Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see communicative oddities and ironies. Particularly those visible in Johannesburg’s CBD where I work.

It’s not often that you get a mash up of both irony and blatantly beautiful stupidity. I doubt even Zapiro could have envisioned competition to his witty illustrations but PAM have laid down the challenge!

Imagine your surprise as the “designer” of PAM’s political poster when you find your rough draft with spelling mistakes still visible appearing on every single street lamp pole in Johannesburg’s CBD.

Well PAM you have my vote we must wek togetha to resolve the akademik crisis and cancell of the debts of the studants.

If only Moral Fibre had the intellectual capital to spend on witty marketing posters!!

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Recently Skittles relaunched their homepage - well its not so much a homepage as it is an amalgum of their various online properties. instead of landing at a typical homepage stuffed to the brim with various feeds all over the “w w w” as Stephen Fry calls it you’ll find a hover bar on and a pop up which asks but one favour, “enter your birthday please”. It is only upon verifying your birthday that you are forced to experience the results of their web designer projective vomiting purpel bullshit all over the screen…BUT up until then its all blissful nothingness, Sartre would have loved it..

Why nothing else - why did they forgo the opportunity to ram home their core brand message? Why did Skittles shun the opportunity to stick their sticky sweety-fruity goodness right in your face like a beggars hand coming through your window? Well because they just didn’t need to. Afterall why re-invent the wheel? Why recreate social spaces which already have habitual users, who enter into a mutually exclusive relationship with such social sites and important to Skittles already have strong brand identities of their own?

I call this the power of not developing, or not wasting money on unnecessary innovation. Skittles going social shouldn’t be at the cost of future product development - they aren’t going to create the next social niche, “soft sweet and socially polygamous”. No, no they are not. You can see the power of not developing at work with the way that MXit has integrated popular instant messengers into its “textually” active mobile chatting community. You can see evidence of this in the way that a system like google’s friend connect circumvents the ordinary web development architecture and simply pins itself to pre-existing infrastructure in a symbiotic (parasytic) relationship with a host. Do no evil, give me a god damned break, Google your oligarchical, tyrannical, imperialistic, colonialist, blood sucker….ahh whatever, I digress.

Back to Skittles, a system of systems. Skittles as you’ll see in the movie I’ve embedded below floats a hover menu bar across various social territories. If you click “chatter” you’ll find yourself hovering over twitter feed, with the pooled mentions of all those who have tweeted about Skittles. If you click on “friends” you’ll hover of the 600 000 user Facebook page. IF you click media, you can either chose to see all those pictures in the Flickr database tagged as Skittles or navigate back to the Skittles homepage to watch Skittles ads. What would a social hover bar without Wikipedia entries? Well you are in for a treat -pun intended- upon clicking “products” you can scan through every product offering Skittles has, every single flavour, from the lesser known ‘fecal matter’ to the more popular ‘tupurpulosis’. No the content is not interesting, but I scanned all of the pages using the Skittles Social Bar just because it was something novel to do between remembering to breathe.

There is much to learn from Skittles’ approach to development.

1. Utilise the available social media spaces to your advantage - leverage those social media sites which substantial traction with your target demographic. Don’t recreate them and brand them as if they are your own shiny inventions.
2. Be prepared to make mistakes and be prepared for bloggers to act like pratty prat-heads and attempt to scrutinize your every move. Like me.
3. Don’t forget that the mark of a great social experience is a great user experience. If your hover bar covers portions of the content your users are going to browse - make sure it can be moved out of the way! Simply minimising the hover menu bar in this case resulted in a red strip blocking my view of some of the Skittles content. Very annoying.
4. Remember that your brand name may have various other uses - for instance when Skittles filtered Twitter and Flickr for content they couldn’t have expected thousands of tenpin bowling pins to appear on their twitter and Flickr streams. Well I guess they could have, but maybe they just let things happen as they would if Skittles wasn’t involved…a smart move or a poor one who knows?
5. Where possible allow users to extend their own personal hemispheres into your brand’s. I mean Skittles didn’t force you to register on their site, they encouraged you to user your twitter and facebook accounts to interact with their brand - thus latching onto the user by attracting them to their social environment rather than locking the user in to a temporary and transient experience.

