Victors & Spoils has had no problem attracting clients

When Victors & Spoils was first launched two-and-a-half years ago, the company had more detractors than fans. (Note, I was among the latter.) Much of the industry dismissed the idea that the model could ever replace the traditional agency/client relationships. The more vocal members of the creative community found all kinds of reasons to condemn the new company. The talent wouldn’t be as good. The whole idea of crowd sourcing would undermine the value of the creative person. The best people wouldn’t submit to this kind of process and platform.

Co-founder/CEO John Winsor and I had numerous conversations about why the critics were wrong. Great ideas can come from anywhere. Plenty of people would welcome the chance to have their ideas considered. (After all, how many of us encounter a daily dose of rejection already?) Clients had tired of paying for overhead and some of the excesses of the advertising industry.  And since agencies could only sell the talent they had on staff, by definition they were limited in the number of ideas they could generate to solve a problem.

Clearly, John and his partners were a step ahead of the critics. From day one the agency met with success.  Thousands of creatives from all over the world joined the community.  And the agency’s pitch resonated with lots of clients. Dish, Discovery Channel, GAP, General Mills, Harley Davidson, Virgin America, Levi’s and a host of other brand name advertisers signed on.

And why not?  They could get a slew of ideas — curated, filtered and on strategy — for a lot less money than they would pay in a typical retainer relationship.

From the very beginning I thought this was the perfect acquisition for a holding company. Think about it. Holding companies serve large global clients. They make the claim — sometimes actually true — that they can harness the collective the resources of multiple sister agencies to serve a client’s total needs. Yet they really don’t have a model, infrastructure or software platform for doing so. Ask anyone who has participated in a cross agency (there’s a more disparaging word for it) shoot out and they’ll tell you it’s among the more miserable experiences in which you could ever participate. In many cases it wastes time and resources. And for the individuals encouraged (if not forced) to participate it often results in nothing more than demoralization.

But with Victors & Spoils platform — the community, the software, the process — it could be so much more efficient. A holding company can tap into an existing community, create a new one, invite more people to participate with less time and effort, and effectively manage and evaluate more submissions. Add some incentives or gaming dynamics, make it easier for people to throw in ideas, and it’s likely that participants might even welcome the opportunity to help the company cause. Perhaps more importantly, clients might have a genuine reason to believe that multiple agencies could work together on their behalf.

Until now, most ad agencies have been threatened by Victors & Spoils. They’re perceived to undermine the value of individual creatives, diminish the role and impact of the creative director who hires and guides them, and convey to clients that there might be a better idea outside the walls of the agency.

But if, in the end, our job is to solve big problems, deliver the best and most effective idea, and leave no stone unturned in determining it, maybe we should all acknowledge that community, software, and yes, crowdsourcing techniques, are the way to go. Maybe not always, but certainly sometimes. Add to that the fact that we really only have two choices — resist progress or embrace it — and we have even more reason to welcome the innovation that V&S has pioneered over the last two years.

John Winsor, Claudia Batten and Evan Fry had the vision and the courage to try and change how ad agencies work. Looks like the big holding companies — at least one of them – is starting to believe they’re onto something.

A recent Twitter exchange between John Winsor of V&S and Marty St. George of Mullen client, Jet Blue

Most successful ad agencies have been built around a combination of the two:  relationships and ideas. The former yields the kind of partnership that lets a brand team totally immerse itself in a client’s business, work as a partner rather than a supplier and take a vested interest in the success of the business.

That’s not to say that relationships are more important than ideas. After all, it’s the latter that goes into the market, attracting attention, generating buzz, driving results. No one gets famous from a relationship; it’s the ideas that make you immortal.

But you could argue that relationships contribute to great ideas in a big way. A strong relationship results in trust, which invites braver thinking. It yields a partnership that encourages client and agency to work through challenges and problems together. And it motivates creative teams to work even harder than they already do. We all want to please a client who appreciates what we do for them.

