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Will Online Food Save The World?

by Walter Naeslund on October 8, 2009

Bild 2009-10-08 kl. 12.05 by you.Kicking back for a well deserved five minutes in the red sofa at the office, a thought came to mind: Why do we store such huge amounts of food in distributed warehouses all across the city? I’m talking here about the grocery stores. I can understand that we need the small corner stores for when we need something right away, but for the bigger grocery shopping streaks, this seams to be inefficient. Perhaps contrary to what intuition tells us, shopping for groceries on the web should really make this middle buffer of city-distributed mini-warehouses unnecessary, giving us cheaper and fresher goods right?

If we order food online, the main distribution centrals can order everything on demand, and nothing will have to get old while being stored locally. It should also be environmentally smart, since discarded food comes at a huge environmental cost.

Just a thought from the red sofa.

Now back to tomorrow’s pitch presentation and coffee with some of Honesty’s new partners. Exciting times!

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Forsman & Bodenfors and Svenska Kyrkan Don’t Know Google

by Walter Naeslund on September 1, 2009

If they only knew what a great idea they really had! Forsman & Bodenfors just came up with a new site for Svenska Kyrkan (The Church of Sweden) where you can submit your prayer to the site. The prayer is then keyworded on the site so that you can find other prayers on the same topic.

What makes this idea so great is that it suddenly makes The Church of Sweden relevant for a vast number of current topics like swine flu or economic crisis. Just like the church is relevant across a broad spectrum of topics in real life, it becomes equally relevant online. It also produces thousands of pages with relevant cross links. Brilliant.

Unfortunately this is also where the brilliance ends and it becomes apparent that Forsman & Bodenfors haven’t understood what a great idea they really had. Why is that? Well – much of the power of this idea, say a potential 20-50% of visits to the site, comes from the fact that the church becomes a relevant hit on Google for so many different topics. Or would have become just that, if they would have been at all visible to Google. And they aren’t, simply because F&B don’t know Google. Forsman & Bodenfors have chosen Flash as their technology for this campaign, which in it’s standard form isn’t indexable by Google. And they haven’t done any of the standard workarounds to make it so. To Google, this looks like thousands of identical and uninteresting pages with different names. Google looks at it, scratches it’s head, and throws all of them in the garbage without indexing anything. Let alone indexing on a wide variety of topics.

Svenska Kyrkan 1

You can see above what the site looks like. You can see the selected prayer in the middle with keywords in different colors and the share buttons. Pretty, but utterly useless from a Google perspective. Because if you take a look at how Google sees http://svenskakyrkan.se/be, this is what Google sees:

Svenska Kyrkan be på Google

Google sees three pages instead of the potential thousands. One containing the main page containing the Flash file, the Flash file itself described with this beautiful text: “txt Header instructions txt1 txt2 txt3 txt4 Header instructions txt Header instructions txt txt Lorem ipsum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, …”, and the fail page “the prayer doesn’t exist”.

In plain English this is a complete failure, and an awesome display of the problem most agencies are facing – they are smart, but they live in the past.

Besides the Google perspective, there is also the perspective of user behavior. Users want intuitive interaction. It is not intuitive to use an embed-code to embed text. For video, there is a purpose for the embed code, but for text? No. People naturally want to be able to copy and paste the text directly, preferably with links and colors and everything. That way we also get relevant links all over the web linking back to the Church of Sweden site on relevant topics. THAT would have been brilliant.

Conclusion – This is really an excellent idea, but the excellence is there by mistake, and is not taken advantage of at all simply because of lacking knowledge of basic SEO. It’s really sad. Especially since it would have been so easy to solve by using DHTML or even underlying indexable content.

One thing puzzled me though. How could something like this receive thousands of entries? Truly a mystery. At least until I switched on the television in my hotel room and saw television commercials for the internet campaign! Advertising for… advertising! What on earth?! To get traffic to the site you try to buy this traffic with television dollars?! A site like this one should get at least 20-50% of its traffic via search, which would have been free, self regenerating, and incredibly easy to achieve.

Suggestion – (Hi friends at F&B, I know you’re reading this and you know I love you, but I HAD to write this, since it’s such a great example to learn from. Please accept my free advice here as a return favor).

