Feeding the Puppy

The Social Lego Principles

Hello there, Feeding The Puppy readers... fancy working together on a wee project?  OK, read on...

Over the last few months, there's been a couple of recurring themes here on Feeding The Puppy.  Firstly, Twitter has been cropping up almost weekly, from Dell's $2m Twitter revenue stream to the use of it to power events like SXSW. 

It's safe to say that it's stepped beyond 'fad' - microblogging is teaching people that the sharing of small pieces of information not only connects them to other people, it can create something very useful too. 

You may remember that we like connecting and useful things.

Secondly, my ongoing Lego obsession shows no sign of abating; it's probably a combination of the fact that I grew up with it, and that as a company they've embraced their community to continually deliver a whole raft of interesting, engaging and delightful ideas about how to add even more magic to their products...

For instance, I was in Brighton with Helen and Dad on Sunday, and I took them into the Lego shop there to look at the augmented reality boxes they have... the look on the faces of all the kids & their parents in the store was brilliant. 

(Basically you hold up the box in front of the screen, and the model magically appears on top of the box to show you what it will look like in 3D... get yourself along to a Lego store and give it a shot)

...see, I've gone off in another Lego trip again.  If you want to know all about how 'Lego caught the Cluetrain', you should spend 40 minutes over lunch watching the brilliant Jake McKee talk about his 5 years there as Lego Community Manager:

Anyway, beyond 'Lego the company', I think 'Lego the concept' could well make for a brilliant analogy for how you can think about Twitter and other social media. 

So I've started to pull together the following, which I'm going to call...

The purpose of these principles is to create something that's very easy for people who perhaps aren't as au fait with the social media landscape to 'get it', and start thinking about it themselves.  Because if more people start to understand what's going on, I think our world will be a better place for it.

SO HERE'S WHAT TO DO...

I've created three principles as a start point - please comment, improve, refine, develop those initial three. 

Then there are obviously more principles than that, so how would you extend the analogy?  As a form, I think it works ok as...

- a short title

- an example from the world of Lego play

- how that example works in the world of social media

So here's my first three...

If you pick up a single block, it's a not a very interesting thing.  Even a few of them together just look like a vaguely similar collection of objects.  The really cool stuff starts when you have enough blocks available to start building something meaningful.

Which is why it's hard to understand what the fuss is with something like Twitter by just looking at one person's account, or looking at individual tweets.  The more blocks you connect together, the more interesting things become.

No kid in the world has ever sat down with a box of Lego for the first time and built a scale replica of the Death Star.  It takes a while to figure out what blocks go together, what looks good, what works, how many of each type of block you'll find.

Building something in social media takes time and practice.  The more small things you learn to create along the way, the more tips and tricks you'll pick up for the future.  If you build a person, then a car, then a house and a street, soon you'll have a good idea how to build a town.

Everyone in the world owns a unique Lego set.  It's made up of the models they own, the pieces they've lost and the ones they've acquired.  They also like putting things together in their own unique, creative, individual way.  As a result, if you ask everyone to build a car, each car will look different.

Coming from the mass media age where everything looked the same, worked along the same rules, this is a big change to get your head around.  Controlled consistency is out, homogeneous case studies pointless; embrace the wonder of differentiation.

...and now, over to the other people posting below... I've brought thier principles up here, and made an image & title for them...

From David Wilding...

DW: "It's all well and good having a safari set and a motorway set or whatever, [but] it actually gets really fun when you merge the sets together to create bigger "uber-lego"; the sort of lego hybrid that the people who designed the sets hadn't imagined you would make when they created it... point I'm making here is about how social networks and apps all crunch together to create something quite cool"

I totally agree.  Think about the boxes of Lego you were given as a kid.  When they all found themselves in the big central bucket, that's when things really got interesting.  Equally, when Twitter links to a blog or to Facebook or to Google Maps... wonderful things can happen; better than anything any one social media tool can do on its own.

From Carrie Morley...

