iPlot

Branding as Meditation

Meditation, defined as focusing your attention in a non-analytical way, teaches you a great deal about how to manage attention. People who meditate focus on one object, one thought, or one part of their body and avoid diverting any attention from it. This forced focus on one thing, for a limited period of time, creates a change in mind and lets the individual feel in balance with oneself and the world that surrounds him/her. Meditation is a continuous process, and is said to have three stages: relaxation, interiorization, and expansion.

It may sound somewhat esoteric but brands can adopt this technique: The "meditating brand" is able to focus its own attention and that of its audience on only one object. This one object can be a particular product feature, it can be a product benefit, or it can be a conversation topic, a point of view that it wants to convey. Meditation is a means to reduce cognitive overload and simplify a potentially complex matter to one single hook that sticks with the audience.

In some regard, every marketing program is a meditation -- you take a little piece out of a complex architecture of traits, values, and capabilities, and highlight it through repeated communications towards a select segment of your total audience population. Let's say you conducted an email campaign for an enterprise software solution that offers a visual approach to mapping critical business data, and you wanted to target a number of senior level executives. In this case, you would single out one main element of your brand story that you expect to resonate most strongly with the recipients of your email (i.e. the measurable productivity boost enabled by the software). Or take Southwest Airlines, with its consequent focus on low-cost/no-frills as the core value. Focus and repetition, a.k.a. meditation, are the traits of serene brands.

Lessons of the Square Watermelon

Wonderful fable on innovation from Financial Hack:

"Japanese grocery stores had a problem. They are much smaller than their US counterparts and therefore don't have room to waste. Watermelons, big and round, wasted a lot of space. Most people would simply tell the grocery stores that watermelons grow round and there is nothing that can be done about it. That is how I would assume the vast majority of people would respond. But some Japanese farmers took a different approach. If the supermarkets wanted a square watermelon, they asked themselves, "How can we provide one?" It wasn't long before they invented the square watermelon.

The solution to the problem of round watermelons wasn't nearly as difficult to solve for those who didn't assume the problem was impossible to begin with and simply asked how it could be done. It turns out that all you need to do is place them into a square box when they are growing and the watermelon will take on the shape of the box.

This made the grocery stores happy and had the added benefit that it was much easier and cost effective to ship the watermelons. Consumers also loved them because they took less space in their refrigerators which are much smaller than those in the US meaning that the growers could charge a premium price for them.

What does this have do with anything besides square watermelons? There are a few lessons that can you can take away from this story which help you in all parts of your life. Here are a few of them:

Don't assume: The major problem was that most people had always seen round watermelons so they automatically assumed that square watermelons were impossible before even thinking about the question. Things that you have been doing a certain way your entire life have taken on the aura of the round watermelon and you likely don't even take the time to consider if there is another way to do it. Breaking yourself from assuming this way can greatly improve your overall life as you are constantly looking for new and better ways to do things. This was one of the most difficult things for me to do because most of the assumptions I make, I don't even realize that I'm making them. They seem perfectly logical on the surface, so I have to constantly make an effort to question them.

Question habits: The best way to tackle these assumptions is to question your habits. If you can make an effort to question the way you do things on a consistent basis, you will find that you can continually improve the way that you live your life. Forming habits when they have been well thought out is usually a positive thing, but most of us have adopted our habits from various people and places without even thinking about them. I have changed a large number of habits that I have had after taking the time to question them and continue to do so. Some of them I have know idea where they came from while others I can trace to certain people or instances in my life. It's a never ending process, but by doing this, you can consistently strive toward making all aspects of your life more enjoyable instead of defaulting to what you have now.

Be creative: When faced with a problem, be creative in looking for a solution. This often requires thinking outside the box. Most people who viewed this question likely thought they were being asked how they could genetically alter water melons to grow square which would be a much more difficult process to accomplish. By looking at the question from an alternative perspective, however, the solution was quite simple. Being creative and looking at things in different ways in all portions of your live will help you find solutions to many problems where others can't see them. I am not a creative person, but I've found that the more that you look at things from different perspectives, the more creative I have become. It's a learned art and builds upon itself.

