iPlot

Humanity in the Code

My South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) experience began on the “nerdbird” – the flight from San Francisco to Austin. At high altitude and in even higher amplitude, the techies sitting a row behind me were speed-outsmarting each other, jumping from database mining, the UX challenge of creating a human-friendly pixel resolution, the myth of interferences for avionics, to the “stupid-smart Nathans” in their lives (sorry, guys, it was hard not to eavesdrop). I first listened with intrigue (because these guys were really, really smart, and I might as well just transcribe their conversation into a comprehensive SXSW summary post), but after a while I began to resist the unsolicited expertise, and browsing through the conference program I couldn’t help but think of my two favorite session titles this year: “Co-Founder Speed Dating” and “The Evolution of the Douchebag in Modern Cinema.” Giving up on my way-too-thin headphones, I craved an enclave that would offer asylum from the forced intimacy of all the power-chatter, a simple switch-off that would disconnect me from verbal deluge and provides some kind of digital refuge from the very human analogue conversation. With all the new services that enable ‘controlled serendipity,’ it seems ironic that social filtering assumes we constantly want to meet people. I wanted to un-meet. Now. And there was no app for that.

Obviously, the signs of the times are different. Social discovery was a main theme of SXSWi this year. Start-ups from Uberlife, Sonar, to Crowded Room were vying for the pole position in the race to become the de-facto in-situ connectors. The winner, I would submit, will be the one service that manages to balance the need to “find the like-minded” (predictability) with the desire to “discover the unexpected” (serendipity). The path between the two is where true meaning occurs. Being a social utility is not enough – the best matchmakers understand that their job is to put on a great game, not to predict its outcome.

Another theme was the browser vs. OS war, extending the conversation from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that had preceded SXSWi. In light of the emergence of HTML 5 and Mozilla’s recently announced, much gushed about Open Web Devices (OWD) partnership with Spanish carrier Telefonica, the browser-OS web apps vs. native apps showdown drew a lot of attention. As Wireless Watch writes: “HTML5 is coming close to delivering the same quality of experience for web apps as native ones, and with its cross-platform nature can, theoretically at least, break the ties with the OS and allow non-platform owners such as operators or web service providers to create their own brand and distinctive offerings for any device.” My colleague Scott Jenson, creative director at frog, and a speaker at SXSWi, expects this trend to deliver on the promise of “just-in-time interaction,” allowing a far more seamless, personalized, and localized user experience than the super-fragmented native apps ecosystem can deliver today.

SXSWi was bigger, noisier, and messier than ever, and it was hard not get frustrated by the abundance of options and the scarcity of seats. But while there were some pleasant surprises (e.g. a session with “Catch Me If You Can” con artist Frank Abagnale), some panel topics are apparently evergreen. You could still find panels on crowdsourcing and branding in a social media world. The tone, however, was distinct this time: the digital literacy has increased exponentially, far beyond the tech in-crowd. The confidence and techno-swagger were staggering. And everyone, I mean, really everyone, was in town – hardcore digerati, outliers, cultural observers, and more and more business bigwigs. Location matters, and there is no place like SXSWi. Somewhere between hubris and pragmatism, the tech pilgrimage to Austin forms a unique geekipedia, a vast knowledge library, a mega-download of the future to come.

Speaking of which, the “Future of Work” was subject of a dedicated program track this year, and strikingly, eight years after the release of Thomas Malone’s seminal book, the main takeaway from the sessions was that the Future of Work may have already arrived – without us noticing it and indeed not evenly distributed. This became most apparent in a panel on “Decentralized Organizations - Do They Work?” with representatives from Zappos, Burning Man, Second Life-founder Philip Rosedale’s new company Coffee & Power, a marketplace for “small jobs”, and Malone himself. After several failed attempts to get a discussion going beyond just sharing anecdotes, a simple show of hands by the audience made clear that the session title was a rhetorical question. Of course decentralized organizations work. At least for a crowd like SXSWi, for which job title is oh-so-yesterday and even the online social status seems antiquated. The new currency is your latest venture.

Most of the people in the room appeared acutely aware of what Malone described as the historic opportunity in front of us: “For the first time we can combine the benefits of large organizations with the benefits of decentralized individual decision-making.” Indeed, if you combine economies of scale with the value of intimacy, you yield the “Economics of Emotion,” as Alan Zorfas coins them. In his recent article, he references a recent IBM survey poll of 1,700 CMOs who emphasized that building an enduring emotional connection with consumers is fast becoming a top business imperative.

Ironically, the very emotional bond, the very humanity we espouse as value in organizational designs, may be threatened by the technology we create: “True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence,” the ever witty philosopher and writer Alain de Botton poignantly tweeted during the conference (perhaps during a date gone awry).

Keynote speaker Baratunde Thurston (The Onion) heralded the power of “laughter against the machine,” the importance of “artful ridicule,” of “comedy in the code”, and presented examples from various countries – from China to Afghanistan, Iran to Egypt. Not just coding or decoding, aggregating or analyzing, but “reading the world,” he argued, was an ever more important task in this day and age of big data, and as both institutions and experts experience an erosion of their authority, he demanded comedians step in as the new sense makers, the new interpreters who laugh off the tragic with humor. Thurston cited an Old Roman proverb, and his points were not breaking new ground by any means. But his humble and genuine delivery captivated the audience and was touching. As history has told us, it is the fools who speak the truth and foresee the future. Or you can just use Forecast, a social tool that asks “What are you going to do?” and thus captures a valuable aggregation of the likely future based on intentions.

Aside from all that, another key insight from SXSWi this year was that, as with every human enterprise, the effects of horserace politics have begun to kick in. It is now the Super Bowl for tech marketers. From political theatre to tech theatre – the backstory has become the actual story: Egos, plots, gossip, and campaigns trump the actual program. This year’s most controversial “meta-story” was BBH Lab’s Homeless HotSpots campaign – a “social experiment” that had been launched before SXSWi but reached a broader and more critical audience here that was quick in dismissing it as a ludicrous exploitation of homeless people. It is interesting to read The Atlantic’s analysis of how the public’s reaction went through all of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' five stages of grief, but whatever you think of the appropriateness of the idea, the HotSpots campaign presented a welcome counterpoint to the dominant techno-optimism at the show – a gloomy and inadvertently comical question-mark amidst all the exclamation points. The same audience that had laughed about Baratunde Thurston’s irreverence was irritated by the absurd theater of the Homeless HotSpots, and the discomfort expressed in many blogs represented an underlying sentiment that may have gotten lost otherwise at SXSWi: social technology has invaded our lives, but it may not be the great socializer. Or as a colleague admitted over dinner: “Here I am with 17,000 like-minded souls and a dozen of social discovery tools, but when I wander through the halls, I couldn’t help but feel lonely at times.”

