Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
February 20, 2013
3 Comments
[Screenshot of the cartoon showcase page we did for Rackspace etc.]
I’ve started writing a book about gapingvoid’s experience working with Rackspace. Here are some initial thoughts, some more formed than others:
i. WE’VE LEARNED A TON IN THE PROCESS.
I thought I’d share what we’ve learned about Rackspace along the way, about how this small little web-hosting company from San Antonio, Texas turned their unique take on “just being social” into a billion-dollar business.
ii. CAN A BILLION-DOLLAR COMPANY ACTUALLY BE “SOCIAL”?
I know. Right?
We’ve all been bombarded with the Social Media catchphrases, we’ve all seen the hype spewing out of every Internet orifice out there, we’ve heard every cliché and platitude known to man, we’ve all rolled our eyeballs.
The number of people calling themselves “Social Media Gurus” on Twitter numbers over a hundred thousand. “Business is Social!” “Join the conversation!” “Don’t sell, engage!”
“Hire me!” “I’m available for consultation!” “Write me a big, fat check and I’ll solve all your Social Media problems!”
Like I said, we’ve all rolled our eyeballs.
And yet… what if it actually works?
iii. “DEATH BY COMMODITY”.
Rackspace basically sells a commodity i.e. web hosting and cloud services.
They basically sell a lot of ones and zeroes, that they move through a lot of pipes, back and forth between their customers and their servers.
Not sexy, and highly competitive. What’s more, they’re competing with a lot of blue chip companies A LOT Larger than them: Amazon, Microsoft, IBM etc
It’s an easy place to get your lunch eaten by the big boys.
It’s an easy environment to be killed in.
And yet, they thrive.
iv. THE SECRET WEAPON: “FANATICAL SUPPORT” THE CREATION MYTH.
Two young guys start a web-hosting company, with Graham Weston as an investor. Graham gets an email from an irate customers. “Guys, we have to offer our customers Fanatical Support or this isn’t going to work. An ethos is born…
v. SOME MORE IDEAS TO PLAY WITH:
“IF YOU LOVE YOUR CUSTOMERS ENOUGH, YOU WILL HAVE A GREAT PRODUCT, END OF STORY…”
“DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT R.O.I., TALK TO ME ABOUT HOW WHAT WE”RE DOING IS ACTUALLY BEING HELPFUL TO OUR CUSTOMERS.”
“HOW THE OPEN CLOUD CHANGES EVERYTHING”
HIRE THE CRAZIES e.g. SCOBLE, LA GESSE, MACLEOD
“A SHOPPING MALL CAN BECOME A CASTLE”
“COMMODITY? ODDITY? OR BOTH?
“PRODUCT IS THE PEOPLE…”
“TAKE HUMAN BITES”
“LEADERSHIP IS ABOUT CREATING MEANING, NOT TELLING THEM WHAT TO DO”
“RACKSPACE HAS TO BECOME A PLACE WHERE PEOPLE’S HIGHEST NEEDS ARE MET, OR WE’RE WASTING OUR TIME.”
“IT’S WHAT RACKSPACE MUST BECOME THAT’S INTERESTING. IT’S WHAT ALL BUSINESS MUST BECOME THAT’S EVEN MORE INTERESTING.”
[To be continued…]
[UPDATE:] Rob La Gesse, the guy who hired me at Rackspace (and also hired Robert Scoble) left the following comment below:
I’ll be interested in seeing how this series progresses. Not sure everyone here knows this, but I don’t vet Hugh’s work — I see it when you see it. And that is pretty cool to me. I experience his work when you do. No preconceptions.
Yep. It’s what makes it fun– he lets me just post stuff without getting pre-approval. We like doing that way because it lets him see the work for the first time in the wild, which keeps the thinking fresher, somehow.…
February 13, 2012
4 Comments
Good corporate social media is REALLY, REALLY hard… WAY harder than it looks. A few people like my good friend, Brian Solis, make it look easy, but they’re the exception, BY FAR.
My prediction for social media in 2012, is that A LOT of people will finally figure that out, the hard way.
So be careful what you wish for etc.
June 7, 2011
116 Comments
[NB: Today’s guest post is by the world’s most famous ex-blogger, the great Kathy Sierra.]
We’re always searching for that secret formula, that magic pixie dust to sprinkle over our products, services, books, causes, brands, blogs to bring them to life and make them Super Successful. Most marketing-related buzzwords gain traction by promising pixie dust results if applied to whatever it is we make, do, sell. “Add more Social!”. “Just need a Viral Video!” “It’s about the Storytelling!”. “Be Authentic!”
The rise of social networking and media opened up a world of new possibilities, yet most Marketing 2.0 is basically:
“If you cannot out-spend the competition, you can out-friend them!” He who has the most Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and blog commenters Wins! It’s all about Social Capital now!
Sure, you can try that. You can work your ass off to be, as one marketer put it, “the person your customers want to party with.”
I never understood how any of this made sense, given that very little of what I see “brands” (or their human spokestweeters) do on social media is changing the fundamental nature of how users interact with their products. “But that is not the point! It is about being human!”. Nope, I still don’t get it. Why would anyone want to compete on *that*? It felt fragile to be in essentially a marketing arms-race of who-is-the-most-engaging-social-media rock star. What does that really have to do with what users do with the product?
And I saw examples over and over of social media rock stars with tons of followers, yet they were not able to convert those followers into Actual Paying Customers unless the product was what people really wanted. Being super-friendly, “liked”, etc. has limits when it comes to *paying*. I will follow your blog, but no matter how awesome I think YOU are, I won’t be paying for your book unless I think it’ll make ME a little more awesome.
So, why are people still so convinced that social media and all related buzzwords are The Answer? It has always appeared that if the product is truly crap, “your social media strategy won’t save you.” Even the social media gurus agree on that one. But it seems the opposite end is true as well… If the product makes the users awesome (at whatever the product is helping them do), no special secret magic pixie dust sauce is needed either.
Oh, social media does play a massive role in the success of a product that people love, but it is not the product-to-users “engagement” that matters, it is users-to-users (and users-to-potential-users). If people love what a product, book, service let’s them *do*, they will not shut up about it. The answer has always been there: to make the product, book, service that enables, empowers, MAKES USERS AWESOME. The rest nearly always takes care of itself.
Which brings me back to, why are so many so convinced that [insert favorite buzzword] is the answer vs. just making a product that helps people kick ass in a way they find meaningful?
And then someone I trust said this: these [insert favorite new buzzword] approaches are not about saving a crap product or marketing an awesome one… where these tools really DO make a difference for a brand is when the brand has little or no other compelling benefit over the competition. If the product is mediocre, or even really good but with too many equally good competitors, these things can make a difference. If you have little else to compete on, then out-friending/out-viraling/out-gamifying can work.
At least until your competition out-hires a good social media strategist or compelling extroverted social media star and out-friends you.
You do not want to be That Brand. You do not want to be That Product. That Book. That Consultant. You do not want to be in that arms race because it is an exhausting and fragile place to be. You want to use social media not because you *must* but because you can add even more value for your users by doing so. You do not want to be the guy that must ask constantly, “how can I get more comments on my blog? how can I get more followers and fans?”
