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 has become outdated and no longer reflects the social fabric of today’s workforce.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

Old Spice and the Return of Ad-Power: Are "Transformats" the Future of Marketing?

Silver Fish Hand Catch! As the social web’s echo chamber is gushing about Wieden+Kennedy (W+K)’s masterful Old Spice campaign (actor and former football star Isaiah Mustafa wowing viewers with his smooth-talking delivery in video replies to hundreds of online queries or comments tweeted to him by web users), first spoofs are manifesting its pop-cultural credentials, and the meta-story is increasingly becoming the story ("how did they do it?"), both practical and philosophical questions arise. The jury is still out on the campaign’s commercial impact (various news sites and blogs are reporting that sales have fallen by 7%, which various other news sites and blogs dispute). I’m more interested in the campaign as a cultural phenomenon and its lasting implications: Is it a one-off nifty idea or are we witnessing the emergence of something bigger than that, a whole new paradigm for marketers and content producers, as Mashable claims?

Without a doubt, several things are remarkable about the Old Spice campaign. First of all, the numbers: A total of 183 individual video responses have been posted to the Old Spice YouTube channel, and to date the videos have attracted more than 38 million individual views. During the campaign, the Old Spice channel was the most viewed channel on YouTube, and it is now the third most subscribed channel ever on the site’s “sponsor” category. Total upload views for the channel, a metric that includes the original TV ads, currently stand at over 92 million. The final video reply, addressed to “everyone,” has amassed 3.3 million views and over 20,000 comments alone. As of today, the brand’s official Twitter account has grown to 92,000 followers.

Secondly, the campaign has exposed a key ingredient of viral content - disruption, in the form of a classic “What If” proposition that challenges conventional views: What if the main character of a commercial suddenly takes on a life on its own and starts directly responding to viewers?

Thirdly, Old Spice has probably been the first campaign to be both hyper-individualized (Mustafa's individual replies to Twitter users) and hyper-social (spreading virally as people have forwarded and embedded the replies). In fact, the very personalization of the responses has made them so unique and worth sharing. And all of that at hyper-speed: Seldom before has an advertising campaign produced so many highly personalized pieces of content in such short amount of time.

Lastly, the campaign has beamed us back into an age of Mad Men superpower, perfectly coinciding with the imminent launch of the new season of our favorite TV series this weekend. Ironically, though, rather than by relying on traditional persuasive ad-power Mad Men’s clout has been restored by an ad agency using social media of all things. Or, to be more precise: Transmedia. After already toying with them for their 2008 “Somebody Else’s Phone” campaign for Nokia, W+K borrowed the principles of Transmedia again for Old Spice – but this time augmenting them to much more visible effect.

Consider Transmedia a variation of social media. The term is commonly attributed to Marsha Kinder, who premiered it in her 1991 book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Communication scholar Henry Jenkins (author of Convergence Culture, formerly at MIT, now with the Annenberg School in L.A.) then made it popular by crafting a theory of “Transmedia Storytelling” in a Technology Review essay, depicting it as a cross-platform narrative where each platform adds something meaningful to the fictional world – whether it’s more back story, deeper stories for secondary characters, the interactive dimension of a game, or new opportunities for the fans to participate in telling the story. More specifically, Jenkins laid out the “Seven Core Concepts of Transmedia Storytelling”: Spreadability vs. Drillability, Continuity vs. Multiplicity, Immersion vs. Extractability, Worldbuilding, Seriality, Subjectivity, and Performance.

Over the past ten years or so, Transmedia has again and again been considered the “next big thing” without ever really breaking through into mainstream. Battlestar Galactica, the Batman series, or The Matrix were sporadic examples of innovative Transmedia entertainment plays, but only as of late, the proliferation of games, social media, and mobile platforms has given rise to a more widespread adoption of the concept.

