Three videos – choose one (or all three, if it’s a little quiet today).
Time for words to give way to pictures this week. Moving pictures.
First up is Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of advertising agency Ogilvy UK. If you read The Spectator, you’ll know he writes The Wiki Man, a fortnightly column on technology.
His July 2009 talk to TED in Oxford, Life Lessons Learned from an Ad Man, is fast, furious, and very, very funny. But it also has a serious side, that ties in with my last post.
With effortless ease, he moves from champagne on Eurostar to prostitutes in Turkey, from potatoes in Russia to driving in Italy, and makes his point with wit and intelligence.
And his conclusion? It’s easier to tinker with perception than to change reality.
See what you think.
(Click here if you’re reading this in email, and can’t see the embedded video.)
A tangled web
I started watching Jonathan Zittrain‘s presentation, The Web as random acts of kindness, in a dubious frame of mind.
Why? Well maybe it’s all the horror stories I’ve been reading recently about online stalking, sacking and scamming.
But Sittrain highlights the positive side of the web, and shows how it’s built on trust, altruism and selflessness.
Well, most of the time.
I particularly liked his image of beer bottles being passed from person to person as an analogy of how packet data works. And next time I’m in a Chinese restaurant, I’m definitely going to look out for stir-fried Wikipedia.
(Click here to watch Sittrain in action if you’re reading this in email and can’t see the embedded video.)
Ride the wave
Heard of the iPad? Of course you have.
What about Blendtec?
Thought not. But maybe that’s about to change.
You see, the folks at Blendtec have hit on the novel idea of surfing the wave of other, better-known companies’ brand equity.
By blending, of course. Not blending in, just blending.
Their Will it Blend? videos on Youtube are a hoot. They’ve blended glow sticks, lighters and marbles. And a Ford Fiesta.
But by far their most popular video is blending an iPad, which has gone viral. To date, it’s had over 6 million hits.
I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve spoken to recently who don’t have a marketing plan.
It’s all up here, they tell me on the phone, and I picture them tapping their head.
I know what I want to do, they say. Why would I take the time to write it down?
Because writing it down makes it real. It forces you to focus. Writing it down exposes the flaws, shows the holes, and makes you look reality in the face.
But here’s the great thing: it also reveals opportunities you never thought existed, and things you hadn’t even thought of. It takes you in unexpected directions and gets you thinking about alternative strategies.
But where do you start? How do you get over BPS (blank-page syndrome, that is)?
With a template, of course. It’ll give the process structure, order and a purpose.
Microsoft has some great ready-made templates for Word (here) and PowerPoint (here). The PPT is in Office 2007 format, so if you have an earlier version, you’ll need the Microsoft Office compatibility pack (here).
Personally, I’d choose PowerPoint. It forces you to keep it brief, concise and bullet-pointed.
Which is what the best marketing plans are.
Words (don’t come easy)
All bulleted out? Plump up the cushions, grab a glass of port and a mince pie, and take 15 minutes out to watch lexicographer Erin McKean on TED.com.
Erin McKean redefines the dictionary is a witty look at words from somebody who spends her every day swimming in a sea of them.
One of the biggest drawbacks of using online dictionaries is, she says, that it eliminates serendipity.
“Serendipity is when you find things you weren’t looking for because finding what you were looking for is so damn difficult,” she says.
If, like me, you love words and can spend hours on end discovering new ones, this talk is for you. And even if you don’t, this talk is for you.
If nothing else, you’ll find out the meaning of double dactyls, as well as polysemy and synecdochically.
Enjoy.
(If you’re reading in email and can’t see the embedded video, click here instead.)
Free lunch? Walk this way…
If all that talk of words leaves you hungry for more, here’s a great way to access some of the leading reference works for free.
Yes, I said free. Not free* or free++ or even free^. Just free.
There is one catch, though.
You have to be in the UK and have a library card. If you are, and you have, you’re in luck, as your library website will provide a gateway.
Researching a company? Try Marketline. Need to find out more about the Big Cheese? Try Who’s Who. Plus the OED, Oxford Reference Online, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopaedia Britannica – and a whole lot more.
Even if you don’t read (you dont?) it’s worth joining your local library just for the freebies.
With all that reference material, there’s more than enough room for a little serendipity. Not to mention synedoche and polysemy.
Merry Christmas (and don’t leave crumbs on the cushion).
More doesn’t mean better. In fact, it can mean worse.
A few months ago, I was chatting with a headhunter – no, not the South American type, but one who hunts in the concrete jungle.
He places top people into top jobs in the City of London, the beating financial heart of the capital. Think huge salaries, big bonuses and corner offices with walls of glass.
“So,” I said, “what makes them move? Is it the chance of even bigger salaries and bonuses?”
He didn’t even pause to think.
“It’s never about money. Never. Ever.”
Surprised? I was too. Surely you can never have enough zeroes on the end of your bank balance or big fat carrots on sticks at the end of the month?
Apparently you can.
For after a certain point, money fails to motivate. And that point is not as far down the line as you might think. For even high-flyers in the City are motivated by lesser things.
