I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting.

The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly in multiplayer videogames. People discover little cheats in videogames that can advance their score but annoy everyone else. Whether to use them anyway is an example of the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. According to Game Theory, the dominant strategy is to use these cheats.

[Explication: your opponent has the option to use the cheat as well. If they do, and you don’t, you lose. If you do, and they don’t, you win. If you both do, then it’s equal. The worst that can happen from using the cheat is that the stakes are even. On the other hand, if you don’t use the cheat, then the worst that can happen is you losing. That’s worse than the stakes being even: so use the cheat.]

However, the consequences of everyone using the cheats is mayhem and no fun for anyone, so it’s actually also an undesirable outcome, but less undesirable than losing. Everyone cheating rather than playing the game properly. But so long as the strategy exists and can be executed in a way that’s undetected, the rational decision is to continue the abuse. The way to counteract this for developers and publishers is to close down the cheat strategies or publically identify the abusers so that future potential opponents will either (a) avoid them or (b) use the same strategies as the abusers. Identification and iteration of the same game conditions turns the short-term gain into a long-term loss*. Creating a state of uncertainty over whether abusers will/can be identified can also work.

[*Actually, the maths says that continuing to cheat still remains dominant, even when the cards are on the table, but humans are rarely mathematical creatures. People are complicated and irrational: winning isn’t always the overall goal for them. Some people don’t play the dominant strategy anyway, because of a sense of honour or fair-play. On the other hand, some people always will, despite the consequences, because they don’t care. (They’re ‘griefers’ in videogame jargon).]

The second post was by Bobbie Johnson on the Guardian website about the Firefox and Chrome extension Ad-Block. If you use Ad-Block, then it stops the advertising banners and MPUs on websites from loading. That makes for a faster and smoother browsing experience for you as an individual. However, the websites that you are looking at lose revenue, since they probably sell their advertising on a CPM basis – cost per thousand views – it doesn’t matter whether you click on the ads or not. Not all ads are intended to be clicked on anyway, such as branding campaigns.

If everyone Ad-Blocks, then the site you love goes out of business. If no-one does, then it thrives. The ‘cheat’ is the idea that Ad-Block is still pretty-much a secret, or that most other people are more honourable than you. That you can block advertisements, but because hardly anyone else is using it, then the sites will still be OK.

So here’s the obligatory 2x2 matrix:

The best outcome is that your favourite sites prosper and continue, and you don’t have to see the adverts. The worst — the ‘everyone cheats but me’ scenario -  is that they go bust despite you not filtering ads yourself. The dominant strategy is to Ad-Block and hope very few other people do that as well. It will continue to be dominant until enough of us perceive free web media as a long-term game, are identified as free-riders or learn the consequences to our short-term victory.

We want sites to prosper, yes? So what do they/we need to do? They need to make viewing and interacting with their content a long-term game. Part of that is achieved by Bobbie’s column – if Ad-Block is worthy of a column in the Guardian, then it’s certainly not some sort of hacker secret anymore. It is the most-downloaded Firefox Add-on and the leading Chrome Extension. Any certainty that ‘everyone else’ will play a dominated strategy ought to disappear. Thus, the ‘best’ outcome, where you get a free ride on sites that prosper has gone. Take that out of the picture and the game looks rather different: playing fairly together is the new best option. They should probably publish figures on the footer of every page of the revenue lost to filters; maybe scale that into an ‘articles we were unable to commission this month’ widget, if the loss is large enough. Arguably, it should be possible to identify the users of Ad-Block (if it isn’t already) and serve them altered content.

We need to switch off the extension, with the recognition that this is a long game, even if our identities remain masked: it’s the future of free media on the Web. Our best outcome is a free-ride, on sites that are free-to-access anyway. The worst outcome is our favourite sites going bust.

With long-termism brought to the front of our minds, the best outcome is removing a little inconvenience; the worst would be a disaster.

picture credit: HDR cafe

[As you might be tempted to point out: I used to use Ad-Block but I have stopped].

This is a slim volume – 162 pages which includes a lot of pictures, in the form of greyscale screengrabs. It currently costs just £7.99 on Amazon UK, though it’s £15.99 if you buy it in a shop. The book is aimed at both senior executives thinking about what a company’s strategy ought to be for a blog and those tasked with managing the execution. It would also be useful for sole-owners and small businesses looking to expand their online offering, though the text assumes that you’re part of a larger organisation.

