In 2005, while getting his Masters Degree in Business Finance at Boston University, Patel discovered that information about solar power and equipment was not easy for potential users to come by.  He launched GoGreenSolar solely with the intention of providing useful information to his audience.  When the audience for this information grew, he added an e-commerce component.  By the time he got his graduate degree he was one of the solar industry’s most authoritative voices and had developed a brand that will sell over a million dollars of solar equipment online in 2009.

Patel is quick to point out that he launched GoGreenSolar.com with a) no intention of selling anything on the site;  and b) with full commitment to educating the market (and himself) about solar.

Deep Patel’s number one obligation to his brand (and the move that he ties most closely to its success in the marketplace) is to add information.  “I blog seven days a week,”  he says. “No matter what.”

An ‘Adding Information Strategy’ like this produces all kinds of positive outcomes.

It keeps the brand customer-focused.  There’s no better way to keep an audience engaged in your performance than telling them something they didn’t know.

It’s low-overhead.  Adding information costs less than just about anything else you can boost a brand’s performance in the marketplace.

Adding information also keeps the brand narrative fresh.   It is an evergreen move.  The currency of the information added, a relatively easy standard to achieve in a fast-growing industry like solar, ensures that the brand  is ‘alive’ in the minds of its audience.

It expresses confidence.  In an emerging field like solar energy, there’s naturally a lot of uncertainty and ignorance in the marketplace that can be exploited by ‘first in’ players.  Because its strategy is one of educating, not hyping, its, GoGreenSolar stays ‘manufacturer agnostic’, which makes the voice of the brand credible.   This credibility translates into customer confidence in what is being sold on the site.

It demonstrates the importance of conversations.  Deep talks to a lot of people, inside and outside his industry.  Those conversations bring perspective and insight to the information he adds.  Who is saying something (and where and when and why) are every bit as important as what is being said.

Conversations require good listening.  Listening yields suggestions from the audience that can be woven into the brand’s themes.

Adding information creates context.  That’s huge.  By adding information, Patel dimensionalizes the products on GoGreenSolar, until they are more than products, they are essential elements in a larger brand narrative.  In the Networked World where content is ubiquitous, context is king.  It is our ability to make sense of information, to add emotional and meta meaning to cosmetic data, to find patterns in the complex tapestries of life and the marketplace, that set our brands apart and distinguish us as communicators and as human beings.

The ComputerWorld article underscores yet again how vital improvisation is to business in the Networked World — after all, what is improvisation if not ‘agile development’? The article also shows how ‘performance’ in business does not refer solely to folks standing up and holding forth in front of other folks. Apps are performance for an audience, too. The Five App Dev Lessons cited by ComputerWorld are straight from the improvisers’ playbook. Here they are. Our comments are in italics:

1) Break the barrier between developers and end users, and involve users in quality assurance processes. Like all good improvisation, agile development begins with suggestions from the audience. When users become players in your game (e.g. QA processes) they are much more likely to have a rooting interest in your performance (e.g. remain loyal to your brand).

2) Keep it simple. Poorly improvised business scenes often get sabotaged by too much extraneous information. That includes the development of apps with functionality that 99% of your audience doesn’t want or care about. If two players are performing an improvised theater scene set on their wedding night in the car on the way to the airport for their honeymoon…and they toss things into the scene like ‘her mother’, ‘his love of baseball’, ‘what happened at the reception’ and ‘who makes them jealous’…that is going to be one unwieldy and not very compelling scene. But that’s exactly what a lot of apps are like. “Feature Creep” is a horror movie we’ve all sat through.

3) Stick to the script. Okay, right, we know, sticking to a script is the opposite of improvisation, but CW is referring to dynamic scripting languages that, according to a recent Forrester study, can cut development time by 30-40%. Anytime the window between when you think about something (functional specs) and when you can do it (release date) closes, you have become more improvisational.

4) Release early and often. Many agile developers update their apps several times a day (the article cites Wesabe, a San Francisco-based money management site as one of these; Mixx.com, a social news site based in MacLean, VA, as two such developers). Think about yourself as being ‘in the audience’ for money management and social news apps: Are you more likely to applaud a site that evolves organically based on your suggestions, or one that announces upgrades periodically but with lots of fanfare, in the MS Explorer style? In cloud computing land, versioning seems stodgy and unresponsive compared to continuous, audience-minded tweaking.