Look for a better way: The square watermelon question was simply seeking a better and more convenient way to do something. The stores had flagged a problem they were having and asked if a solution was possible. It's impossible to find a better way if you are never asking the question in the first place. I try to ask if there is a better way of doing the things that I do and I constantly write down the things I wish I could do (but currently can't) since these are usually hints about steps I need to change. Get into the habit of asking yourself, "Is there a better way I could be doing this?" and you will find there often is.

Impossibilities often aren't: If you begin with the notion that something is impossible, then it obviously will be for you. If, on the other hand, you decide to see if something is possible or not, you will find out through trial and error.

Take away the lessons from the square watermelons and apply them to all areas in your life (work, finances, relationships, etc) and you will find that by consistently applying them, you will constantly be improving all aspects of your life."

Blog Out

Bruce Nussbaum, assistant managing editor at BusinessWeek, had enough:

"I'm going to take time off from blogging to cogitate a bit. I love curating conversations and being part of others but there are times when I have to turn off the input to generate the output. This is one of them. Talk to you again the week of March 10."

It's not the first time bloggers need a break from blogging, but it is a rare case of an A-list blogger asking for more time to pursue "big thoughts." Are we witnessing the first signs of a renaissance of the long form?

A Good Winter

The album title was just too good to ignore, and I'm glad I followed my instinct for I made a real discovery: "For Emma, Forever Ago" by Bon Iver (from the French "Bon Hiver" = good winter!), which has become a self-released Internet sensation, is one of these KCRW-recommended albums that provide the soundtrack for a soul-searching journey through Americana.

It's ambient folk that creates spaces where you wouldn't have expected them. Justin Vernon, the singer-songwriter behind Bon Iver, locked himself into a reclusive cabin in Northwestern Wisconsin for three snowy months, filling his days with wood splitting and other chores around the land. In the sparseness of this self-selected solitude, he found an expansive, rich landscape of chillingly haunting tunes. They are reminiscent of M Ward's campfire ballads, Elliot Smith's mini dramas, and Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska," yet more nuanced, elegant, and multi-layered. They all sound strangely familiar and made me think of what a colleague of mine, an industrial designer, said the other day: "Meaning can only be construed through memory." Hence the many pop cultural references that "For Emma, Forever Ago" evokes: The songs describe a "heart in winter" that is trying to move "away from her" until it, after "long, cold nights and heavy snow," as one of the songs' lyrics goes, zooms in on a truth that is best told by a lonely voice embedded in a blend of diffident guitar chords, sporadic strings, and the sound of cold steel: Beauty is what you find when you remove everything else.

Collaborative Competition: Sport for a Better World

Here's an innovative approach to facilitating social innovation: a "collaborative competition" leveraging sports.

Ashoka's Changemakers and Nike have partnered to open a worldwide search for projects that use the transformative power of sport to promote social change. Ashoka is a citizen-sector support system for social entrepreneurs. Changemakers is building the world's first global online "open source" community competing to surface the best social solutions, and then collaborating to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions.

Changemakers invited users worldwide to submit innovations to what it calls a "collaborative competition" -- an "interactive solicitation to identify and develop innovative, workable solutions to the world's most entrenched social problems." Competition entries were posted online and made available for anyone to view and collaborate with by providing new ideas, asking insightful questions, and providing connections to new resources. Pro bono crowdsourcing!

Out of 382 submissions, the finalists have now been chosen by a high-profile jury, including Nawal El Moutawakel, member of the International Olympic Committee; Joan Laporta, president of F.C. Barcelona; Ann Veneman, executive director of UNICEF; Mel Young, founder of the Homeless World Cup; Mark Parker, president & CEO of Nike, Inc.; and Sheila Johnson, businesswoman, philanthropist, and CARE ambassador.

The final winners, however, will be determined by you.

You have until March 3 to vote for your three favorite social projects.

The Five Balls Called Life

"...think of life as a game in which we juggle five balls labeled Work, Family, Health, Friends, and Integrity. One day you understand that Work is a rubber ball. You drop it and it bounces back. The other four balls are made of glass. Drop one of those, and it will be irrevocably marked, scuffed, nicked and maybe even shattered."

[from "Two Paths for the Aspiring Alpha Female," New York Times, February 17]

The New Digerati: Connected for a Reason

Steve Rubel wonders if "the Interruption Economy sacks prosperity:" "Conventional wisdom says that technology -- and nowadays the Internet -- will always continue to advance and bring with it productivity gains and prosperity. That's certainly been the case for years. However, historically there are pauses. After the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were fully realized it took awhile for the next big era to begin. I wonder if we're about to enter a similar lull now that the Information Age is arguably almost 30 years old." Rubel demands "we need new tools for managing interruptions -- and they may not be technological, but social. Our prosperity may depend on it."