It’s well-written and contains lots of examples. Unusually for a book about the Internet, it’s also pretty-much up-to-date, appearing to have been finished late last Autumn. The case-studies, while uniformly North American, are mainly fresh and the authors aren’t afraid of criticising companies and organisations whose blogging strategies seem to have gone awry. The information and advice it gives is sound and practical and is careful to remain focused on meeting business objectives like more sales, better customer relations and reduced support costs.

So an overall recommendation from me, if you are interested in the idea of having a blog for your business but are not entirely sure why or how to start. But I do have a caveat…

The book is trying to do two things at once: provide a strategic direction and management information for corporate blogging and give a practical guide to choosing platforms, deciding policies and creating content. It’s already really thin, so this means that it doesn’t provide much detail on any particular aspect. For example, it talks about some of the pros and cons between different platforms such as Moveable Type and WordPress, and hosted solutions such as WordPress.com, blogger and typepad. But since it can only spend 50 words on any particular platform, and there’s a redundant half-page picture of each of these, you’re left with ‘there are lots of different platforms, each of which have some advantages’ as the overall message. There’s also some misinformation in this section, such as: “[because it owns the platform] Google place[s] Blogger blogs higher in Google search results.” See, for example, Andy Beard countering this. The sections on business strategy are similarly starved of detail or any theoretical underpinning for some of the assertions made.

In fairness, most business books are a bit like this: thin. They aim to give executives enough information to make some reasonable decisions, but not so much that they get bogged down in the minutiae or put off by the bulk. IMHO, though, readers would have been better served by choosing between two books: one for executives about strategy and one for the person managing the blog.

To give you an overview, this is my two-minute version of the book:

Ch1: blogs are a rising media force and they can bring customers and potential customers to your website. Also good for search.

Ch2: get people to read your blog through integrated marketing, tools like RSS, other social media platforms and by providing useful information and good service.

Ch3: there are lots of different types of blog – so choose one that best serves your business. It might end up being a tumble-log or podcast, for example.

Ch4: be useful to your readers and responsive to comments. Take comments on board and deal with criticism fairly and calmly.

Ch5: use your business’ expertise to find topics to write about. And why you might want an internal blog for staff as well.

Ch6: get people who are enthusiastic about the subject matter to do the content. This will probably involve the Marketing department, but also others like R&D and freelancers. Make it sound authentic.

Ch7: get eyeballs [sic] for your blog with good writing and content, a readable design, SEO and conventional marketing techniques.

Ch8: getting multimedia content onto your blog isn’t that hard. You can use other people’s – if you get permission or it’s CC licensed – or you can create your own. [This chapter is one that particularly suffers from the word limits: making a podcast – get audacity – open source music here – put it up on iTunes.]

Ch9: get ready for the future by using semantic features and maybe mash-ups. Oh, and mobile. Oops — we’ve run out of words.

The second book is Tris Hussey’s Create Your Own Blog. It’s a bit thicker, so expect that review in a week or so.

As you may know, I launched the newsstand magazine What Laptop & Handheld PC (as it was originally called) back in the day — 1999, to be exact. And I have grave misgivings about the whole affair.

One of the most popular marketing messages that advertisers were pushing then about mobile technology, and they still are now, was ‘maximising your downtime’. This meant — in their examples — your senior exec is travelling somewhere to meet a prospective client. If they were equipped with a laptop or a PDA, they could still be doing other stuff. Because, of course, employees are machines that can churn out 40 hours of work a week. If they are not at their desk, hard at it, then they can do it somewhere else with a laptop.

Total bullshit from the start, then. If you have ever been in these situations, you’ll know that meetings require a lot of preparation. Undoubtedly, more preparation than you have allowed, unless you’ve done the same thing a million times. Your train ride is spent bricking it and preparing, one way or another.

In 2001, or thereabouts, mobile communications got thrown into this. “Out of Touch -  I don’t think so! with Communicotron 2001″. This was about the point that Blackberries started to appear on commuter trains. Nokia had their 9000 series and Palm and Microsoft were waking up to the idea of smartphones.

More bullshit. A Blackberry is poison. I have had two on extended (6-month) press arrangements. They have made me more responsive to emails, sure. But also more worried, less creative and less productive. What’s your priority?

In 2003, the first Centrino processors meant laptops could run on battery power for — meh — in my experience 3–4 hours, but in the marketing parlance ‘all-day’. They’ve got a little better since then, and 6 hours isn’t quite such a stretch to the imagination.

