MollyFlatt

Slow journalism

Slow journalism comes to me so naturally that I’ve taken about five years to write about it.

On Wednesday morning, the Today programme (I cannot wake up without Radio 4′s good-natured, grumble-fest; that delicate blend of warm-crumpet humour and stern, stentorian urgency is the perfect mental espresso) was so interesting that I was moved to switch off the Babyliss. Following Al Jazeera English’s rolling coverage of the Egyptian protests, Marcus Webb, director of the Slow Journalism Company, and former director of BBC Global News Richard Sambrook, were discussing the missing ‘sense of perspective’ in our always-on reporting culture.

Webb was touting his new luxury print quarterly Delayed Gratification, which:

distils three months of the UK’s political, cultural, scientific and sporting life into a witty magazine of record. A combination of almanac, essays and reportage, Delayed Gratification operates on the principles of Slow Journalism, offers an antidote to throwaway media and makes a virtue of being the last to breaking news. Its publications are beautiful, collectible and designed to be treasured.

Gosh. I delayed my gratification for all of an hour, and subscribed as soon as I got to work.

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Journalism, entrepreneurialism and stories

I’ve just come out of the news:rewired conference about the future of journalism both buzzing and confused.

Why confused? Well, how many of these people in any way love what they do? From the tone and energy of most of the speakers you’d have thought the arctic chill had come early. Maybe they were going for ‘calm and authoritative’. It mostly came across as ‘bored to be here, bored to be talking about this and bored by you.’ Fair enough, if you’re trotting out generic stuff about two-way connections with readers. But some of the other stuff was actually quite interesting. It’s amazing how persistently unfashionable enthusiasm is in the UK.

Why buzzing? Well, partly thanks to Mary Beth Christie from FT.com who, on the topic of monetising online media, called for a ban on the term ‘paywall‘. Shopkeepers do not erect a paywall for us to buy milk. Bus drivers do not erect a paywall that we bang against before bleeping our Oysters. We pay for content, just like we pay for bread: we don’t demolish democracy to get there.

But mainly I’m buzzing thanks to freelance interactive producer Philip Trippenbach’s talk on stories vs interactivity. Stories have traditionally been the lifeblood of the media, but situations or issues that are complex, systemic, non personalised, and non localised are actually stifled by the distortion and personalisation of narrative – what they need is interactivity. Events need stories, systems need interactivity.

From Trippenbach’s blog summary of his speech

Class is one of the most influential systems in the world, and Trippenbach is currently producing Britain’s Real Class System for the BBC. This will take the form a nationwide interactive survey that then becomes interactive visualisation, so viewers can mashup, personalise – yes, create stories – from the rich wealth of data. This is definitely a man who loves what he does, and does it well.

I’m a story fetishist, and this transformed the way I see stories, interactivity, and the media. Dude.

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WOMMA Summit 2010: Global word of mouth differences

It’s hard to believe it’s a week since I was in Vegas at the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Summit, which brought together over 600 marketers, agencies, brands, academics and researchers over three days to share thought leadership, case studies, best practice and provocative debate. Over the next few weeks running up to Christmas I’ll be showcasing some of the best keynotes and insights from the event, and I thought I’d kick off with a personal perspective.

As President of WOMMA UK, this year I was heading up an international panel examining the global differences in word of mouth.

via WOMMA@Flickr; L-R: me, Barak, Craig, Jo, Shige


The idea for the session came from my experiences last year – I saw several excellent case studies from the likes of Tropicana and Mom Central but also realised that the very ‘American’ approach just would not wash with many European consumers.

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Of letter bombs and skull tweets

Sticks and stones can break our bones, but words will never hurt us? Bah. Every playground-dwelling kid in the world has shown that phrase the lie. In fact, it amazes me that we aren’t more wary of the idiomatic anthrax that wages alchemical warfare inside us every day.

As any self-help guru worth his weight in jacuzzis will tell you, the words we think and speak determine our moods, our perceptions and ultimately our lives. Tony Robbins – he of the iconic nineties whoop-yeah Bible ‘Awaken the Giant Within’ – may be relentlessly American, embarrassingly self-promoting and an outrageous coiner of Copyrighted Jargonese™, but he’s pretty damn good on what he calls Transformational Vocabulary (™, natch).

The idea is that we’re all infested with thousands of tiny linguistic burrs which lodge in our psychological schemas and profoundly colour our view of the world – often in shades of sludgy, depressive grey. The habitual words and metaphors we use to describe our selves, experiences and emotions inevitably limit and ultimately shape those selves, experiences and emotions. If you’re feeling ‘over-burdened’ as you ‘plough away’ at work before you ‘get slaughtered’ at weekends, no wonder that your day has a submissively miserable farmyard pall.

It was Rory Kinnear who reminded me of transformational language this week. No, sadly not over a chummy brandy and ginger backstage at the National; I simply saw his Hamlet, which is a masterclass in performative vocabulary. Every word is obsessively, precisely coined: immaculately chosen, bitterly revelled in, each speech visibly poisoning his skittish, scatting body syllable by syllable.

Will according to Wordle: Hamlet demonstrates the art of the mindfuck soliloquy

For Hamlet is the master of self-torture through articulacy, the prince of destructive NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). He talks himself into tragedy. The sheer inventiveness and sensual impact of his rhetoric makes his nightmare state of Denmark so real that it transubstantiates from word to matter. His metaphors of death, decay and danger are so relentless that they actually materialise.