CM: "When I was little, my cousin and my brother used to spend hours at my grannies making battle ships out of lego. They would then put them in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs and drop 'bombs' (also make from lego...) and break them to pieces... perhaps what gets constructed quickly is so thrilling because of the speed and ease by which it can be deconstructed, pulled to pieces, and (perhaps) then made better the next time around..."

An excellent point that contains a lot of what social media allows you to do... get small, fast projects started, refine and improve on the hoof, learn new tips and tricks and quickly make the next version just that bit better than the last.  'Always In Beta', as Russell Davies would say.

From Justin Gibbons @ Work...

JG: "get kids involved and it takes on a new dimension, things you'd never think of like making a cake from lego, really raw creativity"

Kids don't stop to ask things like 'but why would people join in?', 'how long will it take?', and especially not 'what's the ROI likely to be?'.  Kids build lots of things, and they build them because, well, it looks fun to do.  Some work, some don't, but they learn lessons quickly and move on.

If you can tap into that mindset, and involve your customers and fans, where you're building things in social media, you're more likely to build something that other people want to play with too.

From Mat Riches...

MR: "I also love the fact that there was Duplo for beginners and Lego and then Lego Technics.  You could get as involved and as deep into it as you wanted, and as you got more and more dextrous or nimble fingered..."

Mat rightly points out Lego have successfully realised with the extension of the main blocks into a simpler form for toddlers, and a more complex form for teens.  There are a raft of different capabilities around social media, both for companies and the people they wish to connect with. 

If you're connecting to a really web savvy, passionate audience you could build a Ning site to set up your own social network.  If you're connecting to my mum, you may be better off with a simple Facebook group.  But bear in mind technology is just the means to an end... unless there's something there that people actually want to do, no matter how suitable the technology they won't join in.

From Clare de Burca...

CdB: "No kid I know has the patience / skills to do lego on their own.  As such it gets used as a joint activity - eg a friend of mine recently gave his 7 year old a model of the death star for xmas and spent a few hours each weekend working through it with him.  They finished it in march.  Its a very cool thing but 90% of the point was the time spent together doing it."

Collaboration is a huge lesson from Lego, thanks Clare.  If you build things together, you all learn faster.  You all believe in the models and projects you build, so don't tear each other's stuff down.  And the more you do together, the faster and more impressive it gets.  And if one person gets too dominant and controlling, it damages the project, and everyone starts to drift away...

NOW IT'S YOUR TURN...

Start contributing in the comments below, and I'll start pulling them up into the main body of the post here.  Then I'll compile as a slideshare deck when we're done...

...we're obviously missing principles on collaboration, sharing, combining platforms and more besides... if you want a spot more inspiration to get you started, then you can do infinitely worse than look through Mashable's newly collated Twitter Guidebook...

Beware the company you keep

An interesting and slightly intrusive change to behavioural advertising was written about in the NY Times yesterday.

Whilst we are comfortable* with the profiling of our behaviour online to deliver a more targeted advertising experience, this is slightly different, and made me stop and think.

Word of mouth is something companies covet and try to enable, getting their customers to recommend and to pass on the great things they do is something that is immensely powerful.

First of all I'll give this new technology (if it is new), a good name for us. I'll call it "digitally forced word of mouth (with a bit of stalking thrown in)". Snappy - we'll work on that.

The premise is that the tracking looks at who uses and interacts with my social media profile (my friends) and what products I use / endorse. It then uses this data profile to advertise these products to my friends (assuming that they will also be a good target for that company). Hmmm, "I am an individual".

It will no doubt spawn the occasional forum conversation of a group of friends asking who has exactly been to the pregnancy test website...

Do I want my friends to know what I like? I might not need to tell them soon.

* accepting (in some cases)

Evening Standard and Jacko... come on, really?

During the tube strike I questioned whether the Evening Standard was really trying hard enough to shed it's image as a reactionary, scaremongering organ of evil...

After all, the 'sorry' campaign was trying to make you believe they'd start trying to be a responsible organ of journalism.

It would appear to be a hard habit to give up... I mean, did they think that just having the latest on Michael Jackson's death wouldn't sell enough copies or something? "Come on lads, what's our angle here..."

