Very talkable and very likeable.

1. Become the CV/resume platform
The design of public profile pages are too dry. Couldn’t the layouts have customisable themes to suit personalities and professions? They need to let people better express their portfolios and achievements. LinkedIn have the opportunity to become people’s CV/resume on the web and should take it.

2. Make conversations easier
Conversation and connection is at the heart of their brand. Group functionailty and social graph integration could be much richer. LinkedIn could be a service people encounter daily.
How about providing free online spaces for people to brainstorm topics or generate feedback on pitches and product ideas?

3. Get more people to go Pro
LinkedIn offer three account upgrade options, ranging from $24.95 to $499.95 per month. I’m sure that’s good value for some professional recruiters, but isn’t there an opportunity for Pro-style badges for the mass market? Done right, people would feel a professional obligation to have a Pro account – it’d be like putting on a good suit for an interview. Flickr seem to have this right at $24.95 per year.

4. Enable real-world networking
Every day all over the world, people attend conferences hoping to make new connections. How could LinkedIn add value? Could they provide dynamic pages on your upcoming events showing who else in your network/target is going to be there too? Could they be more proactive on Twitter, using hashtags to partake in conversations around hot events and topics. Might they even run/sponsor networking sessions at the bigger conferences?

5. Own the advice space
LinkedIn could be the platform for professional advice. Sites like Horses Mouth are getting traction in the mentoring space, but LinkedIn have the scale to take a huge share in this. Most successful business people would be flattered to share their experiences if it was made easy.

Is it possible to use that fleeting moment to market yourself globally?

Sure is. As the b3ta newsletter* explains,

You probably don’t remember Erik Weiner’s performance in The Sopranos. His single line was, “Leon, take your break at two.” Erik is now stretching out his small moment of fame, for comic effect, and thereby making himself much more famous as a result. Clever stuff, Erik.

* often nsfw

It’s to the eternal credit of my then manager, Jason Nicholas, that he signed off a £25k budget to investigate further. Over the following months, I worked with great people at Ogilvy & Mather (especially Saul Klein) to create Guinness’ first website. We didn’t have the brand domain, so it was hosted at the clunky URL of http://www.itl.net/guinness (sadly not captured on archive.org’s wayback machine). We stretched the limits of  Mosaic/Netscape to offer not only images (woo) of a pint, but also an animated gif (double woo!!) of, er, a spinning globe. We even put that address on a TV ad.

But by far the most successful and illuminating piece of work was the Guinness Screensaver. As a format, screensavers went on to be be hackneyed quite quickly, but at the time it was wildly original. It’s not too much of a brag for it to lay claim to being one of the first pieces of viral marketing.

Guinness had just launched a new ad, Anticipation featuring a guy dancing round a pint to infectious mambo music.  The idea was to bring to life his inner excitement while waiting for the pint to settle and be ready to drink. It was fresh and wildly popular.

O&M created the screensaver and we put it on the website. But back then, very few people had internet access and this file was a mammoth 1.3 megabytes(!) In the end, we branded up hundreds of 3.5″ floppy discs and put the file on there (it just fitted, thankfully). We seeded a few to friends and colleagues and suddenly the requests came pouring in. By letter! I had a box under my desk and spent most of my day stuffing envelopes. People would take the discs and pass them around friends and colleagues. People loved having beer imagery in their workplaces. There was a point in 94/95 when it seemed every office had screens saved to Joe McKinney dancing round a pint.

[edit] thanks Leo for the screencap!
Can anyone help preserve this small piece of web/marketing history? It’d be great to screencapture it to a movie file and put it up on YouTube for posterity. The .exe file ran under Windows 3.1 and if you’d like a copy, please email me hello (at] contrarymarketing dot com or via Twitter @cslyons

a blank CD-R in a jewel case with art and liner notes. Fans can just download the music off a P2P site and burn it to the CD-R.

I’m sure this is a genuine case of label/artist differences, but if it were a PR stunt cooked up to raise awareness of the album, it’d be genius.

Imagine: once the hype around Danger Mouse’s audacious blank CD release has peaked, both parties could suddenly come to an agreement to release the album for real and cash in on the publicity.

I think people will pay for digital content – if it’s easy enough.

The problem with handing over £0.99 to read a newspaper online is not the price - it’s just too much hassle. You have to fill in your details, confirm your email address, enter your credit cards etc. Urgh. Simple micropayments have never been cracked on the web.

Apple have shown the way forward. No-one was buying digital music till they made it easy. No-one bought mobile apps till it became a breeze to do so. The sweet integration of device (iPhone), content (apps, music, tv) and store (iTunes) removes all the barriers. They’ve made it almost fun to spend.

When paying for good content on the web is this easy, people will do it.

btw, would anyone have bought iFart on the web using a credit card?

The full 18 mins are worth watching, but if you want a flavour, start at 10’14″

A brilliantly inventive and talkable use of media – playing perfectly to Lost fans’ love of the unexpected.

This is smart and in direct recognition that people don’t mind ads as long as they don’t get in the way.

