Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

How to get to Carnegie Hall

Monday, February 6th, 2012

As the old joke goes, a man carrying a violin case in Manhattan gets stopped by a couple of tourists who ask him how to get to Carnegie Hall. The violinist responds, “Practice.”

So obvious, it’s funny–no one gets to Carnegie Hall without a ton of practice. It is usually the most ‘talented’ performers who practice most diligently. The talent onstage in Carnegie Hall is, as much as anything, a talent for practicing. A love of the hard work and focus that it takes to master one’s craft.

CarnegieHall1Rob McNamara writes in Integral Life about ‘The Necessity of Practice.’ Practice, notes McNamara, is preparation. What we are seeing and hearing onstage at Carnegie Hall is a performance informed by preparation. It is the preparation that elevates and defines the quality of the performance.

Everyone has a Carnegie Hall, a place or ideal they’re trying to get to. A vision for the future. And then, quite often, something happens. We get sidetracked. Distracted. Too busy to practice. We stop off at the Carnegie DELI and call it Carnegie HALL. Our ego tells us we have arrived. That’s when the unproductive patterns–sameness, repetition, redundancy, stagnation, smugness—set in. That’s the point where our performances become cyclical, begin to repeat themselves, and our audiences get bored, and begin wondering why they paid their money.

McNamara defines the act of practicing as ‘Engagement.’ The GameChangers Orchestral Model™ identifies six practices that generate productive outcomes in the world. Engagement is one of the six. The other five are:

Heeding (listening, paying attention, observing actively). In the Orchestral Model™, this practice precedes Engagement. As the social media doyenne, Sally Falkow, (@sallyfalkow) says, “You don’t go right up to people having a conversation at a party or social event and just start talking. First you have to hear what conversation is about, and then can you be part of it, and engage with people in a meaningful way.”

Learning. What is revealed to you as a result of your interactions with others, and with your environment? How does your network inform you? How do you turn learning into solutions? All this takes practice.

Creating. How does what you do make a difference? How does it make you unique? How do channel creativity toward innovation?

Performing. What are your criteria? What is your Carnegie Hall? Is it a seven or eight digit number? A place? A whale of a client? A standard you have set for yourself, or that others have set for you? How does your performance differentiate you?

Deciding. How consistent are you? What values do you represent? How clear and shareable are your decisions? What themes are important to you? Who and what influences your behaviors? If your deciding practices are weak, Big Trouble soon come.

Performing and Deciding are what we call the core practices. If you are not good at these–if you don’t have a clear vision of where you’re going, or if you are indecisive and wishy-washy along the way—the rest of the practices will not matter, because you’ll be too busy zig-zagging toward a mirage, rendering meaningless decisions in service of illusory goals.

So call the whole thing Engagement, yes, definitely! Practice it! Be engaged! Be present! Pay attention! Notice! That’s a good first step. Then refine your practices into the six different areas of the Orchestral Model™, like an athlete working on muscle groups or a musician working through different progressions.

And when call comes from Carnegie Hall, you’ll be ready.

What is a Theme?

Monday, July 11th, 2011

SarahLawrence2Last week GameChangers got hired to conduct a ‘thematic exploration’ of a client’s brand. Most of us, at one time or another in our educational lives, if not our working lives, have had to wrestle with themes. What are they? And, when it comes to business, what purpose do they serve?SarahLawrence6

Themes are Big Ideas. That’s part of it, but only part of it–because ideas can get too big, and, like a balloon so large it cannot be inflated, they will never find their definition, nor serve their purpose.

