Matter/Anti-Matter

(Credit: Billpapa.org)

Reading the business section of yesterday's New York Times, you couldn't help but notice the juxtaposition of two seemingly different companies, which, at second glance, have more in common that you might think. One is Bloomberg, the financial data juggernaut that has enough cash to aspire to become “the world’s most influential news organization.” The company has placed its bets on the acquisition of the venerable BusinessWeek, trusting that it will broaden its reach into a mainstream business audience. A few pages later, Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross reveals Apple’s pending patent application for a new advertising pop-up technology that forces users of devices and web sites to acknowledge the reception of the commercial message.

What Apple calls “enforcement routine” is basically a radical ad-based model that offers consumers to use Apple’s products and services for free or at a discount if they “watch ads they may not want to watch.” Stross writes: “Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad--it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.” As Stross points out, other brands went down this path before and utterly failed, and he is stunned that Apple, if it is serious about this technology, seems to be willing to risk its  reputation of consumer-friendly “cool.”

One story can be read in the context of the other: Bloomberg and Apple not only share a zealously rigid culture and a “walled garden” business model based on selling high-grade packages at a premium price; they are also both media companies. Both have strong communities driven by the Three C’s of Communities--connectivity, content, and context--and both are wondering which of these parameters they can exploit more aggressively without jeopardizing the integrity of the community that is the foundation of their business. Both Apple and Blooomberg create value by heavily relying on network effects within an ecosystem that they tightly control. Both are distributing content to raise demand for their products. And both have a strong brand to extend – and to lose.

With the acquisition of BusinessWeek, Bloomberg’s strategic trajectory is clear: Owning a proprietary technology platform (it sold 300,000 terminals to date), the company is looking for ways to reach more potential buyers (and sell premium services). Apple’s “terminals,” on the other hand, are its iTunes store and its user interfaces, and the recent patent application indicates that the company might explore the exploitation of attention generated through these properties. Bloomberg is buying attention to open up new sources of revenue, Apple might be selling it.

The two brands have one last trait in common: They are not really embracing social media, to put it mildly. Apple, as a company, does not engage, and Bloomberg even discourages its employees to engage. Apple and Bloomberg, in some ways, are the antidotes to a marketplace that – propelled by the forces of the Social Web – is becoming increasingly atomized, hyper-distributed, open, and transparent. Secrecy, compliance, top-down hierarchies, rigid communication policies, and walled gardens are characteristics that may be somewhat outdated in this era, and yet they seem to be the very cornerstones of Apple’s and Bloomberg’s success as the two firms thrive as the surprise champions of their respective categories. Both came to save ailing industries, ripe for innovation: Apple reinvented the music industry and the Smart Phone market. Bloomberg is determined to reinvent the news business. But in the long term, can Apple sustain its community of loyal users without becoming a more transparent organization? And can Bloomberg really emerge as “the world’s most influential news organization” without going social?

The House has passed the first comprehensive reform package of the health insurance industry in decades, which is now up for debate in the Senate. This is a highly complex issue, but there are some quite basic reasons why it's so difficult to accomplish significant reform, and in part these have to do with psychological responses to change and uncertainty. 

A few years ago I was fortunate to work with a couple of organizational consultants, and they introduced me to the concept of NICs and PUFs. These funny sounding acronyms give insight into why health care reform is so difficult for many people to support. (And once you have this shorthand for thinking about scenarios, you find ways that they apply in all aspects of life.)

The two acronyms, and their counterparts PICs and NUFs, refer to the likelihood that something will happen, whether the impact with be positive or negative, and how quickly the impact will happen.

PICs: Positive, Immediate and Certain. This is the best case--a good impact will be for sure happening to me soon.

NICs: Negative, Immediate and Certain. This is the worst case--a bad impact that will surely happen, and right away. People instinctively avoid these as much as possible.

PUFs: Positive, Uncertain and Future. Something good may happen, but if it does, it will be in an indeterminate future, and I don't really know how good it will be if it does happen.

NUFs: Negative, Uncertain and Future. The opposite of course, that something bad may happen at some point in the future, with an uncertain degree of badness.

Applying these to the health care debate, they clearly illustrate why there is resistance to reform.

The consequences of reform in terms of money-out-of-pocket, quality of care, and choice of care are all unclear for most people, naturally so since the changes are complex. It's therefore unclear whether the changes will be positive or negative in nature. Depending on one's financial situation, job security, and satisfaction with current health care service, one may be inclined to see the change going more in the positive or negative direction.

The battle over the public option partly revolves around whether people will get bumped off their existing plans and onto a government plan. This would represent potentially a large scale change, and again may be seen positively or negatively depending on one's circumstances. But when that switch may happen is unclear. Would the introduction of the public plan cause an immediate sweeping change as employers dropped their private insurance for the public plan, or would the status quo hold? Since this is unclear, people have differing opinions about how it will play out.

