Last week, I wrote about possible futures of social networking, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself. I used a 2×2 matrix with likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis, leading to four scenarios. I said that the likely/ negative quadrant is the default, as our world seems to devolve into chaos, when left to its own devices; if we reach out for our better selves, we might create a better world, in the likely/ positive quadrant; if we are lucky, we might even exceed our expectations and approach the unlikely/ positive quadrant; and if we are unlucky, we might mess things up, and find ourselves in the unlikely/ negative quadrant. This week, I’ll use the same 2×2 matrix to imagine four possible futures of media, like before, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself.

The Likely/ Negative Future

Amidst widespread speculation that the social web will hasten the end of journalism as we know it, media organizations have emerged at the forefront of innovation in technology. They have not only adopted, even co-opted, social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but also collaborated to create their own media network Streamly, to compete with them. On Streamly, half a billion citizen streamers share more than 2 billion hours of storystreams each week, most often from their haptic streampads, but sometimes even 24×7 with full-body Streamsuits, in the hope of being featured on Streamly, but also on every mediastream in the world. These storystreams range from the amateurishly banal to the professionally shocking, with elaborately staged sex and violence. Streamly automatically slices and stitches together similar stream segments into themed streamcasts, which are then hand-curated by professional streamistas who work for news organizations, and the most popular streamcasts are syndicated as mediastreams across the world. Many of the most popular mediastreams are either pornstreams or shopstreams, with seamless single touch bidding to buy the objects of desire. Corporations and government share their own storystreams, with pre-negotiated paid quotas for being featured on mediastreams, and agreements to filter out and censor stream segments that are against their best interests.

The Likely/ Positive Future

Streamly, along with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, has become an important platform for creativity, citizenship, and grassroots community organization. Even though pornstreams and shopstreams continue to be popular as streamcasts, streamistas employed by both Streamly and media organizations, also curate green, health, education and human potential streamcasts. Editors at media organizations have strong editorial policies on which streamcasts to syndicate as mediastreams, and rely on their reputation as tastemakers and opinion leaders to grow their subscriber base. Corporations and governments track storystreams to understand public opinion and change their policies, and even though they sometimes try to shape it with their own storystreams, they are almost never entirely successful. Worried about Streamly’s growing clout, free expression activists have started a freestreaming movement and hacked together a software called OpenStream to slice and stitch together storystreams into open-source streamcasts. Media organizations first considered legal action against OpenStream, but then decided to endorse it and even create a Streamly API to enable others to create similar apps, in response to adverse public opinion.

The Unlikely/ Positive Future

Building up from the Positive/ Likely scenario, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Streamly have all become powerful open ecosystems for creative expression and public dialogue, and the media ecosystem looks like a rich recombinant rainforest. However, people are beginning to tire of navigating these endless streams, even with the aid of search and recommendation AIs that are more powerful than ever before. Zen Minimalism has become a powerful world religion with its more than 2 billion new converts are beginning to apply the principles of minimalism to media and deciding that they won’t pay attention to anything today that they won’t pay attention to in a month from now. While pornstreams are still popular, shopstreams have almost disappeared. Almost everyone has a streampad, almost everyone streams, but almost no one streams 24×7 with full-body streamsuits. In a short time, the amount of streaming has become almost half of what it used to be, but the richness and diversity of streaming has increased dramatically, as Zen Minimalism practitioners often use their free time to perfect their craft. The practice of streamcasting and mediastreaming has also disappeared, as Zen Minimalism practitioners aren’t really interested in what’s popular or what everyone is watching. The media ecosystem is more of a rich recombinant rainforest than ever before, but it’s also as intimate as an evening of storytelling around a campfire.

The Unlikely/ Negative Future

Building up from the Positive/ Likely scenario, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Streamly have all become powerful open ecosystems for creative expression and public dialogue. Media entrepreneurs have built multi-million dollar startups on top of these platforms. Millions of apps and millions of niche-specific streamcasts have tried to follow their example but most have had limited success. As these platforms have become more open, and their app ecosystems have exploded, automated streambots have overwhelmed search and recommendation algorithms, and discovery has become a big problem. Streamly’s once-futuristic synthesis AI is now submerged under spam and Google’s PageRank search algorithm has long become obsolete. As a result, new streamers begin to get disappointed and give up, while established streamers and streamistas begin to wield power similar to 20th century media monopoliedecades short time, the rich recombinant media rainforest dries up into a media desert with half a dozen global monopolies who employ a few hundred star streamers, while a few thousands wannabe streamers toil away to attract their attention. These monopolies protect their subscriber bases with powerful firewalls and closed proprietary devices, which don’t even work with each other. Outside these closed monopolies, the web feels like the Wild West, where virusmongers, spammers and scam artists rule.

In Summary

In imagining possible futures of media and contextualizing it against my possible futures of social networking, I realized that the difference between the positive and the negative scenarios is determined by a small number of factors: what does society value and how much, what’s commercial and what’s in the commons, who wields power and to what end. I also noticed that the Unlikely/ Positive futures in both the essays share the same assumptions, while the other three scenarios don’t really. It seems to me that there are many possible futures, each different from the others, but all our most preferable futures lie in the same direction, one in which humanity’s spiritual progress leads, not lags behind, the society’s technological progress. The question is: how do we choose these futures over the others?

Now that we have a social network for one billion people in the world (Facebook), a social network for 150 of your most intimate friends (Path), and a social network just for your significant other (Pair); a social network for videos (YouTube), a social network for photos (Instagram) and a social network for status updates (Twitter); a social network for professionals (LinkedIn), a social network for curators (Pinterest), and a social network from Google (Google+); not to mention a parallel universe of social networks in China (Renren, Weibo, Youku); it seems almost impossible to imagine how the social network of the future will be different from the rich diversity we have today.

Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent

Today’s social networks know what our and our friends’ interests, intentions and consumption behaviors are; know how to recognize patterns in our behaviors and contextualize them against our friends, others like us, or the world; know how to track and federate our identity across the web and across the world; know how to serve us status updates, news, entertainment and ads that we are most likely to consume; even know how to manipulate our behavior by tapping into our gameplaying instincts with challenges, points, levels and badges. Today’s social networks seem omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent; it’s almost shocking that a Facebook-Google-LinkedIn-Twitter hybrid hasn’t already evolved into a dystopian version of singularity, subjugated nation states, and enslaved all humanity. It seems easy to imagine then how things might become worse from here, more difficult to imagine how things might become better.

Possible Futures: A 2X2 Matrix

Predictions are easy to make, because almost no one expects them to turn out to be correct, and they almost always don’t. I find it much more meaningful to look at possibilities instead, scenarios that are likely or unlikely, positive or negative, worlds that may or may not come into existence. I love the 2X2 matrix, so I’ll use one which is preferred by futurists: likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis. I think of the likely/ negative quadrant as the default, as our world seems to devolve into chaos, when left to its own devices; if we reach out for our better selves, we might create a better world, in the likely/ positive quadrant; if we are lucky, we might even exceed our expectations and approach the unlikely/ positive quadrant; and if we are unlucky, we might mess things up, and find ourselves in the unlikely/ negative quadrant.

Like William Gibson famously said: “The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” So, one way to look at the future, without going into the domain of fantasy and science fiction, is to look at the very near future, perhaps even the present, and extrapolate from elements that seem to have arrived from the future. Here, then, are four possible futures of social networking, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself.

