In Praise of the Side Project

What hobby or skill would you develop if you could find the time and energy to work on it every day? The answer to this question may provide a major level-up for your creativity, career and company. 

So many of us are so busy being Professionals that we forget to be Amateurs.  The word Amateur comes from the Old French meaning "lover of", and ultimately from the Latin amatorem meaning "lover". But these days being called an amateur is often a put-down. 

Many great companies and products have grown out amateur hobbies and side-projects though. Yuppie Chef, the popular South African e-commerce company, is a good example of this. It grew out of a side-project at Live Alchemy where staff were playing a game to see who could conceptualize and launch a business in a day - and a couple of kitchen-geeks in the team did that and just kept going. 

Jamiix, a South African IM support business that is now operating in four countries, grew out of a young man's desire to help curb drug addiction in his neighbourhood. 

Woothemes, one of the world's top Wordpress theme development companies, was developed after-hours by Adii while he was working for a large printing company. He offered the CEO the opportunity to buy-into his side-venture and to run it as a business-unit within the company but his offer was declined. Within a year Woothemes was making more money every week than Adii originally valued the whole venture.

Twitter grew out of a side-project at the now-defunct podcasting start-up Odeo. 

Apple Inc. grew out of a border-line-illegal little blue box that the young Jobs and Woz built that basically hacked telephone networks so you could make free long-distance calls.

And if you want to know what the start of this process called "innovation" looks like, read the following two forum posts:

Here's Linus Torvalds announcing Linux:  

Hello everybody out there using minix -

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things). 

Larry Sanger posted about the experiment that would turn into Wikipedia as follows:

No, this is not an indecent proposal.  It's an idea to add a little

feature to Nupedia.  Jimmy Wales thinks that many people might find the

idea objectionable, but I think not.

"Wiki," pronounced \wee'-kee\, derives from a Polynesian word,

"wikiwiki," but what it means is a VERY open, VERY publicly-editable series of web

pages... 

On the front page of the Nupedia wiki we'd make it ABSOLUTELY clear that this is experimental, that Nupedia editors don't have control of what goes on here, and that the quality of articles, discussion, etc., should not be taken as a reflection of the quality of articles, review, etc. on the main part of the Nupedia website. Does anyone have an objection to our trying this out? Larry

I think that’s what the beginning of innovation is like - not really sure of itself, perhaps a little cheeky, but backed by a person's commitment. Also note that the authors of these posts above aren’t trying to keep their idea secret, not asking readers to sign NDAs, just trying to get the support of others.  

The thing is, it's not the idea that succeeds. It's that you manage to put it into practice and help it gather momentum. 

What about big established companies? These are the hardest to change, because of the many established routines and practices that people have. 

Google has a process called "Innovation Time Off", where employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time working on side-projects. This practice has given rise to products such as GMail, Google News, Google Transit, and their main money-maker AdSense. 

Sometimes it's not even that radical. Say, for example, you want to do more gardening but you're stuck at work the whole day. So you start a little guerilla gardening around the office - it starts with a pot-plant, then a window-box, then others join you. Soon the office is blossoming, literally, a company herb garden is estabished, people's moods and productivity improve and a greater awareness of the natural environment is fostered. Do you think that this could make a difference to the culture and results? I believe so. 

Another great example of this kind of small but significant change can be seen in the Standard Bank's "Takkie Day". Branch Manager Maggie Lesele started helping customers get served while they were still lining up outside the branch on pay-day, and soon expanded this service ethic to getting her staff to start wearing running shoes instead of high-heels on these days in order to serve customers faster. This has been a resoundingly successful initiative that has spread to other branches around South Africa, while providing a brand-boost to Africa's largest retail bank. 

So, Im interested in your next small idea. That little something in your world that you think you could improve, or that project you want to do because it might just turn into something (or not).

Have you ever had a side-project or experiment turn into something bigger? Please share and help inspire others to start on theirs. 

Social Media Marketing: You Get What You Pay For

There is a misconception that Social Media Marketing is free, easy and cheap to do. This misconception can lead to poor results and missed opportunities for brand owners as well as digital media practitioners. While creating accounts on Social Networking services may be free to do in many cases for individuals, there are a number of real costs involved when it comes to creating social media constellations that deliver value and return on investment for larger organizations.

I was recently quoted in Malaysiakini (paywall) saying that Tourism Malaysia's RM1.8million for a Facebook page was "a bit too much". Since this is such a hot issue in Malaysia right now, and one that can have ramifications on social media budgets around the country, I feel that it is important to clarify and contextualise my comments.

