Category Archive

Ugh I’ve had a kind of emotional hangover since about lunchtime yesterday. I feel rotten about getting stuck in a cynical snarky frame of mind. To blame twitter would be like blaming my exercise books for having blank sheets at the back that were perfect for writing notes to pass in class. To blame anyone at NESTA would be like blaming Mr Liberal for not being able to control his pupils. And to blame any of my fellow participants would be saying “they made me do it, sir”. Oh bugger, now I’ve got the Grange Hill theme running round in my head.

But anyway that’s what I did yesterday, I regressed into can’t-be-bothered schoolboy (the one who ended up with average O-levels and piss-poor A-levels), a role I reprised at university as smart-arse know-it-all (who had to pull far too many all-nighters to get a 2:1). People found some of my twittering amusing but it wasn’t really a productive use of my time to sit there snarking, steadily becoming more frustrated and in the end getting, well, a bit depressed really. In fact I felt just the same as when we had that backchannel hoo-ha at LesBlogs2.0. Stuck in a room with far too many smart people not able to say anything while some other smart people sat on the stage and weren’t able to say enough. But I have to recognise that that’s just how I see it, it doesn’t mean that everyone else had the same reaction.

The thing I can take responsibility for is that I went into it entirely unconsciously - I didn’t really look at the programme, as was evidenced by my shock on arrival at the scale of the whole thing. If I had thought about it, I would have known that I was likely to rebel against the keynoting and panelling and would have planned to do something entirely different and positive with the opportunity instead of sitting there and trying to disrupt it. The only bit I behaved in was Bob Geldof’s bit - he’s a great performer and I’ve loved him ever since he tore up that picture of John Travolta on Top of the Pops.

So I’m sorry NESTA for poking you with a stick. I’m sorry Jonathan Freedland for calling you names on twitter. And I’m sorry to myself for using up a valuable day so miserably.

Ho hum. On to better things. I’ve sat in similar events and said “We can do better than this” I don’t think that’s true - it was a great event, but the programmed content was not for me. What I will say is “We can do something other than this - in fact we already are” That’s where my effort’s going today rather than in trying to pull somebody else down.

Bonus Link: The bit that Geldof quoted from WH Murray

It struck me that Clay Shirky’s lovely notion of cognitive surplus has another expression in these panel and single speaker conferences. Where sitcoms mask cognitive surplus, occasions like this NESTA Innovation conference amplify and magnify it. We have 3,000 smart people (ok not smart enough to not come, but pretty smart nonetheless) sitting in a room listening to 4 other smart people on stage. The weight of ideas, thoughts, inspiration and excitement is enormous, and for me anyway painful - we all rush out to grab food and talk rapidly before coming back in to listen to the prime minister. Gaaaah! Cue Desperate Housewives.

Just a snippet. Cross not to have power supply.

Sir Tim says something to the effect of:

People doing interesting things fall between stools. The web has to be thought of as humanity connected, rather than an interconnection of computer systems. And you have to remember it’s big, very big and it’s complex. It’s not apparent yet what all of its characteristics are. We don’t know yet for example what the blogosphere is and how it will behave. We just don’t know - we can’t show that it’s stable. So we have to study it, we have to understand it better so that we can take care of it.

Live blogging a bit from the Royal Festival Hall as and when today. No power in the hall at all, so currently on 53 minutes

We’ve got a whole bunch of big names talking to us this morning, TB-L & Bob Geldof with a rumoured appearance by the PM. First impression - it’s bloody huge! We’ve heard talk of 3-4,000 people. The hall is full and I think we’re just about to be moved out of the front-row seats we’d grabbed by being the first in. It was too good to be true.

Or maybe not. No, we’re sitting still Ha Ha!

A slow project this one. Ask as many people as I can remember to do when I’ve got my camera with me to answer a “simple” question - “What is the web for?”

I tried it out at the Tuttle Club a few weeks ago. This is what came out of the mouths of some of the Smartest People in Social Media (TM)

So there are two ways I want to take this forward. I want to do it with a more diverse group of people, and I want to edit a bunch of them together in a watchable way. Your thoughts on how to do this are welcome.

I have more. I will release them. Soon.

Breakfast and conversation again yesterday, courtesy of OneAlfredPlace and Steve Moore I love the way that Steve keeps playing with different formats. This one involved three cool people (coincidentally all members of my twitterstream) Jeremy, Kevin & Matt from Penguin, The Guardian and Channel 4 respectively, all talking about what happens next in their worlds, ably steered by Rebecca Caroe. As Matt disarmingly pointed out, when you ask people in the vanguard of change what the future will be like, it’s not surprising that they describe a scenario in which there are really cool jobs for people like them. But as I feel part of the same vanguard, I’m not going to disagree with what they were saying. The common thread for me was that they all see their jobs as doing away with technology dependent descriptions of what they do (sell books, paper, TV programmes) towards being in the market for ideas and stories. I wanted to ask to what extent they saw themselves as competition for each other, or more properly for our attention.

Mark has captured the nugget in what Matt said about some current C4 research on teenage net use.

“Seems one girl the researchers were following was hanging out online doing amongst other things a spot of the hi-speed Instant Messaging that only the young can really manage for any length of time.

She had sorted all her contacts into 6-7 or seven groups - schoolfriends, family etc but also “bitches” “wankers” and so on. What was striking though was the way in which she switched contacts between the groups in real time. Even if the members of her different social networks remained mostly consistent over the short term, their roles were in constant flux. And those are just the small set of folk she is in regular contact with regularly…”

Read the whole thing for Mark’s point on this (as well as some bonus Tommy Cooper) but what struck me was how it fits with what I’ve been saying about compartmentalisation - that the way we dealt with having larger numbers of acquaintances than 150 was to split them up (at least in our heads) and make sure they never came into contact with each other (except when we wanted them all to share something with us - weddings - or where we were no longer in control - funerals - both of which, especially with the addition of alcohol can become explosive situations). I see a lot of people struggling with the problem that online social networks make compartmentalism more difficult. It seems to me that the solution here though is a creative third way - keep the idea of compartments, but treat them much more dynamically.

As usual, I feel I’ve taken hundreds of words to say something very simple and obvious. Sorry.

One of the things twitter has taught me is how fragmented our social networks are. Not everybody who reads this blog knows everybody who reads this blog. So there will be some folk who don’t know Stephanie Booth in fact she teetered on the edge of my network mostly through the european KM folk until twitter made us all feel much closer.

