In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a brief guide to podcasting, suggesting that this would rapidly become a useful tool in the training world. Eighteen months later, with podcasts proliferating from the BBC, CEOs, neighborhood gossip bloggers and marketers, it seems like at least for knowledge transfer the podcast has gone mainstream.
But podcasting is still controversial and largely misunderstood in the training world. There are those who look on podcasts as nothing more than upgraded audio cassettes or books-on-CD. Their objection is that there appears to be nothing new to justify all the fuss. Others will avow that passively acquired audio-only is an ineffective medium for learning, so podcasting must be a retrograde step, even if you can now podcast video and images too.
Then there are those who see accessibility issues looming – what about learners who don’t have an MP3 player? On the other end of the spectrum are the techno-zealots who, predictably, over hype podcasting as a revolution in learning. But in the middle are an awful lot of people who are quietly just getting on with it, and are making learners rather happy.
As for the view that iPods are like CDs or cassettes: is TiVo like a VCR? Is BitTorrent like the BBC? Just because the digestible output is similar does not make the user experience or the benefits the same.
Yes, the end product is audio content, but then you get that from the telephone, the radio, and the towne crier. Where podcasts differ, and they are significant differences, is in:
1) Their ease of creation and immediacy.
2) Their disintermediation of lengthy and expensive supply lines.
3) Their ability to time shift delivery.
4) The user's ability to seek and even automate acquisition of only those targeted pieces that are of interest.
5) The ease with which they can be integrated into other web 2.0 resources such as blogs, discussion forums, communities of practice, and so on.
Try doing that with a commercially produced and distributed CD system.
What about the argument that audio-only is a poor training medium? Well, that may be true for many subject or skill areas. But it’s not necessarily a poor learning medium for many other fields. You can’t blindly accept the conventional wisdom that you retain only ten per cent of what you hear, and make sweeping decisions about all learning on that questionable precept.
It's alternately amusing and annoying that bogus "statistics" like the "10% from hearing" notion manage to embed themselves so deeply in the folklore of training.
Many have no academic study behind them; others have questionable studies to support them; others may have a sound study or two in the background but have been widely misinterpreted or misapplied. We all like simplistic rules by which to manage our work, but often what we take as fact is nothing more than gross generalization at best, pure mythology at worst.
Podcasts will be created badly and used inappropriately by many, but this is true of any technology that enables (democratizes?) content creation - PowerPoint, web video, the digital camera. It was only a few years ago that the august professors at Stanford were putting talking-head videos of actual lectures online and selling it as e-learning.
I have wasted a lot of time partially listening to bad podcasts. They suffer from fuzzy audio, atrocious speaking styles, muddled structure, and often simply incorrect content. But, as with other resources, you learn to discern good from bad, and you select those sources which are useful to you.
There are a lot of things that I would not choose to learn in an exclusively audio mode, but I find that podcasts are a very convenient way to stay in touch with what is going on in my fields of interest. Being able to hear the voices of people who I respect adds a dimension that holds my attention, often better than their written words.
It's not easy to podcast well, even if the technology is simple and you have well designed content to convey. I've made many attempts, and find I just don't have the voice, but I keep on experimenting (watch this space..).
I can see a time in the next year or two when podcasting skills training will appear in the catalogues just as presentation skills training or webinar skills training does. Now there's a business opportunity for someone …
Tuesday, April 4, 2006
Friday, January 20, 2006
Stupid in America
American schools in general do not turn out high school “graduates” with a decent education. They do turn out people with almost belligerent assertiveness, and boundless (though unfounded) self-esteem that makes it difficult for them to perceive that they have anything more to learn. In an individual this is tragic; in a corporation, it’s dangerous; in a nation it’s disastrous.
Over recent years studies have shown that illiteracy, innumeracy, and inability to communicate are among the major workforce challenges facing American corporations. Schools no longer produce employable graduates, forcing companies to launch their own basic education programs – or, more recently, simply set up shop in India. Last week a report titled “Stupid in America” was aired by a major television network in the US. Though its focus was the sad reality of American schools, it struck me that there were some important lessons for corporate training.
In essence, the piece described how, between the ages of ten and fifteen, kids in the US get left behind in basic knowledge and ability levels by kids in two dozen other nations, and argued that poor teaching is at fault. (This is all about averages, of course, and there is no denying that there is a positive end of the bell-curve where excellent schools do a superb job). The study is nothing new – I can recall reading of similar dismal results years ago. Yet American schools and teachers’ unions continue to resist any attempt to measure teaching performance. How odd it is that in corporate training we stress evaluation of impact against learning objectives, and are increasingly held accountable for ROI, yet that concept is scorned in school education, where the foundation for future growth is laid.
Educational authorities, in turn, blame the lack of learning on lack of funding, but there is evidence to show that more money often leads to poorer performance – schools tend to spend budget increases on offices, sports facilities, computers, security systems and so on, rather than on better teachers and better educational processes. By contrast, smaller low-budget schools led by passionate educators who have no computers, gyms, or even janitors are producing exceptional results.
