Outside Innovation

A Pragmatic Solution for Eldercare in the US—Designed by Elders for Elders

As many of you know, I now live year round on the coast of Maine. One of my local heroes is Chip Teel, who has been pioneering in eldercare for over two decades. He’s a local M.D., with a family practice of seven professionals. A large proportion of their clientele are elderly people. Chip, who has a specialty in geriatrics, served as director of the local nursing home. He has also been very involved as the Medical Director of a nearby retirement community.

Over the years, Chip’s elderly clients have been very clear with him about one thing: they don’t want to move out of their homes, no matter how frail they become. When their declining health and fragile mental states made it necessary for them to move out of their homes, they were often unhappy, and their conditions worsened. When Teel could figure out ways to keep them at home and provide the supplemental services they needed, they thrived. So he engaged with a group of his clients to try a couple of experiments.

Customers Want to Interact With Each Other In and Around Their Activities and Projects

By Ronni Marshak

As we continue to do our web site audits on how well companies “manage our stuff,” Patty Seybold surfaces some insights based on our research and our customer engagements. As customers describe how they’d ideally like to get things done in the perfect world, a subtle requirement emerges: at the core of the next generation of win/win business models are customer-centric ecosystems that don’t just answer product or business transaction questions, but, rather, address the issues of how do I get things done. And, for advice, they turn first to their inner circle of family, friends, and colleagues; next to their outer circle of people out there in the world who are facing the same challenges; and, only as a last resort, to the subject matter experts that are associated with your brand.

Build Community Around "My Stuff"
How Will Online Communities and Social Networks Evolve?
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, November 10, 2011

Nokia’s Design by Community Phone

Scott Jordan sent me a link to Nokia’s “Design a Concept Phone by Community” site. I’ve been following the traffic and the dialog for a couple of weeks. What Nokia is doing is offering a series of interactive design polls about different aspects of a new concept mobile phone. Here’s this week’s:

Each week you get to “vote” by moving sliders on a different aspect of the phone design:

• Display and User Interface

• Size and shape

• Materials

• Operating System

• Connectivity

• Camera

• Enhancements

Children Are Driving Innovation in Rural Uganda

I am spending two weeks in Uganda at the Uganda Rural Development and Training (URDT.net) programme. My goal on this, my fifth trip, to this incredible hotbed of grass roots, bottoms up innovation, is to midwife a book. The working title for the book is, "It Takes a Child to Raise a Village," a play on the famous book by Hillary Clinton, "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child."

This week, I am working with the 236 girls from the Girls School to help them write their own book—a rebuttal to Hillary's. These girls—who come from families who live on $1 a day in rural villages with no electricity, plumbing, or running water—know that THEY can make a difference in the lives of their families. They have spent the last 10 years becoming change agents for their families' farms and businesses. These 13 to 20-year old young women have the poise, the know-how, the humility, and the quiet determination to help their families create a shared vision of how they want to improve their livelihoods.

Each one of them has a wonderful story to tell about how they mobilized their family members to improve health, nutrition, sanitation, income generation, and family cooperation and harmony in their households. They also acknowledge that they (even at age 14 or 15) have become role models in their communities. People come to seek their advice. They are truly changing the cultural norms in their villages and their families. And they and their families are highly respected because of the role the girls have played in improving their families' incomes while they are attending school.

In so many poor regions of the world, children have to drop out of school and work to support the family. At URDT's Girls’ School, thanks to this unique educational experience, the girls are increasing their families' income while they're away at school by teaching their parents what they've learned about organic farming, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, sanitation, health, and community development. They've also taught their families how to create a shared vision for what they want to achieve and an action plan for getting it done. This is truly remarkable for a group of wonderfully ordinary teenagers in a rural, backward society and a "women don't count" culture.

I feel privileged to be working with these young women! I look forward to sharing the draft of the book with you soon!

The Anatomy of Innovation

I really enjoyed completing my case study about Nature Education's groundbreaking Scitable platform for science education. Many people are happy to showcase their innovative projects. But few people are as forthcoming as Vikram Savkar in taking me behind the scenes. 

