July 31, 2006
July 29, 2006
July 28, 2006
please blog me
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[Cartoon inspired by Rubel's recent post.]
"all existing business models are wrong. find a new one."
Probably my favorite bit of "How To Be Creative" is the intro to Point Number Eleven:
11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.It's weird when you find yourself a professional cartoonist, even though you don't really publish anything in the conventional sense.Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one.
Instead of using the cartoons to sell books, t-shirts, magazine editorial etc, I use cartoons to sell $10 wine, suits, yachts, software, whatever. All very indirectly. The more indirectly, the more I prefer it.
Would this approach have been possible before the internet and what Chris Anderson calls "The Long Tail"? Of course not.
The journo from the WSJ can yak on to the contrary all he wants [As long as his bosses don't fire him, which, by the way, I believe is an important point to remember]. But he's missing the big picture.
[Order The Long Tail book at Amazon here. Congrats, Chris!]
[UPDATE: Lee Gomes, the WSJ journo in question, responds.]
July 27, 2006
my latest ambition...
[Fenderkicker is the company blog of BCR Yachts, a yachting sales & charter company in Antibes, Cote d'Azur, France.]
My latest ambition is to spend more time in Antibes, France. It might just be a phase.
[NB: Fenderkicker is one of my business interests.]
July 26, 2006
i can't believe calacanis...
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[Cartoon inspired by Jason Calacanis' recent post.]
gapingvoid bizcards
Very groovy: In preperation for visiting BlogHer, Jen downloaded one of my high-resolution images and whacked it onto her new business card.
[NB: I'm totally cool with that, as long as people read the licensing terms first.]
Thanks, Jen! Rock on.
"whatever marketing becomes will start, I believe, as a technology trend."
I totallly agree with Doc's recent comment:
Whatever marketing becomes will start, I believe, as a technology trend.Brilliant. [Doc's blog is here.]
As I'm fond of saying, when people in the advertising business ask me where my disaffection with that industry comes from, I tell them to do the math:
The Cuetrain wasn't written by a Leo Burnett employee.
Movable Type wasn't invented by McCann's.
RSS wasn't invented by JWT.
Robert Scoble doesn't work for Fallon.
Techmeme wasn't invented by Saatchi's.
Advertising people are supposed to be in "the idea business". But none of the ideas that have excited me in the last 5 years or so have come from Madison Avenue. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Why do you think that is?
summertime...
It's high summer, it's hot as the dickens outside, and half of Western Europe is on their month-long summer vacation.
I'm supposed to be uber-motivated at the moment, and I simply am not. Neither is anyone else, it seems. Every one I know is buggering off to some small Greek island, the South of France or wherever.
Somebody wake me up when Autumn arrives...
July 25, 2006
and in other news
[A lovely view of Paris. Click here to watch the video.]
I arrived back in Cumbria last night, after 11 long days on the road. So good to be back home, I cannot tell you.
I suppose the trip had two highlights: Visiting Paris for two nights, then back in London for a week, to do some work for Stormhoek.
J'adore Paris. It's that simple. I'm planning to be back in mid-August. Can't wait.
Meanwhile, Stormhoek just gets busier and busier... Not sure how I'm going to be able to fit everything in, but hey, that's what makes it fun.
the stormhoek song
Stormhoek now has its own jingle. Heh.
[Download: The Stormhoek Song MP3]This all ties in with what I said last week about "Ooze" [Objects of Sociability]. Creating your own Ooze is a good thing. When your customers create Ooze for you, that's even better.Rob Lane, aka Weekend Wino, hasn't even had his Stormhoek dinner yet, but couldn't resist trying some. He cracked open a bottle of Pinotage and it was, apparently, a hit. He loved the wine so much, he wrote a song about it! Genius.
We're thinking it will become our official anthem. We may even try to release it. What do you think Rob, can you hear the Ka- Ching of the royalties… ?
Thanks, Rob!
[Related:] A quote from Guy Kawasaki, in a recent e-mail exchange between him and I:
Now instead of schmoozing, there will be oozing.So there ya go.
links etc.
