Yes, I still have a blog, it seems, and I’m still using it to pimp work events.

Next Tuesday, we’re doing What Happens to Radio? And you should book right now, honestly.

Some of you too-cool-for-school nu-media folk might be thinking ‘who gives a shit about radio?’

So this is why I chose radio for our next event.

• It’s already proven itself as the most adaptable media. It’s incredibly portable; it can do indoors, outdoors, cars, mobiles, whatever.
• It’s also adapted to the Internet era from the start. Almost every radio station has had an internet presence and streaming of some sort from the start (viz. 1995’ish). So we know that they’re great innovators and have been for a long, long time.
• At the same time, it’s been very static in terms of presentation and programming. Some disconnect there, surely?
• There’s a struggle there. People under-rate radio, again thinking that it’s somehow out-of-date and surpassed by internet services. Check your facts, people. The most meagre local station has hundreds of thousands of listeners. Test that against any internet radio-style service.
• There’s tons of innovation: not just DAB but whole new ways of experiencing and interacting with the medium. That’s what we’re going to be talking about!
• There’s a massive conundrum factoring the ephemeral and ambient nature of radio with the new demand for interactivity, audience feedback loops and more revenue.
• It’s square. Some people think that none of this stuff is happening and I wanted to show how wrong they were.

I promise that my next post will not be quite so promotional.

I am obviously speaking in an out of work capacity here. And rather later than is fashionable in the blogging world — Calacanis’ announcement that he’s giving up blogging was nearly two weeks ago.

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.

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? © 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.

© 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. ;-)]

I was at a press briefing for the launch of a new report called Learning 2.0 from the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) this morning (it’s not online till 21/2). They asked me what I thought of the title. I’m not sure they appreciated me saying that calling everything 2.0 makes me roll my eyes nowadays. They reckoned that for mainstream marketing people, the idea would still seem pretty fresh.

Anyway, the report was about training and learning in the marketing industry. The gist of it, which I thought was pretty sound, was as follows:

• People nowadays don’t have jobs or even careers for life. We have these portfolio careers and we’re all entrepreneurial about those careers. The average in-house marketer stays in a job for four years; it’s even lower in agency land.
• Our employers don’t have our individual agenda at heart when they design training or development programmes. They have the company’s interests in mind.
• There’s a conflict of interest here, of course — you might want to do a public speaking course, for example, because you envisage yourself as an effective public speaker. But if your boss doesn’t think that’s part of your job, the chances are, you won’t be doing one.
• Employers also tend to confuse training and learning. Training gets done to you. Learning is something an individual does themselves. Companies tend to think of training as their responsibility, rather than learning. They also think (62% of them — HROs — do) that “done to” training is the most effective way to deliver education for the job, according to survey results.
• Educationalists have identified at least 37 different types of ways in which we learn stuff, from reading a book to playing simulations. Each individual will have their own preferred and most effective learning styles. In-house training tends to focus on one — sit in a room with a bunch of other people and get talked at.

Therefore, there’s a big need for change when it comes to professional development. Individuals need to do more to take the initiative, since they’re ultimately in it for themselves. Their own preferred learning styles might mean that the current provision their company offers is utterly useless. They’d learn more from reading books, or blogging, or going to excellent networking events. Probably a combination of different learning activities. They should push for those things to be recognised as CPD investment, and potentially paid for by their employer.

On the other hand, employers need to open up their definitions of training and learning. Why does only sitting in a room and being talked at tick the box? This doesn’t necessarily imply extra investment or resources on their part. Just an openness to recognising that learning is taking place in other ways. Companies need to fund and provide time for the learning an individual wants to undertake — not just the kind that’s always been provided.

To my mind, this situation has arisen as a consequence of the dreadfulness of appraisal culture:

“Now, Ian, it’s your annual review. You have done OK, but could do better. How can we help you?”

“Well, boss, I agree I could do better. [and really want a pay rise which isn’t at all linked to this appraisal. wink-wink.] But you see, I don’t really know much about phone sales.”

“Ah — we’re doing a course in May about phone sales. I’ll send you on that.”

Box ticked. Job done. Next subject. My arse.

(Bonus link to a fab blog post on this very subject from the Chief Happiness Officer — from which I stole the wink-wink gag.)

Afterthought: the worst CPD I have ever received was when I worked as a teacher. In many respects, it’s the loneliest profession — you spend your entire day with clients. Yet, the professional training is zilch — “we’ve bought this new CMS and we’re having a training day on how to use it.” “Yeah, but, how can I be a better teacher?” “Sorry, what?” — How appalling is that?

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.

© 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.

Anyway, it’s about when companies embrace all this nakedness and transparency and conversations idea. If they do, where does the PR company’s role lie? What’s the logical outcome of this ‘cluetrain’ railroad? It’s aimed at PRs, mainly, but everyone is welcome to come, as always.

I’ve heard some fascinating answers to that question, ranging from ‘get them to shut up quick’ to ‘embrace and dance’. If PR is reputation management, then are these power-ups, loose cannons, guardian angels, friendly fire or bulls in a china shop? Can you think of better metaphors than me? Have your Say!

Are you personally affected by this issue ? Then e-mail us. Or if you’re not affected, can you imagine what it would be like if you were ? Or if you were affected by it but don’t want to talk about it can you imagine what it would be like not being affected by it ? Why not email us ? You may not know anything about the issue, but i bet you reckon something. So why not tell us what you reckon. Let us enjoy the full majesty of your uninformed ad hoc reckoning, by going to bbc.co.uk…clicking on “what i reckon” and beating on the keyboard with your fists and your head”.

(Thank you, Jem Stone)

If you’re in London and can come along, it would be great to meet with you, share a few beers and talk about this stuff. With less beating.