What are Social Live Experiences?

Social live experiences blend technology, community and location to create immersive experiences that blur the boundaries between online and offline.

Source: pochacco20 on Flickr

The rise of social live experiences can be attributed to three broad trends. First, people are constantly live-streaming their experiences by posting updates, photos, videos and check-ins through location-aware smart phones and tablets, creating a dynamic stream of location-based content. Second, social networks are integrating online and offline experiences through features like single-click check-in and location-tagged content sharing on multiple networks (for instance: Instagram toFlickr, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare). Third, social networks are opening up their APIs, including social graph and location data, so that others can build applications that connect people around locations.

As a result, people are seamlessly transitioning between online and offline events and connections, and organizations are creating real-time experiences that merge, even transcend, the physical and the virtual.

Consider the proliferation of location based social networks beyond Foursquare (video). Some entrepreneurs are using social network APIs to build location-based mashups (Sonar, Banjo (video), Highlight) and augmented reality apps (Google Glass (video), AcrossAir (video), Nokia City Lens (video)) that connect people and experiences around locations, often by highlighting “people and experiences near you”. Others are creating niche location-based real-time social networks around sharing rides (Waze (video)), public transport (Moovit (video)), runs (MapMyRun (video)), and dishes (FoodSpotting (video)), or completing challenges (SCVNGR (video)). These location-based social networks, along with the ubiquity of location data in popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, have made it possible for organizations to create seamless social live experiences at scale.

Google Glass

The most visible examples of such experiences are large political, entertainment or sports events. Even as journalists and spectators at the venue share first-hand experiences with their networks through location-tagged status updates, check-ins, blog posts, photos, videos, and live-streams (UStream, LiveStream, Vyclone, Google Hangouts), a larger group of people join the conversations by sharing, commenting on, remixing and curating this content (Storify (video)), checking in to live television broadcasts (GetGlue, GoMiso, Viggle), and contributing original analysis and opinions on blogs and video blogs. While all major public events, all over the world, are becoming live social experiences on their own, event organizers, social networks and media organizations are increasingly creating social curation platforms to act as hubs that connect people and content around such events (IHeartRadio’s Twitter Tracker, Grammy Live, CNN/ Facebook U.S. Presidential Inauguration, OccupyStreams).

Conference and expo organizers are also using social media to transform events into live social experiences, amplify their impact beyond the venue, and connect attendees to create a community. Some organizers are even creating custom mobile apps to help event attendees network, share content and stay in touch (SXSW Social / SXSW Go (video), Mobile World Conference, BlogWorld & New Media Expo, Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum, Amazon re:invent, Guardian Changing Media Summit, NY Craft Beer Week). Other organizers are creating private networks to live-stream the event to extend their reach to a wider community of subscribers (TED Live).

SXSW Go

Finally, public spaces are using technology, including QR codes, to enhance the experience for visitors by adding a virtual layer. New York’s Central Park transformed the park into an interactive game board for its World Park campaign with QR code clues and content all over the park. Sweden’s Gothenburg city created a Tram Sightseeing App (video) to help visitors get a geo-tagged guided tour at the price of a tram ticket. Several museums and institutions in Amsterdam use the Museum App to create QR code enabled interactive guided tours of cultural locations in the city. New Delhi’s Turquoise Cottage bar used QR code admittance stamps to share time-sensitive updates with patrons throughout their Christmas Eve celebrations. The Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra created a unique concert with musicians spread all over the city, and the music being synced in real time online. However, many of these initiatives haven’t fully integrated social sharing and community building into the experience yet.

Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra

Some of these initiatives have had significant scale. For instance, 2 million Facebook status updates were published onCNN.com/live during the U.S. Presidential Inauguration in 2009 and 3 million photos have been uploaded to Foodspotting. The scale and success of these initiatives show that the boundaries between online and offline experiences have blurred beyond recognition and all experiences are likely to become both social and live.

How do Social Live Experiences work?

Social live experiences are spread over a vast and varied territory which has overlaps with other frontiers of engagement we have covered before, including social curation, collective intelligence and transmedia storytelling. However, all social live experience platforms and programs have three common characteristics: a hybrid physical-virtual experience, real-time tracking plus social sharing, and value creation through the physical-virtual interplay.

Social live experiences are often set in a specific physical space, like a park, museum, stadium, hotel, restaurant, or store, but they can also take place out in the streets. Sometimes, the primary aim is to engage the people present at the venue, or in a specific city (SXSW Go); sometimes, a secondary aim is to use social media amplification to attract more people at the venue (Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra); sometimes, especially with large broadcast events, the aim is primarily to use social media to amplify the on-site experience to engage audiences who are not physically present (Grammy Live).

Real-time tracking and social sharing are integral elements in social live experiences. People can do real-time tracking automatically through location-aware smart phones (Waze) and sensor-enabled devices (Nike Fuel Band), or manually through social media updates and check-ins (FoodSpotting). These data streams and updates are then aggregated and displayed on maps (IHeartRadio’s Twitter Tracker) and, sometimes, streams (Storify) to enable social sharing. Social sharing is usually manual, enabled by social sign-ins, one-click sharing and linked social accounts, but it can also happen automatically, by automatic posting of runs or rides on social networks (Nike Fuel Band), or automatic alerts on people and experiences near you (Highlight).

Finally, social live experiences are so compelling because they create unique value through the interplay between the physical and the virtual. Sometimes, this value lies in increased intelligence about our own behavior (Nike Fuel Band), our own network, our city (Waze) or country (CNN/ Facebook U.S. Presidential Inauguration), or the entire world (FoodSpotting). Sometimes, this value lies in serendipitous discovery of people (Highlight) and experiences (SXSW Go) near us. Sometimes, this value lies in more meaningful connections with friends in our network (Google Glass), or strangers who share similar interests (OccupyStreams).

Social Live Experiences for Brands

The easiest way for brands to create live social experiences is to make it easy for people who are already participating in offline brand events to share their experiences on social media. Many brands are already using sophisticated social, mobile and geo-local technologies to create memorable experiences, then creating viral videos based on these experiences (T-Mobile Angry Birds Live; Mercedes Key To Viano). Some brands are designing these experiences so that sharing the experience with friends is intrinsic to enjoying the experience itself. For instance, Unilever created the Share Happy interactive vending machines that uses facial recognition technology to measure smiles, rewards big smiles with free ice cream, and encourages users to share their smiles on Facebook. Goertz created an interactive virtual shoe fitting display that enabled users to try out any shoe from the catalog and share photos with their Facebook friends to ask for their opinions. Coca-Cola used RFID enabled wristbands to encourage teenage visitors at a Coca Cola theme park to seamlessly tag and share photos on Facebook. Anthon Berg used iPads in store to give away free chocolate to people who committed to do small acts of generosity for friends and family members.

Coca-Cola Village

Some live social experiences go from online to offline back to online. Some brands are tracking online conversations to find opportunities to engage in real-time, real-life random acts of kindness, which encourage the delighted recipients to talk about the experience online, creating valuable word of mouth. For instance, Orbit White in Israel gifted chewing gum hampers to people who checked in at cafes. KLM in Amsterdam surprised travelers who shared an update or check-in about their KLM flight with relevant gifts, based on their previous updates. Kleenex in Israel gifted a Kleenex Kit to people who shared a status update on Facebook about being sick. Kotex in Israel gifted a craft item to women influencers based on the items they had previously pinned on their own Pinterest boards.

KLM Surprise

Other brands have created activations that people kick start through online actions or submissions, but result in a compelling experience in a physical space. Coca-Cola reimagined their iconic Hilltop ad for the networked age by enabling people to share a coke with a stranger through their mobile phones, then capturing the receivers’ surprise as they received the Coke at specially designed vending machines all over the world. Ariel created a game where online influencers used a Facebook app to shoot paint at white designer clothes in a physical exhibit at Stockholm airport, then cleaned the clothes and gifted them to the influencers. Nike and Livestrong created a “chalkbot” that printed messages received from supporters on social media on streets all along the Tour de France route. C&A in Brazil asked fans to like clothes on their Facebook page, then displayed the like count on hangers inside the stores to help female shoppers make better shopping decisions.

Ariel Fashion Shoot

Many brands are also creating elaborate technology-enabled games, reality shows and treasure hunts that engage people both online and offline. Playground in Sweden asked shoppers at the hiking equipment store to support one of three fitness enthusiasts in a competition to stay awake for the longest time, and returned the money to the winner’s supporters. Mini Gateway created an iPhone app to invite Stockholm residents to catch and keep a virtual Mini, to win a real Mini Gateway. Jimmy Choo asked fans in New York to track its Foursquare check-ins to be the first to claim a pair of trainers at the check-in locations. Levi’s asked fans in Australia and New Zealand to track Twitter updates to be the first to claim a pair of Levi’s at the checked in locations. Nike invited London Nike+ users to claim a street by unlocking codes at phone booths and winning points by running through specific routes. Samsung rewarded fans for recording their walks, runs or rides during the London Olympics on the Samsung Hope Relay app by contributing to charities.

Nike Grid

Finally, the most progressive brands are creating devices and smart phone applications that enable consumers to use their products in a more meaningful way, by enhancing the product experience through sensor-enabled virtual self-tracking and community-sharing. For instance, Nike FuelBand (video) enables people to track their activities and workouts on the Nike+ community to analyze their own progress and compare or share their activity levels with their network. Volkswagen Smileage (video) enabled Volkswagen owners to track their drives, record memorable moments and share them with their networks. Stella Artois created an augmented reality bar guide to help people find and share bars that serve the brand.

Volkswagen Smileage

The Future of Social Live Experiences

We believe that both location-aware smart-phones and sensor-enabled devices will become ubiquitous in the near future, and almost all physical events, experiences and spaces will become social live experiences.

We expect that many location-based social networks will add augmented reality features and many augmented reality apps will add social networking features, so the boundaries between the two will blur. We expect more niche location-based social networks and augmented reality apps to emerge around niche interests and activities like live music, street art, hiking, swimming, driving and cycling. We also expect branded versions of these networks and apps, primarily by product brands that want to extend their experience (Volkswagen Smileage, Nike+), but also by brands who wish to be seen as curators of popular culture (Stella Artois Le Bar Guide).

We expect all public or semi-public spaces like parks, stadiums, museums, and event venues to build the infrastructure — including Wi-Fi connectivity, NFC or QR code stations, live-streaming equipment and sensor networks — to enable social live experiences. Event app platforms like QuickMobile (video), EventMobi (video), CrowdCompass(video), Guidebook (video), DoubleDutch (video), Grupio, Conference Compass (video) and MuseumApp already enable event organizers to create custom smart phone apps. We expect them to increasingly become specialized around niches like conferences, music festivals, and public spaces. We expect organizations and brands to use these tools to design delightful experiences that encourage attendees to share updates and photos across their social networks, creating word of mouth and increasing the reach of the programs and events.

Finally, many brands have already integrated digital elements – like QR codes and touch screens – into their retail experiences. We expect more brands to transform their retail experiences into social live experiences, by encouraging shoppers to share messages or photos on their friends’ social networks to avail of discounts or shopping advice, bringing online reviews into the store to help shoppers make better shopping decisions, and creating in-store activations that people can participate in online.

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This is the ninnth report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

What is Collective Intelligence?

Photo from jodiejaye on Flickr

Collective intelligence involves analyzing the collective actions and feedback of people, finding patterns and trends, and sharing it back to aid understanding and guide action. Organizations, artists and changemakers are using collective intelligence to analyze opinions and behaviors, identify patterns and trends, and recommend actions or inspire change.

The rise of collective intelligence can be attributed to three broad trends. First, people are sharing immense amounts of location-based, personalized data online, both implicitly by searching, clicking or buying and explicitly by creating profiles, posting status updates, and checking in to locations and events. Second, people are beginning to use sensor-based devices to track and share real world data about our bodies (quantified self) and our devices, houses, and environments (internet of things). Third, web platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are anonymizing and aggregating this data, mining collective intelligence from it themselves, and also making it available for third-party applications via robust APIs.

Web platforms are using data to create reviews of the most important trends and events in the previous year (Google Zeitgeist(video), 2012 Year on Twitter (video), Facebook Year in Review); add new perspective to important political, sports and entertainment events (Amazon Election Heat Map (screenshot), Twitter Political Index, Facebook America Votes 2012 (video),Twitter Oscars Index); and even predict potential career paths (LinkedIn Career Explorer (video)), the spread of communicable diseases (Google Flu Trends (video)) and traffic conditions (Google Maps Traffic (video)).

News and entertainment media organizations are partnering with internet platforms or using their APIs to use search and social data to analyze public opinions, predict the outcome of important events (USA Today/ Twitter Election Meter, Facebook/ CNN Election Insights, E! Heat Gauge (video)) or showcase upcoming artists (MTV Music Meter (video)).

Several web platforms are finding patterns in user profiles, networks and behaviors to make better product, movie, book, music and restaurant recommendations (Amazon, Netflix, Random House’s Bookscout, Goodreads, Pandora, Bundle).

Entrepreneurs and changemakers are creating niche platforms to mine social and search data to improve traffic conditions (Waze (video)), optimize energy consumption (Opower (video)), and aggregate health data to predict outbreak of diseases (Sickweather (video), Flu Near You (video), HealthMap (video)) and even explore effective cures (Patients Like Me (video), NextBio (video)).

Next Bio

Some collective intelligence initiatives have achieved significant impact and scale. For instance, Waze’s community of 36 million drivers shared 90 million user reports on real time traffic, accidents, hazards, police, gas prices and map issues, and Opower has used data from 80 utility companies to help reduce energy consumption by 2 billion kilowatt hours and save $234 million on electricity bills.

The success of such collective intelligence platforms shows that it’s possible to synthesize search, social, sensor and self-reported data from millions of people into meaningful real-time insights that can guide actions and change behaviors at scale.

How does Collective Intelligence work?

Collective intelligence platforms can be classified across three dimensions: the type of data, the method of data analysis, and the possibilities for participation.

Most collective intelligence platforms use a combination of search, social, sensor and self-reported data. Recommendation engines (Amazon) primarily use on-site browsing, buying and rating data, but are beginning to add social data. Navigation apps (Waze) primarily use automatically updated location data from smartphones, with some self-reported data. Many behavior change applications (Opower) use sensor or transaction data from their own or partner devices, but sometimes add in social data. Many platforms from media and entertainment organizations (MTV Music Meter) use social data sourced from social network APIs. Platforms that use search, social or sensor data typically use the public APIs or take a one-time permission from the user. Platforms that use self-reported data from specialized communities often build their own community platforms and add gamification features to encourage people to share data regularly (Patients Like Me).

Different collective intelligence platforms synthesize data in different ways. Some platforms use algorithms to cluster users and products based on viewing, buying, or rating behaviors and show their recommendations in terms of “users who liked these products also bought these other products” (Amazon) or “users who have similar characteristics also behaved in this way” (Opower). Many platforms plot search, social, sensor and self-reported data on maps, based on keywords or metadata, to find shifts in geographical patterns over time (Sickweather). Other platforms find patterns in social conversations through text and link analysis and connect them back to source or profile data (Facebook/ CNN Election Insights). Some platforms allow users to filter through the data based on time, location, popularity or sentiment to get to more nuanced insights.

Many collective intelligence platforms have overlaps with co-creation communities, social curation platforms, and behavior change games, and offer similar possibilities for participation. Crowdsourcing-driven platforms ask users to create profiles, share answers or ideas, and engage with other users’ content (Patients Like Me). Curation-driven platforms ask users to engage with other users’ content and tag their own content so that it might be included (Sickweather). Behavior change driven platforms compare the users’ behaviors with similar others and incentivize them to change their behavior through gamification features (OPower).

Waze

Collective Intelligence for Brands

Many organizations and brands are experimenting with collective intelligence in meaningful ways.

A number of organizations have created ideation platforms to crowdsource insights from employees, partners and customers, and some have even used these insights to create new product and service offerings (Dell Ideastorm, MyStarbucksIdea). Many other organizations have created long-term public or private insights communities to get a more nuanced understanding of consumer behavior, and some have even shared these insights back with the community. For instance, Nestle launched the Happily Healthy Project (video) quiz to help Australians measure their Happily Healthy Quotient and compare it to nation and state averages, filtered by a number of demographic variables like age, gender and income. Other organizations have partnered with independent community platforms to get insights about specialized high-value communities. For instance, several pharmaceutical companies have partnered with Patients Like Me to understand patient needs and drug performance.

Other organizations have taken the social curation route to synthesize and share insights from social conversations around important events. For instance, KPMG built WEF Live to curate the conversations around World Economic Forum and highlight the most important themes from WEF delegates and WEF watchers from around the world. During the 2012 London Olympics, GE tied up with NBC to track Twitter conversations around the games. Almost all major brands are trying to use big data, including search and social data, to understand and engage with consumers. For instance, Vicks combined aggregated search data from Google Flu Trends with demographic data to target moms in high flu zones with ads for their premium Flu Thermometer. @WalmartLabs has analyzed vast amounts of social data (“fast data”) and combined it with public web data and proprietary data to create the social genome, a living database of entities (people, events, topics, products, locations, organizations) and their relationships. It is now building a series of collective intelligence social applications using the social genome, starting with the social gift recommendation app Shopycat (video).

Finally, some organizations are building platforms and products to synthesize and share insights from sensor data, both in the quantified self-space and the internet of things space. For instance, the Nike+ (video) and Adidas MiCoach (video) range of wearable sensor-enabled products enable people to track their workouts, compare themselves with friends and similar others, and even compete with others. Audi partnered with MIT to create a Road Frustration Index (video) based on traffic and weather conditions, reported accidents and driver sentiment from social data.

Shopycat

Future of Collective Intelligence

In the near future, we expect more social platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to synthesize user data to share insights that help users get a new understanding of their own behaviors (how families interact on Facebook). We also expect social platforms to create more data-driven applications that help users make meaningful decisions and change their behaviors (LinkedIn Career Explorer, Google Flu Trends).

We also expect the social data space to explode with new, specialized players. Gnip, Topsy and DataSift (video) aggregate data from multiple social platforms, provide applications to recombine and analyze them, and APIs for third party developers to build applications on them. Other data players are focusing on building social data applications for a specific industry: Dataminr for financial services, BlueFinLabs (video) and Second Sync (video) for Television, Next Big Sound video and The Echo Nest for music, and ReviewPro for hotels. We also expect other data startups to focus on sensor data (SensorCloud (video)) and transaction data (Swipely (video)).

We expect that big corporations will acquire many of these social data startups. For instance, Twitter acquired TV social data startup BlueFin, Intuit acquired personal finance startup Mint, eBay acquired personal recommendation startup Hunch, and Walmart acquired social commerce startup Kosmix (now @WalmartLabs). Other organizations will partner with platforms like Kaggle or DataKind to run crowdsourced data challenges.

We also expect that organizations will shift their focus from collecting and analyzing data to creating applications that use the data to help their users get better understanding and make better decisions. As a result, social curation tools like MassRelevance, insight community tools like CommuniSpace and crowdsourcing tools like BrightIdea will all strengthen their features around visualizing and showcasing data bask to the users to guide action.

Finally, we expect that “fast data” will be the next big thing after “big data”, as organizations seek to analyze data streams from social conversations, search queries, sensors, and transactions, find patterns and actionable insights, and share it back with users to help them make better decisions, all in real time.

- X – X – X -

This is the seventh report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

What is Transmedia Storytelling?

Photo from xavitalleda on Flickr

Transmedia storytelling involves telling a story across multiple media platforms – including TV shows, movies, graphic novels, books, games, mobile apps, microsites, social networks, online communities and offline events – in a way that each platform explores different aspects of the same storyworld. Media organizations, changemakers, and brands are using transmedia storytelling to create immersive storyworlds that drive participation, action and loyalty.

The rise of transmedia storytelling can be attributed to three dynamics around how people create, consume and share stories today. First, people are consuming news and entertainment in byte-sized pieces, on smart phones and tablets, often on-the-go, leading to new opportunities to create cross-platform, location-aware storyworlds. Second, people have access to so much content that they are filtering for out or skimming most of it, except for content they are most passionate about. Third, people are simultaneously acting as consumers, curators and creators of content, making it possible to create non-linear storyworlds that grow through their participation.

As a result, movies, TV shows, games and toys are all turning into transmedia entertainment franchises. Studios are releasing not only movies but also alternate reality games (ARGs), set in elaborate storyworlds (A.I.’s The Beast, The Dark Knight’s Why So Serious?(video), The Hunger Games’ The Capitol (video), Prometheus’ Weyland Industries). Television networks are creating transmedia storyworlds to sustain fan interest between TV show seasons (Heroes’ Evolutions, Lost Experience (video),Dexter’s Hunt for the Infinity Killer (video), Game of Thrones’ The Maester’s Path (video), True Blood (video), BBC’s Sherlock’s The Science of Deduction (case study), and creating book series by TV show characters to deepen fan engagement (Castle’s Nikki Heat series, How I Met Your Mother’s Barney’s Bro series). Video game studios are creating ARGs to heighten anticipation around new game launches (Halo 2’s I Love Bees, Gun’s Last Call Poker). Toy brands are building transmedia entertainment franchises around popular characters (Barbie Life in the Dreamhouse, Barbie and Ken Reunion video). Some authors and publishers are creating immersive online experiences to bring alive the storyworlds in their books (Harry Potter’s Pottermore (video)). Independent storytellers are increasingly turning to transmedia storytelling to engage fans and build a reputation (Dirty Work interactive web series (video), Pandemic 1.0 ARG (video), The Guild web series and comic book). Beyond the entertainment industry, organizations and changemakers are applying transmedia storytelling to engage people, especially students, around science and social causes (NASA’s MarsCuriosity Rover, Urgent Evoke (video), World Without Oil (video), Ed Zed Omega (video), Cosmic Voyager Enterprises (video), Routes (video)).

Harry Potter – Pottermore

Some of these transmedia storytelling programs have had significant scale and impact. For instance, the ARG Why So Serious? launched fifteen months before the launch of The Dark Knight and attracted 11 million participants from 75 countries. Harry Potter’s Pottermore has 4.4 million registered users who have earned nearly 60 million points for exploring the storyworld and performing virtual actions. The Guild web series is currently in its sixth season and has received 83 million views on YouTube.

The success of these transmedia storytelling projects shows that, even as attention spans are shortening and media consumption is fragmenting, fans are willing to immerse themselves in non-linear, multi-layered storyworlds, and even extend it through their contributions.

How Does Transmedia Storytelling Work?

At the heart of transmedia storytelling is a storyworld with its own mythology and socio-cultural norms, which sets the stage for a cast of characters with their individual narrative arcs and web of relationships. Increasingly, people are consuming such storyworlds not as a linear narrative, but as a multi-layered, multi-platform, immersive experience.

Transmedia storytelling projects can be classified across four dimensions: the fictional or non-fictional nature of the storyworld, the depth and width of the storyworld, the interplay of different media channels with the storyworld, and the possibilities for participation.

Many transmedia storytelling projects are set in a fictional storyworld, with characters and plots, or even a mythical or speculative universe. Filmmakers, TV producers, game designers and writers use transmedia storytelling to extend their fictional storyworlds across channels (True Blood, Halo 2’s I Love Bees). Changemakers and educators often use transmedia storytelling to create speculative universes that provide new perspectives and open new possibilities for participants (World Without Oil). Increasingly, documentary filmmakers and non-fiction authors are creating transmedia projects by creating books, films, games, apps, events and social movements around the same theme or cause (It Gets Better, Half the Sky).

Transmedia storyworlds range from simple story extensions to immersive multi-layered, multi-platform experiences. Story extensions can include blogs, vlogs, social network profiles and even books from fictional characters (Gossip Girl’s blog, MarsCuriosity Rover on Twitter, How I Met Your Mother’s Barney’s Bro series),  to simple apps and games set in the storyworld (Pretty Little Liar’s Bump and Tell, The Hunger Game’s Become a Citizen), and book or film adaptations of the original project. Other storyworlds are immersive experiences, with multiple interconnected websites, web video series and multiplayer games that explore back stories, introduce new plots, characters and twists, or re-create the story in the real world (Prometheus’ Weyland Industries, Pottermore).

In some transmedia projects, the storyworld is distributed across many channels, and each channel explores a different part of the storyworld in an interlocked way, sometimes simultaneously and sometime in sequence (Heroes’ Evolutions), while other projects have minimal interplay between channels (Welcome to the Pine Point (video), or replicate the same storyworld across channels (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries). Most transmedia projects that are built around an alternate reality game have a strong live, real-time feel with many moving parts (Dexter’s Hunt for the Infinity Killer), while others are more asynchronous.

Finally, some transmedia projects provide multiple possibilities for fans to co-create the storyworld by deconstructing plot twists on fan wikis, contributing fan fiction and fan art, creating their own parallel narratives in virtual worlds, solving puzzles and playing games to unlock new parts of the storyworld, competing in challenges and tournaments, and participating in scavenger hunts, flash mobs and events in the real world (Why So Serious?). Other projects create an immersive multimedia experience, but provide fewer possibilities for participation (Our Choice).