The Likely/ Negative Future

Let’s start with the likely/ negative quadrant, the one we are thinking of as the default. Facebook(-RenRen-YouTube-Youku-Fox-Reuters) and Apple(-Amazon-Disney-Penguin-Viacom-Virgin) are locked in a pitched battle to become the leading media and experience network, while Google(-Microsoft-Skype-LinkedIn) is focused on the enterprise experienceware market, and Alibaba(-WalMart-Citi-Weibo-Twitter) has the highest valuation with its experiential commerce business, but all four are worried about how upstart SuperEgo(-Orange-AmEx-PayPal-Zynga) is beginning to control the identity market with its EgoExperience reward program and a series of recent acquisitions. Consumers accumulate Ego points by buying experiences from Alibaba, consuming branded experience from Facebook and Apple, or performing well on monthly Google work experience appraisals, which they can redeem to consume more branded experiences, buy more experiences or sign up for longer hours of work experience. If they don’t meet their monthly minimum quotas on either of the three types of experiences, their EgoExperience rating goes down and their access to premium experiences is limited. In extreme cases, membership from the EgoExperience reward program is revoked, severely limiting the consumer’s long-term prospects of buying and consuming experiences.

The Likely/ Positive Future

Let’s now look at the likely/ positive quadrant, which shares many of the characteristics with the likely/ negative quadrant, with a few important differences. Facebook and Apple are still the dominant media and experience networks, but they are also open platforms for millions of experience creators, who share their experiences under an ExperienceCommons license, so that others can remix them and share them forward. Google is still the leader in the enterprise experienceware market, but it works closely with TEDExperience and WikiExperiencia Foundation to help millions of professionals co-create an open source ExperienceBase of the world’s best learning resources. Alibaba still has the highest market capitalization, but more than half its profits come from its WholeExperience brand, which sells meaningful experiences. SuperEgo is still powerful, but it is under constant scrutiny from consumer rights groups and it hasn’t yet been able to tie up with Google work experience appraisals. And, the hottest new startup in the Bangalore-Shanghai-Tokyo experience-corridor is ExperienceZen, which creates bespoke minimalist experiences for more than half a billion experience-weary users, by helping them block out most branded experiences, focus on the most meaningful work and life experiences and even completely switch off from the ExperienceNet for two weeks every year, while maintaining a respectable EgoExperience rating.

The Unlikely/ Positive Future

In the unlikely/ positive quadrant, the internet has evolved into a powerful open source public network called Mirror, managed by the Mirror Foundation, with wide representation from government, business and civil society. Almost everyone in the world is on Mirror, via smartphone-like MirrorScopes, and Mirror is deeply integrated in all aspects of our life. All news and entertainment is created and consumed on it, all communication is routed via it, and all business models are based on it. MirrorCode is designed so that others can create their own MirrorWorlds upon Mirror, but all MirrorWorlds share Mirror’s core concern with humanity’s spiritual progress. Mirror is designed so that it individually optimizes for what’s good for each one of us, what builds our character, what leads to our long-term happiness, what helps us approach our best self. If I have just broken up with my girlfriend, it will subtly hint that I should get back in touch with my high-school sweetheart who is also single again. If I need to lose weight, it will point me towards healthy food and lifestyle options on MirrorSearch and show me MirrorStreams of my friends practicing yoga. If I ask it a direct question and it feels that I am not ready for the answer, it will even hold back the answer from me, and ask me to take tests that will help me prepare myself for it. Mirror will even throw challenges at me that build my physical, mental, emotional and social resilience, and reward me for completing those challenges by giving me new MirrorPowers and unlocking higher levels of MirrorConsciousness for me. The range of news, content and experiences available on Mirror are rich and diverse, as most content is created under a MirrorCommons license so that others can build upon it. Top ten lists are almost unheard of because each person consumes content based on their unique taste, but artists make a good living because they are generously supported by loyal patrons. Scam-artists and virus-mongers sometimes succeed in gaming Mirror’s code, but, in general, businesses that create meaningful experiences tend to do best on Mirror.

The Unlikely/ Negative Future

Let’s now look at the unlikely/ negative quadrant, which shares many of the characteristics with the unlikely/ positive quadrant, with a few important differences. Mirror is as powerful as before, but Mirror Foundation is now controlled by the American and British governments, supported by the Resurgent Universal Church, and a consortium of multinational conglomerates. The governments wants to use Mirror as a tool for propaganda to weaken China, the church wants to enforce its regressive moral code on the entire world, and the multinationals want to trigger subconscious urges that compel consumers to buy more mindlessly. They try to make subtle changes to the core MirrorCode to serve their needs, but MirrorCode is resilient and rejects these changes. The Mirror Foundation then starts a full-scale war on MirrorCode, by creating a series of viruses that threaten to undermine its core structure. China retaliates and tries to take control of Mirror through its own virus attacks. The European Union and Japan refuse to participate in the MirrorWar and try to create firewalls to protect their own part of Mirror. Brazil and India first try to broker peace between America and China, then create an antivirus to protect the MirrorCode core. However, multi-lateral peace initiatives, firewalls, and antiviruses all fail in the end, and Mirror fragments into a thousand pieces, each one an island of code disconnected from the others. Without Mirror, nation states break down into city-states, the major religions disintegrate into warring factions and multinationals go bankrupt. When the dust settles after a decade, the world reorganizes itself into disconnected city-states, local folk religions and distributed global subcultures that have no way to speak to each other.

The Different Between Utopia and Dystopia

There are probably infinite possible futures and these are merely four possibilities amongst them but I hope that you see that relatively few things need to change for us to end up with the utopian positive futures or the dystopian negative futures, namely: what does society value and how much, what’s commercial and what’s in the commons, who wields power and to what end. Dystopias, after all, are utopias with a few critical fatal flaws and the biggest fatal flaw, perhaps, is humanity’s spiritual progress lagging behind the society’s technological progress. Let this, then, be our touchstone for making choices that might lead to the more preferable of these possible worlds: are we only thinking of our technological progress, or also of our spiritual progress?

The Power of Crowdsourcing Insights and Innovation

According to the recent PwC CEO Survey of 1200+ business leaders across 69 countries, business leaders believe that crowdsourcing people’s insights are one of the main drivers for leading innovation and change.

We have a significant body of knowledge on crowdsourcing now, including business rationale, application areas, best practices and case studies. We have seen dedicated third-party crowdsourcing platforms in action for almost a decade and learned from their successes and failures. We have seen diverse Fortune 500 corporations design dedicated large-scale platforms to crowdsource insights and innovation across business functions. However, we saw a gap in the market for comprehensive solution to crowdsource insights and innovation and launched the People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform and approach.

People’s Lab Crowdsourcing Platform and Approach

The People’s Lab platform helps organizations build and nurture public or private, web or mobile, hosted or white label communities around four pre-configured application areas: Expertise Request Network, Innovation Challenge Network, Research & Insights Network and Contest & Activation Network. Our community and game thinking features encourage people to share rich multimedia content and vote/ comment on other people’s content, while our social intelligence algorithm helps us identify the most influential people, themes and content.

Crowdsourcing Insights from Conversations and Communities

The People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform and approach forms the core of our distinctive insights and foresight approach, which consists of four elements: organic conversation analysis, MSLGROUP’s own insight communities, client-specific insights communities, and ethnographic deep dives into these communities. This four-part approach helps us distill a deep understanding of societal values, consumption behaviors and attitudes towards brands, not only in terms of insights that help explain our world today, but also foresights that give us a glimpse of future worlds.

People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine

As an example, 100+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling on the MSLGROUP Insights Network. Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it — on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web — to distill insights and foresights. We have been sharing these insights and foresights with you on our People’s Insights blog. Now, we have compiled the best insights from the network and the blog in the iPad-friendly People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, as a showcase of our capabilities.

We started with the belief that some of the most inspiring projects that are shaping marketing and communications are at the intersection of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling. Three months and thirteen weekly insights reports later, we feel validated that our intuition was right.

In the first issue of the People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, we start off with a framework for purpose-inspired transmedia storytelling, which weaves together elements from all the three drivers of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling. Then we look at thirteen inspiring projects at the intersection of these three drivers. Many of these projects build upon at least two of the three pillars of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling and some leverage all three.

