social intelligence

Daniel Goleman's new book: "Social Intelligence", delves into a new application of neuroscience: social neuroscience.

We always knew (intuitively) that we are wired to connect with others; that empathizing with a person made us feel or take on their emotional state. With the recent advances in neuroscience, however we know a lot more about how our brains scan faces or other body actions in order to pick up on unconscious social cues.

Since advertising is all (or often) about creating empathy between brands and individuals, this kind of learning could help planners and creatives make the executions..well, more genuine. After all, if companies and agencies are struggling with the fact that advertising is seen as disingenuous, why not find ways to make it less so? By the same token, it might be useful for planners to study acting and talk to good actors, so they can understand the mind state someone like this enters to create a certain emotional tonality.

On a simpler level, this research should be (yet) another argument for shifting the balance a brand's messaging to creating that social empathy. This reminds me of the excellent AOL executions that ran in the US here a person mimicked spam by walking up to people randomly and shouting at them. It's hard to create social empathy when you are trying to sell something or provide a lot of information to people in a short period of time. If our brains are constantly scanning for emotional cues, why not focus on tyring to provide them?

the ultimate question

Creative development and production laways seems to come in waves, and this happens to be my time of year. While there are many "better" qual techniques these days for understanding people's reaction to work (e.g. ZMET), I always ask myself if all of the probing we do is counter productive - leading us and clients to believe we understand a situation when we should just be looking at surface level reactions .

This is why I was drawn to this site. Fred Reichwald and his team have found that there is only one question that counts: would you recommend this product/ad to a friend? His team uses this question to score how loyal a set of customers are to a brand, but there is no reason why it could not be applied to advertising or other research. This correlates to limit how deep or how detailed our probes. Would you watch it again? Would you tell someone about it? It sounds to easy .

book club

Gareth has had a great idea: starting an online book club. The more you voice your support, the more likely it is to get going, so click here to tell him what you think.

gifted contributions

Some people have left some great "have you seen this" comments over the last few weeks, so I thought it was worth bringing them upfront rather than lost in the post.

In response to my post about Google's custom searches , Rey pointed me to his custom advertising search .

Ozgur responded to my post about Social Light by pointing me to this great Google Earth/Flickr mash up. Someone has marked out parts of the town they grew up in on Google Earth and left little post cards/stories on it.

Last, but by no means least is Emily , who left us this little pictoral wave after her Coffee Morning in Sydney. I'm sure SF can come up with something more wacky to pass to the rest of likemind .

a conversation with Chip Conley

Chip Conley , author and CEO of Joie de Vivre Hotels is one of those business people who "gets it". After hearing him speak at the M-Squared conference this month, I had a chance to meet with him and chat in further depth about his business philosophy and his forthcoming book: "Peak: How Great Companies Get Their "Mojo" From Maslow" .


When I say that Chip Conley "gets it", what I mean is that he has built his entire company around the creation of emotionally driven brand experiences. Each of his individual hotel brand experiences is designed/based around a magazine brand and seeks to create the same vibe as that magazine's content and writing. For instance, the experience of Joie de Vivre's "rock n' roll" hotel - The Phoenix - was built around Rolling Stone . However, being in the boutique hotel business, you might expect the company to do this for his customers. What makes Joie de Vivre truly different is that the company creates meaning for employees and investors too. In the book, Conley talks about how this helped Joie de Vivre survive San Francisco's dot-com travel meltdown and has helped keep his turnover rates well below industry averages. Better yet, he provides the theory and advice for companies to be able to do this themselves. While this is a well established theory (e.g. The Service-Employee-Profit Chain), it is not necessarily easy to put it into practice.

