It is surprising to me how many big companies do not understand how the web and social media is going to empower and change EVERY ASPECT of their business, their industry and their competitors business. The reason is simple, the operating system for business has changed, in other words the way human beings are motivated to connect and create value has changed. My belief is that every business has to realize that it is a co-creative eco-system that includes it’s employees, partners, competitors and customers and the way they are motivated to create and realize value is the only measure of success. This TED video get’s to the heart of the problem and that the current reward system is actually hurting businesses and industries ability to innovate and dare I say evolve. It’s important to mention how industries need to change as they are one of the greatest impediments to change for a corporation as they are where the culture of value creation is created. Most corporations that want to survive have to re-imagine themselves as industry change agents instead of cogs in a ever more decrepid clock.

“A task that requires mechanical skill, bonuses worked as expected, the higher the reward the higher the performance”

“A task that requires rudimentary cognitive skill a larger incentive led to poorer performance”
D. Ariely, U. Gneezy, G. Lowenstein, & N. Mazar, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper no. 05-11, July 2005; NY Times, 10 Nov. 08

via EstateofFlux

There are some consultancies emerging which are helping companies with this task of re-imagining their value creation system, these include The Dachis Corporation, The Altimeter group and Victor & Spoils. Interestingly all these companies come from different backgrounds, Dachis coming from the digital/interactive agency world, Altimeter coming from the world of analysts, and Victor & Spoils coming from an advertising background so it will be fascinating to see how they approach this transformation of business.

My personal philosophy is that organizations need to provide a framework for their customer base (and entire ecosystem) to participate in the co-creation of meaningful value. The new paradigm is co-creation, co-operation on bigger ideas than just the motivation to consume. As Kathy Sierra says organizations have to find the bigger idea that their product lives in and work on that bigger idea.

Of course I should mention that Traackr.com is a tool that helps organizations connect with the most influential people in particular industries, which in my mind is the first step for an organization that wants to be an industry change agent. Give me a call or email me if you would like a demo 415.713 6763

UPDATE: I have not read it yet but it looks like The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism will be an interesting read in relation to rethinking business.

I’m shocked at how long it’s been since I posted to ExperienceCurve, but I guess a lot has been going on and it’s easy to endlessly put off updates to the blog. Anyway, here’s the update and I hope to keep this up a bit more regularly.

I recently left Nokia and joined a new company called Traackr, who have developed software that makes it easier to find and engage with influencers online. The product is primarily targeted at PR companies and brands who actually want to get in touch with and engage with the passionate experts who are really leading the dialogue in their markets. As you can imagine, this business really resonates with me, because I do believe there is tremendous value creation (co-creation) opportunities that happen outside of a companies traditional boundaries. Call it blogger outreach, community outreach, blogger relations, influencer marketing, word of mouth marketing, or social media marketing, it is happening on the outside, in the wild west of the growing social media landscape.

The challenge for most companies that want to participate in a dialogue with the community is to find the people who are leading the conversation, who are the experts, the people who’s ideas spread, the people who in Seth Godin’s terms have “clout”. An additional challenge in Social Media is to be able to differentiate popularity and real influence.

An Example Authority list

Traackr’s approach to finding influencers uses a deep search across content and 20+ social networks to find the authors of influential content. We then develop several scores for the people we find that can help characterize that persons influence.

The 3 scores we currently use are Reach, Resonance & Relevance.

One of the most interesting intersections of these metrics is between reach and resonance. In conducting our searches it has become apparent that influencers we find that have a lower Reach and higher Resonance (ie. there stories spread further), are the experts with a much more engaged audience. These are of course the people that can be missed when doing more traditional searches using google etc. that focus primarily on popularity or audience size.

So far we’re are having a great response from our clients, so if you are involved in blogger outreach or influencer marketing get in touch. You can call me directly 415.713.6763 or email at karl at traackr.com (and yes we know the name is not ideal

BTW if you’re interested in reading more here’s a great post listing many of the resources available for finding influencers.

I think this simple story of how a customer at PF Changs got an appetizer and desert bought for her after tweeting about her food is a great example of how small things can make a big difference. I love that this example demonstrates the value of connecting employees and customers through social media enabling a more human connection.