Digital Britain - Word Cloud

Bhav and the guys at OPera have spent the last week reading, analysing and writing a 'what's in it for us' synopsis of the Digital Britain report.  All I managed to do was glance through it, and post a funny video.

Anyway, I'll going to read their whole thing imminently, but the first thing I'll share from it is the word cloud.  I'm dismayed by the lack of use of the word 'people', but that's maybe just a current bugbear of mine, rather than something significant...

I'm trying to win a bookcase from Faris

Yes, I'm trying to win a bookcase off Faris.  It's not really a long story, but it's one that you should go here to read about. 

But if that's 'the long', then 'the short' is that I needed somewhere to post the following up online.  And this is that place.

It's the entry on 'book reviews' in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  (With a million, million apologies to the late great Douglas Adams, of course).

 

I originally did this for the IPA Excellence Diploma last year.  It is an excellent thing to do, I recommend it.  Though it has made me one of those annoying fellows that quotes lots of stuff.

Thingfrastructure

I've just read this brilliant piece by Matt Jones of Dopplr / Schulze & Webb on what he calls 'thingfrastructure'...

(I found it via Influx Insights, thanks Ed)

Matt proposes that...

"the technologies of rapid fabrication and pervasive networks are allowing the tangible and the intangible to switch places and mingle."

Eh??!

Don't worry, I'm going to 'write out loud' to get my head around it too...

Rapid fabrication - We can make things (real world, physical objects) very quickly, and replace it often.  We don't have to make something in the bulk we used to, with the homgenous consistency we used to, or at the price it used to cost.  Moo cards being a great example; I've just had another set of 100 delivered, with a variety of personalised, different images, at a much lower cost than traditional business cards...

The same technology is beginning to affect packaging, and when 3D printing kicks off properly will really come into it's own...

...so physical objects are becoming updatable very regularly.

Pervasive networks - Through a combination of constant access to the network through a myriad of devices, the low cost of everything from processors to RFID tags, and the design & use of systems to capture information, there is increasingly some information & data capture sitting behind everything we do.  It's also referred to as Ubiquitous Computing (so Wikipedia tells me).

...so everyday actions can provide timely, relevant and useful information.

Now, here's the clever bit:

i) we can quickly make physical things based on the best available information

ii) we can collect the best available information from the things that are in the real world

This means that the real world of 'tangible' objects influences the intangible world of services via the network, and vice versa, as Matt's chart shows:

It means that every thing that is a part of the connected world is more than just a physical object; it becomes a connected, influencing part of the world around us and the services we use.

(and no, I didn't just blog about this because of the Lego slide Matt uses; it's not part of the ongoing Feeding The Puppy obsession with Lego as a brand and a metaphor).

But what would it mean in real life?  Here's an example of where this could go...

Imagine you are about to leave home from work one night, and fancy cooking a curry.  Using your mobile, you’ll be able to find a recipe, and then connect to the refrigerator in your kitchen at home to see which of the ingredients you need. 

The fridge knows what the contents of your kitchen are; there's an RFID tag on each of the items in the fridge & cupboards that identify them, the date they were placed in there, the number of times they have been taken out and replaced (telling you roughly how much you've used, and therefore need).  

The fridge responds with a shopping list.  You take this list, and connect your mobile to the satellite navigation system in your car. 

Your car contacts a series of stores which you could pass by on your route home, and checks which ones have all the ingredients (because all the RFID tags in store act as a real time inventory of stock), which ones are at the lowest prices, and which will take the least amount of time as a detour on your way home.  You get exactly what you want, in the fastest, cheapest, most convenient way.

This is commonly referred to, I believe, as the internet of things, but I think Matt's concept of Thingfrastructure is a great build, because it highlights the need for services in this world, and not just physical things.

Companies in this new world will of course have to make sure the things they produce are great (there's noweher to hide a dodgy product anymore, as Chris alluded to recently).  But it will be the service they create around the things that will make people choose them over a competitor...

So, the smart supermarket could identify what people are using certain products for.  They could start printing the recipes on the back of the next print run of packages.  Or add in photos taken by customers of the meals they created, or tips on how to make the recipe better, or what wine people tried with it.  Or become as competitive on price as possible by creating packs that are the exact size people need for the recipe...

