by Walter Naeslund on July 21, 2009
If you break something, you fix it. If only United Airlines would have had this moral policy when they broke Dave Carroll’s Taylor guitar, they wouldn’t have suffered. But they did. Oh, they did.
Because creative people aren’t like ordinary people. They don’t fight back with legal action that huge and rich organizations can defend themselves against. Instead, they fight back with emotional triggers, often using the deadliest of them all – humor.
In Dave Carroll’s case, the attack took the form of a song called United Breaks Guitar’s, and a corresponding video on YouTube. The video has already been seen by millions of viewers, and has gained plenty of coverage in different mainstream media and on blogs.
When coaching brands about social media, I always talk about “Google Equity”, an equity that is not built overnight, but takes time, effort, and most of all, the inspiration of others. The United Airlines brand, like so many others, has done this poorly, and thus can’t put up much of a fight when something like this happens. Last time somebody completely lost grip on Google was when US Airways Flight 1549 crashed in Hudson River. And now, the United Airlines Breaks Guitars is in the top search results for “United Airlines”.
My top advice for United Airlines and other brands is to put real focus on building Google Equity. Offence is the best defence.
But regardless, since Dave Carroll has promised another two songs and videos on the subject of his broken guitar, I really would think twice before pissing off a creative again.
Similar Posts:
by Walter Naeslund on April 18, 2009
I encourage everyone to cut out and frame today’s editorial in DN. It’s one of the strangest editorials I have read in a newspaper of a democratic country, and it will probably be worth money some day. Since it was an editorial, I actually considered cancelling my subscription. But then I read this article, which is more balanced and actually shows quite clearly a couple of interesting points.
Henrik Pontén’s quote is, for example, really entertaining. Especially when he claims that this verdict will lead to “reasonable content” on the web. 
We can see in this article how this is a war between conservatives and innovators. Researchers are sceptical to these controlling behaviors, while corporations making money off of the old system want to retain the status quo. I guess one can’t blaim them. Humans are inherently afraid of change.
More interestingly, Viasat’s CEO Hans Skarplöth, whom I have discussed here earlier, is in this article as well, calling the false sense of security derived from this verdict and the IPRED-law “naive”. Brand-wise we can now start to see one of the big winners, and I think that Viasat’s moral courage will be in the marketing textbooks and lectures of the future. As will the ruined brand name Metallica.
Similar Posts:
by Walter Naeslund on November 25, 2008
This is the second part of my idea sketch on privacy and integrity. The first part can be found here. There is also an interesting comment on that post by Michael Dahlén where he talks about information symmetry, a theme that I’ll adress later in this post.
In this second part I will show you two talks, the first of which happens to be one of my favorite talks ever, by the phenomenal writer and psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The second talk is a rather graphic and frightening one by Philip Zimbardo, and I will only present the link here and not embed it since there are some very graphic images in the presentation.
Anyway, I wrote in the first part about how we psychologically maintain moral behavior in a self-regulating way, by rewarding and punishing each other in more or less subtle ways to maintain moral equilibrium. It’s an extremely impressive distributed control system, much like the self balancing control system of a market economy, but much more refined and granular.
In Haidt’s talk, five moral foundations are listed as ones that we have with us from birth. These five are:
1. Harm/care
2. Fairness/reciprocity
3. Ingroup/loyalty
4. Authority/respect
5. Purity/sanctity
If any one of these foundations are challenged, we react quickly to restore equilibrium. At least until we shift the equilibrium by fundamentally changing the rules of the system. There are several ways of changing the rules of the system, but I will focus only on one of these here. The one I will focus on it the introduction of anonymity.
If we remove personal responsibility from the system by introducing anonymity, studies have shown that several of these moral foundations seem to fail. Some of these studies are presented briefly in the talks below. Personally I’m most intrigued by the first two of these foundations. It seems that people can turn evil and cause harm when power is introduced in combination with the removal of personal responsibility. Consider uniforms in war for example, or hoods worn by executioners through all time. And people in many systems seem to loose sense of reciprocity by cheating when individual contributions are unclear. We also seem less prone to do good under such circumstances.
So is this view highly cynical? Well, perhaps not. Perhaps it’s just how civilized group behavior evolved. How else would something like this be governed? The peer to peer equilibrium control system is perhaps the only viable path for evolution to take (Darwin would say that the present state is proof of that. I would too).
This view would explain why religion was a really good idea for keeping up moral behavior. Because even when nobody was watching, god was. But the notion of god created a huge information asymmetry which was quite scary, and often abused throughout history.
