gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

london geek dinner/pubcrawl with scoble and winer, 7.00pm Dec 7th

Robert Scoble and Dave Winer are in London on the 7th, so we're all throwing a geek dinner.

The Coach & Horses
29 Greek Street,
Soho
London, W1V 5LL, UK
7.00pm

[C&H's Facebook Page here.]

It's in the upstairs restaurant. To get there you have to go behind the bar and up the stairs, so tell the barstaff when you arrive that you're there for the geek dinner etc.

The deal is, everyone pays £15 per head when they get there. There's an upstairs cash bar and some sponsored Stormhoek Blue Monster wine.

Since I hinted about it last week, about 40 people have put already their names down via e-mail. We've got room for a dozen or so more.

It's not a very big restaurant [securing a big space in London is IMPOSSIBLE during December, because of all the Christmas parties], but if you fancy coming, please drop me an e-mail and I'll see what I can do to fit everybody in. Thanks.

[UPDATE:] As the restaurant is FAR TOO SMALL to accommodate everyone, the good news is, there's going to be a photowalk/pubcrawl afterwards. So the alternate plan would be to turn up around 9.30 and start hitting some more pubs. I'll continue hanging at the C&H till the end, but I might join the posse later on for last orders or something.

[UPDATE:] The restaurant bit is full up. Dang, didn't take long. But feel free to turn up for the pub crawl, if you're in the neighborhood. Apologies, Thanks.

Next time we'll book a bigger place, well in advance. Right, Robert?

Should be a fun evening. Rock on.

why facebook might be consigning themselves to the slushpile of history.

["Social Media". Drew it about 20 minutes ago. Inspired the post below etc.]

So what's stopping Facebook from putting in a small, tickable box that says, "Please do not let my 'Friends' send me any more of these REALLY ANNOYING Vampire/Zombie/Super wall/Super Poke/Whatever invites. I really, really don't want them etc..."?

Heck, it would probably take one of their junior coders only a few minutes to do. What's the problem?

I'm starting to suspect the short answer is, they WANT you to spend hour after hour after hour every month on their pages, deleting the crap. Makes the numbers look better for their bean counters:

"Yes, Mr Investor, people are spending on average 4 hours a day on our site. Can we have your vast pots of money now?"

But when in fact, 3 hours and forty five minutes of said 4 hours is spent deleting Zombie invites and their ilk, you start getting the feeling that somebody in Silicon Valley is taking somebody else for for a little ride.

I'm not saying this is what Facebook is doing. I'm saying this is what it's starting to feel like to me, more and more.

Don't get me wrong, I generally like Facebook and have found it mostly useful. I've even met their CEO, Mark Zuckerberg once before and liked the guy.

That being said, if they want to fix the problem, they can easily do so. If they do not, they're sadly just consigning themselves to the slushpile of history.

["HUGH'S THIRD LAW": If you p*ss in the soup for long enough, eventually it stops tasing like soup."]

[UPDATE:] Oh, Happy Day. Looks like Facebook now lets you ban annoying apps on the latter's Facebook homepages. Look for the link at the bottom right hand corner. Rock on.

nice one

Steve Clayton and The Blue Monster make it onto MSFT's Channel 10.

[UPDATE:] Attention Suit Geeks! One of my partners-in-crime, Savile Row tailor Thomas Mahon, has just set up his own Twitter page. Rock on.

hugh's second law [zuckerberg was on a roll]

HUGH'S SECOND LAW: "The minute the Facebooks of the world forget they are replaceable, is the minute people like me move in for The Kill."

[HUGH"S FIRST LAW: "All online social networks eventually turn into a swampy mush of spam."]

[UPDATE: I left the following message in the comments: "Ben Grada, I'm not anti-Facebook. In fact, I quite like it... But the ever increasing amount of non-relevant stuff it's letting through the net is beginning to concern me. I actually met Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year in Silicon Valley. Good guy. Wicked smart and gracious manners. I hope he works it out."]

relentless

eat me

bitter

add another 50 points

shut up and...

[FYI: The Stormhoek Twitter promo is still on, Gang.]

misery and i

exploding

"important announcement" from gapingvoid

After I found myself permanently exiled from the advertising business in late 2004, I found myself with only a single, unpaid gig remaining i.e. this website, gapingvoid.