Many companies should ask themselves ‘could something like this happen at my company’ and if the answer is no start removing the reasons why.

Thanks to Andy Sernovitz for the video

This is a wonderful diagram from Bud Caddel who writes WhatConsumesMe.com. I’ts a concept I believe in and one that I wished I had really understood a long time ago. Finding something that you really love to do is for some people is itself a lifetimes work. I think sometimes it takes a lot of courage to do what you love because often people don’t have the same vision as you. Jump and the net will catch you is the term I often think of. In many ways I am in that place right now as I’ve found my offices will be shut down in a couple of months and if I want to stay in San Francisco i will have to do something new, and some of my ideas so far, i love, but also scare me

I know now is a time of transition for many people and I hope everyone has the possibility to at least contemplate work that they will love.

Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open – Alexander Graham Bell

I just got this email from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) which I decided to republish in it’s entirety because it made me so angry. Essentially a thinly veiled corporate mouthpiece and lobby is distributing books and curriculum to schools saying “think first copy later”. This to me is a disturbing indication of how corporations are infiltrating schools, which IMHO should be institutes of learning and broadening the mind as opposed to teaching corporate propaganda. Some corporations are stealing our ability to be creative by trying to OWN everything, and this is not just about music. Consider natural seeds and genes that Monsanto and other corporations are actually patenting. If you can copywrite the program of life itself we are heading for a dystopian future. Please support the EFF as they are one important vanguard in protecting our rights and freedoms in the information age.

Last week, the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation — a nonprofit mouthpiece for the entertainment and software industries — unveiled plans to spread its protectionist ideas to the nation’s schools and libraries through the distribution of a curriculum titled “Think First, Copy Later.” “Think First, Copy Later” and other intimidating educational materials were produced by the MPAA, RIAA, Business Software Alliance, and other content holders to scare students into believing that making copies is wrong.

EFF knows that the creators and innovators of tomorrow don’t need more intimidation. What they need is solid, accurate information that will help them make smart choices about how to use new technologies. That’s why EFF is launching the free, Creative Commons-licensed “Teaching Copyright” curriculum and website to help educators explore copyright issues in their classrooms. These materials encourage students to discover their legal rights and responsibilities — including how to make full and fair use of technology that is revolutionizing learning and the exchange of information.

The debates over copyright and technology — whether they take place in classrooms, pressrooms or courtrooms — should be based on facts, not fear. Help EFF in our ongoing efforts to educate the public — including smart, creative and inquisitive young people — about the purpose and limits of copyright law.

Please donate to EFF today!

The best and most creative ideas are often based upon utter simplicity and beauty. All of us have seen elegant solutions and I know i’ve had experiences in companies where people have asked “why can’t we create a solution like that” pointing at a design led company. I think it’s because often people don’t trust their intuition, and they delve into our head to try and make it better, more accessible, dumbed down. What do we end up with? Something inelegant, homogeneous, serving everyone, and delighting no one.

Here’s another example, an oldie but a goodie: What would the iPod Packaging look like if Microsoft designed it.

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change … And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with the resignation of power, and power with the denial of love. Now we’ve got to get this thing right. What [we need to realise is] that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic … It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”

It recently struck me that there are two kinds of approaches to transform the behavior of organizations, one approach is to use empathy to understand human needs and motivation, and the other is power, the ability to force or coerce a particular behavior. I look at the empathic approach coming mostly from design disciplines and the more coercive/power based approach coming from strategy and the more militaristic aspects of business (which is of course about projecting power). It appears to me that the empathic approach and power based approach are often at odds in organizations or out of balance. Extreme examples would be an organization run on slavery, it’s all power and negative empathy, similar diagrams would be appropriate for Enron, Oil companies etc. Positive examples of a balance of empathy and power would be patagonia. Anyway, I put a presentation together to explore this concept and would appreciate any feedback or comments on this.