We hope that you will enjoy the magazine and subscribe to receive subsequent issues. We also hope that our magazine and blog will inspire you to start a conversation on how you can distill actionable insights and foresights from conversations and communities.

Social Technologies and Power Structures

The debate on whether internet and mobile technologies are transforming traditional power structures is dominated by three divergent narratives.

According to the first, utopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies enable individuals to publish and distribute content, self-organize into communities of interest and participate in collective action. As a result, they can create new types of media outlets, build new types of civil society organizations, and monitor, protest against and even bring down governments. Even though these new degrees of freedom are far from universal, they are fundamentally changing political power structures. The future has already arrived, this narrative insists, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

According to the second, status quo, narrative, power structures are ingrained into our society’s institutions and internet and mobile technologies don’t really change these institutions, or create new ones. The case studies compiled by the utopians constitute anecdotal evidence, at best, and the influence of networked technologies will always be limited because of issues related to access or ability. So, internet and mobile technologies are a minor influence on political power structures, at best.

According to the third, dystopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies are, in fact, enabling traditional institutions to further consolidate their power through censorship, surveillance and propaganda. So, even though they give us the illusion of greater power, they have, indeed, compromised our ability to protect our privacy, have access to diverse views, and build real institutions.

It’s not easy to conclusively argue for one narrative or the other, unless we outline the entire range of possibilities that social technologies open up for citizens and activists.

The 5Cs Framework

Social technologies encompass many different types of tools, such as blogging, microblogging, video-sharing, photo-sharing, podcasting, mapping, social networking, social voting, social bookmarking, lifestreaming, wikis, virtual worlds, and several new and hybrid tools.

Cutting across these tools, there are five underlying dynamics in social technologies, the 5Cs of social media: Content, Conversation, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these five dynamics constitute the value system of social technologies. The tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 5Cs is here to stay.

If we wish to understand whether and how social technologies can empower citizens, it’s useful to explore how citizens and activists can leverage these five dynamics.

The First C: Content

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social technologies allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

User generated content is the driver of the citizen journalism phenomenon, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms like CNN iReport, Global Voices, NowPublic, and AllVoices have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Researchers have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

At the Content level, the design challenge is to create or harness focused content creation platforms that scale even if only 1% of the users create content.

So far, most initiatives in India have struggled in this respect. Platforms like MeriNews are too entertainment focused to be called citizen journalism platforms and individual or group blogs like Kafila don’t have the scale to make a meaningful impact.

The Second C: Conversation

The second C, Conversation, refers to the idea that social technologies enable two-way dialogues between citizens that sometimes take the form of viral memes and tip into the mainstream consciousness.

One to one conversations tip into viral memes as consumers and curators congregate around compelling content. Natural disasters like the China earthquake and South East Asia tsunami and crisis situations like the Israel-Gaza war and the Mumbai terrorist attacks often lead to viral memes, sometimes misleading ones.

Sometimes, activism campaigns also tip into viral memes. The 2009 Valentine’s Day Pink Chaddi campaign that protested against the right wing political party Sri Ram Sena by sending them pink panties as Valentine’s Day gifts became viral when more than 50,000 people joined in on Facebook.

At the Conversation level, the design challenge is to create compelling content that demands to be shared and seed conversations around it that can tip into a viral meme.

Evidence suggests that the art of designing viral activism campaigns hasn’t been perfected yet and most campaigns that to go viral happen to tip and find it difficult to replicate their own success later.

The Third C: Collaboration

The third C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social technologies facilitate the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at two levels: co-creation and collective action.

In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

At the Collaboration level, the design challenge is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism).

In 2009, I co-founded a crowdsourced election monitoring platform Vote Report India that is a good example of a platform designed for co-creation. The Ushahidi based platform presented an aggregated visual view of irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections by plotting text messages sent from polling booths on a Google Map. However, we realized that the platform couldn’t scale without tapping into an offline volunteer network. Kiirti is a more evolved co-creation platform that factors in the need for such an offline support ecosystem.

The Pink Chaddi campaign resulted in more than 2000 pink panties being sent to Sri Ram Sena and is a good example of collective action in India.

The Fourth C, Community

The fourth C, Community, refers to the idea that social technologies can facilitate sustained engagement around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object. Often, lifestyles, passions and causes make for more compelling social objects than people, organizations, or campaigns.

At the Community level, the design challenge is to identify a compelling social object and build a large and vibrant community around it.

I am currently working on iJanaagraha, a community platform built around the notion that real change begins in the neighborhood. It’s a new type of citizen platform, with strong location, community and activation layers, designed to promote proactive citizenship by providing citizens the information, tools and networks to drive real change in their neighborhoods and cities.

The Fifth C, Collective Intelligence

The fifth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us.

It becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

At the Collective Intelligence level, the design challenge is to aggregate our individual and collective actions in databases, and run sophisticated algorithms on them to build reputation and recommendation systems.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and some of the work done by the Sunlight Foundation are good examples of citizen initiatives that tap into collective intelligence. I haven’t seen any good examples of such initiatives in India, but we are building such capabilities in the iJanaagraha platform.

In Summary

So, the 5Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social technologies.

As we move from Content to Conversation to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them.

Each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for conversation memes and meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

The 5Cs framework can also be used to design and measure specific social technologies initiatives. The best social technologies initiatives leverage all these five layers, but most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social technologies initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between.

I want to emphasize that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Conversation layers. It’s important to note, however, that institution-building kicks in only at the Collaboration and Community layers, and real change happens only when we build new institutions.

Finally, evidence has shown us that all these five underlying dynamics can be used for both good and evil. Misleading or inflammatory content can be used to drive propaganda and spread rumors. Communities can easily become cabals and collaboration and collective intelligence can be used to profile and persecute minorities and other disadvantaged groups.

Social technologies open up possibilities for new behaviors and new power structures. It’s up to us, as individuals and societies, to choose how we use these possibilities. The question is: how well will we choose?

Marketers have always used stories to share information, change opinions and influence decisions. Now, as people create, consume and share brand stories in new ways, marketers need to go beyond the 30-sec product ad or the 300-word press release, and tell purpose-inspired transmedia stories that inspire, organize and energize people.

Six Trends in Storytelling

Let’s start by recapturing the six important trends that are reshaping how people create, consume and share brand stories:

- Short attention spans: People are consuming news and entertainment in byte-sized pieces, increasingly on smartphones and tablets, often on-the-go.
- Narrow interest graphs: People are selectively paying attention to the topics and sources they are most interested in, and filtering out the rest.
- Social serendipity: People are discovering new content based on what is shared by their networks, or by other people like them, via sophisticated algorithms.
- Community curation: People are forming on-the-fly communities around a shared passion or purpose by curating content around hashtags and trending topics.
- Remix in context: People are remixing photos, videos, art and music and sharing their creative work in the context of a time, place or event.
- Emergent storylines: People are curating their own Facebook or Twitter timelines as work-in-progress stories, with emergent narratives.

These six trends play an important role in the narrative arc we will draw next: from Hero’s Journey to Heroes to Everyday Heroes.

From Hero’s Journey to Heroes to Everyday Heroes

Heroʼs Journey: Storytelling

The Heroʼs Journey is a good example of a monomyth, or a universal story, that cuts across all types of stories, including myths, movies, novels, and ads.

According to Joseph Campbell, all stories follow the same three-part narrative structure of the Hero’s Journey. In “departure”, the hero listens to the call of adventure and leaves the “known world” for the “unknown world”. In “initiation”, he meets guides and allies, falls in love, undergoes a series of tests and trials, discovers the answer and receives the gift. In “return”, he reluctantly returns home, survives a near-death experience, and shares his wisdom and power with the rest of the world.

The Hero’s Journey has been used by filmmakers to create franchises like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Matrix, and by marketers to tell compelling stories about brands, most often through 30-second ad films.

However, the six trends that are reshaping how people create, consume and share brands stories are also reshaping both the nature of the universal stories themselves and the art of how these stories are told.