When I last saw Steph, in Berlin at the girl geek dinner, she had a twinkle in her eye and shortly thereafter announced the reason to the world - Going Far is going to be her vehicle for running cool events and the first of these will be on May 16th in Lausanne - Going Solo a conference for people who work by themselves (and with others) on a freelance basis, covering how to run things in a business-like way, how to market, how to charge…etc.

The thing I like about this is that it’s another example of the demand side supplying itself - the speakers already announced are Suw Charman, Stowe Boyd, Martin Roell and Laura Fitton rather than some list of people you’ve never heard of organised by people with no idea of the industry and totally pwned by their sponsors.

There’s a few days left of early early bird discounts but even after that the fee’s under £200 for another month. Should be manageable from most parts of Europe. And unlike many such conferences, you’re likely to learn enough from it to make it pay for itself quite quickly. If you can’t currently recoup the cost of the day, travel and accommodation in a couple of days of consulting, then you *definitely* need to go and learn how to

Just to be clear - I’m not involved in the organisation of this in any way beyond friendly chats with Steph from time to time - but I have great faith in those involved that they will make it a really special day. I’ll be booking my place just as soon as those invoices get paid

Bonus: You can see Steph talking about it herself in the corridors at LIFT08 last week.

Unpacking that it’s a barcamp for people interested in the Web for UK Government - all of those terms are very widely defined.

I’ve been in sessions so far about Managing Risk (war stories about how to get stuff done without getting fired or in a scrap with IT people), Communities of Practice (Steve Dale on the difficulties of getting I&DeA to move from knowledge-repository to connecting people) , Twitter (Jenny Brown opening up a discussion based on why she loves it) and right now I’m listening to Tom Steinberg talking about MySociety. And we haven’t had lunch yet.

I can feel the overstimulation already creeping in. I’m going to do a sesh on Social Media Cafe around 2pm I may also do a Seesmic demo.

It seems that London’s opera critics think that Sally Potter’s Carmen is, well, a bit crap. I can’t comment, I haven’t seen it yet - but I still love the blogging and videoblogging over on the ENO’s mini-site. A couple of the critics have been a bit sneery about the whole 2.0 angle on this but I think they’re missing the point - the show may be gimmicky (err.. I don’t think opera folk call it a show, but you know what I mean) but the blog isn’t - I really think it’s taken a big step in a new direction for the Arts, opening up the creative process and the backstage, as the production progressed, rather than filming a fly-on-the-wall and then stitching it all together later. This shows up “what *were* they thinking?” as lazy rhetoric - you could have seen what they were thinking by following the site. The real question for the critics is “if they’ve been talking about what they’re going to do for so long and in such detail, why did the bits you don’t like in the production come as such a surprise to you?” and why weren’t you writing something about it back then?

I really hope that the ENO has the courage to keep that material up and to carry on with this experiment now and into future - it adds a layer of interestingness before you see the show as well as afterwards - it’s icing on the cake. As I say I haven’t seen the show, so I don’t know if this is an occasion to peel the icing off and give the cake to the dog or whether this is professional critics talking out of their arses again. Now is the time for the Carmen folk to get the conversation really going - fight back or surrender, doesn’t matter which, but say something.

The thing is that critics are part of the problem with opening up performance to a wider audience. The good news is that their power is diminishing as we gain the opportunity to hear people we know and trust talk about what they like and don’t like. I much prefer getting recommendations from my friends and I look forward to seeing some ordinary people’s reaction to Carmen, people who don’t have any prejudice against ENO and don’t already have a fixed opinion about how this opera needs to be done in London today.

I went to a C4 Education screening last night entitled “TV is dead?” My answer - read my blog (two years ago! - funnily enough about the same time as I started thinking about blogging for theatre) The bit in the programme where, if I’d been at home, I’d have been shouting at the telly, was when someone from the Beeb trotted out the old line that in future, as media professionals, they would be the people that we could trust to sift out the crap. NO, BBC, STOP! I don’t want your opinion on what’s crap and what’s not, I want you to make excellent programmes that no one else can make. More “Dr Who”, “Comics Britannia”, “Windscale”, “The Mighty Boosh” (oh God! *More* Storyville, not less!!!!) and fewer animals stuck up trees and celebrities who can’t tap dance.

Phew!

I really liked that younger people were included in the debate in a fairly unpatronising way, though friends and other regular readers know what I think of panel sessions.

Missing from last night was any recognition that the internet is about social interaction not content delivery (just like TV has always been) and so you should be concentrating on making stuff that people want to interact around rather than worrying about how they get it and whether everyone’s paid exactly the right money (whole other rant on that one - tell us straight - how much money gets spent on protecting rights? - how much more or less is it than the amount of money you currently lose to “piracy” - how much more money might you actually make if you weren’t so tight arsed about it all - *hint* watch Radiohead very carefully)

Also missing was any glimmer of understanding that advertising might not work any more. The real question here is “TV Advertising is Dead?” And it comes in two parts - 1. People don’t want to be interrupted or fed commercial information any more, they want it self-service and 2. The current advertising sales model is based on pulling the wool over the eyes of advertisers with extrapolations from sample audiences - what happens when you (and they) start to get real audience numbers in real time based on actual attention data from your viewers/subscribers in a form that makes comparison with other online media forms more like-for-like?

Well, more like I have some compassion for him - but “I have compassion for the fool” sounds like something Martin in the Simpsons would get punched for saying (more Simpsons later).

I went to the Frontline Club last night, actually, thanks Euan for reminding me that I *paid* to go to the Frontline Club and hear Andrew Keen speak about his book what he wrote. I got to meet Richard Sambrook and Graham Holliday and had a quick drink and catch up with Euan afterwards so it was worth it actually.

Andrew is a man who clearly gets something out of being (metaphorically) beaten up by one half of the audience while the other half looks on, amazed and puzzled by the rage of their usually rational fellows. I couldn’t help thinking that this is probably a situation Andrew has found himself in again and again. I felt very much like I was watching an unconscious videotape of the world according to Andrew Keen aged four and a half. He behaves like a picky child. “Don’t want this. Don’t want that. Don’t…. want” So, to save you from reading his book or paying to feed him in some other way, let me summarise what he doesn’t like:

community
libertarians
democracy (he spits the word “democratisation” when he reads from his book)
hippies
Dave Winer
people ’stealing’ stuff on the web
people having the chance to ‘criticise’
people making economic choices
free markets
state regulated markets
anonymity
humility
Glen Reynolds
Tim O’Reilly
Jeff Jarvis
foocamp

By the way, when I asked him the question “So what *do* you want” I included liberty rather than libertarian - yes I do know the difference, but I’d slipped into troll behaviour too - I’m not immune to it, that’s why I have compassion for him.