People who see PICs in health care reform obviously support it--they think it will bring positive changes, quickly. This may be because they stand to gain personally, or see immediate benefits for those who are currently under- or uninsured.

People who see NICs are against reform, believing that it will have immediate negative results, whether for themselves or others.

PICs and NICs are going to be hard for politicians to sway as they are pretty entrenched in their positions (anchored by the Certainty and the perceived near-term consequences). Immediate impacts, whether positive or negative, often have a more powerful influence than ambiguous longer-term ones. That's why dieting is difficult--immediate pleasure of a cupcake now vs possible ambiguous connection to expanded waistline later. It's also why saving is difficult--the benefits in the far of future feel less compelling that buying the latest gadget or trinket today.

It’s the PUFs and NUFs that are the swing votes in the health care debate, and here we are tending to see the “devil you know is better than the devil you don’t” dynamic playing out. With something as literally life and death as health care and insurance, the glass-half-empty NUFs tend to outweigh optimistic PUFs. If there is a chance of a negative result that you can’t define or predict, then it can seem safer to stick with the status quo rather than hold out hope for an ambiguous improvement at an indeterminate point in the future.

(Credit: Victors & Spoils)

It's always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alums, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle."

V&S says it will "provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's most talented creatives." The press release promises that "perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd" but stays mum on how exactly the crowdsourced creative department will operate.

In any event, V & S is eating its own dog food. The first line you notice on its web site (after the humble "Welcome To Victors & Spoils. Let's Change An Industry") is "Why does this site look so plain, Jane?" and the answer is: because the site design, the look and feel, and even the logo are being crowdsourced.

Whether crowdsoucing yields better creative results, who knows? It certainly is a differentiator. V&S COO Claudia Batten twittered that she got calls from five Fortune 200 CMOs in the first five days since launch. We will follow this one closely.

Forrester is about to release a new report on “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age,” in which it proposes replacing “brand managers” with “brand advocates.” Advertising Age provides a sneak peek at the ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’ presented in the report: permission, proximity, perception, and participation. Other core elements include: “embracing an expanded role for consumer intelligence, focusing on strategic brand platforms, and empowering a federated organization."

A fervent advocate of marketing as a cross-organizational catalyst for change myself, I wholeheartedly agree with BBH Labs which believes the Forrester report points to a potentially larger opportunity for the discipline: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”

This view is really becoming a groundswell, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano from the Dachis Group (“Social Business Design”), Francois Gossieaux (Beeline Labs), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.

Further reading:

HSM Interview with Amazon’s former Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend on the four P’s of marketing

Ogilvy and Acision white paper on advertising in 2020

Jones and Bonevac: "Should We Be In the Advertising Industry?"

Dave Evans: "Social Business: the New Black" 

John Ellett: "Marketing has changed"

George Potts: "Political Campaigns: The New Paradigm for Marketing Organizations in the Social Media Age"

Rob Rose: "Stop Being a ‘Data Driven’ Marketer"

Gary Hayes little flash application shows how active the social web is. Hayes built the application based on data he pulled from a range of social media sources, which he compiled at the end of September 2009.  You can download his Social Media Count here.

(Credit: Berlin Twitter Wall)

Upon the 20-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city of Berlin has launched a remarkable “living” online memorial: the Berlin Twitter Wall.

Using the hashtag #fotw, people can share their thoughts on the Fall of the Berlin Wall and tell the world “which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place.” The Web site scrolls messages along a backdrop of the East Side Gallery, a famous stretch of the wall still standing and painted with murals. By clicking "stop" and "play", older tweets are shown. A click on the cameras up on the wall displays a selection of the domino-artwork that will fall in a symbolic act on Nov. 9, 2009 at the "Fest der Freiheit" (festival of freedom) at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

I love how the Berlin Twitter Wall intersects history and real-time action, memory and instant gratification, gravitas with graffiti, concrete architecture and virtual realm--and make all of that open and social.

(Credit: Digital Labor)

My mom always told me “Make your passion your profession, and you’ll be a happy man.” She was right, and I am glad I followed her advice. Yet I appear to be part of a minority. In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”), this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of workers who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%, and the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%. Furthermore, the article refers to a more recent survey by DDI which found that more than half of the respondents described their job as “stagnant,” as in “nothing interesting to do” and “little hope of professional growth" within their current organization. Half of these “stagnators” said they were planning to look for another job as soon as the economy recovered. These survey findings are flanked by several recent cultural events in the US that indicate a shift in the way we negotiate the meaning of work, for example Michael Moore’s “Capitalism – A Love Story” and a whole New York Times Magazine issue on “Anxiety.”