[image credit: Digital Journal]

The Economist and the Human Potential

If TED is about “Ideas Worth Spreading,” then the Economist’s Ideas Economy conference series is – as the title would suggest – about ideas worth monetizing. It’s the Economist, stupid! The venerable publication, a notorious late adopter, has realized that despite solid market standing it must reinvent itself to survive, both through a suite of new digital products and by branching out into the conference business. The focus on Innovation (as in “a commercialized original idea,” as the excellent moderator Vijay Vaitheeswaran defined it in his opening remarks) is a natural fit: The Economist has always stood for liberal economic policies and liberal social values – which is typically the kind of fabric that innovation thrives in.

The most recent event of the series took place last week in New York: With the theme “Human Potential,” 250 business leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, and academics discussed for two days how to foster and tap into the creativity and intellect of their employees, stakeholders, peers, and students. The cynic could object and ask “Do we indeed have potential?,” inferring that the term “potential” implies progress and betterment – but are we, humans, even good? And if so, can we get better?

According to Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, the answer is a clear yes. He presented a “history of violence,” arguing that violence is on the decline, which, as he readily admitted, appears to be somewhat counter-intuitive, knowing that there has not been a single day without war in the history of mankind. Attribute this to a recording bias: The magnifying effect of mass media makes violence more visible than ever before. Yet, Pinker cited empirical studies showing that the amount of actions which cause physical harm has steadily decreased over the past centuries. Despite the many atrocities it saw, the 20th century was not the most violent century in terms of absolute numbers (compared to the total world population), and acts of terrorism, Pinker pointed out, can only be described as (statistically) “insignificant.” Clearly, Pinker commented, the US overreacted in response to the 9/11 attacks. Before you cheer about the rise of human enlightenment and moral reasoning, however, consider that the way violence is committed may have become more subliminal, and that, more pressingly, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a few rogue individuals (or states) can arguably do more harm nowadays - that is, cause ‘ultimate violence' - than ever before. Additionally, it remains difficult to project future trends based on historical data so that an overly optimistic, non-violent concept of human potential might be flawed because of a bias of retrospective. In fact, the Rational Optimist's great blind spot is that it cannot look into the “heart of darkness,” that it has no means to explain or forecast truly irrational behavior.

On top of that, it is, of course, particularly hard to assess the human potential when you are human. Is human potential limited to humans? Can humans really fully unleash their own potential or will it take artificial intelligence to do so? Were the attendees in New York able to realize human potential or rather its impediment? The conference, for the most part, stayed away from such provocations. Notwithstanding the occasional excursion into macro-economic or philosophical debate, most of the program was devoted to more pragmatic topics such as employee motivation, knowledge management, institutional and non-institutional learning, and creative thinking.

Like Pinker, Richard Florida struck an optimistic tone in his opening keynote, in which he heralded creativity as the essential resource of our societies. According to Florida, one third of the US workforce is employed in the creative sector, generating 50% of the overall wages. The unemployment rate has only gone up by 5% during the economic downturn, much less so than in other market sectors. Creativity, says Florida, is the key to economic recovery and the main catalyst of the “Great Reset” that he proposes. Asked about what he would tell the citizens of Detroit, he said “harness the creativity there,” claiming that “if we could turn 60% of services jobs into creative job we would boost the economy.” While that stood uncontested, his insisting on the metropolitan region as the hub of the “creative class” provoked more audience dissent in the subsequent Q&A. In the connected age of virtual worlds and social networks, the physical density of “idea people” seems to have lost some of its relevance. This is not to argue the importance of geographical talent clusters, but increasingly, innovation overcomes boundaries of space and happens whenever, wherever people meet (online). Geography is no longer destiny, and no longer does human potential start in cities, as Florida claims.

My colleague Robert Fabricant, VP of creative at frog design, who spearheaded a “social experiment” at the conference (more about that in another post soon), offered a less class-centric view on creativity. For him, creativity does not exist so much exclusively within an individual as it does between two entities: “Because that which is created needs a response to bring it to life.” He used the analogy of the old Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons to illustrate this collaborative creative interaction that is at the center of innovation.

The relationship between creativity and well-being, values and value, social purpose and money, self-actualization and economic success was the main theme of the conference. Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, shared some remarkable insights, based on his institute’s annual survey on “what does the whole world want?” This time, the majority of respondents said: “A job” – in stark contrast to previous years when the answers had ranged from “a happy life,”and “family,” to “health.” The responses this year shifted the focus to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Why is that? First of all, the inequality between the rich and the poor is growing, and it is no surprise that many living in developing countries consider “finding a job” an existential need. Secondly, the growing middle class (in India and China, and other emerging markets) has become much more aware of its possibilities and views employment as the main enabler of a brighter future for themselves and their families, one that often includes better education and increased consumerism. And then, well, there was the recession in the developed world - and its lasting implications.

So are we seeing a renaissance of materialism? Does money beat meaning? The final debate of the conference, conducted in classic Oxford-style, looked at this conflict through the veneer of employee motivation. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and entrepreneur Lynn Tilton, CEO and principal of Patriarch Partners, contended that “money motivates more than social purpose.” The two were facing formidable opponents in Clay Shirky (author of Cognitive Surplus) and Dan Ariely (author of The Upside of Irrationality), who argued that social purpose was the more powerful motivator. The pro faction – albeit perhaps exhibiting more passion – ran out of arguments soon and could eventually only help itself by evoking the Nazis (Godwin’s Law posits that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. In other words: all discussions - regardless of topic or scope - inevitably end up being about Hitler and the Nazis.") Brook and Tilton’s mechanistic concept of human behavior was easily rebutted by Shirky and Ariely, who insisted that money is always only a substitute of meaning,refering to Wikipedia, Lego, and other examples of meaning-driven engagements. “Money can motivate your employees to show up,” Ariely said, but if you want them to not just show up but commit with their full creative and intellectual potential, you need to motivate them with non-monetary incentives.”

This view was echoed by Cristóbal Conde, president and CEO of IT services company Sungard, who endorsed transparency and called “creating a platform for collaboration” the most important task of today’s business leader. It didn’t matter that he almost literally borrowed his own words from an interview with the New York Times earlier this year – they still rang true. “Collaboration is one of the most difficult challenges in management. I think top-down organizations got started because the bosses either knew more or they had access to more information. None of that applies now. Everybody has access to identical amounts of information.” Conde said further: “The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management.” Conde: “Micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.” Sungard uses enterprise micro-blogging service Yammer to enhance internal knowledge sharing: “It has given our employees a voice.”

With CEOs like him, the company is not a 20th century idea: “The more I teach, the more I learn," Conde said. Humility, openness, and collaboration are the hallmarks of a new kind of humanistic organization, led by humane leaders. That’s an idea worth spreading – and monetizing.

Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control?

 

Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it remains the topic du jour for businesses of all kinds. Granted, it has been on the agenda of every executive ever since Henry Chesbrough’s seminal Open Innovation came out in 2003. However, as several new books elaborate upon the concept from different perspectives, and a growing number of organizations have recently launched ambitious initiatives to expand the paradigm to other areas of business, I thought it might be a good time to reframe “Open” from a design point of view.