Cool — I can actually ignore the conference and do emails instead. Thanks for the £700 or thereabouts spent on my presence, but I learned nothing, because I wasn’t paying attention or thinking about the topic under discussion.

In 2006, the first ‘all you can eat’ data packages started to appear, meaning that, yes, if you had coverage, you could do normal things on the Internet while you were out and about, and not worry too much about the charges.

I don’t want to even start on why this is not going to make you do more work. It isn’t, OK? There is no way on earth that people are going to do more work. Stop it.

In 2008, none of that extra productivity and connectivity seems to matter a stuff. What were all these executives up to with their high-powered communications gadgets? Certainly not bringing home the bacon or making sensible decisions. If the credit crisis does anything, I hope it explodes this myth.

Mobile technology is great — it lets you put in your four hours a day of real work — proper, excited, creative, wonderful stuff, from anywhere. But don’t expect extra anything.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am an enormous fan of downtime: skiving-off, fucking-about, pissed-up afternoons and all the rest of it. Extra productivity is an evil myth designed to make us buy more stuff because we’re continually so guilty about having achieved a normal amount of work. Having been given (or — the real kicker, bought ourselves) these toys to improve productivity, it gets even worse.

But get real. There is no extra productivity. People (even me) like work — we like having a purpose and getting down to the real nitty gritty. But I reckon there’s about 20–40 hours a week* of that in all of us, depending on how creative, clever and original you are supposed to be. You are naturally programmed to create a certain amount of real work. After that, you do busy work, “research”, find work for other people, do pointless admin shit and piss about.

AND, this is why downtime is so important: stay in the pub, wander off to the other department, go to networking events in work time: that’s when you make new relationships, connect different things together, come up with the new approach.

Fucking hell. Downtime is gold.

No links or proof in this post. Sorry. But true. Here’s to the value of downtime — see you in the pub.

(* Many clever, creative people put in 80+ hours a week according to the time clocks. But creative, clever, real hours…?)

A lot of people might see this as a victory for blogs and bloggers. I’d agree, sure. But, on reflection, I think it’s more of a victory for Carphone Warehouse.

It’s easy for anyone to set up a blog, and give themselves a platform on which to rant and rave about whoever is annoying them this week. OK, it takes a bit longer to establish any readership and authority, and being a decent-ish writer helps, as well. However, any old fool, given some determination, has the chance to do that, on a purely hobbyist basis. As I think I have sufficiently proven.

What’s harder than setting up a blog, is for big organisations with established systems, hierarchies and hide-bound tradition to change. To move from a position where “it’s not this department”, “you need to speak to X about that” and “sorry, there’s no one available right now.” To get to the position where an individual within that organisation can say, “I can see what you’re saying. I’ll sort it out now.” Not only that, but they’re polling for your opinions and ready to intervene where they can be helpful. That would be an enormous culture shock for most large organisations.

My negative experience using the traditional lines of communication, which I persisted with due to a misguided sense of moral decency, versus the guerilla efforts that eventually achieved results, speaks volumes. When the latter worked, it saved portions of C/W’s reputation in some ways, not to mention my relationship with the company. But again, it was the company’s response, not my rudeness (as my nana might have perceived it — and she still oversees my conscience), that got the result.

Technology and social media, in particular, are allowing these transitions to happen within even the largest organisations. But it’s happening on uneven levels and with unequal levels of satisfaction when it comes to people’s experience. The future is spead unevenly, like William Gibson said. The overall movement is positive, though.

Sometimes that’s because it’s on an outlaw level, outside the traditional hierarchies, and the bosses don’t even know about it. Often, it’s on a project basis or through an external agency. Sometimes, it’s individual champions injecting change into organisations, because they actually care about the company or organisation they work for. Less commonly, it’s established by enlightened managers. When the instigators (I still have the C/W hold music in my head) — whatever their methods — achieve real results for the company and create more trust, faith and humanity, the message will spread, inside and outside the company. When they get it right, the impact on the bottom line can be enormous.

Many of us end up hating the large organisations we’re forced to deal with; creating mechanisms to rehabilitate those relationships is crucial. Personal publishing platforms and individuals empowered to engage with them are the way to take this forward.

