July 14, 2011 • 7:00 am PDT 653 responses

It’s been a week since I snagged a Google+ invite, and while it’s fun to hit the reset button on my personal social media life, what I’m really interested in is how the service is going to impact teaching and learning. There’s a good chance that Google+ is going to become a powerful communication and collaboration tool in the classroom. In fact, it could end up being a serious education game changer.

Google+ has some clear advantages over Facebook in the K-12 arena, especially since students younger than 13 can’t join Facebook. Some school districts even have policies prohibiting teachers from friending students of any age, period. There isn’t (yet) any such prohibition around Google+, and because the Circles feature makes it simple for teachers to separate their personal lives from their professional lives, all the awkward possibilities of students seeing photos of their teacher from a party pretty much disappear.

Even at the college level, Google+ seems like it’s poised to revolutionize things. Sure, over the past couple of years, colleges have increased their presence on Facebook, and even created Facebook-specific apps. But again, the Circles strip away the weird privacy issues so that professors can feel more comfortable about interacting with their students online.

Stanford’s B.J. Fogg, director of the university’s Persuasive Technology Lab, says he’ll be using Google+ to foster collaboration on research projects. “Probably every project in my lab will have its own circle,” he said. Likewise, Lehigh University journalism professor Jeremy Littau wrote on his blog that he plans to require every student to sign up for Google+. “I’m already planning on holding Hangout office hours this fall for students, where they can get on and ask questions about class material,” he says. I can certainly imagine this kind of innovation happening at the K-12 level as well.

I’ve written before about the healthy sharing of ideas among teachers on Twitter, and how educators are using it to engage introverted students in learning. But Twitter also has its disadvantages—namely, that it’s not archived. Educators can have a great conversation about a topic, but once a day or two has gone by, those tweets are buried in a user’s tweet stream. In comparison, Google+ will allow teachers (or students) to have discussions with each other without a 140 character limit. And if a user wants to access the discussion a couple months later, they’ll be able to do so.

One challenge with adopting Google+ at the K-12 level may be whether some school districts continue to block access to Google. That’s already fairly common: Districts worry about students accessing pornography, and they don’t want their employees accessing their Gmail during the day. And, if teachers don’t get training on all the ways it can support what’s happening in the classroom, chances are, they’re not going to use it.

Of course, we won’t really know the impact of Google+ on the classroom until school starts back up in August and September. It’s going to be pretty exciting to see the ways educators at all levels use the service to transform education.

March 31, 2011 • 5:30 pm PDT 90 responses

Good news for teachers looking to collaborate with their colleagues in other parts of the world. Skype has a new free service just for educators called Skype in the classroom, “a free global community created in response to, and in consultation with, the growing number of teachers” using the tool to help students learn.

Teachers already access the eight-year-old service for joint projects, global language exchanges, and guest lectures, but have had a hard time using it to find like-minded collaborators. Skype in the classroom solves that challenge by letting a teacher specify what grade or subject she teaches, and what kinds of projects she’s interested in working on together, when she first sets up a profile.

Last December Missouri fifth grade teacher Kara Cornejo became one of the first beta testers of the tool. When Cornejo set up her profile, she indicated she “wanted to do a weather around the world unit.” A one-minute search of other testers led her to another educator looking to collaborate on the same unit. By the end of the first day, five additional teachers had reached out to her.

The service already has almost 7,000 users, and Skype is looking for additional feedback on how to keep making the tool even better. They’re also looking for tips, articles, links and success stories that can be added to their library of inspirational resources and ideas. They’ve already received classroom videos

on weather, mega-cities, and world populations, to classroom exchanges on earthquakes, culture and language, to helping deaf children communicate, teaching English to Haitian children, connecting students with experts from lawyers and authors, survival experts, paleoanthropologists, and other inspirational guest speakers on global issues such as peace and the importance of intercultural cooperation.

Need proof that the collaboration being facilitated by Skype in the classroom isn’t just hype? Watch the video below detailing a U.S. and Chilean classroom exchange on earthquakes.

In April, Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal and the first major investor in Facebook, announced “20 Under 20,” his experiment that will pay students from some of the nation’s most elite colleges $100,000 each to drop out and start companies. Thiel’s views on college degrees are pretty controversial—he believes they’re unnecessary for talented, entrepreneurially-minded students. After sifting through 400 applications, Thiel announced his inaugural class of fellowship recipients and their projects on Wednesday.

Most of the 20 proposed projects tackle a range of fields you’d expect—biotech, information technology, economics and finance, energy, robotics, and space—but three tackle education and two fall in the category of career development. For example, 19-year-old fellow Dale Stephens, the head of UnCollege, “a social movement that applies the methods of unschooling—the self-directed brand of homeschooling with which he was raised—to the realm of higher education” plans to use his fellowship to create Radmatter, a platform that will “revolutionize how we develop and demonstrate talent in the twenty-first century.”

Two other fellows, Nick Cammarata and David Merfield, are working as a team on a project that sounds similar to what Khan Academy founder Sal Khan envisions. Their project, OPEN, “aims to flip the industrial-scale classroom experience” by letting teachers “create and share online lessons designed to be viewed at home by their own students, leaving class time free for more engaging activities.”

The fellows have two years to develop their ideas into businesses or revolutionary technologies. If they’re successful, one question that’s sure to linger is, given the caliber of applicants—they hail from MIT, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford—would they end up being successful, and maybe more well-rounded, if they stayed in school and got their degrees? Thiel only chose fellows who are already the cream of the crop—people like Sujay Tyle, who is one of the youngest students at Harvard and was already interning at DuPont when he was a teenager. Tyle’s probably going to make it big whether he’s a Thiel fellow or not.