 I gained a good understanding of the steps required to innovate within a large organization:

• Hire an outside renegade.
• Have him build and sell his vision.
• Let him create his own team.
• Locate the team off-site.
• Take a blank slate approach.
• Create a blueprint with an integrated cross-functional team.
• Have the team implement the technology, the content, the user interface design, the business plan, and the marketing plan in parallel.
• Leverage your corporate technology group by agreeing on design standards up front and having them conduct architectural reviews throughout.
• Engage customers as hands-on advisors throughout the process.
• Design your information architecture around customers’ activities towards their goals.
• Build in instrumentation that lets you measure what matters to your customers as well as your sponsors.
• Beta test with friendly customers and invite them to invite their friends.
• Promote via the Internet and social media.
• Make it easy for customers to tell you what role(s) they are playing.
• Let customers see what activities they’ve performed, so they can pick up where they left off; profit from your ability to track what activities customers in different roles are doing.

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How to Revolutionize Your Industry

If your business model is under siege, what should you do? That’s the question that Vikram Savkar asked himself a couple of years ago. At the time, he worked for a publisher of high-priced textbooks. He decided that among the reasons the textbook publishing market is broken are:

• Customers don’t choose what to buy -- the students who buy the books don’t get to choose which books to buy (their professors assign them).
  
• There’s no feedback mechanism for students to react to the material in the textbooks, nor to interact with the people who write them.
  
• There are no real alternatives to traditional textbooks, so publishers can’t tell what their customers would prefer.

So, when he got the opportunity to reinvent what he perceived to be a broken market, Vikram seized the opportunity. This week, we present the a case study on Scitable—the project that Vikram and his team at Nature Publishing Group’s new Nature Education division have launched. You’ll see that they are attempting to create an alternative to science textbooks and to come up with an alternative business model.

As I explored Scitable and learned how students and professors are using it, I noticed that a lot of the third-world students who are flocking to Scitable would probably not have bought $150 textbooks on genetics. So Scitable isn’t replacing something they would have bought. It’s replacing something they wouldn’t have bought. It’s providing a new value proposition to a new market. 

Business Exchange: Good Example of Crowd Sourcing and Social Networking

Ron Casalotti is the Director of User Participation for Business Week’s Business Exchange. Ron’s understanding about how to encourage user-generated content comes naturally. He became addicted to AOL’s online communities in the 1990s. By day, he worked in the leasing business. At night, he would join live chat groups on topics he cared about. Soon, he found himself volunteering as a moderator for a number of AOL communities, including the really popular gaming chat groups.

After serving as a volunteer moderator in exchange for free AOL time, AOL made him an offer in 1997 to come on board full-time to run a number of their most popular communities. After over 10 years hosting and managing communities at AOL (weathering the Time Warner merger), Ron posted his resume on LinkedIn and was immediately tapped by Business Week to come and run customer-generated content at the new Business Exchange site they were planning. “Once I decided to leave AOL, I thought I’d be job hunting for a while, but I walked across the street, and settled into my new job in less than a week.”

LEVERAGE!! You can use your LinkedIn Profile, saving time so you don’t have to create yet another profile! And, when you post on Business Exchange you can have those posts syndicated out to your Twitter feeds.

Leveraging Business Users’ Existing Investments in Social Media

Use Your LinkedIn Profile. Before talking with Ron, I took a look at the site. What immediately tickled me about the Business Exchange site is the way that users’ profiles are “automagically” generated from the profiles we already have on LinkedIn. What a relief, I thought! I don’t have to create yet another profile to participate in this dialog! (You may recall my earlier post “Where’s Your Profile Online?”.) When you register for Business Exchange, you can use your LinkedIn Profile, saving time so you don’t have to create yet another profile!

Tweet Your Responses. Equally useful (for those of us who are overwhelmed by all the demands on our time and our new found need to strut our stuff in public), when you post on Business Exchange, you can have those posts syndicated out to your Twitter feeds. This is a really clever way to convince time-pressed business people that it’s worth their time to read and comment on Business Exchange. And it’s a great way to spawn word of mouth PR.

Contribute Your Content or Content You Value

Here’s the crowd sourcing part: Registered users can contribute articles on a variety or topics, and/or suggest new topics. Your contributed articles wind up right next to the Business Week articles that have been selected and added to the Business Exchange collection. The other thing that’s quite amazing about Business Exchange is how easy it is to add articles to it. These may be articles you’ve written, or articles you’ve found in other publications that you think Business Exchange readers would enjoy. You simply hit the submit button, enter the URL, and it will grab the title and abstract from the originating site, create a link, and all you need to do is comment (if you want to) and hit enter. You might think that this would lead to the site being cluttered with self-promoting junk. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Since you can only submit URLs, rather than blog directly on the site, all of the linked news items and blog posts seem to be of “publishable” quality. If it’s your own blog post, you publish first on your blog, and then submit it to Business Exchange. (It will post right away; you don’t have to wait for approval). If it’s a link to an interesting article or blog post from someone else, Business Exchange creates the links, includes the logo of the originating site and respects their copyright by simply linking to it on the original site.