That organisations as large as C/W are allowing that to happen is extremely heartening. Facilitating that, of course, requires organisations to allow for extreme trust, 20% time or flexible working hours, mobile technology, and a realisation that your reputation belongs with your customers, not the marketing department.

The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.

The paper discusses what Web 2.0 is, how businesses might adopt some of the approaches it brings, how their PR will change as a result and ends with a ‘manifesto’…

To practise Communications 2.0 is to:

1. Cede a portion of editorial control to your users – give them proper channels where they can get involved
2. Treat your web site as a database of content, not a static publication – use open standards-based technology
3. Incorporate user-generated content into your web site to help cross and up-sell your services – offer comment sections, forums and content-tagging
4. Place a web component within every single communications exercise – all your audiences are on the web so this is mandatory (to ignore the web would be like having an early 20th century ad campaign without newspapers!)
5. Look before you leap – Listening and monitoring through tools such as blogs should become a no-brainer. It’s an excellent way to dip your toe into the water, understand what’s going on and even get input from your community on the best way to pursue further engagement
6. Assess your organizational readiness and prepare your engagement carefully — you need to consider HR, legal and IT issues before you embark on a new ‘communications 2.0’ strategy
7. Develop a new PR policy – decide what you should do, why you’re doing it and then, in the words a famous sports shoe manufacturer, JUST DO IT!
8. Consider the use open source software in order to deploy new communications channels cost-effectively – don’t reinvent the wheel: the solution is out there somewhere
9. Introduce new web-based tactics quickly and often – you have nothing to lose — everyone remembers the successes and forgets the (inexpensive) failures
10. Measure everything that you do, all of the time – it’s easy with the web. Make sure you get your hands on decent web site stats and talk to your PR/web agency about how you can track campaigns more effectively
11. Invest in the tactics that are working and pull the one’s that aren’t
12. Approach the discipline of communications as a process, a dialogue – don’t be afraid of the market talking back….embrace user comment and content and put mechanisms in place that encourage it – it’s far cheaper than a focus group

I know the paper wasn’t really intended for public consumption but I find this a little disturbing. They’re talking about the Web 2.0 era or attitude purely as a way to flog more stuff (check number 3). User content as a cheap focus group (12). Also, don’t 6, 7 and 9 contradict each other? Either you act quickly because failures don’t matter (9) and JUST DO IT (7) or you plan carefully (6). For me, one of the key advantages of this brave new world for companies is that it gives them the chance to be better and make better stuff. The paper doesn’t say anything about that. But maybe that’s just me in my little dream world.

I’m sure that my PR colleagues Simon, Simon, Antony, Drew and Stuart — who actually have some expertise in these matters — will have more to say on this subject.

• See what’s out there. New services can help companies analyse their online reputations. Blog-focused search engines such as Blogpulse or Technorati allow companies to search by keywords.
• Respond pro-actively. Companies need to take part in discussions about their brands; these discussions will take place regardless, often in the most unpredictable ways. The discovery of the geyser-like effects of putting Mentos mints into Diet Coke or Pepsi led to thousands of videos on YouTube demonstrating the phenomenon.
• Manage online conversations. Companies that enter the blogosphere need to be prepared to post even the most critical comments about their brands, products or behaviour. They also need to respond quickly and with the right voice. Communications that come across like corporate press releases will attract criticism.
• Match rhetoric with action. No amount of online communication will save a company’s reputation if it is not reflected in its behaviour. And any gap between corporate pronouncements and corporate action will be quickly spotted and will be generally derided.

The last point is particularly important, controversial and interesting. As Katy Howell of Immediate Future told me a few months ago, this is an age where a company’s wrongdoings might be blasted across the internet in a matter of moments. There really is no damage limitation that can be applied except being good.

Thanks to Drew for the tip-off and more.

But what is SLATES?* According to Dion Hinchcliffe, it’s this:

SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users create emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon’s recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes.

So it’s the kind of things that we’re used to from blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and flickr, applied to workers in a corporate environment. These also fall under the umbrella term Network IT, IT that’s devoted to facilitating collaboration, allowing expressions of judgement and what Andrew McAfee calls fostering emergence — that is, allowing new information and work patterns to spontaneously appear by making the tools available.

Ross Mayfield, whose wiki software SocialText plays a starring role in the just-released SuiteTwo package of enterprise 2.0 tools, is sanguine about the impact of this on organisations:

Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging. With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing — something will emerge.