Indeed, for someone who likes to see himself as an outsider, Thiel’s picked students who are inside an extremely elite world and have a whole host of opportunities and resources at their disposal. Why not try to find budding entrepreneurs to support who don’t already have everything going for them?

photo (cc) via Flickr user TechCrunch50-2008

The daily deal model can be a force for positive change, by sending a message about the buying power of conscious consumers, or as Blissmo is trying to do (see next slide), changing our buying habits for the better.

As we pointed out earlier, Groupon evolved out of a do-gooding platform before ballooning into the fastest growing company of all time. It has all but left that behind, and even inexplicably chose to mock nonprofits in Super Bowl ads. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Another mainstream deal site, Living Social proved these platforms can be used for giving as well as buying when it raised—and matched!—more than a million dollars in donations for tsunami relief in Japan.

And then there are the sites with social and environmental consciousness built in to the deals and the companies behind them. Here are four daily deal sites that are better (for the world) than Groupon, so you can have your discount and support your values too.

Blissmo’s founder, Sundeep Ahuja, says he doesn’t want to be a green version of Groupon. He wants to stop climate change. “We’re on a mission to shift consumption patterns,” he says.

“This site was founded with the philosophy to have macro impact on micro actions,” he says, comparing it to Kiva, the microfinance platform—another organization he helped get off the ground.

Kiva made lending to poor entrepreneurs accessible, easy and addictive to everyday Americans. That’s what he wants to do for environmentally friendly consumption.

“People don’t care about climate change,” he says provocatively. “The people who say they care, they don’t act. It’s effectively a psychology problem. So we’re out to find amazing products that are better for people, better for their families and for their world, and shine a spotlight on these products.” But not a “green” spotlight, just a regular old 60 percent off email spotlight.

Early on, Ahuja cultivated partnerships with environmental groups with massive email lists like the Nature Conservancy and the Care2 consumer community. Blissmo now serves the daily deals to those groups, a savvy business move that bodes well for the young startup. Through these kinds of partners who have memberships in the millions, Blissmo reaches several million people, with Blissmo reaches over 100,000 subscribers.

Right now the products are similar to what you’d find on the mainstream daily deal sites—beauty products, food, clothing—but Blissmo vets the companies for environmental impact. Ahuja says he turns to third party verifications like organic, Fair Trade, or B-Corporation certifications. And when that’s not available, it’s a gut check by Blissmo staff who have backgrounds in the social change space.

It doesn’t mean all the Blissmo deals are do-no-harm models of perfection, in fact, that might not be the best strategy for impact. If consumption habits switch toward the best in industry companies, even within bad industries, then, Ahuja says, he’s succeeding.

For instance, good luck finding an environmentally friendly airline, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fly the best of the bunch when you travel. Ahuja says he’s reached out to Virgin Atlantic because he thinks they’re better than the rest. (For the record, flying is usually more environmentally friendly than driving your car.)

Look for new kinds of incentives for better consumerism out of this site as they scale.

This tiny startup is just for the folks of Orange County, California right now, but if the model works, watch for copycats around the country. DealGooder boasts that it “brings together socially conscious shoppers, local businesses and nonprofits, to make this world a better place, one deal at a time.”

Co-founder Cara Mungo tells GOOD, “In less than 5 months and in just one city, we have grown our subscriber base by 600 percent (in addition to the thousands of people that make up our nonprofit partners’ subscriber base of donors and supporters), donated close to $10,000 to local charities, and saved people over $100,000.”

The logic is the same as Groupon: customers sign up for a daily email with one big discounted offer a day that “tips” if enough people sign on. But with this site, 50 percent of profits go to a featured charity that changes each week.

Right now DealGooder posts modest goals for small, local organizations in the area. This week’s target, for instance, is to raise $500 for Share Our Selves that would provide food for 165 needy families. DealGooder offers half-price movie tickets to get you there. The site posted a personal best of $2,000 in one week for the American Red Cross Japan Relief Fund.

Mungo says, “Our DealGooder philosophy: have fun, do good, help others.” She thinks it’s working because the site plans to spread into five new markets in the next six months.

Operating in five cities in Canada, ethicalDeal fully embraces the “green lifestyle” it promotes through discount offers, in sharp contrast to Blissmo. In fact, ethicalDeal uses the word green—in green font!—more than any other site on this list. “Part green city guide, party green deal site, part green action network, ethicalDeal helps you discover the best green stuff to do.”

Behind this green-thusiasm is a smart logic from founder and social entrepreneur Annaela Krebs who recognizes many socially-conscious consumers have trouble finding and vetting companies they want to patronize. By offering up a slate of approved local brands and businesses, ethicalDeal becomes a resource for choice, not just a temptation for impulse buys.

The deals are environmentally friendly versions of the mainstream deal sites: 64 percent off eco-friendly cleaning services, 50 percent off organic and health food, 50 percent off hemp clothing.

There’s also a bonus, though: straight up cash, or account credits anyway. If you refer a friend, you get $5 when they make their first purchase. You can only spend the money on the site of course.

By Christine Lagorio | @lagorio | Mar 1, 2011

Where might you want to search that Google can’t reach? The social slice of the Web, plus everything that an individual has password-protected hovering in the cloud, has been largely off-limits to traditional search engines. Well, until an Israeli high-school graduate took a hiatus from Army duty to spend three months at Y Combinator, bombed on a few projects, and then struck gold in his last 48 hours at the start-up incubator. Daniel Gross, along with co-founder Robby Walker, 27, created Greplin, a user-authorized search that can access Facebook, Twitter, Google Documents, Salesforce, and more. The site launched in late February. Inc.com’s Christine Lagorio spoke with Gross, age 19, about his struggles, raising nearly $5 million in investment after just six months at work, and his unique lack of college experience.

Tell me how Greplin came about.

I’m originally from Israel. I was in Israel and had graduated high school, and I was all set to go into the Israeli Army. I applied to Y Combinator. And not thinking I’d get in, I was invited to an interview. I thought of it as a fun long weekend in San Francisco. They had an odd reaction—they didn’t quite like what I was working on, but I guess they liked me. They wanted me to come back, so I hopped back on a plane.

