These people have bought back into striking perspective the slim beachhead we live on, with our awareness and understanding of social media and reminded me how quickly we can get surrounded and overpowered by ignorance and idiocy when we venture too far into the unexplored hinter land stretching before us.

We now live in a world of constant shifting change that far outstrips our ability to keep up. In the last ten years our world has splintered from a handful of stable structures to six billion little pieces, all struggling to make sense of their brief existence in the vast and empty halls of eternity.

It is with these eyes I see the stark contrast between following my parent’s dreams for me to practice law and living my own dream: working with the web. As a lawyer my role would be an unassailable expert offering the sound advice of a trained professional who knows everything about the inputs and outcomes of the system.

Working with the web is about understanding that I can’t know the outcomes for everything (read: anything) and appreciate I can be wrong, reserving my right to change my mind and encouraging others to do the same.

Being a lawyer is like being a parent, and I am beginning to realise my career choice has doomed me to perpetual mental childhood, learning and growing and making mistakes often.

It is an interesting space to work in and I truly believe it will keep us forever young.

The arrival of the web and the ability for individual people to communicate directly with each other, regardless of geography or indeed language, will precipitate a change in our society we, at the dawn of this new age, cannot begin to comprehend.

And it is to this point, the unknown and unknowable future of our society that I have been considering these last few days following the judgment of Judge Harvey to allow the naming of those charged with the murder of John Hapeta in traditional media but not the internet.

Some initial thoughts

Before we begin looking at this decision I want to explain my thoughts about suitable strategies to ensure success in this new environment.

First and foremost it is important to keep in mind that no one knows how things will turn out, and to be honest if I did, I would already be retired as a social media billionaire.

So what is a successful strategy?

Planning any actions in this new unknown environment comes down to using a three stage process:

• Take action
  We have to start somewhere with social media: I am sure when the first village settled together they wondered WTF they were doing. To learn anything about how we are all going to interact with each other using social media we have to begin to experiment.
• Don’t bet the farm
  Most of our actions in this space will fail because we really are feeling our way blind in this unknowable place, so don’t commit to an action which you can’t walk away from. Start small and replicate success.
• Learn lessons
  Most importantly of all is: review the actions taken and use metrics to gauge failure and understand why, because this way you will uncover success.

The problem the judiciary face

I have a deep and profound respect for the job of the judiciary, and more particularly how judges go about the difficult task of assigning responsibility and quantifying loss and punishment.

To facilitate this difficult job the judiciary has built up a complex set of rules controlling the information juries should hear when deciding each case. This process has evolved over hundreds of years to ensure only relevant and reliable information is considered by individuals on a jury in reaching decisions in criminal cases.

Unfortunately the internet generally and social media specifically changes all the rules, because today we all have the ability to communicate facts, rumors and conjecture onto a platform that is accessible instantly and eternally to potential future jurors.

This sidesteps the judiciaries important control of information into a courtroom, but because the internet sidesteps ALL control of information it leaves judges with a real issue.

So how does the judiciary cope with this?

The simple fact is: I have no idea.

But thinking about it, I would advocate a three stage approach:

• Take action
• Don’t bet the farm
• Learn lessons

And I believe now this is exactly what Judge Harvey did, and his actions are entirely appropriate and admirable.

My initial reaction was this approach wouldn’t work, and I still believe that, but at least this is a start.

Congratulations Judge Harvey – FWIW you have my support.

I am yet to read the judgment myself, the New Zealand Court’s website doesn’t carry District Court Judgments and when I called the court just before, they were closed for the evening. If anyone has a copy of the judgment I would appreciate being sent it. Of course the stupid thing is the judgment itself would name the defendants and so couldn’t be published on a website…

The issue of pre-trial release of information, traditionally by the media, is a real one and as a law grad with experience in police PR – I feel my opinion is informed enough to pass my own judgment.

The thing for me is that the Judge must have realised there would be a lot of media interest precipitated by his unique ruling, so I also suspect his decision was motivated by more than just the issue of justice in this case. But I wonder whether these kinds of issues need to be tackled centrally and not by a single ruling, that is bound to cause an inevitable amount of media interest.

I am going to reserve my judgment, however, until I have read Judge Harvey’s, but I will say: everyone deserves a fair trial, and the biggest mistake Harvey made is thinking he can centrally control a decentralised communication system like the internet.

