Digital Digressions

What makes collaboration successful?

Collaboration is becoming increasingly important for both innovation and business success. It is also a key enabler to protect companies in the eye of the storm. Collaboration relies on individuals being accountable to each other ethically. 4 key principles are at the heart of this: Appreciation, Trust, Commitment and Recognition. Read more>>

The death of traditional marketing

The world is changing at an unprecedented pace. Connectivity is changing how information is created and distributed and conversations between consumers build brands more than communication strategies do. It’s a cut throat world out there as this little video illustrates better than a 1000 worlds. So for those who still wonder why communities are so important and why companies need to learn to converse with their consumers rather than talk at them - look no further:

Did you know?

Right now I'm in the midst of a huge annual effort in the company to gather up insights, trends and inspiration to kick-off our annual innovation process - taking a starting point in a broad understanding of the world (both long-term and short-term) and making sure that insights are at the heart of how we innovate as a company.

When I say 'innovation' I literally mean 'the act of generating more value for the consumer, customer and the business by fulfilling a need or job to be done better than anyone else'. And to do that well, you of course need to understand what the needs and jobs to be done are out there - where can you be better, do more and be more relevant than you were even just a few months ago.

Of course it is a challenge to make sure you have as much relevant insight as hand as possible - but the second challenge is quite the opposite - the sheer quantity of information that is now available and the rate it also changes presents quite a task to ensure you don't drown people in information, but sift through it all - establish patterns and digest and present the insights in ways that make it workable for a wide range of people from different disciplines.(Remember: none of us are as smart as all of us, so the more people you can involve in the innovation effort the better chance you have of innovating both on small, medium and large scale and often you'll need all of those to be truly groundbreaking). So you need to create an inspiring and empowering experience, sparking ideas as opposed to anxiety (too much information, I can't handle it) or the opposite: boredom (I've heard it all before: what's new?).

One thing that I came across recently, is this 'Did you know' range of videos - which are very inspiring in how they contextualise the pace of change taking place right now. Below is the original video, which also talk about things we need to do as humanity to make sure we can keep abreast with the developments. I am told that the CEO of Coke recently used to get his team of senior leaders thinking about the pace of change. Below that is the other video, a 2008 update of some of the facts mentioned. So insights can be inspiring - in fact, when you really know what's going on - you realise we are all living on borrowed time and the more we understand that, the more likely we are to stay in business in the future too.

The LEGO Innovation Model

Innovation is one of those topics rife with debate and often what is innovation to one person is business-as- usual for the next. Communicating an innovation is often half the job of getting it on the shelf and innovators and designers alike, regardless of where they work, often have to be relentlesss lobbyists and use sophisticated tools of persuasion to further their concepts such as fancy presentations, multi-media, eye-popping visuals - you name it, these are the tools of the designer witch-craft. Needless to say, invariably the more skilled you are in all this, the more sought-after you are as a designer.

What we did at LEGO revamping our innovation process flew in the face of a lot of this. We recognised that some of this 'witch-craft' was getting in the way of making solid business decisions. Concepts were bought into, not because they had a solid business case behind them, but because people developed emotional attachments to them or saw it as their ticket to career advancement to push something through, regardless of the cost. To be fair, this happens all over the place, not just LEGO, but the difference is we chose to do something about it. Arguably some of this, along with the very hard work of the entire organisation in many different areas goes some way to explaining our remarkable turnaround from the doldrums in 2003 where our survival as a company was at stake. Last year, we posted our best results ever in the company's entire 75 year history. Perhaps just a little bit of that remarkable turnaround was down to this.

http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/en/About-Design/managingdesign/Design-at-LEGO/

The link above leads you to the full case study published at the Design Council site and it makes not only for some very good reading, but also is a timely reminder of the value a common tool can have in bringing different disciplines together working on innovation that combines design and business thinking instead of encouraging a war between the two. Having a shared language is tantamount to bringing people together and this model in particular has helped us have some hard-hitting, but objective debates about the merits of concepts and collectively understand how to improve them. Only by creating a shared foundation can you have any hope in trying to solve a problem together.

Leadership lessons from John Wooden

Something I wanted to share with you that landed in my inbox earlier and in its simplicity captures more about leadership than many books written on the subject. Leadership is not something you are born with, it is something you do to people, either well or abysmally. We all have sour memories of how it felt when someone did it badly and we may be privileged enough to know someone who really inspires us in this regard. After all, its much easier to point to who is a good or bad leader, than it is pinpointing what it is they do or don't do that makes us say that.

However, John Wooden may be able to help us. He is generally regarded as the nation's greatest basketball coach. His UCLA teams during the 1960s and 1970s won 10 NCAA men's basketball national championships and set records for consecutive victories. But since retiring in 1975, the 97-year-old coach has gained fame as a philosopher and motivator.

[From LA Times]

Wooden sat down with The Times and offered up 10 tips -- one for each of the NCAA basketball championships his players won at UCLA -- for how business owners can become better leaders.

1. Listen.

One thing that is often overlooked in leadership is the ability to listen. Listening is so important to those under your supervision.

2. Care.

Another very important part of leadership is to make those under your supervision feel that you care for them -- not just for the job they are doing for you, but you really care for them personally. You just can't tell them you do that, you have to show it.

While some roles aren't as big or in the forefront as others, they are still very important. I used to use this analogy: It is like having a powerful car. Now the engine, like an Alcindor [now called Kareem Abdul-Jabbar], who played for me, that's powerful. Here's another fellow who is just a wheel. And there is another fellow who is just a nut that holds the wheel on. You have to have them all. You must make every person feel that they are needed.

3. Recognize.

When I was teaching in high school in basketball, for example, [I taught that] my players must never score without thanking someone. Don't run over and shake their hand but look at them and give them a little sign or something of appreciation. Everybody likes to have a pat on the back.

4. Prepare.

[Managers should be aware of] preparation for whatever their job is, little or big, preparation is so important. Failure to prepare is preparing to fail. You must not put things off.

5. Be industrious.

Nothing can be accomplished without work. You've got to work hard. If you are looking for the short cut, if you are looking for the easy way, if you are looking for the trick to get things done, you might get them done. But you are not adding strength, you are not building.

6. Have enthusiasm.

If you don't enjoy what you are doing you are not going to be able to give it the industriousness that you should have. You must have that to inspire others to do their best.