In my three months there, I built several things, none of which caught on. Right at the end of Y Combinator, you get a cool opportunity to get up on a stage and show your project to the world. And our project had just got shut down, so this was 48 hours before the end of the program. I went over to [Y Combinator co-founder] Paul Graham’s house, and he said, “Just build something that you’d want to use today, not something you think people could use somehow.” So I created a very, very, very basic demo in that 48 hours.

I got a weird reaction. I was a disheveled 18-year-old kid. But the idea had support. So I spent the next months building a workable product by night and raising $780,000 in angel funding. It was from a pretty cool team, the guy who made Gmail, Paul Buchheit, and Chris Dixon, and the guy who did Square. Also the CTO of Facebook, Bret Taylor.

Was there an “a-ha” moment in deciding on working on a search engine for peoples’ online documents and social media files?

I had this very long list of things I thought would be cool. Greplin was always near the top. But my mistake at Y Combinator was not listening to my own intuition enough. There’s the line “Wouldn’t it be cool if this thing existed?” but those aren’t often good ideas, because you’re not the ideal user. It’s also very hard to make a product when you’re not the target audience. Because you have to make decisions along the way, and unless you would be the target user, you’re going to make the wrong decisions. Understanding that fact was my “a-ha” moment. Greplin was the one project idea I had for which I was the target audience.

Where does the name come from?

The idea came way before the name. The idea was in a sense a headline: A search engine that lets you find all of your stuff online. This guy Adam Goldstein [cofounder of flight-search start-up Hipmunk] and Paul Graham were sitting with me. Adam just threw out this name. And using the word grep, which in CS programming is essentially a command for search. So a lot of nerds get that. Adam threw out the name, and people liked it.

It’s also a good one because people can pronounce it, spell it over the phone, and has a backwards inside joke that you’ll only get if you a technical person. Total win.

Did you ever have to slow down and think: Wait, what am I doing?

Well, once, and it was wise. More or less, we had some money in the bank and we launched the product. But we had this weird problem where we didn’t know so many people would use it. I mean, a lot did. Somehow the code I’d written at 4 a.m. trying to get onto stage didn’t scale very well. (Laughter.) At that point you can either monkey-patch everything, or you can start from scratch. We chose to do the latter. So we spent September through last month reworking it all.

And you just launched the site officially last week?

Yeah, we raised $4 million from Sequoia in December, and kept programming, and then just lauched the site, and we’re trying to keep it growing since.

You say you’re not trying to compete with Google, but what you’ve created seems a lot like Google for social media and cloud-computing. What portion of your data lives, personally, is in the cloud?

I had this realization a few days ago when I thought I lost my laptop. Then I realized I don’t think I have a single piece of information that’s solely on my laptop. I think I’m indicitive of a future generation.

You told the Wall Street Journal “We’re Switzerland; we’re neutral.” What does that mean?

I think what I was trying to say is that if you look at a product like this, it’s useful. There’s a need. And the question is why hasn’t someone built it already? The answer is that Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., they’re not able to get access to the data other than your own. Google and Apple compete. They’re not sharing data anytime soon. We’re Switzerland, because any company creating a product like this cannot be biased to any product over another.

Do you think you’ll go to college eventually?

The way it works in Israel, you’re supposed to go into the Army first, and they have a computer science division, I would have done that. But regardless of how successful Greplin is, say, even if we go public someday, my parents won’t be satisfied unless I get a degree. They won’t speak to me. But, really, I’ve been completely focused on the company, and haven’t given it too much thought.

Did you always intend to become an entrepreneur?

I was always fascinated by the greater speed start-ups function at versus larger corporations.

It was always something I wanted to do—the unexpected thing was how quickly that happened. I thought I’d go to the Army, develop relationships with intelligent guys, and then three years later maybe start something.

How does your life and work now compare to what you see yourself doing in five years?

It’d be really great for me personally if we were able to keep growing Greplin in the next five years. If we can create something that’s a household name and that people use every day, that’s a dream.

How to get a job at Google, interview questions, hiring process
The Google hiring process is designed to hire the most talented, creative, and articulate people in the world who will be the best fit for Google. The Google culture is different. You notice it the moment you walk on campus. It isn’t for everyone, but it works amazingly well for Google. That is why cultural fit is so important. There is a lot of mystery and misinformation about the Google hiring process so I would like to give you my perspective on how it works, and more importantly, why it works.

Google receives over one million resumes per year, and hires about 1,000 to 4,000 people each year, depending on economic conditions. So, in any given year, less than one half of one percent of all applicants actually get hired. That means a lot of people who are very successful in their current jobs, and others who are very talented, will not be be hired at Google this year. That is just the reality of the numbers. As Google continues to grow there will be more opportunities. As of this writing there are about 1,000 job openings.

The Process – In some ways the hiring process is pretty standard, it is the evaluation that is different. This video explains the steps and what to expect. All open jobs are listed on Google.com. Browse for a job that fits you and submit your resume online. Every resume submitted online gets reviewed.

Recruiter screen – In the first step of the process the recruiter screens every resume for technical requirements, education, and experience to make sure there is a potential fit. If there is no fit you will get a polite “no fit at this time” response, but your resume will be kept on file. The recruiter really does look at existing resumes on file when a new job req opens up. If there is a fit, a recruiter will contact you to set up a phone screen interview.

Phone screen – A recruiter will contact you, explain the process, and let you know what to expect. The recruiter may ask for your SAT scores and college GPA, if this is a technical engineering role. Yes, even though I have over 20 years of experience…they still asked for my numbers. The phone screen is usually done by an employee in a similar role, and usually takes 30 minutes. There could be two or more phone screens, and you may even be asked to write code in a shared Google Doc during the phone screen if this is a technical role. The goal is to further assess your technical skills, past experience, and motivation for this new role.