What sparked my interest in particular was the Dachis Group’s list of Six Social Business Trends to Watch which referenced the phrase JP Rangaswami coined at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference: “Design for the loss of control.” His point was more IT-specific, arguing that the combination of pervasive digital infrastructure, software-as-a-service, cloud computing, social software, and smart phones have enabled employee- and customer-driven solutions to a degree that renders top-down IT systems obsolete. As Dion Hinchcliffe of the Dachis Group writes: “Enterprises currently expend considerable resources trying to impose control on a situation that increasingly appears like it not only can’t be controlled, but almost certainly doesn’t need to be.”

No longer in control

The new paradigm Hinchcliffe describes has implications far beyond just IT. For one thing, employees, who are facing an increasingly hybridized work/life proposition, are eager to do what they are passionate about, and they will increasingly find the digital spaces and tools that allow them to do this most effectively without having to ask anyone for permission. Companies have to come to terms with the fact that the traditional model of managerial resource allocation and coordination (mainly coerced through extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards and punishments, such as payments, promotions, demotions, etc.) has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce.

Moreover, customers, too, seek out relationships with brands that go beyond the merely transactional. Empowered through ubiquitous access to information and therefore radical transparency, through an abundance of choices on the web, as well as the ability to contribute and tap into social networks (and thus social capital) in real-time and on-the-go, they expect brands to offer engagement and collaboration models that match the more distributed and multi-layered mechanisms of value creation through social media.

Commitment is fickle, reputation volatile, and loyalty scarce. In short: Companies have lost control – over their workforce, their customers, and as a result, their brands. Or, more precisely, as Charlene Li points out in her book Open Leadership, they have never really been in control – what they are actually forced to give up now is their need for control.

The power of pull

So what can they do besides just bemoaning this loss and passively observing how the new centrifugal forces of the Social, Real-Time Web are disrupting their traditional business and engagement models? Li lays out how business leaders can and (must!) embrace the new rules of openness. John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, in the The Power of Pull, provide an actionable framework for how these new forces can be leveraged through “shaping strategies” on the individual, institutional, and societal level.

These “shaping strategies,” as the term suggests, present an exciting challenge for design. If designers embrace the insight that influence is replacing authority as the new currency in the “pull economy” and that the best way to gain influence is to give up control, they will have significant impact on how this new economy is shaping up. In fact, they are uniquely positioned to develop what Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison call levers of “access, attraction, and achievement” that provide the “creation spaces” and tools for employees and customers alike to design their own destiny, create their own meaning, and thus convert their very own skills and passions into productivity and loyalty.

In essence, businesses can use “shaping strategies” to amplify and accelerate the inevitable loss of control in order to avoid employees and customers abandon them. This may sound counter-intuitive but the upside is considerable. A deliberately designed loss of control grants companies the only remaining and arguably most critical competitive advantage – access. As long as they enable and facilitate knowledge flows, ideas, passions, skills, and experiences, they have access to them. In fact, if they fully leverage the “powers of pull,” these assets will gravitate towards them.

X-problems and social networks

Openness is no longer just a nice stunt but a fundamental requirement for any business that wants to thrive in the new “pull economy.” Because we’re increasingly dealing with "X-Problems," as my colleague Adam Richardson reckons in his book Innovation X, we need approaches that allow us to come up with creative solutions to problems we may not even know yet. In other words: Solutions that help define the problem. Or as Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison put it: “If you want to find out what it is you don’t know that you don’t know, you need to hang out with other people who might already know it.”

The loss of control enables the creation of more weak ties in a company’s network (inside and outside of the organization), and, as social network research has shown, weak ties are more conducive to transporting foreign ideas, knowledge, and skills – because they move faster from one node to the other as the network becomes more accessible and nimble on its fringes. The further you get away from the core of your network, the less control you (may want to) have.

You could argue that designers have been designing creation spaces, feedback mechanisms, and other participatory experiences for some time now. They certainly have, but perhaps without fully recognizing or deliberately orchestrating the amount of loss of control that their designs represented. It seems like the time is ripe to understand these efforts as part of a broader shift and consolidate them into a series of formats that, going forward, shall serve as blueprints for “design for the loss of control,” across different corporate functions and disciplines.

Frequently, these solutions will involve de-institutionalizing decision-making by removing the intermediary. In many cases, this may imply an act of democratization, but it is also important not to see this as a zero-sum game. Control is not just shifting from one hand to many; rather, it is dissolving and defragmenting and along the way diminishing – or turning into something else, far more valuable: social capital that resides in the public domain and is no longer controlled by anyone. The formats that propel this new mode of collaboration and value creation are emergent and informal, and they typically carry a significant amount of tacit knowledge.

Here are some recent examples:

Open ideation/crowdsourcing: Open ideation (or crowdsourcing) is based on the assumption that the best ideas for new products, services, and business models may come from outside of your organization or from those people inside your organization who are typically (by function or hierarchy) excluded from the ideation process. Like all open innovation efforts, crowdsourcing redistributes control from an elite group of thinkers and doers to a broader group of self-selected participants. By broadening the funnel, companies can harness the accumulated or aggregated knowledge of these voices. Crowdsourcing is usually focused on ideas and insights but can also cover a wider array of collaborations with external parties throughout all stages of the innovation cycle. Dell, Starbucks, P&G, and many other organizations use crowdsourcing. Nike partners with Creative Commons and Best Buy for GreenXchange, a platform that promotes “the creation and adoption of technologies that have the potential to solve important global or industry-wide sustainability challenges.” TED is expanding its reach through TEDx, “independently organized TED events," without compromising the exclusivity of its brand. Furthermore, Victors & Spoils brought crowdsourcing to the world of advertising; and IDEO recently launched its crowdsourcing platform, OpenIDEO, inviting the public to join “creative challenges” that tackle social issues through design. And there are firms such as InnoCentive that specialize in crowdsourcing services for other companies. All these companies not only make ideas accessible to more or less open publics (to some extent, giving up control over IP) but also commit to making the follow-up on these ideas (at least partially) transparent (giving up some control over agenda-setting and strategic planning).

Open design research: frogMob, developed by frog design, is a tool for crowdsourced design research, based on the idea that everyone can be a researcher for a day, just by paying a little more attention to the world around them. frogMob uses guerilla photography and stories to take a quick pulse on global trends, behaviors, and artifacts. Launched internally first – tapping into frog’s eight global studios – we are now expanding frogMob to a broader public. Through frogMob, we are able to “mobilize” not only our internal network around a specific assignment but also external contributors on an ad hoc basis, in a short amount of time (like a Flash Mob). frogMob allows us to provide lightweight, rapid design research for clients who ask for a “trend scrape” that identifies patterns and offers unexpected inspiration. The key here is to tap into existing knowledge flows - in a nimble way that does not require too much commitment from the participants and eliminates bureaucratic hurdles.

Open strategy: Crowdsourcing can also take place as a combination of online and offline collaboration, as demonstrated by NPR and its Think-In on the future of digital media. Supported and facilitated by frog, NPR hosted an open strategy session, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations. The Think-In harnessed the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators, and it developed concepts that NPR incorporated into its organizational roadmap. The event was augmented through live-commentary and streaming via various social media channels. This social augmentation made the workshop accessible for a broader audience, which – like the on-site participants – felt so genuinely passionate about NPR that they committed some serious time to this collective brainstorming. Such passion for brands could also be put to work through a more radical version of a Think-In: a “brand hijack” that convenes customers and other interested parties to explore new directions for a brand – yet with the twist that the brand itself would not participate (but may have the option to co-opt the results of the session afterwards).

