

Is that feeling of horror just something you get used to after a while? And if you don’t, how do you manage those feelings? Would it be a better asset to be totally blase about events? I can see that as an asset in some of my colleagues, who just get on with it while I go off to the toilet to be sick again (not really).

Photo from the BBC’s coverage of the day.

o AIG www.aiglondon.com

o Conchango www.conchango.com

o Digit www.digitlondon.com

o Digital Outlook www.digital-outlook.com

o Glue www.gluelondon.com

o Imagination www.imagination.com

o Kin www.kin-design.com

o Lateral www.lateral.net

o Moving Brands www.movingbrands.com

o Poke www.pokelondon.com

o Precendent www.precedent.co.uk

o Smoothe www.smoothe.com

o TribalDDB www.ddblondon.com/tribalddb

o Up the Resolution www.uptheresolution.co.uk

Should be an excellent session. It’s part of the conference package (book now), but you can get into this bit for free. More details here.

The day started at the Boat, Coq D’argent, the East Rooms on Tabernacle St., where it was great to catch up with reprobates like my old friend Simon Prockter, Robert Loch and new media dilletante Paul Carr, who, it seems, has a new book coming out about the Web 2.0 start-up scene in London over the past couple of years. (review soon). Also great to catch up with the people from Crimson, past and present.

Photo credit: Mulquem. More here.

And then off to the Moo Party down at Brick Lane.

And did I learn anything? Mainly, not to mix beer and wine and indiscriminate cocktails (again) but also that there are a host of UK startups on the horizon, which I can’t tell you about. That the London dotcom entrepreneur crew are indefatigable in their desire to create something worthwhile and wonderful, and will not stop until they’ve done it.

And most interestingly, the ones that have done it already are among the hungriest to do it again.

At work, we paid Jason Calacanis £5000 to come to London and speak at a conference last year. From reading the blog, it seemed he had a lot of interesting opinions and a very interesting background, we figured, so would add a lot of value and interest.

We’re a not-for-profit enterprise within a learning establishment. Budgets are hard, but we hoped his appeal would boost ticket sales considerably. It didn’t, but that was our misjudgement. Hands up. At least we’d get a great presentation, eh?

He came. He gave a sales speech for Mahalo. That was all he talked about - how wonderful it was and how it would save the Internet.

Then he cleared off into town to do interviews for competing media, coming back four hours later to sort-of take part in a closing panel session.

Not blogging any more? Good. He is a greedy, lazy, egotistical bastard who screwed us over.

I’d be even more delighted if you were to: (a) book for the event; and (b) help us get the word out.

On getting the word out - grab this badge, stick it on your site and link to www.idesign-london.com - there is a pint in it for you*. I can do you a white version or different sizes if you like. Or - look - here’s the PSD File to *cough* mash-up your own!

The following might be loosely interpreted as marketing talk. You are free to go straight down to the blue button.

Early Bird Rates: Admission to the conference, the exhibition and portfolio clinic is currently available for just £60 (£50 for concessions). This price will rise in August, so don’t delay, book today. drinkapintamilkaday.

idesign 08 will showcase the best and most innovative work in the field and feature keynote speakers at the top of the profession. The programme is designed to be inspirational, informative and challenging. You will be a better interactive designer by the end of the day - or better able to understand the designers who work with you! You’ll also know about new opportunities and your pathway through this new digital world.

This conference is for you if:

• you want to be inspired with new ideas about web, 3D, interactive and mobile.
• you are a design professional who needs to keep abreast of the latest thinking and see best practice.
• you’re passionate about the future of the digital world.
• you want to share ideas and opportunities with like-minded creatives.

Speakers (more to come!):

· Brendan Dawes, Creative Director - MagneticNorth

· Ann Longley, Digital Strategy Director - Media Edge: CIA

· Adrian Shaughnessy, Consultant Creative Director - This is Real Art

· Colin Jenkinson, Design Director - Cogapp

· Ximo Peris, Creative Director - Smoothe

· Simon Waterfall, Creative Director of Poke and president of D&AD - Poke

· Michael Nutley, Editor-in-Chief, NMA - http://www.nma.co.uk

· More information about the speakers and the programme at http://www.idesign-london.com

The event will also host portfolio clinics from London’s top 10 digital agencies, and the digital design day exhibition and seminars.