And yet, Americans will be surprised to hear that the most dramatic manifestation of this apparent misery-at-work trend occurred in “socialist” France. A spate of attempted and successful suicides at France Telecom that occured over the past twelve months, many of them explicitly prompted by stress and dissatisfaction at work, forced the deputy CEO to resign and sparked an emotional national debate about life in the modern corporation.

“You are what you do,” German philosopher Immanuel Kant contended long before we started talking about Work/Life balance. Having always been an idealistic concoction most fervently promoted by those biased towards Life, this balance wouldn’t even need to be promoted if it were indeed a battle of equal powers. It isn’t. Work has invaded every single aspect of our lives, and it has infiltrated our society Mafia-style: controlling and demanding every hour of our lives without appearing to do so. Increasingly, Work is no longer visible as such and is instead embedded into Life, which makes its power even more frightening: If you do things that are work but don’t feel like work, then Work has ultimately prevailed.

With the advent of digital media, the relationship between Work and Life has again dramatically changed. Social computing has turned the workplace into the living room and the living room into the workplace. For the digital knowledge workers of the attention economy, it has become harder, if not impossible, to separate Work and Life. The concepts of live-to-work and work-to-live, often pitted against as a clash of American and European cultures, are too one-dimensional to truly capture the reality of most professionals today. Work is Life, and Life is Work, and there is not much in between. The question is no longer how we can balance our digital lifestyle with our professional lives, the question is: How were we able to get any work done before the digital era? And how did we have a life before Twitter?

The new digital work lifestyle has profound implications for one’s (professional) identity: What do you do when everyone else does everything all the time? With everything and everyone connected, the once clear contours of our existence give way to an indistinguishable maelstrom of stimulation: the story of our life is no longer a curriculum, it is a non-linear stream. You can go swimming, fishing, snorkeling, and sailing in it. You can choose to stay on the surface or take a deep dive. But you can never leave. And you can always drown. With Work and Life being the Big Blend, it is shocking but not surprising that for some the only way to take a break from Work is to take a permanent sabbatical from Life, as in the case of the France Telecom workers.

The borderless Work/Life experience creates agoraphobia, an anxiety about an indefinite space of self-actualization possibilities and one’s position within. As Alain de Botton, the philosopher for the knowledge worker, put it: “It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. It’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm and be free of career anxiety.”

The Economist suspects that companies aggravate this anxiety by a new, ill-conceived form of Taylorism: “Giant retailers use ‘workforce management’ software to monitor how many seconds it takes to scan the goods in a grocery cart, and then reward the most diligent workers with prime working hours. The public sector, particularly in Britain, is awash with inspectorates and performance targets. Taylorism, which Charlie Chaplin lampooned so memorably in ‘Modern Times,’ has spread from the industrial to the post-industrial economy. In Japan some firms even monitor whether their employees smile frequently enough at customers.”

These are all measures that will very likely deter Generation Y workers, the digital natives who have grown up with the Internet and expect organizations to provide them with much more ambiguity and empowerment than these were willing to give to their parents. For the Gen Y’ers, Work is no longer just what you do; Work is another way of Life – a meaningful life. It implies a Work-Life package that reconciles passion and profession, meaning and earning, impact and income. A good job is what you believe in – as long as you can abandon it at will. Sure, Work has become invasive, but so has Life, as work performance is being constantly disrupted by the micro-events in one's digital life feed (email, Twitter, blogging, social networks, etc.). Companies need to learn to convert this distraction into productivity. In fact, this might be the biggest management challenge for the next ten years: Learning how to leverage the tools of distraction to increase productivity – and happiness.

No matter where on the Work/Life continuum you’d place yourself, you will acknowledge the one premise that unites us all: how we are going to work in the future will determine how we’re going to live in the future. Consequently, the Berlin-based creative collective Palomar 5 believes that the best way to find out about the future of work is to let people from different backgrounds work together. Palomar 5 has therefore organized a six-week long Innovation Camp in Berlin that gathers, Big Brother-like, 30 handpicked uber-achievers under 30 to explore (and live together) a vision of work in the digital future. The Camp’s agenda and workflow have been carefully crafted and encompass various modules, guest experts, and collaborative creative assignments that tackle Work/Life as one big design challenge.

In a similar vein, The Internet As Playground and Factory: A Conference on Digital Labor will be held at the Eugene Lang College of The New School in New York City on November 12-14. An overview Introduction sets out the seminal questions arising “in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media.” The conference is free, with advance registration required.

