Banning employees from social media is insane
If you believe the numbers, as many as 25—50 percent of all companies still restrict their employees from using social media during the workday. No messing around on Facebook. No connecting with digital friends. And God forbid, no sharing or talking about your employer or company.
These philistines of the business world remain convinced that time spent on social networks can only serve to jeopardize office productivity.
On the contrary, those of us who appreciate the value of listening, connecting, and engaging know just how absurd that argument is, regardless of the research. But guess what? It turns out that even when we’re just wasting our time watching senseless videos or keeping track of a friend’s late night exploits, it still might be a good thing, especially if we work in an industry where problem solving is part of our job.
Need evidence? You can find a pretty compelling one in a recent Wired column Driven by Distraction – How Twitter and Facebook make us more productive workers. Arguing convincingly that social media participation is well suited to stoking the creative mind, Brendan I Koerner reminds us of the following:
“Studies that accuse social networks of reducing productivity assume that time spent microblogging is time strictly wasted. But that betrays an ignorance of the creative process. Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation.”
OK, so Wired is clearly vested in advocating almost anything digital. But this argument has been around since before the social web. Check out Creativity and the Mind, Discovering the Genius Within by Ronald A. Finke and friends. He’s written and entire thesis that will convince you that:
“People are more successful if we force them to move away from a problem or distract them temporarily.”
Of course all the companies still slapping a lock on digital access can roll out another argument: the confidential nature of their company’s information or the even more effective government regulation and compliance excuse. Alas, that line of reasoning seems a little stale now, too. I mean if the Department of Defense can embrace social media, can’t an insurance company?
In its new policy (Directive-Type Memorandum 09-026), announced last week, the Department of Defense states that the default for the DoD non-classified network (the NIPRNET) is for open access so that all of DoD can use new media.
“Service members and DoD employees are welcome and encouraged to use new media to communicate with family and friends — at home stations or deployed — but it’s important to do it safely. Keep in mind that everyone has a responsibility to protect themselves and their information online, and existing regulations on ethics, operational security, and privacy still apply. Be sure never to post any information that could be considered classified, sensitive, or that might put military members or families in danger.”
As U.S. military. Capt. Nathan Broshear, Director of Public Affairs for 12th Air Force (Air Forces Southern) who is currently leading Air Force communications in Haiti, says:
“We’re not launching missiles, we’re launching ideas.”
My friend David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, sums it up better than I can. So I’ll leave you with this quote from David.
“There is a huge number of companies that are putting their organizations at a disadvantage. If I managed a hedge fund, I’d sell short a basket of stocks of companies that block social media like YouTube and Facebook and buy stock in the companies (like IBM) that encourage employee use of these new tools and have an established social media policy like the DoD.”
Works for me, David. What do the rest of you have to say? Is there a legitimate excuse to restrict employees from using social media?
Can the iPad bring back print advertising?
The print world may owe a debt of gratitude if the iPad helps save it
I got my start in this business making print ads. I loved everything about them: the challenge of the blank page; the possibilities of the two-dimensional plane; the art of combining an image and words to yield an idea greater than the sum of the parts; and the chance to create pictures in a reader’s mind with nothing but a perfectly crafted headline.
In the early days, Mullen was known for its print. Campaigns for Timberland, Smartfood, Swiss Army, LL Bean and many others were a perennial presence in local and national award shows. We built arguably one of the best studios in the business, worked with renowned photographers all over the world, and attracted art directors who were obsessed with the craft.
Then, thanks to the web, it all came crashing down. We got all kinds of new creative platforms — video, social, mobile, applications — but the rapid demise of that age-old form so many of us loved was (for those of us over 40) shocking. At least at first.
But now, the medium is about to get a second life. Thank you iPad. It will give us back all of things that made print great:
- A large two-dimensional space on which to create a piece of commercial art that captures one’s attention.
- A palette onto which we can place stunning visuals.
- An environment (digital magazines) where a reader may actually welcome something remarkable rather than simply look for the little “x” to close the ad.
Of course, it will also inspire something entirely different: a totally new digital form of print. Think Bernbach meets iPhone meets Wired meets UGC meets social media. All potentially combined into a single execution that’s conceptual, engaging, user friendly.
Consdider what Pentagram has to say:
“The conventions of online advertising—banner ads, pop ups, and so forth—aren’t popular with readers, with advertisers, and certainly not with designers. But the iPad is a new medium that will create a whole range of opportunities. Once people start exploiting what it can do, we may see the kind of creative renaissance that will deliver the next George Lois or Lee Clow. People will start subscribing to certain i-mags just for the ads alone.”
