What’s interesting to note is that the report also suggests Chrome continues its meteoric rise in gaining market share, seemingly continuing to take bites out of both Internet Explorer’s and Firefox’s user base—even whilst those two browsers grapple for the top spot.

It’ll be interesting to see if and when Chrome’s market share levels out over the next few months. With both Internet Explorer 9 and the long-overdue Firefox 4 both set to be released any week now, it could end up being a healthy three-way scrap for users.

Road safety campaigning in Britain in the ’80s wasn’t high on anyone’s radar. Most people were complacent about it and politicians felt they were doing enough. Road deaths were at around 6,000 a year, a figure in line with other countries.

When a group of BBC journalists were brainstorming possible television programmes, they challenged Nick Ross to make a boring subject interesting. You guessed it: road safety.

How did he do this?

Firstly, he reframed the concept of road safety from a statistic to an epidemic (the programme was called “The biggest epidemic of our times”). You can’t do much about a statistic, but an epidemic is a threat to the community that we can all face up to and fight.

Second, he realised he needed to bring the numbers to life. What does 6,000 people a year really mean? So, for the opening of the documentary, he asked the population of a typical British town with a population of 6,000 people to lie down, as if dead. “Every year”, he began, “a town the size of Wallingford dies on British roads”. He went from talking about an abstract number to talking about something that was completely unacceptable.

Thirdly, he changed the language. He shocked the authorities by no longer talking about “saving lives” but instead about “killing”: instead of 6,000, they should aim to only kill 4,000 a year.

He became Chairman of the National Road Safety Committee and in that position eventually managed to get his revised targets accepted. Tighter legislation and greater investment led to the number of deaths to come down to 3,500 at the turn of the milennnium. The momentum has been maintained with deaths down to 2,500.

The UK is now among the leaders in the world for road safety and as a direct consequence British mortality rates to the age of 50 are among the lowest in the world.

I think this demonstrates that understanding human behaviour is a great asset for communicators.

His first point is that Facebook gets interactions and people.

Facebook understand users on 2 different and important levels. They understand the interaction between user and computer and they understand the interaction between people and their friends.

The second point was a bit of a revelation to me. I never really got why people would use Facebook to send messages to each other. I always though it just generates an email that arrives in my inbox anyway, which then makes me go onto Facebook to read and reply. Joe enlightened me thus:

With Gmail I get spam, newsletters and mostly crap. I might get 1 email a day from a friend. Because of all this crap I use Facebook, Twitter or SMS to message friends. Email is mostly junk.

If I want to message my friend Jon I should be able do it in a way that suits me and suits Jon. I write the message in Facebook and Jon decides if he gets the message via email, Facebook or SMS. I don’t have to remember which method suits Jon best. I can be sure he’ll get the message.

I would highly recommend a read of the whole article; the points are explained in detail, with some good examples.

He explains why we add too much:

“…As digital marketers seek to increase profits, they almost always make the same mistake. They continue to add more clutter, messaging and offers, because, hey, it’s free.”

Why it’s frequently a poor idea:

“In fact, human behavior tells us that this is a more permanent effect than we realize. Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention…”

And concludes:

“More is not always better. In fact, more is almost never better.”

While there are occasions when Choice Architecture can dictate that ‘more is more’, I think the principle of simplicity or focus in a age of increasing complexity is nearly always an improvement for users.

Seth Godin: The inevitable decline due to clutter

Well worth a watch.

There is an interesting comment by Dan Greenberg who uses a comparison with rowing to make the point that you get to a certain size where you need managers.

When it’s a single, there’s no room for a coxswain (equals there are no meetings or managers).

When it’s a quad, you have with and without coxswain. There’s a trade-off between the extra weight of a manager… and the better synchronicity of the team and steering of the boat.

When it’s an 8, there’s a coxswain. There’s no question that a manager is needed, even if the team is finely tuned and well-practiced at working together.

I don’t think Jason is advocating to do away with managers, I think he’s advocating being mindful of how imposed distractions kill productivity. Finding the right balance is all about the personalities of the people involved.

We often talk about whether we should have music on or not. Some think the office is like a morgue without, some can’t get anything done with.

You can’t please everyone all the time.

Start of Movember

After 4 weeks of careful cultivation each of us managed to grow a mo, and raise a grand total of £1,100!

Captain MainWaring's Moustache

Nick's growth

Iwein's tache

Pete's Mo

We even made it onto Bristol Culture Best Movember Efforts 2010. Ok, that wasn’t very hard, I just sent in some pictures.

So what have we learnt?

• We made more money then I ever imagined, mainly thanks to Nick’s dad’s efforts.
• Those of us who were married before are still married (as far as I know). I think our other halves secretly liked it and are looking forward to next year already.
• The secret to raising money is pictures. This is all about making a fool of yourself, so pictures work.
• Nothing works as well at raising money as a personal email to friends and family. I only did this a couple of days before the end. In hindsight, I should have done this earlier. I think the email worked better for all the pictures I had been posting on Facebook regularly(ish) before.
• We did not communicate this to our clients effectively. At least that’s the conclusion I draw from not receiving any donations from our clients. There is one exception at Cofunds – he was growing a mo too and we saw him a few times during November. We used our company Twitter stream as the main – if not the only – channel to communicate this to our clients. In hindsight, we should have dedicated at least one company newsletter to this. I don’t know for sure, but I think this would have generated more donations.

I really enjoyed this slideshare on storytelling and advertising. This was presented by James Mitchell of BBH at the APG Battle of Big Thinking.

He’s only 24 – What have I been doing all my life?!

My favourites:

1. Ideas don’t come from watching television - or my take on this – procrastinating will not generate ideas.

4. Good ideas come from bad ideas. Coming up with a good idea requires work.

5. Ideas hate conference rooms. Ideas don’t happen when you want them to.

10. Ideas come from trouble. It’s amazing how something seemingly negative can turn out to be beneficial in the long run.

16. Ideas come when we’re not trying.

It’s difficult to have confidence an idea will come if you keep working at it. It will.