Of course, it all sounds very far away and futuristic... but hey, if the iphone fridge is here already, it may be closer than you think.

It's iPhone day! Do you need one? Ask Hunch...

Welcome to June 19th, 2009, the day that may well be remembered for all time as 'the day Apple released an iPhone that was only a little better than the last one, in order to let the other phone manufacturers catch up a little and make a longer fight of it'.  Or something.

Anyway, you may (like me) be thinking 'I'm out of contract on my old phone.  Shall I get an iPhone 3GS?'

Well, via mashable, I've just come across something that may help you decide... it's called Hunch, and it's a new service that helps you make decisions.  It's also co-founded by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake.  She's obviously very in to co-founding things.

The Hunch proposition is simple; "Hunch helps you make decisions, and gets smarter the more you use it".

Let's give it a whirl then...

OK, so after the first very obvious question, I'm thinking 'wow, it's just going to tell me what I want to hear...'.

But no, it takes this only as a first step, then starts questioning what I'll use the device for (phone calls/Mobile internet etc), what sort of job I do and whether technology is important to it, whether I'm with a service provider that does the iPhone... Hunch is asking a lot of rational questions that, if I'd just done my usual impulse buy, I'd have bypassed.

It's basically a decision tree, though it's a decision tree is defined and refined by the people who use the site, rather than being fixed.  So it cleverly crowdsources the right questions to ask...

...and then, it reaches a decision for me...

 

OK then, I will...

Now, think about what Hunch now knows about me... sure, it knows I want an iPhone.  But it also knows the sort of job I do, what I use a mobile device for, whether or not I can afford an iPhone... it's started to build up a picture of me through the data I've willingly given it.

And if I save my profile, and then ask more questions of it, it builds up a more robust picture of me... so will give me, on a personal level. better answers.

Meanwhile in the background, it's collecting data about everyone who uses it... it will be able to use all of that information to cross-pollinate the 'answers' it gives people. 

So if other iPhone purchasers have been asking about gaming systems, and then I ask about whether I should buy an XBox 360 or PS3, it has some data to help steer decisions, as well ask asking me a whole set of new questions...

 

So far, according to Mashable, Hunch has over 30,000 users, and a database of 7 million questions.  I'd expect that to get a lot bigger a lot faster, too.

It's another example of how the internet means companies need to think about 'thousands not millions'  (see the earlier post if you want a recap). 

If you want to talk to the people who might want an iPhone, or an XBox, or who want to know what film to see at the weekend or recipe to cook tonight with the aubergine they have left in their fridge... then places like Hunch could increasingly be where they turn first.

Susan Boyle: bigger than Elvis

Well, not bigger actually.  Seemingly the right size to superimpose...

Spotted on Monday's trip to Manchester.  And another small part of what Faris refers to as our recombinant culture, which you should head on over to his house to read more on.

#digitalbritain: I hope we get an orientation day

The 'Digital Britain' report is released today.  It's Lord Carter's 'months in the making' report on, well, everything digital and how it affects the UK economy, it's people, governance etc etc.  You can read all about it here at the Guardian.

I'm off to read it now for an hour or so. 

Before I form any real thoughts on it though, the whole affair reminds me a lot of this Mitchell & Webb sketch.  I just hope we all get an orientation day...

Just try replacing the word 'bronze' with the word 'digital'...

"will the digital still need tying to sticks?"

"oh yes."

"cracking."

Dell and Twitter; thousands not millions

The morning after the iMedia conference last month, I wrote a list of five things that I believed to be true about the state of the world, agencies, communications, and so on.

It's here, if you didn't see it already.

Anyway, one of the five has been nagging at me ever since:

"We used to reach a million to affect a thousand.  Why not now just reach the thousand?"

...and it seemed to bother other people too, judging by the comments from Will, Andrew, Emily and Jeremy.  So I've decided to expand a little...

We as an industry evolved in a world where it was nigh on impossible to find the exact few thousand people who wanted your product or service at a given time. 

Even if you found the few thousand, then you'd be hard pushed to communicate your offer in a cost-effective way.

