The concept of freedom

For me, it’s striking how the anti-SOPA narrative enlists the concept of ‘freedom’ to its cause. It’s such a contentious word, freighted with multiple meanings.

In China, for example, ‘freedom’ might mean the freedom to own your own property, or to criticise the government.

In the US, the idea of ‘freedom’ is used by thinkers on both left and right to bolster the case for rights or obligations in every area from foreign policy and homeland security to birth control and digital IP. We can see its versatility, and its almost mystical resonance, in classic slogans such as ‘Freedom is not free’ and ‘Information wants to be free’.

Contrasting the ‘free world’ with post-Communist China highlights the fact that freedom is a matter of degree, or historical perspective. The slave’s idea of freedom is different from the millionaire’s.

However, they both share a strong desire to hang on to whatever freedoms they have. Once we have a freedom, of whatever sort, we hate to give it up. And the more emotion or morality we can instil into our concept of freedom, the powerful the case we can make for keeping it.

Digital freedom is recent

Younger readers may need reminding that the freedoms we take for granted on the internet have only existed for a few years. There was a time when social media did not exist, Wikipedia did not exist and ‘sharing’ consisted of downloading Coolio at 1.5k/s through a creaking modem while your partner moaned at you to get off the bloody phone.

The era of which I speak is not the 1750s, but 1995. Digital freedom is very new. We have very quickly got accustomed to it, and naturally now take it for granted. But I would argue that we are only just beginning to see its effects. And they’re not all positive.

Physical and mental freedom

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki contrasts two sides of freedom: physical and mental.

[Americans] have an idea of freedom which concentrates on physical freedom, on freedom of activity. This idea causes you some mental suffering and loss of freedom. You think that you want to limit your thinking, you think some of your thinking is unnecessary or painful or entangling; but you do not think you want to limit your physical activity.

More cryptically, he reflects:

If you seek for freedom, you cannot find it. Absolute freedom itself is necessary before you can acquire absolute freedom.

One interpretation of these words is that freedom to do something is not the same as the freedom to be something. Indeed, freedom to do things may hold us back from being what we want to be – or what we should be. This calls into the question the idea that more freedom is always a good thing.

Like children, we may need to have our freedom limited in order to grow up. More subtly, we may need to learn which freedoms are worth having, and which we don’t really need to use, or hang on to – even though we can.

Glutted and clotted

Again, it’s a question of context and degree. For the orphaned child solider in the Congo, more physical freedom is urgently required; the freedom to share screengrabs on Twitter is off the radar. But if you already have more than enough physical freedom, you might want to consider whether grabbing more freedoms will necessarily help you – or anyone else.

SOPA will put a stop to me profiting from Walt Disney's IP, and rightly so

In his book Retromania, Simon Reynolds characterises the modern-day relationship to culture as ‘glutted/clotted’. There is, he argues, simply too much stuff. Thanks to digital media, it’s too readily available and too lightly gained to have any value. Like the Sorceror’s Apprentice, we got what we wished for, but it’s overwhelming us: we’re drowning in content.

And, so far from being warmly appreciative of our new ‘freedoms’, we’re actually more like spoilt children – desultorily flitting from one web page to the next, always skitting over the surface, always going somewhere else. Social media amps everything up even further, adding unwelcome overtones of peer pressure, anxiety and compulsion (see How social media ruined our lives).

Less content, more appreciation

If we want to preserve our mental balance in the face of that onslaught, we need the same thing that a Zen practitioner needs: not more freedom, but more discipline.

For us, navigating the digital sea means choosing a destination and staying on course, or we’ll be tossed about by myriad undercurrents of distraction. For the modern office worker or student, perpetually beset by seductive digital baubles, concentration may be the key skill that separates the achievers from the wasters.

I absolutely don’t endorse the power of Big Media to dictate our private habits. Nor do I place my trust in government as the arbiter of cultural consumption. However, bad actions can sometimes have good consequences. If SOPA does happen, and if it does lead to a lot less content being out there than before, perhaps we’ll rediscover what is really valuable in our culture. And that doesn’t mean the shallow ‘freedom’ to ‘share’ content in ways that we’ve recently grown to like, but its deeper essence – what it really is, always has been and always will be. The medium is not the whole of the message.

But how do you talk to a film?

My first thought was to contact Bryan Singer, the director whose vision brought this taut thriller so vividly to the screen. Unfortunately, he wasn’t available. Apparently he’s a bit busy with Battlestar Galactica.

‘No, you're missing the point. Shut up. I don't want to hear anything you have to say.’

So I moved on to Christopher McQuarrie, whose snappy, streetwise script gave life to the film’s cast of cops and crims. Turns out he’s tied up too, overseeing editing on Mission: Impossible.

Feeling a bit dejected, I moved on to others who, I felt, might be able to share a little of the film’s spirit – stars Gabriel Byrne and Chazz Palminteri, and editor/composer John Ottman. None of them could spare the time.

Finally, I got through to the second-unit assistant caterer. Apparently, she’d placed jalapeños on the wrap-party canapés, among other tasks.

‘Yes? What is it?’ she began, rather testily. It dawned on me that I was speaking to a paid employee associated with the film, rather than the film itself. But since films can’t really talk, that was as close as I was going to get.

‘Well, I’m a big fan of The Usual Suspects,’ I began, hesitantly. ‘And I just wanted to… engage with it somehow. Join the conversation. You know, like on Facebook and that?’

