Peter Svarre's Blog

How to work with User Experience methods

2009-09-22T10:51:00.002+02:00

I have now been working in the field of User Experience for approximately 10 years, and the holy grail has always been some kind of coherent methodology which makes it easy to understand the many different methods and tools withing the field. And not least some kind of process which explains when to use what, and why it should be used in different situations.
Well - it looks like we are finally there. Or at least we have taken a major step in that direction here in Hello with the UXBASIS model.
We have been working on the project for more than a year along with our different client assignments. The UXBASIS model is thus not an academic exercise, but a methodology grounded in day-to-day work with clients and Hello's own projects.
The UXBASIS model will have three manifestations:
1. A web page which can be accessed here: http://uxbasis.hellogroup.com/
2. A deck of cards which can be "played" in a meeting with clients and account people
3. A poster to hang on the wall in any UX department
The web page is now ready in a beta version. We are still weeding out the last spelling errors and small mistakes, so comments are still welcome here.
The cards and the poster will go into print when we are out of the beta phase and then we will start selling and shipping posters and cards at a cost price, which will have to be determined.

Check out the UXBASIS website, and rememeber to share it with friends and colleagues in the UX field.

The Twitter Brain - Hello Ignite Episode II

2009-06-11T09:30:00.004+02:00

"Twitter is basically like small snippets of text working like neurons - getting fired back and forth, interacting with each other. Basically creating a new kind of global awareness"

Hello Ignite

2009-06-01T22:10:00.005+02:00

We have launched a new knowledge sharing concept in Hello Group. It's very simple: Every Monday morning a Hello employee gives a five minutes presentation about any subject, which is related to digital communication and marketing - or basically whatever is on the mind of the presenter that morning. The concept is inspired by O'reilly's Ignite concept, so each presentation consists of 20 slides that auto refreshes after 15 seconds. Stressful - yes! But also very effective, because a presentation never lasts more than exactly five minutes.
In the name of web 2.0 and social media, we are of course sharing all of this incredible knowledge with the rest of the world. I will be publishing the presentations here on this blog, but they can also be found on Youtube, Facebook and Slideshare.

Our first Ignite presentation was given by our in-house rocket scientist (and I mean that literally - he build the freakin' Tomahawk missile...) Ashley Raiteri, who is talking about icons and visual representations in software and web development.

Haiku Gonzo Journalism - the art of the social media update

2009-04-26T19:56:00.002+02:00

I just had a conversation with my friend Signe Wenneberg about what characterizes an interesting Facebook update/tweet as opposed to the utterly irrelevant, boring and useless update.

We all know the situation, of course. You are scanning through your friend updates – be it on Facebook, Twitter or any other social network. Some updates make you laugh, others make you think, others again make you act, and finally some make you think: “Why the f… did you have to waste 1,7 second of my life posting this irrelevant, ego centered, stupid garbage!”.

People who do not understand the dynamics of social media, of course, think that all the content of Facebook and the like is irrelevant, ego centered, stupid garbage. But the fact is that Facebook, Twitter and other “profile-based” social media actually serve as perfect social filters for information. Personally, I get most of my information about cultural events and a large part of professional news from the status updates and tweets of my “friends” on social networks. By spending approximately 30 minutes on Facebook every day I get a convenient overview of what is happening in my professional area, and what kind of cultural events I should absolutely not miss in my geographical vicinity.

And I get all of this information, because I have friends who write interesting updates – in other words very short little sentences, which have the author as the starting point, but communicate a piece of information which is potentially relevant for other people.

In other words, the interesting social media update could be described as a kind of Haiku Gonzo Journalism. And seen in that perspective we have all become – or are becoming – Haiku Gonzo Journalists.

So what is a Haiku Gonzo Journalism?

Well basically it is all about being able to tell an interesting and relevant story by using yourself as the starting point – very often using humor or quirky statements to accentuate your point or attract the attention of your reader. This is of course extremely difficult, and what makes it even more difficult is that you need to operate in the playing field of 140 characters plus the ability to add links or embed further information or media.

Just as in traditional journalism, there is unfortunately quite far between the really clever Haiku Gonzo Journalists in the social media space. We are all still untrained in the art of Haiku Gonzo Journalism, but I think that as people get more used to Social Media communication they will both become more skilled Haiku Gonzo Journalists, and they will learn how to filter away the people who do not understand the subtleties of communicating in the social media space.

