Facebook : Counterpoint

My online friend Satish at Naked NY commented on the Facebook Indigestion post...Said that my Facebook experience could be at dramatic variance with the teen sentiment/ relationship with Facebook!

So, I asked a young friend of mine to put her thoughts around the subject...Here's her take...

My virtual umbilical cord (and no, this is not about the progress in medical technology!)
"The age of the global citizen...half my childhood buddies are all over the world...i know at least one person in every continent(maybe even Antarctica..i wudn't be surprised) friendships made for life...with only a geographical barrier...bridged by something as technological as the internet."

"Technology and relationships don't mix, like cold steel and heartfelt warmth maybe? Well, I'd beg to differ."

"School friends, college friends, colleagues, friends' friends, a lot of alliances you would best forget but there are just as many that matter so much."

"My best friend in 6th grade who left for boarding school in Shimla. Or another bestie who moved home to Japan when i was 14. My first crush who has lived in Colombo since we were 12, but i got in touch with again 7 years later...all thanks to Facebook."

"With such fast paced lives and with everyone in a different part of the world it's difficult to catch up for even a cursory drink, making the Boozemail application one of the largest used on Facebook."

With newsfeeds giving you a play by play update on your friend's lives(which you can update the settings of to ignore lesser acquaintances, and bring your inner circle into the limelight) to building an entirely virtual social life for the simple reason that, having a real one that functions the same way, is plain impossible.

"Facebook is what binds me to my old friends and actually helps me get closer to people I never got a chance to bond with earlier. You may realise that you and a casual friend may have similar interests from the groups you join, the applications you prefer, and a million other things considering Facebook is so customised you can read a person's personality just by visiting their profile page. for eg. Leena and I studied in the same class for 6 years in school, casual friends, but she only realised i was a fellow fan of The Doors when she read my status message. It simply said, 'Bhavna is: stoned immaculate'"

"Friendships are born out of sticky situations, escapades, lurid stories brimful of laughter and tears. Getting caught for bunking maths class and playing basketball instead or talking about your dreams and your passion over a cup of coffee while watching a beautiful sunset cannot be recreated even with the best graphics."

"We bond through sharing good times and the not-so-good (rather horrible, horrendous and torturous) ones and this is not an emotion that transmits through an LCD screen. So when you think about it, Facebook is nothing close to the real thing, but it's one hell of a replacement when the real world is out of reach."

Thanks B for sharing your thoughts...

What have you Stumbled Upon Today?

Stumbled upon this nice post on StumbleUpon Vs Google by Muhammad Saleem!

Nice read...Note to myself - Use StumbleUpon as much as Google...Actually Yahoo. I don't know your experience, but Yahoo searches invariably throw up better results these days!!

StumbleUpon is becoming an essential part of my planner tool-kit!

Facebook Indigestion : Burp:-)

Like many of you, I have been poked by friends, acquaintances, distant friends, old friends, friends of friends, new friends, do-I-know you friends, once-a-year-Happy-New-Year friends and more(phew)...

I get flowers, and wine and nick-names & superlatives and messages on the wall/ upgraded wall, and in the process these drive me up the wall! Generally been twittered and jittered by all this thumb typing and social media.

I soldiered on because I felt if I protested, I would be deemed uncool or out of sync with facebook applications...Until Kajal sent me a mail with somewhat similar thots and sentiments...So, that makes it two of us. I am not the only one facing Facebook Indigestion...

As I surpass the Dunbar Limit/Number(=150) of meaningful relationships, wonder what happens when everyone is connected to everyone. And then we all twitter, skype and say similar things to each other and drive each other crazy!!

Maybe, it ain't that bad. Maybe it's just Ponting's hammering in the T20 match(going on now) that's affecting my thots:-). Or maybe all this is going a lil over-board...I am gonna spend more time with my real job:-), my offline family/community and real flowers and beer!!

Next post. Will touch upon Relationship Capital and the Asymmetric Value of relationships(in normal English, quantity affects the quality of relationships:-)

Disclaimer: I have gained awesomely through all this social networking and web 2.0. it's just that overdose of anything gets you diminishing returns!

Eno kahan hai:-)

Jab Gopinath Met Mallya

Am referring to yet another merger and brand name change. Good ole Air Deccan dons the new name of Simplifly Deccan. And here I had barely stomached the inane name change from Indian Airlines to Indian Airlines!

I love both the characters in the sky play - Vijay Mallya,love him for being the Indian Richard Branson(in flamboyance, attitude,business acumen, ambition and aspiration if a little less in business creativity). And Capt. Gopinath for making flying accessible to the common Indian( well the ET/TOI definition of the common Indian:-)

And likewise, their two airline brands are so very different. Air Deccan - simple, accessible, human(thanks to those lovely Orchard advertising), a lil earthy & maybe frugal and KF - reeking with flamboyance, class, excess, exclusivity, Yana Gupta and the dressed-in-red-air-hostesses..

Maybe Air Deccan had to change as Mallya no longer wants it to be a cheap-airline. Budget/ economy yes, cheap no! But why tamper with such a strong brand! Why merge its distinct identity into KF.

I feel the Deccan-KF design promiscuity might dilute the KF aura a bit...It's still early days, but I am not vey sure if this new Deccan nomenclature and 360 design synergy with KF was the best possible branding solution...

GreatWayToHaveAWebsite.com

Some days back, Rob (Mosley) from a small London creative agency Nonsense wrote a mail to me...