Does throwing more and more money into organizational training have any payback if it is primarily directed at hardware, computer systems, and more prestigious “corporate campuses”? And how does the recent trend toward having training run by technocrats rather than trainers affect our focus on the core mission – helping people perform better? Often the technology we adopt serves to further entrench legacy models of training rather than encourage new thinking. The more we standardize learning around enterprise technology systems, the more we suppress the individual passion of trainers and instructional designers.
I am a product of a number of colonial schooling systems that could all best be described as totalitarian, more “Brick in the Wall” than “Ridgemont High.” While my American peers were hanging loose, I was enduring daily beatings because my hair was a millimeter too long or my handwriting was too angular. So I am sympathetic to the libertarian laissez faire approach taken in many schools today. That freedom and concern for the individual choice is one of the great attractions of learning 2.0. But the needs of the individual employee and the needs of the organization are often on divergent paths, so some structure and focus is called for.
I don’t buy the argument that the blame for the dumbing-down of America’s youth falls exclusively on the educational system. It seems clear to me that culture, particularly the culture in the family, has failed to instill a strong enough veneration for learning and corresponding intellectual curiosity. Parents abdicate responsibility for educating their kids, particularly when they get a little difficult in their early teens. It is easier to concoct a host of external reasons for a child’s learning problems than to acknowledge personal failure. But learning takes place within an evolving ecosystem, not in isolated instances.
Companies make the same mistake – they think that performance problems should be solved by training, and if that doesn’t work, training gets the blame. How many times do we hear trainers bemoan the fact that the environment to which trainees return almost guarantees that what was learned will never be reinforced or applied? It was only after I left school that I understood the real purpose of homework was not to keep me from going fishing, but to get my parents engaged in the education process. We should do more to integrate learning with the workplace and engage managers and the immediate “work family” in supporting the ongoing development of new skills. Blended learning should blend what happens in class or online with what happens back at work, and that means getting the learners’ immediate colleagues engaged as a support network.
Looking from the outside at the way schools perform can teach lessons and prompt questions about corporate training. Are issues of choice, teaching passion, learning culture, and budget echoed in corporate training? Is it not more important to build a culture within the organization that overtly values and rewards learning, rather than use it as a reward in itself? By outsourcing much of our training, particularly to vendors who are not held accountable for anything more than smile sheet scores, do we risk the same abdication of responsibility and dilution of influence to which so many American parents have apparently succumbed?
Over recent years studies have shown that illiteracy, innumeracy, and inability to communicate are among the major workforce challenges facing American corporations. Schools no longer produce employable graduates, forcing companies to launch their own basic education programs – or, more recently, simply set up shop in India. Last week a report titled “Stupid in America” was aired by a major television network in the US. Though its focus was the sad reality of American schools, it struck me that there were some important lessons for corporate training.
In essence, the piece described how, between the ages of ten and fifteen, kids in the US get left behind in basic knowledge and ability levels by kids in two dozen other nations, and argued that poor teaching is at fault. (This is all about averages, of course, and there is no denying that there is a positive end of the bell-curve where excellent schools do a superb job). The study is nothing new – I can recall reading of similar dismal results years ago. Yet American schools and teachers’ unions continue to resist any attempt to measure teaching performance. How odd it is that in corporate training we stress evaluation of impact against learning objectives, and are increasingly held accountable for ROI, yet that concept is scorned in school education, where the foundation for future growth is laid.
Educational authorities, in turn, blame the lack of learning on lack of funding, but there is evidence to show that more money often leads to poorer performance – schools tend to spend budget increases on offices, sports facilities, computers, security systems and so on, rather than on better teachers and better educational processes. By contrast, smaller low-budget schools led by passionate educators who have no computers, gyms, or even janitors are producing exceptional results.
Does throwing more and more money into organizational training have any payback if it is primarily directed at hardware, computer systems, and more prestigious “corporate campuses”? And how does the recent trend toward having training run by technocrats rather than trainers affect our focus on the core mission – helping people perform better? Often the technology we adopt serves to further entrench legacy models of training rather than encourage new thinking. The more we standardize learning around enterprise technology systems, the more we suppress the individual passion of trainers and instructional designers.
I am a product of a number of colonial schooling systems that could all best be described as totalitarian, more “Brick in the Wall” than “Ridgemont High.” While my American peers were hanging loose, I was enduring daily beatings because my hair was a millimeter too long or my handwriting was too angular. So I am sympathetic to the libertarian laissez faire approach taken in many schools today. That freedom and concern for the individual choice is one of the great attractions of learning 2.0. But the needs of the individual employee and the needs of the organization are often on divergent paths, so some structure and focus is called for.
I don’t buy the argument that the blame for the dumbing-down of America’s youth falls exclusively on the educational system. It seems clear to me that culture, particularly the culture in the family, has failed to instill a strong enough veneration for learning and corresponding intellectual curiosity. Parents abdicate responsibility for educating their kids, particularly when they get a little difficult in their early teens. It is easier to concoct a host of external reasons for a child’s learning problems than to acknowledge personal failure. But learning takes place within an evolving ecosystem, not in isolated instances.
