Tethering ourselves to the web

April 29th, 2012 • Comments

What are the next steps for social interaction, and what happens after the conversation’s been going on awhile? Do we stop pouring forth linkage and retweets, what Seth Godin calls, random pokes, and go out and make something?

What how does the social factory make value?

When thinking about where we are in social business at the moment, what comes to mind is the image of the child still on walking reins, trying to be let loose in a playground. Children who are held onto for safety by their parents.

We’re still in the infancy of the social revolution, but the dawning sense is one of spectacular change on the horizon – a new renaissance of the self.

Depending on the quality of our leadership it’s a change that can be an emergence or an emergency, as some people call it. We are at a crossroads.

It’s a change that for many means they are unanchored, like life is for the 250 million people, and counting, who are unemployed across Europe with the means to feed their futures.

Social business is us. As Danah Boyd has written, social business is what we will make it.

Right now in the evolutionary chain of our connected development, we’re all plankton, on our way to creating spectacular new life forms.

This TED talk is a six-minute metaphor of what we are capable of and a film that recognizes traits we’re all capable of, including the species that eat their kin.

The biological nature of social organization in business is based on the idea that affinity is stronger than structure.

When affinity is stronger than structure, social molecules collide and they find each other using social media. Instead of the ‘eat or be eaten’ karma of the primordial soup, enlightened and connected society can support and nurture one another as a healing and generative mesh in action. We have the means to create useful action out of shared interests. We can define the types of interaction and cultural collaboration that add and generate value. Using social technology and social crm we can create a contribution economy out of a return on involvement.

So the question becomes, how can we create sustainable, collaborative culture and move towards enlightened evolution this time around?

Well, it might have something to do with tethering.

Consider the hashtag as a digital maypole around which people converse, share ideas, and commune generally. The hashtag is an example of tethering.

In a social organization, contractual ties are looser, sufficiently loose to allow the kind of personal expression that supplements corporate reputation and personal reputation. That’s especially appropriate perhaps, given that the fixed contract relationship is increasingly being seen as an unnecessary overhead and people who are out of work want ways to contribute and prove their worth. That’s another kind of tethering.

These days most of the best people would not like to be employed, but they may choose to be tethered to a good organization and be part of it that way.

People with social leadership skills, the linchpins, are able to consider now who they tether themselves to, which raises the talent bar, saves costs and builds a better culture. When good people associate themselves with an organisation, it enables them to up their game.

Social organisations can help develop this sense of tethering, and platforms like Kaggle show how it can be done.

And finally, it’s worth that in the digital age, we all want to connect and release what we’re capable of as generative value which can be the better for society, as a new kind of cultural interaction, one where people choose what they associate to, because the web enables that.

For all organisations going social, consider the nature of the contract that underpins it. Tethering can be a good source of generative value because it works two ways, symbiotically, as we stretch our legs into a new social chapter of interaction.

 

 

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Social business, social fabric and the healing mesh

April 1st, 2012 • Comments

The business of social media engagement comes down ultimately to what we think, do and feel.  For social business practitioners in the business of doing things better, it’s easy to see the world as one big data problem. If we had complete and open data running through the corridors of corporations, including information about how we think, informed decision-making would be arguably so much easier.

Equally important to social business is how we feel and this is where the lines of engagement are being drawn. One of the best definitions of social business came from Chris Brogan a few years back when he said ‘social business is human business’. That one line captures something fundamental about the nature of social business, and the business strategies needed to adjust to it.

Working on developing quantified organisations means placing stock, as well as taking comfort, in the numbers. But what makes social business truly matter is how it can deliver more business health and performance than conventional methodologies.

Chiefly this comes down to the way social business can develop generative and organic value through people working collectively together. This post is about how social business does that and how, in doing so, it can help renew the fabric of torn and fragmented society. It’s a post, in particular, about the ‘healing mesh’. The mesh can be a distributed network, as Lisa Gansky’s described it. The healing mesh can be spun around a hashtag, or a virtual experience that people gather around like a digital maypole. It can be the wired and connected infrastructure that’s increasingly housing shared value and enabling collaborative consumption business models.

The healing mesh is an evolved step on from an industrialized scale focus on consumption at all costs to a focus on empowerment and on human relationships as an alternative source of value generation. As a means to driving business opportunity it’s hitting the mainstream, as signaled this week with the news that GM has signaled a commitment to car sharing as a part of its business model.

At a visceral level, the healing mesh is the product of interaction that’s stimulated to heal because of a neurological sympathetic response to conditions around it, whether business or personal. It’s a response to the dysfunctional workplaces that 30% of all US workers are now describing as psychologically unsafe and is created from the synapses of people calling out what can be better as a result of social business.