Our conversation covered a fairly wide range of topics, but some of the key themes that emerged were:

Building Business for the Long Term
To Conley, building a strong business means being focused on building strong relationships with employees, investors and customers. This does not have to be in conflict with the short term revenue demands of Wall Street, but it often seems to be. In particular, it seems to conflict with the demands/expectations that companies grow quickly. We spoke about the fact that in many cases, the companies that succeed at building strong relationships are those that are private (e.g. Joie de Vivre) or who exercise a great deal of control over their financial destiny. They have been able to focus and spend behind the issues that will create success over the long term: strong, empowering corporate cultures, motivated employees and great customer service. We also discussed the benefits (and pitfalls) of employee ownership which, while it can create an ownership mentality and sense of involvement, is slightly meaningless if employees are not listened to. United Airlines is a good example of this.

Reflecting on this after our conversation, I wonder if marketers shouldn't really reflect on what it would take to create an ownership culture among customers. What would you do in your business to make customers feel as if they owned a piece of your company? If they did, how would you communicate with them and treat them?

Training
Accomplishing all of the above takes an investment in human capital. In our conversation Conley noted that this is a major endeavour for Joie de Vivre at all levels of the company. In contrast, many (if not most) major US companies have ceased to provide line level employees with the kind of training that will help them align their job performance with the company's business goals. Very often there will be training on the basic skills (e.g. how to present), but nothing on behavior modification, adapting to change etc. Those companies that do invest (GE being one very well known example), tend to reap the rewards.

One interesting aspect of the conversation was what defines training. Conley pointed out that training does not always have to be a formal "sit-down" learning session. It can be simple exercises which reinforce behavior e.g. managers talking about stand-out individual employees at weekly meetings.


Feedback Mechanisms
As mentioned above, creating an ownership culture helps create workplace fulfillment, or what in his model Conley would call meaning. But, without the feedback mechanisms to listen to employees (and customers), this culture simply cannot be created. Listening to complaints and ideas from all sources is something that Joie de Vivre does well. It administers the Fortune Best Companies to Work For survey to it's employees and benchmark's itself against the best. It encourages people to submit ideas and empowers them to create change.


Having has a peak at "Peak" (sorry) I would recommend buying it when it comes out. In the mean time you can read Chip Conley's blog here.

custom search

The great thing about Google is it searches absolutely everything fairly well. But that's also the problem: sometimes you don;t want to search absoltely everything. So the folks at Google have come up with Google Coop, which allows you to specify which sites you want to search for information during the search.

But that is not Google's real intention. What they would like you to do is to put the custom search box on your site and have people use it to search for the kind of topics you and your site/blog visitors care about. In effect, this is a Long Tail play enabling people to narrow cast their searches around specific areas of interest.

Given my experiences with Blogger Beta, I may not jump straight into this. But this is just another example of Google's complexity/interestingness strategy: innovate at an incredible pace and, while you may be wrong sometimes, you will not be boring.

Via GigaOm

long tail experiment

Chris Andersen reports on an interesting Long Tail experiment undertaken by Universal Music, who made their European music catalogue available for purchase online. There have been 250 000 downloads from approximately 3000 tracks on offer, which (in the words of the Universal press release: " lends weight to author Chris Andersen's Long Tail theory."

Elsewhere, Tower Records has gone into liquidation and George Lucas has announced that he is getting out of the theatrical release movie business to focus on TV, saying it is to expensive and risky.

Long Tail 3 Fat Middle 0

massive body art

According to the Journal of the American Academy Dermatology, half of American;s in their 20's have a tattoo. One take on this is how it affects the workplace, exacerbating tensions between a generation raised on the Internet and multitasking, and that raised on Wall Street . Another take is that while we talk about the average person co-creating on the Internet, we can't forget the increasing extent of this generation's creativity offline.

Internet singularity

Internet singularity is an idea/theory which states that "a deeper and tighter coupling between the online and offline worlds will accelerate science, business, society, and self-actualization."



The root of the argument for this theory is that because more people can produce more ideas, more quickly online, the more work we do online the better of we will all be. Also, the Internet represents a "purer", quicker testing ground to validate new theories.

This nice little post from Hitwise attempts to show evidence for this the theory using data about iPod conversations online, iPod innovations/updates and iPod sales. I'm not sure I buy the/an implied idea that Apple is listening in to consumers that much, but the theory is nice.