The real pixie dust is when you ask yourself, “how can I help my users get more comments on THEIR blog?”. You want to be the guy who asks, “How can I help my users get more followers and fans?” And that is why I have always been such a fan of Hugh and Gary V and Tim Ferris, for example. Not for the comments their followers make about Hugh, Gary, and Tim… But for the comments their followers make about themselves. In a nutshell: Hugh, Gary, and Tim might well be the people you want at a dinner party, but what matters is that they help people become more interesting at their OWN next dinner party.
What prompted me to write this is the latest magic pixie dust buzzword, one that I am passionately against: gamification. Applying principles of game design to non-game activities can be done carefully, artfully, and with wonderful results. We use principles of game design in our programming books, for example, and you may have heard me at SXSW talk about using aspects of game mechanics to help create passionate users. But the current crop of “gamification” experts are doing nothing more than “pointsification/badgification”, taking the most superficial, surface mechanics of games and applying them out of context to areas where they are, as I have referred to it, “the high fructose corn syrup of engagement.” Once the sugar-rush novelty has worn off, there will be a substantial crash from the high. And it may be one from a which a brand cannot recover.
Don’t be that brand.
Don’t be that product.
Don’t be that book.
Be the one people talk about NOT because of your latest gamification and WOM campaign, but because it is obvious to your users and those they influence that your brand, product, book has made them better at something. Something they care about. Don’t be the slot machine of your industry. Give people an experience that leaves them feeling a little better about their own capabilities, not better about the faux-status awards they know, in their heart, are not examples of anything more awesome than a marketer’s attempt to use them.
Just make people better at something they want to be better at. When your goals and your user’s goals are truly aligned, you don’t need pixie dust. Don’t out-spend, don’t out-friend, and please don’t out-badge. There is a world of difference between helping someone *appear* more awesome and helping them actually BE more awesome.
–Kathy Sierra
May 18, 2011
2 Comments
[I added the following to the “About” page. Thought it would be useful to clarify what it is exactly gapingvoid does for a living. Hope it helps etc.]
“Social Media happens around Social Objects, not the other way around.”
At the core of any social media campaign, there are Social Objects.
Social Objects are the Alpha and Omega of Social Media. Without the former, THERE IS NO LATTER, end of story.
So that’s what gapingvoid does. We make Social Objects; that’s what the cartoons are, that’s what “Cube Grenades” are.
We make social objects, big and small. For businesses, brands and individuals.
Check out the Cube Grenade page. We’ve made social objects for large companies like Microsoft, Rackspace and Purina; we’ve made them for small startups and individuals.
I went on record years ago, saying, “Social Objects are the future of marketing.” With the Internet, time has proved me right.
My business partner, Jason Korman and I are experts at this stuff. Feel free to email us anytime at gapingvoid@gmail.com, Thanks.
April 7, 2011
No Comments
March 29, 2011
No Comments
December 10, 2010
4 Comments
October 29, 2010
9 Comments
[I drew this cartoon back in New York, 1998. Backstory here.]
Mark Earls, one of the greatest marketing minds on the planet, is bored of social media. Or at least, the conversation about social media.
So let’s try to get at least this thing really straight:
Social networks are not channels for advertisers or for the adverts/memes you, your clients or any of your so-called “influentials” create, social networks are for all of the people who participate in the network.
Being a social creature means you spend your life in social networks; being part of a social network gives each individual a number of benefits — shared protection, shared resources and most importantly shared learning. Our ability to learn from each other (the appropriately-named Social Learning) is one of our all-too-mutual species’ most characteristic capabilties and the engine by which stuff gets pulled through populations (from technologies to health habits).
In other words, social media (and the brands that want to be part of it) are at their most powerful when they offer two things:
Shared learning.
Shared teaching.
Great art teaches. Great artists teach. What do you teach? What does your business teach? What is actually learned, imparted? Not just the practical stuff, but the deep, messy stuff about ourselves?
Just thought I’d ask…
[UPDATE] Darren left a great comment:
I frequently talk to people and companies who are looking to take their first stab at social media presence specifically for the purpose of advertising their product or service. No! No! No! Its about engaging your audience in meaningful conversation. Inevitably, they push forward, create a Facebook page and Twitter account, post for a few weeks. They have almost no fans or followers and wonder why their 27 posts with 10% coupon codes brought no increase in revenue!
Because their 27 posts and 10% coupon code played no part in shared learning or shared teaching, that’s why.
[#smarterconversations]
September 3, 2010
14 Comments
[The “Life Is Too Short” print…]
I first started playing with the idea of “Smarter-Conversations” way back in 2004, the same year gapingvoid really started getting traction in the blogopsphere.
Though not something I talk about day-in-day-out, it’s always been there somewhere in the background, informing everything I work on. Here are some notes:
1. In the seminal book, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, the great Doc Searls famously declared, “Markets are conversations”. If you buy that premise (and I do, wholeheartedly), then quod erat demonstratum, if you want your marketing to be smarter (i.e. more effective), you need to be having a “Smarter Conversation”.
2. “Conversation” is a metaphor. Making your product sleek, elegant and graceful while all your other competitors make their product look cheap, plastic and clunky is a smarter conversation. Not all conversations need words.
3. It’s not just what you say, its how you say it. Calling it the “iPod” is a smarter conversation than say, the “MZT-2300-B Electronic Portable MP3 Digital Hand Device”.
4. Smarter Conversations scale. That’s what I really like about it. Anyone can have a smarter conversation– from a mom n’ pop pizza joint to a Fortune 500 company. It can happen in a Superbowl ad or on printed on the back of a paper napkin. You can start one on a blog today, for free. Or on Twitter or Facebook. The tools don’t necessarily have to change, the way you talk to people has to change.
5. Deciding to have a smarter conversation isn’t a business decision, it’s a moral decision. Like I said in the last point, the barriers to entry are zero. While your competition treats their customers like idiots, you treat your customers like intelligent human beings. You don’t do that because your accountant told you to, you do that because that’s who you are.
6. The Smarter Conversation’s value comes from, I believe, not by yet more increased business efficiencies, but by its humanity. For example, take two well-known airlines. They both perform a useful service. They both deliver value. They both cost about the same to fly to New York or Hong Kong. Both have nice Boeings and Airbuses. Both serve peanuts and drinks. Both serve “airline food”. Both use the same airports. But one airline has friendly people working for them, the other airline has surly people working for them. One airline has a sense of fun and adventure about it, one has a tired, jaded business-commuter vibe about it. Guess which one takes the human dimension of their business more seriously than the other? Guess which one still will be around in twenty years? Guess which one will lose billions of dollars worth of shareholder value over the next twenty years? What parallels do you see in your own industry? In your own company?
7. If Smarter Conversations work, it’s because they help humanize the company. I wrote about this years ago in an article I called “The Porous Membrane”. To paraphrase: Ideally, you want the conversation between customers [the external market] to be as identical as the conversation between yourselves [the internal market]. The things that your customer is passionate about, you should also be passionate about. This we call “alignment”. A good example would be Apple. The people at Apple think the iPod is cool, and so do their customers. They are aligned. When you are no longer aligned with your customers is when the company starts getting into trouble. When you start saying your gizmo is great and your customers are telling everybody it sucks, then you have serious misalignment. So how do you keep misalignment from happening? The answer lies the cultural membrane that separates you from them. The more porous the membrane, the easier it is for conversations between you and them, the internal and external, to happen. The easier for the conversations on both sides to adjust to the other, to become like the other. And nothing pokes holes in the membrane better than blogging.