But if Will Burns, the founder of Ideasicle, is right, the relationship side of things just might be diminishing in value. In Will’s words, many clients care less about relationships and more about getting an idea faster, cheaper and more efficiently. He should know, having held senior account and new business roles at agencies that include Wieden, Goodby, Arnold and Mullen.

In response to that “trend,” Will created Ideasicle, an expert-sourcing agency.  Similar to the crowdsourcing model of Victors & Spoils, which also posts briefs to a vetted community of creatives, Ideasicle calls on an even smaller stable of hand-picked, experienced, award-winning creatives who have joined as “experts.” All of them have worked with Will in one of his previous positions, so he has a good sense of how to match them with assignments.

When Ideasicle secures an assignment – sometimes from an ad agency needing to augment and internal effort, but more often from a brand advertiser looking for fast, affordable access to top talent – it posts the news to members of the Ideasicle community. Those who are available agree to work on short notice as a swat team. They collaborate with each other online — conceiving ideas, revising them, making each other’s concepts better – but stay invisible and anonymous to clients. Hired guns, they work for the joy of creating and the guaranteed payday.

Ideasicle offers clients what it calls "expert sourcing."

Knowing my interest in crowdsourcing and new models, Will showed me a quick peek behind the curtain. The talent is impressive. And despite their anonymity, more and more clients are embracing the model, caring not who works on their business but rather what comes out of the process.

Like Victors & Spoils, which has generate impressive PR and clients – Harley Davidson, Levis’, Virgin America, General Mills, Discovery Channel – Ideasicle is challenging the traditional models as being inefficient and over-priced.

I’m not saying I agree totally with that sentiment. In a world where the only real trend that matters is hyper-connectivity, you could make an argument that brands need a deep relationship with an agency  like the one I work for, where a dedicated hyper-bundled team can deliver creative, paid media, earned media, mobile and digital all working together to produce coherent brand experiences that consider everything from context to culture.

But it’s also likely that the new models, anxious to prove the maxim that abundance breaks more things than scarcity, are to be taken seriously. Perhaps we should embrace aspects of what they do ourselves, finding ways to source ideas from more people and places and deliver them even more quickly and efficiently.

What do you think?

A lot of crowdsourced or co-created projects yield questionable results. But there seems to be a new formula that works pretty well. Short snippets of film edited into something wonderful by a talented curator/editor. We saw the first big example of this with Ridley Scott’s Life in a Day.  And this week we see another great effort from Mont Blanc to celebrate its 190th anniversary.

To honor Nicolas Rieussac’s invention of the chronograph – he recorded time to a fifth of a second in 1821 – Mont Blanc has challenged image makers to capture beauty in a single second of a film. Participants choose their favorite 60, each of which becomes part of a short film and qualifies to be chosen as the single best one-second video by director Wim Wenders. Hard to imagine that one one-second film can be the best, but someone’s got to win.

There’s also an opportunity to craft your own playlist of other people’s videos and be recognized for your visual prowess even if you choose not to submit.

Is this a good idea? I think so for a host of reasons.

• It’s a perfectly relevant idea. The beauty of a second. What better way to call attention to the chronograph?
• It’s remarkable easy to enter. Simply upload a film from a computer or mobile device.
• The prize is great: a trip to Berlin and a new Mont Blanc chronograph.
• The finished films that feature the top 60 seconds become something you can send to your friends with appropriate bragging rights.
• Mont Blanc generates a piece of content they probably couldn’t create themselves.
• And finally, the participants become a bit of a media channel, sharing and passing the videos around the web.
• Best of all, when you take a look at the first film, it lives up to the idea that a single second is plenty long enough to convey beauty.

Now if only the website weren’t, as Boing Boing called it, an obnoxious blob of flash.

A month ago I crowdsourced questions here and on Twitter for the instructors at BDW’s Making Digital Work workshop.