On Site Interview – The first on site interview will be with four or five people for 45 minutes each. The interviewers may include the manager and other employees with similar roles. This interview will go deeper into your technical skills or domain specific knowledge. If this is a technical role you will be asked to solve technical problems in real time, which may include coding a solution or white-boarding a design. This can get pretty intense for the unprepared candidate, or incredibly fun and stimulating if you are into it.

Non-engineering roles will have different evaluations. Marketing and PR people might be asked for writing samples, or asked how they would handle a delicate PR issue. Business people might be asked how to position one product versus another, or how to evaluate competing offers. Others might be asked how they would handle a hypothetical problem and how they would measure success.

You may also be asked some questions like “How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?” or “There are 8 balls. Seven of them weigh the same, but one is heavier. Using a balance scale, how do you find the heavier ball with just two weighings?” I was asked both of these questions in my interviews. There are lots of puzzling questions like this. Sometimes the precise answer doesn’t matter. The purpose is to 1)observe your thought process, 2)test your quick thinking ability under pressure in real time, and 3)see how you articulate your thoughts and ideas.

Interview feedback – Every interviewer submits their feedback in a standard format about the candidate and assigns a numerical ranking to the candidate. The feedback is reviewed by the recruiter and compared to feedback on other candidates for this job and similar roles. There is also a process to collect feedback from former colleagues. All existing employees resumes are in a database. A search is done to match the candidates resume to employees resumes to find matches for schools or companies for the years specified. An email is sent to the Google employee asking their opinion on the candidate. If the consensus is that there is a good fit, and they want to make an offer, it goes to the hiring committee.

Hiring Committee – There are hiring committees for each major job classification. The committee consists of senior managers and directors, and experienced employees from this domain. They see all the potential candidates for all open jobs in this area so they have a very good feeling for the required capabilities and availability of highly qualified people. The committee reviews every piece of feedback as well as the resume and work experience. If there is consensus agreement from the committee to recommend an offer it then goes to the next level of review.

Executive Review – Senior level management reviews every offer. Hiring is taken very seriously at Google. Hiring great people is the most important thing we do. It has lasting impact on the future of the company. If the Executive Review comes out favorable it goes to the compensation committee for that part of the offer.

Compensation Committee – As you might expect the compensation committee determines the appropriate total compensation for the offer. They have the advantage of reviewing all the offers in a specific domain so they have a very good handle on what is fair and appropriate, and the competitive salaries from other companies.

Final Executive Review – Yes, it is true, one of the top execs looks at all employment offers before they are extended to the candidate. This sends a clear message to everyone how serious we are about hiring great people.

The Offer – The recruiter will notify you of an offer, and will explain all the details of the offer. Google offers are very competitive, some might say generous, and very thorough. Google wants you to be happy, motivated, and totally focused.

Why it works – How it works is interesting, but why it works is more important. Communication, no compromises, and consensus are the key ingredients. Communication means the candidate is acknowledged soon after submitting a resume, and is updated when status changes during the process. Given the huge number of resumes, the process sometimes takes longer than we would like, or the communication is less informative than desired, but we strive to keep candidates informed. Maintaining the highest standards with no compromises is essential. Gaining consensus through committees ensures the standards remain high, avoids “blind spots”, and many mistakes.

Hiring is everyone’s job – Nearly every employee at Google has recruiting, interviewing, and hiring as part of their job responsibilities. It is part of the job, and it is measured. Employees get bonuses for referrals that get hired. Most employees do several interviews each month, and all are required to submit written feedback based on standard categories and criteria. The hiring committee looks at every piece of feedback during the decision process.

Feedback on your feedback – Interviewing and feedback is taken very seriously at Google. Employees are coached on how to do better interviews, and how to write more insightful interview feedback. The system keeps track of how many interviews we do, what ratings we gave, if the person was hired, and how our interview feedback was rated by the hiring committee. That’s right, our feedback is rated for quality by the hiring committee. Over time it becomes clear who the best interviewers are, and their best practices are shared with the rest of the team. That is one indication of how serious Google is about getting the hiring experience right.

No Single Hiring Manager – Hiring decisions are made by hiring committees. This means that no single hiring manager can make a potentially bad decision by themselves. This doesn’t guarantee 100% success, but it does reduce bad decisions. There must be consensus that the candidate is a great hire. Doesn’t this slow down the process? Not really, in fact the process insures that candidate status is reviewed by the committee every week. There is no opportunity for the hiring decision to get delayed by personal deadlines for other work. The consensus approach avoids “blind spots” or biases by an individual hiring manager, and results in better hiring decisions. Candidates are compared across several groups to make sure the acceptance criteria remain high.

Compensation fairness – It is important to note that compensation is decided by a separate committee, not the hiring manager or hiring committee. This ensures that compensation is fair across groups and within similar job roles. Again, the consensus approach avoids potential blind spots or biases of an individual manager.

Only hire the best fit – There are lots of job openings at Google. Some have been open for a long time. Google would rather leave a job unfilled than hire a sub-optimal candidate. The hiring committee will not allow a less than great hire just because the hiring manager is anxious to fill a slot.

Google also has a very different approach to setting goals and rewarding achievement. We set goals and measure progress every quarter, not once a year. We set impossible goals and achieve many of them. Even when we fall short the results are impressive. Achieving 60% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary. Read “How Google Sets Goals And Measures Success” for more details.

Google has a very different culture than most companies. You notice it as soon as you walk on campus. You see it in the employees you talk to. You feel it when you attend internal meetings or TGIF company meetings. It starts with Larry, Sergey, Eric, and the senior management team. The culture remains strong and true because the hiring process requires hiring only the best fit, the people who have that unique “Googley” character. The secret to Google’s success is its people. That is why hiring is everyone’s job at Google. See if Google is right for you. Check out open jobs here. Send me an email if you need help.