Booking site:

Notes:

If you wish to make a group booking (five people or more) or believe you might be eligible for a press pass, email michelle.hardiman@nmk.co.uk for more information. Or just leave a comment, and I’ll get back to you.

Concessions are available for students, unemployed, freelancers, not-for-profit companies and charities. And other riff-raff, I expect.

*or simply great karma, for non-pint-drinkers.

That’s quite frightening for potential oil-riggers and for people in the oil and gas industry who hire such folk.

I was lucky enough to be at a presentation from Kevin McNulty from Coole Immersive yesterday, part of the Visual Web Convention. They’ve made a simulation game that allows new oil-riggers to get that first six months’ experience for free. That’s to say, the likelihood they’ll have a reportable accident drops to <5% if they’ve used the game. That’s a fairly cast-iron case for games in the workplace, if you ask me.

Earlier in the day, Lord Puttnam gave a challenging keynote suggesting that this field - serious games - was a potential answer to the work he was doing with the climate change commission in the House of Lords. Briefly, his argument was that younger people are more likely to engage with games than any other media - I’d agree with this but suggest that older people are also gamers. Games are also blessed with the ability to offer experiential learning unlike any other pedagogic technique currently available - I think the oil rigger case study shows that’s true. Communicating the things that all of us need to do to avoid the looming disaster that climate change will bring is a tough problem for all professional communicators. We held a private event this week for advertising professionals called Can Advertising Save the Planet? The answer is probably ‘no’, but as communicators, we have the ability and responsibility to make things a little easier and better - the disaster is imminent, after all, but even the lowest of the low can do something to help.

If we are to steer society away from catastrophe and into education, games will have a key part to play.

Unfortunately, as Puttnam admitted, as soon as something is called a ‘game’ then bureaucracy and government recoils. The idea of our government lending public support, and ultimately money, to games, is stymied by its vocabulary. Games are trivial and a social harm in the minds of most bureaucrats and, sadly, most newspaper editors (see the press about the recent Byron Review which, while admitting a need for some governance over which titles were available to younger gamers, was overwhelmingly in favour of video games as a learning resource, if you bother to read the whole thing).

Flipping back to climate change and the emergency we face communicating the facts about it and what needs to be done, then games provide an excellent opportunity. But the flip-side of the problem with bureaucrats then sets in - entertainment providers are terrified of being associated with anything remotely ‘worthy’. Being ethical is, apparently, uncool.  There have already been a few brave attempts - World without Oil, the BBC’s Climate Challenge and others. But the likes of Sony, EA and Microsoft aren’t developing or promoting these sorts of titles. What needs to happen to make the big games publishers alert to their power to change the future?

[Update - Robin Blandford has some videos of what this looks like and a challenge for the rescue industry]

As is customary at top-end press-conferences, there was a schwag-bag for all attendees containing various branded giveaways. Mouse mats, mugs and stuff - it saves having to buy Xmas presents for a lot of journos. *cough*

(As an aside - Yay! that more bloggers and vocal fans are getting their hands on this stuff.)

But the cleverest bit (for me) was that this also included an online keycode for WoW that would allow players of that game to gain a new companion for their online avatars - the characters they play in the game. Remember, they invited guild leaders and fanatical WoW bloggers along**.

The pet itself will be a miniature version of the Archangel Tyrael of Diablo 2 fame who will travel with you on all your grand adventures in Azeroth! Pictures of this amazing new pet will be available on the official website soon for everybody to check out.

Get it? The WoW pet is a viral promo-item for Diablo III! It’s limited edition, so it’s sought-after; it’s a sign of prestige in the community; and it’s constantly in the face of relevant audiences.

Pure genius. Or evil.