We settled on five.

How do we get clients to embrace more innovative work?

What can we learn from software startups?

Do agencies have a role in social media?

How do we stop the talent drain?

What kind of people should we hire?

Here are the answers from my good friends and teachers Matt Howell, Gareth Kay, Kim Laama, Tim Malbon, Sheena Matheiken, Scott Prindle and John Winsor.I weigh in, too.

Some of my favorite soundbites:

Matt Howell on innovation: If we’re serious about selling more progressive work we have to get serious about investing in prototyping, showing how something works and how you’d interact with it.

Gareth Kay on social media: One of the biggest problems with social media is that people are too focused on the media part of social media instead of on the social part.

Sheena Matheiken on software inspiration: Developers in general, especially the creatively inclined ones, are such doers. They just create stuff. They don’t sit around and noodle. They make and prototype.

Tim Malbon on software inspiration: Try not to treat what you’re trying to make like a piece of traditional media. It doesn’t need to be designed massively up front. It can be cruder; it can be quicker.

John Winsor on retaining talent: Traditionally agencies are siloed. The creative department stands on a pedestal. The account people are there to serve them. Strategy is somewhere in between. But great ideas come from everywhere so you need to set up a system that accepts that great ideas come from everywhere.

Scott Prindle on hiring: The core quality is an entrepreneurial spirit. Someone who is passionate about the digital space, maybe someone who thought about being in start-up. They have to come into the into the agency and quickly generate ideas and move things forward.

One thing about all of these folks is that they’re willing to share. Ideas, advice, insights. Take a look and connect with them on Twitter. It will be worth it. Thanks for stopping by.

We didn’t really know what we were doing, but what the hell. This was the new age of media. We didn’t have to have anything figured out. We could figure it out as we went along. Iterate. Pivot. (Pick your buzzword.)

In the beginning we thought we’d provide a window into the world of Millennials through which brands and marketers could peek and learn. We (Mullen) might get some credit, prove that we knew this generation, and maybe even snag a client or two. Fail. No young writer wanted to post a “let us tell you old folks about our generation” article in order that marketers could better figure out how to sell to or engage with 20-somethings.

Instead it turned out that the editors, writers and readers wanted to connect with each other. Share thoughts, observations and musings. Support one another’s efforts to get better at writing and developing content. And more importantly, try to build something that might have value and be enduring.

So we (Mullen) did what any smart grown-up ought to do. We got the hell out of the way. Alex Pearlman (she), a young editor right out college showed up and took over. She recruited editors, set up an editorial calendar, created theme weeks, evaluated writers and took the blog to a new level. Christine Peterson, a recent college grad employed as a social strategist at Mullen managed to find an extra 20 plus hours a week to become community manager — gathering and organizing the “crowd” of writers, suggesting articles, and injecting the project with a never ending supply of passion and enthusiasm.

Then, late last spring, the two of them decided it was time to expand. They contacted The Boston Globe, offered to show the newspaper the opportunity it was missing, and invited the editors to a presentation. And here’s where it got really good. My Gen-Y friends Alex and Christine polled Boston’s Millennials regarding their media habits. They shot and edited man-on-the-street interviews. They did an analysis of the kinds of relationships urban dailies and newsweeklies had with bloggers. And they put together a stand-up dog and pony show (without any help from anyone over 24 I might add) to take to Globe management, including its editor in chief Marty Baron. My favorite line from the presentation: “Our generation doesn’t want ‘the man’ telling us what’s news.” Mr. Baron is, of course, the man. But fortunately he didn’t seem to mind.

Fast forward a few months later. The contract with the Globe’s parent company The New York Times is done. TNGG lives on Boston.com. It will post hyper-local content for the city’s students, recent grads and 20-somethings, covering “what’s going on on-campus, in the clubs and pop-up galleries, in those boardrooms where flip-flops are allowed, and everything in between.”