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Reinvention is a constant that all businesses and industries go through. Ad agencies, media agencies, market research agencies and management consultancies are currently going through one such reinvention, and a dramatic one at that. These professional services help organizations interact and influence the end individual. They exist and thrive in what I call the Insight Economy.

The future for these kinds of companies is not very clear. Industry and organizational experimentation is happening in all areas. The successful new professional service will be one that accurately understands the nature and needs of the new industry environment.

The Pains of an Industry:
The digital disruption has made interacting with the individual exponentially more complex and nuanced. The plethora of new channels not only makes reaching a segmentation more difficult, but traditional segmentations are obsolete as individualized digital experiences are creating people with multi-faceted, multi-layered and unique identity points.

Digital has lowered barriers of entry to many industries and professional competition is on the rise in all domains. Tech companies are becoming media agencies, management consultancies are becoming digital agencies, and digital agencies are becoming traditional/creative agencies.

Competition is not only rising in the professional practices, but where it actually counts too: the ability to influence. Digital has enabled each connected individual to potentially be the king of their own domain, or the multiple domains in their sphere of influence. The open stream of consciousness that now exists means the work and influence offered by professional services is even more at risk of being belittled and relegated to irrelevance.

The ever-evolving nature of Digital means everyone, including those traditionally seen as “experts,” has fallen perpetually behind.

And so clients have lost confidence in the ability of these professional services to provide a reliable and appropriate return on investment. If the professional service’s influence on the end individual is diminished, if they don’t even know what would influence the end individual, and if they may not even have the capacity to learn what could influence the individual, why should clients pay?

What makes matters worse is that most professional services are still organized in large, lumbering, un-adaptive institutions that derive their revenues from over-charging on services that are fast becoming obsolete themselves.

In other words,
It’s chaos out there
We’ve got our backs to the wall
And we don’t know what to do

So what is the most promising and versatile business model for the agencies and consultancies in the Insight Economy?

Formation & Scale:

1) Be Lean & Tactical, Modular in Growth
Lets take a page out of the geopolitics strategy playbook. Traditional military units are ineffective in engaging trans-border terrorist groups, but we’ve now created tactical military cells specially equipped to handle specific needs and objectives in specific circumstances in specific locales. Professional services need to be reformed the same way. No longer can we operate with large, generalist divisions. We need to live in small cells of tactical units; each designed to be the expert on a specific purpose, in a specific environment, in a specific localization. Only then can we be flexible and focused enough to stay on top of the learning curve, and adapt to evolving situations. It’s also cost-effective. Operating a smaller group means the unit can survive at a time when the work required becomes more piecemeal while still requiring a high state of intensity.

Lean and focused doesn’t mean alone. Like terrorist cells or elite military units, professional services need to live in fluid integrated networks that work in tandem, coordinated to achieve one objective. Different units of the same expertise should be built in different localizations to master the nuances of the diverse geographies. Professional services should drop in and out of different situations, working with different partners, and solve different problems.

It”s the only way to operate in this influentially-fractionalized environment.

2) Be Upward+Downward Scalable
Fast Company recently published a fantastic article about advertising, and in it they described a company called Co, a 5-person consultancy that can draw upon a network of 44 multi-disciplinary partner agencies in the event they take on a project more than their 5-person team can handle. In this way they can scale up and down to precisely fit the project size. In addition, they can invite the right combination of talents together that fit the project scope.

Upwards+downwards scalability may not be the most job secure, but its more sustainable than the status quo. Clients and the work require greater customization. If you cannot offer the exact solution, a competing team will. The industry can no longer afford or tolerate redundancies. Those that expected an advertising or media job to mean a steady paycheck should wake up. The future of this industry will look a lot more like the film-production industry, where everyone lives project by project.

Such frequent scaling may pose problems for quality control, but this is the challenge of the new professional service. Creating replicable guidelines, procedures and methodologies to ensure highly integrated collaboration from Day 1 will be the mark of a successful company.

Scope:

3) Be Highly Specialized, Non-Integrated, and Positioned to Frame the Question

AdAge published an article by TB Song, Ogilvy’s Greater China Chairman that talks about the changing trends in China. Song states:

“Marketers often spend 10% of their budget to produce the average TV spot and 90% to blast it across mass media. In the coming years, budgets will look more like those of movie studios -80% for production and 20% on promotion. The stronger the content, the less one needs to spend on publicity.”

Indeed, today’s individual will only pay attention if there are nuanced, resonating, and timely personal meanings and relationships involved. But in this chaos its not only content production that will grow, the more important issue is what the content production should be, and who it is for?

Song proposes that Ad Agency Planners will break away and form their own niche practices. I agree with Song’s forecast. Successfully answering: “What content production should be and who it is for?” requires long-term, immersed specializations in categories/practices to develop the proper insights and trust. As traditional segmentations give way to tribal rituals, secrets, and micro-social interactions, the important question becomes which tribe, ritual, secret, and interaction should the organization/brand be involved with. Only a highly specialized professional service has the chance to answer this question. Specialists need to detach themselves from their present integrated service units in order to focus on particular areas and find the greatest relevant value – that’s what clients are really ready to pay for.

Unfortunately not all specialists -and by extension agencies- are created equal. Planners are already positioned to capture high individual value because they are helping make sense of the chaos, and helping to frame the question. By the same logic specialized market researchers and management consultants may have a similar value-added.

This leaves creatives in a particularly difficult position. In an age where one ‘Big Idea’ has a harder and harder time convincing its value and ability to resonate, creatives are at risk of becoming a commodity. The earlier mentioned Fast Company article suggests that the way to capture higher value is for creative strategists to evolve from story-tellers to story-builders, meaning they curate, participate, and add to never-ending story-lines in co-creation with the end individuals. This again would need to be highly specialized, as story-builders need to be adept at maintaining and innovating intricate interactions that are relevant to the cultural nuances of the particular community.

