Majority of US Consumers Say They Will Engage in Online Crowd-sourcing

August 25, 2010 at 3:31 am · Filed under FASTforward'09

Forester recently presented data indicating that sixty-one percent of all US online adults are willing co-creators, and they are open to co-creating across a large range of industries. At the same time, Forrester reports that consumer product strategy professionals indicated that half of all companies are not using social media to engage their customers in product creation, design, or strategy. What are they waiting for? I have written about crowd-sourcing a bit (see for example: GE Crowd-sources Green Ideas Through its Open Innovation Challenge and Building Enterprise 2.0 into the Product Development Process) but it has been largely from a company perspective for this was welcome data and I was pleased to receive a review copy.

Forrester said that many companies are hesitant to engage customers in co-creation because they are unsure how customer willingness and do not have a strategy. In the Forrester report, US Consumers Are Willing Co-Creators, Douglas Williams outlines conditions for co-creation engagement.

The majority of willing participants will help with most products but expect some type of incentive, which is only fair. There is wide spread interest across a variety of industries. The top two industries in terms of willing participation are personal computers (76%) and TV (75%) following by consumer packaged goods. This third place finishers has gotten some of the most press.

Thirty percent will only help their favorite brands and these are probably the strongest helpers. Time commitment is an issue for even these strong advocates so it needs to be manageable. The report suggests that if a company already directly communicates with certain consumers via social media, it makes sense to target fans or frequent visitors for co-creation. I would agree and all the more reason to use social media to promote your brand.

The report recommends product strategists begin by targeting consumers who they are already engaging with the brand. They should also recognize that participation will be stronger if the interaction is appealing from the consumer’s point of view, in terms of the topic, incentive, and time commitment. These seem to be the important variables to consider.

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Hyper-Social Enterprise: What it Takes to Lead One

August 18, 2010 at 10:31 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds, Work 2.0

Social enterprises don’t just spring out of some primordial corporate soup, they need good leaders to get them to the promised tribal lands. And we’re not talking about aggressive, power-obsessed leaders — the new leaders for the Business 2.0 organization need to be willing to let their communities take the lead with new initiatives.

Our FastForward friend Francois Gossieaux, along with co-author Ed Moran, has just published a new book that leads managers and business leaders through this new connected economy, titled The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media.

There are many great points raised in the book, and I’ll focus on Francois and Ed’s discussion on what it takes to manage and lead a Hyper-Social enterprise.

Interestingly, the good news about all this is you don’t need to move the mountains and the sea to get to hyper-social nirvana. “You don’t need to do away with hierarchies, as some pundits would have you believe, nor do you have to fear that social media will destroy them — it won’t. ” (aw, shucks…)

But there will be strongly linked communities of employees, customers, and prospects forming within your orbit as a result. They will be part of your hierarchies, and they will be outside the walls of your organization.  Questions you need to ask of your managers and leaders include: “Have we challenged ourselves hard enough in evaluating everything we do?” “If we could restart the company tomorrow, what would it look like?”

Francois and Ed also identified the eight essential qualities Hyper-Social leaders need to embrace:

1. They behave like humans and demand that their people do too.
2. They ditch the rule books and embrace values.
3. They live their values.
4. They trust their people and create trusted environments.
5. The embrace transparency.
6. They embrace diversity.
7. They never compromise on the quality of the people they surround themselves with.
8. They let go of control.

Not only do Hyper-Social enterprises need a new way of leadership, but this extends to talent as well. As pointed out above, moving to a social enterprise doesn’t require a great overnight upheaval. But there is a need to bring forward enlightened individuals who understand the power of social media and know how to effectively communicate across these new channels.

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TV May Be the Next Social Media Checkin Targat After Location

August 17, 2010 at 3:07 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Mobile, Social Media

Foursquare has become huge as a location checkin service. There are others, as well in the field. I have not gotten the bug but it took me a while to warm up to Twitter. Now, as Mashable reports, a number of services have popped up that re-purpose the checkin concept, popularized by Foursquare, and connect it to media and entertainment, as opposed to location.

Now checkin to TV and movies is more virtual than physical but that is fine in a virtual world. In practice, this entertainment checkin behavior is more familiar than location checkin. It actually emulates the way we experience entertainment in our everyday lives. Mashable writes, “the desire to share is unchanging — it’s how we share that will continue to evolve with the help of social media and entertainment checkin services.” I agree.

Mashable mentions three entertainment based checkin services: GetGlue, Philo and Miso. They all have mobile and web applications designed to support and enhance this natural entertainment-driven social behavior. Here is what Mashable wrote:

GetGlue’s iPhone app extends beyond just television content and supports checkins for books, wines, topics, celebrities and video games. Rewards come in the form of stickers earned from app activity. GetGlue has been around for years attempting to master social recommendation via the browser. With the move to mobile, the company can marry checkins to the social intelligence previously harvested.

Philo is hyper-focused on live television. Viewers use the iPhone app or web to check-in to the live content they’re watching. Philo pulls TV listings directly from cable providers, so viewers can even see the content that’s trending locally and pinpoint where to watch it. App users earn show-specific awards based on their behaviors and work their way up a Hollywood-style ladder to earn “Director” and “Executive Producer” “credits” for shows.

Miso is also about creating a social television watching experience. The alpha service currently has iPhone, iPad and web apps that support TV show or movie checkins. It bills itself as “Foursquare for TV” and has its own game mechanics and badges that are designed to hook viewers with the promise of unlocking additional content.

It seems that checking-in to television shows or other entertainment modes, if done right, can create a connection between media consumers with similar interests. I wonder when this trend will move to the enterprise. In some ways many of the collaboration platforms provide a similar services as you can see who has read what and people can comment on it. The difference is that checkin takes it a step further with real-time reporting.  Even this capability can be found in some enterprise collaboration platforms. It is just not focused in the same way as these Web checkin tools.  I am sure that this and Foursquare for the enterprise will evolve but will it take off and sustain itself. I am still thinking about this one.

