Honesty's first office. In a corner cupboard in my apartment.

When I founded Honesty AB on Valentine’s Day 2009, I had just started on a brand new relationship with an amazing girl. It’s somewhat telling I guess that I am now, two years later, celebrating Valentines Day on my own with tacos and a movie. I don’t want to blame it on work, but there is something about entrepreneurship that just consumes you, and I can understand if that’s something that can be a pain to be around sometimes.

I am also celebrating Honesty’s 2-year anniversary alone. Not really because I would have had to perhaps, we are fifteen people working at the office today after all, of which five are partners, but I somehow feel that this particular anniversary only applies to me. The first partners after me came in when I had been working on Honesty alone for 7,5 months and for them, that date (somewhere in October) is when it all started. I’m sure they will want to celebrate Honesty’s 2-year anniversary then instead, and I can understand that.

But still, this date, February 14 2009, will remain in my heart as one of the most important dates of my life. It’s the date when I took a pretty scary leap of faith, when I said to myself that no, I won’t go for that safe employment, and no, I’m not sure I’ll be able to support myself financially or even keep my apartment.

Still, I went for it, and even though it has cost me a lot personally, it has also completely changed my perception of what I believe to be possible. Starting an ad agency from scratch, without a single cent in financing, was something that I wasn’t sure was possible, at least not if you want to become a large agency and be eligible for the larger accounts, but today, two years into the game (or 16 months if you ask my partners) we are indeed up there competing for the biggies, and winning. Considering our current size, this is pretty amazing. I’ve launched many projects before Honesty, but this is the first one that I would consider strikingly successful, not only as a start up, but as a company. It’s the first one, but I don’t intend it to be the last.

So will I celebrate next year’s Valentine’s Day alone once again? There is no way of telling. But I do feel that Honesty is not in it’s infancy anymore, and that there are now many other amazing people that I share the responsibility of entrepreneurship with. So who knows. Maybe this year will also be one of love. Not only of Honesty.

It’s been an amazing past couple of weeks! Apart from the clients we already work with, we have now won not one, but two major long running pitches and are now the strategic lead agency for both Stena Metall and Halebop.Stena Metall is a big and extremely competent recycling company. In a world full of greenwashing and wishful thinking, Stena Metall is a company that actually delivers what other companies only talk about. What is charity to many companies is core business for Stena metall, and that’s a communicative truth if there ever was one! We’re also really happy to have the Gothenburg-based agency Stendahls as a partner in this venture helping us with local production, organization of sales material, sales offers and much more (Stena are also Gothenburg-based). Don’t know what we would do without you guys.Halebop is an awesome brand delivering mobile telephony to the young and beautiful people of the underworld (well… of Sweden rather, but you know what I mean…). Halebop is one of the most consequently executed brands in Sweden and one that has THE most satisfied customers in the industry. It’s one of those accounts that just has it all. Thank you for choosing us! We’re really glad to have you as partners. Because that’s what you are – partners – not merely another client. *Love*

In many ways, these two brands are on completely different ends of the scale, but there are also key similarities: they both incredibly passionate about what they do, and they both have genuine communicative true values at the core of their operations. We always talk about finding the communicative truth, and with these brands, we didn’t have to dig deep to find it.

Again, we’re really proud to have been chosen to represent you. We know our competition was tough and that you had plenty of great options to choose from. Thank you! And cheers!

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.

It was more than eleven years ago that I started my academic career at the M.Sc.-program for media technology at Linköping Institute of Technology. Way back then, the web was completely different, Google didn’t exist (it was actually founded the same year), and ICQ was the name of the game for communication.

But it wasn’t too long ago that I went to ad school, and now that I think of it, I find a few things about my education there quite strange. While I was there I did a bunch of interesting stuff. Formally, I was a copywriter student at Berghs School of Communication, but in reality I was more into strategy, and I also did one of my internships as an art director at BBH New York (who also have an SEO-questionable big Flash-behemoth as their site by the way). I have always loved trying different things, and this was certainly a great opportunity to do that.

Oh, nostalgia. My desk at BBH New York.

But the copywriting education itself was flawed in one key way – whoever put it together didn’t seem to be aware of something called “the internet”. I never once in two years heard anyone talk about web copy, much less give a lecture on SEO. I’m not sure how it is there today, but if they don’t dedicate time to that, I think it is very strange.