What if you would have used existing and established services such as Facebook status updates and Twitter posts (#whatever) to complement your web interface as a way to input prayers?  And an email adress (spam filtered of course) and an SMS-service (free of course)[edit: they have SMS-input]? What if your output of the prayers would have been much more flexible, mashable, widgetized and projected at the churches of Stockholm? Or whatever. Make it bigger. Give it presence.

But more than anything – learn SEO. Optimize that thing! Optimize it! Because really, what you came up with, apparently without realizing it, was a really good idea! You have great brains! But by implementing it the way you did, you created a bomb without a fuse.

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For some reason, this image comes to mind. ;-)

SocialMediaCool

Yeah, we're down with social media.


[Edit: Article about the site in Swedish: ]

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5 Questions and 9 Answers About The Future of The Internet – My Hyper Island Interview

by Walter Naeslund on August 27, 2009

wlt by you.A couple of days ago I was contacted by students at Hyper Island for an interview about the future of digital communication. Here are their questions and my answers:

1. What do you think will happen in the future regarding digital media? For example real time applications, Flash, Adobe Scene 7, Motion Graphics, Mashups?


Innovation Will Gravitate Towards the Efficient
It is always difficult to say anything about the future. Even the inventors themselves can rarely tell how their inventions will be used. Remember for example that Twitter was created as a way to let people know via SMS where the party was. Their invention then took on a life of its own in the hands of the users. On the other hand, this kind of “Darwinistic” innovation is a key feature of the digital technologies. Especially when it comes to innovation in the realm of open source and open APIs.

What we can say is that innovations will gravitate towards increased efficiency in different fields. And this realization is useful. Whenever you come up with an innovation or a campaign, ask yourself: will this make things more efficient? If the answer is yes, the innovation will stand a chance of succeeding, if not, it may at best become a short lived hype. In particular, innovations making collaboration and coordination more efficient are interesting when it comes to the internet since they promote themselves.

Good Bye Flash, Micro Sites & Poor Indexing
Real time applications will be important because they’ll make things more efficient. “Awesomely cool” but utterly useless Flash-based micro sites have always been a bluff and will increasingly be called as such by clients with a deeper understanding of the internet. Such sites make nothing efficient. Perhaps some people will disagree with me here and start arguing that I’m way too rational and that people buy with their emotions, but my bet is that these critics don’t understand the social web. What is often inefficient about these Flash-porn sites is that they are SOCIALLY inefficient. There is no way for me to efficiently share and discuss the content with my friends.

Recently we have started seeing “share”-buttons thrown into the mix, but these usually don’t tap into the actual behavior of people, and are just there because “social-media-is-the-new-hip-thing-and-therefore-we-need-share-on-Facebook-button“. Again, ask the question – will this make things more efficient in some dimension? They are also often inefficient in that they’re not indexed properly by search engines. The question then is, what are they good for? For inspiration? As some sort of interactive film? Very recently (like, right now) I saw one such campaign where they were actually showing commercials for the campaign on television! Making advertising for advertising must be the ultimate proof of failure and inefficiency.

Flash in general will get fierce competition as we will want sites to be more application-like, fast, optimized and useful. HTML5 will be a primary technology and may well put Flash and Silverlight in the shade.

Mashups & Commoditization
Mashups will continue to be super important because the idea of mashups resonates with the basic idea of innovation: take the best of what’s around and make it better. Since the costs of interacting with other open API innovations are so low, the total value of all parties in a mash up interaction will increase. We all benefit from mashups. If somebody has made the best map, like Google Maps for instance, there is not much point in using energy making a copy of that, but rather put our energy into innovating a new service and use their map. They win, and we win. More than anything, users win.

A lot of what required coding before are now commodities that you can pick up and just connect to something else through an open API. Smart people can thus create quite cool innovations by just putting pieces together. An internet-innovator friend of mine said that he’s very reluctant to try anything that he can’t build a first prototype of within an hour. He’s one of the most interesting and successful innovators of the new web in Sweden.