7. Be patient.

Good things take time. And that's the way it should be. We don't want it that way but that's the way it is. I think that is a very important thing that a leader must get across to those under his supervision.

8. Have confidence.

You must believe in yourself. If you don't have confidence in yourself you can't expect those under your supervision to act with much confidence.

9. Don't fear failure.

Have initiative but don't be afraid of failure. We are all going to fail at times because we are all imperfect. When I had assistants, I always wanted them never to be afraid to make a suggestion. We don't know a thing we don't learn from somebody else in one way or another. If you do agree [with their suggestion] and use it and it works, be sure that they are the one that gets the credit, not you. Now if it doesn't work, you take the blame because you made that decision to use it.

10. Win respect.

You have to have the respect of those under your supervision. You can't obtain that respect unless you are honest with them and they can depend upon you. Don't try to sell them a bill of goods or you will lose all respect.

Some very good rules to live your life by. Enough said.

Train Yourself Smarter

Sounds like the ominous beginning to a self-help book, but there is more truth to the title that what you may think. There are plenty of studies out there that suggest the positive benefits of brain training, often suggesting that doing cross-words and memorising long lists is a good way to get yourself thinking smarter, faster. However, this is like saying that simply doing curls with a dumb-bell will make you an Olympic athlete. It's not purely the muscle fitness that matters, it's the whole package, so aerobic fitness, endurance, stamina you name it - all have a part to play in what finally comes together in an explosive meter sprint for the finish line. Same with your brain.

Or put more precisely, of course intellectual stimulus helps develop your brain, but so does physical training. In fact, research published from Harvard Business Review onwards, suggests that if we want to increase our mental capacity, we have to increase our physical fitness to match. This, because the brain like any other muscle in our body depends on blood flow to do its thing and the higher your metabolism and ability to sustain physical exercise at an beyond your aerobic threshold, the better 'oiled' is the machine to deliver continuously on what makes all of us smarter - learning.

It's hard to learn anything when you are tired, it's even harder when you are stressed and learning is what allows your brain to build more connections between neurons, which can potentially fire and give you ideas, helping you be more creative, think faster or even just make the right decision ahead of the wrong one. Worst of all, many of the high pressure jobs out there today requiring continuously operating at stress-levels, make learning all but impossible, so cycles of burn-out are not uncommon. We work hard, feel under pressure to do things better, smarter, faster so we get stressed, making it harder for us to learn how to do things differently, so we then get frustrated, which of course makes us even more stressed... you know the drill.

Interestingly, it is not all out of our hands however. There is a way of being methodical about it all and making it possible for you to prime yourself for some very steep learning curves, perhaps radical career changes even or new jobs in other companies where the mix of the familiar to the new is radically turned on its head and you have to spend most of your time learning, before you can become productive. This is crunch-time for many of us. Can we not just make the transition, learn what is necessary for us to deliver on the job, but also ensure we keep learning to make sure we stay ahead and begin not just doing the usual but increasingly the extra-ordinary?

Research suggests that balancing our increasingly busy work lives with some well-developed and above all challenging exercise can help us do just that.

From bikeradar A recent study from Illinois, USA gives further evidence that exercise can augment brain power.

Using 110 students researchers looked at a battery of fitness criteria (eg endurance run, push-ups, body mass index, etc) then selected the low and high scoring subjects to represent low and high fitness students [4].

All subjects were also assessed for IQ, visual cognitive speed by presenting randomly arranged pictures and activity. Additionally they were wired up to an electroencephalogram to measure brain activity across various regions of the skull. This allowed researchers to look at how fitness levels related to brain function. Their conclusion is very telling: “We found that aerobic fitness was positively associated with neuroelectric function and behavioural performance in preadolescent children engaged in a stimulus discrimination task”

Put more simply: fit children have better functioning brains. 

This research makes promotion of active pastimes and sports something we older humans should be engaged in for the well being of younger generations and it’s good for you at any stage of life too. Research on elderly subjects from 70 to 90 suggests that walking alone “is associated with a reduced risk of dementia” [5]. Across most age groups it appears that exercise of even a modest amount helps to keep the brain functioning better.

The bottom line is you don’t need to break 20 minutes for 10-miles or win a Grand Tour to gain positive mental health benefits from exercise. As Max Ehrmann wrote in his 1927 Desiderata: “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself”.

And this is the point exactly, to improve fitness - not accelerate your burnout. I can personally attest to both greater learning capacity and ability to sustain higher workloads since I started a regime of road cycle training. I have gone from 30km nearly finishing me off to losing over 10kg and riding 140km the other weekend at a pace many of my fellow riders had to work hard to keep up with. This is progress for sure, but what it really has helped me do is be the reset-button to hard work, crazy travel, lots of pressure and make sure I stop, get out there, blast around the country-side getting rid of adrenaline and all those nasty stress hormones that make us sleep badly, gain weight and over time get depressed. Instead, by finding an outlet that works I am happier and have made greater leaps and bounds in terms of progress in everything I do, because as the quote goes in Starwars - it brings balance to the force.

Think Eco-Systems not just Issues

Take global warming or government regulation as examples - these are all very complex topics, collections of variables where solving the problem cannot be achieved through solving one issue alone, but in fact the solution rests in addressing the eco-system tying together all the inter-linked variables. In fact, seeing things on purely the issue level may in fact be contributing to the problem.

In the book Freakonomics the authors quote numerous examples of cases where seemingly complex phenomena have very simple origins, but often in an entirely different field and the eco-system magnifies the impact through all the inter-related variables and creates an impact on local, sometimes national and international levels. One of the striking examples is their analysis of crime figures in large cities in the US. The numbers were growing at epic proportions year-on year until sometime in the mid-eighties the trend suddenly stopped and began a steady decline. Experts tried to attribute this reversal to anything from an increase in spending on the police, a growth in numbers of staff, prisons, different governments, new laws etc. but the biggest impact came from the legalisation of abortion.

How could this have anything to do with crime figures you may wonder? Here the eco-system comes in: the women most likely to have an abortion back in the 60s where women in low-income households with several children already and who before the legalisation either had to risk their lives to have an abortion by often unqualified people in unsafe conditions and risk prosecution or not have one at all. Many didn't and subsequently struggled to look after their children, who often ended up in crime from a lack of opportunity in life. As abortion became legal in many states, the numbers of these 'unwanted' children dropped and the sheer numbers of disadvantaged youth decreased, thus decreasing the populace likely to commit crime. It's not to say that the other measures had no impact at all, but collectively they helped solve the problem as the eco-system of ideal conditions leading to crime gradually became more untenable.

