Digital Influence Mapping Project

For the Guy/Gal Who Has Everything: Web Trends 3.0

I love great visualizations. This is going to be a year for more of them, no doubt. Oliver and his folks at IA Japan have released another version of their mashup of the Web 2.0 landscape and the Tokyo subway map. It is but one group's view on cataloguing many of the significant brands and businesses online. It is done so well that it is worth having. You can buy a poster at their site. You can also download jpegs and even a full pdf.

The best part if their interactive start page which makes all of the "destinations" on the route clickable - not sure what Badongo is? Just click on it to go there.

Buy a map for someone you care about in social media. And tag their site, they do great work.

Idea Bar #11: The Agency of the Future - Innovation Lab

Agencies are going through a dramatic transformation. Traditional Ad Agencies will scale back staff between now and first quarter. Media agencies, at the top of the pile, are choking on word of mouth marketing because that discipline does not behave like all of the paid channels out there. Public relations continues to grow and not because it is the "cheap" medium. PR works really hard for clients and is more efficient at selling and building brand at the same time. With all this change, what is the shape and role of the agency of the future? Sure, the marketing and PR silos will crumble into one 360 pile. But there is another opportuntiy for agencies as the next innovation lab for clients (and themselves).  

Google spends a tremendous amount of time and money on innovation (the fabled "20%" of everyone's time and the expression of that effort via Google Labs.) Agencies struggle to follow suit due to the business model of the big conglomerates (mine is WPP). Considering my entire business - 360 Digital Influence - is a boot-strapped innovation within Ogilvy/WPP, innovation does happen and it can be quite impactful.

The People's Innovation Lab
We plan and deliver some pretty intense workshops for clients to help them understand or simply get more out of social media and word of mouth innovation. We just held a 2-day word of mouth marketing workshop for a major client and consumer marketer. This was done essentially in partnership with Word of Mouth Marketing Association (member) to bring the best thinkers and doers together to help the 315 brand marketers in attendance understand and apply WOMM to their marketing efforts.

We also have the beginnings of a digital innovation lab across the Ogilvy eco-system. We plan to participate more in that this year. The model is very locally driven which means good ideas from local markets being shared across the globe.

I want to take that a step further. I want to create a consumer-driven lab experience that comes together at the point of sale: retail. Let's create an Ogilvy storefront where we apply some of our best thinking not simply in terms of retail experience but all of the marketing that surrounds the products and services we "sell" for our clients. The store/lab would have an intense digital layer that engages a cadre of advisors and influencers to engage them in ongoing feedback and to be the seedbed of outbound word of mouth on new innovations at the Open Lab. And we will integrate our clients into that store/digital experience. One month, the partner would be American Express, another Kaplan University, still another the Lance Armstrong Foundation (all clients). Clients would subscribe to 6 month episodes.

Episodic and Continuous Innovation
Many companies have their own innovation labs. Certainly the CPGs all have the fake stores where they work behind the scenes to optimize the selling experience. Ours would be different. First of all, the Open Lab, would be, literally, open to the public.

Look at what Urban OUtfitters is doing in Hollywood with Space 15 Twenty. They have created a retail experience that accomodates a number of brands in a new collaborative retail experience. Or there is the creative marketing agency - Neverstop -  that also runs a barbershop storefront. (You can read about it in my favorite magazine - Metropolis)

They wanted to add some "social" street-level experience to help them stay in tune with other consumers. Let's take that a step further and create a storefront which can be designed around a brand (rolling "pop-up" episodes with a single, street-level storefront). Digital programs - word of mouth, social media and digital marketing would all be launched to drive traffic and engagement.

What's the Point?
Certainly this is not a reach play or a volume sales play. This is about innovating around influencer marketing. That's who would come here. That's who would susbcribe to our Facebook group. People who want to know what is next, who have something to contribute (for spotlight, social capital and to try a product experience), and who love the brands that would be featured in the Open Lab (I know, we have to work on that name....).

This is about innovating from the outside in. Brands get the benefit of the real world exchange with people and the creative thinking from the agency "creatives" who try these ideas out. For me, it's where these Idea Bar ideas could see the light of day for test and insight.

For every 6 month "epsisode," brands would have 2 month-long positions in the store plus a full digital influence program to support it. These would include planning and reporting. The promise would be to deliver 3 tested marketing innovations that could each move the needle on their business.