Next Web Amsterdam

2009-04-22T09:28:00.003+02:00

The previous two years I have been blogging from my favorite Internet conference - The Next Web in Amsterdam. This year I was unfortunately unable to go, but luckily two of my colleagues went instead. You can follow the updates from the conference on James Kelways blog - which will be updated with new posts as James gets his notes from the conference sorted out.

James' blog: User Pathways

Extreme desert marathon

2009-03-16T11:48:00.001+01:00

We are running this project with Novo Nordisk, where we are building a news website for Søren Lilleøre who is running a six day extreme Marathon in the Morrocan Desert at the end of this month. It's a pretty extreme endeavor and it doesn't become less extreme by the fact that Søren is a type 1 diabetic who has to carry his own insulin and injection devices in the sweltering desert heat. Check out the website, which we (Hello) build in a couple of days and which will be unfolding with a bunch of interesting stories and videos about Søren in the next month or so...

Check out runningwithdiabetes.com

Hello looking for Wordpress/mash-up wiz kids

2009-03-04T14:35:00.003+01:00

I am heading up a super exciting social media news project, which is starting this Monday and running for a little more than a month. We are basically putting together an ad-hoc team consisting of a journalist, a Wordpress/mash-up specialist, some assistants and a person with audio/visual skills.

Right now we are looking for the Wordpress/mash-up specialist and the assistants. The Wordpress guy should be familiar with Wordpress and how to move content into and out of Wordpress (youtube, flickr etc. etc.). The assistants do not need technical skills but should know the ins and outs of the social web. The assistants could be employed either as project interns or as student helpers for the period.

The project starts Monday and ends in the middle of April, which means that we are extremely pressed for time. So if you are interested or know of someone who could be, please contact me on +45 4040 9492 or email: peter [dot] svarre [at] hellogroup.com.

Forsvarets Kommunikationskonference

2009-02-25T22:31:00.002+01:00

I just came back from a really interesting afternoon/evening with the Danish Defence – or rather the communication branch of the Danish Defence, which consists of approximately 100 individuals spread all over the different branches of the Danish military.
I must admit that I was quite impressed by what I saw. I expected an extremely top heavy and bureaucratic organization with little understanding of anything related to the Web. What I found was a truly diverse organization with a large degree of openness, flexibility and willingness to listen to inspiration coming from the world outside – in my case the world of web 2.0 and digital social networks.
But then again – the Internet was invented by the military almost forty years ago, so why shouldn’t the military be able to incorporate the philosophy of social networks, user generated content and web 2.0?

Nevertheless, for those who saw my presentation today (and for everyone else) here is my presentation from today. It consists of some of my core ideas about web 2.0, but incorporates some more specific slides and examples related to the Danish Defence.

http://www.slideshare.net/petersvarre/forsvarets-kommunikationskonference

(The presentation is in Danish)

Facebook statistics

2009-01-19T18:51:00.000+01:00

Wemind has created a very nice Google Spreadsheet page containing updated statistics about Facebook usage. Very convenient…

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pRwSFd8OY4WZPkUch2kR_GA&gid=0

Hello looking for Senior Direct Marketing Copywriter

2009-01-12T14:59:00.002+01:00

Are you ready to say hello to a new career? HelloGroup is looking for a Senior Direct Marketing (DM) copywriter with lots of DM experience, excellent communication skills and – most importantly - the desire to write up a storm.

You’ve worked with direct marketing, lead generation, e-marketing and other DM disciplines. As the world of digital media is our preferred playground, it’s important that you either have experience working with these media or are keen to learn more about the opportunities they offer.

We’re happy to consider candidates from a variety of backgrounds, but it’s obviously an advantage if your current role involves writing DM copy and you have a proven track record in this field, so you may already be employed by a direct marketing or digital agency. You may be a trained journalist or have some other form of education in the field of communications, or you may have an education in the humanities.

We’re a company with an international stable of clients, so whether you’re a native English speaker or have Danish as your mother tongue and are competent in English,
we want to hear from you.

Because HelloGroup is a young, rapidly growing company, you’ll have the chance to leave your personal stamp on your work.