Biofuels are another example of where eco-system thinking really needs to be applied on a much larger scale than today - touted as the solution to the West's reliance on fossil fuels, the growth of crops destined for biofuels is now accelerating across the world, leading to an increased rate of rain forest destruction (these are our most efficient weapon in clearing CO2 from the atmosphere) as land is being cleared to grow palm oil - a crucial ingredient in biofuels. Much agricultural land previously home to food production is being converted to grow crops for biofuel, putting food production in danger. The biggest irony of all is that the process of producing biofuels has a greater negative impact on global warming than fossil fuel use - proving that there is no simple 'solution' to global warming, in fact simple solutions may in fact be aggravating it further, instead we need to think in eco-systems, not just locally, but nationally and internationally.

Nancy Gibbs of Time, talks in her column about the Vatican reflecting on its mortal sins for the modern age (24th March 2008) of the fact that back in the past sloth, lust, greed, envy and anger accounted for virtually all the crimes of mankind, whereas today the issues that once were the clear culprits behind our follies and misfortunes are far more complex than the 7 deadly sins alone. Causes and consequences come together to form eco-systems, where one problem feeds another and addressing consequences is meaningless without understanding and addressing the causes. Contextualising what was once simple in our now increasingly interlinked world - Quoting Mohandas Gandhi's version of the 7 deadly sins:

• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Science without humanity
• Knowledge without character
• Politics without principle
• Commerce without morality
• Worship without sacrifice

The responsibility rests with the individual, but that includes the duty to take care of others as well as yourself.

Institutional hubris meets the empowered consumer: The Terminal 5 song

A while ago I treated you to the full transcript of my own experience with British Airways on my return journey, which got delayed a full 28 hours. Back last summer that was an epic delay and worthy of headlines, but it pales in comparison to the debacle known as Terminal 5.

Newspapers here in the UK have been full of articles cataloguing the events that transpired when the new Terminal was finally opened to the public, mass-scale computer failures preventing anyone from logging in to check in passengers, an incomprehensible baggage-handling system that failed as soon as it was turned on, an elaborate and beautiful glass-covered building with inadequate signing and logic to handling vast quantities of people needing to move from one floor to the next, the list is endless.

Outraged consumers have filled columns and airwaves venting their spleen about how this kind of behaviour can be tolerated and how come no one has sued the pants off BA and BAA by now - it surely would happen in the States. The most creative expression of consumer-generated discontent is the Terminal 5 song that captures brilliantly some of the madness that this episode in the history of disasters known as BA/BAA ventures and service - it's even catchy! Bring on the empowered consumer!

Hello world... and a new book: Groundswell

No, contrary to popular belief i have not fallen off the edge of the planet (just yet) although my silence recently could have given you that impression. Things have just been bonkers, I have been travelling too much and at times been so tired I have had absolutely nothing to add, which knowing my ability to talk may actually come as a blessing to my colleagues..

Things are looking up though - for those of you who followed my efforts to use this blog to recruit someone to join me, the news is: it worked! Surprisingly social networks and namely Facebook came to my rescue in that a friend came across the blog post and thought of a friend who would be perfect for the job (and he is!) and told me to get in touch (via Facebook). Sounds serendipitous and it was - but it turned out to be the best bit of sideways recruitment I've ever done. Now we both owe him a beer so Alex, when you do stop twittering and feel the onset of a beer, let us know.

Apart from that many things are afoot, which I need to share with you in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I wanted to build on the topic of communities, social networking and the lot and introduce you to a new book, Groundswell where my colleague, Tormod Askildsen, head of community development at LEGO has been interviewed too. read a little here on the topic of AFOLs or Adult Fans of LEGO:

Groundswell on Social Media Today

Avoiding the 3 pitfalls of Innovation based on Insight

Don't get me wrong - I'm a fierce proponent of innovation based on insight. How else would you be able to frame your innovation and understand whether what you are proposing is even relevant, unless you understand the competitive landscape in which you operate? The purpose of this post is not to question whether you need insights or delve into how innovation works or how to fuel it, but instead, assuming you have a smooth running innovation machine - and you work from solid consumer insight - how come things can still go wrong?

Interestingly, cognitive science can help us here, specifically the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who three decades ago explored the benefits and risks of heuristics, or shortcuts in thinking. Heuristics help to explain the time we get it wrong even when having been presented with all the reasonable information and insight, which presumably should have led us to make the right conclusions rather than the wrong ones. There are three errors, which are common when this happens:

Anchoring error - This is when you seize on the first bit of information and basically make your mind up before you have heard the whole argument, even when some subsequent findings may be contradicting what you seized on initially.

Availability error - This is when some surprising findings emerge that remind you of a dramatic past case and you mistakenly apply mental models or conclusions from that case to new findings and rationalise them in the same way, again leading you to potentially make the wrong conclusion.

Attribution error - Despite getting a ton of insight, it can sometimes be very tempting to group these findings into stereotypes and grossly generalise, to see information as ways of confirming what you already know, rather than seeing the little inklings that your stereotypes aren't correct. Here again the information may be correct, but your use of it incorrect.

These mistakes are all very human and can easily happen, but research in other fields are showing just how dangerous these mistakes can be. In the engineering field these errors can lead to countless hours spent hunting for a technical problem in the wrong place, in the medical fields the very same mistakes can lead to gross misdiagnosis and potential patient deaths and of course in design, to redundant products and solutions. To err is human, but to err without learning from your mistakes is plain stupid.

Understanding Innovation

Innovation is one of those words that are very hip these days. Granted, even I have it in my title. Interestingly, it is also one of the most misunderstood words in business today, so perhaps it's worth spending a little time understanding exactly where it comes from.

If you look for the definition of creativity on Wikipedia, you'll find over 60 different versions - most will agree on the basic premises below and beyond that, the views are radically different depending on your scientific or cultural background. Summarising:

• At the simplest level, creativity is about bringing into being something that was not there before
• Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of ideas and concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts
• Creativity occurs when a person thinks a thought that is outside the space of thoughts that is even conceivable to that person Margaret A. Boden

Now creativity is not innovation, although the two are frequently confused for one another. Innovation is actually made up of two halves:

• Imagination: No new ideas can be generated without a person’s abilities to ‘ think outside the box’ or envision alternative ways in her mind
• Creativity: No insights, however brilliant, will ever be realised unless they are projected out, i.e given material form

A person’s creative expression is the visible face of imagination at work.

