“How to Be Generous: A Guide for Social Media Brands”

Paul Worthington, Head of Strategy, Wolff Olins.

Source: bluestreet:

“Things are changing. Great ideas are not only coming top-down; they’re coming from interns, they’re coming from customers sharing their best ideas out of love for your brand (like Dell Idea Storm), from ethnography in third world countries. Innovation is about inspiration coming from continuously listening for the unexpected which can come at anytime from anywhere; nothing linear about that!”

Innovating Innovation: The Best Ideas Can Come From Anywhere

BY JOEL RUBINSON, Wed Jun 17, 2009 at 1:41 PM

Identityworks.com launches Identity Forum...

Celebrating the use of corporate identity as a management tool, the Identity Forum is an international online community of leading identity experts - designers, strategists and corporate brand managers - who have been invited to contribute thoughts on corporate branding events, trends, issues and ideas.

Contributors include Larry Ackerman, Clive Chajet, Brian Collins, Jonathan Knowles, Jerry Kuyper, Scott Lehrman, Joel Portugal, Denis Riney, Roger van den Bergh (all in the U.S.), Dan Dimmock (U.K), Marco Rezende (Brazil), Errol Saldanha (Canada), Gabi Toth and Marius Ursache (Romania), and Tom Vanderbauwhede (Belgium).

Identity Forum is edited by identity consultant Tony Spaeth. Spaeth also edits the educational site Identityworks.com, where he reviews strategically sound, creatively effective rebrandings by corporate leaders, and he co-edits the strategy database site CorporateBrandMatrix.com.

Credits go to Gabi Toth for designing the Forum site, and to Miles Newlyn for the idea of Identity Forum’s flag…

A quick summary: "Digital Britain: The Final Report"

Key points to arise from the [Digital Britain: The Final Report] report include:

- The UK is to have a Universal Service Commitment of 2Mbps (2 Mega bits per second) by 2012, this is to be funded in a number of ways, £200m surplus from the Digital Switch Over Help Scheme, commercial gain through tender contract, contributions from private partners, money from other public sector organisations, consumers themselves by resolving wiring issues in their homes. Additionally the wider coverage obligations placed on mobile broadband providers will help to meet this obligation.

- The report does not set an minimum speed for upstream or latency, though does suggest that money spent on meeting the USO should be spent in such a way that does not preclude expansion to Next Generation speeds in the future.

- A 50p per month on fixed copper lines (basically telephone lines, i.e. residential phone lines, business analogue lines, ISDN2 lines and cable telephone lines. This £6 a year will go into the Next Generation Fund, the purpose of which is to fund the roll-out of Next Generation services in the third of the country where at this time commercial operators are saying solutions like fibre are not feasible. A sum of £150m to £170m is expected to be raised per year from the fund, with the aim of connecting most of the final third by 2017.

- The 50p levy is not part of providing the basic 2Mbps USO.

- In the area of illegal file sharing the report outlines a proposal to legislate and give Ofcom the a duty in reducing the amount of file sharing over the Internet in the UK. This will comprise of notifying account holders when it appears their account has been used to infringe copyright, and an obligation to keep records so that serious repeat infringers can be identified and thus allow targeted court action against the most damaging breaches of copyright.

- A code of practice to underline these obligations will be produced, which should set out the processes for rights holders to inform Ofcom.

- Ofcom will also be provided with additional powers, so that if this warning system does not have a significant impact on illegal file sharing then Ofcom can place additional conditions on broadband providers. For example blocking of sites, port blocking, bandwidth capping, data volume caps, traffic shaping. This measures are only expected to be used if the overall level of illegal file-sharing does not diminish after a 6 month initial period.

- The report outlines that it plans for the first stages of the warning system will be deemed successful if infringement is reduced by 70% in the first year.

- Fair use gets a mention, since at present even if you own a copy of an album on CD, ripping it onto your MP3 player is a violation of copyright law. Nothing concrete appears, other than to mention that this area is heavily constrained by the EU copyright framework.

Source: thinkbroadbrand

In a difficult and unforgiving sector, is it time for a new era of support and empathy or is it still survival of the fittest?

After planning, implementing and contributing to various blogs and forums over the past five years, and Twittering with Tweeple for two of those, I now find myself a little ashamed of admitting to difficulty in gauging whether I should respond to (cantankerous) comments.

According to friends, a combination of my fascination for all things digital, and an insistence of wearing a suit-jacket for every (non) occasion has apparently earned the reputation of being, a bit Geek Chic. Perhaps, Geek Sheik?!. It would appear, after many years of thinking I was out on the periphery, I appear to now conform to a category, or tag. However, in the context of this post, I’ll let you decide (quietly) if it’s cool or not.

As a result of now becoming tagable, I feel slightly embarrassed and overwhelmed by the response received by my last post. For friends who missed it, my post didn’t contain any geeky, tech-related thoughts, opinions or observations.

My previous post (my first on the Brand Republic blog) focused on an identified need for agencies, not all I may add, to embrace the holistic benefits of business development. I tried to clearly explain how I saw the process of developing new new business as a function and element of a wider strategy - an attempt to differentiate one from the other, encouraging innovative thought to transform, once-speculative (cold) approaches it to targeted initiatives. Conversation-led engagement, if you will. Personally, and from comments and feedback (both on and off-line) received externally, I thought I did a good job.

The embarrassment I now have comes with a sense of hesitation in responding to comments, direct messages and opinion I really disagree with - fearful that my newly found geek-chicness would quickly transform in to that of a cold, cantankerous and self-opinionated fool.

Blogging and the provision of platforms, like Comments Central, are of course used by individuals to voice opinion, spark debate, increase profile and aid the organic growth of traffic to websites and blogs. So, what should one do when a comment is posted, by another industry professional, who adopts (what appears to be) a belittling tone-of-voice, risks the possibility of ill-perceived desperation and opens themselves up to scrutiny?

My dilemma: Should I trust the intelligence of the reader, and an ability to draw one’s own conclusion or, like the U.S. Presidential Debate, (respectfully) knock ‘em back in to place with proven fact?