Dreams

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Whitney Leave a comment

It is so important to keep dreaming.

Dreams are about possibilities and motivation.  Even if they seem very far out of reach, or only glimmers of possibility, they are glimpses of possibility in the world.

As we get older, dreams often seem impractical.  After many of your early hopes and dreams fall to the wayside as more fantasy than reality, it’s easy to start to believe that dreams are illusions, or even more cynically, for suckers.  It’s easy to start to demolish someone else’s dreams before they even get started.

Yesterday, I had some additional kids join my video and podcasting class.  While some kids were busy at work, one of the kids and I sat down and talked a bit about design thinking and went through steps initially about designing a surprise experience for someone else, a prompt I got from a Quarterly.co box from Standford Design School.  After working that for a bit, we decided to talk about inventions and design, and the 7th grade young lady said she’s love to have a cell phone shaped like a Unicorn.  We both drew concepts, and then shared them and started to marry the designs together.  We took paper, and did a rapid prototype of a few possible designs, looking at pros and cons.  We came up with a final design that had some really cool innovative features I haven’t seen before, but a quick check of the web convinced me that they were possible.

I was also disappointed that my initial concepts for her idea were rather rigid and mundane, based on what I was familiar with, and it was the whimsy and unbounded nature of this young girl’s imagination that made everything possible.  We talked about everything from what features should be software or hardware buttons and more, and I realized that this collaboration between vision, dreaming, and the practical all really need to come together to move innovation forward- you need a mixture of everyone’s skills to invent the future.

This fun brainstorming session and rapid prototype process was incredibly engaging for both of us.  It made me think how much fun it would be to do a design thinking class with kids as an after school class.  Within the school day, it might be harder to do this sort of thing, as kids become, even by middle school, adept at trying to work within stated and unstated rules of adults and school to do what’s expected rather than a more dreamlike what’s possible.  I worry that kids are becoming more and more hemmed in by rules and have less time to simply create and be whimsical.

Rather than worrying so much about business plans, sourcing and marketing, why can’t we just make a unicorn-shaped smart phone?  What are the elements of good and bad design? (Hint: you need to make sure the horn is retractable) Even if the Unicorn Phone just remains a dream, the process of this thought, idea, and seeing if it’s even possible sparked that flame of Dream Big back in me, that I had let die out a bit, feeling a little worn down by the daily grind.

I think what I learned most from yesterday is that you always need to have some dream.  You need to have that sense of potential, of infinite possibility and joy.  Working with kids is an amazing reminder of that sense of limitless possibility, and I hope the teachers around these young people don’t forget it’s more important to encourage their dreams than tie them to the “real world” any sooner than necessary.  Even in the real world, they will still need those dreams, so help them dream big, and dream often.

Discovery, education, happiness, learning , , , , , , ,

Mother’s Day

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Whitney 3 Comments

What’s it been like to be a mom?  Especially as a I have a son heading off to college in the fall, it’s a time of reflection, joy and a bit of fear rolled into one.  I wrote this a few months ago for another purpose, but this seems a perfect time to bring it to life on the blog.  Let me know what you think.

When my first son was born, I knew I would learn more about boys than I could imagine.  Even though I have a younger brother, our age difference turned me more into his babysitter and occasional tormentor than someone from whom to unlock the secret of Guys.

My initiation as a mom of Guys started out slowly, with the lessons of “Whatever you do, keep that thing covered at all times- it could go off at any minute!” and moved on to realizing gadget facility is inborn, when James, at age 2,  reflexively grabbed the mouse away from his Grandma to show her how to use it.  “Me Do It” became a big theme in our house.  Then there were lessons about the convenience of having “outdoor plumbing” and the joys of potty training, and how guys really can, in a pinch, stop anywhere- not an option for most of us women.  By the time the second son was added to the mix, I thought I was really getting the hang of things.

Alongside the fart noises and blowing snot bubbles with their noses, and a general viewpoint that handwashing was for girls only, I came to understand what makes boys, and eventually men, special.  I occasionally do feel like I’m the only thing standing between them and total feral living, and that Dave Barry was right in his Guide to Guys, that women exist for the purpose of setting standards. While I often feel like Miss Manners trying to establish order in a rowdy fraternity party, the truth under it all, is that I love it.