There are some services following de-integration that will be commoditized, and have already begun so. Media buying, media metrics, and to a lesser extent creative production are becoming more interchangeable and will become generally support-services, because they don’t answer the main value question, “What content production should be and who is it for?”.

Those that will offer the highest value, and reap the greatest rewards, will be those professional services that can de-integrate, and be highly specialized with the ability to frame the question.

Value:

While the above formation, scale and scope sections deal with organizing oneself for tomorrow’s industry, this value section is about defining and defending a sustainable positioning.

4) Give Free Data-Points, Get Paid for Insights
A great blog article interviewing the founder of PSFK reveals the new nature of information value-creation, and anyone in the business of information-professional services, publishers, media-should pay attention. The small team at PSFK navigates through an immense amount of information and data points at a voracious speed. Acting as a media platform, they freely share and broadcast the information they come across with the public. PSFK instead gets work and makes its money consulting on concept development and trends. Their value-added is not from the selection of information they broadcast, but from linking disparate data points, synthesizing patterns into insights.
Why freely publish what you’re looking at? Shouldn’t keeping it secret give you more advantage?

PSFK has embraced the new reality that information flows free, and the benefits gained from free broadcast outweigh the loss of potential revenue from taxing that information access. Consider why you use Twitter. What benefits come from freely tweeting and re-tweeting all those links? For one, you gain a following of people who begin to associate you as a credible source for a specific kind of information-sounds to me like the best kind of advertising you could hope for. Perhaps more importantly, you build conversations and relationships with a growing network of like-minded and equally amazing people. A network that will elevate the quality of information you consume by in turn sharing with you what they’re looking at. In this new insight economy, professional services are only as good as their information community. The traditional model of market research that ignores community immersion and commitment is dead. Give free data-points. Build your information community. Get paid for deeply nuanced insights.

5) Narrow-Casted Community Connectors
Your community is your long-term defendable competitive advantage because it is one of the most difficult assets to build and copy. Ask any Web 2.0 platform and they’ll attest to this. Communities are not just important for social media, but as we’ve just discussed, for professional services as well. Once you have immersed yourself with credibility and trust in a distinguishable community, clients won’t just want to draw on your insights from that community, they’ll want to connect to the community itself. And they’ll hire you to help them do it. This is the professional service’s next value added beyond insight. This is the real influence industry.

As a community connector, a professional service will “narrowcast”: strategically identifying and working with a small group of community leaders who influence the influencers. Each company will narrowcast in the community they’re immersed in. PSFK offers connection to high-level creative thinkers. Co, narrowcasts from their extensive network of media, branding, technology and other experts in North America. Victor & Spoils, another company mentioned in the Fast Company article, crowd-sources creative production from their base of operations in Boulder, Colorado. China Youthology, the company I help lead, will explore connection opportunities between passionate organizations and the China youth community.

Being a connector can produce powerful win-win opportunities, but can only be achieved by first having credibility with the community. This credibility is rooted in deep immersion, commitment, passion and membership.

Where could we see this new model of professional service enter mainstream use?

It would have to be a place that: a) Clients are willing to try new things and are thirsty for an edge. b) There is less dominance by conglomerate holding companies. c) There is a sufficient supply of talented specialists. d) There is an entrepreneurial spirit by those in the industry. e) There are growing communities of interest.

I’d say that China has some challenges when it comes to growing the supply of quality talented specialists, but this problem is already on its way to solving itself as more and more talent migrates to Asia in search for new opportunities. The other hurdle for China are the clients. It is not that China’s domestic clients aren’t willing to try something new, but the unsophistication, immaturity and general lack of standards in the client-agency/consultancy relationship has in the past made progress difficult. A lot of education, hand-holding, and culture-building continues to be needed. But perhaps this is also China’s saving grace. With less legacy impeding the breaking of convention, maybe China will have an easier time embracing a new agency and consultancy model.

However, I can also see other regions being the first to champion this model. All have their weaknesses and strengths, but all are in desperate need for change, and a model-like this one-that can help solve their ills. I would also surmise that the adoption of this model may arise by industry instead of geography. Ad agencies and market research agencies are likely to be the first.

Some last thoughts:
With all this reinvention going on in agencies and consultancies, the onus is really on clients. In the new insight economy marketers will not be able to rely on a one-stop-shop to answer all their questions and do all their work. It won’t be only a matter of assigning budgets and deliberating on pitches. While able to help clients frame the right questions and connect highly nuanced strategies, new agencies and consultancies will only be able to add value if the client is sophisticated enough to know what kind of professional service they need, and what kinds of value creation really matter to the organization.

If you’re finding yourself in the insight economy, and feel the pains of the industry, start your reinvention by first asking, What’s your specific community of connection? How do you immerse to capture the right, relevant insights and build to provide a unique, value-added professional service?

Appbackr

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company’s wholesale catalog of apps is now available to buyers. Appbackr showed off the marketplace at the DiscoveryBeat 2010 conference today. Appbackr’s wholesale buyers pay the developers immediately, and the developers can start work on new apps. Meanwhile, the developers retain control of their own intellectual property.

Appbackr is offering hundreds of dollars in incentives to early participants who offer their apps for sale during Appbackr’s first month. About 1,500 people signed up during an earlier test version of the launch. Trevor Cornwell, chief executive of Appbackr, said the company hopes to prove to this group exactly how Appbackr works and why it can be a critical part of the developer ecosystem.

Apple developers agree to sell a certain number of units to wholesale buyers at a discount. Those buyers buy the units in bulk and pay their money upfront to developers. When someone actually buys the app on iTunes, the Appbackr buyer profits, pocketing the difference between the retail price and the wholesale price. The wholesale buyer becomes an advocate of the app — Appbackr refers to these people as “backrs” — and promotes it heavily. The developer thus gets a built-in fan with a vested interest in promotion. The return of the wholesale buyer is 27 percent to 54 percent once an app sells at the retail level.