8. Social Media is not about reaching a mass audience. Social Media is not about creating yet another sales channel. Social Media is about allowing the Smarter Conversation to happen. That’s all. Why do some companies lose, while other companies win? Because the latter has a smarter “conversation” with its customers. Zappos had a smarter conversation about the power of customer service and the power of company culture. Peet’s Coffee came along 20 years ago and began a smarter conversation about coffee with millions of people within a very short space of time. Target’s recent massive success started from a smarter conversation about good design. Savile Row tailor, Thomas Mahon came along and, with his blog, had a smarter conversation about $4000 English bespoke suits. Lucky’s Juice Joint had a smarter conversation about fresh-squeezed. Big companies, medium companies and tiny companies, whatever– it was never about size, it was never about the choice of media (social or otherwise), it was all about language.
9. Social Media allows you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business– including advertising, PR and corporate communications.
10. Ask not what tools you want to use, ask how you want to change how you talk to people. All evolutions in marketing are evolutions in language. Those who can raise the level of conversation in any market, win.
11. Start today. It’s never too late to begin a Smarter Conversation. Like I said, money or time is not the issue. Making the decision is the issue, and only you can do that.
June 3, 2010
11 Comments
In this morning’s daily newsletter, I sent out the cartoon above with the following commentary:
WE KNOW our future is tied into our creativity, that without it, we’re dead. Yet we resist it, anyway, with every fiber of our being.
To survive in the future, we’re ALL going to have to get more creative– not just the boys in the black polo sweaters, but every last one of us, regardless of job title.
Ergo, businesses are going to have to get more creative.
Which means businesses are going to have to get more personal.
Creativity, as you know, is a very personal matter. So for sake of argument, let’s assume that, like I implied, there’s a direct link here between “Creative” and “Personal”.
Ergo: Long term survival = More creative = More personal.
I don’t care who you are, social media makes business more personal… at least, it does if you know what you’re doing.
Ergo, “More personal” leads to “More creative” leads to “Long term survival”.
So what more justification to apply social media to your business do you ACTUALLY need? What MORE do you need to tell your boss? We’re talking long term survival here, folks.
Something to think about…
June 1, 2010
3 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “Wake Up”, goes to one of my favorite old clients, Jeff Paiva.
It was Jeff who got me to go down to Sao Paulo early last year, who got me my cube grenade commission with his then employer, the Brazilian ad agency, agenciaclick.com.
Jeff has since moved on, and after a brief spell in London, is now head of social media at Young and Rubicom, Brazil.
I had a splendid time down in Brazil. A really amazing country– I REALLY liked the people I met down there. I CAN’T WAIT to go down there again, maybe one day…
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission your own ‘Cube Grenade’.]
[Jeff, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 20, 2010
2 Comments
Today’s “Daily Bizcard” design, “South Beach”, goes to Alex de Carvalho, one of Miami’s most active social media evangelists.
Alex and I have known each other for a while. We first met at Le Web Paris 2005. He was living in France at the time, he moved to Miami a couple of years later, about the same time I first started going there on a regular basis.
As my business got more and more Miami-based (I now visit there once a month, for around 4 – 10 days), we became good friends. When I’m in town Alex, Maria and I will usually meet for drinks at least once or twice, probably at Monty’s. It’s become part of my Miami ritual.
I drew this cartoon back in January, while I was staying in South Beach, Miami. Up to that point, it was the longest I had ever stayed in that town– ten days or so.
It was quite an experience. South Beach is full of random people– tourist and local– walking around, almost aimlessly. I wandered up and down Ocean Drive again and again, trying to see stories in the faces. All their faces seemed to tell stories. Not all of them were happy ones.
[The Daily Bizcard archive is here etc.]
[Commission Hugh]
[Alex, please send me an e-mail at gapingvoid@gmail.com with your shipping address and the details you want on the back of the bizcard, and I’ll send a free box of 100 to you. Thanks!]
May 5, 2010
1 Comment
[“Conspire”, which I sent out in the newsletter recently. You can buy the print here etc.]
I just wrote my first guest post ever over on Copyblogger.com, “Why You Shouldn’t Write For Other Writers”.
Traffic spikes can be quite addictive. The type of blog post that might get you a lot of “bloggerly love” may not be (and probably isn’t) the kind of blog post that gets people to buy whatever it is you’re selling.
Traffic and influence are great. It’s lovely having all these people kissing your hiney at social media conferences.
But at the end of the day, it’s not the A-Listers or the pajama-clad, Web 2.0 basement-dwellers who are paying your mortgage. It’s the regular shmoes with a regular problem who are willing to pull out their credit cards to get it solved.
I hope you’ll go check it out, Thanks.
April 16, 2010
14 Comments
A Twitter comment from the London-based writer, Alain de Botton got me thinking. We can argue the numbers all day long, but they seem fairly ballpark to me, so let’s just assume for now that Alain is correct:
“The Law of Money & Complexity: An artist needs 20 followers to survive; a writer 20,000; a newspaper 300,000; a TV station, a million.”
That same day I saw something related– this very sobering info-graphic on PSFK.com, about how many “units” a musician needs to sell per month in order to make a minimum, meager monthly wage of US $1,160.
Anywhere between 143 units [Self-Pressed CDs] to 4.5 million units [Spotify], depending on the media.
Selling four-point-five-million units seems to me like an awful lot of work [39 units per penny], just in order to make a lousy Grand…
None of this is rocket science. It’s just that people often forget, building up a massive audience via social media is very, very hard… not to mention, highly unlikely to happen.
Whereas building up a smallish-medium audience (say, 5 – 20 thousand) of committed, interesting people is fairly doable and straightforward, if you know what you’re doing.
Of that audience of 5 – 20 thousand, you can probably expect to turn between maybe one or two percent of them, maybe more, into paying customers annually. So we’re talking about an economic base of around fifty to maybe a couple of hundred customers per year.
Or if what you’re selling is pretty high-end, like my friend, James Governor’s Redmonk [software consultants] you can do well on far fewer bites than that; maybe three or four new clients a year.
Is the profit margin on the product you’re selling large enough to feed your family with such small numbers?
If the answer is “No”, you’ve got yourself a marketing problem.
Please bear in mind that “results may vary”. The numbers I gave aren’t written in stone; the important thing is to always remember that social media marketing is not mass media marketing, and for the most part, doesn’t behave like it. If you want to get successful in this game, unlike TV, you need to align your offering to a comparatively tiny, highly discerning, highly interactive audience.
It’s either that, or pray that one day your site becomes as large as Techcrunch, Huff Post or Boing Boing. Nice work if you can get it.
March 25, 2010
No Comments
Polaris Ventures, the Boston and SF-based venture capital firm, asked me to design a poster for their annual Digital Summit, which they throw every winter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
The premise is simple: Once a year they get their favorite people to Jackson Hole for a weekend of skiing, partying and talking about all things digital.
Thanks to Mike Hirshland for thinking of me for this project. It was a great little assignment. Rock on.
[Commission your own Cube Grenade. The Cube Grenade archive is here.]