I think it’s well worth a look, so go check out Skittles.com and remember what I said, the future is in the past. Perhaps like Marx predicted we’ll soon see the end of history… Huh?? You’ll get in the morning and hopefully I will too.

Take a tour through Skittles.com with me:

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As its the final week of this epic challenge to claim your spot in Nerd Heaven I thought I might take a look at this kick ass interactive campaign, the Intel Soccer Challenge, created by Amorphous, for Intel, Mecer and Adidas. The game which has a football oriented challenge as its focal point encourages users to play and possiibly win an Intel powered Mecer Graphite Cosmos Gaming PC

Melissa Attree who pointed me to the campaign initially describes the basic gameplay:

“All you need to do is join the Intel Soccer Challenge. You have ten shots to beat the keeper and you can play as many times as you like. The challenge is not jut about the number of goals scored as you can score additional points the more spectacular and flamboyant your play…..and believe me you can pull some very cool moves.”

At a purely superficial level Amorphous has done a sterling job and should be proud of themselves. The gameplay mimics that of a Playstation 1 era football game, simple keyboard shortcuts to execute moves and whilst simplistic in nature bloody addictive. Amorphous has paid special attention to the limitations of our local network speeds, your focal point isn’t the bandwidth which you, had they not optimized the game, heard hear trickling down the pipes as its last drops pour out of the Clouds. Instead loading times are quite fast and with only two clicks you are playing the game, a few more clicks and you’re registered and ready to win the Mecer Graphite Cosmos Gaming PC

BUT, this isn’t just a game it’s an excellent opportunity for Intel, Mecer and Adidas to associate themselves in a credible way with Football - a great way to piggyback on the current Fifa World Cup communications which disrupt us daily. You would think that this is solely in order to leverage any possible future connections to the Fifa World Cup 2010 however the general thrust of their campaign highlights Intel and Mecer’s gaming PC, the so called Mecer Graphite Cosmos Gaming PC, with Adidas’ “sponsorship” lending its name more to complete the total Football experience instead of trying to woe World Cup fans. At a time when consoles appear to be dominating the gaming sector a move to raise awareness of the power of an Intel driven gaming platform is a necessity should the PC remain relevant in this territory. Furthermore a communication strategy which focused too much on attempting to hijack the World Cup for publicity would only have raised more awareness of the Fifa World Cup, not the Mecer PC. See Heineken’s relationship with the Bond films for an example of how co-branding oft results in one mega brand grabbing the spotlight.

My only real gripe is that the game isn’t very social. Whist the site has a rankings table and allows users to invite friends to stand a greater chance of winning the Mecer Graphite Cosmos Gaming PC the overall experience harks back to the era of computer gaming which was very anti-social. You are up against a digital foe and you can’t even call on your friends for support. Where is my angry mob I cried out a few times… For instance I would like  to have seen a Skittle’s like social media hover bar (which could be moved around! Skittles you fools) with the typical user’s social media sites embedded within the experience. For instance sharing short snippets of amazing goals scored on flickr or Zoopy.com, or sending your highest score to a facebook page which could create a leader board and dish out smaller prizes to high ranking players. Embedding social media functionality would have allowed the creation of more brand touch points and would thus have contributed to an ever more memorable experience with the brand.

I think that that overall the campaign rocks, you’d better enter quick as I’m notching up some epic scores and intend on taking that gaming PC for myself. All you need to do to play is visit www.intelsoccerchallenge.co.za http://www.intelsoccerchallenge.co.za to register.

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Every once in a while a find myself standing outside my own commonsense, outside my everyday consciousness and I am able to look at things with detached eyes and intellect. As a social scientist one would call this the “sociological imagination”, it’s what we try to teach undergrads; but until the penny has dropped how do you teach one to think about and interpret the world around them in a novel way that is completely isolated from their socialization, previous experiences, ideology and commonsense schema of the social world in which they live?