My first response to the journalists' line of enquiry was to state that each Facebook campaign is different, and the cost should be dictated by a) what you aim to achieve, b) in what period of time, and c) with what budget. The costs may include consulting, design, development, application hosting, management and advertising among many more.

I did state very clearly that if Malaysia tourism is investing a lot of money in developing and hosting applications for their Facebook pages, that they would likely be spending their money on Facebook and Google ads. Ads are necessary expenditure if you want to drive a lot of visitors to your Facebook page over a short period of time. By the way, some companies pay as much as $8 per fan on their Facebook page.

The statement that the average social media campaign costs $30 000 per annum is ridiculous and I was quoted out of context here. I was referring to one of the fixed costs of doing social media marketing: the annual salary of a Social Media Administrator. If you want a more thorough breakdown of social media spend, see this infographic based on Focus research. It shows that average total spend per annum among companies who use Social Media is currently $210 000. Now, I wonder how many of those companies are national tourism ministries responsible for generating RM56billion per annum? Let the budget match the reward.

Here's the basic sums to work-out the rough break-even numbers on this particular Facebook page:

RM1 800 000 (total budget)/RM2500 (average spend per tourist) = 720 (number of people who need to be convinced to come to Malaysia per Facebook page)

720 (visitor target - see above) / ±3% (guesstimate average Facebook Page conversion rate) = ±24 000 (fans needed for the page to break-even)

With only one application out of six launched, there are already 34 000 fans of the Facebook page. Now the question is one of efficacy in converting those fans. This should be easier than with traditional media due to fact that once someone has "liked" your page they will continue to recieve updates from you. In fact, recent research has shown that advertising to Facebook fans instead of non-fans can reduce the acquisition cost of registrations by 44%, event signups by 33%, and purchases by 15%. As a bonus Facebook Pages also provide demographic insight into who the fans are, which can inform campaigns across other media too.

Lastly, one quote in the article said “(The Facebook page) should be connected to other things, like TV perhaps" - while this is a good point that media spend should be co-ordinated and cross-polinate, what I actually said was closer to the spend on the Faceook page "should be compared to other things, like TV perhaps". The point being that RM1,8million is a small fraction of tradtional media spending (e.g. producing and placing TV ads). In fact the budget per region for Malaysia Tourism is RM30million, the region is among the world's top Facebook using countries, and so perhaps the question should be "why isn't more being spent on this?".

Malaysia's Tourism Minister YB Dato’ Sri Dr. NG Yen Yen has expressed a similar sentiment (with facts and figures too) on her blog. These views are my own, although I did consult with the Minister subsequent to the article being published to find out how the budget was being spent. I will be attending a press conference in Kuala Lumpur today with the minister, but I'm also very happy to discuss further in the comments below or on Twitter.

The Ultimate Social Media Strategy is Not Having One

On Sunday 1st May 2011, Barack Obama announced that Osama Bin-Laden had been killed. The strike against his compound in Pakistan was not televised, but it was tweeted. The thing is, Al-Qaida was already looking irrelevant after the “Arab Spring” - the social-media enabled revolutions that occurred throughout the Middle-East in early 2011.

With a heartfelt video posted online earlier this year, 26 year old Asmaa Mahfouz effectively managed to spark a series of public protests in Egypt that would unseat the country’s corrupt and brutal presidency.

Tools like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube don’t topple governments, but they certainly can help convince, connect and organize the people who do.

The phenomenon of Social Media is revolutionary in the truest sense. Citizens, Consumers and Communities can now organize without “organizations”.  It is an issue, then, that Organizations need to take very seriously.

Trifles, Truths and Trends

While Social Media may seem to some to be a bunch of online websites and mobile applications, it is in fact a cultural phenomenon that is coming to define our times.

These websites have all emerged as a result of the convergence between people’s fundamental social needs and a host of enabling technologies - the founders didn’t invent online social media, they responded to an emerging trend with well-designed database-backed websites that made it easier for people to do what they already wanted to do.

It’s useful to distinguish between the tools that we use, and the trends that enable their use. Making this distinction will ensure that we invest our effort in ways that are meaningful as opposed to simply ‘cool’. To make this clear, try consider Social Media in terms of Trifles, Trends and Truths:

Trifles are fashionable at a particular time, but aren’t likely to represent a major societal shift by themselves. In the product world this could be something like skinny jeans - it might seem like a great idea right now, but in time that feeling will pass. The technical world is filled with trifles - thousands of websites and applications that are launched every month, each one promising to be the next big thing. Trifles are here today gone tomorrow. Even giant companies like Facebook and Twitter could be seen as Trifles, because there are no guarantees that they’ll be around in a couple of years - we’ve certainly seen many other large companies come and go in recent years.