There was a brief pause. ‘Films are one-way, one-to-many cultural communications,’ she said flatly. ‘Interaction adds nothing.’

That wasn’t very social. ‘But I’m the audience!’ I protested. ‘The community. Surely I’m part of the film, in some small way?’

‘Not really,’ she sniffed. ‘It’s true that a film lives in your mind, at least partly. But the more of yourself you pour in, the more you dilute the magic. It’s like scribbling in the margins of a book. You’re just talking to yourself, really. Isn’t that obvious?’

‘No, it isn’t,’ I said sulkily. ‘Can’t you make me a little online game, or let me upload a photo?’

She sighed audibly, as if explaining something to a child. ‘Firstly, your contribution would be embarrassingly gauche and unoriginal. That kind of goes without saying, since you’re a footling amateur with nothing at stake. But the real point is that your input is totally superfluous. A film is already complete in itself. You watch, and that’s it. The end.’

‘Is Kevin Spacey there?’ I asked plaintively, with a slight wobble in my voice.

‘No,’ she replied firmly. ‘And anyway, he’s not Keyser Soze. He’s not even Jack Vincennes. He’s just a feller. Creators are never as cool as their creations.’

I didn’t want to hear that, but I knew she was right. I’d known it ever since I found out Steve Jobs didn’t use deodorant for most of the 1970s.

‘Look, this isn’t really my job, talking to saddoes who want to interact with stuff,’ she said. ‘They just added it on to my job description. So, are we through?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said dejectedly. The line clicked and she was gone.

A couple of days later, I’d pretty much forgotten the whole sorry episode. But when I returned to my desk, something was nagging at me, particularly when I worked on anything to do with social media. I just kept thinking… is a film really any different from a brand?

• This fictional post was inspired by a pub conversation with @paulsaxton.

In my view, these sorts of tweak reflect social sites’ implicit bias towards increase and accumulation: more followers, more content, more activity. Arguably, just giving such prominence to follower/followed numbers encourages the ‘bigger is better’ mindset of quantification and comparison. In the world of Twitter, we’re always gaining, always growing, always getting more.

More ≠ better

However, from a user experience viewpoint, growth is not necessarily improvement. It can just as easily mean dilution, or fragmentation. Building a quality Twitter feed is as much about filtering and rejecting as it is about adding and exploring.

Nothing stays the same for long, particularly in digital. Personally, I want my Twitter feed to be more like a ‘current faves’ playlist than a monolithic, ever-growing collection of every CD I’ve ever heard.

When it added the lists feature, Twitter seemed to be conceding that many people’s feeds had become too large and unwieldy to be useful without some sort of filtering or categorisation. Yet the overall focus is still on ‘more’ rather than ‘better’ (let alone ‘less’).

Negative news

A notification of who someone else has followed is of limited interest really. All it indicates is that someone is trying out someone’s feed – so by definition, it’s far from being a recommendation based on full knowledge. In a way, ‘negative’ news – notifications of other people’s unfollows or blocks – would be far more useful (as would an ‘#unfollowfriday’ hashtag).

This sort of social ebb and flow is part of life. We meet people, join groups, hang out, and see how things go. Sometimes we stay together, and sometimes we drift apart. With research showing that most people have only five really good friends, it’s clear that we need to let go of the less-valuable relationships to devote our attention to the ones that matter. Severing a tie that helps neither party isn’t ‘negative’ – quite the opposite, in fact.

Argument amplification

Also, hearing about ‘negative’ events would appeal to our very human desire for gossip, disagreement and conflict – both observing others, and participating ourselves. Social sites are curiously prudish about the ‘dark’ side of their experiences, preferring to pretend that we are all happily following and retweeting each other with never a cross word spoken. But, again, argument and anger are part of our lives – so why shouldn’t they be a part of Twitter?

Now, some people would rightly argue that the dark side of social media has been all too apparent on occasion, with people jumping on hater bandwagons without thinking. (I documented one such occasion in this post.) But maybe people would think twice if sites had built-in mechanics to highlight their more ‘negative’ actions. And, at the end of the day, a website is just a medium – people write the Tweets.

Digital insulation

The ultimate step would be providing news of our own ‘dislikes’ – the people who’d decided to unfollow or block us. Some people in my feed seemed unsure about this, and I can see how it might be upsetting.

But the reality is that some people like us, others don’t. Some people stick with us, and others drift away. While there’s no need to obsess over our ex-friends (or outright enemies), it’s equally unhealthy to shut them out of our worldview completely, just because a digital platform allows it. In the real world, we’d probably still have to deal with them on some level – seeing them down the pub, or hearing people talk about them. Why should the digital world be so different? Is it really healthy to want sunshine all the time?

A balanced view of the world takes in decline as well as growth, dark as well as light and, yes, death as well as life. The social sites, and our experience of them, should reflect that.

In fact, the feed is a stream of gags about sandwich pastes, Chichester and what being an intern at a firm like Shippams might be like, all delivered in an engagingly naïve tone with adventurous spelling and punctuation. It’s surreal, inventive and very, very funny.

On one level, the feed is an in-joke, almost certainly created by a marketing insider. It brutally satirises the doomed ambitions of dull-as-ditchwater brands like Shippams to ‘engage’ via social media. (In reality, Shippams has wisely opted to have no social presence at all.)