Sticks-in-the-mud may regard this emergence stuff as ‘chatter’ and wonder when this user is going to be doing old-fashioned stuff like getting on with her job. It’s a genuine concern and the need for small pilot programmes and metrics for its ROI will be as necessary to any Enterprise 2.0 project as it is to any other change in the way businesses work.

*In my view, ‘extensions’ is a bit redundant, but I guess SLATS wouldn’t sound nearly as good. ‘Links’ is a bit lame too, but there’s already something called SATS.

So how do you do it and why would you do such a thing?

What are the main things companies should consider before getting involved?

If you are not authentic and do not offer anything to the community, you are likely to be ignored, at best. But those firms who commit to a long-term presence in Second Life have an opportunity to interact with their community in new and innovative ways.

We recommend that people join, learn and really feel things out before jumping in.

Is advergaming all about brand? How can advertisers measure response?

It is all about the brand at this point. Second Life provides a way for brands to reach out and connect with their audience in new and different ways.

Regardless of how you choose to measure this interaction, it would ultimately be qualitative over quantitative.

Is there a danger that users could be put off if Second Life becomes too commercial?

We equate more residents and companies coming in-world with a richer experience for everyone. Of course, this will require balancing the concerns of early adopters and other niche demographics, with that of the population as a whole.

Ultimately, the more people that choose to come in-world, the more opportunities it will create for all residents. We think residents recognise this and will accommodate an increasing variety of presences in-world. At present there is such a wealth of activity that participation in any commercial aspect is completely voluntary.

Personally, I’m not entirely sold on Second Life, though I am fascinated by the discussion. If I want to play computer games, then I’ll play a computer game. With 1.2mn members, a massive 35% of whom signed up in the last month, it’s nowhere near the size of World of Warcraft (8mn) or even Guild Wars (2mn). However, the lack of elves, dwarven warhammers and the like means that it’s more socially acceptable for grown-up marketing professionals to express an interest. I’d argue that this makes the level of coverage a little artificial compared to its real-life impact.

As with most social media engagement, as Catherine says, the metrics of ROI are pretty messy. It “provides a way for brands to reach out and connect with their audience in new and different ways” that can only be measured qualitatively. The trouble is that most businesses can’t do everything. How will they be able to measure the advantages of a SL presence against other forms of activity? Also, having a building or an island in SL kind of requires one or more people to be there. Empty shops don’t, to me, suggest a company that’s “engaged”. So that’s three FTEs if you want a full-time presence… for results that you won’t be able to quantify for ages. Good luck getting that past the grumpy FD.

* I know the headline has nothing to do with the story. Sorry. But I wanted to use it anyway.

We were talking about the ways in which elements found on consumer sites, such as flickr, are penetrating the business environment and changing organisations’ expectations of how the software should behave and the activities it should facilitate.

One interesting example is ‘folksonomy’. Our software has had the ability to add keywords and other meta-tags for years. But in a lot of cases these remained unused. Now we’re seeing considerably more interest. It’s my belief that people have gone out and used sites like flickr and experienced first hand the usefulness of tagging and the versatility it can bring to information management. They then bring that back into the workplace and have an expectation that they will tag items and that others will too.

But the change goes way deeper than that:

There seems to have been an increase in corporate agility. If you take a step back in time, companies used to talk about Knowledge Management, and they’d hire a Knowledge Manager. They did it in a top-down way. Now, there’s far more awareness that the creation of knowledge requires collaboration. Our focus in creating applications has become much more about enabling people to work together in shared spaces.

So people are asking for wikis and blogs? I suggest.

It’s ironic. Wikis and blogs tend to be viewed with suspicion by senior managers. They sound far too trendy and up-to-date. A lot of the corporates we deal with are still deciding whether to upgrade from Windows 98 to XP, so anything invented in the current decade is going to raise eyebrows.

At the same time, though, there is this trend to having more and more people within a business contributing to web applications. We may not call them wikis, but that’s what they are, effectively. There’s a lot more acceptance that people from across an organisation can contribute useful knowledge on a subject, even if that’s not their official area of expertise.

I’ve expressed some suspicion of the term Enterprise 2.0 before, and in some respects, what Stewart said endorsed that scepticism. Corporates are not likely to be hotbeds of revolutionary change. On the other hand, there’s a lot more going on in terms of attitudinal changes and approaches than even the managers of those organisations are aware of. It seems that so long as we don’t mention the dreaded ‘2.0′, things will move along just fine.