But the problem isn’t just in the schools. I read an article recently in the Swedish advertising magazine Resumé by a young and successful copywriter who said that web copy doesn’t differ very much from traditional copy. This is what he said:

“Jag ställer mig också ibland frågande till definitionen av webbcopy. Skillnaden är inte så stor, det är bara de dramaturgiska förutsättningarna som är lite annorlunda. Men i grunden handlar det om att kunna skriva intresseväckande”.

or in my own humble English translation:

“I sometimes question the definition of web copy. The difference isn’t that big, it’s just the dramaturgical premises that are somewhat different. But basically, it’s all about writing to awaken interest”.

Assuming he was quoted correctly, I find this strange. We can of course have different perspectives on what constitutes a big difference, but I would say that the difference is definitely significant! And more importantly, most copywriters don’t have any knowledge of, or experience from writing for search engines.

Google isn’t like your normal target audience. For one, Google doesn’t read between the lines. Humans understand that a passage like “…the dark mysterious pulse of the the night…” refers to, say, dance or sex, but can Google understand that? Google does, on the other hand, read around the lines, takes context into account, weighs remote links, clusters and evaluates what others have written – stuff that humans have a harder time doing.

I tell copywriters “to write for the hearts of men and the mind of Google”, and that is much harder than just doing one or the other. Good copywriters will need two sets of skills, and will be harder to find, harder to educate, and much more expensive to buy, simply because of the upcoming imbalance between supply and demand of this skill combo.

I love to theorize about social behavior and how it relates to our behavior on the internet. But sometimes I get the urge to be just a little more practical about things. How can we actually use all this theory? Before we dig into what I call The Hang Glider Theory, let’s gossip a little.

The Anatomy of Gossip

It seems reasonable to me that gossip evolved as a tool to manage coordination of larger societies. It was a way to trade the social currency called reputation. Reputation, in turn, was a way to govern collaboration between individuals where you neither had a close enough common interest in genetic propagation, nor first hand knowledge of the individual’s contribution or withdrawal from the common pool of value (stash of nuts, Mammoth meat, whatever), nor a strong enough reason to hurt or kill the individual in question. Gossip was a more granular way to control behavior so that it wouldn’t become abusive. Killing individuals for stealing a banana makes society somewhat unstable, but so does letting banana theft run wild, right? Gossip and reputation worked really well here as a way to make societies more stable, to enable rudimentary trade over time and distances, and support larger scale collaboration in general. Societies using this tool prevailed and individuals mastering social behavior thrived. If this wasn’t true, we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing today. Apparently, those who stayed behind in their caves and didn’t interact perished. Maybe somebody should tell this to marketing execs who don’t think they need to engage in social media.

Positive and Negative Gossip

If this is how gossip evolved, one can imagine why negative gossip is so much more common than positive gossip. It was more valuable to know who not to trust than knowing who to trust, simply because it was more expensive to be ripped off or killed than to miss out on the benefit some good social interaction. This could explain our approach anxiety and also why our reflexes for spotting danger is so much quicker than the mental process of spotting something good.

To this day, negative gossip dominates. Even though I can’t show you any conclusive evidence, I think we know it intuitively from our everyday lives. Just look at a rack of gossip porn… sorry gossip magazines.

Gossip and Brands

This is also true for brands. It’s so much easier to go viral on some negative spin than on some positive one. There are tons of examples, the “Disgusting Domino’s Pizza Clip” being only one.

But wait a minute – if this is built in to our minds from thousands of years of evolution, and the internet makes this kind of gossip ultra efficient, will this not happen to us all the time? Yes, my dear Watson, it will. And for that reason, strategies to handle it will have to be part of our management models, but also part of our strategic communications thinking.

How to build it into our management models is crucially important, and includes things like corporate guidelines, empowerment of employees, etc. It is outside the scope of today’s post, but I promise discuss it further some other day.

Instead, today, I’ll propose a model for building it into our strategic thinking. I call it The Hang Glider Theory:

The Hang Glider Theory

If the domination of negative gossip is human nature, then we have a downward gravity of gossip on our scale from attraction to repulsion. So what if we could do what hang gliders do and use this force of gravity to gain speed and create lift again? To nurture warm upwinds and gain even more lift, eventually ending up turning negative momentum to positive lift?