Companies make the same mistake – they think that performance problems should be solved by training, and if that doesn’t work, training gets the blame. How many times do we hear trainers bemoan the fact that the environment to which trainees return almost guarantees that what was learned will never be reinforced or applied? It was only after I left school that I understood the real purpose of homework was not to keep me from going fishing, but to get my parents engaged in the education process. We should do more to integrate learning with the workplace and engage managers and the immediate “work family” in supporting the ongoing development of new skills. Blended learning should blend what happens in class or online with what happens back at work, and that means getting the learners’ immediate colleagues engaged as a support network.
Looking from the outside at the way schools perform can teach lessons and prompt questions about corporate training. Are issues of choice, teaching passion, learning culture, and budget echoed in corporate training? Is it not more important to build a culture within the organization that overtly values and rewards learning, rather than use it as a reward in itself? By outsourcing much of our training, particularly to vendors who are not held accountable for anything more than smile sheet scores, do we risk the same abdication of responsibility and dilution of influence to which so many American parents have apparently succumbed?
Monday, January 9, 2006
Corporate pandemics of 2006
Inspired by a batch of recent frustrating consulting gigs, a battery of medical check-ups and the current buzz about pandemic preparedness, here are my predictions for six emerging corporate pandemics that trainers will have to deal with in 2006:
1) Ulteriorsclerosis – the clogging of an important initiative by personnel or policies, for spurious reasons that mask more pernicious ulterior motives. Widespread ulteriorsclerosis will lead to the demise of several organizations in 2006. The disease, once it takes hold and starts to spread, can only be cured by surgical OD interventions. It manifests itself in the right projects not being approved, or not moving forward, for apparently good reasons which, with persistent investigation, turn out to be fatuous. Ulteriorsclerosis is typically artificially induced by the idle, the desperate, or the power hungry, and can be career threatening to diagnose.
2) Nearly Ubiquitous Wireless Mobile Informal Learning Syndrome (NUWMILS) – the propensity to instantly learn only what one needs to learn in order to perform, when and where the performance is required. Also referred to as Schizogooglia, it will evolve in cultures where networked knowledge links of known quality and reliability become so intuitively accessible that it will be like having multiple brains in your head. Sporadic outbreaks have been occurring with increasing frequency, and now seem set to attain pandemic status in 2006. Once it loses its stigma and is accepted as a blessing rather than a curse, NUWMILS will be renamed “ambient learning” and at least three gurus will claim to have invented the term.
3) Mailanoma – the unrestrained metastasizing of productivity-sapping email, texting, and instant messaging, leading to complete breakdown of one’s ability to communicate. While much of this has been from externally inflicted spam, as 2006 progresses there will be increasing volumes of malignant messaging that are internally generated through quite unnecessary cc-ing, bcc-ing, and e-messaging of people sitting whispering distance apart. As communication is the life blood of organizations, malfunctioning of the system can cause a serious breakdown in performance – and in the ability of training to have an impact.
4) Infobesity – the deleterious effect of excessive data consumption on the fitness and agility of individual and corporate minds. With the volume of new data being produced doubling every three days (vs. every three decades a few generations ago), Infobesity will become dramatically debilitating, though it will stimulate the growth of technology filtering tools. Those who master infofiltering will jog confidently through the fog, while those who don’t will keep staggering into lampposts. Employees and teams with calcified knowledge filtering modes will become alienated and resentful, unable to compete, and decreasingly productive. Fortunately for them, they make up most of upper and middle management, and still dominate the shareholders of most large companies. So they will hold onto legacy processes and implement new glass ceilings to keep info-savvy juniors from gaining power (often by inducing ulteriorsclerosis in the relevant area). Unfortunately for their companies, the info-savvy are subversive, mutate rapidly, are well networked, and will job hop into smaller, more fluid entities that will collaboratively run competitive rings around the big corporations.
5) Organizational Incontinence – the involuntary leaking of things you’d rather not have others see. As the networked world brings on premature aging in organizations, they will start to leak at increasingly alarming rates. They will leak knowledge (IP Incontinence) as their walls become porous and their employees network outside of the company to gain the insights they need to get things done. They will leak processes, as much that used to be done in-house becomes outsourced. They will leak secrets, as staff start to blog and podcast without the censoring filter of Corporate Communications. And they will suffer from increasing motivational incontinence as employees finally lose all sense of belonging to a cohesive caring organizational family. This in turn will lead to the leaking of valuable employees. Organizational Incontinence, in all its forms, may require a significant rethink of the role of learning services, and its repositioning as an aid to the enhancement of an individual’s market value.
6) Learning Impact Myopia – the failure to expect or demand that learning initiatives have lasting effects. Like most other things in corporate life, training activities will be evaluated more and more on what effect they have on each quarter’s financial results, rendering longer term impacts irrelevant, and in turn making the development of long-term programs pointless. When trainers struggle to develop interventions that have lasting impact, they will be told that such esoteric stuff simply does not matter, and will be pressured into providing instant gratification to the bean counters. Learning Impact Myopia and Schizogooglia both seek faster short-term solutions to the expertise problems, but for different reasons. Trainers may have to selectively succumb, while still fighting for some strategic surgical impact. [Paradoxically, Surgical Learning Impact Myopia (SLIM) -- the deliberate implanting or nurturing of e-learning 2.0 where appropriate -- may give SLIM organizations added vigor and longevity].
