lead/marke | ralf schwartz

Best Damn Christmas Ever!

Via thisisnthappiness.

May All Your Wishes Come True!
Thx for following. See You next Year.
ralf 

Unendliche Dummheit - Geht Kopieren über Innovieren?

(Note: This is a post for The Third Club)

In 'Edge'*, meiner Lieblings-Publikation, las ich gerade folgendes Zitat. Ich möchte es hier als Gedankenanstoß wiedergeben, als Aufforderung, es kritisch zu hinterfragen, nicht zuletzt weil sich die Reflexionen des The Third Club auch um die Beobachtung immer seltener werdender Innovation drehen:

"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely.

What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet.

We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by.

And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard.

My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers." - Mark Pagel, Edge

> Dass Facebook und Google dumm machen sollen, hat man ja schon öfter gehört. Verallgemeinerungen, die einem wenig helfen. Was aber ist mit dem Netz als Ganzem? Erzieht es zur Kopie? Verleitet es zur Kopie?

... bitte bei The Third Club weiterlesen ...

 

* Edge: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Eigendefinition Edge

 

[L/M NET] Helge Tenno "Simple (part 2 of The next 80%)

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

The reason large parts of the corporate Internet is boring, difficult and of little direct use / effect is because we are unnecessarily complicating it. The Internet should be one thing: simple.

This is the second part of my presentation The next 80%, find the first part here:
Part 1: Introduction

 

.

Let me demonstrate with a couple of examples how even minute tasks get unnecessarily complicated online.

Example A:
Comoyo is an Internet based content service. The first thing that happens as I fill in the form is that it refuses the password that I use on 95% of all my Internet accounts. Why would you do that? Why would you start of by inviting people to a service they don’t know what is, offer them a log in and the first thing you do is just crash the whole process? If the system is to complex then redesign the system. We are putting to much of the responsibility on to people, instead of IT.

Example B:
This is the beta version of my Internet bank, the picture is from a sneak preview they offered their customers. Now, I have a bank because I need help doing bank-things. Most often (95% of the time) this means checking my account or paying some bills. The best thing the bank can do is offer me a service that makes banking better. But they don’t. Approximately 15% of the interface is spent on banking, the rest of it is navigation, CRM or a media platform that wants to sell me stuff I don’t need. They give me everything except the actual banking service that I should be demanding (people are just to polite and don’t know that their experiences are being robbed online. In the words of Richard Saul Wurman, the creator of TED: “I would have designed a much better Google interface, it’s not difficult.”).

Now, the reason the Internet isn’t simple, is because of technology. We are treating online as something complicated, something that doesn’t work, something we don’t understand. – And my question is: how much do we really need to understand?

Take a look at other pieces of technology: bread, asphalt, language, bicycle, chairs, door knobs. Now do you think about these things as technology? They work and they are, no questions asked. But this is not the case with the Internet, why?

Understanding the nuts and bolts of the Internet is as important to a business as understanding the complexities of the mechanics that goes on inside the door when we twist the door nob.

Unfortunately the fog of technology diffuses the process of building something meaningful by trivializing the discussions and spending to much time focusing on irrelevant details. When we think of the Internet we are not thinking business models, identity and brand value. We are thinking users (what is a user?), HTML5, responsive design (why would you offer the same service in every situation?), apps or clicks.

The Internet is fascinatingly simple, if we just stop referencing it as technology and start thinking of it as a loaf of bread – because our customers already are.

(ralf says:
All those gurus out there are very deep into the technologies and secrets of the internet. But they cannot transcend the easiest mechanics of it.

To the opposite of my father I never wanted to understand a radio, a television set or loudspeakers. And he was limited by that understanding. He always told me that small speakers cannot - due to the laws of physics - create deep sounds. But they can these days. I showed him. He said: No they can't. They just sound like they can.

We are in the very early stages of the web. We have to get it out of our way. We have to understand that it is not important to understand it. We do not have to understand oxygen to understand that we have to breath. We even do not have to understand that we have to breath. We just do.

We just have to take care of the web's independence, its neutrality, and ubiquity. We must take care that politicians do not sell it to corporations like they did with our water systems and resources ... as simple as that.

The more simple a medium (in McLuhan's sense) is the more precious it will be for us and our future.)

Helge works as a Planner for SDG, helping brands and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in consumers lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them. Twitter: @congbo

Ross Dawson: "2012: 12 Themes - What to expect in the year ahead"

2012: 12 Themes - What to expect in the year ahead

View more presentations from Ross Dawsn

[L/M NET] Helge Tenno "The next 80% (part 1. introduction)"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

According to Microsoft people have moved on, they have explored and adopted online communication / connected technologies to such a degree that they are almost unrecognizable compared to only five years ago.

People have an adoption mindset and culture, in contrast to companies who calculate and protect.

As businesses are ready to settle for the first generation Internet, people are already adopting the second and third. This has created a gap that the presentation tries to point out, and help corporations understand what online has become and where it is headed.