What’s Missing: Threaded Discussions

Something I find odd about the current Beta version of Business Exchange is that it isn’t very easy to see others’ reactions to articles. Under each article’s abstract you can look at the “Actions” taken on that article, and see which users have saved or reacted to it and what their reactions were. But it’s hard to find. And, there’s no threaded discussion/blog commenting capability that lets you build on others’ reactions (yet). There’s no real discourse happening on the site. Just a lot of great content and interesting people.

Why Twitter Rules (and What to Do About It)

In the past few months, the Twitter phenomenon has reached epic proportions. Personally, I chalk this up to the malaise that is gripping us all as we struggle to make sense of both the economic crisis and the political seismic shifts that are upon us. Not content to consume news media and blogs, we now all want to make sense of it, to share our observations, and most of all to connect. So this odd 140-character microblogging platform, known as Twitter, has ballooned in importance. In the last week, the Financial Times published a full-page article about Twitter. U.S. Congresspeople tweeted during Obama’s speech to the joint houses of Congress, and Keith Olbermann’s CountDown described the Congressional "Twits tweeting," and John Stewart ran a great spoof on the new Congressional pastime of tweeting. (The software is called Twitter; the short messages you send are called “tweets.” And yes, anyone who IS anyone is doing it.) The best way to get up to speed on Twitter in my opinion is to use the Twitter How To's and links at Mashable. Feel free to drop me a note. My twitter handle is pattyinboothbay.

How Should Your Company Deal with Twitter?

No matter what your personal opinion is about this phenomenon/fad, you should take note about how your customers and prospects are using Twitter and how your company should be engaging with them using this popular tool.

1. Best Use of Twitter: Real-Time Customer Support. The best way to win the hearts and minds of customers and prospects is to set up a twitter search filter on your company’s and product’s name(s) and to ensure that your customer support organization is tracking and responding to these tweets in real time. Oddly enough, when someone is stuck in line at an airport, having trouble with your Web site, or having difficulty using your product, they are highly likely to tweet about it (before they send you an email or call your support line or while they’re doing so). It’s an easy way for people to vent frustration and reach out to the world. If your customer support team responds quickly, both with a public tweet (so others will know you’re listening) and with a Direct Message to offer personal assistance, you will not only solve that customer’s issue but have that positive experience re-tweeted. Here are a couple of good examples:

• Andybeal: Ordered from Office Depot for the first time—won’t use them again. No delivery Thurs—too busy to deliver. Friday? No explanation & no package

• edwinaoki: Comcast outage. Can't get to anything east of Denver. They say "they hope to have it fixed by 8pm". That's 13 hours!

• TESFox: I have to say, Comcast is doing an excellent job of being there for customer service. Hats off for @comcastcares and the live chat team!

2. Planning and Managing Events. Whatever event you’re planning—whether it’s a local gathering of wine connoisseurs, a training class, a big user conference or a new product launch, Twitter should be part of your pre-, during and post-event communications plan. You can create a buzz before the event and encourage participants to tweet their notes, impressions and commentary during the event, and buzz after the event. You can make it easy for groupies and participants to retweet by providing hashtags (#ourevent) that they can embed in each tweet to make it easy to filter and search.

• gavangibson: #UBL Saul Kaplan: innovation=better way to deliver value to customer; zappo.com, virgin

• UserAdvocate: So far #drupalcon:solr is a breath of fresh air. Looking forward to see where he's going with his take on information architecture

• RobynGreenspan: RT @HSMAmericas #WIF09 Patricia Seybold Confirms as Featured Blogger at the World Innovation Forum http://tinyurl.com/abbrxy

3. New Product Launches. Twitter is a great way to get the word out in seductive and non-intrusive ways about upcoming new products or services. Most companies offer a limited number of “beta invites” via Twitter. These become coveted and people start asking for them so they can be part of the in crowd.

