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Facebook Places Means Bye Bye Foursquare

Walter Naeslund — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:10:05 +0000

First we got Gowalla and then we got Foursquare. At least that was the order in Sweden. Both took off quite rapidly and some of us both love it and use it for everything from party planning to personal branding (some with great success).

But both of these services always felt somewhat like a third leg. Their integrations with Facebook were somewhat crude and a lot of the social potential was wasted.

Enter Facebook Places. From what we can see so far Facebook Places is a real Foursquare/Gowalla killer. One reason is that you instantly get MANY of your friends on board. At least here in Sweden, Foursquare isn’t THAT big yet; and Facebook will swat it like a fly on the wall (pun intended). Another reason is that these users are actually your friends (or at least Facebook friends) and you thereby avoid having yet another social network to add and accept contacts to.

But the killer reason must be the social connection where you can tag the friends that are with you and that they can simply accept your locating them. That will probably increase the number of check ins dramatically, thereby creating way more activity than on Foursquare/Gowalla. Activity=pulse=life. In my mind, that means bye bye for Foursquare/Gowalla. Time will tell.

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True Story: We Survived an Emergency Landing and Went by Ambulance Plane to The Pitch

Walter Naeslund — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:33:00 +0000

How the hell can you end up in a seduction lecture, an emergency landing, a fire truck and an ambulance plane, all on the way to a client presentation? And can you still pull off the presentation? It sounds incredible, but this is that story:

A few months ago one of our biggest clients asked us to come down to Gothenburg to present our latest communications concept for them. The presentation was for the top marketing executives from all international markets, so needless to say this was a key presentation for us.

As fate had it, this meeting ended up being scheduled only two hours after the end of a speaking engagement on “Basic Seduction Theory for Marketers” in Stockholm that I had accepted an invitation to several months earlier. If you know anything about Swedish geography, you know that getting from Berns in Stockholm to the Gothenburg harbor is not something you do in two hours unless you’re EXTREMELY lucky with your flight times. We weren’t that lucky.

So I canceled the speaking gig, right? No. Canceling speaking gigs is not something I take lightly, and rescheduling the client presentation was not an option. What to do?

I started calling around to see if I could get hold of anybody with a helicopter or a plane who could fly us down to Gothenburg (always the optimist). We actually did get hold of one friend with a plane, but it turned out that he didn’t have a “cloud license”, something that I had never heard of in my life before, but which apparently meant that he couldn’t fly if there were clouds in the sky. Hoping for clear skies seemed a bit brave since we do live in Sweden after all. I’m not that optimistic.

I am however stubborn. Ridiculously stubborn at times. This was one of those times.
– Let’s book a business jet, I said to Emil (Honesty’s account director) who looked at me in disbelief.

Business jets are not exactly cheap, but after some calling around I managed to find a plane that was slightly cheaper than the others. I booked it. I guess I should have known better. Keep reading.

The talk in Stockholm went great. After I finished I rushed out to a car waiting outside with the motor running. We had to have our own car since taxis like to keep speed limits (stubborn bastards) and we really didn’t have time for trivialities like that (If you’re a policeman reading this, I’m only joking. Promise.). As we zoomed towards Bromma Airport I tried to clear my head to prepare for the next presentation.

You get what you pay for, and I suppose I should have realized what kind of plane to expect, but what came rolling out of the hangar was this tiny piece of junk propeller plane. The pilot wore jeans and a windbreaker. But there was no turning back now. We rushed aboard the four seat plane, put on our headsets and buckled up.

As the plane took off we felt immediately that something wasn’t right. The plane bounced around in the sky and sounded like an out of tune sewing machine. We held on to our iPhones for king and country. The pilot bravely pushed on for five minutes that felt like an hour before his voice came on in our noisy headsets:

– As you can hear there is something wrong with our engine and we have to turn back to the airport.
At this point Emil was starting to become really nervous about not making it to our super important meeting and asked politely (Emil can only ask politely):
– Ehrm, Mr Pilot, We’re in a bit of a hurry and…
The pilot cuts Emil short.
– That’s the least of our problems right now! We need to get this plane back on the ground!