Heroes: Transmedia Storytelling

First, let’s look at the art of storytelling.

NBCʼs hit TV series Heroes is a good example of transmedia storytelling, where TV shows, graphic novels, video games, mobile applications, offline experiences and online communities explore different aspects of the same “story world”.

While many transmedia “story worlds” exhibit elements of the three-part narrative structure of the Hero’s Journey, they expand it, by incorporating multi-layered intertwining narratives, complex social networks of characters, and storylines that unfold over hundreds of hours.

In fact, we don’t really consume popular culture anymore, certainly not as a linear narrative. Instead, we co-create it, by deconstructing plot twists in elaborate blog posts, contributing to extensive fan wikis that delve into the motivations of each character, and creating our own parallel narrative in virtual worlds and alternative reality games built around films and TV shows.

As popular culture becomes more layered, brands have had to rethink marketing. Increasingly, ads attract audiences to branded “story worlds”, which try to retain their interest over the long term, and convert them first into passionate fans and then into paying customers, much like movie trailers with entertainment franchises. P&G’s Old Spice Man is not only one of the most memorable marketing campaigns in recent times, but also an entertainment franchise in the making.

Everyday Heroes: Purpose-Inspired Storytelling

Now, let’s look at the nature of universal stories itself.

CNN Heroes in the US and CNN-IBN Real Heroes in India are good examples of purpose-inspired storytelling about everyday heroes acting as change agents, with a clear call for participation and action. The phenomenal popularity of the TED conference is another example of our innate need to celebrate everyday heroes with “ideas that matter”.

These stories about everyday heroes who are changing the world share some elements with the Hero’s Journey, but diverge from it in important ways. First, each one of us is a hero with a different call for adventure, a different journey, and a different reward, which means that the idea of the monomyth itself is problematic. Second, the most important journey is the journey within, into the “unknown world” of our own hidden potential, to search for our own best self. Third, our biggest battles are the ones we fight with ourselves and the only way we can win is by helping everyone else win too.

As people have become better at filtering out the 30-sec tell-and-sell product ad, brands have had to rediscover their reason for being and tell stories that inspire, organize and energize people around a shared passion or purpose. GE’s Ecomagination and Healthymagination initiatives are powerful examples of a brand telling purpose-driven stories that inspire participation and action.

The Storytelling Mandala

The Storytelling Mandala is designed to help brands tell stories that inspire, organize and energize people to participate and act around a shared purpose. The inner circle consists of a new three-part universal story that articulates the purpose of the brand, the change it wants to catalyze and the quest it has undertaken. The outer circle focuses on the art of transmedia storytelling, including the role of content, the sources of content, the role of channels and the role of paid, owned and earned media.

Question 1: The Universal Story

To inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose, brands need to tell their story in three parts, in sequence: why (purpose), what (change) and how (quest).

- Why (Purpose): Who are we and what is our reason for being? What is our shared purpose, our Social Heartbeat, that can inspire people?
- What (Change): What is the change we are trying to bring about? What does change mean for individuals, communities and the world?
- How (Quest): What is the journey we must go through to catalyze positive change in the world? What if the only way we can win is if everyone wins?

Even when brands want to tell purpose-inspired stories, they inevitably find it difficult to abandon their tried-and-tested benefit-driven tell-and-sell claims. Therefore, it’s critical to build a bridge between the benefit-driven claims that move units and the purpose-inspired stories that move hearts.

Question 2: Role of Content

To tell their story in a compelling manner, brands need to create three types of content, each with a different role: long form tent pole content to pull in people, short-form content pegs to push out stories to people, and ongoing two-way conversations.

- Tent pole content: Long-form content like minisites, apps, reports, games or films to showcase the full story in one place and pull in people.
- Content pegs: Short-form content pegs like blog posts, infographics and video clips to highlight and push out different aspects of the story.
- Conversations: Ongoing two-way conversations to push out the content pegs to pull in people to the tent pole content.

Think of a tent. The content tent pole holds up the tent and attracts people to it. The content pegs hold down the tent and support the content tent pole. The tent needs both the content tent pole and content pegs.

Now, think of a movie. The movie itself is the content tent pole, while the trailers, interviews, announcements and reviews are content pegs, leading to different types of conversations like buzz, gossip and rumors.

Question 3: Sources of Content

Brands need to recognize that creating content requires time and resources and tap into three sources of content: create original content, crowdsource content, and curate conversations.

- Create original content: Brands need to create a critical mass of compelling original content, including almost all the tent pole content like minisites, apps, games, films and reports and at least some of the content pegs like blog posts, video clips and infographics.
- Crowdsource content: If brands are able to create compelling original content, they can use it as a provocation to crowdsource content pegs from influencers and community members, often by running crowdsourcing contests.
- Curate conversations: Finally, brands can curate conversations around their content tent poles and content pegs into timelines (Storify) or collections (Pinterest), and use them and content pegs, and even content tent poles.

Marketers and agencies are increasingly hiring journalists and filmmakers to create original branded content. Marketers are also creating contests to crowdsource everything from personal stories to Super Bowl ads. Finally, most media companies, and many marketers, are curating conversations and using them as content pegs.

Question 4: Role of Channels

Once brands have created, crowdsourced or curated content, they need to organize them across channels, knowing that some channels work best for content repository, some for content aggregation, and some for content distribution.

- Content repository: Channels like YouTube, SlideShare and Flickr are typically used for storing videos, documents and photos respectively.
- Content aggregation: Websites, blogs and Tumblr (and increasingly social and mobile apps) are typically used for aggregating content and conversations.
- Content distribution: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are typically used for distributing content to community members and influencers.

The purpose of the content repository channels is to pull in people deep into the content archive, while the purpose of the content distribution channels is to push out the latest content and create conversations. The purpose of the content aggregation channel is to link pull and push, stock and flow, content and conversations.

Question 5: Role of Media

Finally, brands need to intentionally use paid, owned and earned media in sync to attract strangers, convert them into familiars and then into promoters.

- Paid Media (for strangers): Targeted display, search or social ads to attract people who don’t know anything about the brand, and seek their permission to join an owned media platform.
- Owned Media (for familiars): Private or public online community platforms, social networking groups, or events to organize people who have given permission to the brand to share regular content with them.
- Earned Media (for promoters): Ongoing conversations with community members and influencers to trigger participation and action and energize them to become promoters.

However, even as brands are investing to build permission-based owned media assets, they are realizing that familiars and even promoters sometime lapse into strangers and even community members sometimes need to be reactivated with the help of paid and earned media.

Purpose-Inspired Transmedia Storytelling

In summary, brands need to tell new types of stories, purpose-inspired stories, and tell them in new ways, via transmedia storytelling.

If brands do this, they will inspire, organize and energize people to participate and act around a shared purpose; build permission based owned media assets that will increasingly look like entertainment franchises; and thrive in a world in which media is fragmented, content is cheap, attention is the biggest constraint, but storytelling can still win over hearts and minds.

Gaurav Mishra, Asia Director of Social Media, MSLGROUP

The Power of People’s Insights

According to the recent PwC CEO Survey of 1200+ business leaders across 69 countries, business leaders believe that crowdsourcing people’s insights are one of the main drivers for leading innovation and change.

We have a significant body of knowledge on crowdsourcing now, including business rationale, application areas, best practices and case studies. We have seen dedicated third-party crowdsourcing platforms in action for almost a decade and learned from their successes and failures. We have seen diverse Fortune 500 corporations design dedicated large-scale platforms to crowdsource insights and innovation across business functions. However, we still see a gap in the market for a complete yet cost-effective crowdsourcing solution that can be used across multiple application areas.

People’s Lab: Crowdsourcing Insights & Innovation

We are delighted to share that we are launching MSLGROUP’s People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform and approach today to help organizations tap into people’s insight for innovation, storytelling and change.