Josh Michaels, founder of iPhone developer Jetson Creative, said that Appbackr will change the way small developers think about funding and distributing their products. The wholesale business is a necessary part of any business ecosystem. It results in better funding and support for manufacturers in any industry — in this case, the equivalent of the manufacturer is an app developer. The wholesale mechanism also leads to more efficient distribution of the products and better discovery by consumers. Appbackr’s payment solution is built on top of PayPal’s applications programming interface.

Appbackr’s own financial backers are Cambridge West Ventures, Zenith Group, Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, and the Hall Financial Group. Appbackr was founded in March and has 10 employees. There are no direct wholesale rivals. The company received a seed investment of $725,000 and won $50,000 from PayPal in a developer challenge contest. Cornwell previously started Embarkons, a peer financing site, and Skyjet, an online reservation system for the private airline industry. Sam Zappas and Robert Clegg are also co-founders.

[Disclosure: Appbackr is a sponsor of VentureBeat's DiscoveryBeat 2010]

Full-service advertising agencies are challenged with integrating digital capabilities into their traditional media mix. Technology in the past 10 years
moved advertising beyond interruptive one-way push messaging into a two-way participative context. To agencies this represents more than just a
wealth of new media options; it requires an entirely new way of doing business. Here’s how the leaders are thinking.

Interactive Is a Mindset, Not a Medium
“…We started looking at digital as not just a medium but as a whole different way of creating relationships.” –Dan Wieden, Co-Founder and CEO,
Wieden+Kennedy

In 2010, Ad Age and Creativity named Wieden+Kennedy agency of the year due largely to their understanding of new media and dialogue,
showcased in great campaigns like “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” for Old Spice. Just two years earlier they lost the Nike running business
due to their weaknesses in digital. Like most agencies W+K initially tried to add a set of digital capabilities as if it was another arm to an octopus,
hoping all arms — digital, TV, print, radio, etc. — would somehow work together. How did they progress from digital laggards to an interactive
powerhouse? It started with a shift in their mindset.

The ad industry’s interactive evolution can be divided into 3 stages. Stage One, Digital Departments, is occupied by those agencies simply hiring
or buying digital capabilities like we saw in the mid 2000′s. Many large traditional agencies still live here. The crowd thins out toward Stage Two,
Digital Integration, where agencies are still trying to work these new media capabilities into their traditional mix, often clumsily, rarely effectively.
Only a surprisingly small handful of agencies like W+K and others in this post can claim seats in Stage Three where Interactive Thinking is encouraged
from the top down across all employees and media.

Creative Comes Before Channel
“As an industry we are becoming overly focused on the ‘How’ at the expense of the ‘What’… While the ‘How’ can determine the speed, and to some
extent, the degree of success with which consumers take this step to embrace a brand, it really needs to start with a compelling ‘What’”. –Harvey
Carroll, President, Grip Limited

Technology has enabled thousands of specialty shops to spring up in the past decade, often taking substantial business away from large incumbent
agencies. Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang attributes their success in part to specialized skill sets traditional agencies simply don’t have — yet.

But successful full-service agencies still have a strong edge over most of the specialty shops nipping at their heels: they know how to build brands.
The introduction of new media options makes great storytelling and execution more important than ever. Winning agencies start with the creative first
– a responsibility of every employee — then look for the media platforms that generate the best reach, frequency and impact. The winning ideas are
those generated from knowledge of all channels, not just a mobile app or the latest location-based social network.

Educate Everybody Often
“Creatives in a digital agency also have to understand file size limits, the impact of their design on bandwidth, user experience, and navigation. File
formats, anti-aliasing, compression — words and techniques which traditional creatives think of as technical, but a digital creative uses every day.”
–Anonymous blogger

Generating and executing these great all-channel ideas requires continuous education on new digital tools and technologies, and this requires
investment and commitment from above. Top players are hosting weekly all-hands workshops where team leads present their thoughts on mobile,
emerging tech, social, local, analytics, search, platforms, data visualization, apps, gaming, and a world of other topics. Any agency that doesn’t have
a close relationship with Facebook and Google is missing out on a great source of support and inspiration.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky worked their way up to the Interactive Thinking stage in the last few years, due in part to solid leadership and talent
acquisition from digital giants like R/GA, but as recently as 2008 they were still pushing out some online campaigns that simply didn’t work. The
Volkswagen Road Joy microsite was intended to be an engaging repository of inspiring user-gen videos, but because the all-Flash site didn’t allow
for deep links, sharing, voting or commenting, or indexing the campaign languished. With a commitment to education and knowledge-sharing
these missteps are becoming increasingly rare from the leaders.

Hire Interactive Leadership
“We didn’t even appear on the attributes that defined the future… External perceptions lagged behind agency reality.” –Derek Robson, Managing
Partner, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

Top agencies recognize the need for interactive leadership, not just a digital figurehead. A visible, credible interactive strategist who educates and
inspires both inside and outside the agency will land bigger accounts, grow existing clients, and take years off the typical climb up toward Interactive
Thinking. As the agency talent wars heat up in 2011 these thought leaders who carry digital knowledge and business development skills are becoming
increasingly valuable.

Goodby hired Derek Robson to turn them around. He brought new definitions of creative and reorganized the agency. “One department called Strategy
focused on how the message and channel can work hardest for each other,” he says in his Agency Evolution deck. Within one year their digital revenues
rose over $100M and the digital share of the agency output rose from 18% to 42%. Today, many client and award wins later, they’re one of the first
names to come up in discussions about successful integrated agencies.