He said that he wants “an information economy that reports objectively and employs trusted and respected professionals”.

Other classic quotes:

“Who am I to say that people in China shouldn’t blog”
“Journalists should be more arrogant”
“If you’re being paid and someone is editing you, then you’re a professional journalist”
“I don’t like the idea of humility”
“Tell me a blogger who’s better than Polly Toynbee”

stop. sniggering.

The story I took away is that he went to foocamp and got the wrong end of the stick. From the reports I’ve seen, foocamp does not represent what the majority of us are doing on the web no matter how much Tim O’Reilly would like it to. Its exclusivity goes against all of the openness that makes our experience here worthwhile. foocamp’s greatest contribution is the Barcamp movement which was created in reaction to it. Does Andrew know what Dave Winer looks like when he gets mail from Tim?

When Euan called him a troll, and then asked him if he knew what that meant, he said “No”. I said “Liar” I kinda hope the mic picked it up, though that’s not the behaviour I aspire to.

Struggling with my conscience, I whispered to Adriana next to me “How do you handle trolls offline without resorting to physical violence?”. The Simpsons, of course, has the answer - Treehouse of Horror VI - The Attack of the 50ft Eyesores in which Homer steals a giant donut from a collossal Lard Boy advertising statue prompting Lard Boy and several other promotional likenesses come to life and terrorise Springfield. Lisa asks an ad man what to do - he explains that the advertisements need attention to stay alive and so aided by a nifty jingle performed by Paul Anka, the townsfolk’s attention is ironically drawn away from the misbehaving mannekins who all fall down dead.

Tom Coates thinks Andrew should go on the naughty step. My positive experience of parenthood has come from encouraging the desirable, ignoring the undesirable, and getting them in the kitchen making some donuts.

Sorry for using his shock tactics to grab your attention, but as I rode home from listening to the troll, Andrew Keen, I realised there was something I could agree with him on:

He says Web2.0 is just a mirror for our culture and society.

I see a new-found confidence, optimism and freedom. I see happiness and laughter. I see a breathing out, a loosening of the belt, a relaxing, a kicking off of the shoes. I see humility and humanity. I see maturity.

He sees threats, groundless criticism, a loss of authority. He sees immaturity and people making outrageous statements in order to gain attention. He sees selfishness and self-centredness. He sees confusion, stealing and interference.

You look in the mirror and you see what you are.

More in the morning…

I’d love to write about what’s going on here at podcamp uk but i’m finding it very difficult because everyone’s so noisy

What a surprise that when you get a bunch of podcasters together they talk and talk and talk and shout and play music and talk and laugh and shout some more.

The other problem I have is that I’m having to use a mac which also has weird colour coded keys , it looks like for some sort of media editing software. However, I’m quite pleased to actually be participating a lot more than when I spend all of my time live-blogging for a change.

I’ve also just looked at my phone and seen that I have 4 new v-mail messages, so perhaps I should find somewhere quiet to listen to them…

I can’t embed it here because of wordpress.com rules, but here’s a link to some video from Charles Frith of some of what I facilitated at Interesting2007

Video: Interesting 2007

Also, don’t know if I linked but here are the slides I would have used, if I’d used slides.

I just want first to distinguish this from the events that Chris has facilitated through Social Media Club. I am involved with Social Media Club in London, and what I’m talking about might well be a place to host Social Media Club (or even Social Media Cafés!) and I love both concepts - but neither are what I want to talk about here - I’m talking about a place, not an event.

Phew! Perhaps I’d better start again…

This comes from a number of conversations I’ve had with people in London about having a place to meet, hook up, get groups together, socialise, train people, co-work etc. I blogged about something in a slightly different context about 3 years ago and the idea has been frothing in my head for a long time. I’m thinking of a confluence of the creative, tech and entrepreneurial tribes who are currently gathering around social media and online social networking. I’m talking about the kinds of people who are regulars at Coffee Mornings, Open Coffee, Social Media Club, Chinwag Live.

So far it’s as concrete and as fluid as this:

We (whoever we are - the united socialmediatistas of hereabouts) acquire a space that we can use for the above-mentioned types of activities. It might be laid out as follows (though do not get hung up about physical orientation, upstairs/downstairs front/back doesn’t matter as much as the ideas of separate spaces for different activities).

Ground floor is open to the public, a café style space with good coffee, tea, snacks, fussball, space invaders and the like - maybe the odd plate of eggs bacon chips and beans. Plasma screen shows a rolling twitter timeline from all our mates. An alternative to constantly having to find somewhere to meet up and have coffee and a place where people love you using the wifi.

First floor (don’t get hung up on the physical orientation, just a separate space) is for members & guests. Not a posh exclusive (male) type of private members club (you know where I mean), but something softer, gentler, more suited to creative & geeky types than just to the thrusting entrepreneur. Facilities are flexible meeting rooms, desks and co-working spaces and more exclusive lounging, chatting space with coffee & tea. It’s a bit quieter up here.

Second floor (again really just another separate space) is for media production - podcasting & video-blogging equipment for hire - soundproofed studios, maybe some helpful techies to guide the uninitiated.

Questions:

Why? Why not take an existing institution and warp it into what we want? Now that we are, just, starting to see that there’s a group of us interested in the same things, I think it would be good to have a place of our own.

When? I may be biased by the number of people I mix with who don’t keep normal office hours but I think this is an all-day & evening thing, though possibly not at weekends?

Where? London, I’m pretty certain, but where is our spiritual home? Soho, Shoreditch, South Bank? Somewhere that doesn’t start with ‘S’?

Who? Who will come, who will be members, who will use which facilities? I’m starting a group in Facebook to guage interest and carry the conversation forward. Also what kinds of people do we need to make it happen - property development, deal-makers, investors, staff as well as potential members and customers.

What? Salons, open spaces, meeting (verb), meetings (noun), training, improvising, podcasting, eating, talking, working, collaborating, farting about, other activities with no predefined or explicit purpose, interesting pursuits. What else?

How? Yes.

More questions please - and answers if you have them.