Everything is there – the lame invitations to contribute user-generated content…

…the attempt to hijack trending topics…

…or establish self-serving hashtags…

…’helpful’ ideas for enjoying the product…

…and ‘interesting’ facts about the company and its ranges.

Naturally, @ShippamsPaste has been a runaway success. As I write, it has 2300 followers, having gained about 800 just yesterday (when I first saw it). It’s generated the sort of viral social publicity that brands would kill for – which is why Shippams would be well advised to let it run, rather than sending a crabby cease-and-desist letter. (Always assuming, of course, that it’s not an absolute marketing masterstroke from the brand itself.)

What’s interesting, though, is how the feed has whipped up such interest. Although it’s finding popularity through social channels, @ShippamsPaste is an interruptive phenomenon, not an engaging one. Like the Old Spice campaign, it uses the product and the brand as the starting point for some inventive, memorable humour that grabs our attention with both hands. But that’s got very little to do with ‘engagement’.

Normally, we’d never want to connect with a brand like Shippams, but we’re definitely up for some LOLs and WTFs at the expense of its products (or pompous social-media delusions). @ShippamsPaste offers the sort of content that makes the sharer look cool just for sharing it.

And, ironically, we’re far more likely to try the product as a result of reading @ShippamsPaste than if the firm’s marketers really had tried to engage us in some fun activities or content generation around the brand.

@ShippamsPaste rarely replies to its audience, but that one-sidedness is the whole point. As with other Twitter wits (@sixthformpoet, @jacques_aih, @OhLookBirdies), the feed preserves its superiority and mystique with one-way communication, rampant creativity and strictly rationed audience interaction – the exact opposite of what most social campaigns deliver, on all three counts.

Such refusal to compromise is hard to achieve once suits and client anxiety enter the frame – but our real-life experience of social media proves its worth. The social content that people genuinely respond to is much closer in spirit to a traditional interruptive TV campaign than it is to ‘engagement’ – however that hazy term is defined.

And that’s why this funny, fishy feed can tell us a lot about what people really want, what really interests them and what really makes them more likely to buy.

It wasted our time

I’m not saying social media delivers no benefit. Fun can be had, opinions shared, friendships formed, contacts made, business won. But most social media is like the first pint out of the barrel: 95% froth. For every useful or gratifying transaction, we have to wade through acres of footling irrelevance – other people’s, and our own.

There seems to be a conspiracy of silence about this in business circles. No one talks about how many hours they’ve sunk into social media, as if those thousands of Tweets and replies somehow didn’t take hours to think up and type.

I can only presume that the employers of some of my Twitter friends deployed a similar doublethink when they drafted their social media policy. Or maybe they’ve decided that legislating against social is like Canute ordering back the waves. Either way, I guess they’ve decided to disregard the many hours that their people spend on marginally relevant Tweeting in work time.

The truth is that social media is a formidable time-sink, delivering questionable returns on the hours we put in. Just ask yourself: does your social media time seem well spent? Do you feel you’re investing your time, or frittering it away?

It spoilt us

Social media brings the rolling, never-ending format of modern current-affairs TV to written media, presenting us with a stream of links to fascinating posts and pages from which we can pick and choose.

Sadly, as Thomas Paine noted, ‘that which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly’. When it comes to it, none of those writings are actually quite interesting enough to read to the end, or perhaps even click on in the first place.

When you look at our passive, lazy consumption of digital media, the term ‘feed’ seems completely apt. The more delicacies are laid on our table, the less grateful we become.

It humiliated us

Social media pulled a major bait-and-switch on us. First it kidded us that we were worthwhile. Then it rubbed our faces in our own inadequacy.

The very format of social sites, based around personal ‘updates’, made us feel that every detail of our lives was worth sharing. Social media gave us a new layer of self-consciousness: the restless search for something we can share.

Before long, we were casting about for things to post or Tweet that would make us look interesting or cool. But when we posted, we quickly saw that there was always someone cooler and more interesting out there.

I used to think I was quite funny. Now I’m getting ground down by the way Twitter has the perfect smartass comeback for absolutely every life situation, news story and cultural event. In the same way, dauntingly intelligent comments on news sites are eroding my ability to form opinions on current events. Forced onto a global stage, the ego withers like an old sprig of parsley.

It made us needy

Phil suddenly realised there was no wi-fi at the hotel. How would everyone find out what he thought about The Apprentice?

Humans are naturally social animals, and have always craved the affection, recognition and respect of peer groups. But social media straps a rocket to that instinct – and not in a good way. It allows us to build networks far larger than anything we could maintain in the real world, and cram far more interactions into our daily lives than would otherwise be physically possible.

This has two results. One is dilution of experience, as the ‘currency’ of interaction is debased. As Umair Haque argues in this brilliant article, social media is characterised by ‘thin relationships’ conducted via ‘low-quality connections – linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships’.

The other result is addiction. As our interactions are watered down, we need more of them to get the same hit. Social media use becomes a psychological crutch, just like using nicotine, alcohol or caffeine. Checking our @ replies, counting followers or retweets, checking Facebook updates – all easily become compulsions. And all the more so because they’re so easy and convenient to carry out – with a smartphone, the means of addiction is always to hand.

The acquisition and comparison of numbers and totals (followers, friends, RTs) adds an extra edge of digital materialism. Who’s got the most?

