The Sunday Times Social List

These days, it's not often that you find something decently digital emerging from a traditional media outlet. And, when you do, it's generally from the stable of the big digital hitters, namely Wired, Fast Company and certain bits of The Guardian. But this morning, I noted a little tweet pointing to The Sunday Times Social List. A clear, well animated video succinctly explained what on earth this was all about and (despite the fact that it was not embedded from YouTube and, thereby shareable) I clicked on through.

After a simple set-up interface and a few nice infographics later, I was told I was a "Pioneer" and 129th on the Social List. Not bad for a Sunday morning with a cup of tea.



I'm interested to see how this develops. Unlike Wired's recent "Most Influential People in Tech" issue which was put together through investigative journalism (read nepotism and favouritism), this list seems to be growing out of real influence across the four key social networks - Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn. Even better, its success and failure will rely on the very people hopefully to be included in it. It's a win-win situation - The Sunday Times has their work done for them and meets the leading lights in Social, while social influencers get their clout verified.

It may not have the smug factor of The Rich List, but I'll be watching my ranking like a hawk! Come on Ashton, please RT me into the top ten!

A wise investment

Very exciting news Camilla's Store readers (yes Mum, that means you!). I've decided to get my game face on about this site. What started in April 2008 as an outlet for my thoughts, has now become one of my most important assets. This blog has got me interviews, got me jobs, and helped me hone my craft as a blogger, writer and, ultimately, strategist. So it's time to give it its dues and show it some love.



My friend Ellen Turnill and her boyfriend Sam Putera are going to design and develop Camilla's Store 3.0 over on Wordpress. So watch this space and get ready for some BAMF upgrades!

Kinder not-very-Suprised

Kinder Eggs clearly had no idea who they would be dealing with when they Kinder Surprised me with an Augmented Reality toy. The only related video I could find on YouTube was this one from the makers - Total Immersion.



Unlike these happy-go-lucky kids rocking out to a bit of Phoenix and enjoying the "Engaging Digital Experience", I was left struggling with a UI exclusively in Polish while waving a marker around. After trying several games (one of which required a different marker to the one in my egg, and another which filled a white screen with red dots), I finally ended up on one where you "bop" the characters in the corners with your head to win points. Fun times.



If I'm 27 and felt more than a little jealous of my friend cracking on with assembling a self-propelled boat, I can only imagine the frustrated tears of a child attempting to get this thing going. The Kinder Magic smacks of a bored creative team attempting to band-wagon on the "cool new thing" yet ultimately alienating the very digital instinctives they were trying to engage with. Kids today may be digitally savvy, but they are still kids - they won't love something just because it's on a computer, they will love it if it's simple, fun and - ideally - in a language they speak.

Gay for Fey

Absolutely loved this hour long Q&A with Tina Fey at Google. Wonderful to see a funny, articulate and ambitious woman achieve so much well-deserved success.



And some sound advice on picking who you work with: "Never work with someone you wouldn't want to bump into outside the bathroom at 3 o'clock in the morning". Fact.

David Armano - Media isn't Social

These days, not many YouTube videos are worth 16 minutes your time, but TED talks are always something special and this TEDx one is no exception. From how to avoid becoming an asshole online, to some pretty sweet and simple graphics on social media, Armano makes some good points.



One part which particularly resonated with me, was his chart on Planning and Improvising. As in life, successful brand strategy in today's world is based on both the ability to PLAN and the freedom to IMPROVISE. Setting guidelines for look, feel, tone of voice, messaging and so on are all vital for the core of a brand, but so too are the more flexible elements which allows the company to respond in real time to its environment.



Right now, social media is one way brands - and the people responsible for marketing them - are able to bring this flexibility to life. But, as Armano goes on to say, "Social media is this hot thing right now. Marketers tend to [go after the new thing] without fully understanding it and doing their homework, or really digesting what's changing." Finding ways to spot and integrate the new and the next, is just as important as being on top of what's hot now.

For a whole treasure trove of charts, graphs and continuums, check out Armano's Flickr set here.

And thanks to Mills at ustwo for Showyou-ing me this vid and disrupting my breakfast!

This...

Just happened! *Puts on game face*

20 Reasons...

Been thoroughly enjoying everyone's feedback to my "20 reasons not to date a digital strategist". Some very funny responses, including a few people who thought they were all very good reasons to date a strategist! Well, we try!

A couple more reasons have been added to the post, so have scroll and check them out. Meantime, thanks to @joesafiend for sending this Twitpic over today - very funny!

OMFG!