So how can we address the issue of controlling pretrial releases of information?

Unfortunately in a decentralised world control is impossible – but having a conversation about the issues is probably a good start (in contrast to dictating a ruling).

I will also suggest this link as a starter for ten.

I‘ve had a number of troubling interactions recently at work related functions around online marketing. These involve conversations between me and senior marketing types who ten years ago so proudly stated “I don’t know anything about computers, I don’t have to, we have secretaries to do that sort of thing” but now have me cornered wanting to discuss a below the line campaign for one of the top three online verticals. The conversation continues:

Them (out loud): Don’t you know about the online ROI darling?
Me (internally): Oh gawd make it stop. *skulls remainder of drink in hand*
Me (out loud): I need to get another drink; please excuse me.

Despite their online conversion, and don’t get me wrong, I admire someone who can change their mind about things, their talk is buzzword bullshit and they still haven’t got their head around what the webs have done, particularly in decentralizing communication. The worst thing though is their misunderstanding about how we so called “online specialists” go about our working life.

A commonly held misconception is that we web people are privy to a single universal set of principles, which we apply and find the answer to any and all web related communication problems. Unfortunately there is no magic book here and communicating online cannot be distilled to a campaign specific recipe for success. Successful online communication begins by understanding the fundamentals, not the specifics, and learning the fundamentals will help you to understand the changing landscape of communication.

Comparing old brands and new brands

I have mentioned the difference between old media branding and new media branding before:

Branding is no longer about building a brand somewhere out there in brand-space and attracting willing … consumers to it, like a beacon lit by the fire of large advertising budgets. Branding is now about building trust and understanding with each and every individual customer.

And although this statement is true, it is pretty generic and I want to add some more detail to the difference between old and new media branding so we can start to understand what the fundamentals for communicating in the online space are and hopefully together work out strategies that can turn truths into insight and opportunities for everyone.

A theory of brands and branding

The idea of brands is a relatively new one for humans and is a result of how we think about the world and structure events into cause and effect. Let’s take the example of someone shooting you with a gun: as the bullet speeds towards you on its deadly journey into your soft flesh you can analyse the situation in one of the following ways:

• Physical level
  At the physical level you can understand and think about the mass of the bullet, its velocity and trajectory.
• Mechanical level
  At the mechanical level you think about and understand the bullets flight on the basis of a machine, with gunpowder, lead, bronze casing, sights and a trigger.
• Personal level
  At the personal level we think about the person holding the gun; because physics and mechanics aside, he is the guy who wants you dead.

These three levels of abstraction are an intellectual adaptation to help us make sense of events and actions in the world with a view to recognising and avoiding potential dangers while cashing in on beneficial opportunities. We have these three levels of understanding because the human world is complicated, a falling rock can be avoided with a fairly basic strategy but escaping an army of angry rock throwers requires a different approach entirely.

Marketers use these facts

Successful marketing involves talking to people on the Personal level because marketers know communicating on the Personal level unlocks a powerful tool: emotion. Emotion does not exist on either the Physical or Mechanical level and emotion is the single biggest motivator in the human world.

Exercises in branding, be it advertising or media articles are designed by marketing departments as a Personal level interaction between people and brands. These brand exercises are successful when they instill in the minds of potential customers the idea that the brand exists as a single living entity requiring Personal level analysis.

These newly created beings, these brands are used by organisations in two ways:

• Attraction
  Creating a brand a consumer can relate to as a person encourages the consumer to engage, relate to and value the brand. Having an attractive brand helps an organisation to sell goods and services to people who haven’t been customers before.
• Retention
  Creating a brand a consumer can relate to as a person reminds the consumer of the values expressed in the brand. Sure the last time they called the organisation behind the brand the experience was bad and the person in the shop was rude but the ad supporting the brand values washes the sins of real life interaction away.

In our brains there is no difference between the one bad Personal level interaction with the customer service representative and the ten television commercials (TVCs) they have seen since because the TVCs are structured so the brand interaction is also a Personal level interaction.

For our brains, it is all the same interaction with the same “person” and with the bad experience outweighed by good experience ten to one, the net result is positive feeling toward the brand – despite the fact there was only one actual and “real” experience.