Most users would admit to some level of addiction to social media. Recently, Ofcom found that 60% of teenagers admit to being ‘highly addicted’ to their smartphones, primarily due to Facebook use. And we’re still talking about services that offer only the most basic means of interaction – posting messages, replying, sharing and tagging photos. Tomorrow’s social media will be to Twitter and Facebook as heroin is to cannabis.

It wound us up

Social media gets us all steamed up by exposing us to two kinds of opinions: those we like, and those we don’t.

Confirmation bias means we tend to build networks of people we agree with – single-issue Facebook pages being a prime example. Frequenting such networks validates and entrenches our opinions, as we see the same views expressed over and over again.

In some contexts, extreme views are inflamed as people incite each other to go one step further and say the unsayable. We saw this most recently with the response to the UK riots, as Twitter users whipped up each others’ desire to see brute force used against citizens, more to gain revenge rather than to restore order. At heart, the mass hysteria of the commenters wasn’t so different from that of the rioters – it just wasn’t expressed physically.

If we do find an opinion we disagree with, chances are we will have the opportunity to respond to it online, which draws many of us into that blind, righteous anger that characterises so many online comments and reactions. The more we read, the more extreme our views get – the phenomenon known as attitude polarisation, which forms the basis for Godwin’s law.

Discussion and disagreement are part of life. But the nature of social media – anonymous, hard to stand out – turns the volume up to 11 on everything. Instead of chatting with a few friends round a pub table, we’re deluged with an infinite digital cascade of industrial-strength opinion. Unable to digest it, we’re left with an unhealthy residue of acid emotions – coupled with a weird alienating distance from our digital interlocutors.

It shattered our attention

Zen teaches that concentrated mindfulness of the here and now is the way to enlightenment. Truth is not somewhere else, but can be found in the sights, sounds and people that are present, right now.

Social media delivers the exact opposite, diffusing and fragmenting our attention over a multitude of ‘somewhere elses’.

The next time you walk out on a beautiful sunny morning, check out how many people are scurrying along hunched over their phones. Or observe the couples having lunch, each with a phone on hand for that side order of interaction to complete their meal. What did we do before we had these crutches? Did we just walk when we were walking, and talk when we were talking, and think when we were thinking?

It hardly matters, because there’s no going back. We’re never alone – and even when we’re with someone, we’re always with someone else too.

The idea of getting a second helping of social is apt, because digital media has become rather like food for us. It’s not hard for us to get as much as we need, or find whatever we want. It’s about choosing what, when and how much is healthy for us to consume.

It’s not too late. Social media is still young. But pretty soon, we’re going to need to stop obsessing over what all the great things we could do, and start thinking about the better things we should.

‘Waste messages’ pretty much sums up the exercise. And leading copywriter Nick Asbury has already done a very good job of skewering the inanity of the survey, so I won’t recycle his ideas. But, as Nick notes, even if the survey was far more cogent and concise than it is, the principle behind it (crowdsourcing) would still deserve to be binned. I’d like to explore some of the reasons why.

Surveys are not reality

Consultations like Brent’s ask people to evaluate alternatives in a measured, rational way, in one concentrated session, and give explicit feedback. They invite them to become discerning, disinterested experts rather than impulsive, self-centred consumers. Respondents are required to verbalise and organise their thoughts into a form they’re prepared to share.

Unfortunately, that’s the exact opposite of the way people actually consume marketing messages. In daily life, we often apprehend creative content chaotically, hurriedly, semi-consciously and perhaps also reluctantly, over multiple occasions – watching TV while eating dinner, listening to radio in the car. If we do form an internal impression of the message, it’s likely to be vague, non-verbal and largely unconscious. Our reactions don’t have to be rational or consistent, because they stay inside our heads. And if the message isn’t directly relevant to our lives, we’ll probably just ignore it.

Moreover, crucially, we’re faced not with many versions of a single message against a clean white background, but with thousands of radically different messages, all screaming madly for our attention from a range of media.

So asking for views on potential creative may throw up some interesting opinions, but it can never reflect the response it would get in real life. A rat that can run a laboratory maze may not be ready for life in the sewer. If you want to know whether your ad is a winner, you need to put it in the race. For real.

People don’t know what they want

When you ask people what they want, they’ll give you an answer, even if they have to make something up. If I ask you whether you prefer cats or custard, you’ll think of an answer, even though you’ve never considered the question before. You can’t help it.

However, people’s response to abstract questions or ideas may not tally with their reaction to a fully executed cultural artefact. As Henry Ford said, ‘If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ People may neglect or reject they very thing they’d like best, if it’s outside their conception or just presented to them in the wrong way. Steve Jobs echoed Ford when he said, ‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’

The crowd can’t create

To prove this point, Russian researchers Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid asked the public in several countries what made a perfect picture – and what didn’t. They then commissioned artists to paint the ‘most wanted’ and ‘least wanted’ pictures based on people’s answers. You can read about the project here and see all the paintings here.

I’ve included Germany’s most wanted picture on the right. Like the others, it’s a ludicrous, incoherent mashup of visual clichés that few people would really enjoy. (By contrast, many of the ‘least wanted’ paintings are convincing abstracts that I’d be happy to hang in my lounge.)