But as the internet removes anonymity in a (more) symmetrical way, it is much more difficult to abuse this information. I don’t mean to be bombastic, but I can truly see us moving into a new era of higher moral standards and a better world – simply because we increase communication efficiency and information symmetry. And I would like to encourage you to consider this the next time you read a negative article about the breakdown of privacy.
It also puts a new spin on Google’s “Do No Evil”-tagline, doesn’t it?
Now watch these two amazing talks and consider what I just said:
Talk number 1 by Jonathan Haidt:
Click here for talk number 2 by Philip Zimbardo.
Similar Posts:
by Walter Naeslund on June 29, 2008
If you are like me and are interested in how people work, keep reading.
In one of the books I’ve read this week (by Jonathan Haidt) there is a discussion about the law of reciprocity. This law (as I presume you all know) states that we humans find it very difficult not to return a favor we have recieved. There is a lot of research done on this by Richard Caldini that I won’t go into here, but it’s awesome. His book “Influence” is by the way required reading for anyone claiming to be a communicator.
Haidt links this law of reciprocity to evolution. It has been a very succesful bit of evolution; basically a law of collaboration, to a degree which separates us from most animals.
Collaboration requires language, which we have developed, and we have also developed gossip as a means of encouraging good collaborative morale (the importance of gossip is therefore gravely underestimated). But what’s interesting is that it seems that this feature is what has required us to develop such enormous brainpower, and thus enormous brains, and thus enormous heads. It turns out that the size of a mamals brain is proportionate to the size of the group it must keep track of, and the average human peer group is somewhere around 150 people.
In fact, we have such big heads now that we humans can barely give birth to our young. And when we do, the toddlers are just half baked (to keep head size down), unable to move properly, and have to be carried around for two years or so.
This incredible evolutionary sacrifice as a trade off for social skills puts new perspective on the importance of social networking and gossip doesn’t it?
Now there has been a revolution! We have invented Facebook and other similar social aids to help us keep track of an even larger number of people.
Weighing the evolutionary sacrifice of headsize against the invention of Facebook can therefore only lead to one conclusion. Facebook will eventually shrink our heads.
Similar Posts:
by Walter Naeslund on April 22, 2008
What’s better than a free lunch? Well, sometimes, the lunch that you pay for is better. Here is why:
Lionell Robbins’ definition of economics from 1935: “Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses” doesn’t accurately describe the field of economics as noted in the late nineties by the “new economy”-supporters as well as the more modern Long Tailers. It’s the scarcity paradigm that doesn’t hold true in the digital age, where the marginal cost for information approaches zero. You know this already. The same holds true for ideas, or does it?
Not really. It’s true that the cost of distributing ideas approaches zero, but the value of that idea can both increase and decrease depending on the distribution. In the advertising sense, spreading an idea makes it more valuable (like We Try Harder or Just Do It), but spreading the ownership of the idea makes value decrease (like Jeep or Rollerblades unless you stay associated to being “The Original and Best”). You’ll see the same thing when you look at super high value web services like Facebook, You Tube or Flickr. They don’t give away the shares in the companies do they?
I intend to apply this structure to my own business of Walter Naeslund and here is how:
Here at Walter Naeslund we come up with a lot of ideas for different brands, but a lot of times there are reasons why we don’t have any luck approaching that brand with our idea. The brand owner may have a retainer deal with another agency eating up their budget, or they can be unable or unwilling to pay for our services for some other reason.
So we don’t approach them with our idea, and the idea goes to waste. But for spontaneous ideas, the marginal cost of putting the idea out there is zero. Therefore the idea or strategy or innovation or concept will be published here on walternaeslund.blogspot.com. Anyone who is able or willing to pay for a particular concept will see it promptly removed from this blog, though the idea may have been exposed to competitors or media already. For some that may be fine. Otherwise you can make a retainer deal or a running bill deal with us beforehand, and then no idea within that deal will be published. What you pay for then is your very own focused ownership of the idea (higher value) and we will then work on making it spread (higher value again) with your ownership retained.
Ideas put on the blog can of course be taken without payment, but the idea will have a publishing date and a moral ownership that is ours. Using it will put you behind moral bars and we will have a “ideas stolen”-ticker on the blog with special events where we celebrate you. (At least we’ll get a fun party out of our work, right?)
Fun huh?
The worlds first Open Source advertising agency. It’s an experiment. We call it WNOA: Walter Naeslund Open Agency.
Similar Posts:
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=ef6d134b-ae46-48c0-96d3-bc6c65fc3269)
