Category archives: Mass Collaboration
From Social Media to Social Production in 2012 Elections
Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Saturday, 18 June 2011
Picture: Gaming Revolution design by Sean Mort on Threadless (vote to bring it back).
In his 2008 election campaign, President Obama showed what can be achieved with Social Media. As if commanded by Joe Jaffe, he joined the conversation from initiating to responding, from simple status updates to slick videos. The influence on Social Media Marketing has been so profound that the Obama Campaign might be a leading cause of Wind Tunnel Marketing in Social Media Marketing – - strikingly similar tactics used across to boost conversation and “fan count”, the new metric to stand alongside the “website hits” of yesterweb.
Looking a little closer at 2008, there were signs this wasn’t only about Social Media, but Social Production. In particular, within the race for the Democratic nomination in Texas, Obama hinted at what happens when you get beyond conversation and build a new type of “Outside Organization”.
Yes, Obama was using Facebook, Twitter and e-mail to build awareness and recruit volunteers, but he was using tools like his MyBO website to co-ordinate volunteers and enable them to co-operate. As Technology Review described “In Texas, MyBO also gave the Obama team the instant capacity to wage fully networked campaign warfare.” As the head of the Clinton campaign conceded when they understood what was being organized on MyBO:
“I remember saying, ‘Game, match–it’s over.”
Social Production lessons for the 2012 Election
On June 1 2011, Techcrunch reported that the CTO of Threadless would be joining the 2012 Obama campaign. We believe this represents a shift to Social Production – building the tools and organization necessary to enable large groups of people to work with and on behalf of the Obama campaign, in the same way that Threadless has learned to work with their community to create, market and sell happiness-making t-shirts.
Threadless is no Social Media slouch with over 1.6 million Twitter followers or 300,000 Facebook fans. However much of the value creation is being done by a only a few thousand people (based on our estimates from the 6% of “addicts” according to Quantcast) using a custom platform, not Facebook or Twitter.
How do you build an organization that can depend on people that are not fulltime employees to generate a big chunk of the value that your organization creates? Threadless knows and they are joined by a small number of organizations who have figured this out.
From getting fans to creating value with fans
In a recent report, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) described the shifting focus from conversation to generating value across the organization – Re-envisioning customer value – Opening the floodgates of new potential. They highlight a number of successes across different functional business areas:
+ New Products: Today P&G get 50% of innovation from outside the organization
+ Product Development: Intuit works with 25,000 to get ongoing feedback
+ Service and Support: British mobile phone company, GiffGaff has its customers responding to 50% 99% of the support questions – more on that below.
Building new organizations using Social Production
GiffGaff provides an important example of what happens as organizations shift focus from Social Media to Social Production. The Giffgaff tag line:
“the mobile network run by you”.
“The company’s customer support community has over 200,000 100,000 users and delivers three million 5.5 million page views per month as of June 2011. At least 50 99% of queries are answered by other customers and 95% are answered in less than one hour. The average response time on the companies Help boards is less than a minute and a half. “
How might Obama use Social Production in 2012?
Creating conversation is one thing – designing organizations is something else altogether, but as the EIU examples show, Obama has many options to change how campaigns are organized and operated. From collecting better intelligence to focusing volunteers on critical geographies, we expect to see his campaign build on the experience in Texas in 2008.
In a likely close election campaign where votes in specific geographies really matter, changing the economics of these essential efforts will shift the game, enabling Obama to use resources more efficiently, with more agility than his opponents. While we cant predict the outcome of the election, we expect this to cause some WTFness among traditional campaign organizers.
Unfortunately we will have to wait a while to see how the Obama campaign will use Social Production. At a minimum the t-shirts will be awesome and in the meanwhile we can look forward to some masterful Social Media as Obama begins tweeting again from @barackobama.
Posted in: Leadership, Mass Collaboration, Open Innovation, Social Media, Social Production | Tagged: EIU, Giffgaff, Intuit, Obama, P&G, Threadless | No Comments
Building a better Tomorrowland
Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Saturday, 1 January 2011
We wish you a happy, healthy 2020.
So there’s lots to do in 2011, to make this happen.
This was brought sharply into focus on our holiday trip to Disney’s Magic Kingdom.
The centerpiece of Tomorrowland is mini-speedway of fun to drive, CO2 spewing cars. This contrasts with the rather slow, not-particularly-funly-named, environmentally responsible, Peoplemover.
Shouldn’t we be asking for sustainability and fun? Maybe some Tesla-inspired electrics on the Tomorrowland circuit?
But there was hope in Tomorrowland – just ask Mike Wazowski (with one eye). For years Monsters Inc. was using “scream fuel”, when it turns out that fuel sourced from laughs provides a far more efficient source (along with much much better monster-human relations).
We know the Monsters Inc. experience is not unique – we just have to ask the right questions and challenge assumptions.
We’ve been inspired by the abundant creativity and talent we’ve seen in 2010 from participants in Social Production challenges we’ve helped create, like The Betacup and Life Edited.
Hope you’ll join us in building a better Tomorrowland in 2011. Cheers!
[photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/expressmonorail/]
Posted in: Mass Collaboration, Open Innovation, Social Production | Tagged: | No Comments
Forage like meerkats (for creative challenges)
Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Wednesday, 14 July 2010
Meerkats are pretty good at foraging for food.
Why is this important?
We trying to be good at foraging for great creative challenges.
This is why we created asmbl.us with mr.peter (he is also from South Africa, so he feels strongly about showing the greatness of Meerkat-inspired foraging).