Open-source humanitarian software: In the software space, open-source projects have long been an established form of open innovation, see IBM’s Eclipse platform. Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), founded by teams from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, uses open-source methods to “hack for humanity.” It describes itself as a community of “developers, geeks and tech-savvy do-gooders around the world, working to develop software solutions that respond to the challenges facing humanity today.” The group runs “Hackathons,” inviting the best and the brightest hackers from around the world, who volunteer their time to tackle disaster relief issues with through software applications. The Hackathons are designed as so-called “codejams,” fast-paced competitions that give the participants a set amount of time to solve the challenges they are given. At the end of a two-day marathon of hacking, a panel will review each hack, and the winners will walk away with prizes, as well as the right to call themselves “RHoKstars” ever after. Another example of open-source humanitarian software is Ushahidi’s CrowdMap which displays crowdsourced crisis data on maps as a free cloud-based service.

Open-(source) social networks: Lockheed Martin, the giant defense contractor, built its own networking site called Eureka Streams and released it open-source for the public to use. As Fast Company writes in a recent blog post, “The company's management had recognized that an internal social networking tool could have all sorts of procedural benefits for a large, and geographically disjointed organization. Essentially it lets ‘knowledge workers’ inside the company find and talk with other experts who may have valid input to particular projects, but who would otherwise have zero oversight or input.” Dow Chemical is another example of a company setting up its own social network, in this case to help managers identify the talent they need to execute projects across different business units and functions. Dow has even extended the network to include former employees – a smart move. Closed networks are of diminishing value. A recent McKinsey Quarterly report argues, “In the longer term, networked organizations will focus on the orchestration of tasks rather than the ‘ownership’ of workers’ and advises executives to ‘make the network the organization.’”

Open branding: In the spirit of transparency, design firm Continuum is partly revealing to the public its creative process. The specific challenge is to create a brand identity for the Design Museum Boston, a nomadic institution that exhibits mainly in the virtual space. For six weeks, Continuum is partnering with Core77 on a blog series that will reveal the firm’s process and progress as it takes on the challenge. Readers are invited to comment but it is not quite clear to what degree they can influence the creative work. It’s a non-commercial client and a low-risk project but in any case, making a creative project transparent – even somewhat haphazardly – is an interesting experiment that is worth following. The more radical experiment would of course be to put the creative control over a project fully in the hands of the “smart crowd” and have the creative team steered by a disperse group of “remote creative directors”- beyond just input comprising of insights and ideas. Other, more radical formats are imaginable: For example, sharing a company’s entire communications (some, more or less tightly managed corporate Twitter accounts are in a way a precursor to this) with the public. This would be radical transparency indeed, and an experiment with unpredictable outcome – will the benefit of enabling reciprocal, collaborative relationships outweigh the risk of reputational landmines and IP violations? Is it IP, in the end, as proprietary “knowledge stocks” (The Power of Pull), that serves as a company’s greatest asset or isn’t it rather the ability to attract talent and grant access to knowledge and skills? There’s another, softer benefit to it: Brand personality comes from being personal. The more transparent and the more vulnerable brands are, the more personal, they more authentic they will appear. Transparency is a prerequisite for authenticity – an unmasked and immediate act of communication.

Open social-capital enablers: Small, ad-hoc, start-ups are popping up that leverage the principles of self-organization, which Clay Shirky so aptly described in Here Comes Everybody, to rethink “capital” and reinvent human resources allocation in order to tackle global issues. Originated from the Sandbox network, an exclusive network of young innovators and entrepreneurs under 30, this movement calls itself “Emergent Transformation,” and Max Marmer, one of its masterminds, writes on its group blog: “Lately we have been observing an accelerated movement of ventures that are revolutionizing how we take initiative on a global scale. They can be mostly found in the areas of education, innovation, collaboration, networks, entrepreneurship, and human development: spaces that most likely will dominate the future of value creation in our society. These ventures are leveling the global resource play, unleashing unused & undeveloped human capital and leading to a socioeconomic transformation.” For example, there is Supercool School, an online school platform that strives to give people worldwide access to education by building a new global infrastructure of live online schools. Or Assetmap, an online platform that helps individuals discover and leverage resources directly from the community around them, using the methodology of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD). Max Marmer believes “One huge differentiator that sets these projects apart from almost all other organizations is their emphasis on ‘human potential’ or ‘social capital,’ rather than economic capital. The hope is that by creating a clearly defined space for these organizations to work in, there will be more opportunity to share this social capital, allowing them to achieve complimentary aspects of mutually shared visions. Their aspirations are tied to value creation, based on co-operative contribution, and will allow them to fulfill personal passions. Giving new meaning to their work, it’s helping people lead happier lives.”

Open conferences: Un-conferences are facilitated, face-to-face, participant-driven conferences centered on a specific theme or purpose. They are the antidote to the conventional conference format, radically disrupting the delineation between curator and attendees, speaker and audience. The attendees are the experts. Many organizations and groups have begun to use un-conferences to capture and externalize the full breadth of expertise assembled at conferences. Some conferences prefer to incorporate only some un-conference formats into their program – participant-driven sessions that are developed on site in real time.

Open conversations: Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And ad shop Crispin Porter + Bogusky did it. All of them use their corporate web sites as social hubs that curate what is being said about their brand rather than staging what their brand has to say. These efforts are attempts to at least co-opt the conversation on the Social Web before brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of the brand's social universe. In other words, what if a brand faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than the brand itself? Or if McDonalds suddenly saw itself confronted with a site aggregating blogs, videos, news, and tweets, all about but not by McDonalds? Think of this as the logical extension of the company profiles that already exist on LinkedIn and Glassdoor.com, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee information, salary information, and recent news. Indeed, third-party brand curators might realize that brands live in the ‘social commons,’ and that whoever builds the right aggregation mechanism and establishes the most popular channels to reach a mass audience will “own” the branded conversation on the web. Take a look at how Get Satisfaction’s “community-empowered customer support” plays this – it is not an uncontroversial model, but it is “designed for the loss of control (of brands),” enabling customer-to-customer service. You could also spin the idea of a “social homepage” a bit further and not only curate the social web conversation about your brand but actually give away your whole homepage to third parties and to public service announcements, stories, or art. Give up control – gain social currency.