[UPDATE: If you want to help, there's now a wiki for you to scribble on and a Facebook group to join.]

My old friends from the Guildford School of Acting got together in the Union Club in Greek Street (thanks Paul!) to compare grey hairs, pot-bellies and war-stories from our marriages, divorces and other relationships. We were also honoured by the appearance of our former principal Michael Gaunt and head of first year Ian Ricketts. We had a fabulous time, which stretched into the evening when we stumbled over the road into the nearest pub.

I shot some bits of video especially for those luvvies who weren’t able to make it - I hope these give a flavour of what it was like and give you even more encouragement to come along next time.

Angus Deuchar

Paul Spyker

A bunch of folk starting with Ian Tolmie

Another bunch of folk starting with Darren Ruston

Lucy Davidson

Ian Butler

Adam Tedder (and me)

A fortnight now since Interesting2007 and blogging time & opportunities have been scarce (at least on my own behalf) as I’ve just started two big projects where I’m making social media for clients (which is nice). I can’t possibly link to all the lovely people I met but most of them have blogged or flickr’d already. Slide sets are starting to appear on slideshare

I did get the feeling that something shifted, nothing world-shattering, but there was a subtle changing, we’d done something differently and as a result it all, y’know, shifted.

Look it was a one-day “conference” but it wasn’t a conference like any I’ve been to and it wasn’t an un-conference in the Bloggercon or PolicyUnplugged mould and it wasn’t a seminar, workshop, showcase, gathering, conflab or conglomeration - it was definitely not a symposium or a trade-show. It was a bit of a happening, an exhibition, a show & tell, a festival of ideas. And it held my attention all through from 11am to 6pm (I did get a bit of a numb-bum towards the end, but that might have been because I was wearing too many pairs of pants.

But it was a group of (mostly) intelligent people in a hall, sitting on chairs in rows listening to other people speak, one at a time. So what made it stand out as something different?

Nothing was ever more than 20 minutes away - actually that was a lie, because my slot was more than 20 minutes away from Rhodri and his saw (thanks Roo), but I guess no-one got bored with having lunch.

No Q&As - people seemed to accept that the majority of people were not going to speak. I have never seen a good Q&A session except at political meetings. We’ve got blogs now to have our say, or not and none of the speakers were up their own arses about talking to people afterwards - that would have been absurd.

Self-service - we all helped ourselves (as Russell said “we’re all grown-ups and you’ve only paid twenty quid”) but we all helped each other too. I arrived too late to help set up, but it was set up and nobody was crying or running around with scissors - and we cleared away quickly and fairly painlessly. There was no feeling (for me anyway) of separation between “organisers” and “punters” though these two did a splendid job of co-ordination. Also Russell was not “in charge” but he was definitely “in charge”.

It was on a Saturday and few people had a surname, let alone a job-title. The few collars I spotted were all open and any ties were undoubtedly ironic or accidental.

It was actually really good for me not to have wifi. I started off in recording mode as it was (I’m realising more and more that it’s one of my coping mechanisms for being thrust into large groups of people - I’ve been doing it with my camera since about 1979) but if I (and other similarly challenged folk) had the excuse to hide behind a laptop screen, we’d have had a much poorer experience.

It was village-hall-y and Festival of Britain-y and a bit arts-and-crafty and, well, just right for people who’s early life was a mix of oil-crises and moon-landings, dreaming about amazing cities in the sky with hovercrafts and no pollution and peace and smiling children and stuff.

It was hopeful.

As an experience, what was it like? Well, a bit like listening to Radio 4 all day, but with no long programmes, it was a bit like a random walk through the best bits of wikipedia, then again it was like live current.tv for people born in the ’60s & ’70s, or peeking at the RSS reader of someone really consistently smart. Does that help?

There were things I could have done with more of. More variety in presentation style, most people plumped for what we know, which is showing pictures or lists on a big screen. More music, preferably with acoustic instruments - the electroplankton quartet was a fun concept but I wish we’d made more of an effort with ukulele’s and kazoo’s. More analog, 3D art and time to really see the Folksy folk. More fun in the goody bag - I still haven’t used the shaving oil, but it was a point of “ooooh!”.

So some quick ideas for “next time” - Multiple locations - eg InterestingLondon, InterestingEdinburgh, InterestingBucharest, InterestingAmsterdam with video-linkups at set-times throughout the day. Bingo (or some other communal game) perhaps also played internationally via the video-link. Some form of backchannel - the twitter feed worked nicely before and after the day - one computer with a net connection projecting the stream might be cool.

And yeah, you *did* have to be there, really.

I made a set of pictures I took at the second Hallam Foe screening.

Observations:

1. Looking at Jamie & Sophia in these pictures really shows you how much they were acting their socks off. Just at a physical level, for example, in the film, it is quite clear that she’s an older woman, but here they look about the same age.

2. I need a new camera, this one is fine for whipping out and taking shots of London’s rubbish, but it can’t cope with the conditions and so some of these were too crap to post. All round I’m getting a bit tired of using shit equipment. Please Father Midsummer, can I have a new MacBook, a 3-chip videocam with flash memory not tape & a Digital SLR?

3. Having said that, the grainy quality of some of them reminds me a) (nostalgically) of prints from a 110 instamatic and b) the rougher cut of the film we saw before.

Update: I see that the movie is to be shown on the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival - kewl!

I enjoyed helping out again at VNU’s second Blogs & Social Media Forum on Tuesday. I decided to twitter rather than live-blog here today. You’ll find the first one here in my twitter archive and it goes through to here 48 tweets later

I ran a (rather frenetic and noisy) speed networking session so everyone had the opportunity to spend at least 3 minutes with at least 5 new people. I then held an open space which came up with conversations on real work, monetizing social media, the dark side of social media, using it in academic situations such as teaching in a business school and what being a metaverse evangelist really means. As I was busy being challenged in the same way that Johnnie is when holding a space I only really got to take part in Euan’s conversation about real work, but others have blogged their experiences and reactions: Marie Howell, Robin Hamman, Roo Reynolds and Fiona Blamey.

At the end of the Skill Share last week, I asked three participants to reflect on what they’d got out of the day. Here’s the video:

I shot lots more footage in the sessions - that’s still coming through the sausage machine

David Dixon is founder of The Phone Room, a call and contact centre specialising in telephone fundraising for not-for-profits and ticketing for arts organisations. I’ve been talking to David for a while about blogging and social media in this context and he invited me along to help record a “Skill Share” day last week where he and his colleagues were meeting with people from sister companies in the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Germany to talk about their common experiences and how to improve their effectiveness.

