“What do you do?”
“Oh me? I work with strategy and… stuff”.

How many times a day do we hear that said? If you’re anything like me, you hear it quite a few times. And while I really appreciate the value of an excellent strategist, it’s really a misused term. A lot of times the word “strategist” seems to be used for people who have a hard time converting ideas into reality, and for that reason prefer to stay in the world of the abstract. If you ask me, there is too much dead strategy in the world, strategy merely describing your fantasy. We need more action.

What is one of the world’s most scarce resources however are excellent tactical people. I don’t talk about production staff now (though important as well), but about people who can take abstract strategic concepts and break them down into concrete actions that actually deliver on the strategies. There are a lot of strategy documents laying around with abstract ideas that serve more as a wish list to Santa than as an actual plan.

So how do you find awesome tactical people? Look for how to-posts! People blogging about how to actually implement stuff are often doers. And if you see that strategic understanding in what you read, reach for your checkbook. These guys are rare.

We have a guy like that in the Honesty partner team. Jesper Åström, who today has the somewhat useless title Digital Director (title being useless, not the role), is a tactical mastermind. He can draw up implementation plans of the most amazing sizes, creating 100-page presentations that actually commit you to action, not to philosophical fluff. And sure enough, Jesper’s blog is social media tutorial heavy. Read it. It’s the best investment you’ll make in a while.

Now all I have to do is to figure out a title for him that actually makes sense. Online Tactical Officer? Tactical Mastermind? Awesome Tactical Dude? Man I hate titles.

Don’t believe everything I say, also check out Rich Nadworny’s post on our advertising agency Honesty at the Digital Strategy Blog. Thanks for writing Rich!

/W.

Since I drew the first napkin sketch of the Honesty agency in February there has been a lot of toil, sweat and tears. Today I can finally say that stage 2 is completed with the recruitment of Jesper Åström as the final piece of the puzzle. Jesper joins as new digital director alongside Simon Sundén and also the last of the six planned partners in the company.

Jesper has an impressive track record and has been working with everything from hardcore gambling traffic generation and conversion at WGP to making designer campaigns take off at H&M, we’re Jesper was responsible for social media and SEO globally. In short, he is like a combination of a special forces soldier and your best friend – a great guy with a lethal skill set.

Now is not the time to kick back and rest, and we’re all basically working around the clock, but there will be some kind of celebration. Perhaps a more luxurious lunch on friday.

It’s just a really happy day for me!

Yesterday I cleared a desk for our new partner at Honesty who has his first day at the agency today. And this is not just any random guy, but one of Europe’s leading experts on SEO and search marketing, Simon Sundén. As many of you know, I’ve been quite frank in my criticism of the lacking ambition in the field of SEO and search marketing among some of our most famous advertising agencies. This is my and Honesty’s way of showing where our priorities lie.

The biggest challenge in building Honesty has been in recruiting precisely the right mix of people for the partner management team. I knew early that it would take six people to get this to work properly: two top creative directors, one great client director, and two very advanced digital marketing experts. Simon is one of the two in the latter category, and the next one will be presented within a few weeks. How do you get people like this? You make them equal partners. Period. I other words, they are all as much Honesty as I am. I love it!

All in all I’m just very excited about this and am looking forward to the next presentation already!

Oh, and don’t forget to fan us on Facebook! It’ll be fun!

Great news!

We have now finished our first round of expansion at Honesty and now have four of the six partners here full time! Fantastic!

Honesty will be divided into three units, each responsible for their own area of expertise. The three areas are Management & Strategy, Digital Business Development, and Creative Studio.

Two of the new partners, Martin Marklund and Petrus Kukulski, take on the roles of creative directors, and will head the Creative Studio. Martin and Petrus are two of the most experienced creatives in Sweden with a truckload of awards and plenty of amazing characters to their credit. We’re very proud to have them with us.

The Management & Strategy unit will be headed by me (Managing Director) and another of the new partners, Emil Clase (Client Director) who is also extremely experienced in handling client relations. Emil is also a completely amazing person to have on board, and also great lunch company if you’re in the mood for discussing your business with us.

For the Digital Business Development unit, we have two new partners which will be disclosed in two phases. The first one, our new expert on traffic generation using search and social media, will join us on Monday 9/11. Stay tuned for more info on him. The second one, our new edge in digital business strategy and conversion, will join us later this fall.

If you know Swedish, you can learn more about all the news on our Honesty site. We’ll have an English language one up shortly. You can also read about us today in Dagens Industri (4/11).

Now that we’ve launched stage one, I promise to become a better blogger again.
See you soon!