One of the great advantages of brands working with agencies is to get the benefit of fresh thinking from marketers who work across different clients and have a built-in methodology for being creative*. I want to extend that role to product and service marketing innovation. No one can afford to go back to the "old way" of marketing even in this full-blown recession. We must go forward. We must innovate in that quick and dirty way that let's us try something quickly, refine it, and deploy it. The days of camapign cathedral-building are over (plan a program for 6 months or longer, then deploy, then start over). We all need a source of continuous innovation and much of it had better come from outside the organization or we haven't learned some of the most enbduring lessons of this crowd-sourced era.

Everyone inside the agency would work in teh Open Lab at one point or another. It would not be its own sequestered group. It could become more than a retail lab and become a place to try out new creative, put together experiences (you know, arty stuff like poetry slams and origami jams).

We need a nice pedestrian city - Chicago, Philadelphia, New York. We need 5 clients at $200K initial subscriptions with a modest investment from the agency side.

Oh, the things we could learn. Oh, the ideas we would launch. Oh, the agency business we would transform.   
  
Related Pop up stores information:

• Trendwatching

• Businessweek

• PFSK

*creative must be defined differently. Now it includes a strategic view, an eye toward channel and platform complexity. The "big idea" is not enough.

How Has Creative Direction Changed: Jakob Trollback

Earlier this Fall, I had the chance to speak with Jakob Trollback of Trollback & Co. while we were both speaking at Interact 2008. He's a tremendous Creative Director, one of those guys who transcends platforms and is just plain good at being creative. He was nice enough to answer some questions and then update them recently (3.09)

Q: How has the role of the Creative Director changed from when you first began?

A: The Creative Director title, like all titles, have had different meanings at different companies. Coming from a design background, I was very surprised when I first found out that copywriters could be creative directors. From where I came, it was such a highly visual role, regardless of how conceptual the thinking may have been. Time passed, I started my own company and at about the same time, the market slowly started to shift. Old roles became – well – very old, and lines started to blur everywhere. We have been referred to as a design studio, a production company and a branding agency and all these roles have been served by a largely unchanged group of people. The big difference is that the visual component in a way has become the least important part today. It's so much more about understanding society, culture and human nature and figure out how to be relevant. For us, a lot of the ground work happens with words, then you have to find a way to emotionally engage people. Today's CD has to be like a world class DJ, because even if a decent DJ can keep people at content with hits, only the best understands and challenge the audience with new experiences do in a way that excites them and keeps them coming back.

Q: Do creative directors today need to be strategic leads too ro can they rely on planners et al?

A: As a CD, your only real task is to be relevant to society, or to a particular sector of society. To some degree, you may be guided by statistics and strategic thinking, but only as a starting point. You have to feel what is right, and dare to gamble on it. You also have to be a great salesman or your most interesting ideas will die. Planners and strategy are important tools to get new thinking out in the mainstream. Even if the creative idea is influenced by strategy, it has to raise above it and be so much more daring than a chart could ever be.

Q: Is “engagement” just a buzzword or does it really mean something? What?

A: The only way you can change someone's mind – or behavioral patterns – is to make them want to change. Only by showing that an idea (or product) matter, you can hope for result. So unless you can engage someone emotionally, you can only expect marginal success.

An old joke comes to mind:
Q:  How many shrinks does it take to change a light bulb?
A:  One – but only if the light bulb wants to change.

Here's a great video of Jakob at TED a year ago or so.

A Unique Digital Event in DC: Interact 2008

Once in a while there is an interesting digital event in DC. We have more than our fair share of social media enthusiasts and experts, digital marketers and user experience affiicionados. But like a lot of us, I am burned out on blogging summits. My interests are about integration, creativity, crosspollination...

Welcome to Interact 2008. September 29th and 30th in DC.

While I will be speaking there, my main reason to attend is to meet some of the very cool eclectic players who will be on site. We have:

• Creatives like Jakob Trollback, Nick Law, David Carson, Hillman Curtis
• Social media thinkers like Kelly Goto, Brian Solis
• Marketers like Andrew Elliot Smith, Rohit Bhargava (okay, I know him)
• Business leaders like Ted Leonsis, Albert Wegner

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of other folks who bring interesting perspectives none of who you would find at a regular digital conference:

• Joanna Champagne from the National Gallery of Art
• Michael Chasen from Blackboard
• Hoofman Radfar from ClearSpring

So, if you are looking to meet some of the top digital thinkers and do-ers in the country, join us in DC. And want a different, thought-provoking event - Register for the event.