This situation was definitely not improving.

We came down towards Bromma Airport for a proper emergency landing followed by a parade of ambulances, fire fighters and airport security cars. When the plane came to a stop, some kind of emergency procedure started with debriefings and reports. Emil and I were so worked up about not missing our meeting by now (we had after all just risked our lives to get there) that we somehow managed to convince the plane rental people that we needed to go on the fastest plane available to Gothenburg like… right now.

To this day I still can’t figure out exactly how this happened, but minutes later, after a short ride in a fire truck, we were taxing out to the runway aboard an ambulance jet (I shit you not) and took off for Gothenburg to the roar of jet engines.

Rocketing across the sky in what must have been close to 1000 km/h we tried to finish up the presentation keynote.

The interior of the ambulance plane consisted of three seats and a stretcher, plus two ad guys with MacBooks. It’s no exaggeration to call this a strange scene.

When we walked into the meeting we were a mere fifteen minutes late. We walked in, trying to breath normally, apologized for being fifteen minutes late and fired off our presentation. It was one of those moments from an American high school movie when everything is in slow motion and the fat kid scores the winning goal in the football finals. *Musical score fading up*

On my way out from the meeting I looked up and met Emil’s eyes. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing I did, “I don’t know what the hell just happened, but somehow we pulled this off”.

We had made it! The concept presentation was a great success and today we are rolling out that concept in Sweden and internationally. When the evaluation came back from the speaking gig at Berns, it was all top marks there as well. Somehow we had managed to execute what seemed like an impossible plan.

So what’s the moral of this story? Well – I guess I can summarize it in this single sentence: “Impossible is a mindset”. There is always a way to get things done if you put a bit of extra effort into it, and I think that sticking to this conviction is an important ingredient in succeeding with anything. And besides, getting some adrenaline through your veins every once in a while keeps you young and peachy.

But don’t take my word for it. Go out and try it for yourself. Pick out an impossible project and just go for it. You’ll be surprised how far a little bit of stubbornness can take you, let alone a lot.

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Turning Love Into Money

Walter Naeslund — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:39:36 +0000

Social media is going out of fashion. Not really because there’s anything wrong with many-to-many media platforms. Quite the contrary in fact. These platforms represent enormous potential. No, instead it’s because of the misunderstanding of what this type of platform can be used for in our jobs as business consultants (Yes, that’s what we are. Not clowns).

Why Millions of Views are Worhless By Themselves

Let’s face it – racking up bought YouTube views, spam-clicked (or “seeded” in agency lingo) by child laborers in sweat shops doesn’t sell any product. Period. Putting up cheeky case film-friendly Facebook-ideas doesn’t either. If you had seen the result graphs I’ve been shown on iPhone 4s in dark pub corners by deep throats in black hats (I somehow seem to be the favorite point of contact for these people) you’d be amazed. If you’ve ever wondered why the standard answer on questions involving the word “ROI” often float out into pink clouds like the “let’s not underestimate the power of fun” or “your brand needs to join the conversation”, the answer lies in this simple fact: Agencies don’t yet understand how to turn people lol-ing to their fun little films into paying customers.

Jesper Åström on Billing Relationships

Yesterday my colleague and business partner Jesper Åström was the keynote speaker at The Bring Dialogue Conference 2010 in Strömstad. The title of his provocative talk was Social Media Money, but the topic was really about how to create billing relationships – the exact topic that keeps account managers awake at night trying to figure out how to persuade their client that their next “fun viral” is a great idea. I say provocative because if you think about this for a bit you realize that there’s quite a bit of discrepancy between what you see in advertising awards shows at the moment and the topic of billing relationships. I wonder if this term has ever been uttered in Cannes (except when talking about the agency-client relationship).

Jesper went into topics like how social persuasion mechanisms are enabled through platforms like Facebook and how to use metrics and open source data mining to drive buying behavior. He also went into more tactical stuff like his 5 C’s of viral marketing that are part of the everyday vocabulary at Honesty by now, and also the topic of his upcoming book.