‘Stardom’ is a Big Idea. So is ‘Food.’ They are not themes. They are un-inflatable balloons, weighted down with so much meaning we can never get them off the ground. What makes a Big Idea buoyant? What gives it definition and gets it off the ground? Explorability.SarahLawrence5

The Big Idea must be Explorable (by at least two people at any one time). When a theme is Explorable, we can map to it. It can help guide us, and give us our bearings. At any given time, we can assess our position with regards to it. Themes, by virtue of their Explorability, suggest action. We can do something about them, through them, with them.SarahLawrence3

‘Reality Show Stardom’ is a theme. ‘Food of Love’ is a theme. (’Love of Food’ is another theme altogether.) When a Big Idea is Explorable, we can tell, and others can tell, objectively, whether we are engaged with the Big Idea or not. If we are studying dance at Sarah Lawrence, we are, in all probability, not exploring the theme of ‘Reality Show Stardom.’ It’s easy, by contrast, to imagine a hundred moves that do explore that theme. If we propose marriage over dinner, we’re sailing in the ‘Food of Love’ balloon. If we’re eating Cheerios and checking the box scores from last night’s game, we’re in a different balloon. Explorability gives Big Idea shape and definition, and carries us into new territory.SarahLawrence4

Which brings us to the business purpose of a theme:

The exploration of a Theme transports us. That, by itself, would be enough to make the exploration of a theme a valuable exercise. The buoyancy inherent in a Big Explorable Idea gives wings to our actions and adds to our sense of purpose. If a theme is strong, rather than get lost in the exploration of an idea,we have the potential to discover ourselves it it.

There’s a second big reason that Themes are important to business and brands: Themes are the glue that bind your brand to your customers. They are common ground that you explore together. Social media are the mechanisms, a garage full of vehicles, so to speak. Themes define the conceptual, physical and virtual territory you and your customers can explore together.

The narrative belongs to the customer. By exploring Themes that are authentic to your brand and relevant to your customers, you increase the probability that your product will play a meaningful role in their lives.

All photos in this post are from http://www.slc.edu/graduate/programs/dance/

All photos in this post are from http://www.slc.edu/graduate/programs/dance/

My Grandmother Was a Witch…

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Back in the Dotcom era, I’d often get asked to speak on panels about this new thing called the Internet.  The moderator’s final question to the panel would always be something like, “Where’s it all going?”  When my turn came, I’d begin with the line:

“My grandmother was a witch…”

It would get everyone’s attention, for sure.  After a beat filled with lots of blinking eyes, I’d explain that my grandmother knew how to dowse for water with the forked limb of a peach tree, and when I was seven or eight years old I’d asked her one day when she was burning trash in the rusty barrel behind her house how she did it, and she said, by way of explanation, “I’m a witch.  Didn’t you know that?”

After she put it like that, I noticed things about her that, to my young and fertile imagination, seemed like total witchcraft:  How her flowers and vegetables grew to enormous sizes–chrysanthemums like volleyballs and corn on the cob as long as your forearm.  How she would talk to her animals, her hens and her cats, and how they’d talk back.  And how the same voice that could chat with cats could throw off the pitch of an entire congregation singing a hymn in church on Sunday.

I’d tell the audience that I had come to believe that what my grandmother knew was just a tiny part of a whole body of folkways and connections to the Earth that must have, at one time, been whole.  I suggested that centuries of science, rationality and organized religion had shattered and scattered this body of knowledge to the ends of the earth, but that it still existed, as little slivers and remnants, like what my grandmother knew.

I said that what I thought would happen is that the people who are the keepers of these little pieces would be able to use the internet to find one another, and re-connect what they know, and reassemble those slivers in beautiful new ways, and that maybe these new ways would be what saves the planet.

I’d get nothing from the audience.  Blank looks.  Crickets.  Maybe one older woman in the audience nodded in understanding, but that was about it.

And then someone  else on the panel would say something like, “I think e-tail is going to be driver for growth in the tech sector in the foreseeable future…” and you could almost hear the audience sigh with relief as the talk got back to terra cognita.

Today, when I get asked to speak about social media, I will sometimes tell this same story, about My Grandmother the Witch.

Today, almost everyone in the audience nods in understanding.

Next chance you get, plant a peach tree or something.  We’re going to need it.DiviningRod1

Social Media Week – Los Angeles

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

SMW3I’m producing, or helping with, four GameChangers events next week as part of Social Media Week in Los Angeles:

1) A two hour GameChangers workshop, ‘The Revolution Will Be Improvised:  Brand Narratives in the Networked World,’ at KCET television studios.  This will be a quick introduction into the fundamentals of improvisation for business communication, and an exploration of how, to be effective, brands must be prepared to improvise their narratives in the social media space.

