Electing a US President (in Plain English)

Common Craft strikes again. Swing thought: planners' job is to make strategic complexity as simple and succint as these guys continually do.

Fallon Brainfood: Communicators Forum @ University of Minnesota Q2

I presented a keynote at last week's Communicators Forum at University of Minnesota and I ran over time before I could answer many of the Question Cards from the audience. Let's keep the dialogue going. Here are more answers to one of the cards (expect a few more posts in coming days):


Q: Many of the examples refer to "selling products" - can you talk about how we might translate this to "selling research"?
Great question. Ironic, too. Because I am, right now, "selling research". Or strategy. Or an odd hybrid, but I digress. My point is, thru all my social media tools, I am working to get insights out of the file cabinet, out of my notepad, out of the presentations for 6 people and never seen again, and into the hands and minds of my living clients/associates/collaborators/students, etc. In this day and age, there is so much data and research that the role of interpreter and guide is more vital than ever. Research matters not if the people who matter don't "get it". Your mission, as researcher, should be to demystify and help them "get it". So be the Virgil of your research. Social media can help you get your research "slippy" and out there and exposed and in the conversations.

How to get your research social? Dramatize your research's effects on people, show us on YouTube what the data means in an engaging way, blog about how it impacts us in ways we never expected, podcast the interviews of those at the frontlines of your research, Delicious your article links to parallel paths of other thinkers in your field. Slideshare your latest thinking, and Flicker the latest charts and graphs. Get it out of the research journals and into the spheres of influence, your peers, your bosses, your financiers, the press, whoevs and wherevs, get the research socialized, man!

The old school approach to research? A mysterious cabal sequesters themselves away and test and think, then come down off the mountain with tablets of new gospel. Well, the new way is

-Open share - you don't own an idea if you insist on hiding it, you own an idea by sharing it. Throughout the research process, tease us with drafts and sketches and updates.
-Open source - in college, collaboration on a test or paper is called "cheating"...but collaboration is the only way to solve problems faster and smarter in this age. Start cheating, and letting others cheat off you which requires
-Open code, make your info stealable, thus it is desirable, thus it is shareable, thus it gets spreadable. Give up a few secrets (charts, graphs, insights, interviews) and let others work on the equation with you and pay you back. Oh, and steal from others, too (just give credit so that person may own their contribution).

Some quickie sites that come to mind for me (while not knowing what form of research you specialize in) of making research engaging and slippy:
http://blog.compete.com/
http://www.wefeelfine.org/index.html
http://twistori.com/
http://www.heynielsen.com/
http://www.trendrr.com/home

Fallon Brainfood: Communicators Forum @ University of Minnesota

I presented a keynote at last week's Communicators Forum and I ran over time before I could answer many of the Question Cards from the audience. Let's keep the dialogue going. Here are some answers to one of the cards (expect a few more posts in coming days):

Q: Give an example of how you control/mitigate negative feedback in social media on behalf of a client.
A: Control is an interesting word. I don't think you can control negative feedback in social media - or rather, you control negative feedback mostly at the service and/or product touchpoint. I.E. Make good products/services, you control most negative feedback. But I am being coy, I guess.

Lemme reframe the question: 'the villagers are angry, they're outside our gates with blog torches, now what the heck do we do?'

Well, negative feedback seeks a response. And the internal audit that should be had in face of any critique is: 'are they right?' If they are right, um, do something about it. If they are wrong, well do something about that. The tension that often sparks a groundswell of negative sentiment across the web is often the fact that absolutely nothing is done (no repair, no acknowledgment) in face of a critique. This lack of any response fuels a revenge mentality.

In my opinion, many negative feedback crises snowball from 2 faults: 1) not responding properly when the problem was small and indeed "controllable" (think Kryptonite Bic Pen Gate), and 2) not making real change or repairs when/if the negative feedback was made (think airlines still haven't changed the system even after years of us complaining).

This quandry always existed (customers complaining and speaking negatively) - the only difference today: customers can make a blog post and expose you to the world and incite a million-man groundswell against you (though really they are only aggregating a million people that already agreed with the negative sentiment). Let's be real, this isn't the complaining customers' fault (control people's sentiment? no.)- it may be the fault of a problem that actually needs to be addressed and/or changed (control your own organization? yes.).

Strategies for managing negative feedback:

-Take It Seriously. Address the negative feedback when it is just one lone caller/blogger/commenter - try to solve his single problem and turn frowns to smiles (a single change just may help you head off millions of the same latent complaint waiting to bubble up). Today, you never know if that lone complainer has a million followers to his blog.

-Use the blogosphere (or any consumer feedback touchpoint) as your early warning system. Track sentiment. Measurement tools abound (see some of my presentations for dozens of examples).

-Talk back. Directly. Blogs have "comments", make yours. Tweet back. YouTube response video back. Email back. yLive back. IM back. Call back. And it won't hurt you to bring some tidy reparation gifts in exchange, but a clear resolve to the problem is probably gift enough for most.

-Consider inviting critics in - stock your advisory panels with haters/lovers who are likely complaining 'cause they actually care deeply about your brand (funny how that works).