What EA-Games did to handle a bug i their Tiger Woods ’08 game is an old but clear example of this strategy. The bug was that you could walk out on water in the game, which created quite a bit of buzz in the gaming community. But instead of doing something boring, like fixing the bug, or just keeping quite, EA put on their hang glider and used the momentum. This it what they came up with:

Now, I’m not saying that creating a funny film will solve your problem, make sure you hear me now. For Domino’s for example, that would probably have been disastrous. But this film is a clear example of the theory at work.

But even for the Domino’s case much could have been done. Cool campaigns could have been created for recruiting 2 new employees (implying that there were in fact only 2 people involved), or you could have taken these two individuals in to help out with improving working conditions at Domino’s (they were obviously the two most dissatisfied employees in the country), or you could have turned the restaurant in question into an institute for food freshness and employee care, making the incident a turn around symbol. Or whatever. Just not this:

…which is boring, and guilty sounding. It’s also very similar to the “a few bad apples”-defense used in the Abu Ghraib trials. It sounds like you throw out and indict two employees without changing anything in the system, thus leading us to wonder if there aren’t a thousand others just like them out there, being just as dissatisfied and disloyal, only waiting to sneeze on my mozzarella sandwich.

So – this is The Hang Glider Theory. Try it out. Tell me what you think of it. Have fun!

Thanks to all for your interest in yesterday’s post about Forsman & Bodenfors, Svenska Kyrkan, and Google. It led to many interesting conversations both in the comments of the post, on Twitter in my email inbox, on Facebook, and over the phone. Wasn’t quite prepared for that kind of response. So, thanks!

Today I want to talk to you about something else. I want to talk to you about clients. Because even though it is our responsibility as consultants to provide know-how and ideas, clients also need to take their share of responsibility. In short – everybody needs to do their job.

Yesterday I met a prospective client who had great knowledge and understanding of communication and the internet. He almost cried over how he had to actually teach his expensive consultants how to do their jobs. Clients such as this one are a pleasure to meet, and the projects with them always turn out great. They have passion and they understand their role in a successful project.

But sometimes… just sometimes… you bump into something dark and completely different. Let me tell you one of these stories:

On one April morning earlier this year I sat on the balcony with at cup of coffee and a copy of Dagens Nyheter in my hands. I started reading about a topic that I have a particular interest in – computers and learning. The project described in the article is called Skolwebben (The School Web) and is intended to be an information hub for teachers, students, and parents alike. A great idea to be sure! The internet could be an amazing tool to move
learning into a whole new era, but only if competence and ability is
blended into the mix. Here, this didn’t happen.

As I continued reading,  I almost choked on my coffee. This project took on enormous costs. 17 000 000 SEK was poured into the project which was to be carried out by TietoEnator. For anyone of us who has ever worked with communication systems 17 000 000 SEK is a huge sum. For that kind of money we could create amazing strategy, amazing tactics, and amazing implementation. The money would be put into streamlining efficiency for the users based on their actual behaviors, and would be built on open source technology. But this is not what TietoEnator does. Instead, the produce a buggy, complicated and expensive system, hated by teachers, students, and parents alike. From what I could tell from the article in Dagens Nyheter, the project was on it’s way to the garbage can and would then be restarted from scratch.

There is plenty to read about this project and you can find much on Google. Try for example this search. But be prepared to get upset.

As I was sitting there on my balcony, I felt I had to do something. I picked up my computer and wrote an email to Anette Holm, the IT-director of Stockholm City, and also the person who had been commenting the story in Dagens Nyheter, explaining to her my ambition to help out. I told her that I would put mine and my agency’s resources at her disposal to figure out how to turn this catastrophe into something useful. I offered to do it for free*(see edit below).

When I received her answer I had to read it over and over five times before I could believe what it said. I could have understood if she wasn’t willing to involve a new agency into the project, but I had never expected this. It was just too much. Here is the email:

“The School Web is not primarily a matter of communication. Thanks for your offer, but I don’t see the need.” I read in the email.

