Why Do You Work?

Most of us would say money. And yet money alone does not motivate better work or increase job satisfaction. Do we work for money because there is an underlying premise that people don’t like to work and must be bribed to do it?

That may have been true for the industrial revolution, but a key difference between the industrial economy and the digital economy is that the role of the worker has shifted from brawn to brain. Knowledge is now a key differentiator, so is it also time to revisit this most fundamental value equation?

A year ago, Seth Godin wrote about the passionate worker:

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.  The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation… because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour.

A recent Businessweek article, “Will Work for Praise” describes how web entrepreneurs are making money through armies of volunteers willing to work for free to build their own personal brands. In a web 2.0 world, there is an implicit symbiotic relationship in place around resource exchange: entrepreneur(s) with money provide(s) platform and technology, volunteers with time provide relevant content to build a personal brand and help others.

Adam Smith, who is widely regarded as the father of modern economics, lived and wrote during a similarly challenging transition from an agrarian to industrial society. Before he published The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote a classic treatment of ethics that laid the foundation for his free-enterprise classic. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith proposed that beyond economic pursuits, there are moral pre-requisites to capitalism. Human nature isn’t just about self-interest but it also includes important motivators: sympathy, empathy, friendship, love and the desire for social approval.

The Wealth of Nations draws on situations where man’s morality is likely to play a smaller role — such as the laborer involved in pin-making — whereas the Theory of Moral Sentiments focuses on situations where man’s morality is likely to play a dominant role among more personal exchanges.

If people want to work and are willing to do it for free or some other value exchange in the digital economy, should businesses adapt to this new sensibility?

This entry was originally written by Lori Laurent Smith (moi), edited by Marta Strickland and posted on Threeminds.

Content Strategy for the Social and Semantic Web

Remember the party game “Telephone”, where a simple phrase is whispered from ear to ear around a circle of friends? The payoff is when the final phrase is uttered out loud by the last person and it is completely transformed.

Content flows online the same way.

No longer constrained to the artificial restrictions of a web site, or even the browser (mobile), content is ‘the story’ that is being passed from blog post to comment to tweet. Content takes on a new reality from its passage across the web. From a marketing and brand perspective, the challenge for content strategy in a social and semantic world (aka web 3.0) is to ensure the key messaging content is still accurate and complete as it evolves.

Before going much further, let me clarify what content strategy means for the social and semantic web. Content strategy is a 40,000 foot strategic overview of content, aligning content, its purpose, creation, publication, and use with the overall business strategy and marketing objectives of an enterprise. Developing a content strategy means it must be resilient against the web reality that the content will be adopted, mixed, mashed and recreated in a post-modern lovefest by enthusiasts and enemies, influencers and newbies. Additionally, there is the hyper-connectivity of users plus the immediacy and velocity of conversation so:

a. Inconsistencies or gaps between the message and the supporting content, or user experience will be called out
b. Gaps filled by users aggregating and adding to existing content
c. Online perceptions of brands, products, or services are created that are a new reality from the user’s perspective

This is complicated by the increasingly interactive nature of the web making not only the content but where, when and how its accessed, organized and read, viewed or listened to, important elements to consider.

To simplify this approach, here are the key questions marketers, strategists, planners and the like may find useful when developing a comprehensive content strategy:

1. Why communicate at all? What is the risk:reward?
2. What are the goals and objectives of:
   1. The enterprise, how can the content strategy help achieve them?
   2. For the content strategy itself?
3. What does real success for each of the above look like?
4. How is success measured?
5. What content already exists?
   • Where are there gaps
   • What content must be created?
   • Will fans create it?
6. What are the desired outcomes of creating and distributing this content?
7. Who are the uber-influencers to carry and serve the content?
   • Where are they?
   • How best to connect them with content?

These musings are most definitely a work-in-progress. What else would you add to consider when developing a content strategy for the internet as it continues to evolve beyond the browser?

Brand Identity and the URL

Bud Gibson had a great comment on my last post, asking how do you establish identity with out a URL? The simple answer is: you don’t. Here’s why…

The corporate or brand URL / website as a keystone for both information architecture (I/A) and content strategy has already passed its zenith.