Be prepared! The future will be a dangerous place if you relinquish control of your integrity to the organizational pandemics.
Compliments of the season to all, and may your 2006 be filled with health, wealth, and happiness!
1) Ulteriorsclerosis – the clogging of an important initiative by personnel or policies, for spurious reasons that mask more pernicious ulterior motives. Widespread ulteriorsclerosis will lead to the demise of several organizations in 2006. The disease, once it takes hold and starts to spread, can only be cured by surgical OD interventions. It manifests itself in the right projects not being approved, or not moving forward, for apparently good reasons which, with persistent investigation, turn out to be fatuous. Ulteriorsclerosis is typically artificially induced by the idle, the desperate, or the power hungry, and can be career threatening to diagnose.
2) Nearly Ubiquitous Wireless Mobile Informal Learning Syndrome (NUWMILS) – the propensity to instantly learn only what one needs to learn in order to perform, when and where the performance is required. Also referred to as Schizogooglia, it will evolve in cultures where networked knowledge links of known quality and reliability become so intuitively accessible that it will be like having multiple brains in your head. Sporadic outbreaks have been occurring with increasing frequency, and now seem set to attain pandemic status in 2006. Once it loses its stigma and is accepted as a blessing rather than a curse, NUWMILS will be renamed “ambient learning” and at least three gurus will claim to have invented the term.
3) Mailanoma – the unrestrained metastasizing of productivity-sapping email, texting, and instant messaging, leading to complete breakdown of one’s ability to communicate. While much of this has been from externally inflicted spam, as 2006 progresses there will be increasing volumes of malignant messaging that are internally generated through quite unnecessary cc-ing, bcc-ing, and e-messaging of people sitting whispering distance apart. As communication is the life blood of organizations, malfunctioning of the system can cause a serious breakdown in performance – and in the ability of training to have an impact.
4) Infobesity – the deleterious effect of excessive data consumption on the fitness and agility of individual and corporate minds. With the volume of new data being produced doubling every three days (vs. every three decades a few generations ago), Infobesity will become dramatically debilitating, though it will stimulate the growth of technology filtering tools. Those who master infofiltering will jog confidently through the fog, while those who don’t will keep staggering into lampposts. Employees and teams with calcified knowledge filtering modes will become alienated and resentful, unable to compete, and decreasingly productive. Fortunately for them, they make up most of upper and middle management, and still dominate the shareholders of most large companies. So they will hold onto legacy processes and implement new glass ceilings to keep info-savvy juniors from gaining power (often by inducing ulteriorsclerosis in the relevant area). Unfortunately for their companies, the info-savvy are subversive, mutate rapidly, are well networked, and will job hop into smaller, more fluid entities that will collaboratively run competitive rings around the big corporations.
5) Organizational Incontinence – the involuntary leaking of things you’d rather not have others see. As the networked world brings on premature aging in organizations, they will start to leak at increasingly alarming rates. They will leak knowledge (IP Incontinence) as their walls become porous and their employees network outside of the company to gain the insights they need to get things done. They will leak processes, as much that used to be done in-house becomes outsourced. They will leak secrets, as staff start to blog and podcast without the censoring filter of Corporate Communications. And they will suffer from increasing motivational incontinence as employees finally lose all sense of belonging to a cohesive caring organizational family. This in turn will lead to the leaking of valuable employees. Organizational Incontinence, in all its forms, may require a significant rethink of the role of learning services, and its repositioning as an aid to the enhancement of an individual’s market value.
6) Learning Impact Myopia – the failure to expect or demand that learning initiatives have lasting effects. Like most other things in corporate life, training activities will be evaluated more and more on what effect they have on each quarter’s financial results, rendering longer term impacts irrelevant, and in turn making the development of long-term programs pointless. When trainers struggle to develop interventions that have lasting impact, they will be told that such esoteric stuff simply does not matter, and will be pressured into providing instant gratification to the bean counters. Learning Impact Myopia and Schizogooglia both seek faster short-term solutions to the expertise problems, but for different reasons. Trainers may have to selectively succumb, while still fighting for some strategic surgical impact. [Paradoxically, Surgical Learning Impact Myopia (SLIM) -- the deliberate implanting or nurturing of e-learning 2.0 where appropriate -- may give SLIM organizations added vigor and longevity].
Be prepared! The future will be a dangerous place if you relinquish control of your integrity to the organizational pandemics.
Compliments of the season to all, and may your 2006 be filled with health, wealth, and happiness!
Friday, September 30, 2005
Thinking outside the idiot box
The current buzz about IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) makes me realize how rapidly some industries are evolving, and how relatively slowly the marketing profession is responding.
In 1998 I engineered an invitation to the Royal Television Society conference, the biennial Cambridge gathering of 200 of UK television’s elite. Much of the conference was spent in presentations, planning, and self-congratulation on the recent coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral. The only two presentations that still stick with me were a history professor’s singularly unpopular assertion that TV was creating news rather than simply reporting it (much hissing from the audience), and a demonstration of WebTV by the now CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer.