Open HR: Of all critical business functions, HR might be the one with the greatest potential for innovation. With dynamic, quickly accessible expertise replacing static piles of proprietary knowledge, and companies moving from organization-centric to network-centric modi operandi, HR becomes a key enabler of assets through the nurturing of relationships, developing talent, and fostering a culture of openness and participation. This is not just pep talk but includes new tools and methodologies that radically alter the relationship between employee and firm. A recent study by Birkman International that surveyed nearly 20,000 HR professionals found that 83 percent of respondents see great potential in social media-based HR solutions, particularly when it comes to improving communication, learning, and knowledge sharing. Here at frog design, we have launched frogForward, an open-ended, conversational, and social performance management app that allows our employees to provide 360-degree feedback any time throughout the year (not just during review cycles). Goal-setting is entered as a stream, and the feedback – peer, managerial, and employee feedback – can be shared openly or privately. This new approach reflects the changing realities of work performance, from a task-driven control and coordination approach with quantifiable goals to a holistic view that is more situation-and context-aware, gives the employee significantly more control of the process, and considers intangibles such as tacit knowledge, social intelligence, and relationship-building. frogForward shares this approach with Rypple, an ad-hoc social network that provides simple, direct, anonymous, and ongoing customer and employee feedback.

All of these initiatives, whether they apply to brand, CRM, product development, R&D, customer service, or HR, exhibit some similar characteristics:

- easy access;

- open platforms that harness the creativity and expertise from people outside of the organization or untapped sources inside;

- open-ended formats that can evolve as the problem statement changes;

- ample room for participation and emergent self-organization;

- easy mechanisms for tinkering and hacking (e.g. through open-source formats);

- small formats that can be easily shared

- strong incentives (ideally intrinsic motivation or social currency);

- real-time visibility (through sharable content);

- tie-ins to dormant or active social networks;

- and distributed decision-making.

Openness as permanent crisis

There is another aspect to this: The most imminent and urgent manifestation of “loss of control” is of course a crisis. And in times where terrorism, financial downturns, natural disasters, as well as catastrophic events on the individual level are a steady companion to our societies and personal lives, designing for crisis has become a default skill, forcing designers to make contingency planning an integral part of the experiences they create. Often, this means developing exit scenarios that are flexible enough to provide a structure for emergent solutions in response to emergencies. (The notion that architects design spaces so they can be escaped from has been thoroughly examined by Stephan Trueby in his book Exit-Architecture - Design Between War and Peace). In other words: an easy way out. And in. Because exits are entry points as well. If you design ways out of the system, they might as well serve as ways into the system.

If you think about it, this insight may provoke a different notion of openness – understanding it as a system where exit and entry are identical. In this line of thinking, an ecosystem on the Social Web could be seen as a system in permanent crisis – it is always in flux, and its composition and value are constantly threatened by a multitude of forces, from the inside and the outside. What if we understood “designing for the loss of control” as designing for structures that are in a permanent crisis? Crises are essentially disruptions that shock the system. They are deviations from routines, and the very variance that the advocates of planning and programs (the “Push” model) so despise. At their own peril, because they fail to realize that variance is the mother of all meaning; it is variance that challenges the status quo, pulls people and their passions towards you, and propels innovation. “Designing for the loss of control” means designing for variance.

One system in permanent crisis that contains a high level of variance is WikiLeaks. The most remarkable thing about the site appears to be the dichotomy between the uncompromised transparency it aims at and the radical secrecy it requires to do so. The same organization that depends on the loss of control for its content very much depends on a highly controlled environment to protect itself and keep operating effectively. But not just that: Ironically, secrecy is also a fundamental prerequisite for the appeal of WikiLeaks’ “there are no secrets” claim. Simply put: there is no light without darkness. And there is no WikiLeaks without secrets.

Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open, nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative choices for positive effects. You need to build enough variance into a system to make it “flow” and yet retain some control over the underlying parameters (access, boundaries, authorship, participants, agenda, process, conversation, collaboration, documentation, etc.). Only if you maintain the fundamental ability to at least manage (and modify) the conditions for openness, will you be able to create it. To design for the loss of control, control the parameters that enable it.

These are just some initial thoughts. What other formats and business models can you think of that “design for the loss of control” to everyone’s benefit and increased social value? What other variances can be created and effectively shaped? What design principles must be applied?

Over to you.

Edelman's Six Digital Trends to Watch

From “marketing in the age of streams” to the “Googlization of media” to “situational awareness” to “location, location, locaton” to “business becomes social” to “private becomes public” – in their latest report, Edelman’s digital mavens Steve Rubel and David Armano provide a solid overview of the six key digital trends to watch.

Six Digital Trends To Watch by Steve Rubel and David Armano

 

Dreaming of Bio-Transparency

If you worry about social media pushing the boundaries of privacy on sites like Facebook these days, then you may want to be mindful of what is looming on the horizon next – because ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet.’ What we are sharing (mostly voluntarily) today is mainly a cocktail of sociographic data (birthday, birthplace, location, education, memberships, hobbies, etc.), convictions, intentions, and activities. Soft stuff, really, if you think about it; information that can conveniently be tweaked and entirely made up at your fingertips online, as needed to enhance your social credentials. It remains a virtual currency in a virtual world.

“Hard” privacy data looks different, and we have not been sharing it much to date. It cannot be easily fabricated or altered because it is literally an existential part of our individual lives, and as such becomes only social through the act of sharing. Radical Transparency in its most radical notion extends to those human areas that are most personal, and it doesn’t take much imagination to pinpoint the most sacrosanct of them: our genetic code and our dreams; the very physical and the very meta-physical fabric of our selves.

As for the latter, movies have long envisioned the intrusion of others into our utmost private spheres. Think of “Strange Days,” “Minority Report,” or “Memento,” which all riffed on memory-theft or manipulation. And now the director of “Memento,” Christopher Nolan, has a new mega-project out, “Inception” (the film opens in the US on July 16), in which the main protagonists are dreams. In an interview with the New York Times the director describes the radical thought experiment underlying the film, the idea of multiple people sharing the same dream: “Once you remove the privacy … you’ve created an infinite number of alternative universes in which people can meaningfully interact, with validity, with weight, with dramatic consequences.” Web sites such as Dreamstop or Whispy are already delivering on that vision, albeit in poor execution. Someone needs to come up with a less esoteric way and a better business model for social networks based on dreams. How much wasted creativity could be harnessed if there was technology allowing us to make the subconscious transparent, as a social “dream feed”?

An even “harder” and more integral data set of ourselves is the genetic code that we all carry. The temptation to “socialize” this very foundation of our individuality will be hard to resist. It is only an incremental step, technically, but a huge leap, of course, morally, from sharing personal health records to making publicly available the source code of one’s life performance. But as the cost of getting personal genomes deciphered is plummeting, it seems fair to assume that this information will sooner or later populate the social web (on sites such as 23andMe). In a recent special report on “The Human Genome,” the Economist somewhat pragmatically deliberates the implications of this new brave world of bio-transparency. Referencing Stewart Brand, the American futurologist, who famously coined “Information wants to be free,” the magazine posits that “One of the lessons of the new biology is that it is all about information.” It claims that “Everyday genomics is coming, ready or not” and that there is “no hiding place.” “There will be mistakes on the way, and suffering, too,” it concedes, “But technology, once invented, cannot be unlearned.” The article closes with another one of Stuart Brand’s memorable quotes: “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” That might be required indeed, especially if you consider sharing information about our genomes to be the precursor of sharing actual genes – the real deal.