1. Mary Hodder launches Dabble, which some sort of Media search thing Looks interesting. Mary Hodder is very, very smart, so I'm happily expecting great things from this.
2. Scoble just got interveiwed by the BBC World Service.
3. Big TV/advertising story from Jeff Jarvis:
Linear TV should kiss its ass goodbye.4. Socialtext Releases First Commercial Open Source Wiki. Congrats, Ross!
5. British journalist Hugh Fraser just got a job as a pro blogger for the Seatlle startup, Exbiblio. I met Hugh last December when he interviewed Robert Scoble and I for a podcast at the London geek dinner.
July 23, 2006
i can smell a lost soul
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I usually agree with everything my friend, Doc Searls says.
I'm not saying he’s necessarily wrong, it’s just that I’m not quite getting it. Yet.
Yes, it would be nice to think that one day we won’t need to market anything. Sellers would not need to interrupt, buyers would not need to be interrupted. The internet would seamlessly do the job for us, finding out the customer’s intention first, and then finding the product that suits said intention the best, in that order. And Larry, Serge and their contemporaries would be even richer than they are now. Fair enough.
And yet, I’m not so sure. There’s so much grey area between [A] existing markets and [B] markets that almost exist. And you could say the art of marketing is turning the latter into the former. A market is not a fait accompli.
Right now there are millions if people who currently have zero intention of ever drinking a glass of Stormhoek [a winery I have a small stake in], who if I have my way, will be happily drinking a glass of Stormhoek sometime in the next couple of years. If so, then that, My Friends, is marketing. It has nothing to do with their current intention. It has nothing to do with what Doc calls The Intention Economy. It has everything to do with marketing, or whatever you call that which I do for a living.
That being said, another part of me hopes Doc is right. This is not because of some kind of post-Cluetrain koolade-drinking on my part, however much I revere that book. This is because I would so ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT if my clients and I did not have to "market" our wares, but instead the internet somehow provided us with instantly-automated, intention-economy profit. It would sure beat working for a living.
Instead of waiting for that day to arrive [it would be nice if it did, but I’m not holding my breath], I would recommend instead, fighting like hell to create something that offers [A] value for money and [B] stories other people like telling.
And if the post-Cluetrain internet makes that job easier, Rock On.
July 22, 2006
how come you never get jealous
[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]
July 21, 2006
how to keep your meme alive
[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]
How To Keep Your Meme Alive.
As any gapingvoid reader will I know, I have a couple of memes out there, that I’d very much like to keep alive. The cartoons and the gapingvoid widget, Stormhoek, English Cut and Thingamy being the main examples.
The cartoons, Thingamy and English Cut seem to do alright by themselves. Just keep cranking out the good works, keep blogging, and the rest takes care of itself. The ideas end up spreading in the right directions, at their own pace.
Stormhoek, however, is different. Unlike the other memes, Stormhoek is dealing with a very old, establised market that is controlled by a few very big players: the supermarkets, the large wine and liquor chain stores, Diageo, Constellation, Gallo etc. For a small player, it's a food chain that is almost impossible to break into.
But maybe, just maybe, by using social media, we can circumvent the esablishment and create our own international brand. I think we can do it. As I’m fond of saying, “Why shouldn’t a small wine company see Google or Apple as their competion?" That's what's intereting to me. That's why I'm involved.
There’s certainly a lesson here to be learned from Apple. Two words: “Playfulness” and “Re-invention”.
Though there’s always been a very serious side to Apple, their designs always have a playful side to them. Look at the old Macintosh. Or the Newton. Or the iPod.
And re-invention. The reason we’re still talking about Apple, twenty-plus years after their Macintosh debut, is they’re always trying to re-invent what they’re bringing to market. And they do a superb job of it.
When the Macintosh “conversation” gets boring, their designers go back to the drawing board and try to bring out something to re-start the Apple conversation afresh. And for the most part, it’s been working. Especially these last couple of years.