Real Time & Concurrent Editing
Technically, real time and concurrent editing will be important. I don’t know exactly which implementations of this will be the killer apps yet, but true real time collaboration is efficient and will become very popular. Not least by means of Google Wave. But we may well see other applications than these. For example live use of scripts for different purposes. There are a gazillion imaginable uses for such live scripts, but to get an idea, imagine a script being uploaded and run on a users iPhone returning different data depending on conditions such as position, battery status, orientation, in call status, who else is around, etc…

Real time and social search is very interesting and is an area where Google is lagging hopelessly behind. Here, Facebook and Twitter rule.

Mobile
And of course, mobile will be important, but there will be less difference between mobile and non-mobile. What is non-mobile today anyway? The iPhone is not a mobile phone with computer capabilities, it’s a computer that you can make calls on. And it has very comprehensive sensory systems like camera, video, positioning, integrated internet connection, gyro, accelerometer, compass, etc… Laptops have most of these too, but are lacking a few things like positioning and true mobile internet. The next generation of MacBooks will have a SIM-card slot and positioning. Mark my words.

Short answer: Real time. Mash ups. HTML5. Mobile.

2. What is the next big thing? (The new Facebook/Twitter for example)
The next big thing is Google Wave and all the amazing applications that will be built on top of it. Twitter will probably tip over and become mainstream in Sweden, but I’m not sure of it. Facebook with their aquisition of Friendfeed and their new search functionality is becoming very powerful as well.

3. Which trends do you see in digital media?
See question 1.

4. What qualifications will the media industry require?
Great rebels. Great thinkers. Great designers. Great writers. Great system designers/programmers. Great digital networkers. Great storytellers. Amazingly great leaders who can make all these other people love to work together. People who are not afraid to fail. People who can make the current Swedish labor legislation go away. Howard Roark.

5. What is the biggest challenge for the future in the media industry?
There are a lot of people today with power, who’s power relies on a monopoly of information and information distribution. These people will fight hard to stop anything that will remove their power. It’s very natural. They will eventually loose, but they will destroy a lot of value as they fight in increasing desperation. The music industry is the obvious example of this. It will be a perfect rerun of what happened when free-to-air radio was introduced.

Another challenge is our labor laws. Many agencies today have to fire people, but the law forces them to fire the newcomers, and the newcomers, on average, know more about digital communication. Also, for the same reason, they won’t be able to recruit the people their clients demand. This will create a downward death spiral. In nature, those who are able to change in accordance with the changes in nature survive. We are no different.

For me and for Honesty, this is good news of course, since we will be able to recruit the right people from the start.

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Social Web Camp vs. Bring Dialogue Conference ‘09. Waking Up to a Different Reality.

by Walter Naeslund on August 24, 2009

Contrasts are what make life interesting. Yesterday I woke up here:

…from the sound of sheep walking around outside my tent. Today I woke up and threw myself into a cab to Arlanda to fly off to Oslo and Strömstad for the Bring Dialogue Conference ‘09.

When I got here I realized I’d be staying here:

…at the luxury spa resort in Strömstad. Slightly different from camping – haha! It’s actually even nicer than what the picture shows.

But conferences are all about the people. The people at Social Web Camp were the elite of social media – almost like Sweden’s own R&D-department of digital communication. Here we have a similiar number of people from the business elite (at least from what I can tell so far). Probably as smart, as passionate, and as creative, but in slightly different fields. Also, we have some amazing speakers like Kjell A. Nordström, Micael Dahlén, Magnus Lindqvist, and Jan Bylund. Only to name a few. (Note that all but one are striking the same knuckles-in-chin-pose). :-)

And then I haven’t even begun talking about the shellfish buffet that is planned on Koster for tommorow night.

Those of you who attended my session at the Social Web Camp got to see a preview of the talk I’m doing here. Stay tuned for Slideshare presentation that will be posted shortly. I’ll be discussing the evolution of gossip, good, and evil, draw parallels to social media, and also present thoughts on strategy for approaching this new breakdown of brand privacy.

See you soon!

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More On The Beauty of Stealing

by Walter Naeslund on May 28, 2009

Dear Chris,

You left me a comment on my “Cut, Copy, Steal, But Never Lie”-post about how it is “NEVER okay to steal”. I believe you are missing my point, and since I believe it’s quite an important one I will dedicate this whole post to an answer to your comment.

