colaboratorie mutopo

Over the last week, two things happened that suggest that many organizations are heading into the social media hype cycle to “you lied. it didnt work” (jobs may be on the line – at a minimum consulting jobs), while others are moving beyond the dip  to effectively harness social media.

Businessweek echoed a challenge to some of the most visible consultants in social media such as @chrisbrogran and @garyvee from others active in the space, who have differing views on  how businesses can harness social media (I think @armano would prefer social business). The concern is that, unless something changes and we show results, we will find ourselves in the “you lied. it didn’t work” phase.

Sorting those that can get results from those that cannot, is not easy. But there are huge differences between those who know and those who claim to know as demonstrated last week in DARPA’s Network Challenge.

DARPA asked people to find 10 balloons across the United States and a team from MIT’s media lab, won. As @mirzu put the solution so eloquently:

In fact most of the 4,300 participants used some combination of social media tools. Some people simply monitored twitter (we observed this throughout the day of the contest). Others enabled people to submit locations on a google map using APIs. Others set up Facebook groups. Still others had an iPhone app. In fact many of the strategies seem to mirror the types of work being sold to organizations as “social media”.

Many participants in this contest would probably refer to themselves as social media experts, but many could not verify the location of even one balloon – there were only 900 submissions of which many were spurious.

So what lessons can organizations learn from the DARPA contest for spotting Snake Oil salesmen?

focus on outcomes - many people can use tools, but few can use them to achieve specific outcomes, so focus projects that can achieve specific business goals versus simply using tools.

test and measure – you should be able to measure some outcomes that impact the business. DARPA was still going to learn if someone found 5 balloons and not all 10. But it would enable them to compare the results of different approaches.

small experiments are fine – DARPA is not likely to deploy MITs strategy in Afganistan next week, but it is likely that they will try this out again with more money and resources to see how it works for more realistic/useful problems.

Most important, beyond ballons, DARPA shows you how to spot spot Snake Oil salesmen. And you dont need to put too much as risk. We’ll be out of the hype cycle dip over the next few years. Please be patient.

Our first story takes place in the Springfield. It is the story of a car company that sets out to create a new car.

Powell Motors is in need of new ideas. So they turn to Homer, because it is reasoned, he represents the interests of the average American. He should therefore be able to define what he wants in a car. He is given free reign and the result is well, less than what was hoped. In fact, the Powell Motors is forced into bankruptcy and the Simpson’s extended family is torn apart.

Looking at the Homer, now, it is perhaps easy to see what all the fuss is about. I don’t really want one and my guess is, you might not either.

Our second story takes place more than 15 years later, in present day Massachusetts, no where near Springfield. It’s being slowly documented, but this is what we know so far.

Local Motors wants to build C.O.O.L cars. They invite a large community or car enthusiasts to participate in the development of their car. But this is where the similarities with Powell Motors ends, because Local Motors decides to decide differently. While Homer was the decider with rather unfortunately results, Local Motors doesn’t let the community decide everything. The don’t leave them alone to figure things out and show up at the end to see the result.

Local Motors cleverly picks some things to do themselves (chasis design), some to leave to other manufacturers (door handles from a Miata, I think) and then they choose a few areas to get some help (body styling). And then for good measure they borrow some ideas from IKEA for assembly. The people who submit body designs are specialists, but the people giving feedback, encouragement and voting on their favorites are prospective customers.

Seeing the Rally Fighter now, it is easy to see what all the fuss is about. I stopped caring about cars sometime ago, but I want this one.

The Homer, I think most people would agree (aside from Bart, perhaps) was a massive #fail. The Rally Fighter, well it is still too soon to say that this will be a commercial success, but it looks very encouraging.

Local Motors is using crowdsourcing – making very clear choices about where and how they want the crowd involved, how things are owned and they are discussing with the crowd as they go and experimenting to see what works (we love recursiveness almost as much as crowdsourcery). It sounds a lot like the process experiments that saw Linux depart from the traditional processes of its time, or the cleverly organized participation in WordPress or Mozilla as they go up against traditionally organized competitors.

The Rally Fighter feels like the result of magic. As Arthur C. Clark put it

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This technology is just the artificial, artificial intelligence kind. And it takes some clever experimenting, organizing, tools and people to make it work properly. The story of the Rally Fighter suggest to me, that we should stop looking at Crowdsourcing in the simplistic terms that resulted in the Homer and start to consider that although it may require new organizations, tools and people, it’s very likely to produce magic.

This presentation explains how we are using social product development ideas for the betacup.

Whether you are creating a doughnut, a store to sell doughnuts or a custom doughnut service, you are following a design process.

The processes we have come to know and love, involves a group of designers moving through the process typically from a question, problem or idea. The design group has typically operated within an organization, often working with partners and a “representative” group of customers. The scale might be small with fewer than 10 people or perhaps as many as 1,000 people for a large automative design problem.

But many many more people are joining the design process, during different phases of the design process. Think about how many people are involved in open source projects like Mozilla or WordPress? At times the process involves a small core group and other times conversations with larger groups of users on their respective support sites.

These ideas are finding their way beyond digital back to the physical world. Threadless is celebrating its 10th anniversary next year – they opened up concept generation and selection for t-shirt design. And quickly became a reference for what might be possible with a more open design process. Some complain that t-shirts are simple, but more complex design is happening – Local Motors are taking this thinking to the automotive industry, one of the more complex design processes – the latest product of their design process is the rally fighter.

Adding all these new participants is making our beloved doughnut lumpy. At different times in the process, more stakeholders are asking to participate and they are adding value in a variety of ways. Support forums are often the source of inspiration for new products, features or services, increasingly resulting from conversations between customers. Customers are often involved in proposing ideas to specific problems or to help select concepts. It might still be difficult to get involved in specialized production and development processes, but customers have proved to be very valuable during beta product evaluations, too.

Its not the prettiest thing at the moment. But we think it has lot of potential. People are going to add new filling, some sprinkles and eventually we think they may look strange, but they will taste better.