When a big commercial brand partners with a charity at the fundraising end, the exchange is simple. The big brand burnishes its image, the charity makes some cash.
In a networked world, things get more complicated. Here are a couple of examples:
1) Vodafone and the happiest phone call
Here’s the most effective fundraising thank-you video ever created:
Authenticity is what makes this so remarkable – the audience get a genuine share in their moment of triumph at saving a baby’s life.
I have no idea how the plug for Vodafone happened to feature at the 1min 20 secs mark – it looks completely unplanned – but as a piece of feelgood exposure for a mobile phone company it’s a phenomenal success.
That authenticity, that sense of worth, goes beyond anything a conventional advert could hope to achieve. It is the gold standard in charity partnerships, and even though it may only be seen by a tiny audience, for Vodafone it’s certainly worth the price of a few free phone calls.
2) Pepsi, bringers of light
This is a quite breathtaking fundraising video for an innovative Phillipino charity. It went thoroughly viral a few months ago, notching up 1.5 million views.
The story of this video is a curious one: the charity had a great media hit from Reuters and the BBC in July:
Someone from Pepsi obviously saw this, and got a bit miffed that the bringing of light was being linked – by that incredibly distinctive red bottle-top – to Coca-Cola. So it’s been remade with higher production values, a picturesque main character, and a hero dressed in blue: the Pepsi bottle-top.
As a shot in the Cola wars, it’s an entertaining piece, and it’s great news that this charity will have got so much exposure from teaming up with Pepsi’s marketing gurus.
But what is interesting about both of these is that they take the charity partnership away from the supporters and out into the field. As charity communications narrow the gap between the donor and the mission, it’s no longer enough for a company CEO to stand awkwardly on a stage at a fundraising event, handing out a giant cheque with a company logo on it. Sponsoring of fundraising events is just too distant from those deep emotional connections that digital media is creating between charity supporters and the people and animals they help.
The creation of that Child’s I Foundation fundraising video depended on staff being happy to film every moment of their work. For Vodafone, it depended on their inserting their services, inescapably, into that work, so their brand was visible at these key moments.
Pepsi’s video was a response to the incredible ubiquity of Coca Cola, who were inserted into a charity’s work by the fame of their bottles, and, ironically, by the amount of plastic waste they leave in the slums of the Phillipines.
In a digitally networked world, charity communications are becoming a constant stream of near-live media from the field: videos, podcasts, blogs, Tweets, project reports. Companies need to find ways to insert themselves inextricably into that stream. The charity that can offer innovative ways for big brands to do this will find itself riding out the recession very comfortably indeed.
EDIT: Thanks to @jon_bedford for showing me the Child’s I Foundation video
It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not to exceed, in savagery the crime itself, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration….
Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. The modern rituals of execution attest to… the disappearance of the spectacle and the elimination of pain. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Troy Davis was executed in a white-walled room, with 20 or so official witnesses. He was also executed live, in public, to an audience who might not have been able to see the body of the accused, but were as emotionally engaged as the baying eighteenth crowds who enjoyed the executions of criminals as a public spectacle.
The eighteenth century mob at a public execution
I did not attend any of the vigils that took place all over the world. I did not need to. The intensity of the experience was more than enough on Twitter and Facebook, watching, waiting, and debating with friends, celebrities and millions of others all over the world, as a man went to his death.
For thousands of years, punishment was the most public part of the judicial process. That changed in the nineteenth century. The accused and their fates were hidden away. This was a consequence of a change in the way that legislators understood the legal process:
It was intended to apply the law not so much to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Sentences would be passed in public, but the rest of the process would take place behind closed doors, until one morning the newspapers would announce that an execution had taken place the previous day. It was a process that was formalised, codified and unemotional.
What happened on 21 September was quite different. Rumours of a last-minute pardon, a new witness, a changed time for the execution surged through the digital mob. #lettertogeorgia and #noevidence trended all night, ritually repeated on Twitter like the chanting of a sports crowd. Right-wing pundits vied with each other to shock and rile the mob even further.
