What Star Wars Teaches Us About Branding - Audience Participation

When you create something and place it in the public domain, there is value in leaving enough space for people to project their own personalities onto it. Create a compelling message and wrap it in a evocative story. The critical part is to let the audience grab the concept or idea and make it their own, give them the tools to edit, copy and paste their own content into the work, this not only can increase your marketing reach with word of mouth and social sharing but also it starts to create unique stories and a shared culture that can live without the original creators input. The brand can become far more organic and find a more natural path to success.

A great example of the power of this is the film and franchise of Star Wars. It doesn't take much to find Stars Wars on YouTube and see all the fan videos, remakes and outtakes that they have made. Search for Star Wars on Google and see all the fan sites and forums about the Star Wars universe. Think about how a whole generation bought into the story and still talk about it today. Consider the iconic characters and their cultural place as references in conversations. Did George Lucas plan all of this? Or did this occur through the adoption of the film by people that fell in love with the brand all the way from films and books to toys? 

The genius of the Star Wars brand is how people adopted it and made it their own. There was enough space and depth to give people a platform to build from. They could relate and find meaning inside the story. There is a powerful brand lesson here about telling stories, allowing room for adaptation and most importantly allowing audience participation in the messaging. Don't just build a brand with dogmatic imagery and messaging, keep some space between the lines for people to fall in love and become your biggest fans.

Could Crowdfunding be the Future of New Project Development?

Reading this article reminds us that the jump from concepting and ideation to actual production is something that can be very difficult. Could crowdfunding be a possible solution to this more difficult problem of funding ideas?

Traditionally, design companies show new product development workflow as something like this.

With design concepting and ideation on the left progressively working towards a proof of concept and prototype, then finally flowing through to production and distribution. All very simple when you know how. Of course this is the idealized view of product development and it requires time and effort, not to mention money to make this process work.

The reality is as the article suggests more like this.

Where the concepting and ideation are can be quick and full of possibilities then the reality of having to make and distribute and getting investors involved can change the new products possibility of surviving in the marketplace. Ultimately you have to get to a point in the product development where considerations about marketing and product placement occur. To get people to buy your product thoughts on differentiation from competition and potential rivals has to occur. Most likely you will need some kind of advertising and marketing effort to make that happen. When should these have been considered? Probably quite early on in the product life-cycle. Then the questions of manufacturing and shipping to consumers has to discussed and solved. Apple hasn't just been innovative in their products but also in the infrastructures that support the making and shipping of these items. Innovation si more than a good idea and great product.

So this leads onto the focus of the article, for the majority of start ups and small businesses that have lower budgets and not the reach and resources for these systems to be put in place, how can they solve these issues without help? Could a form of crowdsourcing that involves investments from a crowd, called crowdfunding help?

Firstly there are 2 important questions to ask yourself.

1. Do I have the time to make this commitment?
2. Do I want to develop this publicly

These questions of course have huge impacts on whether you should begin a crowdfunded project.

Certainly crowdfunding has been shown to work in gathering money for projects\ that seem worthwhile. One attempt at this that has proven successful has been the work by Grameen bank, an attempt at helping the third World at getting micro financial help for individual projects that can help those in extreme poverty.

So how might this fit into the building of an idea at what stage should you seek funding from other people. The website suggests getting people involved at the proof of concept stage, of course this makes sense that people want to see at least something working in action rather than pure speculation. Then the idea has already started to prove at least it can be made. The speculation of course might still be in the interest of the public at large and it's possibility of future growth and success. But then that is what investment is all about, speculation on future growth.

There are already many sites forming on this concept such as kickstarter and IndieGoGo, they are proving out the model and already have many projects looking for crowd funding. Time will tell how successful these become. but already signs are looking positive for this new venture into funding. Kickstarter has already as of 2010, had 319 successful projects and raised over $9.1 Million in funding these efforts. Top catagories seem to be towards film and music efforts with design making a growth sector in third. The reason suggested is that designer primarily spend their time working on projects for others and are not as used to pitching their ideas for themselves.

Noted reasons for Kickstarters crowdsourcing success are suggested to be:

1. They filter which projects get posted to the crowd -
makes them interesting and worthwhile

2. You only get funding if you meet the threshold of prior to launching your project
keeps projects realistic and encourages crowd participation in promotion as projects get close to reaching their goals

3. Easy to find and promote projects
Easy is always good in these efforts, as it makes it easier for anyone to get involved.

4. Its success has made it more successful
As Malcolm Gladwell would suggest reaching a tipping point in success will only lead to more interest by others.

5. It's not about the money
Like most crowdsourcing efforts the crowd is most motivated by personal pet projects and interests.