20 Reasons Not To Date A Digital Strategist

In response to 50 Reasons Not To Date a Graphic Designer...

20 REASONS NOT TO DATE A DIGITAL STRATEGIST


1. They won’t date you unless you are followed by someone who follows them
2. They only want to eat at places with Foursquare specials
3. They will live tweet your date. Even the third one!
4. They will start a Tumblr about your relationship, with supporting Twitter feed
5. They will try to send you naughty pics via Photoswap
6. They will introduce you to their friends via Hashable
7. Their idea of a gift is to get you in on the Beta of a new app
8. Their idea of sending flowers is to take a picture of some on Instagram and @ you
9. If you make a joke they will LOL
10. When you have sex they imagine Pete Cashmore
11. They saw the new viral video two weeks ago
12. If they had to choose between saving you or their iPhone from a burning building...
13. They crowdsource where you should go on holiday
14. They have no idea what’s going on in Libya, but will send you 5 videos of cats talking before breakfast
15. They dream in 140 characters or less
16. They still won’t let you shop in Gap because of the whole logo thing
17. They judge the seriousness of the relationship based on the number of platforms you are connected on
18. SXSW is just a chance for them to catch up with everyone they’ve ever slept with
19. When you don’t update your status on Facebook for more than a day they assume you are dead
20. When they #ff people, you only find out later they were Furiously F*cking them

.... 21. They call themselves "Digital Strategists"
.... 22. According to Mashable, "Active Twitter Users Have Shorter Relationships".

Let me Showyou

Most of the time when people ask me what I do in my job everyday, my response is "I blog and I tweet". It's simpler than going into some in-depth explanation about brand strategy, and is far more effective in alienating people who do "real" jobs like saving lives and changing the world. As my friend used to say "It's PR, not ER".

Anyway, an app I did the brand strategy for launched yesterday, so I can finally reveal what I get up to during the week. Showyou is an app for the iPhone and iPad which gives people the fun of serendipitously discovering and sharing new videos via their social graph. The Twitter buzz today has described it as "Flipboard for videos".



You can check out the full case study for the project by clicking HERE.

It's still quite a new arena, but I'm really enjoying working on app brands for several reasons. Firstly, the clients are usually from a tech/digital background so they are well tuned in to the "moving world" and up for taking risks. Secondly, stand alone app companies are generally quite small, if not in start-up mode so you are working directly with the founders. It's their baby, they're really excited and you all want to get the best out of a branding exercise. And finally, app brands by their very nature give you room to think right up to the edge, if not off it. Living on a smart phone or tablet, apps can come to life visually, sonically, gesturally and socially - all amazing opportunities to create ownable, branded assets.



Showyou is an absolutely fabulous app. The designer on the team, Marian, and I spent practically a whole weekend passing the iPad between us, drifting through the 'infinite grid' of Showyou videos. I'm thrilled I got to be a part of how it came to life.

Game Changing

I recently read that the Starbucks Mobile Card app has had over 3 million users, making Starbucks "the nation’s largest mobile payment network". Not Amex, not Visa, not Bank of America. Starbucks.

I also read that Google has set aside $100 million to pay for original programming across ten YouTube channels. Fox, CBS, HBO, ABC... looks like you're going to have a new network to contend with - one with in excess of 2 billion viewers per day. That's more than double the prime time viewing figures of all of the major U.S networks combined.

Ten years ago Nokia wouldn't have dreamt that their biggest competitor would be a computer brand. Just as a hundred years ago, Nokia couldn't have imagined moving from making rubber galoshes to mobile phones.



Brands know that competitors emerge from the most unlikely of places and, with today's incredible pace of change, they are doing it faster and harder. It seems if you don't own the platform, the device, or sell caffeinated drinks to Americans, then no industry is safe.

I saw the best minds of my generation...



Picked up O - The Oprah Magazine at the airport this weekend. It's the poetry issue - Oprah shares her private journals, and there's "words that soothe, ideas that delight". For the most part, it's not a bad read. It's poetry lite or poetry for dummies, and I'm all for getting people into poetry at any level. But just when I started to think this could really impress me, I get to "Eight poets accessorized with snippets of their own verse - celebrate freedom of expression". One up-and-coming young poet has this byline:

"By day, Whited is the communications director for Schools That Can, an educational nonprofit; by night, she's working on publishing her first book of poems. "I write a lot about questioning the boundaries of self," she says. "I like experimenting with new things." Case in point: this suede miniskirt, shorter than Whited would normally wear but comfortably balanced by a long-sleeved oxford and cotton sweater."