“Overcoming” is the word of the week, and this is about putting things in perspective, realising no matter how hard things seem the temporality of it all means problems of the now are not problems for very long.

The temperature outside induces me to think about things other than distance and time, call it introspection if you want, call it the imminent end of my current employment, but in all honesty: what worried me three weeks ago no longer seems so important.

One of the key requirements for “overcoming” is appreciating the future as a vast expanse of unknowable events; but there are things we do know: the sun will rise tomorrow and the earth will carry us back into the warmth of summer sun once more.

So in the mean time let’s all sit down and drink a glass of red wine, reacquaint ourselves with the rules of our favorite board game, and make the rich gravy with juices from the roasting pan. Pretty soon spring will be here, bringing strong winds for Wellington, warmer weather and planning for the holidays.

As I write new lambs, tucked up in their mother’s womb, are dreaming dreams of their first summer; that is if their green grass hasn’t already been invaded by lumbering dairy cows.

• It is dynamic
  The online environment changes so fast so it is never boring, there are always new ideas, and new ways of working through issues and the scope for positive change seems endless. Every job has its good points and bad points, but we get to change the bad points, it’s what they pay us for.
• Forming deep and meaningful personal relationships
  We are all connecting in strange new ways and here on the internet you are all so much more of an important part of my life than strangers on the street, I love hearing your thoughts on twitter, your passions and your dreams. Most of all I love being a part of it all, because IT IS all happening. It is happening right now. It is happening right here.
• We’ve all ended up doing the same thing
  The webs are converging all our different jobs into the one single profession. When people ask me what I do, I still say I am in the media industry, but the skills I use for my job are the same as so many other people, who work in a vast variety of organisations, sectors and industries.

And it is the last point: how all our jobs are coming together through the shared experience of being online that this post is about and as the title of this post says – I dedicate this thinking to my wonderful girlfriend Megan. This is written for her.

Human resources is a hard job

Megan is an HR professional and until I met her, I didn’t really understand what that meant and I had assumed HR are limited to things like paying the salaries - (BTW: it turns out confusing HR with payroll is like confusing my job with a paper boys).

To many people HR is just hiring and firing but covers everything from “performance management” through “organisational values” and “strategic resource planning”. HR is where the meat meets the metal, on the line between systems and subjectivity.

This is all about organisational cohesion and what sorts of thoughts and feelings bind us with our colleagues at work.

Internal communications is boring

Internal communication is seen by many in the news industry as the poor and frumpy cousin of media rels or PR. Dealing with the fast paced world of deadlines and bulletins is exciting, getting quoted in the newspaper is high profile, and how cool is it to be on radio, or TV!

But internal communication is important; and can add a huge amount of value to any organisation by pulling disparate people together into a shared experience of belonging. Internal communication is more HR than PR; and IT own the connections between us.

It’s a sticky little issue

The problem is as our jobs are converging into each other we are left interacting individually on this apex between the responsibility of different departments and often the compromises we reach suits nobody. We have to look for ways for us to work together better.

Working together isn’t a weekly newsletter (sorry PR) and it isn’t a performance management strategy (sorry HR), the best way to work together is across a single, independent, dynamic and interactive platform, which is within IT.

I think the problem is that IT reports closely to the business but core business metrics, particularly HR metrics are not being pushed back into IT planning and to be fair the PR department only just heard the word “metrics” about 18 months ago.

We need to sit down and begin a conversation and discuss how our three departments can work together as a group, for the good of the whole organisation. Maybe we should first think about what exactly “a group” is.

School of fish

Groups are all about belonging, sharing and trusting and what binds us together is our shared experience. This shared experience is built up from all the stories we have and share with each other about working within our organisation. Everybody in a company is woven into these stories, there are heros and villains, victory and tragedy; and sometimes even a little bit of love and occasionally some passion too.

Organisations are the sum total of these shared stories and by agreeing that principle HR, PR and IT will be able to progress.

The shared experience of an organisation defines that organisation

We need a platform to share our organisational experience; and thankfully “sharing experience software” otherwise known as social media applications are plentiful and cheap. Encourage individual innovation, try everything to see what works and replicate success. There are no wrong answers in this area; so the systems supporting the platform need to be able to respond to change quickly.