Like real challenges, new horizons and things that keep them fresh, alert and engaged.
What makes people tick is at the heart of Dan Pink’s talk, which I’ve just finished watching. The surprising science of motivation was delivered to TED Global in Oxford during the summer.
Here’s what I took away from it:
Larger rewards almost always lead to worse results.
Incentives dull thinking and block creativity.
The key to the 21st century can be summed up in three words: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Google ‘gets’ it (that’s why we have Gmail, Orkut and Google News).
But I don’t want to spoil the talk by giving too much away.
Grab a skinny latte, put your feet up and treat yourself to 18 minutes and 36 seconds of entertainment, insights and sticking candles to walls (no, really – trust me).
Imagine you’ve published a string of highly successful books, that have been acclaimed as both profound and accessible. You’ve presented tie-in TV series that did very well in the ratings.
You’ve got a big house in a fashionable part of London. And as if that weren’t enough, before you even started to climb the ladder of success, you had a trust fund of £200m (that’s more than $300m), thanks to your banker father.
You’re happy, right?
Not if you’re philosopher Alain de Botton.
In his presentation to TED Global 2009 in Oxford in June, he confessed that the gap between his hopes for his life and the reality are so divergent, he ends up weeping into his pillow – usually on a Sunday evening, as the sun goes down.
Sound familiar?
De Botton’s talk, A Kindler, Gentler Philosophy of Success, is humourous, entertaining and highly practical. In a world that spins ever faster, with success seemingly forever beyond our grasp, he injects a welcome note of reality into our frenzied lives.
It’s 16 minutes long, and you’ll feel better after watching it. I guarantee it (or your money back).
Yes, I know I’ve advised against using foreign words, but this is different (no, really). Papillon is French for butterfly, and papillonner is what they do: they butterfly. They flit randomly from one thing to another.
It’s so much more fun than concentrating on a single subject, but like chocolate, it’s best in small chunks and only as a treat.
So what have I come up with? Well three ideas struck a chord – mainly because they sound toe-curlingly familiar.
1. Don’t forget to think one step ahead
Have you tried Google Alerts? It’s a great little service that scours news, blogs and websites to find keywords you specify. Want to know what Kylie is up to? Or Bill Gates? Or even yourself? (That’s called narcissurfing, by the way.)
It’s great – when it works. Some time back, I set up several alerts. Days later, I’d received nothing.
And then, by chance, I checked my Gmail account online.
If you’ve got a Gmail account, you’ll know that Google has cleverly decided to intercept spam at the server level. So even if you’re downloading your mail using their POP3 service, you still have to log on every so often to see what the spam filter has trapped (and to see a few ads, naturally).
And then the mystery was solved. For there, sitting forlornly in my spam filter, were my alerts.
So let’s get this straight: Google’s Gmail spam filter had trapped Google Alerts emails.
What a triumph of technology.
2. Don’t get too clever
It’s happened twice to me recently. I’m filling in a form, and the last step is one of those randomly generated collections of letters and numbers. All you have to do is type it into the box, to prove you’re a real human being.
And that’s when the trouble starts.
Is that 8 or S? Or maybe a 3? It’s distorted, squashed up next to something that could be a question mark, or might be 2. Your guess is as good as anybody’s. So you have a go.
Wrong. You try again. Wrong.
And then you give up. So something that was designed to avoid automated completion ends up repelling all boarders.
If you find this frustrating, you’re not alone. Somebody’s even set up a site called I Hate Word Verifications (don’t worry, you don’t have to type anything to access it).
3. Don’t let your fingers take over from your brain
Or, put another way, watch out for your blind spots (note to self: that line might need reworking).
Many years ago, I did a roadshow to launch some Microsoft products. My presentation was pretty straightforward, all scripted, timed and double-checked by the demo boffins on the mother ship in Redmond.
It was what we called a seminar in a box – just add one presenter, and stir vigorously.
At one point, in Microsoft Word, I had to type a line that included the word t-shirts. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had to type and talk in front of 1,000 people, but it does funny things to your brain. And with my fingers disconnected and thinking for themselves, t-shirts came out more often than not without the r.
Not my finest hour.
In the end, I had to substitute the word sweater, safe in the knowledge that I could mangle it without audible gasps from a startled audience.
We all have blind spots. It’s one of the reasons I proof-read three, four, even five times before I send out any copy. And I’ve invented all sorts of ways of shaking it up to make sure I see the copy afresh:
print it out
change the font
use coloured paper
use coloured text
read it out loud
use a pen under each word and read out loud (make sure you’re alone)
And guess what? Shaking it up works.
I might even recommend it to the journos on the UK’s Daily Telegraph. If they’d used it, they might have included the letter l in public the first time round in this article online (ouch – they’ve since corrected it).
And finally, one thing you shouldn’t forget
OK, before we finish butterflying, why not flit on over to the TED site and catch David Pogue’s presentation? He’s the technology correspondent of the New York Times and his talk, entitled Cool new things you can do with your mobile phone, is entertaining, engaging and…cool. Make sure you catch his iPhone song to the tune of My Way.
(for the US edition, 