Alternate reality games are a particularly popular form of transmedia storytelling, as they can be effectively incorporated into short-term high-intensity campaigns leading up to big launches. Most ARGs comprise of elaborate scavenger hunts that take place across fake websites and blogs, real web publications, fan communities, physical artifacts, flash mobs and rallies, and often include a series of puzzles, single-player simulations, and multi-player challenges or tournaments. Most ARGs induce mystery through hidden clues, suggestive announcements and partial reveals, and new elements are revealed on a preset schedule or after fans complete milestones. Fans share clues and solutions over online communities and wikis, and collaborate to unlock levels and complete the game, to get rewards like points and badges, physical artifacts, or exclusive content.

Case study: The Dark Knight – Why So Serious?

Transmedia Storytelling for Brands

Brands are learning to use paid or co-branded ads to pull consumers into branded transmedia storyworlds, which aim to retain people’s interest over the long term, and convert them first into passionate fans and then into paying customers, much like movie trailers with entertainment franchises.

Some brands bring their fictional characters or mascots alive through ads, web videos, video games and social network profiles. Burger King’s former mascot The King made appearances in real life, on TV shows and in video games.  Aflac created social media profiles for its mascot Aflac Duck, to engage consumers year round. P&G’s Old Spice created 185 video responses to tap into the popularity of its Old Spice Man, which is not only one of the most memorable marketing campaigns in recent times, but also an entertainment franchise in the making.

Most brands have created such storyworlds as part of alternate reality games, as they lend themselves to short-term, high-intensity campaigns. Brands have created alternate reality games to showcase the brand purpose, engage consumers and build excitement around events.

Coca-Cola built on its brand promise of happiness by creating a series of ads set in the fictional world of the Happiness Factory. Coca-Cola has also created a Happiness Factory Bible to outline the storyworld, character back-stories, and potential transmedia projects. Axe created the Axe Anarchy Graphic Novel (video) based on storylines and characters suggested by fans. Wrigley’s 5 created the Human Preservation Project (video) to showcase the importance of protecting and stimulating our senses. McDonald’s created The Lost Ring ARG to engage consumers around the 2008 Beijing Olympics and drive them to its outlets to search for clues. Audi created the Art of the Heist ARG to launch the Audi A3 in the US and showcase its sophisticated technological innovations.

Case study: AXE Anarchy: The Graphic Novel

Several technology brands have created branded transmedia storytelling programs to launch new products, highlight product features, and showcase the potential of technology to change our world. Intel & Toshiba created The Beauty Inside (video), an interactive film where anyone could play the role of the lead character. Nokia created an interactive story called Someone Else’s Phone to show how a lost phone might reveal all our secrets to a stranger. Nokia also partnered with Tim Kring to create the Conspiracy for Good (video) to support social organizations and showcase its Ovi platform. Microsoft created The Vanishing Point ARG (video) to launch Vista. Google created the Niantic Project ARG to showcase its augmented reality app Ingress (video). Orange has created a series of ARGs — Alt Minds (video), Detective Avenue (video) and Fanfan 2 (video) — to showcase the transmedia storytelling technologies created by the Orange Transmedia Lab. Cisco created The Hunt ARG to engage its sales force and inform them about upcoming Cisco technologies.

Case study: Conspiracy for Good
Some brands simply partner with existing media properties to create co-branded transmedia storytelling programs. For instance, Ford sponsored the Legends of Alcatraz ARG, based on the TV series Alcatraz. AT&T partnered with Tim Kring to create the Daybreak ARG (video), based on the TV series Touch, to showcase the power of technology to transform our lives. Microsoft created a Bing-powered treasure hunt called Decode Jay-Z to launch Jay-Z’s book Decoded, by releasing each page of the book in a new physical location, one page at a time, and using Bing search and maps to guide fans to them. Coke Zero created an obstacle course and challenged people to Unlock the 007 in them, as part of its brand promotions around the James Bond movie Skyfall.

Future of Transmedia Storytelling?

In the future, we expect all types of storytellers to create interactive multimedia content using tools like Thinglink (video), Stipple (video), Flixmaster, Mozilla Popcorn Maker (video), 3WDOC (video) and Klynt (video). We also expect transmedia storytellers to orchestrate transmedia projects — manage content and mailing lists, publish content according to a schedule or in response to audience actions, make calls and send emails or text messages — using tools like Conducttr (video), IFTTT and Zapier (video).

We expect transmedia storytelling projects, especially alternate reality games and augmented reality experiences, to create customized experiences around locations, using tools like SCVNGR (video), Moveable and Aris Games.

We expect that TV shows will use tools like Galahad (video) and Rides (video) to create truly interactive multi-screen experiences through real-time transmedia storytelling. Transmedia game designer Andrea Phillips believes that television is the most exciting area for transmedia right now:

“You already have a schedule, you know when your episodes will be airing and you have your pacing. It’s a fantastic spine around which to build a more intensive interactive experience… If I let you forget about my show for seven days until I air again, that gives you seven days to find something else to care about more.”

We see more studios adopt the Participant Media model and create engagement, even movements, around their movies using proprietary platforms like TakePart. We also expect more independent authors and documentary filmmakers to try to catalyze social movements around their books and movies.

We expect that ARGs will become an even more important part of the launch campaigns for new movies, TV shows and video games. We anticipate that many of these ARGs will be co-branded with technology brands to showcase new possibilities in technology, or with consumer brands to launch new products or create immersive experiences around the brand purpose.

Finally, we expect more brands to sponsor or create their own interactive storyworlds, either as short-term campaigns or as long-term destinations.

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This is the seventh report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

What is Social Curation?

Photo from peterhellberg on Flickr

Social curation involves aggregating, organizing and sharing content created by others to add context, narrative and meaning to it. Artists, changemakers and organizations use social curation to showcase the full range of conversations around a topic, add more nuance to their own original content, and set the stage to crowdsource content from their community members.

The rise of social curation can be attributed to three broad trends. First, people are creating a constant stream of social media content, including updates, location check-ins, blog posts, photos and videos. Second, people are using their social networks to filter relevant content, by following others who share similar interests. Third, social media platforms are also curating content, by giving curation tools to users (YouTube playlists, Flickr galleries, Amazon lists, Foodspotting guides), using editors and volunteers (YouTube Politics, Tumblr Tags) or using algorithms (YouTube Trends, Auto-generated YouTube channels, LinkedIn Today).

As a result, a number of niche social curation platforms have emerged to enable people to curate different types of content — including links, photos, sounds and videos — into boards (Pinterest), trees (Pearltrees (video)), pages (Scoop.it (video)) and narratives (Storify (video), Cowbird). Some social curation platforms are focused on specific niches; for instance, Learni.st(video) helps people curate lessons and Fancy helps people discover cool things to buy.

In addition, media organizations are using social curation to add depth to their programming and media entrepreneurs are creating new media business models around social curation. News media organizations are curating conversations around popular topics (The Guardian #smarttakes) and important events (Al Jazeera War on Gaza, Facebook and CNN Election Insights, Current TV Politically Direct). Entertainment media organizations are using social curation to amplify the participation around sports and entertainment events (GRAMMY Live, Oscar Buzz, E! Entertainment’s GRAMMY Heat Gauge (video), Fox MLB Playoff Hub,Turner Sports Ryder Cup, Fox Sports’s Survival Sunday, ESPN NCAA Tournament of Tweets, I Heart Radio’s Twitter Tracker) and shows (X Factors USA, ABC’s Pretty Little Liars Suspect Tracker, American Idol’s Fan Wall). Media organizations are also creating hubs to enable fans to connect with anchors and stars (NDTV Social, CBS Connect Lounge). Media entrepreneurs are building new types of media platforms around posting excerpts from the most relevant stories from around the web (The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post) or linking to them (Techmeme, mediagazer, memeorandum, WeSmirch, Alltop (video)).

Finally, changemakers, artists, entrepreneurs, and organizations are using social curation in many meaningful ways. Changemakers are curating stories to put a spotlight on important issues (ViewChange (video), Human Rights Channel (video), Amnesty International: Free Pussy Riot Map Project, Global Voices Threatened Voices, ) and provide support during crisis situations (Japan earthquake, Haiti earthquake (video)). Artists and storytellers are curating social content to create new types of artifacts (Band of the Day (video), The History of Jazz (video), On the Way to Woodstock (video), 7 Days in September(video)). Entrepreneurs and organizations are building curation-driven communities around specific professional niches (Venture Maven, MuckRack); sports leagues, teams and athletes (Olympic Athletes’ Hub (video), NBA China, MLB 140 Club, FC Barcelona, Team Great Britain, NY Giants); artists ((MTV Music Meter (video), Billboard Social 50 Chart); and even countries (Curators of Sweden (video)).

Ushahidi Haiti Earthquake

Some of these curation initiatives have gained significant traction. For instance, Pinterest has more than 40 million users and Huffington Post is amongst the top 25 websites in the US with 39 million unique views and 37 million social actions per month. The popularity of these platforms shows that social curation is an increasingly important model of social engagement for social networks, media platforms, and organizations.

How does Social Curation work?

Typically, social curation platforms can be classified across four dimensions: the interplay between creating, curating and co-creating content; the method of curation, through themes or people; the visual representation of curated content; and the possibilities for participation.

Most standalone social curation platforms (Pinterest, Storify) are built almost entirely around curated content, but others (Cowbird) use a combination of original, curated and crowdsourced content. Social curation platforms created by media organizations typically aim to amplify participation around their original content (including news reports, TV shows and sports events) through curation and co-creation, but some, like Al Jazeera War on Gaza, focus almost exclusively on curation. For many changemakers, the value of social curation lies in showcasing diverse point of views. For many artists, social curation is only the first step in creating original artifacts with well-crafted narratives.

Most social curation platforms search for and filter content by keyword, then group relevant content into themes, and sometimes highlight the most influential people talking about the themes (Current TV Politically Direct, Grammy Live, Oscar Buzz). Other social curation platforms filter content by people and organizations, then highlight the most popular content created or curated by them (Venture Maven, Olympic Athletes’ Hub, NBA China, MLB 140 Club). Some social curation programs are built around serial curation, with a number of people contributing or curating content in sequence (Curators of Sweden).

Social curation platforms use different visualizations to showcase content. Streams continue to be the most popular visualization (Venture Maven, Oscar Buzz), but dynamic grids are also becoming popular (GRAMMY Live). Some platforms filter content by location and plot them on interactive maps (Al Jazeera War on Gaza, I Heart Radio’s Twitter Tracker). Some platforms are organized as directories to search for and find people (Olympic Athletes’ Hub, NDTV Social). Many platforms use sophisticated social data visualizations to display content (E! Entertainment’s GRAMMY Heat Gauge, Current TV Politically Direct). Increasingly, social curation platforms are mashing up different visualizations to create rich, interactive dashboards (Facebook and CNN Election Insights).

The Olympic Athletes’ Hub

Finally, different social curation platforms offer different possibilities for participation. Some platforms merely make it easy for people to make sense of the curated content. Others also enable community members to follow people, vote on options, share content, add comments or updates, and upload photos directly from the interface. Still others add gamification elements to the platform (Pac 12’s Battle of the Tweets), or give community members access to special content based on the level of participation (Mission Impossible Flock-To-Unlock).

Social Curation for Brands

Almost all consumer brands, and many organizations, have started experimenting with social curation, by showcasing their own social content, or social content about them, on their websites.

Some brands have started creating short-term social curation hubs to curate the conversations around their own events, like fashion shows (Victoria’s Secret) and product launches (Ford Fusion).

Other brands have created social curation hubs around events they are participating in. KPMG created the World Economic Forum Live dashboard to showcase the most important conversations and trends emerging at Davos in 2012 and 2013. TaylorMade created a social hub to help fans connect with athletes during the 2012 US Open Golf. During the 2012 London Olympics, GE tied up with NBC to track Twitter conversations around the Olympics.

Another opportunity is to use social curation to create niche communities around a shared profession, passion, or purpose. For instance, in 2009, Microsoft created a unique B2B community called ExecTweets, where people could find and follow top business executives from different sectors and engage with their tweets.

Now, several brands are pioneering powerful branded content programs by integrating original content, curated content and crowdsourced content. Pepsi Pulse has transformed the Pepsi homepage into an interactive pop culture dashboard driven by social media, as part of its #LiveforNow campaign. The dynamic grid dashboard is a mashup of original articles about pop culture and live performances, content from Pepsi’s many celebrity endorsers, and relevant fan content, including content tagged with #livefornow. Secret Mean Stinks Gang Up For Good uses a similar dynamic dashboard to mash up original videos and tips on stopping teen bullying with fan conversations and photos from a series of social media challenges for teens. iQ by Intel uses a sophisticated social curation system to mash up Intel’s own original content with content created and curated by Intel employees to showcase technology’s impact on our lives.

Finally, many brands are integrating elements of social curation into their co-creation communities, and the boundary between curating content and co-creating content is blurring, especially in the context of short-term campaigns.

The Future of Social Curation

We believe that social curation will change how media organizations and brands tell stories and engage their communities in 2013.

We expect news and entertainment media organizations to experiment with new business models tied to social curation.

We expect news media organizations to tightly integrate original content, curated content, and crowdsourced content to add depth to their stories and increase social engagement around them. Steven Rosenbaum, CEO of video curation platform Magnify.net and author of Curation Nation, argues:

“The most successful curators include sites like The Huffington Post, that embrace the three-legged-stool philosophy of creating some content, inviting visitors to contribute some content, and gathering links and articles from the web. Created, contributed, and collected — the three ’c’s is a strong content mix that has a measurable impact.”

We expect lifestyle and entertainment media to go further, and add a social commerce layer to this three-part strategy, to create new business models like Fancy that blur the boundaries between media and commerce players.

We also expect more brands to create more powerful social curation programs. Many brands are already active on Pinterest and we are likely to see new types of social curation programs on Pinterest with the launch of Pinterest business accounts and Pinterest-focused content marketing tools like Curalate. Specifically, we will see many brands use Pinterest, and niche Pinterest-like social curation platforms, for social commerce.

In addition, we will see corporations and brands that are already committed to serious long-term branded content programs (LVMH Nowness, Coca Cola Journey, American Express OpenForum, Qualcomm Spark, Cisco Network, IBM Smarter Planet,HSBC Business Without Borders) to follow the example of media organizations. We expect them, and many others, to design branded content programs (like Pepsi Pulse, iQ by Intel and Secret Gang Up For Good) that have specific strategies for creating long-form original content artifacts, using them as provocations to curate and crowdsource short-form content, then creating new long-form content artifacts from such short-form content.

Finally, we expect a number of startups to create social curation products for brands and media organizations. Products like Storyful (video), NewsCred (video) and Swift River (video) focus on media organizations and specialize in curating and syndicating the most relevant content. Other products like Percolate (video), Rallyverse (video), Mass Relevance (video), CurationStation (video),Olapic (video) and PublishThis (video) target entertainment media organizations, corporations and brands, and offer features to drive social engagement.

Storyful – It’s all about people

To address this big opportunity, we are creating our own proprietary social curation software that will source the most relevant stories on a topic from vetted sources, rank them based on social popularity on a private dashboard, and enable human curators to publish them on social networks, email newsletters, mobile apps and touch-enabled dynamic web magazines, and drive social engagement around them.

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This is the sixth report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

Photo from pagedooley on Flickr

Hello. My name is Gaurav. I am Indian. I am thirty three years old. I work in marketing, but sometimes I think of myself as a thinker and writer. I want to write many books. I want to use my ideas to change the world.

Two and a half years back, in September 2010, I first came to China for work. Since then, I have come to China many times for work, mostly to Beijing and Shanghai. Six months back, in September 2012, I moved to Shanghai. Before that, in the last five years, I have lived in Mumbai, Delhi, and Washington DC.

I am learning Mandarin. My teacher tells me that I already know more than four hundred words. But, I can’t write Mandarin characters yet. This year, my goal is learn at least one thousand words. I am writing about my life in Shanghai, in Mandarin, to practice my Mandarin.

Sometimes, I think of myself as a nomad. I travel for work all the time. In the last three years, I have traveled for almost two-third of the time, and visited more than twenty countries, mostly, India and China. So, you can imagine why I am tired of traveling.

This year, I want to travel less. I want to stay in Shanghai; explore and understand the city. Everyday, I want to eat healthy, do yoga, and go out on long walks. I want to learn Chinese and Tai Chi. I want to read a lot, write a lot. I want to make a lot of new friends. These are simple things, don’t you think?

Why Shanghai? Shanghai is my favorite city. If I could live anywhere in the world, I would choose Shanghai. Shanghai feels like the center of the world, with unlimited energy like New York, and unlimited possibilities like Mumbai. That’s why I love Shanghai.

I also love Shanghai because it has four seasons, and both Spring and Autumn are beautiful here. I love walking around, especially in the French Concession, which is filled with wine bars, restaurants, and historical buildings. Everyday, I walk to work in Jing ‘An; I love watching old people exercise in Jing ‘An Park. I rarely take a taxi, maybe only once a week.

Two or three times a week, I go out with my friends for dinner. On the weekend, sometimes, I meet my friends for brunch or tea, and we talk for many hours. Sometimes, I sit in a wine bar by myself, reading a book and sipping red wine. Maybe once a month, I invite my friends, and their friends, to come to my house, for a party.

I like that I have friends from many nationalities in Shanghai, but I don’t like that almost all of them work in marketing. In the future, I would like to make friends with people from different fields of work: artists, writers, musicians, internet geeks, entrepreneurs and changemakers.

I am excited about writing in a new language. I can only use the simplest words to write about the simplest things, but I am hoping that these simple words will give you a sense of who I am. I use Tencent WeChat (gauravonomics) to share updates about my life in Shanghai, so do feel free to add me.

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您好。我的名字叫高睿。我是印度人。我三十三岁。我做营销工作，但是有的时候我觉得自己是一个思想家和作家。我想写很多书。我想用我的想法改变世界。

两年半以前，于二零一零年九月，我第一次来到中国工作。从那时起，我就已经来中国工作很多次了，主要是北京和上海。六个月以前，二零一二年九月，我搬到了上海。在这以前的五年, 我一直生活在孟买，新德里和华盛顿特区。

现在我在学习中文。我的老师告诉我：我已经学了四百多词了。但是我还不会写汉字。今年，我的目标是学习一千个词。我想用中文写一些我在上海的生活，来练习我的中文。

有的时候，我觉得自己是一个流浪者。我一直在出差。在过去的三年里，差不多有三分之二的时间我都在出差，我去过二十多个国家，但主要是在中国和印度。所以，你可以想像，为什么我有一点儿厌倦旅行了。

今年， 我想少一点儿出差。我要呆在上海。探索，发现和了解这个城市。每天，我想吃得很健康，做瑜伽和出去散步。 我也想学中文和太极。我想看很多书和写很多东西。我想认识很多新朋友。这些都是很简单的事情，你觉得呢？

为什么是上海？上海是我最爱的城市。如果我可以住在世界上的任何地方，我一定会选择上海。上海好像是世界的中心，就像纽约一样充满了无限的能量，像孟买一样充满了无限的可能。这是为什么我爱上海。

我爱上海，也因为她四季分明，春天和秋天都很美。我爱散步，特别是在法租界，那里有很多酒吧，餐厅和古老的建筑。每天我走路去静安工作。我爱看老人们在静安公园锻炼身体。我很少坐出租车，也许一个星期一次。

一个星期两到三次，我会和我的朋友出去吃晚饭。在周末，有的时候，我会见我的朋友，我们一起吃早中餐或者喝茶，我们会聊很长时间。有的时候，我会一个人坐在葡萄酒吧，看书和品啜红酒。也许一个月一次，我会邀请我的朋友和他们的朋友来我家玩。

在上海我有很多来自不同国家的朋友，但是大多数朋友都做营销工作。 以后，我也想结识其他领域的朋友们，比如说艺术家，作家，音乐家，互联网怪才，企业家和变革者。

我很兴奋可以用新语言来表达我的想法。现在我只能用最简单的词语写最简单的事情，但是我还是希望这些简单的文字可以帮你们了解我。现在，我一直用腾讯微信(gauravonomics)和大家分享我在上海的生活， 如果你有兴趣，请加我。

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Nín hǎo. Wǒ de míngzì jiào Gāo Ruì. Wǒ shì yìn duó rén. Wǒ sānshísān suì. Wǒ zuò yíngxiāo gōngzuò, dàn shì y ǒu de shíhou wǒ juéde zìjǐ shì yīgè sīxiǎngjiā hé zuòjiā. Wǒ xiǎng xiě hěnduō shū. Wǒ xiǎng yòng wǒ de xiǎngfǎ gǎibiàn shìjiè.

Liǎng nián bàn yǐqián, yú èr líng yī líng nián jiǔ yuè, wǒ dì yī cì lái dào zhōngguó gōngzuò. Cóng nà shí qǐ, wǒ jiù yǐjīng lái zhōngguó gōngzuò hěnduō cìle, zhǔyào shi běijīng hé shànghǎi. Liù gè yuè yǐqián, èr líng yī’èr nián jiǔ yuè, wǒ bāndào le shànghǎi. Zài zhè yǐqián de wǔ nián, wǒ yīzhí shēnghuó zài mèngmǎi, xīndélǐ hé huáshèngdùn tèqū.

Xiànzài wǒ zài xuéxí zhōngwén. Wǒ de lǎoshī gàosu wǒ, wǒ yǐjīng xuéle sìbǎi duō cíle. Dànshì wǒ hái bù huì xiě hànzì. Jīnnián, wǒ de mùbiāo shì xuéxí yīqiān gè cí. Wǒ xiǎng yòng zhōngwén xiě yīxiē wǒ zài shànghǎi de shēnghuó, lái liànxí wǒ de zhōngwén.

Yǒu de shíhou, wǒ juéde zìjǐ shì yīgè liúlàng zhě. Wǒ yīzhí zài chūchāi. Zài guòqù de sān nián lǐ, chàbùduō yǒu sān fēn zhī èr de shíjiān wǒ dū zài chūchāi, wǒ qùguò èrshí duō gè guójiā, dàn zhǔyào shi zài zhōngguó hé yìndù. Suǒyǐ, nǐ kěyǐ xiǎngxiàng, wèishéme wǒ yǒu yīdiǎn er yànjuàn lǚxíngle.

Jīnnián, wǒ xiǎng shǎo yīdiǎnr chūchāi. Wǒ yào dāi zài shànghǎi. Tànsuǒ, fāxiàn hé liǎojiě zhège chéngshì. Měi tiān, wǒ xiǎng chī de hěn jiànkāng, zuò yújiā hé chūqù sànbù. Wǒ yě xiǎng xué zhōngwén hé tàijí. Wǒ xiǎng kàn hěnduō shū hé xiě hěnduō dōngxi. Wǒ xiǎng rènshi hěnduō xīn péngyǒu. Zhèxiē dōu shì hěn jiǎndān de shìqíng, nǐ juéde ne?

Wèishéme shì Shànghǎi? Shànghǎi shì wǒ zuì ài de chéngshì. Rúguǒ wǒ kěyǐ zhù zài shìjiè shàng de rènhé dìfāng, wǒ yīdìng huì xuǎnzé Shànghǎi. Shànghǎi hǎoxiàng shì shìjiè de zhōngxīn, jiù xiàng niǔyuē yīyàng chōngmǎn le wúxiàn de néngliàng, xiàng mèngmǎi yīyàng chōngmǎn le wúxiàn de kěnéng. Zhè shì wèishéme wǒ ài shànghǎi.

Wǒ ài Shànghǎi, yě yīnwèi tā sìjì fēnmíng, chūntiān hé qiūtiān dū hěn měi. Wǒ ài sànbù, tèbié shì zài fǎzūjiè, nà li yǒu hěnduō jiǔbā, cāntīng hé gǔlǎo de jiànzhú. Měi tiān wǒ zǒulù qù jìng’ān gōngzuò. Wǒ ài kàn lǎorénmen zài jìng’ān gōngyuán duànliàn shēntǐ. Wǒ hěn shǎo zuò chūzū chē, yěxǔ yīgè xīngqí yī cì.

Yīgè xīngqí liǎng dào sāncì, wǒ huì hé wǒ de péngyǒu chūqù chī wǎnfàn. Zài zhōumò, yǒu de shíhou, wǒ huìjiàn wǒ de péngyǒu, wǒmen yīqǐ chī zǎo zhōngcān huòzhě hē chá, wǒmen huì liáo hěn cháng shíjiān. Yǒu de shíhou, wǒ huì yīgèrén zuò zài pútáojiǔbā, kàn shū hé pǐnchuài hóngjiǔ. Yěxǔ yīgè yuè yīcì, wǒ huì yāoqǐng wǒ de péngyǒu hé tāmen de péngyǒu lái wǒ jiā wán.

Zài Shànghǎi wǒ yǒu hěnduō láizì bùtóng guójiā de péngyǒu, dànshì dà duōshù péngyǒu dōu zuò yíngxiāo gōngzuò. Yǐhòu, wǒ yě xiǎng jiéshì qítā lǐngyù de péngyǒumen, bǐrú shuō yìshùjiā, zuòjiā, yīnyuè jiā, hùliánwǎng guài cái, qǐyè jiā hé biàngé zhě.

