Social Strategy & Design by @KarlLong

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

Exec Summary: Yes, advertising is still a valuable discipline, but what it needs is a higher purpose. Advertising needs to inspire more than mass consumption, it needs to communicate ideas that inspire action, and participation. The good news is the internet is one of the best mediums ever for the propagation of remarkable ideas, and at their best ad agencies create great ideas that inspire above and beyond the act of passive consumption…

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

Executive summary: I think people should pay a subscription fee based upon how many people they follow.

I’ve been thinking about an appropriate business model for twitter for a while now, it seems like a fun intellectual business problem to wrestle with. Almost all of my ideas had something to do with the amount of followers a person had, something that blended subscription, pro features and or advertising.

I realized last night that it might be better to have a model that charged people based upon the amount of people that they follow. I think a wonderful side effect of this would be to provide an economic incentive to only really follow people who you are interested in, as opposed to playing the twitter game of ‘you follow me and i’ll follow you back’ game.

Here’s the idea, keep twitter free and clear for some number of people that you follow, say 500 or a 1,000, but after the first thousand charge some sort of subscription fee.

The benefits of this are first you don’t penalize people who are very popular, and who actually attract people to use the service. Even better you discourage MLM spammers who seems to be invading this service and gaming the ‘you follow me and i’ll follow you back’ game.

What do you think? I get a huge amount of value out of twitter and am totally ready to pay, what do you think? How much would you pay per 1,000 people you follow on twitter?

So what does Bernie Madoff’s Ponzie Scheme, the financial services industry, the housing market, and Facebook have in common? They all look(ed) very attractive as they were/are growing, in other words rapid growth can obscure real value, as long as there is continued growth.

My prediction, is more an imperative and that is “The Flight from Growth to Value” and this is not just in social media, but also in business in general. 2008 demonstrated quite starkly that growth often obscures lack of ‘value’. This was demonstrated by the housing bubble, then the dramatic collapse of the financial services industry, then by the Bernie Madoff ‘ponzie’ scheme. All 3 of those dramatic collapses demonstrate how growth can obscure real value as long as there is continued growth. One of Wall Street’s greatest failures is it’s singular focus on measuring and rewarding growth, Wall Street IMHO is part of a systemic, management, and cultural problem that focuses our measures of business success on the wrong things. In fact the term ‘bubble’ is a fantastic term for describing this blind belief that somehow growth is the key, because as long as the bubble is growing all the participants feel like they are part of something valuable, this is of course the essence of a ponzie scheme and most multi level marketing businesses.

What has this got to do with Social Media? well I think there are several social media companies who are valued primarily due to their amazing growth, and it’s obscuring what the real value is that they create. The problem in social media is that it amplifies network effects so brilliantly that growth drives more growth, now this is great if you have a business model that creates and captures tremendous value, but if it doesn’t your burn rate goes up and revenue is always just round the corner… until you stop growing and then it collapses. In the end this is the definition of a bubble, everyone wants to join in as long as it’s growing.

It is when bubbles burst that winners emerge and they are generally not the ones you expect, the phrase from the first .com bubble was ‘Even chickens can fly in hurricanes’, and that’s the case with a lot of social media companies now. I think facebook is at great risk of collapsing if it doesn’t figure out what the real value is that it creates and figures out a way to capture it. Once myspace figured out it’s real value was in connecting bands, growth became less important than doing that better.

Two great examples of social media companies with business models that create value are Threadless.com and Yelp.com. Threadless was started in 2000 for $500 and by 2006 were doing 6 million in revenue with 11 employees (6 of them part time), this year they are on target to do 40 million+ in revenue.

Here’s my presentation that I gave at Inverge last year, it’s called “employing your customers for fun and profit” and it illustrates a lot of the ideas I think are important in social media business models, ie. it is the users/customers that create value, you just have to figure out how the help your users/customers do it better.