This idea came to me recently while watching a presentation called “The Medium of Design is Behavior” (it was targeting interaction designers but I think it’s pretty accurate to say all design uses the medium of behavior*). It then struck me that you could say the same thing about business “the medium of business is behavior” and be pretty accurate. What I realized as i thought about this though was that although design and business were both trying to influence behavior that they to approach the problem from two different sides, one from empathy and one from power.

Please leave any feedback in the comments, this is very early stage and I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts.

Please check out these sources of inspiration as well, I stand on the shoulders of others:

• Demystifying Interaction Design: The Medium of Design is Behavior
• Cory Doctorow on self determination and the future
• Is your company designed for Humans by Peter Merlholz

Idris Mootee on combining B school and D school thinking (that’s what I do
Interesting post from Shiv Sing – Global Social Media Lead at Razorfish on Technological Determinism

*A couple of people suggested that design was also about attitude and not behavior, but I would suggest that attitude will influence behavior.

Foursquare appears to be a wonderful evolution of Dodgeball, a much loved service that Google bought a couple of years ago but didn’t fund, and eventually shut down at the beginning of March. Dodgeball was a super simple SMS based service that you would send a text message to with the name of the venue you were at, and then dodgeball sent a richer text message to your friends letting them know the name and address of where you were at. Zeitgeist in San Francisco was the most “checked in” place and there was an unofficial Dodgeball closing party there on the night Dodgeball was finally closed. It was at this party that I started hearing rumors of a new service called Foursquare which was supposedly being worked on by the previous founders of dodgeball.

On March 10th the New York Observer wrote an article about this new service and described it as “dodgeball on steroids”, like Dodgeball but with a fun ‘metagame’ associated with it.

You should be rewarded for going out more times than your friends, and hanging out with new people and going to new restaurants and going to new bars–just experiencing things that you wouldn’t normally do.” So, a game that rewards being adventurous and outgoing in, you know, real life?

Yes, it’s like WOW for your social life!

I won’t go into all the details but one feature that I love is that if you ‘check in’ the most at a particular location you are named ‘mayor’ of it, but you can’t rest on your laurels because people are competing to take that away

I’ve been talking about and thinking about game mechanics in social networks for a couple of years now ever since seeing the ShuffleBrain presentation at GDC, and this is the first social network that seems to have explicitly built this into their design making the social network a ‘big game’. Anyone who plays games like Xbox or WOW no how addictive small rewards can be and i’ll be fascinated to see how it plays out in real life.

Having had a preview I can say that I think that Foursquare may well take SXSW by storm just like Twitter did a couple of years ago, and speaking of twitter they have made some very creative use of the API like having the option to send ‘check ins’ via direct message etc. I recomend you look out for this, it will be out tomorrow as an iPhone application, but as was Dodgeball it is SMS that will become the primary interface for most people.

It was about 10 years ago that a very well respected friend of mine suggested I read a book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, his description intrigued me. He called it “One of the best academic books on visual communication and the psychology of visual perception… oh and it’s in the form of a comic”. I’ve read the book several times and it has influenced my thinking in several important areas, namely visual branding, narrative, visual design and interaction design; it is an extraordinary book.

Anyway, because of my love of the book I was excited to see Scott was talking at the TED conference. One of the best bullet points i’ve seen in a while was this:

• Learn from everybody
• Follow No One
• Watch for patterns
• Work like hell

I found this great video from German Ad agency Scholz & Friends via twitter friend Gabriel Rossi. In the video they lay out a very accessible history of advertising with some lovely animation and music. What I do like at the end is the question they ask of their fictitious Brand X “Don’t you have something interesting to say”. It seems that after years of “crafting messages” to appeal to the faceless mass consumer market many brands have lost their ability to do or say anything interesting. Exceptions of course are companies that stand for things more meaningful than just promoting the consumption of their products. See my related post Is Advertising Worth Saving.

Scholz & Friends: “Dramatic shift in marketing reality” from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo.

On a related note I put a presentation together a year or so ago to present to some Industrial Design students on the topic of branding. I took a similar, historical approach calling it “A Brief History of Branding” which i’ve shared on SlideShare.

If you are interested in this kind of stuff you should follow me on Twitter where I share a lot of this sort of thing