Komar and Melamid’s project was a joke with a serious point: you can’t make art out of opinions. People’s responses to a cultural artefact are legitimate, but that doesn’t mean you can use them to guide the creative process; to do so is to put the cart before the horse. The crowd may know what it likes in great detail, and with great certainty, but it still can’t create it.

The answer may lie outside the scope

Look at the way Brent’s survey endlessly shuffles a narrow selection of treatments featuring the words ‘recycle’ and ‘more’, certain shades of yellow, blue and green, a tasteful sans-serif font and lower case type.

What if big red letters in Comic Sans, alongside a cartoon dustbin, would actually be far more effective than any of Brent’s options? The survey as it stands will never find that out, because it very clearly rules particular options in and out.

Obviously, my treatment probably isn’t the right one. But the perfect idea is out there. A properly briefed and empowered creative could go out and find it – or at least get a bit nearer to it. More and/or better creative thinking would have been a far better investment than the survey.

While Brent claim to be seeking opinion, they’re actually imposing far more ideas than they’re inviting. Like everyone who conducts ‘listening exercises’, they’re torn between intellectual insecurity and a need for control.

You only hear what you want to hear

Any agencies or creatives who have presented ‘options’ to a client will know all about the way the consultation process is closed down and stage-managed. While the options are ostensibly equal, there is always one that the creative prefers. Often, one or two will be complete no-hopers, in there to make up the numbers. Sometimes, there’ll be a totally off-the-wall option, inexorably destined to be earnestly discussed but ultimately rejected.

The whole exercise is designed to give the client an impression of due process, and stress their own personal importance and involvement, while gently shepherding them towards a predetermined outcome. (Sometimes I wonder if the clients actually know this, deep down, but play along anyway for the flattery.)

The point is that it’s impossible to avoid bringing your own agenda to the consultation, even if unconsciously. The options on the table, the phrasing of the questions, the format of the survey – it may look balanced and scientific on the surface, but it can’t help but reflect your own idea of what’s right.

You end up imposing your own ideas

Thanks to social media and the web, the ritual of presenting options to the client has mutated into a monstrous and dangerous new form: completely crowdsourced creative.

Instead of badgering their creative agency into producing one good design and four pointless alternatives, the client can just go straight to 99 designs and get 500 rubbish designs to choose from – at a fraction of the cost.

Since the designers involved are paid little or nothing, their submissions are severely compromised in terms of commitment, time and ideas. So instead of buying one great idea, the client gets lots of weak ones through which they can enact their own taste and control-freakery. Crowdsourcing design means buying lots of rubbish little dogs and barking rubbishly yourself as well.

The mindset behind all this is puzzling. I guess we could sum it up something like this: ‘I know I can’t do this myself, so I need someone more creative to do it. And although I trust them to produce the ideas, I don’t trust them to choose the best one – I’ve got to do that. And even though I wouldn’t have any idea how to proceed when faced with a blank page, I’ll know the right answer when I see it.’

You can’t judge quality as well as you think

‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ Will you though, really?

Buy the Arden edition of Macbeth and read the footnotes. You’ll see scholars who spent their lives reading Shakespeare arguing over what he meant to write, in cases where the original text is unclear. Although we know that a line of Shakespeare is genius the second we read it, we probably couldn’t pick it out in a beauty parade of similar lines.

The classic case in point is the saga of the Gap logo. Having (wrongly) caved in to social-media pressure over its new logo, Gap opted for crowdsourcing – before descending into uncertainty, bottling the whole thing and keeping their original. It was excruciating to see a company that had been brought to its knees by feedback going back for more, looking for yet more content when what they needed was clarity.

The lesson is clear: choice brings uncertainty. You need to reduce options, not proliferate them – throw away the bad ideas and get to the good. Anyone can casually throw out another possibility, particularly when they’ve got nothing to lose. Genuine creatives pick one winner and back it all the way. For better or worse, they commit themselves in a way that survey respondents or crowdsource participants just don’t. And only commitment gets results.

The best way to get great ideas

Rejecting second-rate alternatives is a job for creatives. They do it so the client doesn’t have to. They do it as part of their method, before they show anything. They do it internally, before they write a word or draw a line. They probably do it unconsciously, before they even start thinking about the job. And they do it because they’re the experts – or, at the very least, more expert than the client is.

All creative work is based on the idea that there is a single best solution to a communication problem. For that product and that client, in that medium, in that culture, at that point in history, there is an answer that is perfect. That’s what we aim for when we brainstorm, when we produce and filter alternatives, when we revise and revisit our work, when we reject ideas and start again.

Looking at the great work, such as the famous Economist posters, we feel that it’s close to perfection. The concept is so elegant, so well executed, that we feel we’re looking directly at an idea, rather than the expression of an idea. The creative, the execution and the client have all come together in perfect harmony. And that’s where we’d all like to be.

Of course, we might not get there. There might not be enough time, or enough money. We might not be focused enough, committed enough or indeed creative enough. The client might not agree with us. But whatever the constraints on our work, we’ll arrive at a solution that’s the best we can do in the circumstances. It should be presented without alternatives and published without consultation. To do otherwise is weak, misguided and simply not effective.

Believe in creatives and trust them to create.

Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
REM, lyrics to ‘Losing my Religion’

I recently wrote a guest post for Econsultancy entitled ‘Are we in a social media bubble?’, which suggested that social media was overvalued, both by investors and by marketers.