“By catching them at a time when they’re pausing the program, when they’ve finished with a program,” said Tara Maitra, vice president and general manager of content and advertising at TiVo, “the viewer’s main reason for being there isn’t being interrupted.”

Seems so much more civilised than a 30 second spot. And you can easily imagine Google wanting a piece of this action.

TV AdWords anyone?

(Thanks to @adbroad  for the tip)

But of course, it is anyway. And we all made it so. It’s freshness and audacity screams out to be shared.

Big brands have lost the advantage they once had on finding, sanitising and packaging youth culture for us. A big budget and well-researched ad concept is no match for authenticity and peer recommendation.

Reminds me a bit of this marvellous piece of lo-fi fun from a few years ago:

Suppressing things there is a huge market for rarely works and the publicity around this verdict will likely produce copycat services and spread the awareness of bittorrent technologies further into the mainstream.

I heard a great line attributed to Cory Doctorow “P2P is a demand signal from the market”.

More power to forward-thinking business models such as Spotify, gaming tie-ups and ad-funded services.

This is going to be an ongoing PR management issue for Innocent, but hats off for blogging it in the first place and keeping open the comments thread. This way the debate happens on their site and allows them to put their side of the story.

Indeed, so far the objectors have not gained much traction on other new protest platforms such as Facebook, and my bet is that this will die down. There’ll always be some people who object to corporate buy-ins (eg, McDonald’s and Pret. Btw, now no longer), but most people don’t care that much.

So long as Innocent remain open and engaged, they should be able to contain the dissent and continue with their plans.

For much of the first decade of the Web’s existence, we were told that the Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a friction-removing machine. We were misinformed. The Web didn’t kill mediators. It made them stronger.

We know Google is a big hairy 800lb gorilla. What’s remarkable is how loved a gorilla they are. Often when companies are perceived as too successful, pressure groups form to turn on them: witness the scale of dissent around McDonald’s, Tesco, Wal-Mart, Starbucks et al.

Staying likeable when you’re massive is not easy.

So how does Google do it? There are many reasons, but I think the big three are:

1. Accept no substitutes
   Google aren’t dominant in search because they bullied their way onto our toolbars – they’ve earned it through being the best. I’ve come to believe that, were I to use another search engine, I’d somehow be getting substandard results
2. Free to consumers
   Pretty much everything Google offer to consumers is free: search, gmail, image search, Docs (an excellent alternative to Office) and more. Imagine how Starbucks could quell its detractors if it could give its lattes away for zip (btw – could they do that??).
3. Constant wow factors
   From streetview to moon maps to witty gmail features, Google come across as a company that does stuff for fun – they love life, they love the web and they’re not a place where killjoy accountants have wrestled control.

This all adds up to a feeling that Google is on our side. Who cares if industries get shaken out or that a corporation knows our intimate secrets? It’s more than a fair bargain, thanks.

Can they sustain this? Sure for the next year or two, but people move on (or retire rich) and cultures change. Can the next wave of Googlers continue to woo us? Will a future CFO be tempted to put ads on the home page? Will shareholders demand ‘new ways of monetisation’?

Will we still love them tomorrow?

Re-imagine, re-introduce or remix your product.

Trainer companies have long found new ways to benefit from nostalgia – see Reebok Classics or Converse all-stars – and long-defunct video games are making a comeback on new platforms.

I wonder how long it will be before mobile phone manufacturers do something with classic handsets?

Up to now phones have been getting smaller, techier and more serious. Maybe there’s opportunity in doing something different – I can imagine Shoreditch fashionistas slipping their SIM card into a second, old-skool phone before a night out.

As a brand opportunity, heritage in mobiles is one thing Nokia and Motorola have over Apple.

Sitting here in 2009, spam volumes have never been higher, but my gmail account gets maybe one false positive a month. Email remains quite usable.

This is what I call the horse-shit fallacy.

This is not simply a pejorative term, but is based on (possibly apocryphal) tales of London in the late 19th century. Apparently, the volume of, um, little horse presents on the streets was a growing concern and doom-mongerers voiced that “at the current rate” in 20 years time we’ll be three feet deep in the stuff.

Of course this didn’t happen, and it never would. The reason being simply (and what I argued at that spam panel) that we’d never let it. Life is not linear, and successful marketing is predicated on solving problems. Although I had no idea how spam would be dealt with, I trusted that someone would fix it. In this case, it was Google.

Extrapolating the past to create a projection of the future is endemic in our culture and only serves to immobilise innovation and limit thinking.

Don’t believe the hype. Listen out for that phrase “at this rate…” and give it a dollop of what it deserves.

Photo by Pleple2000

I use Google Reader and it’s the first (and often only) page I check on the web. There are good offline readers (eg, Vienna for the mac) but Reader is web-based and thus syncs across all your home/work computers. There are also a growing number of iPhone apps (Byline being the best to date) which let you continue reading on the move or when offline (eg, on the tube).

It takes a while to find the right feeds for you, but I’ve put together a selection of my favourites in the tech/marketing/thinky space. Right-click here and save this file. You can then easily import this ‘opml’ file into Reader (settings>import>).

Do let me know your suggestions for great sites/feeds I’m missing. Thanks.