Imagination and creativity are each faces of a coin called innovation

With this in mind, innovation becomes a process of fueling the imagination and using creativity to bring into existence the ideas at imagination gives rise to. The two go hand in hand and innovation becomes very hard if a) your imagination is stifled or b) you lack the creativity to bring to life the ideas that you've had.

Therefore fostering innovation is about a process to ensure that there is enough food and stimuli for individual and collective imaginations to engage and about creating avenues for creative expressions to materialise and be improved iteratively either by individuals or collectively. Some past blog posts to inspire you:

Avoiding Creative Apartheid 

Why Innovation cannot remain in the realm of the few

The 7 Must-Do's of Innovators

How to Encourage Innovation in Business

The Conditions for Thriving Innovation

That is not to say that these traits all need to exist in a single individual, instead they can collectively emerge in a community, in an organisation, a film crew, and so on. Successful organisations, communities or creative groups accommodate both the acquisition of stimuli to inspire the imagination of members as well as individuals with an ability to creatively realise those ideas. Collectively or individually, an essential part of innovation is the social dimension that fuels imagination and creativity as well as the process of iterative improvement. None of us are as smart as all of us.

Avoiding Creative Apartheid

Right, here we are - new year, new challenges and not surprisingly: probably still a lot of the old challenges about too, hopefully with the wisdom (and increased girth) of some time off during Christmas, we will be able to approach those issues afresh.

So my first post of the year is dedicated to a topic capable of arising fury within me, over and over again - despite my (by now) many years within the field of design and most recently innovation. This topic, so aptly named Creative Apartheid by Gary Hamel, captures the problem very well:

Too many executives seem to believe that while few people in the company may be really clever and creative, most folks aren't. Gary Hamel

Just before Christmas in fact, did something happen that reminded me yet again of how widely spread this notion is and how it can easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy - i.e this way of thinking means that those esteemed to be 'creative' become intellectually lazy and stop making an effort to ensure that those not currently deemed to belong to the 'creative class' can make a useful contribution, thus proving that creative output invariably only comes from those already belonging to this group of esteemed individuals. Sound confusing? Let me explain by using an example of something that happened to me recently:

2 external consultants had been hired to revamp the value proposition of a service. Famed for their role in a number of award-winning commercials and one being a well-known author, this pair had the credentials of 'creative genius' written all over them, certainly within the advertising field. Personally I have nothing against the duo and find their work and ideas highly refreshing, but what happened next is what constitutes the problem.

To boost the creative work a series of brainstorms had been called, with a mixture of both individuals from the team involved in providing the service as well as a few select externals, including myself, whose insight and background was relevant to the task at hand. Coming in to the workshops I was taken aback by firstly, how linguistically focused many of the excercises were in the sense that not only did they focus on creating ideas, but also crafting these ideas into the most beautiful prose ever - all at the same time. Secondly, the sessions dived straight in, with no warm-up whatsoever to bring the team together and with a very ambitious agenda of work to achieve by the end of the day.

As you would expect, the sessions floundered and much less was accomplished in the time available than what the organisers hoped for. The two consultants, like everyone else, were completely drained by the days activities and proceeded to question why some of the individuals had been present at the meeting, when they clearnly weren't going to contribute anything. It appeared that lines had got crossed between the leaders of the group and the consultants as to what was the outcome of the session and who should be involved. Some of the comments from the consultants annoyed me hugely and I began to think in detail about what had happened and why I had adjusted to their working methods and some of the others hadn't.

1. Relaxing before innovating - check out some 'non-method' methods of how to get people to drop some of the familiar office-induced tensions and anxieties that are the enemy of any creative brainstorm Running Creative Brainstorms
2. Beware of imposing your own ideal way of working on others - advertising as an industry seems to be extremely word-heavy, rewarding to people with linguistic intelligence and capability, but those who lean more towards visual or spatial intelligence, or indeed are capable technological innovation sometimes struggle expressing their ideas purely in words. Be aware of your own comfort zone in terms of not just working style, but also jargon and lingo pertaining to your own professional field and how that can turn off people who aren't doing the same work as you. What are the things that all of you have in common? Concentrate on that to bring together a diverse team and build on everybody's strengths rather than exposing their weaknesses.
3. Don't divide people into the creative and non-creative, not even implicitly - a Freudian slip earlier in the day from one of the leaders made the rest of the day excruciating to say the least. When discussing how the groups should be split, rather than just talking names, the person emphasised the importance of having at least one 'creative' per group, this way of talking of course again deriving from the advertising industry's way of talking collectively about creatives when in fact meaning art directors and copy writers, yet to non-advertising folk this sounds like dividing people into creative and non-creative people. Again, when this is the perception, it is needless to ask why anyone would bother contributing.
4. Concentrate on one task at a time - Again, break things down into manageable-sized chunks - if you are a team with a track record of previously working together your chunks can be bigger, but your innovation may only be incremental as being familiar with each other means your thinking may already have got stuck in some grooves. To avoid this manifestation of group-think, you could adopt a role-play approach, where each of you champions the cause of a specific group relevant to the problem you are trying to solve, for instance consumers, marketers, designers, programmers etc. If you are a diverse team, the chunks need to be smaller, yet your innovation can potentially be bigger, because fresh pairs of eyes on old problems can help see things from new angles.
5. Plan accordingly - if it is a huge task you are embarking on, and you have a diverse team to help you with it, one brainstorm or workshop may not be enough, but you instead need to plan a sequence of them, progressively narrowing down the scope. Again, the earlier you start your planning the more options you have at your disposal.
6. The facilitator often does the most work, but invisibly so make sure you have one and that they understand what is expected of them and why the others are there - The best facilitators just make things happen and that's how it seems, but the reality is very much that of the swan in the lake, above the water graciously gliding past, making it seem effortless while feet paddle feverishly under water to keep the bird moving. That is the facilitator for you and with a diverse team the facilitator often has to be the one capturing comments, building on people's comments, coaxing input from the more quieter team members, keeping time, the lot. A task not to be underestimated and often the success of any brainstorm is down to how good the facilitation was.
7. If language is an issue, focus on expressing ideas, not composing the most lyrical prose - Capturing ideas and phrasing them for most conceptual impact are two different things and require two very different modes of thinking: ideas need your mind to be in open-mode, thinking freely, broadly and making lateral links as well as conceptual jumps. Finding the best adjectives to describe a product you already know what it is, requires your mind to be in closed mode - analysing, evaluating. Often people stuggle to leap from one mode to the next in the same session, so it's a good idea to split them apart, forcing everyone to be in the same mode all at the same time.
8. Allow contribution and input, even when the official session has ended - particularly if this is your own team you are drawing upon, it's no good if you normally tell them to zip it when they have a suggestion or idea for you and then you ask them when it suits you. Walk the talk and allow people to be part of the beginning as well as the end. Sometimes you can't make amendments anymore despite people coming up with an excellent idea, but grace them with an honest explanation of the situation and if possible, think up a way of using their idea somewhere where it still can make a difference. If you do that, you find people are more willing to help you too.
9. Having the idea is the easy bit, implementing it is often hard - that means making sure the ideas live on beyond the brainstorm and they will, if you have observed the rules above. People you have involved will have a vested interest in making sure the ideas survive and are acted upon, because they were part of creating them, but invariably it will take a lot of hard work, not just from you, but from everyone - so what better than having a team around willing to help!