Transmedia is now increasingly popular for content producers who are facing economic pressures to maximize their assets across platforms. The NBC series Heroes is often cited as a watershed moment, and Tim Kring, its creator, is widely seen as the man who made Transmedia plausible for a mass TV audience. Kring is also one of the forces behind Conspiracy for Good, a large-scale cross-platform movement that attempts to use Transmedia to support social causes – Lina Srivastava calls this “Transmedia Activism.” At the heart of the Conspiracy for Good experience is a locative event over the course of three weeks in London, starting in mid-July and running until August 7th. Another recent example of Transmedia Storytelling is the comic franchise The 99, Naif Al-Mutawa’s vision of Muslim superheroes that he has extended to multiple media formats. Moreover, Wired UK recently hired agency Six to turn its latest issue – featuring a cover story on Transmedia – into a transmedia Alternate Reality Game (ARG). There are even some who call the iPad “the world’s first transmedia device” – a questionable notion given the rather retro lean-back mode of consumption that the iPad encourages.

Before this backdrop, the Old Spice campaign is arguably the most comprehensive use of Transmedia in an advertising context to date, and it serves as the blue print for what I call “transformats.” I would pinpoint their three main characteristics as follows:

- Transmedia: Transformats use a multi-modular presentation of narratives that extends the story across various media and allows a social web-enabled “audience formerly known as the audience” to participate in the story development. In the case of Old Spice, it went full circle: from YouTube to Twitter and back.

- Transcendent: Transformats transcend not only the original medium but also the original story, creating new meaning beyond the conceived plot. In the case of Old Spice, the main protagonist was given a life on its own and the power to directly interact with members of the audience. Thus, the story became an open-ended conversation, and the initial message faded amidst a chorus of issues (user-)generated by the cultural fabric of the social web.

- Transformative: Transformats advance marketing best practices and lift the state-of-the-art. Key here is that the design of the marketing program itself is the story (see meta-marketing), or at least an integral part of it. Case in point: The majority of coverage on the Old Spice campaign heralded its innovative quality, and many stories were background stories that shed light on “the making of.” Perhaps that’s the most powerful thing about innovation, from a marketing perspective: True innovation always is a story in and of itself.

Transformats may indeed constitute a whole new framework for state-of-the-art marketing. They may span even more media (TV, social web, movies, radio, print, AR, etc.), zig-zag more artfully between virtual and real world, and incorporate more gaming mechanics that incentivize users through “achievements” modeled on behavioral economics. Besides advertising, transformats may also have a place in media outlets: Imagine direct video responses from reporters to readers’ comments or interactive maps that enrich stories by pulling in user-generated real-time data and commentary, as a hybrid of professional and citizen journalism. Or reporters who post their intent to run a story and publicly ask for input and feedback (a moderated WikiLeaks, if you will, where readers can follow the genesis of a story). Or articles that readers can “park” after the morning read of their print newspaper, just to pick them up in the evening on their TV screen (as envisioned here by the NYTimes R&D lab). All of this would make the newsroom of the future a social media-savvy, super-convergent, real-time multimedia production studio, with the release cycles of stories shrunk to almost zero, and various media and engagement modes extending their life cycles to X.

It doesn’t require too much imagination to see transformats also play a seminal role in transforming education, healthcare, civil society, and even politics. Already, Gwynne Kostin, director of new media and citizen engagement at the General Services Administration, examines on GovLoop how to “adopt ‘Old Spice’ success to government” by embracing what she extrapolates as the campaign’s main tenets “speed, planning, talent, and trust.” While this ambition appears to be perhaps a bit of a stretch at this point, the overarching trajectory is evident: In an economy where attention is as scarce as commitment to action, stories that transcend their original storyline, set new standards for their genre, and engage people across various media can make a difference. As the complexity of our societal challenges is increasing, our solutions are becoming more open-ended. In other words: To tackle X-problems, you need to have X-conversations. Old Spice was just the beginning.

