Outside Innovation

MIT's Smart Mobility Project Featured at TEDx Boston

I enjoyed Ryan Chin's presentation about the MIT Smart Cities' mobility on demand project.  It's a compelling vision with some great green engineering (intelligent wheels, folding electric cars and one-way vehicle-sharing). An important next step: creation of the software required to manage the dynamic pricing required to incentivize people to return cars, scooters, and bikes to the locations with the most demand.  Here's a link to my report on the innovative work being done by this team under the visionary leadership of Prof. William J. Mitchell at MIT. Here's the great conceptual map that CollectiveNext created during Ryan's talk.

Image: Franco Vairani

NBC Consumer Content -- Where is it Going??

Cameron Death (pronounced deeth), VP Digital Content, NBC Universal at Forrester conference.

How consumer attitudes towards TV have changed.. primetime networks crossed with cable networks in 2002/2003.. in terms of marketshare... So major networks have increased their cable share. We're an industry that has had to shift to make changes in terms of consumer viewing habits.

DVRs is one of the most fundamental shifts.. 34% of people who watch The Office do so in a time-shifted mode. So we're doing a lot of stuff to keep viewers and consumers engaged throughout the time-shifted experience.

Showed same Broadband and Internet chart.. Video online is now a reality. The pipe is wide open. If you look at the growth of YouTube.. 28 billion minutes spent last year 90% growth; 300 million users.

Since adoption rates (new technology coming up to 50% adoption) is happening faster and faster, so we as content providers have to up our rates of delivering content on all platforms. Multiple screens going at the same time, e.g. watching tv, surfing online, IM'ing with friends, etc.

Are You Empowering Your Customers to Codify Their Knowledge and Share It with Others?

Customers Contribute Perspectives

Much ado has been made about user-generated content (UGC). Yet it’s often difficult to do well. There are several U.S. news organizations that have opened up blogs to reader comments and then closed them back down again due to the vituperative comments they attracted. Other news brands have been more successful in integrating readers’ perspectives and contributions. We’ve written about CNN’s I-Report, commented on MSNBC’s more recent efforts, and, two years ago, chronicled some of the BBC’s initiatives in Outside Innovation and in a longer case study.

 BBC is very aggressive in promoting user-generated content. Just about every third story on their early morning broadcast includes the now familiar mantra, “let us know your thoughts on ‘Have Your Say’ at bbc.co.uk.” At the end of each segment, they read some of the more insightful comments about the day’s stories. YouTube is another great tool for user-generated content. Today’s BBC World morning news featured a story about an activist campaign that Saudi Arabian women are mounting by uploading YouTube videos of women driving cars in Saudi Arabia —part of a campaign to lobby the government to lift the ban on women drivers.

Community 2.0-Lessons Learned from Non-Business Environments

PANEL DISCUSSION

Craig Newmark, Craigslist

In 1994, Craig was working at Charles Schwab evangelizing the Internet. It's an information-intensive business. He began to comment on arts and cultural events. His buddy Jim Buckmaster is the Webmaster. "We pretty much do one thing well. We prefer not to screw it up. I pretty much do full time customer service. I still do. "

Scott Meyer--About.com

Bought a year ago by the New York Times. Our audience is so different than

We're now about the 10th largest on the Internet in terms of business services. We're a distributed publishing network. We're also a technology company... we've developed search optimization and other technologies that are propagated around the company. I didn't start this business. About.com started as a human search company.. rebranded it as About.com to be a full-service portal. We retrenched as search took off.. We made all the people who were organizing content into journalists. and organize communities around those pieces of communities. We've got 600 sites today, each one captures. 60,000 topics. We have the biggest pregnancy site. We also have one on Tatoos, cats, etc. Help you find information and people who share the same interests...

Alexandra Samuel, Social Signal
My previous life was in politics and social science. We worked on on the internet--helping political organizations do grass roots outreach. There were limited ways to mobilize the passion. A couple of years ago, Web 2.0 tools made it easy to mobilize -- A community at the March of Dimes for parents with children who are in neonatal intensive care.