The first effect the organisation feels following the provision of a suitable platform, is increased cohesion; because if everyone is sharing stories with everyone else, we can work together better as we know each other more. This is the metaphorical equivalent of the organisation taking in a deep breadth; I have seen it happen.

Unfortunately not all of the stories that are shared are going to be good ones, but knowing what is wrong with the organisation is more helpful than knowing what is right. Working together PR can find and write the stories, IT can share the stories and HR can tell us how we are all going reaching our dreams.

After all everyone loves a story with a happy ending.

Occasionally, however, I stumble upon an interesting idea, one that is both insightful and potentially useful. I have mentioned meme theory before, and in this post will use it to explore the throw away comment in the last post likening modern communication to r-selection strategy using a metaphor for evolutionary reproductive strategy in biology to tease out some principles for successful communication in the world of the internet.

WTF is “communication” in this context?

Communication here is corporate communication, or communication designed to affect a business result and a business results can be any number of things relating to what an organisation does. Examples include:

• Getting people to buy more widgets,
• Convincing people it wasn’t the widget manufacturer’s fault some widgets have exploded and killed people
• Getting a political party elected by leveraging off the rampant anti-widget sentiment sweeping the nation following the recent spate of widget related deaths

This kind of communication is actually quite complicated and the amount of money spent in this area is probably going to frighten people who are unfamiliar with marcomm’s (Marketing and Communication) budgets. But the process of achieving strategic communication outcomes is well known and basically involves the following steps:

• Identify the business result
  Let’s use the example from above and pretend we are embarking on a crisis management exercise for the Widget Manufacturing Co following a spate of widget explosions which have led to numerous deaths. The business result would be to support the continual sale of said widgets into the local market.
• Identify the target audience(s)
  These are the people who you need to get your message across to: here the audience will be potential purchasers of widgets and also probably regulators who want to ban widgets based on their poor safety record.
• Define the target audiences’ current state
  This is what the target audience thinks now which is preventing the business result and in this example the current state is something like: Widgets are faulty and are likely to explode and kill people when used.
• Define the target audiences’ desired state
  This is what the target audience needs to think to achieve your business result. In our example the desired state is: Widgets are safe to use and perfectly harmless when used correctly/the recent spate of widget related deaths are just a coincidence or a result of operator error.
• Simple equation to uncover key messages
  The key message can is obtained by mentally subtracting the target audience’s current state from their desired state i.e.
  Widgets are safe to use and perfectly harmless/widgets are not to blame for recent widget related deaths
  MINUS
  Widgets are faulty and are likely to explode and kill people when used.
  EQUALS

  • Evidence of a long history of widget safety
  • Information relating to the quality control in the widget making factory
  • Evidence to tarnish the reputation of previous victims to support a theory they used the widgets improperly and are therefore responsible for their own demise

The three messages obtained from the target audience analysis are commonly known as key messages and, insofar as this post is concerned, can also be thought of as memes (I’ll come back to this later).

r-selection and k-selection again

If you really wan to find out a bit more about r-selection and k-selection for reproduction and evolutionary success I suggest you read the wiki article on it, however, basically r-selection and k-selection roll like this.

• k-selection - think koala bear breeding strategy
  k-selection involves having few off spring, but investing in them heavily to train them up with the skills they need to cope with a competitive environment. This is a strategy to use when you are reproducing into a stable environments and competition for resources is tight.
• r- selection - think fish or frog breeding strategy
  r-selection involves having a lot of offspring, not investing in them at all and letting your babies find their own way in the world. This strategy works best when faced with not very much competition, or when you are reproducing into a dynamic environment.

If meme theory is correct, and I think it is, cultural information (the information that codes for humans which isn’t contained in our DNA) evolves through the same process (natural selection) as genetic information (the information that builds your bodies) does.

Sorry guys, I know it is getting a bit tricky here, but bare with me

The process that shaped the development of a coffee mug is the same process that shaped the development of the human hand. This suggests strategies that apply to biological evolution will also apply to cultural evolution.

r-selection and k-selection as a metaphor for communication

The internet has totally and utterly revolutionised the marketing and communications business and what was previously a fairly stable environment with tried and tested methods has been replaced by a seething mass of new connections, communication methods and mechanics, all evolving very quickly.

