Crowd Surfing » Uncategorized

We’re all lawyers now

Martin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 13:44:04 +0000

When I was at university, the law students were the ones burning the midnight oil in the library and even after they graduated, they had to go through years of Law School before they could be let loose on the statute book. It now appears that they wasted their time, because the cuddly Coalition now running the UK has decided that we are all legal experts. As from today, we have been invited to submit our suggestions for which laws or regulations should be changed; all in the interests of creating “a more open and less intrusive society”. His royal Cleggness has appeared on YouTube to tell us why this is such a good idea.

Crowdsourcing new flavours of Walkers crisps is one thing, but applying this approach to the passing of legislation strikes me as being completely superficial. It will simply provide a platform for unrepresentative, extremist views, from both left and right, advocating such things as the legalisation of cannabis, the removal of speed cameras, the hanging of health and safety officers and the right to lock up anyone who doesn’t read The Daily Mail.

This is populist politics at its most puerile, giving people the illusion that their opinions matter. Drafting legislation is a complicated process, with numerous checks and balances built into the system. It rarely produces perfect laws, but it is far better than legislation which panders to popular prejudice.

Amplifying the volume of moaning

Martin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:32:53 +0000

Interesting post from Ben Bold describing P&G’s frustration with the way that social media appeared to exagerate customer complaints about the latest Pampers product. When looked at from a positive perspective, social media is ‘word of mouth of steroids’, but, as P&G has discovered, it can also ’amplify the volume of moaning.’ To paraphrase the old tree falling in a forest line, if a customers moans but you can’t hear them, does it make it a complaint?

Ironically the fact that 11,000 people chose to join a Facebook Group demanding that the company bring back the old version of Pampers is a massive testament to the power of the brand. It should also guarantee P&G’s social media department a decent budget increase during the next round of internal negotiations.

Showing a human face

Martin — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 08:33:30 +0000

One of the ways that financial services businesses can rebuild trust is to show more of a human face. And that means real humans, not the weird people in the pinstripe suits. All too often, the hyper control freaks running most financial institutions prefer to rely on corporate anonymity, rather than allowing real people on the inside to talk to real people on the outside. This is also the reason why many struggle with social media, regarding it simply as another one-way channel to disseminate bland corporate puffery, rather than a platform for real dialogue.

All credit then to insurance company LV and its agency ThirtyThree for coming up with a means of allowing potential recruits to choose the actual call-handler they would like to deal with their enquiry. A series of posters will feature existing LV employees, who can be contacted via a mobile text message or email. A recorded message from the employee appearing on the poster is then sent to the potential recruit.

FA fails news management test

Martin — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:31:43 +0000

The Football Association has provided a perfect illustration of how tight news management no longer works in the age of social media. It had intended to formally announce the 23 England players selected to play at the World Cup on its official website, but failed to allow for the Twitter effect. Theo Walcott, who was surprisingly not selected, had already issued a statement via Twitter and the names of all of the players excluded from the final 23 were being shared over the internet, before the FA’s PR machine had finally cranked into action.

The FA discovered, like so many traditional institutions, that you no longer have the luxury of sitting on news stories for hours whilst you go through laborious approval processes and get your act together. In the old days you could issue a story under an embargo and be reasonably confident that it would be respected by the traditional media. Now, when everyone is a potential journalist (including footballers, their agents and random hangers-on), stories can emerge and spread in seconds.

Greenpeace goes for the logo

Martin — Wed, 26 May 2010 09:22:12 +0000

Brand or company logos are highly precious things. Small armies of designers, brand managers and trademark lawyers spend their waking hours and huge amounts of money, creating, nuturing and protecting them. When they get it right, this core element of a brand’s intangible value can be worth hundreds of millions of pounds, which is why Greenpeace’s currently strategy of encouraging consumers to subvert the BP logo is a masterstroke. The pressure group has created a microsite www.greenpeace.org.uk/behindthelogoas a platform for professional and amateur designers to express their anger about the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and create their own versions of the BP helios logo.

