Communities Dominate Brands

Someone once told me a story about Herbert Simon

I was in the Hospital Club the other day with J-Mac and Vikki Chowney having a good ol' chinwag and this bloke comes up to me, asked me to write down something that I felt was important to me and then took my photograph.

You can see the result here

Mario the photographer writes

We are all shaped by the things that someone once told us. The words we hear impact on us, whether we want them to or not, and it’s undeniable that they have a power.

Someone Once Told Me is essentially a means for me to practise my photography - and give others the excuse to use their cameras - as well as giving me something to do on my days off as I wander around London, which always feels full of possibilities.

But SOTM is also an attempt to gather and chronicle some of the things that people have heard in their lives, the messages and expressions that have stuck in people's head, for reasons both obvious and odd. Someone told me once that this project was 'photography meets storytelling', which sums it up rather neatly, I think.

Fascinating and thank you Mario

Where are we now, Nov 2008, in the Communities Dominate space? Graeme Wood summarizes

This is an absoloute must-read blog posting for any readers of our blog.

Our friend Graeme Wood at GeekMedia has written a fantastic blog posting about where we stand, entilted The Future of Social Media. When you read it, the blog posting sounds almost like an updated book review of our book Communities Dominate Brands, the themes are all there and the ethos is precisely that of "Communities Dominate" except that when you read each his 49 points, you notice that his examples are all beyond our book, and in many cases the points he's now identified and separated, are distinct from our book (yeah yeah yeah, it is about time for Alan and me to work on a sequel, we know we know, but we've been kinda busy ha-ha).

But back to the fantastic article. It would not do justice to the whole piece for me to extract an excerpt. I urge you, please hop over to GeekMedia and read the whole thing, you'll find it makes fantastic sense, you'll find many familiar themes and the "right companies" and the "right people" mentioned, yet it all builds and makes so much sense. A must-read piece. Thanks Graeme.

So cool, Economist innovation award for inventor of SMS: Matti Makkonen

This is so cool and so relevant.

Matti Makkonen, a giant of Finnish telecoms, has been awarded the Economist Innovation Award for Computing and Telecommunications for 2008. You may not have heard of Matti Makkonen, but you do use his service every day. In fact, no other computing or telecommunications system has ever been used by more people than the one he helped invent and create. It is SMS text messaging.

So cool, so cool, so cool.

Matti has retired and in his last job he was CEO of the Finnet Group in Finland (one of my two operator employers back when I used to be employed in Finland) but I was truly privileged to have actually worked with Matti to considerable and deep degree. He was a senior VP at Nokia when I was there, and right after I was promoted to start up and head Nokia's business consulting unit, my boss sent me to tutelage to only one person - Matti Makkonen. Because of Matti's long career in the telecoms operator business as a senior exec prior to joining Nokia, he was perfectly poised to give me advice on what my department was to aim for and achieve - as the clients of my department's consultants would be the major mobile telecoms operators around the world.

In giving me advice, Matti was always thoughtful, insightful, and helpful. He was able to truly guide the development of my little department and I was always impressed at how thoroughly he would dedicate his attention to the needs of what was, after all, a very junior exec in HQ with a modest department. He treated me with enormous respect and this was also something I then insisted my consultants would always do with everybody else, both internally at Nokia and with our customers.

Matti was also supportive of me after I left Nokia to launch my own consultancy. He is in every sense of the word a gentleman. And for Finland's mobile telecoms industry, he is one of the true giants. Now he has won this year's computing and telecoms award for innovation, by the Economist, for SMS text messaging. I love it.

Matti, my best best best congratulations. I know you are retired, and won't bother reading techie blogs and following this industry anymore, but this award is so deserved. I will make sure I get the word to you also via email, that we Finns all around the world are celebrating you.

And I have to add, that once again, yet once again, the Economist - my favourite weekly newsmagazine - manages to prove it truly understands the 7th Mass Media, they get their stories on mobile telecoms right far more than any of their rivals. Good call, Economist.

