The Passion Economy
"The building blocks of the Passion Economy are individuals. Talentedindividuals. Talented frustrated individuals white hot and waiting for an output to pour their condensed frustration into and smelt a new thing. And we live in a creative age with a huge creative class. How would it be if we could connect the passions of our creative consumers and address their frustrations? Facilitate, educate and promote their inherent talents as members of the connected age to make a difference?"
The Passion Economy is the fantastic new ebook from Sean Howard that takes a look at the possibilities if our economy becomes driven by the connection of passionate individuals.
Some of the brightest minds in social media took part, including:
Scott Suthren
Ellen Di Resta
Gavin Heaton
Charles Frith
Mike Wagner
Mack Collier
Mike Arauz
Katie Chatfield
Alan Wolk
Peter Flaschner
Matthew Milan
Download the ebook:
The Passion Economy: opportunity for brands or jut a fad?
or check it out on scribd:
The Passion Economy eBook http://d.scribd.com/ScribdViewer.swf?document_id=12684582&access_key=key-9v7vtse1zxrycas5ysd&page=1&version=1&viewMode=list
Cultural Resonance & Gallagher
“Cultural Resonance is achieved when your audience uses what you've created to talk to each other about something meaningful that they've been observing in their culture.”
The thing about cultural resonance is that our culture is constantly in flux, constantly changing. So for us to remain meaningful, we must change right along with it. Seems simple enough, but this is in direct competition with the single, simple brand message.
With your basic 360 degree mass marketing model, the goal is consistency, to be “on brand” or “on message.” You do this so you define the culture, but are not defined by it. Not often is the goal to simply stay meaningful. Irrelevance is one of those sad realizations that companies come to about 2 years too late. And that’s the good ones. This shift doesn’t sneak up on you overnight.
So we need to be more malleable in our messages and more eager to evolve. Frankly, people who are the same forever at some point just stop being interesting. The Gallagher watermelon bit was hilarious with the first smash. And probably the hundredth. But after decades of comfort in his one great bit, Gallagher confused a flash of resonance with sustainable interestingness.
I wish I could remember who said it, but the fundamental corollary is this - are you creating stuff people want or making people want the stuff you create? Are you reflecting the culture that surrounds you or only imposing your vision upon it? The survival companies, those well prepared for this economic reset are those defined by their audience in the products they create, the services they offer and their attitude towards the culture they share.
Tune In Saturdays: Mayer Hawthorne
Holy shit, why is there not more of this out there? Prepare your groove pants for the greatness of Ann Arbor's Mayer Hawthorne, a sometimes blues-y, sometimes funky, but always soulful album that probably belongs more fittingly in 1966 rather than 2009. Very few records get me as excited as this one did, or as disappointed that there are only been 2 songs released.
Mayer Hawthorne - Just Ain't Gonna Work Out (video)
Mayer Hawthorne - When I Said Goodbye (video)
The Stimulus Bailout Crisis Bank Deathray Plan #2
It's hard not to love the trend towards better data visualization; all those complicated stories made much easier to understand.
But really I just wanted to bitch about the ridiculous number of advertisers now "feeling our pain" with their very own "bailout" special or "stimulus package." Seriously, people are freaking out. It's scary out there, and the last thing we need is to have this financial death spiral beaten into our brains. The cable news channels do that plenty.
Oh yeah, I just lost my job and my house, my wife just left me to go live with her mother because she doesn't want to live out of the back of my van, but phew! - Mitsubishi has their bailout plan! Everything will be okay!
Anyway - complaining over - here's how we got here. Don't be too depressed. It's our patriotic duty to spend, so go buy yourself something nice. Maybe a new pair of jeans or an HDTV to lighten the mood?
Interestingness from all over.
Banners - The Media-Creative Schism
"You have a million dollars of a client’s money to spend online. Whichis more profitable? Give it to a boutique studio that has a team of 15
expensive people on the project, with high overhead costs and a lot of
freelancer bills, or to give it to Yahoo, and take 25% profit off the
top, and assign one media guy to oversee it? The profit pressure is
immense to just give it to Yahoo."
Making Online Retail Social
WujWuj launched a retail portal allowing friends to by items together at lower cost than a single item. Not sure if it can scale, but interesting product nonetheless.
Facebook Gets Older
Can Facebook avoid the MySpace death spiral through the masses? For that matter, can MySpace regain its cool? Or is this the opportunity for the next big social player to arise? Friendster, then MySpace, then Facebook, then what?
The neurological basis for Intuition
"According to a new study, our gut feelings can enhance the retrieval of
explicitly encoded memories - those memories which we encode actively -
and therefore lead to improved accuracy in simple decisions. The study,
which is published online in Nature Neuroscience, also provides
evidence that the retrieval of explicit and implicit memories involves
distinct neural substrates and mechanisms."
Internet Speed: Measured in Remixes
"Just remember that these pieces of content spread because real live
human beings thought that they were remarkable enough to tell someone
else about. And all of these remixes happened because real live human
beings were inspired to create them."
