Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

One of the things that struck me recently as I was teaching a class in Blogging and Social Media at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University is that whatever technology I was teaching about might not be here next year. I tried to take an approach where I didn’t teach tools so much as much as tried to demonstrate what creative and amazing things people were doing with the tools. I was trying to teach these guys how to be curious, creative, and to think critically. When I saw this video today it just slammed that fact home.

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.

In this fascinating interview on Charlie Rose, Lawrence Lessig provides some interesting comments about “hybrid economies” where companies co-create value with their customers. As he says some companies, mostly new and small, are already adopting this hybrid economic model, but bigger companies in the future will be transformed by this.

Most companies look at what consumers create, co-create, and share with the world as some kind of free resource to be exploited in what ever way they can, but the winners in the future will be the companies that can create ecosystems in which all the participants are valued, rewarded, promoted, and empowered. Companies are going to increasingly have to treat their customers as contributers and stakeholders in their business, and the concept of where a company begins and ends will blur.

Social Media is the engine behind this massive and slow moving change and for most companies change is not something that can be avoided. Anyone who thinks that social media is about influence, popularity, or an audience is sorely mistaken and business models built on that will be shaky at best. Social media provides the tools to empower and lead a legion of people who believe in your vision, be they customers, employees, partners or competitors, the opportunity right now for all companies is to be a change agent for your industry, are you up for the challenge.

BTW this was the topic of a recent talk/presentation I gave at Inverge and the Social Media Marketing summit, it was titled “Employing Your Customers For Fun and Profit”, I hope to have video of that soon. I’ve had some companies express an interest in having me come in and do the presentation for them and I’m happy to share it, time permitting.

Anyway, don’t just take mine and Lawrence Lessig’s word for it, check out these books if you are interested in this transformation of business.

The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers by Prahalad & Ramaswamy

“web-empowered consumers will usher in “a new industrial system” characterized by “co-creating value through personalized experiences unique to the individual consumer.” Under the new regime, headstrong consumers will “seek to exercise their influence in every part of the business system,” and companies will accommodate them by, for example, allowing them to design their own individualized cosmetics and houseboats (an innovation whose benefits include “emotional bonding with… the company” and “a greater degree of self-esteem”).”

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig and it’s associated blog page here

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Also watch this video of Clay at the web 2.0 expo where he puts into describes the massive cognitive surplus that enables huge projects like Wikipedia to be created, and how much of it is available

Related: Kaplak Blog has an excellent write up of the Rose/Lessig interview as well, worth reading.

Also follow Lawrence on twitter.com/lessig Clay Shirky at twitter.com/cshirky and me if you like at twitter.com/karllong.

It’s funny, I would suggest that Apple and Google probably have very different design processes and certainly a very different culture so what is the common denominator?

I think it could well be that they both have very influential people at the executive level in the organization that is focused and passionate about the design of the customer experience, ie. Steve Jobs and Marissa Mayer.

Can you point to the one person in your organization who “owns” the design of the user experience? Do they have the power and influence to effect every aspect of the user experience?

via

T-shirt All Tied Up From Full Bleed via tcritic

Having read this on a post at LinuxWorld it got me thinking:

So when the cost of deciding to do something becomes much more expensive than doing something, what do you do? Here are a few ideas:

• Empower teams to launch experiments
• Develop a process for manageing projects as a portfolio of experiments
• Evaluate projects regularly
• Killing projects should be as easy as starting projects and everyone needs to understand that, and the criteria
• Start cheaply
• Get ready to fail faster
• Prepare to fail in public and be ok with that
• Create a “beta” culture
• Put basic legal boilerplate frameworks in place that minimize risk, don’t reinvent it each time

Those are just some rough ideas, any more? Anyone facing this issue?

It still boggles my mind how many startups think that advertising is the monetization vehicle of choice. Didn’t we already do that during web 1.0, eyeballs are not the be all and end all.

IBM just completed a survey called “the end of advertising“, and in it Read/Write web reports that 11% of users say they would pay for a “youtube premium” account to avoid advertising. This would yeld 100 million in additional revenue.