It was interesting to see the reaction. As you’d expect at Econsultancy, many people didn’t agree with me – but a good number did.

Some commenters described the article as ‘jumbled’ and ‘full of holes’, which was hardly surprising, since it was written on a difficult subject, at the very limit of my knowledge.

Others, including some professional social media marketers, offered balanced, reasonable replies. That was gracious of them, since on one level my post was a mischievous trollbomb designed to get a reaction – albeit one that I put a lot of effort into.

What I didn’t get, however, was a flurry of links to authoritative case studies demonstrating killer ROI or a deluge of sales from social media. When I was researching, I was worried that I was missing something – after all, could the social media gospel really be built on such a thin foundation of proof? Well, turns out it can.

The map is not the territory

Recently, I’ve been reading How to do better creative work by Steve Harrison, a brilliant former copywriter and creative director who worked with Drayton Bird and David Ogilvy. He ascribes the start of digital/social hype to the concept of permission marketing, popularised by Seth Godin.

Permission marketing hinges on the idea that customers want transaction, control and interactivity in their buying experiences – that they want a ‘conversation’ with brands. This seductive, powerful idea has become the central belief of digital marketers, particularly those working in social media. ‘Everything has changed’ is an oft-heard refrain – indeed, it’s being wheeled out all over again in regard to mobile.

However, permission marketing is just that: an idea rather than an observable real-world phenomenon. It’s a theory, or perhaps a rationalisation, that reconciles marketers’ existing goals with emergent consumer behaviour. It’s something we believe in because we want it to be true.

Intellectual glue

Rather than catering to an express desire to interact with brands, social media marketing tries to take people’s love of interaction and redirect it for commercial ends. The concepts of permission, interaction and engagement provide the intellectual ‘glue’ that bind marketing and social media together.

Dig around, and you’ll find remarkably little concrete proof that social media drives sales. Engagement, yes; cash money, no. As I noted in my Econsultancy post, a lot of the well-worn examples, like Dell, don’t look so pretty when you get up close. Try to cut through the brand-waffle to something concrete, and you’ll often find there’s nothing there. Hence the lack of evidential challenge to my post.

Hence, also, the weak pro-social media argument that ‘your customers are there, so you need to be there too’. Not ‘your customers are buying products like yours through social media, right now’. As yet, the most convincing argument we have is that brands have got to find a way to invade the social space somehow. But just because they want to doesn’t mean they can.

Of course, it may be that it takes time for social-media benefit to filter through from brand equity to sales. But time’s getting on. Where is Godot?

Gimme some truth

In my Econsultancy post, I drew an analogy between the subprime bubble and the social media boom.

Like all analogies, it illuminated some parts of the issue while obscuring others. Metaphors must be used with care, or you end up in a world of abstraction, seeing parallels that aren’t there.

What is certain about social media? Opinions are subjective and self-serving. Statistics are selective. But our own experience is always real, if only to ourselves.

So here are some of my own experiences of social media and the wider digital realm.

• I am 39 years old, with a young child and a reasonable disposable income but very little spare time. That puts me squarely in the target market for a host of brands.
• There are a handful of brands I really like – Apple, North Face, PlayStation. I have zero interest in engaging or interacting with them. I have desultorily friended them on Facebook, where I invariably skip over their updates. Life is too short.
• I have played one branded online game in my life (created by O2). I won some SMS credits that I had 24 hours to use. I would never spend time on any such online promotion again, and if one of my friends suggested I did do, I would feel embarrassed for them.
• I follow around 2000 people on Twitter. None are brands. I do not follow back anyone, business or individual, with a commercial or self-promotional message in their last three tweets. I have clicked on a sponsored trending topic once, and never will again.
• Twitter has played a part, but not been instrumental, in gaining me two or three pieces of work from new contacts. In each case, I think it was this blog, plus my experience, that sealed the deal, rather than my social presence. (For me, the major commercial benefit of Twitter has been in publicising blog posts, which encourages links, which improves SEO, which drives traffic, which generates leads.)
• At the time of writing, I have posted 8681 tweets. At one minute per tweet, that’s 18 eight-hour days spent on Twitter (and that discounts reading time). Since I tweet in work time, that represents many thousands of pounds in opportunity cost ‘spent’ on Twitter. The work gained from Twitter doesn’t outweigh that cost – nowhere near.

I’m absolutely not saying that my experiences are representative. I’m just saying they’re real. And, in fact, I suspect they’re more representative than a lot of social media pros would like to admit.

Why am I saying all this? To make the point that I can’t square my own experience with the party line on social media. Increasingly, I find it hard to espouse a vision of social media where people ‘out there’ are supposed to act in ways that I simply can’t identify with. It’s hard to give clients advice that I feel, from my own experience, just isn’t right.

Are you keeping the faith?

I wrote this list post about self-promotional list posts for self-promotion

List posts are an ideal way to gain exposure and credibility. Here are my top five tips for writing self-promotional list posts that get results.

