Jed Hallam

Need a Thursday boost? You need The Cult.

Make my back burn,
And those heads that turn,
Make my back, make my back burn.

The sparkle in your eyes,
Keeps me alive,
And the sparkle in your eyes,
Keeps me alive, keeps me alive.

The world,
And the world turns around,
The world and the world, yeah,
The world drags me down.

Oh, the heads that turn,
Make my back burn,
And those heads that turn,
Make my back, make my back burn, yeah,
Yeah-hey…

The fire in your eyes,
Keeps me alive,
And the fire in your eyes,
Keeps me alive.

I’m sure in her you’ll find,
The sanctuary,
I’m sure in her you’ll find,
The sanctuary.

And the world,
The world turns around,
And the world and the world,
The world drags me down,
And the world and the world and the world,
The world turns around,
And the world and the world and the world and the world,
The world drags me down.

Ah…

Hey-yeah…

And the world,
And the world turns around,
And the world and the world,
Yeah, the world drags me down,
And the world,
Yeah, the world turns around,
And the world and the world,
The world drags me down.

Sanctuary.
Sanctuary.
Sanctuary.
Sanctuary.

(Track from SoundCloud, The Cult – She Sells Sanctuary by joelneto.)

As many of you will have heard yesterday, Mark Hanson, the deputy managing director of Wolfstar Consultancy, passed away on Wednesday. Mark had been suffering from depression for quite some time and took his own life (our official statement is here).

I’ve worked with Mark for more than eighteen months now and since I first met him he’s been an inspiration. I’ve worked with some incredibly talented and generous people but none who took as much time as Mark did to really help and develop people. Within a few weeks of joining Wolfstar, Mark had spotted that I wasn’t really enjoying the traditional side of public relations, but that I had a massive passion for thinking up new things. At this point, even I didn’t know that about myself. But that was Mark, ten steps ahead of everyone else. Mark encouraged me to pursue some of my geeky ideas and convinced Wolfstar that there was huge value in my seemingly random scribbles. Mark pretty much singlehandedly crafted my career path and helped me to find out what I enjoyed most about communications and business.

One of the things that stood out most for me about Mark was that he always asked questions, I swear his favourite phrase was ‘so what?’. He challenged me every day, to the point where I would go home feeling pretty pissed off at him, shouting profanities about him in the car. But I always knew that every comment, every piece of praise and every criticism was carefully selected to make me better. To help me improve. He would ask me to use geeky technology to create something that had never been done, to challenge me, to see what we could do and what we could produce to help clients. (He would’ve had a field day laughing at me today struggling to create an RSS feed from a Twitter search so that I could collate every condolence.)

A few things have have stood out today; 1) Mark touched so many lives, more than anyone could ever have thought (and he should’ve done a lot more name-dropping), and 2) there is still too much stigma that surrounds depression and mental health.

Depression is a crippling illness. It isn’t the same as a broken leg, or a heart problem. The brain is what controls our everything and lets us see what we see. If the brain is suffering then everything is suffering. Mark was a very private man, he was by no means anti-social, but as Paul Staines so elegantly put it, ‘he never seemed to empty his glass’. He’d ask you questions for hours and listen intently, taking every single detail in, but would brush off any question directed at him. I had at most two moments with Mark where he gave away personal details. Two. In eighteen months. But I always thought that he was just trying to remain incredibly professional. We need to continue to talk about depression and mental illness, campaigns such as the WhatStigma campaign are great, especially if they make people talk about this illness more openly (you can find more information about the Time to Change campaign here).

In a lot of ways, I think that Mark has finally found relief from his pain and suffering. Anyone that knows Mark will know that he didn’t really suffer from mood spikes, he was always very controlled and very precise. On a level, constantly. Which, I suppose, is why his death has come as such a surprise to everyone.

One of the positives about today has been the huge reaction, which was so tremendous that Mark’s name trended for almost all of yesterday, something that (as Derek pointed out) he would’ve given his wry smile at and probably made him said ‘Haaannssson’ (anyone that’s met Mark will know what I mean).

So as Mark would say, ‘let’s cut the bullshit’.

You leave hundreds of devastated people behind, but I hope you’ve found peace mate.

I wish Clare, Mark’s family and anyone who came into contact with Mark my sincerest condolences. Mark was an incredible gentleman, an inspiration and a mentor and he will forever be sorely missed.

Three posts in two days? Don’t get used to it…

I’ve just seen this Renault ad. It’s. Incredible.

Influence is a tricky concept. It’s at once both an art and a science and it’s as elusive as it is complicated. With the rise of social media making data and connections much more visible, it’s inevitable that marketers are now asking ‘how do we influence the influencers?’.