Prove It
“I think we’ve been the foremost organisation using technology and digital innovation. Over 43 per cent of our business today comes from that. That’s
almost triple what the norm of the industry is and we see that continuing.” — Miles Nadal, Chairman and Chief Executive, MDC Partners

An agency’s investment in interactive is proven in many ways, from case studies and industry awards to the quality of the measurement and reports
they provide their own clients. As the notion of accountability gains momentum, agencies are under increasing pressure to provide reports that go
far beyond clicks and unique visitors. With social media gaining attention and budget, earned media vs. paid media and engagement reports are
becoming more common. And if the agency’s own website and blogs aren’t updated with shareable links and indexed content, they’ll find themselves
quickly behind. While it’s a bit painful to get to, Taxi’s case studies section is benchmark content showing their insights, ideas and impact per campaign.

With the advertising industry back in growth mode and RFP’s flowing freely, many full-service agency leaders are labeling interactive leadership as
important but not urgent. But any agency not advancing its interactive mindset, creativity, education, leadership, and proof is at risk from those who
are. Clients and talented employees — both current and prospective — will soon insist on it.

by Pete Blackshaw
Published: October 15, 2010

Pete Blackshaw

Six years ago, I purchased a domain name — JoeCopy.com — that I figured would lead me to long-awaited digital riches.

The insight was simple. TV copy development was outrageously expensive, and creative often failed to hit the mark. Meanwhile, average Joe — empowered by the expressive equalizer of social media — had readily available tools in hand to become Don Draper overnight.

I mean, couldn’t the almighty consumer — armed with relevant and intimate experience with the product — hit “the big idea” faster and better than the agency guns? My basic idea was to create a web platform to accelerate the hand-off.

Then I blinked. YouTube popped onto the scene with a viral fury. IMovie found a tipping point popularity for “add water and stir” video production. Thousands of “Joes” started to organically populate the airwaves with consumer-generated ads.

Sensing opportunity (or demise), brands quickly capitalized on the trend and invited consumers to “create the TV ad,” garnishing the invitation with words “co-creation” and “crowdsourcing.” In effect, the brands started putting out de facto “RFPs” to consumers.

Some, like Frito-Lay, did this extraordinarily well for major events like the Super Bowl. Unilever crowdsourced a Dove Award before the 2006 Academy Awards. Nike fortified its 2006 World Cup efforts with a user-generated soccer dribbling montage. And so on and so forth.

While some of this has endured — Doritos continues the tradition, quite well, I might add — both the buzz and practice of consumer-generated TV ads has chilled in a big way. Just look around — the core foundations of TV copy development and production have barely changed.

What’s going on here, and what can we learn from this pivot back to the reality of brand control?

Let’s start with the brand wallet. In our exuberance over social media, we tend to romanticize the free, but in fact these campaigns are not cheap. In fact, a ton of work needs to wrap around these campaigns: the invitation, the collection infrastructure, the impenetrable legal rules and regulation (and related approvals), the pre- and post-review process, the content curation, the prize money or reward, the ads to promote the ad-contest and the ongoing maintenance of the “brand stands” promoting the effort.

Yes, all this conspires to create an extra source of sustainable value — sticky brand content, a wider funnel into the brand via search results — but it’s a big pile of work in an era where most marketing remains project-based and scrutinized via a narrower ROI lens. At some point, the old-fashioned stuff seems a bit easier and accessible.

Second, there’s the “time value of new.” Having monitored buzz for nearly 10 years, there’s absolutely no question that first movers in this “create your ad” space reaped massive PR and word of mouth by ceding creative control to consumers. In fact, most of us in the case-study-happy marketing blogging community couldn’t stop gushing about this bold redistribution of creative initiative.

If you carefully unpeeled the buzz from the last six Super Bowls (one of my annual rituals), so much of the “earned media” had far less to do with the potency of the creative than the novelty of the format. Let’s never forget that news is the currency of word of mouth, and at some point, the “know it first, tell it first” crowd always moves on to the next gig. This is true across the entire social landscape. Maybe we should call this “social depreciation.”

Third, advertising isn’t necessarily a popularity contest. The ad that wins isn’t necessarily that ad that sells. Maybe there’s something to be said for breakthrough creative, grounded in real consumer insights and time-tested building blocks of persuasion. (I know John Caples is smiling right now.)

Here we need to be clear about our end objectives. If “earned media” is the prize, the outsourced TV spot can trigger an impressive, sustaining residue of social media. If persuasiveness and purchase intent against the reach audience is the goal, that’s a different story.

Then again, perhaps we can have our cake and eat it too. As we further immerse ourselves in all things social, we’re getting smarter and savvier at blending paid, owned and earned media for maximum return.

Maybe the far bigger idea here is “consumer-fortified media.” Here co-creation is an end result but not a starting point. We put our best foot forward through breakthrough ad creative (memorable, engaging, talk-worthy), and we use the social tools and instruments to grow or “fortify” its value.

Remember that the now-legendary Dove “Evolution” spot was not consumer generated. It was, in fact, a brilliant piece of agency copy, “fortified” by extraordinarily well-managed levels of consumer engagement. Indeed, Unilever checked every box to ensure the spot found life well beyond the TV GRPs. Years later, it still generates millions every year in “earned media.” Just type in the word “beauty” in Google and tell me what shows up in the center of search results.

The same could be said for the recent Old Spice campaign. Wieden and the brand pioneered breakthrough video copy, but it was “fortified” by consumer inflows (questions and feedback) and outflows (word of mouth, pass along).

The fact that consumer-created advertising hasn’t taken off should not be taken as proof that the larger concept of “user-contribution” is flawed. We know it can work, but it’s far from the silver bullet we once assumed.

Importantly, there are other immediate ways to leverage consumer “copy” inputs, starting with the basics, like consumer feedback and product testimonials. Letting consumers express their authentic opinions in video, for instance, has been proven to be incredibly persuasive.

We can also just continue listening — more attentively than ever — this with the assumption that a big a-ha moment or idea may be nested in the unsolicited commentary of engaged consumers.

In the end, that’s co-creation too! And I know “Joe Copy” would agree.