1. List posts are a great way for anyone, working in any area, to position their expertise as essential for the widest range of clients. So your first point should assert the universal applicability of your niche.
2. Continue by stating something banal and self-evident as though it’s a revelation. Point 2 should develop the theme established in Point 1, while preparing the ground for Point 3.
3. Your third point is probably the right time to introduce yourself as the solution to the problem you’ve created and link back to your site. For professional help with segueing seamlessly into the link, contact a copywriter.
4. Use Point 4 to discourage readers who think they could do it themselves by dropping some scary-sounding jargon. You can resist this disintermediation by alluding to interactive and iterative conversation architecture in the social space through the strategic use of brand advocates and beaconicity metrics.
5. The well has often run dry by the time you reach Point 5. So just recap what you’ve already said: use list posts to emphasise how essential your area is, position your experience as unique and do your best to scare the reader into action.

The Chinese word bin, meaning 'guest'

Choosing a blog for your guest post

Initiatives such as Be My Guest provide an ideal platform for bloggers to approach each other. But you can also find suitable venues independently – just find a blog you like and submit a polite email to its owner, asking if you can guest on their blog.

The blog you choose needs to be relevant to your own site, and the more directly relevant the better. If you sell computer equipment, you won’t get much benefit from blogging at an angling site. The audience won’t be interested in your content, and the backlink (see below) will give you very little SEO benefit.

The ideal host blog is probably at a competitor site, since the domain is likely to be relevant to the same keywords as yours and their readership is likely to be similar to yours. But getting a guest slot with a competitor can be difficult if you don’t already know them somehow, for obvious reasons. (Build up a relationship through social media first, then ask.) So you might find it easier to target related sites that aren’t direct competitors, but still have busy and popular blogs. Look up and down the ‘food chain’, and side to side for linked niches. For example, a graphic designer could post at the blog of a web developer; a pie-maker could guest for an outlet that stocks their wares.

The approach

When you make your guest posting approach, it’s important to bear in mind the underlying transaction of guest blogging, which isn’t what it might seem at first glance.

On one level, offering to guest on someone’s blog is doing them a favour. You’re offering them free content that they would otherwise have to create themselves. You may also be offering fact, opinion or style that is different from the host’s, bringing welcome variety to their blog. If you have a high profile, or can promote your post in lots of channels, your guest post might attract more traffic than your host normally gets.

However, it’s not all one-way traffic. On another level, guesting on someone’s blog is actually an opportunity to promote yourself, enhance your profile and link back to your site. If you are a smaller fish than your host – that is, the blog you’re guesting on is very high-profile (or has a higher average PageRank than your site), then it’s actually the host who is doing you a favour by allowing you to blog.

So it’s a good idea suggest a mutual guest posting arrangement, and give your host as much flexibility as you can in terms of what you’re going to blog about, how much you’ll write and so on.

The get-out

To avoid embarrassment, it’s polite to give your host the opportunity to decline your offer of a guest post if they want to – not implicitly, but by saying so out loud. They might not want your style of writing or subject area on their blog, or they might not want anyone else guesting on their blog. At the end of the day, it’s their blog.

By the same token, it adds reassurance if you give them ‘final cut’ – the option to amend your guest post, ask for it to be amended or just reject it, with no hard feelings. Even with hundreds of solid gold posts on your own blog, your host can’t be sure what you’re going to give them.

To add weight to your initial approach, you might want to send your proposed guest post (or an example of one) along at the same time – with the option to request a replacement, or course.

Guest posting and SEO

The significance of guest posting for SEO can hardly be overstated. Most hosts will let you include a link back to your site in your guest post, perhaps in the brief author biography that accompanies your post. You can control the anchor text of that link, which is crucial. Your post title will almost certainly form all or part of the URL’s HTML page title, which is also key for SEO. And finally, you control the content of the page, since you’re writing it.

All that adds up to a brilliant way to gain a keyword-text backlink from a keyword-relevant and keyword-dense page, perhaps on a keyword-relevant domain such as a competitor’s site. In other words, the holy grail of SEO. Blogs are seriously rated by search engines because they are human-edited, content-rich, niche-specific online resources where links carry a lot of authority.

Also, blog posts get comments. Commenters do your SEO work for you, extending the content of your guest post along relevant lines and bigging up the popularity of the guest post in Google’s eyes – which, in turn, boosts the value of the backlink it contains.

Blogs that are integrated with social media through plugins like ShareThis and TweetMeme carry their own ready-made gauge of relevance and authority – which Google almost certainly uses to get another handle on how strong the page content is. If your guest post is popular in social media, that increases the link juice passed to your site by the backlink in your guest post.

Finally, your guest post might also attract backlinks itself, which also increases the value of the backlink it contains to your site – the phenomenon known as ‘link boosting’ in SEO circles. You could even build links to your guest post yourself, but keep it strictly white hat or you’ll nobble your host’s rankings – the blogging equivalent of leaving stains on the guest towel, and counterproductive for you too.

To sum up, guest blogging offers killer backlinks for modest effort, which most SEOs are desperate for. In fact, it’s practically the only way to gain such powerful links through your own proactive efforts – rather than being passively granted them, as when someone lists you in their blogroll.

The key points for SEOing your guest posts are:

• Include keywords in the title. You can’t control the HTML page title of your guest post, but it’s almost certain to mirror or contain the title of the post. Put keywords near the start if you can (e.g. ‘Snowboarding essentials’ rather than ‘The essentials of snowboarding’).
• Include keywords two or three times in the opening paragraph, and at least once in each subsequent paragraph – if you can. Don’t insult your host by trying to stick ridiculous keyword spam on their blog. They’d be entirely justified in rejecting it.
• Include synonyms and variations of your keywords too. Too much repetition looks unnatural.
• Use relevant keywords (rather than the name of your site) in the backlink to your site, if you can. Author bios often provide a good opportunity. For example: ‘Tom Albrighton is a copywriter…’
• Don’t push it with the backlinks. One link towards the end of the guest post is acceptable. Linking off the first paragraph looks spammy; more than one link looks greedy.