The day kicked off with presentations from David and Daryl Upsall who heads up the Fundraising Company in Spain. Here are my lightly edited notes from these presentations.

David Dixon - How do we enhance voice fundraising in the age of new media

Note this is “voice fundraising” not just about telephones or whatever device you might happen to be using to convey your voice such as: web, e-mail, mobile voice, mobile web & wap, sms, vismail, affiliate marketing, VOIP (and associated services), social networking, user generated content, MMORPGS such as Second Life.

There’s just been a conference about charities using Second Life - one of the main speakers is from Oxford University which has bought an island in the space. There’s also been a sponsored walk in aid of the American Cancer Society - it’s like temporary emigration - they are very real and people spend money on them, lots of big companies are setting themselves up there.

So we face a big threat - not so much in Spain, but further north. If you listen to calls you see that nearly everyone is very old - over 65 probably - the reason for this is that they were recruited by direct mail. Most of the donors in britain are acquired through direct mail. This is changing, but not that quickly. The effect of mass direct mail is under threat from both generational (older people dying, younger people not responding to direct mail) and technological change (the move to online) and the marginal rate of return is reducing all the time.

When direct mail started, you had to be very stupid not to get a good response, but as time goes by the quality of your communication has to go up in order to maintain profitability as the marginal rate will always move towards break even. So a small change in marginal response rates means that a whole bunch of mail becomes uneconomic, meaning that the volume of direct mail will have to reduce. At the moment it’s still increasing as the only way to increase profitability but that doesn’t mean that it’s going to continue like this forever.

We don’t know when it’s going to happen, but I believe it will be sometime in next 10 years. So we have a problem coming and I want to be on top of it beforehand. So now we’re investigating new media, we don’t have to but i’d like to be thinking about it now to get a strategic solution in place before it’s needed.

We’re focusing on learning how to integrate voice with new media. Our new kit allows us to work with sms email and web alongside voice, so we can position ourselves as an integrated contact centre. We don’t quite understand how to do it best yet, but we could get started right now.

The problems that charities face are: How to migrate from ‘here’ to ‘there’. How to restructure organisationally. How to monetise new media and how to grow expertise.

We are developing expertise so we can sell more voice fundraising, involving TPR directly with clients’ strategic planning. Historically, we haven’t been part of that planning, but we’d like to be in future.

An example of the experiments we’re doing is Donor Connect - it’s affiliate marketing - an awful lot of people want to give but don’t know who they want to give money to. Increasingly people go looking for ideas on the internet. In the commercial world for any search on a generic term you’ll see a mix of direct producers and affiliates who guide searchers towards the producers, with the affiliates getting a small cut.

If you were to type in ‘help darfur’ you’d get such a mix. Opinions vary on it - some people think that they are squatting and stealing traffic - others think its good because they are doing the suppliers job for them without getting paid until they get a result.

So we’re working with a network of affiliates - 1-2,000 from Affiliate Future - they do the dissemination for us. It captures people with a general interest - so if they know they want to help the people of darfur, they will get a way of finding it. and then we will get the calls.

We’re piloting it at the moment - pay per registration with a 10-day cooling off period - basic identity data - one phone number. We want to see if and how the model works so everything is being tested. In any sample we find a number of non-contacts, qualified prospects and sometimes single gifts with qualification information, but the main aim is new monthly donors which is what the charities pay for. Charities love this - they get to only pay for the people who actually pay them.

The thing that isn’t happening is the call back - assumption that people who’ve registered online will only respond to e-mail. So there’s a great opportunity - because voice is still the best way to talk to people.

So far we’re not getting huge numbers - given how much we’ve spent, we’re still pleased, but of itself it’s not great. We feel we’ve proved the basic concept but we want to show that we can do volume.

The ROI was 1.06:1 with a highest donation of a £100 Paperless Direct Debit. TPR income per contact was over 60% more than usual.

So good for us and good for the charity. The average donation levels are higher by web than we get by mail or face to face on the street. We think that attrition will be low as we’re creating a relationship. If we can prove it works we’ll do more - and go to all our clients and say give us your data and we’ll do the rest of the work.

Daryl Upsall - Integrating fundraising & communication- how to stand out

Daryl explained how there is so much going on as the web grows up and content (pictures, stories, videos) is going to be generated much more by individuals rather than charities. Here are the examples Daryl used.

Big shift from billboards to online. Google sells more advertising in the UK than Channel 4 in 2006

In UK 10% of young people get news from internet - even Murdoch is in on the act buying myspace - he knows that the traditional newspaper is dying. Where are the charities on myspace? In individual people’s pages. Lots of people setting up microcharities.

youtube is the perfect place to recycle content - very few charities have their own blog - does anyone do podcasting for charities? how about videoblogging?

First aid - St John’s Ambulance have put all of their courses on podcasts through iTunes.

SMS - Italians donated 18m euros in 24 hours for tsunami. but nobody’s capturing the phone number data by call back.

Vodaphone campaign in Spain - supporting various charities with shortcodes for each one. again no data capture even for feedback.

Unicef at Berlin New Years Eve party. 130,000 donated 350,000 euros
26m people sent a message for Live 8 - nobody got back to them.
e-mail campaigns work less but still effective getting 150,000 people to sign a petition - 95,000 new names - 225kUSD

Amnesty has probably the biggest database of e-mail addresses - amina libre - stoning women campaign 140 e-mails –> 9m people who can now be telephoned.

Keep your eyes open for anyone who’s doing something snowballing.

Amnesty’s base is getting older too. so they’re saying let’s build some lists of younger people - pencil in envelope not working. downloading music (john lennon)

Ticketing - fastest growing area is sms - latest is sending barcodes. How do you ticket your charity events - and what’s happening to the phone numbers generated…?

The mobile phone newsletter - via qr-code in Japan - building response mechanisms into advertising.

El Pais - unique numbers on paper is an entry to daily lottery - with immediate textback collecting permissions.

Online auctions - ebay for charity - you can sell anything and again generating leads.

Everyclick - every time you use the search engine, charities make money - some corporates force their people to use it.