Wǒ hěn xīngfèn kěyǐ yòng xīn yǔyán lái biǎodá wǒ de xiǎngfǎ. Xiànzài wǒ zhǐ néng yòng zuì jiǎndān de cíyǔ xiě zuì jiǎndān de shìqíng, dànshì wǒ háishì xīwàng zhèxiē jiǎndān de wénzì kěyǐ bāng nǐmen liǎojiě wǒ. Xiànzài, wǒ yīzhí yòng téngxùn wēixìn (gauravonomics) hé dàjiā fēnxiǎng wǒ zài shànghǎi de shēnghuó, rúguǒ nǐ yǒu xìngqù, qǐng jiā wǒ.

Photo from jdhancock on Flickr

I will be in Amsterdam for several weeks this year for THNK‘s Creative Leadership program, an 18-month, part-time, executive education program for senior international talent from social entrepreneurship, creative entrepreneurship and business intrapreneurship. THNK comprises of several intensive weeks spent on campus in Amsterdam during the first 6 months engaging in Quest (coaching), Forum (workshops) and (innovation) Challenges, followed by a personal entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial challenge (Accelerator) during the next 12 months.

An important part of THNK is Quest, which focuses on personal development through intensive coaching from professional coaches and peers, using 360 degree feedback tools, like the THNK MIRROR. In preparation for the first THNK module in early March, I am reflecting on my THNK MIRROR results (based on scores from two superiors, two peers and two subordinates on a scale of 1 to 5), trying to understand my gifts and learning edges, and identifying the behaviors I’ll work on during my THNK experience.

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My gifts lie in envisioning a better future (4.27), applying an explorative mindset (4.03), and acting with passion and purpose (4.00). My learning edges lie in orchestrating creative teams (3.74), and driving breakthrough change (3.59).

Some of my highest 360 degree scores are on storytelling that moves to act (4.67), seeking inspiration from different sources (4.33), growing and harvesting creative networks (4.33), thinking big (4.33), articulating a clear vision (4.33), and continuous self-development (4.33). Other high scores include casting the creative clash (4.20), and having the courage to be a pioneer (4.20). None of this is a surprise to me.

Some of my lowest 360 degree scores are on protecting bottom line viability (3.20), empowering others to create (3.25), flexibly driving change (3.33), and unleashing the creative organization (3.33). Other low scores include coaching creative teams (3.60), unleashing an accelerating change (3.60), personal mastery (3.67), engaging the whole system for change (3.80), critical thinking (3.83), and finding creative solutions (3.83). Again, the only surprises are the relatively low scores on critical thinking and finding creative solutions.

Some of the biggest differences between my own scores and the 360 degree scores are on: authentic leadership (2.00), engaging the whole system for change (1.80), flexibly driving change (1.33), and protecting bottom line viability (1.20). Other big differences are on: creating a sense of velocity (1.00), storytelling that moves to act (0.67), coaching creative teams (0.60), and unleashing an accelerating change (0.60). I was surprised that, in all these cases, the 360 degree scores were between 0.5 points to 2.0 points higher than my own scores.

I was most pleased by my high 360 degree scores on authentic leadership, storytelling that moves to act, and courage to be a pioneer, because they reinforce my self-image of setting an example for positive change. Specifically, I was pleased with the big difference between my own score and the 360 degree score on authentic leadership, as it gave me positive reinforcement in a moment of self-doubt.

I was most displeased with my low 360 degree scores on empowering others to create, and coaching creative teams. I think that my personality is shifting from my usual rational architect INTP profile towards an idealist healer INFP profile. So, being able to create positive change at the personal and interpersonal level (orchestrating creative teams) seems more important, or at least more immediate, to me than being able to create positive change at the organization-wide and system-wide level (driving breakthrough change).

In summary, the THNK MIRROR scores underline the reasons why I joined the THNK program. In spite of my many strengths, I haven’t been able to create real positive change. Often, I am not able to manage my own time and keep my promises, or mobilize resources to finish my projects. Even when I am able to finish the projects I start, I am not able to stay engaged long enough for them to create long-term, system-wide, sustainable change.

During my THNK experience, I would like to work first on orchestrating creative teams, and then on driving breakthrough change. Specifically, I would like to work on areas like empowering others to create, coaching creative teams, and unleashing the creative organization. Once I have mastered these skills, I feel like I’ll be in a better position to work on engaging the whole system for change, flexibly driving change, and protecting bottom line viability.

Within orchestrating creative teams, I am already really good at growing and harvesting creative networks (4.33) and casting the creative clash (4.20). I have a lot of work to do in the areas of empowering creatives (3.25), enabling change agents (3.33), and coaching creative teams (3.6). I have been working on this edge, but I think that my team members see me on a spectrum from insensitive (at worst) to inconsistent (at best), depending on how aware I am of my actions.

I would like to become a leader who inspires people to achieve their full potential and create their best work. I would focus more on people and less on projects, and continue to enable and empower people, even when things are off-track. I would find the time and the energy to help each person on the team to grow, but also create the conditions for the team members to come closer to each other. I would resist the temptation to try to do everything myself, but continue to stay engaged and support the team. I would coach the team to think more creatively, tease out the creative conflict, and challenge themselves to find more meaningful answers. If I am able to do this, we will be able to create much more impact together than I can create on my own.

To bring about this change, I would need to shift my focus away from “I” to “we”, and from “I” to “you”. I would need to become more aware of myself and others, and remember to stay aware. I would need to live my intention to be always kind and nurturing every day, including to myself, through my words and actions. I would need to rein in my fight or flight impulse, rein in both my sharp tongue and my tendency to retreat within myself. I would need to become better at setting the right expectations for myself and for my team, and working together to create the conditions for us to reach them.

I am trying to manage my energy by deepening my yoga and meditation practice; I am hoping that it will also help me become less self-centered. I am also trying to manage my time more intentionally by becoming more organized and practicing a regular productivity workflow on Trello. I have cut down my commitments in terms of both workstreams and travel to create more time to coach my team. I am also trying to minimize my “coordinate” time, and prioritize my “coach time” over my “create time” by creating Trello projects titled “growth and happiness of X” for each of my direct reports.

Finally, I would also like to build upon my gifts of envisioning a better future, applying an explorative mindset, and acting with passion and purpose to create my THNK Accelerator project (a hybrid of two ideas: a social innovation collaboratory called FutureCrafting and a near future science fiction novel called Mirror), with the intention of inspiring, organizing and energizing changemakers to strive for their best selves and craft better futures.

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In preparation for the first THNK module in early March, I am reflecting on my leadership philosophy, including how I think about the underlying principles, and how I want to see them lived out in practice.

I feel that I am at my best as a leader when I am working with a small group of creative and innovative people, with the shared purpose of creating meaningful change, for people, organizations, communities, and the world. The shared purpose helps us create a common understanding on both the destination we wish to reach and the possible paths that might lead us to it.

I invest time and energy in selecting the right people for my team, often working with them on a side project before I invite them to join the team. If I like them, I ask them to take the MBTI personality test, and they almost always turn out to be idealist NFs or rational NTs; my preference is to surround myself with ENTJs and ENFJs to round off the edges of my own INTP/ INFP personality.

I am deeply committed to the growth of my team, and like to create both the space for them to learn on their own, and opportunities for them to learn from our work. I insist that we always do our best work, and inspire them to explore their boundaries, by setting high expectations, and leading by example. I often see myself as an agent provocateur, the one who asks “what if?” and “why don’t we?”, the one who casts the creative conflict, the one who changes the status quo.

I often find myself saying “this isn’t good enough” and “this is how we do it” and I sometimes worry that I always want things done my way. Over time, I have learned to say “do you understand why we are doing this?” and “what do you think; how else might we do it?” as often. Now, I would like to become better at saying “this is why I love what you did” and “this is why I love working with you”.

I would like to become more consistent as a leader; less like the brilliant but absent-minded professor who takes them on a roller coaster ride, from ephemeral moments of epiphany, to nagging doubts of inadequacy, interspersed with days of benign neglect; and more like the personal coach who understands their aspirations and motivations, their strengths and weaknesses, and helps them become better every day.

Beyond my team, I proactively build and nurture a network of likeminded changemakers all over the world. I am generous in sharing my ideas with them, connecting them with each other, and creating new opportunities for them. I am curious to learn why they do what they do, what makes them tick, how did they become themselves, and where do they go from here. I would like to go beyond sharing ideas and become better at collaborating with them, co-creating new projects, sharing ownership, and scaling impact.

Photo from xjrlokix on Flickr

I will be in Amsterdam for several weeks this year for THNK‘s Creative Leadership program, an 18-month, part-time, executive education program for senior international talent from social entrepreneurship, creative entrepreneurship and business intrapreneurship. THNK comprises of several intensive weeks spent on campus in Amsterdam during the first 6 months engaging in Quest (coaching), Forum (workshops) and (innovation) Challenges, followed by a personal entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial challenge (Accelerator) during the next 12 months.

An important part of THNK is Accelerator, which involves working on a 12-month long personal project, to start a new entrepreneurial venture, lead an organisational transformation, or  create sustainable social impact. In preparation for the first THNK module in early March, I am reflecting on my initial ideas for my project, where they came from, what’s the change I wish to bring about through them, and how I will need to change myself to work on them.

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I feel like I have spent the last few years trying to find meaning in my life and work, through a journey of reduction, by asking myself who will I become if I don’t do this, or own that. This journey has included: living a year without buying anything I didn’t need, giving away almost everything I owned, taking a year off to think and teach a class on social media and social change, creating a social platform to crowdsource election monitoring, starting my own social media and social change agency, practicing Vipassana silent meditation, beginning and abandoning three books, and living in America and China.

Sometimes, I feel that I am like the Greek king Sisyphus who was cursed by the Gods to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this action forever. Sometimes, I feel that I am like the Indian king Trishanku who wished to ascend to heaven in his mortal body, but was suspended by the Gods in his own heaven, between earth and heaven. Sometimes, like Albert Camus, I think of it as the irony of the human condition, and wonder if the only meaning to be found in our lives is in striving to ascend to heaven, in rolling the boulder up the hill.

In any case, my search for meaning is far from done, but I have learned what’s important to me: creating a positive change in the world, learning from new experiences, striving to be my best self, having the freedom to make my own choices, and being generous in sharing what I own and create. Last year, I synthesized these five principles into a personal manifesto. This year, I have used these principles to create a personal dashboard on Trello to visualize what success will look like, at the end of the year, and track my progress.

In the context of work, in everything I have done over the last five years (as a marketer, a writer, an academic, a changemaker, an entrepreneur, and an intrapreneur), I have been rooted in two values: purpose and participation. These values have shaped the consulting work I have done for clients, the new thinking and offerings I have created, the personal projects I have worked on, and the communities I have participated in. These two values have also shaped the two initial ideas for my Accelerator project.

My first idea is FutureCrafting, a community of changemakers, who are using technology to craft better futures. FutureCrafting aims to use crowdsourcing and transmedia storytelling to help us think about possible and preferable futures in the areas of sustainability, wellness, learning, urbanism, and media; and help us evaluate our personal and policy choices today, so that we might craft better futures for tomorrow. First, we will work within small groups to map possible futures in these areas on a 2×2 matrix with likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis, leading to four sets of possibilities. We will be guided by William Gibson’s advice that “the future is already here; it’s just not very evenly distributed”, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s advice that “any technology in current use is likely to be at its half life; the older the technology is, the longer it’s likely to last”. Then, we will use transmedia storytelling to craft speculative fiction narratives that bring these possible futures to life, and make them accessible to the larger community. Then, we will use these speculative fiction artifacts as provocations to invite the community to participate in a crowdsourcing challenge, to expand our set of possible futures, validate their mapping on the 2X2 matrix, and link them to our personal and policy choices. Finally, we will design mechanisms to make it easier for people to make the personal choices and support the policy choices today that lead to preferable futures tomorrow.

My second idea is Mirror, another transmedia storytelling project, built around a near future science fiction novel, which explores the possible and preferable futures in the areas of sustainability, wellness, learning, urbanism, and media through the lives of six everyday heroes: an Indian data scientist, a Dutch ethnographer, a Kenyan community organizer, a Brazilian game designer, a Chinese filmmaker, and an American hacker. We explore the storyworld through the lens of a social network called Mirror, which is so popular that everyone in the world uses it, and so powerful that it not only curates experiences we want to participate in, but also gently nudges us towards experiences that are good for us, that make us happy, help us grow, become better people. We witness our six protagonists embark on perilous quests to find meaning, in a cosmic game that blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual, only to discover that they can only find the answers they are looking for if they learn to still their minds and look within. We explore a new world order, in which independent city-states pursue their own visions of benign technological utopias, only to relearn that technology alone can’t help us create a utopian society, unless our spiritual progress catches up with our technological progress.

I have been playing around with both the ideas for months now, without being able to really work on either of them. Now, I feel that I should design my THNK project as a hybrid of the the two ideas; the FutureCrafting community can help create the storyworld, while the Mirror novel can bring it to life. Between the two, they can inspire, organize, and energize changemakers around the world to strive for their best selves and craft better futures.

Both these ideas speak to many of my gifts in the areas of envisioning a better future, applying an explorative mindset, and acting with passion and purpose. Specifically, gifts like thinking big, articulating a clear vision, having the courage to be a pioneer, seeking inspiration from different sources, growing and harvesting creative networks, and storytelling that moves to act will come into play, as I work on the project.

At the same time, I realize that I will need to work on my learning edges in the areas of orchestrating creative teams, and driving breakthrough change. Specifically, I will need to work on edges like personal mastery, empowering others to create, coaching creative teams, and unleashing the creative organization to bring the project to life. Then, I will need to work on edges like flexibly driving change, unleashing an accelerating change, engaging the whole system for change, and protecting bottom line viability to create long-term, sustainable impact through the project.

I also realize that I will not only need to learn new behaviors, but also new skills to work on the project. I will need to immerse myself into the disciplines of scenario planning and transmedia storytelling and train myself to become a practitioner. I will need to master an understanding of the technologies and social dynamics that are shaping the future of sustainability, wellness, learning, urbanism, and media. I will need to bring together a truly multi-disciplinary team, including many volunteers, and learn to play the role of a producer. Finally, I will need to learn how to raise the funds for the projects, perhaps through a crowdfunding platform like Kickstarter.

To do all this, I am sure that I will need all the help I can get, from potential funders and collaborators, scenario planning and transmedia storytelling gurus, and social entrepreneurs and changemakers. So, if FutureCrafting and Mirror speak to you, do write to me or share a comment below; I would love to hear your feedback and explore opportunities to collaborate.

What are Co-creation Communities?

Photo from youraccount on Flickr

Co-creation involves organizations, entrepreneurs, artists, experts and people coming together people to create new artifacts including books, movies, music, art, software, products and solutions. Artists, entrepreneurs and organizations benefit from the contributions of community members, while contributors showcase their insights and creativity, and get rewarded in terms of recognition or prizes.

The rise of co-creation can be attributed to three broad trends. First, millions of people all over the world are expressing themselves not only by posting blogs, photos, and videos, but also by hacking software and hardware, and making art and craft. Second, people are increasingly thinking of themselves as creators, showcasing their creations in online portfolios (Behance (video), deviantART, SoundCloud), and selling their creations in peer-to-peer online marketplaces (Etsy, Cafepress, Zazzle (video), BandCamp, Lulu). Third, people are teaching each other how to create things (Howcast, Instructables (video), Skillshare (video), Craftsy (video)), and learning by making things together, in online (DIY.org) and offline (MakerFaire (video) communities, often building upon easy-to-use open-source kits (Arduino). Author Patricia Martin calls this cultural movement “The Renaissance Generation“.

As a result, we are seeing a number of platforms focusing on different aspects of co-creation. Threadless (video) invites its community members to submit t-shirt designs in theme-based challenges. HitRecord invites artists to upload their creations, remix others’ creations, and participate in collaborative projects. Quirky (video) and Ahhha (video) invite wannabe inventors to collaborate with the community to convert their ideas into products. Cut On Your Bias (video) invites fashion enthusiasts to collaborate with new fashion designers on their upcoming collections. Other platforms, like OpenIDEO (video), which we have covered in our report on collaborative social innovation, focus on bringing together businesses, governments, non-profits and change makers to co-create innovative and sustainable solutions around a shared purpose.

Threadless

In the public consciousness, co-creation communities are best known for the free user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia and the free and open source operating system Linux, but they have also resulted in books (The Mongoliad, Business Model Generation), movies (Life in a Day (video), Britain in a Day (video), The Cosmonaut (video), CollabFeature (video)), music (Genetic Music Project) and art (The One Million Masterpiece).

Some of these co-creation platforms and projects have had significant impact. For instance, Threadless’s community of 2.3 million members have submitted and voted on 260,000 t-shirt designs and won $7.1 million in awards. National Geographic and YouTube received 4,500 hours of footage in 80,000 submissions from 192 countries for Life in a Day and the YouTube channel has been viewed 34 million times.

Life in a Day

The success of co-creation platforms like Threadless shows that people don’t only desire to express themselves creatively, but they also want to create together with likeminded creators, in online and offline communities. Equally importantly, the success of co-creation projects like Life in a Day shows that it’s possible to break down big creative endeavors, like making a movie or creating a product, into small tasks, inspire thousands of contributors to engage in the task, then aggregate the contributions back into a meaningful artifact.

How do Co-creation Communities work?

Co-creation communities can be classified across three important dimensions: the relationship between initiators and contributors, the possibilities for participation, and the nature of collaboration.

Source: Quirky.com/Learn

Typically, the platform owners, or their partner organizations initiate co-creation projects (Threadless, Cut On Your Bias, OpenIDEO, Life in a Day), but community members can also initiate projects (HitRecord, Quirky). On many platforms, community members retain the right to their own contributions, but winner usually give over their rights for prize money, or licensing fees. In some cases, the initiators share the ownership of the project by releasing it under a Creative Commons license.

Most co-creation platforms enable community members to submit contributions, activate their social networks, and rate, vote and comment on contributions. Some also provide gamification features like points and levels to encourage community members to participate more (OpenIDEO, Quirky). A few platforms also enable community members to collaborate with others and form teams. Some platforms are more restrictive, and only allow community members to vote on options (Cut On Your Bias).

Most co-creation platforms rely on challenges to attract contributors and encourage participation, so community members often end up competing with each other. However, many co-creation platforms incentivize community members to support others’ contributions by rewarding them with social influence (OpenIDEO) or cash (Quirky), or creating a culture of quid-pro-quo collaboration (Threadless).

In essence, all co-creation communities are designed around four dynamics: connect, catalyze, crystallize, and celebrate. First, platforms need to connect community members around a shared interest so that they have a context to engage with the platform and with each other. Then, platforms need to catalyze contributions, often by running time-bound challenges. Next, platforms need to synthesize these contributions into meaningful artifacts and products. Finally, platforms need to celebrate the most powerful or popular contributions by rewarding them.

Co-creation Communities for Brands

“Consumers are beginning in a very real sense to own our brands and participate in their creation… we need to begin to learn to let go.”
- A. G. Lafley, former CEO and Chairman of P&G

Branded co-creation communities can be classified into three models: branded challenges on niche crowdsourcing platforms, branded co-creation challenge platforms, and ongoing co-creation communities.

In the first model, brands run short-term public or private challenges on niche crowdsourcing platforms to tap into their specialized communities: designers, developers, animators, filmmakers, engineers, or scientists. Challenges typically have phases for entry submission, community voting, and selection of winners by jury members. Creativity-driven challenges related to creative designs, branded videos and animation films (Zooppa, PopTent (video), Tongal (video), Eyeka (video), MOFILM, Springleap, Talenthouse) are typically public, and winners are often selected based on a combination of community voting and jury judgment. Solution-driven challenges related to software applications, product innovations, and business solutions (Top Coder, Kaggle (video), Local Motors (video), Innocentive (video), Jovoto (video)) are sometimes private and winners are sometimes selected based on objective technical criteria.

 Jovoto

In the second model, brands create their own co-creation challenge platforms to engage their community members and crowdsource branded videos (Doritos Crash the Super bowl, Pepsi Halftime (video), Tata Indica Xeta Shootout) and product innovations, including limited edition designs (Nescafe Dolce Gusto’s Euro Design Contest, Citroen You Like It We Make It (video), Heineken Your Future Bottle (video), Nike ID (video)), new food and beverage flavors (Mountain Dew Dewmocracy (video), Lays Do Us a Flavor (video)), Domino’s Australia Social Pizza (video), McDonald’s Mein Burger (video), Lec Ice Cream), new product designs (Fiat Mio (video)) and business solutions (GE Ecomagination Challenge (video), GE Healthymagination Challenge, GE Imaging Innovation Challenge). Some brands host the challenge on niche crowdsourcing platforms to tap into the community, but also promote them on their own branded destinations (GE Quest (hospital video, flight video), Domino’s Ultimate Delivery Vehicle (video)). Other brands need to create their own branded destinations to provide sophisticated dashboards to community members to pick and choose product options to customize their product (Nike ID, McDonald’s Mein Burger, Fiat Mio). Some challenges offer separate community prizes based on community voting, and jury prizes based on jury selection, and some reward community members who offer constructive comments and feedback with prizes.

Fiat Mio

In the third model, brands build and nurture their own co-creation communities and encourage contributions through a series of challenges (Heineken Ideas Brewery (video), Domino’s Think Oven)). The most successful of these co-creation communities, like Nike ID (video), not only run a series of challenges but also create value for consumers between challenges, by enabling them to customize the products on an ongoing basis. Other co-creation communities, like LEGO CUUSOO (video), rely on the almost unlimited passion of their brand fans to sustain engagement, and only need to regularly review popular submissions, and launch them as new products. Several brands have invested heavily in ongoing ideation platforms to co-create the brand experience with their customers and launch product and process innovations based on customer ideas (BarclayCard Ring(video), My Starbucks Idea, Dell Ideastorm, Best Buy IdeaX). These communities rely less on challenges and rewards, and more on community engagement and customer support, to sustain participation from community members.

Nike ID

All the three models need brands to incentivize community members to submit and support contributions. Incentives can range from social influence and gift cards on one extreme, to a Super Bowl TV spot (Doritos Crash the Super bowl), a million dollars or 1% of net revenue (Lays Do us a Flavor), or a $10 million commercial contract (GE Ecomagination Challenge).

Future of Co-creation Communities

Co-creation challenges around crowdsourcing designs, videos and stories have already become the norm for adding a social media component to brand campaigns, and many creators are becoming fatigued with them, forcing brands to support them with bigger paid media budgets, more attractive prizes, and celebrity endorsements. We foresee that, going forward, the best way to run such challenges on a small budget would be to partner with a niche creative crowdsourcing community like Jovoto or MoFilm. We also expect such creative crowdsourcing communities to specialize by country and language, with Neocha Edge in China and Brandfighters in Netherlands being early examples.

At the same time, we expect more brands to run higher order co-creation challenges focused on product innovation and incentivize contributors with a percentage of revenue (Lays Do Us a Flavor), and even create ongoing co-creation platforms to invite ideas from customers (Dell Ideastorm) or enable customers to customize their products (Nike ID). We also expect third-party product innovation communities like Quirky to create end-to-end new product development solutions for brands, beyond ideation.

Author Nilofer Merchant lists co-creation as one of the 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era:

“More and more companies embrace consumers as “co-creation” partners in their innovation efforts, instead of as buyers at the end of a value chain. Consumers, traditionally considered as value exchangers or extractors, are now seen as a source of value creation and competitive advantage. This collaboration shares power between the participants as we start to recognize value creation as an act of exchange, not simply a one-way transaction. As an exchange, all parties need to do it sustainably as each must have equilibrium to stay viable.”

We also expect that more organizations will follow PepsiCo’s example in replicating co-creation best practices across brands (Mountain Dew Dewmocracy, Doritos Crash the Super bowl, Pepsi Halftime) and countries (Lays Do Us a Flavor), and run them over multiple years (Doritos Crash the Super bowl, Lays Do Us a Flavor) to maximize the benefit from them.

Even as white label co-creation solutions like MSLGROUP’s People’s Lab, Brightidea and Spigit mature, we expect more players to enter the markets with niche offerings. Some of them will specialize in platform-specific co-creation apps (like Napkin Labs for Facebook), while others will specialize around use cases (like product customization). We also expect more niche crowdsourcing communities like Zooppa and Innocentive to offer specialized white label solutions for brands to host both short-term and long-term co-creation communities.

Finally, we also expect crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter to differentiate themselves by adding features and incentives to encourage community members to not only fund projects, but also co-create them.

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This is the fifth report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

What are Grassroots Change Movements?

