Thinking Interactive

Just like everyone else with a pulse, I am a fan of IDEO so I was pretty excited to see that they have launched two new blogs:

• IDEO Labs - Various folks at IDEO are sharing some of the cool they are working on. They already posted on how they made their own multi-touch interface and posted the Flash API to Google Code.
• Design Thinking - Tim Brown is thinking about design thinking for an upcoming book on said topic. I found this post about what design thinking feels like to be particularly thought provoking. There’s also another post where he identifies himself as maybe the only person on the planet who loves (not just likes) Cuil.

Have you ever looked at the work of an agency and wondered why their television commercials and print ads are so great and why all their interactive work is so weak? Here are five reasons why that dynamic exists (each of these could be a blog post in and of itself).

1. Masters of the Brand – The concept that ad agencies hold the keys to their clients’ brands. Any control that agencies had over the brand is now in the hands of the consumers, who have a collective voice far more powerful than any agency’s, one that is amplified by the current generation of web technologies. Brand broadcasts have been drowned out in favour of brand interactions. Designing these interactions requires a change in mind-set from that of the tastemaker to that of the proactive listener, an adjustment that many agencies are having trouble making.
2. Hierarchy of Media – The belief that the importance of a medium or channel is proportional to what clients are willing to spend on it instead of what the value will be on it for their clients, essentially prioritizing cost over return. Rather than taking the time to educate their clients on the importance of the digital space, many agencies would prefer to take the path of least resistance and continue to push the services that both they and their clients are comfortable with. As a result, the interactive component often ends up being a poorly conceived, underfunded afterthought.
3. Creative as a Department – In order to do great interactive work, creative cannot be a department, it needs to be an adjective, one used to describe everybody involved in a project. Each team member needs to be able to innovate in his or her function in order for a project to reach its potential. In addition, the central idea driving a project should not be the exclusive domain of a single individual or department. It needs to be free to come from a strategist, a developer, a designer, a project manager, a usability engineer or even the client (heaven forbid) depending on the needs and nature of the project.
4. No Technology – Many agencies do not have their own in house technologists, which limits their ability to fully understand the medium. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to innovate. It is akin to someone offering marble sculptures without being a marble sculptor themselves. An artist can have flawless concept sketches, but in order to realize those concepts, the artist needs to understand the stone all the way to its core. Otherwise, the true potential of that marble block will never be realized. Similarly, an organization that does not have a deep, functional understanding of a technology will never be in a position to fully exploit it, much less direct someone else to do it.
5. Allocation of Talent – This stems from the Hierarchy of Media. The highest paid and most influential positions in many agencies still belong to those who work in television and print, reinforcing to employees that those are the desirable areas to work. As a result, you will often see someone leading or playing an influential but dispassionate role in an agency’s interactive department in the hopes of using it as a stepping-stone to one of the traditional forms of media (sadly, this happens on the client side as well for much the same reasons).

Side note: I stopped including the songs at the end of each post because I didn’t like the aesthetic of the player and they don’t show up in the RSS feed.

A couple of weeks ago, Sean Moffitt at Buzz Canuck wrote a blog post that presented 9 types of brand community based on their positioning on two axis, one of exclusivity and one of involvement. I found this to be a fantastic way to dissect and describe brand communities and wanted to explore the model a little further by attempting to define the lines between the various levels.

Exclusivity
As I examined the levels of exclusivity (low, medium and high), I attempted to identify the divisions between the three levels and I came to the conclusion that there are actually four, which are as follows:

1. Open - These are communities that do not require registration in order to participate. Examples of these include message boards that allow anonymous posting and blogs that do not require registration in order to comment. To be honest, I can’t think of many brand communities that fall into this category as most marketers can’t resist collecting consumer information although you may be able to make a good argument for Facebook Pages and other similar social network groups to be included in this category as the brand creating the group has no ownership over any of the users’ data and many do not even require the user to join the page or group in order to participate.
2. Registration - These are by far the most common form of brand communities and require nothing from the user but registration.
3. Purchase - These are communities that require either the purchase of a product or a membership in order to join in addition to registration.
4. Outside Selection - These are communities where members cannot self-select themselves into the community. They must be selected to join by the organizer of the community or invited by an existing member. Communities in beta mode are excluded from this as their exclusivity is either an attempt to generate buzz or genuinely a function of technical limitations.