UPDATE - I was just surfing the web to find a contact for Matti, and found a comment on his award by Jukka Salonen, the CEO of Finnish mobile developer Bookit. Look at what Jukka said and observe the pattern, this truly is the personality of Matti Makkonen, he made everybody feel like this. Listen to Jukka explain:

I was just a young guy – when I joined Telecom Finland in 1996. Matti was a top executive but yet he took time and patience to listen to my ideas of making PC applications available to a mobile phone. Matti listened carefully and then replied: “Why should we limit mobile applications to things we normally do on a PC!  Mobile phone has advantages that PC does NOT have: It fits nicely in your pocket, so it is always with you. You can use it with one hand and press the buttons with your thumb, even when you moving. Think if we could make reservations, payments and quick and easy transactions just pressing one button”. Think of the mobile phone as a remote controller of your life, continued Mr. Makkonen.

One - you see Matti acting just as gently and respectfully towards a far junior new hire at Telecom Finland in 1996, as he did to me as one of the most junior execs of Nokia in 2000. But secondly, observe the second half of that paragraph - and most importantly the timing. In 1996 Matti Makkonen was telling his employees that a "mobile phone has advantages that a PC does not have."  Does this sound familiar? Can you see the seeds of Tomi Ahonen's 7th Mass Media theory and so forth. Here is where it all came from. At a time when the whole world said that nobody would type text messages on a phone, and that mobile phone penetration rates would never exceed 20% per capita - Matti already saw that this was a "remote controller of your life". Matti, you truly are a genious.

And thank you Jukka for that wonderful anecdote of Matti's life. And in addition to a much longer story about his career, there is a wonderful recent picture of Matti Makkonen in the story, and Matti seems lively and energetic and youthful in that photo as he always was, seeming decades younger than his real age. I miss my sessions of guidance by my mentor....

Tomi launched parallel blog for 7th Mass Media to support his newest book of same name

I wanted to take this moment to celebrate the launch of my sixth book, Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media (subtilted Cellphone, Cameraphone, iPhone, Smartphone). The book appeared on Amazon UK and Amazon USA this week and had its first ranking at the UK site already (debuting at 59,000 ranking and number 36 in telecoms books and 78 in advertising books). Remember that you can always buy it direct from the publisher (probably also the fastest way to get the book still now in November 2008) who ship worldwide at http://mobile7th.futuretext.com/

The book has incredibly warm first reviews, ranging from Chip Hawkins (we all know him as the founder of Electronic Arts and he now is chairman of Digital Chocolate) to Vodafone's Strategy Director Daniel Appelquist calling it my best book yet. Digital tech guru and fellow author Paul Golding has written the first book review (I can't believe how fast these are coming in these days, when my first book came out, it took literally six months for the first review to be published) and I can only say, thank you Paul, you are incredible.

But the big news is that I have launched a blog about the book at   www.7thMassMedia.com   and welcome all of our readers to sample the blog and those who have an active interest in how mobile is used as a mass media channel (including of course mobile advertising, mobile marketing and engagement marketing on mobile). The blog will also track the feedback for the book.

As to our loyal readers here at CDB - do not worry. I am not going to desert you ha-ha.. I love the CDB community and especially waking up and starting my online day visiting the CDB blog and discovering a new blog by Alan. He is my inspiration and hero, and I only wish he had time to post every day...

And then there are our regular readership, who give us such a rich sounding board here in digital feedback, and a continuing dialogue on the comments sections. I will of course continue blogging here. But some readers must have felt over the past three years that at times Tomi's postings are "almost too much" about mobile. That is why the 7th Mass Media blog (and book). I will focus mobile-specifc blogs to only 7th MM, and advertising/marketing blogs only to CDB, but any convergence areas to both of course.

But check out the 7th MM blog and consider it for yourself. And yes, anyone reading this, if you would like to sample either my brand new book on Mobile being the 7th Mass Media, or if you have not yet read Communities Dominate Brands - then send me an email to tomi at tomiahonen dot com and request an excerpt of either (or both) books. The CDB excerpt is one chapter in length (plus book foreword from Coca Cola and one case study) while the 7th MM book excerpt runs 2 full chapters and the foreword and one case study. I'll be delighted to send you the samples from the books so you can safely test the books for free, before thinking of buying them. We believe in this method, that is why we practise what we preach at CDB (and 7thMM).