2) A workshop billed as ‘Communication Trifecta:  Levels of Meaning in Presentations’ at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.  This will be for students at USC who are learning to use new media tools and platforms to help them ‘get their show on the road,’ as my dad used to say.  We’re going to focus on how to give good presentations.  (Hint:  It’s not the presentation, it’s the presenter.)

3) A science communication workshop based on biomimicry–using processes found in nature to produce sustainable designs and business strategies–at the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC.  The workshop continues a program begun by the actor Alan Alda and science journalist K.C. Cole to help scientists improve their communication skills.  Cole, who was mentored by (and has written a book about) Frank Oppenheimer, creator of the Exploratorium in San Francisco, will be co-facilitating with me.  Alda will be viewing segments of the workshop via teleconference from Stony Brook U. in New York.

4)  A program on fan culture hosted by the Cimarron Group that will be moderated by the legendary Henry Jenkins of M.I.T. and USC, who’s like a Professor of Fanthropology.  The program will look at the ways that fan culture affects the marketing of motion pictures.

Only the GameChangers workshop at KCET is open to the public. If you’re in Los Angeles  next week, please plan to attend.  The biomimicry workshop will be streamed live online (follow @socialmediaweek on Twitter for the video link.)   You’ll also want to check out the full schedule of events for Social Media Week. There’s something in it for everyone.  And a lot of it will be streamed live.  You can track it via @socialmediaweek on Twitter, and on the Facebook page and lots of other channels, too.  The new networks have thousands of channels, dontcha know.

Ultimately, all human discourse is social media.  The fact that we have new platforms for doing it doesn’t guarantee we’re going to be any good at it.  For organizations and individuals alike, getting good at social media means getting good at human skills like listening, finding agreement, and synthesizing different points of view into a brand new whole.  That takes improvisation.  And that is why GameChangers is so committed to Social Media Week.  Social media platforms are the stages, and every stage needs its play.

Social Media Week in Los Angeles is being produced by Erick Brownstein and The New Agency.   The event began last year as the brainchild of Toby Daniels and his company, Crowdcentric, in New York City.

Is Social Useless?

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

A response to Spencer Fry of Carbonmade, who recently posted a blog entry entitled: “Down With Social–Social is Immeasurable and a Waste of Time.”

Quantum1ASpencer, I agree to this extent:  The phrase ‘Social Media’ is so amorphous as to be essentially meaningless.  In fact, all media are social.  It’s like saying Wooden Tree, or Feathered Bird.

The most social medium is sexual intimacy, followed (if we’re talking relevance; preceded if we’re talking chronology) by meaningful face-to-face conversations, scaling out from there, and eventually reaching the nebulous netherworld of thoughtless Likes, meaningless Tweets and snarky YouTube comments.  Noise.  Cosmetic data with no emotional or meta resonance.

What’s usually ignored in conversations about Social Media platforms is the Science of Narrative.  Narrative is the force that makes media meaningful.  Narrative may not make the world go round, but it describes for us why and how it does.  It provides context for information that would otherwise appear as random.  The reason social messaging echos and evaporates is that it’s not connecting with a narrative.  (A hashtag or a mention does not a narrative make!)

The most relevant aspect of Social Media will turn out to be the lens it afford us with which to perceive narratives.  We are, I believe, at a stage in the history of narratology that parallels where physics was at the turn of the last century, when the science moved from the Newtonian to the Quantum.

Marketers who use social media as you have described it, as a fashion statement, are doomed to keep firing blanks at a target they cannot see.  They are using Industrial Aged models to engage in a Networked environment.  It’s like trying to split an atom with a pendulum.

Those who use it as a lens on narrative, will be able to direct ‘particles of meaning’ at the quantum narrative made visible by social technologies and capture the massive energy predictably released by these interactions.

Old Spice Gamechange

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

OldSpiceMan1When he was working at Twelve Horses Interactive (now part of One to One Interactive) in Reno in 2007-08, Dean McBeth (@evilspinmeister) participated in some of the very first GameChangers workshops.