Luckily this unemployed phase didn't last long. Sure, I had a month or two of being poor and desperate, but then English Cut came along, then Thingamy, then Stormhoek, then the consulting, then the Blue Monster, then the paid speaking gigs. Within two years or so I had turned the ship around quite nicely.

But somehow gapingvoid got lost in the mix. Even though the plan has always been to keep gapingvoid at the very epicenter of what I do, in the last 18 months or so it seemed to get increasingly pushed to the margins.

I guess that's not surprising. With so much going on it's hard to make a small cartoon blog [with equally small advertising revenues] the main focus of one's business.

But of course, without gapingvoid, my own personal global microbrand, the other stuff would never have been possible. Therein lies the rub.

The last three years has been without question the most exciting period of my career, but My God, it has stretched me thin. I'm worn out.

So this last week I've been telling people I work with, I'm changing the game plan. I'm going back to basics. From now on building "the gapingvoid brand" will become my first priority. Yes, I will still be working with the same people and projects I'm working with now, in much the same way, but in a much less involved capacity.

Time to regroup. Indeed.

I'm thinking now would be a good time to thank everybody who reads gapingvoid on a regular basis. Without you, the last three amazing years would never have happened.

Thanks, Everybody. You guys rock.

blue monster in the chicago tribune

[Click on image to enlarge etc.]

My friend, Leah Jones was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune. What's that on the cube wall behind her? The online article is here.

You talk, they hear on Web
Companies are reading and listening to what is being said online as they seek to take advantage of new marketing opportunities evolving on social networking Web sites.

[The Blue Monster mentioned in Microsoft Watch.]

gapingvoid facebook app hits the 3,000 mark

[A new cartoon updated onto your Facebook page daily etc etc etc...]

The gapingvoid Facebook cartoon app [which basically does the same job as the gapingvoid widget, except for Facebook etc] has just passed the 3,000-user mark. Thanks SO MUCH once again to Michael Kamleitner for building it.

[LINK: People who have already added the gapingvoid Facebook app.]

I've had a week from Hell since getting back from Barcelona [Hey, guess what? My life consists of more than just cartooning and blogging. Surprise, Surprise.]. Planning to head up to Cumbria this weekend and just draw cartoons and take long walks in the bracing country air for a week or two. Sorry for the recent lack of new cartoons. That will change, and change soon, you have my word on it. Rock on.

netcamp, bucharest, romania, december 5th, be there.

I'll be speaking at Netcamp on December 5th. I've never been to Eastern Europe before, so I'm excited.

london geek dinner with hugh macleod and robert scoble, december 7th, 2007

[This is just a rumor at the moment...]

[Scobleizer.com]

[Bonus Link] Great post on MicroBranding from Johnnie Moore:

"It's all an experiment."

My own take on microbranding is to realise that small stuff matters. Too many brands try to bash us over the head with their fixed propositions, values statements, idealised lifestyles etc etc. (And we're just their customers, think what it's like for people who work there.)

stormhoek given south africa's no. 1 brand campaign award

Just got this e-mail:

Last night, in Johannesburg, the Council of judges for South Africa’s Marketing Excellence awards gave a gold medal and trophy to Stormhoek as the best Brand marketing campaign of the year (Small Budget).

They gave the same awards to other brands for Medium Budget and Large Budget and Extra Large Budget.

Finally, they gave a bigger trophy to the Grand Prix winner for the overall brand campaign winner and this went to Stormhoek.

Gold awards and trophies were handed out for sponsorship campaigns, arts and culture campaigns and an ex-advertising copywriter (now Absa Bank marketing manager) called Happy Ntshingila was crowned Marketing Man of the Year.

the global microbrand, revisited

It's been just over two years since I wrote "The Global Microbrand Rant":

There are thousands of reasons why people write blogs. But it seems to me the biggest reason that drives the bloggers I read the most is, we're all looking for our own personal global microbrand. That is the prize. That is the ticket off the treadmill. And I don't think it's a bad one to aim for.

1. The good news about blogs is that they're very powerful. The bad news is that they're very time consuming. So no wonder in the last two years we've seen so many other kinds of "Cheap, Easy, Global Media" spring up- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc etc.

2. I will be frequently quoting this line from Clay Shirky until the day I die: "So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast." I've been promising myself to write Clay for a while, asking him to elaborate on "Vast". I have a few ideas. You?