This is the first of several parts:
- The introduction, which is mainly concerned with stating the gap between people and corporations.

2. The gap: 80% of what Europeans do online today didn’t exist in their lives five years ago. – Microsoft 2010

•  
  - The Internet was nothing but a wall of web pages that you had to visit – with almost physically cumbersomeness. Hyper linking was the most impressive thing it did.

  - Phones where something you used to talk to people, the buttons where numbers or letters – a button did nothing more than present a digit. Today buttons are applications, one push and the phone becomes a gaming platform, a social network or tool for locating you in the world.

3. Think about that, five years ago most people didn’t have either Facebook or smart phones in their lives.

Imagine the leap that people, you and me included, have made these last years.

4. This is the thing with people, they are crazy, and unpredictable … they are adopters, they are curious and they are looking for opportunities.

5. And this is where businesses are failing…

6. Because, polar to people, business is static and predictable. People are dancers and companies are calculators.

Businesses take steps into worlds that are already known and explored, or incrementally tries to improve something that might already be good enough or uninteresting.

If you want to see the future, you need to look at people – not businesses. And so we need to understand why people today, you and me included, are generations ahead of companies when it comes to exploring and taking advantage of connected technology…

7. Ask this question: Has corporations adopted new habits with the same eagerness and interest as people?

And why hasn’t it?

Is it because they don’t want to, or is it because their way of thinking when it comes to online is something completely different from the way people are thinking about and approaching online?

.

8.Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com says: “We are at the light bulb stage of the internet”.

We are in the first generation of online services, and if the current generation of businesses are struggling with understanding the opportunities in this generation, then it’s hard to imagine how they will cope with the changes coming in the second, third and fourth generation.

 

(ralf says:
A great and very true thought of Helge.
Think about that in practice, in your own surrounding. You try stuff at home, you love new stuff, you test it (eg. Amazon, Google, facebook, flickr, instagramm, foursquare, etc.), you talk about it with your friends. You talk about it with your colleagues.

But you would never get the obvious idea to adopt or adapt the mechanics, the benefit, the delivered and perceived value for your own brand, product, service or corporation.

This behaviour is truly unbelievable, ridiculous, and suicidal - because it prevents creativity and business innovation. It prevents success.

And nobody cares. Nobody changes that culture.
But corporations which do not learn from people will perish.)

Helge works as a Planner for SDG, helping brands and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in consumers lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them. Twitter: @congbo

[L/M NET] Drew Neisser “Long-Term Success is Made Up of Short-term Successes”

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

While doing homework for another article, I ran across a recent study by IBM called “From Stretched to Strengthened” that offers insights into the challenges facing CMO’s around the world.  The study is well worth reading, especially if you are a CMO, and stresses a number of important themes including the needs to:

• Deliver value to empowered customers
• Foster lasting connections
• Capture value, measure results

After reading the study, I reached out to IBM with some follow up questions and got in touch with Yuchan Lee, General Manager of IBM’s Enterprise Marketing Management business.  I think you will agree that Mr. Lee has smart things to say about measuring ROI, using social media for research, the importance of having a clear “corporate character” and finally, the need to think long-term when it comes to customer relationship building.

DN: Is ROI the right metric for CMOs or just one of many important metrics? 
It is the most important, as reflected by our CMO Study. Other than a metric based on reflecting customer up-take (e.g., revenue, satisfaction level), which most companies already measure, marketing ROI is essentially the highest level scorecard for an organization’s ability to efficiently and effectively allocate its resource to hit marketing goals.

DN: Why do you think so many CMOs struggle to demonstrate ROI? 
The heart of the challenge is the nature to which marketing activities influence buying behavior, and how behavior manifest itself over time. Measuring ROI in marketing involves sifting through tons of noise in the data to connect all the pieces of evidence that influenced the purchase behavior.  This is an inexact, statistically-based science that, until recently, was too hard to tackle.

DN: Why do you think marketers have been so slow to embrace research via social channels? (i.e. only 14% mine blogs)
Before a company embraces a social channel, it must first believe it has to.  This requires a shift in strategy based on the realization that consumers are more in control and the company is losing its grip on branding.  In my experience, this shift is scary to many companies and many are slow to realize it and to turn this realization into action.  Furthermore, even if one is ready to take action, the newness of engaging social networks makes it challenging to know where to begin.

DN: Why should marketers expand their research horizons beyond traditional channels to things like blogs? 
We believe traditional marketers need to expand not just research but all areas of market and customer engagement as well as demand generation to the social channels.  That’s where the center of influence for purchase decisions is and will continue to be. That’s where detailed, real-time, and unfiltered market feedback data can be best gathered and analyzed, and ultimately where the brand of a company will truly be reflected in the future (if not already!).

DN: What’s in it for the more proactive marketers who are mining new digital data sources? 
Additional data, if incorporated properly, allows a company to know what is relevant to its customers — potentially down to the individual customer level.  We believe the ability of a company to deliver relevant communication in sales/marketing/services is the basic ingredient to a successful customer relationship and a prerequisite to staying in business.

