I'd like to share a bit about what I've been influencing me lately in terms of participatory marketing, self-sustaining systems and platforms of participation.
Rather than tie all these neatly together for you, it might be more enlightening and offer you more opportunity for creativity and innovation if I don't synthesize these. So in no particular order, I present to you some illuminating reading that has left an imprint on me.
Pierre Omidyar's commencement speech (via Fast Company blog) underlines my own thinking about self-sustainable scalable systems. Perhaps because I am lazy. Perhaps because I come from a 'product' mindset. Perhaps because I am fascinated by the concept of leverage. Perhaps because E-Myth and all my reading about complex adapative systems and emergence has made a great impact on me.
So people often say to me - "when you built the system, you must have known that making it self-sustainable was the only way eBay could grow to serve 40 million users a day." Well… nope. I made the system self-sustaining for one reason: Back when I launched eBay on Labor Day 1995, eBay wasn't my business - it was my hobby. I had to build a system that was self-sustaining… …Because I had a real job to go to every morning.I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working - catching complaints and capturing feedback -- even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat.
If I had had a blank check from a big VC, and a big staff running around - things might have gone much worse. I would have probably put together a very complex, elaborate system - something that justified all the investment. But because I had to operate on a tight budget - tight in terms of money and tight in terms of time - necessity focused me on simplicity: So I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.
By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth - it could achieve a certain degree of self-organization. So I guess what I'm trying to tell you is: Whatever future you're building… Don't try to program everything. 5 Year Plans never worked for the Soviet Union - in fact, if anything, central planning contributed to its fall. Chances are, central planning won't work any better for any of us.
Build a platform - prepare for the unexpected... …And you'll know you're successful when the platform you've built serves you in unexpected ways.
Jon Udell of InfoWorld's post on the Architecture of Participation is a short (meaning go read it, no snippets here) but powerfully thought-provoking piece.
And I mentioned Bruce Sterling's SIGGRAPH speech in passing (I think it's an excellent example of a manifesto) and although the intended audience is fairly geeky (I know, I've been to SIGGRAPH when I was a computer graphics software engineer), this is highly relevant must-read for business innovators and marketers. I've read it about three times now and I get something different out of it each time. It's hard to pull snippets from it - but here's an attempt.
If you're the kind of guy or gal who attends SIGGRAPH, then you are best described as an end-user of Gizmos. You're not here just to shop, to buy stuff in styrofoam blocks. You come here to participate in your industry. Your parents were consumers, back in the 1960s. But you are here to add value and advance the state of the art, so you are some kind of participant. Not a consumer. An end-user. An end-user is the historically evolved version of a consumer.A Gizmo is not manufacturable by any centrally planned society. A Gizmo is something like a Product, but instead of behaving predictably and sensibly for a mass market of obedient consumers, a Gizmo is an open-ended tech development project.
In a Gizmo, development has been deputized to end-users.
End-Users, who are people like practically everybody in this audience, do a great deal of unpaid pro bono work in developing Gizmos.
The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime,".....The people who make Spimes want you to do as much of the work for them as possible. They can data-mine your uses of the spime, and use that to improve their Spime and gain market share. This would have been called "customer relations management," in an earlier era, but in a Spime world, it's more intimate. It's collaborative, and better understood as something like open-source manufacturing. It's all about excellence. Passion. Integrity. Cross-disciplinary action. And volunteerism.
When you shop for Amazon, you're already adding value to everything you look at on an Amazon screen. You don't get paid for it, but your shopping is unpaid work for them. Imagine this blown to huge proportions and attached to all your physical possessions.
By making the whole business transparent, a host of social ills and dazzling possibilities are exposed to the public gaze. Everyone who owns a spime becomes, not a mute purchaser, but a stakeholder.
From Tom Peter's Outsource-Proof Your Career slides
Organizations will still be critically important in the world, but as 'organizers,' not as 'employers. - Charles Handy
A bit of my own views about cocreative collaboration and participation from a past post for additional context below (what I referred to as 'agile marketing' below I'm now referring to participatory marketing):
We live in an age of information democracy ... some would say information anarchy. The old marketing tactics are like taking a sledgehammer into a painting studio. The new approach of "conversational marketing" is both subtler and more powerful. It speaks to the reality of consumers today and the environment they live and work in. Done properly, this kind of marketing is a powerful adjunct to strategic thinking", says Brian Johnson, strategy consultant of global management services organization, Accenture.This newsletter item (source for the opening quote and Johnson's quote above) coins "continuous closed-loop marketing"[1] - I like that term - and it sounds like what I call agile marketing (an extension of agile development principles, see also the agile alliance manifesto). For me, agile marketing encompasses a continuous [and iterative] feedback loop where you collaborate with customers at every phase -- the conception, design and distribution/delivery of a product or service.
[1] Continuous closed loop marketing. "Edensilk has found that the answer to today's consumer and strategic reality is to abandon one-way marketing, while also not falling prey to the belief that the only alternative is interactive marketing. This better practice is called "continuous closed loop marketing" - which depends upon daily conversation and learning between organizations and their customers."
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