What about the SEO implications of reciprocal guest posting? If you’re getting a backlink from your host, aren’t they also getting one from you? Well, yes they are, but this isn’t such a big problem. Reciprocal links between relevant sites won’t harm your standing in Google; it’s only the spammy reciprocals that get you into trouble.

Exchanging guest posts with a direct competitor can often be beneficial: you’ll both get an SEO boost relative to the competition, and just because your rival has gained doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve lost out. If they are at #15 in Google, you’re at #11 and you each rise three spots as a result of the reciprocal link, you’ll be on page one and they’ll be a step nearer to it.

If you’re worried, you could exchange guest posts with a similar player who speaks the same language but is too far away in geographical terms to compete with you.

Content of guest posts

So far, I’ve taken it for granted that your guest post will be good enough to be accepted, read and commented. But to actually achieve that, you’ll need to create some first-rate content.

You might approach guest blogging with the idea of palming off some second-rate or hastily produced content on your host. Forget it. While you can get away with ‘potboiler’ posts at your own blog – brief comments on news stories, whimsical reflections, half-formed analyses, reposting YouTube videos – it’s really not on to offer this kind of thing for publication elsewhere. Instead, you should work hard to write the best post you can for the host blog: something at least as good as the content you post yourself.

Partly, this is out of courtesy to your host, but it’s also based in enlightened self-interest. Remember, you want them to create some quality content for you in return, and/or invite you back to guest post again. But also, as I’ve explained, the SEO power of your guest post is directly related to its quality, which governs the inbound links and social-media votes it will attract.

With your own blog, you can hit and miss – blogging away weekly or even daily until you discover by trial and error what your audience will take a shine to. With guest posts, however, you’ve got just one opportunity to post some killer content at a new domain that will attract links, comments and social-media mentions. So give yourself the best chance of success.

It can feel a bit sad to ‘give away’ content you’re particularly proud of. If so, remind yourself that your premium content will probably bring you more benefit at someone else’s blog than it would at your own. That should help you get over the heartache…

My guest posts

• Is copywriting evil? for Ben Locker
• Copywriting for conversions for MediaVision
• If you don’t know, say so for JargonWriter
• Five things your home page can do without for Emily Cagle
• Take your time for The Right Writer
• The top five freelance fears, and how to face them for Diary of a Mad Freelancer
• When clients attack for Freelance Folder
• Google’s Farmer update and the squeezed middle for Econsultancy

A droll little sentiment perhaps, and no less satirical for being true. It wasn’t even that original, having much in common with an earlier tweet by Kevin Mills (@bravenewmalden). My concern for Egypt’s future, though certainly sincere, sadly did not originate before the blanket news coverage of the recent protests. And, like many others, I’d have been hard-pressed to name the country’s president a month ago. (I probably could have managed its capital city.)

Having got that off my chest, I went off to have my lunch. Little did I suspect that, by the time I returned, that little Tweet would prove so resonant as to gather around 50 retweets. One of them was from UK comedian Sue Perkins (@sueperkins), who has 75,000 followers, which seems to have put the whole thing into overdrive:

A few people had actually commented on the tweet, but there were so many more messages quoting it that I could hardly find them. I realised I was getting an insight into how the @ mentions of people like Stephen Fry and Kanye West must look, all the time.

I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing. Then I got a message from TrendsUK, informing me that @tomcopy was now trending in the United Kingdom:

Sure enough, when I clicked through to the site, there I was, sitting proudly atop the trends list – a ‘breaking’ trend, no less:

At this point, a dizzy sense of unreality descended. Just as the revolutionary spirit had swept through the streets of Cairo, so my dryly ironic comment on it was taking the UK by storm. Soon, everyone would know my name. I’d be recognised on the street – indeed, leaving the house might well be impossible, with so many adoring fans pressed desperately against the windows. A millionaire several times over, I’d be looked up to in awe as a cultural arbiter of formidable prescience and power. Women would want me; men would want to be me.

In fact, all that was happening was that a few people were pressing a button on a computer screen because they liked a gag. But it still felt weird that this little tweet had taken on an independent life of its own, pinging around the world from one personal network to another. Was it part of me, or had it broken free somehow?

I expect you’re wondering what a Twitter celebrity does with his Saturdays. Well, the answer is that he goes into the garden to clear up some fox poo and bounce on a trampoline with his daughter. Yes, incredible as it seems, my family’s ignorance of Twitter meant I could sustain this double life for the whole afternoon. And besides, I try to stay grounded. The street is what made me who I am, and I try to stay in touch with it; it gives me power.

When I came back in, I found that the Tweet was still gathering retweets (including one from US comedian Tom Green, @tomgreenlive), and had passed the 100 mark, becoming  a Top Tweet on a search for ‘Mubarak’:

But by 5pm, the mentions seemed to be drying up. A solitary tear crept down my cheek, then fell, forgotten, like yesterday’s trending topics. But I’ll always treasure the memory of my brief season in the sun. And one day, some day, I’ll be back…