Haven’t been writing much lately. Things changed pretty rapidly at the agency, and suddenly my writing habits had to give way to meetings and pitch-work. It might also be a poor excuse for a bad case of writers block. I’m not sure.

From a work day where I was the only full time employee at the agency (with a network supporting me of course) we’re now four full time people at the office every day, with two more on their way in. Pitches and presentations piled up quickly, and we’re now working hard to keep up. So far I’m really proud of the work we’re doing

We’re looking for a good art director by the way, if you happen to be or know one. He or she has to be fast, productive, innovative, hands on, digital & analogue. We don’t ask much. On the other hand, for somebody who would love to work at an experimental but efficient Willy Wonka factory for the low wages we can afford to pay, this could be just the thing.

So now you’ve heard my excuse for not writing. It’s a pretty lame excuse. Because writing really is crucial for my inspiration. I notice though, how hard it is to start writing after even a short break. Writers block builds up crazy fast. In my ideal world I write something every day on here, and I will try to get back into it. Not so much for you as for myself.

On a completely different note, I’ve re-opened the Friend Connect membership system in the column on the right, so go ahead and join and we’ll change the world together. Everybody’s welcome!

Just a quick note on yesterday’s debacle. The article was written by Tobias Rydengren Rydergren based on an interview with me. It’s not incorrect in any way, and it’s well written and everything, I just want you to see it from that perspective. My texts can be found here on walternaeslund.com. The article quickly received over 4000 4600 votes and 6000 page views, which said something about the heat of this topic.

Other people have also written on the topic . Notably Nikke Lindqvist, one of Sweden’s absolute geniuses in the SEO-business. Though he managed to spell my name wrong (Naeslund, Nikke, with ae), he shares some interesting thoughts.

I also attended the awesome party thrown by Garbergs yesterday (thanks!), and met quite a few people from the industry. I didn’t receive a single negative comment, and plenty of positive feedback, so I really think that we are in a business that wants to change and get better. And really, that’s the point of this whole affair – that we all can get better and reclaim the digital crown.

After quite a few comments and a two interviews, I would like to clarify here on the blog that this is by no means an attack on Forsman & Bodenfors or Lowe Brindfors. They are just providing us with very clear and good examples to learn from. This is a problem for a big chunk of the industry. In all fairness, we could keep going around on a safari of the Swedish ad agency sites and see a lot more of this.

Here, for example, is a screenshot of one such agency, taken today. This agency (one of the biggies) is seriously charging clients big bucks for modern communication advice.

(I will buy whoever finds this site and posts a link in the comments a glass of excellent Champagne at Brunnsgatan 1 at 18:15 tomorrow Thursday).

Now, let’s cut this bullshit out and get serious again about reclaiming a position as a leading nation in digital communications.

Cheers.

Last week I wrote about how Forsman & Bodenfors don’t understand how the internet works. In absolute terms, the description was fair, but in relative terms, they are not worse than most of the advertising business. Yesterday we got another painfull piece of evidence to that effect.

I’m talking about the brand new website of Lowe Brindfors. But to discuss the site we need to separate two things: Design and communications efficiency.

Design

It’s a matter of taste of course, but I think this page is very well designed from a print designers point of view. It’s excellent print design, but awful interactive design. Because it is not interactive. It’s like designing a very pretty car with only passenger seats. And just like such a beautiful but useless car, this site belongs in a museum. Which leads me into point 2:

Communications Efficiency

This thing is a very pretty printed catalogue in digital format. It’s what websites were in the late 90′s. The entire thing is a big Flash-page, with text that you cannot copy, films you cannot share, posters that you can download as PDFs (!) but not share with anyone, and invisible coworkers that you can only reach via email or telephone. No wonder they have this disclaimer on the site:

Apparently they think that the elusive internet out there is about technology and gadgets, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Because really, these new technologies are VEHICLES of ideas. Nothing else. But the ideas have to be made for a world of transparency, not to fill expensive media plans. And for you to come up with such ideas, you have to know how this transparent world functions.

Search and SEO is ONE important aspect to understand in order to get people “to spend time with the brand” (to use Lowe Brindfors’ own terminology), and this is what the brand new Lowe Brindfors site looks like to Google:

According to Google, what’s most interesting about the new Lowe Brindfors site seems to be their webmail (!), followed by pages from their old site, and a PDF press-release from August 2008.