He and his team are putting together their web-site...High Time We Had A Website
In a bigger agency set-up, few suits would have gotten together and created a brief and then it would have been delegated to the IT department/ their vendor and periodic status reports...

I think hightimewehadawebsiteis an example of online presence meets agency POV/ creativity meets WOM meets wisdom of the crowd!

Mental note : Must do something on these lines in the next 6 months...In fact the learning would be really useful for a co-creation project that I am doing(for some reason I don't like the sound of this word Co-creation though, sounds too mechanistic)

And guys...Do visit this site and vote...There are just 14 days before voting closes!!

Tough Guy. Great Teacher. Now Gone

Had read this obituary article of James Michaels in HT Mint/ NYT. JM was the editor of Forbes magazine for almost 40 years, died in the first week of this month at 86!

Writer Gretchen Morgenson talks about JM in this obituary- "JM would care only about the Forbes reader. Writers' egos, famously large, concerned him not one bit. When editing, he would hammer his views directly into reporters' copy, often in capital letters. Flaccid writing and weak thinking brought out his bark and bite."

Here are some examples, culled from an aging file known internally at Forbes as the Abuse File. I've kept them because I treasure them"

''This is badly written and badly edited. It would be an insult to foist it on the reader.''

''This is a real snoozer, lacking in specifics. Why not just send them a nice lacy valentine and forget the prose.''

''I'm sending this one back because the character is deader than a dodo.'' Can't the writer ''inject a little life without adding 10,000 words?''

''A good story turned into oatmeal by bad organization.''

''Please fix this quickest. It lacks most of the ingredients of a Forbes story. The quotes are room emptiers.''

''This is the kind of sentence that drives readers to stop reading.''

''This is a paid advertisement. Did you forget to say he walks on water?''

As you can see, the comments were blistering. But they were also instructive. Any writer who heeded them became the better for it. Here are some more:

''If I can't stay awake editing this, how can a reader stay awake reading it? What's the point? If it has a point, maybe we can make a story of it.''

''I can't make head nor tail of this. There's a story buried in all this confusion, but I can't find it. Fix it or kill it.''

''This is a remarkable job of interviewing an interesting and colorful man and getting precisely one quote.''

Writers were not the only ones to feel the Michaels lash. ''Your initials are on this so I suppose you understand it,'' he wrote to one of his editors. ''I don't.'' Atop another article, he wrote: ''Replace or run white space.''

He regularly banned words and phrases he considered overused. ''Fast track,'' ''game plan,'' ''bottom line'' and ''superstar'' were some examples. ''Upscale'' was another: ''If I see this word again I'll upthrow,'' he wrote.

Why I am reproducing this article is because I feel, as a planner one has to go through a lot of crap as well - some copy-writer generated:-) much client generated, mostly other planner/ self generated!!

It pays to avoid the wind in strategic thinking and conversations. And one has to work mightiliy hard to expel it. The sharper the words, the better the thinking!

These JM nuggets(acerbic quotes)are really a tresure trove!! They give one a lot of direction if we are willing to learn.

Context is Everything

Spotted this little ad on the now ubiquitous Garbage Dumper on the streets of Bombay...

Translated it means - "Please don't litter or spread old jokes!!"
It's an ad for the show Great Indian Laughter Challenge III on Star One...

Another kick-ass 'contextual ad' was the towel I got as a freebie at the Goa Ad Fest earlier this year from Times Now. The message said - "Big or small, we cover them all":-)

One of the biggest ways to fight ad clutter in the media landscape would be to tell interesting stories in a context. The relentless pumping of advertising rupees without a context mostly irritates the consumer or is plain filtered...

The Consumer Is Clueless

My friend Benny mailed me this link a while ago...Have a dekko!

1. It proves yet again what I firmly believe, perhaps you might as well!!
That consumers can be mostly misleading when it comes to evaluating a half-cooked creative stimulus. They are clueless. But we can't entirely blame them!

2. Yet, clients(almost all) will hang on to every word of the 6-8 guys(who make the FGD group) who pop-analyse the creative thread-bare as if all of them were seasoned critics...Even though at the back of their mind they might know that the FGD guy is a 'frequent participant' from Amar Colony/ Lajpat Nagar(if you are doing the FGD in Delhi:-)

3. The often hurriedly assembled narrimatics, animatics or other aha-I-managed-to-kill-the-creative-matics are as different from the final creative as chalk and cheese. Yet, this fact is brazenly ignored by the research agency and the client.

4. With almost all the persuasiveness and memorability of the ad dependent on the final execution and the special effects of the finished product, I fail to understand what benefit do we gather by the rigorous analysis of the half-cooked creatives...

Finally, however unscientific it may sound, there is little substitute to creative judgement and trust between the client and the agency...

More than 20 years after this 1984 Apple TVC, the 'life of a creative campaign' around the globe is still hostage to the tyranny of the FGD - the pop-pontification of the 'career FGDist'!

Vodaphone Throws a Bouncer

On the back of a strategically sound ad campaign for the Hutch name change comes this unlikely bouncer from Ogilvy! Maybe there is more to follow, but the first burst leaves me cold...

1. Beats me. What does Vodaphone mean by make the most of now?? The consumer hardly knows the brand. Why should he/she listen to this rather patronizing tone...

2. Suddenly the warmth and the simplicity of Hutch is gone! Kaput! This is not the continuation of the 'brand switch-over'? And if Vodaphone had to do such a dramatically different campaign, why did it blow up crores of rupees on the 'pug campaign' till last week??

Maybe, I am suffering from 'premature enunciation', but this doesn't make sense as of now...