This tactic has particular resonance because the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ tagline – the idea that this is a business committed to non-traditional energy sources - looks even less credible in the wake of the current environmental disaster. Greenpeace will now be hoping that the BP lawyers adopt the approach taken by their counterparts at Nestle, who thought it would be a good idea to block similarly customised versions of the Kit-Kat logo, on the grounds of trademark infringement.

All this succeeded in doing was to transform a relatively minor web phenomenon into a global media controversy. It will be interesting to see whether the lawyers at BP take the bait.

A digital politician for a digital age

Martin — Thu, 13 May 2010 13:18:57 +0000

Gordon Brown was famously described by David Cameron as “an analogue politician for a digital age”, so it it interesting to see how wannabe Labour leader David Miliband has been quick to put social media at the heart of his leadership campaign. Gordon Macmillan in Brand Republic provides a great summary of his plans.

Next stop for Miliband should probably be Google’s Zeitgeist conference, which famously hosted David Cameron in 2007 when he was seeking to underline his digital credentials. Hopefully is he does attend, Milliband will avoid Cameron’s star-struck description of Google as “responsible for a large portion of the wonders of our modern world.”

For the record, I’m just about to put a bet on Andy Burnham as the next leader. A very clever politician and closer to the Labour Party heartland than the either of the Milibands.

Hairy Crowdsourcing

Martin — Mon, 10 May 2010 11:25:37 +0000

You rarely have the opportunity to put tranvestites, alpaca farmers and hairdressers in the same sentence, but all of these groups are now working together to protect the US Gulf Coast. In a brilliant example of crowdsourcing – co-ordinated by the Matter of Trust charity – hair is being collected from hair salons in France, Spain, Brazil, Australia, Canada and the US, combined with animal fur from sheep and alpaca farmers and then stuffed into used nylon tights (some of which have been supplied by tranvestite group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence). The resulting ‘hairy sausages’ (for that is what they look like) are then used as booms to help soak-up oil produced by the sunken BP platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Here’s how AFP reported what has become my favourite empowerment story.

The Empowerment Election

Martin — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:59:06 +0000

It is almost as if the UK population got together and worked out what would be the best way to annoy its political masters. “I know, let’s create a situation in which none of the political parties can put together a working majority … allow our vote to swing wildly from constituency to constituency & then throw in a Green candidate just to prove how fickle we are.” The fact that all of the political leaders and their advisors are scratching their heads trying to work out what to do next, shows how well the plans have worked. We have confused the buggers – not difficult after a night without sleep – and confounded the pundits.

This was the election for the subversive and contrarian spirit that lies at the heart of the British psyche – the same spirit that swept Boris to power in London and put Rage Against the Machine at the top of the charts. The people are ungovernable … & isn’t it great.

Naked Expression

Martin — Tue, 04 May 2010 08:20:58 +0000

What motivates 1,000 people to take off their clothes, on a typically freezing Bank Holiday weekend, to appear in Spencer Tunick’s latest naked art installation? Exhibitionism, a spirit of collective action or simply the desire to participate in something that you could tell your friends about for years to come?

This time, Tunick was aiming to reinterpret the works of L.S.Lowry for an installation named ‘Everyday People’ – although judging by the photos, there weren’t too many matchstick people available. His work – or more significantly, the willingness of everyday people to appear in his work - is a perfect expression of our times, combining people’s desire for self expression with the spirit of collective action.

The Society of Contestation

Martin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:47:42 +0000

The title comes from a typically profound piece of intellectual musing by those very clever chaps at the Future Foundation. Their argument is very compelling – the collapse of trust in all forms of institutional power and our willingness to challenge traditional sources of expertise and leadership, has created a situation in which the people are almost ungovernable.

Here are a selection of the best quotes from The Future Foundation paper:

“Authority has to battle for legitimacy every day; it can have no expectation of canned applause.”

“The truth as affirmed and broadcast by any institution is intrinsically, programmatically contestable. For every fact there is an anti-fact.” … & on a similar vein “Democracy is terrible hard work” … a sentiment that I am sure Barak Obama would all too readily endorse.

“It is noticable, in fact, just how hard it is these days for Governments to convert their programmes into policies.”