So here it is: Tuesday, March 16 at 11:00 AM in Ballroom B
My @sxsw presentation that covers the themes and topics of The No Straight Lines Project, (video) so come along to cheer me along, heckle or profoundly disagree with my point of view.
A technological revolution can be defined as a powerful and highly visible cluster of new and dynamic technologies, products and industries, capable of bringing about an upheaval in the whole fabric of the economy and propelling a longer-term upsurge of development. It is a strongly interrelated constellation of technical innovations, generally including an important all-pervasive low cost input.
A great surge of development is defined here as the process by which a technological revolution and paradigm propagate across the economy, leading to structural changes in production, distribution, communication and consumption as well as to profound and qualitative changes in society.
And that is exactly whatt is happening. I think Haque’s findings are sound – and make sense. I agree that a No Straight Line approach to what we make, how we make it and who we make it with is; different, better, faster, more human, more sustainable, less costly than the heavy process silo approach to business that has dominate our world for the last 150 years of so. I explored these ideas at MIT (podcast) a few years back and with Nokia (video) and more recently at The Do Lectures.
But I also think this point of view is important, as expressed by William Powers and Perez,
New technologies do not come out of nowhere, they are human inventions in the first place and they succeed or not to the extent that they met fundamental human needs. So it is no accident that all of what we define as 2.0 is centered around, as Howard Rheningold says, human talents for cooperation. Not something that legacy industrial and media companies want to hear. The nature in this context is different, its multifaceted and blended. Where reputation, identity, “I” Needs “We”, craftsmanship, commerce etc., becomes the fuzzy logic so hated by bean counters and straight line thinkers.
Local Motors, TxtEagle and Grow VC (examples here) are also examples of the re-engineering of business that a No Straight Line approach can deliver. So what happens when push economics becomes pull and networked economics, a report by the Aspen Institute, put together by David Bollier got my neurons humming in 2006.
Indeed as Jay Burton Rogers, founder of Local Motors says,
You cant be nimble if you tool big!!
Time to Reboot. We are today, as social philosopher Richard Sennett argues; seeking too recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time. Indeed, Stephen Heppell considers the 21st century to herald the ‘learning age’. In the 20th century, he argues, we built big things (railways, universities) but the focus for the 21st century is ‘helping people to help each other’. In his view, “The old stuff won’t do any more”. And the sooner management wakes up to that fact, the better.
It never ceases to amaze me that people, some people, refuse to accept that Japan has much to teach us in terms of how to market successfully, create killer advertising campaigns and do other cool stuff in which he mobilee device lays an integral role.
Here we have Chris Billich from Infinita, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Tokyo a while back when I was there on a mobile marketing learning journey, giving us his unique perception on Japan.
The presentation is insightful pointing to our near future as mobile our remote control for life.
On Wednesday, a Milanese court convicted three Google executives of violating privacy and gave them six-month suspended sentences. This is an analogue verdict in a digital age. If allowed to stand, it poses a serious threat to the development of the internet and to freedom of speech.
The reason being that a film had been uploaded to “their video-sharing website” of school boys teasing and bullying an autistic boy – despicable without a doubt. But, and its a very big but,
herein lies the regulatory rub. If someone used a telephone to blackmail or abuse someone else, they would be the ones guilty of crime, rather than BT or Ma Bell. Similarly, internet sites that feature user-generated content (including news sites such as the Guardian’s) have not generally been held liable for content as long as they dealt with complaints of objectionable or libellous content reasonably quickly. This is the principle that the Italian verdict overturns, with worrying implications for freedom of speech.
These are very important issues, because there are some that would welcome the opportunity to bash, and even more crush freedom of expression. Coming soon is the time when the negotiation of what type of world we can expect to live in comes centre stage as legal fights and debates unfold, utopianism replaced by dark cynicism, or the cruel hand of a court applied like a hammer into sensitive issues.
