1. Do good work
2. Show good work to people who have power to give you more responsibility
3. Ask for more responsibility
4. If told NO, ask what you need to do to get more responsibility
5. Repeat
Alvin Toffler predicted the “prosumer” in his 1980 book The Third Wave, and with recent technical advances in web and digital technology his vision is being realized.
Like so many startups, Flickr started out doing one thing (a game) and by listening to customers transitioned to another offering, online photos. The small team including technically-smart founders could turn customer feedback into rapid release cycles. A key to Flickr’s growth was making photos public by default.
The freemium business model was first described on Fred Wilson’s blog: “Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.“
Flickr’s platform was timely in compounding the positive network effects of broadband, digital cameras, blogging, social networking, and online syndication.
Flickr’s core business message: Don’t build applications. Build contexts for interaction.
Stages in the open systems movement: Linux; APIs; user-generated content. Flickr combines the last two to compound their use.
Flickr’s interestingness algorithm factors in popularity, interaction, identity, and time.
Flickr uses the first three of the six kinds of revenue models: Subscription/membership; advertising; transaction fee; volume/unit-based; licensing and syndication; and sponsorship/co-marketing/revenue-sharing.
They managed to avoid the four major cost drivers (inventory, payroll, IT, and marketing/advertising/CRM) compared to retail photo printing and online stock photo companies.
In March 2005 Yahoo! brought Flickr for an estimated $40 million, a value that can be calculated using a customer-based formula in which revenues are directly tied to customer fees, not unit prices. Tracking customer behavior and metrics on an ad-supported site can result in an average revenue expectation per customer; in 2006 it was $13 for Google. Flickr had advertising, premium services, and partner revenue, making the average revenue per customer about $20. Multiplied by Flickr’s 2 million customers, we arrive at the $40 million valuation. More sophisticated formulas might give different weights to customers based on how actively they use the platform.
Maybe you’ve gotten one: the RFP that asks for mountains of miraculous work, for no money, delivered in 20 minutes. Or the one for a project so boring you wouldn’t give it to an intern. This morning’s Breakfast Club asks: Can we perform a Jedi mind trick and turn those nightmare RFPs into satisfying, rewarding work? ?Victor Lombardi, veteran consultant and teacher, will lead a discussion about rethinking how to conquer the dreaded RFP.
the new devices will allow users to set up an e-mail account on Nokia’s Ovi Web portal without ever going near a PC. That’s an important distinction for the millions of mobile-phone users who live in regions without reliable electricity, much less computers and Internet connections. “It gives those millions of users their first identity on the Internet,” says Alex Lambeek, Nokia vice-president in charge of handsets aimed at low-income users.
A brilliant move, IMHO, and makes me wonder about which other bits of the PC-oriented Internet could be mobilized.
But Niti goes on to explore how an email address changes our identity or online presence differently.
Not long I was talking to a project manager who was writing her first request for proposal, explaining the common wisdom on budget disclosure: “You’ll want to give them a ballpark idea of what your budget is without telling them your actual budget; agencies will sometimes configure the work to take all the money on the table.”
But as I, with fresh eyes, watch her go through the proposal process, I do wonder if simply telling the agencies the budget wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Floating this idea on Twitter sparked these replies, mostly from peeps on the agency side:
“I always make them tell me the budget. If they can’t then I don’t send a proposal. That’s my tough love policy. Very few balk. I [tell them] we could propose $1M site, but its best that I know what the constraints are. 99% find it helpful.”
“It would certainly decrease wasted effort.”
“Absolutely! It would eliminate spinning our wheels too. Why waste the time proposing something they can’t afford?”
“I’ve worked at agencies where we lost jobs because we proposed too large a project. This could have solved it.”
“Agree…”
Money is a great constraint for spurring creativity. And if the same budget were disclosed to all agencies, the client can still compare the relative value of each proposal. The only drawback I can think of is if the budget is far out of alignment with the work requested, and if this is the case the client should be working with an expert outside resource to craft the RFP anyway.
