barcamp, barcamplondon, barcamplondon3

BarcampLondon3: VRM – Adriana Lukas

Commerce has always been Conversations —> Relationships —-> Transactions but advertising assumes a transaction, and has historically tried to ignore the difficult bit ie relationships.

VRM is about how we get to take power over our own commercial information, about making a platform for you to do this, not about owning the data.

Adriana says I can’t remember all the things about everything I’ve done, I want lots of it remembered automatically.

So collect the data, make some tools for analysis, overlay your social network and preferences.

Too much for 30 minutes 🙂

phew

Need. to. write. (and get some invoices paid…)

I have a fantasy about this weekend’s barcamp that I will sit around and write about all the cool things that are currently in my head. However, I have a feeling that if I wanted to do that a better solution would be to check into a hotel for the weekend rather than sleeping on Google’s floor with a bunch of ueber-geeks.

My week has included a gut-wrenching theatre experience, meeting two super-smart young women for vittles and having my mind expanded both times even though neither of them seem to have a blog (only annoying because it makes them difficult to link to), having 20 super-smart peeps of both genders sit around and talk tuttle, meeting with a client and getting to think big thoughts about their online social networking, having a breakfast consisting of coffee, fruit salad, bacon and enneagram, covering the Edge Awards Winners Workshop and getting to meet a whole big bunch of people who love developing the talents of younger people – together with said younger people as well, natch. I had the treat last night of hearing the history of Dolphin Square as related by some of it’s longer term tenants. Oh yes, and my copy of The Starfish & The Spider arrived so I’ve also been reading and getting an explanation for why I’m more Mary Poppins than Maria von Trapp.

That’s just some reasons why my facebook status said “Lloyd is phew”

friends of harry, harry tuttle, london, prototyping, social media café, tuttle

Tuttle Club First Prototype

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Yesterday I was knocked out that not only had 20-ish people signed up to come talk about the Tuttle Club AKA London Social Media Café (and bring their own coffee and a donation to help pay for the room) but they pretty much all turned up and treated the idea seriously like it’s really going to happen. At the risk of over-thanking, which is probably impossible since today is Thanksgiving anyway, thank you again for your participation, contribution and general good humour.

I put up a page on the wiki for people to write about it and link to what they thought if they wrote/filmed/recorded/drew something about the day. However all I did was to list the names of people who have come.

So if you were there – go here and say something about your experience of the session and what you’re going to do next. Please do also tell everyone you know about what a cool time you had and what you liked about it.

If you weren’t there but are still interested in what happened – go to the same place and have a look. If when you get there, there’s still nothing but a list of names, find someone on the list that you know and use every bullying technique you have at your disposal to get them to open up about it online.

marketing, rolling snowballs, scoble, social media snowflake, starfish

Social Media Starfish => Social Media Snowflake

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Social Media SnowflakeA couple of weeks ago, Robert Scoble blogged and made a couple of videos talking about the combined use of a whole bunch of social media tools and wrapped them up by saying they were a starfish. His point by the way was not only to explain how these tools all help with marketing and sales conversion but also to talk about how Open Social is changing the landscape.

When I came to present this to a client in the context of a social media strategy however, I was about to use Darren Barefoot’s excellent graphic version (with added logos!) when it suddenly occurred to me that actually it would be better to talk about it as a snowflake because we’re in the business of making snowballs to roll downhill.

Hey Scoble, don’t worry, the underlying idea’s the same and all credit to you for it 🙂

friends of harry, harry tuttle, social media café

Friends of Harry

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Harry Tuttle
Thinking about Harry Tuttle. Harry is a Freelance Heating Engineer in a world where such things are illegal. Central Services call Harry a terrorist.

Harry appears briefly two or three times in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. I don’t know if it’s the best film of the late 20th Century, but it’s certainly consistently one of my favourites. Harry, played by Robert De Niro, and his attitude to paperwork and bureaucracy just struck a chord with me, growing up as the battle raged between Thatcher’s anti-social selfishness disguised as freedom and the post-war monolith of nationalised industry. And despite the fact (brought home to me last week in Berlin facing a row of smooth-faced twenty-somethings) that this was more than 20 years ago and before some of you were born, that film – what it says about the state, big business and “terrorism” are still things we’re talking about.

Harry’s spirit is summed up when the hero, Sam Lowry asks Harry about his broken-down, over-engineered, bodged together heating system. Sam says “Can you fix it?” “No,” says Harry, “but I can *bypass* it”. And that’s what I see again and again among this band of misfit, oddball geniuses who I bump into around the web and it’s physical outcroppings, many of whom I now call “friend” and not just in a FaceBook kind of way.

Thank you for your suggestions about guest/hosts. It really helped me be clear that we needed something simple which neither implied any power, hierarchical or elevation of status in the relationship nor unswerving agreement, just something in common, that we can all agree on. “Friend” is great for that. And I’d suggest that we’re all, in some way “Friends of Harry” so that’s what we’ll be. Anyone who comes to the café will be a Friend of Harry, but of course, you can be a Friend of Harry without actually coming there – that’s what Harry’s like.

To keep this up, I’m also starting to talk about the “Tuttle Club” as another name for Social Media Café partly because it’s shorter, partly because it says more about a point of view than a technology and partly because I increasing get the feeling that we’re about more than Social Media. The names are interchangeable, but I think that the Tuttle Club probably covers more than the just the café in London. Let’s see.

social media café

Being a guest and a host

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I’ve been thinking about what the people who attend the cafe should be called. I do think it’s a good idea to have a name for them and it definitely should not be consumers or users and probably not even customers. I think it should be something other than all that.

The spirit that I’m trying to capture is that you don’t *only* go there to get stuff out. You also go there to give something of yourself. If you’re not into giving of yourself, then it’s probably not the place for you to go… today – maybe tomorrow you’ll feel differently, who knows.

I’ve been thinking of us as both guests and hosts. However, perhaps because I’ve been in the land of concatenation where if you don’t have a word for something, you take two existing words and smash them together, I can’t get past guesthost or hostguest, both of which are tricky to say and to understand in English.

It’s not on the critical path 🙂 but I’d be interested to hear any suggestions.

babelfish, friends, stephanie booth

Wilkommen

Last night I twittered in German when I’d arrived:

Wilkommen in berlin. Sehr spät und glücklich mein schlafzimmer zu finden. Guten nacht twitternet :)

however when I got to Rezeption this morning, I really struggled explaining to the waitress what I wanted for breakfast (It didn’t help that I hadn’t decided).

and then this morning I listened at last to Stephanie Booth‘s babelfish presentation, which opened up lots of questions to me but reminded me of why all this multilingualism is complex. We think that we either know a language or we don’t, but as well as the continuous scale of fluency there is also the complicating dimensions of whether we it’s written or oral and whether we are transmitting or receiving. So my level of fluency in German (just one of the languages I pretend to know) varies depending on whether I’m reading, writing, listening or speaking – in fact it seems to me that *my* fluency is represented in that list in descending order, so I’m quite comfortable reading and making sense, but ask me to open my mouth and you get ummm errrr… silence mostly and a lot of hand waving.

busking, music, seesmic, singing, ukulele

Uke News

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Long-time readers here will have been aware of my plunking and warbling, but I’ve only recently been coming out of the ukulele closet more widely.

My seesmic fun has been well-received but before all that started, I did an audition for a busking licence on London Underground and yesterday, I heard that I passed 🙂

I know it’s not to everyone’s taste, so I just wanted to warn those who are uke-averse that shortly (just waiting for my police check) you won’t even be able to escape by going underground…

I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.