Outside Innovation

Are We Becoming Numb to Creeping Privacy Invasion?

As the political debate swirls around the U.S. President's apparent violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to permit the National Security Agency to engage in domestic wiretapping and email monitoring without obtaining warrants, I find myself comparing and contrasting the outrage I feel about being spied upon by my own government to the way I feel about being spied on by brands whose services I use and trust. It's interesting to me, though, that I seem to trust many service providers who routinely spy on my online behavior.

On the other hand, I'm sure that many of you felt a sense of outrage when you discovered that Apple associates your personal ID with every tune you've ever put into iTunes, whether or not you purchased that music through iTunes. (By the way, this is a feature you can turn off.)

CUSTOMERS AS CREATORS

Customers Create Your Content,
Create Their Products and Your Products,
Create and Share Their Intellectual Property

In 1997, Bo Peabody gave me a tip I have never forgotten: Let your customers strut their stuff!

Back then, 26-year old Bo was the creator and founder of Tripod, a Web site that he designed for college kids and recent grads, like himself, who needed help learning about the basics of life after college. So, Bo created Tripod to provide “Tools for Life” for college-age kids.

Tripod attracted 1 million customers in 27 months—customers who returned to the site several times a week and brought their friends, generating millions of dollars in revenues from fees and advertising. How did a group of college kids build a multi-million-dollar business in two-plus years, netting Bo and his co-founders $58 million when they sold it to Lycos in 1998?

At launch, the Tripod site included a resumé builder. Within the first six months, responding to suggestions from his customers, Bo’s team launched an easy-to-use “Design Your Own Web Page” wizard.

All of a sudden, thousands of people, not just techies, but all kinds of folks, began to create their own Web sites. Up until 1996, only corporations, universities, and a handful of technology-savvy individuals had Web sites. Tripod’s Do-It-Yourself Web Page builder and hosting model changed the landscape of the Internet forever. Instead of sporting a few thousand well-funded corporate Web sites, the I-way suddenly sprouted tens of thousands of personal billboards.

What can you learn from Tripod’s success? Never underestimate your customers’ desire to strut their stuff. Figure out how you can enable and encourage customers to show off their ideas, their dreams, their designs, their ideas, and their accomplishments.

Patty’s Top 5 Wish List for 2006

Here are the things I’d love to see come true for each of you this year:

1. Adopt a customer-driven resource allocation model
2. Instill a culture of customer innovation
3. Shift to customer-centric rewards and measurements
4. Improve the quality of customer-critical information
5. Accelerate your migration to, and your ability to reap the benefits from, an open, adaptive services-based IT architecture

Happy New Year!

2006 Stuttgart, originally uploaded by magnetisch.

Seasons Greetings, courtesy of this great photo found on Flickr!