There’s no dearth of books on the subject either: If I had to pick two, I’d go with Alain de Botton’s The Sorrows and Pleasures of Work (with a poignant chapter on accountants) and Don Tapscott’s Grown Up Digital which provides a comprehensive overview of the aspirations and habits of the Gen Y workforce.

Forgive me but I have to plug something my company (Frog Design) is involved in. I'm only doing this because it is such a neat event: In collaboration with Frog, NPR will host a unique Digital Think In this Friday in our offices in San Francisco, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations.

Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In will harness the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants include leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm include: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.

The Think In will explore five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants will break out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational roadmap.

The event will be live-blogged and the Digital Think In micro-site will feature live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees will be tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin. NPR's Andy Carvin will be posting to YouTube and Flickr under "nprthink," and updating NPR's Facebook page.

Join the NPR Digital Think In (remotely)

(Credit: Maple and Leek)

Twitter’s “suggested users” list is a Who’s Who of Twitter celebrities, featuring the likes of Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Ashton Kutcher, John McCain, Martha Stewart, and others with millions of followers. The New York Times claimed that a spot on the list would guarantee 500,000 additional followers and reported that social media guru Jason Calacanis had offered $250,000 to be listed.

Last Friday, Twitter did something remarkable. It added a number of well-known social entrepreneurs and innovators to this list, among them Social Edge, Skoll Foundation, Kiva, Matt Flannery (Kiva co-founder), Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen Fund founder), charity: water, GOOD Magazine, Kjerstin Erickson (FORGE founder), and Room to Read. Not knowing what was going on, Kiva’s Flannery thought there was a spam attack and complained about the 500 new users a minute he was getting. But not for long.

Twitter’s move is huge, not only because it propels social entrepreneurs to enter mainstream but also because the microblogging service--THE trading floor for attention on the Web--has decided to give away some of the attention it attracts to promote good causes. Consider it the New Socialism: a redistribution of attention, not of material wealth. What’s even more remarkable is the reaction of one of the benefitting organizations, Social Edge, which immediately sent out a message to all its new users pointing them to a list of 100 other social entrepreneurs and innovators on Twitter. Give more than you take: that’s the power of meaningful marketing and exactly the kind of giving that makes companies thrive in the ‘share economy.' Good creates more good.

There are other, even more immediate ways in which Twitter can be used for doing good. My colleague Jacob Zukerman proposed it the other day, and I found the concept instantly compelling: instant social action, enabled by Twitter. Tweet Mobs for collective action. The idea is simple: Convert all the attention on Twitter into real-world action--in real-time. With some twitter users attracting more than a million followers, their social influence is significant--why not use it for social good, especially when you can “eventize” it by creating artificially scarce moments of real-time public collaboration?

The link between tweet and deed is not new on Twitter and exists in various formats (Mashable has provided a great overview): Cause-related fundraising (Tweet fund drives) via Twitter has been made popular by Twestival, Tweetsgiving,12for12k, Tweetathon, and others. An alternate concept is Twollars, a Twitter-based currency with no hard money value that allows users to pledge money to charity using Twitter. Describing itself as “a currency of appreciation for Twitter,” it effectively connects micro-payments with micro-blogging. (Speaking of currencies, PollyTrade links Twitter accounts to E*Trade account and allows brokers to trade stock via Twitter.) And there are Tweet-Ups--offline events initiated and organized via Twitter--but in this case, too, the tweet and the deed are asynchronous. Carrotmob, a congenial social media platform for social activism, uses Twitter, but it still requires a moment of translation as well: good will and a commitment to a cause can be immediately “socialized,” however, the output--the action--still occurs via intermediary.

All these formats do not convert instantly into offline action in the way Flash Mobs do. What if followers not only follow but do (in the best “Here Comes Everybody” style)? What if Blog Action Day became Twitter Action Minute? These Twitter Mobs or Smart Tweets would capitalize on the unique combination of peer pressure, presence, location-based eventization, and of course, sheer reach. The train wreck Sarah Lacy-Mark Zuckerberg interview at SXSW 2008 was a negative example of live-mobbing on Twitter, a disaster unfolding in real-time, amplified through the synchronous meta-conversation on Twitter. The #CNNfail campaign in response to CNN’s deficient coverage of the Iranian election, was another one. The enormous power of these real-time conversations is frightening, but it is also promising. The more optimistic equation goes like this: Attention = social capital = social action. What if a group of Twitter followers all picked up one piece of garbage from the street? What if they all gave food to a homeless person? What if they exchanged money, products, hugged a stranger, etc.? And so on. It’d be a real-time, real-world transaction that would be as swift as the transactions taking place at breathtaking pace every second in the highly virtual realm of international finance. A smart attention-to-action cascade. A Good Mob.

Maybe a fantasy--but a good one.