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

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.

“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.

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.

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

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

Supernova Conference Co-Creation TitBits
Jun 24, 2006 - From what I can tell this is the first time I mention social media as a descriptor, although I was still enamored with the term “co-creation” which was my particular focus in 2006. I even started a podcast called The Co-Creative Business Show (not supported, has probably been hacked, not responsible for content) and I put out 5 decent episodes but the production overhead was too much. Great experience though and talked to some great people about some seriously interesting topics.

The Audience Is Dead But The Show Must Go On
Jul 7, 2006 - I think this is one of my fav blog titles, bummer no one commented and I linked to some other bloggers

Die Web2.0 Die Die Die Fucking Die or the Social Media Manifesto
Jul 19, 2006 - I think this was a post that lost Scott Karp as a potential internet friend who write’s Publishing.20, sorry Scott, I did have a smiley face which I thought would cover a multitude of sins. Oooh, and I also take a jab at rocketboom, i’m sure they didn’t notice.

Why Social Media Kills The Competition - Yelp.com Case
Aug 1, 2006 - This is hands down one of my favorite case studies that I wrote from participating in a community, yelp is an extraordinary example of a social media business model. If they fail it will not be due to a lack of a powerful business model, it will be a lack of executing and scaling that business model.

3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing - What Every CMO Needs To Know
Aug 11, 2006 - Another post I really like and I’ve got great feedback on, really looks at how to manage creative projects differently in a social media environment.

Beyond Viral Marketing - Engagement, Narrative, & Passion
Sep 12, 2006 - This is my first post about “big games” or “alternate reality games”, I have a great belief in these being powerful examples of motivated user generated experiences (I still can’t think of a term to sum this up, but the power of these games to inspire participation are extraordinary). Check out Area/Code, a company specializing in big games. It’s also something that Nokia has pioneered with it’s Nokia Games that it’s been doing since 1999

Book: Outside Innovation - How Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future
Sep 28, 2006 - What this book is about is what social media is good for and enables. It enables you to engage customers in your innovation process. Amazingly to me, and a wonderful example of eating your own dog food, 3 years on the blog that Patricia started to talk about this book is still going strong.

What’s The Role Of Social Media In The Next Election?
Sep 29, 2006 - Wow, this is still 2006, another one with no comments, wow, I was relentless.

Putting the Fun In Functional - Game Mechanics and Social Media
Dec 18, 2006 - This is a critical presentation to look at if you need to do any work with social networks. Basically it lays out the game mechanics that are built into social networks that drive behavior, this is the heart of what makes social networks tickle the very reptilian area of the brain and can make them very addictive.

Social Media Is Dead - So Says Steve Rubel
Dec 28, 2006 - Well this one got some comments I actually tagged some people in the post that I wanted to respond to the post, I should do that more.

What is Social Media
Feb 19, 2007 - Well this seems like an ideal post to end this post on, as this is my first blog interaction with Stowe Boyd, who I have actually recently come to know as a friend, and who continues to blog at /message about social computing and at /ground on issues of localism and sustainability.

What is Web 2.0 Feb 20th, 2007

Ning.com - Roll Your Own Social Network - The Rise Of The Social Niche-Work Mar 2, 2007

Advertising, as an industry is going to get hit very hard in 2009 as it’s caught in a perfect storm. A combination of the economic downturn combined the massive shift in how people, formerly known as consumers, interact with and experience media, is going to put enormous pressure on an industry already in trouble. Look at the industries that support traditional advertising, retail, auto industry, financial services, you see where I’m going with this. WPP is rumored to be cutting ’several thousand’ jobs and Omnicom is letting 3,500 people go.

Now the problem advertising has is very similar to the challenges of the record companies have had over the last few years, not so much that people are stealing their content, but the shift in culture is disrupting their business model. The music business thought it was in the distribution and promotion business, and a large part of it’s business model was built around that. Suddenly distribution and promotion was solved by peer to peer and the music business had to change how it ‘added value’ and it’s slowly figuring that out.

