JonathanMelhuish.com

I found Annesley and Kate in posh pizza-place The Yard, pondering a piece of paper packed with scribbled notes. This was the pitch - an attempt to explain the CarrotMob concept in a way that the bar owners of Old Street would appreciate its value. After briefly scanning my eye over his notes, I suggested we just head out and “ad lib” - the first meeting would refine our pitch more in a few minutes than we could hope to achieve in hours of talking about it. And indeed it did.

In retrospect, perhaps The Foundry wasn’t the best place to start, simply because it’s somewhat atypical. The interior is strewn haphazardly with a motley assortment of donated second-hand furniture and outcast television sets. This isn’t really a bar – it’s an artist’s lair that happens to serve alcohol.

Jonathan, the bar’s long-term owner, sat in unnerving silence as we explained the concept in detail. When he finally spoke, his strongly-worded reaction took us aback slightly: “I don’t think I like you telling me what to do. I’ve been doing a lot of things here for a long time”. He pulled a bottle of “Eco Warrior” beer from the fridge and told us how he had supported a local brewery for years, and encouraged them to convert to Organic. He told us that he didn’t like the idea of being judged only the basis of electricity consumption or the idea of environmental “assessors” snooping around his establishment. And finally, he rejected the idea of being in competition with other bars in the area - “it just doesn’t sound like a good way of doing business to me”.

Things weren’t looking good. Uneasy looks were shooting around the table. He had made a lot of good points which seemed to cut right to the heart of the CarrotMob idea. Maybe we’d failed to appreciate just how American this idea was? We’d already received strong criticism that we were encouraging unnecessary consumption, a claim that’s hard to deny when the event revolves around getting people to come out drinking on a Tuesday night. Now a republican was strongly attacking the fundamental ideas behind CarrotMob.

We hadn’t been shown the door yet, though, so we tried hard to praise his past achievements and explain why the competition was necessarily simplistic, allay his fears about energy-efficiency advisors and even suggest that it didn’t need to be a competition if he wasn’t comfortable with that. He seemed to slowly warm to the idea, and eventually started suggesting ways in which we could spend the money – like pedal-powered generators to power the TVs!

Encouraged by our eventual success, we proceeded to an altogether-different venue – the brand new Roadtrip bar. They’d obviously spent a lot of money on the shiny interior but clearly hadn’t given a moment’s thought to energy efficiency. As soon as the manager realised we weren’t intending to simply hire the venue he lost interest and told us to email to make an appointment. We decided that it probably wasn’t worth it. The response in the Bricklayer’s Arms was also to come back later, but was at least accompanied by a friendly smile.

The friendly Irish barmaid in the Barley Mow seemed very keen to find out what CarrotMob was all about and informed us that the pub was run by a couple who lived upstairs. She thought they might be interested, although they were out. Annesley went back the next day to meet the owners and found that they were indeed very keen on the idea, although the pub was part of a chain of 12 pubs and restaurants, so they’d have to ask the chain managers first. We followed-up by email and are waiting to hear back from him.

We were distracted at this point by a drunk guy who interjected and insisted on buying us all drinks while repeating in a loud voice “look guys, I’m not a jerk, I’ve got a PLC!”, as if the two things were mutually exclusive. He proceeded to tell us how he is an ex-commando and that the course of his life had been changed when he sat down for a beer with a Greenpeace activist he’d previously forcibly removed from an oil rig. It was a gripping tale, I really hope it was true.

After we’d drunk up, we went over to Favela Chic and gave a slightly-slurred but very successful explanation to the manager, who quickly understood and seemed keen to participate. Perhaps having a little blood in the alcohol stream had relaxed us a bit and seem less like nervous salesmen!

Cengizhan, the owner of Aquarium, didn’t seem to speak a lot of English, although I’m not sure his permanently bemused expression was entirely due to the language barrier. He seemed to be open to the idea from a commercial perspective, but energy efficiency obviously wasn’t something he’d given a lot of thought to.

Cocomo is a cosy little retro bar that we’d stand a good chance of completely packing out. The bar manager, Chris, told us that the owners were abroad but that he had “completely free reign” so he wouldn’t necessarily have to agree it with them first. He seemed really positive so we agreed to keep in touch.

Motherbar was completely empty apart from the barman, who was listening to vomit-inducingly cheesy pop music. Annesley phoned the manager the next day, got some interest and followed up by email. I guess they could use some publicity.

I’m not sure why we bothered going into the Electric Showrooms really. The bar is characterised by an enormous sign above the door, lit by a hundred lightbulbs. Something tells me they won’t be switching them to low-energy bulbs no matter how hard we try.