I'm sure a pink suede miniskirt is precisely what Stephanie Ann Whited has in mind when writes. It's such a shame that Oprah couldn't get to the end of an issue without commercialising the heart out of it. And, without getting all feminist on ya, it points again to a greater issue with publishing. As women, magazines only offer us reasons to hate ourselves and feel ugly, unfit, unhealthy, poor and bereft of Jennifer Aniston's upper arms.



Wired and Fast Company (the other mags I picked up), however, are packed with men's advertising insinuating I am an interloper to these publications, yet they always leave me inspired and excited. You don't see 10 page spreads of "Tech's Hottest App Developers Programme Pool Side in 2011's hottest swim trends"!

Can't now decide if that's a good or bad thing. There's my feminism argument out of the window.

The Art of Hotel Living

In art, literature, film and personalities I've always been drawn to doomed decadence. To me, the journey from having it all to having nothing is fascinating. Whether that "all" is money or talent or social standing, I am gripped by people's ability to waste it all in the most dramatic way.



Caravaggio's astounding painting and genius for capturing light was all set against an infamous backdrop of dead prostitutes, brawling and, eventually, exile. Gatsby had everything he wanted except the flashing green light at the end of East Egg where Daisy lived. The Tenenbaum children were prodigies, making them all flawed and flailing adults, unable to cope in the real, chaotic world. And Edie Sedgwick, raised riding horses in the bosom of a large, wealthy family wound up cast out of Warhol's Factory addicted to drugs and dead at 28.

Deviance, decadence, escapism, denial - these base and torturous human behaviours often manifest themselves in one particular place. A hotel. Since the invention of maid service, room service and the mini-bar, checking out of your life and into a hotel has firmly represented that all is not - or is about to be not - well. A person's state of mind must be considerably altered to find solice in arming oneself with just the bare essentials and take up residence in a hotel.



The Chelsea in New York has a long history of writers and artists in residence. Jack Kerouac wrote much of 'On the Road' there. Dennis Hopper met the man who would eventually produce 'Easy Rider' there. And Leonard Cohen wrote a song about it. More recently, The Chateau Marmont, temporary home to Hollywood's runaways, featured as the third character in Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere". The audience quickly learned everything they needed to know about Johnny's character by his disconnected existence at the Hollywood hotel.



My friend Rosanna told me about Patti Smith's autobiography. Rosanna felt that Patti's stay at The Chelsea was more about looking cool than realising that people in hotels often produce great work because they are alone, lonely and without distractions. My friend went on to explain how she believed that "living in an impersonal space makes you want to create things that defines who you are, and express yourself".

As I enter my third week in a hotel, Rosanna's words resonated strongly. With the clothes in the wardrobe the only link to my real life, to myself even, I recognise the desire to define myself through creating things. Hence why this is one of the longer blog posts.



The Shakespeare & Co. bookshop in Paris embraces the traveller's need to create themselves out of a rut. As you roam the Narnia-esque bookshop, tiny enclaves holding typewriters and rudimentary bunks appear through the gloaming. Artists and writers passing through are welcome to a bed for the night so they can gather their thoughts and, possibly, their minds.



Bur perhaps my favourite study of hotel living is Wes Anderson's prologue to The Darjeeling Limited - 'Hotel Chevalier'. Natalie Portman's character tracks down Jason Schwartzman ordering grilled cheese in a Paris hotel room.

Portman: How long have you had this hotel room?
Schwartzman: I don't know.
Portman: More than a week?
Schwartzman: More than a week.
Portman: More than a month?
Schwartzman: More than a month.

Hotel Chevalier is the perfect capture not only of decayed love, but of the cathartic aloneness one finds at the other end of the world in a hotel bathrobe.



All photos by me, except the typewriter which I stole from here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deanno/3703658172/sizes/m/

Stuff hipsters hate

Thanks to Instagram and Picnik, now you too can create emo hipster photos for your blog!





Speaking of emo hipsters - I'm thinking of moving this blog over to Tumblr. Anyone who
- Has a view on that
- Knows how to do it
- Wants to offer moral and emo support
...please get in touch.

Letter from America: Third time's a charm.

I am back in fabulous San Francisco for a couple of weeks with work and, now clocking up a total of 3 months here since May of last year, it really does feel like a very nice home away from home.

On the work side, I'm here doing brand strategy for a super cool app with some very exciting technology behind it. As such, I had the opportunity to do a brand workshop from the client's Command HQ in Paolo Alto. Just south of SF, Paolo Alto is a sweet suburban enclave just riddled with tech start-ups. You can't buy a Soy Latte without overhearing someone discussing their latest round of VC funding.



