Christopher Carfi

I’m not sure what it is that causes some people to turn into uninspired automatons when they get into “business” mode. (Back in the days of the power tie, I blamed it on lack of blood flow to the brain. These days, with few organizations requiring suits, I’m not sure what the reason is.) It almost seems that there’s some work ethic thing that says “if you’re enjoying what you’re doing, you must not be serious about it.”

I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. I think that if you’re truly impassioned about what you’re working on, you can’t help to enjoy what you’re doing.

To that end, there seems to be a nascent movement toward creating tools for business that are able to achieve real results while not being so buttoned-down that they drain the humanity from the room.

The first inkling that I had of this was back in March at SXSW, where I ran into Amy Jo Kim, CEO of ShuffleBrain, on the flight from the West Coast out to Austin. AJ and her team are doing some groundbreaking work in figuring out how brain games and social networks intersect.

The very next day, while still in Austin, I had the chance to attend a session called Playing On! Interface Lessons from Games, a panel anchored by Nicole Lazzaro, CEO of XEODesign. And summarily had my mind tweaked in ways that were highly unexpected.

The net-net: Many of the key concepts that have helped propel games to be a $21 billion industry in 2008 are applicable in business, too. The concept of “collecting” things, like experience points (XP) in role-playing games? We see that behavior in business apps, as well…what’s in the upper-right hand corner of your Twitter screen? It’s the number of “friends” you have — a collecting behavior. The idea of going on a “quest” in that same role-playing game (and you can go now to see just a few of the many quests that players can choose to embark on), that what Nicole calls “Hard Fun” in gaming-speak? But game development techniques that focus on player engagement by promoting a sense of quest and XP collection have been around since the Game Boy Advance (GBA) era. Take the case of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow where each boss encounter or level up results in an increase of the protagonist’s XP points, powers, and abilities. Or Drill Dozer where exploration forms a crucial component of its gameplay. These are but a few from a sea of titles available to download, play, learn and enjoy as gba roms from online repositories like Gamulator. Panning away from games, you can see those very concepts of quest through collection in action every time you log into LinkedIn, and are told that “Your profile is 85% complete.”

Not only are the patterns from game design starting to make their way into business, but “games” themselves are being turned into serious facilitation techniques as well.

Last week at the Innovation, Design and Serious Games Exchange, I had the chance to see first-hand how a thorny, serious product management question (“What features do our customers really want in the next generation of our product?”) could be deftly teased out of a diverse group by way of a game-based technique. Check out these two videos with Luke Hohmann, CEO of Enthiosys, where he facilitates a session that turns the traditional “focus group” into a collaborative design session:

“Buy A Feature, Part 1”

“Buy A Feature, Part 2”

(More on “Buy A Feature” here.)

I’m convinced there’s something going on. There’s a fundamental improvement in the way business people interact in this kind of scenario. It’s not the rote, mind-numbing, death-by-Powerpoint. Instead, it feels like a shift toward bringing the “whole person” into the workplace using much more engaging techniques than have traditionally been used in many industries and environments.

So, what do you think? Is this just some wacky, West-coast frittering away of time? Or are we seeing the early stages of a fundamental change in business?

Just posted a roundup of the coverage of the new USAspending.gov site up over at Supernova.  Check it out, including a solid video overview (includes some cool visualizations of where your tax dollars are going.)

(A recent column I wrote for Mobile Marketer.)

On the surface, there are stark differences between
business-to-business marketing and business-to-consumer marketing:
audience size, volume of sales and magnitude of purchases. But as
mobile becomes ubiquitous for connecting with customers, are we
starting to see a convergence between the two? Some industry insiders have contested that a desire to manage unified communications via mobile avenues could become more common in years to come.

I would contend
that the answer is, yes – if we have the courage to think creatively
and move beyond the already-tired clichés of mobile marketing such as
text campaigns and mobile couponing.

In fact, with a bit of creative thought, the opportunity for
connecting with new customers in both audiences is quite remarkable if
we concentrate on the experiences that can be provided with today’s
mobile devices.

So what are the ways that we can get creative?

Let’s look at the root of that word, “creative” for a second. It stems from create.

Every
one of our prospective customers – both B2B and B2C – has not just a
tiny screen onto which we can foist our message, but now has the
ability to create things as well – photos, videos, conversations and
relationships.

Let’s look at the taken-for-granted camera phone capabilities.

Again,
why not think about how we can bring prospects into the process by
enabling and encouraging them to be a creative part of the sale,
instead of a passive recipient?

In the B2C case, we can, for
example, encourage contests and participation where customers take
their photos with the most interesting/scenic/extraordinary usage of
our products and submit them to a community site.

Similarly, we
can encourage B2B customers to send their sales reps photos of their
unique environment/circumstance/prickly problem so that the reps can
better understand the situation and propose an insightful solution.

In the B2C case, we could encourage video testimonials to be pulled into a powerful montage.