Discussing the healing mesh with Anne-Marie McEwan (@smartco) recently, we reflected on how social business can weave, repair and create a lucrative social fabric by recognizing, as Yves Michaud’s suggests, that creativity emerges in the context of dereliction and decline. In so doing, the synaptic responses that arise out of that awareness can create the action potential to produce fibrinogens as the mesh that form the healing wound of a grazed knee at an individual level, or a broken society at a collective one.

A key element of sustainable businesses in the future, including the nature of the networked organisation and quality of life in the workplace, is going to be whether there is a shared point of intention. Intention will run like a thread through social organization. The battle currently is for people’s minds, but the opportunity can also be about connecting with people’s hearts and by creating choice as part of a lucrative gestalt.

Anne-Marie and I had lunch recently at Petersham Nurseries, tucked away by the river near Richmond.

It’s a modern Avalon, a restaurant within a gardening centre and nursery with the glorious combination of a Michelin star and a hard dirt floor. Full of beautiful things, good food and rusty tables, it is a place with good husbandry and a love of nature at its heart, where decay and growth run comfortably hand in hand.

It was the perfect setting for a conversation about the nature of the networked organisation today and social fabric in the 21st century and this concept of the ‘healing mesh’.

During lunch our attention turned to the health of networks, what organic beauty and value is in them at a systemic level, what makes them attractive, genuine, raw, appealing, and capable of fostering cultures that can flourish.

In social business the net worth, as we say, is the network. What that suggests is it’s very much the act of coming together and the connectivity between individuals, as much as the individuals themselves, that makes a difference to the health, vitality and performance of distributed organisations. Organisations can benefit a great deal today by relearning and redefining how they ‘do interaction’ and it is curious how much of this act of choosing to come together marketing effort actually focuses on side-stepping.

Letting things happen is so often not a marketing objective. The battleground for business and marketing power is often intent on developing brokerage as a means of cultivating dependency and seeking control over people’s minds, using direct or indirect commands to ‘like us!’ and the ease and convenience of zombification strategies designed to nudge and dilute free will. Decode marketing speak and very often consumer choice often is the elephant in the room, the thing that technology applied to marketing and advertising can obliterate because it’s too random. With so much invested in the way we do things, marketers often assume it’s easier to change the nature of the consumer than the nature of the business model.

Yet the skill and the insight involved in letting things happen is like that of a good sailor with their hand on the tiller, and the metaphor for social businesses as a means of cocreated and generative value can be a boat where people are in it together. Social businesses where people connect because they want to are essentially an odyssey towards value created out of a common purpose, need or desire. It puts problem solving, not profiteering, at the heart of the corporate intention. That kind of interaction between people is the warp and the weft of healthy social fabric for a distributed, networked age.

Contrast that with what we are seeing revealed as ‘wounded people and wounded organisations’, as Anne-Marie put it over lunch. We’re seeing networked opportunities blocked by obedient gatekeepers only trying to do their job and organisations stuck in vicious repeat loops confined by their own protocols. When the risk of breaking out of ‘the way we do things around here’ is regarded as culturally and operationally too disruptive, what happens it that emergence becomes emergency and business models become calcified.

We say at Visceral Business that ‘affinity is stronger than structure’ because the accessible connectivity of the web enables people to do the things they want to, not just what they have to do. But what we have in the here and now as reality at many levels is a failure of the systems of leadership to enable that.

The healing mesh of social business is what happens when you put skin into the game. A fantastic advantage of the social web is that people can reach out to one another, and do, which creates the opportunity for a new kind of social fabric, woven together out of connected intention. That kind of co-operation can be the fabric for an emergent civilization.

The intangible values that bind us also drive the tangible benefits that can be experienced as part of an open access economy. As Anne-Marie put it, ‘People are eager to go above and beyond what is expected in their work – but leaders are failing to provide systems and performance environments that let people find meaning in their work. People find meaning in their relationships with work and with each other. They need to be given opportunities to learn, to contribute, to be listened to, to be appreciated, trusted, to be socially included and to feel safe. In fact, to be treated as human beings.’

Social organizations can be the conduit for that kind of activity and effective high tech and high touch strategies can enable new kinds of interaction across social, mobile and local touchpoints, on and offline. As a terrific article by Mary Joyce put it recently, the more we understand about innovation, the more we understand that it is a social process.

So the healing mesh is essentially the intention of people coming together in a certain way with specific value beliefs attached to that way.

Out of that thought, myself and Anne-Marie have come up with a project we’re calling ‘the Petersham project’ as a homage to the source of the thought and a line of enquiry to explore the question, what’s the kind of cultural code needed to enable a healing mesh, and how can it be realized?

