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It is summer in New Zealand now and looking out on the clear blue sky quilted with tufts of cotton wool clouds; you could be forgiven for thinking nothing has changed. Every morning the sun rises slowly in the east, reaching it peak around midday, before sinking to settle behind the hills to the west.
The same stupid dog barks restlessly when its owner is away; and the kids at play in the park by the sea, seem as happy and carefree today, as they are every other day.
But today is different.
On this day our world has split to shed its old skin, leaving tender new flesh, soft and vulnerable, beneath. At first the change is almost imperceptible, like distant music drifting from the bonfire along the beach, caught in the eddies and flows of the warm evening wind. But once you have hold of it, you can tease the change out, unravelling it like a ball of wool let down long flights of stairs.
Now we have the change, we can peel more and more of the old husks from this day, and the change we thought could never happen, stares boldly back at us, surrounded by the ashes of the way things were.
This change does not descend from the sky, flanked by horseman, raining fire and brimstone from a sword made of lightning; but instead creeps quietly up to us and slips silently into our ear.
It begins as a glimmer of excitement and hope and a promise of love with acceptance whenever we need. As the change grows stronger, it will fill every part of us, nourishing and refreshing and soothing our pain.
From this day to our last day, the change will support us: reassuring us through the nasty storms thrown up by the maelstrom of life; and ensuring we take the time to reflect on the long afternoons of contentment, surrounded by the people we love.
This change will save us from the frightening futures we have created for ourselves; and we can begin this process and accept this future right now.
You just need to accept the inevitable truth, this change is you.
The word community is increasingly being used as a broad term defining a group of individuals interacting on a particular online platform, these “communities” are thriving on websites like YouTube, Flickr and the countless blogs abounding on the internet.
This new phenomena has precipitated a plethora of opinions on what communities are, and what they can be used for. Some strive to emulate the positive and powerful community of Wikipedia, now the single most significant repository of knowledge in human history (possibly excepting the Library of Congress) created by community of individuals dedicated to writing, editing and validating articles ostensibly altruistically.
Particularly important is the promise of a feature allowing us to tap into communities to achieve business results, and there is a growing band of people employed to think about this very issue.
Successful community engagement promises insight for marketing, sales, employee engagement, productivity, strategy and planning, to name only a few. So how should the modern organisation go about leveraging off the concept of community? And what value can these communities actually deliver to these businesses?
The first step in understanding the power of communities is to understand what a community actually is.
So WTF is legal agency?
In Commercial Law an agent is someone who has the power to act on behalf of a principal and can bind a principal to their decisions and actions, typically in the course of employment. A good example of an agent acting on behalf of a principal is a shop attendant contracting with customers for the sale and purchase of goods in a shop.
It’s legally interesting because the goods sold do not belong to the shop assistant.
The principle of agency is a very important one in modern law, particularly considering corporations are defined as “fictitious legal persons”, and can only ever act as principals through the agency of real people.
The legal concepts supporting the formation of agency and the rights and obligations that agents and principals have and confer are complicated but this should be enough to apply the idea of agency to the relationship between genes and the organisms they construct.
Genes and organisms as principals and agents
All eukaryotes (a group including all animals, plants and fungus) are built by the instructions contained within the nucleus of the cell. These instructions are catalogued by DNA and written in genes and the relationship between genes and the eukaryotic organisms they build is a form of agency.
The genes act as principals and dictate the starting point for their agent’s life but then submit responsibility to those organisms for continued existence.
The gene-principals retain control over their organism-agents and instil a strong desire to find food, safety and a mate; however, the relationship between genes and organisms is one of strict agency and there are no circumstances where a gene-principal can escape the action of an organism-agent.
Genes are bound completely by the actions of organisms.
The story of a lonely albatross
A black browed albatross, dubbed Albert, has been visiting the shores of Great Britain in search of a mate. It is thought he was blown off course from his natural home in the South Atlantic 40 years ago and despite being unequipped by biology to cope with his new environment has acted as a faithful agent to return every year, again and again, to a long and lonely coast.
