Interesting South 3 is fast approaching, and I’ve been thinking about the speakers and the topics that will be explored tonight. I’ve just taken a tour around Sydney (with a detour through Lebanon) using Google Street View. Below, you’ll be introduced to the speakers and topics featured tonight, along with an image captured from my joyride through Sydney…

Remo Giuffre – Anatomy of Cool – What’s cool? Who decides?

This shot was taken outside one of the coolest music venues in Sydney – the Hopetoun in Surry Hills. The sun right in the lens makes the shot even cooler. So I guess it turns out this photo is cool – and I decide!

Alan Jones & Miles Campbell – Placebos – Learn how powerful the placebo effect can be

This is shot is taken outside the RPA hospital Emergency in Camperdown. Hardly a place you’d want to be handed a placebo, but it sticks with the medical theme.

Patrick Hofmann – Away with words – Images and Icons too often fail the needs of their audience.

Even though Patrick won’t be talking about his work at Google, I thought I’d visit the Google Pyrmont office for this shot. Unfortunately this bus is in the way. An example of an image failing the needs of its audience?

Miles Merrill – Perform your own stories – why don’t writers speak or speakers write?

Berkelouw Bookshop is just down the road from the Chauvel in Paddington, where the conference is to be held… So I thought it made sense to visit there for Miles’ talk.

Basil Donovan – Oral s£x is new black

With little more than a close-up of a mouth at its entrance, “short stay hotel”, Stiletto seemed like an obvious place to go for Basil’s talk.

Adam Dennis – Rebuilding our singing society

I’ve only ever been inside the Vanguard for a moment – never for a show. It’s a cool venue… I tried going to a few karaoke bars for Adam’s talk, but they are mostly underground with little signage, so in a way, Street View doesn’t really let you visit karaoke bars. Shame, really.

Amy Frasca & Virginia Mesiti – Bondi to Beirut

I’ve already been to Bondi, so I thought I’d visit Beirut. They don’t appear to have Google Street View in Beirut, so this is the best I could do.

Steve Maxwell – On his soapbox

This is a building Steve Maxwell knows better – at least from the outside – than pretty much anyone in Sydney. When he stands on Speakers’ Corner each Sunday afternoon, this building provides part of the backdrop as he expresses his political views to anyone who’ll listen.

Cale Bain – How improv can save the world

The first time I saw Cale on stage, it was here at the Roxbury Hotel on a Tuesday night. His show, Full Body Contact No Love Tennis is great.

Tim Baynes – The permanence of temporary things – Some of the things we perceive as temporary are the most enduring

Harry’s Cafe de Wheels – a pie cart – has been one of the most enduring structures in Sydney. Evidence of Tim’s point?

Ash Donaldson – Why do we believe silly things

This is the Scient0l0gy building around the corner from my place. One time I went inside and did a personality test… Needless to say I failed miserably, have no personality, and need the services of this organisation. No thanks – not today!

So there you have it. My little tour of Interesting South 3, entirely from my laptop. It’s going to be a great night – looking forward to seeing you there!

And don’t forget, if you can’t join us, it’s ok – ABC Fora are coming to film it and stick it on TV ABC2 and the web!

The more you like to get things done at work, the less you like meetings. At least, that’s the conclusion of researchers from the University of North Carolina:

“For those driven employees who are focused on completing tasks and achieving goals, meetings are an annoying interruption to their work and productivity; job satisfaction decreases as the number of meetings they attend increases.”

Almost all the work I do relies on effective meetings. So when fellow bald man, Seth Godin posted his suggestions for meeting innovation, I felt inspired to collate a few ideas from him, Robert Gerrish and Amanda Gore and build my own set of Rules for Awesome Meetings.

This is a draft, so if you’ve seen something work well, or have some feedback, post a comment! Here’s what I’ve got so far…

PREPARATION

• Have a meeting with yourself first. Do you really need a meeting on this? Can an email suffice? (Robert Gerrish)
• Know the meeting’s intended outcomes, pitch your meeting to a co-worker and see if they’ve got an alternative route to the outcomes you desire. (Robert)
• Require participants to prepare: always read/do something before attending meeting. Not done? Can’t come. (Seth Godin)

TIMING/SPEED

• Latecomers pay a fine. (Seth – who proposes $10 in the coffee jar if you are more than two minutes later than the second-last person)
• Meetings to be booked in increments of five minutes. No more than 4 increments, unless there’s a great reason. (Seth)
• Bring an egg timer to the meeting. Out of sand? Out of time. (Seth)
• Remove all the chairs from the conference room. Things will be faster if it’s more comfortable back in your cubicle. (Seth)
• Calculate and publish cost of your meeting to the business.