There are several people we’ve thought about inviting into this project, and if you’re interested in becoming part of it please find either me or Anne-Marie on Twitter. We’re looking to manifest this healing mesh by creating a forum for people who share the fact that they are all sympathetic and attuned the potential of the social web. We’re aiming to develop an exciting piece of learning, helping organisations, groups and communities to determine for themselves how they can perpetuate a healing mesh culture, in the same way as our understanding of ‘flow’ is so powerful as a set of insights.

Anne-Marie characterized the need by saying ‘there are too many dysfunctional workplaces and there is no excuse for that. We know what healthy workplaces can look like and there is an opportunity for us to conceive of them, driven by values that can now come together in a powerful way. Some of us see the opportunity beginning to be squandered. The Petersham Project, as we see it, is a way of declaring specific values and beliefs.’

We both think by opening up our sense to this question the fun will be in seeing how these emerge. We think the healing mesh is here already. It is emerging, area by area, city by city, and hashtag by hashtag, as a mesh of the committed. It is a mesh of those who seek to heal by leaning in to the questions looking for answers, the issues that need solving and the needs that are being asked to be met.

Social business ask questions about how open access, interactive organization and sustainable business can be most lucrative and how people can commune together to meet needs and solve problems. As organisations become more dispersed, there’s a paradox in this development. The social fabric and cultures of connected enterprises are increasingly going be dependent on the ties of the healing mesh and the way in which the committed bind together as a social fabric, with the ability to drive the strength and viability of a vibrant networked economy that can be taken forward. We would love to hear your thoughts on it.

 

 

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The rise of the expressive web

February 8th, 2012 • Comments

Human/Need/Desire. Bruce Nauman, 1983
 

As a living thing powered by billions of people, the web is constantly evolving and currently one thing above all others is emerging. It’s a trend we’ve been talking about with clients for a while, it’s the rise of what we’re calling the expressive web.

According to Techcrunch, Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. It is one of the top 10 social media sites in the world.

Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram and Foodspotting are challenging original titans of the web like Flickr and Youtube. They’re offering an altogether more sensual and collaborative type of social platform and providing people with a greater opportunity to express themselves, in new ways, that is proving highly attractive.

Four main drivers are powering this shift.

1. The expressive web creates extra value
We’ve laid the basic groundwork of the web, so what now? Reveling in the sensuality of rich, interactive content feeds into a basic Maslow-style desire for advanced self-expression. Increasingly people are finding their voice. That voice is creative, it wants to be expressed.

Smart brands will enable this and make it part of their culture. This is happening as a shift towards co-creation, too. As the web becomes more democratic, users also want to become more compelling by seeking out and adopting content platforms that are built on co-created expression, around them and their desires.

2. Masses of data makes socially powered curation attractive
Two years ago when we were saying to brand managers that brands of the future will need to be good at curation, many of them didn’t understand what we were saying. Now, reputations can be rapidly built and brand associations can be recast by good curation skills. Curation as a sense-making skill is only going to increase in demand. Platforms like Pinterest, Scoop.it and Storify that make curation easy are becoming big winners because of this.

3. Rich content contains more information
Ever since the logo was identified as a cool shorthand, a body of scientific evidence’s been amassed about how much information is conveyed by ‘the pretties’. Analytic types may gasp, but a good image contains substantially more information than the equivalent in words or numbers (up to 20 times more information in fact) which goes some way to explaining the popularity of the infographic.

Interactive features, responsive web design, sound effects, they all create what we’d call a ‘visceral’ reaction. A moment of interactivity that fires synpases has engagement potential and is also expressive.

So while words will always be around, the web’s giving us a whole new way of communicating in cool shorthands and it has big implications for information architects and content managers.

4. Doing a job is harder these days, being expressive’s an antidote
In fact, 225m people in Europe don’t have a job at all. Those that do have full plates and can be pretty stressed out. It’s a sideways issue perhaps, but the expressive web is providing an alternative to traditional spoon-fed entertainment that enables escapism and self-discovery in ways which are just as highly accessible but where the user is in control.

The expressive web is therapy. It generates ideas and sparks the imagination. Another reason that explains people are taking to it in such numbers.

For marketers this is a very big deal. It’s a signal that, thanks to the social web, the essential nature of communication is taking a turn and it’s demonstrating how the quality of the co-created user-experiences becoming key performance indicators.

IBM’s Global CMO Study shows around 70% of chief marketing officers are unprepared for the explosion in data and the social web that the expressive web intersects. Many of them are in organizations with legacy structures finding it hard to turn around the way they do things.

As sites like Pinterest show, the expressive web has just ramped up the communication challenge a notch. It’s making it even more important that communication isn’t being seen as boring or difficult to use. It’s asking marketers to think about the way they define and serve up content in a fundamentally different way.

The expressive, artistic, web is the high touch equal-and-opposite to high tech functionality. It was never not going to happen. Are we prepared to make the most of it?

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How will you make your mark in 2012?