3. Blogs may not be around in ten years. Facebook may not be around in 10 years. What WILL be around, however, is the aforementioned "Cheap, Easy, Global Media". The latter is never going away, save for a nuclear holocaust. Whoever said "Blogs are just a fad" back in the early days was missing the point. It was NEVER about blogs. It was about something far more "vast".

4. Beware on becoming a "VaporGuru". This is the term I use for people who don't seem to do very much except write in their blogs and speak at conferences [i.e. People like me. Exactly!]. Not that what they have to say isn't always useful, it's just that it's a very crowded market. Secondly, their perspective often tends to be that of an observer, not that of somebody who has actually gone ahead and "actually done it". Which is why I stick so doggedly to the wine trade. No matter what they may say about me on Techmeme, people are always going to want to uncork a bottle.

5. We're still waiting for the Blogging Messiah. And we always will be. Doc Searls came pretty close a couple of times, though.

6. Again, I'll say it one more time: Blogging is just the tip of the Cluetrain iceberg. And it wasn't the tip that sunk the Titanic.

7. Type "GlobalMicrobrand.com" into your browser and see where it takes you.

8. I consider The Blue Monster a Global Microbrand. One that has been adopted [but not assimilated *cough*] by a Global Macrobrand i.e. Microsoft. Both feed the other. Cultural Symbiosis. Rock on.

9. In retrospect, over time I haven't written enough about the GMB as perhaps I should have. Probably because, like I said in my original post, none of it is rocket science. It's really just a case of just doing it. The only other advice I can offer is, keep reading the blogs that you admire and learn from them.

10. I plan to be thinking more about The Global Microbrand schtick for the next wee while, and hopefully writing more on the subject. If you have any thoughts or links you think could help me out, please feel free to send them my way. Thanks.

11. [Saving the best for last:] The question isn't, "How do you turn your blog into a viable business model?" The question is, "How do you turn a viable business model into your blog?"

[Update: Dr. Mani, a Children's Heart Surgeon, muses about The Global Microbrand. Nice to see when folk with "real jobs" also start thinking about this stuff, as opposed to the usual suspects etc.]

[Update:] Just got an e-mail from Terry Rock:

I think this is why you haven't talked much about the Global Microbrand: [See the 10th slide: Make Sandwiches [don't just take orders]].

Since I saw Merlin's presentation online, that's been the mantra in our
micro-organization: stop taking orders and start making sandwiches.

You don't build a global microbrand talking about building a global
microbrand.

Terry T. Rock, PhD
President & CEO
Calgary Arts Development

micromarketing on micromedia

When I first started working for Stormhoek, I started marketing it via the blogosphere i.e. sending out samples of the wine to other bloggers in the UK, Ireland and France. It worked well. Later, when we launched in the USA, we started sponsoring geek dinners. That too worked well. Very, very well, actually.

Now, to help launch our new Stormhoek labels, we're offering the same deal with members of the UK Twitter community.

So why Twitter?

No, it's not because Twitter is the hot new Web 2.0 app of the moment [Some people would argue that it most definitely isn't]. It's something more fundamental than that. Something to do with what I call "Micromarketing".

Stormhoek has sponsored a few hundred geek dinners over the last two years. The smallest were just a handful of people. The largest was the now-legendary Techcrunch party in Silicon Valley.

Techcrunch's Mike Arrington is a good friend of both me and Stormhoek. His is probably the only large event we'll keep sponsoring from now on.

Why? Because frankly, we find the smaller the event, the more we seem to get out of it. Having personally attended many of the parties, both large and small, I've seen this in action. When we sponsor large parties, nobody notices, talks about, or remembers the name of the wine that was served that evening. With smaller parties, the opposite is true. People seem truly appreciative that a commercial wine business would go to all that trouble, just to reach out to so relatively few people. But why not? From trying to connect with people on a much more intimate and human level, we have far more stable and stronger building blocks to create a community around our brand.

As opposed to the other extreme. London, the town I live in, is awash with parties sponsored by large wine and spirit brands. We've all been to them- probably far more than we'd care to admit. Usually held in large, impersonal downtown nightclubs, the venue teeming with random hangers-on and wannabe's, all waiting for the celebs to show up, all trying to be heard above the din, all trying to get laid, all trying to get drunk, all trying to quickly make some useful business contacts. Total meat markets. In spite of all the time, money, effort and PR thrown at them, for the most part, they're just not that fun, interesting or memorable.