First of all, the majority of site visits no longer begin on the homepage i.e. www.brand.com or www.brand.com/product. When was the last time you typed in www.amazon.com? What about the last time you visited Amazon, how did you get there? More often people click on a link and recognize the ‘storefront’ but not because of the URL. Similarly, search engines have been serving up deep links for years, bypassing the master brand URL entirely in some instances.

As human behavior has adapted to the navigation of the world wide web, we have gradually dropped inclusion of ‘www’ and ‘.com’. Even the reduction of URLs into a more convenient format via TinyURL or Bit.ly for Twitter. What is more important is the relationship between the referring party to the TinyURL – that the referring party is trustworthy and is viewed by the referee as an authority in some way. The result is based more on individual needs and desires and the brands, products and services to meet them rather than the URL.

Underlying all this techno-stuff is a more important fundamental shift in the movement of the value provided by content, more sophisticated users. The brand is being defined by the consumer perception of the capabilities of it to meet their needs rather than broadcast its own unifying message. As smart content strategy practices accelerate and the underlying semantic web structure develops, content will seek out relevant viewers rather than enticing users to seek relevant content.

Having pondered this for a few days, now I have a much larger question: is the web site dead?

More to come…

Cubism as Inspiration for the Semantic Web

We are in the early days of a revolution being played out in pixels across the digital landscape. A hundred years ago, social revolutions spawned global avant-garde art direction, namely Cubism, which in turn inspired many of the major art movements of the 20th Century: Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and others.

Today’s information architects, content strategists, designers, developers are the artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers of yesteryear. Historians will one day regard social media | web 2.0 as a pivot point in the evolution of our information society, much as Cubism emerged as a lynchpin between the classical aesthetic begun in the Renaissance era and the Modernism of the 20th Century. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.

Dutch artist and professor Wil Uitgeest wrote in Aardschok – Bliksemflits, that the art movements of the 20th century were no longer about painting as a window to re-create a temporal reality but instead, these movements reflected macro changes in our collective consciousness as well as our actual, individual experience. Cubism, in particular, shifted perspective from the external to the internal, where artistic expression became individual self-identification viewed through a collective prism.

In web 1.0, the non-technical users were observers, visiting sites and slowly learning the vernacular of the digital medium. Gradually, the discipline of information architecture (I/A) emerged as a way of organizing web sites based on principles derived from library science, design and architecture. Like a Renaissance painter, the information architect wanted to make their ‘picture’ (web site) easily viewed by their community of relatively unsophisticated users who, in turn, could easily understand the content. As the medium matured, content strategy emerged as a compliment to the information architect so the I/A could focus on the structure and design of the more robust site experience, leaving the strategist to populate the framework with appropriate content for the user.

There is a strong parallel to be drawn between classical art forms pre-20th century and web 1.0. Just as Cubism played a critical role in the evolution of art history, I believe we can look to Cubism and its many progeny for cues on evolving the digital medium beyond the web site towards the promise of the semantic web. Instead of a single perspective (e.g. the ‘brand web site’) with limited demands, web 2.0 challenges the very definition of content strategy and information architecture to manage multiple, simultaneous perspectives against a human discourse in real-time.

With a robust content strategy distributed through disciplined and carefully constructed forms of I/A, like the Cubist painting: fractured yet cohesive, an individualized 2.0 experience can be developed and guided through rhetoric and content, freed from the framework limitations of a traditional web site.

Snow White and the 7 Random Things Meme

Having been tagged by Marta Strickland (who was tagged by Stacy Lukas, who was tagged by Ken Burbary who was tagged by Shannon Paul… oh yes, it’s a tightly knit digital community here in Motown), here’s 7 random things about me:

1. I can cook anything from scratch. My passion for cooking started when I was 5 with an Easy-Bake oven. I was making fancy side dishes by age 10 and cooking the family dinner around 15. But I can’t stand rinsing lettuce.