The research arguments around this, on the other hand, are strong and compelling. Why do any more research offline when so much is going on online, you can find ways to observe that and remain closer to customers all of the time.

morning coffee

Today was the first likemind SF and, despite missing the alarm this morning and having to drive like a bat out of hell to get there, it was a great time.





My fellow organizer Tad was there of course. We hadn't met yet but it great to chat about our shared perspective on Clorox (his employer, my client).






Amanda from Flamingo came - we had met while she was interning with Kirhsenbaum SF ) and I was in NY, so it was great to catch up. Note the obligatory SF cable car in the background.




Last but no means least was Rob, who usually goes to likemind NY but happened to be in town for the weekend.





Great people, great conversation. Hopefully we can spread the word even further next time and get more folks.

fresh health

Straight off the back of my post about prescription drug ads is the launch of some new health insurance advertising. No-one likes insurance in the US - they view it as an obligation (almost a tax), and when it comes to health insurance things are even worse. Which is why I wonder whether or not people will really believe this advertising and whether or not it will matter. Most people are health insurance "takers" through their company. They have little influence with their HR department's provider selection. Was advertising the right choice here (other than for PR and regulatory value?

Agencies are Ghettos

"...if you are solving a big problem you need to think holistically. Agencies are ghettos. You don't make big things in ghettos. You need clear focus and collaboration.

You also have to work in small teams. Take the launch of the Mars probe. You need a group to get it in space, a group to speed it up, a group to decelerate it, a group to land it, a group to package, a group to bring it back. These groups usually have only three to four people. There's more accountability in such a small group. You can only get four people into a taxi."
Paul Lavoie, Taxi

coffee

Remember: the first likemind SF is tomorrow at 8 am, Cafe Madeline, 300 California St.

social light

A while back, I posted an idea that I had about a Google Maps mash up which would allow people to leave post its or stickies at different locations for people to find. And of course, I now find someone is doing it - and even better than the way I had thought of it (unsurprisingly).

Social Light is in beta for a service that allows people to create and receive these tags on their mobile phone. The beauty of the system is that the localized tags just appear wherever you are (as well as on a map at the company's web site). This clearly depositions services like Vindigo as very 1.0, but the key for the company will be creating a user base before anyone else enters the market.

Thanks to Piers and PSFK for the lead.

your dreams miss you

Watch the Rozenium TV spot here


Since the FDA legalized prescriptions drug advertising on TV a few years ago, pharma companies have spent a lot of money on TV ads to create consumer pull. However, because of strict regulations on what claims, product beenfits etc. could be made, this has resulted in either very boring, inane ads, or rather doom and loom: talking about the disease, the side effects of the drugs etc.

This is why it is worth noting the new Rozerum campaign. Rozerum is the first (so they claim) truly non-addictive sleep aid. But, as the above ad, shows, they go about romancing the problem in an accessible way. The characters take it out of the drug world entirely (especially imho, the beaver). The company has gone a step further, creating a podcast with tunes that will help lull people to sleep.

Kudos to Cramer-Krasselt Chicago

failure

We were pitching for the Palm account. We didn't get it. Bugger.

It would have been a really nice pitch to win - an interesting brand with a really engaged user base: people for whom the brand allowed them to self identify. They were Palm users and did not belong to the dreaded Blackberry with their deadly email overload swarm (OK, losing may have made me go off the deep end, but this is not to far from the truth).

The challenge is that Palm is hurting. The Blackberry Pearl - a sweet looking little device - means that Blackberry is catching up with them in terms of design and functionality. Which is why it is hard for me to understand why they have brought out the Treo 680 (pictured above). In the words of Gizmodo : :"Should We Care". Believe it or not this is not sour grapes: we did not know the details of this product during the pitch. But I am really surprised that the only thing different about the product is the price point (which isn;t that much lower).