My colleague Fabio Sergio has written and spoken extensively about the subject of smart bio-feedback, raising some provocative questions around his vision of “your heartbeat becoming the conversation” – a body-to-data interaction model that turns our bodies into messengers, into “pulsating active nodes on The Network.” By the same token, sharing our dreams and DNA will make our bodies and souls the ultimate social media of the future. As a result of it, publicness will emerge as the only possible human modus vivendi – sharing ergo sum; see my genes, see my dreams, therefore I am. Privacy won’t be dead. But everyone who chooses to live a public life may ultimately gain the ability to live a more fulfilling, healthier life.

[image credit: Three Trees Studios]

Growth Ltd.

While in transit at the Munich airport, which is in many ways the epitome of civilization, I’m watching on one of the TV monitors the live footage of the street riots in Athens where Greek citizens are protesting against their government’s budget cuts after decades-long fiscal excesses. It’s like watching CNN blend with surveillance cameras. Greece, the birthplace of democracy, the mother of all civil societies, recently rejuvenated by new infrastructure for the 2004 Olympics, has fallen prey to greed, moral decay, and poor governance. It is ironic (another Greek invention) that what was once a flourishing empire is now a red number on a balance sheet and a black sheep in one of modern democracy’s most ambitious projects: the European Union. If America went straight from Barbary to decadence, skipping civilization, as the joke goes, then Greece might be on its way straight from civilization to decadence to Barbary. Two people dead, hundreds injured. Police units carrying sticks and tear gas marching on the main streets of Athens. One is familiar with these images, but not with seeing them against this backdrop. It’s like an atavism invading our civilized lives, as a stark reminder of how fragile they are.

Greece is facing an unsettling time of austerity, as it is trying to repair the social contract with its citizens. The bail-out funds approved by the European Union provoke strong resentments on both sides – creditor and debtor – as can be seen by the strained German-Greek relationship. But maybe this crisis will have a cathartic effect, as German journalist Gabor Steingart opined, and finally pave the way for the United States of Europe as a more effective successor to the rather lofty political-economic abstraction of the European Union. Or perhaps, with a more negative spin, the deficit crisis is the precursor of a looming European crisis of much larger proportion that fundamentally threatens the sustainability of the European social welfare model, built and defended by predominantly left-leaning governments in post-war Europe. Gross public social expenditures in the European Union increased from 16 percent of GDP in 1980 to 21 percent in 2005, compared to 15.9 percent in the US. The New York Times comments: “With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes.” The "European Dream" has always been that economic growth would correspond with expanding social welfare systems, and as it turns out this dream might indeed remain a dream.

At least Europe was dreaming with its eyes wide open. In 1972, it was the Club of Rome, back then mainly made up of European scientists, which instigated and framed a subsequently heated debate after expressing strong concerns about finite resource supply. For its seminal “Limits to Growth” scenario report, it ran computational models factoring in world population growth, consumption trends, and the availability of various critical resources, and concluded that the end of growth would probably arrive between 2010 and 2050 (the study has been re-run repeatedly in the years since the original publication, using more sophisticated software and updated input data, with similar results).

Almost 40 years later, in light of the ongoing economic crisis, climate change, and a catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the question of the “limits to growth” has risen to new prominence. Wall Street’s irrational exuberance and the growing number of failed capitalist states have shown us that market efficiencies alone cannot be relied upon in unlocking the physical limits of resource supply. “The party is over” views are mushrooming. Richard Heinberg, an American journalist and educator who has published extensively on ecological issues, writes on his blog: “In late 2009 and early 2010, the economy showed some signs of renewed vigor. Understandably, everyone wants it to get ‘back to normal.’ But here’s a disturbing thought: What if that is not possible? What if the goalposts have been moved, the rules rewritten, the game changed? What if the decades-long era of economic growth based on ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption is over, finished, and done? What if the economic conditions that all of us grew up expecting to continue practically forever were merely a blip on history’s timeline?”

Yet so far growth continues: The IMF is forecasting 3.9 percent global economic growth for 2010, despite the threat of a double-dip recession. And most research indicates that the world in 2050 will be richer than the world in 2010. But the problem is that current projections also show a steady decline in the growth rate and a population of around nine billion by the year 2050. The carrying capacity of the Earth’s ecosystem may then very well reach its limit.

Growth is relative indeed. There are, as economists might say, opportunity costs. The comprehensive report by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern undertaken on behalf of the UK government, estimates the costs of climate change, for mitigation and adaptation, to range from five to 20 percent of global GDP.

In recent years China’s economy has been growing at eight percent or more per year; which means it is more than doubling in size every ten years. China now consumes more than twice as much coal as it did a decade ago – the same with iron ore and oil. And it is continuing its growth (11.9 per cent in the first quarter this year!) at the expense of curbing gashouse emissions (after a temporary decline they have risen to unprecedented levels this quarter, causing the largest six-month increase in the tonnage of human generated greenhouse gases ever by a single country).

Speaking of this in economic terms, one wonders what the bottom line of our civilization will look like when the full impact of growth is fully documented and externalized. What will offset the systematic exploitation of natural resources, increase in output, and the accumulation of materialistic wealth? It might be a desirable effort to craft a balance sheet of our societies that would juxtapose the absorption of material and human resources with an accurate documentation of the positive gains: cultural refinement, collective learning, freedom, happiness, spiritual enlightenment, delight, quality of life etc. Will there be scientific breakthroughs that sustain our existence or even extend it to other planets? Whether the accumulation of intellectual equity will ultimately save us from our seemingly inevitable demise, well, that’s a whole other question. At the very best it might possibly prolong the finite life-cycle of our species, and that appears to be a desirable result to most of us.

But perhaps it makes sense that we yet have to find ways to make all these intangible assets tangible, that we have hitherto fallen short of materializing the immaterialistic, as the lack thereof may well protect the very lynchpin of our striving for growth. Because in truth, it is not growth for growth’s sake that we’re seeking, it is hope. Perhaps it is the Calvinistic ethics, revisited and reversed: More than the wealth we're accumulating today it is the debt we're making that lets us persuade ourselves that there is a future. Paradoxically, debt is a warrant, an underwriting of the future, simply because someday someone must still be there who will ultimately have to pay for it all (you'd think).

What is growing, too – at the expense of privacy, as some would argue – is online social capital. More than 50 percent of the world’s population is under 30 years old, and 96 percent of them have joined a social network (“Social Media Revolution”). Facebook’s population represents the fourth largest country in the world. This “social wealth” stands in stark contrast to the “Age of Austerity” many now project on purely materialistic terms. As we mount this social wealth and generate more and more social and creative capital, maybe we can overcome the constraints of materialistic growth simply with our ability to inspire behavior change through the strength of our connectivity and the stubborn power of our imagination. At the very literal end of the day, this, and nothing else, is what innovation is all about.