The point is that this copy/mash-up/stolen goods/call it what you want/, works so well BECAUSE it is draws upon an existing campaign and because we leave a clear reference to it – much like linking to the original post when remashing it. Just like with the blog post, both parties benefit from keeping the discussion alive. The campaign CD Fredrik Lundgren put it best: “tap into the existing conversation”. Amen.

What ISN’T neither smart nor “okay” (if that matters) as you put it is to steal and pretending it’s your own. You are then missing out on the power of sailing on an existing idea while also behaving like a prick. And if you look at this post, you might want to consider what ad agencies have been up to for the past couple of decades.

And by the way, thank you for commenting!

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A Guilty Pirate Bay Verdict Will Make us Look Like Idiots in The History Books

by Walter Naeslund on April 17, 2009

In about an hour we will know the verdict in the Pirate Bay-trials. Let’s hope that people are being smart about this. Because a guilty verdict would not be good for anyone. Especially not for art and artists.

A guilty verdict would do little to boost sales. I believe we’ll see the opposite result. Darknets and stealth services (like Pirate Bay’s own would evolve quickly. Innovation incentives in the legal realm would be smaller. We would do little but slowing down inevitable change. From a wider perspective, it is just not intelligent.

If they are found not guilty however, it will be considered a future oriented statement. One that would benefit artists, culture, our country, and eventually the world. The music industry will have to come up with something better and more useful than Pirate Bay, and to be honest, they already have. Though Spotify would perhaps need some healthy competition. Spotify is just one small step, but it is a step in the right direction. This type of evolution is where we are going. A guilty verdict would just make us look dumb. Especially in the history books.

From the angle of the artist, nobody has put it better than Paulo Coelho:
“I didn’t start writing to get rich, I started writing to get read”.

Read more: 
Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Or if you don’t feel like reading, listen to this interview with Mr Coelho:

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Think Twice Before Even Dreaming About Using IPRED. Or Associating With Anyone Doing It.

by Walter Naeslund on April 5, 2009

We are now starting to see the effects of the Swedish IPRED-law, which states that copyright holders can go after individuals downloading protected content. Apparently, Swedish internet traffic has now dropped by nearly half. And since when is that a good thing? I thought traffic was valuable?

I believe that you can never be quite certain when you make predictions about the future, but in this case I think that the case is quite clear, and that we can now see the evidence emerging.

But first off, I want to be very clear that I am on the side of artists and other creators of value. I have strong opinions about this subject, but they are all about realism. Not about anarchism.

What the IPRED-law is doing is to protect an outdated business model for music, motion pictures, and other content. It’s implementation will remove incentives for product- and business model development like for example Spotify.

What’s worse, however, is that it directs valuable resources to evil forces, such as terrorists and criminals. Why? Well, a lot of people care about music and film. Much more people, in fact, than are criminals and terrorists. And thus there is a broad base for recruiting creatives to help keep music, film and other content free. If we go after file sharing individuals using the IPRED-law, there will be strong incentives to develop stealth file sharing software, and a large and powerful community engaging in it. We will quickly see increasingly sofisticated software of this type appearing and being deployed. With file sharing, we’ll be back to where we started, but criminals and terrorists will have brand new fast stealth tools which they would never have had the resources to develop themselves. And even if this if perhaps an exagerrated fear (there is after all already great stealth services out there, as well as bad guys using them), it clearly shows that this law will be completely useless very soon because of people learning to use these stealth services.

And what about open wireless networks? Will they all disappear now? That will not make brands trying to utilize IPRED very popular, and will actually damage the country’s progress towards connectedness. Read on.

Because another angle is the branding angle. And here it becomes very interesting when opening todays newspaper DN (unfortunately not linkable yet). In one article you can read about how people are boycotting the film- and music industries. Here are some examples of quotes from the public cited in the article:

“I’m completely going to boycott the music- and film industry now. Earlier, I’ve spent an average of 1000kr (ca $100) per month on cinema, DVDs, concerts and CDs. That will now end. All this will be cancelled”.

Or this one from a middle age person:

“I’ve never file shared in my life, but now I have to if only to show them that they can’t scare us. Let’s fight to protect our last rights. I have just downloaded file sharing software and figured out how it works. This will be fun”.

