Loz
drdonzoFiled under: business
There’s always the old joke about the mass debate….but what’s the joke about the almost overnight obsolescene of future plans?
At a corporate level, think about the sheer volume of out-of-date material – from internal calendars through to the shareholders’ report. We do some work for an agency that tries to attract foreign investment into Hungary. Some might argue that there was never a great deal of material there in the first place. But, now, their story really is shot to pieces. The same goes for many of the UK-based organisations that we’ve dealt with over the years.
Organisations simply don’t know where to turn to make sense of what’s going on out there….just how will consumers and customers behave differently in the current recession? Of course they’ll spend less overall and be more careful in every area of spend…..but there’s a lot more to it than that. Mindsets and lifestyles will change in ways that are extremely difficult to predict.
That, we’d like to think, is where we come in with our sign collection, and our ability to decipher patterns of emerging behaviour from the collection and analysis of a large quantity of signs of change.
I always thought that when it was about survival, politeness and civility would be the first casualties. Seems not so, according to The Economist.
In road traffic, a sign helps us understand where we are and where we could go. In marketing, the word has come to mean the latest thing – or rather a precursor to the next big thing. So what actually do we mean when we say “sign”?
As we understand it, a sign is a piece of current information, a snapshot of a potential trend, that gives us an indication of what can be expected in the future. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. An individual sign is meaningless without context – and without other signs to support and contradict it.
In short, a “sign” is anything that is new and remarkable, but that is yet to become a full-blown “trend”. Whatever that might mean…
This blog is our way of collecting signs and trying to assemble their meaning.
Things must be getting desperate in the UK. I just listened to the Guardian’s excellent daily news podcast and they had a guy called Monty Don, president of the Soil Association, on. This is some of what he said (the rest can be found here):
Most people are unaware of how tenuous our food supply is and the whole thing could come tumbling down in exactly the same way as the banks have. So we have to grow more of our own food or we won’t survive and the way to start must be at home. The beauty of that is it’s about the liberation – from the tyranny of supermarkets and this anonymous food supply. You get back to basics and it goes back to a very British tradition of diggers and levellers and common ground and proudly being independent. These were things people did right up to the second world war in urban situations that would be surprising to people now. I think we can tap back into it.
Not long ago, some guy who enjoys digging in his garden would have been laughed at for coming out with this kind of stuff, even at a dinner party. Now he is on the news.
Have you seen the hidden Skype emoticons? Obviously a bit of in-house fun, but adds to the cuteness and the brand appeal. Except for the guy mooning, of course. 
Just type “(heidy)” into the chat box to see Skype staff member Heidy as “a cute little critter and his nut”.
Seriously, if you can get employees like Heidy 
to do this kind of thing, you are onto a winner, whatever your line of business.
Hands up if you want our blog to be like this? Not me. And not because it is obviously about making money.
The headlines just don’t make me want to read the articles, which are actually quite interesting and on the kind of topics we want to write about. Actually, it was the first other blog we linked to, so who are we to criticise.
Any thoughts?
It’s so simple, free and “in” there’s nothing we need to say about it – but here are 17 ways to use Twitter from a marketing point of view.
See how we use it be looking us up. We are GloriousDay and DrDonzo.
Be there or be square.
There is a battle raging in cyberspace. It is a power struggle between the geeks and the sharers on one hand, and the cynics, journalists and marketeers on the other. It’s easy to see there can be only one winner. What started out as self-publishing and blogging is now an avalanche of Facebookers, mySpacers and Twitterers creating content and exchanging opinions. We will sign up for all those revolutionary technologies soon so you can stalk us, but first, here’s our new blog. So, what’s so great about a blog and why would consummate professionals want to share our secrets with you? Here’s a list:
- Laurence, why the hell am I writing this on Google Docs? I could be typing it straight onto the Internet for everyone to read.
- A blog doesn’t have to be about what the dog ate for breakfast. (Although it can be.)
- There is no need to consider layout or relevance, you can just post whatever pops into our heads at any given moment.
- There is no need to post every day, or even every month.
- A blog post can be as short or as long as you want. A good blog post should be online in the time it takes to write an e-mail.
- A blog post can contain text, images and video.
- A blog is the sum of its posts – lots of short posts look better than a handful of long ones.
- Anyone we invite can post here on different topics at the same time.
- Anyone can join in on the comments. We might learn something from you, you might learn from each other, or we might just all agree to disagree.
- Everything we post helps our Google ranking, and that means more people can find us.
- We might meet some like minded people we want to work with.
- We believe in free speech.
- We believe in free beer. More on that later.
- Blogging is environmentally friendly.
- Most importantly, if you don’t like it, YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ IT!
So, what are the disadvantages? There aren’t any – because the whole thing is inclusive and optional. So are you in, or out? Either way, the geeks and sharers will win. As Woody Woodpecker said, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
