Archive for the 'Co-Creation' Category

Creative Commons Case Study Database

Published
by
Karl
on June 25, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 0 Comments

I think many of us intuitively know how important Creative Commons is in supporting the co-creativity, like mashups and many kinds of consumer generated content. Now we don’t have to rely on our intuition and Creative Commons have created a database of case studies of it’s use around the world.

Creative Commons projects are found across the globe, with licenses used by private individuals to large corporations. The stories on this site tell of some of the thousands of individuals and organisations who use CC on a daily basis for a multitude of purposes across a variety of content. This site aims to highlight the fantastic work being done by creators and content aggregators in the CC community. It details some of the available tools for creation and collaboration which employ Creative Commons licenses.

The Case Study Wiki chronicles past, present and future success stories of CC. The goal is to create a community-powered system for qualitatively measuring the impact of Creative Commons around the world. All are encouraged to add interesting, innovative, or noteworthy uses of Creative Commons licenses.

If you want to know more about Creative Commons check out this video here:

The Power Point That Made Me Cry (because I was happy)

Published
by
Karl
on June 24, 2008
in Co-Creation, Customer-Experience, New-Strategy and Social-Media
. 5 Comments

Your mileage may vary but some of the themes in this slideshow “happiness as your business model” resonate so deeply with me it literally brought tears to my eyes. In the deck Tara (author of HorsePigCow and founder of Citizen Agency) connects so succinctly Maslows hierarchy of needs and the concepts of autonomy and relatedness it just blew me away. Funny because i’ve been trying to connect the same things for the last five or six years with limited success, so you would imagine it would make me feel quite inept seeing how well Tara has done it here, but that’s not the case at all, i feel like it’s a huge confirmation and an opportunity for me to go back and see how I can build on it.

I wrote an article way back in 2003 where I tried to connect a concept called the “hierarchy of customer experience” to loyalty, which was heavily inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy and Hertzbergs two factor theory of motivation which included “Trust > Competence > Autonomy > Creativity/Relatedness”

Here’s another look at an earlier attempt:
The Hierarchy of Customer Experience

I’m quite convinced that a model like this is the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of web 2.0/social media type companies. Increasingly it will be the secret behind the real success (and real failure) of all companies and organizations.

Ripping Marketing A New One and New Marketing Blog

Published
by
Karl
on June 5, 2008
in Co-Creation and Marketing
. 3 Comments

Well that is Bill Hicks ripping marketing a new one, heard about this via Johnnie Moore’s weblog where he also mention he’s starting a new collaborative blog. The the new blog is called Marketing 2.0 in which some very respectable marketing bloggers are getting together to post on how marketing is changing.

I rather like Johnnie’s inaugural post where he even questions the validity of marketing 2.0, I mean, doesn’t marketing just go away if it’s built into the DNA of products and experiences?

In the shiny world of Marketing 2.0, we’d see the back of all that advertising and direct mail - the 99% of noisy clutter that interrupts our viewing and travelling pleasure with its crude efforts to flog us stuff we don’t need.

But maybe we’re just kidding ourselves. Us marketing types have always had a real talent for that, haven’t we?

I wonder if we’re just repeating that tired old solution for any other substandard product with a dodgy customer image - the rebrand! Hey folks this isn’t nasty old Marketing, this is New Improved Marketing NOW with Added Authenticity…

Reminds me very much of victor papanek’s sentement from his seminal book from the 70’s called Design for the Real World

There are professions more harmful than industrial desing, but only a very few of them. And possibly only one profession is phonier. Advertising, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care.

Now, both me and Johnnie do have one other thing in common and that is we are from England, which I think gives us a somewhat different view of marketing, because to be quite honest America is a nation that has been marketing better than any other nation in history. What we often refer to with slight disdain as that American razzmatazz is in fact the American marketing machine revving up into high gear.

That being said advertising is becoming less effective, customers are becoming more aware of the impact of their consumption, are holding companies to higher standards, and are seeking more meaning out of the products and services they buy. As post war marketing theory, segments, demographics, focus groups, monolithic ad networks and the mass market are becoming increasingly irrelevant companies have to look for new ways to engage.

Twitter Influence, or so much for inbox zero

Published
by
Karl
on May 22, 2008
in Co-Creation, Marketing and Viral-Persuasion
. 5 Comments

So Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst at Forrester and author of the Web Strategist blog just said this on twitter:

And then this happened:

Damn, there goes inbox zero

When twitter is actually working i’m here

Social Media and Gutenberg - Hyperbole?

Published
by
Karl
on April 25, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 5 Comments

I just got quoted in the Marin Independent Journal from a panel I was on this week. The quote they chose to use was:

“The move toward social media is as big a change as Gutenberg and the printing press,” said Karl Long, a product manager at Nokia. “Social media is the ability for anyone to publish anything without any cost.”

and of course to potentially reach anyone online.

So what do you think? Hyperbole?

Interestingly Steven Fry and the BBC recently put online a 60 minute show called The Machine That Made Us that is all about the Gutenberg press and how it changed the world.

see part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six here.