However, it seems to easy for people to tie themselves up in fluffy methodologies like ‘we need to engage people’ and ‘be really nice and everything will work’. Well being nice and talking is fine (in fact, I’d whole-heartedly recommend it) but it won’t influence the influencers.

So we invest time in learning new maths and borrowing methodologies from the sciences. Which is where Gordon piqued my interest over at FHBeta last Friday.

In Gordon’s post, he points to a few highly regarded articles and papers that discuss the diffusion of ideas/content.

In ‘Exhibit A’, Gordon points to a New York Times article that highlights that network structure is more important in determining spread of ideas that the number of friends someone has. I absolutely agree with this. Using theories developed back in the 50s and 60s to understand the spread of viruses we can begin to understand how information moves (but that’s as far as I’ll take this explanation for now, as it’s a much bigger post). It’s always important to remember that influence and exposure are two different, but equally important things. If you’re exposed to something on a frequent basis it’s going to have more impact than being exposed to it once by someone influential. Human beings are inherently forgetful – we need to be reminded of everything. Barack Obama is influential, but we might forget that he uses an iPod Nano – but we’re constantly reminded by the media – influence and exposure are two important parts of spreading messages. Again, a bigger post for another day.

In ‘Exhibit B’ Gordon points to a Stanford paper that attempted to unpick the mechanics of something ‘going viral’ on Facebook. The upshot of the (pretty technical) paper is that information tends to have a pretty shallow distribution chain so it’s important to reach a shed load of people. Which, again, I kind of agree with.

However (here comes the caveat).

What most research doesn’t look into is the ability to borrow theories from multiple disciplines and combine them to create different approaches to network analysis. The Stanford statisticians talk about global cascades (very interesting stuff, honest) which is basically a formula for figuring out how many people it takes for an idea of piece of information to get passed from one person to another (a basic formula for ‘the viral’ effect). But the research stops at this and I know that there are more theories that can be strung into this that would help build a better and more reliable model for understanding influence. Sadly, you’d have to pay for that though .

Influence has always been about more than numbers, but for the purpose of our day jobs, it’s important to build a formula that takes into account a wide variety of metrics and then measure everyone by the same ruler – it won’t give us a solid understanding of influence, but it will give us something more useful – contextual influence – which, after all, is all we’re looking for. A way to filter a large group of individuals into a prioritised list so that we can minimise our effort, maximise the output and make our client more money.

Cynical? Yes. True? Yes.

This blog post was initially written in November, 2010, and was subsequently mothballed because I thought it’d look ridiculously link-baity. It still does, however after the Demand Media IPO fiasco, a conversation with Stephen the other night and today’s J.C. Penney controversy, I feel much braver. So here goes, Google hates SEO.

Hot on the back of the announcement (sic) that Google has more than 10,000 data points for its SERP, I’ve made a decision. A bold decision.

Google hates SEO.

Contrary to my illustrious past of link bait titles (see #wolfstargate, social media monitoring is pointless etc) this is not a link bait post for the sake of link bait. It’s serious.

Let me take you back… Right back to 1998. Larry and Sergey, sat, joking around, talking about organising the web. Showing you what you want to see. Connecting you, the searcher, to the content that you’re looking for, by others, the publishers. Connecting the user to the content.

Now fast forward more than twelve years and millions of dollars of investment and now there’s a team of more than 22,000 people working on more than 100 products/services and generating more than $23billion a year. Connecting people to content. Making information accessible. Producing complicated (MIT complicated, not Nottingham Trent complicated) algorithms that connect a user to content. The right content.

Then, along came the search engine optimisers and ruined the party.

(For the uninitiated, search engine optimisation is (and don’t take my word, listen to Wikipedia) “the process of improving ranking in search engine results”.)

The job of your SEO agency is to drive your content/website up search engine ranking pages (SERPs) and you’ll pay the agency more the higher that they drive your content/website up the SERPs. Simple. Except Google already spends millions of dollars ensuring that the right content is displayed on those pages. Ensuring that people are connected to content. So what an SEO agency is doing is ‘gaming’ Google.

Google, the organisation that hires MIT PhD’s and Stanford computer science geeks.

And SEO agencies that are constantly playing catch up, guessing at any one of the 10,000 ranking metrics that Google uses to compile SERPs. Guessing.

How many SEO geeks does it take to work an MIT algorithm? It sounds like the worst type of geeky joke, but currently, hundreds of thousands of SEO ‘specialists’ are selling their wares claiming to give you ‘top three results’. Oh yeah, how? Maybe for a day or two, but in the long term? HOW?

So now let’s imagine this slightly differently. You’re Larry or Sergey and you’re investing a lot of money into complex algorithms to help connect people to content and every day someone is trying to game your product to display their content higher than your PhD’s think it should be.

Annoying, huh?

Now you see why Google hates SEO.