Actics Blog

ClownFish Marketing has got an interesting niece piece on PSFK on ‘not needing’ consumers as a future challenge for marketers. The piece mentions another recent and very nice article from The Observer on the rise of ethical consumerism - also homework for you guys. Even though it’s probably too late to influence your holiday shopping now.

British Petroleum, BP is in trouble. Financial Times have two recent articles that report environmental negligence, loose worker safety standards, and a general tendency to cover things up and obstruct inspections (pay per view content, unfortunately). This behavior contrasts sharply with the responsible environmentally friendly image of itself that BP has been trying to promote in it Beyond Petroleum campaign. (For a critique of this campaign click here.)The reason for such misbehavior seems to be the general difficulty in enforcing regulation of multinational oil companies, together with cost-cutting pressures (particularly in the 1990s when oil prices were low). All in all, BP seems to regard social responsibility as a matter of PR, easily dealt with by investing in posh advertising campaigns. But the company obviously lacks an instrument that would enable it to take the cost of behaving unethically into its economic calculations. Actics would be a wonderful motivator for them (and for the rest of the oil industry). It would give them a direct feedback on the costs of their actions, internally,in term of diminishing loyalty and motivation among employees, and externally in terms of a tainted reputation. This way Actics could supplement state regulation with the regulatory power of the collective intelligence of the networked public.

Cognitive psychologist Marc Hauser and his team at Harvard University are researching human moral decisions. In total agreement with the Actics philosophy the scientists believe that humans make moral decisions on the basis of their intuition rather than rational judgment. In Actics we call that ethical foundation ‘feeling of proximity’. However, if we want to make the world a better place Hauser says, we should actually focus on our actions, not stop with intuition. That’s precisely our principle of ‘maximization’ and the whole point of Actics: Identify what sparks your ethics in order to perform actions creating marginally more value (given 1 hour and my current capacities only, what should I do to create more value for the things and people most important to me).

You can actually help the scientists getting more valid data by doing the ‘Moral Sense Test‘. After you’ve done that (to save you from ruining your ‘pure intuition’), go listen to a brief NPR.org feature on the research.

The new report from WWF could hardly be hardly be more congenial to Actics. Although focused on sustainability branding and marketing strategies there’s a very short way from Actics’ ethical TQM like advice to ‘integrate your ethics into all parts of your company for better business performance’ to WWF’s advices to ‘integrate sustainability into all parts of your operation and unlock vast innovative and commercial potentials’.

Here’s a very lightly modified (most of this is quotes!) list of WWF advises we can very much agree to:

1. Observe and understand the values of your present and potential customers
2. Get your own house in order: improve your internal processes, from office management to production and logistics
3. From CSR to CSO: The Corporate Responsibility Function should be a driver of innovation. Focus on opportunities rather than risk
4. Motivate employees: Make part of their performance review depend on how they perform their job, in line with company/brand values
5. Collaborate: Include personnel from all relevant functions
6. Communicate: If you are open, honest and heartfelt then a bit of sniping here and there from your critics will just be grist to your mill. Think about how consumers interact with the new media landscape. Facilitate new channels of dialogue.
7. Engage your consumers in your ethical journey
8. Measure and monitor: Find ways of identifying, measuring, evaluating and reporting various elements of brand value, including those that relate to ethics, so they can be used by managers as indicators of performance.

Go read the report. Good stuff!

We can not fail to notice-with everybody else - Time Magazine’s celebration of the participatory culture of Web 2.0. In their cover story ‘The person of the Year is You’, they underline how 2006 has not only been a year of humiliating US defeat in Iraq (+ a number of other geopolitical misses, like North Korea), but also the year in which the Web emerged not simply as a medium for pushing pay per view (as in the famous Aol-TimeWarner merger in 2000), but as a ‘tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter’. Time goes on to describe the success stories of YouTube and MySpace and propose that these present ‘an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding,not politician to politician, but great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person’ . Cute!

But Time says nothing of what most would consider the three most interesting developments in matters of Web 2.0. The first is 3-D web. The spectacular success of Second Life (and its emergence as a pioneering business field) suggests that the future of the Web might well be in more immersive environments (after all, sci fi writers have argued this for a long time, ever since Startrek began featuring a holodeck). Also, anyone who has tried will have noticed that the interactive environment of Second Life provides a far more engaging experience than what the Virtual Reality masks were able to give in 1995. Maybe the key to virtual reality lies in social interaction rather than neuroscience. (Financial Times has a brief piece on this, alerting investors that 3 D Web might be the next big thing- unfortunately the feature is for subscribers only).
Second, affinity markets. A number of services are arising where users can collect and organize information about goods, services and investment opportunities. This way, it becomes possible to ground economic decisions in other factors than price- like values, sympathies and affinity- in a systematic way. Ad RFID tagging and you can easily scan the wine bottles at your local shop to find out which have been produced by feminist wine growers, or which producers share your views on sustainable agriculture. Of course Actics is part of this. We provide a way for people to access information on the performance of organizations or other actors in relation to their particular values and affinities (see here for more on affinity markets).

Three, people, or at least kids are abandoning MySpace. Once it goes corporate its not fun anymore. This might seem like ordinary teenage trend-obsession, but it actually points to something deeper and more important. When companies rely on the autonomous productivity of users as a source of value, then most attempts to capture and valorize that productivity can also be resisted, or at least evaded. I write more on this below.