• aneel: rt @somic: CohesiveFT launches VPN-Cubed for EC2 - Build-your-own [transatlantic] [on-demand] private network in cloud! http://bit.ly/xqUqa

• utopiah: @tonylucas a friend told me I should ask for a beta invite, since Im curious about cloud computing services, here I tweet ;)

4. Customer Outreach and Gentle Evangelism. Many brand managers have managed to find the perfect tone in their Tweets. They don’t barrage you with blatant PR or marketing. They ask for reactions. They thank you when you DO tweet about their products or brands. They float ideas. They engage with people.

• angie1234p: @RockYourDay Morning Dave. Have I got news for you lol Molson Canadian is on Twitter (@MolsonFerg) Thought you might find it interesting :) [PBS: Fans notice your presence!]

• BlakeSunshine: @jessiecarp I work at National Instruments on www.ni.com/community- hope your semester is off to a great start

5. Drive Traffic to Your Site, Blog, E-Store, YouTube. Apart from free give-aways, twitterers don’t appreciate blatant product pitches. They’ll “unfollow” you quickly. But we do love to pass around links to great funny videos, useful commentary, insightful analysis, useful tips and tricks. Make sure that your contributions include seductive links that people will value.

• artrox: RT @thebrandbuilder @alydesigns @peopledesign: '5 Lessons in Business Innovation' http://tinyurl.com/bnwmvb (design around your customer) [PBS: Note the ReTweet—being passed along—also the use of a “tinyurl” which saves space]

• it_world: The cloud and the public sector - water and oil?: Public sector CIOs should look to the leading cloud computing .. http://tinyurl.com/d7hmep

• QuadrilleKnits: we now have over 3,000 followers on twitter..Quadrille_Books, QuadrilleFood, QuadrilleEco, QuadrilleHome, Student Cook, Jewish_Princess etc!

• doingmedia: @christinawodtke Congrats on the 2nd edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web http://ping.fm/Tlv8A

6. Monitor Your Brand/Reputation. Twitter is the least expensive and most effective way to track your brand’s reputation online. You can just set up a search filter, turn the feed into an RSS feed (so you can capture and analyze it as it flies by) and then take actions to improve customer experience and/or amplify the good vibes.

• tivogrrl: “Enjoyed seeing USAA at Mx 2009. They are a financial services company that really gets customer service.”

• AdayVA: “@VistaPrint Thanks for ease of use and great customer service :)”

• richsharples: “Innovation loves a crisis, but only after customer have stepped out from under their desks” - classic Jonathan Schwartz quote [PBS: Jonathan Schwartz is the CEO of Sun—monitor execs’ names as well as company, brand and product names]

• josephnasto: Wal-Mart Customer Finds Human Teeth in New Wallet http://tinyurl.com/bt7zan

Analyzing Twitter Activity in an Integrated Web Analytics Platform

What if you are in charge of monitoring all search and social media activity around your products and your brands and constantly tuning your brand’s SEO and site merchandising? Ideally, you want an integrated approach for monitoring, analyzing, and taking action on the searches, tweets, blog posts, and buzz that’s swirling around your brand and your products. There are two keys to success:

1. Put the responsibility to monitor, analyze, and take action in the hands of a single coordinated team, don’t silo it across your firm’s PR, social media, e-commerce, SEO and site search, product and promotion merchandising, and customer support teams. Things move fast. You need to be able to get in front of the customer parade, not behind it! It’s fine to have distributed responsibilities for analyzing, tracking, and acting on customers’ buzz, interactions, and activity, but you’ll want to function as a virtual team, and ideally to use an integrated platform—one that lets you spot trends quickly and take action quickly.

2. Provide your team with integrated tools that let you monitor and analyze activity in real time across all of the different internal and external traffic sources that you monitor—those you control and those you don’t control.

The good news is that the leading-edge search analytics and e-merchandising platforms are embracing the leading edge social media trends.

Omniture Embraces Twitter

One of the top search analytics and e-merchandising platforms—the one used by the majority of large brands—is Omniture. It’s good news that the Mercedes Benz of e-commerce search and merchandising is moving with Porsche-like agility to embrace the leading edge social media platform. In a Mashable blog post, entitled: Omniture Adds Twitter Analytics for Brands, Jennifer Van Grove writes:

“You could try one of these 10 reputation tracking tools, but Omniture’s already powerful analytics product, SiteCatalyst, is now the first of its kind to actually import Twitter data for better measurement of brand activity. Omniture’s already powerful analytics product, SiteCatalyst, is now the first of its kind to actually import Twitter data for better measurement of brand activity.