We’re always looking to extend our pool of happy employees, so we sincerely hope that you’re not just in it for the money, but also for the great colleagues, the exciting challenges and the boundless future. In return, we offer you the chance to work with people as dedicated as you are.

Hello is headquartered in the heart of Copenhagen, next door to the Royal Palace and The Marble Church. We work with some of the most interesting clients on the market, including Microsoft, Adobe, Novo Nordisk, Telia, Vodafone, Saxo Bank, Elsparefonden, Fritz Hansen, Syd Energi and Zyb.

If interested please go to:

http://www.hellogroup.com/jobs/if-youre-a-senior-direct-marketing-copywriter-say-hello

And please mention in your application that you saw the posting on Peter Svarre's Blog

Online surveys and usability testing

2008-12-08T20:47:00.003+01:00

When you are working professionally with online communications, you typically work with a conceptual separation between:

Usability of the communication
Relevance of the communication
Visual design of the communication

The separation makes sense for the professional because it makes it possible to

Optimize usability through improved Information Architecture
Optimize relevance through improved content strategy and planning
Optimize the design through an improved use of graphical elements

The problem about this separation is that it is only conceptual. It does not exist in real life and it certainly does not exist in the heads of ordinary users visiting websites. For the casual visitor of a website, there is no distinction between usability, relevance and design. If the website is really relevant to the user, she will typically also think that it is really easy to use and maybe even also good looking. Similarly a user visiting two websites with exactly the same content, but with different degrees of usability will also consider the user friendly website much more relevant than the website with low usability.
When we, as professionals, try to determine usability, relevance or design of a solution we therefore need to be very cautious about how we talk to the actual users of a website. If we ask about relevance, we may actually get an answer which is much more related to usability and vice versa.
This all may seem a bit abstract, so let’s provide an example.
In the early days of the Internet I was testing the e-banking solution of Danske Bank. We used qualitative as well as quantitative methods – an online survey and a think-aloud test. Our gut-feelings told us that the usability of this very early version of the online bank would be very low, and this gut-feeling was confirmed in the think-aloud test, where all of the first-time users more or less failed to understand the basics of the application in the 1,5 hours the test lasted. However, and this was the surprising part, in the online surveys we asked a number of usability questions about navigation and general user friendliness of the online bank, and this time the results were in the completely opposite end of the scale – people loved the online bank and found it very easy to use.
The reason, of course, was that the relevance of an online bank was tremendously high. So high that people were willing to spend hours and hours to actually learn how to use the application, and when they had learned how to navigate the not-so-user-friendly application, they actually found it quite easy to use. The users were simply unable to tell the difference between relevance of the online bank and the usability of the online bank.
This is approximately eight years ago, and I told myself that I would never again make the mistake to ask people usability questions in an online survey. If I want to test the usability of a website, I will either use a qualitative think-aloud test or actual tracking data using some kind of metrics system.
Unfortunately it seems like my ancient experience has not become common lore in the web analytics business. More and more often I seem to bump into online surveys on all sorts of websites that are trying to ask people questions about the usability of the website (see example below).
The problem about this kind of surveys is that they simply do not provide the answers that the website owners think they are getting. It may seem like an easy and cheap solution when you buy the survey from the web analytics consultants, and it may seem like you are actually getting answers to your questions, but this is unfortunately not the case!
Online surveys are utterly useless when it comes to determining usability of a website. They are extremely good at determining demographics and content relevance questions, but they are simply unable to give you truthful answers when it comes to the usability of your website.
This may sound very dogmatic and not very pragmatic in the face of real life, where you are often constrained by time and resources. However, being a bit dogmatic when it comes to research methodology may in the long run be more pragmatic, because you will avoid getting the wrong answers to the right questions.

The Long Tail of Social Networking - Google Friend Connect

2008-12-03T10:39:00.005+01:00

Google is now running their new program "Google Friend Connect" in a beta (surprise!). Basically the idea is to build the long tail of social networking sites by offering an easy add-on (widget) that can be embedded on your blog, website or whatever you like to publish on the Internet. The widget makes your website a social site where people can join the sites and become members of your own little micro community. In other words - you have become your own micro Zuckerberg :-D
Of course this is too tempting to be ignored, so I have immediately installed the app on this blog (as you can see on the right hand side of my front page of www.petersvarre.dk.
So check it out - join the "Peter Svarre's Blog" community and start the micro social networking revolution right now!!!
And read more about Google Friend Connect here.