Interaction
As I attempted to define the lines between the levels of interaction with communities, it became apparent to me that the level of interaction is rarely consistent across all community members. Even in the communities where a certain level of interaction is required in order to maintain membership, there is always a huge spectrum between the users who are performing the bare minimum and the most active participants. As a result, it makes more sense for the model to become an explanation of the types of brand community members rather than the types of brand communities. In defining the differences between members’ interaction levels, I decided to use a pared down version of Forrester’s six categories of participation.

1. Spectators - This category could be considered a combination of the Joiners and Spectators in the Forrester model. These are people who will join a community, but will not contribute anything, preferring to consume the contributions of others without joining the conversation.
2. Critics - These members are people who will respond to discussion threads, tag content and post comments as well as ratings and reviews.
3. Creators - These members are nearly always the most active members of the community and contribute by writing articles (often as a way to start a discussion thread) and posting their own photos, videos or artwork.

Upon initial inspection, it would appear that now I am mapping traits of a community member (interaction) against traits of a community (exclusivity), but I would argue that the level of exclusivity of a community also represents the level of commitment on the member’s behalf prior to joining, with the only exception being potential members of an outside selection community. However, in most cases I would say that the influencer status required to gain an invite to those communities require a prior commitment far beyond a simple purchase.

Below is a diagram showing the intersections between the three levels of involvement and the four levels of prior commitment. The arrows indicate increasing levels of potential brand impact (both positive and negative). While it is fairly intuitive that a more involved member can do much more to boost or damage your brand, the level of prior commitment also corresponds to the level of brand impact because as the level of commitment increases, the exclusivity of the community increases, thereby providing each member with a higher degree of influence (both on and offline). For example, people are much more likely to listen to someone who they know owns a Harley Davidson (by virtue of their membership in that owners’ community) than an anonymous post on a Harley Davidson discussion forum or blog. Also, in addition to having more potential impact, I would expect community members to demand more involvement from the brand as they move upwards and to the right through the categorizations.

The above dynamic creates an interesting balancing act for those setting out to create brand communities. I believe most brand managers if asked would say that they would prefer brand community members in the upper right part of the chart., but before a brand sets out to recruit or create a community of those high impact members, they need to consider whether or not they are willing to devote the internal resources necessary to continue to feed the demands of those members and respond appropriately if a negative groundswell does occur.

With the launch of their new website, Modernista shows they do (disclaimer: judging by a Google blog search I am pretty slow on this). Rather than displaying their content within a typical agency site format, Modernista took the concept of a social media hub to the extreme, allowing (arguably) the best in breed site for each type of content do the heavy lifting for them with just a simple DHTML overlay allowing the user to navigate between them.

Once I realized the conceit of the site, half the fun became guessing which service they would use for each type of content (spoiler: they made all the obvious choices). Their print work is all displayed through Flickr, categorized through the usage of albums and tags to allow users to navigate the work by client and category. Their television spots are brought to you by YouTube with playlists allowing users to view the videos by client. Similarly, all their interactive work is presented through a link to… you guessed it… del.icio.us, again using tags to categorize their links. Finally, their about and news sections are brought to you by Wikipedia and Google News respectively. One of the best things about this site is that as Modernista is taking you through all these sites, you can hit their escape button and be released into the familiar comforts of whichever social media space you happen to be in. In addition to a great conceit, the site creates a fantastic social media ecology, drastically increasing the reach of Modernista’s content (they could have improved the strength of this effect by cross-linking all their channels to one another rather than just back to their own domain and by using some of the third party Facebook applications to bring their other channels into their Page, but that could be nitpicking on my part).

One critcism I do have of the site is Modernista’s use of “web” spelling in the menu, which may indicate a bit of a shortcoming in understanding of the interactive space on Modernista’s behalf. People only intentionally spell things like that if they are a fledgling start-up and the correctly spelled domain will cost a fortune or if they are a really cool 16 year old on MySpace. Other than that, I really have to applaud Modernista for a fantastic concept with a strong execution.

Update: Wikipedia clearly doesn’t like how Modernista has co-opted their service, but instead of taking the entry down, they have posted a large warning on the top of it. I find this surprising given how protective Wikipedia’s admins are over the neutrality of the site. I would guess they haven’t taken it down because the way Modernista has used the page isn’t occurring within Wikipedia and therefore is not covered in their terms of use.