So here am I thinking, maybe it's a good thing that we instead decided to aim for the other extreme. "Push the Edges" in the complete opposite direction. Instead of large, paparazzi-infested events, we'd send some wine over to, for example, a small group of six or seven geeks in a small town in Wales, who are having a small dinner party at one of their houses. Why not? Exactly.

So that's exactly what we are doing. The aforementioned small dinner party in Wales is going to be the first event that we're going to be sponsoring, once the new bottles arrive in the UK towards the end of this month.

i.e. Everybody is sponsoring the big mega-events, with the disconcertingly faint hope of scoring Mainstream-Media pickup. Instead we're going for the opposite extreme. Micromarketing. Micromarketing on Micromedia.

Exactly.

[UPDATE: The standard schpiel on the Stormhoek Twitter UK Promo: I've been allowed to send sample Stormhoek bottles with the new labels to anybody who wants one. The deal is, you have to be UK-based, of legal drinking age, and on Twitter. And as always, no, you don't have to blog or twitter about it if you don't feel like it. Please feel free to send me an email at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address, if you're interested, Thanks. Rock on.]

Hello from Barcelona

I'm writing this from my hotel room in Barcelona. I'm not planning to go out tonight, but if anyone is in the neighborhood and fancies hooking up, I can meet in the bar downstairs for a beer. My cellphone doesn't seem to want to work in Spain, so call the hotel at the number below.

Hilton Diagonal Mar Barcelona

Passatge Taulat 262-264
08019 Barcelona, Spain
+34 935 070 707

1. The number of people on the Microsoft payroll is the same size as SEVEN Roman Legions [The Romans had about 25-30 Legions at the peak of their power]. And they spend their time arranging long lines of one's and zero's into clever little lines, and getting paid for it. Somehow they manage to make it happen.

2. A young Microsoft employee I was talking to said an interesting thing to me. We were talking about this big cultural change that is going on inside Microsoft. He said a lot of it is generational. The old guard is highly competitive, the new guard is more collaborative. The old guard sees Open Source as a threat, the new guard sees Open Source as an opportunity. He was confident the new guard will prevail because, of course, being young, they'll be around for much longer. He reckoned it'll be at least another decade before the outside world starts recognizing the change that's currently happening internally. Interesting.

3. I must have repeated the following story at least a dozen times in the last twenty four hours: The inspiration for the Blue Monster came from a conversation I had late last year, with Steve Clayton. Steve told me that, like a lot of other Microsoft employees, he could be making a lot more money and taking a lot less grief from the general public, if he was working somewhere else. But he chooses to work for Microsoft anyway. Why? Because he gets to play with the cool new toys. He gets to work on stuff that will "change the world". And as I continue to find out whenever I meet someone who works for Microsoft, this is a commonly held belief inside the company. From a marketing perspective, this a far more compelling storyline than "Your Potential, Our Passion" or whatever.

4. When I first checked into the hotel last night, afterwards I stepped outside the hotel to go smoke a cigarette. There I randomly met a group of American Microsoft employees. We chatted for a bit, then I told them who I was. Two of them immediately took off their jackets to show me the Blue Monster t-shirts they were wearing. Small world, indeed. Apparently somebody at the conference made a whole batch of them to give away as schwag, but they went fast. They ran out in only a couple of hours. I'd love to get my hands on one of them before I leave, but I'm not too optimistic.

5. On blogging for the company you work for: Somebody in the audience today asked me what they should do if their boss doesn't like the idea of them blogging. I replied that if you have something interesting to say about your product, and still your boss won't let you blog, my guess is that he's probably an idiot, and you should quit your job and go work for somebody else.

6. I firmly believe that the general perceptions of Microsoft will be very different in twenty years' time than what they are today, and for the better. And I also believe that, when the textbook writers eventually get around to writing the story of how this change happened, Microsoft blogs and bloggers will be at the very center of the story. It is this belief that made Microsoft interesting to me in the first place, and continues to do so to this day.

[Update- Friday Night:] Back in London. Arrived safely home etc.

do you know everybody

[A wee drawing I did for Deborah Schultz when I was recently in San Francisco. She scanned it and e-mailed me the image.]

I'm off to catch a plane to Barcelona. See you on the other side...

[Bonus Link:] Debs has a really cool diagram of The Social Media Ecosystem here.