Trends are more sustainable shifts in commerce and culture than any particular company or product can represent. Whereas YouTube.com may be a Trifle, Social Media and people’s capability and desire to share their perspectives online is a Trend. The trend is large, millions of people and thousands of companies are behind it, and it’s likely to shape the way we all do things over the coming years.

Truths underpin and enable any trend. The closer a Trifle or Trend is aligned with a human Truth, the more likely it is to be sustainable. The human truth of Social Media is that people are fundamentally social. People’s need to connect with each other is almost as high up as the survival instinct. Combine this powerful natural driver with web-based tools to enable social connection with mobile devices that connect seamlessly to the web, and you have the makings of a major behavioral shift. People are responding compulsively to the opportunity to do social grooming whenever and wherever.

The idea is to align why you use technologies to the truths (and this is the most important work you can do), what you do to the trends, and how you do it to the trifles.

Digital Nomads

The use of mobile phones is a particularly interesting trend to pay attention to. Smart phones -  that enable web browsing and applications - grant us the wherever, whenever access to our social networks that we so compulsively desire.

The first mobile social-network was your phone’s contact list, and it was every bit as revolutionary as Facebook’s social graph - if not more so. The contact list in the phone in your pocket accompanies you to work, and the work-places of your “friends” (I use inverted commas because we all know how far the definition of “friend” is stretched in social media). The effect of which is to blur the boundaries between our social-lives and our work-lives. No need to deny you use your phone, however occasionally, for personal communication while at work - the research shows that we all do it.

The thing is that your work life is probably creeping into your social life too. Email is no-longer confined to your desktop. Thanks to mobile devices it now follows you around to dates, lines at the supermarket, and even holidays.

In this way we are digital nomads: mobility allows us to roam with our economic and social structure carried with us in tiny digital caravans. We’re seeing the enterprisation of our social lives, and the socialisation of our enterprises.

Companies around the world have blocked Social Media access at work, because it’s seen as an unproductive waste of time. However, as we all know - with the rise of smart-phones, people are accessing Social Media media at the office anyway.

The good news, though, is that research conducted at the University of Melbourne has shown that a certain amount of free web browsing is actually conducive to productivity, as long as it doesn’t take up more than 20% of our day.

Busyness

This blurring of boundaries can have a host of unforeseen consequences. For one thing, there’s a general sense that we are all more busy and distracted than ever before.  There’s always something demanding our attention.

Multitasking has gone to another level. Tabbed browsing online, multiple applications running on your computer, and people contacting you on various devices and channels - everything urgent, everything “real-time”. While media multi-tasking may have seemed like a good idea some-time in the 90’s, it was clearly a trifle, because subsequent research has shown that it may have adverse affects on memory and brain function.

Do you ever get anxious when looking at your email? You could be suffering from “Email Apnea” - the tendency to hold your breath when dealing with an over-full inbox. This nasty little unconscious habit activates your sympathetic nervous system to kick-in the fight-or-flight response - so your poor body thinks it’s being chased by a mammoth animal while you’re just sitting at your desk. This is generally experienced as “stress”, which by the way can make you fat.

A simple way to deal with this overload is to just force yourself to single-task. Commit uninterrupted time to complete work tasks, enjoy short guilt-free social-media breaks between, and take regular “tech-free” sabbaticals on holidays and weekends.

Social Media and Reputation

Time-wasting is perhaps the least of company worries when it comes to social-media. With entire organizations connecting to the outside world publicly, the potential for PR blunders, Wikileak-type scandals, and general impropriety is greatly enhanced.

Qantas Airlines discovered this earlier this year when their share price was significantly affected by a false rumour that emerged on Twitter. The hard-earned lesson, in words of their CEO, Alan Joyce: "In this modern day and age with social media, you have to be responsive immediately. You have to be out there with the facts very fast, so it's changing the whole dynamic and speed to market that organisations like Qantas have to respond to."

It’s not just companies that need to be mindful of social media. It has become standard hiring practice to do a Google search on someone before hiring them. Have you Googled yourself? What comes up there is colloquially called your “Google CV” - the contemporary alternative to the paper version. If you want to take control of the impression you make online, the best advice I can give you is to ask yourself if you’d be happy for your boss or clients to see what you’re uploading. If not, don’t post it.

Clearly it’s not possible to stop people from using social media, so the most viable response seems to be simply to educate people on responsible online activity. Forward-thinking companies have drafted official Social Media guidelines for staff, along with ongoing training to help people use these powerful tools responsibly, professionally, and sustainably.