I love being the one that gets to turn a bit of a blind eye and feign disapproval as they create a duct tape harness to raise themselves up and down between the first and second floor with a pulley, while secretly wanting to jump in and help.  I love it when they are washing the car and decide to spray me, too, just like I’m one of the guys, even if I protest at that time.  I secretly enjoy when they come up to me, give me a hug, even when it’s only to gauge whether they are taller than me yet.  I love seeing them have that sense of pride once they are taller and get things down for me from the high shelf, while giggling that I should put everything lower because I’m so short, and I laugh and say I’m now living in a forest of boys.

I’ve felt a great responsibility to any future girlfriends/daughters in law  as well as to my kids, to raise men that would have all the characteristics we would want in the perfect man.  A sense of adventure, humor and playfulness.  Kindness and caring.  Manners and civility.  A dash of home skills to make them both self-sufficient and good partners.  I’ve tried my best, and it’s getting to the time where, whether I’m ready or not, they’re launching into the real world,  and my cautions to be careful or “wear a jacket, please, it’s 20 degrees outside!” will only be dull echos they hear in their head.

While I tease my husband he will never have to worry about me leaving him for another man, but a nice, quiet, pink and ruffly cottage at the beach might be a serious concern, he knows I’m kidding. I’ll take any moment they’ll give me, to spend time with the dirty socks, cooking meals and taking that dance around the kitchen in the arms of my babies, who are now the men I’ve always known they would become, from the moment I held them in my arms for the very first time.

Uncategorized

Brand Decisions

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Whitney Leave a comment

There’s been a big social media dust up this week, after the CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch made comments about limiting the sizes he sells so only the beautiful people shop there.  Turns out, according to Forbes, Abercrombie is already floundering against increasingly hip competition, so this shouldn’t help them much.

The interesting question this raises is one brought up by Erika Napoletano on Facebook today, which is whether anyone should care- in fact- should we praise A & F CEO for making his marketing crystal clear?  Now that we know this is where he stands and how he runs his companies, the public has a clear choice and gets to vote with its pocketbook.

We all make decisions when we shop- and about whether the clothes we choose and wear reflect how we feel about ourselves.  Our clothes reflect everything from our comfort, style to values, which is why changing brands when values seem to change becomes tricky.

For example, there are certain stores I don’t want to shop in, because to me, they represent my Mom and an older group of consumers.  This is not different than when I shunned minivans when we first had kids, but eventually capitulated to that or a mini SUV, when practicality outran our quest to pretend we weren’t getting older.  When I shop for my kids, ever since they were little, the goal has been to find things that were not horrifically expensive for growing kids, while finding things that “didn’t make them look like orphans” as my Grandmother would have put it.  We bought things from Gymboree because the cotton was soft and things were well made and lasted through two boys worth of wear before passing them on.  We shopped at the Children’s Place and Gap Kids because the clothes were also well made, attractive, and didn’t force my kids to decide who they were when they put on a shirt.

However, once middle school rolled around and then high school, clothes started to become more of the statement about who you are and what group you hang with.  They start to telegraph things about your family.  With boys, there’s less chance of the “indecent exposure” problem, but you still have to choose a style of sorts.  Are you going to go for the athletic look?  Works well for an athletic kid, but harder to pull off for the video game crowd.  Prep?  There’s a thin line these days between Prep and “Fabulous”, so that’s a tough one.  Skater/Surfer dude? Works well with peers, but it can rapidly lead to the adults in your life assuming that you are a smart aleck and disrespectful.  There’s always Land’s End and LL Bean, but this starts to look like school uniforms or like your mom is dressing you for some golf match, and it doesn’t work for many kids after grade school.  Outdoorsy is a close cousin of athletic, and is pretty safe.  Old Navy and the Gap, cousin stores, are okay, but some of the “in” things are pretty seasonal, making for a short-lived closet.

Matching a kid to a style isn’t easy, because it’s often about trying to find a Brand or Store where you can consistently find stuff that a)fits and b) works with who your kid is as a person.  Once we figured out the A&F worked for one of our kids, shopping and decisions became easy.  However, now that the CEO has come out and said something I think we all knew anyway- that beautiful people only need shop there- I feel funny about continuing to purchase stuff from that store.  It will telegraph a whole new meaning, louder than ever.  This one will be more “I’m shallow and I know it and Flaunt it” – the boy equivalent of “Living in a Barbie World” that’s something I can’t get behind.