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Bill Gates on Adoption in K-12 and Education

August 16, 2010 at 1:53 pm · Filed under Adoption, Gaping Void, Hugh McLeod, Innovation, KETC, Management Theory, Organizational Design, Public Media, Public TV, Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, University, education

Few people are as passionate about Education than BG. Here he is talking about what he has learned by a lot of experiments.

• That K-12 is best as an immersive system with long days – best 6 days a week and in the summer as well. The best charter schools know this and practice it.  Having had all my school like this myself – my sample of 1 agrees with this.
• This means that for K-12 Place is key – like going to Boot Camp. But there is a real role here for online in that it expands the scope of the place
• BG feels (2.50) however that shifting the formal system to either of these ideas – more immersive and more online – can never happen – the cultural barriers are too high
• On the College and university front, he points out that here the issue is access. The main barrier to access is “Place” that drives direct cost and prohibits the student from having any flexibility.
• Here he anticipates big movement driven by the economics. Place drives costs of up to $250,000 for a BA. He thinks that the target is to reduce this not to $20,000 but to $2,000

I think this is entirely possible. But what established university will have the guts to do this? Will they all end up like the newspapers? Hanging on for dear life?

I think that most will rather die than change. As many of us are finding in the front lines of change – it is impossible to underestimate the power of the establishment.

But I think that maybe a few established universities might go the whole way. I think that those who do will win the most. There is something very important about having an establishment organization or person as part of a revolution. Martin Luther had his Prince who defended him from both the Pope and the Emperor. In newspapers it may be the Guardian. In public TV it may be KETC. (Here is KETC Immigration page where they are putting the Public Into Public TV).

I think of my university here on PEI – What if UPEI had another 25,000 online students? here is a snip of a larger idea like this that I wrote 5 years ago:

Come to PEI for the summer and meet the other students and then go onto take an online Master’s degree in the Natural Economy. The Master in the Natural Economy (MINE) is a master’s degree course that engages the learner as many of the ideas and practices of the new ways of organizing and acting as possible. It embodies the ideas of our new time. It draws on hundreds of “Gurus” that live all over the world that bring their own story and experience to bear. Students, who nearly all are employed, develop their own path of study within the context of the course intention.

The school initially emerged out of one course, Marketing as a Conversation inspired by Cluetrain and by the ongoing thinking and blogging of by people like Seth Godin, Hugh McLeod, Johnnie Moore and Jennifer Rice. Their marketing revolution was the first breach of the old system that took hold.

There are a number of paths that students can take but all the work is founded in the ideas of how real relationships and real networks work. Paul Hawken is Dean Emeritus and the current Dean of the School in Natural Economy is George Dafermos who’s early writing on the use of Open Source, as an organizational model, has been so influential. Robert Scoble is the Visiting Guru this year and will be on PEI this summer offering workshops in Voice and Culture. He replaces Dave Pollard who will be sorely missed.

Students spend a month in the summer here on PEI where their task is to get to know each other and to decide on their focus for study. They then return home and form groups that are facilitated by the gurus. The full Masters degree costs only $7,000 and has of course no other costs. There are now 17,000 students in the system that is 4 times the size of UPEI, conventional undergraduate school.

MINE Graduates are in extreme demand as organizations struggle to understand the shift that they have to undergo. The traditional business schools have had great difficulty in moving this fast because they have such an investment in the old. Similarly, the major consulting firms have all but collapsed, as they too could not reframe their costs and their competence.

In their place have emerged networks of “Gurus” like the Hughtrain Alliance that are recognized as the key talent that shook the marketing world. These networks have a very different model and become partners of the host organization. They are not report writing organizations with expensive offices and extreme hierarchies but are much more like coaches of a team. Most of the students of the Natural Economy work and most of their study is in the context of solving their real challenges.

In effect, consulting has become an extension of the education process.

As with Luther – the big change will happen on the edge where the “field” is weakest. A small undergraduate university, like UPEI or back in the day Wittenberg, is less gripped by the power of the prevailing culture and can see the gains that might accrue to them.

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The Failure of Traditional Intranets

August 12, 2010 at 3:12 am · Filed under Enterprise 2.0

Oscar Berg posted a useful piece on why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers that I learned about through Twitter and Marcia Conner. Oscar begins with some stats on the increasing amount of knowledge-based work. He writes that a study by The Work Foundation estimated our workforce has 30 per cent in jobs with high knowledge content, 30 per cent in jobs with some knowledge content, and 40 per cent in jobs with less knowledge content.

Oscar notes that knowledge work is less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work. Move over Fred Taylor. He adds that the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work progresses. I would add that it is very context dependent and this argues against the concept of best practices, at least the static kind.  This makes it hard to know in advance what knowledge you need.  This means that you need to place control over knowledge access in the hands of the worker and not the system. It argues against scripted solutions.

Most traditional intranets do not provide the flexibility for knowledge access that knowledge workers require.  As Oscar writes, “most of today’s intranets primarily consist of pre-produced information resources which are intended to serve information needs which can be anticipated in advance. They aim to serve people who perform predefined and repeatable tasks.” This is so nineteenth century.

Now in the twenty first century we have the potential to address these needs through a social intranet (aka enterprise 2.0).  This is more than a simply adding collaboration tools. As Oscar writes, “It equips everyone with the tools that allows them to participate, contribute, attract, discover, find and connect with each other to exchange information and knowledge and/or collaborate.”  Ahem.

I have just given you the highlights. Hopefully this is enough to make you want to read Oscar’s complete passage.

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