Tag : presentations

Not so long ago, Neil Perkin invited me to speak at the event he was arranging to take place at Google UK HQ. Neil was keen to explore what Agile Planning means and the event, named FireStarters, brought together a 100 or so planners to share in the discussion. What followed was an excellent evening that included Mark Earls giving us What She is Having and many breakout sessions on various themes over beers. Neil has a great write-up on his blog.

This was a great chance to expand on the Lean Startup based approach we are using at Made By Many and introduced at Planningness in NY back last September. Since then we have learn't alot and the presentation I gave (embedded after the jump) introduces what I think can become some best practice for developing "Lean Agencies", agencies built from the ground-up to search for innovation. 

People are sharing stuff online more than ever before. The popularity of services such as bit.ly, ShareThis and even Twitter are evidence of this.

You often hear people bandy around an “80/20 rule” (see Pareto principle) where in a social environment, 20% of people will contribute 80% of the content, be it through forum or blog posts, new topics, videos etc. It’s horribly over-simplistic but it’s a tidy rule of thumb. It’s a good way to remember that you will only ever get a small number of folk actually contributing anything to a community. The theory being that if you can get the 20% then the 80% might follow. It’s been around for a long time and you can see patterns of this in anything that exhibits long tail behaviour. It’s supported by Forrester’s highly useful Social Technographics® ladder of behaviors, which is worth grokking if you have the time.

Data. It’s the word on everyone’s lips and… err fingertips. Yes, we all dream about getting our hands dirty with data nowadays. I’ve read a number of excellent blog posts and seen some killer presentations on the subject over the past few days and I thought I’d share. Because sharing is *good*.

The Battle Between Art & The Algorithm (by my brother Ben at BBH Labs). In this post Ben provocatively suggests that the rise and rise of algorithmically powered recommendation is robbing us of serendipity: “We’re talking about the end of surprise.” Having taken us to the edge of despair he then highlights some examples of things working pretty well (AKQA’s Halo 3 work, anything by Jonathan Harris – especially We Feel Fine.) What a tease.

Made by Many has worked with Amnesty UK since January ’08, and helped them design and buildProtectTheHuman.com – their digital activism community.

Stuart pointed us to this neat video that uses graphic design to track the marked shift in marketing reality as it stands today. Take a look.