Rubel is not the only one who expresses concern about the World Wide Web hampering productivity. He refers to Mark Cuban, who has made a similar case, and Idris Moote, who points at research showing that interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, and blogs take up nearly 30% of each day, which -- on an annualized basis -- represents a loss of 28 billion hours for the entire US workforce. Are we on the way to becoming the United States of ADD? Are we a nation of knowledge workers with very little but heavily dispersed knowledge and only a bit of attention capital left? Will there be an information backlash, as a result of a new digital divide "between geeks and those who are blissfully and decidedly low tech" (Rubel)?

There are some serious signs indicating that the new generation of digital citizens, the twenty-somethings who have grown up with the Internet and are accustomed to ubiquitous information, may already be one step ahead. Gone are the days of 'net pour le net.' Although the number of new blogs (more than 120,000 new weblogs are created each day) is staggering (as is the number of deserted blogs), blogging has not become a social norm -- it remains the passion (or addiction) of a few. Furthermore, the average time users spend on social networking sites is on the decline, and the once explosive growth of social networks has stagnated. In fact, a certain Facebook fatigue has set in, and users (including, reportedly, Bill Gates) are leaving the site, deactivating their accounts (if they can). In its heyday, social networking was an activity, now it may finally be turning into what at least Facebook, according to its mission statement, has always claimed to be: a utility. (Of course, the ironic truth is that Facebook would never have experienced such explosive growth if its claim had been true).

The new digerati have brokered a new online/offline balance as they find their "first life" in the real world unexpectedly attractive: face time trumps Facebook. They do not respond to emails on the weekend, as they are hiking, traveling, or engaging in some world changing social endeavor -- from running an AIDS marathon to volunteering for the Obama campaign to founding their own non-profit. They share the sensation that one's fortune is not made in front of a screen and that "quality of life" is the prerequisite of a good life. The new digerati want to be connected but only for a reason. They build their own social networks and take advantage of the communication tools at hand -- but they have matured their use of them. They scoff at those who spend their time chained to the PC, while they themselves enjoy utmost mobility. Applications that aim to succeed with the new digerati need to provide utilitarian value for social users on the go: Take, for example GyPSii, a new social networking platform designed specifically for the mobile phone. It connects people, places, content, and events, but it is no longer a destination.

frog Design Mind: The Health Issue

Today, renowned design institutions are giving greater attention to personal health issues than ever before; IIT's Institute of Design, for example, just launched a new research division dedicated to "Rethinking Health," and other schools are incorporating industry-specific coursework. At the same time, medical organizations are looking to the human-centered practices of design to better serve their consumer audiences, reinforcing new treatments with multi-platform support systems. By better structuring the vast information systems that exist in labs, hospitals, and insurance companies; by improving the efficiency of medical devices and treatment programs; by identifying new, more effective means of educating individuals about their personal health, designers have a critical role to play in improving the state of health care today.

That's why, at frog design, we have just published the latest issue of frog Design Mind, focused around the issue of Health.

http://www.frogdesign.com/design-mind/

Inside this issue:

• The Behind-the-Scenes Battle for Your Medical History: the competitive bid for your personal health records - who wants them, and who has the best offer.
• The Paradox of Choice: a capitalist case for universal health care.
• Dynamic Archetypes and the Diet: a new approach to design research and health - when Personas aren’t enough.
• Switching Off Disease: the shocking new way that genetic researchers are battling disease - and how designers can help.
• Innovation and Control: an investigation of the complicated space between creativity and control in medical device design.
• PC Development for the Developing World: a look at the OLPC project: the cause, the controversy, and - above all - the competition.
• Medical Breakthroughs: a slideshow of recent medical breakthroughs from top research labs around the globe.
• Single-Sided Deafness: a visual investigation of what it means to live with single-sided deafness.
• iTEACH: Taking on TB and HIV in South Africa: an interview with iTEACH organizer Zinhle Thabethe.

Video: Data Portability 101

Michael Pick, from Smashcut Media, has created a great video that illustrates what Data Portability is all about.