Why would such a great brand make a play that is only about price.

no middle

Tom Asacker has a great article on the shrinking strategic options for brands, thanks to Wal Mart.

Asacker points out that with the House that Sam built growing at such a huge rate,brands either have to innovate and justify a premium, or be forced to play the vlume game, which inevitably means playing with/for Wal-mart.

Asacker is implying that a brand cannot create a premium through image alone, something I am inclined to disagree with. You can't have bad, static product development, but you don't have the best products to build a strong brand. Your center of creative excellent can be marketing, not just operations. However,given the huge number of companies selling to Wal-Mart, why can;t agencies apply creative power to supply and production issues, so that those who route through Wal-Mart can still make a profit.

likemind sf

Only through diversity do new things come to life. Think about it - if everyone is pretty similar, you all get on the same wave lenth. hence why it's good to meet new people, hence likemind.

Egged on by Noah and Piers and their success in NY, Tad Kittredge (ex-planner, now at Clorox) and I want to kick off Likemind SF.

So if you are around this Friday the 20th at 8am, come meet us at Cafe Madeleine, 300 California Street for an early coffee/tea/bloody mary.

measuring brand power

John Battelle, in his book and at last week's M-squared conference , talked of search as the new language by which we conduct business. Using his same arguments, there is a pretty compelling case for arguing that search, or search technology, is the new way to measure brand power.

Old brand valuation models e.g. Y&R's Brand Asset Valuator, measured a brand's strength based on people's stated connection with the brand. The strength of using search and other Web 2.0 technology is that we can actually measure behavior. The online equivalent of the Mini license plate I posted last week is a blog post. We can measure salience not just through search volume but through items like Google Trends or Google Talk. In fact, Google has just started publishing a music chart - < a href="http://www.google.com/trends/music"> Google Music Trends - based on mentions the behavior of Google Talk users.

The data is out there, just waiting for someone to gather and use to create an algorithm...which is exactly what Google's expertise is.

As Google grows and expects it may become such a center of knowledge on consumer behavior, that will have the same distribution and marketing power as Wal-Mart. Let's hope it really does no evil.

new quotes

"Open your mind and people will show you what’s on their minds”

This is from Sam Harrison'sa book "Idea Spotting" (via Brand Autopsy ) - it is almost the essence of blogging.


"Never ask for permission, just beg for forgiveness"

This one is from a client - apparently it is old but I had never heard of it. It's a great way to remind yourself to follow your gut.

the back story

In today's world, it seems that truth is a multi layered concept. What is reported as news, is not necessarily the truth - even if it is declared so by a reputable government or (if such a thing exists in consumer's minds) a reputable company. There is always more information to be had and the Internet is the way of obtaining it. As Henry Jenkin's documents in Convergence Culture , people will band together to get to the real deal on anything from a new story to their favorite entertainment shows. Outing is (or was) a public sport. I do not believe that it is our desire to tear down icons which drives this search, but rather a desire to be the one sin the know.

The search for the back story applies just as much to corporate brands as it it does to media ones. The Internet enables people to search for the real deal on everything from electronics to hotels. It means that people will find out about your where and how your products are made, the way you work, what you pay employees etc. Thinking about all of the interviews and focus groups I have done over the past few months ( and discounting the typical over analysis the is par for the course in that setting), it may be that the whole notion of prima facie is becoming obsolete.

In fact, having a back story can be a distinct advantage. In n Out Burger's secret menu is just one well know example, but so is the legend-cum-myth that is Steve Jobs or even the stories of company like Stonyfield Farms or Innocent. The point is that a back story establishes authenticity: if you don't have one then you may be a cold corporate being or you may be hiding something.

Worse still, you may just not be worth looking into.

the king done good

I get the feeling that our brains are so used to hearing the word "integration" that we may have taken the more basic steps involved for granted. Admittedly, the "brand police" ruined it a bit for us by making job #1 getting texactly he same look and feel across media. So it's good to be reminded of what happens one a brand can get a strategic idea across in a unexpected and unused medium.