The way communication use to be (k-selection communications)

The Widget Manufacturing Co have finished the thinking behind their communication drive and have identified their target audience, the current and desired state and have explicit messages. The next step would be to look at media their target audience consumes, and then craft a press release or advertising copy which contains the messages.

A crisis management strategy such as the fallout from widget related deaths is more than likely going to involve a press release and paid placement (advertising copy) the Widget Manufacturing Co CEO and Marketing Director will brief relevant agencies, the agency team would draft a statement and/or advertising copy, and these will be bounced back and forward between the agency and the company.

Finally the press release and advertising copy will be agreed and forwarded to the media.

Hopefully you can begin to see how old media communications is like k-selection: a low number of offspring (a single press release or ad copy) with a large amount of investment; something like 10-15 people would have had input in this press release of only 500 words.

This strategy worked really well when everyone use to sit down at 6pm and Judie Bailey would tell the country how it was, but the internet has changed all of this, people now get information from a thousand different sources that constantly change and if you want to communicate in this new environment betting the farm on a single press release and ad placement, down a single channel is no longer the best strategy.

How it is today (r-selection communications)

The Widget Manufacturing Co completes the same process to identify target audience, current and desired state and have the messages. Like the biological reproductive strategy to tackle dynamic environments r-strategy communications is about getting those messages down every single channel available; facebook, myspace, blogs, twitter, forums, plurk, IRC, AIM, flickr, youtube anything and everything you can get your hands on.

r-selection communication s is getting away from two hours worth of arguing about whether to use 12 point verdana or 11 point arial in the press release; whether to give the story to your old drinking buddy who still works for the Dominion Post, or worry about whether tv3 will send a crew. R-selection communications is a focus on getting the message out to people, visit relevant blogs, get involved in forums; make a YouTube video etc.

Conclusion time

The key to thinking about communication as a mechanism for meme replication is that memes can only replicate in peoples minds. By itself a press release, media article or advertising insertion is worthless; it is the audience (the people who consume the media) that matter.

Professional communicators need to stop focusing on the media and focus on the individuals involved. The social media mindset is recognising the most important parts of the communication equation in the early stages of the 21st century are people.

If you wanted a handy hint for a good first step to engaging people, not just media, with your marcomms messages, I suggest starting with your internal communication. Learn the technology internally and fly from there.

I am sure insects will be okay, they have latent (ie unexpressed but complete) genes for: high atmospheric carbon/high temperature/high vegetative growth to cope with the change and (relatively) short generation cycles to ensure evolutionary success.

This is the classic difference between the two reproductive paradigms: r-strategy and k-strategy.

k-strategy is a mammal strategy, it involves investment in the young at the expense of few offspring. It is a strategy of success when faced with a stable environment.

r-strategy is fish strategy, it involves no investment in offspring, but producing thousands of them in the hope a few survive. It is a strategy of success when faced with a dynamic environment.

So let’s dispense with the metaphor and look around us, would you say that the environment for your communication is stable? Or dynamic?

It is of course dynamic. The internet is a revolution for communication and as such an r-strategy for communication will prevail, rss, sound and video at the bare minimum.

Unfortunately without a serious attempt at stabilising the carbon in the atmosphere you need to kiss goodbye to all the mammals as a result of your decision, and probably some bird species too.

The next lecture will involve sex selection, colonization of island environments and peacocks to counterpoint this basic lesson.

Beans and yams with roast potatoes, seemed like a good idea for vegetables but I feel I need to admit I am also making a rich fig sauce to accompany the mutton-bird, however, due to issues to do with neutrality and not wanting to open myself up to criticism of bias, I cannot detail the sauce recipe here.

These vegetables are about to be cooked including possible future product placement revenue opportunities.

Once the vegetables have been safely cooked in the oven, it is time to get your grill on

The mutton-bird is ready to be grilled.

It isn’t a good idea to get sidetracked when the mutton bird is under the grill, things can go badly wrong quickly, burning, smoking and fire. After a while the mutton-bird will be grilled properly and should look like this.

Mutton-bird ready for carving and eating.

The next step is to dish up the vegetables, sauce and sea bird ready for eating.

The finished product

There you go, now you too are empowered to eat a migratory sea bird that between climate change and human exploitation are unlikely to be around forever.

Get’em before they go the way of the Dodo.