On the journey beyond, or No Way Back From Here says J Mac

I now had 3 days at 2 conferences in London where both Jonathan MacDonald and I spoke (or chaired) here in London and we both observed a palpable energy about this intention to pursue that "army of fanatics" and how comprehensively that will change not only advertising and marketing, but also telecoms and IT, and media, and indeed all of business, and beyond business, into government, education etc.

Jonathan "J Mac" wrote about how this changes his mind-set, and he is shifting gears. For those who know him, he does not mean he is "shifting down" ha-ha (J Mac is incredibly energetic and dynamic, far more so than I am for example, and many say I am quite energetic ha-ha) - no, Jonathan is shifting gears now - upwards. He goes from talking about the "Communication Ideal" in the "Every Single One of Us" thinking. I just blogged about it that it is the natural progression of where our book ended in 2005 and should be read by anyone who liked our book.

But now, he moves beyond. J Mac is working on "volume 2" of the Every Single One of Us thinking. He goes from how to communicate it, to how to do it. He calls it "No Way Back from Here." He blogged about it yesterday (I cannot imagine how he found the time for that), a very revealing posting showing where he feels the "vibe" is in this space.

Meanwhile at the Mobile Content conference yesterday, that I chaired and where J Mac was deliberately set to be the last speaker to close it out (he chaired it on Day 1, when I was the keynote ha-ha, see the parallel), I was asked by several, why no, why here, why us. Why not Silicon Valley, or Finland, or based on my book Digital Korea, why is this sudden leadership into the "army of fanatics" philosophy not emerging out of South Korea. I had some quick responses to that, but am thinking about it, and have a far more complete picture in my mind emerging now. I will blog about it shortly.

If you look at young people - under employment age but already fully literate - and how they interact with technology, and in particular computers and mobile phones, and the internet on both (a revealing statistic of Flirtomatic UK users from the conference yesterday - Flirtomatic has over 1 million users mostly in the UK, with a little over half using mobile and the rest using the internet version, with a youth and young adult -skewing user base. But an "online" survey conducted via mobile only (so obviously these are heavily mobile Flirtomatic users) of 6,000 Flirtomatic registered users, which asked do you use the internet - not if they used Flirtomatic - on their mobile phones - then a totally stunning 85% said yes. If this is out of half a million british users, and a massive sample size of 6,000 (normal Gallup style marketing research surveys have sample sizes typically of 1,000 or so) - they find over 8 in 10 (young) mobile phone users in the UK who access the internet on their mobile.

I do not mean to suggest that 8 in 10 Brits do so. Absolutely not. But I do mean this indicates that of the Flirtomatic (mobile version) user base, which is half a million strong, the vast majority already do.

Sorry about the distraction (oh, and another side note, Flirtomatic CEO, Mark Curtis's book is Distraction, and a brilliant read. Its subtitle is Being Human in a Digital Age, it is very very thought-provoking).

Sorry, yes. But I meant, if you look at young people today - younger than working age, and how they use the internet, mobile, etc - then you see they work and collaborate totally in different ways to their elders.

Totally differently. They know instinctively how to Google and search. They know instinctively how to collaborate in Wikipedia and post their reviews on Amazon and give their mood on Facebook. They do real time commentary on Twitter (I just had a series of 20 or so comments of my Future of Mobile conference presentation Twittered in real time. I read them afterwards and it made for a strange reading of what was on the minds of the audience. Very humbling..)

Now how will this Generation C (Community Generation) behave in the future? How will they work when they graduate and get their first jobs? How will they run companies when they move up the ladder and start to assume control.

They KNOW instinctively, that collaboration - especially in the digital information age - is the natural competitive advantage. They will insist on collaboration. Remember the "bizarre" CEO fifteen years ago who insisted that all executives have to use email, or the CEO ten years ago who insisted all management have to actively use SMS text messaging in internal communications. Their companies achieved competitive advantages over their rivals that in hindsight gave them "insurmountable" leads in productivity, and ceteris paribus (all other things being equal) would propel their company into far better competitive performance than their peers from that time.