A Performance Agency Relationship

My vision for Honesty is that we should be the most expensive agency around, but that we should be worth every penny. That means we nee to provide the highest ROI for each Dollar paid to us. Since clients are not idiots, there is really only one way to achieve this in the long term, and that is by showing REAL results. Not YouTube views, not Gold Lions, but sales and hard cash. To demonstrate results like that we measure everything and always strive to have performance based sections built into our business relationship.

If you’re a client of some agency reading this I strongly encourage you to have this built into your agency relationship as well, but don’t fall for the trap of using metrics like “views” or other fluff that doesn’t directly and visibly correlate to your earnings. There is a lot of cheating going around (look for hidden development graphs as a clue for example). Look for metrics like engagement and conversion rates instead, because at the end of the day, you will get what you measure.

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The Pain of Being an Ad Man

Walter Naeslund — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:15:45 +0000

Life of an ad man may not be physically challenging (except for yoga class), but it can be quite psychologically tough. You pitch a lot and work really hard to get to deliver out what may seem like quite small units of product. Especially in the beginning, you can work for months and months only to get, say, five films out the door. For us, even though we haven’t actually lost a single pitch yet, we have had other things happen, like us withdrawing for different reasons or clients backpedalling their plans.

If you’ve seen season 2 of Mad Men, there is this one episode where everybody works like crazy over the weekend to win the American Airlines account, only to have the pitch vanish before their eyes. These things happen.

If you’re in some other line of business, say sweeping floors, the floor is done when the floor is done. Nobody will come steal that reward from you. Or say that “yeah, this floor is fantastic, but we can’t run it for legal reasons”. Or whatever.

Sometimes I wish I had a job on the side, a job where what I produced was produced and delivered and where I could move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing… I guess it could be something like baking bread (tried it at a bakery this summer) or selling ice cream. Or it could be something where I could write short chunks of text and deliver them instantly to an audience of hundreds of people and even have them comment back and discuss with me. Wait… I guess this blog is that job.

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Get Inspired by 400 Web Geeks and 1 Motorcycle Racing Team

Walter Naeslund — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:23:58 +0000

Camping with 400 or so web geeks in tents, that’s how I spent my weekend. This was the second edition of Sweden Social Web Camp (SSWC), and it was much as I expected. Talented people, smart people, dreaming people, entrepreneurial people, people who talk more than they have to say, and people who talk too little. At SSWC, it’s important to know what to listen for.

I’ve been known to criticize the advertising business for being isolated and conservative. I still think that this is true, but it’s actually quite true of this clique as well. The community has been called an echo chamber because there is so much retweeting and reblogging that originality suffers. Why, for instance, didn’t we see almost any advertising people at this years event? Isn’t the social web relevant for the advertising industry? Is the advertising business not working to get this area of communication dialed? Hell yes they (we) are. Only, it seems to happen in parallel with “the social web community” rather than in concert. This is wasteful. For this coming year, I would like to call on everybody to really try to mix things up and hook up with “the other guys and gals”. Trust me, if we could get this to work it would be the mash up of the year.

Still, things on the island were not entirely unoriginal. One of the definite top original stories of this year was that of Morris Packer and his “Morris Motorcycles” project. It’s just an amazing story of a crowdsourced electrical motorcycle racing team and electrical motorcycle brand. We’ve only seen the beginning of this one, mark my words. It’s one of those stories that I just fell in love with from the moment I heard it, and I really can’t understand how I’ve managed to miss it before (I guess I’m just as isolated as anybody mentioned above). Morris is also an amazing public speaker, so book him if you get the chance.

Coming back to reality, I felt a mix of frustration and inspiration. Frustration that we have not come further, and inspiration that there are some extraordinary individuals out there like Morris or “The Dogvibes Dudes” (Sebastian Wallin & Co). True wizards.

This is just the explosive frustration-inspiration-mix of emotions I felt that time in the hospital bed and that I know will lead to good things. It gets me to do stuff and I guess that in some sense, this is exactly why I go to these things in the first place, to re-charge.

Plus, of course, to get out in the middle of the night with Crazy Dan to create flashlight art.

