I'm not really a fan of mission statements. Rather than being an exercise in inspiration, looking at an aggregated list of the mission statements of the Fortune 500 companies makes you realise how vague and riddled with corporate-speak many of them are. Mission statements are all too often just that - a statement of intent that is not really brought to life through the culture and daily interactions of the business.
That said, I think it's very important for companies to have defined values that inform their culture, vision, hiring choices and just about everything they do. As Fred Wilson once said:
"Companies are not people. But they are comprised of people. And the people side of the business is harder and way more complicated than building a product is. You have to start with culture, values, and a committment to creating a fantastic workplace. You can't fake these things. They have to come from the top. They are not bullshit. They are everything. There will be things that happen in the course of building a business that will challenge the belief in the leadership and the future of the company. If everyone is a mercenary and there is no shared culture and values, the team will blow apart. But if there is a meaningful culture that the entire team buys into, the team will stick together, double down, and get through those challenging situations."
Some of these articluations of company culture can be very powerful (like the note that greets Apple employees on their first day). In a separate post, Fred mentions the nine things that Twilio (the web and mobile apps telephony business which is a portfolio company of Union Square) have set out as their values (click to enlarge).
One of my favourites, though, is Biz Stone's set of seven assumptions that he says all Twitter employees are asked to pay attention to and embrace. Despite the fact that we know making assumptions isn’t ideal, he says, we do it anyway so if you’re going to make them, make it these:
We don't always know what's going to happen. And that’s OK.
Leave space for the unknown.
There’s a creative answer to every problem.
There are more smart people outside your company than there are inside. Use them.
We will win if we always do the right thing for our users.
The only deal worth doing is a win-win deal.
Your co-workers are smart, and they have good intentions.
This is an image from the Blue Brain project, showing a network of 30 million connections between the 10,000 neurons that make up just one neocortical column. Our brains contain around ten million times this many neurons in total. Manuel Lima (a senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing) uses this as illustration in this wonderful RSA lecture in which he explores the idea of network visualisation as a way of navigating the complexity of our modern world. The RSA have done another lovely Animate film of it below which is worth watching.
One of the ideas that I found most fascinating is how the structures we use for classifying knowledge and mapping our increasingly complex world are shifting away from hierarchical 'tree-like' representations that reflect our desire for control, symmetry, simplicity and balance, towards potentially far more accurate and convincing network representations. Networks are, and perhaps always have been, a fundamentally better way of understanding the 'organised complexity' of the ecosystems which surround us and of which we are a part. Fascinating.
When I talk to clients about getting into a 'digital mindset' I often end up talking about the differences between distributed and destination thinking. Destination thinking is the kind of media approaches that have been with us for many years. We create content, attract (or 'drive') users to that content in order to keep them there for as long as possible, serve advertising at them, or make money from them in some other way. The defining characteristic of destination thinking is that the user has to be on one of our properties in order for us to be able to monetise that relationship. So, to take the example of a traditional media owner, whilst The Daily Telegraph may have multiple channels through which it is delivering its digital content (apps, website, podcasts for example) those channels are still largely owned media assets that requires the user to be in situ.
Distributed thinking on the other hand takes the approach that the relationship might be monetised in many different places, not necessarily your own. Google's Ad Sense network is a great example of classic distributed thinking. Rather than the users just coming to the Google domain, millions of sites around the world have embedded small boxes on their site that use Google algorithms to serve contextually relevant text link advertising against editorial. The relationship is revenue share, so whilst the publisher is deriving additional benefit against the energy and resource they have invested in creating that content, Google are also successfully monetising access, context and relevance. Similarly, we don't need to go to Google to use Google search since it also powers the search functionality on millions of sites around the web.