December 28th, 2011 • Comments

Picture credit http://bit.ly/vafRYw

One definition of genius we really like round here is genius is ‘the ability to connect two seemingly unconnected things’.

Truly successful social businesses do this, they make connections between ideas and people. They also stimulate responses to create action potential, like synapses do when they fire. Social businesses make things happen, powered by affinities and the connective tissue of networked technology. And there’s no doubt that 2012 will be hallmarked to no small degree by the impact social business will have on it.

This raises some significant considerations for marketers. For social marketers that concentrate mostly on the ‘media’ part of social media, the ultimate aspiration and the holy grail of social, is to go viral. Social contagion’s the big win, the coup. The crucial key performance indicator is to make things shareable.

What social media like that thrives on however, and not entirely healthily, is often a shareability based on the open-mouthed factor of things that are either insane or incredible, spread out of disbelief, or momentary pleasure, and not much more.

Are we shattering an ecosystem we can all thrive in by doing so? As this mildly amusing article in 2002 accurately predicted, and Nick Carr’s book The Shallows has covered since, our attention spans are getting shorter.

We’ve slowly been turning into digital goldfish where everything competes with a ‘best ever’ or ‘awesome’ kind of hyperbole for share of mind, in the place of simply being interesting and sustainably relevant to a particular group of people with a shared interest, purpose or sense of communal identity that has longevity.

If the two chief gratification buttons in life are ‘fun’ and ‘meaning’ what’s relevant in this context is how, as Thomas Friedman and the historian Walter Russell Mead have both observed, after the 1990s revolution that collapsed the Soviet Union, the Russians had a saying that seems particularly apt today:

‘It’s easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.’

Have a think about that for a moment. It’s the essential reason why some viral social media campaigns can actually be unhelpful to brands. The sticking plaster on a short and increasingly unpredictable sales cycle, social media campaigns that are designed to go viral can end up fostering audience relationships based only on instant and temporary engagement in a similar way.

In 2012, social media tactics unconnected to core social values can serve up content that at a deep level devalues rather reinforces the impact of a social brand and its sustainability. Social business brands need a purpose beyond profit or product and a core sense of the big picture.

The good news is here though. Beyond going viral, is going scalar.

To make a mark in 2012, the genius of making connections between two seemingly unconnected things is the kind of social media integration that can quite literally scale your business. Going scalar is pulling people into your business who are advocates beyond the act of sharing.

Scaling business through the harnessing of participation and deep insights that go beyond likes, +1’s and unique views can mean walls can become permeable membranes between a brand and its users, that business becomes designed around connections instead of divisions, that being ‘on brand’ can happen anywhere by anyone, and that talent can be brought into the business; that target audiences can be replaced by shared experiences that have lasting impact.

There’s no internal and external in the social organization, so the costs of managing another marketing channel (as social is so often seen as being) or of outsourcing your voice (as agencies so often encourage) become part of a leaner, more connected and more empowered constituency of committed users that can co-create the future fuel for business strategy with you.

It’s a sustainable strategy for how a brand’s or organisation’s social voice can get bigger, and have lasting impact. That’s why the two words embedded into Visceral Business are ‘is us’. We really believe in enabling the kind of social business that can create shared value, long term stakeholders and sustainable cultures.

If you want social business success in 2012 going viral’s not necessarily a bad aspiration, but going scalar’s possibly going to be a better one.

So the question is your business sufficiently adapted and suited to scalar, or will it rely on the flash in pan of short-term virality? Can deep authentic connections help you make your mark in 2012? It’s a genius opportunity.

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The 4 P’s of Social Business

December 3rd, 2011 • 4 Comments

It used to be the case, when marketing first became a profession, that the 4 P’s held sway. The 4 P’s were the shorthand to make sense of the plethora of activity that sales and marketing was becoming; they led to a code of practice of sorts that made sense, reference points in a unified framework able to guide a brand’s overall sales and business development.

They were the firstly ‘product’, the tangible good or an intangible service that’s mass produced or manufactured at large scale with a specific volume of units.

Then ‘price’, the amount a customer pays for the product which the business increased or decreased the price paid if other stores had the same product.

‘Promotion’, representing all of the communications that a marketeer used in the marketplace and finally ‘place’, the way of getting the product to the consumer and/or how easily accessible it is to consumers.

That was then and this is now, and as marketers think about how to corporate social business into what they’re doing there’s arguably just as much of a need for a framework, for the same kind of sense-making.

If we’re doing it all again, what might the 4 P’s look like today? Well, here’s a suggestion:

People. Your core asset. Whether they’re inside or outside the business itself, in social business people are number one, they’re both the creators, and the carriers, of your media and messages. As things turn out, no amount of viral agency cleverness comes close to doing the job without them; so get to know them, connect with them, create relationships with them in and across the communities in which they exist. The people are the new product that powers any form of social organization.

