In the September issue of Harvard Business Review, Ed Catmull, cofounder and president of Pixar wrote an excellent article entitled How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity. Below are five lessons that stood out in my mind.

1. There is no single idea. A single idea means very little. It takes multiple good ideas (in Pixar’s case, thousands) in order to produce anything of value. This concept holds true far beyond the film realm. Consider something as simple as the iPod, an easy to use, aesthetically pleasing MP3 player. One idea right? Not really. The scroll wheel, the menu system, the locking mechanism and the consumer friendly client (iTunes) are just a few of the good ideas that drove made the iPod what it is.
2. Good people matter more than good ideas. Once it is acknowledged that no single idea can stand alone, it becomes clear how important execution is and in order to ensure top notch execution, an organization needs good people. As Ed writes, “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.”
3. Barriers between disciplines inhibit innovation. Given the different languages, goals, philosophies and often locations between people working in different disciplines, barriers will naturally occur. In order to foster innovation these barriers need to be removed. One of the biggest things Pixar has done to remove these barriers is to create open communication channels. Anyone should be able to approach anyone else regardless of department in order to solve a problem. This requires managers to loosen the reins on process a little bit and accept that they will not always be the first to know about everything and will occasionally be surprised.
4. Trust is paramount. In order to foster creativity, each member needs to be be trusted enough to be given leeway to be creative within their purview. In addition to that trust, team members need to trust and respect one other enough to be able to provide honest criticism and not pull any punches. Inversely, those receiving feedback need to trust that those giving the feedback are doing it for the betterment of the project not out of ego or in order to serve some alterior motives.
5. Ideas are to be shared. This one I found to be both surprising and quite forward thinking on the part of Pixar. Pixar proactively shares their ideas externally by encouraging their technologists to publish their ideas within the academic community. Sharing ideas outside of an organization provides three primary benefits. Sharing can bring in or inspire new ideas by initiating exchanges and dialogue, it can establish your organization as thought leaders within your industry and it is an excellent way to attract talent.

The fact that I haven’t posted about this site yet shows how negligent I have been with this blog. Not too long ago, a friend of mine and a few of his buddies launched a site called Cameesa. Cameesa could be best described as Fundable meets Threadless. It works as follows (I hope they won’t mind me stealing this graphic from their site):

While the site hasn’t taken off yet, they have managed to produce one completely crowdfunded shirt and a couple others are real close (the Day of Bad Rain and Skulls are Still Kool! are 90% funded) and the number of good designs continues to increase. Each week there seems to be a couple more shirts added to the list of production candidates that are definitely worthy to wear. Their community also appears to be growing at a healthy rate with lengthy threads attached to many of the designs.

While I don’t see Cameesa threatening Threadless anytime soon, I think the fact that they have produced one T-shirt and are on the verge of a few more shows that their model could work if they are able to sustain growth. It may also signal that the North American market may be ready to see more commercial crowdfunding applications and perhaps that is the most exciting part of Cameesa, by building this site, they have created a crowdfunding platform that could be leveraged across multiple verticals. While I do like Fundable, I think the first commercial crowdfunding application to gain mainstream traction will be one that will be focused on a specific vertical or function, allowing for a more straightforward user experience. Whether or not Cameesa, strikes it big, I am expecting exciting things from the team behind it in the coming months (you can follow their adventures on their blog).

I love checking out Subvert and Profit’s task lists and trying to figure out which links are paid and which are red herrings. Sometimes it is obvious and other times I am baffled trying to think that someone would pay for this content to be bumped. Take a look at the list below and try and guess which are the sponsored stories.

Digg
http://digg.com/2008_us_elections/Devastating_New_YouTube_Video_John_McCain_s_Neverending_War_2
http://digg.com/comedy/Smooth_Triumph_stars_in_the_show_I_Got_My_Bong_Out
http://digg.com/space/Seti_home_My_Laptop_found_E_T
http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Police_investigating_vandalism_in_Fall_River
http://digg.com/tech_news/Internet_Scammers_charge_for_FrostWire_and_iTunes
http://digg.com/apple/Apple_Launching_App_Store_Beta_Program_2
http://digg.com/movies/Must_See_Flash_Of_Genius_Trailer

Stumble Upon
http://watchmojo.com/web/blog/index.php/2008/07/20/who-shrunk-the-venture-capital-business/
http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/015489.html
http://www.hells-handmaiden.com/?p=2176
http://www.baliblog.com/places-to-go/the-valley-at-kekeran.html
http://www.joystiq.com/2008/07/20/facebreaker-to-allow-breaking-of-peter-moores-face/
http://www.otrcat.com

Tonight I attended the Toronto Facebook Camp, an event put on jointly by Trapeze and Refresh Partners. The night started with a recap of what has been going on with Facebook and its platform since the last camp, which was well done but had a varying level of value depending on how close you had been following Facebook over the last few months.