Distributed thinking can lead to some powerful advantages. The embed functionality on YouTube videos for example, enables the platform to monetise the video content it hosts wherever it is consumed (and that's a lot of places). One of the big paybacks is, of-course, data. Twitter uses data collected from the integration of millions of Twitter follow buttons to recognise patterns in site and content visits that can be used to recommend other accounts to follow. Facebook log-ins and functionality are embedded in countless sites across the web and the Like button positioned against billions of pieces of content, giving Facebook access to a huge wealth of contextual data which it might reapply in multiple ways. Having established this kind of distributed presence, imagine what kind of three dimensional data might be possible if all those Like buttons could spin off other actions and descriptors (such as 'Want', 'Buy', 'Watch', 'Listen to', 'Read'). This might be one way in which Facebook could create a whole new scale and type of intentional marketing of the kind Noah talks about.
Distributed models are often difficult for businesses long based on legacy destination thinking to get their heads around since they start from a completely different place. Whilst the growth in importance of distributed thinking does not mean that destination has no place (that would simply be an example of lazy-endism), I think we'll increasingly see examples of the smart combination of both types of thinking applied to all kinds of marketing and content models.
Let me give you an example. ASOS Marketplace was created a couple of years ago by one of the smartest digital retailers on the web as a platform to facilitate ASOS customers (and new young designers) selling their own clothing to other ASOS customers. I suspect that most retailers would have run a mile before contemplating allowing their customers to buy from each other on their site, perhaps instead of buying from them. ASOS on the other hand, recognise that Marketplace creates a compelling, sticky piece of content that gives users a reason to come back to site again and again, generating plenty of opportunity for them to also shop from new stock. But there's another, very real benefit for ASOS. Whilst much of the action happens back on the ASOS site, Marketplace also provides a platform for a community whose distributed presence reaches out into manyareas of theweb. ASOS marketplace is interesting as a solution for a number of reasons - not least because it was created by an agency, as a long-term platform (rather than a short-term campaign), and it is very much a business solution, not a marketing solution.
When The Guardian launched their Open Platform, they talked about how it was designed to allow people to re-use Guardian content and data for free and weave it "into the fabric of the internet". It's a description I have a lot of time for, but it is the possibilities created when both types of thinking are combined that is so exciting. Or to put it another way, and to borrow another phrase I have a lot of time for, it's about "focused creation, ubiquitous distribution".
The function and role of Product Management is increasingly becoming a really pivotal one in many digitally facing organisations. Having been aware of it's increasing popularity amongst media owner organisations, the growing importance of Product Management into a much broader spectrum of businesses and sectors became clear when I was researching organisational structures and resourcing for Digital Marketing on behalf of the smart folk at Econsultancy late last year. From the subsequent project on The Progression Of Agency Value that I also did for Econsultancy earlier this year, it's clear that there is also some fascinating take-outs here for agencies.
Our paths have crossed a few times, and each time I'm rather fascinated by his views on the rise of Product Management. So I asked Nic if he would answer a few questions on the subject for the readers of this blog:
NP: What is a good pithy description for the role of a Product Manager?
NN: A product manager in the digital space is someone who really owns the whole process of creating and executing products that audiences love. That means everything from the product strategy and vision to the detailed delivery and the ongoing running of that product or service. That ongoing part is crucial – and it is what makes them different from project managers who flit from task to task.
The BBC often talks about a product manager as like a conductor of an orchestra in that they bring everything together; they co-ordinate and inspire; they embody success or failure. I think a football manager is another good analogy. Ultimately they are responsible for results – but there are some difficult characters in the boardroom and on the pitch who need to be managed. They need to be across the big strategic picture but also be across detailed tactics on the training ground – as well as the views of the fans. Ultimately they need to get the best out of the very different skills sets that make up the team.
NP: Why is this role becoming so much more prevalent/important/pivotal?
NN: Everywhere you look the internet has created new competition and threatened long standing traditional businesses. Barriers to entry are falling, audiences can move to a competitor with a click of a mouse. In many cases having great content is no longer enough – it needs to be combined with great experience.
Creating those experiences requires having an understanding of technology, design and content and so you need people who understand all three. Steve Jobs talked about the magic that happens when the creative people and the technologists come together, but he also recognised that it’s very hard to do. That’s why Apple along with many of the other most successful companies in the technology an internet space employ product managers and give them a significant amount of power and control.