Or this interesting one:

“Let’s demand a seal for artists entirely without association with the major labels”. Now wouldn’t that be interesting.

Like I wrote the other day, we can already see smart companies, like Viasat for example, taking advantage of this, publicly promising NEVER to have anything to do with the IPRED-law, and thereby end up in the same future oriented category as for example Spotify.

If I were a copyright holder today I would think once, twice, and three times before even thinking about using this law. It may very well cost you your brand.

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Not So Hostile Takeover Of Forsman&Bodenfors
(+ Outfit of The Day)

by Walter Naeslund on April 2, 2009

This is the first, and perhaps the last time we’ll do an outfit of the day post on here, but today is a special day.

Because today, symbolically enough on the day of the Golden Egg Awards, my agency Honesty is moving into new offices. And not just any old shack, but the legendary 6th floor of Kungsgatan 48, formerly famous for agencies like Forsman & Bodenfors and Manne&Co. They had an impact on the communications industry, and I humbly hope to have a shot at the same feat.

Now that we have F&B’s old offices, maybe we should buy their old aquarium website as well… hmmm… should we say $300?

Also, the new Honesty offices are overlooking Konserthuset, the venue of the Golden Egg Awards tonight. So if you go out for a smoke, don’t be surprised if you see us burning the midnight oil. There is much work to be done. You find us here:

Bild 4 by you.

And what about the outfit of the day? Well – since we’re moving, I’m wearing functional work clothes. The world’s premier fleece hoodie from Houdini because it’s super comfy, and a T-shirt I got from Cunning Communications in New York a few years back, because I haven’t had time to do laundry (not that I didn’t appreciate the gift though, thanks guys).

IMG_1085.JPG by you.

Just in case, I also wear the world’s most comfy socks from Smart Wool. And let me tell you – there is nothing quite like it.

IMG_1087.JPG by you.

Boom. Ready for anything.

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Attacking In Group Doesn’t Make You Innocent.
– It Just Makes Things Worse.

by Walter Naeslund on April 1, 2009

OMG. Reading this mornings newspaper, I get the same vibe as when I hear about bullying in schoolyards, or when I listen to Philip Zimbardo talking about evil at TED.com – “if we attack in a group, we all get away with it”.

Earbooks, Storyside, Piratförlaget, Bonnier Audio, and Norstedts have decided to take advantage of the new and highly controversial (79% of young men are against, and half of the general population) IPRED-law to attack, in formation, ordinary people downloading audio books from file sharing sites. This is NOT smart.

Sure, one of them could attack an individual and say that this is what they believe in and have some sort of pseudo-discussion about rights of artists. They could make it part of their identity and stand by it. I don’t believe in it, but at least it would feel honest and perhaps even a little courageous. But when hiding behind each others backs, effecively saying that they’re a little bit ashamed, it’s absolutely devestating for their brands.

On top of it all, Bonnier has a brand new R&D-department working to take Bonnier into the future. Suddenly this sounds less than convincing. If putting the numbers on the board of what kind of money they MIGHT make off of this (will it even be a +sign in front of that number?) against the cost of the damage they’re doing to their brand, and multiply that number over the medium or long term, this will seem like the worst decision in a long time. It’s very unfortunate.

Compare this to what Viasat are doing, leveraging this law to show off their brand as progressive and intelligent.

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Viasat Pushing of Against Ipred Towards a Better Positioning

by Walter Naeslund on March 31, 2009

I‘ve written quite a bit about the Pirate Bay trials and how the music industry is undermining itself and its own business. As of tomorrow we have a new law in Sweden, the IPRED-law, allowing copyright holders to go after downloading youngsters. Any such attempt is of course entirely in vain. I’ve written about it here, and you can see this concept being popularized in recent articles here, here, here, here, or any of these. And these examples are only from 1 Swedish, very large newspaper.

Anyway – just in time for this new law, Viasat presents a study by Sifo showing that most people are sceptical to this new law. Not only that, Viasat, who are themselves “victims of piracy” state that they are NOT going to utilize this law AT ALL.

Now, this law is suddenly useful, though perhaps not in the way intended by the record labels. A brand like Viasat opposing the law may give them a nice position, branding them as future- and customer oriented.

Smart move.

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