A million signatures on an Amnesty petition can be dismissed as mere clicktivism. But tens of millions of people communicating with each other make a kind of live audience, and thus change the meaning of an execution. Under the scrutiny of that number of comments, it ceases to be a machine-like legal system acting on a judicial subject, and becomes a group of human beings killing another while the world watches.
The Twitter mob is never an attractive spectacle, least of all when something horrible is occurring in the world. But the new way that the world is watching seems certain to make death penalties a far rarer thing.
It’s our habit when talking about new media to think in terms of what went before. Your Kindle is a just like a book. Or maybe a shelf containing all your books. Or an amazing shop containing every book that’s ever been written. Or it’s a publishing house, taking on the complete task of printing, distributing and marketing books. We make the same kind of comparisons with the App Store, iTunes, Netflix and many others.
When Amazon decides to suddenly remove Nineteen Eighty-Four from our Kindles, Apple sucks a vaguely subversive App out of our iPhones, or Twitter claims exclusive ownership of any photo we upload, we don’t know how to feel about it. Is it a publisher legitimately choosing not to put out something they don’t like? Or is it a thief coming in and removing something that belongs to us from our shelves? Is it no more disturbing than a shop deciding what it will and won’t sell? Or is it like a totalitarian regime, censoring material it doesn’t like?
Unlike any shop, shelf, publisher or book, the latest update to iTunes has 16,849 words of terms and conditions – over 50 pages of them. Of the hundreds of millions of users who have downloaded it, I would guess that a few dozen, mostly Apple’s lawyers, have actually read them. The Kindle’s are on a similar scale, and, while Facebook’s and Twitter’s are shorter, they change every few weeks.
Somewhere, buried in all that legal language, there may be some explanation of what we are collectively signing up to (if we had any sense, we’d at least run a quick search for important keywords like ‘soul’, ‘firstborn child’, ‘full moon’ and ‘sacrifice’). I love all this free software, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the sheer scale of these T & Cs does make me think that someone, somewhere is going to get very badly screwed. I hope it’s not me.
Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people over the Internet. They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day. Douglas Adams, 1999
There has been some very silly stuff written about the riots and social media written in the last few days (this article in the Telegraph perhaps takes the prize for being most cretinous). It is, however, absolutely certain that these riots could not have been organised without the ability of loose networks to communicate spontaneously.
Simply put, new technologies have taken power from traditional authorities and give it to ordinary people. And some of those people are not very nice.
After the arrival of police radios in the 1960s, the boys in blue had a huge advantage over any kind of mass uprising – they could communicate with each other, the people on the street could not. That changed with the mass uptake of mobile phones, and the coming of the mobile internet has given a further advantage to loose self-organising networks. Whether you’re toppling a regime in Egypt, organising a flashmob to prove how fun and quirky you are, or trying to gather enough people to rob a branch of Curry’s in broad daylight, the ability to instantly share information is essential. A lot of kids have discovered that they are now more mobile than the police, and are taking full advantage of that fact to burn down their own high streets.
All that said, however, I am getting slightly bored of Blackberry Messenger being treated on news outlets as if it was in some way morally reprehensible, to the extent that the head of Blackberry manufacturers Research In Motion has had to issue a kind of apology. Without their bicycles, the rioters wouldn’t be able to move around London and gather in numbers – when the police arrive with overwhelming force the youths scatter to wherever they’ve left their bikes, and whizz off into the night, only to reconvene somewhere else – but nobody is blaming Halfords.
“Let us say that making a lolcat is the stupidest possible creative act….Yet anyone seeing a lolcat gets a second message: You can play this game too… The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about the iPad that bugs me so much. Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus has finally shown me what is wrong with it: it’s incredibly difficult to make a lolcat on an iPad. Cognitive Surplus is a book about the joy of the ‘Publish’ button, the story how the internet has given hundreds of millions of people both the opportunity and the incentive to become creative. It’s the story of the coming victory of active, sharing media over passive, solitary ones.
Courtesy of *right-click* *save image as* (and Helge.at)
But the iPad transforms the web into a passive medium –you can consume video, pictures, sounds and words on it, but it’s extremely difficult to create anything. Even sending a Tweet on an iPad takes three times as long as it does on a Blackberry. Compared to a laptop or a netbook, it’s agonisingly slow to use.