NP: What kind of people make good Product Managers? Are they hard to find?
NN: Both IBM and Ideo talk about T Shaped people – those who have may have a detailed understanding of one area but who know enough about the whole picture to be able to collaborate horizontally across disciplines. They’ll normally have a good understanding of technology, design and business needs but typically they’ll also have great communication skills, the ability to translate and synthesise. A great product manager sets the vision for what needs to be built but lets the discipline specialists use their creativity to contribute to that bigger whole.
And yes – given that job specification, it’s a tough ask. Developers can do it, but often don’t have the wider business vision. Marketers, editorial people or strategy people can be great product managers but often don’t have enough understanding to the complexities and discipline required to deliver great products. There are more and more good product managers in the media sector – but a real gap of people at a senior level who can confidently articulate product strategies in the boardroom.
NP: This seems to have been a role that has grown from within media organisations. Do you think it has relevance across a broader spectrum of businesses/sectors?
NN: It’s come from the technology companies more than the media sector – but media companies are increasingly adopting a product led approach because it makes sense as they move to a more complex multiplatform world with multiple touchpoints. They need people with more focus on the audience and the technology.
Most companies and sectors will recognise the need to work more horizontally and the growing importance of digital services and products in what they deliver. They have probably created these kind of hybrid cross-cutting roles themselves –but maybe called the job something different and not given it enough power in the organisation.
NP: What are the potential implications for marketers and ad planners?
NN: Brands are increasingly thinking and behaving like media companies. They need to run products and services and channels – either on their own or working with agencies. Content marketing is going to grow in importance and that’s all about the deployment of these skills in a digital space. It is also about that long-term ongoing commitment to a domain to an audience and to a product – not a one off campaign. Product strategy is going to be a much more important part of marketing success.
Finally, product marketing and communication is a closely related discipline – and in the media industry the interfaces with the digital product manager are critical.
My thanks to Nic for taking the time to answer these questions.
Image credit: I took this photo on my recent trip to Kiev and if my very rusty O-level Russian is to be believed, it says 'products'
I've been playing around with the Tomahawk Music Player. Tomahawk is described by Word Magazine (which is where I first saw mention of it) as a "high-precision one-stop desktop app for millions of tracks from every last corner of the web". It's a pretty good description. Tomahawk runs many sources of music side-by-side, so you can plug it into your Spotify subscription and your iTunes library, but it will also crawl the web to find music wherever it exists (including Soundcloud, YouTube, Grooveshark and many more) and enable you to play it seamlessly regardless of source.
It's been developed by the open source community (people like Richard Jones, who years ago worked on the scrobbling capability that was pioneered on LastFM, have been involved). The smart thing about the service is that since it doesn't host any of the music it plays, it doesn't have to deal with any of the licensing issues that the places it is streaming from do. And it also has some rather neat functionality that enables you to create playlists based on any number of criteria including familiarity, mood, danceability, duration, tempo, and even a measure of the online buzz about an artist or track.
I've been using it a lot, and doing so reminded me of using publishing aggregators such as Zite, Flipboard, News.me, Pocket and Instapaper and the way in which they enable access to a broad range of content without requiring you to visit the source of the content (with Pocket and Instapaper you need to be on the content to initially bookmark it of-course), frequent the publication websites or download their apps.
A couple of weeks ago, the Editor-In-Chief and Publisher of Technology Review wrote a searing piece declaring that (in stark contrast to Chris Anderson's rather silly The Web Is Dead piece from a couple of years ago) the future of publishing and media doesn't lay with applications but with the web. Christopher Mims, a Technology Review staffer, balanced this with an exposition that was slightly antithetical to that set out by his boss, arguing that instead of consuming via walled-garden publishing apps, we're increasingly consuming content through aggregators like those above.