"the one with the back label on the front"

[The new Stormhoek front labels. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

[The new Stormhoek back label. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

After many months in development, Stormhoek has finally got its new label designs.

The front label is a fairly classic look [our customers like that a lot]. We had a ball, however, with the back label. Notice how we put both the Blue Monster logo on the back [without any explanation], and also, the Unofficial International "Hacker" symbol. Oh, yeah, we also borrowed the "Change the World or Go Home" tagline from the Blue Monster [Disclosure: gapingvoid is more evil than Microsoft. Just so you know.].

The vast majority who see our wine on the shelf have never heard of us before, have never read gapingvoid, and don't know us from Adam [The same is true for the vast majority of other wine brands]. So most of the marketing is done on the supermarket shelf. It's actually pretty intense, thinking about it all.

The funny thing is, people in the trade like the back label SO MUCH there's already talk happening about Stormhoek being the first wine to have itself stacked on the shelf with the back label facing frontwards.

So the Stormhoek hook becomes: "The one with the back label on the front".

I love that idea... We'll see what happens.

[UPDATE:] I've just learned- the new design will be arriving into the UK at the end of this month [November]. Expect to see them around the supermarkets [Tesco, Asda etc] soon after.

[UPDATE: Stormhoek Twitter UK Promo:] I've been allowed to send sample bottles to anybody who wants one. The deal is, you have to be UK-based, of legal drinking age, and on Twitter. Send me an email if you're interested, Thanks. Rock on.

"microsoft repositions to kick ass"

Eric Karjaluoto has an excellent post on what he would do, if he were given the task of re-branding Microsoft:

I’d ask the team at Microsoft to ask some blunt questions about who they really are. I don’t mean the bullshit “mission statement” responses here either; I’m talking brutal honesty. From a peripheral standpoint, my nutshell response to this situation would be something like, “We’re the most powerful computing force on the planet, and we’re acting like a bunch of sissies.”

Of course, none of this is going to happen. Microsoft is still a behemoth, and it’s not as though they are asking for my opinion.

People want Microsoft to change. That is the essence of what made the Blue Monster such a hit, it was a way of people outside Microsoft telling people in Microsoft of the intense need for change...

[Thanks to Leah for the pointer.]

geek dinners

["Big Love". The Stormhoek label we designed for Valentine's day 2007]

[Reposting this blog from 2 months ago:]

In 2006 my client, Stormhoek, a small South African winery had a lot of fun sposoring "100 Geek Dinners".

We like sponsoring geek dinners. We really do. So we want to do more. Lots more.

[The "100 Geek Dinners" logo from 2006]

We're not sure how many geek dinners we'll be sponsoring. We chose the number "2000" just because [A] it sounds good and [B] it's much larger than last year's "100".

[Small Stormhoek-sponsored dinner, May 2006, USA]

The plan is to start doing it in Britain, via Facebook.

So if you have an upcoming UK event happening on Facebook, and you feel you might want a wine sponsor there on the night, please drop me a line and I'll check it out. It doesn't have to be a big event; in fact I personally prefer the small ones. Just so long as it's an interesting evening. Thanks. Rock on.

[UPDATE:] In the end, we decided to bag the Facebook angle. Found out that Micromarketing via Twitter worked far better for us.

valentine's day is a'coming

[One of the Stormhoek cartoon labels we're doing for Valentine's Day, 2008. Click on image to enlarge etc.]

[IN OTHER NEWS: I'll be in Paris in December, speaking at Lew Web 3. It's quite an impressive list of speakers. Several people attending I've been wanting to meet for a couple of years now...]

It's that time of the year again, when folks like me in the wine business start thinking about what to do for Valentine's Day.

What we've done at Stormhoek is come up with some Valentine's Day-themed cartoon labels, part of the much larger Stormhoek Cartoon Series we're currently developing [Blue Monster Reserve is part of that].

So in the back of my mind, a wee voice is telling me, "Hey Kids, let's do something interesting!"

Fair enough. Only, what constitutes "interesting"? I have a few ideas. How about yourself? I'm looking for input at the mo'. Please feel free to leave a comment below or send me an e-mail. Thanks.

[UPDATE:] Rik from Holland just sent me the following e-mail. Rock on.

Hugh. just read your post about the valentine's ideas. Some thoughts:

Why not create a gift set of a nice box designed by you, with special valentines edition wine and a postcard on it (on a lovely ribbon of course) with one of your cartoons. Then create a website that lets people send one of these to the object of their affection, and lets them put a personal message on the card.