[image credit: atticwritersworkshop]

The Soft Power of Social

Over the course of the past twelve months, I wrote several blog posts and articles about the Chief Meaning Officer, a role which I envision as an innovative leader who employs the new social power of marketing – provisioned by Social as a governing principle of all business interactions – to transform his/her organization (Charlene Li also elaborates on this theme in her new book Open Leadership). I presented this concept at some conferences including next in Hamburg, mostly to fellow marketers or representatives from digital agencies, and you can also hear me riff on it in this podcast produced by Dutch brand agency Energize. I received a ton of feedback: encouragement, endorsements, and consent, but also skepticism suggesting that this model might just be another marketing fad.

Invited by BIDC, the Beijing Industrial Design Center, I was extremely grateful to have the opportunity to introduce the idea to a group of Chinese designers at a workshop in Beijing a few weeks ago. It was the first time I shared the Chief Meaning Officer framework in a different cultural and professional context, and it was a welcome reality check.

I was a bit worried that the topic might be a stretch, both because product designers would not really care that much about marketing innovation, and also because I wasn't quite sure how relevant the gospel of the social web might be for a Chinese audience.

The attendees, however, repudiated all my concerns. First of all, meaning seems to be a timely denominator for a generation of digital natives that demands more self-governance, quality, and accountability in its interactions with brands, no matter what the cultural and regulatory parameters are. The appetite for “betterness,” as Umair Haque would call it, is a global phenomenon.

Moreover, because both my audience and I were outside of our comfort zones, we ended up having a very open and animated discussion that nicely bridged marketing and design. One can’t exist without the other. Marketers’ task, you could argue, is to make tangibles intangible, whereas designers make the intangibles tangible. Both orchestrate time and space to create meaningful experiences that transcend a unique value proposition based on scarcity by pointing to a higher mission, a greater cause that is universally appealing.

This is the unique “soft power” – the ability to shape a brand of cultural principles and behaviors – that marketers and designers have in common and that nowadays is mostly facilitated by the mechanisms of sharing and collaborating on the social web. If economic growth stagnates, currencies deflate, and institutional systems fail, this social soft power might be the only power remaining to hold our societies together – in Greece, California, or China.

Chief Meaning Officer: Tangible Ways to Create Intangible Value

On the Eve of Marketing 2.0, the Dawn of Marketing 3.0?

I’m en route to the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris, one of the most respected gatherings of marketing executives presenting and discussing the latest trends in their field. In a way, the story of the conference is the story of marketing itself. The somewhat yesteryear name indicates that a few years ago, when Marketing 2.0 premiered, it was conceived as a forum for pioneers who were early on embracing digital marketing and social media. Times have changed. What used to be at the fringes of the profession has moved into the mainstream, and both program and attendees of Marketing 2.0 reflect that. That’s not a bad thing. Digital marketing IS marketing, social media IS media. You would think..

According to data from eROI and eMarketing & Commerce (eM+C), US marketers spent 13% of their online marketing time on social media in 2009, the second-largest share of any tactic. And yet, a recent eMarketer article claims that social media is still not fully integrated into the marketing mix and in many cases remains an ad-hoc activity that is siloed in the organization and under-budgeted. The level of integration varies vastly depending on the tactic. The publication cites research from marketing management firm Unica suggesting that a majority of voting features, product reviews, user-generated content and RSS feeds are integrated with other campaigns, however, less so social networking sites, blogs, or micro-blogs. Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst, suspects (in an earlier report called “Five Reasons Why Marketers Need to Have a Social Media Strategy”) that marketers often neglect an integrated strategy because they – mistakenly – believe that social media is easy and cheap, ignoring that “much of the real cost of social campaigns is in the people-hours spent fostering and maintaining social conversations.”

The full integration of social media is only a matter of time, but the next frontier of marketing innovation is not yet on the horizon. In many ways, we still live in a marketing 2.0 world: marketing programs that leverage social networks, blogs, mobile, Twitter, real-time conversations, social content, viral memes, crowdsourcing, and so forth have become the norm. Just this week, I had a meeting with the online marketing team of a leading German automaker, and it is hard to imagine anything that would be news to them. They have it all figured out, really, as have almost all big-brand marketing departments. Most of the conversations I have with marketing professionals these days are around tactical issues – budgeting, staffing, monitoring, and, of course, measurement, which is a sure sign of a market-wide saturation. In Gartner Hype-Cycle speak: social media has reached a plateau, and it will soon reach the trope of productivity, as the enterprise-wide implementation of social media collaboration tools is on the rise. You will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano (with Edelman), Francois Goisseaux from Beeline Labs (and his upcoming book on The Hyper-Social Organization), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

But where’s the next hype? Looking at the usual industry augurs, Forrester has produced some good thinking on interactive marketing (with its ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’: permission, proximity, perception, and participation), and BBH Labs clearly is the thought leader when it comes to the confluence of advertising, social media, and digital storytelling. But all that is an apt description of state-of-the-art practices rather than breaking new ground Augmented Reality and Transmedia may rise to the occasion, and there is the exciting possibility that the iPad finally enables brands to become full-blown publishers. And the whole notion of “Marketing with Meaning” has certainly introduced a new perspective, injecting the dusty CSR model with a more tangible and Millennial-friendly proposition of cause-driven social innovation. Chief Culture, Chief Experience, Chief Meaning, and Chief Convergence Officers and other variations are heralded as the manifestations of innovative marketing models, but at the end of the day all they represent was already stated – loud and clear – by the Clue Train Manifesto in 1999.

Notwithstanding the lack of new paradigms, the marketing function is definitely better positioned than it was a few years ago. It has benefited from the growing convergence of disciplines, media, and formats that shape today’s company-customer interactions: Product design firms are moving into advertising. Advertisers are launching product innovation offerings. Marketers employ design thinking. Design firms are adding go-to-market services. Innovation consultancies are selling iPhone apps. Interactive agencies take on mobile advertising. PR firms are offering branding services. And so on. While creative disciplines are converging, the modes of effective (digital) interactions are converging as well: the combination of real-time, social, mobile, location-based, augmented, and gaming elements are the secret sauce of almost every integrated program these days. Campaigns are becoming products (as just one example, look at AKQA’s recent launch of its Digital Products Group), and marketing innovation is evolving into marketing IT. Marketers, as the renaissance men of 21st century business, can be at the heart of this all, if they’re smart.

Fig. The Great Marketing Convergence

BBH Labs describes the tremendous opportunity ahead: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

Marketing is back at the table. Now it needs to demonstrate that it has the chops to innovate and really drive change in organizations.

Checking In

Privacy Is Over. Here Comes Sociality.

As widely discussed by privacy advocates and blogs, Facebook recently changed some of its privacy settings. Users are no longer able to limit the viewing of their profile photos, home towns, and friends lists to only approved friends. Those are all public now by default. Moreover, Facebook’s new default settings “recommend” that dynamic content such as status messages and photos be made public. While the blogosphere still closely scrutinizes these changes and is aghast at Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘privacy is over’ claims made at the Crunchies awards (he didn’t actually say it verbatim but his statements more or less implied it), I have to admit I was surprised that all this stirred such an uproar. Facebook is only reacting to a larger social trend as it strives to become an asymmetrical and therefore more growth-enabled network (or communications platform) – like Twitter. Privacy, at least a more traditional notion thereof, is the collateral damage of this strategic agenda. With the value of reciprocity (narrowcasting) succumbing to the prospect of exponentiality (broadcasting), privacy is no longer commercially exploitable. “No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of ‘free,’” writes social networking researcher Danah Boyd in a blog post in which she otherwise harshly criticizes Facebook’s move. The age of privacy as we know it might be over indeed. Is it worth fighting for?