Whilst we may not quite be at the point where aggregators are replacing newspaper and magazine apps, my own experience is that aggregators offer an enhanced user experience due precisely to the fact that they can aggregate content from multiple sources, and also offer unique functionality that curates the most shared stories from my social networks and positions those alongside my Instagram and Google reader feed creating a far more personalised experience. As the Mims' piece points out, aggregators typically offer an excellent reading experience where advertisements are stripped from the content we consume.
Layers of aggregation are another example of just how difficult it is these days to keep any kind of control over access to your content. The lack of monetisation for content accessed via these apps is an issue, but aggregation of content through different means is simply not going to go away anytime soon. So I'm left feeling that the longterm future is more likely to be about embracing it, and exploring ways to make it work better as a business model for both aggregators and publishers.
I wrote about Enrico Dini a couple of years ago. Enrico has developed a 3D printing technology large enough to print buildings. Yes, buildings. It uses sand combined with an inorganic binder to print structures in stone with no human intervention. Constructions which are strong, cheap, environmentally-friendly, and rather amazing.
The technology allows the design of structures that are architecturally complex and so opens up a whole new range of potentiality. There's something very Gaudi-esque about the structures which have been built so far, which is no bad thing at all. Enrico believes that his technology will 'revolutionise the way architectural design is planned, and building constructions are executed', and it's difficult not to see the possibilities. The current focus is on building a version of the printer that can be used on building sites everywhere.
I love the scale of his vision. No mucking about with printing small plastic objects here. Judging from what I've read of his story, it seems to have been an ambition that he has pursued at much cost. And I've read now that a documentary film is being made about his journey. Definitely one to watch out for.
The BBC have just released some interesting research around participation online. The findings (the result of a "large-scale, long-term investigation into how the UK online population participates using digital media today") have raised a little controversy since they seem to indicate that the long-term model or view of participation online, the 1,9,90 rule, is outmoded.
The so-called 1% Rule has been around (as far as I can work out) since 2006 when it was mentioned in a blog post by Ben McConnell of the Church Of The Customer blog who talked about how "small groups of people often turn out to be the principal value creators of a democratized community". Shortly after that, usability expert Jakob Nielsen defined it further, describing the 'participation inequality' apparent in most online communities where the majority of users (90%) are 'lurkers' who don't contribute, a small minority (9%) contribute a little, and an even smaller minority (1%) of users account for almost all the action. Over time, this seems to have morphed into a 'creators' (1% of people create content), 'editors' (9% edit or modify that content), and 'lurkers' (90% view the content without contributing) framework.
The BBC claim that their research (I've embedded a presentation of the research findings below) shows that the number of people actively participating online is significantly higher than 10%, with 77% of the UK online population now active in some way and participation now the norm rather than the exception. The key driver of this, they say, is the rise in 'easy participation' - activities that once required significant effort but are now seamless and every day. 60% of the online population fall into this category. Interestingly, they also found that despite participation becoming much easier, a significant minority (23%) did not participate at all, a passivity not as closely related to digital literacy as some might expect. This leads them to conclude that digital participation is best viewed through the lens of choice, the decisions we make based on who we are rather than what we have, or our level of digital skill.
Shortly after the BBC released these findings, GigaOm weighed in with a post saying that the Beeb had got it all wrong. In claiming that the 1,9,90 rule was outmoded, they said, the BBC were missing the vital point that the 1% rule was "never intended to dictate a single pattern across the entire web: it was a rough guideline for expectations inside any given online community or service." It shouldn't be a surprise that 77% of people participate online, they went on, since people behave in different ways in different places. The fact that people can be highly active and participatory in one community whilst a lurker in another, means that it's perfectly possible for 77% of the online population to be active whilst the 1% rule still holds true for many individual online communities.
I can see their point. But in fairness to the Beeb, the researchers do point out that their 'passive, easy, intense' model shown above is neither a progressive one (ie. people do not progress from being passive to being easy and then intense participators), nor is it a universal one - so you may indeed be intensely active in one facet of your digital life (likely the things you are passionate about), whilst far more passive in others.