Radical Authenticity

One of the fears that people have with all this online use is that Big Brother is watching us, but with all our millions of tiny cell-phone cameras, tweets and wikis, the bigger story is that we are now watching Big Brother.

With the explosion of information available online - much of it unreliable - we have become far more skeptical consumers.The true currency of the web today is Trust. And Trust is built over time by aligning what is said with what is done.

Ultimately, social media is not just a communications channel that can be managed and controlled. It is a not a set of technologies to be mastered, it is a cultural reality to be engaged with. It promises to expose the corrupt and reveal the extraordinary, and if nothing else it is to guaranteed to keep us on our toes. It is chaotic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. So the best social media strategy, then, is not a strategy at all, it is to be purposeful, ethical, and transparent and let our communications and behaviours flow from that.

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If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in a course I'm running in July for UCT Graduate School of Business: Nomadic Leadership

Game Design and Motivation Architecture

Some of the greatest challenges in business today centre around keeping people motivated, productive and loyal. We live in times where a plethora of choices and digital distractions makes this more difficult than ever before. However, in response to this challenge, game designers have been developing incredibly powerful ways to get people to learn, stay attentive, collaborate, and stick with the task until it's done with excellence.

Games are systems designed to keep people highly motivated and engaged to perform tasks and achieve goals. There's been a movement recently to see how Game Mechanics (the elements that make a game playable and interesting) can be applied to more serious challenges like employee retention, customer loyalty, and productivity. From Clicks Club Points and SAA Voyager Miles to Foursquare Badges and Twitter Follower counts, games are creeping out of the box and into our daily lives.

What is a Game?

The key components of games are 1. goals 2.  rules 3.  challenge, and 4.  interaction. They involve mental and/or physical stimulation (hence their role in learning and development). A game can also be distinguished from play which is usually unstructured, and a puzzle which requires a strong mental concentration and is undertaken alone.
According to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, in Rules of Play:"A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome."

With these criteria as a basis for the definition, you can see how school - with it level-ups, grades, and guilds (not their language) is a kind of massively-multiplayer reality game (MMRG). Of course, if they actually thought about it as a game, perhaps the whole thing would be more exciting and compelling for all involved! As an example of explicit game-design in higher-education see Lee Sheldon's awesome "Gaming in the Classroom" syllabus where students get Experience Points (XP) instead of grades.

Elements of Game Design

Games are a kind of narrative, albeit a participative one. Even games like Tetris hold the allure of the Hero's Journey, the Monomyth as described by Joseph Campbell:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

 The enabler of this journey into self are a set of game design principles. The most basic of which is a Schedule of Reinforcement - or how often someone gets a response to a particular action (see 5 Creepy Ways Video Games are Keeping You Addicted). However, there are thousands of other game dynamics that can be built into game design.

I love SCVNGR's play-deck of game dynamics, here's 3 of 47: 

1. Appointment Dynamic: A dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take some action. Appointment dynamics are often deeply related to interval based reward schedules or avoidance dyanmics.
Example: Farmville where if you return at a set time to do something you get something good, and if you don’t something bad happens.

2. Progression Dynamic: a dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks.
Example: a progress bar, leveling up from paladin level 1 to paladin level 60

3. Cascading Information Theory: The theory that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative.
Example: showing basic actions first, unlocking more as you progress through levels.

More obvious gaming elements are things like leaderboards and points, which can also be used to boost a player's status or earn them virtual goods.

Applications to Life and Business

"Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game." - Donald Trump

Daniel Pink points out in his book "Drive" that money is not suffiently motivational for people to stay working productively. It is rather a combination of satisfying work to do, regular feedback, status, and social interactions that stoke the flames of high performers. These are, incidentally, the same game mechanics that keep people productively present for hour on end on games like Fantasy Football and many others.

In Jane McGonical’s Ted Talk on "How Gaming Can Make a Better World" she discusses how World of Warcraft players play on average 22 hours per week (a part time job), often after a full day's work. She calls this "Blissful Productivity" - an idea that stems from the understanding that people are happier when they have satisfying work to do. She also describes a sense of "Urgent Optimism" that gamers have - a sense that the goal of the task at hand, while challenging, is achievable. These feelings are highly motivational, and are the result of careful systemic craft by smart game designers.

Renowned Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a different lens on these same ideas in his work around "Flow" (that state of joyful immersion in what one is doing, to the extent that time seems to drop away). According to Csikszentmihalyi there are three rather game-like conditions that are necessary to achieve the flow state :

 

1. One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals. This adds direction and structure to the task.

 2. One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and his or her own perceived skills. One must have confidence that he or she is capable to do the task at hand.

3. The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows him or her to adjust his or her performance to maintain the flow state.