At the time a mere VP, Steve Ballmer was actually heckled. From the audience I heard all the superior snickers of disbelief and the whispered dismissals of the very notion that television might become interactive. The leading decision-makers in the industry were so conditioned by their past experiences of television that they could not conceive that any significant change might be possible, let alone desirable.
I had seen WebTV unveiled a couple of years earlier in New York, before Microsoft acquired it, and had been captivated by the notion that you no longer needed a computer to surf the web. In those days I was all about convergence, and would assail anyone who would listen with my predictions that TV, the web, and mobile telephony would collide and facilitate revolutions in entertainment, communication, and education. Of course this was not original thinking – lots of people were working toward achieving that convergence, and it was an uphill battle.
One of the people at the conference who I tried in vain to convert was a producer of Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, whose resolute position was something like: “The internet is rubbish. I’d rather have my children watching TV than wasting their time online. You can’t get more educational than a television documentary.” The Big Breakfast was at least innocent, entertaining, predictable, and vaguely informative. But, to my mind, it seemed more worthy of the “rubbish” label than much of what was available online.
The singular lack of vision, with an edge of defensiveness, demonstrated among the television cognoscenti at the time was frustrating, but not unexpected. Even highly intelligent and wonderfully creative people have their limiting horizons and their comfort zones.
What is remarkable to me is not so much that attitudes and behaviors have changed, but how rapidly they changed. The technologies have advanced significantly in the past decade, but so too has our willingness to use them. Our notion of what a computer is has dissolved – it is no longer a grey box under a desk connected to the world with cables, but a palm-sized clam-shell on our hip. It has become almost second nature to take and send images and video using a mobile phone. E-commerce is rapidly going mobile – in Japan you can rent a car, or even get a Coke from a vending machine, by pushing a few buttons on your phone. Bloggers proliferate, entertainment and commerce exploit new media, and news coverage and commentary have decentralized and gone real-time. Now, with the imminent arrival of the millions of channels made available by IPTV, convergence is almost total.
But what of marketing? Where are the revolutions in thinking, the exploitation of new possibilities, the creativity and experimentation? I still work with companies, some with seemingly limitless resources, who are slowly “putting their ads online” and trying to catch up with a paradigm that now belongs in the last century. It baffles me why we in marketing are so slow to evolve. Our role in training is to prepare brands for the future, yet we cling tenaciously to the past.
Is it because marketers define themselves too narrowly, and think of themselves in “activity” terms instead of in “outcome” terms? Or is it because companies don’t consider the value that marketing can bring to the organization is sufficient to justify the potential cost of innovation? Or is it, perhaps, that the current generation of management is still conditioned by its own past experiences, and is not capable of seeing that marketing does not have to be that way? I know that we have only recently accepted the benefits of online engagement, but perhaps we should continue to peer over the horizon instead of settling into a new zone of comfort?
If you did not have a website or the capacity to run TV or print ads, but you and all your target customers had web-enabled mobile camera-phones, how would you exploit the technology more efficiently and effectively help build your brands and grow revenues?
In 1998 I engineered an invitation to the Royal Television Society conference, the biennial Cambridge gathering of 200 of UK television’s elite. Much of the conference was spent in presentations, planning, and self-congratulation on the recent coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral. The only two presentations that still stick with me were a history professor’s singularly unpopular assertion that TV was creating news rather than simply reporting it (much hissing from the audience), and a demonstration of WebTV by the now CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer.
At the time a mere VP, Steve Ballmer was actually heckled. From the audience I heard all the superior snickers of disbelief and the whispered dismissals of the very notion that television might become interactive. The leading decision-makers in the industry were so conditioned by their past experiences of television that they could not conceive that any significant change might be possible, let alone desirable.
I had seen WebTV unveiled a couple of years earlier in New York, before Microsoft acquired it, and had been captivated by the notion that you no longer needed a computer to surf the web. In those days I was all about convergence, and would assail anyone who would listen with my predictions that TV, the web, and mobile telephony would collide and facilitate revolutions in entertainment, communication, and education. Of course this was not original thinking – lots of people were working toward achieving that convergence, and it was an uphill battle.
One of the people at the conference who I tried in vain to convert was a producer of Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, whose resolute position was something like: “The internet is rubbish. I’d rather have my children watching TV than wasting their time online. You can’t get more educational than a television documentary.” The Big Breakfast was at least innocent, entertaining, predictable, and vaguely informative. But, to my mind, it seemed more worthy of the “rubbish” label than much of what was available online.
The singular lack of vision, with an edge of defensiveness, demonstrated among the television cognoscenti at the time was frustrating, but not unexpected. Even highly intelligent and wonderfully creative people have their limiting horizons and their comfort zones.
What is remarkable to me is not so much that attitudes and behaviors have changed, but how rapidly they changed. The technologies have advanced significantly in the past decade, but so too has our willingness to use them. Our notion of what a computer is has dissolved – it is no longer a grey box under a desk connected to the world with cables, but a palm-sized clam-shell on our hip. It has become almost second nature to take and send images and video using a mobile phone. E-commerce is rapidly going mobile – in Japan you can rent a car, or even get a Coke from a vending machine, by pushing a few buttons on your phone. Bloggers proliferate, entertainment and commerce exploit new media, and news coverage and commentary have decentralized and gone real-time. Now, with the imminent arrival of the millions of channels made available by IPTV, convergence is almost total.