________________________________

*World of Warcraft - or WoW to its friends - an online roleplaying game which charges a monthly subscription - to around 10mn people.

**WoW players organise themselves into ‘guilds’ to assemble teams for online combat and for social reasons - their leaders are the most visible, longstanding and respected players.

Via. Kotaku

Anyway, I was at Media Futures 08 last Friday where one of the best sessions was the opening keynote from Dr. Brian Winston.

He started with a quotation ostensibly* from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales in the Observer saying that it’s likely there’ll soon be digital revolutions in far-flung places we don’t tend to consider very much, such as Kazakhstan. With internet connections and the Web 2.0 tools that have become available over recent years, Wales says, it’s likely that they’ll be able to propel themselves very quickly through twenty years of technological progress and produce the next crop of internet tycoons.

Nonsense, said Winston. What both Wales and Wikipedia forget is that Kazakhstan has a Stalinist dictatorship. There will need to be a very different sort of revolution before there’s any kind of technological one that’s based on democratising technologies. It’s an example of the way Web 2.0 technophiles seem to find it extremely easy to forget about politics, sociology and history to try to establish the revolutionary impact of the next latest thing. They think technology has the power to change societies, whereas in actual fact, cultural and social conditions need to be met in order for technological advances to exist at all.

Digital itself has a history going back to the 1920s, he argued, which everyone conveniently forgets. And even then, it’s simply a system for encoding things. An equivalent would be the switch from AM to FM radio - and very few people talk about the FM revolution.

We are in a condition where we conveniently forget the years of discovery, exploration and mistakes that lead to whatever is in today’s headlines. We’re also conditioned into accepting the rhetoric of marketing as fact. Web 2.0 favourite theories like ‘the wisdom of crowds’, ‘the hype cycle’ and ‘crossing the chasm’ are actually commercial products, not independent academic studies.

The conditions for the emergence of new technology are cultural, not inherent in those technologies themselves. Edison didn’t ever envisage the gramophone being used to record music, because the likelihood of that use was not culturally probable at that time. The ability to create cheap electric cars has existed for years, but has only been allowed to come to life relatively recently as car companies have reached a point where they want to be viewed as environmentally responsible. And many new technologies - so breathlessly announced in the tech press and the press releases that spawn them as so very new and revolutionary - are based on fairly basic facts about the human race. People like to talk - if that’s via mobile phone, social networks or face-to-face maybe doesn’t make that much difference. We would do it anyway within the limits of whatever means we had available.

When we’re confronted with the latest, greatest, revolutionary product from the web or anywhere else, the proper response ought to be, ’so what?’ It’s likely that there will be no sensible answer to that question, but even if there is, it will probably be about it fulfilling or adding to a social imperative that already exists. Technology, Winston argued, is not going to create new social needs or desires.

_________________

Personally, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, and I think it’s true that society creates technology, not vice-versa.

However, I didn’t used to need to know the day’s news at 7am in the morning. I didn’t used to read hundreds of people’s opinions every day. I didn’t used to hear from my friends and colleagues every day (albeit indirectly through blogs and social networks) and thus feel continuously part of an international professional community. While I could have created a printed fanzine instead of this blog, I probably wouldn’t have been bothered. It’s often remarked that before mobile phones were ubiquitous, you had to turn up to social engagements instead of cancelling. And there was a time when if I wanted to watch Dr. Who, then I had to be sat at home at 5pm on a Saturday. Some of those things are about the increasing demands for communication and information required by a post-industrial society that still needs to make a living, but not all of them.

Mobiles and web things and social networks may have come to exist as a consequence of social and cultural demand, but the consequences of their existence also go beyond what those causes required. There then emerges a two-way process whereby technology both fulfils social needs and then is stretched to create new patterns of behaviour as we tinker and test the new limits of our existence. Another basic fact about humans is that we are tinkerers and testers. Not always all of us, but enough of us to alter the nature of common discourse over time.

*Wales has since repudiated the article quoted in Winston’s talk, which was apparently written by a third party on the basis of a conversation, and has written a new one, which is more moderate in its position regarding developing economies.