The Ecology of Finance
"Even free-marketeers like Greenspan now recognize that unregulated
capitalism has serious, perhaps fatal, weaknesses, and is in need of a
tune-up. The world could try to develop a new model from first
principles, but Princeton's Simon Levin, the Scripps Institute's George
Sugihara, and Oxford's Bob May have published work pointing out that
there are many natural systems that mimic, in nontrivial ways, the
functioning of financial markets. "I've come to understand," says
Levin, "that they're the same kinds of systems." Both feature
competition for limited resources; individuals trying to maximize their
own return; and competition and exploitation as well as the need for
cooperation."
Overcoming our empathy deficit
"I want to warm to a theme that we too suffer from a deficit of empathy
in the way we relate to those we seek to influence. We may try to
understand their lives but we never really try to see the world through
their eyes. That’s partly because we are constantly trying to lump
people together so that their incredibly disparate lives become more
manageable for us. And when we aren’t doing that we are dividing them
into horrifying segments and then, even worse, writing ghastly pen
portraits about our imaginary lives."
Tune In Saturdays: Malajube (revisited)
Putting aside the absolute obtuseness of releasing an album in some countries and not others, leaving me listening to Malajube's new record, Labyrinthes, without buying it, I'll have to forge ahead considering just how good it actually is.
From QRO Magazine:
"Leave it to the French, or at least, French-Canadians to put amuch-needed, thought-provoking twist on rock 'n roll. While the underground music world continues to stretch in infinite directions, Malajube helps to recenter the trends with an inventive mix of soaring '90s alternative rock sounds and ultra-modern effects. Labyrinthes is a clear gem in 2009's rock bag."
And check out this fantastic, Clue-like video for Porte Disaru:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3108461&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
MALAJUBE || PORTÉ DISPARU from Dare To Care Records on Vimeo.
From Stereogum:
Malajube - Ursuline (mp3)
Our Emotional Brain.
We think of ourselves as mostly rational beings, separated from the animals based on our ability to reason, to control emotion. It's a subject Jonah Lehrer (if you're not reading his blog, you're missing out big time) tackles in his new book, "How We Decide."
It's an image with roots throughout history, starting with Plato's description of humans as the rational Charioteers of our emotional horses. It continued throughout most of Western culture, from the Cult of Reason to the inception of our country with Jefferson's "governed by reason and reason alone." This is probably because people simply don't like thinking themselves to be something other than rational decision makers, nor do they want to feel duped by irrational emotions. We tend to think of emotional decisions negatively.
But that bicameral description isn't fully accurate. While obviously our rationality can overcome some of our emotional urges, we've also found that we can't really have the rational bits without the emotional either.
In studies of people with damage to the part of the brain involved with emotional processing in regards to decision-making, they actually tend to no longer be able to make decisions because of over-rationality. They obsess over the mundane details of life, from what color of pen to use to what restaurant to choose. After countless hours of weighing options, they've lost the emotions that allow them to use their rationality.
Or think of it this way. Our emotional instincts have been instilled in us over billions of years. Birds, fish, worms, etc. operate on emotional instincts solely. These parts of our brain are much more refined. It's the rationality that's new. Or as JL says:
“These new talents were incredibly useful. But they were also incredibly new. As a result, the parts of the human brain that make them possible - the ones that the driver of the chariot controls - suffer from the same problem that afflicts any new technology: the have lots of design flaws and software bugs. (The human brain is like a computing operating system that was rushed to market.) This is why a cheap calculator can do arithmetic better than a professional mathematician, why a mainframe computer can beat a grand master at chess, and why we so often confuse causation and correlation. When it comes to the new parts of the brain, evolution just hasn’t had the time to work out the kinks.
The emotional brain, however, has been exquisitely refined by evolution over the last several hundred million years.”
This reminds me of Feldwick's missive, "Exploding the message myth." Too much of our advertising is focused on selling rational benefits without catering enough to the emotional underpinning. He describes how a couple funny chimps kept a tea the undisputed category leader for decades. Or consider the explosion of Cadbury's Gorilla, or the goodwill created by Zappos on twitter. These companies are shedding emotional bread crumbs for the audience to use in forming opinions about the brand. It's not about the hard sell, but giving the consumer a greater volume of meaningful short cuts to use in decision making. Short cuts that make you a more viable option, mostly through trust and context, not necessarily price.
So what do we do with this? It means doing more cool stuff. Increasing small, expressive interactions and worrying less about the mass and meaningless. Don't do things that make you look like another cog in the corporate machine, do things that make you a valued member of a society. More reciprocal relationships and less trying to sell shit. In short, our new mission is to simply "be awesome" in every thing we do.
As Marty Neumeier described, "A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service or organization."
And our "gut" has everything to do with combining the emotional and the rational. One can't exist without the other.
(photo from kevindooley)