But what of marketing? Where are the revolutions in thinking, the exploitation of new possibilities, the creativity and experimentation? I still work with companies, some with seemingly limitless resources, who are slowly “putting their ads online” and trying to catch up with a paradigm that now belongs in the last century. It baffles me why we in marketing are so slow to evolve. Our role in training is to prepare brands for the future, yet we cling tenaciously to the past.
Is it because marketers define themselves too narrowly, and think of themselves in “activity” terms instead of in “outcome” terms? Or is it because companies don’t consider the value that marketing can bring to the organization is sufficient to justify the potential cost of innovation? Or is it, perhaps, that the current generation of management is still conditioned by its own past experiences, and is not capable of seeing that marketing does not have to be that way? I know that we have only recently accepted the benefits of online engagement, but perhaps we should continue to peer over the horizon instead of settling into a new zone of comfort?
If you did not have a website or the capacity to run TV or print ads, but you and all your target customers had web-enabled mobile camera-phones, how would you exploit the technology more efficiently and effectively help build your brands and grow revenues?
Monday, May 16, 2005
Constructive disruption, presence and focus in a wireless world
The other day I was running a workshop to define competitive strategies at a client company. Five minutes after the scheduled start time the first few participants wandered in. Twenty minutes later everyone was there. Were these lapses in discipline clues to their competitive problems, or simply the way it is in business today?
The fact that everyone was eventually there physically, did not mean they were mentally present. Mobile phones vibrated constantly. Blackberries were consulted obsessively. People left the room to take calls. Thumbs compulsively punched out SMS messages. Much of the communication was task-related, with people seeking input from clients and colleagues or remotely accessing data on their desktops; much of it had nothing to do with the task at hand. Yet the work got done, everyone contributed effectively, and the result was better than any had hoped for.
This apparent lack of focus is not a unique phenomenon, nor is it a recent development. But it has become more and more pervasive over the past few years. There was a time when I would ban mobile phones from meetings. Then I simply banned their ringing out loud. I realize that we are living in a radically different communication paradigm to that of a few years ago. We are now able to multitask in a way that was simply not done in the 1980s. Back then, most people did not have the skills or the tools to “parallel process” productively, and if they did, it was something done in the privacy of their own office. Politeness was our way of denying that we were unable to do many things at once without chaos, or apparent rudeness, ensuing. It’s interesting how digital deftness has corroded punctuality and redefined attentiveness, by changing our sense of time, place, and focus.
Our perceptions of what is "normal" behavior are determined by the habits of our most familiar peer groups. Over the years I have done a lot of work in various Latin American and Asian countries, South Africa, and most of Europe. In a business meeting context, the sensitivity to punctuality and attentiveness is always less cultural than contextual, and within that context you cannot make sweeping statements about national cultural attitudes or behaviors because corporate culture plays a major role in guiding those attitudes.
There are a couple of companies that I have worked with in Mexico and Brazil where -- counter to the false national stereotype of unreliability and lack of urgency -- I am always the last to arrive at my meetings, the other participants eagerly glancing at their watches as start time approaches. Conversely, there are companies in the US and UK where -- counter to the false national stereotype of task-focused discipline -- I have given up expecting more than half of the participants to be punctual, and where participants come and go at will (physically or mentally) throughout the meeting. Our concept of appropriate ground rules for interacting in a formal business meeting, no matter what its purpose, is being changed, not by e-learning, but by a growing culture of constructive disruption.
Some of us, fortunate enough to have graduated in the age of Aquarius, are most comfortable with the lava-lamp mindset, where we can endlessly watch things unfolding slowly and elegantly. We were succeeded by the MTV generation, a society of sound/video-bite junkies, who couldn't focus for more than 15 seconds on anything unless it moved dramatically, constantly. Then the post-MTV perpetually-looping CNN mode of communication produced people who assume that there is no beginning or end, believing that they can always catch up no matter where they start or how often they get distracted.
That fractured attention span seems to be getting even more fragmented with the advent of SMS and other remote communication technologies. The latest generation of company recruits thinks and behaves in genuine non-linear random-access modes. This internet generation, the “digital natives” born into a world where personal computers were already pervasive, is a society of text-bite junkies who can't think unless they are thinking about many things at once. To support this, text is making a comeback, fleshed out by a resurgence in cryptic iconography. Instant messaging, SMS, chat-room style communication, ticker-style news highlights on TV. All of it is text, but not as Shakespeare knew it. Text has a new Morse code that evolves and mutates daily. If u hve smthg 2 say, it takes 2 long to cre8 a pic. Or it did before camera phones came along. :-) LOL.
A picture is not worth a thousand words to communicators who can instantly infer complex meanings from cryptic alphanumeric string-sets. A picture is too limiting, too defined, too unambiguous, too unchallenging -- and way too unspontaneous.
