Tom Adams

Pre-shopping

A nice set of thoughts from IPG Emerging Media Lab on pre-shopping. How clever they are.

Phwallets

In-app commerce is here at last. Starbucks have marched ahead in their oh-so-Seattle way with this interesting app that allows you to manage your loyalty card and even pay for drinks in participating silicon valley outlets. The Japanese have been doing this for some time of course (as evidenced by the BBC) with their Osaifu-Keitai, but then they're always 3 years ahead of the rest of the world in these matters. Perhaps it's time we started to think not about phones, or wallets, but 'phwallets'?

The whole Intertube in one

It's doing the rounds but I want to make sure I witness this extraordinary sprint through digital creativity and innovation from Google on this page. Favourites are YouTube Symphony and this wonder from Uniqlo.
And what better diversion for a cold autumn evening than Parkour interactive style on the Intertube.

What on Google Earth

Just when you thought it was safe to consult Google Maps on your way to granny's house, it seems that Google are taking the (logical) next step to introduce branding to augmented reality mobile applications. So you can see where the nearest coffee bar or McDonald's is when you're on the move. Similarly, consider the potential for context sensitive branded video content that maps onto Google Earth from these boffins at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Mediated

New from Dr. Michael Wesch - the Kansas State Professor of Digital Ethnography who delivered The Machine is Using Us (over 10 million views of this version alone) - comes a wonderful talk on the anthropology of YouTube. I was doing something altogether off the subject of digital strategy the other day and found myself coming back to the theme of mediation. Wesch makes a compelling case, building on Marshall McLuhan, that media mediates not content, but rather human relationships. And as media change, so does the way we relate to each other.

As we grapple daily with the improbably knotty problem of MyTwitFace and its impact on brand thinking, this thought keeps coming back to me. In essence, we simply need to remember that everything is mediated: relationships, reputation, ideas and commerce. In the sense that everything increasingly passes through someone or something else before it reaches us. And in the transition, it takes on new meaning. For example, someone sending a funny film isn't just someone sending a film. It's them saying: 'This is funny', 'I know what funny is', 'I'm thinking of you' and 'We like the same things don't we'. It depends on them using a computer, a video aggregator like YouTube and email. As Wesch and his students point out, when we Tweet, we are doing it alone into a phone or computer screen and talking simultaneously to ourselves and 'everyone'.

As with all the best thinking, I found myself wishing I had said or written nearly everything in this lecture. Which means I will promptly try and say or write most of it again with continual reference to Dr Wesch by way of paying it forward...

Brand reputation lives in this reality now, and just like ideas or relationships, it passes through people before it reach us - and takes on new meaning as it travels. If I say I like a restaurant or a car or smoothie or a holiday company, other people will take my view seriously and build it into their decision making. They will also take our collective opinion seriously, even if we have all submitted our views independently of each other. So we have to work even harder to keep the promises brands make, and tell stories that resonate, so that when they reach consumers - like chinese whispers - the message is consistent with our hopes.

And even more powerful is the idea made tangible by augmented reality apps like this one for iPhone users in Paris that actually mediate your view of the physical world in real time, by showing metadata on the high street you're standing in. Detractors have long talked about the low impact of digital media on impulse and food purchase decisions, but if you can hold your phone over two competing products in a Walmart aisle and see which one consumers vote 'best buy', this argument starts to thin.

I have an ongoing debate with a friend about whether comedy catchphrases of the kind seen in Little Britain (or Harry Enfield before him) are powerful because of the initial observation, or because even the most unfunny people can use them to make their friends laugh in the pub. I think it's the latter. They work, because they work when they're mediated. Perhaps creative communications needs to get back to that kind of simplicity in the new media reality?

Facebook the most 'valuable' social network

Yes, I'm reading TechCrunch today, and in true post-arrhoea, am now frantically recording all the interesting things I find in case my memory suddenly fails (due to infant-related sleep deprivation). I should really just put a link to the website on here and be done with it. Still, Facebook is winning everywhere (particularly given the recent staff losses in non-key markets for MySpace) and this lovely pie chart proves it.

Sekai Camera

Very interesting augmented reality iPhone application demonstrated at TechCrunch50 by its charismatic if unintelligible creator. Don't look down, look up!

Twitter tree

This is a very nice short history of Twitter. Shows how much has changed since 2006.

It's official

It's one thing to talk endlessly in a strokey-beard way about the power of social media, it's another to have it brought home to you personally during a major life event. My daughter was born last Wednesday (coincidentally at the same time as the birth of our new company SapientNitro).

As soon as I had regained the feeling in my legs and drunk a restorative cup of tea, I found myself unthinkingly tweeting her arrival (something modest mind you) and uploading early photos to MyTwitFace. Not, I hasten to add, because I am 14 and have nothing better to do. But because I knew that would be the fastest, easiest way to share the wonderful news with our family and friends.

Similarly, my good friend and colleague Tom Evans is unwell at the moment (get well soon) and I found out he was on his way to hospital not by text, or from his wife, or by phone, but because he sent a 1 line tweet telling everyone (and no-one).

Somehow, and without any fanfare, it's simply become normal to share instant moments of the most personal kind with people you know. And people you don't. In fact, things don't feel quite as real until you've shared them.

Hold the tweet, you say, doesn't Tom do this for a living? Isn't this something he should have been doing as a matter of course 4 years ago? Well, the truth is I was. But in an experimental, try anything kind of way to find out how things work for myself. And most of it was from my laptop, which is mainly on my desk, which in its own right rules out spontaneous life experiences like skydiving or doing Tequila slammers with the Archbishop of Canterbury (not something that happens often).

The big difference is that it's now totally mobile. I can share images, thoughts and ideas in real time from my iPhone without any delay or loss of quality. I can be in the birthing centre, on a cable car (again, this doesn't happen too often) or at the end of the garden but nothing is going to stop me telling you what's happening right now. And that's the fundamental difference for me: it's unleashed a genuine spontaneity to my microblogging and networking that wasn't possible before. In essence, it's as much about my life outside work as my work life.

But that's the tricky thing. Just like mobile phones created a tyranny of contact, and Crackberrys made email an unbroken stream of consciousness, social media creates an expectation of immediate, personal and important information. I only hope I am interesting and funny enough... 

Samuel Tweeps

Hilarious and thought-provoking Twitter experiment from Paul Gyford who is tweeting from Samuel Pepys diary as if he were alive today. You can of course read the diary online here, but why not follow the unequalled self himself here. I'm not sure many tweets are as delicious as this from Monday: Lord! to hear how Creed pleases himself in behalf of my Lord Sandwich, and do inveigh against Sir W. Coventry as a cunning knave.