Privacy (from the Latin ‘privatus,’ according to Wikipedia: “separated from the rest, deprived of something, especially office, participation in the government”), the “right to be let alone,” is considered a human right in most parts of the world, in spite of all cultural relativism. Historically speaking, privacy has undergone a remarkable evolution. Aristotle distinguished between the public sphere of politics and political activity, the polis, and the private or domestic sphere of the family, the oaks. If a citizen of Athens was a private man, then it meant he was stripped of any political office and therefore considered “inferior.” Later, in the enlightened civil societies of Europe, however, privacy became a hallmark of the bourgeoisie, a hard-earned privilege that marked the delineation between upper and working classes. The latter had work – if they were fortunate – the former “had a life,” because they could afford it. This life tended to be private, by definition. In the emerging information economies of the 20th century, various theories described privacy as control over information about oneself (Parent, 1983), while others defended it as a broader concept crucial for human dignity (Bloustein, 1964), or emphasized the social aspect of it with regards to enabling intimacy (Gerstein, 1978; Inness, 1992).

Throughout their historical mutations, the public and private spheres needed one another like yin and yang. Having a life was a private act, but only if it was publicly earned and respected. This dialectic relationship will always remain. There is no privacy without publicy and vice versa. And yet, while privacy may never go away as a philosophical counterweight to publicy, today it is publicy that counts as the new privilege of the digital upper class. Privacy has been marginalized to the fringes of a society whose modus operandi is based on the very public mechanisms of social sharing. In the digital era, a private life does not exist. Google ergo sum.

The search engine’s recent public stance against the Chinese government, threatening to shut down all its China operations after Gmail accounts of Chinese activists had been hacked, highlights this new power structure and the evolving value of privacy in our ever-connected world. When the privacy of Google’s users was violated, the company decided to respond with a public statement, mounting public pressure to press on an essentially private matter. Good for a company that does not want be evil, many people applauded, but it bore a certain irony that Google acted as de facto digital state with its own foreign policy. Isn’t Google, after all, built on the very principle of making private data public? Isn’t it because of Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” that we have come to terms with the fact that our online lives and afterlives will never be private again and will be perpetually archived in the very public cloud?

In the case of Google vs. China, what was bemoaned as the loss of privacy was in fact the lack of publicy. Privacy is the most precious asset in more or less closed societies in which trust is a scarce resource and true publics don’t exist. But as we live our lives in the openness of the web, isn’t it publicy that we need to enable and protect? An ideal publicy that is so transparent and democratic that it doesn’t need privacy as refuge?

It’s complicated. Stowe Boyd has declared this to be the “Decade of Publicy,” in which he expects “the superimposition of publicy on top of, and partly obscuring, privacy:”

“Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent. (…) It’s as if we are gaining the ability to see into the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the social spectrum when we are online, and in some contexts we are dropping out yellows or reds. To those tied to the visible color spectrum we are habituated to, this new sort of vision will be 'irreal.' But ultraviolet has always existed: we just couldn't see it before. (…) This will be a fracturing of the premises of privacy, and a slow rejection of the metaphors of shared space. The principles of publicy are derived from the intersection of infinite publics and our shared experience of time online, through media like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The innate capability we have to shift in a heartbeat from a given public, and our corresponding persona, to another, is now being accelerated by streaming social tools. This will be the decade when publicy displaces privacy, online and off.”

As we struggle to maintain the traditional, monolithic privacy-publicy dichotomy, perhaps we must start using a different terminology altogether and embrace a new concept: sociality. In a hyper-individualized society, sociality is becoming the main object of desire for individuals. Or as Markus Albers puts it in his forthcoming book about what he coins the Meconomy:

“The Meconomy does not entail a purely egoistic philosophy. On the contrary, it promotes a new culture of empathy and social engagement. As we increasingly decide for ourselves how, where, and with whom we work, the search for meaning gains more importance. The trend to combine economical with social engagement grows stronger. We want to do good, be happy, and make money. In the old patriarchal, hierarchical, and inflexible working world, these aims were often mutually exclusive. In the Meconomy, their combination is almost a precondition for success.”

The semantic coincidence is telling. “Me” desires “Meaning.” As much as publicy needs privacy and vice versa, the “Meconomy” needs the “Meaning Economy” – as its co-evolutionary, symbiotic partner. With meaning emerging as the core currency of all market interactions (because it is ultimately what consumers buy; and friends, fans, and followers buy into), people, organizations, and brands that provide meaning will be the power players of the new Me(aning) Economy – brands like Apple, conferences like TED, contests like the Olympic Games, sport clubs like FC Barcelona, media organizations like NPR, non-profits like UNICEF, and, yes, politicians like Obama.

Sociality may succeed privacy because it is a critical precondition for meaning. To be meaningful, meaning needs to be shared, and sharing can only occur in open social settings. Open social settings, however, by definition, compromise privacy, in all its four textbook modes (solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve). Meaning means giving things a name, making sense of “Black Swans,” unexpected events. In other words: Only an event that becomes a story (which still is the most powerful social media of all times, a true evergreen on the social web!) is meaningful.

Thus, it makes sense to replace the strict privacy-publicy opposition with a multi-layered continuum along progressive levels of sociality. Sociality may turn out to be a much better variable for describing and regulating our digital lives. The question then no longer is how private we can be, but how social we want to be. Instead of privacy seetings, we should speak of sociality settings: The maximum number of friends we want to have; and through which channels we want to ‘socialize’ our contents etc. Privacy understood as sociality (as an enabling and not a defensive right) grants us the ability to control who knows what about us and who has access to us, and thereby allows us to vary our social interactions with different people so that we can control our various social relationships at different levels of intimacy.

This new sociality is most visibly manifest in online social networks. It is worth noting that these not only mirror the mechanisms of offline social interactions but actually provide users with more control over their privacy (or sociality) than they would ever have in the physical world. On Facebook and other networks, you can pick and choose the people you want to meet and share ‘presence’ with; in a restaurant, bar, and other public spaces, you can’t. Exclusivity in the real world needs to be earned, whereas online it is a given.

Bill Thompson pledges we should embrace the new liberties that come with this new radical transparency:

“The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality,’ how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted – in all senses – disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human.”

All this openly shared user data represents not only an enourmous amount of social capital but also a huge collective leap of faith. Whether the big digital platforms and ecosystems will honor this trust to maintain civic publics or if they will choose to exploit it for (private) economic reasons, at any price, will be one of the defining moments of this young decade and the most impactful decision it will have to make. Control (as the catalyst of privacy) is good, but trust (as the catalyst of sociality) is better. We can afford to lose our privacy, but we will not survive the loss of sociality.

[image: Geekologie]