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

The Tipping 2.0: Activating Dormant Social Networks

I have to admit I am still disturbed by Duncan Watts' debunking of Malcolm Gladwell. It turns out that, according to Watts, not a tiny cadre of connected influencers sparks successful trends and lifts them over a "tipping point," rather it is a network effect triggered by the complex interplay of "accidental influencers." The problem is: If viral effects are accidental, so are the powers of marketers. In other words, Watts' theory renders marketers clueless and useless. But maybe not everything we thought to know about viral marketing is wrong. There are some little things that we can do, perhaps, to make the unknown known through viral means.

Closely following the presidential nominees' campaigns (and having an email from one of the contenders in my inbox every day), I have come to realize that campaigning means activating dormant social networks -- through a cause or a shared set of values and beliefs. In fact, activating dormant social networks is the foremost task at hand for today's marketers (of products, services, causes, or political programs), as we face the daunting challenge of connecting with fragmented audiences that are increasingly split into billions of social atoms populating myriad micro-networks.

The small world is indeed much smaller than we think it is. While social networking has visualized the alleged "six degrees of separation," all online communications essentially have a social component and can be seen as expressions of the underlying social micro-verses, "the worlds within worlds," in which, shifting time and place, individuals can travel and interact online. Unlike Facebook et al, however, they are not externalized and not visible, at least not at first sight.

Let's therefore apply the term "social networks" in a much broader way, not only encompassing the traditional social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.) but also all those online hubs where users collaborate to create and distribute content to the effect of any exchange (of opinions, goods, or services). Blogs, connecting author and reader and establishing a forum for conversation threads, are in essence latent social networks as much as wikis are or eBay and Email. Once their underlying social graph is activated by distributed content, they very much resemble the structure and attributes of what we commonly consider to be online social networks.

Moreover, we all form our own little social networks: our address book is our Facebook, so to speak. David Armano calls this the "social solar system:" "When we think about social networks we tend to focus on the connecting nodes. The links that bind us and what makes a network a network. But the less frequently told story is the one where we spend countless hours building and maintaining our own little 'social solar systems.' In these 'social systems' we have multiple planetary ecosystems revolving around us." Frequently, our own social systems will overlap with the social networking sites we populate as well as the social networks we create through our online activities; they may even be fully congruent in some instances. The larger one's digital footprint, the more likely all these networks match up, and the easier it is for marketers to connect with the target individual.

But how exactly do you consolidate all these micro-verses? Viral content is the catalyst. As we do with "online social networks," we tend to use the term "viral" solely for those stories whose exponential and explosive growth is visible. It is worth pointing out though that all online content -- tweets, blog posts, comments, presentations, videos, etc. -- is inherently viral. Not only does the Internet consist of a huge number of dormant social networks, it also houses a vast array of dormant viral content.

The marketer's job is to connect the two: networks and content. Or better: Our job is to connect members of dormant networks through content, creating and distributing the type of content apt to trigger the desired network effect. If that occurs, content is passed from one individual to the next, though a cascade of networked viral distribution: partly through formalized online social networks (Facebook etc.), partly through activated dormant networks of existing online populations, and partly by individuals who establish new networks within their own "social solar systems."

Facebook's Beacon was a failed but bold and utopian attempt in this regard. It sought to visualize (that is, materialize and commercialize) the implicit social patterns within the dormant network comprised of Facebook shoppers, with purchase information as the content catalyst for activation. Other, less controversial attempts include DiSo's quest to turn the blog platform WordPress into an active social network, or considerations to flip email services into social networks, as Yahoo tried with Mash and Google with is Reader.

All of these examples illustrate the opportunity for marketers. If you want to get the message out to fragmented micro-audiences, ask yourself the following four questions:

1. Which online social networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.) does your target user (audience) inhabit?
2. Which dormant social networks does your target user (audience) inhabit?
3. Which one of those dormant social networks can you best activate?
4. Which content can you utilize to activate it?

If you follow these steps, it doesn't matter if Watts proves Gladwell wrong. Yes, influencers may have more muscle to spread content within their networks and thus accelerate a viral effect, and yes, targeting them alone may not be enough. For the activators of dormant social networks, however, the most important aspect is systemic: it's not about dotting the connectors; it's about connecting the dots -- through content.