Your website is done – time to start working

2008-12-01T21:48:00.003+01:00

There is something strange about the way that customers and clients in the web business work together. It is almost common knowledge nowadays that you don’t just launch a website – you launch a web presence! Nevertheless it seems like most relationships between customers and clients are project based, meaning that they focus on launching a website and when the website is launched, the customer-client relationship is winded down to a minimum of support and bug fixing.
There are at least three reasons why this pattern is counterproductive:

Experience tells us that most successful websites like Facebook, Wikipedia and Craigslist all started out with one business plan and ended up being successful with a completely different business plan. If you simply launch a website and leave it there, you will never be able to tweak your website into the successful entity which actually serves a customer need.
Some of the most successful websites today are community driven, which means that the website constantly changes shape and content based on user input. For community websites the hard work does not end when you launch the website it actually only starts then. When dealing with communities you should be prepared to spend almost more hours and resources on maintaining you website as you did building it.
Tracking and KPI measurement is becoming increasingly important – especially in these times of financial tightening. But measuring you website traffic and your KPI’s avail to nothing if you are not also willing to spend resources on optimizing your website based on the statistics. The truly successful website manager in a time of financial crisis is the person who constantly measures and optimizes the website in order to always create optimal ROI for the website. So again, the hard work doesn’t stop when the website is launched. Launch day of the website is simply the beginning of a long and meticulous measure-optimize-measure process, which never ends because a website is a living creature which constantly needs to adopt to changing markets and user needs.

It is puzzling why these simple facts are so often ignored in the offline world – resulting in scores of half-baked monolithic websites which are kind-a-cool, but not really relevant for the target group or the original strategy – simply because the website hasn’t been allowed to develop in a fruitful and ongoing ping-pong relationship between clients and agencies.
I don’t say this often, but maybe we should take a look at how things are done in the offline world. When you launch a store in the real world, you are perfectly aware that you need to hire a bunch of people to maintain the store and sell the products within the store. It is basically not terribly difficult to build a physical store – the hard part is to maintain the store and persuade the customers to keep coming back.

Venstre 2.0

2008-11-14T16:48:00.001+01:00

You may agree og disagree with Søren Pind as a politician, but he has some pretty interesting observations about web 2.0 and politics in Politiken today.

Basically Pind is saying that it is time for Venstre to move on from the (so far successful) "contractual politics" paradigm to a new 2.0 paradigm of politics, where negotiation and participation supersede the contractual relationship between politician and voter.

In the world of digiraties such statements are of course not news – web 2.0 has been around for a couple of years now, and talk about markets as conversations has been around even longer.

What is interesting is that this lingo has now found its way into and op-ed written by a politician in the somewhat technology disinclined paper pages of Politiken.

Søren Pind writes that Venstre is the only political party which is truly ready for web 2.0 because, according to him, Venstre is the only political party which is not focused on the past. Well – I think Venstre should take a look at Radikale.net and pay close attention to Socialdemokraterne who most definitely are going to copy some of the successful online campaigning methods from Obama’s presidential campaign.

Venstre definitely has the ideological potential to embrace web 2.0 but the political party seriously needs to shed the burden of contractual politics before it can move into the world of web 2.0.

And exactly that part may not be so easy to do…

Facebook as a journalistic tool

2008-11-11T23:47:00.003+01:00

I was giving a presentation about Facebook as a journalistic tool at Journalistisk Fagfestival this Monday.

It was kind of a strange topic because in my perspective it would be similar to giving a presentation about the telephone as a journalistic tool. The telephone is an everpresent means of communication which is used for millions of purposes and only sometimes for journalistic purposes. The same goes for Facebook: Facebook is used for millions of different things and in some cases it can actually also be used for journalistic purposes.

Nevertheless I tried to come up with a short presentation about Facebook and some of the most obvious ways that Journalists can use Facebook in their daily work as editors, writers and site managers.

Read all about it in the presentation on Slideshare.

Facebook som journalistisk arbejdsredskab

How to make money on online social networks

2008-10-02T15:19:00.002+02:00

I was giving this presentation on the topic "How to make money on online social networks". The presentation contains some of my standard slides about web 2.0, but I have specifically for this presentation added five revenue models for online social networks:

1. The media model
2. The freemium model
3. The app model
- App-vertising
- App as revenue source
- Adds in apps
4. The Golf club model
5. The Intranet model

See the presentation here:

How to make money on online social networks

web 2.0 - updated presentation

2008-09-30T09:56:00.002+02:00

Yesterday I was giving a presentation about web 2.0 for a group of Danish CEO's. The core of my web 2.0 presentation is still the question of identity and how identity in a 2.0 world is defined by creation more than consumption. In this presentation, however, I have added a couple of ideas from the Web 2.0 Expo conference in New York.

First of all Barry Libert's S.C.O.R.E approach to involving your customers, and secondly a couple of slides about future trends (1. Web meets world, 2. Gestural interfaces and 3. web 3.0)

Watch or download the presentation on Slideshare:

Web 2.0 presentation

AAAARRRRGH!

2008-09-21T10:30:00.003+02:00

I am usually always struck by a mild degree of depression when I come back to Copenhagen after spending time in New York. Usually it helps to stretch out in the couch and read today’s newspaper and slowly get back into the local rhythm.

This was, however, a very bad idea today.

I don’t really know whether I am in a state of chock, despair or outright frustrated rage, but after reading an article in Politiken I just realized that the traditional Danish media or at least the editorial board of Berlingske Tidende seems to have understood nothing and learned nothing of the last five years development on the Internet. What seems to be common sense and ordinary street knowledge for media and advertising people in New York is apparently exotic, dangerous, and threatening lore to the established Danish Media industry.

I am quoting from the paper (which ironically proves my point) version of Politiken:

“Der er grund til at være agtpågivende over for en så stor spiller på markedet som Google. Vi ønsker, at vores egne hjemmesider, ikke Google, skal være indgangen til nyhedsbilledet”, siger Lisbeth Knudsen, koncernchef for Berlingske media.

And Ebbe Dal from Danske Dagblades forening:

Det er udmærket, at Google har nogle motiver om, at de vil udbrede information. Men det bortforklarer ikke, at Google er et af verdens største brands og er udpræget forretningsmæssigt anlagt. Hvis de vil benytte danske avisers stof, så er der tale om en forretningsmæssig handling, og så er der et økonomisk mellemværende mellem Google og aviserne

I could start to argue about the importance of deportalization, co-creating, syndication, transparency, conversation and openness, but I would rather encourage people to read my 11 previous blog posts from the Web 2.0 Expo conference in New York. They somehow perfectly sum up what is wrong with the above two quotes.

Web 2.0 Expo 11 - Second Life gets a second life

2008-09-21T09:44:00.002+02:00

We probably all remember the short but brightly burning burst of hype surrounding Second Life. Finally the web had become something that looked like the futuristic vision by authors such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Companies, organizations and individuals scrambled to the new virtual worlds for diverse reasons spanning from profit-making, branding and pure curiosity.

Personally I always found the hype somewhat strange. First of all there wasn’t really anything conceptually new about Second Life. Virtual worlds had been around for almost 20 years – although in more primitive shapes, and in many ways Second Life reminded me more of Teledanmark’s failed Opasia initiative than the brave new future of the Internet. Secondly Second Life re-introduced spatiality and bodily presence on the Internet, which in many ways was a medium which has gained success exactly because it transcended spatiality and bodily presence.

Well, not surprisingly the Second Life (virtual worlds) hype did not last long. In a matter of about six months it turned out that there weren’t that many citizens living a second life and companies started to realize that they had created abandoned ghost towns in stead of shining brand castles.

But virtual worlds are not completely dead. In a presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo, Wagner James Au talked about the post hype state of virtual worlds and pointed out that there is still a heart beating in virtual worlds and more specifically in Second Life.

First of all James Au pointed to three different reasons why the hype around virtual worlds never became more than hype:

The citizen statistics were heavily over-inflated. Many one-time visitors or non-active citizens in Second Life were counted as active citizens.
Companies misunderstood the culture of user creation within Second Life. They didn’t understand that this was a new world with new rules – and these rules were mostly defined by the susers.
Companies mistook virtual simulated locations for geographic reality, which is not a super cool thin in a world of instant teleportation and flying avatars.

Overall companies never really understood how Second Life was unique in comparison with good old physical life. Companies and old school advertising executives simply for the first time thought that they understood the Internet because it looked like something they already knew. But basically they did not understand anything. They did not understand that in a virtual world like Second Life you need to leverage the worlds’ unique strengths and characteristics. For example Second Life is about transgressing gravity and physical laws and therefore it makes sense to create applications that address this.

Companies need to understand that you can’t use traditional in-your-face branding techniques in virtual worlds. Companies trying to force-feed their messages to the citizens of virtual worlds will soon experience how teleportation and flying avartars mean that customers are even harder to fixate and engage than in a physical world. Just like in the world of web 2.0 user generated communities companies must learn that branding and communication with customers grows through conversations and through offering the users truly useful applications, services and information which serves their needs in the specific virtual world. It also means that you need to see your brand with new eyes. Nissan may give away free Nissans in Second Life, but who would like to drive a free Nissan when you can buy a reasonably priced but supercool Masserati in the (virtually) next door Second Life neighbourhood?

Just like in the world of web 2.0 companies must also learn that they must passe over control over the branding experience to the users in exchange for genuine user passion and creativity. James Au mentioned the example of Paramount which gave away free Iron Man costumes in Second Life and encouraged users to take pictures and make movies of themselves wearing the Iron Man costume. Of course some of these users behaved wildly inappropriate in their Iron Man costome – almost as bad as Robert Downey Junior in his pre rehab period… But the fact was that the users interacted with the brand in a way which created a strong brand presence and a lot of awareness of the Iron Man movie.

Finally James Au talked about the enterprise level possibilities of virtual worlds. In many ways virtual worlds are actually more suited to things like meetings between business partners and job fairs than direct to consumer marketing.

Web 2.0 Expo 10 - Unleashing the Power of Crowds in Your Business

2008-09-21T09:38:00.001+02:00

Sometimes conference presentations are just that: conference presentations. Sometimes conference presentations take you to another level. And then again – but not very often – conference presentation can be somewhat like entering an evangelist church.

In this presentation at the Web 2.0 Expo Barry Libert, CEO of Mzinga introduced the audience to his church. The god was WE, the son was Barry Libert and the Holy Spirit was the conversations that companies need to engage in order to understand WE.

As a secular Dane visiting gods own country the experience was somewhat disconcerting, but the fact was that Barry Libert had a number of forceful statements – not necessarily very new or original, but forceful and convincing.

First of all Libert stated (and I couldn’t agree more) that web Web 2.0 is fundamentally not about technology – it is about enabling companies to be human again – it is about having conversations with their customers. It is no longer about the company, the product or the enterprise – it is about WE. It is a matter of interacting with customers where they are, and on their terms.

This is of course a philosophy which we have known since the Cluetrain Manifesto, but the difference today is that, according to Libert, leading American companies are starting to understand WE. Not least attributable to the fact that Libert himself has convinced a significant number of these companies about the value of WE.

Barry Libert then unveiled his five commandments that must be obeyed by all companies aspiring to enter the heaven of WE.

As Libert said: When you S.C.O.R.E. you win the benefits of WE:

Be Social (everything in business is social and about social interactions)
Be Co-creative (I don’t necessarily know where to go, so I will accept that you help me develop my company and my products. I accept that my customers are smarter than me)
Be Open (start a company blog, join a social network)
Be Rewarding (Prize people outside your company for contributing to your company)
Be Evaluated (Use surveys, comments and ratings to improve your product)

And that was it. There was no more to it!

I, of course, missed a bit of context and examples from the real world and from real companies that have SCOREd, but I was afraid to be expelled as a heretic from the church of WE so I faithfully kept quiet.

Web 2.0 Expo 9 - Ten tips for managing creative environments

2008-09-21T09:30:00.000+02:00

Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson from Adaptive Path spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo about how to manage a creative organization.

Based on a study of several different creative organizations ranging from theatre groups, over symphonic orchestras to a restaurant kitchen Mason and Nelson had created a list of 10 (turned out to be 11) tips to people trying to manage a creative organization.

You can agree or disagree with these tips, and in many cases the experiences from an avant-garde New York theatre group may not be directly applicable to the world of marketing and digital strategies. However, I find it to be and interesting list to keep in the back of your head if you are sitting on top or in the middle of a creative organization.

The 11 tips:

Cross train the team. People should understand the entire working of the company.
Rotate creative leadership. Change the person who is in charge of projects. Reduces competition because people get to change roles.
Actively turn the corner. Creative processes go through 2 phases. Divergence and convergence. Divergence is about opening up. Rules are not that important in this phase. In the convergence phase rules becomes more important. So turning the corner is about actively expressing when we move from the divergence to the convergence phase.
Know your roles. When it is production time, everybody needs to know their roles.
Practice as a team. Like sports teams.
Make your creative mission explicit. As a company or organization, which creative problem are you trying to solve?
Kill your darlings softly. Be respectful about what stays in and what goes out. Develop ways to speak when you are killing ideas.
Leadership is a service. The creative leader must make sure that creative people have the tools and the environment where they can perform.
Generate projects around creative interests. Find work that really engages people. Work with side-projects, because it will engage people and because side-projects can become major projects.
Remember your audience. Look around – take a look at your audience or your potential audience.
Celebrate failure. To be creative you must try things and some of them will fail. It is important to be able to talk about failure and learn from failure.

Web 2.0 Expo 8 - Social Marketing

2008-09-18T17:18:00.005+02:00

Michael Lazerow, CEO at Buddy media gave a presentation about Social Marketing here at the Web Expo conference.

His presentation can be seen here:

http://www.slideshare.net/lazerow/social-brand-marketing-for-web-20-presentation/

Check it out – especially some of the cases are quite interesting.

Basically Lazerow’s point was that social advertising SUCKS!

It sucks because it just doesn’t work to throw banners in the face of people interacting on Facebook and other social networks. The old advertising model where you basically shout your message to your audience is dead and does not work in social networks.

What works is social marketing which is all about engaging in conversations with your customers. A conversation which can be more or less sophisticated and integrated with your CRM systems, but nevertheless a conversation where your customers participate by their own free will and because it creates value for them.

Lazerow then talked about the App as the new add. Apps are not only Facebook apps, but any kind of social network applications, where you use social components as part of your marketing and communication with your customers. These apps can live in Facebook, Orkut, Bebo, Myspace, Linkedin or even in your own community networks. Apps can also be integrated with existing webservices like iLike, Tripadvisor etc. etc.

Lazerow then showed some interesting Facebook App cases from FedEx, New Balance and Bud Light. Check them out in his presentation.

Finally Lazerow talked about how to generate traffic to your app, which from my perspective actually was the most interesting part of his presentation.

Lazerow basically declared the viral marketing of apps dead. Today there are more than 25.000 apps on Facebook, so the chance of your app becoming a viral success all by itself is almost none. Apps like any other product in a multi-product world must me marketed and it order to have success with your app you need to market it heavily and be willing to pay the cost of this marketing.

Marketing of apps can take place both within and outside the social networks, but Lazerow specifically mentioned that his company often used other popular apps to market their own apps.

Web 2.0 Expo 7 - Filters and Information Overload

2008-09-18T17:18:00.004+02:00

OK – I am attending a lot of presentations today at the Web 2.0 Expo, so I will try to shorten down my summaries a bit in order to squeeze them all in…

Clay Shirky – the author of “Here Comes Everybody” – gave a quick keynote presentation, which was about information overload and the filtering of information.

Basically his point was that information overload as a phenomenon has been around since the days of the Gutenberg press, where we encountered a world containing more information than any single human can absorb in a lifetime.

What has changed with the Internet is therefore not information overload, but rather the economics of information overload.

In the pre-internet age publishers of information – be it print, audio or video – had to take a risk when choosing to publish a book, print a newspaper or run a television program. This risk was related to the fact that it was fairly expensive to be a publisher.

This has changed today where the costs of publishing are approaching zero. Today we can relatively risk-free publish anything we like. This means that filtering of good and bad content has moved from being a pre-publishing event to a post-publishing event.

So we are still experiencing information overload, but in stead of having publishers filter our information, we now have number of other services that do the filtering for us. This is services like Google, Spam filters and everything else which helps us sift the relevant from the irrelevant.

It was not super clear exactly what Shirky wished to communicate, but basically his point was that the challenge today is not information overload – the challenge today is to constantly design and re-design filters that can help us navigate in a post-publishing information overload world.