So creative brainstorms can work - and pooling people's ideas, regardless of background and don't you believe anyone that tells you the opposite. In fact, if the brainstorm didn't come out as planned, rather than blame others, it's worth taking a long, hard look at yourself to see if you indeed committed some of the mistakes catalogued above. Fix the problem and try again. As Gary Hamel puts it:

When you look at companies like Toyota, you see their ability to mobilize the intelligence of the so-called ordinary workers. Going forward, no company will be able to afford to waste a single iota of human imagination and intellectual power.

Deeper Sense of Luxury

In an earlier post I talked about what makes a good toy, contrasting two rival consumer mindsets against one another as partially to blame for the problem with toys imported from China: on one hand the desire (or expectation) for safety and quality at knock-down prices; on the other hand - the (almost) accepted transitory nature of many products and the subsequent unwillingness to spend money on products where safety and quality are taken extremely seriously.

So where the true cost of quality has eluded people, and the effects of low quality not being completely clear (until now), it has been an easy option for many companies caught in this dilemma to go for Chinese-manufactured products as keeping manufacture in Europe or the US would simply have created prices that consumers would not be willing to pay.

However this is beginning to change. First indications of this was the emergent trading up, trading down trend where people deliberately sought to save money through highly thrifty shopping for everyday essentials, yet splashing out on upgrading select items in luxury outlets. Yet, contributing to the warped sense of value is of course the flip-side to all this, where reports and documentaries detailing how many luxury labels charge a premium for the 'perception' of quality they embody, but in actual fact many products are manufactured just the same as ordinary priced items. Luxury items simply command a higher margin, with labels pocketing the change.

What people are beginning to understand is what exactly the elusive term 'quality' means. It appears that Quality functions like a broad stroke term to encompass high expectations on:

•     Material
•     Finishing
•     Design and Usability
•     Functionality, features and compatibility
•     Ethics and sustainability
•     Health and Safety
•     Environmental Impact
•     Service and replace-ability

Many still refuse to pay the premium that this may translate to in the short term, but as we increasingly begin to be able to factor the costs of the long-term impact of such choices - it becomes very hard to sustain the argument. Leading this change is the growing attention paid to corporate social responsibility and initiatives like the Deeper Luxury report by WWF UK where the media response to this could be the tipping point for the Industry as suggested by CSRwire

Media Response to WWF-UK Report on Luxury Brands Could Be Tipping Point for the Industry.

Last week over fifty newspapers and magazines from Britain, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Switzerland reported on the corporate responsibility of the world's largest holding companies of luxury brands. For the first time they had been ranked on their ethical performance in the report Deeper Luxury: Quality and Style When the World Matters, which was published by environmental group WWF-UK. The news went 'viral' through trade journals and blogs on fashion, jewelry, and celebrities.

The report "could herald a huge change in the way global luxury brands operate," states Fashion UK.(1) 'The luxury goods industry looks like it's having its own Nike moment," suggests UN corporate reporting expert Dr Anthony Miller, referring to the mid-90's criticism of labour practices in Nike's supply chain that made the company invest heavily in its corporate responsibility programme. Within days, Just-Style.com reported that "PPR Group commits to improving sustainability" as a result of the publication.(2)

 

Earning the Affinity of Your Consumers

Some years ago I came across an excellent paper by Juan Pablo Valencia and Taryn Westberg at the London Business School, where extensive investigations were conducted into how experiences people have with brands influence their perception of it and how best to generate value from Brands through experiences.

Their paper (Experience and the Brand) discusses this in elaborate detail, which makes for some interesting reading in itself and one of their conclusions is to use a consumer affinity pyramid where you place your consumers based on the level of their affinity for your company. The people who love your brand are at the top and those who hate you are the very bottom. Interestingly people at different levels of the pyramid have specific consumption patterns, thus generating different revenue for the company. Moreover, as they move to higher segments the bring more value in the following ways:

• Higher consumption rate and repeat usage
• More willingness to pay price premiums
• Longer relationship with the brand (decreased churn)
• Word of mouth/brand ambassadorship
• Community Effects

There are alternative models to the one just described. For example, brand impact can be evaluated by calculating the advertising and PR expenditure that would be needed to get the same results in terms of changes in customer behaviour. The concept is simpler, but can only be used for comparative purposes. Alternatively, if customers can be tracked through CRM or other means, then the actual impact on sales can be measured. Sales impact can then be used to determine effectiveness with an ROI model.

So then we get to the interesting part. If this is indeed the case - the big question then becomes: how do you influence people's movement upwards in the pyramid? What creates higher levels of affinity in consumers? Is it a fancy marketing campaign? Is it friendly staff? Is it the ability to customise your own products? Well, as far as I can tell - it is not that simple. Despite the transformative power of experiences (as extolled in the paper), consumer affinity is made up of a range of factors, if one is to consider affinity from a long-term perspective, where it can truly have an impact on the company and its sustainability. Ultimately there is no gimmick solution to this problem, but in fact it is one that demands a profound re-evaluation of the company as a whole, what it is, what it stands for and how it treats its supporters: the consumers.