Integrating f2f & mobile - Greenpeace India - bought a whole bunch of numbers in Bangalore - sent them a message (some would say spammed them) and if they replied positively they said “we’ll bring you a tree to plant in your garden”. They bought 39,000 numbers and got 2.3% conversion - the person bringing the tree was a fundraiser ready to sign them up to donate. Lead to supporter conversion 16% planning now to recruit 22k new supporters this way.

It’s about developing relationships - John Aspinall Foundation - get info via shortcodes about animals with click through to sponsor immediately. totallywild.net including ringtones of their sound or a related music download.

Last week I spent a couple of days helping the Stormhoek guys out with their offering at the London Wine Fair. On the Thursday, I spent all day with Andrew Porton chasing round with a live video feed to a video-wall interviewing people on the stands for the official wine fair blog winefairlive.com. The first day I spent more time on my own doing much the same thing, but in a less formal way.

The first of these I’ve uploaded is unusual in that it features more of me than the peeps in the booth. You saw yesterday what I get up to in my leisure time. I thought you’d like to be reassured that it doesn’t get much better when I’m “working”. Hey, I don’t drink - I had to have some fun somehow

Busy couple of weeks but I’ve just uploaded a bunch of recent pics starting with an excellent day I spent in Rome working for Policy Unplugged on a internal awayday for a large professional services firm. Johnnie Moore held a really stimulating open space for them and I ran around with my camera, while Roy, Cindy & Chris did the *really* hard work

Johnnie blogged about it much nearer the time. I was really glad too that we made the effort to go into the city even for an hour and enjoy good food and sunshine before experiencing the metro and a slow train to the airport on which we passed some of our time speaking to an interesting young man who called himself “Sami”

Thanks to those who’ve blogged and linked to this, especially Richard Stacy & Mike Butcher If you’re still trying to make up your mind, go see what those guys say.

There are still some places left so do go and book here http://www.eventbrite.com/event/58737686

I’m off to the London Wine Fair for a couple of days - god knows how much blogging will happen here in the meantime

Do you know any PR people who know that social media is important and want to get up to speed, but don’t quite know where to start?

I went to the last Chinwag Live called PR Unspun (podcast here) and could see an opportunity for talking in more detail to PR folk about how to move from relating well to the press or the public to relating well to people like me (and you probably), bloggers. Now I won’t suggest we call it BR, as that brings to mind curled sandwiches, cold damp carriages smelling of something awful and “We’re getting there” (oh no you’re not!) but Better Blogger Relations seems to work with people, so I designed a half-day workshop.

I shall introduce people to the basics and then cover:

• Finding people who are talking about your clients.
• Monitoring online conversations methodically.
• Engaging with an online community.
• How to be interesting to bloggers.

I’m just setting up the first one on Friday week (25th May). As I’ve got it down to a choice of two venues and am just clearing up the details, I thought I’d put tickets on sale through eventbrite anyway - it’s £95+VAT and limited to 12 places. Please do point your favourite, but as yet clue-deprived PR people to the booking page or buy a ticket yourself.

UPDATE: Venue confirmed, it’s: CCT Venues Barbican, Aldersgate House, 135-137 Aldersgate St, London EC1A 4JA

I went on Tuesday. I’m sure I should have gone on Wednesday when Chinwag had a thing about PPC and all of my twitter stream seemed to be there.

Actually no, I wish I hadn’t gone at all. The saving graces were unexpected meetups with Ged Carroll, Kevin Anderson and Ian Delaney and an expected meetup with Andy Hyde.

I wanted to interview the big fat blue mouse and the leopard girls (sorry rupert) but they’d gone on a break I think, so I started shooting this B roll stuff and then…

thank god it was free to get in (and out again)

I idly twittered that I was wondering whether the interesting2007 t-shirt printers (so cool!) would perform their service on an adult-sized romper suit.

Three of my friends responded.

Sam thought it kinky.
Johnnie thought it bizarre.
Suw felt uneasy at the thought.

Well I think that says a lot more about them than it does about me.

When I’m bragging (yes, I’m generally too modest, but occasionally it happens!) that the things I was talking feverishly about 2 years ago are now what make me a living, people often ask “So what are you talking feverishly about now” When I tell them “face-to-face ” they sometimes look a bit disappointed, but that’s really where I think the exciting stuff is going to happen in the next period.

What I’m particularly frisky about is the bootstrap effect - we’ve built a bit of a relationship online, then we enrich that relationship offline and face to face, then when we go back online it’s all been taken forward and we do more new and interesting things together… and so on… and so on… and so on….

So the must-do meatspace convergence points in my diary so far are:

NMK Forum

VNU Blogs & Social Media Forum

Anything by Policy Unplugged

Chinwag Live

Second Chance Tuesday

Interesting2007

Disclosure: each of these events is either giving me a press pass to come and blog or are paying me serious wonga for creating rich records of the day (all except for Interesting2007 for which I’d gladly pay twice the entry fee and possibly don an adult-sized romper suit - but that’s another story)

I’ve been invited to a screening of Surveillance this Saturday (14th April) at midday at the NFT but I have a prior commitment.

According to the blurb the film was well received at the Berlin Film Festival recently and I just spoke to Paul the Director who tells me that it’ll be going to Seattle and Chicago later in the year. I have been given a DVD copy (and watched the first 20 minutes, which hooked me) so I’m going to blog about it when I’ve had a proper look.

If you’d like to go see it (and if you blog about it that would be lovely too) then give me a shout and I’ll put you in touch with the production team.

The very opposite of Interesting2007

Just to let triangulation freaks know that the official blogging4business blog is being written by Robert Andrews - a much linkier live-blogger than I can manage.

And for another reference point you can see the conference filtered through the fingers of Stephanie Booth.

Moderated by Mike Butcher of mbites.com and vecosys.com
Simon McDermott - CEO Attentio
Heather Hopkins - Head of Research, Hitwise
Kris Hoet - Marketing Manager, EMEA Consumer Marketing, Microsoft Online Services Group
Scott Thomson - Analytics Director, Starcom

SMc: Monitoring conversations to evaluate for example campaign impact, identifying what influencers are saying about your products, monitoring reputation and understanding consumer behaviour. So the big questions are “Are we discussed?”, if so then “What are the issues that are being raised” and “What do they think?” We do some benchmarking and look at trends as well as understanding who the influencers are and how you can communicate wth them. for example we worked with a consumer eletronics player that had a lower momentum than other products.

MB: what’s the technology that you use?

SMc: we use a proprietary time-based search technology looking at buzz together with staff who look at what it all means. We’ve been doing it for 3 years.