People’s Lab helps organizations build and nurture public or private, web or mobile, hosted or white label communities around four pre-configured application areas: Expertise Request Network, Innovation Challenge Network, Research & Insights Network and Contest & Activation Network.

People’s Lab comes with powerful community and game thinking features and full email integration. People share rich multimedia content and vote/ comment on other people’s content. Our social intelligence algorithm helps us identify the most influential people, themes and content. Finally, our solution includes end-to-end support including custom design and development, community management and content creation.

People’s Lab Case Studies

The People’s Lab platform has been designed and developed by MSLGROUP’s social team in India with inputs from our insights and innovation experts from all over the world. Over the last year, we have used the People’s Lab platform and approach to create communities for both MSLGROUP and its clients:

1. Contest & Activation Network: Dell Go Green Challenge

In 2010, Dell India used an early version of the People’s Lab platform to create a challenge for design students and others to share ideas on how to redesign, reuse and recycle gadgets to make them go green.

2. Innovation Challenge Network: MSLGROUP Innovation Catalysts Network

MSLGROUP Innovation Catalysts Network consists of 150+ MSLGROUP agency leaders, practice leaders and client leaders, who share insights with each other to co-create new and innovative client offerings.

3. Research & Insights Network: MSLGROUP Insights Network

MSLGROUP Insights Network consists of 50+ MSLGROUP thinkers and planners, who share and discuss inspiring projects on corporate citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling.

4. Expertise Request Network: MSLGROUP Crisis Network

MSLGROUP Crisis Network consists of 50+ MSLGROUP crisis experts across industries and geographies, who tap into each others’ insights in real time to help clients plan for and respond to crisis situations.

People’s Lab Insights & Foresights Approach

The People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform also enables our distinctive insights and foresight approach, which consists of four elements: organic conversation analysis, MSLGROUP’s own insight communities, client-specific insights communities, and ethnographic deep dives into these communities.

As an example, 50+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on corporate citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling on the MSLGROUP Insights Network. Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it — on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web — to distill insights and foresights. We share these insights and foresights with you on our People’s Insights blog and compile the best insights from the network and the blog in the iPad-friendly People’s Lab Quarterly Magazine, as a showcase of our capabilities.

As you can imagine, we can bring the same innovative approach to help you distill insights and foresights from conversations and communities. As a matter of fact, we are helping a leading consumer products company identify beauty influencers in several key markets using our community-driven insights and foresights approach.

Providing our clients with ideas that are strongly grounded in insights and foresights is core to our strategy, as a leading “People Relations” network. The People’s Lab platform and approach helps us distill a deep understanding of societal values, consumption behaviors and attitudes towards brands, not only in terms of insights that help explain our world today, but also foresights that give us a glimpse of future worlds.

To start a conversation on how we can help you win with insights and foresights, write to Pascal Beucler at pascal.beucler@mslgroup.com.

Over the last two years, I have led 50+ workshops with 2000+ marketing and communications professionals across Asia, so I have become a workshop specialist of sorts within MSLGROUP.

I use a discovery-driven approach in designing and leading workshops, with conceptual frameworks, in-depth case studies, and post-it note gamestorms. This beautiful quote in Richard Bach’s ‘Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah’ sums up what I try to do in my workshops:

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.

My favorite parts at my workshops are games that help participants remember what they already know. These games involve large post-it notes, chart papers, marker pens, some doodling and many aha! moments. Let me use three examples to show you what I mean.

Social Heartbeat brand planning workshop

Our Social Heartbeat framework helps brands design powerful purpose-inspired platforms and programs to inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose.

We first look for a shared purpose or Social Heartbeat to inspire people, realizing that we need to build a bridge between benefit-driven and purpose-inspired communication. Then, we design a long-term online-offline platform to organize people, in a way that fully leverages paid, owned, and earned media. Finally, we design the consumer journey and create a series of short-term programs to energize people and take them from the benefit, to the bridge and then to the purpose, or the other way round.

I start by Social Heartbeat workshop by asking participants to create a social network profile on a post it note, with their name, avatar name, avatar picture, and five passion tags that define them. Then, I ask them to put up these post-it notes on the chart paper and draw lines between them, if they share a passion tag. We discuss how we connect with others around our passion tags, how some people are more connected than others and how connections lead to all sorts of good things, both online and offline. Then, I point out that less than 5% of the passion tags are related to brands. If people don’t define themselves around brands, and don’t connect with each other around brands, then what is the role brands can play on the social web? It’s an important question for marketers with an elegant answer: brands can help consumers connect around passion tags that resonate with the brand values (I call these shared passion tags Social Heartbeats).

Later in the workshop, I ask the participants to remember the last time they talked about a brand they don’t work for. I ask them to write down on a post it note the brand itself, why they talked about it (the trigger) and how they talked about it (the context or the medium). Then, I ask them to arrange the post-it notes around themes. Most groups arrange the post-it notes around the product categories their brands belong to (usually fashion, technology, gadgets, cafes, mobile or auto brands). Sometimes, they arrange the post it note around the content of the conversation (kudos, complaints, enquiries, recommendations), the context of the conversation (at home, at office, at a mall, online, on phone) or the trigger to talk (a good/ bad product or service experience, an ad, a promo, a contest). Almost always, no one mentions a FMCG brand (soft drinks, shampoo, toothpaste, snacks), which makes me wonder: if no one is talking about the brand that spend the most money on advertising, what should these brands do (apart from getting really worried)? It’s another important question for marketers with the same elegant answer: consumers will talk about these brands only if they stand for the shared passion tags (Social Heartbeats) that consumers care about.

Social Integration Journey social business planning workshop

Our Social Heartbeat framework helps corporations build enterprise capabilities for social by integrating social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes, to drive strategic change and real ROI.

Most organizations go through the social integration with these six stages. They start with inaction, then move to incubation and experiment with standalone platforms and tactical programs, before they are ready to integrate social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes. Organizations can use the framework to not only map where they are in relation to relevant others, but also plan for what’s next. So, it’s both a “how the world works” framework as well as a “how to change things” framework.

Towards the middle of my Social Integration Journey workshop, I ask the workshop participants to create a post-it note for each of the social initiatives in their organization. I ask them to write what they are trying to achieve with the initiatives, how short-term or long-term these initiatives are, and what channel(s) they use for these initiatives. Then, I ask them to draw the Social Integration Journey framework on a chart paper and place the post-it notes on the chart paper. Usually, the post-it notes cluster around one or two stages, which helps the participants map their present stage of social integration. Then, I ask them to identify other relevant organizations and repeat the exercise with their social initiatives on another chart paper. Once again, the post-it notes cluster around one or two stages, but have wider distribution, which helps the participants map the possibilities they haven’t explored yet. Finally, I ask the participants to identify their potential stage of social integration, discuss why they wish to reach there, and discover barriers that might stop them. I have found that workshops participants who engage in this participatory process of benchmarking themselves against relevant others are more open to seeing new possibilities and working towards making them real.

Crisis Curve crisis planning framework

Our Crisis Curve workshop helps organizations map out, plan for and build capabilities to manage crisis scenarios across the four stages of the crisis curve: flash point, spotlight, blame game and resolution.

Based on the interplay between mainstream media and social media at the flash point stage, we categorize crisis situations into three types that need different approaches: real world, slow burn and flash mob. Then, we use our proprietary crisis planning and response toolkit to help organizations plan how they can best leverage social media at each stage in the crisis curve.

Towards the end of my Crisis Curve workshop, I ask the workshop participants to think of a ‘real world’, a ‘slow burn’ and a ‘flash mob’ crisis that can seriously impact their business and draw them on a post-it note. Then, I ask them to imagine each crisis situation going through the flash point, spotlight and blame game stages over three days and, for each stage, map out the best case, worst case and most likely case for each crisis situation. They draw newspaper or television headlines, blog post titles, social network updates, photoshopped parody images and viral video storyboards on post-it notes and sometimes enjoy the exercise more than they should. Finally, I ask them to plan their response for for each crisis situation, by mapping out key influencers, keywords, spokespersons, and messages for each of the scenarios they have created.