You can find out more information about crowdsourcing in a previous post here.

Gamification of the crowd

I recent article I read highlights some of the power of crowds and mixes in some gaming concepts to make a novel use of crowdsourcing to help scientific progress. The amazing claim is that the power of the crowd actually came up with an enzyme that was better than anything the scientists working in the field had come up with on their own. The new crowd produced enzyme is 18 times more effective than it was before the crowd got involved.

The crowd playing this game are logged into a system called FoldIt, that basically requires folding proteins to form a correct solution. It is like a biological version of Rubik's cube. It has rules and systems, that can be learnt and lend themselves to crowdsourcing. The power of the crowd is the ability to tackle these complex objects in bite sized pieces and problems. One of the fascinating things is that the crowd are not all experts in protein folding and in fact do not need to be to play. The rules of gene folding are like the rules of a game that can be learnt and played with.

The lesson to be learnt here is that by creating a compelling game that has easy rules and ability to experiment without consequence has not only grown a large interested group of game players, but has actually enabled time and effort playing the game to be turned into something practical in the real world. This fails nicely inline with the whole concept of innovation and working on bite sized problems, using a growth mindset and playing in safe environments. Nice confirmation of some of those concepts.

You can read some more about some of my crowdsourcing discoveries here and here.

3D printing - The future of product design?

Watching this video about Microsoft's model shop, where they design and develop the next hardware products for Microsoft. I was left thinking how amazing 3D printing is and some of the possibilities that might evolve from their evolution and adoption. Already the output is stunning, for rapid prototyping small objects it can produce something as complex as a mouse in about 3 hours of printing time. Also it has the ability to render complex objects already formed using a suspension material, that is removed later, leaving something like a wrench already in a mechanically working form, without assembly. Of course, these objects are fairly fragile and not built for hard commercial use, but they do allow you use variations of material properties. From a hard material like plastic to a more varied material like rubber just this diversity is compelling. Now of course these printing devices are not cheap and they are not going to sit on your desktop for sometime. But like all things disruptive and new they will of course grow in popularity and most importantly become cheaper to buy and run as time progresses. With this in mind, it got me thinking about the future possibilities of this technology for a consumer and the potential for networks of people that could utilize their skills in 3D.

If we think about the current state of 3D we are quite simply using more 3D now than ever before, hollywood films have totally absorbed the medium as a production tool for blockbuster films, product designers are using digital in every aspect of new product design and the applications that support all these people from professional to amateur are getting easier, faster and more approachable to learn. For example, Autodesk now has offers 3DSMax and Maya as their entry level 3d applications, and although very deep applications in terms of functionality, they also are supported by a huge network of budding 3D artists on such sites as CGsociety. The line between amateur and professional is much less now than it may have been decades ago where you might need a degree in either engineering or software to understand 3D design.

This leads me to believe that learning, and using 3D applications now, as well as finding great 3D assets and designers is far easier than ever before and will continue to rise, as more jobs look for these skills and people learn them whether for career options or personal pleasure. Just look how quickly the video editing industry changed as more people started to use video editing software on their home computers. If this adoption of 3D proves to be true then why not in the future wouldn't people start to design and even print, their own products. They might even be able to join a community of designers and even if unskilled in the actual design, maybe they could download the "blueprint" models and just hit the print button. It seems very likely that crowdsourcing efforts could easily create very usable functionally correct objects. Now of course, the objects are going to be simple at first. I could easily imagine a toothbrush, or computer mouse already being possible. Really the only missing parts are the electronics, however with a network of "object creators" all that would be needed is templates and purchasable packs of parts to transform you dead 3D printed object into a real working tool. After all I pull apart my electric toothbrush and the only part I couldn't 3D print is the battery.

Todays social networks show that people like to create and customize their own creations. iStockhphoto is testament to what a good crowdsourcing model can produce. High quality very acceptable creative work. 3D would fit nicely into these existing models of crowdsourcing and social networks, with the right motivations and rewards I think 3D artists and engineers would be glad to share their work. Their is no reason that I can see that once the cost of the 3D printing hardware comes down and the materials available allow you to "bake" them or pick harder materials for regular use that this couldn't take off as the next big phase of digital printing.

You could even, make the jump of saying that if the right materials are discovered that the objects could utilize the fact they these objects are easy to create and don't last forever. Maybe they should be made of some kind of biodegradable material. Use it a few times them as it starts to degrade, put it in the compost and print another one. Nothing I like more than the idea of sustainability.