-Adopt a process for personal consumer touch that is proactive (think Comcastcares on Twitter). Phone banks wait for complaints to come, can we meet problems earlier up the stream?

-Enable change agents, not just complaint takers. That means the complaint hotline team needs to be reframed. Organize the negative sentiment into monthly reports, DEFINE THE MOB'S PROBLEM, and have MIB agents who can tap the right officer in the company to deal with these problems. And then hold those departments accountable - think Internal Affairs at the Police Department, somebody complains, somebody gets suspended (or at least investigated). If departments are held accountable to complaints, well, they tend to work harder to prevent the problems. Everybody wins.

I won't pretend these are solely "social media" strategies, as they probably make sense in whatever media your customer touches - its simply called listening and responding (or good business, maybe). There may be some efficiencies to doing these via Facebook, or not.

Yeah, I admit that all these suggestions are not easy. But it ain't easy stomping out a raging groundswell of negative sentiment about your brands, either.

BONUS CASE STUDY: Offer your customers the "Marvel No-Prize"! Marvel Comics has the unique problem of juggling multiple comic characters, with multiple writers and complicated story planes. Over the years mistakes happen in the comic character continuum. Fans are avid and engaged keepers of the brand truth and they will write and call Marvel out on any and all story mistakes. In response to every geek writing in to tell Marvel what idiots they are for missing a story mistake, they introduced the Marvel No-Prize. Marvel No-Prize is the award given to the keen fan who not only points out a mistake BUT ALSO SOLVES HOW THIS IS NOT A MISTAKE AFTERALL (thru some mental jujitsu and back issue research).


A couple things are happening in this model: a) hater energy is converted into solver energy, b) only solvers are recognized in the letters pages of the comics and complaints are "controlled", c) the crowd is tapped on behalf of the brands to co-create and look for holes then patch them up. If you buy my assertion that most haters are secretly your lovers who care deeply about your brand, then the Marvel No-Prize metaphor may work for you, give the haters a paddle in the boat and a way to contribute answers for you, put 'em to work! *The actual Marvel No-Prize that you receive is a heavily branded empty envelope, and your feature in the comic book letters page. Which further proves the point: recognition and credit is half their goal.

Live Web in Plain English (as Advertisement)

Common Craft strikes again, this time for the new Google Docs app - yet another smart play at making Google your dashboard for digital living (Facebook is aiming at becoming your dashboard for social life).



*Google Docs don't work for Safari...so, ya'll lemme know how it's workin'.

Ignorance of Crowds, too

Murray and I are in an ongoing tug of war about the Wisdom/Ignorance of Crowds. Found this interesting counterpoint (Murray's side) at Strategy+Business magazine about the limits of peer production and some case examples. And to the question of rightful "creators" in a participatory/UGC environment, the conclusions drawn in this article helps guide us.

Some excerpts:

The bottom line is that peer production has valuable but limited applications. It can be a powerful tool, but it is no panacea. It’s a great way to find and fix problems, to collect and categorize information, or to perform any other time-consuming task that can be sped up by having lots of people with diverse perspectives working in parallel. It can also have the important added benefit of engaging customers in your innovation process, which not only allows their insights to be harnessed but also may increase their loyalty to your company.

-First, peer production works best with routine or narrowly defined tasks that can be pursued simultaneously by a big crowd of people. It is not well suited to a job that requires a lot of coordination among the participants. If members of a large, informal group had to coordinate their efforts closely, their work would quickly bog down in complexity. The crowd’s size and diversity would turn from a strength to a weakness, and the speed advantage would be lost.

-Second, because it requires so many “eyeballs,” open source works best when the labor is donated or partially subsidized. If Linus Torvalds had had to compensate all his “eyeballs,” he would have gone broke long ago.

-Third, and most important, the open source model — when it works effectively — is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be. Linux has been successful not just because so many people have been involved, but because the crowd’s work has been filtered through a central authority who holds supreme power as a synthesizer and decision maker.

But if peer production is a good way to mine the raw material for innovation, it doesn’t seem well suited to shaping that material into a final product. That’s a task that is still best done in the closed quarters of a cathedral, where a relatively small and formally organized group of talented professionals can collaborate closely in perfecting the fit and finish of a product. Involving a crowd in this work won’t speed it up; it will just bring delays and confusion.

via Strategy+Business Magazine

Live Web In Plain English

The Common Craft Show is a series of short explanatory videos by Lee and Sachi LeFever. Their goal is to fight complexity with simple tools and plain language.

Mass Interactive: Funny Or Die

Funny Or Die is a comedy video site containing both professional content from big name talent and user-generated content (think YouTube for funny). Will Ferrell and Adam McKay are behind what could be considered a farm system for discovering talent for their company, Gary Sanchez Productions.

Trendcentral notes that although the site is still in beta, "it has already become one of the fastest growing content-based websites in history so far (faster than YouTube)".

The first video, The Landlord, has already garned over 2 million views (to date) in only a few days of going live.

*"IN BETA" IS RIGHT...half the embeddable links don't work, and it don't xfer to my Vod:Pod...hope IT at Funny or Die works it out. Fast. Cuz tech glitches just ain't funny.