A large part of the advertising industry is IMHO in the awareness building business, and if you think about it the internet is very quickly solving the awareness problem much faster than advertisers can. Right now with my personal network I hear about products I might want even before they are built. Not only that, if it’s a really interesting product I might even get connected with the founders of the company and give them immediate feedback via twitter, facebook, or their blog. Now, as Renny Gleeson of W+K points out one of the problems ad agencies have is the investment they have in current ways of doing things:

“it irked me recently at the DLX Summit to hear interactive media agencies and publishers focused on teasing efficiencies out of their systems - “oh, we need a streamlined IO process”, “oh, we need a streamlined RFP process”, “oh, we need a GRP equivalent”.

Bullpuckey.

That’s navelgazing incrementalism.
…
But it’s hard for media and creative agencies to imagine a landscape that doesn’t look like the one they just spent all this time and money building. Frankly, they aren’t incented to. They’ve invested as heavily in the communication delivery systems and techniques as brands are in the pseudo-science of “brand management” perched precariously atop reams of best guesstimates about media effectiveness.”

So the question is if advertising needs to reinvent it’s business and business model, what is the business it should be in?

I think the answer to that question depends on where you think the future of business is going. IMHO I believe the future of all business will be based on what Lawrence Lessig calls a Hybrid Economy, where a business co-creates value with it’s customers, and the businesses that win in that case will be the ones that not only have a system to capture and share that value, but inspire their customers to create more and more valuable things and ideas. Sounds quite utopian I know, but look at Yelp, Threadless, Etsy, Amazon, Ikea, South West, Dell and TechCrunch; these are organizations that engage their customers in co-creating value, these are the pioneers of this hybrid economy. Now, I don’t just believe that’s the future of business because the internet is allowing it, I believe that people are ready to step up, ready to be led toward something more valuable and more meaningful. As Clay Shirky says there is a cognitive surplus ready to be used, in one weekend Americans watch enough commercials to build a complete wikipedia. So I believe that’s the future of business, so what is the role of advertising in that?

First of all I think advertising has a massive role in the future of business but, as the best agencies do, it needs to get back to the job of inspiring people, inspiring them to be part of something bigger, helping them understand how they can participate in increasingly valuable ways with companies and organizations. This also has nothing to do with the medium, they can use TV, the web, facebook, twitter, whatever, but the important thing is ‘what’ they are doing, as opposed to ‘how’ they are doing it. Now, one important dependency here is the businesses themselves, they have to shift their strategy from just shipping products, to stand for something bigger, something more important, something that customers can believe in. They should look at companies like Patagonia who get 36,000 resumes for every open position, that’s a company that is inspiring action above and beyond the act of consumption.

UPDATE:

Just found this great post from Garick Schmit at Razorfish’s Digital Design Blog that also calls for brands to stand up for more and do more.

Related to this post is a couple of others I put together recently so if you want some background:
The Future of Business and Social Media inspired by Lawrence Lessig interview on Charlie Rose

Advice about Social Media for CEO/CMO and other Senior Executives

My 2009 Prediction on Social Media and Beyond - The Flight from Growth to Value

Advertisement: Golf Ball Packaging Advertising Ideas Logo Golf Balls

Things are changing at such a rapid pace, and it’s not just technology. Technology and specifically the web has become a ‘culture accelerator’ or a ‘culture globalizer’. Just as Television accelerated change in culture across America, the internet is accelerating change in culture around the world. The developing countries are in many ways like America was in the 50’s. Lots of new technology, new concepts of free time, and disposable income.

I’ve heard people describe developed nations moving to a Post Consumerism society, and I think the hybrid economies talked about by Lawrence Lessig and the cogitative surplus described Clay Shirky are examples of a Post-Consumer thinking (I’ve written further about those concepts here). Now, it is unrealistic to imagine that developed nations have fully become post-consumerist society but it is happening. But my question is, how quickly will the developing nations move beyond the new consumer culture that is being foisted upon them and adopt a more meaningful model of creativity and consumption? I hope the culture accelerator does that otherwise our planet is in even more trouble than it already is.