Don’t Interrupt, Disrupt! How to Be Viral Without Viral Marketing

As we’re inundated with hero shots of the iPad every day, on every billboard and the back of every magazine cover, it appears to be a good time to rethink the relationship between advertising and product, between marketing and innovation. It’s not that Apple doesn’t spend any money on advertising – no, it was pouring a whopping $500 million into its launch campaign for the iPad. But what is different is that Apple’s marketing doesn’t have to be clever or utterly creative. In fact, it is stunningly not so. No major social media campaign needed to be sparked, no user-generated content contest needed to be held. And while the ongoing tongue-in-cheek anti-Microsoft ads are undeniably cute, they are not really an advertising revelation. Gone are the days of the bold “1984” campaigns. Today, Apple has earned enough attention to forgo any ostentatious marketing, in fact, so much that a cleverly orchestrated campaign would distract from the brand rather than boosting it. The company simply displays its products – that’s all it takes. Apple’s products are viral without any viral marketing.

Viral and ‘spreadable’

Before digging more into this, let’s pause for a moment to examine the term ‘viral,’ which has come under scrutiny recently, not for the first time but more critically, since transmedia augur Henry Jenkins, in ever-so-dramatic fashion, “declared war on viral media.” Jenkins wrote: “Until marketers understand the consumer's active agency and the social mechanisms shaping their circulation of content, they are doomed to insult and alienate the very people they are hoping to attract.” Jenkins suggests we replace ‘viral media’ – and, by extension, ‘viral marketing’ as the discipline that produces ‘viral media’ – with the new term ‘spreadable,’ arguing that this would more accurately reflect the consumer’s agency and the dynamics of content-sharing. Fair enough, yet Jenkins, in his academic fervor, underestimates practitioners. They know the social mechanisms of sharing all too well and are perfectly capable of distinguishing between the built-in contagious distribution of a product and the spreading of cultural memes as content that accumulates meaning as it is passed on. They are not one and the same, but innovative marketers use both notions and the outcome is similar, which is why, for the sake of simplicity, I will stick with the catch-all ‘viral’ in this post.

Advocacy and amplification

But back to Apple and the relationship between product and marketing innovation. At the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris this spring, I had the pleasure of hearing Steve Knox from Tremor, Procter & Gamble’s word-of-mouth marketing arm, illustrate the underlying cognitive principles of viral marketing. In his view, there are two dimensions that matter: advocacy and amplification. If you have a strong brand advocate (a passionate user) but lack the appropriate channels to amplify his/her evangelism, you won’t have much of a viral effect. You are stuck with early adopters, derived from sociologist Everett Rogers’s “diffusion of innovations” theory and so perfectly portrayed by Rob Walker in his New York Times Magazine column, but without critical mass they will not convert into mainstream success. On the other hand, if you muster strong amplification, yet for a product without vocal advocates, you will fall into the over-amplification trap: Awareness of the product will quickly dissipate or, worse, the over-exposure might backfire and inadvertently shed light on the product’s flaws as the gap between visibility and user advocacy will create a suspicious gap just waiting for the blood-sucking blogosphere to be exploited. Simply put: If you generate a lot of talk, but there’s nothing to really talk about, you may end up with a lot of chatter, but no true social conversation – and thus no viral, no networked distribution.

Disruption and transcendence

So what makes a product worth talking about? Fox’s theory is intriguing: he points to two main principles of viral effects that emulate cognitive models. First, the product needs to disrupt a cognitive schema, a mental model that the mind produces to consolidate divergent information into one convergent worldview. We’re lazy and fearful creatures, easily intimidated and overwhelmed, so cognitive schemata help us make sense of the world around us by simplifying it into templates. They allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting a vast amount of information. Here’s an example: A plane in the air matches our mental model of a plane but a plane on the Hudson River presents a stark violation to our cognitive schema of a plane. It will therefore create much more attention than the routine plane picture we’re used to. It is – in other words – disruptive.