Platforms are the conduit of that connectedness. Platforms can be proprietary, like Facebook, Twitter and Google +, they can be bespoke as your own communities inside and outside the business, and they can be shared, as places of connected interest, the places of old, where people will gather.

Protocols. Old processes may still be in place in many organizations, culture change takes time, and neither people, platforms or points of connections can do much without being enabled by them. Social businesses depend on the cohesion generated by protocols, that is the ability to feed information through the pathways that can be easily understood and taken for granted. Softer and more fluid than processes, protocols are ‘how we roll’ the collective, intelligent, agile and learning ways the organization puts in place the means to grow and become more effective.

Points of connection are the pulse points that move people when brands are experiences. They’re the moments that matter, the values that are shared and everything that people come into contact with as the touchpoints of the social brand. As social business fundamentally changes how we ‘do interaction’, that thing we used to call marketing becomes a series of points of connection, a purposeful exchange between you and your people around shared social objects.

Many brands and organizations are just at the start of incorporating social business and media into the way they do things. The four P’s may have changed, but the idea of finding a framework to make sense of what’s needed remains the same, a kind of connective tissue that can unify and help frame what social business means. Ideas people can buy into create elegant transitions. It would be great to hear what you think – does this resonate with today’s networked business needs, what’s missing?

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Visual and visceral

November 27th, 2011 • 1 Comment

Today at Interlagos, Brazil, it’s the final Grand Prix of the 2011 Formula 1 season. It’s also 20 years since the incomparable Ayrton Senna won there in front of his home crowd (if you haven’t seen the film Senna it’s highly recommend as a story of life, passion and purpose; the racing is a metaphor, just a part).

Brazil is a country of expression, with many valuable lessons inside that, particularly as we enter an age where expression’s now a part of an ever growing universal currency of connection.

This logo is a study in visual design that captures some of those lessons, a study of form, feeling and identity and a combination of the visual and the visceral that matches, in many ways, the peerlessness of the man.

For brands, social business takes the standards of brand expression required to be successful to new levels.

Brand design has to do more to be functional because of social media than ever before. It has to work in compact spaces and express values and a sense of culture and personality that reach out, evoke as well as being capable of being differentiated and distinctive.

Most of all, it has to move people, to jump off the screen and be the beginning of a narrative and a journey of association.

This logo is a balanced blend of identification and communication, graphically arresting and also compact, it is technically focused, informative and articulate.

What sets it apart as a logo is that captures the unique personality of the man – the restlessness of his quest, his dynamic energy that people love and associate with him so much, as well as the cool technical design of his focus that meant he delivered, capturing the imagination, hearts and minds of millions of sports fans along the way.

The red swoosh of the track-fashioned ‘S’ is itself, quite literally, a masterstroke; partially incompleted, full of energy, like him. It’s a racing logo of course, but it’s Senna’s logo reinforced by the simple name below it, in less-is-more lettering with just the right amount of typographical flair.

In the design is implicitly an articulation of the values and personality as well as a graphic shape and form that’s immediately recognisable, confident and authoritative.

This effervescent identity speaks for him and his legacy long after the moment; as a logo it reconnects people to the excitement he created on the track.

In death, Senna’s magic lives on. In life, some brands are barely pulsating. We try to do work that does something about this, combining the visual and the visceral so that at every level, the identity of the collective, connected brand makes a difference.

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A few thoughts about play and engagement

November 24th, 2011 • 2 Comments

A very stimulating two day conference was put together this week as a line of enquiry led by Pat Kane and Escape Artists called ‘The Play’s The Thing’. To use his own words, Pat has spent years ‘researching, advocating and practising play as our enduring principle of possibility and optimism in the human condition’.

The two days of the conference explored a wide range of dimensions of wellbeing and the role of play as part of the social agenda, and it meshed very well with Visceral Businesses ideas about social business and how, ultimately, engagement, shared value and co-creation comes through doing things that move people to respond and make a difference.

So, play for us has never been a passive but a highly creative pursuit, and with that in mind it was a great opportunity to be involved in a line of enquiry that was so stimulating.

Those two days, and the number of dimensions explored in them, were a refreshing antidote to the massively overhyped, headline grabbing nature of ‘gamification’ that’s somehow managed to obscure many currencies of play on offer that are less lightweight, more nuanced and in the long term almost certainly more sustainable.

The enormous level of flux being experienced in community and commercial landscapes right now suggests that maybe it’s time we conduct a very conscious consideration into how we develop the ways we can ‘do interaction’. What happens when ‘gamification’ becomes a generic, what then?

For this conference I was asked to think about the question ‘what possibilities for sustainable wellbeing does networked and gaming culture bring us?’, particularly as we see an emergence of cyberbeings and cyberbusinesses, and this is a summary.