The client's house is your classic American modern home pimped out to the nines with screens and servers. Every room has been re-purposed to house tech and engineering teams all "wired in" and making the future happen. For someone with a barely concealed Geek Fetish, such as myself, their place is pretty nerd-tastic. The app I'm working on has already launched in Beta, so watch this space to see how the project develops!

Outside of work, there is only really time to eat. So I have been hitting the breakfast, lunch and dinner scenes pretty hard. For breakfast, I can nip out of my hotel to The Ferry Building for a Bluebottle coffee with a goat's cheese and apricot jam sandwich. Lunches, grabbed from nearby South Park in the Soma district consist of "Super Tacos" from Mexico au Park, or a Jalapeno Popper from The American Grilled Cheese Company. And dinner has been anything from hipster pizza at Delfina, Lobster Po Boys at Anchor & Hope, posh fried chicken at Foreign Cinema and even a quick and dirty Burger from In "n" Out. Calories on location don't count, right?




And finally, in this travel journal-esque post, to note that I have just returned from a rather wonderful weekend in Napa. Carrie Bradshaw's response to Mr Big's announcement that he was moving to Wine Country was "If you're tired you take a nap-a, you don't move to Napa!". And how wrong she was. My friend and I left SF yesterday morning with bags under our eyes and full of work anxieties. After mucho vino and mucho lolling in the hot tub in the cool and pleasant rain, we drove back today feeling well-rested and ready for another week.



Working abroad has its downsides - jetlag, disorientation and feeling forced to pull the plug on your life at home. But they are far outweighed by the upsides - new sights, new friends, new experiences and - for those who find it hard to switch-off - the chance to have a change of scene while still showing up for work each day! Clearly Napa didn't quite get its hold on me, yet!

How does Mr. Porter measure up?



Check out my piece on the Pitch Design blog now. Currently available log-in free! Click here.

Checking out – a new buzz word or the answer to monetizing location-based social networking?

Last week I feverishly posted about Venmo’s new “check out” service without much pause for explanation or analysis. So now, in a slightly calmer state of mind and with a few days spent mulling over the benefits, I’m back with more.

Venmo is an app which “makes it fun and easy to pay and charge friends” and is currently only operational in the US. Venmo acts as a social payment platform by allowing people to exchange money using their phones. Users can then socialise that transaction by attaching a message to the payment and posting it to Twitter or Facebook. It’s this social element which builds unique user stories around purchases – every brand’s dream.



Last week Venmo announced an extra service, which allowed users to attach their location to their socialised transactions – a behaviour Venmo have termed “checking out”. To me, this is exceptionally exciting.

Retailers are already getting on board with the idea of rewarding customers who check-in to their stores and unlock badges associated with offers and deals. A couple of weeks ago, Foursquare launched the ‘Century Club’ badge for people checking in for 100 days on the trot at the same place – rewarding their most frequent and loyal customers. I’m assuming it’ll be coffee shops and delis who will win Century Clubbers – low value purchases which are part of a person’s daily routine.

For any retailer or brand, loyal customers are their bread and butter – a guaranteed flow of trusted consumers. But for retailers with a higher ticket price, or for those wishing to distinguish between frequent, low-spending customers and occasional, high-spending ones, Venmo Places will be right up their street.



In my first job out of university I worked as the wholesale manager for a small boutique food company. After a few months I noticed that I was spending most of my time liasing with, negotiating with, advising and managing a handful of small independent food stores who, together, contributed to just a fragment of yearly sales. Meanwhile, our biggest wholesale customers were being ignored – placing high orders but rarely given the time to be sold in on new products and up-sold on their monthly orders. Having recognized this, I developed a simplifyed order process for our smaller customers, which took the pain out of managing them, and in turn, gave me more time to focus on our more profitable customers.

This is exactly what Venmo Places can offer – visibility on who your most valuable customers are. Not just those routine-orientated Foursquare Mayors who will stop by and check-in every day regardless.



By seeing spend against check-ins, retailers can map tailored rewards to a broad range of customers. They will have invaluable insight on the customers who spend $4 a day every day for a year ($1,460p/a) deserving little treats, and the customers who come in once a month and drop $250 ($2,400p/a) and who, with a little bit more attention and incentivizing, might be upgraded to a bigger monthly spend. It’s business basics with a modern flair. Call me geeky, but that seems like pretty powerful stuff.