There are two things that an iPad is amazing at:
1) Looking at stuff. It is absolutely the best device in its weight class for watching Youtube videos, or flicking through photos.
2) Symbolising its owner’s wealth and importance.
For anything else, it’s full of barriers: there’s no right-click, which means no ‘view source’, no ‘image info’, no ‘save target as’, none of those essential tools for a blogger to get the stuff they need; there’s no really accurate pointer, which means copy-paste takes nine times longer than it should; even typing is a chore. Worse still, in exchange for the hermetically sealed world of gimmicky junk in the App Store, you’ve closed down the infinite possibilities of the open source world. No GIMP, no WinAmp, no OpenOffice, let alone Drupal, Apache or PHP. Instead of Googling your kitten, copy-pasting it into GIMP, clicking the text tool, and writing a few rofltastic words, you have an endless fiddle with Apps, fat fingers and the iPad’s broken file management system. And if you can’t make a lolcat, the ‘stupidest possible creative act’, you can’t do anything.
Apple market themselves as enabling creativity, and perhaps once that was true. Apple gave non-technical people tools that were once available only to geeks, breaking down barriers in editing films and photos, and producing music. But The iPad is a sad pacifier, as destructive to creativity as the television. If you truly embody the values Apple claims to promote – artistic, sociable, inspiring – you need to bin your glowing rectangular status symbol.
Because if they did an ‘I am a netbook, I am an iPad’ advert, the netbook would be Che Guevara, constantly on the move, stirring up a revolution, while the iPad would be a morbidly obese child, endlessly hitting a single button in order to watch yet another 3-second Youtube clip.
When MySpace came out, I decided instantly that it was a lame ‘my-first-website’ kit for people too lazy to even figure out Geocities.
When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it sounded dumber than a box of hammers. Who wants a blogging service that limits them to a completely arbitrary number of characters? Cutesy silicon valley crap that nobody in their right mind would ever bother with.
You are mayor of a farm. Whoop-de-do.
I still think Foursquare is a sort of jumped-up version of Farmville – a site whose success is solely a consequence of its ability to spam other social networks.
Obviously, I was wrong. MySpace’s successor Facebook is a completely essential part of my social life. Twitter has almost completely replaced all other media as my source of news, gossip and viral lulz. Eventually, Foursquare, or some equivalent, is going to hook me as well.
All those world-changing social websites were, initially, baffling. They had to be, because they were using a new technology to create a completely new set of behaviours in a massive audience.
So what about Google+?
Well, it’s a mixture of the best aspects of Facebook and Twitter with some clever, useful ways of organising contacts and a slick video-conferencing tool. I like it, as far as it goes, but I can tell you right now that it’s not going to change the world. If they’d released it 5 years ago, I’d have said Google+? WTF?’ Then it might have had a chance.
In the early days, the Internet was for reading and writing. Images took forever to load, and the nature of HTML meant accuracy was a necessity for putting anything online. As a result, the words on the web were often rather well written. Even the flame wars were in properly punctuated sentences.
Things changed: ecommerce brought people online to shop; YouTube gave the goggle-eyed TV-viewing masses to Google; finally, social networks made it easy for everyone to spew their most trivial thoughts into the cloud. Over time, search engine optimisation and the exigencies of linkbait culture have driven ‘style’ to the digital margins, a minor consideration against the all-important secret sauce of killer content and a great keyword-packed headline.
Here, then, are a few choice delicacies for anyone out there who still loves the baroque, the discursive and the prolix. Make yourself comfortable (and don’t click these links if your lunchbreak ends in 5 minutes):
Dangerous Minds, by Malcolm Gladwell
From the New Yorker, the spiritual home of long-form journalism, a perfect twisty-turny Malcolm Gladwell analysis
The Women’s Crusade, by Sheryl WuDunn
Is there any major UK newspaper or website that would publish and promote a 7-page argument for the role women’s rights play in international development?
The Great American Bubble Machine, by Matt Taibbi
“[Goldman Sachs is] a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Wow. Just wow.
Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, by Michael Lewis
The Liar’s Poker author has written an absolutely jaw-dropping dissection of the Greek financial crisis.
