I am very pleased to introduce you AOC III, the book you be published at some point in April.
“It’s time to get busy!” is the subtitle of the book this year. After all it’s been 4 years since the Times Magazine and Adage have voted the consumers, sorry people as the person/agency of the year. We have move a long way on since then and we have to start making thing as tangible as possible.

You will be able to read my ramblings on why we have to roll our sleeves and start to do stuff instead of just theorizing them.

Feel free to discover all the contributors of the book by clicking on the names below.  Can’t wait for the book to be released.

As always, many thanks to Drew and Gavin for organizing everything. And kuddos to Chris Wilson for the cover design.

Here is a random though I’ve had for a very long time. I’ve actually had it since my childhood…

Why does the next challenge always seems to be the one you are going to struggle with when in fact things go mostly OK if not smoothly?

I don’t know if there is psychological pattern here but for instance when I was a child and changed to the next class, I was always unconsciously dramatising the difficulty of the next chapter but found it relatively straightforward when I was actually stuck in the middle of the year.

To give you an analogy, it is like staring at massive book and thinking, ‘god that’s a lot of pages!’ and then actually not finding it particularly huge nor painful to read.

Well I still have this feeling when I am introduce to a new brief or a new problem to solve and I think that this uncertainty it is what keeps you on your toes, ready to find the best possible answer.

That’s it, I nothing particularly insightful to add here but I’d love to hear your experiences if you have ever felt something similar.

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The first part of the video is a very eloquent state of where the gaming industry is at the moment with games like Farmville, MafiaWars and the blurring between real and virtual. Quoting James H. Gilmore’s book What consumers want: Authenticity, Jesse Schell very rightly pointed out that the need for authenticity and reality are the main reasons for the success of these new kind of games.

The second part of the video is a the ultimate marketeers dream, transforming our life into a big RPG game where  – for instance – we would have points for brushing our teeth, (courtesy of a tooth brush manufacturer) getting at work on time, paying attention to ads on TV… Foursquare is already starting to do it as people earn point by going out therefore consuming more. This is where we have to be really careful when advising our clients. As I pointed out a while ago technology and capitalism have no moral sense as they are amoral, however we lot (clients and agency people) should have a strong moral sense and decide what the next steps are. I only hope we didn’t escape the tyranny of image for the tyranny of reality.

Have a watch at the video (in three parts) it is thoughts provoking:

You can’t force an idea to spread but you can influence its diffusion. This sentence is basic common sense to me, however as Voltaire once said “common sense is not so common”. So many times I have seen people debating for the wrong reasons because they are only trying to force it to happen rather than provoking constructive discussions.

It you have a look at what recently happened in France with the so called “national identity” debate, it is very representative of a non discussion.
If you don’t have a clear point of view, you cannot generate any debate and worst, you are only giving more room for personal subjectivity.
What has been done here reminds me of what large corporations are doing when they have lost their purpose in life, they write corporate documents using meaningless empty words trying to fill the void.

We must fight for a genuine point of view on things not necessarily the right one, but the one that seems worth fight for. When you have done this work you have solid foundations for a constructive debate.

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Here is one for all the French readers of this blog. I have always been looking for in-depth thinkers of the Internet. I have been reading Francis Pisani’s blog for a few years now but I’ve came across Paul Mathias’ blog just recently.
His work is very interesting, you can find his thoughts on ‘What is the Internet?‘, Google and the cultural issues and the future of mobile here.

I particularly like the fact that unlike many academic thinkers he isn’t all negative about the evolution of the Internet but he underlines how this ‘global phenomenon’ grows beyond the technology to create its own reality. According to Paul Mathias the Internet isn’t only a semantic place, it an extension of our lives.

By growing beyond the technology he means that the Internet is changing many aspects of our life: juridical (downloading), social and anthropological (love and sex), moral, the border between private and public…

“When we think about the the Internet, we need to think beyond the Internet, we need to think about us, what we think we are and the world we want to create.”

Have a look at his book for more informations.

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Here is a rant I’ve been wanting to write for quite a while and today I’ve decided to stick it on the blog and see if it makes any sense.

We may have much more digital tools available to our fingertips these days but are we more knowledgeable? I am not talking about the whole ‘Google making us stupid’ thing here, I am talking about finding genuine and interesting content that could make us more knowledgeable.

The more the Internet is growing the more difficulties we have to find new and interesting content. Google ranking works in such ways that it is now very hard to look for information beyond Wikipedia for instance. I have nothing against Wikipedia, it is an amazing and very reliable way to look for information however it is only one way to look for knowledge.

