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.

Money is important to us. Control over our life situation is too. But then, how can we possibly accept Internet banks as they are today. How can we possibly think that it’s okay to, say, not be able to get a visual overview analysis of our expenses and incomes? How can we possibly put up with the long and complicated OCR-numbers or basic search functionality? And how is it possible that we have such user hostile login procedures?

I can’t present all my ideas for my perfect Internet banking experience in just one post, but I can show you three examples of what Internet banking would look like if I had my say, and also what I think it will look like in just a couple of years. Here we go!

Facebook Secure Connect

Logging in to your Internet bank today is more or less of a hassle depending on your particular bank, but it’s nevertheless a hassle. Banks have been lagging behind the times here, focusing on security, but not on usability. The market forces will inevitably push us closer to an optimal trade off between security and usability. We see people leaving their bank today, simply because the login security solution is too complex (using USB-hardware for example).

To creatively solve this problem outside identification providers will step in. On of those will be Facebook. Our online identity is contained in our Facebook accounts, our Google Profiles, Twitter accounts and other services that we haven’t even learned the names of yet. We have come to trust them for logging in to other services now, and since more advanced transactions are taking place using this login by the minute (buying major chunks of advertising for example), a need for more secure identification procedures will arise. A second version of Facebook Connect called Facebook Secure Connect will be launched using secure authorization technology and will eventually be adopted by the banks. One bank will lead this evolution and the others will be both inspired and forced to follow.

Facebook will lead the way in this development, but Google will be quick to follow. To compete with Facebook, Google will go on a marketing rampage for secure OpenID and couple with Google Budget Analytics:

Google Budget Analytics

The amount of control you have over your budget and cash flow today at your ordinary Internet bank is really a joke. You get a list of your transactions and not much else. Besides that, it’s also really messy to go back and check out your history. My own bank has recently made it possible to export to Excel XLS-format, but give me a break – XLS? In 2010?

Instead, when you log in to your bank using secure OpenID all transactions will automatically be indexed, fully searchable and categorized. You will be able to analyze your economy at all levels from the very basic (cigarettes, food, rent) to the very advanced with cluster analysis, seasonal trends, forecasts and goal tracking.

In step two, Google will also launch Google Budget Analytics For Business where you can do your books and account distributions more or less automatically. This will kick ass for small businesses.

Facebook’s reply to this will be to enable sharing services where you can share selected transactions and events in your feed, much like what Blippy does today. Come to think of it, Facebook will probably buy Blippy.

Open Banking API

Finally, banks will realize that they are best at doing what banks do, and will hand over interface design and function to the experts. Banks will release secure API-sets to allow third party specialized internet bank companies to connect to their systems. This will in turn open up the market for hardcore competition. Google will be way ahead already and will release Google Bank which will be an big expansion of Google Budget Analytics. Here, they will also have tight integration with Google Spreadsheets, and will also allow for seamless integration with Google Chat, Google Voice and Gmail for interacting with your bank’s customer service.

And what about Apple – the self proclaimed customer experience rulers of the universe? They won’t remain on the sidelines for long.

Man, I wish I had the cash to go into this one myself. Call me if you know any investors who would like to change the world with me on this one.

Update: Interesting link about the poor quality of internet banking (in Swedish).

I got an email this morning from Jung Von Matt Stockholm asking me to check out their new “optimized” site in the wake of the Lowe Brindfors debacle a couple of weeks back. I really don’t intend to take on the role of advertising agency website critic, but since they asked, and since I like the guys at JvM, why not give it a go.

The site is another in the long line of WordPress installations showing up lately in the advertising world, like Farfar and Great Works for instance. And really – why do anything else? WP has become a kick ass back end. This one is also a very pretty WP-installation design-wise. I’m not absolutely sure about the usability flow for this particular design, but that could be just me.