Lessons Learned:
Alex: You have to connect with people who are  passionate about your brands. The approach we use is "Reflective Glory Marketing".. create a community of something that people do feel passionate about. Example: You can Change Everything if you change your bank..Vancity credit ... let's you list all the things you'd like to change in your community... you can't sign up for a credit card there. You can declare what you care about in the community.

Craig: We are a community service to a degree. If you focus on being a community service, you tap into that human social need to connect and to help. Newspapers used to perceive itself as community services, which is important in a country that is trying to be democracies. But in recent years, they've focused on profit margins; they've fired investigative journalists. That's a mistake. There are now folks who are helping journalists get paid for doing investigative journalism. For example, what lobbyists are paying what congressmen for what legislation. It all comes down to community service and trust. It's an interesting observation that the most trusted name in journalism in Stephen Colbert and John Stewart.

Alex: Right, Colbert really gets 2.0.He lets his  fans build and maintain the Colbert Nation web site and he just plays with them on it. 

Scott: I Told the Boston Globe--guys here's the fundamental problem with traditional publishers, I just rented my vacation cottage on Craig's List. You need to decide what you're trying to achieve. If you're a news organization, you have to decide what you're trying to achieve. The NYTimes doesn't want citizen journalism. Lots of people talk about OhMyNews in South Korea. They have 12 or 15 editors, all the content is sent in from folks out in the field.

Craig: Companies should engage their communities to provide better customer service and to improve products. If you have customer company reps on discussion boards where they're helping customers solve problems and have company people visibly listening, to actually change the products and services. Provide discussion boards, engage your community thru them, take some chances. If someone says the wrong thing, it may haunt you, but it's worth the risk. We should also have internal discussion boards. The people on the front lines know a lot more about what's going on... Everyone tells their boss what they want to hear. Internal discussion boards offer the possibility of breaking the internal communication failure.

Scott: About is actually a pretty small organization... 600 people. A lot of our content is generated by contractors. They have their own internal discussion site to share what's going on. It's incredibly valuable. Talk about Control: We did things with NBC for the Olympics.. it's all about the Control of the Olympic Committee. We had a blog that allowed people to sound off about what wasn't working in the NBC coverage of the Olylmpics, which they wanted so they could get out from under that control.

What’s the Value of Customer-Contributed Content? $1.65 Billion!

Customer-created content is good business. Letting customers strut their stuff is profitable.

Google’s acquisition of YouTube is proof that customer-contributed content is shrewd business practice. Going from zero to $1.65 billion in 24 months is an admirable accomplishment. It’s the kind of accomplishment that makes most business people both jealous and incredulous. Yes, letting customers strut their stuff makes very good business sense, indeed! The content is free. Customers flock to the site to see and be seen. Visitors’ viewing, tagging and downloading habits create a natural merchandising engine. It’s cool because others thought it was cool. I can find it easily because others have tagged it.

Customers are playing the roles of Lead Customers/Users, Contributors, Guides, and Promoters.

 
Customers’ Behaviors have Changed the Business Model for the TV Industry

Customer-led merchandising is great marketing. Letting customers strut your stuff reaps advertising revenues and free publicity.

What tickles me is how fast the entertainment companies ran around in front of the customer parade. After years of posturing and hand-wringing about intellectual property protection in the era of file-sharing and easy downloading, all of the major entertainment companies signed up to take part in the spoils.

As the Google/YouTube deal was going down, the dominos fell throughout the movie biz. According to Hiawatha Bray, YouTube deals hint of new era for Net media - The Boston Globe, Universal Studios, Sony BMG, CBS, Warner Music, et al all quickly inked deals with YouTube and Google that go something like this: “It’s OK with us if customers pirate video clips from our movies and TV programming, you (Google-YouTube) tell us about them and give us 50% of the ad revenues.”

This is “found money” – additional revenues they wouldn’t have gotten. It’s also customer-led merchandising. Customers will vote with their eyeballs and their tagging and rating, highlighting as noteworthy programming that might otherwise lag in the Nielsen ratings.

Now, what about all those home videos? Will amateurs also get 50% of the ad revenues for their amazing pet tricks’ videos?