By creating hubs like Wikipedia and RSS feeds, we are easing the process of looking for information but we are to a certain extend creating an illusion of knowledge. Looking for a Wikipedia entry isn’t enough, it is only giving you some surface knowledge.

This is quite paradoxical for a planner but I am now operating in a vacuum online. I have spent so much time building my Netvibes page over the years that I am now doing 80% of my browsing on it. It is becoming increasingly difficult to fight against laziness and browse beyond the RSS feed.

To fight against my digital routine I try to post one interesting link/idea a day on my Twitter. Most of the time I try not to use any content from my Netvibes to post these links and it hasn’t been an easy task so far.

Balance between efficiency and discovery, that’s what it is all about!

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A while ago I wrote a post called French Planning. As I have been interviewed, together with a few other French planners working in London to give our perspectives on British planning by Stratégies magazine, I have decided to write a second one.

Overall I am pretty happy with the article, as the major points I wanted to make have been landed properly, however I just have one small concern about the title of the article.

“La recette du  (vrai) planning a l’anglaise” could be translated like this ‘The (true) recipe of English planning’. The problem I have with this title is that planning can’t be summarised by right or wrong as every planner will have his very own definition of the discipline. And the truth is, there is no magical recipe as every briefs and contexts are different. It is even truer for the digital environment as sometimes you will have to lead and sometimes you will have to work on a very small piece of the business.

Anyway, sorry to be picky but I thought I had to precise this last point!

You can have a read of the article here (in French) and make up your own mind.

You properly understand things when you get stuck into them. This is one of the most important things to understand when it comes to digital. I’ve been using Twitter for about two years now, however I am only using it as a link provider tool to look at other people and inspirations.

I have truly experienced Twitter as an alternative way to look for information during Le tour de France this year. Although I knew the immediacy of the site allows you get a snapshot of the news quite swiftly, following professional riders has been a very interesting experience.

The Herd and Tipping Point effects are interesting to follow. A famous rider starts twitting: Lance Armstrong and then you can follow half of the peloton and a few team manager.

But the most interesting thing to look at is the way they are using Twitter. Digital blurs the borders between virtual and real and by reading some of the twitts I was wondering if the riders realise they are talking in a public environment. Have a look at some of the samples below; we are miles away from the traditional, consensual post effort interviews.

Following Le tour on Twitter has been far more exciting than on the press. Even sport newspapers were using Twitter as a source for information anyway! I am obviously not saying media are dead or something like that. There is of course a role for media in the future. As they can’t compete for the immediacy of the news anymore they should focus on the quality, taking the time to go one step back and having a look at the bigger picture in order to add value.

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Seeding is increasingly important in today’s digital world. However, seeding isn’t working. Good seeding is rare and most of time treated like media buying.

If things aren’t done in a right way from a seeders perspective, it is the same from a bloggers perspective as some saw here the opportunity to participate in a vicious business model. As Paul Boutin from Wired puts it, “The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”

Of course you could argue that good content will always spread, the reality of things is that you will need some solid seeding thoughts beyond the send to a friend button.

Here is the main issue: ‘Industrial seeding’ isn’t talking to the real actors of the web anymore. It is talking to people that transformed their blogs into magazines. These aren’t the genuine actors of the blogosphere, all they are interested in are financial deals not content.  By doing so these bloggers have lost their only real power: credibility. The problem isn’t therefore about the blogosphere not being right to spread new ideas but more about finding the genuine actors of the web.

Indeed finding the right persons or groups take a lot of time and often require people with connections within these communities not a media buying agency.  Moving forward, seeding should be considered earlier in the process to allow enough time for research, making the right connections. If you are short on time anyway, sources like the Social Media Library (for the UK) are interesting and will give you an idea of the persons to contact.

Of course the two main things to remember are: great content is paramount and be transparent and collaborative when contacting bloggers.

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David Reich had a great idea to take the Age of conversation to the next level.

In his own words: “Well I thought I had an idea to get spur more talk about The Age of Conversation 2, by writing about random essays in the book and asking those authors to, in turn, pick a page at random, write about it and then tag that author to do the same.”

So I opened the book to page 112 – The fear thing by Lois Kelly. Funnily enough I am mentioning the ‘Fear of the new’ in my essay.

I really liked Lois contribution, it starts with an analogy: ‘an idea cemetery’. Who is to blame for all those great ideas that ‘never seen the light of the day’? Her answer to this simple question is very sharp: we are the one to be blame for all the great ideas that died. If you think about it, the excuse of having conservative clients, colleagues isn’t a valid one. It is down to every single person to make a difference and fight for an idea that is worth it. As Gandhi once said: “Be the change you wish to see in the world”.

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