So in 50 or 100 years will there be a documentary about how the internet changed us? I wonder what it will be called? The Machine That Distracted Us? The Machine That Got Us Laid? The Machine That Got Us Jobs? The Machine That Connected Us? The Machine That Democratized Everything? The Machine That Made Culture Global?

Thanks as always Kottke

Lawrence Lessig for Congress

Published
by
Karl
on February 20, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 0 Comments

Political? Maybe, but I think if Lawrence Lessig does run for congress it will be one of the most significant political moves marketed and enabled through the internet and social media, a truly grass roots effort. He may be running for the 12th district in California but he would be IMHO the Congressman for the district of the internet, as founder of the creative commons, and being on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In many ways the amount of support I think Lessig will get from the web this may well turn into first global campaign to get a congressman elected :-)

Go to lessig08.org to show your support, and read about his mission further at change-congress.org, you can also join his 3,300 strong group on facebook

Draftlessig.org has just noted they have raised $20,000 in the first 48 hours

Political Advertising 2.0

Published
by
Karl
on February 19, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 0 Comments
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
A. J. Liebling
(1904 - 1963)

The Black Eyed Peas recently did a music video which was a mashup with Barak Obama’s “Yes we can speech” and has been watched by over 4 million people. This parody called “No we can’t” mashes up John McCain sound bites in a similar fashion.

For more on interweb presidential politics check out Techpresident.com

Death Of The Influencials - Debunking The Tipping Point

Published
by
Karl
on January 28, 2008
in Co-Creation and Viral-Persuasion
. 6 Comments

When I first saw the link on twitterFimoculous with the title “Is the Tipping Point Toast?” I thought someone was going to debunk the whole idea behind it. But what was being debunked was just the concept of roles of people involved in making a trend “tip”, and most importantly the influencer’s. Sounds terrifying to most marketers because the whole idea of finding and cultivating influencers is often the cornerstone of “seeding” viral/WOM campaigns, and as they say in the article marketers spend millions on this process.

The article is on fast company and key point of the article though is to point out that it is not the people spreading an idea that matter as much as the idea itself, and societies readiness for the idea. I think this is one of the reasons that ideas that are laser focused on a niche often succeed, it’s because the idea can be much more finely tuned to appeal the people who will initially receive it. Once it is successful in that very small niche it’s likely you will have the critical mass to get out to the broader audience you seek. It’s kind of like starting a fire, the niche is the kindling

Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

It reminds me of what Jonnie Moore was saying on his blog recently about social objects:

So don’t let all the talk about social objects make you think that marketing is all about the props. The props are great if they spark relationships, and they may look important as markers of relationships… but they’re not the real magic.

And Guy Kawasaki agrees :-)

Edumacation

Published
by
Karl
on January 27, 2008
in Co-Creation and Get-Smart
. 3 Comments

Found this video on Jonnie Moore’s always thought provoking blog. It’s a collaboration of 200 students in an anthropology class that looks at the defining characteristics of students today.

It certainly seemed bleak in many ways, and illustrated how the modern school system of lecture halls and chalkboards were antiquated, but what surprised me is how much the web was mentioned but mainly in the context of facebook. Isn’t there a wealth of information out there on the web, what of wikipedia, or the mountains of blogs out there written by smart, thoughtful people, if they were anthropology students weren’t they reading Grant McCracken? I’m just saying, how many of them were blogging, podcasting, putting videos on youtube? Well actually they are all blogging at http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=119″>mediatedcultures.net, and of course they put this video up on youtube which has been viewed almost 1.5 million times, and they used a wiki like service to edit the document to put the script together for the project, so thankfully it did go beyond facebook :-)

Anyway, the video did immediately reminded me of Sir Ken Robinson’s amazing talk he gave at TED in 2006 asking the question “do schools kill creativity?”.

Be Kind Rewind - Sweded is the new Mashup

Published
by
Karl
on January 24, 2008
in Co-Creation
. 0 Comments

Just saw the new Jack Black/Mos Def movie “Be Kind, Rewind” last night and I loved it, the director also did Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind and this movie had a similar quirky quality. Apart from being a very funny movie, it had a wonderfully positive message about creativity, that creativity doesn’t have to be perfect, and sometimes we just have to do something and see what happens.

Without giving too much away the movie is about two guys who are looking after a video store who accidently erase all the tapes, their solution to this is of course to shoot their own versions of the movies over the old tapes with of course very crappy, but very funny results. The resultant home made movie has been, in their words “Sweded”, here’s their explanation:

Bekind Sweding Pictures

Here are a couple of movie parody t-shirts which seemed appropriate. These two are both from Last Exit To Nowhere which I Featured once before, and believe me the Robocop reference is entirely appropriate.

Robocop 1 Pictures

Robocop 2 Pictures

And these two are from a new line of movie inspired t-shirts from Kindred Clothing which are wonderfully creative mashups or sweded t-shirts, almost homages.

Biglebowski

Clockhikersguide

Of course they are also running a youtube competition for people to create their own sweded movies: