Hugh Garry

What you know your organisation isn't good at

Stumbled across this quote on Twitter today.

"Good products get made by good people working with the right information and resources autonomously. Fixed processes like Scum are simply bandaids to help cover over some of these deficiencies. As such, I think you need to choose your process based less on dogma and more on what you know your organisation isn't good at".

@andybudd

5 things I'm thinking right now

Following the meme started by Alice then Kim and Dan I've decided to share the nonsense going around in my head at the moment:

1. We're in the early stages of the most important youth cultural revolution since Punk and nobody seems to have noticed yet. If Tony Wilson were alive today he'd say it's fallen in line with the cyclical nature of youth revolution (Rock 'n' Roll, Summer of Love, Punk, Acid House etc). It's a future blog post and a talk I've promised to do for DARE so I won't go into too much detail.

2. The BBC needs to get better at Enabling and Curating. Less producers, more curators. BBC Introducing has been great for musicians, so why not extend it to DJs and Film Makers and Script Writers and so on. One of the organisation's public purposes is 'Stimulating creativity and public excellence' part of which is to 'encourage active participation in cultural activities'. There's a difference between encouraging and enabling. Encouragement is all about suggestion whereby enabling is about making it happen. I think 4iP is a great example of the difference between the two. 

3. It would be great if every time I did something I felt guilty about someone in need would profit. Let me explain. I was brought up Roman Catholic so guilt has always been a big part of my life. Confession and Indulgences kinda allows you to get rid of sin by paying through prayer or cash. In general I'm pretty well behaved these days but I do feel guilty when I spend too much on something or I over indulge in sweet things. If you mashed the idea of JustGiving, the voyeurism PostSecret, the human emotion of We Feel Fine,  and the attractiveness of micro payments you could create an really nice app that crowd sources cash through guilt. When I spend £200 on trainers I want to push a button on my app that instantly transfers £2 to Teenage Cancer Trust so that I feel better about my purchase. At the same time I want to see (in a PostSecret/I Feel Fine) way what all the other people using the app feel guilt over. I've stared this already with my JustGiving account. Feel free to unburden your guilt by donating (99p would have been ideal but the minimum JustGiving takes is £2) Stupid I know, but hey, that's what I'm thinking about now.

4. Soon we'll be checking in with our faces. It's inevitable. Facial recognition software is getting good. Really good. Brands are just getting social media and will soon understand the value of location based services. Cameras are everywhere. People are friending brands on Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare. As a result our profile pictures will give these brands a pretty good idea of what our faces look like. So why wouldn't Starbucks hook up their cameras to some facial recognition, scan everyone that comes through the door, check to see if they're friends (and have granted permissions in their privacy settings), check them in, send a thank-you tweet, post a status and collect some great data real world data without any human interaction beyond going for a coffee... or should that be Grande Mocha Valencia?

5. Now that I've got an iPhone 4 I should start doing some daft things with film again. The most important camera is the one you have in your pocket. I used to love messing with my phone when it had a decent camera in. I'd always be filming stuff. Useless things like this. Or this. I'm amazed how my interest in film stopped when I switched from the N95 to the iPhone. Need to start messing again. It's great fun.

3 Reasons I Love SuperMe

I absolutely love Channel 4's latest games project, SuperMe.

As someone whose recent reading list includes Happiness Hypothesis, Stumbling on Happiness, Delivering Happiness, The Architecture of Happiness and various works by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi it's fair to say I have a massive interest in the theories of what makes one feel good.

SuperMe is a collection of games, quizzes, videos and tips aimed at educating teens on how to feel good about themselves. It's about dealing with failure, coping with the knocks life brings and recognising the powers we already have within ourselves to achieve a state of happiness. I won't go into detail about how it does that, you'll just have to go play. As good games should be it's really easy to engage (you'll be gripped in seconds) and has multiple layers for deeper engagement.

Other than it being a brilliant game there are 3 other reasons why I love it:

1. It's the best bit of public service media aimed at teens you will see this year. Full stop.

2. It's Channel 4 perfecting the excellent work they've been doing around education for some time. If what they've done so far is to be seen as the working out then this really is the answer. I think they've really nailed the balance needed to make difficult subjects engaging through play. 

3. And most importantly it's worked for me and my son who has recently been having one of those rubbish moments life occasionally brings. For week's I've been trying to simplify and impart my learnings from all the books I've read on the subject. It's not been easy. This has suddenly made my life a whole lot easier. It's all there, in simplistic terms, with videos of great people as real-life examples of how happiness can be achieved. Win!!!

So last night I was into my 4th hour of SuperMe (it's research I tell you) when my son looked over my shoulder. "You still playing that game?" has asked as he tore his eyes away from Call of Duty for the briefest moment. "Give it here, I'll show you how it's done" he said dropping his controller. Anything that stops my son's pursuit of a Tactical Nuke in favour of finding happiness is all good in my house... Unless of course you're chasing a 'Wisdom Achievement', which I was. "Nah, it's OK son. Stick to COD for now, you can play this later".