Designing workshops for both the right brain and the left brain

I believe that the best workshops are learning and discovery experiences that exercise both the right brain and the left brain. So, I structure all my workshops around a conceptual framework, to appeal to the left brain, but include in-depth case studies that are rich in storytelling, often via videos, to appeal to the right brain. The post-it note brainstorms are based on the frameworks, so they don’t frighten the left brain, but they involve drawing and storytelling, so they don’t alienate the right brain either.

The best workshops, like the best classrooms, also need to find the right balance between learning and doing. In all my workshops, the participants leave feeling that they have learned both a new way to think about their problem (the framework) and practical ways to apply that thinking (the case studies). In my most successful workshop, the participants also leave feeling that they already had all the answers and I have only helped them connect the dots in their minds.

The Social Integration Journey

Most organizations go through six stages of Social Integration Journey. They start with inaction, then move to incubation and experiment with standalone platforms and tactical programs, before they are ready to integrate social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes.

This simple Social Integration Journey framework helps business leaders not only contextualize their own experience with social, but also plan to extend it. It helps them map which stage of social integration they are at, then build a case to integrate social into their most important platforms, programs, and processes, to drive strategic change and real ROI.

Here are the six stages of the Social Integration Journey:

1. Create a static campaign or country microsite
2. Create an official page organization page on Facebook or Twitter
3. Create a Facebook contest or a Twitter influencer program
4. Integrate social into technology platforms
5. Integrate social into marketing programs
6. Integrate social into business processes

How to build a case for social integration?

It’s important to realize that different stages in the Social Integration Journey are most appropriate for different organizations in different contexts. So, we need to assess the organization’s maturity, motivations and money (budgets) to successfully build a case for social integration.

1. Maturity: We start by assessing the present stage of social integration for the organization and relevant others and the highest stage the organization can transition to, within 12 months.

2. Motivation: Then, we assess the organization’s reasons to invest in integration, including the objectives and decision criteria for the organization and the triggers and barriers for the main decision makers.

3. Money: Finally, we assess the investment required and the organization’s capacity to invest, over 12 months. We recommend planning for a phase-wise approach to transition to a higher stage, with at least 3 to 6 months to consolidate investments at each stage.

We need to use different messages to successfully build a case for social integration at each stage in the Social Integration Journey. Let’s look at these messages.

Stage 1: Create a static campaign or country microsite

In stage 1, organizations create campaign or country microsites to push out information on a campaign or a topic.

Typically, these microsites have limited content and a short shelf-life (my rule of thumb is six pages for six weeks). This fascination with microsites can be traced back to the days when marketers created Flash-based campaign microsites to support TVCs. These microsites were heavy on experience but light on content and had the same shelf life as the TVC, after which they were either preserved for award entries or taken offline. I’m relieved to see that most marketers have moved beyond the campaign microsite, but, surprisingly, many MNCs haven’t created country specific corporate websites in India, China and Japan.

Key Messages for Stage 1
1) The internet has serious scale in Imost Asia markets with 450+ million netizens in China and 100+ million in India.
2) The website is usually the first and often one of the most important sources of information on the organization.
3) Most other peer organizations have created a well-designed country or campaign website, so it’s simply expected.

Case Study: GE Plug Into the Smart Grid
In 2009, GE created an award-winning Plug Into the Smart Grid microsite with augmented reality functionality, but the website had limited content, and GE abandoned it after a few weeks.

Stage 2: Create an official page on Facebook or Twitter

In stage 2, organizations create Facebook or Twitter accounts to push out news updates about a topic. Typically, most updates include links to news items and engagement with followers is limited.

When Facebook and Twitter become mainstream, marketers rushed to create a Facebook page or a Twitter profile, without really thinking about what they will do with it. Even when marketers increased the fan count on their Facebook page by buying ads, the fans rarely engaged with the brand. Even as the first wave of marketers are seeking ways to increase engagement, the next wave of marketers are still setting up their social media presence.

Key Messages for Stage 2
1) Social media has serious scale with 750+ million on Facebook, 200+ million on Twitter, 150+ million on Weibo, 100+ million on Renren, and a high number of these social network users are in Asia.
2) Both B2C and B2B influencers are active on the social media and engaging with organizations.
3) Social media is cost effective as creating official pages on Facebook, Twitter, Weibo is free.

Case Study: Anand Mahindra on Twitter
Anand Mahindra, the highly respected Vice Chairman of the diversified Mahindra Group, uses Twitter to weigh in on topics of public interest and even answer customer complaints in public.

Case Study: Li Dongsheng on Sina Weibo
Li Dongsheng, Deputy to the People’s Congress and President of TCL Group, engages with consumers and citizens on Sina Weibo and has more than 2 million followers.

Case Study: Ching’s Secret
Chinese packaged food brand Ching’s Secret has attracted more than 8,50,000 fans on Facebook in India by sharing recipes and engaging fans in witty conversations.

Stage 3: Create a Facebook contest or a Twitter influencer program

In stage 3, organizations run tactical, short-term, channel-specific campaigns to increase engagement, like a Facebook contest, a Twitter influencer program, or a blogger program.

As marketers seek to increase engagement on social media platforms, they often start with tactics that are specific to the platform, like a Facebook contest or a Twitter influencer program. While these tactical programs are successful in engaging fans and followers in the short term, they fail to exploit the full potential of social media. Most marketers are still in this stage, but some are ready to move beyond.

Key Messages for Stage 3
1) Presence is not enough, organizations need to engage influencers on social media.
2) To engage influencers, organizations need to create regular content, influencer outreach and contests.
3) Engaging influencers is the first step towards converting them into advocates.

Case Study: Identifying influencers via Klout
Klout has emerged as the predominant platform for measuring influence across the social web, primarily on Twitter, but also on Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora and blogs. Klout has recently started the Klout Perks program to help corporations run infuencer programs.

Stage 4: Integrate social into technology platforms

In stage 4, the website is reimagined as a social hub, by adding social features into the website itself, or by integrating website with social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare and YouTube.

After much speculation that the Facebook page might replace the brand website, sophisticated marketers are beginning to view the website as their social hub. Marketers are integrating social into web platforms by adding content creation features like blogs, wikis, photo-sharing, and video-sharing; content-curation features like commenting, voting, reviews, and ratings; and connection features like profiles, groups, activity streams, and leader boards. Marketers are also integrating websites with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn by adding social sign-on, sharing buttons, profile boxes, and activity stream widgets to their websites. Some marketers are even reimagining the website as an aggregation of their social media activity streams. In essence, consumers have become used to an integrated experience across social web, mobile web and mobile applications, enabled by open application ecosystems from both social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry).

Key Messages for Stage 4
1) Maximize the impact of your content across channels by uploading content to YouTube/ SlideShare, embedding it on blog/ website, then sharing it on Facebook/ Twitter/ LinkedIn.
2) Use API code snippets, widgets and RSS feeds to integrate social networks into website to improve search optimization and discovery.
3) Enable Facebook/ Twitter/ LinkedIn social logins to customize website experience based on the user’s social graph and simplify content sharing across the user’s social networks.

Case study: Nike+
To realize its purpose of helping each one of us find the athlete within us and transform running from a solitary pursuit into a social activity, Nike created the Nike+ app and community. A sensor tracks running data via the iPod or iPhone and syncs it with the Nike+ community. Nike+ members have run 37 million miles so far.

Stage 5: Integrate social into marketing programs

In stage 5, organizations design community-centric integrated marketing programs to connect people around a shared social heartbeat.