Photo from untitlism on Flickr

Grassroots change movements involve a large numbers of people acting as change agents, in their own lives or in their communities, in a way that their actions can be aggregated or coordinated, leading to significant impact and meaningful change. Grassroots change movements might be catalyzed and managed by organizations, including corporations, or they might be sparked by an event and spontaneously spread through the initiative of volunteers. Many grassroots change movements are political and focus on issues like human rights, freedom of expression and economic equality. Now, many organizations are applying a similar approach to catalyze behavior change and create shared value in the areas of environment, energy and sustainability; health, wellness and nutrition; education, learning and capability building; and happiness, kindness and human potential.

Grassroots change movements have moved into the mainstream due to four important dynamics. First, people have new types of power: to access information, connect with each other, express their opinions, and change the course of public debate. Second, people don’t trust organizations; in fact, trust in all organizations is at an all-time low across the world, and people believe that they themselves can drive real change, not governments or corporations. Third, people are searching for meaningful connections with communities around a shared purpose; they expect organizations to enable such connections, and are willing to reward organizations who do. Finally, the scale of social networks (Facebook has one billion members globally), the ease of one-click sharing via Facebook Likes and Twitter Retweets, and the virality of popularity-driven activity streams have made it easy for people, especially Gen Y, to participate in and help spread such movements.

Unilever CEO Paul Polman succinctly summed up the power of social movements and their importance for corporations:

“If [social media activists] can bring down the Egyptian regime in a few weeks, they can bring us down in nanoseconds.”

We have seen a number of grassroots change movements, in which social media has played an important role. Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, India Against Corruption, Spain’s 15-M and Mexico’s Yo Soy 132 focused on economic equality and political regime change. Kony2012 and Free Pussy Riot focused on human rights in Uganda and Russia. WWF’s Earth Hour and 350 focus on climate change. It Gets Better and All Out focus on LGBT issues. Bono’s ONE and RED fight poverty and AIDS in Africa. Movember rallies people around men’s health, Adbusters’ Buy Nothing Day promotes anti-consumerism, Free Hugs Campaign encourages human kindness and Startup Weekend supports entrepreneurship.

350

We have also seen an ecosystem of dedicated platforms and products to support such movements. Change.org, Avaaz.org, Care2 and Causes are amongst the leading platforms for changemakers to start and support petitions, raise and donate funds, recruit and volunteer, and create and share content, each with several million members. Edward Norton’s Crowdrise partners with celebrities to raise funds for non-profits. eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media and Take Part use socially conscious movies like An Inconvenient Truth, Contagion and Food Inc to promote social actions. Agencies like Blue State Digital, Purpose and GoodCorps exclusively focus on creating social movements, while organizations like New Organizing Institute help build capabilities for grassroots organizers. Finally, changemakers use platforms like Meetup, UStream and Kickstarter to organize events, livestream video or raise funds.

Participant Media/ Take Part

Some grassroots change movements have achieved significant impact. The Arab Spring movement led to a series of regime changes across the Middle East. The Occupy movement and Take the Square movements have spread to over 100 cities in the United States and over 1500 cities globally. 1.1 million people worldwide registered for the Movember movement in 2012 and raised $135 million for men’s health.

The success of such grassroots change movements shows that people have the desire and the tools to participate and act to drive change around a shared purpose they are passionate about.

How Do Grassroots Change Movements Work?

Grassroots change movements typically involve four change drivers: a shared purpose to inspire people, an ongoing platform to organize people, a series of interconnected programs to energize people, and stories to spark participation and action.

Almost all grassroots change movements have a strong shared purpose. Often, the purpose is to oppose a harmful practice, prevent a negative outcome, or fight to protect something, but movements focused on positive outcomes also work (Free Hugs Campaign). Often, movements are initiated by an individual, a small group, or an organization, and then carried forward by volunteers and supporters.

Many movement organizers provide ‘how-to’ guides to show supporters how to get involved (Earth Hour, It Gets Better). The best movements create a ladder of engagement for supporters, to first get them involved with simple actions like signing petitions, voting for causes, or sharing content; then get them more engaged by asking them to share personal stories, donate money, buy merchandise, or volunteer time; and finally convert them into partners by inspiring them to recruit supporters, raise funds, or organize local events. Some movement platforms also use gamification features, like points and leaderboards, to move supporters up the ladder of engagement. (Movember).

Movember – Fundraising Tips

Even writer Evgeny Morozov, who rails against “slacktivism” in his book Net Delusion recognizes the value of this approach:

“Create diverse, distinctive, and non-trivial tasks; your supporters can do more than just click “send to all” button” all day. Facebook could actually be a boon for those organizing a campaign; they just need to figure out a way in which to capitalize on identity aspiration of “slacktivists” by giving them interesting and meaningful tasks that could then be evaluated.”

If a movement becomes successful, the original leaders find ways to spread the movement across the world, while maintaining its original spirit (Adbusters/ Occupy). Many movement organizers also create guides to help volunteers organize local chapters or events (How to Occupy, Earth Hour, 350, Startup Weekend). Some organizers create interactive maps, so that supporters can easily find local chapters (Earth Hour, 350, Take the Square).

Movement platforms can be designed to have ongoing engagement, like an online community or a physical space, or periodical engagement, like an annual event or an annual contest (Movember, Earth Hour). The most successful movements keep supporters engaged through a series of interconnected programs (350 2010 summary, 350 2011 summary, Kony MOVE:DC, Kony Cover the Night) and a stream of stories, often shared by the community members themselves (We Are the 99%, It Gets Better).

All Out

Sometimes, these programs result in offshoot projects that spread the movement to new constituents or in new directions (Occupy Network). Often, other organizations join in a movement and create their own offshoot projects, helping the movement grow (Amnesty International Free Pussy Riot Map).

Many movement organizers proactively seek the support of celebrities to gain more visibility. Invisible Children asked supporters to email or tweet to specific celebrities whose support could spread their message. Earth Hour partnered with celebrities to create the I Will If You Will campaign.

Earth Hour I Will If You Will

Finally, stories and content play a big role in sparking a wave of sharing and participation, which help movements go viral and achieve results. For instance, the Kony2012 video has received 95 millions views on YouTube and attracted global attention to the Kony 2012 campaign. The Free Hugs Campaign video has received 74 million views. The original It Gets Better video has received more than 2 million views and the response videos have more than 50 million views collectively.

Free Hugs Campaign

Grassroots Change Movements for Brands

Brands are realizing the power of grassroots change movements and creating movement marketing initiatives to benefit from them.

Scott Goodson, author of the movement marketing book Uprising summarizes how movement marketing works:

“You start by identifying a powerful idea on the rise in culture. You then join, fuel and add real tangible value to the idea through innovative marketing and social media. People who share the passion for the idea join the cause. And rally others to get involved too. And so, a movement is born, which smart brands can profit from.”

Brands can engage in grassroots change movements at many levels, starting with participating in existing movements, then creating their own campaigns around purpose and participation, and finally catalyzing and committing to long-term movements.

Many brands start by participating in or partnering with movements that resonate with their values, and encouraging their employees to participate. For instance, Gap and Google encouraged their LGTB employees to create videos to participate in the It Gets Better movement. Several brands have supported the Earth Hour and (RED) movements, and some have played significant roles in promoting these. For instance, Starbucks with its annual {RED) programs (2008 video, 2009 video, 2010 video) has raised more than $10 million for the (RED) Global Fund.

Starbucks RED

Some brands create short-term campaigns around purpose and participation, but stop short of committing to them long enough to turn them into movements (GE Celebrate What Works). Sometimes, these short-term campaigns are a part of long-term purpose-led programs (GE Ecomagination Tag Your Green (video).

Brands that have committed to long-term movement marketing initiatives can take three distinct routes. They can rally people to support a cause or raise funds for it; they can inspire people to change their own behavior in a way that adds up to meaningful change; and, they can create ecosystems to support changemakers who are creating change in their own communities.

Some brands see movement marketing as an extension of cause marketing, and create campaigns that rally support for a cause. Here, brands typically partner with a non-profit and make a donation to it, often based on sales or community participation, but also create content that inspires community members to pledge support, share their own stories and spread the word. For instance, Google Take Action (video) rallied people to pledge their support for a free and open web. Aircel Save Our Tigers (video) catalyzed a public debate in India to protect tigers. Brand crowdfunding programs, like Chase Community Giving (video), American Express Members Project (video), and Starbucks Vote.Give.Grow, that ask community members to support non-profits by volunteering or donating money can also be included in this category.

Increasingly, brands are creating movements marketing campaigns that focus on inspiring people to change their own behavior, and aggregating these actions so that they add up to meaningful change. For instance, P&G’s Secret Mean Stinks (video) aims to end girl-to-girl bullying and inspire girls to gang up for good and be nice to each other. Sometimes, these behavior changes movements can be fun and whimsical. For instance, Doritos in Argentina created a movement to bring slow dancing back (video).

Some brands create an annual event to focus their effort to bring about behavior change. For instance, American Express’ Small Business Saturday encourages Americans to shop at independent stores, each year on the Saturday following Thanksgiving (2010 video, 2011 video, 2012 video). Other brands create a series of interconnected behavior change campaigns around their shared purpose, or Social Heartbeat. For instance, over the years, Starbucks has created a series of movement marketing campaigns in the US, which link back to its shared purpose of being the “third place” and nurturing community values (vote in the 2008 elections, pledge 5 hours of volunteer time, change local communities, bring your own tumblr, help create jobs). Tata Tea Jaago Re in India has created campaigns to inspired people to register to vote, volunteer for causes and spread positivity. MSLGROUP has helped Alpenliebe inspire millions of young people in China to share, appreciate and engage in everyday acts of kindness, through a movement marketing campaign that is now entering its third year.

Some of these behavior change movements can also be seen as behavior change games. For instance, Nike has created a series of campaigns, increasingly around Nike Plus and Nike Fuel, which use gamification features like challenges and levels to inspire people to become more active (Nike Global Game on World, Nike Hong Kong Make It Count, Nike Mexico Bid Your Sweat, Nike Global Missions).

Finally, some brands are creating long-term platforms, with the intention of creating an ecosystem to connect changemakers and build capabilities. These platforms provide the tools and the enabling ecosystem for people to act as change agents in their own communities. Often, these platforms ask community members to create their own grassroots change projects and activate their networks to get funding and scale their projects. For instance, both Mahindra Spark the Rise (video) and Pepsi Refresh Project (video) created platforms to support changemakers that created significant impact. We have covered both these initiatives in our Future of Engagement reports on crowdfunding and collaborative social innovation.

In summary, brands can create a campaign around purpose and participation, but it becomes a movement only if people make it their own. For movement marketing to work, the brand needs to think of itself as a custodian of the movement, not its owner; it needs to nurture the movement over multiple years, but also create the space for it to become bigger than the brand itself. If a brand tries to control the movement, and keep it on message, the movement is likely to be stillborn, or die a slow death.

The Future of Grassroots Change Movements

In the near future, we expect grassroots change movements to become the norm for civic participation as Gen Ys and Gen Zs learn more powerful ways to connect online and offline to support causes they believe in. As smartphones become ubiquitous, and location awareness becomes an integral part of how we connect with each other on social networks, we expect the boundaries between online and offline action to blur. With people exercising their power in a more organized fashion, all types of organizations, including governments, public institutions and corporations, will need to understand how movements and create crisis response plans in anticipation of public uprisings.

With non-profit organizations and activists adopting grassroots change movements as the primary mode to rally support for their causes, we expect that people will begin to feel movement fatigue, especially for movements that involve fighting against something. Instead, we expect people to channel their energies towards movements that aim to create positive change in the areas of environment, health, education and human potential and participate in collaborative social innovation initiatives to co-create sustainable solutions for complex problems.

Specifically, we expect that people will grow tired of the many movements that ask them to engage in simple tasks like signing a petition, voting for causes, or sharing content. Instead, they will participate in a smaller number of movements and engage in more meaningful acts like donating money, volunteering time, or organizing local events. In a related trend, we expect grassroots change movements to look more like behavior change games, with platforms that enable people to set personal goals, undertake quests, track their progress and receive support. We also expect that transmedia storytelling will play an increasingly important role in cutting through the cacophony of a million movements, building an emotion connection with people, and inspiring them to participate and act.

We expect that movement marketing will become the norm for brands, and most brands will experiment with it to engage Gen Ys and Gen Zs. In response, we will see a rise in cynicism for such programs, with people accusing brands of “movement-washing”. To create successful movements, brands will not only need to create campaigns to catalyze the movement, but also commit to the movement for the long term. Brands will be expected to show their commitment to the movement by going beyond engaging celebrity endorsers and asking community members to share their stories, and creating long term platforms to enable behavior change, support changemakers, or co-create solutions. Brands will also need to take action themselves to show that they have skin in the game and create compelling content to inspire community members to take action.

In essence, brands will have to learn the four skills writers Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith outline in their book The Dragonfly Effect:

“1) focus: identify a single concrete and measurable goal; 2) grab attention: cut through the noise of social media with something authentic and memorable; 3) engage: create a personal connection, accessing higher emotions, compassion, empathy, and happiness; and 4) take action: enable and empower others to take action.”

Finally, corporations will need to learn how to participate in, and even catalyze, multistakeholder movements to shape public opinion. For instance, MSLGROUP in Sweden created the Job Roast initiative to spark a public debate on youth employment before the elections.

The JobRoast: Public Affairs, Dragon’s Den style

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This is the fourth report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

What is Collaborative Social Innovation?

Photo from grafixer on Flickr

Collaborative social innovation initiatives involve businesses, governments, non-profits and change makers coming together to co-create innovative and sustainable solutions around a shared purpose. Such initiatives typically focus on the areas that have the highest potential to create shared value: environment, energy and sustainability; health, wellness and nutrition; education, learning and capability building; and governance, public services and public spaces. Change makers are typically rewarded with prize money, recognition, funding or support; organizations find solutions to important challenges; and society at large benefits from the innovative solutions.

The rise of collaborative social innovation can be attributed to three broad trends. First, businesses, governments and non-profits are realizing the importance of multi-stakeholder social innovation solutions that create shared value, especially in the context of engaging Gen Ys. Second, organizations like the XPrize Foundation, which have a long history of creating “large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prize competitions” to solve problems that are important for society, are learning how to reach new groups of innovators from across the world, thanks to the internet. Third, networks like TED, PopTech, Echoing Green, Ashoka and StartingBloc are connecting young change makers and showcasing their work, through conferences, challenges and fellowships, inspiring others to follow in their footsteps.

As a result, we are seeing a number of platforms focusing on different aspects of collaborative social innovation.

OpenIDEO (video) by design and innovation consultancy IDEO has partnered with businesses, governments, and non-profits to create a series of collaborative social innovation challenges.

OpenIDEO by IDEO

ChallengePost, MindMixer (video), Ashoka Change makers (video) and One Billion Minds are other third-party collaborative social innovation platforms which enable organizations to create challenges for the public. ChallengePost focuses on open government challenges and MindMixer encourages civic engagement, while Ashoka Change makers and One Billion Minds feature a wide range of social innovation challenges. Other platforms, like MIT Center for Collective Intelligence’s Climate CoLab project, are focused on a single topic, like climate change.

Open government is another important area for collaborative social innovation. In the US, Challenge.gov, which is built on ChallengePost, has created a series of open government challenges for federal, state and local agencies, while Data.gov encourages developers to build applications using its public data sets and showcases the best applications. In parallel, organizations like Sunlight Foundation and Code for America are helping create the ecosystem to enable collaborative social innovation. In the UK, SparkCentral is a government collaborative social innovation platform that aims to “build partnerships across the public, private and voluntary sectors to deliver more for less.” In Finland, OpenMinistry is a legislation crowdsourcing platform that enables Finnish citizens to propose new laws to the parliament.

Some of these collaborative social innovation platforms have had significant impact. For instance, Ashoka Change makers has channeled $600 million in funding to more than 10,000 social innovators, through more than 50 challenges, with the help of more than 500,000 community members.

Ashoka Changemakers

The success of collaborative social innovation initiatives shows that organizations and people are capable of co-creating innovative solutions to complex problems, and has created a new model for change makers to showcase their innovations, for governments and foundations to find solutions to societal issues and for businesses to realize sustainable growth.

Like MIT’s Thomas W. Malone says:

“We want to create more intelligent organizations, more intelligent businesses, more intelligent governments, more intelligent societies. As all the people and computers on our planet get more and more closely connected, it’s becoming increasingly useful to think of all the people and computers on the planet as a kind of global brain.”

How does Collaborative Social Innovation work?

Collaborative social innovation platforms are typically a hybrid of three models: innovation challenges, innovation ecosystems, and open data platforms.

Most online collaborative social innovation initiatives follow a contest model in which an organization posts a challenge on a platform and invites individuals, groups of individuals or other organizations to submit innovations. These innovations can be at any stage of completion, ranging from ideas or sketches to full-blown business proposals to products, services or technologies that already exist at a smaller scale.

Some platforms include a structured design thinking approach with inspiration, concepting, evaluation and collaboration phases (OpenIDEO), while others break up the challenge into what, where and who elements (Climate CoLab). Some platforms match community members with challenges based on interest (ChallengePost) while other motivate community members by using game mechanics like a design quotient score (OpenIDEO).

Innovations are judged either quantitatively according to a set of scoring criteria or qualitatively by a panel of judges typically made up of experts, specialists and members of the funding committee. In some cases, community members must vote on ideas to increase their chances of appearing before the judges. Winning innovators are rewarded with either cash prizes (ChallengePost, Ashoka Change makers) or with recognition and satisfaction that they have helped contribute to social good (OpenIDEO, OpenMinistry).

Some of these innovation challenge platforms are designed primarily as destination communities (OpenIDEO, One Billion Minds), while others offer white label options to enable organizations to create their own standalone challenge platforms (ChallengePost, MindMixer).

For some platforms, like Ashoka Change makers, the innovation challenges are a small part of the overall innovation ecosystem, which includes community, capability building and funding.

For other platforms, like Data.gov, the innovation challenges serve the purpose of connecting government agencies who can share public data with change makers and developers who can build applications on top of this data to improve how these agencies deliver public services.

In essence, all collaborative social innovation platforms are designed around four dynamics: connect, catalyze, crystallize, and celebrate. First, platforms need to connect stakeholders so that they have a context to engage with the organization and with each other. Then, platforms need to catalyze interactions so that new ideas and projects can emerge organically. Next, platforms need to synthesize these ideas into solutions that benefit from and build upon the best ideas. Finally, platforms need to celebrate the most powerful or popular ideas, actions and stories by highlighting them.

Collaborative Social Innovation for Brands

Just like third-party collaborative social innovation platforms, branded collaborative social innovation platforms are typically a hybrid of three models: innovation challenges, innovation ecosystems, and open data platforms.

The most popular model for brands is innovation challenges, or contests to crowdsource social innovation solutions. Several brands have launched social innovation challenges, both as part of their citizenship strategy, to fund, inspire and connect social innovators (Mahindra Spark the Rise, Dell Social Innovation Challenge) and also as part of their business strategy, to co-create innovative and sustainable solutions that create shared value (GE Ecomagination Challenge, GE Healthymagination Challenge (video)).

Social innovation challenges that are part of a company’s business strategy usually benefit the change-maker or innovator, the business itself and society at large. In such programs, the brand is usually looking to invest in or acquire the innovation, or promote it by supporting it with its business scale. For instance, since the launch of the GE Ecomagination Challenge (video) to find innovations in energy and sustainability, GE has committed $134 million to 22 investments and commercial partnerships, granted $1.1 million in seed funding to early stage companies and entrepreneurs, and acquired one of the businesses that entered the challenge.

GE Ecomagination Challenge

Other social innovation challenges don’t have a direct impact on the company’s business, but do strengthen the company’s reputation by strengthening its association with social innovation. In many such initiatives, companies partner with educational institutions or non-profit organizations and target students and young innovators. Dell Social Innovation Challenge (video), HP Social Innovation Relay, Citi Innovation Challenge, Sony Open Planet Ideas (video#!), Toyota Ideas for Good (video), Samsung Solve for Tomorrow (video), Intel Innovators (video),Sygenta Thought for Food Challenge (video, McKinsey Social Innovation Video Contest and Dell Go Green Challenge (on MSLGROUP’s People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform) are good examples.

Some companies commit to long-term social innovation challenge platforms, with the intention of creating an ecosystem to connect change makers and build capabilities. For instance, both Mahindra Spark the Rise (video) and Pepsi Refresh Project (video) ran for two years and created significant impact. We have covered both these initiatives in our Future of Engagement report on Crowdfunding as examples of crowdfunding programs focused on creators.

Anand Mahindra, Chairman and Managing Director of Mahindra Group, talked about the role of such initiatives:

“The way companies build brands has evolved. In version 2.0, we saw companies come in with a larger purpose and meaning, beyond the business. Now, we are trying to build a 21st century corporation, by energizing people and giving them a core purpose to be part of.”

Some of these social innovation ecosystems take the shape of public-private partnerships that bring together stakeholders from business, government, academia and civil society to institutionalize social innovation. For instance, Walmart has created 14 Sustainable Value Networks since 2005 to bring together diverse stakeholders to develop solutions to fulfill Walmart’s commitment towards renewable energy, zero waste and sustainable products. IBM launched the Smarter Cities Challenge (video) to collaborate with local governments and co-fund technology-based solutions to city-specific urban challenges. HP launched the Catalyst Initiative to collaborate with educators in finding innovative solutions to enhance student literacy in STEM subjects.

In other collaborative social innovation initiatives, companies create open networks to share intellectual property and know-how, and encourage stakeholders to build upon it. As an example, to realize its vision of sustainable “considered design”, Nike created the GreenXchange (video) in 2009 as an open platform for companies and people to share green intellectual property, processes and ideas.

Michael Dell, CEO and Chairman of Dell, sums up the opportunity this positive multi-stakeholder approach opens up for all of us:

“The new engine of innovation driven by collaboration, openness, stewardship and the power of the social web gives all of us an opportunity to drive even more rapid, meaningful change across global institutions.”

The Future of Collaborative Social Innovation

In the near future, we expect collaborative social innovation to become the norm both for corporations creating innovations that create shared value and governments and change makers designing solutions for social good.

Even as white label open innovation platforms like BrightIdea and People’s Lab mature, we will see more specialized platforms like ChallengePost and MindMixer, which are focused on social innovation and civic engagement.

Mature organizations will need to go beyond platforms and commit to long-term public-private partnerships that create strong multi-stakeholder ecosystems to scale both the engagement in such initiatives and the impact of the innovations that result from them (Dell Social Innovation Challenge, IBM Smarter Cities Solutions).

Specifically, we expect educational institutions to become more proactive in both partnering with other organizations to co-create collaborative social innovation initiatives targeted at students, and find innovative ways to bring such initiatives into the classroom (OpenIDEO University Toolkit, Samsung Solve for Tomorrow).

Even as more corporations create branding-driven collaborative social innovation challenges, we expect more Fortune 500 firms to follow GE’s example and create challenges which have a direct business impact, by investing in the winning innovations, or using their business clout to scale them.

As open government data and application programming interfaces (APIs) become that norm, we expect many more governments to open up civic data and invite developers to build applications on top of them. We also expect some non-profits and corporations to experiment with this model and share data or intellectual property in an open network so that third party developers can build social innovation applications on them.

In a TED Talk, former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Beth Noveck said:

“If we want to see the hopeful, exciting kinds of innovations in clean energy and education and development, if we want to see those adopted and scaled, we must all participate. Open up institutions and let the nutrients flow throughout our culture to create open institutions, a stronger democracy, a better tomorrow.”

Finally, as organizations become better at designing and measuring collaborative social innovation initiatives, we will see them investing heavily to replicate pilot innovations across markets and scale their impact (Walmart Sustainable Value Networks).

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This is the third report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

We are delighted to announce the launch of Social Hive Index, MSLGROUP‘s proprietary software and approach for benchmarking social engagement, in context, with customization.

Social Hive Index is named after Social Hive, MSLGROUP’s global social media offering, with 150+ dedicated experts, and deep capabilities across Plan, Build and Engage. It is our second proprietary product after People’s Lab, our proprietary software and approach for crowdsourcing insights and innovation.

THE NEED

The effectiveness of social engagement is not universal, but contextual — relative to a geography, industry, topic or peer group. However, social listening and analytics tools don’t benchmark social engagement around a topic, relative to peers, with a single score. And, tools like Klout, Kred and Peerindex that do measure social engagement with a single score don’t allow customization around specific use cases.

Our solution is to create a single dynamic score to benchmark how organizations and influencers are engaging their community members on social media around a specific topic, relative to their peers. The Social Hive Index normalizes quantitative social data and qualitative scores into a single dynamic score between 1 and 100. The index benchmarks organizations and influencers against relevant peers, from the same geography, industry, or topic, to add context. Finally, the index provides a number of customization possibilities to meet specific needs and use cases.

THE METHODOLOGY

The index uses a combination of automatically updated social data, qualitative research waves, and our proprietary normalization algorithm to create a single score between 1 and 100. In the qualitative research waves, our analysts define the universe of entities and their social media properties, assign weights to each property based on fit with theme, and score each entity on storytelling and engagement, based on benchmarks. Then, our software automatically pulls in daily updated social data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare, Klout, Kred, Peerindex and SEOMoz. Finally, our proprietary normalization algorithm converts social data and qualitative scores into a single score between 1 and 100.