Burger King managed to do that for me this weekend. This what not a nice Burger King mind you - more the "quick stop at a four garage corner" type place. Nevertheless, there were lots of nice little unexpected surprises everywhere we turned -something ot keep the parent (me) amused while the child (Aidan) played with the inevitable toy. Compare it to the example below form McDonalds and ask yourself where you would rather be sitting eating a burger?



Welcome to partner logo hell :)










If Burger King does fall short in one place, it is not in the signage but the personnel. Try as you may, it is pretty hard tohire happy, conversational people at $7.50 an hour (and I'm being generous with the wage). Maybe someone will be really radical and start paying more :)

advertising hall of shame

Over on Adliterate Richard Huntington has been moderating monthly group discussions on how a particular great strategic idea (e.g. Honda, Sony Bravia) and the great ads that result really do work in the marketplace. It all stem's from his desire to show that, amidst all the hubris in our world, great advertising can work.

Now, I totally agree, support etc. what Richard is thinking and doing, but to me this is only half the problem. To me, too much bad advertising exists, and good advertising would work that much better if it was all wiped off the face of TV. So if for every Oscar, there is a Razzie, we need an Advertising Hall of Shame. We need communal pressure that can rid us of the blights of culture which are making our lives that much more difficult.

Now, the honorary inductee has all but been decided: Kraft's "Crumbelievable". But I believe it cannot go into the hall by itself. So I am going to nominate the current Campbells Soup campaign in the US: "Possibilities". It contains all the hallmark's of advertising that wasn't even that good in the 1980's: an overly happy jingle, slice of life events of Mum cooking, the "bite and smile", and the blindingly obvious objective (which is being used as a strategy get people to use Campbell's Soup as more than Soup").

(Campbell's don't seem to have posted this horror on the web but I will try and dig it up for those living outside the US).

So vote hard and vote often or nominate someone else. In the mean time I will try and design a trophy - suggestions welcome.


UPDATE:



This pair of classic NHS specs may be the trophy I was looking for. However, Campbell's advertising is nowhere to be found online - even Y&Rs website (it's not a good sign for the ads when the agency refuses to put them on the website).

brand power

Is this a new way to measure brand power?

smarter coffee

A really good day would easily be defined by getting a chance to sit down and have a smart, leisurely chat with someone over coffee. Which makes today good twice over.

At lunch I had a chance to catch up with the smart and fabulous Emily Reed , author of Conformists Unite and Carpe Via and part of the Open Intelligence Agency (OIA) . I have been lucky enough to call her a friend for quite a few years and it was great to catch up and chat about things like her about work, stand up comedy and life in Australia. The stand up comedy part stood out in my mind because, while you would think that comedy is about funny story telling, Emily told me that you have to earn the right to do this with your audience and actually start by telling funny one liners. A metaphor for brands perhaps? The Australia part of the conversation was equally interesting. I have only been once and love it (bias - my Gran was Australian) and think of it as a fairly free-spirited country. However, Emily's experience is that it is more conservative than she expected, with businesses being reluctant to take risk.

On the work side, I have had a chance to work with Emily and OIA and I would rec commend them to anyone.



Later on I got a chance to have coffee with Noah Brier - superb blogger and creative at Renegade Marketing. We shared our frustration at the lack of proven measurement tools for tracking engagement (are there no entrepreneurs in the research world?) and the general formulaic approach most research companies take. They find a methodology and plug away at selling that rather than devising a different set of tools and measures for each unique market or situation.

We also discussed the challenges of building agency cultures to promote greater creativity and idea swapping (especially when you have hire rapidly to deal with client projects). I think we both agreed that internal blogging has a real role to play here in terms encouraging greater idea sharing participation in the process. I remember that years ago I got O&M NY to set up Lotus Notes so that planners could share files and other documents and it really helped create greater learning for the whole organization.

Hopefully I can gather a few more people in SF and start doing this kind of thing on a more regular basis.

meetup in SF

I'm going o be grabbing coffee with fellow blogger Noah Brier at Cafe de a Presse at 3.30 on Thursday. Anyone who happens to see this (late) notice, feel free to drop by.

where will TV go?

