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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 has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce.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.

The Conversation Wars

Modernista did it. Skittles did it. And now the world’s hottest advertising firm, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CPB), has done it, too: the NY outfit has re-launched its corporate web site as a conversational social hub that curates what is being said about CPB rather than staging what CPB has to say. Some may scoff at this move and denigrate it as “sooooo six months ago,” but I agree with Paul Isakson when he heralds the influence of the new CPB site on the rest of the industry as potentially paradigm-shifting.

The demarcation line here runs between pioneer and early adopter: CPG is the latter, no doubt, and while there’s nothing really innovative about the new site, it is nonetheless still radical relative to the vast majority of corporate web sites out there. Bringing CPB’s client portfolio to life by marrying the Kantian “You are what you do” with the Twitterian “You are what they say about you,” it certainly sets a new standard for the online presentation of creative industry brands. And – the proof is in the pudding – it accomplishes the ultimate goal of any conversational site: it is the talk of the town (or at least that of Madison Avenue).

However, as I was browsing through the plethora of content on the new (beta) CPB.com, an unsettling feeling came over me. It occurred to me that the trend of conversational corporate web sites going mainstream might trigger an unexpected, inadvertent effect. With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf.

Similar to Google’s profiting from original content on the backs of original publishers, brand-specific aggregators could benefit from being parasites of original brands’ social universe. In other words, what if Skittles faced unexpected competition from a third-party site that provided a much more comprehensive and easier-to-access curation of Skittles conversations than Skittles.com 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 XING, which aggregate individual member data into a fairly transparent view of companies, including employee 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.

This scenario will hardly be a conflict that brands can legally solve, and it may therefore present a troubling blind spot in the social media ecosystem. Sure, brands can claim their corporate URLs and even their Facebook profiles (not always their Twitter feeds, as you can see exemplified by http:/twitter.com/ted – “I got it first, I win.”). Aggregators, however, operate in social web’s no man’s land, in indisputable territory.

Brand value, extremely volatile anyway, would then become completely unmanageable for the original brand owner. The very transcendence that is emblematic of powerful brands, may become their curse: brand loyalty is not so much loyalty towards a certain company; rather it is – as the name implies – loyalty towards a brand, wherever it lives and however it appears, both of which not limited to the confines of the official representation on the brand owner’s properties. It is the conundrum of successful brand builders that the bigger their brand becomes, the more likely their risk that they lose it to the social commons. Skittles and CPB have recognized that the main threat for their brands is not coming from competitors at the center of their industry but from outliers at the fringes –and they have preempted it, at least so far. My advice for all the others, the late adopters: Take action quickly and launch your own branded aggregation portals before third parties beat you to the punch!

While third-parties might try to benefit from curating branded conversations, Twitter produces the reverse trend as well: brands acting as parasites of existing third-party conversations. UK furniture retailer Habitat had to apologize for referencing the popular hashtag #iranelection in its Twitter feeds. (Over)-eager to drive eyeballs to its feed, it had committed the ultimate sin of social brands: it had stolen a collective currency that no one brand could possibly own.

Another scenario is brands initiating Twitter conversations that are essentially solipsistic. Web-site building company Moonfruit conducted a campiagn offering10 free MacBook Pros as prizes randomly awarded to Twitterers who would use the hashtag #moonfruit. The result: #moonfruit became a trending topic, attracting 400 tweets a minute, more than 10,000 times per hour, and 200,000 per day. Moonfruit’s Twitter followers rose to 23,000, and according to a Moonfruit spokesperson, visits to its site were up 600% on day two of the campaign. Some bemoan it as a "tragedy of the commons" or caution that "unless the Twitterverse wises up, we'll end up getting deluged with hashtag spam." I'm not so worried. The different responses to Habitat's and Moonfruit's campaign show that the Twitterverse can self-regulate attention-hijacking attempts and tell the cool from the not-so-cool. Let Twitter do what Twitter can do. All is fair in the conversation wars.