THE USE CASES

Social Hive Index can be used across a range of use cases, from public topic leaderboards for thought leadership, to research report to benchmark best practices, and private company dashboards for campaign measurement. For instance, the index can be used to create a public leaderboard of the most engaging “Fortune Global 100 companies on sustainability” or “UK influencers on beauty”. Or, the index can be used to create a research report to benchmark best practices on storytelling and engagement in an industry, geography, or topic. Or, the index can be used to create a private dashboard to benchmark a company against relevant peers in the same industry, geography, or topic.

MSLGROUP has already used the Social Hive Index software and approach to create MSLGROUP’s PurPle Index, to be launched in January 2013. PurPle Index measures how effectively the Fortune Global 100 firms are engaging people on social media around their purpose, in the areas of environment, health, education and human potential. We are also speaking to a number of clients across the world, to help them benchmark their social engagement on a topic, with relevant peers.

IN SUMMARY

Social engagement is more important to our clients than ever before, and our investment in proprietary products like People’s Lab and Social Hive Index shows our commitment to help our clients not only create social engagement, but also measure it. To start a conversation on how we can help you create and measure social engagement, write to pascal.beucler@mslgroup.com.

Pascal Beucler, SVP and Chief Strategy Officer, MSLGROUP

Gaurav Mishra, VP of Insights, Innovation & Social, MSLGROUP

What are Behavior Change Games?

Photo from nanpalmero on Flickr

Behavior Change Games use game design elements and the power of communities to motivate people to achieve challenging tasks in the real world. Behavior change games have been used to enable people to lead a healthy and sustainable lifestyle, recover from illness and injury, manage time and money, learn new skills, and engage with political and social causes.

The rise of behavior change games can be tracked to three changes in how people play games. First, social games on Facebook have widened the appeal of games beyond the video gaming niche of kids and young adults. For instance, Zynga’s Farmville had more than 83 million monthly active users at its peak. Second, marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers have adapted game design principles in contexts other than entertainment, to design marketing and loyalty programs, social networks and training software, and serious games for social impact. For instance, location-based social network Foursquare, which uses gamification to make “checking-in” more fun, crossed 25 million users in September 2012. And, third, the explosion in personal, social and location data has led to the popularity of the quantified self movement, enabling people to track and change their behaviors. For instance, 10 million people use personal finance management service Mint.com to track over $80 billion in credit and debit transactions and almost $1 trillion in loans and assets.

Behavior change games use the power of games, networks and data to help people create meaningful change. In 2012, a number of niche behavior change games emerged across a diverse range of topics. Quentiq, FitBit, Nexercise, Healthrageous, Hotseat, Jawbone UP, Striiv and Zamzee help people track their workouts and activity automatically. Fitocracy, SuperBetter, Habitual, SlimKicker, Hubbub, HealthMonth, Mindbloom, HealthyHeroes and Goalpost help people become healthier and develop good habits. PracticallyGreen, RecycleBank and OPower help people adopt a greener lifestyle and save electricity. Mint and Payoff help people manage their finances and debt. Urgent Evoke and World Without Oil educate people about social issues and encourage them to contribute to solutions. Code Academy and DuoLingo help people master a programming language, or learn French. Epic Win and The Email Game help people increase their productivity and complete tasks or clear their email inbox. Finally, Goodify, Keas, Shape Up and Youtopia are focused on organizations and schools, and help them motivate employees and students to volunteer or get fit.

Some of these behavior change games have also created social impact at scale. Shape Up has helped 700,000 people lose 1 million pounds, PayOff has helped members pay off $41 million of debt, and OPower has helped people reduce energy consumption by 1.6 billion kilowatt hours and save $179 million on electricity bills.

The success of behavior change games shows that people can change deeply entrenched behaviors and form lasting good habits, if they are able to break up big challenges into small goals, receive feedback on their progress, and tap into their networks for support.

This is not surprising. Game researcher Jane McGonigal, who is also the author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World explains why such games work:

“Gamers spend on average 80% of their time failing in game worlds, but instead of giving up, they stick with the difficult challenge and use the feedback of the game to get better. With some effort, we can learn to apply this resilience to the real-world challenges we face.”

Jane McGonigal at TED 2010

How do Behavior Change Games work?

Most behavior change games include four game design mechanisms: setting goals and missions, tracking progress, receiving incentives, and receiving support.
The first step in most behavior change games involves setting a goal and missions, quests or challenges to achieve the goal. Players have missions assigned to them, choose from a set of pre-configured missions, or create their own missions. Missions range in difficulty, and new players are encouraged to start with easier missions before proceeding to more difficult ones. On Mint and Payoff, typical goals include paying off a credit card debt or buying a house, while on Fitocracy and SuperBetter typical missions include eating healthier or working out.

Most behavior change games track progress by asking players to complete virtual tasks (Urgent Evoke, World Without Oil, Code Academy and DuoLingo) or self-report on their progress (RecycleBank, Fitocracy and SuperBetter), while some automatically track data through sensors and feeds (Quentiq, Nexercise, Zamzee, OPower, Mint and Payoff). Most games use points, rankings, levels and leader boards to help players measure their progress and compare their performance to friends, similar others, and other players. For instance, OPower compares players’ energy consumption to that of their neighbors and Mint compares peoples’ spending habits across categories such as coffee, phone bills and gas. These benchmarks help players re-evaluate their missions and encourage a healthy sense of competition, both to beat their own best performance and that of their friends.

Players receive incentives when they accomplish tasks such as completing their profile, inviting friends, sharing their progress, or achieving a milestone. Incentives range from rewards like points, virtual goods and unlocked content; recognition through badges, levels, titles and special privileges; and in some cases real-life prizes including cash prizes (Payoff.com) and holidays packages (RecycleBank). Incentives are effective in attracting first-time players, helping them get started and creating fun and excitement. After they are hooked and begin to successfully complete missions, players receive the ultimate incentive to keep playing – they see a change in their behavior and experience a sense of pride and self-empowerment.

Most behavior games are intrinsically social in nature. They encourage players to share their performance with their social networks and connect them to other people who have struggled with or overcome similar challenges. These communities of friends and like-minded strangers offer players support, encouragement, advice and, when needed, a good dose of peer pressure. In some games, friends have specific roles to play; for instance, in SuperBetter, players invite allies to create special missions for them, while in Urgent Evoke, players give power votes and act as mentors for others.

Behavior change games work best when they are designed with wonder, playfulness and storytelling at their core. In spite of the hype around gamification and the success of white label gamification solutions like Badgeville, Bunchball, and BigDoor, it’s not enough to just add community or game elements to boring tasks.

Game researcher Nicole Lazzaro explains why we play games:

“Wonder, one of the strongest emotions of game design, rivets player attention and unleashes powerful neurochemicals that facilitate learning. At the heart of every intellectual pursuit, at the root of nearly all engagement, wonder keeps players coming back.”

Game researcher Raph Koster argues in his book Theory of Fun for Game Design that games and stories have a complimentary role:

“Games tend to be experiential teaching; stories teach vicariously. Games are good at objectification; stories are good at empathy. Games tend to quantize, reduce, and classify; stories tend to blur, deepen, and make subtle distinctions. Games are external – they are about people’s actions; stories are internal – they are about people’s emotions and thoughts.”

Behavior Change Games for Brands

Brands are beginning to create their own behavior change games, as marketing campaigns, smart phone or social apps and even sensor-enabled products, to help people change their behavior in an area that is aligned with the brand purpose.

Several brands are adding game elements or even creating social games to deepen engagement with their grassroots change movement campaigns. These are typically short term contests, tied to marketing campaigns or important events, with prizes for participation. For example, MTV created the MTV Fantasy Election to educate and engage young voters around the 2012 U.S. elections. Players created teams of politicians and gained or lost points based on their team’s performance on five criteria — civility, transparency, honesty, engagement and public opinion — calculated by using data from social networks and non-partisan civil society organizations.

Other brands are creating smart phone or social network applications that enable consumers to sign up for challenges, self-report on their progress, and get the support of their friends to stay fit. For example, GE has created a series of social apps including HealthyShare and Fit Friendzy as part of its Healthymagination initiative to help players stay fit.

Finally, sports and fitness brands are creating sensor-enabled products and creating games and communities around them to enable people to automatically track their personal data and use it to change their behaviors. Nike with Nike+ has been an early leader in creating a behavior change game ecosystem, including the Nike+ community, Nike+ iPhone and Android apps and several Nike+ products including the Nike FuelBand. Since 2006, Nike has motivated its community of 7 million people to achieve 13 million daily fitness goals, run 733 million miles, and burn 27 billion calories. Now, Adidas is trying to replicate its success with miCoach.

The Future of Behavior Change Games

We believe that we are only beginning to understand the potential of behavior change games to create meaningful change for individuals, communities and the world, and also their many risks. In the future, behavior change games that tap into the power of games, networks and data will become pervasive across business, civil society and government organizations and permeate all aspects of society.

Game designer Jesse Schell, who is the author of the classic The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, predicts in his visions of gamepocalypse talk:

“Games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of “gamepocalypse—-where every second of your life you’re playing a game in some way.”

Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse from The Long Now Foundation

We expect the gamification enterprise solutions ecosystem to mature, and new startups to focus on niches like governance and public services, health and wellness, environment and sustainability, and education and learning. For instance, UBoost offers gamification solutions tailored for education and health.

We expect behavior change games to also become more focused on specific demographics, diseases or habits, to create customized experiences and close-knit communities. For instance, Goalpost has created a 12-week game to help people quit smoking and Zamzee focuses on helping teens become more active.

Specifically, we expect healthcare and insurance companies to work with governments to explore behavior change games as cost-effective ways to manage, treat and prevent long-term illness such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease. As Dustin DiTommaso, VP of Experience Design at Mad*Pow, said:

“Each year, billions of dollars are spent to move our behaviors in a healthier direction to avert crisis such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other costly and painful afflictions. Leveraging the motivational dynamics of game play to energize and sustain people through behavior change is a challenging yet profound solution.”

We expect to see a new generation of innovative sensor-based gadgets designed to track data and trigger behavior change in niche areas. Products like the Withings blood pressure monitor, FitBit Aria Wi-Fi scale, MyZeo sleep manager and Changers solar charger are early examples of this trend.

We expect brands to create their own behavior change game ecosystems, like Nike did with Nike Plus, or acquire innovative startups that integrate the power of game, network and data, like Intuit did with Mint. Other brands will sponsor third party behavior change games and make them available for employees and associates like Aetna did with Mindbloom Life Game.

We also expect more brands to partner with games to create dedicated versions for their employees, like Zappos did with SuperBetter. Zappos was a development partner with of SuperBetter from the game’s inception, and Zappos employees were the first to use SuperBetter to achieve their health goals.

Zappos SuperBetter on Vimeo

Finally, we expect more start ups like Goodify, Keas, Shape Up and Youtopia to offer solutions for companies to inspire employees and engage them around health and wellness, and social service, and we expect these startups to specialize around narrow niches.

- X – X – X -

This is the second report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

Can’t see this presentation? Click here to view it directly on Slideshare.

What is Crowdfunding?

Photo from p22earl on Flickr

Crowdfunding involves people coming together to collectively fund projects they are passionate about and help bring them to life. Crowdfunding has been used to support a wide variety of projects, including disaster relief, citizen journalism, political campaigns, startups, art (music, movies and books), game development, scientific research and causes. In return, funders receive a reward, which might include a product, a customized experience, equity, or simply recognition, depending on the type of project.

Microlending platforms like Kiva, peer-to-peer lending platforms like Prosper and micro-donation platforms like DonorsChoose can be considered to be predecessors to crowdfunding platforms. However, crowdfunding in its present form can be traced to the inception of platforms like indiegogo in 2008 and Kickstarter in 2009, both of which connect people to creative projects in need of funds. It entered mainstream consciousness in 2012, when several projects on Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms raised more than $1 million each – and up to $10 million – in funding. These include technology gadgets like e-paper watch Pebble; a music record and tour by Amanda Palmer; gaming projects like gaming console Ouya; and even a community center in Glyncoch, Wales.

The success of such crowdfunding projects shows that people are willing to offer financial support to people and projects they believe in, and has created a new model for artists and entrepreneurs to fund their projects.

How Does Crowdfunding Work?

On most crowdfunding platforms, a creator (an individual or a group) pitches a project to the community and asks for small amounts of funding. Then, the creator and the community promote the project on the crowdfunding platform, on the social web, and in mainstream media, to gather support for the project, and help it reach the funding goal within a specified duration.

Successful creators often have a clear plan for completing their project and a public history of successfully completing similar projects, backed up by links to project website and personal social network profiles. By launching the crowdfunding project in public, creators back up their projects with their reputations.

Most backers support crowdfunding projects based on trust, to help their friends or public figures they have long admired create something meaningful. Others are inspired by the newness of the idea or the rewards promised by the project, such as backstage passes for a concert or being included in a film’s credits. Yet others are attracted to the idea of co-creating the project, by having insider access to updates and the ability to contribute their own ideas to it.

Crowdfunding platforms offer creators more than just money. They also help creators test their ideas in public, build a strong community that supports them and spreads the word, and gain visibility on the platform itself, on social networks, blogs and sometimes even newspapers and television.

As Stephan Angoulvant, design director at texting printing company Lumi, shared:

“For us, Kickstarter has been a powerful tool to connect with a community passionate about our work, to help us collect critical insight, and to provide a time line that helps us organize our activities as we grow our project.”

Platforms offer one of two funding models: ‘all or nothing’ in which the creator only gets the funds if the project reaches the funding goal, and ‘keep it all’ in which the creator gets whatever amount the project has raised, irrespective of whether it has met the funding goal. Over time, three distinct models of crowdfunding have emerged, focused on donations, lending and investments.

As crowdfunding becomes mainstream, we are beginning to see niche crowdfunding platforms targeting specific geographies, funding models and types of projects. Pozible, Zeczec and WeFund focus on diverse projects in Australia, Taiwan and the U.K. respectively. ArtistShare focuses on music projects, CrowdRise and Razoo on non-profits, LoudSauce on meaningful ads, GiveForward on patients, GoFundMe on personal projects, SpaceHiveon public spaces, Credibles on food businesses, and Crowdfunder and CrowdCube on startups.

Crowdfunding for Brands

Several brands have used crowdfunding principles in their programs to connect their fans with worthy projects and non-profits (targeting backers), and to encourage fans to start their own projects and catalyze positive change (targeting creators).

In the most popular model, brands ask their employees, customers or fans to vote for eligible non-profits to receive philanthropic grants. Many brands also enable the community members to directly back the non-profits by volunteering or donating money. Several brands have launched recurring programs that follow this model, which include Chase Community Giving, American Express Members Project, and Starbucks Vote.Give.Grow.

In another popular model, brands ask their fans to act as change makers by creating their own projects and gathering support from their networks to qualify for funding. Not only do these projects receive funding, but also visibility from the brand and its community members, and support from the brand and its employees to realize and scale the idea. Branded programs that follow this model include the Pepsi Refresh Project, Benetton’s Unemployee of the Year and Mahindra Group’s Spark the Rise.

Both of these types of crowdfunding programs tap into the same dynamics as the crowdfunding platforms. Brands provide change makers and non-profits the opportunity to connect with a larger community, and offer their fans a range of projects that match their passions. Change makers and non-profits activate their networks to support the projects, and keep backers engaged with updates on progress during the fundraising period. The brand provides credibility and visibility, beyond funding. Finally, brands rely on the wisdom of crowds to identify projects to fund, and fans feel affinity not only for their favorite projects, but also for the brand for creating the platform to support them.

The Future of Crowdfunding

In the near future, we expect equity-based crowdfunding platforms to become a popular way to fund startups across the world, as financial regulation is modified to allow allocation of equity against crowdfunding. Such models already work in markets like the UK.

We also expect consolidation amongst the larger crowdfunding platforms, as large crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and indiegogo become truly global through organic growth, acquisitions and partnerships. For instance, indiegogo is already investing in supporting projects by creators from across the world and building a strong global network of partners, and Kickstarter has already expanded to the UK.

In parallel, we expect even more niche crowdfunding platforms that focus on an under-served segment or geography, as white label crowdfunding software like Launcht, Hayduke, Invested In, CrowdForce and Catarse become more powerful.

We also expect some niche crowdfunding platforms to focus on connecting brands with creators and backers. Projeggt in UK is trying to promote a model where brands sponsor projects in return for custom rewards from creators.

Already, we are seeing examples of brands, organizations and celebrities supporting projects on crowdfunding platforms. For instance, Mozilla Firefox is offering matching grants at Crowdrise.

Some brands will go further and create their own crowdfunding platforms, and ask their community members to fund projects and non-profits on a matching grant basis, not only through virtual actions such as voting.

However, as branded crowdfunding programs become mainstream, and their novelty wears off, we expect that they will become more focused, with a stronger alignment between the brand’s purpose and the type of projects or non-profits it funds.

- X – X – X -

This is the first report from an upcoming report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I am writing with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija. The report will highlight the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and change makers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Sharing Economy.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

We are delighted to share the third issue of the People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine with you.

The People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine pulls together the best insights from our Insights Network, in which 100+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling on a private network created on our proprietary People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform. Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it — on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web — to distill insights and foresights.

We started with the belief that some of the most inspiring projects that are shaping marketing and communications are at the intersection of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling. Nine months, thirty-nine weekly insights reports, and three quarterly magazines later, we feel our intuition is validated.

In the third issue of the People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, we look at thirteen inspiring projects at the intersection of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling. Many of these projects build upon at least two of the three drivers, using powerful stories to inspire crowds to take action and drive change.

Citizenship:

- How CNN and Facebook are encouraging discussions around the upcoming U.S. elections on social media with their I’m Voting Facebook app, and tapping into the insights and power of crowds.
- How Chase has built a community of change agents, by empowering people to make a difference in their local and national communities.

Crowdsourcing:

- How the McDonalds Mein Burger campaign became a successful formula to crowdsource product innovation and tap into niche online communities across Europe.
- How apps like Foodspotting are crowdsourcing photos and reviews of dishes, and changing the way people engage with, share, and discover food.
- How platforms like Kickstarter and LoudSauce are empowering people to fund projects that they are passionate about, and empowering thinkers, inventors, artists and activists to achieve their visions.
- How brands like Anthon Berg, Coca Cola and Alpenliebe are crowdsourcing and spreading generosity, happiness and kindness in Denmark, the Americas and in China.

Storytelling:

- How NASA, Nike and Free Pussy Riot, a group of global activists, used transmedia storytelling and inspire people to dream, achieve personal goals and unite to drive change.
- How SuperBetter is merging story and gaming to motivate people to meet their health and lifestyle goals, reach out to their friends and strangers online for support, and have fun.

In the coming weeks, we will continue to track inspiring projects at the intersection of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling. We will also synthesize the underlying trends and their implications for global marketing and communications professionals into an annual report, which we will release in January 2013.

Do subscribe to receive our weekly insights reports, our quarterly magazines and the upcoming annual report, and do share your tips and comments with us at @PeoplesLab on Twitter.

You can also read this magazine at Slideshare, Scribd and Issuu.

PurPle is rooted in the idea that purpose is about opportunity and potential, and people make it real with their passion and insights.

To become PurPle, organizations need a shared purpose to inspire people, platforms to organize people, programs to energize people, and stories to spark participation and action.

While PurPle includes corporate citizenship and cause marketing initiatives, the most powerful PurPle initiatives truly integrate purpose and participation to catalyze collaborative social innovation with stakeholders or grassroots change movements with consumers.

First view (and share) the PurPle Manifesto, in text, poster, and video formats:

PurPle Manifesto text:

Are you PurPle?

Society has changed. People don’t trust brands. People have new sources of power. People are seeking meaningful connections.
People are demanding that business has a purpose.

Business has changed.Good growth is good for business, to open opportunities for innovation, become more customer-centric, attract and retain talent, build relationships with governments.

The relationship between business and society needs to change, to create shared value: environment, energy and sustainability; health, wellness and nutrition; education, learning, and capability building; happiness, kindness and human potential.

Purpose + People. PurPle.

How can businesses become PurPle, create collaborative social innovation,catalyze grassroots change movements? A shared purpose to inspire people, platforms to organize people, programs to energize people, stories to spark participation and action.

Purpose + People. Purpose is about opportunity and potential. People make it real with their passion and insights.

Purpose + People. PurPle.

PurPle Manifesto poster:

PurPle Manifesto video:

Then, view the PurPle introduction slide deck to get a sense of how PurPle works:

Finally, register to download the PurPle iPad book-app which we will be releasing soon.

We believe that the future of brands and organizations lies at the intersection of purpose and participation. If you share our belief, do get in touch to explore how we can work together.

In previous essays, I wrote about possible futures of social networking and media, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself. I used a 2×2 matrix with likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis, leading to four scenarios. I said that the likely/ negative quadrant is the default, as our world seems to devolve into chaos, when left to its own devices; if we reach out for our better selves, we might create a better world, in the likely/ positive quadrant; if we are lucky, we might even exceed our expectations and approach the unlikely/ positive quadrant; and if we are unlucky, we might mess things up, and find ourselves in the unlikely/ negative quadrant. This week, I’ll use the same 2×2 matrix to imagine four possible futures of branding, like before, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself.

The Likely/ Negative Future

In a world with infinitely short attention spans, infinitely fragmented media channels and infinite perfectly undifferentiated brand choices, effective branding has become an almost impossible exercise. After decades of fighting against opt-out data sharing and virus-like tracking cookies, people have given up on the idea of privacy and embraced their granularly quantified, aggressively gamified and fully public selves. Armed with big data, brands have rushed forth to fill hitherto sacred spaces in people’s lives with personalized, location relevant, time sensitive ads, going beyond TVs, tablets and mobile phones to automobile control panels, eyewear display screens and wearable bio-sensors. Instead of blocking endless streams of competing ads, filtering out spam, or prioritizing what’s relevant, people have grown to treat ads as ambient noise, which cancels itself out, resolves itself into a non-intrusive, if unattractive background. Surrounded by screens, in their homes, out on the streets, and on their own bodies, people have developed a symptom called screen blindness, forcing marketers to invest billions of R&D dollars in the next frontier of neurobranding, which promises to insert ads directly into the neural connections in the brain.

The Likely/ Positive Future

As screen blindness grows to epidemic proportions, it undermines the productivity of millions of knowledge workers, and even threatens to trigger a global recession. Panicked governments, multinationals and civil society organizations come together to create a new multilateral agreement called the Paris Protocol and cut advertising spends to 25% of pre- screen blindness levels, with immediate effect. As marketers cut down on advertising, they refocus their budgets on creating compelling branded transmedia experiences; commission artists to create branded movies, music, art and literature; and reimagine their brands as entertainment franchises and cultural memes. All marketing begins to look like entertainment marketing: brand trailers attract people to the brand entertainment franchise, and, if they fall in love with the brand transmedia experience, they become hardcore fans who immerse themselves into the brand culture, subscribe to receive updates on upcoming brand experiences and buy brand artifacts to flaunt their brand fandom. The boundaries between media, brands and agencies blur as brands buy media companies, media companies start their own brand experience consultancies and agencies create their own brand experience franchises.

The Unlikely/ Positive Future

Marketers realize that people are more likely to remix and share cultural memes that are part of the public commons, and decide to release their brand transmedia experiences under an Experience Commons license. Some marketers even go beyond and open-source their brands, so that any activist, artists or entrepreneur anywhere in the world could apply to use the brand for their cause, art or venture, as long as they meet the brand guidelines. The most authentic projects are accepted as part of the brand’s official canon, while others are treated as non-canonical forks. While most marketers retain the veto on what is accepted as canonical, and set strong guidelines for how non-canonical forks represent themselves (BrandX, independently curated brand experiences), some marketers leave such decisions to their brand custodians, who are often passionate volunteers from the brand community. The revenue from brand experiences and artifacts are divided amongst the creators of the canonical projects, based on their contribution to strengthening the brand meme.

The Unlikely/ Negative Future

Over time, with the help of new advances in neuromarketing, some brand memes become so strong that they begin to look like religions, with their own creation myths and sacred texts, their own pantheons of Gods and Goddesses, their own rituals and pilgrimages, and their own power-hungry leaders and fanatic fringes. Devotees of the most powerful brand religions begin to not only look down upon others, but even exclude them from social, economic and political opportunities. As bigger brand religions create conversion, exclusion and persecution campaigns, smaller brand memes face the choice of dying, going underground or consolidating with other endangered brand memes. Soon, neighborhoods and even nation states begin to divide themselves into homogenous brand religions and custodians of competing brand religions begin to battle each other for political positions. As the majority brand religions use state power to disenfranchise minority brand religions, the minorities begin to demand their own separate states and create underground guerrilla marketing armies to fight state propaganda. All over the world, brand coups are organized and brand regimes are overthrown. When the dust settles, the world is divided into two warring brand superpowers with empire building tendencies and a coalition of brand states struggling to maintain their independence.