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The Only Student Who Passed The Test

Walter Naeslund — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:09:51 +0000

Lol!This is precisely my humor.

Check out more awesomely funny pics on thefuturebuzz.com.

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Peeing on an Invitation For a Million Dollar Event

Walter Naeslund — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:00:24 +0000

We call them generation free, a blogging generation used to getting everything for free, from Champagne-laden store opening parties to trips and luxury goodie bags. In exchange brands get exposure in a post if they’re lucky, or at least the bloggers’ approval.

Last week something happened that shocked generation free. The invitation to the youth magazine Veckorevyn’s Blog Awards show landed in bloggers’ inboxes. But this year, something was wrong.

Many bloggers, not the ones in the very top end of course, got the above version of the invitation. Translated into English the words on the top of the page read “You have priority to buy tickets to Sweden’s biggest blog awards show!”. Buy? Buy?! Like… with money buy?!

The scandal was a fact. Veckorevyn had the AUDACITY to ask bloggers to PAY for tickets to the show. This did not sit well with generation free.

Now the war was on, and debate was running high. On one side, you could find people who thought that it was obvious that bloggers should pay, comparing the show with cinema experiences, pocket books and grocery stores.

On the other, you could find pro bloggers like Kenza considering letting some Mani (I hope it’s her pet) relieve him-/herself on her (non-pay) VIP-invitation.

Both sides are right of course. And wrong.

Of course it’s easy to agree with the “bloggers should pay”-side that a show like this one with a million or two (SEK) in budget cannot rely solely on sponsors to pay for everything, though I think you’ve been a bit lazy in your calculations. You can of course go even further and calculate accurately what kind of total profit margin Veckorevyn wants for their entire operation, and set up exactly and dynamically how much each invited blogger should pay to be admitted, taking into account what kind of PR-value each blog represents. This would mean that you would get a dynamic range from those who would pay a lot, to those who would pay a single dollar to those who would actually get paid to go. Then you would really have strong support for your rational argument. There is only one problem. This is NOT a rational problem.

For those of you who share my interest in game theory, you know that people do not act rationally in this type of situation. This is NOT a matter of the fee (200SEK≈$30) being a lot of money, or the event not being worth the money (these very same people spend 200SEK on latte and lipstick all the time). It’s a matter of psychological functions connected to ego and status, and a matter of how this event is defined. We know from experience that it’s easy to go from paid to free, but difficult to go the other way for any product. This event is defined by earlier events as not only free, but part of a category, promotional events, that has been, by definition, free for a long time.

I’m not saying that any side is right or wrong here. I really don’t care about that. What IS interesting is how people are trying to explain this with rational arguments. It’s like putting up a rational argument for why you should fall in love with you. People just don’t work that way.

So where did the above invitation end up after my little iPhone photo shoot? Well – I didn’t pee on it, but I’m with Kenza on this one. It’s just more fun that way. F#*!ck logic.

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CSI Stockholm. Not So Bad Ass.

Walter Naeslund — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 07:33:56 +0000

When we came to the office that morning last year there had been a break in. Very bad ass police officers showed up on the scene and started dusting for prints. Total CSI-style.

Curious as I am I started snooping around their gear. I love this stuff. But as I did I came across something very suspicious. What da?! What was that red thing on the left side?

Let’s zoom in on that.

A lollipop? A lollipop?! What the hell are you going to do with a lollipop when the robbers come crashing in? Bribe them?

Maybe these cops weren’t so bad ass after all…

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Is The Devil in The Imperfections?

Walter Naeslund — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 08:04:02 +0000

One of the strangest and most amazing projects I’ve ever had land on my desk was to do a presidential campaign in the Philippines. We ended up not taking it on for practical reasons, but when something like that lands on your desk, you can’t just brush it off. You have to check it out. And we did.

Said and done, and before I knew it I was on a plane to Helsinki for further transportation to Hong Kong and on to Manila. This would turn out to be a very special trip loaded with amazing experiences, connections and friends. I ended up staying in Manila for a week, attending meetings, lunches, dinners and drinks. Sleep was something that I didn’t do a lot of. I promise to tell you more about this adventure sometime, but for this post, I want to share with you what happened afterwards.

