theIdeaStudio (Customer Crossroads)

Brand Lecturing is Out - Co-Creation, Sharing, Architecture of Participation is In

I've been documenting examples of a trend recently that I call Content Co-Creation.  Turns out other people have spotted this too, and have written some interesting posts on the topic:

Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users calls it sharing:

Sharing knowledge, lessons learned, product reviews, tips and tricks, links/bookmarks, and even photos

She points to Tim O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0, where he labels this the architecture of participation:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

Co-Creation in Action

Here's a good example of what I'm talking about.  The Lance Armstrong Foundation has created a donation site where you can upload a photo of someone who has battled cancer into a mosaic.  You can be part of the creation of something special that a lot of people will see.  It's much more personal and more connected than simply sending a cheque in.  As the copy on the site says, "we want you to be part of it".  [Thanks to Jennifer Rice for bringing this to my attention]

My Take
Tremendous energy is going into anything and everything that lets people become part of the conversation. If your brand is only doing one-way communication, you are missing out on an opportunity to become part of a richer dialogue with your customers.
Risky? Maybe.  But if you want to differentiate -- and you do want that -- you can't wait until everyone else is doing it to get started. 

Let's Try a Little Co-Creation: Send in Examples
Seen a good example of this trend?  Please post ideas, links, thoughts...

Technorati Tags: content co-creation, marketing trends, Lance Armstrong, Cancer Mosaic

Demographics: What's Happening to 50+

Until recently, the only marketers interested in the over 50 crowd were in either the wrinkle cream or the cruise lines business. That's all about to change. 

There is increasing evidence that 50+ are not looking to retire anytime soon. 

Several services for job seekers over 50 have sprung up.  The latest I heard about is here: Prime50, which was recently purchased .  Here's what Prime 50 said in a recent press release:

Prime50 was formed after extensive research indicated a looming shortage of skilled people in the workforce as a consequence of the steep decline in the birth rate since 1965...

It became all too apparent that employers were laboring under many myths and false perceptions about this age group. Many employers' assumptions about the 50+ age group were inaccurate.

...research also indentified a number of employers who, tired of constantly training replacements for job-hopping younger workers, were actually turning specifically to the mature workforce. What these employers have discovered is that, in addition to bringing a wealth of experience, the 50+ tend to stay on the job significantly longer.

Putnam Investments, an investment management firm, surveyed 1,726 US retirees in December 2005, for their "Working Retired" study, and had some pretty interesting findings:

• 7 million of the recently retired had returned to work after an average of 1.5 years in retirement
• They estimated that about 1/3 of retirees are now working
• Just over half work part time, just over a third work full time, and the rest are actively seeking work
• Their average household income is high, at $87,000.
• Most still have a mortgage (60%) which is less than half paid off
• Two-thirds wanted to go back to work to stay happy, healthy and mentally active, and to enjoy life; the other one-third had to go back because they did not have sufficient savings to retire.
• They are working in jobs requiring similar skill levels to what they had before retiring
• Those in the survey had an average age of 61.

The Big Opportunity

There is a big opportunity for financial services firms here, as William T. Connolly, head of retail management at Putnam pointed out:

"Their retirement investing needs will be different from any group that has come before them. Our industry must recalibrate its planning assumptions for advising these investors, as well as the 75 million Boomers that come after them"

While people are still working, they are still spending money on everything from clothes to cars. 

The prize will go to companies that start finding opportunities in the 50+ crowd by creating products and services that meet their unique needs, and starting to understand the segments that form this large and growing group of people. 

Technorati Tags: retirement, marketing to 50+, how retirement is changing, financial planning 50+, financial services for over fifty, over fifty, marketing over fifty, Putnam Working in Retirement, Prime50

The Indie Virus: What will those bloggers think of next?

The Indie Virus is an experiment in linking cooked up by Chris Pearson at Pearsonified. [I have a lot of links to the Indie Virus here... hint--> they don't all go to the same place.]

I found out about it from the ICE blog, a very good customer experience blog, that talked about The Indie Virus.  And I'm exceptionally grateful for having finally received a clear explanation of the difference between tags and Typepad keywords, as well as finding this excellent tag generator!

Another guy who would appreciate The Indie Virus is Karl Long, who has some stellar material from time to time.  Plus, Karl agrees with me about the co-creation trend, and it's always nice to know a kindred spirit.

Grant McCracken, generally gifted in the brainfood department, might be interested in The Indie Virus, as he was recently deconstructing Web 2.0. He has a lot of subscribers, and doesn't really need my help, but what the heck, eh?  

Dave Pollard, at How to Save the World, needs the help of The Indie Virus even less, but his material is so consistently worth reading that I must suggest a visit.

Ethan Johnson would likely appreciate The Indie Virus, if only for the potential to promote his interesting new online magazine, Vision Monthly. [I was very chuffed to be asked to contribute.]

You may be getting suspicious about these wierd links with the same name, and you've guessed right. The Indie Virus is really a devious plan to raise the rankings and awareness levels of lesser known blogs, such as this one.  However, each of the links takes you to a post worth a look, and all the authors are worth a visit.  The experiment seems to have worked -- you can check out Chris's statistics tracking on the link.