5) Let the users, not the developers, determine new features. We would amend this slightly to read “Let users and developers working in collaboration determine new features.” The spirit of the tip is correct — take suggestions from your audience — but developers know things that users cannot, and vice versa. The collaboration between developer and user should no more discriminate against a developer’s idea than it should against a user’s. And hey, not every idea from every boss’s wife is automatically a bad one. Stay open to where the good ideas come from, because they can come from anywhere.

P.S. A commenter on the article, a guy named ‘Grant’, notes that the ‘agile development’ described by Havenstein is nothing new, and has been around for a couple of years. He rejects the idea of branding any app a ‘Web 2.0′ thing. Grant has a very good point, not only about the concept that there actually is no such thing as a ‘version 2.0′ of the Web, but also about versions generally. With agile development, versioning loses meaning. Versions of apps are like the same movie with many remakes. An agile app, by contrast, is one long neverending movie. An agile app never repeats itself, while versions repeat themselves all the time. Another advantage to agile development over versioning: Users have for too long been forced to pay for versions of software that are either way overbuilt or mostly cosmetic. With cloud computing and agile development, that game is changing in a hurry. Why should I care what version of an app I’m using as long as it does what I need it to do, and enables me to work today more productively than I did yesterday?

What do Jif Peanut Butter and the commedia dell’artes of the Renaissance have in common? Both are improvised performances that are informed by suggestions from the audience.

A suggestion is the word(s) or idea(s) given by the audience to an improv group from which the group develops themes for a performance. Suggestions are important to improvisation because they make the audience an active collaborator in the show. Watching a group springboard from a suggestion into an exploration of themes inspired by that suggestion is one of the most engaging aspects of an improv performance. It engenders a natural rapport between audience and performers, and gives the crowd a rooting interest in the outcome of the show. After all, if something is our idea, we want it to be good.

The business improviser also acts on suggestions from the audience. The purpose is the same: to bring the audience into active collaboration on your performance and give it a rooting interest in your success.

In the commedia dell’artes, an early form of improvised theater, small troupes of performers traveled from town to town in Italy and central Europe, giving spontaneous shows on street corners. These troupes used satire as a way of appealing to the locals’ sense of humor. Before the show began the performers would gather as much information as they could about the town and its people. Who the bigshots were. The name of the constable. The concerns of the citizens. The performance would then arise organically from this ‘conversation with the audience’. Because the troupe had been given useful information and invariably had a repertoire of stock (usually masked) characters that figured into the life of every small town, they could perform scenes that hit home with the audience.

Entrepreneurs and business executives like Jim Stengel, the Chief Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble, maker of Jif peanut butter and a hundred other familiar consumer brands, understand that brands in the Networked World are, in effect, improvisational performances for the marketplace, and spend much of their strategic focus ‘listening to the community describe itself’. These days marketers like Stengel call on their brands to reflect to an unprecedented degree what the community is saying. A multi-billion-dollar company like Procter & Gamble and a centuries-gone commedia dell’artes company from Italy have this same vital fact of life in common: The success of each depends on how adept they are at acting on suggestions from their audiences. In business, the community describing itself instigates what I call an Umbilical Loop of interactions between audience and performer by which brands are built and sustained in the marketplace.

Business-related suggestions are usually complex and come in a multitude of forms via many channels and, if the organization is wired at all, in massive volume. On the other hand, sometimes suggestions can be slap-you-in-the-face simple.

In 1998 Dr. Taryn Rose was an orthopedic surgeon practicing in San Francisco. Her patients included quite a few stylish, shoe-loving women who frequently complained to Dr. Rose about and needed treatment for foot pain – pain caused by those stylish shoes. Dr. Rose, too, wore fashionable shoes, and her feet would suffer during the long hours she spent building her practice. The complaint was so chronic that Rose took it as a suggestion from the audience. From the suggestion of ‘hurting feet’, the entrepreneurial physician arrived at a theme of ‘comfortable fashion’ and began designing shoes that appealed to her audience’s sense of style and her doctor’s sense of good health. Suffice it to say that Rose no longer practices medicine. Today, she is a well-documented business success story, the founder and CEO of Taryn Rose, Inc., which in 2007 will enjoy retail sales worldwide in excess of $20 million.