We’re making it easier to find the best creative challenges.
And we’ll also use the data to research and understand the how the best challenges work.
Take a look at asmbl.us and let us know what you think.
Update: like the Meerkats we aspire to be, we had a sense that things were about to get really interesting. GE just launched the largest open innovation challenge worth over $200 million!
Posted in: Mass Collaboration, Social Production | Tagged: | No Comments
the betacup – how are we doing so far?
Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Saturday, 10 April 2010
How are we doing after 1 week?
+ 65 ideas
+ over 300 comments
+ almost 30,000 views of ideas
+ almost 1,000 registrations to submit ideas
In addition, the contest has good press and is the subject of steady twitter conversation all of which is helping to move the numbers above.
But how good are the ideas?
Here are some good examples:
+ new cups – some are created from existing waste materials, some while you wait and others are designed to disappear when not in use (while also checking into foursquare)
+ new recycling or reuse options – cups can be used to distribute seed or if we had more ways to collect used reusable mugs, perhaps more people could use them.
+ new behavior – these ideas explore ways to encourage behavior to reduce or eliminate the use of paper cups.
I personally believe this last category is where the best solutions will be found (I’m not a juror, but I will be voting with everyone else for the community prizes).
One of the big changes in recycling is the cost of tracking. For example barcode scanners are ubiquitous, so barcodes can be used to track and reward reuse. In fact the cup (or the lid) can become the more valuable kind of plastic (the kind you buy stuff with).
Going one step further, loyalty card programs result in interesting data for segmenting customers for selling more stuff, but they can also be used to cause better behavior.
Beyond the ideas, we’re excited to see how the process unfolds
Because submissions are public some interesting things are happening.
+ comments – feedback is already resulting in iterations, so we think some of the submitters are benefitting and enjoying the feedback
+ teaming up – it has happend once already and there seem to be some discussions already (this is how the netflix prize was won, so this is interesting, for sure).
+ juror expert feedback – we have already seen some of the jurors weigh in with their particular expertise, so we’re looking forward to seeing how this helps submitters to identify and address prospective issues with their submissions.
We’ve just started, so why not submit an idea or encourage other people to check out the betacup challenge.
Posted in: Mass Collaboration | Tagged: betacup, jovoto, starbucks | No Comments
Zipcar needs community centered design, not just user centered design
Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Wednesday, 9 September 2009
We have been Zipcar fans since we first signed up in 2007. To say that we liked the service, is an understatement. I told more than one person that this was the future of car ownership – that people would migrate to this model as they had moved from ownership to leasing. And we mentioned them a few times in various posts.
Now I am being forced to eat my words, as I enjoy Zipcar less and less. It seems I am not alone, judging by these comments on getsatisfaction and these epinions comments and these on YELP for NYC. And of course, to keep myself honest in realtime, there is this:
myzuk EPIC Zipcar fail! My reservation is starting an hour late because some idiot can’t get from 22nd & L to 19th & M on a grid system? Bullshit.18 minutes ago from web
To be fair, plenty of people love Zipcar. They still have good experiences and they like the idea, as I do, of not owning a car and being part of something that seems to be better for the environment, since most of the city folk dont need our cars waiting around for us all the time, do we?
I still think this is a great idea, but why is it going wrong? And what can ZipCar do to fix it?
Lets start by aligning interests (hint fines dont really align interests)
Zipcar wants people to do a few things:
1. fill up the car with gas
2. keep it clean
3. return on time
There are some other things like reporting demage etc, but lets start with these.
Today, most people seem to get the filling up with gas part right.
The big issues seems to be – the cars seem to get dirtier each time we use them. And there seem to be more problems with people returning late.
The current approach are fines. Ok, I understand. That seems like this would align interests – you are late, so you get fined. But what happens to the person who is delayed an hour? (see above tweet).
This is a community, so why not make use of non-financial currencies? They work in most communities.
Why not show me a profile with their ratings?
How many times have they been late?
Did someone report the car dirty after they used it?
In this way, we could weed out the people who dont care. I’m betting it would be a lot more effective for Zipcar, in the long term. In the short term, they would likely see behaviors adjust. People would not rent close to BAD people. Or they wouldnt rent the cars after them. Maybe their rates go up to cover cleaning and “buffer time”.
However in the long run, Zipcar might not see their early, loyal users defect to competitors and they’d likely reinforce the idea that this is not a car rental company but a group of people sharing cars. And I think that will likely give them a huge ecoomic advantage in terms of positive word of mouth and lower maintenance costs, etc. Let the BAD people rent and pay more.
Community Centered Design vs User Centered Design
Zipcar has great tools. The experience of finding and booking a car could hardly be easier. And if you need to update on the go, the mobile apps are good too. Their user centered design is excellent.
But what about the community centered design?
In a recent conversation with Richard White of uservoice.com (he is a happy Zipcar user, I should add), he expanded on the idea of community centered design – the design that improves the experience for the community. Community design is about designing incentives to get the community to behave a certain way. For example, in Richard’s case they use vote limits to force people to make a choice between options when voting for differnet ideas on uservoice. The vote limiting means you have to make choices – you cant support everything. So it makes it easier to see what is important. The end result is that the community benefits overall, even if the individual user might complain that they wanted more votes.
Zipcar can we try a little community centered design? Please.
I’m betting if you get this right, you wont have to go head to head with Hertz Connect, since you’ll have a real community helping you out and they’ll be well, just a rental car company with their traditional, more expensive cost structure. We can help you. Just let us.
Posted in: Mass Collaboration | Tagged: | No Comments