And check out the cool blog that Jess3 put together.

How Has Creative Direction Changed: Steve Hayden

I am a Creative Director. Have been for 15 years. While I started in "digital," I didn't start in digital, so-to-speak. I produced TV spots and broadcast design for a decade. Once a CD, I attacked integrated marketing campaigns across mediums - TV, print, radio, out-of-home, all forms of digital. As Greg Johnston, our group CD here at Ogilvy PR says, "it's the 'idea' that matters."

As our 360° Digital Influence team does more and more integrated work with the more traditional advertising teams at Ogilvy, I set out to ask some of the most well known Creative Directors in our ranks how "creative direction" has changed over the last ten years.

I got lucky and was able to corner Steve Hayden, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, and one of the most respected Creative Directors in the business. I didn't expect his answer....

Another good interview with Steve Hayden from Ihaveanidea

Learning from Product Design

I have always been a fan of product design. While I have spent a lot of my professional career in design - graphic design, user experience design, televsion design - I have never worked in traditonal product design. I admire Ideo and have had a chance to work with them via my client Snap-on. I used to follow frog design back in the day. Now I am becoming a fan of Adaptive Path.

Subject to Change is the "Adaptive Path" book written by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba and Todd Wilkens. They cover a lot of their experiences and methods for product and service design. It's a good read. Part of the time I felt they were corroborating what I already believed. Part of the time they demonstrate a clear POV on develop products and services for clients that is insightful and fresh.

Social Media Engagement is like "Product" Design

One reason I focus on product design (I put "product" in quotes because it is the trade term but as you will see in my post, it is a misleading term) is that the discipline shares some best practices with what I do now with social media programs. There are three things in Subject to Change that stand out and are worth mentioning.

Empathy

The Adaptive Path guys (APgs) spend a lot of time talking about best ways - some new, some old - for understanding people. They stress the importance of empathy and they introduce research methods that can lead to spreading empathy for people (who use services and products) throughout the organization. One way they define empathy is "an understanding of a person or group's subjective experience by sharing that experience vicariously." While I know that the APgs are trying to be very professional - and I agree with them - I cannot help but want to shout - "It's not enough for companies to practice empathy; they should love their customers and want to know them personally." Anyhow, that's just the social media nut job in me. But the world would have a lot better products and services if companies made empathy a priority.

Behaviors, Motivations and Meanings

I am a  champion of usable design. Sounds terrible when I think about it. "Usable design" sounds like such a low bar. When I use it, I mean focusing on being of-use and offering a streamlined user experience. It implies focusing on tasks - what does the user want to accomplish. Just the term "user" says it all. APgs champion a new way which is not so new. It stresses understanding behaviors, motivations and meanings beyond simple tasks. They talk about people, not users. Their field research methods support this.  While APgs are suggesting this is an evolution for interactive and product designers, this is one area where I think the best brand marketers have a leg up. Our agency and many of our clients have long had ethnogarphers and held a deep value behind understanding behaviors. We long to understand the emotional drivers of our fellows by knowing what they do and where they find meaning.

Stop Designing "Products"

There is a huge interest amongst marketers to think about traditional products like services. In APgs case, they use examples like the iPod/ITunes service and the early Kodak film system (camera + development services). Any company ought to be looking at how to expand their view of their product to a potential service. That will be more difficult for simple consumer packaged goods (i.e. toilet paper). But with digital marketing and social media many, if not any, brands can think about being "of-service" in their marketing of their products. Listen to what your customers are saying and observe what they are doing. Find some way that you can enhance their lives that stems from the barnd. If you make Tupperware, help potluck supper enthusiasts. If you make computers for students offer people a companion program from Stephen Covey. If you offer a weight loss product, build your customers a way to track and reward their progress.And build a community of customers who add value to the overall customer experience. Spend more energy on that than on old-school advertising.   In short - design services not products; and market products likee services.

You should pick up Subject to Change. And you could do worse than to start thinking like a "product" designer.

Social Media Visualizations

I have become a quick fan of MITs Technology Review. Not sure why I am just paying attention now, but I picked it up a few months back in an airport and rediscovered a great pub (nicely designed to thanks to Art Director Lee Caulfield).