MB: is Hitwise going to cede the market to these guys or are you doing something else?

HH: well I’m really here to talk about monitoring blogs and we don’t compete with Attentio.
So comparing Sony Rootkit with Diet Coke & Mentos - the Sony story resonated wildly with the tech community but it wasn’t such a big story elsewhere. At Hitwise we have some people who like data and a lot of data. We’re blogging and it makes our life a lot easier dealing with journalists, but also our engagement with our customers has gone up.

MB: so if you monitor your own brand using free tools why would anyone pay for a service
HH: well we can’t justify it given how small we are - it’s for larger brands really

MB: why not just give people laptops and let them get on with it?
KH: Well we did that but we also do a lot going out to the community and meeting people face to face, building a relationship with bloggers. For all that we need to track who’s using what so we can focus on the right people. We use Attentio, but we also use lots of free tools too. We use comment tracking and we get good results out of that. The best way of tracking is of course to be reading everything

This week we launched an update on maps but there’s no big launch around it, but because we’ve been engaging and tracking some of the people in the cities covered and we can then talk to them and then that gets picked up by mainstream media - also is good for getting feedback.

MB: interesting that comments are very important.

KH: everybody changes their opinion because of comments. Also comments are the easiest way for people to connect with each other - you don’t have to have a blog yourself. “Everybody is a customer” It’s a kind of early warning system. And people are still often quite thrilled to get a reply.

MB: what feedback do you get?
ST: there’s a difference between just listening and then trying to change people or affect their behaviour. So we use a number of services to provide contextual information about online conversations.

MB: so trying to influence the conversation can be dangerous? (ref Cillit Bang vs Tom Coates)
ST: yes it’s about finding the influencers and then treading very very carefully.

MB: So a replacement for focus groups?
ST: Yes, but I think that research industry is eager for revolution. We’re all interested in understanding online behaviour better and although you can do it yourself it helps to get help.

MB: how can you iron out differences in the results from different blog tracking methods?
SMc: we offer companies granular insights into the brand eg French blogosphere reaction vs German - we don’t have much demand for standardisation with other markets - what people want is a quick read of what’s going on but yeah, you have to tread carefully.

Q: Any research into the social profile of bloggers and whether they are representative.
A: HH: we can do this with blog audiences - slightly male skew, all social grades represented, but tends to be urban people under 35.
SMc: younger people are more involved in social networks and don’t blog as much but there are studies that show that people move into blogging more in their twenties.
ST: our focus is less on who is saying it and more on what is being said as the former is too much to ask at the moment.
HH: also demographics are very dependent on the types of blogs visited and the type of conversation going on

Q: After my Dell guarantee lapsed it went wrong. I blogged about it. 2 months later I got a comment from Dell apologising and putting someone in touch the next day, collected laptop and repaired it free of charge. So tracking does work.

SMc: if they’d been monitoring a while ago they’d have got a better response from Jeff Jarvis

Q: international tracking - how mature are the offerings? How close are we to saying “These are the 3 most influential” in this geography.
SMc: Quite a long way on the breakdown. We’re focusing on Europe and we’re getting there.
KH: we tried this for the launch of Windows Live. I think it’s a very human thing - the tools don’t really work, but getting in touch with people and talking to them is much better at pulling out who the most influential are. It’s not just about links, it can be just as much about community activities in real life as much as online.

Q: So once you know them, how do you start a conversation without them getting suspicious.
A: people have lots of ways of getting in touch. Be humble. Explain what you’re doing. Ask for help. Invite people to events. It doesn’t always work but we keep trying.

Q: There are very good metrics in academic circles for measuring influence - SNA is probably the way we should go.
HH: I think this is absolutely the way to go for larger brands.

Lee Bryant - Headshift
David Fitch - Simmons & Simmons
Olivier Creiche - six apart
Adam Tinworth - reed

Lee’s telling us about some of the cases and then looking real world perspectives of what is being done.

We’ve got mature well-developed products now and we have some good external services for getting people started without involving IT and then you can build your own mashups and services using things like Ning.

But it ain’t what you do…

So just putting in blogs isn’t enough, you need concrete business use cases, engagement and people support and (at least a degree of ) a connected infrastructure.

We’re just about to release a library of use-cases that might be useful for people to look at info & knowledge sharing, innovation & R&D, internal comms as well as Marketing & PR.

So here’s some cases.

OC: We just deliver bricks, the important stuff gets done by these guys who build interesting and useful houses. Last year we were still just explaining what blogs are and how we thought they might be used. Bob Lutz: “No better opportunity exists to engage”.

Web publishing is way ahead in this country (Adam’s going to talk about Reed’s experience) Most of the creative stuff starts with smaller businesses and that then gets picked up by bigger players EG Serious Eats, Huffington Post vs Washington Post.

Internal Communications eg Citrix were very fast growing and had new employees not staying very long so they wanted to hold on to a bit of that knowledge while they were there, across dozens of projects and going very fast. AEP is a much bigger company but with the same story - trying to stop e-mail becoming the central repository for knowledge. They start small, they experiment, nobody *knows* how it will work but one of the success factors is having a champion someone who has a better idea than anyone else which shows the way for others.

Marketing and Community types of blogs eg Arcelor and Mittal merger raises a lot of anxiety among various stakeholders. Launched a blog/2.0 site because they wanted to be very open about what they were doing and how they were going about it and they let people go out with cameras and interview people around the world about what they felt about it. still being evaluated, but they are very happy and the press coverage has been excellent.

David Fitch:

What’s key to us is providing an infrastructure for lawyers to share knowledge and expertise across practice areas but also offices, knowing what’s going on inside the firm and outside.
We’ve been experimenting for about 3 years pushing a group of conservative people towards using new ways of operating. Blogs RSS Wikis are words that frighten lawyers so we’ve been giving them new tools and our experience is that people are able to use the lighter tools very easily - especially like bringing the time to publish down.

Our business case - the investment was zero - we used open source and tested it internally, but once we started, other people followed very quickly. so we didn’t have to justify an investment decision but we now have good evidence for new investment.

AT: we got into social media entirely by accident. We set up a small team and started out blogging and suddenly got requests to provide it internally. Publishing firms tend to be quite balkanised but as we started moving into a new business of interacting with our readers, we had a lot to learn and this raised a hunger for people to share what they’re learning and keep conversations going.