March 23, 2010
9 Comments
[View from one of my notebooks…]
People are always getting excited about social media. I’m as guilty as anyone.
That being said, it’s not nearly as exciting as my favorite media of all– good ol’ fashioned pen & ink.
Or a good Beethoven piano sonata, come to think of it…
March 10, 2010
86 Comments
Hello Everybody,
I hope you guys are having a great time receiving the newsletter. I’m sure having a blast sending it out!
Obviously, as a cartoonist I like people reading it. So equally obviously, I want to grow the list.
In terms of growing it, I’ve got my own ideas, certainly. But then I thought to myself, maybe it would be more fun and interesting to reach out to you instead. This is “social media”, after all. And even though I’ve doing it for years, this “open source” stuff is still REALLY interesting to me.
So here’s what I’m asking: You guys receive the newsletter. You guys are a savvy crowd, and you will have plenty of opinions of your own.
So what do I need to change? What could I do better? How could I improve the layout? What new ideas or tools could I be using? And perhaps most importantly, what could I do to make it easier for you guys to share it with your friends?
If you’re already a subscriber, feel free to leave a comment below of send me your feedback at gvdailycartoon@gmail.com. Thanks a lot!
UPDATE: Since I first posted this an hour or two ago, the comments have POURING in below. Thanks, Guys, this is REALLY helpful!
13 Comments
[“Texas”, which I sent out in the newsletter recently. You can buy the print here etc.]
Tomorrow I head for Austin, for the annual 5-day drunken orgy that is South By South West Interactive. Here are some thoughts:
1. SXSW is the only “MUST ATTEND” event on my calendar. It’s the one show I never miss, ever. Unless you’ve already been, it’s hard to convey JUST HOW MUCH more fun, interesting and full of business opportunities it is, compared to other shows. I can’t emphasize enough, if you’re into the Internet, just how much you’re missing out if choose not to attend. Sure, the price of going [entry fee, plane fare, hotel bill, taxi rides etc] might be quite daunting for some of us, but compared to the business and networking you could EASILY end up doing there, that cost is minuscule.
2. So you thought last year was crazy? Last year had ten thousand attendees. I heard on good authority from somebody inside the org that this year’s numbers have doubled. Hope you got a good hotel booking.
3. I’m on a panel on Monday. I hope you’ll come see us. All the other panelists are good friends of mine, so it should be fun…
4. I’ll be signing books. Barnes & Noble will have a little micro store on the fourth floor of the convention center, selling books written by some of the attendees. I’ll be there to sign copies of “Ignore Everybody” on Monday, March 15th at 5.20pm. My signing will last for 30 minutes.
5. Free Booze! Free Sex! A lot of companies sponsor parties, so as long as you have a pass, it’s pretty easy to go the entire five days without ever paying for a single drink or meal. Plus with all the young singles everywhere, everybody’s trying to get laid. X-thousand geek twenty-somthings trying to hook up en masse is pretty entertaining to watch. By Sunday or Monday everybody’s a basket case.Which is why the veterans are always telling the newbies, “Pace Yourself”.
6. Creating an island of calm in a sea of bodies. It’s going to be a madhouse this year, so to make ourselves easier to find, gapingvoid has hired a trade show booth for the event. If you want to meet up, that’s where you can find me. I’ll be selling art, doing business, signing drawings and exchanging business cards. My focus this year will be much more about business, than my usual hallway wanderings.
7. I’m better organized, this time. Pretty much all the parties and events I’m planning to attend are already in my calendar. In past years I just turned up and went with the flow. It was exhausting after about three days. Never again.
8. Follow me on Twitter if you want to see what I’m up to on the day. Heck, that’s what everybody else uses, too.
9. SXSW makes me proud to be Texan. I’ve seen this a lot: People come to Texas for the first time to attend SXSW, and “fall in love with the barbecue”. Texas has always been a very misunderstood State, if you ask me. SXSW does a great job of helping to fix that, at least with my crowd.
February 14, 2010
60 Comments
[The “Life Is Too Short” print. The image was the first one I sent out on “Hugh’s Daily Frickin’ Cartoon”. UPDATE: As of January, 2010, I am no longer publishing new cartoons on gapingvoid. From now on, “Hugh’s Daily Frickin’ Cartoon” is the place to see them, Thanks!]
1. Figure out what your gift is, and give it to them on a regular basis. 2. Make sure it’s received as a real gift, not as an advertising message 3. Then figure out exactly what it is that your trail of breadcrumbs leads back to.
Every weekday morning I send out out a new cartoon to my e-mail list.
My daily “gift” to the world, as it were…
One gift per day, that’s my quota. Anything more and I get too swamped. I also work hard to make sure that it feels like a gift on the receiving end. I try to put some heart and soul into the exercise, otherwise people would unsubscribe in droves.
If enough people like the gift, it’ll build up goodwill, they’ll tell their friends, and the list will grow. The more the list grows, the more people discover the trail of breadcrumbs that leads back to the work I actually get paid for.
And even if people don’t follow the breadcrumbs the vast majority of the time, that’s OK, too. I’m happy if people just dig my work, just value the gift. Not everybody’s in the market for what I do for money– I’m not in the market for everything my friends do, either. That doesn’t mean I don’t value them or their gifts highly. It cuts both ways.
It can’t be selfish. It can’t expect something back in return. It can’t huckster. People can tell, you see…
Everything I do now professionally begins with the act of gift-giving. You?
1. Figure out what your gift is, and give it to them on a regular basis. 2. Make sure it’s received as a real gift, not as an advertising message. 3. Then figure out exactly what it is that your trail of breadcrumbs leads back to.
Just do these three things, and all your social media marketing dreams will come true, I promise.
February 4, 2010
30 Comments
[“Poor Imitation”. The cartoon I sent out to the “Hugh’s Daily Cartoon” list a day or two ago…]
It’s been a while since I last wrote about blogging to any great length, but here are some random thoughts, in no particular order:
1. Blogs work SUPERBLY if you have great content. It’s when they don’t that people bitch & moan about the medium. That was true ten years ago, when I started blogging, and it’s still true today.
2. Great content is really, really hard to make. That’s why so few blogs have it, but that’s not the medium’s fault. The same is true for any other media.
3. It’s OK to sell something on your blog. We’ve all got a living to make. Besides that, your blog is your own personal property. If people don’t like your content– whether it’s selling something or not– there’s no law saying they have to read it. They can go somewhere else. When people complain about my own blog’s long-running commercial agenda, I just think, “Dude, you’re about a decade too late. That ship sailed A LONG time ago.” Besides, I LIKE selling stuff via the blog. Sure beats making cold-calls.
4. No, I’m not keeping up with your blog. Like a good friend said to me a couple of years ago, “Man, I don’t even have time to read the blogs of my good friends anymore.” Ditto with me. Heck, it’s hard enough keeping up with my good friends’ Twitter streams.
5. Time to quote Shirky again: “So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.” -CLAY SHIRKY in 2004.
6. Facebook? Twitter? Who cares? The latter two are easy. Like I implied earlier, blogging is hard. Writing is hard. Getting other people to read it is the hardest bit of all. “It’s the content, Stupid.”