In Summary

Like in my previous essays on possible futures of social networking and media, the present contains the seeds for all these possible futures. Stephen Baker has written how big data can be used to manipulate us. Kirk Cheyfitz believes that all brand marketing will look like film marketing. Martin Lindstorm calls neuromarketing the next frontier in marketing and compares cult brands, especially Apple, to religious cults.  Alex Bogusky has created an open-source brand called Common. It’s up to use to choose one possible future over another. Let’s aim for the Unlikely/ Positive future of open source brands.

Last week, I wrote about possible futures of social networking, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself. I used a 2×2 matrix with likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis, leading to four scenarios. I said that the likely/ negative quadrant is the default, as our world seems to devolve into chaos, when left to its own devices; if we reach out for our better selves, we might create a better world, in the likely/ positive quadrant; if we are lucky, we might even exceed our expectations and approach the unlikely/ positive quadrant; and if we are unlucky, we might mess things up, and find ourselves in the unlikely/ negative quadrant. This week, I’ll use the same 2×2 matrix to imagine four possible futures of media, like before, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself.

The Likely/ Negative Future

Amidst widespread speculation that the social web will hasten the end of journalism as we know it, media organizations have emerged at the forefront of innovation in technology. They have not only adopted, even co-opted, social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but also collaborated to create their own media network Streamly, to compete with them. On Streamly, half a billion citizen streamers share more than 2 billion hours of storystreams each week, most often from their haptic streampads, but sometimes even 24×7 with full-body Streamsuits, in the hope of being featured on Streamly, but also on every mediastream in the world. These storystreams range from the amateurishly banal to the professionally shocking, with elaborately staged sex and violence. Streamly automatically slices and stitches together similar stream segments into themed streamcasts, which are then hand-curated by professional streamistas who work for news organizations, and the most popular streamcasts are syndicated as mediastreams across the world. Many of the most popular mediastreams are either pornstreams or shopstreams, with seamless single touch bidding to buy the objects of desire. Corporations and government share their own storystreams, with pre-negotiated paid quotas for being featured on mediastreams, and agreements to filter out and censor stream segments that are against their best interests.

The Likely/ Positive Future

Streamly, along with social networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, has become an important platform for creativity, citizenship, and grassroots community organization. Even though pornstreams and shopstreams continue to be popular as streamcasts, streamistas employed by both Streamly and media organizations, also curate green, health, education and human potential streamcasts. Editors at media organizations have strong editorial policies on which streamcasts to syndicate as mediastreams, and rely on their reputation as tastemakers and opinion leaders to grow their subscriber base. Corporations and governments track storystreams to understand public opinion and change their policies, and even though they sometimes try to shape it with their own storystreams, they are almost never entirely successful. Worried about Streamly’s growing clout, free expression activists have started a freestreaming movement and hacked together a software called OpenStream to slice and stitch together storystreams into open-source streamcasts. Media organizations first considered legal action against OpenStream, but then decided to endorse it and even create a Streamly API to enable others to create similar apps, in response to adverse public opinion.

The Unlikely/ Positive Future

Building up from the Positive/ Likely scenario, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Streamly have all become powerful open ecosystems for creative expression and public dialogue, and the media ecosystem looks like a rich recombinant rainforest. However, people are beginning to tire of navigating these endless streams, even with the aid of search and recommendation AIs that are more powerful than ever before. Zen Minimalism has become a powerful world religion with its more than 2 billion new converts are beginning to apply the principles of minimalism to media and deciding that they won’t pay attention to anything today that they won’t pay attention to in a month from now. While pornstreams are still popular, shopstreams have almost disappeared. Almost everyone has a streampad, almost everyone streams, but almost no one streams 24×7 with full-body streamsuits. In a short time, the amount of streaming has become almost half of what it used to be, but the richness and diversity of streaming has increased dramatically, as Zen Minimalism practitioners often use their free time to perfect their craft. The practice of streamcasting and mediastreaming has also disappeared, as Zen Minimalism practitioners aren’t really interested in what’s popular or what everyone is watching. The media ecosystem is more of a rich recombinant rainforest than ever before, but it’s also as intimate as an evening of storytelling around a campfire.

The Unlikely/ Negative Future

Building up from the Positive/ Likely scenario, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Streamly have all become powerful open ecosystems for creative expression and public dialogue. Media entrepreneurs have built multi-million dollar startups on top of these platforms. Millions of apps and millions of niche-specific streamcasts have tried to follow their example but most have had limited success. As these platforms have become more open, and their app ecosystems have exploded, automated streambots have overwhelmed search and recommendation algorithms, and discovery has become a big problem. Streamly’s once-futuristic synthesis AI is now submerged under spam and Google’s PageRank search algorithm has long become obsolete. As a result, new streamers begin to get disappointed and give up, while established streamers and streamistas begin to wield power similar to 20th century media monopoliedecades short time, the rich recombinant media rainforest dries up into a media desert with half a dozen global monopolies who employ a few hundred star streamers, while a few thousands wannabe streamers toil away to attract their attention. These monopolies protect their subscriber bases with powerful firewalls and closed proprietary devices, which don’t even work with each other. Outside these closed monopolies, the web feels like the Wild West, where virusmongers, spammers and scam artists rule.

In Summary

In imagining possible futures of media and contextualizing it against my possible futures of social networking, I realized that the difference between the positive and the negative scenarios is determined by a small number of factors: what does society value and how much, what’s commercial and what’s in the commons, who wields power and to what end. I also noticed that the Unlikely/ Positive futures in both the essays share the same assumptions, while the other three scenarios don’t really. It seems to me that there are many possible futures, each different from the others, but all our most preferable futures lie in the same direction, one in which humanity’s spiritual progress leads, not lags behind, the society’s technological progress. The question is: how do we choose these futures over the others?

Now that we have a social network for one billion people in the world (Facebook), a social network for 150 of your most intimate friends (Path), and a social network just for your significant other (Pair); a social network for videos (YouTube), a social network for photos (Instagram) and a social network for status updates (Twitter); a social network for professionals (LinkedIn), a social network for curators (Pinterest), and a social network from Google (Google+); not to mention a parallel universe of social networks in China (Renren, Weibo, Youku); it seems almost impossible to imagine how the social network of the future will be different from the rich diversity we have today.

Omnipresent, Omniscient, Omnipotent

Today’s social networks know what our and our friends’ interests, intentions and consumption behaviors are; know how to recognize patterns in our behaviors and contextualize them against our friends, others like us, or the world; know how to track and federate our identity across the web and across the world; know how to serve us status updates, news, entertainment and ads that we are most likely to consume; even know how to manipulate our behavior by tapping into our gameplaying instincts with challenges, points, levels and badges. Today’s social networks seem omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent; it’s almost shocking that a Facebook-Google-LinkedIn-Twitter hybrid hasn’t already evolved into a dystopian version of singularity, subjugated nation states, and enslaved all humanity. It seems easy to imagine then how things might become worse from here, more difficult to imagine how things might become better.

Possible Futures: A 2X2 Matrix

Predictions are easy to make, because almost no one expects them to turn out to be correct, and they almost always don’t. I find it much more meaningful to look at possibilities instead, scenarios that are likely or unlikely, positive or negative, worlds that may or may not come into existence. I love the 2X2 matrix, so I’ll use one which is preferred by futurists: likely/ unlikely scenarios on the X-axis and negative/ positive scenarios on the Y-axis. I think of the likely/ negative quadrant as the default, as our world seems to devolve into chaos, when left to its own devices; if we reach out for our better selves, we might create a better world, in the likely/ positive quadrant; if we are lucky, we might even exceed our expectations and approach the unlikely/ positive quadrant; and if we are unlucky, we might mess things up, and find ourselves in the unlikely/ negative quadrant.

Like William Gibson famously said: “The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” So, one way to look at the future, without going into the domain of fantasy and science fiction, is to look at the very near future, perhaps even the present, and extrapolate from elements that seem to have arrived from the future. Here, then, are four possible futures of social networking, in a near future so near that it could be the present itself.

The Likely/ Negative Future

Let’s start with the likely/ negative quadrant, the one we are thinking of as the default. Facebook(-RenRen-YouTube-Youku-Fox-Reuters) and Apple(-Amazon-Disney-Penguin-Viacom-Virgin) are locked in a pitched battle to become the leading media and experience network, while Google(-Microsoft-Skype-LinkedIn) is focused on the enterprise experienceware market, and Alibaba(-WalMart-Citi-Weibo-Twitter) has the highest valuation with its experiential commerce business, but all four are worried about how upstart SuperEgo(-Orange-AmEx-PayPal-Zynga) is beginning to control the identity market with its EgoExperience reward program and a series of recent acquisitions. Consumers accumulate Ego points by buying experiences from Alibaba, consuming branded experience from Facebook and Apple, or performing well on monthly Google work experience appraisals, which they can redeem to consume more branded experiences, buy more experiences or sign up for longer hours of work experience. If they don’t meet their monthly minimum quotas on either of the three types of experiences, their EgoExperience rating goes down and their access to premium experiences is limited. In extreme cases, membership from the EgoExperience reward program is revoked, severely limiting the consumer’s long-term prospects of buying and consuming experiences.

The Likely/ Positive Future

Let’s now look at the likely/ positive quadrant, which shares many of the characteristics with the likely/ negative quadrant, with a few important differences. Facebook and Apple are still the dominant media and experience networks, but they are also open platforms for millions of experience creators, who share their experiences under an ExperienceCommons license, so that others can remix them and share them forward. Google is still the leader in the enterprise experienceware market, but it works closely with TEDExperience and WikiExperiencia Foundation to help millions of professionals co-create an open source ExperienceBase of the world’s best learning resources. Alibaba still has the highest market capitalization, but more than half its profits come from its WholeExperience brand, which sells meaningful experiences. SuperEgo is still powerful, but it is under constant scrutiny from consumer rights groups and it hasn’t yet been able to tie up with Google work experience appraisals. And, the hottest new startup in the Bangalore-Shanghai-Tokyo experience-corridor is ExperienceZen, which creates bespoke minimalist experiences for more than half a billion experience-weary users, by helping them block out most branded experiences, focus on the most meaningful work and life experiences and even completely switch off from the ExperienceNet for two weeks every year, while maintaining a respectable EgoExperience rating.

The Unlikely/ Positive Future

In the unlikely/ positive quadrant, the internet has evolved into a powerful open source public network called Mirror, managed by the Mirror Foundation, with wide representation from government, business and civil society. Almost everyone in the world is on Mirror, via smartphone-like MirrorScopes, and Mirror is deeply integrated in all aspects of our life. All news and entertainment is created and consumed on it, all communication is routed via it, and all business models are based on it. MirrorCode is designed so that others can create their own MirrorWorlds upon Mirror, but all MirrorWorlds share Mirror’s core concern with humanity’s spiritual progress. Mirror is designed so that it individually optimizes for what’s good for each one of us, what builds our character, what leads to our long-term happiness, what helps us approach our best self. If I have just broken up with my girlfriend, it will subtly hint that I should get back in touch with my high-school sweetheart who is also single again. If I need to lose weight, it will point me towards healthy food and lifestyle options on MirrorSearch and show me MirrorStreams of my friends practicing yoga. If I ask it a direct question and it feels that I am not ready for the answer, it will even hold back the answer from me, and ask me to take tests that will help me prepare myself for it. Mirror will even throw challenges at me that build my physical, mental, emotional and social resilience, and reward me for completing those challenges by giving me new MirrorPowers and unlocking higher levels of MirrorConsciousness for me. The range of news, content and experiences available on Mirror are rich and diverse, as most content is created under a MirrorCommons license so that others can build upon it. Top ten lists are almost unheard of because each person consumes content based on their unique taste, but artists make a good living because they are generously supported by loyal patrons. Scam-artists and virus-mongers sometimes succeed in gaming Mirror’s code, but, in general, businesses that create meaningful experiences tend to do best on Mirror.

The Unlikely/ Negative Future

Let’s now look at the unlikely/ negative quadrant, which shares many of the characteristics with the unlikely/ positive quadrant, with a few important differences. Mirror is as powerful as before, but Mirror Foundation is now controlled by the American and British governments, supported by the Resurgent Universal Church, and a consortium of multinational conglomerates. The governments wants to use Mirror as a tool for propaganda to weaken China, the church wants to enforce its regressive moral code on the entire world, and the multinationals want to trigger subconscious urges that compel consumers to buy more mindlessly. They try to make subtle changes to the core MirrorCode to serve their needs, but MirrorCode is resilient and rejects these changes. The Mirror Foundation then starts a full-scale war on MirrorCode, by creating a series of viruses that threaten to undermine its core structure. China retaliates and tries to take control of Mirror through its own virus attacks. The European Union and Japan refuse to participate in the MirrorWar and try to create firewalls to protect their own part of Mirror. Brazil and India first try to broker peace between America and China, then create an antivirus to protect the MirrorCode core. However, multi-lateral peace initiatives, firewalls, and antiviruses all fail in the end, and Mirror fragments into a thousand pieces, each one an island of code disconnected from the others. Without Mirror, nation states break down into city-states, the major religions disintegrate into warring factions and multinationals go bankrupt. When the dust settles after a decade, the world reorganizes itself into disconnected city-states, local folk religions and distributed global subcultures that have no way to speak to each other.

The Different Between Utopia and Dystopia

There are probably infinite possible futures and these are merely four possibilities amongst them but I hope that you see that relatively few things need to change for us to end up with the utopian positive futures or the dystopian negative futures, namely: what does society value and how much, what’s commercial and what’s in the commons, who wields power and to what end. Dystopias, after all, are utopias with a few critical fatal flaws and the biggest fatal flaw, perhaps, is humanity’s spiritual progress lagging behind the society’s technological progress. Let this, then, be our touchstone for making choices that might lead to the more preferable of these possible worlds: are we only thinking of our technological progress, or also of our spiritual progress?

The Power of Crowdsourcing Insights and Innovation

According to the recent PwC CEO Survey of 1200+ business leaders across 69 countries, business leaders believe that crowdsourcing people’s insights are one of the main drivers for leading innovation and change.

We have a significant body of knowledge on crowdsourcing now, including business rationale, application areas, best practices and case studies. We have seen dedicated third-party crowdsourcing platforms in action for almost a decade and learned from their successes and failures. We have seen diverse Fortune 500 corporations design dedicated large-scale platforms to crowdsource insights and innovation across business functions. However, we saw a gap in the market for comprehensive solution to crowdsource insights and innovation and launched the People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform and approach.

People’s Lab Crowdsourcing Platform and Approach

The People’s Lab platform helps organizations build and nurture public or private, web or mobile, hosted or white label communities around four pre-configured application areas: Expertise Request Network, Innovation Challenge Network, Research & Insights Network and Contest & Activation Network. Our community and game thinking features encourage people to share rich multimedia content and vote/ comment on other people’s content, while our social intelligence algorithm helps us identify the most influential people, themes and content.

Crowdsourcing Insights from Conversations and Communities

The People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform and approach forms the core of our distinctive insights and foresight approach, which consists of four elements: organic conversation analysis, MSLGROUP’s own insight communities, client-specific insights communities, and ethnographic deep dives into these communities. This four-part approach helps us distill a deep understanding of societal values, consumption behaviors and attitudes towards brands, not only in terms of insights that help explain our world today, but also foresights that give us a glimpse of future worlds.

People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine

As an example, 100+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling on the MSLGROUP Insights Network. Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it — on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web — to distill insights and foresights. We have been sharing these insights and foresights with you on our People’s Insights blog. Now, we have compiled the best insights from the network and the blog in the iPad-friendly People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, as a showcase of our capabilities.

We started with the belief that some of the most inspiring projects that are shaping marketing and communications are at the intersection of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling. Three months and thirteen weekly insights reports later, we feel validated that our intuition was right.

In the first issue of the People’s Insights Quarterly Magazine, we start off with a framework for purpose-inspired transmedia storytelling, which weaves together elements from all the three drivers of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling. Then we look at thirteen inspiring projects at the intersection of these three drivers. Many of these projects build upon at least two of the three pillars of citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling and some leverage all three.

We hope that you will enjoy the magazine and subscribe to receive subsequent issues. We also hope that our magazine and blog will inspire you to start a conversation on how you can distill actionable insights and foresights from conversations and communities.

Social Technologies and Power Structures

The debate on whether internet and mobile technologies are transforming traditional power structures is dominated by three divergent narratives.

According to the first, utopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies enable individuals to publish and distribute content, self-organize into communities of interest and participate in collective action. As a result, they can create new types of media outlets, build new types of civil society organizations, and monitor, protest against and even bring down governments. Even though these new degrees of freedom are far from universal, they are fundamentally changing political power structures. The future has already arrived, this narrative insists, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

According to the second, status quo, narrative, power structures are ingrained into our society’s institutions and internet and mobile technologies don’t really change these institutions, or create new ones. The case studies compiled by the utopians constitute anecdotal evidence, at best, and the influence of networked technologies will always be limited because of issues related to access or ability. So, internet and mobile technologies are a minor influence on political power structures, at best.

According to the third, dystopian, narrative, internet and mobile technologies are, in fact, enabling traditional institutions to further consolidate their power through censorship, surveillance and propaganda. So, even though they give us the illusion of greater power, they have, indeed, compromised our ability to protect our privacy, have access to diverse views, and build real institutions.

It’s not easy to conclusively argue for one narrative or the other, unless we outline the entire range of possibilities that social technologies open up for citizens and activists.

The 5Cs Framework

Social technologies encompass many different types of tools, such as blogging, microblogging, video-sharing, photo-sharing, podcasting, mapping, social networking, social voting, social bookmarking, lifestreaming, wikis, virtual worlds, and several new and hybrid tools.

Cutting across these tools, there are five underlying dynamics in social technologies, the 5Cs of social media: Content, Conversation, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these five dynamics constitute the value system of social technologies. The tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 5Cs is here to stay.

If we wish to understand whether and how social technologies can empower citizens, it’s useful to explore how citizens and activists can leverage these five dynamics.

The First C: Content

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social technologies allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

User generated content is the driver of the citizen journalism phenomenon, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms like CNN iReport, Global Voices, NowPublic, and AllVoices have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Researchers have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

At the Content level, the design challenge is to create or harness focused content creation platforms that scale even if only 1% of the users create content.

So far, most initiatives in India have struggled in this respect. Platforms like MeriNews are too entertainment focused to be called citizen journalism platforms and individual or group blogs like Kafila don’t have the scale to make a meaningful impact.

The Second C: Conversation

The second C, Conversation, refers to the idea that social technologies enable two-way dialogues between citizens that sometimes take the form of viral memes and tip into the mainstream consciousness.

One to one conversations tip into viral memes as consumers and curators congregate around compelling content. Natural disasters like the China earthquake and South East Asia tsunami and crisis situations like the Israel-Gaza war and the Mumbai terrorist attacks often lead to viral memes, sometimes misleading ones.

Sometimes, activism campaigns also tip into viral memes. The 2009 Valentine’s Day Pink Chaddi campaign that protested against the right wing political party Sri Ram Sena by sending them pink panties as Valentine’s Day gifts became viral when more than 50,000 people joined in on Facebook.

At the Conversation level, the design challenge is to create compelling content that demands to be shared and seed conversations around it that can tip into a viral meme.

Evidence suggests that the art of designing viral activism campaigns hasn’t been perfected yet and most campaigns that to go viral happen to tip and find it difficult to replicate their own success later.

The Third C: Collaboration

The third C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social technologies facilitate the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at two levels: co-creation and collective action.

In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

At the Collaboration level, the design challenge is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism).

In 2009, I co-founded a crowdsourced election monitoring platform Vote Report India that is a good example of a platform designed for co-creation. The Ushahidi based platform presented an aggregated visual view of irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections by plotting text messages sent from polling booths on a Google Map. However, we realized that the platform couldn’t scale without tapping into an offline volunteer network. Kiirti is a more evolved co-creation platform that factors in the need for such an offline support ecosystem.

The Pink Chaddi campaign resulted in more than 2000 pink panties being sent to Sri Ram Sena and is a good example of collective action in India.

The Fourth C, Community

The fourth C, Community, refers to the idea that social technologies can facilitate sustained engagement around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object. Often, lifestyles, passions and causes make for more compelling social objects than people, organizations, or campaigns.

At the Community level, the design challenge is to identify a compelling social object and build a large and vibrant community around it.

I am currently working on iJanaagraha, a community platform built around the notion that real change begins in the neighborhood. It’s a new type of citizen platform, with strong location, community and activation layers, designed to promote proactive citizenship by providing citizens the information, tools and networks to drive real change in their neighborhoods and cities.

The Fifth C, Collective Intelligence

The fifth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us.

It becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

At the Collective Intelligence level, the design challenge is to aggregate our individual and collective actions in databases, and run sophisticated algorithms on them to build reputation and recommendation systems.

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and some of the work done by the Sunlight Foundation are good examples of citizen initiatives that tap into collective intelligence. I haven’t seen any good examples of such initiatives in India, but we are building such capabilities in the iJanaagraha platform.

In Summary

So, the 5Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social technologies.

As we move from Content to Conversation to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them.

Each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for conversation memes and meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

The 5Cs framework can also be used to design and measure specific social technologies initiatives. The best social technologies initiatives leverage all these five layers, but most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social technologies initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between.

I want to emphasize that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Conversation layers. It’s important to note, however, that institution-building kicks in only at the Collaboration and Community layers, and real change happens only when we build new institutions.

Finally, evidence has shown us that all these five underlying dynamics can be used for both good and evil. Misleading or inflammatory content can be used to drive propaganda and spread rumors. Communities can easily become cabals and collaboration and collective intelligence can be used to profile and persecute minorities and other disadvantaged groups.

Social technologies open up possibilities for new behaviors and new power structures. It’s up to us, as individuals and societies, to choose how we use these possibilities. The question is: how well will we choose?

Marketers have always used stories to share information, change opinions and influence decisions. Now, as people create, consume and share brand stories in new ways, marketers need to go beyond the 30-sec product ad or the 300-word press release, and tell purpose-inspired transmedia stories that inspire, organize and energize people.

Six Trends in Storytelling

Let’s start by recapturing the six important trends that are reshaping how people create, consume and share brand stories:

- Short attention spans: People are consuming news and entertainment in byte-sized pieces, increasingly on smartphones and tablets, often on-the-go.
- Narrow interest graphs: People are selectively paying attention to the topics and sources they are most interested in, and filtering out the rest.
- Social serendipity: People are discovering new content based on what is shared by their networks, or by other people like them, via sophisticated algorithms.
- Community curation: People are forming on-the-fly communities around a shared passion or purpose by curating content around hashtags and trending topics.
- Remix in context: People are remixing photos, videos, art and music and sharing their creative work in the context of a time, place or event.
- Emergent storylines: People are curating their own Facebook or Twitter timelines as work-in-progress stories, with emergent narratives.

These six trends play an important role in the narrative arc we will draw next: from Hero’s Journey to Heroes to Everyday Heroes.

From Hero’s Journey to Heroes to Everyday Heroes

Heroʼs Journey: Storytelling

The Heroʼs Journey is a good example of a monomyth, or a universal story, that cuts across all types of stories, including myths, movies, novels, and ads.

According to Joseph Campbell, all stories follow the same three-part narrative structure of the Hero’s Journey. In “departure”, the hero listens to the call of adventure and leaves the “known world” for the “unknown world”. In “initiation”, he meets guides and allies, falls in love, undergoes a series of tests and trials, discovers the answer and receives the gift. In “return”, he reluctantly returns home, survives a near-death experience, and shares his wisdom and power with the rest of the world.

The Hero’s Journey has been used by filmmakers to create franchises like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and Matrix, and by marketers to tell compelling stories about brands, most often through 30-second ad films.

However, the six trends that are reshaping how people create, consume and share brands stories are also reshaping both the nature of the universal stories themselves and the art of how these stories are told.

Heroes: Transmedia Storytelling

First, let’s look at the art of storytelling.

NBCʼs hit TV series Heroes is a good example of transmedia storytelling, where TV shows, graphic novels, video games, mobile applications, offline experiences and online communities explore different aspects of the same “story world”.

While many transmedia “story worlds” exhibit elements of the three-part narrative structure of the Hero’s Journey, they expand it, by incorporating multi-layered intertwining narratives, complex social networks of characters, and storylines that unfold over hundreds of hours.

In fact, we don’t really consume popular culture anymore, certainly not as a linear narrative. Instead, we co-create it, by deconstructing plot twists in elaborate blog posts, contributing to extensive fan wikis that delve into the motivations of each character, and creating our own parallel narrative in virtual worlds and alternative reality games built around films and TV shows.

As popular culture becomes more layered, brands have had to rethink marketing. Increasingly, ads attract audiences to branded “story worlds”, which try to retain their interest over the long term, and convert them first into passionate fans and then into paying customers, much like movie trailers with entertainment franchises. P&G’s Old Spice Man is not only one of the most memorable marketing campaigns in recent times, but also an entertainment franchise in the making.

Everyday Heroes: Purpose-Inspired Storytelling

Now, let’s look at the nature of universal stories itself.