As these mental models keep us sane, it goes without saying that any truly disruptive innovation will often prompt a “This is crazy!” response. “This is crazy,” as in “This disrupts my cognitive schema.” An instant messaging service – that’s familiar. An instant messaging service that only allows up to 140 characters? That’s crazy. Paying credit card bills online. Nice and convenient. Sharing one’s credit card history with others in public? Crazy! An audio player you can walk with? Crazy! Why would you do that? Because you can. Because it’s different. Because it’s unexpected. Because it’s disruptive – and exactly what Roberto Verganti meant by describing innovation as “radically changing the meaning of things.” Steve Knox would call it “radically disrupting the cognitive equilibrium.” The surplus is (new) meaning.

Now, granted, this kind of cognitive schema violation has always been the hallmark of effective advertising: tearing objects out of context, deconstructing their original meaning and giving them a new one, breaching expectations, etc. However, the difference is that advertising does it after the fact, after the product is made or hit the market. Advertising must interrupt to disrupt, and it usually comes too late, when it is only needed as a cover-up for the lack for a truly disruptive product idea. Jeff Jarvis boiled it down to the stinging claim: “Advertising means product failure.”

The second principle of a viral effect is to take two existing cognitive schemata and combine them into a third, transcendent notion. The iPhone, for example, blended the mental models “mobile phone” and “computer.” The iPad blends “book reader” and “computer.” Or take Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian entertainment company, self-described as a “dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment” – a blend of Vegas and traditional circus. Or Starbucks: a blend of fast-food shop and community hang-out (or, on a higher level, an amalgam of coffee and social space, as the British pub is one of beer and space).

Show and tell

Truly innovative products apply either of these principles – they are disruptive as they violate cognitive schemata, or they blend two different schemata into a third, transcendent one. In any case, you end up with the most desirable product you can imagine: a category killer. Its viral effect is implicit, and as it is genuinely disruptive, that is, worth talking about, all you have to is as a marketer is to make the product visible and provide the means for amplifying the evangelism of the most zealous product advocates. That’s exactly what Apple does.

Successful innovative products are always viral because they disrupt and/or transcend and accumulate meaning as they are being shared. Their distribution will be contagious, and by being passed on by advocates they become a cultural meme that is more powerful than anything your marketing dollars could ever buy.

Of course, this also removes the artificial barriers between product development and go-to-market, between product design and branding, between product innovation and innovative marketing. They are inexorably intertwined. The product is the story. The story is the product. And it’d better be viral.

Friend Your Foes - Adobe’s Conversational Apple Ad

Now this is just brilliant. Adobe has found the only possible way to respond to the lack of love it is getting from Apple – EVEN MORE LOVE.

To counter Steve Jobs' recent rant that Flash wasn't "appropriate for mobile devices" (justifying its ban from Apple products like the iPhone and the iPad), Adobe launched a new ad campaign today in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and several other newspapers and online news sites. The ad sports the headline "We ♥ Apple" and continues with: "We love creativity," and "We love flash," but "What we don’t love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the Web."

What’s so interesting about this campaign is that it bridges traditional media with social media, making advertising conversational (again). There’s already a ton of buzz on Twitter and blogs about the ad.

Edward Boches has described it most aptly: “Adobe’s ad (...) becomes just one more reminder that social media isn’t something separated from traditional media. Even more importantly it’s further proof that our consumers don’t simply read, they create, distribute and best of all, amplify. We may not all have a subject as juicy as the rivalry between Adobe and Apple. But it doesn’t mean we can’t use our offline efforts to “start” conversations. After all, there’s nothing to join if someone doesn’t initiate it.”

A Very Exclusive Foursquare Badge: The North Pole

After Coca-Cola's Expedition 206, here's the latest "treat your brand like an activity" (or "make your campaign a real journey") example, courtesy of GE Ecomagination. Under the theme "The Last Degree," the 15-year old Parker Liautaud will begin an unusual expedition today: a quest to become the youngest person to ski the last degree of the North Pole. Thanks to GE, Parker's lonely journey will in fact be very social, featuring special content and interactive features on Facebook, YouTube, and Google Earth. People who follow the journey can pledge their Facebook status to an eco-friendly deed (i.e. replacing a regular light bulb with a CFL) and play with a bunch of other special apps. Parker has published all of his exercises into DailyMile. At the end of this journey, he will check-in via Foursquare for the ultimate reward: an exclusive North Pole badge.