2. I am a fantastic Rock Band / Guitar Hero singer, scoring in the 90th percents on the Hard level in RB2 training. My favorite songs to sing include: Kids in America, The Ballroom Blitz, Hungry like the Wolf and anything by Oasis. If I wasn’t a social media/marketing misfit executive, I’d be the lead singer in a rock band.

3. Having worn glasses all my life due to an astigmatism, I have 4 pairs that I view more as fashion accessories than Rx, although I can’t read a thing without them (including the lyrics to the aforementioned Rock Band).

4. My favorite cut flower is a tulip but I also love hydrangeas in garden beds.

5. I have hair OCD. Not mine — my daughters. Zig-zags, french braids, ballerina buns, lattice ponytails, twists, knots, up-do’s – you name it and I love to style it (when they let me). I’ve made more than 100 hair bows for them to match their outfits. My youngest daughter just mocks me silently with her Shirley Temple curls and slowly slides the bows out when she *thinks* I’m not looking.

6. My favorite perfume and ’signature scent’ is Cartier’s Le Baiser du Dragon (aka “The Kiss of the Dragon”).

7. I am deeply religious — much more than people think I am. Every week, I dedicate at least 15 hours to studying scripture, religious doctrine and related books/magazines in order to strengthen my deep faith in God and to teach others the gospel.

Passing along the meme to:

Dan Sicko

Eric Cedo

Paul Isakson

Adam Wilson

Joe Minock

Leah McChesney

The Four Simple Rules:

• Link your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged

Just Say No

No is the most powerful word in our vocabulary. It is wielded masterfully by the 2-year old in my home.

‘No’ can literally stop people in their tracks, often because it is so unexpected, but also because most people can’t think outside the ‘No’ box. As corporate foot soldiers, we’ve been brainwashed into thinking we must say ‘Yes’ because ‘No’ leads to bad things.

Does it?

If Yes leads to more assignments requiring extra (unpaid) hours, No may lead to a better job with more time and money.

If Yes leads to a wide circle of friends, No culls the circle from breadth to depth and stronger relationships.

If Yes is the warm fuzzy, No is the cold prickly. It takes courage to be prickly and pop a ‘Yes’ person’s bubble. But saying No is a great stress reliever (according to the Mayo Clinic)

We are trained to ‘get to Yes’ in negotiations so we all ‘win-win’ but No leads to getting what you want. Everyone wants to be friends with a Yes person but most people respect the authority of No.

Do you have trouble saying No?

If you don’t happen to have children or a dog to practice on, here are some conversation starters:

• I am in the middle of several projects
• To be honest, I do not enjoy that kind of work or I am not comfortable with…
• I have another commitment
• I don’t have any experience with that
• You will do a wonderful job yourself with your talent
• I need to focus more on my ____ (family, personal need, career)
• It’s better for us both that I decline rather than do a mediocre job
• Something came up recently that is demanding my full attention

Think about the last time you said Yes to something when you really wanted to say No. Why didn’t you say No? Would you do it differently now? Yes can be deceptive but No is honest and authentic. Just aaying No could be everyone’s New Year’s Resolution:

1. Lose weight – just say no to alcohol and desserts.

2. Save money / Get organized — just say no to buying things you don’t really need.

3. Spend more time with friends and family — just say no to additional assignments or things you don’t want to do

4. Get fit — just say no to an hour spent on the computer or watching tv

5. Get promoted — just say no to ’stuff’ that doesn’t matter.

Happy New Year.

Zoetrope Should Be Called Schrodinger’s Cat

Ever thought about the temporal nature of the web? That everything pushes the user forward in time but looking back in any great detail is difficult and time consuming. To complicate matters, multiple versions of the past can exist online if personalization technology is utilized.

Digital business strategy has a promising new toy called Zoetrope being developed by Adobe and the University of Washington. It appears to be a web crawler application that allows for searching and analyzing historical web data, meaning it could soon become much easier to investigate and connect previously unseen patterns and events. I found out about it on the MIT Technology Review site where they managed to upload a cool demo video.

