A little more conversation

November 28th, 2011 Comment 0

This autumn, I have been involved with something that is rather brilliant. ( I am allowed to say this without it being bragging, actually, since said brilliance is more other people’s than mine.) My company, business magazine Veckans Affärer, has joined forces with Resumé, the largest Swedish communication industry mag, and B2B agency Hilanders, to start a conversation. A conversation about where the industries that define Sweden (hard and heavy stuff like steel and paper) are heading, and what actually drives their growth in the 21th century.

This discussion, between the communication industry, top management in B2B coorporations, and the odd publicist, has been played out on – yes, yes, yes – all our platforms, of which the site b2bconversations.se might be the quickest one to access. (Or, if you’re one of those Facebook-is-the-new-Internet kind of people, well, here then.) It is in Swedish, so it’s not for everybody, but for Swedes, there is some quite interesting stuff in there.

And on the 7th December, the next step on this journey will be the B2B Conversations seminar, at the lovely Berns Salonger in central Stockholm. Big name speakers, a panel with a couple of communication people with very good resumés who will occasionally ring a funny bell of some sort (Yes, buying a funny bell is my responsibility. I haven’t yet gotten around to getting one, but whatever I choose, it will be spectacular.), oh yes, and wine. Stockholmers, I hope to see you there on the 7th. Do get in touch for discounted tickets, I’m sure I can get you some, but you have to act quickly – we close registration this week.

The new issue of Railway Modeller and one hour meeting room hire, please

November 12th, 2011 Comment 0

This probably exists in all other developed countries than mine, so it’s probably old-hat to everybody else – but I’d still like to point out that I find this pop-in-at-WHSmith-and-grab-an-hour-of-office space thing quite clever.

A slice of life

October 12th, 2011 Comment 0

The other day, I took a walk around the neighbourhood in the rain – as usual, feigning sportiness by wearing Fabrics That Breathe, but in reality walking too slowly for the activity to resemble any kind of excercise. Anyway. A man jogged past me – early thirties, quite attractive, making good use of Fabrics That Breathe.

Coming around a corner, I saw him again, now in an intense discussion with another, similarly clad, youngish man leaning on his bicycle. Walking past them, I saw that The Jogger had produced an A4 leaflet (from where?) from a kitchen design firm and was now vividly describing his dream of minimalist cabinetry or elegantly built-in appliances to his friend The Cyclist. In the rain. A scene which had a certain poetry to it, two men in functional, brightly coloured materials producing aesthetic visions on a wet pavement. After years of coquettish self-hatred in the middle class over our love of sleek interiors, why not get over it and give in to modern life’s strange beauty?

‘Interact with content from around the globe’

September 8th, 2011 Comment 0

‘Welcome to the new WillSmith.com. In the coming months we’ll be bringing you several ways to communicate with friends and interact with content and information from around the globe.’

willsmith.com

Oh dear.

August, the month of possibilites

August 21st, 2011 Comment 0

I love August. August is like January. August is in fact more like January than even January itself. It’s January on steroids. That is, a month of good intentions, new beginnings, promises of changed behaviour and generally improved personalities. it is August, and I have big plans. With tonnes of exciting stuff on what I wrote my Master’s thesis on (digital, visual consumption stuff that is damn interesting, I must say) as well as a big bag of unsorted but hopefully interesting-when-untangled thoughts from working in media for the last six months in the back of my mind, I just can’t fail with blogging regularly, now can I. Also, a redesign. Yes!

For another day: let’s talk about the power of daydreaming in digital consumption and, yes, production.

I had decided to close my Crédit Lyonnais bank account …

June 27th, 2011 Comment 0

It was never quite like this, but I wish it would have been.

… sometime in the future … but this month, Crédit Lyonnais finally decided that enough was enough. After five years of non-activity – save the odd deposition to cover fees – their bloody-impossible-no-hope-customer algoritms have, correctly, identified me. They’re closing my account for me.

With some types of products and services, consumers are thought to be profoundly boring. Like with bank accounts. Either hyperrational assessors of offers or safety junkies, clinging to a brand because it feels like an institution stuffy enough to lack the imagination needed to do anything remotely risky.

Well, I had a bank account for five years after moving from France, because I liked to toy with the idea that I was back in Stockholm temporarily.

Also, I thought 1 euro per month plus the additional sporadic 27 euro fee (I could never figure out what that one was for, actually), was quite cheap for this pleasurable sensation of faux cosmopolitanism.

I’m not suggesting that this is the most common rationale for keeping a Crédit Lyonnais account. I’m not even suggesting that I’m not an utterly, utterly silly girl. But I think that there’s some kind of poetry in the power of humans to take the most prosaic of services, and just go crazy romanticizing it. And it should be taken into account when trying to figure out the intricacies of ‘consumer behaviour’. That is all.

Confessions of an Upper Middle Class Consumer

May 27th, 2011 Comment 0

The word heritage brand is my Pavlov’s bell.

The power of the simple sentence

May 4th, 2011 Comment 2

Living, breathing, and endlessly going on and on and on about digital media – like I do – can make you forget that the medium is not the message. The message is the message.* And it can be bloody good. A case in point:

* wiseacre part of myself: “Actually, different media do shape discourses. A pipe is never a pipe when mediated. This example would be only half as good as a Facebook status update.” Non-wiseacre part of myself: “Go away.”

Good communication strategies

April 17th, 2011 Comment 1

In New York, I once saw a middle-aged hobo type sitting on the street with a tin cup in front of him and a hand-lettered sign reading I USED TO BE QUITE ATTRACTIVE. I noticed his tin cup was flush with bills. Another time, in San Francisco, I spotted another grimy homeless guy with a sign that simply read I NEED $ FOR A HOOKER, which also seemed to be inspiring charity from the local citizens.

from John Waters: Role Models (2010)

Fast, ruthless, visual

March 31st, 2011 Comment 2

Do you know what I think? I think that people are so obsessed with the idea of “ordinary people” desperately wanting to Interact With Brands, that they don’t see that the logic of digital is not biased towards engagement. It’s a constant flow: visual, extremely fast, ruthless, volatile, hyperactive – and p2p. There’s where you find your bedspread for example, thrown between actresses, mega-cities, pop songs. All appropriated from other people, based on quick, aesthetic decisions. And then before you blink, it’s gone, lost in the flow.

(image flow from northia.tumblr.com)

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