Why MyStarbucksIdea works
Posted on March 10, 2010 by Raul Lansink in Branding, Communities, CrowdsourcingNeedless to say that crowdsourcing with customers is getting big and that many companies are attempting to emulate lighthouse examples as MyStarbucksIdea and Dell Ideastorm. Obviously this is easier said than done. Many initiatives founder after the initial excitement. What makes MyStarbucksIdea work?
In an earlier post I introduced the term Communitize, signifying the trend where traditional company codes and structures are gradually submerged in a constant flow of community-driven exchange and collaboration, defying organizational divisions and boundaries.
Communitizing enables organizations to absorb and harness the collective wisdom of their constituencies, increasing their capacity for change and innovation. Communitized companies are adaptive creatures, sensing and capitalizing on emergent shifts in market currents.
Employee engagement and participative management, Yin and Yang
Posted on January 19, 2010 by Bas Reus in Communities, Dialogue, InnovationIn the last couple of weeks I stumbled upon the term ‘Employee engagement’ in some blogposts. The term almost sounds redundant, as one would assume employees are engaged by principle.. Research shows otherwise. Employees apparently are not engaged in their work. In 2007, a study shows that only 21% is truly engaged, implying those who work a bit harder for the sake of the company. A staggering 38% is not engaged at all. Gary Hamel suggests that this is not on the agenda because most managers are not even aware or simply do not care. See the exhibit below for an illustration. The question is, what is the benefit of having engaged employees? And what is true engagement? Let’s find out.
What is needed for collaboration?
Posted on December 24, 2009 by Bas Reus in Communities, Dialogue, InnovationAll projects we undertake with our clients have one thing in common, there are multiple parties involved. Before officially launching the project to all parties, already many people from different companies are involved. When launching a project, the most important group of people are connected as well. This group is the largest, and has therefore the greatest influence.
Usually they are the personnel of a large company, or a large group of individuals, but always connected somehow. They can have real power. However, the power they can possess can only come to surface when all parties involved are great in collaborating with each other. One of our responsibilities is to try to create a situation where collaboration can really occur, to unleash the power of the large group. What is collaboration really, and what is needed to really make it happen?
Most co-creation projects incorporate a sophisticated website to be the basis for the mass dialogue that comes with a successful project. Although we always like to think hybrid, mixing cyber conversations with brainstorms in real life, it is definitely of great importance to employ a best-of-breed software platform. It should facilitate your project in the best way possible.
It is very attractive however to make the infrastructure for your co-creation project the center of your attention. Quite convenient also, since configuring a website is a process you can easily control. It takes your mind off a far more difficult task you face: How to attract a committed audience and how to motivate it to contribute to your cause with ideas, experiences and lively discussion.
A platform will not do that. Elegant lines of code, html and flash programming do not attract or entertain crowds into co-creation. Even the most beautiful of designs does not convince people to let go of skepticism or resistance.
Communitize.. Typically a verb only a non-native speaker would invent.. Since I (more or less..) coined the term, I guess am free to choose whether communitize is an active or passive verb: Do you communitize or are you communitized? I decided on both. Communitize is something you can actively strive for or it is something that simply happens to you.
So what does it mean? Communitizing expresses the current shift of organizations experiencing the limits of functional stratification, the evaporation of their boundaries and the surge of value creation networks.
The succes of a cocreation project depends on a wide variety of factors, the incentivation of your community members not being the least important one. We’ve seen many different approaches worldwide, ranging from rewards in hard cash to the more implicit remuneration in the form of awards and public honor.
Motivations of audiences may differ per project or purpose. We found in our projects that community members are delighted by us adressing what interests them most: an in-depth discussion and follow-up on the ideas and experiences they shared. Merely sending out gifts did not do the trick, it once even backfired. The gifts were seen as a business transaction, a cold reward that did not do justice to the personal and intimate dialogue people experienced during the course of the project. The disregard for the relationship that had grown was felt as a profound disappointment.
To some of you, this may sound as a compliment. It is not. Twittering is probably one of the most obsolete, wasteful phenomena I have ever witnessed. After an initial trial I decided to pass, as I could not reason why a flurry of tweets would help me get through the day.
And things are getting worse, as people start syndicating their blogs, pages and profiles. Now an avalanche of sheer triviality is constantly harassing me, keeping me up to date with the momentous travails of people twittering how they ‘are just about to enter a client meeting’ or ‘just had a wonderful sip of frappuccino at Helsinki airport’. Who cares?
Frankly, it becomes irritating. It is like a mind numbing buzz we still have to learn how to cope with. Where have we seen this before? That’s right, advertising! For those who see Twitter as another example of how the web spurs true dialogue, they could not be more wrong. Twitter is not about interaction. It is about sending. It is about telling the world what a wonderful, successful and multitalented person you are. Twitter is a medium for personal branding, helping you create a market image and presence by constant messaging.
We hear it all over the place since the term Web 2.0 was first coined. Learning 2.0, Government 2.0, Business 2.0, and Whatever 2.0. Everything is 2.0. It refers to changes in the particular domain. The Web matured very fast during a short period of time, and the term 2.0 was used to show the importance of the development, of the change. Since then, the term 2.0 is a buzzword. The term is applied to bring ‘old’ concept back to life, sometimes rightly, mostly as a marketing trick.
In this list there’s also the concept of ‘Enterprise 2.0’. When you try to unravel what it exactly means, you would probably come up with a definition like ‘The new way of running an organization’, or ‘Changing the way an organization works’. What is really meant by the term Enterprise 2.0 refers to the usage of new web-based, so called social technologies. Social and technology, strange combination by the way… So it refers to bringing the social ‘Web 2.0’ inside an organization.
On the Internet, more and more people are getting used to make use of social networks like Facebook, or share video’s on YouTube, or express themselves by using Twitter. They are all called social and Web 2.0, just like blogs and wiki’s. People spend more and more time on these networks and sites, and are able to find more information and people. This is great, and, as opposed to e-mail, the reach of these tools is far bigger.
We like to think that we can easily change things in the world. That’s no surprise, Barack Obama makes the Americans believe it can be done, and with the Wisdom of Crowds in mind, many think that crowd-sourcing can easily be applied and be used to change things in the world, that haven’t seem to have changed that much in the last decades, or even centuries.
Why is everyone convinced that we can change that much? And do we understand what change is, what change is anyway? I’m not convinced. Change is a process that is mostly referred to as social change. These processes occur in society, in a community and even in an organization. To succeed, these processes need to challenge existing and sometimes deep rooted cultural behavior. Changing the behavior of a single person is difficult, but changing the behavior of a large group of people seems impossible, at least on the short term.
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