If things work out, here’s what might happen. TNGG will have taken the first step in a new distribution model that might earn it a larger audience. A slew of young writers and journalists will gain visibility. Boston.com will demonstrate its progressiveness and win over a new generation of readers who might otherwise eschew a mainstream news channel. Alex and Christine will have set an example for young professionals everywhere. New TNGG boston.com editor Angela Stefano will have a really cool job. And I’ll be able to say I knew them all when.

Wish them luck. Become a reader of Boston.com/tngg. And share the links. They get paid based on traffic.

I got plenty of questions here and on Twitter for the 10 folks who spoke at the last Boulder Digital Work Making Digital Work sessions, which just ended this past Thursday.

Here’s where we netted out. Thanks to the willing Nick Todd, who shoots and helps edit the videos we do at these sessions, we got eight of the 10 speakers on film answering all five of the questions below. Believe it or not, while many of the answers were consistent, few if any were overly redundant.

It might take a few weeks to get a finished video together, but my instinct tells me you’ll find it both interesting and insightful to hear answers from Matt Howell, Gareth Kay, Tim Malbon, Ben Malbon, John Winsor, Kim Laama, Sheena Matheiken and Scott Prindle when we do.

In the meantime, below are the final questions and a few of the answers.

How can agencies inspire clients to do more innovative work?

Answers ranged from setting up internal labs to experimenting more ourselves. That way we can vet new technologies and platforms and develop ideas that we know will work before taking them to clients. Scott Prindle suggested taking on the role of teacher, educating clients more frequently in what’s possible with all the software, social networks and digital toys coming at us. Others talked about the need to bring inexpensive ideas to the table in hopes of inspiring more experimentation. In short, spread excitement.

What lessons can agencies learn from software companies and start-ups?

As an industry, we no longer look to each other for ideas and inspiration. We draw on Silicon Valley, new social platforms, as well as companies like Google and Apple. If any answers stood out, they were these.  Speed is your best friend. Stop perfecting the design of something and get to a Minimum Viable Product quickly by prototyping.  Another equally compelling suggestion – stop organizing people around disciplines and put people together by team.  It accelerates solving problems.

How can agencies stop the drain of talent to young startups and tech giants?

As we hire more creative technologists and developers, we’re competing with a much broader range of companies. Want to attract and retain people whose goals are to make things that matter? Give them more responsibility sooner. Consider a program like Google’s 20 percent time. Eliminate organizational hierarchy.

Do agencies have a role in executing a brand’s social media when authenticity, transparency and access are the key attributes for good social engagement?

This was the most controversial question. Some participants insisted outright that agencies should have no role. Social media and all the new platforms simply emphasize the diminished need for the middleman. Others vehemently disagreed, suggesting that if agencies master the art of conversation strategy and engagement that they should take the lead. Creativity matters even in the new space and agencies are better prepared to be inventive there than clients might be themselves.

What are the core talents you look for when hiring people who’ll drive change and implement contemporary digital work?

This might be the only real throwaway question, but the answers were still pretty good. Kim Laama wants familiarity with the entire digital landscape. I suggested curiosity and a T-shape. Tim Malbon wouldn’t consider anyone who didn’t have a real social presence. (If you haven’t already connected, interacted, shared and contributed on Twitter forget about working at Made by Many.) Ben Malbon, director of strategy at Google’s Creative Lab had my favorite answer. “I’m less interested in people who use technology and more interested in people who want to create it.”

Eventually we’ll have more thorough answers on film.  In the meantime, thanks for joining in.

This time around we have the usual suspects –Matt Howell of Arnold; Gareth Kay from Goodby; Tim Malbon who hails from Made by Many in the UK; Scott Prindle of Crispin; and Kim Laama  who joins us from AKQA– but we have some newcomers, too, including Ben Malbon, BDW board member and director of strategy at Google Creative Lab; Sheena Matheiken, who founded the Uniform Project; and Will McGiness, creative chief at Venables Bells and Partners. Plus, back for his second visit, Daniel Stein, founder of EVB.