This kind of thing will eventually become just so much more link-spam, but it's fun while it lasts.  Happy Friday!  And if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, like me, yaay Spring!

Technorati Tags: The Indie Virus, Karl Long, Chris Pearson, ICE blog, Dave Pollard, content co-creation trend, Vision Monthly

Things That Don't Work: Who's Got the Time??

We don't have the time to deal with things that don't work.  You want to create a great customer experience...?  Then make sure it works right the first time, or gets fixed with blinding ease.  If you won't do this, expect erosion of your brand. 

Case in point: another continuing saga of my Palm TX.

Against the advice of my tech support guy, I bought a Palm. That was in December.  It is now March, and it's not working again. Palm offered me telephone support more than a week ago.  And I just haven't had the time.

Because I know I'm going to need A LOT of time for this.  Uninstall, reinstall, cold start, wipe memory, on and on and on.  You know the drill.  We've all been there, if not with this device, then with some other piece of technology.

A rational analysis would suggest junking the $500 device and moving on. Because I've spent a few thousand dollars of my time trying to get this to work. 

The point here is that ALL of your customers and clients have this problem. No-one has disposable time that they want to spend fixing things that have gone wrong.  We want high, high, high quality and we expect to get it.  And if we don't get it from you on this product, why do you think we would want to try again on another, future, better product? 

There is no such thing as FREE time.

How Many is Too Many? Optimum Workgroup Size

A partner of a very successful urban planning firm mentioned to me last week that the firm is being challenged by growth.  Growing the firm up to 200 people went extremely well.  But the latest addition of another dozen or so people has created cracks in the communication environment. 

His comment put me in mind of a similar discussion with Glen Mehltretter of PeopleFit and my colleague Herb Koplowitz recently. We were talking about how large a working group can be before things don't work well anymore.   It turns out that military organizations have worked on this problem a lot over hundreds of years. And that most military organizations have very similar sizes of work groups, and have had for centuries. 

In a military organization, you need to be nimble, be in touch, know the strengths and weaknesses of people and be able to mobilize quickly in order to stay alive. If the units are too large, life becomes dangerous; if the units are too small, the commanders will be stepping on each others toes. 

Essentially, you can directly manage as many people as you can keep in touch with and know reasonably well.  If there's relatively little coaching involved, and the work is routine and predictable, that number could be very high -- perhaps as many as fifty or sixty people. 

If there is a lot of interaction, such as with senior professionals like designers or analysts, where the manager also contributes to output, the biggest work group is probably going to be pretty small, maybe 2 or 3 or 5 people. 

Where things get interesting is at the level of the skip-level manager.  This person still needs to basically know everyone who is two levels down.  Maybe not know them well, but they need to recognize them when they bump into them, approve their merit increases and promotions, and generally have some knowledge of the larger team.  Turns out this number is around 250 or 300 people.  With more people than that, it's just too big to handle, and one is better off splitting into two units reporting to a manager one layer up.

So I told the urban planner that they might just have stepped over that magic line in their business.

I really wish I had known this some years ago, when the best advice I heard on this subject was "span of control" and "rule of six".  Turns out this was all started by somebody named V.A.Graicunas in the 1920's.

The point of all this is that you need to trust your judgment, and the judgment of people you work with.  And if you think the call centre is just too big, you're probably right.  It usually isn't life and death, as it is in the military, although it often feels that way.

Resources:
Glenn's company web site is a really great reference source on people management, with a lot of articles on selection and talent pool management.  I just took one of their courses, and it was also very worthwhile.  Regrettably, he's not paying me to say this.

Addendum March 18:

I think I may have been less than clear.  Graicunas (pdf article here) said the optimal maximum is 6 for anyone to manage.  Elliot Jaques and others (pdf here and link here) thought Graicunas was wrong.  In part, this was a result of observing examples in the military (see links above), as well as in business organizations.  When I look through the military structures, however, I see truth in both positions.  I see small work teams coordinated by team leaders who all report to managers one level up. 

And the work teams are hardly ever more than 8 or 10 people, even in the Roman Legion.  One could argue that the work of Legionnaires requires less collaboration -- or perhaps less independent work time -- than the work of programmers, for example. 

At one point in my career, I had four regional sales managers reporting to me, each of whom had about 6 sales reps.  It would have been a much better environment, and significantly less expensive, with no more than 2 regional managers, each with a dozen reps.  Of course, by the time I had figured this out, it was too late, and I was in another organization.   

Blogging for Dollars: Where is Web 2.0 really going?

Online Publishing Insider says "Compensate Citizen Publishers Like People, Not Web Sites" (free sub req'd).  Apparently bloggers who wait tables are acting like actors, telling customers they are waiting for their big break which will happen any day now. 
More from the article:

While blogging is showing profit potential for consultants prospecting for new business and savvy marketers creating customer dialogues, the vast majority of citizen publishers aren’t making enough from their efforts to even pay for their Internet connection. For most, their sole hope for compensation comes through Google AdSense. Contextual advertising is fine as a supplement to other programs, especially as a means of painlessly monetizing remnant or network inventory. But the content on many blogs is worth a lot more than remnant inventory. Citizen publishers who rely on AdSense and similar programs end up grossly undercompensated.