Lot’s of other people have put together some interesting predictions for what 2009 might hold for the Social Media space and Peter Kim has assembled a good many of them on his blog here. He has posted them to Slinkset where people can vote on them and you can even submit your own. Trendspotting also put together this excellent presentation that nicely illustrates some of these predictions. Some very interesting people contributed to this like Charlene Li, David Armano, Ann Handley, Rohit Bhargava, Read/Write Web, Ben McConnell, Jeremiah Owyang.

Now, some of the people on the internet that I believe are some of the most important thought leaders did not put any predictions about 2009 so I will urge you to go and listen to and read a couple of recent interviews with them. All of these interviews happened in December and if you dig into them and triangulate the ideas I think you have a pretty interesting framework to think about what’s going to happen online in the next 5 years, and to analyze existing businesses in the social media space.

1. Tim O’Reilly talks in depth about Social Media and value on NPR’s Science Friday
2. Clay Shirky’s recent interview on the Columbia Journalism Review
3. Lawrence Lessig on NPR’s fresh air talking about his new book : Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Tim O’Reilly is very active on twitter @timoreilly and I suggest following him, and even though not very active you should follow Lawrence @lessig and Clay @cshirky as well…. and you can follow my fractured though process there as well at twitter.com/karllong

Update:
I posted this to twitter and got some interesting questions, one in particular got me thinking from @warrenss

@warrenss @karllong Nice work and a great deck! It will be interesting to see what winners emerge.

And my response:
@warrenss two winners (i’ve expanded on the tweets considerably)
1. platform providers that enable people & companies to connect with, and enable niches to create value ie. twitter, ning*, etsy, google, yelp.com, myspace, Youtube, Wordpress, crowdfactory, Etsy, SocialText, 37signals, Digg, TechMeme, Wikipedia, Stubleupon, Craigslist, 4chan.org Flickr, Dare I say Match, OkCupid, linkedin, Xbox Live, Mrtweet maybe Facebook, Nokia, OpenSocial.

2. companies and people that connect with either niches or lots of niches using some subset of the above tools ie. Dell, Apple, Nikon, Nokia, Patagonia, threadless, BoingBoing, etsy, Netflix, and personal brands like Barack Obama, Arianna Huffington, Shaquille O’Neil Ffffound, Gary Veynerchuck, Chris Brogan, Scobleizer, Kevin Rose, Michael Arrington, Hugh McCloud, Jeremiah Owyang, Mashable, Charlene Li, Zefrank, 4chan, Read/Write Web, (you may not know all of those personalities/pseudonyms and nor should you, but they are examples of people who are using social media tools to build incredible influence in their particular niches/communities).

*Ning’s ridiculous business move in shutting down it’s ‘adult’ communities due to concerns about advertisers, they have obviously not seen how much of a market there is for advertising in the ‘adult’ market.

UPDATE: Just read The Smart Growth Manifesto by Umair Haque on the HBR blogs and he articulates a brilliant concept of “smart growth” which focuses much more on the means of “value creation” that comes from growth. It’s a must read!

Recently Kmart hired some popular bloggers and twitter personalities to promote a competition they were running. Essentially the bloggers were all paid $500 to promote a $500 gift certificate to Kmart. Lots of questions about whether this ethical or breaking some kind of sacred blogger covenant to not sell out. In particular posts from Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang on this topic are not only interesting, but have generated an enormous response in the comments. Technosaler has a different take on this and even takes Jeremiah to task for editorializing as an analyst.

This controversy is absolutely baffling to me and IMHO people are asking the wrong questions especially if they have any interest in business on the web.

First of all the competition was a brilliant and simple idea. How to make an idea spread on twitter with a very minor incentive, the ‘chance to win’ something. In this case the motivation to have a chance to win a Kmart gift certificate drove people to rebroadcast that message to their networks. So brilliant the idea, I copied it the same day and posted this to twitter:

“@karllong is giving away 10 x $25 gift certificates for http://threadless.com - just RT this to enter, will tweet the winners ”

Now I only had 1,800 followers at the time and the result was nothing short of extraordinary. That message got retweeted or rebroadcast over 500 times, that means well over 25% the size of my network took an action to rebroadcast my message to their networks. The very first person to RT was @Coryobrien and he had 1200 people following him so I almost doubled my ‘impressions’ on the first hop. I also added 250 people to my twitter network.