Right now, VRM (vendor relationship management) is an idea. It’s predicated on the perception that the relationships between people and brands/companies are terrible. They shout at us with their megaphones and we often do our best to ignore them. Most of the time, the only thing either side ever talks about is the exchange of money - “how much does it cost?” Compared to a real market, a street market, that’s an extremely impoverished relationship.

Up till now, it’s been business that has come up with ’solutions’ to marketing problems. But there are some problems that can and ought to be solved from the individual perspective, the demand side, Searls maintains.

One of the latest solutions to the problem of marketing without wasting loads of money is CRM. Companies collect loads of data about their customers and potential customers and then target their marketing efforts at segments of those groups. CRM is ‘lame and bad’, though, because it isn’t about relationships at all, but about media planning. And it can go wrong badly, Searls recounted that his Satellite TV company simply lost his account details when he last moved house - he lost the extras and perks he’d gained from being a long-standing customer.

Searls also cited the example of National Public Radio in the US, a service akin to the BBC, but dependent on voluntary contributions rather than a licence fee. So how do they get people to make contributions? Every so often they say they are going to have to close down because they haven’t got enough money. So people send in money. Then, for the rest of their lives, they get spammed by the organisation, asking for more. This is ineffective and intrusive. There’s no mechanism for listeners to act the way they want to naturally. They can’t donate money to a particular show they enjoy, for example.

There are efforts to cut out advertising and create more direct relationships. The online sale of Radiohead’s In Rainbows, for example. The trouble is that these come from the supplier side, so we potentially end up with a million different ways of dealing with organisations we want to buy things from. If the nature and technology for managing those relationships came from the customer side, then it could be uniform and cut out a lot of the inefficiencies in the system.

Searls views the VRM project as unfinished business from the Cluetrain Manifesto. The central insight there, ‘markets are conversations’, has struck many people as true and right, but the technological implementation and management of that remains frustratingly tricky.

So how does VRM work?

That remains something of a conundrum. The best bet - as far as I could make out - is that it integrates with blogs or is similar to blogging. Individuals record their preferences and the personal data that you normally need to use an ecommerce site - on their own sites (or maybe they use a third-party service or a facebook app or whatever).

Those preferences are objects on your site - I think they are probably recorded as microformats - little snippets of machine-readable code that you can post online. There are already formats like hCard that can act as an online business card. Carrying that over to record things like product details or preferences wouldn’t be terribly difficult from a technical perspective, as I understand it. So there might be a microformat that records your preference for airline seats, for example - extra legroom, window seat, not by the wing, say. You’d have that little code snippet at a unique URL and you could decide whether to allow universal access or access only for companies that you’ve decided to have a relationship with. If a company annoys you, you could cut off their access at the press of a button.

So you have got all these details and preferences recorded in your online strongbox. Then - if you want - you let Amazon or Waitrose or whoever have access to the parts of that that you chose. The consequences might be that (a) you never have to fill in online forms again; (b) companies get to submit tenders for whatever it is that you want. I need to buy a new laptop - these are my preferences - I’m letting that information out to vendors. What have you got? (c) companies have access to rich data about what their customers actually want from them.

Objections

(a) this all sounds a bit geeky - it will never catch on

Yes it is, so are blogs. And blogs have forced companies as big as Dell to completely change the way they interact with their customers. If we just do it, and it becomes a phenomenon, companies will be forced to listen. Eventually, it will become productised, the same way MySpace productised blogging.

(b) I don’t want a relationship with the people I buy things from

Doc said, “Sometimes, I don’t want a deep relationship, I just want a cup of coffee”. And that’s fine. VRM-style approaches won’t replace all other marketing by every company. However, most people spend most money on big, considered purchases like houses and cars. Our ability to properly judge those purchases will be enhanced by a VRM approach. Large B2B purchases also account for a lot of money. Regular, smaller purchases from companies like supermarkets and bookshops will also be enhanced.

(c) Hang on, I work for an advertising agency/publisher/PR Company.