With Zoetrope, anyone with an ounce of intellectual curiosity can compare historical trends online as well as isolate the event triggers and view the results through sliders, making it seem like video. If you have ever tried to do any competitive analysis, for example, determining the relationship between news headlines and gas prices over time, it has been challenging to graph the results without spending a disproportionate amount of time on the task (or hiring a billion interns). Or, as a marketer, if you wanted to compare your competitor’s offers last week or last year at this time, it was nigh-on impossible to search for them. Yes, tools like the Way Back Machine exist, but they are just snapshots (with questionable reliability), and not archived searchable data.

I like the idea that Zoetrope could prove conventional marketing wisdom is either right or wrong once and for all by being able to compare the macro relationship between traffic patterns at local malls or big box retailers on sunny versus cloudy days by geography. A tool like this could level the playing field for competitors who with a few keystrokes, could quickly learn what offers or promotions increased sales on a given day (assuming the industry releases sales data by day) — kinda like handing them your playbook, so time for marketers to get strategic again! There are probably a slew of other examples (diapers, beer and Fridays come to mind) that I’d love to add.

As it is still in development, Zoetrope only saves a new version of approximately 1,000 different sites every hour. Clearly scalability needs to be increased and that is the aim of the development team who would like to see Zoetrope capture a page every time it changes. But this is a promising start for what would be a powerful new tool in the strategic marketer’s digital arsenal when it is released.

Maslow is dead. All hail Gramsci.

Maslow is dead. Long live Gramsci. Oh, he’s dead too. In the literal sense. But he’s going to become a lot more well-known thanks to a new President Obama and savvy marketers searching for social media models.

Who? Antonio Gramsci, a Socialist – Marxist scholar who proposed that capitalism maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically through a hegemonic culture.

A What? Hegemony means that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination.

In a hegemonic culture, according to Gramsci, the values of the bourgeoisie become the defacto values of the society. For example, in last century the rise of traditional media in America has been dominated by college-educated liberal arts majors whose perspective of life is very different than, say the working class (in Gramsci’s Marxist terms). Yet, his theory goes that the working-class will define their own values, ignoring the bourgeoisie thus evolving American society into a consensus culture where the murky middle reigns.

Nowhere is the murky middle more evident than during elections. Obama won the clear majority of electoral votes (364) yet he only managed slightly more than half the popular vote (53%). Or, his brand did not convince 46% of Americans. We arrived at a consensus, driven by the aforementioned traditional media rather than voting for someone who we individually felt represented us.

Maslow’s sharp focus on individual needs worked for the ‘me’ generation of 20th century Americans who, for the most part, had grown up in a world where their basic needs (food, water, shelter) had been met but their ’self-esteem’ needs of belonging, recognition and appreciation could be manipulated by marketers and exploited by HR departments.

Gramsci’s philosophy works better than Maslow for understanding the intrinsic motivations for the Millenial Generation, formerly known as Gen Y. Community-minded, they love to collaborate and are using social media to blur the boundaries between work and play.  With 80 million Millenials out there, most with Twitter accounts, Facebook, Flickr, iphones and IM, they are (re)creating our culture, political legacy and values.

Wake-up Call: iPhone Apps

The promise of digital integration across screens (tv, laptops and mobile handsets aka smartphones) has finally begun thanks to a kick in the pants from Steve Jobs.

Apple announced that there have been 100,000,000 downloads from the recently launched Apple app store in the last 60 days (which includes a staggering 60,000,000 in the first month). Those are some BIG numbers in a very short period of time.

Aside from the obvious exposure possibilities for brands who might have missed the Facebook app-losion, Apple offers monetization potential that should put a smile on any CFOs face. When you send in your 2009 marketing plan, include a link to the new KPCB iFund initiative: $100 million earmarked for the development of Apple’s iphone and itouch platforms. On their iFund blog, KPCB aka Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (fabled VC firm responsible for funding the internet…well, at least some of the rockstars of web 1.0: Sun, Netscape, Amazon, among others) help contextualize the opportunity with this graphic.