So of course this is very future thinking, the printers are not cheap, the materials I am sure are equally expensive and probably not bio-degradable. The machines require a dedictaed room and you need to be quite a 3D wiz I am sure to make it all work. But then once upon a time the humble computer required a degree in computer science and a dedicated room to house it. Look how far that has come.....

Successful Crowdsourcing Requirements

As part of a project I am working on at the moment I am thinking carefully about how it might benefit from crowdsourcing the content for the site. I can't talk too much about the project right now, but I can share my discoveries about crowdsourcing so far. As I mentioned in a previous post I recently read the book by Jeff Howe, and in a previous post I had found a few key motivators to crowdsourcing on the web. Jeff, kindly puts a summary at the end of his book that extends this list, with the following observations that he made on crowsourcing and what makes it work. His key discoveries for successful crowdsourcing include:

Picking the right model. 

As outlined in his book, which I don't plan to repeat fully here I suggest you buy and read it yourself, he talks about the different models of crowdsourcing that exist, including crowd creation, collective intelligence and crowd voting. Each of these has different goals and needs from the crowd, and some projects require one of these approaches and some require all three.

Pick the Right Crowd.

Picking the right group of minds to tap into is of course important to any endeavor as you want to have the product of their efforts to be inline with your needs and goals.

Offer the right incentives.

offering the right incentives of course falls inline with the right crowd and right model. Some crowds are inspired and work to impress peers and some work to make money, each crowd can be motivated by different things, so it is important to know what motivates your crowd, and allow those motivations to shine and work in your site.

Don't assume the crowd is your new workforce.

It seems that it is easy to fall into the mindset that crowdsourcing is going to save you time and effort and reduce the need for fulltime employees. But as Jeff explains, often the content they produce needs guidance, and filtering, by someone professional in the area of the crowds domain. Crowds also don't always show loyality if they feel cheated and any attempt to think of them as substitute works will back fire.

Dumbness of crowds or the benevolent dictator

This is an extension of the previous principle, crowds are not always very good at self organizing and often need guidance from a guide, or principle that helps focus the crowds efforts.

Keep it simple

The way to think about crowds is to see them as many different people with many different skills and more importantly with various amounts of time available to work on their projects. So as such breaking problems or tasks that are of different sizes ideally smaller the better, is more likely to yield results. Those that have an hour to spare can use it, and those that have 5 mins can also take part in the collaborative efforts.

Sturgeons Law

This is simply that most of the content(+90%) that people of such varing degrees of ability will produce will be less than satisfactory. But 10% will be amazing and above average. The task of course is to get as many people invloved as possible to increase the amount of great work produced.

10% Rule to aid Sturgeons Law

Allow the crowd to sort through the content themselves voting the best up to the top and allowing the bad items to fall to the bottom of the fish tank. The 10% concept comes from the view, of Bradley Horowitz that approximately 1% of a crowd produces something, 10% votes and comments on it and 90% will just consume it. So the 10% is a valuable asset to getting the best of the crowd.

The community is always right.

This simply suggests that the community can be guided, but in the end you are a follower to the crowds wants and desires. After all, if the community feels ignored or pushed, then they will just leave for something else.

Ask what you can do for the crowd.

It is important for crowd to be considered as individual people, they are going to have needs, wants and desires. Your job as a crowdsorcerer  is to put in place those things that address the crowds Maslow needs, if you want to really see success then work with the community you create.

So there you have it a nice summary of some considerations for crowdsourcing efforts. I have already begun to rethink how my project might benefit from some of this advice. Time will tell how successful it becomes. 

Crowdsourcing motivations

Came across this nice list of motivational concepts that help power crowdsourcing efforts. Found here. Seems  many of these are, of course, powered by psychological concepts on human motivation and engagement, but also interesting to note a few of them fall into the realms of game mechanics and gamification of tasks, such as, leaderboards and badges. Of course, it is no real surprise when you consider that fundamentally the crowd is the same group of people in both cases, only in a different context of effort.

1) Monetary Compensation: The company outlines what you need to do to make money. You do it. You make some money (the amount varies widely). Rinse and repeat.

2) Points and Rewards (Non-Monetary Compensation): You do something good or you contribute in a certain way and you get some quantifiable but not directly monetizable reward. Many companies have some type of “points”. Keeping score matters here (see below for more on this). Sometimes these rewards in the end are monetizable either by exchange (turning them in for prizes) or indirectly monetizable (using points to get access to more of the system).

3) Leaderboards and Competitive Standing: Many companies let you know where you stand against your peers. Leaderboards usually reflect you standing using some other form of motivation (earned money, earned points, badges, etc.). What’s key is that you understand from the physics of the system you’re using how to positively affect your leaderboard status. Leaderboards are always public. This plays to people’s desire to compete publicly.