If you’re not already thinking about the possibilities of the iPad and the creation of a new form of digital print you should be. I imagine all of the following as possibilities. Eventually you’ll be able to create ads that let consumers:
- View a product from every imaginable angle with the flick of the finger.
- Change the colors and patterns of anything from shirt and tie combinations to the interior of a car.
- Upload and incorporate images of themselves into an execution so they can try on different outfits or pieces of jewelry.
- Instantly link or connect to back stories about how a product was made; learn its carbon footprint or its nutritional information.
- Find all their Twitter and Facebook friends who have bought the same brand or product to get their personal opinion (new application for Blippy?)
- Explore a brand via digital games, back stories, or through integration with other media, i.e. TV shows.
- Decide which version of an ad or which ad from a brand he even wants to see.
- Share, vote, rate ads in real time forcing creators to get better and more responsive
So, while we’re still a couple of months away from the first shipments, there are a number of things you could be doing right now. For starters, order your iPad and while you’re at it reserve at least a few for your creative department. Then consider the following:
- Make sure your current iPhone app developers are in touch with Apple regarding what will be possible with the iPad and have them share that with creative teams.
- Learn what Conde Nast and other major publishers have planned for their magazines’ conversion to tablets and how you can create advertising that will work in their new digital formats.
- Assemble a team made up of creative technologists, UX specialists, media planners, social media thinkers and creative people to start thinking about the possibilities.
- Identify the brands and clients who are most willing and excited about re-inventing how to tell their stories.
- Avoid simply migrating old content, images and OLA type executions to this new platform. It’s a chance to create something entirely new: executions that change daily; that include digital games; that incorporate real-time conversation.
I don’t have my iPad yet. (It is on order, though.) I haven’t seen a Conde Nast presentation in person. And I don’t have a team assembled internally as of today. But it’s all on the to do list. What about you?
Links and other articles of interest.
Sports Illustrated: Tablet Demo
Made by Many: Content design with cojones
CNN Tech: Print media hails iPad potential
Daily Illini: iPad could save print media
Pentagram: Five ways the iPad will change magazine design
C-Change Media: Why ads on the iPad and other tablets won’t make a difference
Steve Jobs photo by: curious lee
Creativity: can a new book inspire it?
The week before last I had the privilege of being an interview subject for a comprehensive study on creativity. Thomas Vogel, an Emerson College professor currently on sabbatical to research and write a book on the topic, inspired me with questions for well over an hour. Thomas has a very specific hypothesis and framework for his project that I’ve promised not to reveal, but suffice it to say he’s interested in the following:
Techniques for identifying creative talent.
Whether a culture or environment can encourage creativity.
How to evaluate creative ideas.
Ideally, Thomas’s book will deliver both a report on how great creative organizations do what they do, as well as offer a blueprint for companies striving to become more creative themselves.
There are plenty of people who’ve written about creativity as it relates to our business. There are the classics like Bob Levenson’s The Bill Bernbach Book, filled with quotes from the master and remarkably relevant to this day; The Book of Gossage, arguably the genesis for the creative perspective that defines Goodby, Silverstein and Partners; and Richard Wilde’s Problems: Solutions: Visual Thinking for Graphic Communications, lessons that have helped teach two generations how to think visually.
More recently, anyone interested in creativity has been rewarded with Sir Ken Robinson’s The Element, a brilliant thesis that admonishes the public school system for confining us to such narrow definitions of intelligence; instead it implores us to find our personal passion and a tribe that can foster it. IDEO CEO Tim Brown shares his insights in Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. And, of course, there’s always Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers with its simple message and evidence that it’s all about practice. Lots of it.
But thinking about organizational creativity – is that an oxymoron? – makes a lot of sense in an age where ideas, stories, technology and media aren’t simply converging, they’re crashing into each other.
Yes, Jaron Lanier, in his You Are Not a Gadget, reminds us that group think won’t yield the kind of original creative idea that one brilliant individual can conceive, but the fact is that we create more and more in teams now. Take a look at Pixar for example. What comes out the back end is so much more than a writer’s or even a director’s original vision. Sure someone has to be the benevolent (or not so benevolent) dictator, but the finished product requires not only lots of individual creativity but a culture and organization that fosters it. One that accepts diverse opinions and doesn’t suffer the “not invented here” syndrome or tolerate the ugly kind of competition where people feel compelled to stand up and declare, “that was my idea.”
When we made ads, it was easy. A writer and an art director had an idea and executed it. But today, the possibilities of technology, the difference UX can make, the need to design, program, and build something complicates matters.