Not primarily a matter of communication! What?!?! Suddenly it didn’t seem so strange anymore that projects governed by this kind of thinking would make communications projects crash, and take 17 000 000 SEK of tax money with them in the fall. How could anyone with the title of IT-director even write something like this, apparently without flinching? It’s almost Kafta-like.

I sat there looking at the email for a while, trying to figure out what to do with it. It just felt so hopeless. I printed the email and posted it on my wall for while see if I would eventually figure this out. “Not primarily a matter of communication…” echoed in my head. What is it a matter of then? If not communication?

A client like Anette Holm is one that I wouldn’t take on. Good projects can’t emerge from somebody who’s philosophical view of the internet doesn’t include the word communication. I would recommend you all not to take on such projects either. Eventually, we’ll get the clients we deserve, and our clients will get the brilliance they deserve.

Excellence is a business of ideals.

Edit:
FYI, here is a link to the email I sent.

Edit:
The offer was intended as free, though I realize now that I’m looking back at the email that it could possibly have been interpreted otherwise, as commenters “vän av ordning” and Magnus Nilsson have rightfully pointed out. The main point however, is not whether or not we actually did offer our services for free, but that Anette Holm’s thoughts on the project were that “…the school web is not primarily a matter of communication…”.

The mini bus died. All of a sudden we feel the stench of burnt clutch, and minutes later everything just stopped. But more on that later. First a brief report on the highlight of the year so far for me – The Sweden Social Web Camp!

Anyone who has ever read Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged will understand what I’m talking about. In the novel, the most talented, creative and productive people gather in what they call Galt’s Gulch to get away from the world of politics, envy and empty words. This event was just like that. Everywhere you turned you could talk to intelligent and interesting people with a ton of knowledge in different areas. Rarely have I enjoyed a conference this much! Sleeping in a tent was the final and perfect touch to the weekend.

The entire Saturday was filled with sessions on all kinds of topics related to the social web – most of very high quality. One of my absolute favorites was SEO-expert Simon Sundén’s talk on SEO.

But the most valuable aspects of SSWC was perhaps after all the informal interactions taking place all over the island. I could name several here, but notably Dan Carlberg of Bloglovin who is one of the brightest people I’ve met. I picked up a bunch of great ideas and hopefully contributed with a few. Check out #sswc on Twitter to tap into the conversation.

And what about the van? Well – no trip is complete without failure, right? Ours came when our van broke down on the way back to Stockholm. With a smoking clutch the van died just outside of Norrköping. After hitching a ride with one of Simon’s friends, we got on the train in Nyköping. And that’s where I am right now, writing to you.

Thank’s to all involved for an amazingly successful weekend, and a special thanks to Thomas Wennström who put it all together for us!

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/

Today the “Sweden’s most swedish job”-campaign that I was involved in with Syrup Sthlm and Bizkit earlier this year came to an end. Calle Engström, who has been traveling around Sweden blogging, filming and tweeting about his experience, arrived to Stockholm and the STF hostel Af Chapman after posting 82 YouTube-films, 371 blog posts and 762 tweets.

In the early stages we received a lot of comments, both positive and critical, about the project. Most comments have been about the “plagiarizing” of Cumming Nitro’s “Best Job in The World”-campaign. And like I’ve said earlier, you can all start by removing the quotes around “plagiarizing”. Because even though the campaign in itself is perhaps not so similar, honestly tagging on to the very successful “BJITW”-campaign has been crucial in powering the campaign. We actually needed to make it sound more similar than it actually was. And we did. Those of you who have seen my lectures on social media strategy has heard me talking about 7 different techniques, of which one is referred to by me as “Sailing”. And well – this is exactly what sailing is about. Find a good gust of wind and tag along with it.

Anyway – today we can evaluate and look at the sheer numbers. First off we’ve had major media coverage in basically all media of significance in Sweden. From the big ones to the local press. But more interestingly the traffic to the STF website has increased by 70%. And for a client where the website is so absolutely crucial, this is not bad.

Check out Calle in the clip below or on his STF-site.

All work and no play makes Walter a dull boy. And we don’t want that. I’m currently reloading the batteries out on a boat in the Stockholm archipelago, which is why you don’t get a lot of updates right now. But I am reading up on some interesting stuff and will be back soon with some new angles. I hope. If I don’t turn sailor full time. Here are some pics from my life aboard Aniara: