Bookmarking inspirations
Oprah, with a simple reference, can propel a book onto the NY Times bestseller list. Paris Hilton, with no traditional talent to speak of, can install into the common dialect of generation the phrase “that’s hot”. There is no doubt that these and others who are plugged into traditional media outlets strongly influence what’s hot and what’s not.
There are, however, many hot trends that strongly and stealthfully establish themselves without the aid of traditional media sources. Malcolm Gladwell begins his book, The Tipping Point, with a recount of the resurgence of Hush Puppies, a popular shoe brand of the late ‘50s. In the mid ‘90s, a small group of no-name, club-going kids in Soho began sporting Hush Puppies and somehow started a “social epidemic” with the classic $30 shoe quickly making frequent appearances in hip Manhattan bars and fashion runways. Within a year, the once forgotten shoe was sold in department stores nationwide, becoming a staple in wardrobes across the country once again. Throughout his book, Gladwell explores a number of contagious trends that seem to stem from small, unusually informed, and faceless groups of people who are influential through interpersonal means. Gladwell contends that finding and gaining insights from these “influentials” can quickly drive and maintain a brand’s “cool factor”. Airwalk, for example, was extremely successful at tapping influentials in the skateboard community to transform what was counterculturally “rad” to what was mainstreamly cool.
The ability for underground ideas or trends to take hold may not be the product of influentials themselves, as Gladwell asserts, but, rather, the interconnectivity of those looking to be influenced. Recently Duncan Watts, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, conducted experiments in social contagion by performing thousands of computer simulations of fictitious populations. In the simulations he and his colleague, Peter Dodds, manipulated variables related to one’s ability to influence others and one’s tendency to be influenced. The simulations showed that influential characteristics had far less impact than had been believed and, in fact, didn’t seem to be required at all. The widespread transmission of influence through networks was not reliant on a few influential people but, rather, a critical mass of influenced people. In contrast to the belief that there is a small, uniquely influential group of people responsible for creating pandemic trends, Watts and Dodds’s research suggests that influence is not driven by the influentials, but by the influenced–turning the focus away from recruiting those with influential traits to helping ordinary people reach and influence others just like them.
This outreach is happening right now on social bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine. These in addition to others allow anyone to troll the online universe for ideas, news, and commentary and attach tags and catchy descriptions to their online finds. As bookmarked pages receive votes of approval by fellow community members, their influence rises to the front page of the social networks. It is these front pages that propagate a global cascade as viral word of mouth spreads beyond the bookmarking sites to mainstream outlets. The next time you are made aware of a “buzzy” website, an unusual take on the news, or a funny video clip, chances are you owe your awareness to communities of diversely ordinary people interested in influencing and, more importantly, being influenced.
A recent Wall Street Journal article revealed just how powerfully influential these communities have become. The WSJ found that the substantial number of bookmarking submissions originate from a low percent of users. For example, of Digg’s 900,000 registered users, 30 were responsible for nearly one-third of the posts that made it to the front page of the site. This small group of users has become influentially popular by consistently finding interesting and relevant content. Consequently, their bookmarks are monitored by a large number of community members and are more likely to receive the numerous votes of approval needed to catapult their finds to the front page. As Gladwell proposes in his book, the influentials are faceless and small in number, but as Watts and Dodds suggest, the network effects of those influenced drives the influence, rather than the personal characteristics of those influencing. In fact, this small group of influentials is surprisingly ordinary. Some of the most influential people cited in the WSJ article include:
• Pamela Drew – a mother of three in New York
• Henry Wang – a high-school senior and varsity tennis player outside Chicago
• Cliff Worthington – a 45-year-old English Teacher in Osaka Japan
• Jeff Hoard – a 25-year-old worker in a shipping warehouse in British Columbia
• Adam Fuhrer – a 12-year-old hockey fan in Toronto
• Elise Bauer – A marketing consultant in California
Companies have long struggled to harness the knowledge found within their walls. Their pursuit is to ultimately gain a competitive advantage by bringing awareness to expertise and influential ideas. Excluding technical knowledge banks, like Xerox’s Eureka system, which has had great success, efforts in this area have lead to clumsy, often unpopulated repositories with disappointing returns.With each passing day, our world becomes flatter as the universe of knowledge and ideas becomes evermore entwined.
If the struggle is to stay on the wave of innovation through knowledge management, why do we so often limit our efforts to harvesting an internal landscape? The vast majority of our workforce is being defined as knowledge workers as the information age continues to mature. Productive time is increasingly used to troll for new ideas, and surely workers are looking beyond internally limiting and disappointing knowledge management systems for inspiration.
It’s time to open the shutters and leverage each worker’s knowledge collection effort by utilizing social bookmark technologies–allowing employees to bookmark both internet and intranet inspirations. We should limit our tireless efforts of formally wrestling knowledge from the minds of employees and, rather, provide them tools to tag and catalogue the world of found anecdotes and ideas, allowing their influences to percolate to the top of an organization’s strategic list–separating what’s hot from what’s not.