7. My faith in the power of blogging is still as strong as ever. That doesn’t mean I find it any easier.
8. Focus and Continuity are key. I had so many projects going on these last years, I always found it hard to focus. What was gapingvoid really about? Cartoons? Marketing? Self-promotion? Self-expression? It seemed to change on a daily basis. Now that, besides writing books, my business is pretty much focused on two things i.e. making art and selling it, I feel more calm about it all. And gapingvoid’s new unofficial tagline, “Remember Who You Are”, helps keep me focused on the kind of work I want to be making long-term, and why.
9. No, it’s not too late to start blogging. “But the Blogosphere is so crowded now, it’s too late to get first-mover advantage”, I hear you say. Perhaps. But it’s only crowded in the middle and the bottom. There’s always plenty of room at the top. People’s need to be informed and inspired by the good stuff is insatiable. But, as I implied, it has to be good, it has to be more than good in order to get there. Nobody has time for mediocre drek. The world is just too interesting and competitive now.
10. I don’t intend to quit blogging any time soon. It’s become a central part to what I do, that’s just reality. I’ve pretty much always done my own thing on gapingvoid, making it up as I go along. Some stuff gets traction, some gets ignored, that’s just the nature of the beast. The only big change I’ve made to my shtick recently is that I no longer post new cartoons on the blog, just old ones. You can find out why here.
There are 100 million blogs out there already, so a big Thank-You for reading this one. Seriously. Rock on.
[About Hugh. Cartoon Archive. Commission Hugh. Sign up for Hugh’s “Daily Cartoon” Newsletter.]
January 18, 2010
4 Comments
Paul Fabretti, an old social-media PR buddy from my UK days, asked me to draw him a “cube grenade” for his Manchester-based PR 2.0 company, Gabba. Rock on.
[The Cube Grenade blog archive. Commission your own Cube Grenade.]
January 6, 2010
11 Comments
I drew the cartoon above over five years ago. It still applies.
Brian Clark and I were chatting on the phone yesterday about the end of the “Utopian” phase of blogging and social media.
Yes, all that talk about “Conversation”, “The Social Graph”, “End of Marketing”, “Advertising Is Dead”, “Authenticity”, “Transparency” and “Bypassing The Gatekeepers” had its place.
At the same time, I think we all collectively wasted a lot of time by endlessly yakking on about it. “Building Brand Advocates through Influencer Engagement” and similar corporate drivel.
I think 2010 will the year we all start actually being more TRANSPARENT about why we’re really here in the first place: To make money.
Speaking of which, anyone here fancy buying a gapingvoid fine art print? Rock on.
[About Hugh. Cartoon Archive. Commission Hugh. Sign up for Hugh’s “Daily Cartoon” Newsletter.]
October 26, 2009
15 Comments
[Update:] Afterthought by Mark Earls:
But the important thing — and the really revolutionary stuff at play here — is that this kind of (Internet) technology destroys many of the cultural, economic and politic brakes on our fundamentally social nature.
[Backstory: About Hugh. E-mail Hugh. Twitter. Limited Edition Prints. Cartoon Archive. Newsletter. Book. Interview. Essential Reading: “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About ‘Cube Grenades’ But Were Afraid To Ask.”]
August 30, 2009
2 Comments
Shel Israel and I have known each other since 2005, when he interviewed me for his seminal book on blogging, “Naked Conversations”, that he co-authored with Robert Scoble. Since then he’s been running around, writing books and consulting with large companies on all things to do with social media. His second book, “Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods” is launching September 3rd. As he and I have the same publisher, they sent me an advance copy to read, which I was really impressed with. I asked him ten questions, and he kindly agreed to answer them below.
TEN QUESTIONS FOR SHEL ISRAEL
1. Congrats on Twitterville coming out. Please tell us all about it.
In many ways, Twitterville is the de facto sequel to Naked Conversations. The older book gave the argument of why businesses should blog. Twitterville does the same thing, except it goes beyond business to include government, nonprofits and media.
Essentially, I tell the stories of people who use Twitter in interesting and useful ways. The hope is people will read the book and get ideas for using Twitter to help them in whatever it is they wish to do.
2. This book was actually a long time coming. After Naked Conversations, you had a wee bit of trouble getting your second book up and running. A symptom, I believe, not so much of your talents as an author, but of the inherent subject matter itself. A book takes about a good year and a half to write and produce, often far longer. Social Media changes overnight on a regular basis. Please elaborate.
There are two pieces of conventional wisdom for business books: A. Take one bone-dead simple idea and repeat it with some variations for 16 – 20 chapters such as The World is Flat. B. Write about a subject that will not change while you are writing it such as Thomas Edison and the marketing of electricity.
Obviously, I’m bad at following conventional wisdom. I take a different approach in that I like for something that is just taking off which can be enduring. I interview a ton of people and I look for stories that may maintain value for a few years even as they age.
Social media does change overnight, but people don’t and business rarely does. So I look for stories that deal with enduing issues such as profitability, the long slow death of traditional marketing ethics, access to information, making government more accountable and so on.
3. You wrote in your book about South By South West 2007, which has now become legend in social media circles. It was there and then that Twitter launched their website to the public, and everybody went crazy for it. I remember– I was there. The first thing that struck me about SXSW ’07 was that suddenly, unlike a lot of the Web 2.0 conferences I had been to before, the star of the show wasn’t some personality, web celeb, “A-Lister” etc… but an actual, non-living, non-breathing, digital website. At the time, I felt like a real shift in Web 2.0 was taking place. From hierarchical, personality-driven, to something else. You?
I think SXSW 07 is the classic story of a star is born overnight, except in this case the star was a flawed little social media platform originally designed to solve an internal problem.
I have always felt A-List focus was vastly over rated. When you look at luminary numbers and put them against the growth rate of Twitter every day, those who are prominent reach a smaller percentage of the entire Twitter universe every day. Each of them is in fact becoming influential to a smaller – not larger– share of the mainstream.
Twitter is decentralizing by its very nature. Of course there are dramatic stories from Twitterville– @JamesBuck arrested in Egypt; @jkrums taking a photo on the Hudson. But just the drama and luminary angle is much smaller than how Twitter serves everyday people, who just have a few followers, who just post a few times every day. Yet Twitter is changing their lives and their business, all the time.
4. Like yourself, I can totally see the value of Twitter (Very cheap, very fast and very easy– even compared to blogs or Facebook etc). Yet, like blogs before it, mainstream adaptation seems to be taking its own sweet time, yet again. As Ben Hammersley said about new media in general back at Reboot 2005, it’s not because the technology is hard to use (it isn’t), or that it’s intellectually hard to get one’s head around (it isn’t), but that to use it properly requires learning A NEW SET OF MANNERS, a new set of social codes. And getting people to do that is really, really hard. As a Web 2.0 consultant with corporate clients , getting these folks to “learn some new manners” must be the hardest part of your job, I’m guessing. Yes?
Ben has a point, but I would take issue with both of you on just how fast Twitter –and social media in general– is changing the world. If you sit on the equator, sipping a beverage with an umbrella in it, watching a coconut tree sway in a soft breeze, it feels motionless; like nothing is happening.
But as you sit there, you are spinning around the world at something like 2400 mph. You are orbiting the Sun at a speed much faster than that and you are hurtling through the universe at a speed humans cannot yet calculate.