Is internet culture overwhelming organisational culture? The digital divide (if we think of it in terms of those who have embraced connectedness versus those who just get by) is just getting wider. True, "smart mobs" can coalesce and disperse with split second precision. But these are funky folks on the fringe, not mainstream people in the workplace. What may become more pervasive, particularly as mobile phones become smarter and Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous, is a blurring of the line that separates "presence" from "absence". Perhaps technology will be used to inflict punctuality and attentiveness. Or, more likely, technology and parallel-processing mental modes will make these concepts unnecessary, outmoded, and counter-productive.
The fact that everyone was eventually there physically, did not mean they were mentally present. Mobile phones vibrated constantly. Blackberries were consulted obsessively. People left the room to take calls. Thumbs compulsively punched out SMS messages. Much of the communication was task-related, with people seeking input from clients and colleagues or remotely accessing data on their desktops; much of it had nothing to do with the task at hand. Yet the work got done, everyone contributed effectively, and the result was better than any had hoped for.
This apparent lack of focus is not a unique phenomenon, nor is it a recent development. But it has become more and more pervasive over the past few years. There was a time when I would ban mobile phones from meetings. Then I simply banned their ringing out loud. I realize that we are living in a radically different communication paradigm to that of a few years ago. We are now able to multitask in a way that was simply not done in the 1980s. Back then, most people did not have the skills or the tools to “parallel process” productively, and if they did, it was something done in the privacy of their own office. Politeness was our way of denying that we were unable to do many things at once without chaos, or apparent rudeness, ensuing. It’s interesting how digital deftness has corroded punctuality and redefined attentiveness, by changing our sense of time, place, and focus.
Our perceptions of what is "normal" behavior are determined by the habits of our most familiar peer groups. Over the years I have done a lot of work in various Latin American and Asian countries, South Africa, and most of Europe. In a business meeting context, the sensitivity to punctuality and attentiveness is always less cultural than contextual, and within that context you cannot make sweeping statements about national cultural attitudes or behaviors because corporate culture plays a major role in guiding those attitudes.
There are a couple of companies that I have worked with in Mexico and Brazil where -- counter to the false national stereotype of unreliability and lack of urgency -- I am always the last to arrive at my meetings, the other participants eagerly glancing at their watches as start time approaches. Conversely, there are companies in the US and UK where -- counter to the false national stereotype of task-focused discipline -- I have given up expecting more than half of the participants to be punctual, and where participants come and go at will (physically or mentally) throughout the meeting. Our concept of appropriate ground rules for interacting in a formal business meeting, no matter what its purpose, is being changed, not by e-learning, but by a growing culture of constructive disruption.
Some of us, fortunate enough to have graduated in the age of Aquarius, are most comfortable with the lava-lamp mindset, where we can endlessly watch things unfolding slowly and elegantly. We were succeeded by the MTV generation, a society of sound/video-bite junkies, who couldn't focus for more than 15 seconds on anything unless it moved dramatically, constantly. Then the post-MTV perpetually-looping CNN mode of communication produced people who assume that there is no beginning or end, believing that they can always catch up no matter where they start or how often they get distracted.
That fractured attention span seems to be getting even more fragmented with the advent of SMS and other remote communication technologies. The latest generation of company recruits thinks and behaves in genuine non-linear random-access modes. This internet generation, the “digital natives” born into a world where personal computers were already pervasive, is a society of text-bite junkies who can't think unless they are thinking about many things at once. To support this, text is making a comeback, fleshed out by a resurgence in cryptic iconography. Instant messaging, SMS, chat-room style communication, ticker-style news highlights on TV. All of it is text, but not as Shakespeare knew it. Text has a new Morse code that evolves and mutates daily. If u hve smthg 2 say, it takes 2 long to cre8 a pic. Or it did before camera phones came along. :-) LOL.
A picture is not worth a thousand words to communicators who can instantly infer complex meanings from cryptic alphanumeric string-sets. A picture is too limiting, too defined, too unambiguous, too unchallenging -- and way too unspontaneous.
Is internet culture overwhelming organisational culture? The digital divide (if we think of it in terms of those who have embraced connectedness versus those who just get by) is just getting wider. True, "smart mobs" can coalesce and disperse with split second precision. But these are funky folks on the fringe, not mainstream people in the workplace. What may become more pervasive, particularly as mobile phones become smarter and Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous, is a blurring of the line that separates "presence" from "absence". Perhaps technology will be used to inflict punctuality and attentiveness. Or, more likely, technology and parallel-processing mental modes will make these concepts unnecessary, outmoded, and counter-productive.
Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Paid product placement in rap lyrics
The concept of schizophrenic branding is not new. Marketers have always tried to target different messages to different markets using selective media. Of course there is always the fear that one positioning might undermine another. So how do you position luxury brands to the lavish-lifestyle hip-hop generation without turning off your primary staid and conservative markets? Through surgical internet targeting? Too technical. Through product placement? Not repetitive enough. How about through brand name placement in hip hop lyrics? I’m lovin’ it.
Great rockers of old regarded the use of their music in commercials as a sell-out or a breach of artistic integrity, and they stuck with it, at least till they turned fifty and the royalties started drying up. That’s when the Clash backs Pontiac, the Who hypes Nissan, and Led Zeppelin defibrillates Cadillac. Sell out or not, it works.