Social Media and Sports: Sony Ericsson's Twittercup

Here's an example of a traditional marketer proving with a smart Twitter campaign that social media and sports are a natural fit: Sony Ericsson, one of the long-term sponsors of the World Cup, has turned to Twitter to engage fans months before the World Cup begins. The Twittercup collects and counts fan tweets, creating a competition among attending nations. Since its launch in early December it has received over 43,000 tweets. 

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]

Twitter Grows Up In the Aftermath of Haiti Earthquake

In the wake of the devastating 7.0 earthquake in Haiti, Twitter has been serving as a main hub of information, the Nielsen Company reports. Nielsen refers to preliminary analysis of data indicating that Twitter posts are the leading source of discussion about the quake, followed by online video, blogs, and other social media.

Although most online consumers still rely on traditional media for coverage of the quake, they are apparently turning to Twitter to share information, react to the situation, and rally support. Sysomos, an analytics firm in Toronto, estimated that nearly 150,000 posts containing both “Haiti” and “Red Cross” were sent through Twitter since the quake. The Twitter account for the Red Cross, which on average had been adding roughly 50-100 followers a day before the Haiti quake, has gained more than 10,000 followers since.

Combined with tapping into the large mobile universe of text messages (136.6 million subscribers sent and received text messages in Q3 2009), many aid and relief organizations have begun utilizing Twitter to spread the word and gather donations, augmenting their other channels. As online conversations around the Red Cross’s 90999 text campaign ("Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to @RedCross relief") efforts grew, the Red Cross tweeted Friday morning that donations exceeded $8 million.

But Twitter’s growing power comes with new responsibilities. In the aftermath of the disaster, some people used the micro-blogging service to spread rumors and falsehoods, i.e. that UPS would be willing to ship any package under 50 lbs. to Haiti (UPS debunked that myth). Twitter was also aflutter with news that several airlines would take medical personnel to Haiti free of charge to help with earthquake relief (American Airlines and JetBlue said this was not the case). The FBI warns Internet users who receive requests for charitable donations on behalf of earthquake victims to "apply a critical eye and do their due diligence" before responding. "Past tragedies and natural disasters have prompted individuals with criminal intent to solicit contributions purportedly for a charitable organization and/or a good cause."

What all this shows is that Twitter is not like Facebook (as much as Facebook is trying hard to be more like Twitter). Relationships are not reciprocal, and they’re not based on trust but on authority - a currency that is easier to fake. Twitter is much more like a 21st century CNN, a broadcasting network cum narrowcasting option, and as such prone to propaganda and misinformation.

In Search of the People Formerly Known as The Audience

Our friends from the Norman Lear Center in L.A. have put together a comprehensive primer on the "Business and Culture of Social Media." If you're intrigued by social media as entertainment and want to learn more about the notion of "mass self-communication," take a look at the presentation that Lear Center deputy director Johanna Blakley and director Marty Kaplan gave at the Barcelona Media Center. As brands are in hot pursuit of the ever more fragmented group of content generators formerly known as "the audience," the authors pinpoint an interplay of business economy, gift economy, and attention economy.

Download the pdf

Lift10: Connected People

Describing itself as "a series of events built around a community of doers and thinkers who get together in Europe and Asia to explore the social consequences of new technologies," Lift is definitely one of the best conference networks out there. Laurent Haug, Lift founder and curator, is a wonderful host and has managed to maintain a strong sense of community despite continued growth. In addition to numerous satellite events with partners, Lift organizes conferences in France and Korea, as well as the annual Lift conference in Switzerland as its main hub.

Lift10 will take place from May 5-7, 2010 in Geneva and welcome 1,000 participants from 40 countries to "explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in the techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects. They adopt or refute, promote or demote; embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design and innovation, it's time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the 'connected people.'"

Check out some of the Lift10 speakers that have already been confirmed.

The early-bird deadline just got extended to January 31 – you can register here.