Even though there are only 12 million iphones (vs 250 million ‘other’ active mobile devices that can accept downloaded applications), the owners of iphones are downloading apps at an average of 12 million per week versus 3 million for the ROM (rest of market).

Why it matters for marketers is that Apple is the only company with a technology platform that has always been peripatetic (ipod and powerbooks) and, through Apple TV, can extend these applications to everyone with a digital screen. And, just a casual market observation: those who own an iphone tend to be an uber-influencer in their personal network.

There is a tiny window of opportunity over the next few months for quick & savvy marketers to invest in their brand community with an Apple app.

How to Build a Social Media Strategy in 5 Days

Every week, I get asked some variation of the question, “HOW do I get started building a social media strategy”. So here is my recipe that I’m happy to share.

To get started, building a social media strategy requires focused thinking sustained over a few days. Not the multi-tasking mayhem that most managers find their daily lives to be, but the kind of focused thinking done in preparation for a major test or when writing a thesis.

Instead of looking for the proverbial silver bullet, block off a few hours for the entire week. Start on a Monday, spend 3 hours alone in a closed door conference room. Immerse yourself in facts and data. Study the market. 2 hours on Tuesday. Study your competitors. 3 hours on Wednesday. Study your customers — both loyal and one-hit wonders to see what might be the difference between them. 4 hours on Thursday to see where they are online and what conversations they are having. And invest 4 hours on Friday to focus your thinking and organize your buckets of findings into hypotheses.

Here is a list of 10 checkpoints to keep the social media strategy development process focused:

1. Keep your objectives tight and reasonable. Don’t try to solve overpopulation when all you need is to neuter your dog. Just talk with likely users and help them to understand how your product or service fits into their life. And DON’T talk to me about demographics. If you are truly embedded within a community (because that’s what social media is), I can guarantee you that the group has not organized around some arbitrary labeling (w:25-54) or income or geography. It’s more likely to be lifestyle-oriented or significant moments in life.

2. Make the social media strategy EASY (because you’ve done all the thinking work, remember). Sharp and succinct like a short story. One of my favorite (CEO) clients used to challenge me with the opening line: I’ve got a new 30 days. What can you help me do to make a difference to my business? That litmus test gets you to clarity very quickly. Same thing with social media strategy. One page, tops.

3. Create the perfect storm between prioritizing what your customers want with your product / service, picking the top 10 places where your customers socialize (check the incoming pages to your web site for some guidance as to where they might be found), and setting the metrics goals for communication.

4. Clearly state your business objective. What do you want customers to DO? Are you looking for prospects or for regular users to put one more item into their cart or make one more trip to your store. And don’t say both because the more you dilute your social media strategy, the less effective it will be. Singular focus and discipline will produce spectacular results.

5. Get engaged with your customers and target audience. Birds of a feather flock together. Learn from them what they want and build a better product or service.

6. Be trustworthy. Approach communities with honesty and respect. Underpromise and overdeliver rather 6han the other way round. Answer the eternal question: why should anyone believe you?

7. Go extreme. Being distinctive is more important than ever when you are engaging within social communities. Read Purple Cow by Seth Godin. Pick out what is important to customers and make it unique.

8. Fail to plan = plan to fail. One of my favorite phrases of all time (it works better with 9 year old girls than 43 year old husbands, BTW). Be first, but more importantly, be the best. Socialmedialand is filled with ‘firsts’ who failed to plan and improve upon their initial business model. Friendster should have been Facebook. Yahoo is imploding while Google is cloud computing.

9. Don’t change your strategy. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Basically — let it ride. In any change bell-curve, people start off excited but then quickly get scared (especially if there is any kind of setback like lowered sales) and want to go back to ‘the old way’. Don’t do it. Declining sales have less to do with the fact you moved your media investment from traditional to social media and probably much more to do with a fickle audience or a new competitor.

10. Review, rinse, repeat. Socialize your product and strategy so frequently that people can lampoon you. The community will LOL with you (not at you) and as long as you can enjoy the fun, your company will benefit (as will your personal reputation).

Remember: strategy is only half the picture. Implementation is the other half which I will address in an upcoming post.