Broadly speaking we know that higher levels of affinity means people have a deeper emotional bond with a company. Experiences that are meaningful have a capacity to create an emotional bond by virtue of our participation in them, which moves us from objective observers into being active participants. If the experience we participate in is a positive one, or even transformative, our affinity will be higher than it would be if say, we just heard about it from someone else. That means we care more.

We care about the product and the company, we worry when things are not going well, we get more disappointed than average consumers if we are let down and we are also more willing to personally contribute to the company with content, ideas or even help our fellow consumers with advice and ideas. So with this in mind, the responsibility of companies is huge in making sure to respect and value every single last contact with its consumers and not consciously and repeatedly fail its most staunch supporters. That is a radically different approach than merely keeping a bunch of shareholders and investors happy. It's about ensuring every one is happy and consumers first and foremost. So can that even be possible I hear you asking?

Why not? The rate of change in technology, software, CRM and the growing number of online contacts a company receives, it should no longer be impossible to consolidate all these connections into user profiles that can be used, not for endless marketing campaigns and bombarding users with offers, but as a means of going back to basics: of listening and anticipating and respecting, being deserving of that emotional bond people have with you. And for that, you as a company have to behave more like a trusted reliable friend that some faceless bully in the playground that sometimes has a great offer to tempt you with and next minute leaves you in some quagmire of call-centre hell and bad service. The question is as a company: are you worthy of your consumers' affinity?

Why the Era of the Insider is Over

Now this is intentionally a controversial title for a post, but hear me out. I'm not saying that we no longer need people who know stuff, in fact we will need them more than ever before - but what I am saying is that information and expertise is becoming so ubiquitous (through the Internet) that some of the models for profiting from expertise and insider knowledge are rapidly becoming redundant.

So back to the post. Let's start by a poignant example. Here in the UK estate agents have been running amok with property prices of late and been trying their best to prop up property prices all around the country. Why? Because the higher the sale price, the better their fee (as it is often calculated as a percentage of the final sale price). So whether you like it or not, it is in estate agents' interests to get as high a price for a property as possible. [Don't even get me started on whether it is reasonable to pay half a million pounds for some house built over a century ago, where heating mostly benefits the pigeons outside and no angle in the house is 90 degrees, making office chairs on casters spontaneously migrate to one corner of the room.]

Anyway - the game has been that of poker: If we tell you the price is going up and you better get on the property ladder soon, (pandering to the human weakness of dreading to lose out) people invariably believe it and more often than not in recent years, have been extending themselves far more than what could be recommended to just get on that property ladder.

Interestingly this began changing not too long ago, first with Nethouseprices, an on-line facility that keeps track on the actual price for which a property was sold. Certainly this began drawing a lot of interest and curiosity from people, but there was still room for estate agents to jump in the middle and say - 'weeeelll, that was then... this is now and I tell you it is hotting up big time!'. What do I mean? Well, the prices listed on Nethouseprices are lag measures - they only tell you the news AFTER it has happened. It's like saying - I would like to lose weight and tracking your weight only by getting on the scales every morning. The scales will tell you your weight at that precise moment in time, but not whether you are likely to be losing some weight anytime soon.

Well, I hear you ask - how could you measure the likelihood of losing weight? By finding a lead measure instead. So if you measured how often you took some exercise and how many calories you burned every time you exercised, offsetting that against how many calories you took in and going on the theory that if you burn more calories than you eat - you will find that sooner or later you begin losing weight. That's a lead measure. Keeping track of that will tell you before you get on the scales what the scales are likely to tell you. How does this apply to the housing market?

The fact is that the housing market is catching up too and instead of reporting lag measures (i.e the price at which properties were sold and no use to you since the property is no longer on the market so you can't jump in and buy it instead!) we, the consumers are beginning to have a chance to peek into that precious secret folder that only estate agents and individual sellers had access to before - that is, how much the price is coming down WHILE the property is still on the market. Ooops! The emperor no longer has any clothes as PropertySnake, interestingly named to be the opposite of the property ladder, will show. PropertySnake tracks how much prices of properties have fallen over time and by looking up areas by post-codes you get a good sense of the overall trend in that area in addition to what is happening to a particular house. If you then are so intrigued by what you find, you can look up with what estate agent that house/flat is listed with by clicking on the listing.

It is also a step on from traditional price comparison sites, which have mushroomed recently, because again - although those sites compare the prices right now, they seldom give you any indication of where the market is going. The same phenomenon is what happens at Ebay - because everyone can bid whenever they like and only by keeping track of something over time can you see whether the demand for that is heating up or not, it means your powers of detecting broader trends are limited to your own power of observation and whatever little software widget you might have that gives you the bids that are just about to close so you can bid in the last few minutes.

All those are still tactical tools, and up till now the strategy has been left to experts, but as we begin to see with house prices and no doubt with other areas too - the last vestiges for insider knowledge is becoming undone.

Why So Few Women at the Top: The Weight of Many Small Things

An excellent article recently appeared in the Harvard Business Review analysing why so few women have made it to top management in Fortune 500 companies. Their take is an interesting one, highlighting the fact that commonly perceived reasons for lack of female career progression, such as 'the glass ceiling' are in fact outdated metaphors for what is today a much more complicated picture.

They highlight the fact that times have changed and

the glass ceiling metaphor is now more wrong than right. For one thing, it describes an absolute barrier at a specific high level in organizations. The fact that there have been female chief executives, university presidents, state governors, and presidents of nations gives the lie to that charge.

At the same time, the metaphor implies that women and men have equal access to entry- and midlevel positions. They do not. The image of a transparent obstruction also suggests that women are being misled about their opportunities, because the impediment is not easy for them to see from a distance. But some impediments are not subtle.

Worst of all, by depicting a single, unvarying obstacle, the glass ceiling fails to incorporate the complexity and variety of challenges that women can face in their leadership journeys. In truth, women are not turned away only as they reach the penultimate stage of a distinguished career. They disappear in various numbers at many points leading up to that stage.

The article goes on to explain the very complex and nuanced world, to be seen more like a labyrinth rather than a single unsurmountable obstacle that provide the reasons why so few women indeed make it to the top. A series of actions are also suggested as ways for companies to address this problem, making a strong point of the fact that there is more to empowering women than putting quotas in place.

Summarising:

1. Increase people’s awareness of the psychological drivers of prejudice toward female leaders, and work to dispel those perceptions.