We have a number of problems - education - we’re not dictating any solution and we bring people together who (aaaagh contact lens emergency…)

Q: Does it actually work?
A: LB: it devolves things down to the level of the basic unit of work which is the person. What has happened with enterprise knowledge sharing is that people get the pain without any payback, but the lightweight tools give you power to organise your stuff and your contacts with other people and work with it all better. What’s also interesting is putting it on top

Q: do you see this as the end of employee communications as we know it?
A: LB: I don’t think so - every generation sees itself as Luke Skywalker, but it’s silly really because it actually just gets layered over the next one so now that we’re at the human scale where things really do work - people can publish and develop some sort of collective intelligence.
AT: No as it’s a way of taking away the more mundane bits of internal comms work and lets people focus on face to face

Q: MB: Lots of companies have huge intranets - should we just wipe them away?
DF: very familiar with this - there’s a huge wealth of material that’s useful but just couldn’t be found - so we did some work about improving search and findability but also looking at using lighter infrastructure to start again, which will involve some pain, people will have to go back and look at relevance for example, but that change is going to deliver the benefit that we’re moving towards creating communities and connecting people rather than just producing static content.

Q: GC: How do you deal with info that becomes out of date?
A:LB: different approaches - the most interesting is that in a mature implementation anything acquires its own context, tags etc so out of date stuff falls down as sediment in these systems. So then you need some sort of review system, but it’s more about letting more timely stuff come to the fore.
DF: it’s also so much easier to keep your stuff up to date, even for lawyers so just using lighter tools helps a lot.

Ged Carroll - lead consultant for digital strategy at Waggener Edstrom - putting the public back into public relations.

Tamara Littleton eModeration.com moderation of networks

Darren Strange Office UK 2007 Product Manager Microsoft - we don’t think of ourselves as evil, so perhaps we have a bit of a perception problem, which is why I think a large number of us choose to be bloggers. Writes the office rocker blog

Bernhard moderating: So who should blog?

DS: well about 1 in 15 blog at MS but they vary between people who have a very narrow niche where they know everything there is to know, while others are more broad. The good bloggers are the ones who can handle dialogue and ambiguity, not the people who have to be right.

TL: the people inside the company are not the best people to blog - we look for ambassadors, people who are already championing the brand and want to get involved.

B: any examples of this?

TL: yup Budweiser and NASCAR actively seek people to champion the community and the brand.

B: is there ever anything unacceptable to Bud?

TL: sometimes images, but they try to be hands off around discussions and opinions and encourage open dialogue.

B: we’ve talked about brand evangelists

GC: there are probably people in your organisation blogging already without your sanction or not, so good advice is to reach out to them. The most important characteristics are passion, tone of voice and authenticity. Being able to draw on a depth of knowledge but also able to say “I don’t know, but I can find out”

Andyour findings - how many with policies and sanctioned bloggers

GC: varies widely and can be skewed by our client base, but it’s definitely becoming the norm.

B: I want to ask about brand reputation - isn’t it a PR nightmare to have a whole bunch of independent spokespeople

GC: work with HR on T&Cs and establish etiquette within the company for respecting private communication. People have different views, but the best you can hope for is that people will generally go in the same way.

B: what’s the most awkward thing you’ve encountered? If you’ve made a mistake do you get a torrent of response.

DS: yeah, but it’s all coverage isn’t it? MS see that we do far more good than harm on the whole. I’m an amateur journalist in a way and so if something comes across my desk that’s interesting… I have blogged things that other people didn’t want me to. Of course it occasionally undermines the big PR efforts, but I’m not going to leak confidential information. We already talk to journalists, friends down the pub etc so why would we suddenly start blurting things out in our blog. We have no blogging policy and if there ever is one, probably lots of people would leave. We have a whole bunch of people who get together for bloggers lunches for example.

B: so Scoble got into trouble over China working on censorship with GYM. What’s the view on political activity or support on your blog?

DS: well if it was relevant (someone was trying to ban MS Office ) then I’d obviously say something about it. It’s about us having a face and being human with our consumers. Something that’s annoying is journos trying to hijack my blog. I see my blog as my house, and my rules hold. So I’ve had them very keen to get a free copy of MS Office - I know him, we get on well, but instead of just mailing me - he put a comment on one of my posts ranting about whey he didn’t already get one. He ends up looking worse because I just ignored him. This levels the playing field - there are journos who feel free to bad mouth Microsoft, but of course, now I get right of reply. This changes the whole dynamic of dealing with the press.

B: Any other examples.

TL: defending journos - timesonline is a client and they now allow comments on every article (trying to make out it’s a blog) so when there were negative comments about the launch of the site, but what was interesting was that they let that be out there and it turned round over time.

DS: Not so sure about Times, but I think it’s important to have people behind them not just anonymous groups. Having comments doesn’t make it a blog. I also object to having to give info before being able to comment and what’s with no RSS feeds?

B: how about when a crisis hits? Old story of lock-picking (3 years ago) is still the stickiest most prominent story about Kryptonite. So how does this affect how you deal with crisis.

GC: the key issue with Kryptonite is that the problems were well known. The problem in 2004 was that they did a whole lot of stuff to fix the problem, but they didn’t tell people about what they were doing. This would have stopped the issue dead, it was the void of communication back that did the damage.

B: anything you can do about search and it’s stickiness

GC: well it’s all about content so how do you release plenty of compelling content that shows how you behaved well

DS: and if they had an established culture of blogging, their own bloggers would have come higher in results and they could be putting their ‘correct’ view across. So blogs can be a defence mechanism for you.

TL: also if something goes wrong, it’s really powerful having CEO or senior mgt saying this is what we’re going to do in response.

Q: Interested in Bud & NASCAR using ambassadors -I can see how people would be encouraged to blog about NASCAR, but not Bud - where’s the ongoing material
A: well it’s the association with drivers - it’s the sponsorship thing, getting people to see advertising, but also rewarding people with merchandise etc. Re-inforcing the brand’s involvement

Q: Are there good examples of people using blogs to push messages about themselves. Has anyone been successful?
A: GC: MS & Sun in the tech sector - but it’s not about putting a message out it’s about engaging with an audience they already have.
TL: also hi-jacking blogs can be a real faux-pas
DS: on a weekly basis i’ll have pr’s send me stuff - lots are very good, but I’m not going to look like a PR spin machine. I welcome people sending me stuff, but I have to ask myself whether it’s something I