Yet, sitting on that porch it may feel like not much is happening.
Those of us who are passionate about social media; who stand in front of rooms where some of the senior people have there arms crossed and there heads going from side to side, often vastly underrate the speed of change.
To understand that, I advise people to go speak to some young people. Watch their habits; watch how they get influenced on what to buy, watch, listen to; where to work. Watch young people going to the workplace and how they use social media as communications and information and productivity tools.
I maintain that we are at the very beginning of a fundamental global social revolution. And it is moving at a blindingly rapid speed.
5. Like Naked Conversations before it, Twitterville is rich in case studies. You talked to a LOT of people. As a fellow author, allow me to pick your brains. When an interesting story was breaking in the “Twittersphere”, one that might have made an interesting case study at some point, did you make a note, put it on file and save it for later? Or did you just rely on memory (and Google) when it came time to write the book?
Organizing for Twitterville was like taking a speed tour through Dante’s Inferno. I am a poor organizer to begin with. I created 17 Word documents on topic and kept dropping links into it. I had post its on my wall and in my reporter’s notebooks. Then something would break like Mumbai and that wouldn’t fit into any of my proposed chapters, but how could I not cover it. While pondering that, Gaza – Israel broke, so then I had to rewrite Tables of Contents.
The other thing that is a challenge is that I try to be more of a story teller, and most business books are not written that way. In the end, I followed the stories and built chapters around them and then restructured– and restructured the flow of the book to respect the people whose stories I told.
6. It’s the worst-kept secret in publishing: Books RARELY make a lot of money for their authors. That being said, since my book came out in June, the number of emails I get, asking about art commissions or other paid gigs has risen NOTICEABLY. I’m utterly swamped. As I’ve been saying forever, “Blogs are a good way to make things happen indirectly”. It turns out, the same is true with books. It’s all about “Leverage”. What’s been your experience?
You and I have discussed this before, but on the fame-fortune continuum, we are both much stronger so far on the fame side. I made much more money last time by advising companies and through speaking engagements.
With less than a week to go before Twitterville is available, I of course have dreams of being a #1 Best seller. It is far more likely that once again I’ll do better with speaking and business advising than from actual book sales.
When I first started, someone advised me that you write a book to get the speaking engagements. You use speaking engagements to set the stage for your next book. That’s what my strategy will be.
7. Your background is in Silicon Valley PR. With Naked Conversations, your focus morphed towards Social Media. What drove this personal evolution, do you think?
I am very curious by nature. For a long time I was simply amazed at the disruption and innovation that exploded from Silicon Valley. Now, the technology of the last 30 years has become part of everyday lives in the developed world.
My curiosity is very much focused on how this technology is changing the lives of the world’s people. If given the choice of following social media’s role in Iran’s election larceny, or the beta glitches in the iPhone battery, I’ll spend my time following Iran.
8. When Naked Conversations came out, blogging was new. Web 2.0 was new. Now it’s mainstream. I often get nostalgic for those early days, when the blogosphere was tiny, everybody knew each other, and a brave new world seemed to lie just a few pixels beyond the horizon. Now I find myself caring much less about “the future of media” or whatever, and finding I care a lot more about what I can do TODAY with social media, to help MY business. Has social media grown up? Has it become “like our parents”?
Every enduring technology has been introduced with an associated mania. The inventors are brilliant, the early adopters are passionate, and the media is excited because it’s all so new.
This was true probably of every innovation going back to the wheel. But then comes the longer, slower, steadier period of mass adoption, when people adopt these revolutionary concepts just to get their job done. There was a time when hearing a human voice on a telephone must have been mind-boggling. But, over time, the phone just became an everyday tool to let you use in your life and work.
Social Media, dramatic, explosive, disruptive period is now coming to an end, if you ask me. It is normalizing. It is changing more of the world, but is doing it in less dramatic ways.
We are probably starting to get to the stage of development that interests you and I the least. That’s where best practices get established, measurement systems become reliable, bean counters can estimate cost and value. Social media champions are no longer rebels ratting on the gates of large institutions. We have gotten past the barriers. We will soon start taking our rightful places on the org chart, with our own budget allocations.
This is good for business and the world. It’s just a little boring for disruptors like you and me.
9. As a former PR flack, you’ll obviously have more than your fair share of opinions about PR and how that world is changing, fueled on by social media. Anything you feel more strongly than most?
I think when I practiced PR I thought about ten percent of my peers were true professionals who understood that communications is not buzz; that listening is valuable; that customers need to be respected and that those who cover news need to not be on your side if they are to maintain credibility.
I think all of that is true today and the percentage as pretty much remained constant.
But those who practice PR and are skilled at social media – people like Shel Holtz, Brian Solis, Steve Rubel, Kami Huyse, Richard Binhammer, Scott Monty, Todd Defren [the list is long] have discovered that Conversational tools are far more valuable to communications professionals than the aging and inefficiency broadcast tools that I had to use when I was a PR practitioner.
I think this is a great time to be a Communications pro. You no longer need to be the nicely dressed nobody schlepping press kits and whispering into the ear of the official spokesperson. Now you can be the credible spokesperson yourself.
All you have to do is watch closely what the people I just named are doing, and learn from it. It sounds so easy, but I doubt more than 10 % of the communications profession will end up doing that.
10. So now you’ve got a nice little side-career there as a book author. I’m guessing a lot of bloggers reading this wouldn’t mind having the same, one day. What advice would you give to a blogger who one day hopes to get into the book publishing game?
All of it to me centers on the same issue: he ability to find a story and tell it simply and credibly. You do that with cartoons on the back of business cards, for example.
One other tip: writing a book is hard work. If you price it out in dollars per hour, you might do better in the restaurant service industry. I strongly advise you to love writing before you start.
[Twitterville comes out September 3rd, 2009.]
[The “Ten Questions” archive is here.]
[Backstory: About Hugh. Twitter. Newsletter. Book. Interview One. Interview Two. EVIL PLANS. Limited Edition Prints. Private Commissions. Cube Grenades.]
June 17, 2009
5 Comments
One of my Twitter followers sent me this photo.
He had just started working at a new job, was walking around the office to get familiar with his new home, and saw this…
One of his colleagues had used my cartoons to make a big ol’ cube grenade, about blogging and social media.
Now if I can only get these people to start buying the real thing… Heh.
May 25, 2009
34 Comments
I’m currently accepting new private and corporate commissions a.k.a. “Cube Grenades”. Please read on for some selected case studies, or for more background theory, read the commission archives. Thanks!gapingvoid@gmail.com.
Traditional advertising doesn’t work very well.
Sure, it tries, and tries hard, but most of the time, it fails.
It fails far worse now than it ever did during the golden era of TV or print. Those days are gone. We live in The Internet Era now.
Old, traditional advertising was all about creating messages for the media, not about creating social objects for the people using the media.
“Social Objects” is what makes the Internet work, what makes the Internet possible.
Without the social objects, there would simply be no World Wide Web.
Social objects are part of the Web’s very DNA.
In The Internet Era, an ad that isn’t first and foremost a social object, is useless waste of money. Even if we’re not talking about the Internet, per se.
Which is why I invented Cube Grenades: social objects in cartoon form, designed to star real conversations between people.