Now, lets get back, to our J Mac.

He read our book. He says so everywhere. He then went out and thought about it. He came back, worked in this space - helping launch Blyk - and now is teaching the digital advertising world how this really works - through his current employer Ogilvy One. Fine. But he already wrote one book, and no doubt is collecting his thoughts onto his follow-up volume.

Imagine from an investor's or owner's point of view. If you could have someone like J Mac (or our Alan Moore or say David Cushman or someone else like those, who has actually done it, built successful "Communities Dominate Brands" based businesses and processes) and who then have taken those lessons and pushed this thinking beyond our 2005 book - all while sharing and collaborating with us. Imagine if you could have this talent in your organization, to tap into that ocean of marketing power, that is "an army of fanatics." Your company would shortly become unstoppable.

And army of fanatics. Imagine if you had that? You could not lose. Apple has an army of fanatics with the Macintosh computers. Apple has another army of fanatics with the iPod (with some overlap obviously). Now they launched the iPhone - through their army of fanatics. Of course it became the best-selling smartphone in the USA (where the bulk of that army of fanatics is, obviously). Barack Obama used his army of fanatics to get elected.

This is not just Blyk in the UK. This is an universal trend. But it is a radical innovation in all of business (and government and non-profits - imagine Greenpeace - that is certainly an army of fanatics - and beyond). An army of fanatics is not "only" in the digital space. It is a universal trend in humanity, and only online digital networks will enhance that ability, boost it. Remember that the mobile phone is the ultimate lubricant to this interactivity and collaboration, as Howard Rheingold said, mobile phones amplify the human talents for cooperation. Because we all carry them (not all have laptops) and because we always carry them (even sleep with them) and they are always connected (not like spotty coverage of laptops at some WiFi hotspots).

But yes, a rambling posting. There is a fierce urgency of now. Some companies will "get it" and increasingly they will seek out the best thoughts of the thought-leaders in this space. And then when David and Alan and J Mac (and Tomi) say that wait - there is an even more profound change happening now, beyond just blogging and Twittering and SMS...  That there is a fundamental shift in how some organizations work - they will pay attention. And they will experiment in this space. And their experiments will bear incredible fruits - remember Tohato potato chips campaign from Japan, remember the BMW winter tyres campaign from Germany, remember Obama's campaign from the USA. Its not just here in the UK, it is global.

There is no going back. We have come upon the cliff. We know there is a future and now we are told to take a leap of faith. And the latest to push us to jump is J Mac. He says there is no way back from here. Read it.

Iranian Blogger Could Face Death Sentence

An Iranian blogger has been arrested in Iran and charged with spying for Israel. He could face the death penalty if found guilty. Hossein Derakhshan, known around the world as the father of the Iranian blogosphere, was recently arrested upon returning to Iran from Canada.

 

Jahan News, an Iranian website affiliated with Iran’s intelligence community, reported on Monday that he admitted to spying for Israel. Derakhshan, a 33-year-old secular Iranian, has been living in Toronto for the past seven years and holds Canadian citizenship. It was in Toronto that he started writing his blog, Hoder, in both English and Persian. Derakhshan has participated in many international forums as a representative of the younger Iranian generation.

 

Observers have noted a tougher tone in his writing over the past couple of years, in that he has been more supportive of the regime in Tehran. Derakhshan has appeared in numerous news reports providing an Iranian point of view and expressing support for Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

Source The Media Line that I picked up off twitter

We blogged about it here The fight for weblogistan and beyond and here

Flows of information and communication cannot not be ultimately suppressed. If I wanted to create create a movement in Iran to fight extremist views of all persuasions I would enlist the bloggers, hence Iran's obvious distaste for Hossein.

Transformation

Off today to give a keynote at the Nokia Siemens event on Transformation

Jonathan jMac MacDonald and his Every Single One of Us, the book, the presentation, the movement

Coming soon to a theatre near you: J Mac's Every Single One of Us: The Movie !   

Ok, that one is not yet finalized, haha, but Jonathan MacDonald is one of those likeminded souls who has embarked upon our Communities Dominate journey with a vengeance and is now assuming a clear leadership role into that uncharted future where our blog readers all will instinctively want to go.