A short story about entertainment, torpor and all things visceral

This story is a story of our lives, and the curtain goes up at the very beginning, in fact, before the beginning, because even before we were born, we were made to connect. We had umbilical cords to our mothers that gave us nutrients, where we learnt first of all what it feels like to matter and belong.

As we become cyberbeings, that kind of connection continues. In fact, beyond the zero cost and zero return of automated digital transaction, that sense of connection is really what’s most valuable about the ability to be socially networked.

The same access to learning and nutrients we received as children and we developed through play we are now what we get to experience hooked up to the web via the cables to our ISP, it’s a digital motherlode. (This is one reason why gut feelings and clicks are, at a very visceral level, connected).

And there’s something about the way we consume and participate in screen-based media that’s an important element in this story, that touches on things that go back to our earliest days.

Because from the moment of birth, our parents focused primarily on two main things to do to look after us; they were there to entertain us and to pacify us.

 

These days, you could argue, we’ve got similar versions of this. Look at the opening titles of the XFactor and there’s certainly an ‘orb’ theme at play there…plus over the top shiny and a handy little app, too, that manages to turn the impact of an OMG moment into just another button to press.

This is a very infantile form of entertainment and creativity. You’ve got to wonder what’s happening to that cognitive surplus Clay Shirky wrote about as people are nudged into spending hours and hours on Farmville, Bejewled, Skyrim and the others, instead of relying on their own generative faculties.

What’s happening to our own sense of creativity when you can get ‘shiny’ and ‘distracting’ so easily at the other end of a login?

Is Facebook possibly a heist of the free mind, maybe even the biggest global heist of free thinking in human history?

That might sounds radical perhaps, except that last week this article made an appearance in the Guardian, and it leads to the question ‘is the way we are entertained today reactionary and creating torpor, a form of temporary creative hibernation, more than it’s stimulating us and offering the option of self-powered creativity?’

There’s a level of imaginative play, creativity and flow of ideas that goes well beyond clicking our way to the next video game level up. Our economy needs to be tapping into it, developing it, and fast.

The point when gaming becomes a generic value-add is only a matter of time. To  develop authentic well being, what’s needed are businesses that contain and enable a greater level of free expression as fully matured independent creative adults at deep levels, if we’re to develop people as more than replaceable, digital widgets.

Networked culture has a central nervous system to it but, unlike our own sensory and adaptive human systems, it tends to not be very responsive. Perhaps it’s because we’re still so close to the factory age that networked cultures around today are not that great at being shaped by external stimuli coming from without from participants and users.

The same is true of a large degree of online gaming; it has very limited scope for autonomous or co-dependent creation and is much more about you versus the central nervous system than collaborative, individually owned creativity and input.

I think this inability in our collective culture to go beneath the surface in what entertainment can mean, in game dynamics, and this failure to move on from our earliest days is of play, is perpetuating an adult-to-child instead of adult-to-adult society; great swathes of community is at risk of torpor, suffering as a result of restricted imagination and hibernated creativity. This could be potentially a big liability to our wellbeing, as organisations and in our own selves.

Networks, gaming culture and social businesses can all benefit from building relationships, not just in and out of the centre, but across participants as part of their social muscle so participants contribute to the overall shape of play.

Business models today can benefit from building in the space for synapses to fire and initiatives to come out of generative and formative experiences, instead of a reliance to cause and effect reactions.

Individuals can learn a great deal about themselves and expand the opportunities of the environments they’re in when they can be creative from within; being surprising is the best way we can all learn to be more adaptive.

Facebook interactivity is, by comparison, a very controlled activity. Potential suffocation of individual enjoyment is the risk here. If we’re on that path, how far off are we really from an unsustainable model, of sleepwalking our way into a zombie economy.

At a fairly deep intuitive level, people tend to know when they’re being gamed, unless they’re being gaslighted. It’s a gut reaction; and we know that physiologically, the visceral reactions that happen when imaginative synapses fire, bring with them a big degree of action potential far more than a strategy of pacification and programmable buttons. It’s the phenomenon we all know in various ways that’s summed up in the line, ‘when I hear music I just can’t make my feet behave’. We need that energy.

When passion within is denied, the paradox is the most frequent end result is it doesn’t die but it just gets stronger. Who’d bet against that as an asset in your workforce or against the odds of success of a passionate productive person? How can it be developed as an asset?

Leaders that can set in place a strong purposeful direction and then get out of the way so others can co-create around it, have the chance to foster deep, productive and lasting social impacts better than any others.

So the moral of the story for social businesses and brands is, if you’re going to try and collaborate with users, have deep relationships creative with them first. Put space into the business model for people to connect with each other freely to generate surprisng creative next steps and opportunities, and yes, get visceral.