4) Badges and Goal Completion: The system you work with defines levels of achievement or specific goals to complete and you are awarded something (even just a graphical badge) that denotes your accomplishments. Necessary in this motivation (like leaderboards) is that the badges are publicly viewable (this is the boy scout badges concept and is basically the way Zynga learned to dominate the social gaming industry) and a core part of Foursquare’s philosophy.

5) Reputation: The system has some mechanism (usually a combination of all the other things I mentioned above) to help you express to others (and self evaluate) what your reputation is in the system. Foursquare uses the Mayor concept, Zynga uses a ranking system for player titles and Mahalo uses a martial arts belt system. All of these approaches make it easy for someone to understand that someone has a general standing greater or less than them.

6) Community: You can participate in and communicate with a community of similar people interested in similar things.

7) Collaboration: You can work collaboratively with other people on something larger than you could create yourself and the results are publicly (or at least partially publicly) on display. Your group effort is visible.

In another blog post, here are are some of the suggested things we are learning about crowds.

What we’re learning about the crowd:

1)    The crowd needs information about itself. Game mechanics has included this mechanism publicly, in the form of leaderboards, because it encourages people to compete with each other.

2)    The crowd needs information about its goals. These goals are applicable at both at the individual level and the group level. This is a very subtle point because crowd mechanics gets interesting when some individuals in a crowd are hitting the goal – but some are not.

3)    The goals need to be realistic. At Trada, the goal is an advertiser’s CPA. If this CPA is simply unattainable (you can’t get a 50% conversion rate to sales for visitors are your website on a $1000 product) then everyone loses. We’re learning a lot about making sure the advertisers’ goals are achievable as part of the “social contract” that exists between the crowd and its patron.

4)    There need to be known group incentives that are substantive compared to individual incentives. For example, a “group win” should not pay someone 1/100th of what they make when they win individually. As much as possible, the group win should be more lucrative than an individual win.

5)    Group wins, like individual wins, must reinforce a very small set of core incentive principles. In Trada, the CPA is king and almost all the rewards, achievements and levels are a reflection of this. Group rewards must be based on and reinforce the same core incentive structure.

6)    Groups must be able to anonymously socially regulate themselves. We call this the “shoulder tap” – a mechanism where someone in a group can effectively say to someone anonymously “please check your work, it’s way above the goal”. This form of social regulation goes on all the time around us. As a matter of fact, I’m writing this from the ‘quiet car’ on an Amtrak train to NYC. A “shhh” on the quiet car is an example of social regulation and in most cases is anonymous enough that someone in the group is willing to do it.

7)    There must be a rules-based regulator that can be called to enforce group behavior.  Any group must know that there is a 3rd party regulator (e.g. the SEC, Wikipedia administrators, CJ’s network quality group) that has the power to enforce, in a non-subjective and rules based way, final arbitration policy when someone’s behaving badly in the group (including the patron – e.g. the advertiser – in our model).

As I dive deeper into crowdsourcing, I am curious about the future of global collaboration and people sharing problems and approaches to solving those issues, especially large problems around health, environment and technology. I also like the idea of diversity of minds to generate different angles of addressing the problem being tackled. I think crowdsourcing has the potential to change how people work together and work towards the future of innovation. Of course, I appreciate it is not going to work in all instances, but I do think that for content generation and sense of community around issues and knowledge it is proving to very powerful. This investigation will be on going.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a fascinating term coined Jeff Howe, journalist at Wired magazine, to describe the use of large groups of people working on a common task in bite sized chunks. His latest book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, is a great overview and summary of the current trend and ideas on group problem solving and content generation. 


Not everyone agrees with the concepts he raises that the group is more potent than the individual creator, but he does raise some interesting talking points around the open source programming model and content sites like iStockPhoto and YouTube. For me the most fascinating aspect of crowdsourcing and what it allows is that someone whom is a professional in one field of work, can lend his skills to another, which has long been recognized as a good way to innovate. Also the concept of people having other interests outside of their chosen career, that can be used and improved by adopting a crowd of interest, seems to fall nicely inline with modern thinking around people being passionate about things that are not necessarily done for money or profitable gain, but more for personal fulfillment and challenge. 


Overall I think crowdsourcing has some very interesting concepts and the examples given in the book are very compelling, whether or not it can be replicated easily across different domains remains to be seen, but at the least I like the ideas of working as a group of passionate like minded individuals to solve bigger problems in smaller pieces. This book is a great introduction to the concepts and is an easy read to get upto speed on the current trend.