Stormhoek’s challenge [and your business’ challenge, as well] is really no different than Apple’s. Every time we speak to the market, it’s got to be on a higher and more engaging level than last time. If it’s not, then we’re dead.
Like many old industries, the trouble with the wine business is that the poor buyers are utterly saturated with choice. Wine lakes? Ha. Vast seas, more like. Oceans and oceans of the stuff. There are just too many good wines out there, at all price points.
So between wine buyers and sellers, there are only about 3 conversations taking place:
1. Please buy our wine.2. Please, please, please buy our wine with sugar on top.
3. I am utterly begging you, for the sake of my children, to please, please, please buy our wine with sugar on top.
And the poor supermarket wine buyer has to sit through these meetings, day after day. Enough to drive any sane mortal crazy, no matter how much discount the seller is willing to offer them.
Ergo, Stoemhoek’s M.O. is threefold:
• Better wine in the bottle [which leads to better prices and value etc]• Better packaging.
• Better “Ooze”.
If we can do that, then every time we visit the customer [in our case, mostly supermarkets and wine chains] we’ll have something new and interesting to say. And less of the “sugar on top” crap.
1. Better liquid. Not exactly my department, but if Matthew Jukes’ reviews of the sauvingnon and pinotage are anything to go by, I’m not too worried. Seriously.2. Everybody wants better packaging. And if they don’t, they’re mad. We’ve been working on our new stuff for almost a year. Open-Sourced it. Will have new packaging to show the world within a few weeks, and a $2000 check written out to a gapingvoid reader. It’s looking good. Rock on.
3. “Ooze”. That started on the blogosphere, and evolved into sharing wine samples with bloggers, geek dinners, wine lithographs, wine booklets, wine blogging guides. If these had one thing in common, I’d they all had a level of transparency and playfulness. There was definite a certain degree of “Hey, this might be pretty cool, let’s see if it works.”
I think if lose that spirit, we will lose. Keep it, and we will win.
Playfulness and re-invention. Smarter wines. Smarter conversations. Ooze. Keeping the meme alive. Rock on.
[Bonus Link:] BL Ochman talks about using the gapingvoid widget to market Stormhoek.
July 19, 2006
ooze: short for "objects of sociability"
Shel Israel and Stormhoek's Jason Korman met up recently for beers. Shel wrote about it:
Jason wants Stormhoek to be the wine for the rest of us, for everyday people enjoying good times with people they care about. He wants Stormhoek to be your beverage of choice at your next special event and as such he’s making Stormhoek a successful case study for how you can use social media and word of mouth to globally popularize a mass merchandising product.Thank you Shel, for the kind words.
These days I feel like drawing more cartoons, writing more about my adventures with Stormhoek, and doing less of everything else. The reasons aren't just about my NSPR's [Normal, Shameless, Pimping Reasons]. Actually, the business of marketing Stormhoek and the business of drawing cartoons are getting more and more similar to me. Here's why:
Last night Jason and I had dinner with Johnnie Moore, one of my favorite marketing bloggers [certainly the best one in Britain, anyway]. The highlight of the dinner for me was a discussion about what Johnnie called "Objects of Sociability", a term he attributed to Juri Engstrom's talk at Reboot7.
What is an Object of Sociability [OoS, or "Ooze" for short]? "Ooze" is simply something that allows you to engage with another person. It could be anything. It could a party. It could be a bottle of wine. It could be a hyperlink. It could be a social gesture. It could be social currency. It could be doodling a cartoon on the back of a business card at a bar and giving it to the cute barmaid. You tell me.
As it turns out, Stormhoek has been using a lot of Ooze lately. Sponsoring the recent Valleyschwag party was an example. We didn't really have a "message" per se... it just sounded like a fun and interesting event, so why not join in?
Funny, but this ties in to a conversation I had with Juri about two years ago at a London geek dinner. We were talking about the switch in marketing away from "The Message", towards something that one has no control over i.e. The Ooze.