The reason (i figure) that I got the email however is to check it out SEO-wise. Now – first off, I want to be clear that I am by no means an SEO expert. I am interested, and I do have a solid technical background, but let’s be humble and bring in the real Michael Jordan’s of SEO, because I do pride myself in understanding how to bring in the right people. After consulting one of my favorite SEO-experts Simon Sundén, these are some of the quick pointers one would like to fix, even though this site is playing in a completely different league than the all-Flash agency sites we have discussed here earlier. The following are just examples that popped up after five minutes of analysis and discussion during lunch, but feel free to continue in the comments or hire us for a complete audit.

Just-Fix-It-List for JvM

1. No H1′s or H2′s. Only H3′s here and there.
2. Non-optimal URL-structure.
3. Missing desriptions on many pages.
4. Titel on the following pages shouldn’t be “Work”: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/work/?id=69
5. There is a sitemap, but the case-pages are missing: http://www.jungvonmatt.se/sitemap.xml
6. Lots of old pages 404′d and not redirected: http://www.google.se/search?hl=sv&q=site%3Ajvm.se (Example: http://www.jvm.se/projects/unicef)

That said, it’s still a good effort! Congratulations on your WP-site!

By the way – for those of you who think I hate Flash per se, here is one site which uses Flash very well, and where it is motivated to use Flash (it’s a design hotel). Simon also wrote a great post about this today.

I‘ve done quite a bit of thinking about how the social web will make the world a better place. I’ve written about it, and also lectured about the social web, good, and evil.

So when a talk by Evgeny Morozov popped on TED on the topic of how the net aids dictatorships, I was naturally interested. Was somebody going to put up a good argument against my theories?

The answer is yes. And no. Evgeny argues beautifully for the ideas, but simultaneously shows how the dictatorships actually start using the web to reach out and communicate, much like I think companies should. They are proactive, the contribute, they engage, and they are present. They DON’T try to cencor stuff, because they have realized that participation is more effective. And I tell you – if dictatorships do this successfully, companies should too!

Then, of course, these dictatorships abuse their power to flood the system with government biased comments and spam, and commit evil acts, but I’m not as sure as Evgeny is about how effective this is. Compare it for example to this example from the very well designed guidelines at Intel for how to effectively use the social web:

Be transparent. Your honesty—or dishonesty—will be quickly noticed in the social media environment. If you are blogging about your work at Intel, use your real name, identify that you work for Intel, and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in something you are discussing, be the first to point it out.

This is not a guideline that the dictatorships exactly follow. On the other hand, perhaps other commenters don’t dare use their real name either for fear of physical abuse, so this way It may actually work for government agents to blend into the anonymous crowd. Again – we see an example of how anonymity leads to evil and abuse.

Incidently, the campaign led by The Cartel to hunt down file sharers also leads to anonymization of the web, making laws like HADOPI and IPRED all the more troublesome – and also promoters of more serious evil.

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.

I just got an email from Slideshare.com stating the following:

Hey walternaeslund!

Your presentation is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.

We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen
from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everday.

- the SlideShare team

Cool! I wasn’t even planning on posting this presentation on the blog, but since it seems popular, here it is:

Finally we’re away. After picking up coffees at the wonderful Mellqvist Coffee Bar (best coffee in Stockholm?) We’re headed for Social Web Camp in the south of Sweden to camp out on an island with 280 of Sweden’s top experts on digital communication. For a country the size of Sweden, this means that “everybody” is coming. And when I say camp out, I mean it in the literal sense with tents and everything. Very analogue.

Instead of going with the two mothership “Twitter-buses” we took our own mini pirate ship and headed off. After a few cancellations we ended up with a mini-bus and only 4 people riding in it. Very limousine-like.

In the back we also have a crate of the best oysters we could get our hands on. Gillardeau, David Hervé Royal Cabanon, Ecaille d’argent and La Fosse. And a bottle of Joseph Perrier Vintage 2003 to go with it. If we’re going to sleep in a tent, at least we’re going to eat well.

This is going to be very exciting. Stay in touch for the latest updates, and don’t forget to follow everything on Twitter at #SSWC.