Some sophisticated marketers are beginning to realize that their marketing programs are most effective when they don’t only use social platforms, but also become social at the core. As a result, marketers are moving from TVC-centric integrated marketing campaigns to community-centric integrated marketing campaigns. They are talking about shifting the focus of their marketing “from moments to movements” and engaging in purpose-inspired benefit-driven brand-building. In essence, they are talking about designing powerful purpose-inspired platforms and programs to inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose.

Key Messages for Stage 5
1) Convert influencers into advocates by designing integrated marketing programs around a social heartbeat that connects the brand values with the influencers’ passions.
2) Build owned media permission assets by creating a long-term community platform to organize influencers around the social heartbeat.
3) Trigger participation and action by creating a series of interconnected programs around the social heartbeat to energize influencers.

Case Study: Starbucks
Starbucks has created a series of programs to realize its vision of being the “third place”, of the hub of local communities. In 2008, Starbucks created the V2V volunteer network to connect people and actions around local Starbucks stores. In 2008, Starbucks also offered a free coffee to people who voted in the US presidential elections. In 2009, Starbucks created the Pledge 5 campaign to encourage young people to volunteer. In 2010, Starbucks created a campaign to encourage its consumers to switch from paper cups to reusable travel mugs. In 2011, Starbucks donated $5 million and asked consumers to donate $5 to support small businesses across USA and create jobs. Starbucks has also tied up with Bono’s Red initiative to donate 5 cents for every drink to save lives in Africa.

Case Study: Pepsi Refresh Project
As part of its commitment to “deliver sustainable growth by investing in a healthier future for people and our planet”, PepsiCo is giving grants worth $20 million per year to ideas that can refresh the world.

Case Study: Tata Tea Jaago Re
In 2008, Tata Tea tied up with non-profit Janaagraaha to inspire almost 700,000 Indians to register to vote. Since then, Jaago Re (“wake up”) has evolved into an active civic action community.

Case Study: Mahindra Spark the Rise
To fulfill its purpose to enable its stakeholders to rise, Mahindra Group has created the Spark the Rise platform to share ideas that can propel innovation, entrepreneurship, and positive change in India.

Case Study: Dell Go Green Challenge in India
In 2010, Dell created a challenge for design students and others to share ideas on how to redesign, reuse and recycle gadgets to make them go green.

Stage 6: Integrate social into business processes

In stage 6, organizations leverage social media as a tool for business transformation by integrating it with sales, support and innovation processes.

The most sophisticated business leaders know that social media is most effective when they leverage it for doing the right things, instead of merely saying the right things. Organizations like Dell, Starbucks, and GE are using social media as a tool for business transformation by integrating it with their sales, support, and innovation processes. Early experiments to crowdsource innovation are particularly promising, with Dell Ideastorm, My Starbucks Ideas, and GE Ecomagination Challenge being the most prominent examples.

Key Messages for Stage 6
1) Drive real return on investment by using social to drive business objectives like sales, support and innovation.
2) Improve customer satisfaction by listening and responding to customers at the point of need or demand.
3) Crowd-source innovation by tapping into the wisdom of crowd to discover ideas for product or process innovation.

Case Study: GE Ecomagination and Healthymagination Challenge
As part of its commitment to “imagine and build innovative solutions to environment challenges”, GE has created a $200 million Ecomagination Challenge to fund ideas that can reimagine powering the grid, or powering homes. GE has also created a $100 million Healthymagination Challenge to fund ideas that can accelerate innovations to fight breast cancer, as part of its “shared commitment to create better health for more people together”.

Case Study: Dell Ideastorm
Dell uses customer-driven support community to enable customers to answer each other’s questions. Dell’s support forum has helped it increase customer satisfaction and drive down support costs. Dell uses customer-driven ideation community Dell Ideastorm to listen to customer’s ideas on product improvement and new product development. It has also created an internal ideation platform called Dell Employee Storm to listen to product and process innovation ideas from its own 80000 employees. Finally, Dell has created a social media command center to listen to, classify and respond to social media conversations. It has even trained 900 staff in India via its SMaC university and unconference to use social media for marketing, customer support, recruitment and innovation.

Case Study: VANCL Star social commerce community
On the VANCL Star community, fans of the Chinese apparel brand can open a “store” or a photo blog, showcase their VANCL styles, and even earn a commission of 10% of the profit on sales through the store.

In Summary: Six best practices for social integration

In summary, organizations can use these six best practices to integrate social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes.

Technology Platforms
1. Use the website as a social hub that connects content across channels.
2. Use social networks to build relationships and engage in conversations.

Marketing Programs
3. Create platforms that organize people around a social heartbeat.
4. Create a series of programs that energize people to participate and act.

Business Processes
5. Listen to, classify and respond to conversations on the social web.
6. Create private or public communities for collaboration or co-creation.

Which stage of the Social Integration Journey are you at?

The 2010s are turning out to be the decade rich in the myriad shades of crisis. Crisis management in today’s fragile world is intrinsically interlinked with global shifts in trust and power between individuals, influencers and institutions.

The End of Trust

The decade has witnessed a profound erosion of trust in all types of institutions, including governments and corporations.

Even as North America and Europe prepare for a prolonged double dip financial crisis, we have seen social unrest in France, UK, Spain and Greece; a grassroots movement to occupy public spaces across the United States to protest against capitalism; right wing terrorist attacks in peaceful Norway; disclosure of state secrets by Wikileaks; a series of regime changes across the Arab world; and a sex scandal disgracing the IMF.

Even in the buoyant emerging economies of India, China and Brazil, the hitherto silent middle class is beginning to raise its voice and take to the streets to protest against chronic corruption that disproportionately rewards the entrenched elite at the cost of the other 99%; and the low quality of life that persists in spite of increased prosperity.

Trust in corporations, too, is at an all-time low, as a result of astronomical executive salaries paid by banks and auto companies, even as they were being bailed out by public funds; BP’s inability to either control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for almost nine months, or take full responsibility for it; and perceptions of greenwashing by corporations, brought in sharp focus a series of viral campaigns by Greenpeace.

We are also seeing anger against the inability of governments and corporations to show the will to solve our most pressing problems: the short-sighted dependence on fossil fuels that threatens to undermine our planet’s ecosystem; the tradeoffs between economic progress and the good life, like urban pollution and lifestyle diseases; and the barriers to achieve the full human potential, with more than half the world’s population still struggling with poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy.

Power to the People

At the same time, people have new sources of power, as individuals and communities.

First, people are beginning to believe that governments and corporations have failed them and only they themselves can come up with innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

Second, people are leveraging social media platforms to create new public spaces for discourse and dissent that are irrevocably reshaping the global news ecosystem; organize themselves into distributed communities with a shared purpose and a shared vision for a better future; co-create new social innovation solutions and sustainable business models; and collaborate across continents to coordinate participation and action and act as catalysts for change.

Third, people are demanding that governments become both more transparent and less intrusive with their citizens; that government and corporations work together to create an ecosystem that enables civic participation; that corporations not only rediscover their social purpose but also put it at the core of how they engage with people, as employees, consumers and citizens.

Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg underlined these shifts during the recent “e-G8” we organized in Paris: “People being empowered is the trend for the next decade: that’s the core social dynamics… People have the ability to voice their opinion, and it changes the world, as it rewires it from the ground up”.

Unilever’s Paul Polman has also pointed to the new risks such power creates for corporations: “If [social media activists] can bring down the Egyptian regime in a few weeks, they can bring us down in nanoseconds.”

Every Crisis is Global, Social and Viral

The social web is playing an important role in these shifts around trust, power, risk and crisis.

Specifically, we need to master three interplays shaping crisis in the “new normal”: the interplay between mainstream media and social media, the interplay between local and global dynamics, and the interplay between crisis planning and response.

First, the boundaries between mainstream media and social media are blurring as online influencers are linking to media stories and news organizations are quoting online influencers.

Second, no crisis is truly local in our interconnected world, as memes or hashtags can spread globally in seconds on the social web, yet local considerations must be factored into crisis planning and response.