The metaphor I used at the time was "wave vs particle". At the subatomic level, things are interchangably waves or particles, depending on what instruments you are using to observe them [somebody far more scientific than me, please correct me if I'm wrong]. It might look like a wave one day, a particle the next.
A traditional marketing "message" acts like a wave. In the future, I believe marketing messages will behave more like particles [that is, if they want to succeed]. A wave stays connected to its source, a particle does not. Once the particle leaves you, it is no longer yours. You no longer control it, anymore than a dandelion spore controls the wind.
Where old companies are gettting mixed up with new marketing is, they're trying to treat particles like waves, and failing.
A cartoon is Ooze. Stormhoek paying for gapingvoid's bandwidth is an Ooze. A blog post is an Ooze. As a marketing blogger, this to me is the part of post-Cluetrain marketing that is the most interesting.
Particles are not waves. Particles are Ooze.
And I believe Ooze is the future of marketing.
July 18, 2006
marketing is everywhere
[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]
This made my day. From the MSNBC blog:
Though it seems mostly as the result of marketing strategy, Stormhoek appears to have established itself as the geek wine.
"Mostly a result of marketing strategy"? Really? I wrote down some of my thoughts about this over on the Stormhoek blog.
mo' loic
Great interview of Loic Le Meur over at Mobuzz.com.
Loic talks briefly about innovation, then names the 3 businesses he admires the most, namely, Google, Virgin Galactic and the online gaming revolution, best illustrated by Second Life and World of Warcraft.
Also, if you haven't seen it already, check out the utterly fascinating videocast he did with Joi Ito recently. Powerful stuff.
Rock on, Loic!
kathy
Kathy Sierra and I are neck-and-neck on the Technorati 100.
[NB: I love it when the girl goes on top.]
July 17, 2006
back in london
[I drew this cartoon in Paris, two years ago.]
Got back from Paris last night. Had a fabulous time, of course.
I'm writing this from the Stormhoek offices in London.
So what's been going on? The short answer is, lots. The whole Stormhoek thing just keeps getting busier, with more and more to do.
The big story for me these days is, The Stormhoek Guide to Wine Blogging came out last week, and according to the top sales guy here, it's getting a lot of buzz in the UK wine trade.
The idea being, when one of the sales team cold-calls a potential customer in the trade, trying to set up a meeting, he no longer has to explain to the customer who he is. The guy on the other end of the phone line has already heard of him.
Does that make the sales process easier? Does that lead to an increase in sales?
Watch this space.
[Related:] One of our earliest Stormhoek fans, a blogger named Shane Wilson, just became Stormhoek's distributor in South Africa. Very cool.
July 16, 2006
July 15, 2006
why i love paris
Why I love Paris. Watch this film clip I made last night.
[Update:] This restauarant is on The Rue des Envierges, in the 20th Arrondissement [East side of town, Right Bank, get the map here etc. ]. I don't know its name but it's the only restaurant on the street, so it's easy enough to find. Directly opposite a large archway. I had the steak and pomme frites, they were great!
[My favorite bar in the world.] Harry's New York Bar, near the Opera, in Paris. Allegedly where the Bloody Mary was invented.
July 14, 2006
off to paris for the weekend
[I wrote/drew this one on a Metro ticket when I was in Paris in 2004.]
I'm catching a train to Paris this afternoon. Back Sunday.
July 12, 2006
July 11, 2006
armani attacks savile row
Giorgio Armani calls London’s centre of tailoring [Savile Row] a ‘bad English comedy’.
“A bespoke Armani suit goes with a limited-edition watch, a vintage Maserati or a house on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia.”If anyone reading this works for Mr. Armani, please pass this message along to your boss:[...]
He dismisses Savile Row as an outdated institution that has failed to keep up with modern tastes, lifestyle and technology. “Savile Row is a comedy, a melodrama lost in the past. It’s so old it should be in black and white,” he said.
[...]
“When I think of Savile Row I picture a man in an old black and white English film. He is living in the country. He has a butler. He smokes a cigar sitting in an old-fashioned Prince of Wales check suit.”