Jonathan is obviously our dear friend and was formerly with Blyk and is now with Ogilvy One and has not only fully internalized the philosphies that we discuss in our book - but also become a passionate evangelist for the thinking, and even better than that, he has practised what he now preaches - as Jonathan already said when he worked for Blyk,. that the company was built on the philosophies of our book.

So Monday at the Future of Mobile (FOM) conference in London and again on Tuesday at IIR's Mobile Content conference in London, Jonathan and I happened to speak back-to-back. And I've always loved his entertaining style, his insightful observations and his unrelenting intensity to grab audiences and propel their minds into a new direction with a clarity of purpose. So I was extremely eager to sit back and take in his presentations these past two days. And my expectation level was set very high to begin with. He is a superstar speaker.

And J Mac did not disappoint Monday and again not on Tuesday. But there seems to be an even bigger fire now in our Jonathan. He seems possessed to personally generate the change in the media, advertising, telecoms, IT and financial space. Jonathan preached of the need of brands to create an "army of fanatics". And very doggedly repeated the mantra that we have to create that change now.

The reviews of his two speeches have been unanimously off the charts in praise of his ideas and his style, and also remarkably consistent in all echoing full acceptance to what might be seen as radical philosphies of utterly changing so many legacy industries. Yes, this is now the time and yes, it is needed. The new communication ideal is Jonathan's "Every Single One of Us." To help create those armies of fanatics. And to do it now, before your competitor does it.

So? If you missed the J Mac..  How do you get to sample a piece of this radical thinking?

Well - would you know it, Jonathan MacDonald has written a book - and boy is it good! It is called Every Single One of Us. And best of all, if you're into e-books, the digital version only costs 3 UKP (about 4 Euros or 5 dollars). Hey, you can't beat that..

Honestly, for all who read our book Communities Dominate Brands, and you got to that point at the end of Chapter 14 before the case study, and you felt, I wish there were more chapters to this book - in a very real sense, Jonathan MacDonald's book Every Single One of Us is the natural continuation of where our story ended in 2005. Because Jonathan has been "doing it" on top of what we wrote back then, this is very concretely the next steps.

If you enjoyed our book or this blog, you owe it to yourself to go now and check out Jonathans' book. Don't wait. Its here  (Every Single One of Us)  This is the best book for any marketing, advertising or media professionals today.

iPhone 3G wins Phone of Year by UK magazine What Mobile

I'm in London this week doing a couple of conferences and other meetings. I picked up the monthy UK consumer magazine on mobile phones called What Mobile, and its end-of-the-year awards issue. The magazine awarded the phone of the year for the Apple iPhone 3G. This is how What Mobile described the winning selection:

The winner comes as no surprise. The iPhone 3G may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the vast majority of consumers are smitten by its gorgeous interface and stunning looks. We also lvoed the device, awarding it a fivce-star rating and Editor's Choice Award in our September review. The elegant touch menu is a joy to use and the Google Maps function is impressive but in our view the biggest improvement is the App store, offering hundreds of ways to customize and enhance the handset. And the iPhone 3G clearly has a place in our readers' hearts, as swarms of you voted for it. We couldn't agree more - its a deserved winner.

Note that the three runners-up for phone of the year were the Samsung i8510, the Nokia N96 and the SonyEricsson C902.

Our congratulations to Apple.

For location-services to succeed, need easy as SMS texting. Meet Puskaradio from Finland

I loved this simple idea.

I learned from it from my friend Tuukka Ylalahti. Their company has developed a very simple service for any Symbian Series 60 device which has a GPS receiver. You load the application to the phone, and after that, it is literally as easy to send your location to anyone, as it is to send an SMS text message. They say it is really so easy to use, that their own mothers picked it up in a moment and started to use it. The beauty is that the receptient need not be an S60 phone, can be any phone with a browser or indeed a PC with a browser. The service sends a page which opens up at the other end, which gives a map with the positioning. So it is that easy to help people find you.

To see more, check it out at this link www.puskaradio.com

I think these kinds of simple apps are needed to teach people to use location-based services. Very good idea..