Shipping these things etc might take some doing, but you've got time to arrange for that :)

Or you could just send over the card and arrange for it to be a coupon for a bottle of wine at select wine grocers. But that may be slightly less romantic.

On a side note, seeing your whole plan to create social objects of/around your wines, why not do a quirky little wine bar in London. The city could use some decent ones, and this leaves you with a lot more options to do remarkable things. Tastings, in-house geek dinners, and when you make it cool enough (e.g. hire an exciting architect to do the interior) it will be a social object in itself.

imho. Have fun!

Rik

In 2008 I plan to do a LOT more socializing over there...

quick reminder

If you're still after a half-case [6 bottles] of Stormhoek Blue Monster wine, go here. Thanks.

please fall in love with me

not convinced

happy and successful

death

the new microsoft

[Cartoon added to The Blue Monster Series.]

facebook etc.

[Facebook getting a lot of space on Techmeme, 'natch.]

[Related:] Great post from Doc Searls:

But the problem for Mark, for Jeremiah, and for all of us (including yours truly) is that we too easily default to framing our understanding of advertising in its own terms. We regard advertising as an independent variable: something ya gotta have. But in fact advertising is a dependent variable. The independent variable is the individual human being. As Chris Locke put it so perfectly nine years ago, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.

the blue monster game

[Click on image to enlarge]

The Blue Monster has been turned into a game. Ryan Anderson from Fuel Industries in Canada sent me the following e-mail:

Hi Hugh,

We’re just entering the early stages of the development of the game that will include the Blue Monster, and I just wanted to show you how he was being integrated. The idea of the whole promo is to take IT people through a game that shows them the benefits of Technet, which is one of their key IT support services. Right now, the Blue Monster shows up in one of the mini-games, where the hero IT guy has to destroy bad packet requests on the network, identified by port without destroying the real requests (I’m told it’s fun if you’re a geek).

He flashes on the screen and eats all the bad packet requests and leaves the good ones. There’s not much of an explanation of who the Monster is, other than that he’s on your side. I would like to integrate it into the dialogue of the quest game (think Leisure Suit Larry meets The IT Crowd) just as an acknowledgement of it. Mostly, it’s just meant to be a little nod to those who know it, and perhaps we can link to an explanation of what the Blue Monster is… that much is not decided.

I’d love to hear what you think about it, from “cool.” to “I think this is stupid.” Also, if you wouldn’t mind sending me an email that just states clearly that you’re okay with Microsoft using the image in a game in this context, I’d really appreciate it. As I’m sure you’re aware, MS has a lot of lawyers who need things like that, and apparently our exchange on Facebook isn’t enough for them.

I’ve attached a screen capture of the Blue Monster in action… though he moves quickly so I couldn’t get a shot with his mouth open. This is not a final screen design, but it gives you the idea.

Let me know if you have any questions / comments, etc., and I’ll let you know about any changes or additions we make with BM.

Cheers,

Ryan

[Note to MSFT lawyers:] Yeah, I'm totally cool with the Blue Monster being used in a Microsoft game. Just in case you had any doubts etc.

Thanks, Ryan. Rock on!

[PS: Yes, this is indeed a Social Object etc.]

re. rising above the clutter

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here.]

Like the Good Book says, "All is Vanity". From The Frontal Cortex:

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

With hundreds and thousands of wine brands all telling the same story ["Our FAMILY has been making THIS kind of wine on THIS piece of LAND for THIS MANY generations yak ya yak..."] the only way we could get Stormhoek to rise above the clutter was to tell a different story altogether. Which in the end meant a rather unlikely cultural mash-up between a small South African vineyard and the US West Coast technology crowd, including Silicon Valley and Microsoft.

We've had some good results along the way, but the experiment is far from over yet...

[UPDATE] My Chicago friend, Vinny Warren left the following story in the comments below:

I worked in a bar in Ireland in my youth back in the 80s. There was a brewery sponsored inter-pub competition to see which bar could sell the most COLT 45 malt liquor which had just been introduced and was failing miserably. Malt Liquor in Ireland??

It was a very busy pub. So we switched the very popular Heineken taps over to the Colt 45 kegs towards closing time each night for a month.

We won the competition. The prize was a free trip to Spain.