Know any great content that takes more than 10 minutes to read? Give me a few links in the comments below:
After my post Facebook’s dirty secret: your profile page, in which I suggested that Facebook had moved beyond the ‘game’ mechanisms of its early days, someone on Twitter (can’t remember who, sorry) pointed me in the direction of this brilliant rant from Cory Doctorow. He reckons that it is still a game of sorts, but, curiously for a social network, it’s a private game: closer to a slot machine than a sport. You pull the lever, and sometimes you get a wonderful social reward.
Anyway, watch the video. It’s a great talk, and also contains some excellent advice about how to educate your kids.
A couple of weeks ago, I was explaining Facebook to a non-user (they do still exist), and I did something I realised I haven’t done for over a year.
I looked at my own profile page.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. In fact, it made me look like a tedious, self-important, rambling fool.
Why is it that so many deeply private people, people like me, are happy to expose themselves on Facebook? And why is it that someone like me whose job involves a fair amount of work on social media for brands can let their personal page look so crappy?
Because part of the genius of Facebook is that you never have to see your own profile.
Social networks as social competitions
Facebook’s 2005-2008 incarnation, just like MySpace and Bebo, encouraged you to recruit new users by making profile pages a competition. There was a competitive gaming element where you tried to outdo your acquaintances with exciting photographs, your taste in films and music and, above all, the number of friends you had. Your profile was your landing page and, since interactions took place either there or on friends’ profile pages, you were always aware of how you were doing.
Image courtesy of http://www.352media.com/blog/
It was a social network that appealed, as Twitter and Foursquare do now, to the socially competitive. Your profile page was where you kept the score: your photos, your wall, your details, your friends.
The 2008 rebuild changed that and opened Facebook up to a huge new user-base: the shy, the introverted, the ordinary people who didn’t want to shout about how great their lives were. Since 2008, interactions have taken place through the newsfeed, with the effect that you never have a reason to land on your own profile page, and see how other users might perceive you. The creation of the ‘Like’ button took that a step further, allowing users to edit details about personal tastes in music, movies and brands, without even realising that they were changing their profile pages.
That freed Facebook from a lot of social awkwardness. It ceased to be about building your personal profile – it became all about your friends and what they were up to right now. Some people still ‘play’ Facebook in the same competitive spirit: I have friends who get a buzz from ‘Likes’ and comments. But even those people are never really aware that anyone else is watching how they do.
Facebook’s hidden data capture
One hugely beneficial result for Facebook – whether by accident or design – is that you no longer even notice which personal details you’ve fed into the social network.
We Don’t Have Facebook Accounts, Say People Who Care About Privacy
Millions of users who are quite happy to write down everything about themselves and then show it to people complained that their privacy was being compromised.
It was funny, but a little unfair. Facebook does everything it can to avoid showing you what you personally have put in. Its unique selling point, strangely for a social network, is the very strong impression that you are invisible. That’s how Mark Zuckerburg has persuaded all those shy, reserved, normal people – people who hated MySpace and all the garish showing off it entailed – to put their lives on the internet.
Have a look at your profile page today. It may surprise you…
Is the publishing industry making the same mistakes the music industry did?
The marketing has worked a treat on the new James Gleick – I’ve read the reviews, and a few extracts, and now I want it the way I wanted Optimus Prime when I was six years old. But Random House aren’t going to let me have it in paperback until March 2012.
This is what the music industry did 15 years ago. A new album by your favourite artist got several months of promotion, while on sale at a vastly inflated price. Finally, 18 months after the buzz had died down, it came into the HMV sale rack at a price you could afford.
It was a miserable experience for teenagers, and the result was that when an alternative came along – Napster, and then iTunes – they changed their habits instantly. It took just a decade to wipe out a 20 billion dolllar industry.
Books, I’m assured by friends in the publishing industry, are different. They’re intensely desirable objects in themselves; you get a better quality experience with the real thing than with a digital version; they can’t be split into tracks, and sold off as highlights. It all sounds very like the kind of thing record companies were saying about albums in 1998.
When publishers make life difficult for consumers, it creates a situation where people are on the lookout for a way to bypass them altogether – and given that the whole of War and Peace takes up less computer memory than one second of a Justin Bieber video, that’s a dangerous thing to do.