2. Change the long-hours norm.

3. Reduce the subjectivity of performance evaluation.

4. Use open-recruitment tools, such as advertising and employment agencies, rather than relying on informal social networks and referrals to fill positions.

5. Ensure a critical mass of women in executive positions—not just one or two women—to head off the problems that come with tokenism.

6. Avoid having a sole female member of any team.

7. Help shore up social capital.

8. Prepare women for line management with appropriately demanding assignments.

9. Establish family-friendly human resources practises.

10. Allow employees who have significant parental responsibility more time to prove themselves worthy of promotion.

11. Welcome women back.

12. Encourage male participation in family-friendly benefits.

Full version of article

The Business Jargon Buster

Back from my lengthy travels this week I picked up the Economist's The World in 2008 again, a report I always look forward to reading as it is diverse in points of view and always packed with insight, in addition to being spiced up with the occasional slice of current affair humour thrown in for good measure.

Andrew Palmer's The Good Jargon guide is an excellent example of just such an article - close enough to remind all of us of the buzzwords we use, but witty enough to make us laugh at ourselves too. Some of my favourite witticisms from this articles is the references to globalisation. First everything was supposed to become the same (Coca-colonisation), then local differences made all the difference (localisation). Now some things are the same and others different (glocalisation) and because of Thomas Friedman's bestseller we are even debating 2D vs 3D - is the world flat or spiky? It will appear insightful in a business meeting to state that the world is round - but a 10-year old could have told you that.

Also the references to emerging markets by acronym means Brazil, Russia, India and China are a BRIC, China and India are Chindia and my favourite, Palmer is rooting for Spain and Latin America to be referred to collectively as SPLAT, I love it. Furthermore it's not about making heads or tails about stuff no more - instead it's the size of your tail that matters, apparently. The Long Tail is of course the theory of how niche audiences can be catered for through all of us being increasingly connected on-line and thus coupling supply and demand is easier than ever before. The thinking is that lots of niche products are more important than a few blockbusters, but then we have Fat and Heavy Tails where extreme events occur more frequently than theory predicts, but if you do away with tails altogether and go for a Black Swan, you are into territory that is wholly unexpected.

I also totally agree with the point of labelling anything 2.0 - yes we've heard about web 2.0, but do we really need books like The World is Flat 3.0, (making you think of infinite software upgrades where there's no discernible difference, but somehow you still have to pay for it) Lunch 2.0 (Silicon Valley canteens serving free lunches) or Government 2.0 (where citizens become more involved) - seems like we are creating a whole league of BS 2.0 too? Or what about Greenwash - the environmental version of whitewash, or forgetting marketing campaigns and going for 'poking' people instead. It's a ridiculous world out there and somehow we need to describe all these ideas, but it appears that there is an entire industry devoted to dreaming up silly names for things, massclusivity anyone?

Teaching in the Age of the Digital Native: LEGO Exploring Creative Learning Solutions for Developing Countries

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past ...a really big discontinuity has taken place.. This is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video-games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives. (Marc Prensky)

With this realisation in mind, a radical re-think of education and skills development is needed. It's no longer about a teacher at the head of the class-room lecturing a bunch of disinterested students, too busy txting their friends, but about ways to utilise children's competencies and curiosities in the digital fields to improve learning. Another layer to this is the growing digital divide, where said media is becoming more and more important in our lives, but the rate of technology adoption and access is of course the greatest in the Western world, where developing countries are often left behind.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media lab, pioneered a solution to this growing problem through his One Laptop Per Child initiative, where the goal is to create a hundred dollar laptop, available to kids in the developing world to ensure they will not grow up to be the Digital have-not's whose abilities to learn, network and build a livelihood for themselves is hampered by a lack of key skills. As Negroponte puts it: "Any nation's most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children's machine designed for “learning learning.”

Drawing on 10 years of research, product development and success as a consumer robotics pioneer with LEGO MINDSTORMS®,  LEGO Education, The LEGO Group's educational division, today begins testing of creative curriculum solutions in three schools in Brazil to establish the best technology platform for bringing 21st Century skills to students ages seven and older in underserved and developing countries.

LEGO Education is exploring how to harness technology to bridge the physical and virtual play worlds to provide advanced teaching methods that integrate science, math, engineering, language, social skills, and more. The plan is to provide selected classrooms with concept products that foster the hands-on, minds-on creative play for which the LEGO(R) brand is universally known. Ultimately LEGO Education is aiming to provide cost-effective, high-impact, versatile tools that foster creative exploration and learning for those schools and students who need it most to prepare for the future.

LEGO Press release

21st Century Skills

Why Some of Us Give Up and Others Try Harder

How you react to adversity is really telling - some of us throw in the towel and simply give up, and others, facing almost insurmountable obstacles, don't think twice about continuing. What makes us strong on and how do people find the strength within themselves to carry on in the hardest of times?

As an avid cyclist, reading Lance Armstrong's 'It's Not About the Bike' is of course an amazing illustration of how he turned his life around, being diagnosed with cancer, battled four cycles of agonising chemotherapy enough to make the best of us curl up in agony and came back to win a total of 7 Tour de France victories. As he puts it in his consecutive book 'Every Second Counts'

"The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected and revelatory. When you  find the outermost thresholds of pain, of fear, or uncertainty, what you experience afterwards is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities.

Pain is good because it teaches your body and your soul to improve. It's almost as though your unconscious says "I'm going to remember this, remember how it hurt and I'll increase my capacities so that next time, it doesn't hurt as much". The body literally builds on your experiences and a physique and temperament that have gone through a Tour de France one year will be better the next year, because it has the memory to build upon. Maybe the same is true for living too.

If you lead a largely unexamined life, you will eventually hit a wall. Some barriers can be invisible until you smack into them. The key then is to investigate the wall inside yourself, so you can go beyond it. The only way to do that is to ask yourself painful questions - just as you try to stretch yourself physically."

Professor Carol Dweck at Stanford examines exactly this. Through more than three decades of systematic research, she has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t—why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.

[from Stanford Magazine] "Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine—and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor. Students with learning goals, on the other hand, take necessary risks and don’t worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn. Dweck’s insight launched a new field of educational psychology—achievement goal theory.

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.) The model was nearly complete (see diagram).

To me this approach is really interesting, because not only can it influence the way we approach life, career and learning, but through the quote from Lance Armstrong - it can also be applied to physical performance. And to great result, as proven. So what does this all mean? Milton Chen talks about how children can be taught to "feed their own brains" through understanding that their brains and intelligence can be grown and how this mind-set actually improves their academic performance.