And not a single punter ever complained about the taste of their Heineken!

steve clayton's new gig

[Click on image to enlarge/download/print etc. Licensing terms here.]

A couple for months ago at the Blue Monster Breakfast, I drew the cartoon above to illustrate Microsoft's new "Software + Services" schtick.

For reasons that were not 100% apparent to me at the time, my friend, Microsoft Partner Group CTO Steve Clayton seemed pretty keen to get his mitts on it. So what the hell, I let him take the original away with him.

Finally, all was revealed today. Congrats on the new gig, Steve.

[Completely Unrelated] Recent Twitter Post: "The gapingvoid biz model is based not around the cartoons, but around the people who read them. Big difference."

"social gestures beget social objects"

Chris Schroeder riffs on my whole "Social Object" marketing schtick with this very salient thought:

If your company wants to succeed, it needs to have a social object marketing plan.

I don't know about you, but when somebody walks by with an iPhone, I notice. If I see a kid stroll by me in some limited edition Nikes, that registers with me too.

But I can already hear your inner MBA saying, "Yeah, but what if you don't work for Nike or Apple? What if your product is boring home loans, auto insurance or... [the list of boring products is pretty long].

My standard answer to that is, "Social Gestures beget Social Objects."

Which is another way of saying, maybe the way you relate to somebody as a human being plays a part in all this. Maybe describing the product as "boring" is just one more bullshit lie we tell ourselves in order to make the world seem less complicated and scary. Hey, my product is inherently dull and boring, therefore I get to be inherently dull and boring, too. Hooray!

Nowadays, thanks to folk like Nike, we think of sneakers as "non-boring" brands. This wasn't true when I was a kid. Back then sneakers were those bloody awful $3 plimsolls we wore in Phys Ed. But it took companies like Nike and Adidas to come along and by shear force of will, raise the level of conversation in the sneaker department, before sneakers became bona fide global social objects, bona fide global powerhouse brands.

The decision to raise the level of conversation isn't economic. Nor is it an intellectual decision. It's a moral decision. But whether you have the stomach for it is up to you.

Like I told Thomas almost 3 years ago re. English bespoke tailoring, "Own the conversation by improving the conversation." And hey, it worked. His sales went up 300% in 6 months.

It wasn't the change in product that made Thomas' suits Social Objects. It was changing the way he talked to people. The same applies to Stormhoek, which 3 years ago was an $8 bottle of South African wine nobody had ever heard of. Conversation. Matters.

So all you corporate MBAs out there, here's a little tip. When you planning on how to embrace the brave new world of Web 2.0, the first question you ask yourself should not be "What tools do I use?"

Blogs, RSS, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook- it doesn't matter.

The first question you should REALLY ask yourself is:

"How do I want to change the way I talk to people?"

And hopefully the rest should follow.

Think about it.

[Bonus Link: For a more academic take on social objects, check out this post from Anthropologist, Jyri Engestrom.]

isolate [my new business card]

This is the design for my new business card [No, I am not joking].

Feel free to use it yourself [or any other cartoon on gapingvoid] for your own schwag- biz cards, t-shirts, cubicle posters, PowerPoint slides, whatever. As per usual, the full details and regular licensing terms are here etc. Or again, as per usual, you can order printed gapingvoid business cards here at Streetcards etc etc.

[Yes, "Isolate Their Pain Centers" sums up my whole Hughtrain marketing schtick pretty well...]

new twitter logo

Just drew this new Twitter logo for my blog sidebar. Feel free to use it yourself etc.

My Twitter page is an increasingly important part of my online schtick, especially now with Seesmic [Twitter videos, kinda sorta] part of the equation.

london graphic centre

[I've been buying art supplies from these guys for years... Last time I was in their store I picked up one of their bizcards and doodled on it etc.]

insane cartoon

compassion

all control

visit scotland

[Link: VisitScotland.com]

untitled 445

untitled 444

the best questions

evil plans

broken hearts

all tears

view from my window

Sunday Morning view from my bedroom window, at Warwick Hall.

on seesmic

[Loic and me in SF a few days ago.]

Playing around with Seesmic, the latest brainchild of my friend, Loic Lemeur. Think Twitter for video.

It's still in Beta, so you still need an invite to join...

In this vid, Loic and I have this idea for "Blue Monster TV".... a fine idea, to be sure, but as always, it's all about the execution etc. etc.

alone in london

social media

married

lot of money