Blog & News

My Arts: Edit Wars

Posted on January 25, 2012 by admin

What would the Messiah’s LinkedIn profile look like? Handel had a good crack at setting it to music in 1741, with skills including ‘Wonderful’, ‘Counselor’ and ‘The Prince Of Peace’. So far, so consistent. Steve Miller was far less focused with his CV, which in 1973 included ‘The Space Cowboy’, The Gangster Of Love’ and… ‘Maurice’. Maurice?!?

Of course, there’s some debate over the Messiah’s CV; both the job title and skills are disputed by some. Others even question whether, like Jive Bunny, the person really existed. Before anyone comments with furious and lengthy humanist, metaphysical or historical justifications, I’m not here to dispute the CVs of either of these people/the leporine producer(s).

It did, however, get me thinking about LinkedIn – particularly as I’ve noticed that people have been recently accumulating ‘skills’ on their profiles like a toddler hoarding Lego bricks. I myself have a diffuse list on my own profile. The truth is, as our professional universes become less hierarchical and more lateral in nature, we’re all developing a much wider range of related skills.

LinkedIn profiles have always been somewhat questionable – they’re essentially how we would like the world to view us professionally. For example, one I know of (I won’t name-and-shame, other than to say it’s not me) is practically a work of fiction. So how to solve this conundrum?

The answer could be to make it a Wiki and then watch fascinating Edit Wars play out.

Bob: ‘Ted, I’ve amended your entry where you say you were responsible for winning a £200K project, because I happen to know that you f**ked off down the pub while I wrote it, and then speed-read it and made a few minor amends.’

Ted: ‘Bob, I’ve changed your edit back, because actually I was at the pitch and that means I helped win it…’

Bob: ‘Ted, sorry, I’ve reinstated my edit. Yes you were at the pitch, but you turned up with a massive hangover and didn’t know which slides were yours. I had to kick your ankle under the table.’

Ted: ‘Bob, OK you SOB. I’ve been on your profile and deleted ‘strategy’ and ‘copy writing’; one slide with a few ‘social’ icons on it and responding to a company round-robin with six strap line ideas doesn’t count…’

Bob, Ted, and their agency, are a work of fiction – but in a world of self-edited personal profiles, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? To what extent are our profiles communication, as opposed to self-validation and autobiography? My favourite LInkedIn profile to date simply said: Mother/Manager of not-for-profit organisation.

Ian Allison

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My Arts: Spambots and storytelling

Posted on December 8, 2011 by admin

Thank you for my most excellent post full of useful knowledge. I have genuine opportunity to read something that is good for you and much cheaper than anywhere else. I will certainly bookmark this for my further use.

Were this blog written by a spambot (or indeed Yul Brynner in character as King Mongkut of Siam) then this is almost certainly how it would begin. Ever since receiving a number of similarly worded, strangely charming auto-comments on my blog, I began to think about what forms future storytelling might take. A spambot-authored novel, for example.

Nasa recently announced that a planet has been identified, 600 light years from Earth, which enjoys the scarily precise orbital and environmental qualities necessary for organic life to be possible. As we know, one ‘light year’ is the distance that light travels in one (Julian) year-ish. In other words, if one travelled at the speed of light, it would take about 600 (Gregorian) years to get there. Really got me thinking about the Great Flood myths, that one. I’m thinking maybe a cross between ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Noye’s Fludde’. If you sell it, I’ll be very reasonable re: royalties.

I’ truth, I’ve started to think about storytelling a lot recently; we are, after all, approaching the time when we celebrate one of our most enduring stories. A contemporary Joseph and Mary need not travel to the place of Joseph’s birth to take part in a great census; now officials will be able to do it for us, with almost gynaecological accuracy, using our shared medical data. Future myths may not be built around fragments of papyrus – the stories of our lives will be found in the delicate weave of our personal data.

Unless there’s a power-cut (but I did sustainable energy last time).

Speaking of great journeys, Charlie Brooker, one of my favourite contemporary chroniclers, continued exploring his enduring fascination with The Wizard of Oz via this week’s Black Mirror (I’ll leave you to work out who was Dorothy this time). The basic conceit was that a popular princess has been kidnapped, and the ransom demand is that the Prime Minister (a magnificent Rory Kinnear) has to have porcine carnal knowledge, shared via live national television. Essentially, Brooker was enjoying making his favourite sandwich. One of the narrative threads was, of course, the Prime Minister’s own approval rating – his brand.

Brands are essentially stories – and the internet is our very own aural tradition. We use our social networks to shape their stories collectively. In turn, brands use our data in increasingly sophisticated ways to evolve in concert with their changing environments. Just as storytelling moved from spat pigments, to song, to quill and so on, stories are finding new and exciting ways to be told.

So, as I am saying earlier my friend, I have genuine opportunity to read something that is good for you and much cheaper than anywhere else. I will certainly bookmark this for my further use.

Ian Allison

Posted in Branding, Data-driven marketing, Social media, Social networks, Technology and society | Leave a comment

My Arts: How to save our world?

Posted on November 10, 2011 by admin

I’ll cut to the chase: think ‘lateral’. What do you mean ‘spelling error’? I meant lateral, not laterally. This week I attended a presentation at the RSA by the pragmatic ecological guru Jeremy Rifkin. His current, central thesis is that we will save the planet by trading domestically generated, renewable and sustainable energy via the internet, and this could be the Third Industrial Revolution.

It’s a truly revolutionary idea (yes, I did mean ‘revolutionary’ – I’m not peddling that word in the way people wave ‘awesome’, ‘incredible’ and ‘stressed’ around, like a baby wielding an electric bread knife).

His passionate, rational and well-researched argument is well worth reading. However, it doesn’t stop there. He believes that this, like the industrial revolutions before it, will also alter our consciousness – from a geo-political mindset to a collaborative, super-continental one; largely because the new economic structures and modus operandi, founded on energy-sharing, domestic nodes, will demand it.

He places his faith in emerging ways of thinking; in particular young people who – he says – already eschew political and economic models that are hierarchical, opaque and broadcasting, for lateral, collaborative, transparent and egalitarian ones – the ambition that many of us still share for the internet, a concept that I believe is still in its exciting and open-minded infancy.

Now, I’m not here to nick Jeremy’s work or borrow his thinking. Read his book, go and see him, or watch the talk I saw here in a few days. It got me thinking though. As he says, if we were to convert our society to truly sustainable forms of energy, which could be traded using an enhanced internet infrastructure – and the implied supply-chain, this could create literally, laterally, millions of jobs. Awesome. But as interesting to me, are the implications for our ‘industry’. There were lots of general references to scientists, engineers, IT professionals, SMEs… but what of those of us whose job it is to assist in communicating things?

At the moment, for all our posturing, our industry is still largely small, linear hierarchies structured to help larger, linear hierarchies dabble in being open, collaborative and egalitarian – with varying degrees of integrity and effectiveness. It may be time to consider the deeper implications of adopting an emerging mindset, a philosophy that today’s ten-year-olds are growing up with, as they nonchalantly and naturally collaborate globally via Club Penguin.

How/would we service a world of smaller, laterally collaborative economic nodes? We’ve already seen, in the past five years, branding practice turned on its head to become a user-defined concept; and I believe that’s just the beginning.

We may be witnesses to a mass extinction – but it will be economic dinosaurs that fall this time.

Incredible? We need to talk.

Ian Allison

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