To me, Cube Grenades aren’t just about cartoons. Cube Grenades are about something far more important- they’re about doing something that creates real change between people, that creates something that actually matters to people.
Social Objects: I use cartoons. What do you use? Serious question.
1. SHIT CREEK CONSULTING
The groovy cats over at Shit Creek Con sul ting com mis sio ned me to design them their business card. After loo king at the half-dozen or so ideas I pre sen ted to them, they chose the one above.
Shit Creek are a Mic ro soft Gold Part ner. It seems a big part of their busi ness is coming in and clea ning up the mess left behind by the large tech con sul tan cies [I’m not naming any names]. So that’s the idea I ran with.
The name of their com pany implies they have a lot of atti tude. They wan ted a car toon that con ve yed this. Easy. It was a fan tas tic com mis sion and I’m very happy with the car toon they chose.
[The commission archive is here…]
2. TECHCRUNCH
For the last five years I’ve designed the poster for the annual Techcrunch Party. This is the one I did for July, 2010.
[The commission archive is here…]
3. THOUGHTWORKS
A “cube grenade” commission I just completed for Thoughtworks, the global IT consulting company.
Thoughtworks has this term, “Watermelon”, to describe a project that goes terribly wrong, that looks all well and good on the outside (green), but as the project comes to an end, turns out to be a huge ol’ expensive mess on the inside (red). I just took the idea and ran with it.
We’re going to turn this design into a 100 large framed prints, as Christmas presents for their clients. A fun little “conversation starter” to hang on their walls… which of course, is what the the whole cube grenade idea is all about. “Art With Purpose” etc.
Fun!
4. INTEL
“The processor is an expression of human potential”. Exactly.
“Silicon chip as metaphor for blank canvas.” Exactly.
So this was my idea for my client, Intel. You know, the big microprocessor company. “Silicon Chips” etc.
First I drew a wee doodle of a microprocessor, like the one above.
Then I added a tagline to the image. “The processor is an expression of human potential”.
This was my “blank canvas” to start with, as it were.
And then I started to fill said blank canvas with images. As demonstrated below:
The images themselves don’t matter per se. The fact they were drawn by me doesn’t matter, either. That’s not the point.
The point is, as always, human potential. And what Intel can do to help said human potential reveal itself.
“The processor is an expression of human potential”. Exactly.
“Silicon chip as metaphor for blank canvas.” Exactly.
Then I added the Intel logo and their tagline, “Visibly Smart”.
We printed these up as fine art prints. Then I hand-signed them at the Intel stand at the 2001 CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. You can seethe photos here on Flickr.
[The commission archive is here…]
5. ORGPRENEUR.COM
[“Sacred Zombie Cow”. Click here to download free high-rez download etc.]
Thanks to David Gammel of Orgpreneur.com for the great commission. Backstory here.
A “Sacred Zombie Cow” is David’s term for an idea that still lives within an organization, that has long outlived its usefulness.
[The commission archive is here…]
6. PRIVATE COMMISSION– TARA AND REMI
Recently I completed one of my most ambitious pieces in a while– a private commission from Tara, for her boyfriend, Remi’s birthday.
Go here to check out all the photos and the complete backstory.
[Though I haven’t talked about it too much on the blog, yes, I do private commissions. Feel free to contact me at gapingvoid@gmail.com if you want to discuss further, Thanks.]
[The commission archive is here…]
7. PURINA
February, 2010 I flew to St. Louis, to give a talk at Purina, the giant pet food company that’s owned by Nestle. It was their big, annual digital summit. All their top digital marketing folk (and their top ad agency digital folk) were there.
I talked about “Social Objects”, and how I believe they are the future of marketing.
Above is the print they commissioned me to draw for them. I like how it turned out. “All products are information” refers back to something I wrote a few years ago, “The Kinetic Quality”.
How often do large, well-known companies call you up and ask you to draw a cartoon for them? Exactly. I’ve worked in the tech world for big clients before– Sun, Dell, Microsoft etc– but this is my firstcommission with a large, FMCG brand (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods). Not to mention, I’ve always held Nestle and Purina in very high regard. So naturally, I was pretty excited. Rock on.
[The commission archive is here…]
8. FIZZ
I did this cube grenade for Fizz, the well-known Word-Of-Mouth marketing agency [They did all that ground-breaking stuff for Pabst Blue Ribbon etc.].
This idea is so simple… do I really have to explain it? Exactly.
[The commission archive is here…]
9. RACKSPACE
These are three from an ongoing series of cube grenades I was commissioned to do for Rackspace, the large hosting company in San Antonio. I was hired by Rob La Gesse [he’s the same guy who hired uber-blogger, Robert Scoble], to create new ideas/messages in order to shake things up internally. So far it’s working.
[You can see the Rackspace cartoon archive here.]
[The commission archive is here…]
10. THE MONSTER IN YOUR HEAD
Jerry Colonna used to be a Venture Capitalist. He was EXTREMELY successful as a partner with Fred Wilson at Flatiron Partners. Before that, he was an investment banker on Wall Street.
Then he decided he wanted out of the business. He had made his money, he now wanted to give back. He wanted to teach.
After teaching business classes at CUNY in New York for a little while, he set himself up as a business coach. A damn good one.
“A bit like being a shrink,” he told me, “but more business-focused.”
A big part of his modus operandi is not telling people what to do with their businesses, but trying to get them over their fears of achieving that which they MUST do, if they want to become the people they one day hope to be.
“The issues my clients fear the most tend not to be the actual stuff out there– competition, cashflow, marketing,” he says, “but the worst-case imaginary scenarios. ‘The Monster Inside Their Heads’, as it were. So a central tenet to what I do is helping them to get over The Monster.”
So he commissioned me to draw a Monster-themed signed, fine-art print to give away as presents to his best customers and allies. Something to keep on the office wall as a cons tant reminder.
I was glad to do it. I’ve always got my fair share of Monsters, myself. Rock on.
[The commission archive is here…]
11. CRASHCOURSE.CA
A wee commission I did for crashcourse.ca, an education resource. Yes, I wrote the headline. Go see.
[The commission archive is here…]
12. THE ESCAPE POD
My old advertising buddy, Vinny Warren, commissioned me to draw him a Cube Grenade for his Chicago-based ad agency, The Escape Pod.
“We are not in the advertising business, we are in the decommodification business” is a line of mine that Vinny has been borrowing from me for a while now. So it seemed appropriate to design something around that.
[The commission archive is here…]
13. ZEALEAP
Tim Porthouse over at Zealeap.com commissioned this design for his company. The copy at the bottom (which I wrote) reads:
“when a business stops creating, it dies. when a business stops creating culture, it dies. business cultures are not created, they are re-created. business cultures are not created, they are co-created. without collaboration, there is no creation. a business that does not understand its own culture. does not understand its own business. culture matters. the world has gotten too interesting and too competitive to think otherwise. reality is scary. reality is wonderful.”
Cultural Transformation, Baby. That’s where it’s at these days. Exactly.
[The commission archive is here…]
14. HNI
A cube grenade I did for HNI Insurance.
A lot of HNI’s trucking clients operate with profit margins of around 2%. Ouch.
I like the cartoon just because it’s brutally in-your-face and to the point. No messing around.