Rappers have no such qualms. In fact, the bling bling image is all about conspicuous association with elitist brands. Since 50 Cent dropped Courvoisier and Dom Perignon into his lyrics, they have gained recognition and street cred with the hip-hop crowd. Courvoisier has gone from “Huh? Say what?” to simply “Cou.” Jay-Z has had a similar effect on Bentley’s image and recognition, though fewer fans can afford to splash out on one of those. These were brands firmly associated with boring old f@rts, pretentious but effete jet-setters, and industrialists from nations beyond the scope of most peoples’ geographic competencies. Suddenly they are hip, and there is absolutely no danger that their “traditional” markets will ever find out. And it cost the marketing department nothing.
Enter McDonalds, stage right.
Enthralled with the apparent success of their “I’m lovin’ it” campaign, McDonalds has decided that some of that Cou effect would do the Big Mac a power of good. Rappers don’t sing about Big Macs without a little prodding, because a burger does not have the same fabulous decadent cachet as Dom Perignon. So McDonalds is offering a bribe: mention our product in your lyrics, and we’ll give you a kickback for any airtime you get. We’re talking significant money, enough to buy you two Big Macs for every time the product-placement song gets played. If I am not mistaken, that’s a lot more than the record company pays. Five bucks a spin? I’m in.
But will it be a sell out to commercialism? Will fans lose respect for the performers if they know the deal (and they will know the deal)? Will they reject the products pushed, or will they start eating more burgers with their Courvoisier? Now there’s an interesting research project.
Great rockers of old regarded the use of their music in commercials as a sell-out or a breach of artistic integrity, and they stuck with it, at least till they turned fifty and the royalties started drying up. That’s when the Clash backs Pontiac, the Who hypes Nissan, and Led Zeppelin defibrillates Cadillac. Sell out or not, it works.
Rappers have no such qualms. In fact, the bling bling image is all about conspicuous association with elitist brands. Since 50 Cent dropped Courvoisier and Dom Perignon into his lyrics, they have gained recognition and street cred with the hip-hop crowd. Courvoisier has gone from “Huh? Say what?” to simply “Cou.” Jay-Z has had a similar effect on Bentley’s image and recognition, though fewer fans can afford to splash out on one of those. These were brands firmly associated with boring old f@rts, pretentious but effete jet-setters, and industrialists from nations beyond the scope of most peoples’ geographic competencies. Suddenly they are hip, and there is absolutely no danger that their “traditional” markets will ever find out. And it cost the marketing department nothing.
Enter McDonalds, stage right.
Enthralled with the apparent success of their “I’m lovin’ it” campaign, McDonalds has decided that some of that Cou effect would do the Big Mac a power of good. Rappers don’t sing about Big Macs without a little prodding, because a burger does not have the same fabulous decadent cachet as Dom Perignon. So McDonalds is offering a bribe: mention our product in your lyrics, and we’ll give you a kickback for any airtime you get. We’re talking significant money, enough to buy you two Big Macs for every time the product-placement song gets played. If I am not mistaken, that’s a lot more than the record company pays. Five bucks a spin? I’m in.
But will it be a sell out to commercialism? Will fans lose respect for the performers if they know the deal (and they will know the deal)? Will they reject the products pushed, or will they start eating more burgers with their Courvoisier? Now there’s an interesting research project.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Give your supermarket the finger
In September last year I suggested the JIT lattes concept: service businesses like fast-food outlets and coffee shops provide regular customers with RFID cards, so that on walking in the store the kitchen can be notified to prepare their normal order and shave minutes off the time it takes to process each customer.
But that means customers have to carry more plastic in their wallets. You get around this by ditching the card and injecting the RFID chip under the skin of the customer, as some European beach clubs are doing to help members leave their wallets back in the room-safe. But your average store customer is not yet ready to implant a bunch of Cyborgian chips in their bicep. Along comes biometrics, allowing German shoppers to now use their fingerprint to pay for groceries.
It's early days, of course, and privacy issues abound. I can see the CSI team earnestly looking to identify a partial print from a crime scene: "No hits on AFIS. Better try WalMart."
Will people who would go to court to prevent the government from getting their fingerprints on file be willing to let their supermarket have a record of their fingerprints? Of course they will. If e-commerce has taught us anything about consumers, it's that convenience beats out privacy and security every time. It's your finger -- don't leave home without it.
But that means customers have to carry more plastic in their wallets. You get around this by ditching the card and injecting the RFID chip under the skin of the customer, as some European beach clubs are doing to help members leave their wallets back in the room-safe. But your average store customer is not yet ready to implant a bunch of Cyborgian chips in their bicep. Along comes biometrics, allowing German shoppers to now use their fingerprint to pay for groceries.
It's early days, of course, and privacy issues abound. I can see the CSI team earnestly looking to identify a partial print from a crime scene: "No hits on AFIS. Better try WalMart."
Will people who would go to court to prevent the government from getting their fingerprints on file be willing to let their supermarket have a record of their fingerprints? Of course they will. If e-commerce has taught us anything about consumers, it's that convenience beats out privacy and security every time. It's your finger -- don't leave home without it.
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