Yeah. You’re screwed.

Well, not entirely. That’s not going to happen overnight and not going to happen to the whole of the marketplace. Think of VRM as having the same impact as blogging activity now and the way that will grow. We’re at the equivalent of 1999 when it comes to VRM.

(d) Where’s the money?

Good question and it’s not something we know right now. There’s a potential whole new industry called ‘needs management services’; there’s the potential for individuals being paid for access to their data; there’s the possibility to create large, targeted focus groups on the fly similar to YouGov. Basically, that 50% of the advertising budget that doesn’t work is up for grabs because VRM systems guarantee interested, relevant relationships. However, the thing now is to create the phenomenon. From the human being perspective, this better than what we have now. You will have a better life if you embrace VRM.

How to learn more?

I’m glad you asked. NMK is running a panel discussion about VRM on the evening of March 18. Do please come along. Top speakers, cheap ticket, free beers, exciting subject. What’s not to like?

[The picture came via fffffound from here and shows how VRM might work in practise. ]

To cut his talk short, he’d been thinking about the parallels between the birth of social media and the birth of print itself, as described in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe. The printing press caused a social upheaval and changes in the patterns of people’s thought that would last forever. Revolutions are often thought to be sudden and violent, but as well as that, if they are really revolutionary, they are about long-term, irreversible change.

The printing press, like the explosion of social media, changed access to the means of production and distribution of media forever. It smashed feudalism and church control. It also changed the ways in which people think - new modes of behaviour and activity like silent reading appeared. The emergence of continual partial attention through the likes of Twitter might be a modern analogy.

In a revisionist aberration, Mayfield suggested that marketing had always had a place in print, from its very origins, since early books were very often part advertorial for the author’s goods and services. He suggested in Gutenberg’s time, there were numerous helpful volumes that actually were about promoting the writer - think books along the lines of Tenne Most Efficacious Waies to Dryve Traffick to Ye Blogge. He also cited the division and combined hatred and approval created by this new media, a very familiar theme today when it comes to the media created by you and I and reactions to that from the press and the establishment.

Dialectical materialism and Web 2.0, then. The subsequent conversation revealed a few ways into such an analysis, most of which seem bleak in the short term:

(a) this apparent transferal of the means of production into the hands of the people (e.g. ‘push-button publishing’ for everyone) seems like a revolution. But that apparent liberation is contained within the illusion of freedom granted by a very few corporations. Fox, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. At the next level, our ISPs are owned by even fewer, larger players. Our sense of freedom and ownership in this space is a delusion. The recent Usmanov outage proved how fragile this freedom is. If corporations are the new states, then much of social media might be classified as Ideological State Apparatus to obscure the real relationships between those states and the peasantry.

(b) this is even more the case outside the bourgeois social media intelligentsia (viz. anyone likely to attend SMC). Most people are joining in, if at all, through portals controlled by media giants. Unwitting collaborators, my comrades, not revolutionaries. Maybe not the same media giants as ten years ago. But the same forces, same money behind them. Don’t mistake withdrawal from one account and investment into another for a sea change in how capitalism works.

(c) the myth of transparency. Transparency used as a way to bully lesser powers. Corporations remain psychotic: under US law, they are incapable of acting altruistically. If they do anything about the social media revolution, then it will be because they think it will be the best way to drive profits. Watch them, catch them out, be suspicious.

(d) so what/where is the revolution? Regrettably,there was reactionary talk based upon non-scientific doctrine during the evening that ‘life will out’ and that censorship and control will ultimately be bypassed because that it is the destiny of any new communications medium. Applying the scientific method of Marx and Lenin instead, we might conclude that the ongoing struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie will continue and that the inevitable victory of the working classes will ensue to similar effect. Even the benighted might hit upon the truth sometimes. Print led to education, secularity and the spread of scientific thought, eventually, even though its first thrust came from the opposite direction.

Be watchful comrades. The day is near, but not yet at hand.

Update: somewhat more sensible posts on the event from Alan and Jenny.