Disclaiming your way out of obvious lack of knowledge about the psychology and behavior on the internet with something general like a “Hey, boy slow it down”-disclaimer becomes embarrassing when confronted with clients who know the internet – something that becomes more and more common every day thanks to knowledgeable rebels and speakers on the topic like Johan Ronnestam, Simon Sundén, and Björn Alberts, just to name a few. [Edit: + Jesper Åström]

Things don’t improve when I read what Peter Willebrand our Swedish ad-business press Resumé has to say about the new site:

“Resume.se thankfully notes that the trend is the same as in other digital communication: simpler, faster, and more head on”.

This statement is very general, and also wrong. The site isn’t fast. It’s a heavy Flash film with a loader from hell. The trend of the internet is not “simpler, faster, and more head on”. The trend, or rather the permanent shift, is to social participation in dynamically coordinated institution-less groups, which means that a site needs to support that behavior. You need to love people, not just say you love them. The new thing about the internet is not that people can now talk back to you, it is that everybody can talk to everybody and coordinate discussions and topics without necessarily involving you. If anything, this is more complex, not simpler. Grasping the entire strategy for this more complex system requires a more diverse skill set ranging from behavioral psychology to technology.

The bottom line is that you can have the prettiest house in the world, but to make friends, you have to meet them. Or else you’ll end up being very lonely.

Yesterday, BBH Labs wrote an interesting post commenting on some of my thoughts on internet transparency and gossip. The post itself, as well as the comments, are well worth a read. Since it’s one of my favorite topics, I naturally wanted in on the discussion myself, but as I started writing a comment on their blog, I realized it would probably be a bit long for a comment, and instead decided to make it a follow up post here.

Q: Is there any evidence of better behavior and less cheating?

A: I think we can see plenty of evidence to support the fact that the breakdown of brand privacy forces brands to behave better. User comments and ratings are in fact the backbone of much of e-commerce, and are really a form of digital gossip. Companies behaving badly are exposed all over the place. Companies behaving well are to some extent rewarded, even though gossip gravitates towards the negative for natural reasons (it’s often more expensive in nature to make the wrong decision than valuable to make the right one). On the individual level, Googling is a standard part of hiring these days, and cheating husbands and wives are exposed all over the internet every day. Just to mention a couple of examples.

Before language evolved, cheaters were easy to spot in small tribes, but not in larger societies. When language evolved, efficiency of gossip increased and we could now crack down on cheaters and reward contributers in bigger groups. Now, with the social web, gossip is made even more efficient, thus making it possible to spot cheaters and reward contributers in very large groups, spread out all over the globe. It’s the same basic psychology and the same economics behind it, but more efficient means of communication enable us to increase scale. The economics of gossip are very much the same as internet economics, or information economics in general: Providing gossip is virtually free, while receiving it can be very valuable. This creates growth. As a fun excercise, you can try applying these economics to the “piracy”-debate.

“Q”: On one hand it all sounds a little Utopian (and some might argue, less fun). On the other, it does sound rather attractive.

A: It may sound utopian, but it’s really not. I’m not talking about perfect transparency with zero transaction and coordination costs (which would be utopian and impossible). Instead, I’m talking about an increase in efficiency, which leads to a more precise control system that is harder to cheat. Harder, but not impossible.

And I really don’t think that it’s a question of attractive or less fun, but rather of us increasing our ability to coordinate as a species. An increase in ability to coordinate enables us to coordinate more quickly, thus becoming more adaptive to changes in our environment. Those who adapt the quickest to change will be the most fit for their environment, and the fittest will survive. If we let this continue without destroying the efficiency with legislation, this is where we will gravitate towards by Darwinistic law. It’s somewhat like asking if life became less fun or more attractive when language was introduced. I can’t answer that, and I don’t know if it’s a relevant question. I do think that it made us more civilized, and I think that the web will have the same effect.

Q: For other societal constructs, such as a nation/regime, hard to say. The world had pretty honest information on the Iran situation, but that didn’t make the regime behave more honestly. On the other hand if
victims in genocidal warfare in Africa had means of disseminating real time information would the world be more inclined to intervene and act more honestly by upholding basic human rights?

A: There are a few different questions involved here, and I won’t go into the specific situation for each country, but on the structural level you can say this: There is a huge shift in power going on all over the world. The monopolies of information distribution previously (and sometimes currently) held by institutions by economic neccesity, are falling apart. And this makes those depending on such monopolies less powerful. For these institutions, the social web poses a threat, and the only way to stop the threat is to stop entire services, and indeed this is what we are seeing in some of these regimes.

Unfortunately for them, this is also very costly in terms of not tapping into the growth engine of gossip and digital gossip that we spoke about earlier, and will leave them with the choice of handing over power by unblocking internet services or loosing out in the competition with free countries. Ultimately, I think and hope that fighting internet freedom is a loosing battle.