Next up, was Rebecca Sawyer from Facebook’s monetization team, which you can imagine was highly anticipated given how great the representatives Facebook had previously sent to Toronto had been and the fact that anything related to monetization of social networks (particularly Facebook) is bound to draw a crowd.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

I’ve heard a number of people say this over the past few months and I could not disagree more. There is and will always be a lot of value in asynchronous threaded discussions. However, message boards as they exist are a dated technology much in need of an influx of some of the features and concepts that are driving the newer forms of social media.

One idea that I have been mulling over is integrating tags into message boards. It is small and hardly revolutionary, but I think it could add considerable value to the experience for everyone involved. When a user creates a thread, they add tags based on what they think the conversation they are starting is about. The tags will then be editable by everyone so how a thread is categorized can evolve with the conversation. The tags can then be used to highlight those conversations elsewhere. So if I am in one thread, I can see at a glance and browse related threads based on how closely the tags align. Similarly, they can be used to provide additional context for users on pages with other content types. For example, if I am on LeBron James’ profile page on NBA.com, I will be able to see a feed of all the conversations that have been tagged with “LeBron James”. That is a relatively simple example, but I imagine on an ecommerce site, it could become a fantastic way to let your community merchandise for you, creating another sort of recommendation engine. By connecting the tags to a user’s activity, the tags could also be leveraged to create much more robust community member segmentation than what could be gleaned from a users’ profile (I imagine you may even be able to identify where they are in the sales funnel depending on their activity). All this using a pretty commonplace technology that would be relatively inexpensive to implement. Has anybody seen anything like this before? I would love to hear some more ideas on how the message board could be improved upon.

On a side note, how awesome would it be if you came to a community site and there was a tag cloud with one of the prominent tags being “flame war”? All name calling and childish behaviour would be on display just a click away.

Facebook has changed the box that displays the Pages that a user has joined from being labeled “Andrew is a Fan of” to the more general “Andrew’s Pages,” a change that will improve potential success of most Facebook Pages.

Since many users join Pages and Groups as a form of self-identification, the nomenclature that Facebook had used had limited the Page’s potential reach as a communication tool (yet another example of how much impact well or poorly copy can have on the user experience). For example, Vampire Weekend’s Facebook Page has 9156 fans, but only 249 wall posts, 132 discussion posts, 20 fan photos and 3 fan videos with the majority of those contributions coming from a small group of active fans. Assuming that the 8700 or so members who haven’t contributed have not joined for the band’s updates, it is safe to say that most of the members have joined the Page as a way of constructing their online identity/profile and signaling to their peers.

While this dynamic may serve to inflate Page numbers in some cases, it can be detrimental in others where the focus of a Page does not lend itself to users identifying themselves as fans. For example, if I were a high school administrator, it may be a good idea to consider creating a Page for my school, allowing me to effectively disseminate important information and get important feedback from the students and faculty while boosting the profile of the school. However, under the old fan definition, how many surly, image conscious teens would be willing to stamp on their profile that they are a fan of their high school?

This dynamic is the reason that Facebook changed the definition and by doing so effectively eliminating the only advantage that Groups had over Pages for marketers (I am expecting the Groups application to slowly die out or be merged with Pages). While this more general definition is a step in the right direction, why not allow the user to define their relationship with a Page or Group by selecting between a few categories (fan, advocate, hater, friend, coworker)? This would benefit the marketers that the Pages application was built for by providing them with more granular data on their product or brand’s status while enabling the users to more accurately self-identify.

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.

Google is now providing select customers with the ability to embed videos within PPC results (check out the second sponsored result). I am sure this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Google will enable in search results, both paid and organic in the next few years. Once these type of features become enabled for organic search results (which should present enough incentive for web developers to adopt some standardization in terms of microformats), we really will begin to see the next generation of search results emerge.

Update: I should have taken a screenshot as it looks like the experiment is over.