I had a moment today in a supermarket in town. The best way to describe is like when you repeat a word, out aloud, over and over until it eventually becomes meaningless and an arbitrary sound. It becomes novel to you, disassociated from that “thing” you have taken for granted and you can for possibly the first time in your life interact with the sound in a novel and individualistic way. Practice this enough and you will eventually be able to listen to your first language just as sounds, without being aware of the meaning, and it becomes an alien thing that you realize you’ve never actually paid much attention to. Now transfer this feeling to one’s observations and engagement with their social world – these are the experiences of which I speak.

When you are in this state you realize (with painful clarity) how arbitrary some of the rules, rituals and ambitions modern social life are. The only other way I can think of describing it would be that it’s like Neo being able to see the Matrix. I call it “simulacrum of life” because the criteria that define the “good life” have been handed down to us from generations who reinterpreted their predecessor’s interpretation of the “good life”; and it is created for us by mass-media and commercial marketing. At best it’s a hollow copy of something which we no longer understand intrinsically; at worst it’s a synthetic web of shiny lights and catchy music with no poetry in the lyrics that leads us in a merry dance to whatever tune fits the current whim of international market and commercial considerations.

For anyone who feels bad about the dull, hollow eyed animals in large zoo’s or sanctuaries, I invite you to step outside your commonsense everyday consciousness and look at the humanity around you. How many of us are in a position to “see the Matrix” and determine and pursue our own “good life” one that nourishes and grooms our own unique spiritual, creative and human selves, while at the same not maliciously exploiting the natural and human world around us; but rather being a spiritual stone that when dropped in the pond that is the universe sends out positive ripples in all directions.

When your eyes have been opened there will be obvious questions, which I don’t need to state explicitly here. Questions are good, and not all questions need answers – to merely have been asked is sometimes all they need to achieve.

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Each morning I wake up. You do that too? Awesome we have something in common. My smallish Hi-Fi, automatically plays my B Sides and Rarities album of the Smashing Pumkins, rousing me with the sound of a Corgan dragging his fingernails across the strings. I’ve perhaps only once or twice leapt out of bed, instead I look out from the blankets which I’ve defiantly pulled over me and begin mentally practising my profane poetry! Fuck, Shit, FUCK! I can never quite work out the rhyming pattern a Snoop Dogg might be able to given the same choice of words. It was this morning that I realized that perhaps this is ageing me -  I’ve hardly slept in the last month. Why?

I’ve spent nights wrangling with intruders who want to invade my dreams and our yet to be lived in home. Last night for instance in my dreams I created multiple, mini, automated rifle turrets which I could control with a remote control. I had apparently hard wired some form of speaker system into the walls (I don’t remember seeing speakers, my voice just boomed through the empty hallways) and was guiding an intruder through his future. I remember thinking in my dream that I’d turned into that fucking monstrous narrator from SAW, and that now that I had absolute power over my dominion that I ought to share my new found knowledge.

I’ve spent nights thinking about money. I lay awake scheming, dreaming and plotting my next business adventure. Oft I just hit eject on them mid slumber, only to find that some foolish fuck has made himself squillions off a similar idea. I just sway from one side to the next, inviting my feet into the conference call I’m having with my hands which always seem so restless, inattentive bastards! Nevertheless I have so much on my plate that I forget to finish my meals - check out http://www.trendspotting.co.za / http://www.trendtraction.com yeah great domains - I know there’s something I could do with them but when?

I’ve spent nights thinking about my friends, some have stepped into new jobs, whilst others, my closest friends will be stepping out of theirs. I’ve relied more on them than they have been able to burden me with their stress which rises incrementally as this doomed year progresses.

I’ve spent nights thinking about the people who deserve my help. My fiancé, I should be able to spend more time pampering her, she deserves it. I should spend more time with my parents and my grandmothers, they deserve it. I should be aiming to see my brother and his wife more often and help him out as he tries to complete his music degree in London.

Well fuck it. Guys and gals from today onwards, I’m aiming to tie off all my loose ends. So I’ll probably call on you for help. I’ll be asking for favours and I’ll be picking the brains of those I truly respect - but more importantly I’m going to grow up how I want, that’s not at all. Call me Peter Fucking Pan from now on I’m finding time for the people who deserve it, and saving a little time on this earth for me.

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