Making Good Shit Stick Is Tough

Don’t get me wrong. I love the meritocratic world of the web. Good stuff floats, average stuff gets suspended in the sea of mediocrity and bad stuff sinks without trace. And that’s the way it ought to be.

It used to be really easy. Back in 2002. There was a lot less good stuff out there, so getting seen was much easier. But we’re now entering a world where something has to be doubleplusgood in order to get noticed. (Or have a big media / seeding spend behind it).

In an idealised online world influence is something pure. Something that gets earned over time. A few years ago you couldn’t really buy online influence, that’s why ‘viral’ became such a hot topic. If you could find a few of the influencers and get them to mention your thing, the job was done (or at least kicked-off in a decent way).

But now the population is so much bigger it’s much harder to get out there (at speed) without using mass-media style techniques (buying your way in, or lunching people like a PR pro). Getting any kind of cut-through quickly is tough.

Don’t get me wrong, the long-tail is great, it drives the right kind of people in a sustainable and genuine fashion. But getting to a point where you’ve earned a sufficient degree of link-love quite often takes time.

And sometimes time isn’t on your side.

We’re stuck in one of those situations right now. The climate change bill is creeping ever closer in parliament and we’ve not got the time or cash to accelerate the Get On Board campaign for the WWF.

We need more people to get stuck in. The guys at the WWF are doing a great job of getting their supporters involved. They’re pushing as many media buttons as they can. But the story just hasn’t picked up like we all hoped it would.

It didn’t sound so hard, we just wanted people to sign-up to push for a stronger climate change bill. And we thought that using a story around aviation and shipping made sense and wasn’t too complex (or too dumb). Maybe we over-stretched? Maybe we over estimated how much capacity people have to care about the world? Or maybe we just came up with an idea that wasn’t good enough?

But you can’t say that the idea of creating a decent climate change bill isn’t a good one. That’s just a fact. However you look at it.

We need more sign-ups.

Go here to add yourself to the petition.
Go here to visit the blog to find out what’s coming next.

And here’s a nice little video showing some of the people who do give a shit messing up. Everyone likes out-takes don’t they? Featuring David Nussbaum (CEO of WWF), Sarah Beeny, Terry Waite, Lewis Gordon Pugh (the guy who can swim in really cold water) and my personal favourite Chris Packham (who used to be in the Really Wild Show with the one and only Terry Nutkins). It’s not massively funny, it’s just quite nice.

Having said all of the above we’re not doing all that badly considering that everything we’re doing hardly costs a penny and there’s been no paid for media whatsoever :-)

I’m not doing this out of any kind of loyalty to Poke, I’m doing it because I’d like more people to sign the petition.

If you’re looking at this whole thing and thinking – “you guys are being a bunch of idiots, there’s a really simple way you can make this work, all you have to do is xyz…”. Then please leave a comment or get in touch. I’ll make sure that you get fully recognised and lauded as a saviour of planet earth sometime in the future.

All thoughts and opinions welcome…

Great Book – 99 Ways To Tell A Story

Whether you like comics or not this is a great book. The author takes the same, very simple, story (a guy going downstairs to the fridge) and tells it 99 times in different ways. There’s loads of variety and you don’t have to be a comic nerd to get the references, he tells it using a map, different artistic styles, and much more.

It’s such a good book.

I bought it to see if it might inspire me to think about doing presentations in a different way, how I could tell the same story differently. I’ve not had time to think about it properly recently, but I’m sure that it will help when I do…

Love This Concept

Bin magazines

Buzz just sent these round at work. Bins that get sealed with magazines. Perfect for lavatorial readers like me. Although I do worry about the ambient moisture in a bathroom environment causing wrinkling of the mags (from bitter experience).

Ooooohh Trippy

I just got this in a mail from make-up company Hard Candy. Don’t ask why I get make-up emails, I just do, right.

Trippy Makeup

Following on from the acid-free-child-safe microdots earlier in the year it would appear that hallucinogenics are in.

I’m not convinced I’d have proposed ‘start trippin’ as a call to action…

Live Internet Streaming Man

Pretty soon we’ll all be like this. Photo from KK+ on Flickr.

UPDATE: If you want to do live streaming from your phone keep your eyes peeled for Flixwagon. Eran popped by with news of a soon-to-launch startup, see comments for more.

Great Explanations of Wikis, RSS, etc…

Common Craft have created a bunch of interesting explanatory videos, they say:

We’re interpreters. We present your products and services in plain English using short, unique and understandable videos in a format we call Paperworks.

Theres a few of them available in their blip.tv channel: http://thecommoncraftshow.blip.tv/, both useful and nicely presented.

Here’s ‘Wikis in plain English’

If you find it useful and good then you should check out:

Nice work Common Craft folk. I like what you have done.

Bad Interface Destroys Retail Opportunity

It was the last line on this machine that stopped me in my tracks:

Condom Machine

It’s obviously supposed to tell us something about the contents of the machine. But it doesn’t actually help at all. This rather odd ‘Nominal Width 53mm’ raises far more questions than it answers.

Very poor labelling.

Never Ending Web Page

Here’s something we just did for Orange. Goodthingsshouldneverend.co.uk

It’s one of my favourite things that we’ve done in a while. It’s a never ending webpage. Crammed full of fun stuff and lots of surprises. Some are online, some are mobile things. But all of them demonstrate the notion of ‘unlimited’.

Not sure I’m supposed to make this public, but people will find out soon enough anyway, there’s hundreds of wind-up phone chargers hidden in the site. I’m not saying what you have to do to find them, that bit is a secret…

I don’t want to say much more because it’s one of those sites which is really about exploration and experience. (We’re hoping that because it’s a never ending page we’ll manage to hit some record-breaking dwell times on the site).