Coalition of The Willing’ is a film that discusses how we can use new internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures to combat climate change. Through analyses of swarm activity and social revolution, ‘Coalition of the Willing’ makes a compelling case for the new online activism and explains how to bring the fight against global warming to the people. As the film tackles the subject of online activism, we decided that the logical home for ‘Coalition of The Willing’ is here online.
You can view the release dates (here) And its fabulous.
Now spool forward again to today, when the angst du jour is how to get people to pay for online “content”. Once again, the most perceptive insight may come from the music business – specifically from an iconic 60s band, the Grateful Dead, whose archives have recently been donated to the University of California at Santa Cruz. Marking the event in a recent article in The Atlantic, author Joshua Green reminded us of how the Dead pioneered ideas and practices that are only now being reluctantly embraced by corporate America. “One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans,” Green observes. The band “established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets”. He adds: “Only in the 1980s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.”
Quite so. More significantly, though, the Grateful Dead decided that they wouldn’t try to stop people making bootleg recordings of their concerts, figuring that what they lost in royalties would be more than compensated for by being more widely known, and by the resulting sales of merchandise. It turned out that they were right. The band anticipated by decades the “Freemium” business model now being touted by expensive managerial gurus. Stand by for a best-selling business book entitled Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead. And if you want to know the future, ask a musician.
And I pointed out that it was a newspaper that invented the Tour de France to sell more newspapers, and yet traditional media seem completely in thrall of god knows what unable to reinvent themselves. Clinging to the wreckage in hope of salvation. Ten years ago SMLXL called such activity that, the Dead, or L’Equip undertook to achieve their commercial success engagement marketing.
Perhaps one of the most innovative FMCG launches anywhere – whilst others think that Buy One Get Free will suffice, Oh Well.
Tomi Ahonen, my co-author of Communities Dominate Brands provides insight into the mechanics and success of the launch. And one has to ask is this the future of marketing – well for my money this looks a lot more attractive than another poorly conceived, badly written and executed 30 sec spot – or an idle banner ad, that pretends to look important – but really isn’t.
Tohato used Japanese ad agency Hakuhodo to create the launch campaign for the new snacks. And what a campaign they designed, indeed. They designed a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Not only that, but their game ran on mobile phones – another relatively rare phenomenon in the MMOG space, most MMOGs like World of Warcraft, CounterStrike and Lineage 2 are designed for personal computers.
Then – the recruitment of the players/gamers/army. Each side recruited an “Evil Army” based on the brand of snack and those who liked that flavour. Gamers could join the Habanero Evil Army, or the Satan Jorquia Evil Army. To sign up, you had to buy a bag of the snacks and scan the 2D barcode with the cameraphone (83% of Japanese already use the 2D Barcode feature, so this is quite commonplace in Japan today, certainly among the youth, who were the target audience, classic Generation C for Community)
Once in the game, gamers were encouraged to recruit friends to join that Evil Army. The recruiter would gain promotions in the army depending on new recruits, and their recruits. A classic pyramid scheme and remarkably viral. A private was promoted to sergeant, then promoted to lieutanent, then to captain, etc.. The armies had 31 battlefields to win the World’s Worst War. These had again really appealing names for this generation, like Sweet Sucker’s Execution Hall, the City of Anal Torture, and Shadap Bay. Remember the target audience, this is exactly the kinds of names that are cool to them. They generated enormous traffic, 100,000 page views per day. And the game had a 24 hour news alert service to inform gamers what was going on, who died, which team won the latest battle, who was promoted, etc.
Christopher Billich from Infinita gives us some more info,
Players were rewarded with more than 120 collectible wallpapers,for capturing bases, including some very hard to get ones that could only be obtained by players that met a number of objectives. They actually did three installments of this game between October 2007 and April 2008. By the last installment, the game mechanics had become quite sophisticated, including training your soldier (on site, once a day max.) to boost his powers, rank not only depending on the number of people recruited, but also on battles fought/won etc.