[Picture credit: Werkmann]

Yahoo to Launch Flickr Video Next Month

MarketingVox reports that Yahoo plans to debut Flickr Video in beta next month.

Since one in three videos viewed in the US are hosted by YouTube, the new service will face significant competition. Yahoo folded Yahoo Photos into Flickr after its purchase of the site. But apparently it has no intention of doing the same with Yahoo Video, which garnered 3.2 percent of video views in January. Product Manager Kakul Sriastava told CNET's Dan Farber that Yahoo Video and Flickr are seen as separate audiences, and that Flickr must introduce video in an "authentic" way to woo its 23 million contributors to use it. Last summer, Flickr was rated the #2 photo site in the US. Plans to bring video to the offering began circulating around the same time.

CNET's Dan Farber pinpoints the key challenge for Flickr Video: "The problem for Yahoo is that many Flickr members, like myself, have gone to other places to share videos." Flickr needs to add an innovative feature, a true differentiator to win them back. What could that be?

SXSW Interactive 2008: Who Will Be This Year's Twitter?

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

Here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com
Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/
Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw
SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/
SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

Charlie Rose and Robert Scoble Will Give Keynote At Bulldog Reporter's Media Relations Summit

Bulldog Reporter has put together a great program fo the Media Relations Summit, April 6-8, in San Francisco, Corresponding with the summit's theme "The Power of Story: New Media, New Technologies, a New Narrative for PR," Robert Scoble and Charlie Rose will deliver the keynotes. Rose will be talking about "The Art of the Story: Finding the Heart of Drama," and Scoble will be speaking on "The Future of Social and Consumer-Generated Media."

Other sessions will address:

• How to establish your CEO and top execs as industry thought leaders
• Using new technologies to communicate directly with consumers
• Harnessing the power of search marketing for PR campaigns
• Secrets of placing your corporate video on social media sites
• Master class on the latest innovations in guerrilla PR
• How to increase traffic to your corporate website
• Increasing media pick up with ingenious storytelling techniques
• How to make news when there's no news
• New techniques for measuring the ROI of online PR
• How to craft a cost-effective social media strategy

To see descriptions of all 52 sessions, see this 14-page brochure.

Speakers will include:

• Craig Newmark, Customer Service Rep & Founder, craigslist
• Alan Elias, VP, Corporate Communications, Washington Mutual
• Bruce Ertmann, Manager, Consumer-Generated Media, Toyota
• Joe Carberry, SVP, Global Public Affairs, Visa, Inc
• Sally Falkow, President, Expansion Plus
• Karen Kahn, VP, Worldwide PR, Sun Microsystems
• Stacie Bright, Senior Communications Director, Unilever
• Tac Anderson, Web 2.0 Strategic Lead, Hewlett-Packard
• Michael Smart, News Director, Brigham Young University
• Alison Wertheim, VP, Corporate Relations, Charles Schwab
• Lee Aase, Manager, Media Relations & New Media, Mayo Clinic
• Dave Samson, General Manager, Public Affairs, Chevron
• Corrine Kovalsky, Director, Public Relations, Raytheon
• Akilah Monifa, Producer, CBS-TV
• Paula Berg, Manager, Public Relations, Southwest Airlines

The Shrinking Brand / Marketing in a Small World

From micro-loans to micro-vacations, micro-celebrities to micro-trends, speed dating to speed cooking: the "long tail" world of consumers is becoming smaller and shorter. Products, services, and experiences are being deconstructed in easier-to-digest, easier-to-afford bits, allowing consumers to collect even more experiences, as often as possible, in an even shorter time frame. Shrinking attention spans have prompted the rise of what Wired Magazine calls "snack-size media," and the hyper-personalization of online communication has led to new formats (micro-blogs, widgets, feeds, texting, etc.) that challenge long-held marketing conventions.