Magazine apps fail to stack up (Via Design Week online)

For those of you without a Design Week log in - here's the copy from my vox pop on magazine apps. No copyright infringement intended



"At a time when print media is having to pull its socks up on the digital front, most magazine apps fail to stack up to their digitally-native competitors. The Net-à-Porter magazine looks great and is regularly updated with new fashion tips, but many of the things that an app interface offers have been neglected. It is not possible to ‘shop the look’ by tapping on certain elements, nor can you share pages to your social network or through email. It’s not even possible to pinch in to get a closer look at the clothes. With iPhones and Blackberries now as much as an accessory as a piece of tech, fashion magazines have a real opportunity to collaborate with brands to develop profitable apps that mix great editorial with the chance to share, comment and buy."

Then I saw his face, now I’m a Belieber

Last night I went to see the Justin Bieber movie – Never Say Never. In 3D. Now, before you forever delete Camilla’s Store from your Google Reader, please give me a few paragraphs to explain myself.

I’ll admit, it just sounded like a fun thing to do with @celialikesbooks on a quiet Sunday night. But more importantly, as a digital strategist it’s important to know what’s going on with the kids (da kidz) and millions of hysterical teenage girls worldwide can’t be wrong.



Bieber may be a study in poorly managed ADHD but he is also a carefully curated, expertly executed, cross-platform brand who rose from a few YouTube videos to an 86 gig tour culminating in a sell-out show at Madison Square Gardens. There’s got to be some social media strategy lessons in there somewhere. And if they’re delivered in 3D, so much the better.



Firstly, The Bieb. He’s alright – ticks all the boxes of cute, non-threatening, triple threat youth dynamo. But it’s his team – consisting of Mom, grandparents, vocal coach, costume designer, manager and “jester” (their words, not mine) – who really run the show. This is pushy parenting taken to whole new levels, and you are left wondering whether stardom is an excellent outlet for Bieber’s effervescent energy, or a depressing theft of his youth.

In the film, Justin is joined on stage by other celebabies Myley Cyrus and Jaden Smith (“my papa is a guy named Will”), both of whom have an unnerving world-weariness. Poor Jaden only found out his parents had made the helicopter to NYC moments before he went on stage at The Garden. And to think I freaked out if I lost my mum in the supermarket.



Secondly, the film. I hate to admit it, but part of me feels it belongs in the “Films of our era” drawer along with The Social Network. It’s by no means as beautifully crafted, but it’s the first example of large-scale storytelling via YouTube videos, Twitter updates and comments sections I’ve seen.

Justin is the perfect product of the “Digital Instinctive” generation – discovered, followed, and loved by a dedicated online community. And he gives the love back – tweeting his fans to let them know how he’s feeling, giving away front row tickets to kids outside the venue, and regularly updating his YouTube diary. His hit “Baby” has had 468,497,309 views on YouTube. 21,665,394 people “like” him on Facebook”. And he has 7, 481,097 followers on Twitter. That is power. That is a massive slap in the face to any brand who thinks it doesn’t need to engage its customers – and most importantly its future customers – online.



You may not feel a slow-motion hair flick in 3D is an entirely necessary part of the cinema experience, but if you’re wanting a crash-course in the art of digital strategy driving both brand and comms, Bieber is your guy. Never say never.

Photo credit: @celialikesbooks - you keep me real.

Sorry – not available in your country

I thought the days of being the odd kid no one wanted to play with were over. But no, turns out that just living in England can keep you out of the metaphorical sandpit of tech start-ups popping up Stateside. Already this year, I had to suffer the indignity of asking an American what The Daily app interface was like. Ok, it was the guy that designed it, but still.



And today I find out that app-based payment service, Venmo, has added an incredibly exciting feature which, you guessed it, “isn’t available in my country”. Sometimes I wonder why my ancestors couldn’t have just stayed on the boat from Russia for another couple of stops across the Atlantic. Show me the apps Granny!

Anyways, enough whining. Until I get the call from MB SF, I must live vicariously through Mashable and Fast Company. And that new Venmo feature? Location-based payment publishing.



“The Venmo apps for iPhone and Android make it super simple to settle the bill evenly (to the penny, if you like), and given the number of people that are using Venmo to split the bill when they go out, we have integrated with Foursquare and Facebook places to allow you to attach a location to every payment you make.

Venmo Places also makes it really easy to see how often and how much you are spending with your friends at your favorite spots.”

The money shot? This: “Plus, when you publish a payment tagged with a place, it’s a fun way to share your experience with any of your Facebook, Twitter, or Venmo friends who might not have been there. We like to think of it as the “check-out” followup to a Foursquare or Facebook “check-in.””

VERY exciting. Watch this space.