Erica Naone has a great article in the April edition about different schemes for social media visualizations. As a Creative Director, information design has been a long-time love. Now, with digital data, we are seeing interesting approaches to creating pictures of the abstract dynamic of social connectedness. Tools like Visible Technologies help us understand the network path of ideas across bloggers by showing graphics - bubbles, lines, connections.

New Visualizations
Two visual schemes that stand out to me include the work of Mathew Hurst at Microsoft's Live Labs ( I am a regular reader of his Datamining blog)  and the Comment Flow visualization from Dietmar Offenhuber and Judith Donath at MIT Media Labs. The Live Labs work demonstrates the clustering we all sense exists amongst blogs. The image below shows even more centralization than I would have guessed. Is it a 'blogosphere' or a 'blogoclump'?

Comment Flow displays that wonderful mosaic of pics and favicons connected in hubs of comments around core posts or conversations.

On the MIT site, Dietmar describes it as such:

"We have designed and implemented a flexible tool for the content driven exploration and visualisation of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout consisting of nodes (profiles) and edges (friend-links), our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of the messages into account."

They have a movie (64Mb) and an application file for download (26Mb) here - could be interesting.

It reminds me of the display of the Vizster project that Danah Boyd had a hand in.

   So where is all thi sgoing? These research-based and somewhat academic models must become the tools for us marketers tomorrow. If we want to track, demonstrate and prove the flow of WOM and the influence of person X over person Y in a particular conversation, having visual displays of the network and the spread of an idea will be very compelling.

As marketers, we live in a world of 'dashboards' that try to make complex data around campaign performance easy to get quickly and to provide meaning if not insight that can be acted upon. 

Can Crowdsourcing Lead to Commoditization?

In general, I am a big fan of crowdsourcing - asking a large group to come up with a solution to a problem. Some of the best examples tap into the collective intelligence to come up with new ideas that go beyond what a smaller, less culturally diverse group might do (i.e. in-house R&D).

But there is a difference in sourcing ideas and sourcing products. Here's an interesting example of crowdsourcing ideas:

CambrianHouse - people submit ideas for products, solutions and businesses and like Threadless, users can vote on them 1-5 and "I'd buy that". I just voted on Teun's idea which is really a simple one that I share which calls for something to integrate our various social network profiles. Others include creating a kid's shoe exchange (that is a no-brainer and possibly already exists at a local level like in our local thrift store - still a good idea). CambrianHouse has big ambitions. More than an idea exchange, you will also be able to source talent and funding. They even have an inspirational message platform:

"How would you unleash the ideas, talents, and entrepreneurial drive of 6 billion people? Bring them together under one roof."

The devil is in the details. The interface has a great design. It maintains overall simplicity while using some hand-made-looking fonts which humanizes the overall experience.

But can it lead to destructive commoditization?

Yes. I remember in the, gulp, eighties doing work for MTV. They would routinely run contests for independent animators to create broadcast graphics for on-air use. My company created motion graphics professionally. It was common knowledge that MTV not only did this based upon some of the best impulses of crowdsourcing but also to get animation at pennies of the cost. In that case, the winners who recieved a small cash prize had the glory of being on TV. And the creative was judged by MTV-level creative directors so it was generally interesting stuff (even if it did undermine my business).

Now, the design crowdsourcing phenomena comes to Web2.0.

SitePoint - an online crowdsourcing exchange. Designers around the globe can submit work to win a prize. The designer retains intellectual property rights unless they win in which case they transfer it over to the company seeking the design service. Can you feel the collective membership of the AIGA just groaning? (I was/am a member - need to re-activate my membership....).

What's the problem, you ask? Look at the prizes: $100 - $1000. For what? Nothing less than a full identity package, logo development, oh and throw in 2 Web pages with that. DESIGN SHOULD NOT BE COMMODITIZED! If ever there was a case of YGWYPF (You Get What You Pay For) this is it. This is nothing more than a commodity marketplace for outsourcing at the cheapest price. This will not spur innovation or even good design. It will spur the growth of Photoshop amateurs creating crap. The one thing I will give Sitepoint is their own caveat staqted pretty clearly:

"What is this service not so good for?
The Design Contests are not suitable for people who expect to walk away with the perfect design every time. Sure, you might get lucky, but often what happens is you come away with a good design that needs a few finishing touches.
Once you've picked the design you like best and awarded the prize money, you can either work with the winning designer to finish the design off to your total satisfaction, or take it to someone else to perfect."