As we start in on new US TV season, it's worth thinking about how changes in marketing and advertising will drive TV station's business models (which will affect TV culture, which will affect marketing). With TV viewership declining (especially among certain demographics) and the thirty second spot receiving very bad PR, a lot of advertisers have been shifting dollars onto the Internet, to the point that Internet ad sales are up 40% and some prominent brands (e.g. Fosters beer) have ditched TV advertising all together. On top of all this content costs are going up - as the public expects both stars and high production values - and cable channels continue to control distribution.

In the face of all this what can a TV brand do? The following are strategies that are a little riskier- they have disadvantages but circumvent the challenges the channels face (e.g. becoming commodified).

Charge Customers Directly
If people do not want to pay for TV with their time, then charge them directly in the way that HBO or Showtime do. And while this gives you the advantage of being able to take more risks with programming, having great shows like The Sopranos on all the time is not necessary. We forget that most of these pay channels are filled with films we have all seen a million times.

100% On Demand
With digital cable and broadband spreading across the country, charging on a per use basis is now reality for TV stations. The beauty of this model is that it means they do not have to rely on cable channels for distribution and can vary pricing according to demand. I can even see someone doing a deal with a DVR company to make programming directly downloadable to your household, circumventing cable and Internet access providers entirely.

Limit supply
If the price of something is to low, basic market economics says cut supply. What if TV channels reduced the amount of ad time available but charged a little more for it? Consumers may prefer watching the shows, making the network more popular. Admittedly, this idea has the most holes because to rely work it requires oligopolisitc co-ordination (which is clearly illegal).

Serve the Long Tail
Find a niche audience that has a high value to a number of advertisers and corner the market in that group e.g. teen girls

Provide better content or make better ads
Clearly, if you want to woo people back, give them something they want (not that people want ads). For some time now I've been very bored with most Hollywood and TV sitcom offerings. Sure - Lost, Scrubs and a few others are around. But the rest has been to mainstream. Now finally, TV seems to be taking some more risks (something Dino notes as being a conscious effort by old media). It would not be to far fetched for TV stations to start making their own ad like objects for clients if they felt it would provide a more full service, integrated, effective offering.

m-squared conference

Today was Influx Insights (aka Butler Shine Stern) M-Squared conference on the future of marketing. On the whole the speakers were very interesting, though (as is often the case) they were more focused on what they were doing now to determine the future vs. any projection. If there was a theme, I would say it was the idea of opening the brand to consumers - whether it be through open content or consumer definition of the brand. I've tried to summarize my impressions of some key speakers but I am still letting my mind sift through my thoughts, so bear with me :)



Josh Quittner is the editor of Business 2.0 and talked about his magazine's foray into blogging and how what I would term "open online journalism" is actually helping boost sales. Quittner's first observation was that Business 2.0 subscriptions actually jumped higher when they made content free vs. when the publication first jumped on the web. Secondly, he told all of his journalists to start a blog and is using the blog content as the basis of Business 2.0's own blog (and magazine) content. Both observations point to the devolution of content creation and readership to the "individual" or public level (not to mention the fact that it works as a retention tool to keep journalists at a magazine - Quittner already lost Om Malik to a blog, though Malik still contributes to the magazine). The most pertinent question from the audience was where that left the business 2.0 brand??

The other journalist present was John Batelle , CEO of Federated Media and author of The Search . His main point was that content is no longer the proxy or symbol for an audience because people are declaring their interests directly through search. This makes search engines the distributor of attention and makes that attention more available for big and small firms alike. In addition, the fact that search is the new language of navigating the world means that conversations are more likely to be driven by permission (consumers asking for information) than interruption.