DN: A lot of marketers pay lip-service to their corporate values.  Will developing a clear ‘corporate character’ really deliver competitive advantage? 
Having clarity on a company’s corporate character is a necessary but not sufficient element of success.  It must be followed by execution by the organization, every day, delivering a consistent customer experience that is aligned with the corporate character.  The true reflection of the corporate character will come out quickly, most likely in social media.

DN: Your report emphasizes the need to “foster lasting connections.”  Is this goal in conflict with the typically pressing need to deliver short-term revenue?
No.  In our experience, being relevant and adding value to the customer in every communication and interaction is the common denominator for forging a lasting connection with the customer AND the ability to drive successful short-term revenue.  After all, long-term success is made up of series of short term successes!

(ralf says: What I have to say you'll find there: Marketingleiters eindrucksvolle Bankrotterklärung. In German, sorry.)

Drew is the CEO of Renegade, the digital & guerrilla marketing agency from New York City that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service." Twitter: @DrewNeisser

[L/M NET] Helge Tenno > "10 Projects Changing/Challenging the Concept of Communication"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

Do we fail to see the extent of what communication is / has become?

Here are 10 projects that should / hopefully would change / broaden our idea of what communication is:

1. The Copenhagen wheel
The Copenhagen wheel is a perfectly designed combination of a lot of separate ideas, that collectively demonstrates the potential in modern communication. It offers both immediate interest and value through personal benefits in the context where it is used, but also ads a layer of communal value – and taking us one step further in creating the connected cities of the future. It’s an exceptionally complicated idea made into something people could understand and want immediately.

2. Life of George
LoG is a small initiative exploring the interface between technology and reality. It has been extremely well concepted and designed. This might not be an eye-opening revolution, but it is a very well thought through commercial mass-produced product. It has been through all the barriers and ended up as something that could easily, and hopefully, be adopted by the mass (iPhone-owning) market.

3. Sniff
Sniff is only a prototype, but demonstrates with beauty the life an inanimate object can have as soon as it takes on some form of well designed behavior. There has been digital technology inside toys for tens and tens of years, but Sniff approaches the idea of what technology is, not what it outputs.

4. Nokia Push Snowboarding
The way the technology has been implemented into the culture of the sport it is trying to augment is the most impressive feet. Nokia and Burton have pushed the snowboarding culture first – and then designed itself to it – which could not be said for a lot of other commercial technology…

5. Nest the learning thermostat
The objects learns by recording our behavior – and calculating something on top of that recording. Objects are still dumb, but in a very intelligent way. The Nest is an example of everyday appliances becoming a second brain, and a demonstration of how digital objects have gone from furniture you hide away in small offices upstairs to objects you display and want to talk about.

6. Up by Jawbone
How does a wristband with no screen and no sound communicate with its carrier? A vibration in itself says nothing, the interesting thing is how we learn what the vibration means in different contexts. This is a perfect example of the rich unexpectedness of communication – the one without the spoken/written language – and how quickly we adopt and learn new forms of communication.

7. Zeebox
Zeebox is one of several new products being launched to augment the TV experience. Behind it lies the concept of increasing the value of something local by connecting it to the rest of the world – through a parallel system. In this case the linear TV experience. Now any idiot could do that, but it is the tools by which they try to achieve the connection which is brilliant. Zeebox is a first generation concept in this arena, but demonstrates the potential of what is to come.

8. Waterpebble
Ideas don’t have to be big and shiny, they can be small and solve minute problems. It’s the aesthetic of the idea that is the important thing: How does the mechanic of such a small thing change the dynamic of something bigger… Now, if they only could connect it to the Internet…

9. The Wattson
The Wattson gives us access to things that previously where invisible and not present in our consciousness. Just because we can’t see things and talk about them doesn’t mean they aren’t important. The Wattson gives us access to a layer of reality that we haven’t been able to see before but which is highly real and important.

10. Nokia kinect
Now the first nine examples have been impressive, most of them include sensors and things which gives us access to a part of reality that we haven’t explored before. But it doesn’t stop with the invisible data… The next generation handsets gives us access to the layer of communication that emerges as objects becomes haptic and kinetic, opening a whole new world of interaction and behavior, through the sensitivity and richness of touch and force.

In conclusion:

“in the future we will communicate with identities, if these are people or objects doesn’t really matter” – 180360720.no

“Our goal is to first connect all the rabbits, and then connect everything else” – Rafi Haladjian

(ralf says:
This just tells me in its own way and means, that we still do not understand the true scope of the web. We still do not understand what we would sacrifice, if we choke the web with obsolete rules and laws and stuff.)

Helge works as a Planner for SDG, helping brands and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in consumers lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them. Twitter: @congbo

LEGO rules the world ..solves Rubik’s Cube Faster than Human World Record

I WANT A CUBESTORMER II!

 
Via Helge Tenno, member of lead/marke NET.