Virtually everyone of the presenters is either a company founder or c-level executive.  And all of them have been creating, leading, or initiating digital work for a long time.

I thought it might be fun to crowdsource a set of questions we can ask everyone. For example:

What do you see as the next emerging digital or social trend?

What’s broken about the way your company does business?

Will Mesh-type businesses pose a challenge to traditional marketers?

Can ad agencies really learn how to build stuff?

What changes to you plan on making inside your organization over the next year?

What holds your company back from evolving as quickly as it should?

How do you inspire innovation?

If you have anything you’d like to ask us as a group leave your comments here. It might be fun to see if the answers we get back are consistent, different or even contradictory.

I’ll take the five or 10 most provocative or original questions posted here, on Twitter or on Google+ and try and solicit answers from all 10 individuals above.  Who knows, you might learn something, or simply conclude that no one knows what’s going on.

“It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen. “
Clay Shirky

Remember when we talked about social media and mainstream media as two different things? Not anymore. Today, social media is the mainstream media.

True, on Google + we may be talking about the novelty of Google +. And there may only be a few of us puttering around on Percolate or scrolling up and down on Shuush. But despite the never-ending introduction of new social platforms, social media in one form or another has pretty much become everyone’s primary source of content and interaction.

So what does it mean now that we’ve all joined the conversation, mastered the art of engagement and embraced the concept of transparency? Your guess is as good as mine.  But one place to start thinking about it might be the following trends.

Influence gets more influential

Initially I thought that Klout was a superficial measurement of influence.  And while it still has a way to go – it needs to add Google +, Instagram and others for a start – it represents the next wave in social media marketing: learning to identify and leverage influencers.  Already Klout can pinpont influencers by category (sneakers, beer, social media) and geography and help brands connect with them.

Perhaps more telling is the slew of new tools to measure, promote and identify influence. We’ve always had Hubspot, but just this week Edelman launched Blog Level and will no doubt be encouraging clients to use it.

As marketers begin seeking out such influencers it’s only inevitable that more individuals strive to become one. And why not? It’s easier than ever to share expertise, whether blogging, tweeting or answering questions on Quora. And as marketers covet your connections, you’ll benefit further from the validation.

If you’re a marketer you should be developing relationships with all the influencers who can use your product and invite them to play a role in marketing it.  If you’re an individual with any specific area of knowledge, share it, engage, build a following and raise your score. It could help with everything from making a few bucks to getting a job.

Individuals are the new filters

We, as individuals, organize the people we follow into columns on Tweetdeck. We place them into specific circles on Google +. We use them to filter the content that comes into our lives. We create our own magazines with Flipboard and Pulse.  And eventually (see below on the stream beyond real time) we’ll search, using our categories of friends, for recommendations from their past likes, shares and posts. The challenge of course is how any brand or marketer maintains some degree of control over what it stands for as it passes through those individual filters.  We all remember what happens in the first grade exercise where a message gets whispered from one end of the room to another. It comes out as something entirely different than when it started.

For brands and marketers, it’s more important than ever not only to stand for something clear and simple (Zappos and happiness; Jet Blue and service) but to assure it gets passed on and represented accurately (if that’s even possible) by consumers. Clarity will become more essential, along with behavior and tools that mirror what you claim to stand for.

Content generation and sharing gets even easier

Burberry's Instagram via Statigram

Percolate makes it easier to blog by giving users content based on their interests. Instagram has enabled anyone, including the vocabulary-impaired, to fill the stream and attract attention with quickly generated and easily doctored images. Pinterest, a visual bookmarking service has a social component to it that makes it a little like Tumblr, the latter now more popular than WordPress.