Of course, the easiest way for their clients to increase their margin, is to lower their risk. Which is where HNI comes in. Ker-chiing.
[More HNI cartoons here etc.]
[The commission archive is here…]
15. AGENCIACLICK
In early 2009 I was hired by a Brazilian ad agency, agenciaclick to create a privately commissioned edition of the Cube Grenade above.
As with my other clients, they didn’t want these prints just for themselves; they wanted to give these out to their clients, as conversation starters.
“All brands are open brands? Huh? What does that mean? Do you agree with it? Why? What does “open” actually mean? What does “brand” actually mean…?” You get the picture. The same idea that made The Blue Monster so successful. Again, it wasn’t about the message, the object. It was all about the social.
[The commission archive is here…]
16. MICROSOFT: THE BLUE MONSTER
The Blue Monster was a cartoon-based “Social Object” that me and my Microsoft buddy, Steve Clayton, unleashed on the good but unsuspecting folk at Microsoft back in 2007. For those unfamiliar with it, you can find the backstory here on Google. It’s probably my best-know idea to date.
[The commission archive is here…]
17. LINE2
One of cartoons I did for the hackthephonecompany.com campaignfor the client,Line2, the SF-based VoIP company.
Yeah, we went after AT&T. Naughty us.
[The Line2 cartoon archive is here.]
[The commission archive is here…]
18. RACKSPACE 2
There seems to be a conversation happening internally at my client, Rackspace. Spearheaded by people like Robert Scoble and the guy who hired him (and who also hired me), Rob La Gesse.
“Don’t be normal”.
Who wants a “normal” job, anyway?
Who wants a “normal” employer, anyway?
Who wants a “normal” life, anyway?
Exactly.
So why not say it, loud and proud?
So I drew some cartoons on the subject.
I’m thinking they’d make great recruiting posters…
[P.S. At the time of posting these on the blog, Rob hadn’t seen these cartoons yet. He lets me post my ideas “live”, without having to go through him first. THAT IS WHY I’m psyched to be working with Rob and Rackspace. Just so you know.]
[The commission archive is here…]
19. JEFF SANDQUIST
Jeff Sandquist, Robert Scoble’s old boss at Microsoft’s Channel Nine, commissioned me to design this business card for him.
He wanted a design that worked for both techies and non-techies alike. Something that made him appear both good at his job, but still a human being etc.
Fun! Thanks, Jeff!
[The commission archive is here…]
April 13, 2009
8 Comments
[From a recent post on Twitter.]
Now ain’t that the truth…?
I guess the argument still remains, what does “Changing The World” actually mean?
Does it have to be something huge, like Bill Gates starting Microsoft, The Beatles releasing Sgt. Pepper, or Nixon bombing Cambodia?
Or can it be something more modest, like opening up a really cool independent bookstore in a small town in Far West Texas that really could use one?
There’s no right answer.
It all depends on what you truly, truly love. “Meaning Scales”.
April 7, 2009
78 Comments
[UPDATE: “Wolf vs Sheep” will be the next gapingvoid print. Details here.]
In case you haven’t been following, I have been updating a few images from my back catalogue [which numbers over 5,000 drawings, the last time I counted] and turning them into limited-edition silkscreens.
It has been a great experience. It’s allowed me to reacquaint myself with the images, that in some cases, I haven’t really thought about for years. It brings back some old memories, and puts my mind to work in a new medium: How to translate 2″ x 3 1/2″ business card-sized doodle into large, 2-or –3-foot images.
As I spend time with this, I can’t help thinking about that age-old, never-quite-answered question, “What is Art?” How is it different, how has our relationship changed with it from even say, a couple of decades ago? Especially with the Internet evolving our sense of “Media” at such a lightning pace?
I don’t have a definitive answer to this, but I do have a few thoughts on the subject:
The artist whose work best summed up for me the Modern, post-World War Two, 20th-Century world that most of us were born into, is the late, great Andy Warhol. A fantastic magazine illustrator in the 1950s, who got into the imagery of televised, mass media in the 1960s. VERY mass-media. Who appropriated the visual language of a mass-produced, top-down, broadcast, CORPORATE world. The visual language of Madison Avenue, the visual language of Kellog’s Corn Flakes, Heinz Ketchup and of course, Campbell’s Soup. And we look at his work with the same sort of detachment as a TV commercial, or a can of beans in the supermarket. And we NEED to remain detached, or else this rather loud, glamorous, oppressive, consumerist worldview would bury us, would turn our brains to corn syrup.
Then along comes the Internet. A place that doesn’t do shotgun-media,“Broadcast” well. A place where if what you’re saying isn’t engaging, isn’t hitting people on a intimate, human level, it doesn’t get seen, it doesn’t get shared, it doesn’t exist.
Which explains why, as a relatively dedicated citizen of the Internet, I am far more interested in what a piece of “Art” can do for you, once it is on your wall, than what I got out of creating it. What it can do as piece of communication between you and the people close to you, not as a piece of academic Art Theory. I like the “Social-bility” of the work. I like creating “Social Objects”. And this to me, of course, is what the Internet also runs on. This, to me, is also what the new internet-enabled, post-TV world is all about. Instant, Human Connection.
And where does this “Human Connection” come from? Easy– from talking about the world you and I actually live in, not the world the “Theory Police” live in. Yes, that one. The messy one. You know EXACTLY what I’m talking about…
And yes, that’s what cartoons have ALWAYS been about to me, long before the Internet was invented, long before I even knew what Art Theory was. As I’m fond of saying, “It isn’t rocket science”. Real, Human Connection never was.
So, with this brave new world in mind, we’re thinking of publishing one of the three following cartoons:
1. “Wolf vs Sheep”. This is a re-working is one of my historical favorites. I first drew it when I had just to moved to New York, in 1998. It was about what I saw as the choices that people are confronted with in the rat race. They were fascinating times and elicited other favorites of mine, like “Company Hierarchy”.
2. “Love Begets Love”. Virgil’s famous quote. I drew the cartoon as a contender for the Stormhoek Valentine’s wine in 2007. It never made it onto the bottle as a label in the end, but a lot of people loved the drawing.
3. “Create Or Die”. Though I only posted this cartoon for the first time a few hours ago, I’ve so far received about 20 emails from people expressing serious interest in it as a print. I never saw that coming, but what the heck, up it goes…
We’ll publish one of the three, depending on the feedback we get. If you have an opinion either way, please feel free to leave a comment below, ping me on Twitter, or if you think you’re in the actual market for buying one, send me an email. Thanks.
The silkscreen print will be roughly the same size [approx 24″ x 35″] and of the same high quality as “Corinthians” and “We Need To Talk”. The price and number of the edition will also be in the same ballpark.
Please let me know your thoughts. All very exciting. Thanks Again.
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[Cartoon inspired by a recent Twitter post.]
March 24, 2009
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“The web has made kicking ass easier to achieve, and mediocrity harder to sustain. Mediocrity now howls in protest. http://tinyurl.com/czm2sk”
[Twitter Link]
February 17, 2009
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December 23, 2008
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December 14, 2008
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[I’m thinking this would make a good t-shirt. Or maybe a framed litho? Let me know…]
November 24, 2008
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November 23, 2008
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[Bonus: A little badge for your sidebar. Click on image to enlarge etc.]
May 28, 2008
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