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Another study proves the obvious: real world WOM rules

A new Keller Fay study has just corroborated one of the most obvious insights in WOM: the majority of word of mouth still happens offline.

The study found that 93% of the general public use face-to-face communication as their primary mode of WOM, and that even 85% of social media-obsessed teens spread most of their opinions and recommendations offline.

Wow. Who’d have thought it? Um, pretty much anyone who’s a human being?

1000heads’ Robin and Katie stimulate some offline WOM in Soho via our tenth birthday cupcakes

Now, we’ve posted about this a few times before: here and here and here, for example. Or check out our dedicated offline/online blog category, which has lots of examples of how to spread real world conversation. It’s a no-brainer to us: social media is a wonderful amplifier and accelerator of WOM, but most conversation stems from physical, emotional experiences away from the keyboard (or touchpad).

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What type of social network influences behaviour?

Yesterday we looked at the motivations for why people engage in different social venues; this morning I came across an interesting new study looking at what type of social network best influences behaviour.

Because it’s all very well if a network spreads information like wildfire, but if that information doesn’t prompt users to do something – buy the product, sign up for the event, stop smoking, change the way they talk about the brand – it’s all so much worthless WOM.

Didn’t I hear something about this? via Lab2112@Flickr

The study, from MIT assistant professor of system dynamics and economic sociology Damon Centola, looked at the spread of health-related behaviour in two different types of social networks – one based around ‘long ties’, or many distant connections, and one based on denser clusters of more closely connected people.

Sociologists have traditionally believed that long ties are the key to the rapid and broad spread of word of mouth, an insight reinforced by a Guardian study presented at a WOMMA UK briefing last year. However, Centola found that to change behaviour, you’re much better off focusing on clustered networks.

It makes human common sense. It’s easy for us to quickly pass on a piece of content via a loosely connected contact; but to understand something more complex, or change ingrained behaviour, we’ll need exposure more than once, and from trusted and emotionally impactful sources. There is more work to be done, but as Centola says,

“For about 35 years, wisdom in the social sciences has been that the more long ties there are in a network, the faster a thing will spread. It’s startling to see that this is not always the case.”

The study is intended to help improve the design of effective health networks, but it has obvious implications for marketing. We’ve always emphasised the need for multiple entry points with a word of mouth campaign, in order to foster both deep and broad engagement. This ensures rapid visibility but also concrete behaviour change, leading to sales, subscriptions and changing attitudes.

This kind of insight is invaluable in tailoring engagement, according to both the brand’s priority and the nature of the community. Great stuff.

Molly Flatt

Love consumers… but don’t forget brands

It’s easy to give brands a bad rap.

In our warm and fuzzy social world, corporate has pretty much become a dirty word.

Scan social media on any given day and you’ll encounter a raft of articles called things like ‘how to become a business that cares’, ‘the latest social media fail’ and ‘dealing with detractors’ (yes, a few of them might be by us) that suggest brands are big, bad and struggling to engage with people on and offline.

But they’re what makes all this possible.

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The value of social media advocacy? $136.38

It’s the big question in word of mouth: what is an advocate worth?
Well, according to research Syncapse and Hotspex have just released on eMarketer, on average $136.38. The study looked at the Facebook fans of the 20 biggest corporate brands on the site, and calculated the fans’ worth from a combination of how much they spent on the products, loyalty, recommendations and earned media.

In fact, for many food and beverage brands on Facebook, fans spent more than double on the brand than non-fans.

This reiterates the findings of a study earlier this year, which showed that consumers were more likely to buy from or recommend a brand after becoming a Facebook fan or follower.

It’s an interesting start to WOM ROI, although of course the real impact of advocacy goes far beyond Facebook, to cover not just the other social media platforms but real life conversations too.

Facebook fans are a notoriously passive group, and just clicking on a ‘become a fan’ button represents none of the participation and opinion-giving that true advocacy entails. Of course, there’s an exciting implication here. If these guys earn so much for a brand, how much more valuable must the fans be who actually bother to upload photos and videos, write detailed, passionate reviews on their pages and blogs and forums, and take that enthusiasm to the dinner table and the school gates?

Working out the ROI of an individual advocate beyond a single platform is a mighty complex task, but we’re getting there. For now, research like this indicates just how powerful that proactive, cross-platform advocacy is.

Molly Flatt

Thoughts on propagation planning

Recently, the team at 1000 Heads have been discovering and discussing some great content out there on propogation planning.

Ivan Pollard from Naked Communications coined the term and Faris Yakob went on to, well, propagate it in a prize-winning essay for Campaign. Griffin Farley, of BBH New York, continues to develop the theory in his excellent blog, and produced the deck below which gives a neat overview of the approach and case studies behind PP.

Lessons in Propagation Planning Presentation

Lessons in Propagation Planning 2009

View more presentations from Griffin Farley.

As you can see, propagation planning is in essence word of mouth by any other name.

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Digital Storytelling: comics, heroes, symbols and myths

Last Friday I got to combine my lit-geek and WOM-geek selves at Digital Storytelling 2010, “an afternoon of inspirational speakers and events for journalists, academics, entrepreneurs, digital experts and students” created by not on the wires and the BBC College of Journalism.

1000heads were very proud to be Headline Sponsors of such an eclectic and intelligent event. Sadly I couldn’t stay for long, but I did catch Ben Chesterton’s moving presentation of the work he’s doing with Duckrabbit, mashing up audio and photography in the Condition Critical slideshows for Médecins Sans Frontières, which tell some pretty important and powerful tales.

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