I think the response I got when I pitched to the owner of Jam was the closest to what I was expecting before I started – although he didn’t exactly tell us to get lost, he did use the opportunity to complain about how Hackney council made him pay for recycling collection and how it was pointless to do anything about climate change when China was building a coal-fired power station for every lightbulb we replace. He suggested we go pitch the idea at the monthly pub landlords meeting, but I think it would only take a couple of people like him in the audience to make us cry

Our first and only flat refusal of the night came from the owner of Kick. In no uncertain terms he told us that he was already doing as much for the environment as he wanted to in order to keep his concience clean, and that no amount of our hippie gold would persuade him otherwise. A brief glance around would suggest that his conscience was easily-satisfied.

We got completely the opposite response in The RedChurch. The owner was a real intellectual who obviously thought deeply about environmental issues and was yearning for a way to help. It was really refreshing to talk in depth with him and we got a real feeling that he would do everything he could to support us. He even offered us use of the bar during the day as office space. He also gave us our first firm offer. This wasn’t just mere acceptance or friendly positivity, this was wholehearted commitment to the idea.

We were a bit taken aback by how quickly the owner of Verge understood the idea. He didn’t say a lot, but we could tell he absolutely understood by the way he got straight to the point - “What percentage do I have to offer?”. We told him that he’d have to come up with the figure, and left him to mull it over.

Bar 2012 is owned by a friendly young Asian guy. He understood the idea and although he wasn’t exactly brimming with ideas about how he could spend the money, he seemed to really look forward to the opportunity to learn: both from an energy-efficiency advisor and from environmentally-aware people at the event. He had almost exactly the opposite attitude to the owner of The Foundry, where we had started the evening – he knew he wasn’t doing much for the environment right now, but he was quite happy to take our advice.

We certainly couldn’t have predicted the enormous range of reactions we received, but by listening to the concerns of different business owners, we gradually refined our explanation until we could quickly and successfully communicate the idea. It was an enormously rewarding, albeit slightly exhausting, evening and I’m really happy that we got a handful of very positive responses. The hard part could actually be deciding between them – just going to the highest bidder seems like such a cold, American way of deciding. Environmentalism is much more about having the right attitude and applying that to everything you do than it is about simply investing in energy-efficient appliances. Do we vote with our head or with our heart?

Photos by Annesley

I’ve been helping my friend Simon Hammond develop a social networking site designed specifically for mobile internet devices, called Bodder. Although Bodder has been in development for a number of years, it’s never had a clear marketing strategy and has so far only been used by Simon’s friends. As a service that relies on a solid grasp of social dynamics in order to succeed, that doesn’t really sound like a promising approach - we needed to take Bodder out into the real world, see how it was being used, then build that understanding back into the design.

The trouble with Bodder, like many new technologies, is that its true benefits are not immediately apparent, and hence are rather tricky to explain. Another key challenge is that, like other systems that rely on network effects, a social network isn’t much use until a considerable proportion of your friends are using it. Bodder neatly sidesteps this issue by focussing on groups - before you use Bodder to keep track of your friends, you can use it to stay in touch with other members of the same organisations, or to become connected with others who are in the same location or context.

Photo by Simon Hammond

We decided to boil the latter Bodder concept down to its core and ensure that every message had an audience, right from the word go: in exactly 7 days and on a limited budget, we created our own system to allow people to text a message to a large LED ticker display. It’s a fairly well-established concept, but it gets people over the first hurdle - deciding what they want to shout out to the crowd. As soon as they’ve posted a message, they receive a message informing them that they’ve just become the latest member of Bodder, linking them to a page where they can see all of the latest updates from the crowd… and can explore the rest of the Bodder site. Progressively disclosing Bodder’s functionality should make it easier for people to grasp, and increase the likelihood that the hook bites.

Simon wrote a fairly detailed account of how it all went, so I won’t repeat that here, but instead give my interpretation of the results. Although the technology itself worked well, we picked the wrong location to place it in. We chose a prominent, high location that was visible from a large area near the main stage and on a busy route. However, by choosing a position where we were potentially visible to a large number of different people, primarily those who were only passing by briefly, we automatically detached ourselves from any specific audience. This meant that the author of a message had no idea who he was addressing, if anyone, and destroyed any possibility of having a conversation via the screen.

This is probably a good lesson for any internet business to take onboard. On the Internet, it’s tempting to think of your audience as “the world”, but in most cases, you’ll actually attract quite a specific subset, even if the technology is sufficiently generic that it could really be used by anyone. Twitter, for example, is mainly used by the social media crowd, whereas MySpace has long been the home of independent musicians. In a Web 2.0 world, the community is key - not only do you need to know who you’re addressing, your users need to know who they’re addressing too.

This experiment was very successful in teaching us some hard lessons about social dynamics that we could never have learnt sitting at our computers. With these lessons in mind, we’re now planning on taking the same setup to a smaller indoor event where the screen can be visible to the whole crowd. We hope that by making this key change, we’ll get a much better idea of how technology can initiate and support conversations between strangers in the same location. If we can just get them over that first hurdle, who knows what could happen next.