This spectrum of behaviour makes a whole bunch of sense. I can quite see from my own patterns of digital participation that I exhibit a personal form of participation inequality across not only different facets of my life and interests, but across different platforms. And I can quite see how the rise of 'easy participation' might have driven a potentially dramatic shift in overall levels of activity. Think about the fact that in 2006, when the 1% rule was first mooted, Facebook was still quite nascent, there was no Twitter, or Tumblr, or Instagram, or Google+. Equally, there was only a handful of open APIs. There was no frictionless sharing, no Google +1 buttons, or Facebook Like buttons next to just about every piece on content online. Given all this change in such a short space of time, it's hardly surpirising that, as the BBC say, participation is now the norm rather than the exception.
So how do we square that with a model of participation inequality where a very small proportion of a specific online community will actively contribute, and which intuitively (for me at least) still feels right? The first point is that the 1% principle was never designed to be a fixed rule - whilst the broad ratios might be similar, it always accounted for the fact that different communities naturally have different levels of active participation. Wikipedia, for example, has around 80,000 active contributors against a monthly user base (based on Comscore) of around 400 million, meaning that the ratio of highly active to passive is a lot less than 1%.
But I wonder if it's also a question of definition. The BBC researchers defined digital participation as "creating and contributing online so others can see". It's a very broad definition encompassing all forms of activity from publishing a blog post to simply clicking a Like button. And as they ackowledge in their model above, there is a big difference between intense and easy forms of participation. Many of the current forms of 'easy participation' that we now take for granted didn't exist when the model was first originated. So perhaps, reflective of the more sophisticated ways in which we participate online now, it is indeed time for a more sophisticated version of 1,9,90. One that acknowledges that whilst a very small proportion of people within a specific community (and maybe it is still around 1%) will be creating content, a slightly larger proportion of people (and maybe it is still around 9%) will be editing or modifying in some way, a larger proportion still will be simply sharing or bookmarking that content. This sharing still counts as active participation, but much of this is activity conducted by people who might once have been categorised as passive 'lurkers'.
A few asides: Forrester's Technographics tool has long made the distinction between different types of participation online; renowned VC Fred Wilson has written before of the 'web/mobile laws of physics' he encounters in many of the successful startups they see whereby 10% of the registered user base or number of downloads (in the case of an app) will use the service each day, rising to 30% each month; and recent Pew research indicates that 'power-users' of Facebook, typically a proportion of around 20%-30%, account for a disproportionate amount of activity but within that there are different power users depending on the activity - one group dominates friending, another dominates ‘liking’ activity, and another dominates photo tagging for example.
So perhaps the Beeb do have a point - whilst participation inequality may still hold true in online communities, maybe it is time we developed a more sophisticated model to take account of the myriad contemporary forms of particpation not only across the whole web, but within the confines of specific communities. Thoughts?
There's some rather lovely work here by Marco Triverio, an interaction designer at IDEO, playing around with (and disrupting) the asynchronous nature of much non-verbal communication over mobile devices. Feel Me experiments with different ways of creating a 'sweet, playful connection with the person on the other side'. I'm quite taken with some of the ideas here, particularly the thought about creating more real-time physical connections through digital means, and the far more inventive ways than we have at our disposal right now to express feeling through non-verbal gestures over digital devices. It certainly makes things like emoticons look awfully clunky.
It can't have been easy for the guys at Scriberia to visualise Cory Doctorow's amazing talk at last weeks Firestarters event. But chief scribe Dan has done a fantastic job at committing to illustration a talk crammed with great metaphors and delivered at some pace. So, as a follow up to thewriteupsof the event, it's worth taking a look. You can view it in its full glory here.
Well, it was run close by Patricia McDonald's strong post on the interest graph and social commerce but in the end, the winner of Post Of The Month was Dan Hon's personal and powerful post: Myself, Quantified. So well done Dan. You get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the Hall Of Fame. Thanks everyone for your nominations and votes - don't forget to bookmark your good reads for nominating next month.