From a networked and gaming perspective we’re beginning to see just how much the flow of ideas matters as much as interactions.

When gamification and stimulus/response play becomes something trite to grow out of, where will consumers and users find the trusted spaces online in which to grow… will it be in the environment of your brand? …and what do you find stimulating and fires up your creativity? As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

 

 

 

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Falling in love with the back of the product

August 27th, 2011 • 4 Comments


Few people in the modern industrialised world haven’t got something to thank Steve Jobs for. Some of his legacy’s very obvious, some it goes much further than the products themselves and is less so – cultural narratives of empowerment we’re only beginning to fully appreciate in reflection.

Absence is, sadly, often a way to view true value.

The ‘blow the top off my head off’ moment for me, and my first encounter with Steve Jobs’ genius, came in 1984. As a 23 year old account manager, I was given the job of producing the first advertising that Apple ever did in the UK.

It was nothing as glamorous as the famous Ridley Scott ads shaking up the States at the time. The budgets they had over there were way beyond what we had. Apple was still a relatively fledgling company and we were a new market, but we did get to do some classy and arresting black and white advertising in the quality press, perfect for the slightly unconventional architects, creative agencies and other firms that Apple were pitching to at the time.

What was really great about the gig though was the free prize that came with it, an Apple MkII that cost £5,000 installed in my office. £5,000! That alone made it a bit special. But when I got to move that mouse and wiggle a MacPaint digital spray can around a screen that it did it for me. Nothing like it had ever existed. It was a wow moment, a creative wonder that went way beyond working, and I was sold.

I think I can honestly say I can put my entire love affair with geekery down to that moment, just in the same way a stroll down the Kings Road at the age of 11 made me fall in love with creative design. Those moments are visceral, they go deep down and they stay with you.

A whole plethora of stories of Steve’s insight, vision, daring, focus and social impact have been unbundled as he steps down as CEO, and the reputation of the man, how it’s translated into serious dollars and cents in a way that has briefly made Apple this week the world’s largest company, is worth thinking about. Because Apple, despite everything about it that has been about product design, has also been about the quality of its people.

Brands like Apple are personality-led. Their culture, values and ways of doing things, built from and inspired by passion, have set it apart. And what stood out in the tributes for me is Robert Scoble’s take on something very important, nothing to do with the shiny sleek surface design that Apple’s renowned for.

What Robert Scoble’s said about what was special about Steve Jobs was this: Steve’s the ‘only one guy in the industry [that] has ever told me to look at the back of a product to understand its beauty’.

It’s worth considering that back in the day when Apple was spawned, user-friendly was a term that didn’t exist before then. Quite simply, no-one had ever thought of things that way.

Now, user-friendliness has become a holistic user experience. As organisations and all their touchpoints become more social, we can all learn a great deal from that little piece of Steve’s wisdom.

The look and feel of a product, the way Apple approached it, was ground breaking, it still is. Product focus is still important, but needs service and making meaning attached to it, now, to matter.

Today, the ‘back of the product’ is its people.

What makes Apple distinctive is the legions of fanboys and girls, people happy to be defined in no small measure by that ethos and what it’s led to for them.

Social organisations are all about this. Falling in love with the back of the product and understanding its beauty in the social organisation is about bringing out the people who are a part of it, making connections that go way beyond technical.

We can take people out of the boxes they live in within organisations and make more of them, relishing the inventiveness and creativity they have inherently. We can produce things of wonder as connected networks, like Steve Jobs did. The intellectual understanding and emotional commitment is there, often disaffected and unused; as with a technology reinvented and reimagined, with guidance, vision and social leadership, it can transform, in just the same way he did it.

Business didn’t used to be personal. Now it is. 

Steve Jobs’ focus can live on in a new way.

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The Social Media Supermarket

July 4th, 2011 • 2 Comments

 

It’s not what you’re thinking. This is about what lies beyond the many tracking, posting, collaborating and measuring apps there are out there, all of which are a veritable supermarket in their own right.

As any supermarketer will tell you, there’s a big shift involved in helping a consumer in from the point they see the banners outside the store – the media – to how they actually navigate through it and the nature of the user experience – the modeling. The point is that social brand architecture, or the lack of it, can make or break a social brand.

In the early to mid 1990’s a lot of my time was spent advising retailers. We used fundamental sets of assumptions that were in service to, and all about, how customers shopped a store. Many of them are still used today.

Navigating one’s way through a large supermarket is one of modern life’s complex organizational events. Navigating the web’s and virtual organisation’s a step on from that again, which is why services like Google helping by pushing stuff to us.

A socially branded organisation is somewhere between the two. It has a multitude of elements – social objects – and a complex range of activities going on inside it, similar to the number of lines a supermarket may carry on its shelves.

It has a wide choice of elements that consumer and participants can pick up and engage with. It’s accessible via the web, but is still one with a threshold, a sense of inside and outside in terms of belonging that makes it a virtual environment; a brand is by definition an identifiable space.

If you’re a maker of a social brand or business, or a consumer of and participant in one, the degree to which that social organisation can be thought of as your ‘local convenience store’ in terms of familiarity and loyalty, depends on how well the user experience delivers an interesting and sensible shopping experience that makes it something that’s easy to go back to.

In the same way as those retail principles did out of physical spaces two decades ago, there’s a big need to make sense of the digital cultures of brands today, because the curation and cultural meaning of social brands is crucial if people are going to come along and browse, select activities to participate in and commit to involving themselves in your brand, what we quite quaintly call ‘social engagement.’

There’s the things like the merchandising of your hashtags, how are you doing that?

There’s the clustering of social and digital events. How do people get a snapshot of all of it very quickly? It asks for a framework for social category management.

There’s the livery of your social brand architecture. Just as there are semiotics – colours, images, words – associated with fresh food, the pharmacy, the deli, the meat, fish and diary sections of a supermarket, things that create distinctive associations and triggers of understanding, so there are social semiotics. There are the ways people sense-make online around different parts of the social organization as well as unique and distinctive cultural attributes you can call your own, the social differentiators and protocols, visual and verbal languages and points of focus, that need to be easily known.

Many companies are using social media for rapid fire business as usual in the same way as supermarkets are geared to everyday transactional exchanges. The social media supermarket today is a trolley-filling of Likes and +1’s and Share buttons and clickthroughs. But these items are not where the value is for consumers. The cultural value of store environment, the ranging, matters just as much, the social ambience and the ease of shopping.

No social consumer’s going to go out and put 10 Likes and 5 +1′s’ on the shopping list of their social activity today. That’s why brands must become ‘go-to’ destinations to be truly socially potent.

Consumers shop the stores they like because they know where the categories are and because they’re easy to navigate. It’s not just about what social media can do to get people ‘into’ the social organization, it’s what you’re going to do with them once they’re in there that matters. The modelling of your social environment makes sense of the media and the platforms that support it.

What we see is that many organizations are currently frantically trying to put social media on their shelves while ignoring the basic layout of their social environment, but without a social brand framework at an operational level it’s an approach that can only lead to a shallow depth of engagement and restrict the size of user buy-in.

Beyond the frenzy of tooling up to be social, social brands and organizations have the challenge of creating special ambiences, experiences and making sense of what’s on their shelf.

They should be considering the question  of how they’re going to create a compelling user experience, because when there’s a high volume of goods and competing calls for their attention on offer, what really matters is the means to navigate through it in a way that’s capable of continually connecting with a consumer’s desire to shop.

 

 

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Being on Fire

June 21st, 2011 • Comments

(With apologies to Seth Godin for riffing off one of his favourite pictures).

There’s a phrase we’re all familiar with, ‘So and so’s on fire today’. You hear it all the time.

Being on fire’s a state that talks about the temporal nature of influence, how it’s no longer a permanence, as well as the patchy nature of knowledge, and how it’s lumpy.

Another phrase I like describes what I think is the true nature of talent, and it’s ‘everyone’s a genius some of the time’. Einstein apparently couldn’t navigate his way home from the office too well. We’re all better at some things than others. Peak experiences are peak experiences because they do exactly that – they peak. Elizabeth Gilbert in her TED talk speaks about creative genius as a divine attendent spirit and Ruth Stone, the poet, who first encouraged her to recognise that genius as something that comes to visit, when we’re ‘on fire’.

This approach to creativity and talent development is a substantial shift in thinking away from the imperative of ever accelerating performance that people have been conditioned to, where there’s no room to relax in driving operating performance to new levels.

When it comes to talent development, the phenomenon of metaphorically being ‘on fire’ asks us to recognise that genius and flashes of inspiration come at the least expected moments.

Eureka breakthroughs involve accepting the nature of value is undulating. Social community expects that people will ebb and flow in their interest levels to us, in fact it’s part of the attraction. In being this way, it offers the opportunity to create human resource principles for developing social business equity that are more sustainable.

Fortunately now, there is the ability to aggregate the responses and contributions people make through social CRM. We can recognise and accommodate undulating performance, more easily and more of the time. We can develop a body of work as a part of our online credentials, the tracks and markings of the digital footprints we’re making, individually and as organised social brands collectively over time. And we can create a contribution economy in which people are freer to play to their peaks.

So now, the question is, what can you do to enable your fans and supporters and employees to be on fire, more of the time? What can you do to enable your organisation to do the same? What is your strategy for embracing imperfections and off days? Is your brand capable of fostering and holding the fire in people, or is it in danger of going downhill by saying ‘use the stairs’?

 

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