Check out this link for a beautiful example of how AdWords sometimes offers bad branding guaranty. Perhaps Google need to upgrade their context sensitivity with a little sentiment analysis

I just returned from an exciting trip to our’ London ‘headquarters’ for a number of meetings. After being preoccupied with more myopic product development it was tremendously inspiring and revitalizing to meet with different people, branches and perspectives. We did a strategy workshop with a former MIT manager, had a very promising meeting with Anthony and Diana from ClownFishMarketing, one of the most progressive CSR bureaus globally and met with a couple other potential partners. 2007 is definitely going to be exciting and you’ll be the first to know when things start happening.

Only bad thing was flying. Although I haven’t done it since Actics was founded May 1’st 2005, we all must help reduce flying whatever the excuses.

Update: Thomas was writing about travel ethics and flying just while I was flying to London.

As we are about to launch the widget version of the Actics concept very shortly at Actics.com, we have naturally been discussing the issue of centralized vs. distributed community a lot. A couple of recent blog posts seem to support my intuition about the development toward more distributed services. So, as a kind of ‘trailer’ preceding our launch, allow me to briefly present the case for distributed communities that Actics will also support.

Fred Stutzman recently argued for designers of social networking software (SNS) to adopt OpenID to bypass the problem of achieving critical mass on your SNS to get the social going. There’s a lot of network effects (no wonder) and rich-get-richer in social networks, and you simply cannot push everybody on to new sites however great they might be. So, you should simply connect them between their present ‘homes’. OpenID is a new standard offering cross media authentication and ID management. In this context it means basically providing for socializing across different SNS’ (being friends, sending/leaving messages, logging visiting friends from other SNS’ etc). Stutzman’s compelling analogy is allowing people to mail other recipients than gmail users when using gmail yourself.

Today Steve Poland of Vested Ventures writes on TechCrunch:

MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Poland’s argument is very much in line with Stutzman (and he actually already voiced it back in June) and what I havce been arguing in Actics. Why not provide cross media socialization? This should be equally obvious as cross service mailing or cross carrier phone calling. People are more than ‘Studying’ at Facebook, ‘Music’ at MySpace and ‘Ethics’ at Actics.com. There’s something quite old fashioned provincially local about the big social sites refusing things like OpenID. ‘Go ahead and socialize as much as you like - but only in our silo’. People are signed up to all sorts of sites due to chance, timing or personal taste. But that shouldn’t keep them from forming all sorts of communities across their different ‘villages’. This is simple web-globalization.

Naturally, I also agree with Stutzman and Poland’s expectation to see an explosion of services offering cross-media socializing soon. And MySpace, FaceBook and the other major players to support these services in order not to loose members expecting this new natural freedom offered at the next social site. Distributed communities seem such a natural development. And all the talk about widgets the last couple of months is an indicator of this as well.

Back to our coming widget; we simply want to give people the option of engaging their proxies in ethical dialogue in their own meaningful setting, be it a blog, webpage or SNS profile page, rather than dragging all their online and offline friends, families, and readers to Actics.com. For a lot of users, stating and getting feedback on their ethical ideals and activities is simply more interesting in the context of their existing online activities rather than on another new community. Especially as Actics is still new. However, we will still develop a ‘local’ community at Actics.com (launched next year) for those wanting to dig deeper and get more ethical leverage (wait and see!). But if the widget really does support the distributed communities processes we hope for, we’ll roll out a lot support for across the web inter-member engagement via the widget infrastructure. Exciting I think!

After Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp invested $580 million in MySpace, young users are fleeing the site. (Read more here) The reasons are primarily three. One, MySpace is getting old had: You don’t want to keep doing what everybody did a year ago. Two, the fact that the site is going mainstream  (since Rubert bought it) means that it is no longer cool and alternative. There are many other sites who are. Three, since the site has gone mainstream, teachers, parents and policemen have begun surveying profiles searching for signs of sexual promiscuity alcohol and drug abuse, and other naughty things. That way MySpace is no longer the free space it originally was. (This is crucial since, as Danah Boyd has documented one of the reasons american teenagers used MySpace in the first place was that schools, shopping malls and other physical places are now so surveyed and controlled that they offer very few opportunities for spontaneous and free social interaction.)

Users fleeing MySpace is a good illustration of a key contradiction in informational capitalism. Companies recognize that innovation and other forms of  immaterial wealth is often best produced by users themselves- be this technological innovation or affective innovation, the innovation of new forms of life, like MySpace. Consequently the best way to make money is to try to appropriate and valorize this immaterial wealth. But that very move brings these innovations into the mainstream, saturate them with advertising, censor them (like Google might have to do with all the copyrighted material on YouTube) and generally make them less attractive. Consequently, the users, who make up the true labour force in this immaterial economy, flee to other, not yet commercialized venues. Maybe the great by-outs of Web 2.0 platforms that we have seen recently are a sign of the inability of cooperate capitalism to digest this new productive force?

There’s a debate on my Brands book on the P2Pfoundation blog. My analysis emphasises the role of brands as tools of governance; their ability to control and program consumer behaviour. Michel Bauwens and others argue that maybe we have now reached a new paradigm where ‘communities dominate brands‘. I have my doubts. Join th debate here.