In
the B2B case, we can gather videos of customer best-practice tips to
illustrate how our products perform in the real-world and how they are
being used to solve real problems in an efficient manner.

But,
more important than the technical tools, why not enable prospects to
easily connect with the people and information they need to make a
decision to buy?

It is all about the connections and the relationships.

In
the B2C case, a great example of this would be making it easy for
customers to locate and, after the initial sale, create reviews of
their experiences with a product from other customers.

Similarly,
in the B2B realm, this entails providing tools to connect the prospect
with other similar past customer references, testimonials, case studies
or a knowledgeable sales associate.

The upshot is that for both
B2B and B2C we have a real opportunity with mobile: the opportunity to
differentiate based on how we encourage, empower and enable active,
social customers instead of passive targets.

The organizations that crack the code on this are going to be the winners in using this medium.

Moreover, with the emergence of firms like AdAction in the advertising market, businesses can further take advantage of the ‘advertise in mobile‘ technique. This can help entrepreneurs to increase their chances of creating a huge customer base (that comprises both B2B and B2C customers) easily. So, let us use mobile to bring both B2B and B2C customers into the process,
instead of simply throwing marketing messages at them.

Let’s
challenge ourselves to start conversations, and enable prospective
customers to engage with us and with each other, regardless of what
bucket – B2B or B2C – in which they have historically been
classified. Let us try to understand our customers better because that is crucial for the growth of any organization.

How Cisco looks at social media from a governance perspective, as presented by Jeanette Gibson (Director of New Media, Cisco Corporate Communications).  The slide reads: Be Respectful, Be Mindful, You Are Reponsible, Abide By The Rules, Add Value, Be Honest, Be Yourself

New post up at SupernovaHub: "Smartphones Changing the Network."  The key bit, from analyst NPD, via Geek.com:

"The smartphone category grew its share of the overall mobile phone market
six percent annually, having jumped from 17 percent in the first
quarter of 2008 to nearly one quarter (23 percent) of the entire mobile
phone market. According to Rubin, this serves as clear indication of
the rising popularity of the smartphone category that, by many
analysts’ estimates, is already reshuffling the entire market."

Read it.

The folks over at DestinationCRM asked for some initial thoughts on the Social Media Maturity Model.  First, definitely check out Josh Weinberger’s post from June 1 to get the lay of the land. It’s a good guide to the graphic and to the experiment they're conducting.

Next, kudos to Lisa Boccadutre on fitting a whole raft of
information into a very small space. The information density on this
piece is astounding, in that in two pages there are points about time
frames of market uptake of social media, capability changes over a
five-year horizon, strategic evolution, treatment of customers and
evolving social capabilities.

I do have one primary concern: This graphic seems to imply that the
customer will still be on the outside looking in, even five years from
now. Not sure I entirely agree with that.

My key question: What does this look like if the customer moves to
the center of the picture, instead of merely being a target of an
organization’s actions?

So, here we go…

Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1p-CoclHwE

The folks from the German-American Business Association were kind enough to invite Mark Finnern (SAP), Jennifer McClure (Society for New Communications Research), Vassil Mladjov (Blogtronix), Mark Simmons (SixApart), Mario Sundar (LinkedIn) and myself to participate in a televised roundtable discussion entitled “Successful Corporate Blogging.”

Here’s the setup:

“Blogs are
changing the way companies are listening and reaching out to their
customers. This televised panel of media experts is aimed to give
insight in how to use blogging as a successful marketing communications
strategy.  Sample discussion topics include: What are the elements of
a successful blog? How can legal pitfalls be avoided? How can ROI be
measured? How can we confront our fear of blogging? What will the
future of blogging look like?”

The panel was followed by a Q&A
session.

Here’s a link to the video.

Bonus factoid: What I learned…it’s a bit disconcerting when a person whom you don’t know hands you a lavalier mic and calmly instructs you to partially disrobe (in front of a roomful of people) in order to run the microphone cord up the inside of your shirt so it doesn’t show up on camera.

Micah (say "Me(ha!)") does some solid thinking about "The Lie of Community."  The thought-provoker:

…and the money 'grafs:

"Create the ability for community members to communicate as they want to.
Brand managers and most companies want to control the conversation. If
your users are truly part of the community, they will do nothing to
hurt and/or destroy the community in which they live.

Trust them to make your product better. Trust them to make your community better."

Which brands that you know have the courage to actually trust their community members?  And which ones are afraid?

photo: wvs

Some thoughts on social media overload over at DestinationCRM.  The lede:

“Is it time to declare email bankruptcy, delete those 1,000 unread messages, issue a public mea culpa, and start over? With an ever-increasing chorus of “overload,” this social media stuff must be irretrievably broken, right?”

Link to article.
PDF of article.

Current issue of CRM Magazine is out and up online and asks "Who Owns the Social Customer?"

Just starting to dig in…