Well done to everyone at Channel 4 Education, Something Else and Preloaded.

Life in a day

I'm really interested to see how this Ridley Scott film does (though already a little grumpy that I can't embed the trailer). I'm gonna make my contribution. You should too. It feels good to be a part of something bigger, to be connected... that's why we go to football matches an concerts. Even if our individual contribution doesn't get recognised our collective roar will.

In my last post about the role of the BBC as a curator and enabler I made reference to some experimental things they had done in the past. One of the reasons I'm #proudofthebbc is that in my experience I've been lucky enough to experiment and encouraged to do so by my managers. I just wish more people jumped at the blank sheets of paper thrust before them.

When making Shoot The Summer I found myself in an imaginary head-to-head with Spike Lee who had just done a deal with Nokia to make a UGC film shot entirely on mobile phones. For some stupid egotistical reason I just wanted mine to hit the screen before his. I remember at the time wondering how many other films of this nature would pop up before I got mine finished. I assumed everyone would be doing it.

Strangely these other head-to-heads never materialised, and contrary to my assumptions, the tidal wave of mobile UGC films produced by broadcasters never happened. Perhaps they took one look at my movie and thought better of it. Maybe that's a good thing. Better to see experimentation in moderation than have it everywhere we turn for entertainment.

Either way, I still believe there are interesting films to be made in this area, it just needs a few years of experimentation. It's really cheap to do so why not?

The DJ and the Curator

When people would come to me for advice on how to be DJ they were often shocked that 'being good at mixing' was last on my list (more often than not it was first on their list). My advice was always simple and to the point: have good records and never take your eye off the dancefloor. I think that's why I like Ethan's analogy. Knowing your materials is having the right records, whilst as a DJ you listen to your audience who speak with their feet. Both go hand in hand. If you don't know what pushes their buttons then your materials will never be right. Do these things well and you will be good DJ/curator. How you mix (or bring flocks together) is part of the glue that can help take you from being good to great, but it's certainly not essential.

I spoke at an event in Manchester recently and gave my Utopian vision of the future of the BBC as one in which the corporation embraced it's role as an enabler. We've enabled unsigned bands through BBC Introducing for years so why not extend it to DJs, film makers etc. pushing our audience to the long-tail of content they then produce. When asked about how I see roles changes within the corporation I spoke about how I'd like to see less producers and more curators. 

Technology and social media has put the BBC and other PSBs like Channel 4 in the perfect position to democratise the media. The Beeb still needs to be a trusted guide, and the roles of the likes of Peel and Tong will never vanish. But if social media has taught us anything it is that our audience are using new tools to take control for themselves and if we think a chart based on sales or a phone poll still cuts it then we better think again. The BBC can still discover and champion but it needs a big rethink in how it does that.

There have been some really great efforts made by the BBC, mostly experimental, and there have been great learnings as a result, but if ever the time was right for making bold moves then surely that time is now. It's time the networks got it's hands well and truly dirty playing with the tools that enable them to listen to the audience, to discover new talent then push the audience to it.

Rewarding the Love

Rewarding love is something that we've always tried to do at Radio 1 via our social media channels. And why not? It's so easy. Retweeting and replying to tweets can have a huge impact on your audience.  Recognising their appreciation of you makes them feel good about your brand, and when they feel good about your brand they'll share the love with their friends. Do that with 1000 True Fans and you're doing well.

Last weekend we went to the T In The Park festival in Scotland and did some digital shout-outs via Twitter and Facebook. The idea was to get photos of our audience's favourite bands holding up hand written personalised 'shouts outs' to our followers. It went something like this...
 
When the digital world and the 'real world' collide in real-time like this I get a little giddy, even more so when some major stars began playing the game. The result looked something like this. Here's heartthrob Jared Leto from 30 Seconds To Mars rewarding our audience with some Leto Love...

And the reactions went something like this...

And some people liked it for other reasons...

So, our audience told us who they liked, we got photos of them saying 'hello' back, they felt amazing and told all their friends. We rewarded the love of our 1000 True Fans with a digital autograph.

Three days later Old Spice owned social media with a brilliant follow-up to their genius advert. The shirtless Old Spice man asked you to submit questions to which he would respond... personalised and in real time. The results were incredible. Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, Jason Calacanis, Kevin Rose, Perez Hilton, Ellen Degeneres, Christine Applegate, Biz Stone and more scrambled to get their questions answered. His responses were hilarious and the tidal wave of retweets shook the foundations of Twitter for 24 hours. 

A great campaign, executed brilliantly. You can read more about how it was here.

Reach for the Moon

"Always reach for the moon because even if you miss you land amongst the stars".