I’ve always thought the Flickr “pro account” idea was one of the best and simplest examples of monetization in web 2.0 - provide something of value that your most passionate users will pay for, let them subsidize the usage by more casual users. This is of course in direct opposition to most product strategies which take the “safe” route and create a product for the “majority” of their users, which as Seth Godin will tell you is the risky thing to do.

And myspace might be saying “Thanks for the add” to google as well.

I had initially thought this story from Tech Crunch was like a formation of a “coalition of the willing” with the other social networks, but I’m begining to think it might have much bigger implications.

Essentially Google has defined a set of api’s for core features for “social applications”

Could this form the foundation for the Internet to finally become the platform? Sure you’ve got a few social networks involved but what if enterprises started using this as the basis for their own social networks? Imagine companies that started to run their businesses on social applications. Sure email is the lingua franca still, but wikis, blogs, and the concept of social networking are changing the way businesses are working.

The only thing that I see missing that would really enable this to happen is some kind of real identity system, because still the advantage that Facebook has at this time is pretty good identity and relationship management. Again the old adage applies, “on the internet nobody knows your a dog”

UPDATE:
It seems that quite a few people think it’s likely that Facebook will likely join OpenSocial as well, it makes sense, but it’s clear that Google had to get everyone else on board first.

Ars Technica has some more on the story as does Read/Write Web who I totally recommend following for more insight on this.

Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path has just posted a presentation on the topic “The Experience Is The Product” on slideshare, even better he has synced the recording of him presenting this in the UK. In this presentation Peter does a great job of explaining that the experience is everything, it’s the branding, it’s the marketing, and how often our approaches to design screw this up.

Peter will hate me for doing it because he tried to do the whole presentation without mentioning the ipod, but of course he had to, because it’s the best example of experienced centered design out there.

One thing I’ll add is that when people say “experience design” or “experienced focused design” a lot of people think “sensory orgy” or the “wow”. But it’s not about the wow, it’s actually about focusing on the broader experience beyond the product, beyond the use of the product, the system if you like. The experience is the system is probably another way of saying it. Way back in 2003 I wrote a post that is somewhat related called “Thinking Outside the Product”

You might also find this presentation interesting from Marc Rettig on the history of interaction design which illustrates the transition from task focused design to design that takes into account the broader experience.

This is very exciting news, the CCA is launching a new program, an MBA in Design Strategy. This is another Big D MBA, which are of course few and far between, I have a pretty rare MBA in Design Management from the University of Westminster in the UK. Stanford of course has been promoting it’s D School but the MBA qualification or focus on business strategy is very rare.

Big congratulations to Nathan Shedroff who has been appointed chair of the program, Nathan of course wrote the book on experience design I’m particularly interested in his new book that he has written with Cheskin called Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences.

I’ll be very keen to check out the content and approach of this program.

Hugh over at gapingvoid raises the interesting point that even though the market for companies to create and deliver one way “messages” is dissapearing, demand for PR, marketing, and advertising professionals is growing. The question is now that we don’t control the “message” what are we doing?

To quote Hugh:

I’m going to add number 4:

4. Value: Social Equity, the value you build over time from the creation of and participation with social gestures and social objects.

I’m absolutely convinced that one of the biggest differences between traditional marketing, and new conversational, people driven marketing is you actually build value over time. I think blogs are one of the best examples, every time you post to a blog it’s like making a small deposit in a bank account, each one build on the rest, and ends up returning interest that compounds. The value of a blog over time becomes more than the sum of the individual posts, as it and the author becomes interconnected through other blogs and sites.

Traditional marketing and advertising used to try and build brand equity, in the new conversational marketplace companies that are participating are building social equity (i’m sure that means something else somewhere but it seems appropriate).

What else could you call the value you build over time by participating in the O’Sphere?

They must have heard my plea yesterday because today Wal-Mart announced it will be selling Universal and EMI music DRM free. In some ways it seems like this is a move by both Wal-Mart and the labels to try and wrestle away the stranglehold that iTunes has over the DL music marketplace.

I don’t know how this turned into DRM week, but I think the move away from DRM is significant for customer experience and co-creation. As mentioned yesterday Grooveshark’s whole co-creative business model is reliant on non DRM music shared by it’s users.