Third, it’s critical to plan and prepare for crisis scenarios, but it’s even more important to respond to emergent crisis situations authentically, without over-reliance on scripted messages and workflows.

MSLGROUP Crisis Network

MSLGROUP Crisis Network is a global network of 50+ MSLGROUP crisis experts, with deep vertical expertise across industries and geographies, connected to each other by our proprietary People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform. Our experts can not only tap into each other’s insights in real time, but also leverage our proprietary crisis toolkit – including our crisis planning framework and our crisis simulation workshop — to help our clients plan for and respond to crisis situations effectively.

In a world where every crisis is global, social and viral, here’s a roadmap to think about the interconnections between trust, power, risk and crisis, from our experts at the MSLGROUP Crisis Network.

In the first section, we explore how social media is changing trust, power, risk and crisis. We start by looking at the role of social media in societal upheavals in the West, including the terrorist attack in Norway, the riots in London and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. Then, we move to the East and look at how social media is changing the news ecosystem in China, eroding the wasta system of personal influence in the Middle East and uniting the Indian middle class in a grassroots movement against corruption.

In the second section, we outline how corporations can leverage social media to manage risk and reputation. We outline how social media can play a role at each stage in the crisis curve, describe the art and science of crisis simulation, recommend engaging third party influencers in crisis planning, share lessons from managing the global Crisis Command Center for BP, provide a playbook for handling a crisis on Facebook and end with tips and tricks on crisis management from our network of senior trusted advisors.

In summary, here are the most important tips from our global network of crisis experts that you will see across this report:

1. Proactively work on crisis preparedness, including crisis simulation workshops, crisis manuals, crisis collaboration wikis and dark crisis websites.
2. Create local crisis plans in collaboration with key influencers, instead of merely localizing global crisis plans.
3. Train staff, including the C-suite, on the new news ecosystem and guidelines for social media engagement, before a crisis hits.
4. Specifically plan for communicating with all key influencers, including employees, as part of crisis planning.
5. Build trust assets, including the reputation of being rooted in a shared purpose, strong relationships with key influencers, and strong owned media channels like blogs and microblogs, before the crisis.
6. Respond to the crisis with authenticity, integrity and the will to do the right thing, not only say the right thing.

We sincerely hope that the insights and foresights we are bringing here will be useful to you. To know more about the MSLGROUP Crisis Network, or to subscribe to receive similar insights and foresights in the form of a quarterly newsletter, please visit http://crisis.mslgroup.com.

Social media is playing an important role in shaping news stories in general and crisis situations in particular. Specifically, even as social media makes it easy to track an emerging crisis situation, it makes it difficult to effectively manage the crisis situation.

Social media and the news curve

All news stories develop in a similar manner, following the news curve. The news curve has four stages: breaking news, context, analysis and archival. The breaking news stage is concerned with questions like: what happened, with whom and where? In the context stage, more information is added, as background. In the analysis stage, opinions are shared and responsibility is assigned. In the archival stage, the story goes off the newspaper front page, the website homepage and the evening news on TV.

Social media is playing an important role in shaping the news curve. The news curve is becoming shorter in the “breaking news” and “context” stages, but longer in the “analysis” and “archival” stages. The news curve is also becoming more fragmented and news stories are becoming more viral. Different social media behaviors play different roles across the four stages of the news curve. News stories are now being broken on the official Twitter channels of news organizations and shared via retweets. Context is being added by sharing links on Twitter using a hashtag. Blogs and video blogs are playing an important role in shaping opinion. Finally, search is making it easier to find and share archived stories that act as context for new stories.

The 26/11 Mumbai terror attack in 2009 is a good example of how social media is shaping the news ecosystem even in emerging economies. During the 72-hour terrorist seize of India’s financial capital, Twitter, Flickr and blogs became important tools for citizen journalists to share original reporting, news, and opinions. Social media, especially Twitter, played an important role in shaping the mainstream media narrative during the crisis, both in India and internationally.

Social media and the crisis curve

The four stages in the crisis curve correspond to the four stages in the news curve: flash point, spotlight, blame game and resolution. Like the news curve, the crisis curve is becoming shorter in the “flash point” and “spotlight” stages, but longer in the “blame game” and “resolution” stages. Like the news curve, the crisis curve is also becoming more fragmented and crisis stories are becoming more viral. As a result, even as social media makes it easy to track an emerging crisis situation, it makes it difficult to effectively manage the crisis situation.

The interplay between social media and mainstream media is an important aspect of the crisis curve, with online influencers linking to media stories and media quoting online influencers.

Three types of crisis situations

Based on the interplay between social media and mainstream media in the run up to the crisis flash point, crisis situations can be categorized into three types, each needing a different approach: real world crisis, slow burn crisis and flash mob crisis.

In the “real world” crisis, a real world incident (oil spill, financial scam, sex scandal) precipitates the crisis. Mainstream media puts a spotlight on the crisis while social media amplifies the crisis. For instance, during the protracted BP Gulf of Mexico crisis in 2010, the flash point was the oil spill itself, but social media played a critical role in the spotlight, blame game and resolution stages. BP’s crisis response was a textbook case study in terms of its scope and scale. However, a series of failed attempts to control the oil spill over months, then-CEO Tony Hayward’s “I want my life back” comment, and the online spoofs they inspired, did not help BP’s cause.

In the “slow burn” crisis, social media conversations (product quality, customer support, employee discontent) build up into a crisis and are picked up by influential bloggers and even mainstream media. For instance, in 2005, influential blogger Jeff Jarvis blogged about a series of bad customer service experiences with Dell, and became the focal point of the Dell Hell crisis. Dell Hell forced Dell to recommit to creating a positive customer experience and led to several remarkable social media initiatives including the Direct2Dell blog, the Dell Ideastorm‘ ideation community and Dell’s social media command center.

In the “flash mob” crisis, a social media meme (Greenpeace campaign, anti-brand hashtag, anti-brand video) creates a flash mob, turns into a crisis, and is picked up by mainstream media. For instance, in 2010, Greenpeace created a viral video led campaign to protest against Nestle procuring palm oil from Indonesian rainforests and endangering orangutans. Protestors hijacked Nestle’s Facebook page and filled it with abusive comments and Nestle Killer profile pics. Surprisingly, Nestle’s strong corporate citizenship reputation for creating shared value did not help during the crisis. In the end, Nestlé announced that it would stop procuring from suppliers associated with deforestation.

Using social media to manage a crisis

Social media has a specific role to play at each stage of the crisis curve. MSLGROUP has created a crisis management toolkit that includes tools and best practices for each stage in the crisis cycle.

In the flash-point stage, we track negative social media chatter, identify early warning signals, isolate issues, and resolve them, before they turn into a crisis.

In the spotlight stage, we plot a heat map of crisis flows between social media and mainstream media, identify influencers who are acting as hubs driving these flows and focus our crisis management efforts on these hubs.

In the blame-game stage, we help clients shape the narrative by leveraging owned media channels like blog and YouTube to reframe the issue more positively and avert direct blame.

In the resolution stage, we optimize owned media content for search results, so that positive and neutral stories show up alongside negative stories on keyword searches related to the brand.

Most importantly, it’s critical to map out and plan for crisis scenarios in advance, in order to respond to them effectively. We have created a toolkit for mapping out alternate crisis scenarios and planning for their best, worst and most likely cases. This toolkit include a workshop for scenario, keyword, influencer, spokesperson and message mapping, and platforms like a wiki-based war room for crisis collaboration and a CMS-based dark site for crisis response.

In the end, however, managing any crisis successfully, including a crisis on social media, is less about saying the right things and more about doing the right things. So, corporations that are rooted in purpose are likely to respond to crisis situations with authenticity, and overcompensate for mistakes, transforming potential crises into opportunities to reconnect with their stakeholders.