12,000 km from his ancestral home: Albert will live out his days single and notwithstanding another fateful accident will take his genes with him to a desolate grave.
The human condition
The relationship between human-agents and our principals is of an order of magnitude more complicated than the rest of our eukaryotic cousins combined.
Although gene-agents encourage our love of fatty foods and we are attracted to individuals who signal “health”; there are examples of human actions running contrary to the interests of our gene-principals.
In fact we can separate out our behaviour into actions that support and those that go against the reproductive goals of our principal-genes.
Actions supporting the goals of our genes include:
- An act that ensures our own survival up to the end of our reproductive years
- An act that ensures the survival of close family up to the end of their reproductive years (the closer the relationship genetically the more important this becomes)
- An act that increases the likelihood of reproductive success (everything from impressing potential partners - to the act itself)
Actions detracting from the goals of our genes include:
- Offering any assistance to others we are not genetically related to
- Taking a vow of chastity
- Enlisting in the military
Humans act as agents of our genes when we take actions that support our gene’s reproductive success.
This then leaves the question:
When humans are not acting as agents for our genes who or what are we acting as agents for?
A new definition for community
The simple answer to the question is: when humans are not acting as agents for our genes, we are acting as agents for other principals. These principals use us in the same way our genes do, as agents ensuring their own reproduction, and in the modern age of global communication, are replicating like never before.
We can now define a community as any principal other than our genes that use us as agents to reproduce.
This definition combined with a job building high value online platforms should remind us not to concentrate on building attractive communities, but instead focus on building infectious ones.
Wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,
There’s always Pooh and Me.
Whatever I do, he wants to do,
“Where are you going today?” says Pooh:
“Well, that’s very odd ‘cos I was too.
Let’s go together,” says Pooh, says he.
“Let’s go together,” says Pooh.
“What’s twice eleven?” I said to Pooh.
(”Twice what?” said Pooh to Me.)
“I think it ought to be twenty-two.”
“Just what I think myself,” said Pooh.
“It wasn’t an easy sum to do,
But that’s what it is,” said Pooh, said he.
“That’s what it is,” said Pooh.
“Let’s look for dragons,” I said to Pooh.
“Yes, let’s,” said Pooh to Me.
We crossed the river and found a few-
“Yes, those are dragons all right,” said Pooh.
“As soon as I saw their beaks I knew.
That’s what they are,” said Pooh, said he.
“That’s what they are,” said Pooh.
“Let’s frighten the dragons,” I said to Pooh.
“That’s right,” said Pooh to Me.
“I’m not afraid,” I said to Pooh,
And I held his paw and I shouted “Shoo!
Silly old dragons!”- and off they flew.
“I wasn’t afraid,” said Pooh, said he,
“I’m never afraid with you.”
So wherever I am, there’s always Pooh,
There’s always Pooh and Me.
“What would I do?” I said to Pooh,
“If it wasn’t for you,” and Pooh said: “True,
It isn’t much fun for One, but Two,
Can stick together, says Pooh, says he. “That’s how it is,” says Pooh.
I have had an opportunity recently to be exposed to people I haven’t, in the course of things, had to deal with in quite some time. In truth it has taken me back to my therapy days and the long hours of discourse covering irrelevant events in a long distant past.
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.
Each change in communication has bought about change in society. It began with the invention of language over 40,000 years ago when humans began settling into villages, it changed again with the invention of writing precipitating cities, to print and broadcast, that led to states and nations respectively.
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.
Anyway in case you are one of our few international readers, New Zealand Media Madges are all a flutter today with the decision by a District Court Judge preventing websites from publishing the names of two men who have been charged with murdering a 14 year old boy in South Auckland.
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.
This particular post has turned into a bit of a novel and as a result I am going to split it up into bite sized chunks - here is part I.
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.
The Southerly is biting today, and winter has arrived in Wellington, it doesn’t scare me like London, and in fact the cold has advantages. The Southerly is a tail wind for the walk from the city around the habour to home, whereas the spring strength northerly is a hard headwind.
“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.
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