So when the next season rolls around and the kids need new clothes, my choices are going to change as to where I’m spending my money.  My brand decision will change, because it no longer reflects my values.  The question is- what will be the next brand we settle in with, and how long will that last?

 

 

Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Facebook Musings

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Whitney Leave a comment

There have been various reports about Facebook adding pre-roll video to its site, where you would be forced to watch a short commercial before entering your Facebook account, at least for the first time each day.  While I think this is a spectacularly bad idea on many levels, would there be other ways for Facebook to “monetize” that might make sense?

If Facebook’s reported numbers of 1.06 Billion (yes, with a B) active monthly users is correct, and we’re not talking about people who control multiple pages, that’s simply huge- 1/7th of the planet has a Facebook account.  Obviously, the temptation to monetize through ads and promotion is huge, but this additional noise on Facebook is also making the experience for many people less pleasant than ever before.  So instead of trying to get big brands to buy a Facebook ad that would be shown to every member, for one day, for a million dollars, let’s talk about what would happen if you made Facebook a membership service.

Every time you erect a paywall, you start to limit who engages in the service and who does not.  For example, when we ran the first Podcamp Philly, we got close to 600 people signed up for the event, but only 300 or so actually showed up.  It’s hard to plan an event with such a wide swing in attendees, so we introduced a “co-pay” of $20 for a two day event, and the level of no shows plummeted accordingly, to the point where one year, we actually had people sign up the day of the events, increasing our attendance over 100% of sign ups v. show ups, which was awesome.

 

Likewise, on a grander scale, in the early days of HD TV and particularly with sports broadcasting, advertisers were intrigued and pushing networks to invest in HD broadcast vans, etc. in part, because as long as HD TV’s were still expensive, the only people buying them were able to afford them (the early adopters) and they were then a great high end market to target exclusively.

In simpler terms, if you are an advertiser, marketing to people who are already willing to spend money online is actually a good thing, although it may shift the demographics of who participates in the platform. So let’s assume Facebook would consider a membership or premium experience, where you might be able to limit ads if you paid a yearly fee, sort of like premium storage on Flickr or other sites.  Let’s do some quick math:

If every current user gave Facebook $1 a year, that’s $1.o6 BILLION in revenue for the year.  But maybe that would be difficult to manage and control.  So let’s say you make it worth their while and charge $1 a month or $12 a year.  Still chump change, even for the younger set.  That would be a potential revenue of $12 Billion dollars a year, or a Billion dollars a month in revenue.  If you lost half the users, it’s still 6 Billion a year, without mucking about with all the advertising push-push stuff that detracts from the overall experience.

Now let’s see what that means- it sounds obscenely huge, right?  Well, Apple‘s annual sales are 155 Billion, and once you factor in the cost of goods sold, etc.  their profit is $68 Billion for 2012.  To get to that sort of number, factoring out costs, Facebook would need to charge about $70 a year for an account, which seems pretty high, but I could easily see people paying between $1 and $5 a month for a Facebook account, particularly if you could opt out of ads.  I would pay it for my kids as well, to be honest.

It’s an option Facebook has available to it, I assume.  I know I would rather have that than the current system of complicated edge rank, Facebook’s auto-silencing friends whether I want them to or not, and the increased amount of ad noise in my news feed.  And I am sure that I have no interest in Facebook pushing pre-roll video and its data costs to me on any of my mobile devices, annoying me with ads and making me pay for the privilege at the same time.   With more than 1 in 6 accessing Facebook only with their mobile device, this is pretty significant. (Thanks for the great article, Christopher Penn and Shift Communications.)

I wouldn’t be surprised to see facebook go in the direction of premium accounts at some point, and limiting the ads shown there.  But I would expect ads to still be shown, and for Facebook to up the amount it charges for Advertisers to get a hold of that specific, paying demographic.  After all, chase people who have money and you know are willing to spend it first.  That’s targeting.

business, economics, social media , , , , , , , , ,

Make it Viral?

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Whitney Leave a comment

Adapted from picture from Sanolfi Pasteur InstituteOne of the great discussions over the weekend at BarCamp News Innovation/Creation Camp, Started by Greg Linch from the Washington Post was about how ideas spread, and discussing what elements might exist to make something go “viral”.  There was another interesting post that came across my desk this morning from an education blogger, about Making Learning go Viral.   What is it with “virality?”  Seth Godin wrote about it in his book, Unleashing the Idea Virus back in 2000 (You can download a copy for free here)and we’re still talking about it, almost 15 years later, but people are still wandering around talking about the viral (insert noun here) and surprised by its effect.