The day before my planned return to Sweden, Finnair went on strike. This was not good. My trip was already on a tight schedule and I had a talk booked in Stockholm the day after my return. After much hassle, I somehow managed to book a ticket back, but it was anything but the direct route. The trip back pretty much took me half way around the world and about 25 hours. And that was after a week of already very little sleep. When I landed in Stockholm it was early in the morning of the same day of my talk.

There was not much point in sleeping, so instead I took a shower and went for Coffee at my regular place. If you take a good look at the picture below you can tell from my eyes how exhausted I am. Double espresso please!

Even though there was an apparent risk that this talk would not be one of my best, canceling was not an option as one of my rules of engagement is to NEVER cancel a gig. It’s a good rule, but it has consequences (some of the more interesting of which I’ll tell you about another time). I got into a cab that took me over to the Filmstaden venue on Hötorget in Stockholm where the talk was scheduled to be held.

As the venue started to fill up, some switch went on in my head. There was just no room to be tired anymore.

So I rocked away with my talk which was in Swedish for a Swedish audience of marketing executives. Luckily for me, I had done this particular talk many times before, so I could do it on routine. Or so I thought. Because this too, it would turn out, had it’s consequences.

I came back on stage after showing a video clip and blasted away in full gear with my comments to what we had just seen, but now something felt wrong. The audience seemed uneasy and disturbed and there was whispers and giggles in the air. Time stood still for a moment. I understood that something was wrong, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it could be. I felt the pressure building up and a drop of sweat running down my forehead – what the hell was wrong?!

Suddenly I realize that I’m speaking in English instead of Swedish. And to make matters worse I’m over-compensating for my lack of sleep by speaking very passionately. In the wrong language. Everybody in the audience is trying to figure out what in the world is going on. Is he trying to prove a point? Or is he just tooo waaaaay guru to speak in Swedish all of a sudden?

Finally after what feels like forever somebody pulls up the blinds in my mind. “Eh, pratade jag precis engelska?” (“ehrr, did I just speak English?”) I ask in a suspicious tone before I burst out laughing, and so does everybody else.

The funny thing is that this incident was a real turning point in the talk. Suddenly we had all laughed together at something and broken the invisible wall that sometimes exists between the speaker and the audience. The talk ended up being one of the best ones I’ve ever done.

So why am I telling you all this? Well – I guess my point is that we don’t have to be so afraid of making fools out of ourselves on stage (or off for that matter). Perhaps errors are simply human and charming, like dents on a vintage guitar. Sometimes these things are what makes the appearance memorable and good. They can build up tension which upon release trigger bonding laughter.

Perhaps this insight will also make you a better speaker when you can relax a bit more and just go up there and vibe with the audience instead of lecturing to them; when you realize that errors can actually bring you closer to the audience; that the devil is actually in… well… the imperfetions.

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Google Wave is Dead, Long Live Google Wave!

Walter Naeslund — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:52:58 +0000

So Google Wave finally came crashing down. The reason according to Google is, not surprisingly, that Wave “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,”. I guess we all know that.

Not to long ago, I wrote a post in defense of Wave. My main thesis was that Wave is not a service, but a technology set, and as such, an interesting one. As a separate service however, it just didn’t catch on. The implementation of this technology was just not sharp enough, and branding it as an alternative to the master dragon of the web universe, email, was not the smartest thing to do.

What is interesting though is viewing it as a technology. Because, after all, the best parts of Wave like real time character by character updates and drag and drop functionality is already in place in Google Docs instead. Google also releases the technology as open source, which opens up to further innovation.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that Wave is “useless” and “crap” and all kinds of other things. I don’t agree. I think that it carries important innovations that we’ll see in use in all kinds of implementations in the future. It’s like a research project where the conclusions and results can be used for further research and creative commercial implementation.

So Google, I salute your brave venture into the unknown. Like Columbus, you may not have ended up exactly where you thought, but really, when do we ever do that in innovation projects? Who knew in advance what Twitter would amount to for example? Without projects like this one we’d all be stone age savages.

Thank you!

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