There is a funny discussion going on about how people were fooled by the fictional Nova Barakel, who was really a marketing product for a new novel. Some people insist that you should only have “real friends” on FB, and not let people like this in, most seem to agree that this is really bad marketing because it is dishonest. But let’s not be so quick to judge.

There are different strategies for how to handle social media. And the different systems have somewhat different characteristics. While Twitter is an asymmetrical system where you don’t have to follow those who follow you, Facebook is symmetrical. So if you look at for example the Twitter account of Karl Lagerfeldt he has 79717 followers and is following 0 people. He uses his account as a broadcast channel. Some people use their Facebook accounts much in the same way but it’s a bit unusual since they become hard to use for the more intimate and personal stuff. I haven’t personally looked at exactly how many “friends” each of the accounts of the people who “got fooled” had, but if some of them were broadcast accounts, they were hardly fooled. And if they didn’t use them as broadcast accounts, perhaps they were just curious. Either way, why portrait them as vain flagpole sitters? I don’t think they are.

Regardless, we don’t all have to use these tools in the same way. Seth Godin has a quality-rather-than-quantity approach that he endorses in his talk below, that makes sense in many ways. But like I said, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve. Chris Brogan for example has taken the opposite approach quite successfully.

There ARE different ways to use social media because it’s just a platform. A tool. Sure, how you use it says things about you. If you are only following 100 people on Twitter, who those 100 are will say a great deal about you. If you only have 30 friends on Facebook, we can conclude that you are very restrictive about your private life or just very uninterested in Facebook. If you are following 50 000+ people on Twitter because you are autofollowing everyone, well, at least you have a good grip on who is following you, even if a lot of them are probably spam accounts.

You can befriend or follow people for different reasons. Here are a few ideas:

* Friend people you find interesting.
* Friend your customers.
* Friend your prospects.
* Friend your competitors (why not?)
* Search for friends based on interest (easy on Twitter, by using Twitter Search).
* Unfriend spammers.
* Unfriend folks who bother you.
* Unfriend people who talk too much if they’re swamping your stream.

(Suggestions from Chris Brogan).

Based on this list of ideas, there could be many reasons to befriend Nova Barakel, if only because you find here stories interesting. Like I said, I don’t think we should be quite so quick to judge. Personally I would love to make friends with George Orwell for example, even though I could probably guess that his account wouldn’t be entirely genuine because he’s been dead for 59 years, so that he could tell me what happened today in 1939. I can already do that actually by following his excellent blog.

And while I believe in Honesty, I don’t think that it is neccessarily dishonest to do something like this if what you contribute is fun or exciting or mysterious or valuable in some other dimension. If it is not, on the other hand, it’s just spam. And filtering out spam is actually just a click away.

Some links to the Nova Barakel discussion:
http://www.resume.se/asikter/claes/2009/08/13/jag-gick-inte-pa-nova-bara/index.xml

http://www.resume.se/asikter/viggos_dagbok2/2009/08/13/darfor-ar-nova-usel-markna/index.xml

http://www.resume.se/nyheter/2009/08/13/hon-blaste-kandisarna-pa-f/
http://www.resume.se/nyheter/2009/08/13/nagra-har-forsokt-dejta-mi/
http://www.resume.se/nyheter/2009/08/13/kandisarna-som-ar-kompis-m/

When I lectured at Stockholm School of Economics about the future of music and video I remember receiving a few critical questions about mobility: “What about when you’re mobile?”, “What about when you’re on a plane?”, “What about when you don’t have an internet connection?”. Ladies and gentlemen, here is your answer:

And by the way, here’s a little hint to Antipiratbyrån, Ifpi, Sami – Svenska Artisters och Musikers intresseorganisation,SOM (Svenska Oberoende Musikproducenter), Stim, Sveriges Författarförbund, Svenska Förläggareföreningens, Sveriges Filmproducenter och Film i Väst, Svenska Filminstitutet, Dotshop.se, and all you others who think that IPRED is a good idea: INNOVATE don’t LEGISLATE! Without filesharing there would be no such thing as Spotify. Trust me.