It’s hard enough to identify creative talent. Getting different kinds of talent to work together, toward a single goal, all welcoming each other’s contributions to make something better is a challenge. Whether or not one book can help remains to be seen. But an effort to explore how creative companies foster originality — comparing techniques for hiring, identifying common characteristics, understanding how leaders inspire — is a welcome one. It will be both fun and interesting to compare one company to another and learn each other’s tricks.
My guess is that Professor Vogel’s ambitious project may not give aspiring creative organizations all the answers, but it will at least force them (and us) to ask questions about what they’re doing and whether or not it’s fostering more creativity, or just getting in the way.
I wish you luck with the project Thomas. Can’t wait to read the results.
Photo by: Lisa Dragon
Tufts brings video to the college application
I’m not sure what’s more interesting, the fact that the first college to encourage personal videos as part of the application process was Tufts University, a liberal arts college just outside of Boston, or that more than 1000 applicants responded to the optional request.
The former shows just how mainstream content creation has become and the latter reinforces the new level of comfort and familiarity the digital generation has with expressing itself publicly through virtually any medium – images, blogs, videos.
Obviously there are advantages to both college and student. The admissions officers get a better look at the whole student and sense of how creative he or she is. The applicant receives a signal he’s considering a school that thinks progressively and looks beyond the standard academic record and test scores.
Granted the idea of using video as part of the application process isn’t entirely new. Plenty of organizations and contests, from the Ford Fiesta Movement to MTV have employed the technique. And other colleges allow applicants to include portfolios or writing or even websites to augment their application. But this example brings the video application even more mainstream, generating response from kids who aren’t necessarily pursuing careers in film, social media or entertainment.
It seems there are a couple of takeaways. The first is we better make sure our kids (as if they need any help) are good at conveying ideas and arguments using all of the new tools if they’re to compete for a place in those coveted classrooms. (See this blog from 13-year-old Orren Fox.)
But for those of us in the business of advertising, marketing and branding, there’s this. Tufts’s little experiment is clearly one more reminder why user-generated content, crowdsourcing, and personal branding will continue to grow in popularity.
We are only a few years away, at most, from marketing to prospects and communities who themselves are as comfortable at crafting messages, making videos and earning people’s attention as those of us who practice these crafts professionally. And they clearly welcome any opportunity to do so.
Sure, the cynics and over-confident among you will view these videos and feel you have nothing to worry about. It’s not as if any of these are likely to rival a quality TV commercial, or even find enough of an audience to take them viral. But this is still a trend worth watching.
And it should make make things interesting. When we’re all communicators, who’s talking and who’s paying attention?
Creativity calls for trust. Trust calls for play.
Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, talking about play
If you’ve never seen Tim Brown’s talk on serious play it’s a must watch. Besides demonstrating some brilliant interactive speaking techniques, Tim makes a cogent argument for why play is so important to any creative organization.
Play gets people comfortable and relaxed with one another. When we play we lose our tendency toward conservative thinking. We take more chances. We muster up the courage to share our most outrageous thinking. Fear dissipates; better ideas materialize.
In the still developing world of digital communications this matters more than ever. Creative ideas, big and small, are no longer the result of a cozy partnership between a writer and an art director who’ve spent years working with each other, who are comfortable floating crazy concepts even when they’re only half developed, and who are totally unfettered by the frequent, “that sucks,” they get in response.
That level of comfort, enjoyed by so many two person creative teams, is harder to achieve the bigger the team gets. And today, with the new complexities of digital, the typical creative team is as likely to include developers, programmers, UX specialists and social media thinkers as it is a writer and art director. That’s a lot of people in the room. Yet it’s possible that the best, the boldest, the biggest creative idea could come from the social media guy, or even the UX person. If they’re comfortable enough with each other to speak their minds and take a chance. Need help? You can always study what Pixar, Google and Ideo do. You could also get yourself a good ping pong table. But the real opportunity is to make play part of your culture.
On a separate but related note are the findings of noted surgeon and author Atul Gawande. In his latest book The Checklist Manifesto (trust me you should read anything he ever writes) he chronicles the advantages of a simple check list (like don’t forget to have pints of blood in the operating room) that includes the most obvious, “make sure that the operating team introduces themselves to each other.”
Hard to imagine that the doctors and nurses about to cut you open while you’re anaesthetized don’t know each other’s names, but it turns out they often don’t. Yet if they introduce themselves to each other before the operation begins, there’s a 30 percent decrease in mishaps. Why? The simple act of talking to one another before the operation gives people the courage to speak up if they see something go wrong.
Want to make your organization a little more creative? Want to encourage more risks? Then remember to play. Preferably with people whose names you actually know. Does your company play or have other aspects to its culture that inspired creativity? Please share.