So we targeted everybody.  We spoke to millions, in order to affect the thousands.

Of course, over time we got very good at doing this on behalf of clients.  There were two key ways in which we improved what we did.

Firstly, we bought in bulk to deliver better value.  We got people more millions, and by association more cost efficient thousands, for their money:

Then, we began identifying a better selection of the millions; we started targeting much more smartly to make sure we didn't reach people that weren't really interested in the first place.

But the world has changed, phenomally.  I shan't reiterate 'why' again, see the first half of  the 'future of...' presentation if you want a refresh. But save to say this passage from Benkler's 'Wealth of Networks' encapsulates it very nicely...

“It seems passé today to speak of “the internet revolution”...  But it should not be.  The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep.  It is structural.  It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries”

Yochai Benkler, ‘The Wealth of Networks’

To wit; the cost of communication, sharing, and conversation is now so low that companies (and their agencies) have available to them the approach that they arguably would have wanted in the first place.

Just talk to the thousands.

If you can engage in conversation with the people who're actually in the market for your goods and services (and by 'engage in conversation' I don't mean in a fuzzy 'brand' way, but as in have them talk to someone in your company), then you achieve the very thing companies wanted in the first place.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things it's a very new approach... and as such we're only starting to see results seeping out from various places... 

...but recently Dell have shared the results of some of their Twitter activity.  By creating, developing and honing the @delloutlet twitter account, which releases information about deals and offers to be had direct from Dell, the company has directly created $2m in revenue. 

The 'thousands' of people interested in Dell products (in this case 600k+ subscribers to @delloutlet) have opted in to receive news of deals, news, information and exclusive twitter-only discounts.

Whilst clearly only a small proportion of the 600k+ have bought through the channel (do the maths - $2m/600k...), turn it around into old world maths...

...just how many millions of people would you have to reach to sell $2m worth of computing equipment?  And how much would it cost vs. how much it costs for Stefanie @ Dell to run the account.

I think it's a wonderful example of how a company can use social media, and I think there's three main lessons that people should take from it...

1. People like talking to People

Firstly, it's not a conversation being held by 'a brand'.  It's not a faceless 'Dell' account, but one set up and run by Stefanie.  I'm sure someone will cover for her when she's on holiday and stuff, but it's very clear that when you follow the @delloutlet account it's run by a person, not a faceless 'marcomms team'.

And people, believe it or not, like talking to other people.  At the Corporate Social Networking Forum last week, Euan Semple made a very good point; business is founded upon people who trust other people.

So yes, once again, it's about people, people, people...

2. Social media is not 'campaigning' media - it takes TIME to work...

Stefanie and Dell didn't set up their @delloutlet account three weeks ago.  Or even three months ago.  It's been going for 2 years now. 

And the numbers have only really started taking off in the last three months; this graph from Mashable shows the growth of their followers since March 09... from just over 100k three months ago, to 600k+ now.

Also from Mashable, this quote:

"It took nearly two years to reach $2 million in Twitter-based revenue, and only six months to go from $1 million to $2 million."

So that probably means that for the first 6 months, or even first year, the amount of effort, the trial and error, the constant refining probably outweighed the returns by far.  How many companies would have given up 6 months in, with a few thousand followers and limited returns?

Social media takes much longer to work.  Which means that you should really start now, and not be put off when, in the first six months, you're only talking to a handful of people.  Which brings me to the final point, and back to the beginning...

3. Talking to thousands can be much better than reaching millions

I'll be fascinated to see how quickly @delloutlet's success continues to grow, but a quick supposition makes you think that they'll hit $3m in the next three months...

...in fact, let's call it: by 1st September they'll hit $3m.  And probably $5m by the end of the year.  I'll remember to keep an eye out for it...

Which is a mightily impressive revenue stream to have developed.  And yet look again at the followers of the twitter account... it was only in May this year that there were more than half a million.

It just shows that where the old world demanded audience figures that had at least six noughts on the end, it's possible to create highly successful communications in the new world by talking to a fraction of that audience, and at a fraction of the cost too.

(additional stuff: ReadWriteWeb)