Why did this work so well? Probably because I write the number 1 t-shirt blog on the internet (according to google) so my personal brand is totally enmeshed with t-shirts, so it’s totally appropriate for me to promote T-shirts.

To be quite honest I think personal networks are the future of advertising, so forget the ‘controversy’ and focus on the revolution people.

Izea is actually on the right track with their business model which is essentially to empower people to profit from their ‘influence’ or networks. We are the media, and if we are put in charge of what we promote, on what terms, and for companies we believe in, there are few bloggers who will not participate. If patagonia sponsored me I would happily pimp their products for cash, I love what the company does. They have 30 open positions a year (non retail) and they get 30,000 resumes for those positions, people are inspired by what the company does and stand for. I would totally sell my influence to promote companies that I firmly believe in. Sell out, but do it selectively and on your terms.

if you think this idea has merit go and VOTE at Change.org. The top 10 ideas are going to be presented to the Obama Administration on Inauguration Day and will be supported by a national lobbying campaign run by Change.org, MySpace, more than a dozen leading nonprofits after the Inauguration. So each idea has a real chance at becoming policy.

Oil at its 22 month low and America is heading to $1.25 a gallon gasoline, yet as recently as May, Chrysler was offering to let consumers “lock in” $2.99 gasoline for 3 years. Such is the foresight of our car companies, and an interesting indicator of what consumers were not only willing to pay for, but was actually an incentive. There is also indication that more Americans have continued to adopt public transportation at a record rate. Oil imports rose by a record amount during October assuring continued pressure driving gas prices further down.

I informally polled a group that we should tax gasoline to stabilize gas prices and generate revenue, and got some surprisingly positive responses, enough where I thought it was worth thinking about some more. I actually proposed it to be a flexible tax that essentially kept gas prices at a stable level that consumers were ok with.

I think the key to taxing gasoline use the proceeds to fund research into alternative technology/fuels and manufacturing technology that the American car industry (and maybe others if they pay) can share and use to build new American cars. We should use the money to fund the enormous effort it will take to retool and modernize the entire American car industry. Our car companies could win again but overhauling, rethinking, and rebuilding the American industry is going to be a Herculean effort.

Not only would taxing gasoline drive revenue to fund this effort but it would also serve to help us as a nation conserve. Surely conserving such valuable and strategic non-renewable resource is a patriotic act, especially if it went to fund growing a technological and innovation base right here.

I believe we need a management change and we need to hire visionary leaders, change agents, that can help lead an industry. We need the equivalent of Tom Peters or Steve Jobs to help change the industry. We need someone to help us create insanely great cars.

The car industry is so critical to the future industrial competitiveness of our country we need to involve leading thinkers and innovators. Michael Porter, Gary Hamel, Mark Cuban, and C.K. Prahalad could advise and facilitate the development of long term strategy for the industry ecosystem. Hire Guy Kawasaki as the evangelist. Involve Steve Jobs and Johnathan Ives in rethinking design. Involve Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, and Lawrence Lessig work on how technology, open source, and creative commons can be applied in an industry. Put the guys from top gear as head of product testing You get the picture hire superstar business people and innovators to turn this around not bureaucrats, sycophants and lobbyists.

As a tax payer I would invest in car companies to tide them over until you institute a gas tax if I had confidence they were going to hire leaders and not managers to turn these companies around.

I’ve added this idea to Change.org so please go there and comment, criticize, and vote. We don’t deserve failed leadership in such a critical industry as transportation, it is part of our competitive advantage as a nation. It’s very patriotic to conserve Oil.