It also featured an intricate system of gaining/losing “information points” by posting strategically relevant information to the own army’s BBS and eavesdropping on the other side’s conversations, which I thought was pretty cool. You could even defect to the other army if you saw things going downhill for your side.
Tohato demonstrates, how to make advertising money work hard, to attract, engage and change behaviour. It also drives advocacy and word of mouth. It also demonstrates the binding power of co-creation communication strategies, and frankly I have become bored as to whether the media bean counters can count this type of activity. The you just need to look at cost of investment for the campaign and the sales that are directly attributable to that investment.
Address pain points in society to do good and do better
Entrepreneurs looking for growth opportunities should begin by identifying ‘pain points’ in society, say INSEAD Professor Subi Rangan and Shantanu Prakash, the founder of Indian educational company, Educomp Solutions.
In the quest to address that pain point, Prakash set up Educomp in the mid-90s, becoming one of the India’s ‘youngest billionaires’. Educomp’s motto is ‘What learning can be.’ Among other services, the company provides technology-based educational solutions to thousands of schools across India, and is also involved in teacher and vocational training.
“Essentially I think the system is dysfunctional,” Prakash says. “And so when we looked at the system we saw opportunity and we said there is a better way of doing things. And we decided to use technology as an enabler, as a method by which we could improve the existing system. That’s how some of our innovation in the area of multimedia education and even distance learning came about.”
Rangan says the economic paradigm is changing from a self-regarding, instrumental capitalism to a substantive capitalism, which couples society with the market. In essence, it’s deepening the corporate citizenship role of business enterprises.
“Whereas the Schumpetarian entrepreneur starts with gain, my entrepreneur starts with pain,” he says. “They look at the pain in society and ask ‘how can I now make a business of addressing that?’”
Educomp’s Prakash did just that, building a company which today has a market cap of around 1.5 billion dollars.
Not bad and a valuable lesson to those that what to make money in the 21st Century. So, Prakash states
“I fundamentally believe that businesses of the future that operate in some of these areas like education or health or clean technology, will have to take an important decision about how they price their products, how they deliver (them), so that they can meet the aspirations of their consumers. And in meeting the aspirations of their consumers on price points and on quality and other parameters, they simultaneously meet the expectations of their shareholders and investors.” And his advice to other entrepreneurs? Look for society’s pain points.
A year or so ago, I get a call from a lady called Jemima Gibbons who wanted to meet me to discuss how one went about writing a book – so we meet up in my favourite haunt at RIBA and had a chat about what Jemima saw as a significant challenge.
Its a great success, because, and I am not the first to say so, Jemima’s approach to her writing is very elegant. And also, Jemima is not in your face in an evangelical sort of way. That said there is more substance here, than a flourish of the digital quill. Jemima points us to the challenge of doing business, the nature of organisations, and a different way of marketing in a networked society.
So if you want an easy to read, enjoyable guide to understanding the world described as social media – then Jemima’s book is the one for you. Dave Cushman has also written a review of Monkeys with Typewriters. Going back and flicking through the copy Jemima gave to me its, as quite often with books I read that interest me, underlined, and comments written all over it. This book gently states, though it is the most powerful meme in our world today, that social media is not about technology it is about people. As Carl Jung wrote,
I needs we to truly be I
As Jamais Cascio told me, communications technology can be wielded as a powerful agent of change. The authenticity of the book is also that Jemima has spoken to a great many people in business and academia, and those interviews bring as closer to the interface of understanding the significance of doing business in a world where as Doc Searls wrote, markets are conversations, and where we argued in 2004 that Communities Dominate Brands, and that we saw the rise of the networked community generation, always on and always connected. We also saw that at the epicentre of what made business thrive whether that was online or off, was the ability to engage people within a social context – the complete 180 to an industrial approach to not just business, but also, how we work, how we want to lead out lives and how we educate our children. That insight is now unfolding before us, as it touches our daily lives. We are mid-wives to a new way of doing things.
Alan has addressed, radio, television, and conference audiences globally. His book and his articles have been published many respected magazines, journals and newspapers globally.
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