ATTITUDE

• If people are going to be ‘whining donkeys’ in meetings, that’s fine, but they should be obliged to wear special ‘whining donkey ears’. Anyone with something negative to say has to don the ears. (Amanda, who insists even nudging the ears across a boardroom table will influence the quality of the meeting).

VALUE

• Don’t leave with anything unsaid. (Robert)
• Not adding value to a meeting? leave. You can always read the summary later. (Seth)

NEXT STEPS

• Discuss follow-ups and next actions. (Robert)
• Short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting. (Seth)

CONTIUOUS IMPROVEMENT

• Rate meetings & organisers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. (Seth)

So, I’m happy to advocate a combination of these for the meetings I attend, but what do you reckon? What’s missing from my list?

Title image credit: edited image of a photo by Clagnut.

Where does your money come from? If there’s one area where people have consistently innovated throughout history, the way we resource ourselves would have to be it.

When it comes to the creative types, the concept of quitting your day job and just pursuing your art is a great temptation. But if you’re not going to be a Billboard-topping musician or an Academy award-winning filmmaker, how many fans is it going to take for you to lead a comfortable life?

This is a question asked by many, and attempts to answer the question are available via a series of creative types who have been running the numbers… According to Kevin Kelly, it all comes down to the concept of a ‘true fan’. If you have 1000 people who will just about buy any book you write or any album you launch, you probably only need 1000 of these ‘true fans’, because in concentric circles away from your die-hard followers, there will be still others who will buy your work on occasion-

Kelly has concluded that if you’re a creator (artist/designer/author/videomaker etc), as long as you have 1000 people who love you enough to buy what you do, you’ll be well on your way to linking your income to your passion.

Of course, central to this thesis are the questions of ‘how much is enough?’, and ‘what does life with 1000 fans really entail?’.

Bringing some sharp focus on the downside of living a life reliant on this model, musician, Robert Rich offers this take on life as an artist with about 1000 fans:

“The sort of artist who survives at the long tail is the sort who would be happy doing nothing else, who willingly sacrifices security and comfort for the chance to communicate something meaningful, hoping to catch the attention of those few in the world who seek what they also find meaningful. It’s a somewhat solitary existence, a bit like a lighthouse keeper throwing a beam out into the darkness, in faith that this action might help someone unseen.”.

Scott Andrew doesn’t make a distinction between ‘true fans’ and ‘the rest’. He encourages artists to run the numbers on clearing $20 from each fan (a fairly modest number, really). How many fans would it take to quit your day job? He explores the mathematics of this in a rudimentary way -

Brian Austin Whitney [once] pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year — be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever — stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.

…Here’s an exercise: take your own salary, pre-taxes, and divide it by 20. If you were to quit your job right now and start living as a full-time musician, poet or author, that’s how many fans you’d need, spending $20 each year to support your art. So, if you’re making $30K yearly, you’d need 1500 paying fans each year to replace your salary. And it gets better if you’re willing to take a pay cut. In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans.

Of course, if you’re going to manage your relationships with your fans through the various traditional and new media options, you may well need a team of staff who can support you and your art, keep your fans in the loop, etc. so it’s probably best to do the numbers on how you’re going to pay them, too!

This kind of modelling is a great way of looking at breaking outside the mainstream, because it puts your audience – the people you want to reach – at the centre of your planning. After all, art that keeps the audience in mind is far more likely to touch, move and inspire – and surely that should be the whole point?

Thanks to Suzi Dafnis, who’s tiny tweet inspired this post (and its title).

Today I’m heading to NYC and DC for a two week trip, and I’m hoping you can help me make the most of it. Sure, I’ve got some work to do while I’m over there – meetings planned for my work with GetUp etc., but I want to squeeze the most out of my trip. I’m attempting to ‘crowd source’ part of my itinerary by asking my network to advise me on who I should with over the next fortnight.