Clicks of knowledge
Adam Sandler’s most recent adventure on the big screen, Click, was slain by critic after critic, making one wonder why anyone would invest a night on such entertainment. Last week the people overturned the critics’ voice, awarding Click the People’s Choice Award for best film comedy. Click is an example of a product that seems to defy convention with mass appeal. Tapping into the social preferences that can oppose the critical eye is what Proctor & Gamble’s People’s Choice Awards, launched a decade ago by the giant consumer goods producer, is all about. In the spirit of the awards show, P&G has launched two social-networking efforts in an attempt to better understand what best resonates with its consumer audience.
The first networking effort is an extension of the annual awards show. The People’s Choice Community site (launched last Wednesday, a day after the show) is celebrity and fan club driven. The second networking effort, Capessa, was launched last month. Designed for Yahoo’s health section, Capessa is a forum for women to discuss subjects such as parenting, pregnancy, and weight loss. According to a recent WSJ article, the marketing on Capessa will be subtle. P&G will not run ads for its products, but will occasionally offer some links to P&G experts offering tips about specific issues such as parenting or offer a P&G newsletter on a particular subject. Indeed, the only mention of P&G on the Capessa site is a line at the bottom of Web pages that identifies Capessa as being produced by P&G Productions.
These two efforts, particularly Capessa, are not about marketing to the communities, but rather learning from them. According to the article, both new sites will act as continuing focus-group-type environments where P&G–by monitoring consumer discussions on the sites–can learn more about its target audience’s likes and dislikes and what consumers in different stages of life care about; “It’s going to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers,” according to Jim Stengel, P&G’s global marketing officer.
Not only does P&G stand to gain knowledge from the discussions and patterns of its users, but the communities themselves will likely benefit from the resources P&G brings. Both sites will be produced by P&G Productions, a unit that is best known for producing popular soap operas such as “As the World Turns” and “Guiding Light”, and will be used to capture on film the stories of select community members. Utilizing these resources, the stories will likely be choreographed in a way that better communicates the experiences and knowledge they hold.
The resources and informative approach taken by the worlds largest marketer will allow the company to better understand the consumer preferences that can often run contrary to the beliefs and conventions of product developers’ critical eyes. P&G’s efforts stand a greater success of succeeding where others have failed (including Wal-Mart’s failed teen targeted social-networking effort, “The Hub”); the choreography and purpose they bring to the chaos that typically surrounds online communities ensures that ideas and knowledge are exchanged with the appropriate lighting.
The success of P&G in fostering online exchanges of knowledge will likely pave the way for other corporate sponsored, social-networking vehicles. Their success will rest squarely on their ability to not only interpret what’s hot and what’s not, but to provide the structure and resources to the knowledge they contain in order to set them apart from the garbage bins of MySpace, Facebook, YouTube…
iKnow
The blogosphere today was ablaze with streaming news about the iPhone, Apple’s long awaited convergence of its revolutionary iPod and mobile phone technology. Today’s unveiling at the annual Macworld conference did not disappoint. From a technological standpoint it is a new revolution and will inflict a heavy blow to the likes of Microsoft, which just launched its own “iPod”, the Zune, as well as Yahoo, Rhapsody, and Napster who are looking to gain ground on iTunes’ market share by offering exclusive music downloads to mobile phones, which, prior to today, represented an alternative to the iPod.
The iPhone, however, represents a much larger revolution. Playing music and acting as a video player, chat room, photo lab, email client, web browser, and phone, it represents a technological convergence that will empower knowledge sharing in a unique and powerful way. You may be thinking that this is nothing new with the popular use of Treos, Sidekicks, and BlackBerrys, but the iPhone stands alone. When combined, its simple interface, large screen resolution, and powerful OS orchestrate seemingly separate applications into one seamless, mobile, intuitive, sensory tool for expression.
Because of the search technologies of today, the libraries of yesterday are at our fingertips. Now with the unique web-browning feature offered in the iPhone, which allows full sized web pages to be viewed and navigated with ease on its a small mobile interface, the world’s information has the potential to be at one’s figure tips at anytime from anywhere—flattening our world and our connection with it in a dramatic way.
The ability to find information is only one part of the knowledge-sphere. Information does not become knowledge until it is adopted or adapted. Adoption is rarely successful outside of the instructional realm, which includes technical and or encyclopedic information. Adaption is where the true economies of knowledge bring the returns in our ability to evolve and innovate. Yet, adapting posses much greater hurdles than adopting. Adapting requires the translation of information and ideas into a language that is practically unique to each individual. Adaption requires the recognition of patterns that create an adaptable story that fits one’s own paradigm; success requires the ability to communicate in multiple mediums to paint a picture that can be cast under different lights as circumstances warrant.
A picture is worth a thousand words. Cave drawings in ancient times were used to tell stories, today they continue to tell their stories and are relied upon to unveil the intricacies of the human dialogue from times long past. iPhone’s ability to bring picture text, sound , and even video to the dialogue’s of today go a long way to unveiling the stories behind the fury of information that is constantly inundating our ears and eyes.
Apple’s latest offering represents the birth of a new design mindset. The iPhone does not simply extend our accessibility and exposure to busy information, but rather it is a tool that extends our accessibility and exposure to stories. This makes the iPhone a launching pad to having not only information at one’s figure tips but knowledge as well.