Good managers and leaders may already understand these principles, and use them to keep their teams inspired and involved. Not surprising, since these principles are human truths and have have been part of our nature long before the first Nintendo box was shipped.

However, the science of game design that has emerged has put a kind of science and measurement to the way we motivate people. If we as business people are more conscientious of the game mechanics that we are using in our various fields of endeavor - whether Marketing, HR, Leadership or Finance - then we can conscientiously shape the systems we use to motivate people in way that help people be more productive, involved, and fulfilled.

 

Seven elements of relevant education in the Internet Age

Is formal education the surest path to health, wealth,  happiness and societal progress? I think it's important that we start looking directly at what is working for people who we consider successful today.

With the unprecedented rate of technologically driven change in industries and jobs, along with a super-abundance of information, perhaps being educated is no longer a matter of having completed a degree once upon a time. From what I've seen from the most successful people that I know, learning is a lifestyle and the most learned people are not bookworms, but "pracademics" - part doer (practitioner) and part researcher (academic).

As I see it then, being educated in in the age of Google and the web is now a matter of:

Being Educated1) Being Curious and Humble

The greatest threat to the sustainability individuals and companies are that their current processes and technologies become obsolete. Instead of falling back on what you know, you should nurture a curiousity about what is possible. Today the answers are easy once you know what problems are worthwhile solving.

"Perplexity is the beginning of knowledge." Kahlil Gibran

2) Deciding what is worthwhile studying (trends)

We are currently over-qualified in certain areas (business administration anyone?) and underskilled in others (how many Nanotechnicians do you know?). The ability to discern fads (quickly dated tastes) from trends (slow-building, sustainable and significant changes) will help us align our learning to what is likely to be most valuable to society.

"The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed yet" - William Gibson

3) knowing how to access and store information (web user skills + knowledge management)

The answers to your questions are out there, but to find them, store them, and access them when you need them takes some skill. Do you know how to determine the credibility of a web resource? Are you savvy in Boolean Search? Do you use Wolfram Alpha for data crunching on-the-fly? Do you use Diigo or Delicious to store and sort relevant articles and websites online? Is Evernote on your mobile phone, ready for that unexpected idea? There are a host of tools that can radically enhance our intelligence, capacity, and research abilities.

"Access is better than ownership" - Kevin Kelly

4) Connecting with the people who are involved in doing what you're learning about (networking)

Knowing the right people leads to opportunities for continued success and learning - this happens through conversations, introductions and collaborations. I've personally found that the best way to meet and connect with these people is a combination of participating in online networks, and attending conferences and courses that are topically related.

Support, mentoring, and coaching is also a key element of this value factor.

"Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" (A person is a person through other people) - Zulu Maxim

5) Keeping focussed (goals and analytics)

The most useful part of a university degree is the paper you get at the end of it, but not for the reasons you might think. The paper (the degree) is an end-goal that motivates you to finish what you started. On the internet, on the other-hand, there is a tendency to flit along the surface of issues rather than to go deep. The best preventative measure to this distraction is to have goals, milestones, metrics, and an accountability system (once again, mentoring and coaching can play a key role here) that will ensure that you get to a significant depth of understanding and praxis.

"There are literally millions of potentially interesting things in the world to see, to do, to learn about. But they don’t become actually interesting until we devote attention to them." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

6) Maintaining energy, health and wellbeing (exercise & nutrition)

The modern corporate lifestyle is almost by defined by traffic, desk-bound work, technological dependence, high stress, regular air-travel, junk-food,  and stimulants. If education's role is to improve the lives of the educated, then it's incumbent on educators to embed healthy practices that enable clear thinking, creativity, and well-being.

Take care of your body with steadfast fidelity. The soul must see through these eyes alone, and if they are dim, the whole world is clouded." - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

7) Philosophical Engagement (Mental Models and Ethics)

Perhaps the two surest ways to sustain success and build momentum in the long run are: a) having philosophies, mental models, and paradigms that that allow you to zoom out of the day-to-day activity of your work and see whether what you're doing is truly worthwhile to yourself and others,  and b) A good reputation, gained through years of ethical practice.

"The sacred is all about unconditionals; the profane is all about conditionals." - Nassim Taleb

As part of the team behind Huddlemind.net, this is what we're striving to do: to turn it into a place where we can all create a state of "learner readiness" - that is, a state in which we are primed to engage with the kind of knowledge that will truly make a difference. The seven elements mentioned above are the broad categories of engagement that we've set out for the network, but I think they can be used as a guideline for holistic career development and planning too. 

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

What do you think? Would you add or subtract anything here? How can we move closer to making this vision a reality? I'd love to hear your views.