Omniture currently boasts 5,100 clients—think AOL, Microsoft, Oracle, and eBay—capturing more than 1 trillion online transactions per quarter, and is now hoping to support their clients looking for Twitter insights on par with the standard Web analytics they’re used to receiving.

After importing Twitter data into SiteCatalyst, Omniture customers will be able to identify brand advocates and detractors, better acknowledge feature requests from loyal users, categorize Twitterers as customers, vendors, or employees, and get real-time alerts via email or SMS based on specified criteria like spikes in brand mentions. Users will even be able to generate limitless keyword reports - via tweet text scanning - to further segment, analyze, and dissect Twitter-related brand data.”

Tagging the Physical World

When I was a young French teacher, I used to put big signs on all the objects in our classroom (which was actually an old farmhouse) with their French names—la table, le cahier, la chaise, le mur, la peinture, le chat (the cat didn’t like it very much!). I was reminded of this practice when I stumbled upon a similar real-world tagging phenomenon that is cropping up in odd places around the world. It’s a form of mobile tagging, using Semapedia and QR Codes. Semapedia is a research site that lets people create two-dimensional bar codes for physical objects, paste a label with the code on the objects, and link those objects to a Wikipedia article. QR codes (which stands for Quick Response) are the specific 2D bar codes that people seem to have gravitated towards. A QR Code is a matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. While the patent is held by Denso-Wave, the company encourages broad usage. QR codes were originally used in Japan for tracking automobile parts. But they soon began to be used by advertisers who placed them on posters and products in order to provide a quick link to a specific promotion via customers’ mobile phones.

Citizen-Tagging for Fun and Edification

Now, all over the world, people are pasting labels with 2-dimensional bar codes on them onto buildings and objects of all kinds. The purpose of these tags is to provide a link to a relevant Wikipedia article. It’s a citizen-led, guerrilla approach to linking objects in the physical world to useful context and information in the virtual world.

These tags are turning up on stores, museums, paintings, ATM machines, bridges, street corners, parks, records, books, and other types of merchandise. (I found a tag on a carton of San Pelligrino bottled water and another tag on a shelf with Perrier.) If you have a mobile phone with the right software installed, you can point your phone’s camera at the bar code, and the code will be converted into a mobile-URL link to the Wikipedia article about that object. If you take a photograph of the object and upload it to Flickr and add your geographic coordinates, it will also appear on a map which is maintained at Semapedia.org.

Being Where Your Customers Are / Supporting the Flow of Content and Data: The Importance of Community Platform Integration

By Matthew Lees, Vice President and Analyst / Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group

Leveraging the potential of online communities and social media means:

1. Engaging customers with your brand and helping them hold informed and meaningful conversations about your company, your products, and your services wherever these conversations may arise. Your corporate Web site might be the center of your online universe, but it’s not the center of theirs. Sure, they come to your company-sponsored community, but they’re also talking about you in the other B2B and B2C communities they frequent, at social and professional networking sites, and inside the firewall on their company’s intranet.

2. Getting customer-related data to flow easily and appropriately between your own applications. Their data is in their community profiles and in your HR, CRM, sales automation, and other systems.

Integrating applications that share community content and customer data helps deliver on this potential. Integration is all about getting content to move in and out of the community, quickly and securely, to wherever else it may need to be…perhaps your corporate Web site, your service and support application, your CRM system, Facebook or LinkedIn, or wherever else your customers and their data are.

More and more companies are successfully integrating community content and data with other systems and networks. Here are a few examples:

• GlobalTravelBlog.com gives traveler enthusiasts an interactive, map-based interface for finding posts of interest from experienced travelers. The social media platform provider Awareness built this mashup to integrate community content with Google Maps.

• Neutrogena lets its customers participate in its “Beautiful For Good” community directly from Facebook, via an integrated application created by LiveWorld, its community platform provider. If you’re a Facebook aficionado, you don’t need to leave Facebook and go to the Beautiful For Good site to participate.

• Logitech helps its customers find answers and solutions—whether these reside in its own extensive knowledgebase or in its community forums—by integrating its community platform (Lithium) and its knowledge management system (RightNow Service). Search for “mouse problem,” and you’ll be returned a single page that shows relevant and ranked matches in both the Lithium-powered community and the RightNow-powered knowledgebase. No more searching both areas separately. This integration also helps Logitech’s support agents ensure there are no unanswered questions in the discussion forums and lets them easily turn effective customer-created solutions into more formal knowledgebase articles.