Web 2.0 Expo 6 - Web Meets World

2008-09-18T17:18:00.001+02:00

I just came out of Tim O’Reillys keynote speech at the Web 2.0 Expo.

In a speech that ended up on a rather political note, O’Reilly touched upon two themes that are related through the fact that the web is increasingly meeting the world.

The first theme was the changing interrelationship between people, things and events in real life and the virtual world. People meet in real life because of online social networks; people navigate user interfaces using fingers, bodily movements and sound; and people increasingly sell and produce real life products in the online world.

The web is meeting the world in a very physical sense.

This creates huge opportunities for enterprises and companies to use the web solve real life problems and challenges. But this is exactly where companies are failing today, according to O’Reilly – and this was the second theme of his speech. In an age of environmental crises, financial meltdown and global wars, we are still using social media and web 2.0 applications to poke friends, bite zombies or send virtual birthday cakes!

According to O’Reilly great challenges create great opportunities, and we are really facing great challenges today. And web 2.0 and the fact that the web is meeting the world, means that the opportunities to create change are very much present right there in the universe of web 2.0 applications.

O’Reilly then mentioned a number of companies that are actually using web 2.0 to create change in a challenging world:

- Benetech
- Omidyar network
- Google.org
- Amee
- Energy Camp
- Click Diagnostics
- Prosper
- Patientslikeme
- 23andMe

I, of course, agree with O’reilly that we are living in a challenging age and that much more could be done to meet these challenges. But, as opposed to O’Reilly, I actually think that web 2.0 is already being applied to many serious challenges. Of course web 2.0 is being used for silly and stupid social interactions, but the virtual world would be a boring, Stalinistic world without such social glues, which serves a very real purpose – that of getting people to meet and talk together.

Web 2.0 is not a monolithic entity which should only be used for serous purposes. Web 2.0 is a new social structure, which naturally will contain everything from zombie bites to global warming interest groups.

Web 2.0 Expo 5 - Disruption in the Music Industry

2008-09-17T23:35:00.002+02:00

My last session today at the Web 2.0 Expo was the brothers Hadi and Ali Partovi from the music service iLike, which according to the brothers is the largest music provider to social platforms such as Facebook, Bebo, Orkut and hi5.

The Partovi brothers were talking about some of the radical changes which the music industry is undergoing these days:

- Albums are being unbundled
- Economic recession
- Squeezed by powerful retailers
- Competing with free (file sharing)
- Digital sales rising, but not enough

But as their own business testifies, the Internet and specifically web 2.0 may have challenged the music industry, but they have also opened up completely new business opportunities.

The Partovi brothers mentioned specifically four areas where there is room for both monetization and innovation.

1. Downloads
2. Artists as channels
3. Streaming
4. Live music

1. Downloads

Trend:
Right now music downloading is moving from the DRM (Digital Rights Management) paradigm to the DRM free paradigm.

Who are the players:
• Itunes
• Rhapsody, Amazon, Napster
• Ringtones: Thumbplay, Jamster

Where does the money come from:
Consumers are paying for downloads

Opportunities:
• Mobile
• Social /enabling discovery through friends
• Syndicated (you can buy music anywhere on the web)

2. Artists as channels

Trend:
• Musicians communicating and releasing music directly to fans
• From albums to continuous release

Who are the players:
• myspace, iLike
• Kyte, Nabbr, ReverbNation

Where does the money come from:
• Advertising
• Subscription

Opportunities:
• Personalization
• Syndication

3. Streaming

Trend:
Streaming is the new downloading

Who are the players:
• Radio: Pandora, lastFM
• Video: Youtube, Yahoo
• On-demand: Rhapsody, iMeem
• Social media: Myspace, iLike

Where does the money come from:
• Advertising
• Subscription

Opportunities:
• Mobile
• Syndication

4. Live Music

Trend:
Rising ticket prices

Who are the players:
• Ticketmaster, LiveNation, Stubhub
• iLike
• Eventful, Songkick, others

Where does the money come from:
• Ticket sales (consumer pays)

Opportunities:
• Personalization: concert alerts
• Syndication: “on tour” notifications
• Social concert tools – invite friends to go to concerts etc. etc.
• Mobile:
o Concert alerts
o Ticket purchase
o Bar codes
o On-site connected experience