CNN Heroes in the US and CNN-IBN Real Heroes in India are good examples of purpose-inspired storytelling about everyday heroes acting as change agents, with a clear call for participation and action. The phenomenal popularity of the TED conference is another example of our innate need to celebrate everyday heroes with “ideas that matter”.

These stories about everyday heroes who are changing the world share some elements with the Hero’s Journey, but diverge from it in important ways. First, each one of us is a hero with a different call for adventure, a different journey, and a different reward, which means that the idea of the monomyth itself is problematic. Second, the most important journey is the journey within, into the “unknown world” of our own hidden potential, to search for our own best self. Third, our biggest battles are the ones we fight with ourselves and the only way we can win is by helping everyone else win too.

As people have become better at filtering out the 30-sec tell-and-sell product ad, brands have had to rediscover their reason for being and tell stories that inspire, organize and energize people around a shared passion or purpose. GE’s Ecomagination and Healthymagination initiatives are powerful examples of a brand telling purpose-driven stories that inspire participation and action.

The Storytelling Mandala

The Storytelling Mandala is designed to help brands tell stories that inspire, organize and energize people to participate and act around a shared purpose. The inner circle consists of a new three-part universal story that articulates the purpose of the brand, the change it wants to catalyze and the quest it has undertaken. The outer circle focuses on the art of transmedia storytelling, including the role of content, the sources of content, the role of channels and the role of paid, owned and earned media.

Question 1: The Universal Story

To inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose, brands need to tell their story in three parts, in sequence: why (purpose), what (change) and how (quest).

- Why (Purpose): Who are we and what is our reason for being? What is our shared purpose, our Social Heartbeat, that can inspire people?
- What (Change): What is the change we are trying to bring about? What does change mean for individuals, communities and the world?
- How (Quest): What is the journey we must go through to catalyze positive change in the world? What if the only way we can win is if everyone wins?

Even when brands want to tell purpose-inspired stories, they inevitably find it difficult to abandon their tried-and-tested benefit-driven tell-and-sell claims. Therefore, it’s critical to build a bridge between the benefit-driven claims that move units and the purpose-inspired stories that move hearts.

Question 2: Role of Content

To tell their story in a compelling manner, brands need to create three types of content, each with a different role: long form tent pole content to pull in people, short-form content pegs to push out stories to people, and ongoing two-way conversations.

- Tent pole content: Long-form content like minisites, apps, reports, games or films to showcase the full story in one place and pull in people.
- Content pegs: Short-form content pegs like blog posts, infographics and video clips to highlight and push out different aspects of the story.
- Conversations: Ongoing two-way conversations to push out the content pegs to pull in people to the tent pole content.

Think of a tent. The content tent pole holds up the tent and attracts people to it. The content pegs hold down the tent and support the content tent pole. The tent needs both the content tent pole and content pegs.

Now, think of a movie. The movie itself is the content tent pole, while the trailers, interviews, announcements and reviews are content pegs, leading to different types of conversations like buzz, gossip and rumors.

Question 3: Sources of Content

Brands need to recognize that creating content requires time and resources and tap into three sources of content: create original content, crowdsource content, and curate conversations.

- Create original content: Brands need to create a critical mass of compelling original content, including almost all the tent pole content like minisites, apps, games, films and reports and at least some of the content pegs like blog posts, video clips and infographics.
- Crowdsource content: If brands are able to create compelling original content, they can use it as a provocation to crowdsource content pegs from influencers and community members, often by running crowdsourcing contests.
- Curate conversations: Finally, brands can curate conversations around their content tent poles and content pegs into timelines (Storify) or collections (Pinterest), and use them and content pegs, and even content tent poles.

Marketers and agencies are increasingly hiring journalists and filmmakers to create original branded content. Marketers are also creating contests to crowdsource everything from personal stories to Super Bowl ads. Finally, most media companies, and many marketers, are curating conversations and using them as content pegs.

Question 4: Role of Channels

Once brands have created, crowdsourced or curated content, they need to organize them across channels, knowing that some channels work best for content repository, some for content aggregation, and some for content distribution.

- Content repository: Channels like YouTube, SlideShare and Flickr are typically used for storing videos, documents and photos respectively.
- Content aggregation: Websites, blogs and Tumblr (and increasingly social and mobile apps) are typically used for aggregating content and conversations.
- Content distribution: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are typically used for distributing content to community members and influencers.

The purpose of the content repository channels is to pull in people deep into the content archive, while the purpose of the content distribution channels is to push out the latest content and create conversations. The purpose of the content aggregation channel is to link pull and push, stock and flow, content and conversations.

Question 5: Role of Media

Finally, brands need to intentionally use paid, owned and earned media in sync to attract strangers, convert them into familiars and then into promoters.

- Paid Media (for strangers): Targeted display, search or social ads to attract people who don’t know anything about the brand, and seek their permission to join an owned media platform.
- Owned Media (for familiars): Private or public online community platforms, social networking groups, or events to organize people who have given permission to the brand to share regular content with them.
- Earned Media (for promoters): Ongoing conversations with community members and influencers to trigger participation and action and energize them to become promoters.

However, even as brands are investing to build permission-based owned media assets, they are realizing that familiars and even promoters sometime lapse into strangers and even community members sometimes need to be reactivated with the help of paid and earned media.

Purpose-Inspired Transmedia Storytelling

In summary, brands need to tell new types of stories, purpose-inspired stories, and tell them in new ways, via transmedia storytelling.

If brands do this, they will inspire, organize and energize people to participate and act around a shared purpose; build permission based owned media assets that will increasingly look like entertainment franchises; and thrive in a world in which media is fragmented, content is cheap, attention is the biggest constraint, but storytelling can still win over hearts and minds.

Gaurav Mishra, Asia Director of Social Media, MSLGROUP

The Power of People’s Insights

According to the recent PwC CEO Survey of 1200+ business leaders across 69 countries, business leaders believe that crowdsourcing people’s insights are one of the main drivers for leading innovation and change.

We have a significant body of knowledge on crowdsourcing now, including business rationale, application areas, best practices and case studies. We have seen dedicated third-party crowdsourcing platforms in action for almost a decade and learned from their successes and failures. We have seen diverse Fortune 500 corporations design dedicated large-scale platforms to crowdsource insights and innovation across business functions. However, we still see a gap in the market for a complete yet cost-effective crowdsourcing solution that can be used across multiple application areas.

People’s Lab: Crowdsourcing Insights & Innovation

We are delighted to share that we are launching MSLGROUP’s People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform and approach today to help organizations tap into people’s insight for innovation, storytelling and change.

People’s Lab helps organizations build and nurture public or private, web or mobile, hosted or white label communities around four pre-configured application areas: Expertise Request Network, Innovation Challenge Network, Research & Insights Network and Contest & Activation Network.

People’s Lab comes with powerful community and game thinking features and full email integration. People share rich multimedia content and vote/ comment on other people’s content. Our social intelligence algorithm helps us identify the most influential people, themes and content. Finally, our solution includes end-to-end support including custom design and development, community management and content creation.

People’s Lab Case Studies

The People’s Lab platform has been designed and developed by MSLGROUP’s social team in India with inputs from our insights and innovation experts from all over the world. Over the last year, we have used the People’s Lab platform and approach to create communities for both MSLGROUP and its clients:

1. Contest & Activation Network: Dell Go Green Challenge

In 2010, Dell India used an early version of the People’s Lab platform to create a challenge for design students and others to share ideas on how to redesign, reuse and recycle gadgets to make them go green.

2. Innovation Challenge Network: MSLGROUP Innovation Catalysts Network

MSLGROUP Innovation Catalysts Network consists of 150+ MSLGROUP agency leaders, practice leaders and client leaders, who share insights with each other to co-create new and innovative client offerings.

3. Research & Insights Network: MSLGROUP Insights Network

MSLGROUP Insights Network consists of 50+ MSLGROUP thinkers and planners, who share and discuss inspiring projects on corporate citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling.

4. Expertise Request Network: MSLGROUP Crisis Network

MSLGROUP Crisis Network consists of 50+ MSLGROUP crisis experts across industries and geographies, who tap into each others’ insights in real time to help clients plan for and respond to crisis situations.

People’s Lab Insights & Foresights Approach

The People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform also enables our distinctive insights and foresight approach, which consists of four elements: organic conversation analysis, MSLGROUP’s own insight communities, client-specific insights communities, and ethnographic deep dives into these communities.

As an example, 50+ thinkers and planners within MSLGROUP share and discuss inspiring projects on corporate citizenship, crowdsourcing and storytelling on the MSLGROUP Insights Network. Every week, we pick up one project and do a deep dive into conversations around it — on the MSLGROUP Insights Network itself but also on the broader social web — to distill insights and foresights. We share these insights and foresights with you on our People’s Insights blog and compile the best insights from the network and the blog in the iPad-friendly People’s Lab Quarterly Magazine, as a showcase of our capabilities.

As you can imagine, we can bring the same innovative approach to help you distill insights and foresights from conversations and communities. As a matter of fact, we are helping a leading consumer products company identify beauty influencers in several key markets using our community-driven insights and foresights approach.

Providing our clients with ideas that are strongly grounded in insights and foresights is core to our strategy, as a leading “People Relations” network. The People’s Lab platform and approach helps us distill a deep understanding of societal values, consumption behaviors and attitudes towards brands, not only in terms of insights that help explain our world today, but also foresights that give us a glimpse of future worlds.

To start a conversation on how we can help you win with insights and foresights, write to Pascal Beucler at pascal.beucler@mslgroup.com.

Over the last two years, I have led 50+ workshops with 2000+ marketing and communications professionals across Asia, so I have become a workshop specialist of sorts within MSLGROUP.

I use a discovery-driven approach in designing and leading workshops, with conceptual frameworks, in-depth case studies, and post-it note gamestorms. This beautiful quote in Richard Bach’s ‘Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah’ sums up what I try to do in my workshops:

Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.

My favorite parts at my workshops are games that help participants remember what they already know. These games involve large post-it notes, chart papers, marker pens, some doodling and many aha! moments. Let me use three examples to show you what I mean.

Social Heartbeat brand planning workshop

Our Social Heartbeat framework helps brands design powerful purpose-inspired platforms and programs to inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose.

We first look for a shared purpose or Social Heartbeat to inspire people, realizing that we need to build a bridge between benefit-driven and purpose-inspired communication. Then, we design a long-term online-offline platform to organize people, in a way that fully leverages paid, owned, and earned media. Finally, we design the consumer journey and create a series of short-term programs to energize people and take them from the benefit, to the bridge and then to the purpose, or the other way round.

I start by Social Heartbeat workshop by asking participants to create a social network profile on a post it note, with their name, avatar name, avatar picture, and five passion tags that define them. Then, I ask them to put up these post-it notes on the chart paper and draw lines between them, if they share a passion tag. We discuss how we connect with others around our passion tags, how some people are more connected than others and how connections lead to all sorts of good things, both online and offline. Then, I point out that less than 5% of the passion tags are related to brands. If people don’t define themselves around brands, and don’t connect with each other around brands, then what is the role brands can play on the social web? It’s an important question for marketers with an elegant answer: brands can help consumers connect around passion tags that resonate with the brand values (I call these shared passion tags Social Heartbeats).

Later in the workshop, I ask the participants to remember the last time they talked about a brand they don’t work for. I ask them to write down on a post it note the brand itself, why they talked about it (the trigger) and how they talked about it (the context or the medium). Then, I ask them to arrange the post-it notes around themes. Most groups arrange the post-it notes around the product categories their brands belong to (usually fashion, technology, gadgets, cafes, mobile or auto brands). Sometimes, they arrange the post it note around the content of the conversation (kudos, complaints, enquiries, recommendations), the context of the conversation (at home, at office, at a mall, online, on phone) or the trigger to talk (a good/ bad product or service experience, an ad, a promo, a contest). Almost always, no one mentions a FMCG brand (soft drinks, shampoo, toothpaste, snacks), which makes me wonder: if no one is talking about the brand that spend the most money on advertising, what should these brands do (apart from getting really worried)? It’s another important question for marketers with the same elegant answer: consumers will talk about these brands only if they stand for the shared passion tags (Social Heartbeats) that consumers care about.

Social Integration Journey social business planning workshop

Our Social Heartbeat framework helps corporations build enterprise capabilities for social by integrating social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes, to drive strategic change and real ROI.

Most organizations go through the social integration with these six stages. They start with inaction, then move to incubation and experiment with standalone platforms and tactical programs, before they are ready to integrate social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes. Organizations can use the framework to not only map where they are in relation to relevant others, but also plan for what’s next. So, it’s both a “how the world works” framework as well as a “how to change things” framework.

Towards the middle of my Social Integration Journey workshop, I ask the workshop participants to create a post-it note for each of the social initiatives in their organization. I ask them to write what they are trying to achieve with the initiatives, how short-term or long-term these initiatives are, and what channel(s) they use for these initiatives. Then, I ask them to draw the Social Integration Journey framework on a chart paper and place the post-it notes on the chart paper. Usually, the post-it notes cluster around one or two stages, which helps the participants map their present stage of social integration. Then, I ask them to identify other relevant organizations and repeat the exercise with their social initiatives on another chart paper. Once again, the post-it notes cluster around one or two stages, but have wider distribution, which helps the participants map the possibilities they haven’t explored yet. Finally, I ask the participants to identify their potential stage of social integration, discuss why they wish to reach there, and discover barriers that might stop them. I have found that workshops participants who engage in this participatory process of benchmarking themselves against relevant others are more open to seeing new possibilities and working towards making them real.

Crisis Curve crisis planning framework

Our Crisis Curve workshop helps organizations map out, plan for and build capabilities to manage crisis scenarios across the four stages of the crisis curve: flash point, spotlight, blame game and resolution.

Based on the interplay between mainstream media and social media at the flash point stage, we categorize crisis situations into three types that need different approaches: real world, slow burn and flash mob. Then, we use our proprietary crisis planning and response toolkit to help organizations plan how they can best leverage social media at each stage in the crisis curve.

Towards the end of my Crisis Curve workshop, I ask the workshop participants to think of a ‘real world’, a ‘slow burn’ and a ‘flash mob’ crisis that can seriously impact their business and draw them on a post-it note. Then, I ask them to imagine each crisis situation going through the flash point, spotlight and blame game stages over three days and, for each stage, map out the best case, worst case and most likely case for each crisis situation. They draw newspaper or television headlines, blog post titles, social network updates, photoshopped parody images and viral video storyboards on post-it notes and sometimes enjoy the exercise more than they should. Finally, I ask them to plan their response for for each crisis situation, by mapping out key influencers, keywords, spokespersons, and messages for each of the scenarios they have created.

Designing workshops for both the right brain and the left brain

I believe that the best workshops are learning and discovery experiences that exercise both the right brain and the left brain. So, I structure all my workshops around a conceptual framework, to appeal to the left brain, but include in-depth case studies that are rich in storytelling, often via videos, to appeal to the right brain. The post-it note brainstorms are based on the frameworks, so they don’t frighten the left brain, but they involve drawing and storytelling, so they don’t alienate the right brain either.

The best workshops, like the best classrooms, also need to find the right balance between learning and doing. In all my workshops, the participants leave feeling that they have learned both a new way to think about their problem (the framework) and practical ways to apply that thinking (the case studies). In my most successful workshop, the participants also leave feeling that they already had all the answers and I have only helped them connect the dots in their minds.

The Social Integration Journey

Most organizations go through six stages of Social Integration Journey. They start with inaction, then move to incubation and experiment with standalone platforms and tactical programs, before they are ready to integrate social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes.

This simple Social Integration Journey framework helps business leaders not only contextualize their own experience with social, but also plan to extend it. It helps them map which stage of social integration they are at, then build a case to integrate social into their most important platforms, programs, and processes, to drive strategic change and real ROI.

Here are the six stages of the Social Integration Journey:

1. Create a static campaign or country microsite
2. Create an official page organization page on Facebook or Twitter
3. Create a Facebook contest or a Twitter influencer program
4. Integrate social into technology platforms
5. Integrate social into marketing programs
6. Integrate social into business processes

How to build a case for social integration?

It’s important to realize that different stages in the Social Integration Journey are most appropriate for different organizations in different contexts. So, we need to assess the organization’s maturity, motivations and money (budgets) to successfully build a case for social integration.

1. Maturity: We start by assessing the present stage of social integration for the organization and relevant others and the highest stage the organization can transition to, within 12 months.

2. Motivation: Then, we assess the organization’s reasons to invest in integration, including the objectives and decision criteria for the organization and the triggers and barriers for the main decision makers.

3. Money: Finally, we assess the investment required and the organization’s capacity to invest, over 12 months. We recommend planning for a phase-wise approach to transition to a higher stage, with at least 3 to 6 months to consolidate investments at each stage.

We need to use different messages to successfully build a case for social integration at each stage in the Social Integration Journey. Let’s look at these messages.

Stage 1: Create a static campaign or country microsite

In stage 1, organizations create campaign or country microsites to push out information on a campaign or a topic.

Typically, these microsites have limited content and a short shelf-life (my rule of thumb is six pages for six weeks). This fascination with microsites can be traced back to the days when marketers created Flash-based campaign microsites to support TVCs. These microsites were heavy on experience but light on content and had the same shelf life as the TVC, after which they were either preserved for award entries or taken offline. I’m relieved to see that most marketers have moved beyond the campaign microsite, but, surprisingly, many MNCs haven’t created country specific corporate websites in India, China and Japan.

Key Messages for Stage 1
1) The internet has serious scale in Imost Asia markets with 450+ million netizens in China and 100+ million in India.
2) The website is usually the first and often one of the most important sources of information on the organization.
3) Most other peer organizations have created a well-designed country or campaign website, so it’s simply expected.

Case Study: GE Plug Into the Smart Grid
In 2009, GE created an award-winning Plug Into the Smart Grid microsite with augmented reality functionality, but the website had limited content, and GE abandoned it after a few weeks.

Stage 2: Create an official page on Facebook or Twitter

In stage 2, organizations create Facebook or Twitter accounts to push out news updates about a topic. Typically, most updates include links to news items and engagement with followers is limited.

When Facebook and Twitter become mainstream, marketers rushed to create a Facebook page or a Twitter profile, without really thinking about what they will do with it. Even when marketers increased the fan count on their Facebook page by buying ads, the fans rarely engaged with the brand. Even as the first wave of marketers are seeking ways to increase engagement, the next wave of marketers are still setting up their social media presence.

Key Messages for Stage 2
1) Social media has serious scale with 750+ million on Facebook, 200+ million on Twitter, 150+ million on Weibo, 100+ million on Renren, and a high number of these social network users are in Asia.
2) Both B2C and B2B influencers are active on the social media and engaging with organizations.
3) Social media is cost effective as creating official pages on Facebook, Twitter, Weibo is free.

Case Study: Anand Mahindra on Twitter
Anand Mahindra, the highly respected Vice Chairman of the diversified Mahindra Group, uses Twitter to weigh in on topics of public interest and even answer customer complaints in public.

Case Study: Li Dongsheng on Sina Weibo
Li Dongsheng, Deputy to the People’s Congress and President of TCL Group, engages with consumers and citizens on Sina Weibo and has more than 2 million followers.

Case Study: Ching’s Secret
Chinese packaged food brand Ching’s Secret has attracted more than 8,50,000 fans on Facebook in India by sharing recipes and engaging fans in witty conversations.

Stage 3: Create a Facebook contest or a Twitter influencer program

In stage 3, organizations run tactical, short-term, channel-specific campaigns to increase engagement, like a Facebook contest, a Twitter influencer program, or a blogger program.

As marketers seek to increase engagement on social media platforms, they often start with tactics that are specific to the platform, like a Facebook contest or a Twitter influencer program. While these tactical programs are successful in engaging fans and followers in the short term, they fail to exploit the full potential of social media. Most marketers are still in this stage, but some are ready to move beyond.

Key Messages for Stage 3
1) Presence is not enough, organizations need to engage influencers on social media.
2) To engage influencers, organizations need to create regular content, influencer outreach and contests.
3) Engaging influencers is the first step towards converting them into advocates.

Case Study: Identifying influencers via Klout
Klout has emerged as the predominant platform for measuring influence across the social web, primarily on Twitter, but also on Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora and blogs. Klout has recently started the Klout Perks program to help corporations run infuencer programs.

Stage 4: Integrate social into technology platforms

In stage 4, the website is reimagined as a social hub, by adding social features into the website itself, or by integrating website with social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare and YouTube.

After much speculation that the Facebook page might replace the brand website, sophisticated marketers are beginning to view the website as their social hub. Marketers are integrating social into web platforms by adding content creation features like blogs, wikis, photo-sharing, and video-sharing; content-curation features like commenting, voting, reviews, and ratings; and connection features like profiles, groups, activity streams, and leader boards. Marketers are also integrating websites with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn by adding social sign-on, sharing buttons, profile boxes, and activity stream widgets to their websites. Some marketers are even reimagining the website as an aggregation of their social media activity streams. In essence, consumers have become used to an integrated experience across social web, mobile web and mobile applications, enabled by open application ecosystems from both social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and mobile platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry).

Key Messages for Stage 4
1) Maximize the impact of your content across channels by uploading content to YouTube/ SlideShare, embedding it on blog/ website, then sharing it on Facebook/ Twitter/ LinkedIn.
2) Use API code snippets, widgets and RSS feeds to integrate social networks into website to improve search optimization and discovery.
3) Enable Facebook/ Twitter/ LinkedIn social logins to customize website experience based on the user’s social graph and simplify content sharing across the user’s social networks.

Case study: Nike+
To realize its purpose of helping each one of us find the athlete within us and transform running from a solitary pursuit into a social activity, Nike created the Nike+ app and community. A sensor tracks running data via the iPod or iPhone and syncs it with the Nike+ community. Nike+ members have run 37 million miles so far.

Stage 5: Integrate social into marketing programs

In stage 5, organizations design community-centric integrated marketing programs to connect people around a shared social heartbeat.

Some sophisticated marketers are beginning to realize that their marketing programs are most effective when they don’t only use social platforms, but also become social at the core. As a result, marketers are moving from TVC-centric integrated marketing campaigns to community-centric integrated marketing campaigns. They are talking about shifting the focus of their marketing “from moments to movements” and engaging in purpose-inspired benefit-driven brand-building. In essence, they are talking about designing powerful purpose-inspired platforms and programs to inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose.

Key Messages for Stage 5
1) Convert influencers into advocates by designing integrated marketing programs around a social heartbeat that connects the brand values with the influencers’ passions.
2) Build owned media permission assets by creating a long-term community platform to organize influencers around the social heartbeat.
3) Trigger participation and action by creating a series of interconnected programs around the social heartbeat to energize influencers.

Case Study: Starbucks
Starbucks has created a series of programs to realize its vision of being the “third place”, of the hub of local communities. In 2008, Starbucks created the V2V volunteer network to connect people and actions around local Starbucks stores. In 2008, Starbucks also offered a free coffee to people who voted in the US presidential elections. In 2009, Starbucks created the Pledge 5 campaign to encourage young people to volunteer. In 2010, Starbucks created a campaign to encourage its consumers to switch from paper cups to reusable travel mugs. In 2011, Starbucks donated $5 million and asked consumers to donate $5 to support small businesses across USA and create jobs. Starbucks has also tied up with Bono’s Red initiative to donate 5 cents for every drink to save lives in Africa.

Case Study: Pepsi Refresh Project
As part of its commitment to “deliver sustainable growth by investing in a healthier future for people and our planet”, PepsiCo is giving grants worth $20 million per year to ideas that can refresh the world.

Case Study: Tata Tea Jaago Re
In 2008, Tata Tea tied up with non-profit Janaagraaha to inspire almost 700,000 Indians to register to vote. Since then, Jaago Re (“wake up”) has evolved into an active civic action community.

Case Study: Mahindra Spark the Rise
To fulfill its purpose to enable its stakeholders to rise, Mahindra Group has created the Spark the Rise platform to share ideas that can propel innovation, entrepreneurship, and positive change in India.

Case Study: Dell Go Green Challenge in India
In 2010, Dell created a challenge for design students and others to share ideas on how to redesign, reuse and recycle gadgets to make them go green.

Stage 6: Integrate social into business processes

In stage 6, organizations leverage social media as a tool for business transformation by integrating it with sales, support and innovation processes.

The most sophisticated business leaders know that social media is most effective when they leverage it for doing the right things, instead of merely saying the right things. Organizations like Dell, Starbucks, and GE are using social media as a tool for business transformation by integrating it with their sales, support, and innovation processes. Early experiments to crowdsource innovation are particularly promising, with Dell Ideastorm, My Starbucks Ideas, and GE Ecomagination Challenge being the most prominent examples.

Key Messages for Stage 6
1) Drive real return on investment by using social to drive business objectives like sales, support and innovation.
2) Improve customer satisfaction by listening and responding to customers at the point of need or demand.
3) Crowd-source innovation by tapping into the wisdom of crowd to discover ideas for product or process innovation.