The emerging "economy of micro-scale" renders the traditional consumer segmentation obsolete and has major implications for brands that distribute content. The smaller the format, the bigger the chances, it seems, to become the next big (small!) thing. If "selling less of more" is the future of business, communicating more to fewer is the future of marketing.

In a nutshell, you could also put it this way: The world is small. Life is short. But brands still want to be big and have a long life. That's no longer viable. Given the atomization of audience size and behavior, brands will need to "shrink," too, if they want to remain able to connect with consumers. Small brands don't need to be small companies. And it doesn't mean they need to be humble. It just means they understand and embrace the small containers, the micro-media, in which they take place and come to life (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Twittergrams, Kyte.tv, widgets, etc.). With everyone else vying for the premium attention space above-the-line, maybe brands are better off relying on the small worlds of micro-formats and snack-size media below -- if they manage to be really eye-to-eye with consumers, there will be enough room to make a lasting impression.

Ps. I'm working on a book proposal about this (my new year's resolution!) and will post bits and pieces of my early drafts on this blog in the coming weeks and months. More soon...

"Customer Service is the New Marketing" - Really?

The doomsdays for marketers continue. Robert Stephens, founder and chief inspector of The Geek Squad, contends that "Marketing is a tax you pay for being unremarkable." If he's right, then maybe "Customer Service is the New Marketing" indeed. This is also, not too coincidentally, the title of an upcoming summit in San Francisco, hosted by Satisfaction, which seeks to (let others) prove that "smart companies are turning customer service from a cost center into an engine for creating evangelists." Confirmed speakers include Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos; Marc Hedlund, Chief Product Officer of Wesabe; Brian Oberkirch, Principal at Like it Matters, Tara Hunt, Principal of Citizen Agency; and Michael Murphy, Group Brand Manager for Customer Service at Virgin; and others. You can see the full line-up of speakers and the schedule on the summit website.

The folks from Satisfaction have already presented their thesis at some conferences, and now they set out to acquire more thought leadership credentials by hosting their own summit, demonstrating that they are leading an entire movement. However, if you look more closely at speakers and topics (i.e. Deb Schultz from MMI Consulting: "Stop Yelling & Start Weaving: Marketing in a Relationship Economy," Chris Heuer from the recently launched Conversation Group), you realize that the summit's theme is just another riff on the same dominant trend: conversational marketing, social (media) marketing, user-centered marketing, participatory marketing, citizen marketing, or whichever label you may prefer to describe the fact that consumers have become a more powerful part in the marketing equation (and want to be talked to and not yelled at).

Customer service is of course not the new marketing; it has been an important part of marketing ever since David Ogilvy's famous "the customer is your wife," if not long before that. What, then, is the new marketing? Well, conferences like this are the right forum to find out. I will attend -- and I hope that they will invite some real customers, too.

PR is Product Design: Ford's Social Media News Release

PR is a field that is currently going through a series of pretty radical disruptions. The rise of social media has challenged the old way of promoting messages, and today's PR practitioners face the daunting challenge of doing effective public relations when it's more and more the public itself that does all of the relating for you.

Enter the social media news release (SMNR), originally conceived by SHIFT Communications, a viable new format to spark and cultivate online conversations about a product. Todd Defren, Shel Holtz, Chris Heuer, and other bloggers have been on the soapbox preaching about SMNRs for almost a year now. The list of companies that have used the SMNR includes Coca-Cola, BEA, SAP, Novell, and Belkin, among many other smaller companies.

And now -- hat tip to Geoff Livingston -- Ford has released an especially glowing example of a SMNR for its new 2008 Focus. It's quite a production and includes a vast array of social media elements. Flickr-sized Images, RSS feeds, suggested meta-tags, YouTube videos, PDF fact sheets, bulleted facts, and a variety of executive quotes make this release eye and conversation candy -- lavish yet informative.

Livingston writes: "This new social media news release takes the emerging form to a new level, and demonstrates that companies can reinvigorate, static and boring parenthetical form with dynamic content. The result: a virtual work sheet that any blogger, journalist or analyst can use as starting point for a story."