Still their claim is that you can get design for hundreds of dollars versus thousands of dollars. That presumes you will get the same quality of thinking and execution. Not likely. It also implies that design is overpriced in the "general" market. If anything I believe it is underpriced due to the design community's constant struggle drawing the line between design and business ROI (Yes, there are many that do - Target, Dyson, W Hotels, etc...).

Hint: Just look at SitePoint's site design, especially compared to CambrianHouse. I have no squabbles with it's simplicity, but they clearly have no appreciation for any significant level of design beyond the most base level of function-driven design.

The problem lies in the 3 places:

• There is a big difference between idea crowdsourcing and service marketplace. Both are good and interesting. Service marketplaces will lead to commoditization unless there are allowances for quality providers to rise within the marketplace (i.e. like the ability to rate the quality of the eBay seller). Services that are idea-driven like design run the risk of being commoditized in an environment that pushes for the lowest cost.

• The definition of crowdsourcing favors the marketplace version. Look at Wikipedia/crowdsourcing:
  • "a business model in which a company or institution takes a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet. The work is compensated with little or no pay in most cases. However, in a few examples the labor is well-compensated. In almost every case crowdsourcing relies on amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D.^[1]."

• We need more of a common understanding of what intellectual property is worth in a crowdsourcing scenario. If I submit ideas that are incorporated in a product, how should I be compensated? There are examples all over the map on this one. Dell's Ideastorm solicits a wide range of ideas which really represent the wishes of their customers or prospective customers. No one is compensated for their suggestions. Innocentive, on the other hand has bounties in the $10K - $1m range for science-based solutions.   

Questions: 

I realize I am covering a lot of ground here. From crowdsourcing ideas to service marketplaces to co-creation. As these great experiments get played out on the Internet, what are the lessons-learned about what works best? Is there one definition of crowdsourcing and if so, is it more like the one at the head of this post or more like Wikipedia's?

David Belman Wants Emotion

David Belman, one of the founders of Three Spot addressed the WWWW Art Director's Club conference and took us on a 10-year tour from 1997 -2007 of Web design.

And he's not happy about where we have ended up.

• Time spent online has dropped.
• The "character" of sites has flattened if not evaporated.
• We have given up on developing a branded user experience...

David is on to something. I just don't think that we have left the branded user experience completely behind. RGA was also at the podium later and shared their ubiquitous Nike work which is a best-practice branded user experience. There is a tremendous amount of sameness out there.

David ran Seth Godin's one second test: can we recognize brands in :01? It works when we look at an iPod but not so much when we look at Web sites. He cleverly compared NYTimes.com. the Washington Post.com and Miami Herald without their mastheads - hard to distinguish them apart.

David feels we have lost something in our discipline over the years - the impact and emotion. Navigation has become generic. Thousands of pages of content becomes an overwhelming vat of stuff.

43% of users start at the search field within a site. Is this a barometer of some type of failure in design?

Blogs miss out on creating a visual, emotional experience. His point is really about visual design but I think he's wrong. I would argue that the templatization of blogs is a small price to pay for the deomocratization of the publishing platform. And if David wants emotion, just read Birdie Jaworksi's post on her Star Trek convention with her son. I cried.

Still, David's recommendations are real and smart:

1. Make a promise and then keep it
2. Use what you've got (Use your brand equity like Tony the Tiger or VW cars)
3. Have a heart: Connect
4. User directed doesn't equal direction less: people wnat a narrative line
5. Delivering data doesn't equal delivering brand
6. Just because they did it, doesn't mean you should
7. Create an opportunity for users to have an emotional experience with someone they know

I am a big fan of Three Spot.

Curbly - DIY

Curbly.com is a bit of a community for DIYers. There are great discoveries and ideas from community members about furniture sources, make-it-cheap ideas, and more. In their words:

"Curbly is a Web community for people who love where they live. By connecting with others, sharing your experiences, participating in feel-good contests, and getting advice from experts, Curbly is the best community to help you feel good about your place."

Currently there seem to be 419 registered members. Certainly more readers on top of this. The service hasn't been around too long  - judging by when founders Ben and Bruno "joined" - I would say a month or so. I love the overall design and the openness of it. It's a great simple way to bring the young DIY crowd together.

The image above is a wall art recommendation that is actually pretty cool for the apartment set.