Dean has since joined the Wieden+Kennedy Agency in Portland, where he’s a Sr. Community Manager and digital strategist for the Old Spice brand, and one of the principal architects of the currently-raging ‘Old Spice Guy‘ social media campaign.  When Dean and I chat, as we did, by phone, this morning, the subject of improvisation in business is never far away.  It’s always gratifying to hear how the learning Dean took away from GameChangers has blossomed into marketplace performance for him and his clients, never more so than with the Old Spice online campaign.

I ask him about the genesis of the campaign.

“We already had a ‘pop media darling’ (in Old Spice Guy, played by actor Isaiah Mustafa), and we wanted to amplify the existing asset of the television commercials.  Our global interactive Creative Director, Ian Tait, said, ‘Why don’t we have Old Spice Guy reply to comments on YouTube?’  That was the idea that got us going,” McBeth says  “In terms of digital media, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to YouTube.  The question became, ‘How do we expand to every major community on the web?’”

Dean and his counterpart in W+K’s New York office, Josh Millrod, designed a strategy that involved charting all recent online comments about Old Spice, identifying anyone who mentioned Old Spice in a positive way, and ranking these people in terms of their influence.  The most influential people on the list were combined with ‘regular folks’ who, by comparison, may not have had a ton of Twitter followers or Facebook friends, but whose comments the W+K creative team found humorous or inspiring in some way.

This Influencer List, which eventually totaled “between 30 and 40 people,” according to McBeth, was combined with traditional PR channels, to create a core audience for the first wave of Old Spice Guy videos.

Then, in one shooting day, the W+K team shot personalized videos for everyone on the Influencer List, with each video written and directed as a response to the Influencers’ previous comments about Old Spice. ”We wanted to be talking to people who already had an affinity for the product,”  says McBeth.  “The messages were geared to how they’d commented.  We wanted to give them the biggest yes-and we possibly could.”

The W+K team was disciplined about addressing Old Spice Guy videos only to influencers who were already ‘having the conversation’ and avoiding those who weren’t.  “We knew that nothing could kill the campaign faster than sending a personalized video to someone like a Howard Stern who maybe hadn’t said anything previously about Old Spice.  We could’ve crashed in a hurry,” says McBeth.

At the same time, the W+K team kept an eye on influencers like Stern and Ashton Kutcher, who command big online audiences, and when these high profile players commented on the first wave of Old Spice Guy videos, they became candidates for response videos of their own that were produced in a second wave, also shot in a day.  Kutcher eventually got a video addressed to him, and it’s how Alyssa Milano got to be a player in the Old Spice game.

McBeth calls the videos “strategic smart bombs,” and describes them as “gifts” to their recipients.  Interactions with an already-existing narrative about the Old Spice brand.

Shooting 30 to 40 videos in a single day is about 30 to 40 times the typical output for a top-tier agency like Wieden+Kennedy.  The Old Spice team had to be incredibly nimble.  Scripts had to be written, approved by the client and performed as first drafts. A table full of props on the shooting set gave Mustafa and the creative team opportunities to keep the actor’s performances playful and personal.

McBeth2Wieden+Kennedy’s client for the Old Spice brand, Procter & Gamble, “couldn’t be more pleased,” according to McBeth.  “They see it as a new paradigm for brand marketing.  We should be seeing numbers soon that will show tremendous results for both awareness and sales.”  With the success of the Old Spice Guy campaign, Wieden+Kennedy’s other clients are, naturally, clamoring for viral brand mojo of their own.  One thing is certain, the ability to improvise will be key.

McBeth did not learn until after the campaign had been produced that Millrod, his co-creator in W+K’s New York office, has a hobby.  Improvisational jazz trumpet.   If there had been any question before, this new bit of information finalized the answer for McBeth:

“Improvisation is the single most important factor in the success of the Old Spice Guy campaign.”

The Game is the Frame

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

In a conversation with John Seely Brown and Erick B this past week at a party in Westwood hosted by the Deloitte Center for the Edge, we talked about creating value at the edges of networks, where the flow of information is fiercest.  (The new book, The Power of Pull, co-written by JSB with John Hagel and Lang Davison, explores this subject in depth.  My review to follow.)