Case Study: GE Ecomagination and Healthymagination Challenge
As part of its commitment to “imagine and build innovative solutions to environment challenges”, GE has created a $200 million Ecomagination Challenge to fund ideas that can reimagine powering the grid, or powering homes. GE has also created a $100 million Healthymagination Challenge to fund ideas that can accelerate innovations to fight breast cancer, as part of its “shared commitment to create better health for more people together”.

Case Study: Dell Ideastorm
Dell uses customer-driven support community to enable customers to answer each other’s questions. Dell’s support forum has helped it increase customer satisfaction and drive down support costs. Dell uses customer-driven ideation community Dell Ideastorm to listen to customer’s ideas on product improvement and new product development. It has also created an internal ideation platform called Dell Employee Storm to listen to product and process innovation ideas from its own 80000 employees. Finally, Dell has created a social media command center to listen to, classify and respond to social media conversations. It has even trained 900 staff in India via its SMaC university and unconference to use social media for marketing, customer support, recruitment and innovation.

Case Study: VANCL Star social commerce community
On the VANCL Star community, fans of the Chinese apparel brand can open a “store” or a photo blog, showcase their VANCL styles, and even earn a commission of 10% of the profit on sales through the store.

In Summary: Six best practices for social integration

In summary, organizations can use these six best practices to integrate social into their technology platforms, marketing programs and business processes.

Technology Platforms
1. Use the website as a social hub that connects content across channels.
2. Use social networks to build relationships and engage in conversations.

Marketing Programs
3. Create platforms that organize people around a social heartbeat.
4. Create a series of programs that energize people to participate and act.

Business Processes
5. Listen to, classify and respond to conversations on the social web.
6. Create private or public communities for collaboration or co-creation.

Which stage of the Social Integration Journey are you at?

The 2010s are turning out to be the decade rich in the myriad shades of crisis. Crisis management in today’s fragile world is intrinsically interlinked with global shifts in trust and power between individuals, influencers and institutions.

The End of Trust

The decade has witnessed a profound erosion of trust in all types of institutions, including governments and corporations.

Even as North America and Europe prepare for a prolonged double dip financial crisis, we have seen social unrest in France, UK, Spain and Greece; a grassroots movement to occupy public spaces across the United States to protest against capitalism; right wing terrorist attacks in peaceful Norway; disclosure of state secrets by Wikileaks; a series of regime changes across the Arab world; and a sex scandal disgracing the IMF.

Even in the buoyant emerging economies of India, China and Brazil, the hitherto silent middle class is beginning to raise its voice and take to the streets to protest against chronic corruption that disproportionately rewards the entrenched elite at the cost of the other 99%; and the low quality of life that persists in spite of increased prosperity.

Trust in corporations, too, is at an all-time low, as a result of astronomical executive salaries paid by banks and auto companies, even as they were being bailed out by public funds; BP’s inability to either control the Gulf of Mexico oil spill for almost nine months, or take full responsibility for it; and perceptions of greenwashing by corporations, brought in sharp focus a series of viral campaigns by Greenpeace.

We are also seeing anger against the inability of governments and corporations to show the will to solve our most pressing problems: the short-sighted dependence on fossil fuels that threatens to undermine our planet’s ecosystem; the tradeoffs between economic progress and the good life, like urban pollution and lifestyle diseases; and the barriers to achieve the full human potential, with more than half the world’s population still struggling with poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy.

Power to the People

At the same time, people have new sources of power, as individuals and communities.

First, people are beginning to believe that governments and corporations have failed them and only they themselves can come up with innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

Second, people are leveraging social media platforms to create new public spaces for discourse and dissent that are irrevocably reshaping the global news ecosystem; organize themselves into distributed communities with a shared purpose and a shared vision for a better future; co-create new social innovation solutions and sustainable business models; and collaborate across continents to coordinate participation and action and act as catalysts for change.

Third, people are demanding that governments become both more transparent and less intrusive with their citizens; that government and corporations work together to create an ecosystem that enables civic participation; that corporations not only rediscover their social purpose but also put it at the core of how they engage with people, as employees, consumers and citizens.

Facebook’s Marc Zuckerberg underlined these shifts during the recent “e-G8” we organized in Paris: “People being empowered is the trend for the next decade: that’s the core social dynamics… People have the ability to voice their opinion, and it changes the world, as it rewires it from the ground up”.

Unilever’s Paul Polman has also pointed to the new risks such power creates for corporations: “If [social media activists] can bring down the Egyptian regime in a few weeks, they can bring us down in nanoseconds.”

Every Crisis is Global, Social and Viral

The social web is playing an important role in these shifts around trust, power, risk and crisis.

Specifically, we need to master three interplays shaping crisis in the “new normal”: the interplay between mainstream media and social media, the interplay between local and global dynamics, and the interplay between crisis planning and response.

First, the boundaries between mainstream media and social media are blurring as online influencers are linking to media stories and news organizations are quoting online influencers.

Second, no crisis is truly local in our interconnected world, as memes or hashtags can spread globally in seconds on the social web, yet local considerations must be factored into crisis planning and response.

Third, it’s critical to plan and prepare for crisis scenarios, but it’s even more important to respond to emergent crisis situations authentically, without over-reliance on scripted messages and workflows.

MSLGROUP Crisis Network

MSLGROUP Crisis Network is a global network of 50+ MSLGROUP crisis experts, with deep vertical expertise across industries and geographies, connected to each other by our proprietary People’s Lab crowdsourcing platform. Our experts can not only tap into each other’s insights in real time, but also leverage our proprietary crisis toolkit – including our crisis planning framework and our crisis simulation workshop — to help our clients plan for and respond to crisis situations effectively.

In a world where every crisis is global, social and viral, here’s a roadmap to think about the interconnections between trust, power, risk and crisis, from our experts at the MSLGROUP Crisis Network.

In the first section, we explore how social media is changing trust, power, risk and crisis. We start by looking at the role of social media in societal upheavals in the West, including the terrorist attack in Norway, the riots in London and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. Then, we move to the East and look at how social media is changing the news ecosystem in China, eroding the wasta system of personal influence in the Middle East and uniting the Indian middle class in a grassroots movement against corruption.

In the second section, we outline how corporations can leverage social media to manage risk and reputation. We outline how social media can play a role at each stage in the crisis curve, describe the art and science of crisis simulation, recommend engaging third party influencers in crisis planning, share lessons from managing the global Crisis Command Center for BP, provide a playbook for handling a crisis on Facebook and end with tips and tricks on crisis management from our network of senior trusted advisors.

In summary, here are the most important tips from our global network of crisis experts that you will see across this report:

1. Proactively work on crisis preparedness, including crisis simulation workshops, crisis manuals, crisis collaboration wikis and dark crisis websites.
2. Create local crisis plans in collaboration with key influencers, instead of merely localizing global crisis plans.
3. Train staff, including the C-suite, on the new news ecosystem and guidelines for social media engagement, before a crisis hits.
4. Specifically plan for communicating with all key influencers, including employees, as part of crisis planning.
5. Build trust assets, including the reputation of being rooted in a shared purpose, strong relationships with key influencers, and strong owned media channels like blogs and microblogs, before the crisis.
6. Respond to the crisis with authenticity, integrity and the will to do the right thing, not only say the right thing.

We sincerely hope that the insights and foresights we are bringing here will be useful to you. To know more about the MSLGROUP Crisis Network, or to subscribe to receive similar insights and foresights in the form of a quarterly newsletter, please visit http://crisis.mslgroup.com.

Social media is playing an important role in shaping news stories in general and crisis situations in particular. Specifically, even as social media makes it easy to track an emerging crisis situation, it makes it difficult to effectively manage the crisis situation.

Social media and the news curve

All news stories develop in a similar manner, following the news curve. The news curve has four stages: breaking news, context, analysis and archival. The breaking news stage is concerned with questions like: what happened, with whom and where? In the context stage, more information is added, as background. In the analysis stage, opinions are shared and responsibility is assigned. In the archival stage, the story goes off the newspaper front page, the website homepage and the evening news on TV.

Social media is playing an important role in shaping the news curve. The news curve is becoming shorter in the “breaking news” and “context” stages, but longer in the “analysis” and “archival” stages. The news curve is also becoming more fragmented and news stories are becoming more viral. Different social media behaviors play different roles across the four stages of the news curve. News stories are now being broken on the official Twitter channels of news organizations and shared via retweets. Context is being added by sharing links on Twitter using a hashtag. Blogs and video blogs are playing an important role in shaping opinion. Finally, search is making it easier to find and share archived stories that act as context for new stories.

The 26/11 Mumbai terror attack in 2009 is a good example of how social media is shaping the news ecosystem even in emerging economies. During the 72-hour terrorist seize of India’s financial capital, Twitter, Flickr and blogs became important tools for citizen journalists to share original reporting, news, and opinions. Social media, especially Twitter, played an important role in shaping the mainstream media narrative during the crisis, both in India and internationally.

Social media and the crisis curve

The four stages in the crisis curve correspond to the four stages in the news curve: flash point, spotlight, blame game and resolution. Like the news curve, the crisis curve is becoming shorter in the “flash point” and “spotlight” stages, but longer in the “blame game” and “resolution” stages. Like the news curve, the crisis curve is also becoming more fragmented and crisis stories are becoming more viral. As a result, even as social media makes it easy to track an emerging crisis situation, it makes it difficult to effectively manage the crisis situation.

The interplay between social media and mainstream media is an important aspect of the crisis curve, with online influencers linking to media stories and media quoting online influencers.

Three types of crisis situations

Based on the interplay between social media and mainstream media in the run up to the crisis flash point, crisis situations can be categorized into three types, each needing a different approach: real world crisis, slow burn crisis and flash mob crisis.

In the “real world” crisis, a real world incident (oil spill, financial scam, sex scandal) precipitates the crisis. Mainstream media puts a spotlight on the crisis while social media amplifies the crisis. For instance, during the protracted BP Gulf of Mexico crisis in 2010, the flash point was the oil spill itself, but social media played a critical role in the spotlight, blame game and resolution stages. BP’s crisis response was a textbook case study in terms of its scope and scale. However, a series of failed attempts to control the oil spill over months, then-CEO Tony Hayward’s “I want my life back” comment, and the online spoofs they inspired, did not help BP’s cause.

In the “slow burn” crisis, social media conversations (product quality, customer support, employee discontent) build up into a crisis and are picked up by influential bloggers and even mainstream media. For instance, in 2005, influential blogger Jeff Jarvis blogged about a series of bad customer service experiences with Dell, and became the focal point of the Dell Hell crisis. Dell Hell forced Dell to recommit to creating a positive customer experience and led to several remarkable social media initiatives including the Direct2Dell blog, the Dell Ideastorm‘ ideation community and Dell’s social media command center.

In the “flash mob” crisis, a social media meme (Greenpeace campaign, anti-brand hashtag, anti-brand video) creates a flash mob, turns into a crisis, and is picked up by mainstream media. For instance, in 2010, Greenpeace created a viral video led campaign to protest against Nestle procuring palm oil from Indonesian rainforests and endangering orangutans. Protestors hijacked Nestle’s Facebook page and filled it with abusive comments and Nestle Killer profile pics. Surprisingly, Nestle’s strong corporate citizenship reputation for creating shared value did not help during the crisis. In the end, Nestlé announced that it would stop procuring from suppliers associated with deforestation.

Using social media to manage a crisis

Social media has a specific role to play at each stage of the crisis curve. MSLGROUP has created a crisis management toolkit that includes tools and best practices for each stage in the crisis cycle.

In the flash-point stage, we track negative social media chatter, identify early warning signals, isolate issues, and resolve them, before they turn into a crisis.

In the spotlight stage, we plot a heat map of crisis flows between social media and mainstream media, identify influencers who are acting as hubs driving these flows and focus our crisis management efforts on these hubs.

In the blame-game stage, we help clients shape the narrative by leveraging owned media channels like blog and YouTube to reframe the issue more positively and avert direct blame.

In the resolution stage, we optimize owned media content for search results, so that positive and neutral stories show up alongside negative stories on keyword searches related to the brand.

Most importantly, it’s critical to map out and plan for crisis scenarios in advance, in order to respond to them effectively. We have created a toolkit for mapping out alternate crisis scenarios and planning for their best, worst and most likely cases. This toolkit include a workshop for scenario, keyword, influencer, spokesperson and message mapping, and platforms like a wiki-based war room for crisis collaboration and a CMS-based dark site for crisis response.

In the end, however, managing any crisis successfully, including a crisis on social media, is less about saying the right things and more about doing the right things. So, corporations that are rooted in purpose are likely to respond to crisis situations with authenticity, and overcompensate for mistakes, transforming potential crises into opportunities to reconnect with their stakeholders.

A transcript of my 2011 TEDx talk. An update of my 2009 TEDIndia talk.

Here’s the video of the talk:

Here’s the slide deck from the talk:

Here’s a shorter video introduction to the talk:

Why am I talking about this topic?

Over the last five years, everything I have done — as marketer, academic, activist, entrepreneur and a consultant to global brands — has had an underlying theme: how to inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose.

This theme has been the driving force behind I wide variety of powerful projects I have helped create. In 2009, I helped create a collaborative mapping platform for Indian voters to crowdsource election monitoring during the Lok Sabha elections. In 2010, I helped a leading technology MNC create an ideation platform for Indian design students to share ideas on redesigning, reusing and reclycing gadgets to make them go green. In 2011, I helped a leading confectionery MNC create a grassroots movement to inspire Chinese youth to engage in small, everyday acts of kindness.

This theme has also preoccupied me as a writer and speaker. In 2008-09, I taught a course on how governments, businesses and civil society can collaborate with online communities to co-create innovative solutions, or start grassroots movements, as the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University. In 2009, at TEDIndia, I talked about three lessons marketers and entrepreneurs can learn from activists. Now, I am writing a near future science fiction novel about minimalism, mythology and movements, which builds upon the same theme.

This talk is an updated version of my 2009 TEDIndia talk, with one important exception. In 2009, marketers and entrepreneurs were listening to and learning from grassroots activists. In 2011, I am beginning to see CEOs of Fortune Global 100 corporations use these lessons to design purpose-inspired platforms and programs to inspire, organize and energize their stakeholders and drive strategic change.

Three interesting examples of what grassroots activists are doing

Let’s start by looking at three interesting examples of what grassroots activists are doing: Kiva, Ushahidi and Urgent Evoke.

Case Study: Kiva

Kiva (http://kiva.org) is a micro-lending platform that connects individuals with microfinance institutions to help create opportunity around the world with $25 micro-loans.

In 2003, Jennifer Jackley listened to Mohammed Yunus talk about how microfinance can create opportunities and encourage entrepreneurship with small loans. Fascinated, she started spending time in Africa, working with local microfinance organizations, and experiencing firsthand how small loans could change lives.

In 2005, she realized that the entire model would become even more powerful if she could create a platform for microfinance organizations to connect twenty people who wanted to loan $25 with an entrepreneur who wanted a $500 loan to start a small business. On Kiva, microfinance organizations across more than 200 countries share stories about small entrepreneurs who need loans. Individuals give $25 loans to these entrepreneurs, track their progress on the platform, and use the money to give another loan, when they get it back.

In a few years, Kiva has connected more than one million community members with more than 650,000 entrepreneurs, facilitated more than $260 million in microloans, and became a powerful force for social change. Now, Jennifer continues to serve on the board of Kiva, but focuses on Profounder (http://profounder.com), a collection of free tools for entrepreneurs to fund and run their business with the help of their community.

Case Study: Ushahidi

Ushahidi’s (http://ushahidi.com) collaborative mapping platform has been used globally for monitoring elections, coordinating disaster relief and tracking conflict.

In 2008, popular Kenyan activist Ory Okolloh was trying to track incidents of post election ethnic violence in Kenya on her blog. As people started sending her tips, she proposed the idea of a platform that would collect, classify and map these tips. Over a weekend, half a dozen volunteers hacked together the first version of the Ushahidi’s collaborative mapping platform. People shared anonymous tips by SMS, email or the web and the platform classified them into categories, plotted them on a map, and created a timeline of incidents.

The Ushahidi team realized that they had created a powerful tool and invited activists from all over the world to use it, improve it and customize it for different use cases. Over time, they worked with the Ushahidi community to create a mobile version, a hosted ready-to-use version called Crowdmap, and even a tool called SwiftRiver to crowdsource the validation and classification of tips.

Over the last few years, the Ushahidi community has grown into a global network of volunteers, the Ushahidi platform has been used in dozens of instances and thousands of participants have contributed to these collaborative mapping projects. For instance, in 2009, I created Ushahidi’s first election monitoring project Vote Report India.

Case Study: Urgent Evoke

In 2010, International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) partnered with game designer Jane McGonigal to create a social innovation game called Urgent Evoke (http://urgentevoke.com) in which African students collaborated with a global community of more than 4500 members to use African innovation to co-create solutions for the world’s biggest problems.

The objective of the game was to subvert the popular narrative that Africa is the dark continent plagued by problems and the solutions need to come from the West. The Ning-based game (http://ning.com) connected African students with a global community of contributors to solve the world’s biggest problems, with the help of ancient African wisdom and grassroots African innovation.

With a series of graphic novels, McGonigal created visions of crisis scenarios all over the developed world, including floods, communicable diseases and financial market collapse. Community members did background research, completed challenges and received point for helping others.

Since then, McGonigal has written a book called “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World” and created a community called Gameful (http://gameful.org), which I helped fund on Kickstarter (http://kickstarter.com), to bring together game designers who are building games that can change the world.

Three lessons global CEOs can learn from grassroots activists

Platforms like Kiva, Ushahidi and Urgent Evoke have become powerful agents of social change, but they are also important case studies in how to inspire, organize and energize people around a shared purpose.

Today, people don’t trust institutions, people have new power, and people are demanding that corporations not only rediscover their social purpose but also put it at the core of how they conduct their business and engage with their stakeholders.

To stay relevant in this “new normal”, global CEOs need to learn how to inspire, organize and energize stakeholders, including employees, to co-create innovative solutions, or catalyze grassroots movements.

To stay relevant global CEOs need to learn three lessons from grassroots activists: always start with why, give more than you take, and know that you will need help.

Lesson 1: Always start with why

The first thing you should notice about Jennifer, Ory and Jane is that they all started with “why”. They asked themselves: what is my purpose, what is meaningful to me, what inspires me? Jennifer wanted to help entrepreneurs fund their businesses with the support of their community. Ory wanted to help local communities bring attention to incidents of ethnic violence. Jane wanted to use the power of games to solve the world’s biggest problems. All three of them were clear about the “why”, their “purpose”, the unique reason for being for their projects, and, perhaps, even for themselves.

So, here’s the first lesson global CEOs can learn from grassroots activists: learn how to always start with “why” or “purpose”. Ask yourself: what is the reason why your corporation exists, beyond maximizing profits or shareholder value. Know that a corporation’s purpose is often rooted in its history and the personal values of the founders, so looking forward sometimes starts with looking back.

Lesson 2: Give more than you take

The second thing you should notice about Jennifer, Ory and Jane is that, at the beginning, none of them were clear about the “what”: what precisely was the value they were trying to create, or how exactly they would define “performance” or measure success. This is not uncommon for the most successful activists, or the most successful entrepreneurs, for that matter. They start a project as a labor of love, then watch it grow bigger than their biggest dreams, and change the world.

So, here’s the second lesson global CEOs can learn from grassroots activists: give more than you take. Ask yourself: what is the total value created by the corporation, including its economic, societal and environmental impact: Profits, People and the Planet? Work to maximize this value, but know that only a part of this value will be captured by your corporation, and that is precisely how it ought to be.

Lesson 3: Know that you will need help

The third thing you should notice about Jennifer, Ory and Jane is that, even though they were not clear about the “what”, they were all clear about the “how”, or the process through which they would create value, and it was the same in all three cases: “participation”. All three of them wanted to engage with communities of people to realize their purpose, and all three of them created an online platform to host their community.

So, here’s the third lesson global CEOs can learn from grassroots activists: know that you will need help from your community, to co-create innovative solutions, or to start grassroots movements around your purpose. Know that whatever your purpose is, there’s a global community of people who are passionate about it, who are willing, even waiting, to help you realize it. You just need to catalyze this Purpose Ecosystem by inspiring, organizing and energizing people around your shared purpose.

Three interesting examples of what global CEOs are doing

Now, let’s look at three examples of how global corporations are using these three lessons to create powerful purpose-inspired platforms and programs to inspire, organize and energize their stakeholders: Nike, GE and Mahindra Group.

Case study: Nike

Nike’s believes that “everyone who has a body is an athlete”, so Nike’s purpose is to help each one of us find the athlete within us.

Running is a solitary pursuit and the long distance runner is indeed rather lonely, so many people start running, but find it difficult to persist. At the same time, running is one of the most accessible forms of exercise, and Nike would like everyone on earth to be a runner.

In 2005, Nike created the Nike+ community (http://nikeplus.com) to transform running into a social activity. The Nike+ iPhone app tracks running data using a sensor and syncs it with the Nike+ online community. Nike+ members can track their own progress against their goals, share their running statistics and running tracks with friends, and even participate in challenges against other people and teams. So far, Nike+ members have run 37 million miles.

In a different context, Nike believes in the vision of sustainable “considered design”, with zero lifecycle waste. Nike had created a design platform with a considered design index to help its designers build in sustainability into the design of the products itself. Nike had also made serious investments in designing sustainable materials and processes.

When it realized that several other corporations were also investing in similar initiatives, it decided to collaborate with them. Nike created the GreenXchange (http://greenxchange.force.com) as an open platform for corporations and people to share green intellectual property, processes and ideas. Many corporations like Best Buy have also partnered with Nike and contributed their green intellectual property to the GreenXchange. Hundreds of individuals have also joined the community and contributed their green ideas. Nike is also working with other large corporations to create a shared standard for sustainable design, using its considered design index as an input.

Case Study: GE

GE’s purpose is to reimagine how technology can help solve the world’s biggest problems in the areas of environment and health, and then build and scale these solutions using GE’s global clout and resources. GE has created the Ecomagination platform around its commitment to “imagine and build innovative solutions to environment challenges” and the Healthymagination platform around its commitment to “create better health for more people together”.

What’s special is that GE sees Ecomagination and Healthymagination through a collaborative social innovation lens. So, even as it leverages its considerable scale and resources to create innovative solutions to these problems, it has also decided to tap into the global purpose ecosystems around environment and health by creating crowdsourcing-driven challenges backed by GE’s scale and some serious venture capital.

GE has partnered with four large venture capitalists to create a $200 million challenge called the GE Ecomagination Challenge (http://challenge.ecomagination.com) to fund ideas that can reimagine how we power the electrical grid, or consume electricity in our homes. GE has also created a $100 million challenge called the GE Healthymagination Challenge http://challenge.healthymagination.com) to fund ideas that can accelerate innovations to fight breast cancer. GE has received thousands of innovative solutions in these challenges and funded dozens of innovations.

As part of its Healthymagination initiative, GE has also created a suite of applications to visualize its research data, or help users do a quick diagnosis and get tips, or help users tap into their communities to become more healthy. Specially noteworthy is the Fit Friendzy Challenge application (http://healthymagination.com/applications/fit-friendzy), which lets users set themselves exercise challenges, track their workouts, share their workouts with friends, and encourage each other via social networks.

Case Study: Mahindra Rise

The Mahindra Group is one of the largest and most respected diversified business groups in India. To revitalize its corporate brand, Mahindra Group has redefined its purpose as enabling its stakeholders to “rise” (http://rise.mahindra.com) and embrace “the optimism, determination, and grit to take responsibility for a better future”. To redefine its purpose, it delved into its history and culture and spent over 18 months understanding how its employees, customers, and communities saw it, using one-to-one interviews and workshops.

To engage its employees in Rise, Mahindra Group has created an ESOP (employee social options) program to connect Mahindra employees with communities which need help. More than 15000 Mahindra employees have volunteered under the ESOP program for dozens of one-time and ongoing initiatives.

Mahindra Group has also created the Spark the Rise challenge (http:// sparktherise.com) to ask for ideas that can propel innovation, entrepreneurship, and positive change in India. Changemarkers submit ideas in the areas of technology, energy, infrastructure, agriculture and social entrepreneurship; the community volunteers time, equipment, expertise and even funding, and supports them by voting. The winners are selected by a combination of voting and scores from an expert panel. Mahindra Group is supporting almost 50 projects with grants of almost Rs. 2 crores over six months. So far, more than 100,000 community members have supported more than 1100 approved projects.

In Summary

In summary, these simple but powerful principles — always start with why, give more than you take, and know that you will need help – work as well for global corporations and their CEOs as they do for social entrepreneurs and grassroots activists. We have seen how Nike, GE and Mahindra used the same principles to inspire, organize and energize its communities that Kiva, Ushahidi and Evoke. Now, it’s time for you to apply these principles used to catalyze your self-sustaining purpose ecosystems.

Start with why and work together with your stakeholders to find a shared purpose or Social Heartbeat that inspires all of you. Then, create a long-term online-offline platform to organize your stakeholders. Finally, create a series of short-term programs to energize your stakeholders. Remember to win and keep the trust of your community because you will need their help, and remember to give back more than you take.