In short, I’m going to America to have a few coffees with interesting people – and I’d like you to help make sure I fall in with the right crowd.

To give you a hint of what I’m looking for, I am passionate about innovation. To me, answering the question “Is there a better way?” is one of the most important tasks we have as humans. I’m dedicating this trip to meeting with innovators – people who dare to seek the better ways of doing things -  in the fields of media, communication, activism, business – actually, really, any field at all!

But maybe ‘innovators’ is the wrong word? Maybe change-agents, activists, philosophers, thought-leaders, speakers, futurists, rabble-rousers, culture jammers or thinkers would be better words?

If you know (or know of) someone based in NYC or DC that you admire/love/respect/think would be cool to meet, recommend them! I’d like you to please name them in the comments section below, forward this post to them, or email me – tim @ timlonghurst.com.

I’ve got a great feeling about this trip. Naturally, even if you’re nowhere near NYC/DC you’ll be included – I’ll save the best quotes and anecdotes from all of this fun for the blog – I promise! Thanks in advance for your help, Tim

You know, there’s a lot of mistrust out there in the world, and one Sydney based company, Naked Communications, is out there doing more than its fair share to fuel cynicism.

In fact, whenever I hear “Naked Communications”, in my mind’s eye I see a guy in a ponytail. Slick, confident, out of touch, total contempt for the audience, a liar.

While the best of the marketing world caught the Cluetrain long ago and many are scrambling to get their copy of Age of Conversation (two books that remind us to respect – and engage honestly – with our stakeholders), Naked Communications seem to come out every once in a while to show that they’re not afraid of damaging a client’s reputation – as long as there’s a few column inches in it.

I searched Flickr for pony tail man and got this guy – sensitive ponytail man, but he doesn’t quite look as out of touch as the Naked Comms guy in my head:

Background

It all started back when Coke’s advertising agencies conspired to cynically pretend to be activists to sell chemicals, groundwater, plastic and aluminium as a social movement (see Consumers: 1, Coke, Zero). Days after I got stuck into the “Zero Movement” campaign of Coke’s, a rep from Naked Communications phoned. She was keen to discuss why I’d taken issue with advertising people pretending to be activists, and invited me to speak to Naked – and perhaps Coke – for a fee.

I do make most of my income from talks and presentations, but I couldn’t reconcile the idea of publicly campaigning against unethical communication and then somehow getting caught up advising Naked. I didn’t do the talk.

The latest Naked Comms ponytail moment

I haven’t heard about Naked in a while, but today I read in the Herald that they’re up to their old “let’s blatantly lie our target audience and hope nothing bad happens” routine.

Today’s SMH sees journo Caroline Marcus uncover Naked’s latest less than honest marketing venture: what seemed to some to be a Sydney girl using YouTube to spark a relationship with a passing stranger turns out to be a Naked-hired actress.

The actress wasn’t very convincing, and lots of comments on the video suggested it was a stunt. In a rich moment of irony, the actress assured the Herald that her plight was real: “There seems to be a lot of cynical people” she protests. Of course there are, and in a small way, we’ve got campaigns like this one to thank.

Does Naked have a Code of Ethics at their office? Are they using it as a mouse mat?

Being socially destructive – eroding people’s confidence in each other – isn’t a simple by-product of this kind of dishonest marketing, it’s the main outcome. When you’re wrapping a fresh elastic around your ponytail, “Any publicity is good publicity” probably feels like a smart thing to say. But a brand that’s known for its values and the remarkable nature of its products is always going to beat a brand that’s famous for duping potential customers to get attention.

Naked are said to be part of Photon’s “Strategic Intelligence” business. Those are big words to live up to. Being dishonest isn’t all that strategic and being tricky isn’t the same as being intelligent.

If you work at Naked, it might be a good idea to put the two books I mentioned early in this post on your reading list – or, if you get it, give them to someone senior in the business.

Naked’s website actually boasts that “many of our clients cite our honesty as a reason they like working with us.” Based on their track record, I suspect this is a lie, or perhaps it’s just “a bold marketing move” from the Ponytail Posse?