(I’ll add this is specific to RFP situations. I still agree with the usual consultative selling advice to not talk about price until the very end of the sales process.)
I thought of this today as I read about a friend’s company who spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on legal fees just for their domain name. Maybe that was money well spent, but from personal experience I know legal fees are one of those line items that is almost always expensive, difficult to predict, and difficult to control once set in motion. For a start-up, this problem can be turned around into a creativity driver to say, “Here’s how much similar companies say they wished they had spent on legal fees. We’re going to stick to that. Let’s figure out how.”
Note that this is different than merely setting a limit on how much to spend. A simple cap could still allow for business-as-usual behavior that doesn’t generate any new solutions: “we did what we usually do until we ran out of money.”
A real design approach would involve experimentation.
With prototypes for solving legal problems.
Working with lawyers.
Measuring the costs of iteration and the opportunity costs.
I haven’t heard about anyone doing this yet; it’s one of those ripe areas for true business design innovation.
But another way of looking at it is, better the Motrin ad underwent a social media firestorm than a mass media firestorm. Sure the situation was embarrassing, but in sheer numbers this was a small audience of offended persons in the relatively small percentage of the population currently using social media in any significant way. As a baby-carrying dad, the ad made what I thought were obvious errors in execution: cute language and slick typography doesn’t mask the fact that the ad includes copy insulting to the people it’s trying to sell to. But the advertiser obviously needed more feedback to understand this, and they got it — without it offending even larger numbers of people with a larger campaign. From this perspective looking at social media as a testing platform, it was a success.
McNeil Consumer Healthcare, the makers of Motrin, or their agency, Taxi, obviously weren’t prepared for this possibility as the Motrin site was completely down in the midst of the situation. We can easily imagine an ad (or a product) that was launched specifically in social media channels to test the waters, and modified or changed quickly based on the feedback. But this requires a company to be in touch with it’s consumers, and what we saw this week is Motrin Moms telling the company “you clearly don’t understand me.”
Stuart Candy, researcher at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and research fellow of The Long Now Foundation, asked me a few questions about tangible futures and published the interview on his blog. While I’m more focused on near-term concept design these days, it was helpful for me to reflect on why and how I was originally drawn to the practice…
…So we started to consider this problem through the lens of our design experience, asking, “How can we help managers experience futures and strategy so that it can more substantially be understood, shared, and acted on?” The working definition became: Tangible Futures are the output of applying design-fueled disciplines like visualization, drama, and film to represent futures and strategies.
…not really, unfortunately. But that was the headline on a “special edition” of the “New York Times” today. The credibility was in question from the start, as the paper was handed out free at the subway which is never the case with the Times. The production is quite accurate, but a quick glance at the date reveals July 4, 2009.
I love it as a clear example of a tangible future. But the editorial is so far to the left that we’re not really fooled. Only those that already hold these positions will think, “Yes! This is what we could create by July of next year!” So essentially, it’s propaganda. Personally I would have liked to see an editorial stance much closer to reality but with enough difference to be inspirational. (Just for the record, I’m fairly progressive socially, and excited about the results of the elections.)
Of course, we’re talking about the future, so I could be completely wrong about what happens.
When we created them we wanted to accomplish two things:
Provide a forum for advanced practitioners in the field of user experience design to share with us their best thinking on topics that have immediate practical value and to show us where the practice is going in the long-term to help us prepare. Hence the series title, Future Practice
Enable practitioners like yourself to benefit from this education at a lower price than in-person seminars and conferences, without having to travel and emit all that nasty carbon.
For more information and registration, go to the Rosenfeld Media webinar page. For 20% off, use discount code NBSWBNR
(O’Reilly Media). The book is both a good introduction and a synthesis of diverse theories that should offer something to even experienced strategists.
, and with recent technical advances in web and digital technology his vision is being realized.
We’re pleased as punch to partner with our good friend Lou Rosenfeld at 