As Chen explains: "I asked Dweck about the implications of her research -- what teachers and parents should do, for instance. In an email interview, she recommended the following strategies:

 

• Teach students to think of their brain as a muscle that strengthens with use, and have them visualize the brain forming new connections every time they learn.
• When they teach study skills, convey to students that using these methods will help their brains learn better.
• Discourage use of labels ("smart," "dumb," and so on) that convey intelligence as a fixed entity.
• Praise students' effort, strategies, and progress, not their intelligence. Praising intelligence leads to students to fear challenges and makes them feel stupid and discouraged when they have difficulty.
• Give students challenging work. Teach them that challenging activities are fun and that mistakes help them learn."

Funnily enough - my own voracious appetite for reading anything and everything is very much in line with the same thinking. I believe we can learn anything we set our minds to and it is those moments that feel a little like vertigo, when new horizons of discovery open up in front of your mind's eye, that keeps me going and motivated. A full life isn't one without a continous expansion of our mind, abilities and  wisdom.

The Key to Social Media: Above all - Be Useful!

First I would like to dedicate this post to Mum of a LEGO Kid, because you just convinced me to drag myself out of my self-pity (I have a cold!) and reflect on what were my Aha-moments from last week's Conference on Social Media and User-generated Content.

So a rather intimate affair, we were around 50-60 people in total and from a refreshing variety of companies ranging from CNN, Yahoo, Coca-Cola, Deutsche Bank, TripAdvisor, E.On, Honda, Habbo Hotel, Spannerworks and many more. Although initially I was expecting something bigger, the frankness of the discussion and the willingness of people to share their thinking and ideas was great - it seems a smaller conference is more conducive to that, rather than a bigger one where you never get to know everyone there.

Interestingly, there were also plenty of different approaches to the subject matter - from literally how to do corporate blogging by VisitBritain.com to my own talk about how we at LEGO strive to not only involve lead users in our product development, as was the case with LEGO Mindstorms NXT, LEGO Hobby Train and now the LEGO Universe MMOG but also have created ways for everyone to design their very own LEGO products via LEGO Factory and are gradually setting up structures to open up our business platform to our fans and LEGO certified professionals, creating an business ecosystem around LEGO.

Honda contributed with a case studies of their recent marketing campaigns on 'Hate Something Change Something' and 'Hondamentalism', both which I thought were brilliantly executed campaigns, but somehow I was a little disappointed not to see a truer user-focus from them - i.e users really having a big say in what Honda does, more than just interact around the campaigns.. perhaps it is hard to do as a car manufacturer, but somehow I would like them to be different and do it anyway! (call me a hopeless romantic!)

Coca-Cola talked about how coke music was the spring board for many a young aspiring artist and how the community here took off - of course needless to say, music has a strong tribal effect particularly on young people so hats off to Coke for making it happen. Another piece of inspiration came from Yahoo, whose Yahoo Answers is an interesting way to create discussion around a topic and find answers to all your questions, whatever they may be. Not that revolutionary you may say, but think of it this way - Wikipedia is great if you want to find the explanation to something you have stumbled on, but aren't sure of the details. Yahoo answers is great if you have a question, but don't know the answer.. You with me? Hmmm... perhaps not the best explanation - but essentially I'm trying to say that here community interaction is focused around problem solving, where the collective brain of hundreds of thousands of Internet users can come to your rescue whatever the problem.

Also, I can't help but love the pixelated world of Habbo, created by my fellow Finns at Sulake Corporation - also a massively multi-player on-line game, this one primarily at teen-agers and very funny in its approach to characters, locations - you name it.   

So ultimately if I was to distill my thoughts from the conference without making this too long a post it would be this:

1. Create an open platform - platforms work better than closed solutions, because you can never quite anticipate how people will use things you create. If you have a platform, more things are possible and it is easier to reconfigure stuff that doesn't work. Open platforms means its easy for advocates to get others on-board, and you do want a bustling community for it to make sense!
2. Unite people behind something they care about - Social networking is great, but after you've got all your mates on Facebook or Myspace, why would you go anywhere else? Good question. Ultimately we tend to be more open about meeting new people when it is around a subject we are really in to - immediately we have something in common with these strangers and it is easy to strike up a conversation. On-line it is very similar too.
3. Make it useful - Whatever fancy community you want to create, this links to the above point. Many an idea dies a horrible death, because beyond the novelty factor, it really doesn't do much. The bits that people come back to over and over again are the useful bits. Wikipedia is useful. Linked-in is useful too, these things have a purpose people get and hence I predict they will be around for a long while. Facebook has a chance of being around far longer than Myspace, because they went for an open platform, allowing people to come up with tons and tons of widgets and applications (some useful, some less useful), but at least they are there and things happen at a breakneck speed, so there is a reason to keep coming back for more than just checking on your mates.
4. Don't manipulate, facilitate - This one is very much about the approach. Meaningful things happen trough facilitation, only bad things happen through manipulation. Enough said. Help people to make a difference and you help yourself.
5. Be truthful and honest (and humble) - No, Social Media is not some sort of smoke and mirrors thing you can douse a failing product line in and miraculously see it recover.. it is essentially a dialogue and nobody wants to discuss anything with a liar and a cheat. To involve users you have to be honest and truthful, not think you can use this thing to warp people's perception from bad to good. Moreover, treat people with respect - always. I get so furious for instance when I hear people talk about driving traffic to websites by comment spamming - no, it doesn't work. You look like an idiot trying to advertise Cillit Bang by posing as Barry the character from the adverts on someone's blog..
6. Have some fun! Yes it can all be very serious sometimes and uniting people in laughter is a great one, however - it's more of an ingredient, as not all people will find all things funny all the time. Also, people who share a common interest or passion are more likely to be able to share something funny between them and boy, sometimes we all need cheering up!

Last, but not least I'll do a plug for our friends at Spannerworks, who have created a no-nonsense guide to all things social media in a nifty E-Book you can download and dazzle your friends with in-depth knowledge. Or as Forrester research puts it ‘Social Computing is not a fad. Nor is it something that will pass you or your company by. Gradually, Social Computing will impact almost every role, at every kind of company, in all parts of the world.’ Forrester Research, Social Computing - How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What to Do About It