JSB asked Erick and me how social networks (Erick’s area of expertise) and improvisation (mine) create value.

I asked rhetorically in return, “Why do pictures have frames?”

The conversation continued for a minute or so and then JSB repeated, “Why do pictures have frames? That’s a good subject for an article!”

So here it is, JSB.  An improviser’s answer to the question, “Why do pictures have frames?”  (Erick B?  You got anything?  Bring it!)

Frames impose discipline. How many times have we all heard the phrase, “Think outside the box”? Scary many.  Over the past ten years, it has succeeded “paradigm shift” as the #1 business cliché.  Worse than a cliché, it’s bullshit, because it implies that a good creative process is not subject to restrictions.  That it’s totally free. Random and unfettered.  A good process, in fact, begins with restrictions.

A sculptor chooses a rock.  The rock is a frame. The sculpture is already in the rock, and it’s the artist’s job to coax it out.  The rock tells the artist what tools to use.  How much time to allocate.  How much force to apply to the coaxing process.  The nature of the rock suggests where the sculpture will eventually live.  The artist can only create within the limitations of the rock, and yet, within those limitations, there is unlimited potential to bring something delightful to life.  The artist uses the frame of the rock to test his or her own limitations to make something of value.  Our limitations are not in the rocks we choose, but in ourselves.

For improvisers, the game is the frame.  The game liberates potential because players know that everything required for a great performance is already in the game, waiting to be discovered.  In terms of business, ‘framing games’  put the emphasis where it belongs, on human potential, and not on a particular system or platform.

ArtFrame1Frames create focus. The eye knows where to go.  The geometry of the frame introduces–to both the artist and the beholder–spatial and temporal relationships.  These relationships between the art and its environment, and between elements of design within the frame, give meaning to what’s inside the frame.   Likewise, the act of framing helps define relationships within networks; and between a network and the business environment.

Frames provide context. Unless the immense amount of communication coursing through a network is given context, it tends to be read as raw data by platform- and metrics-obsessed managers.  Data is not narrative.  Data is not theme.  Data without a framing game to give it context is meaningless, like water without a container.   All it does is evaporate.   The molecules are still there, but its usefulness vanishes into thin air.

Frames invite valuation. Let’s face it, business needs numbers.  The margins must be there.  How much is the time of a employee at the edge, in steady communication with players outside the company’s network,  worth?  Framing games make valuation possible.  (Not easy.  Possible.)

In The Power of Pull, JSB, Hagel and Davison describe ‘shaping strategies’ for networked organization, which are analogous to the framing games described above.

If this has whetted your appetite for the subject of ‘why pictures have frames,’ you can deepdive into this conversation between the renowned academics, David Bordwell and Henry Jenkins, part 3 of a series about framing transmedia narratives.

Are You a Narratologist or a Platformist?

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Untitled-1

Narratologists, as the name implies, obsess over narrative.  What makes a good story (and a story good)?  What are the emotional stakes?  What’s the relationship between characters?  Between text and subtext?  Who are the players?  What roles to they play, and do these roles reveal or conceal their true natures?  What motivates them?  What needs to they seek to fulfill?   How does narrative create dialogue between players and audience?  These are the questions keeping Narratologists awake at night, and earning their keep during the day.

Platformists obsess over apps. How solid is an app?  How does it scale?  What language is it written in (and how many does it speak)?  Who uses it and why?  What is the feature set?  What is the ROI?   What is the social component?  How compatible is it?   What’s the relationship between reliability and flexibility?  What differentiates it from its competitors?  If you can answer these questions for more than five apps, you’ve got a lot of Platformist in you.

AppsShot1Narratologists and Platformists can collaborate with one another, but one cannot be both.  Not at the same time anyway.  We all have to choose.  To help with your decision-making, here are a few things to consider:

Narratives are designed to make sense of the world by distilling information into meaning.  Most platforms are, by contrast, designed to distribute information. ”Information,” Viola Spolin once said, “is a poor form of communication.” Choose.