Seth spoke about one of the most important factors in spreading an idea virus is to count on sneezers- the very connected among us, who love to pass around ideas, just like someone who might sneeze without a tissue passes around a cold,  accidentally or on purpose.   Sneezers come in two varieties, according to Seth- Promiscuous sneezers who can be motivated by money and the like- while not well respected often for their own opinions, they are still really effective at spreading ideas through their networks online.  Then there are the powerful sneezers- the people you would love to hand your ideas off to, knowing if they like them, the social proof they bring means your idea might really have a chance of taking off.  This could be an influential blogger, a newspaper or TV person, a celebrity, the local head of the PTO, or politicians or lobbyists. These should be people from whom you can’t buy influence (real or perceived) because everytime their default credibility ebbs just a little bit, to paraphrase Seth.

The other key points you should read in Seth’s book include attracting promiscuous sneezers and the lifecycle of a virus, but I’ll let you read that for yourself.

In the end, the whole point is that things will have a better chance to go “viral” if you have somethign that’s worth the attention invested into it, and the access to the idea is easy.  With social channels and social share buttons, there’s a better chance than ever before that your idea could be spread, but there’s more competition as well, making the marketplace more crowded than it was back when Seth first started talking about the idea virus.

More interesting to me is that if ideas spread like a virus, or even as one physician in our session suggested, more like cancer, gradually replicating itself until a mass of a certain size developed, allowing it to spread and metastisize,  is how can we stop the spread of ideas?  For cancer, we give a variety of drugs that act as poison for ideas, or the angiostatins, which cut off the blood supply to a tumor.  How could we do the same thing to bad ideas or lies that become memes?

Can We Kill Ideas?

I’m not sure we’ve figured out how to do this, in part because the initial spread of an idea often involves many exposures to the idea, and the more it’s repeated, the more people come to think of it as true, even if we find out later, it’s not.  Think how many people still believe Barak Obama was born outside the country, and you get the drift, or how smart and important people convinced themselves Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Even when we know these things aren’t true, it’s hard to even craft a sentence that doesn’t  reinforce the idea. (When you say “X believes _____ and it’s wrong”, people hear the wrong idea, and it is reinforced.  Even if they hear the disclaimer, it still reinforces the original bad idea.)

Add onto the problem that we have a 24 x 7 news industry, online and on air, that needs to talk about something.  I saw some of the most insane reporting ever around the Boston Marathon bombings coming from major news channels, because they simply didn’t have anything of substance to add to the conversation.  Any tidbit they thought they had could be magnified out of proportion, and then had to be backtracked later, but the damage of putting out erroneous information has already been done.

I’m not sure we can put the genie back in the bottle.  But I sure wish we had a chance to try.  What would happen if people cut away from the disaster and instead let the workers and first responders do their job, and reported on it later when more facts were available?  Would the rest of the country be harmed by having to exercise a little patience?  What would happen if we didn’t rush to judgment or assume immediacy trumped accuracy?  I bet it’s worth a try.

Sunlight is a great disinfectant, but like most good public health measures, it’s better to prevent disease than deal with its aftermath.  Perhaps one of the best things we can do is to start questioning, or even reading articles before we pass them on, willie nillie.  Maybe we all have to become determined to be better informed, and to start holding journalists accountable for information, not entertainment.  And that also means holding ourselves to this same standard.  You need to double check that that article you are passing along and treating as fact is not an Onion parody. You need to read the whole story, and confirm what you can.  You need to have reliable sources you trust, and primary sources at that.

I think the only way we might have a chance of stopping the spread of some ideas is deciding to be part of the cure ourselves. While getting attention and being a source of the fun new thing seems great, in the end, you have to consider whether your sneezes are, on balance, healthy or benign, or harmful in the aggregate.

And I don’t think that’s easy for anyone to determine, but maybe if we all just take a beat before hitting “share”, we’ll be a little better off in the end.

 

What do you think?  What are the ways to stop an idea virus, especially if it’s harmful?

 

Plug for a favorite book of mine:  In order to learn more about how to harness attention, make sure to check out John Medina’s Brain Rules, especially the sections on attention and memory.

business, community, Discovery, explanations, Marketing, Uncategorized , , , , , ,