Author Mike May (his blog: www.e-venting.net) suggests that the true value of blog content is the same as freelance writing, and that we should all hold out for more.  If there is anyone getting rich on Google ads and Amazon Associates links, it's not the bloggers, that much is clear. 

Last year at this time, I was part of a panel presentation at AIMS ** about doing online research.  I had just started this blog, and suggested blogging as a future topic to a senior AIMS person, who told me that blogs would not last, it was a passing fad irrelevant to real internet marketers. And it may indeed be. But they just completed an event called "Blogging for Executives".    

The truth is, none of us really know where Web 2.0 is headed, in any specific way. 

But the patterns are there. 

The desire to self-publish has always been there, and it isn't likely to change soon.  Remember zines that were distributed in photocopy form, and then migrated to e-zines and e-mail?  First the world wide web, and now blog software and broadband has made self-publishing easier than ever. 

More recently, blog aggregators have started to pile up blogs in the hope of gaining more leverage and making some serious cash.  If you can't write, try aggregating. 

Bloggers are already complaining about creeping corporatism in the blogoshpere.  Yeah, but who cares, really?  One of the joys of the new technology is that as fast as corporations colonize it, we all reach out for something new.  It's a long tail world.***

Mostly what I think is, I'm glad I'm not a media consultant, because the fragmentation trend, in my view, is frankly unstoppable.  The billboard people may be the ultimate winners, since we all still move around in the physical world at least some of the time.  What Gutenberg started is not stopping any time soon.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

** Association for Internet Marketing and Sales aka AIMS was itself a flag carrier for Web 1.0, starting out life as a no-fees, open source, no rules, volunteer-run, free beer kind of organization.   

*** Chris Anderson at Wired started something big with his original article, the Long Tail.  Now he has a blog on the topic and a book coming out in May 2006. 

Complexity versus Simplicity: It's Time for Simplexity

Simplicity is the watchword of the day, and it's popping up everywhere from advertising to focus groups to corporate mission statements. But we don't want to give up our freedom to choose -- we want options, we want products and services that fit our individual circumstances.   All those choices give us the antithesis of simplicity: they give us complexity. 

So how do we get simplicity without giving up choice?  We need simplicity and complexity together, we need simple complexity.  What we want is SIMPLEXITY. 

The Complexity Issue

People are overwhelmed by the complexity of every day life. We are drowning in choice. Just look at the people standing in any aisle of your local grocery store, you will see them going tharn as they try to choose between offerings that are close, but not the same. 

We are also drowning in information, and there's more every day. Trying to keep up has become a challenge of mythic proportions. 

As electronic components have become cheaper, many products have become bloated with features.  Do the features add value?  Maybe, maybe not.  But they definitely add complexity.

The New Simplicity is Simplexity

We can't just take away all the features. The new simplicity takes complexity and adds design and usability to make things that work better for us.

The Google home page is the flag carrier for Simplexity.  Marissa Mayer at Google, described by Fast Company as the "high priestess of simplicity", describes Google's home page this way:

"Google has the functionality of a really complicated Swiss Army knife, but the home page is our way of approaching it closed. It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it. A lot of our competitors are like a Swiss Army knife open--and that can be intimidating and occasionally harmful." 

Philips Electronics is also on a simplicity mission, that they call Sense and Simplicity.   CEO Rudy Provoost says why:

"All too often we have seen innovation driven by technology for technology's sake...whereas simplicity should be at the heart of the consumer experience. Our research results and consumer insights suggest the public is, in fact, tired. Tired of not being able to record a program on TV...tired of spending hours reading an instruction manual...tired of complexity for its own sake..."

Philips is looking for simplicity through design:

"You may still strive for very advanced solutions, as long as you reduce the effort required to operate them. Or if you have very basic, single-function products, the challenge is to enhance the experience associated with these products."

Apple, of course, has had this in their DNA since the beginning.  And the i-Pod products are the essence of beautifully simple and yet highly functional, easy to use devices.   

Contrast the multitude of buttons and adjustments possible on a typical home music component system with the Bose Wave system.  All controls are on the credit-card sized remote.  Very few adjustments are actually possible, because the system makes most of them automatically.  Just take it out of the box and plug it in.

Design

Good design is at the heart of the Simplexity solution.  Design is about taking what is possible and creating what is good and right and easy and beautiful.   

If you want to find ways to differentiate yourself to your customers, start looking for ways to bring powerful functionality to them in a very simple package.  And let your customers save their grey cells for truly intractable complexity like world peace.

References:
Simplexity is actually a term used in the mathematics of complexity theory. I am hijacking it for the Marketing and Customer Experience world. Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, authors of The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, came up with the term in this context.