It is definitely a step in the right direction even though the release is not yet fully social media-enabled: it lacks broader social bookmarking capabilities, and it also does not allow the recipients to comment on the release itself and pick up the conversation right there. I also doubt that Ford has put their release out over the traditional news wires, as they still seem to lack the ability to handle this kind of rich multimedia package.

Questions for the Social Media Group, the PR firm that crafted the release for Ford (and is probably tracking this conversation): How do you measure its effectiveness? What would make it a successful release for you?

The Macro of Micro

There is a remarkable paragraph in David Weinberger’s new book “Everything is Miscellaneous,” actually, it is the last one:

“A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself. We are building an ever-growing pile of smart leaves that we can organize as we need to at any one moment. Some ways of organizing it – of finding meaning in it – will be grassroots; some will be official. Some will apply to small groups; some will engender large groups; some will subvert established groups. Some will be funny; some will be tragic. But it will be the users who decide what the leaves mean. The world won’t ever stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours.”

I like Weinberger’s intellectual optimism. My grandmother always told me that anything but optimism was irresponsible. In fact, she impressed upon me that in times of crisis it is the lack of optimism that inadvertently paves the way for tragedy. And we are in times of crisis. We have entered the age of nano-communication. Our information society is facing a wave of fragmented meaning, in other words, a crisis of spirituality. Only optimism weaves together the loose, miscellaneous ends of information and provides “the big picture” for the aggregated micro-cosmi of Flickr et al.

In this context, it is useful to remember the original meaning of the Greek word “cosmos” itself: “all there is.” What this implies is that each micro must have a macro or it wouldn’t exist (semantically speaking). If a micro-cosmos is “all there is,” it requires that there is more than “all there is.” It is precisely this knowledge of the macro that serves as an indispensable tenet of governance in the information economy, infusing the “micro”-sphere with moral – be it micro-societies, micro-blogging, or in the case of Weinberger, micro-taxonomies or folksonomies.

Weinberger’s book does exactly that: It lays out the macro of micro, a conciliatory narrative for irreconcilable individual truth(ism)s, a shelter for homeless thoughts. And yet, it is ironic that the best approach to truly making sense of the shifting paradigms of information still seems to be a linear book and not Wikipedia (or Twitter, for that matter). Producing and organizing information may be increasingly crowdsourced to a diverse, distributed committee of contributors; creating and finding meaning in it remains a lonely task.

(Shameless plug: More on this in my forthcoming book “The Macro of Micro”)

You're Not Alone: Cluztr Introduces Social Clickstreaming

Here's the formula for new web 2.0 ventures: user-generated content + voyeurism + scoial networking. See Kyte.

Techcrunch reports about the Ottawa-based Cluztr, a social bookmarking site that broadcasts users' clickstreams: "A few years ago clickstreams and attention data was all the rage. In 2005 Michael Arrington covered Attention Trust and a Firefox plugin that tracked every site you visited, the data being stored for private use or opt-in sharing. But not a lot has happened since. The hype never caught up with reality.

Fast forward two years. Ubiquitous broadband and the age of voyeuristic self expression have arrived. The clunky web cams of Web 1.0 have given way to uStream and Justin.tv. Cluztr tracks your clickstream and shares it with the world. Every site you visit is recorded and posted live to the Cluztr site in a social bookmarking style format, but without the need for active involvement; a Firefox plugin does it automatically.
The wealth of data has benefits outside of letting people watch. Content matching links users with similar clickstreams and creates site recommendations based on user history.

Cluztr is also a chat platform. Cluztr users visiting a particular page are automatically displayed in the sidebar allowing discussions on the topic at hand. A privacy option is available. Clickstreams can be set to private or public. Cluztr also adheres to the principles and guidelines outlined by AttentionTrust.org. Users maintain full control over data collected."

Next: Broadcast your email - live-stream your video-trail - live-stream your music-trail - a widget for each friend - the super-personal wearable news aggregator - ...