From the corporate side, Chip Connelly of Joie de Vivre hotels was one of the most interesting speakers from that side of the fence. He pointed out that chain hotels (as well as companies from McDonalds to Avis) are built on delivering a consistent experience but that this creates no emotional connection with consumers. Each of his boutique hotels is modeled on the theme of a magazine with the idea that a magazine represents a total lifestyle brand that people can self-actualize towards. In fact, he framed his whole presentation using Maslow's triangle , including the way to treat employees (money is equivalent to safety, recognition equivalent to esteem and meaning equivalent to self-actualization). The point about using magazines as a model for the brand, according to Connelly, is that they give enough structure to guide people but add enough complexity to the brand (his words) to make it interesting.


Finally, I would be remiss if I did'nt mention Jim Riswold's presentation. The combination of the great art and the heartfelt story of his illness, recovery and then further illness just put advertising in it's place - fairly unimportant.

There were other good presentations - particularly Jim McDowell talk on how Mini were focusing on their customer base as the engine of the brand vs. attracting new people to it (as a way to avoid becoming a fad), but a lot of this has been covered elsewhere.

studio 60: the focus group

Tonight's episode of the show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip serves to emphasize the point in my last post . IN the show and in real life, focus group findings (in this case using dial pads of all things) can serve to make people question their instincts and tone down what they do for fear of offending people. They are based on the point-in-time static models of behavior which are failing us in our ability to understand what works and what does not.

You can see the episode in question here .

P.S. Is it just me that find it interesting that NBS has two shows about late night TV (read Saturday Night Live ) at the same time. Talking about milking a brand.

the physics of retail

CNN Money uncovered this interesting application of physics to retail location choice.

The physicist in question, Pablo Jensen, found a way to model the fact that different types of retail store interact with each other: repelling or attracting each other in the same way atoms have done. He found, for example, that bakeries had positive interactions with butchers and drug stores, but negative interactions with other bakeries (no surprise) and second hand clothing stores.

This model seems similar - admittedly in an indirect way - to "herd" concepts previously put forward for consumers. I also imagine that supermarkets have a lot of data on interactions between products placed next to each other in stores (do biscuits do better next to jam or tea?). All of which serves to remind us that our ability to understand the world makes our jobs more interesting, but more difficult. If interactions and context are reality, then perhaps we should start by throwing our "point in time" measurements and models and finally admit that are (almost) no good at predicting why and how things will work.

a matter of faith

Matisyahu is not new news. I've heard a few of the Hasidic rapper's singles on the radio and thought: "pretty cool." But the other day -having downloaded "King Without a Crown" - I had a real insight into a different world. Not the Jewish world mind you - I already am Jewish. My insight was into the world of Christian evangelicals and Christian rock and how music can be such a powerful tool in creating conviction around a set of beliefs.

Judaism, like many religions, has a huge non-spiritual element - actions, foods and other ceremony's that have created the culture. Without being religious you can feel like you belong through these interactions (the equivalent - perhaps - of feeling Christian by getting married in a church). But for me, I have never felt a strong connection, perhaps due to the fact that being Jewish was never a real choice I made.

But when I really sat down and listened to "King without a Crown" the other day it honestly made me feel a stronger connection than I have felt in some time. It was not that Matisyahu was talking about Hashem (God) or Mishiach (the Messiah) - it was a question of belonging to something that another person had made sound so powerful. Dry or theoretical concepts were now something that can be identified with. This is something that Christian evangelicals have realized for a long time - that putting beliefs (or - if you are cynical - information that demands a certain faith) into verse creates a greater sense and belonging with the whole group: a shared language if you will. Suddenly, i felt that I understood a group that I had scorned in the past.

Hasidim (the Orthodox form of Judaism Matisyau practices) was actually founded on the same principles. We think of it now as being very conservative, but it was a revolt against the text heavy forms of worship at the time. It placed an emphasis on expression through music as a way to lift up the spirit.

If this isn't an example of the medium being the message I do not know. But perhaps more importantly, it shows the importance of building storytelling mechanisms around a set of beliefs that transcend the subject, transforming it from a "thinking" activity to a "feeling" one.