He lampoons English tailors as men “of limited mentality ... who make clothes for the children of lords. They have a restricted idea of how a suit is made. The suit can only be made in this shape, with these fabrics. It has to be a certain way and they don’t go beyond that.
“They don’t research or develop something or innovate. There is no room in their head to expand into something new. They do not think of half the things that I take into consideration when I think of a hand-made to measure suit.”
[...]
“It is very early days, but maybe we will start to do the finale of the Giorgio show with men’s couture. Let’s see what Savile Row has to say about that.”
Thomas Mahon, the Savile Row tailor will gladly meet up anywhere with you, anytime, in front of the press and some bloggers. Then, armed only with basic tools i.e. tape measure, bolt of cloth, shears, needle and thread, chalk etc, you two will both measure and make a suit for a third gentleman, a customer, WITHOUT the assistance of anyone else. Just the tailor, the customer and the tools.
When completed, we will show our results live, to the press and the blogosphere. Then we can all transparently see how much the skills actually match the rheotoric. Easy.
That, Mr. Armani, is what Savile Row has to say. Thank you.
imagine if web 2.0 had happened first
[This cartoon, one of my favorites was drawn in 1998, at the height of Dotcom.]
Web 1.0 [aka Dotcom] was about the corporatisation and monetisation of the web.
Web 2.0 [aka the Blogosphere] is about the humanification of the web.
So you wonder why blogs are important? Humanification. So now you know.
Funny, imagine if Web 2.0 had happened first, before Dotcom. Humanification before Corporatisation. Imagine all the pain we would've been spared.
[Link: Scoble talks more about this.] "The Next Web is The Human Web".
Funny, didn't About.com spend over a hundred million dollars trying to put this very same idea into practice, back in the late 1990's? Remember their ad camaign, "The Human Internet"?
Education is expensive.
[Bonus Link:] "Coke boldly goes where every other clueless control-hungry company has gone before." Rock on.
doc and my father: coincidence
Doc Searls tells the story better than me:
When I was at Reboot8 a few weeks back, I got some fun hang time with Hugh MacLeod, cartoonist-in-chief of Gapingvoid. Somewhere in there I mentioned that I was something of a geology freak. Hence followed this dialog...So Doc [one of my heroes] is reading two generations of MacLeods, not knowing the two are father and son. Freaky! Heh.
"My dad's a geologist."
"Really? What's his name?"
"William MacLeod."
"That's familiar. Is he in the U.K.?"
"No, he's in Texas. He's an authority on the Big Bend area."
"Did he write a book about it?"
"Yes. 'Big Bend Vistas.'"
"I have that book. I bought it a few weeks ago."
"That's weird."
July 10, 2006
mr. unresolved-highschool-issues
[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]
microsoft marketing
[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]
I'm not trying to take a swipe at Microsoft, but their "Your potential, Our passion" campaign just leaves me stone cold.
Especially juxtaposed against what their bloggers are trying to achieve.
Note to the marketing team: If you cannot communicate what your bloggers are communicating [and I'm not just talking verbally, either], you will fail.
Trust me. The answer lies with your bloggers.
if i can sell you hope
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[Inspired by Kim Klaver.]
more widgety goodness
I was delighted to discover that LA uber-blogger, Tony Pierce has added the gapingvoid widget to his blog. Thanks, Tony!
And also, a big thank you to Guy Kawasaki for doing likewise.
As I'm fond of saying, Rock on.
[Now all I have to do is convince Scoble to put it up on his... Hey Robert, it comes with a clean, non-potty mouth version. Just tick the box etc.]
[Update:] The Head Lemur has added the widget. Very cool. [The Head Lemur is one of my faves. Posts like this one just make me laugh. Thanks, Alan!]
July 9, 2006
how women find out
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[Link: Dooce.com]
the echo chamber
[Schwag: Get the T-shirt, mug or tile coaster!]
[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]
grandpa
[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here etc.]