Narrative is inherently more unique, and therefore scarcer and ultimately more valuable than any platform.  As information gets commoditized across platforms–33.5 billion tweets about brands in 2009 (Forrester),  120 million videos hosted on YouTube with an average of 200,000 more added every day (Yahoo Answers), and 400+ million profiles on Facebook (Business Week)–using narrative as a way of organizing and extracting meaning from information grows more relevant all the time.  Would you rather wrestle with one meaningful narrative, or 33.5 billion mostly meaningless tweets?   Call it while it’s in the air.

Narratologists deal in the relationships between people. Narrative wants to be human.  Wants to engage. Wants to move its audience. Yes, it can be messy and unpredictable, but that’s life.

Platforms, on the other hand, deal in the relationships between people and technology.  Platforming may be more predictable, but it’s antiseptic.  It wants to be germ-free. That’s not life. ‘Sterile’ is most likely not an association you want for your brand.

Maybe what matters most is that narratives are a lot more fun for participants.  They generate energy and emotion, manifest purpose, offer possibilities.  They elevate their audience from the drone of daily life. 

Platforms, from the days of Gutenberg’s first printing press, have always been and will always be a pain in the ass. They spawn frustration and induce headeaches.  We find ourselves chained to them.  It’s the nature of the beast. 

Would you rather entertain the possibility of having fun, or guarantee yourself a certain amount of frustration?   Are you a ‘glass-is-half-full-drink-up’ kind of person, or a ‘this-glass-will-automatically-notify-me-via-SMS-when-its-fill-factor-is-above-50%’ kind of person?  You can only drink from one glass at a time.

Narratives define what platforms cannot.  Narratives last longer than platforms.  Mean more. Engage more deeply. Evolve more quickly.  Earn more money in the long haul.

Choose.

SXSW #7 – SOCIAL MEDIA AND HEALTH CARE

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

GameChangers has a health care client, and because of that I am aware of this panel before my friend Josh Rose, head of digital media for Deutsch Advertising, who’s not attending SXSW this year, sends out a morning tweet asking his network if anyone’s planning to attend the ‘Social Media and Health Care’ discussion. I am grateful to Josh for the extra impetus, though, because this turns out to be my favorite discussion of the conference.  Nothing is resolved, no consensus gained, no conclusions reached.  But the quality of the questions posed, perspectives presented and the passion people bring to the subject are amazing and inspiring.  SXSW Health Care1

People here represent insurance companies, big pharma, start-ups, physician networks, social networks built around various health concerns, and NGOs. There are several physicians in the audience, and one guy, Vik Duggal (www.konstructr.com) from the construction business who makes a remark on which, the way I see it, the entire conversation pivots.  Until Vik speaks, the focus has been on privacy issues.  And then Vik says, “All of these comments about patient privacy and the relationship between employees and employers assume the current model.  I’m in the construction business and I can tell you that everything about it is going to change in the next five years.  What’s true today will not be true in the future.”

It’s like Vik dropped a lit cigarette into a gas tank.  The room erupts in conversation that the moderator soon loses any chance of moderating. I had not planned to say anything, but when the moderator tries to calm things down by saying, “I’ve got to tell you, I’m not optimistic” I shout at him, just to keep things lively, “That’s your choice!”

A young physician from Brooklyn, Jay Parkinson, is launching his own social network, HelloHealth.  He says, “Doctors like patients who come in already educated about what’s wrong with them.  Education and prevention are the best medicines we have.”

Later I tell the story of how, at no cost to me, I healed myself of a case of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV) using Google search and a YouTube video of a treatment known as the Epley Maneuver; and how my accountant had paid over $6,000 to ‘the health care system’ to get healed of the same ailment.  One guy jumps all over this.  “And who would you have blamed if it hadn’t worked?” he asks accusatorily.  “Myself!” I bark back at him over a whole chorus of people chiming in with anecdotes of their own.

At one point near the end of the session, a woman with an autistic child makes the following statement:  “I can tell you that the parents of an autistic child typically know more about autism than the average physician, and in my experience, the average physician welcomes what the parents know.”