What this means, of course, is that more people will generate more content than ever. As they do the stream will rapidly become a waterfall of never ending, rarely memorable digital bits, making it even harder to stand out, get remembered or inspire enagement.  I recently saw someone tweeting about how they had abandoned their nightly hour of television to scroll through their Instagram feed instead. He found the images and imagined stories behind them more interesting than network programming.

For those of us in the business of attention and engagement, we’ll find it harder to be noticed.  We might get on the radar for a moment or two, but the real trick will be mastering the network effect and getting more people to generate content for us. Quantity as well as quality may be our friend. Burberry has 55,000 followers on Instagram, but if 25 percent of them also generated content and used a hashtag calling attention to the brand it would be even more valuable.

The stream moves beyond the moment

I don’t know about you, but I miss 90 percent of what flows through my social networks. Going back and filtering or discovering stuff that might be genuinely meaningful is hard right now.  I can save a tweet, or throw a link into Trunkly, but what if next month I want to search what the 10 top creative directors have shared as links over the past month? What if I want to know what new books have been liked more times by my trusted Facebook or Google + friends?

These capabilities are coming.  New platforms like Postpo.st, while still buggy, could make Twitter a far more valuable resource. I know one company in particular that will soon turn Facebook likes into real social currency. When that happens, we will all have more reasons to encourage social response to our products and content.

Wondering what the value of a “Like” is now? Imagine what happens when it becomes a searchable source of recommendations. Don’t think it matters what someone says about you on Twitter a day or two later?  Think again. For marketers it means sharpening your engagement and content strategy with an understanding of the long term value of a Like or a +1 along with learning to earn rather than buy them, ideally from people whose influence is meaningful.

C2C rivals B2C as Mesh-type businesses proliferate

We have too narrow a definition of crowdsourcing if we think it’s about soliciting cheap content. Its real value comes from the new platforms that encourage sharing. Sharing tools, apartments, cars and more. If you haven’t checked out Airbnb, (or read Lisa Gansky’s bookz The Mesh) do so.  Sure you can find the exotic igloo in Greenland, but there’s a room with your name on it in just about any city.

Fueled by environmental concerns, economic realities and the possibilities of the web this trend is just starting to take off. It will inevitably grow and affect lots of businesses, from car companies to hotels, bicycle manufacturers and toolmakers. And if my familiarity with Gen Y is any indication, there will be an entire generation more open to this way of living and sharing than either Gen X or Boomers.

Brands should create their own versions of these networks. It may be too late for a credit card company to invent Groupon or for a camera maker to think up Instagram. But if you’re a business paying attention to what social media is doing (care to share your breast milk?) then you’re thinking about how to create new business models yourself.

There’s a consistency across all of these thoughts.  And it’s this. The individual –content generator, media force, smartphone toter, uber-connector – is driving the bus. She is influencing, searching, producing, accessing, connecting and deciding with more control than ever before. Time to move beyond the basics of social media and learn to be even more creative in the new spaces.

Thoughts?  Other trends – personal data, images, visualization – you think are as or more important?  Please share.

I’m hoping the slow hunch materializes in the case of TNGG. A year and a half ago a few of us speculated that it might be a good idea to start a crowdsourced blog by and about Gen Y. It struck us that marketers would be interested in the next generation’s perspective and that young writers would rather express their own points of view directly rather than have some third party researchers speak on their behalf. It also seemed a good way for an ad agency to play around with consumer generated content and get a little better at social media.

Well I’m here to report that our trajectory hasn’t quite been that of the Huffington Post. We’re not flush with VC money. Nor have we received any offers from Murdoch. (We’d probably decline anyway.)

But we have accomplished something by being patient and by plodding along. This week TNGG will publish its 1500^th article. Not bad for one paid employee and a community of volunteer contributors. Today seven talented and committed editors inspire and curate content from nearly 200 writers (some active, some less so) who generate 30-plus articles a week. Editor Alex Pearlman has become a sought after voice in advocating for Gen Y and community manager Christine Peterson has been singled out as a future leader by MITX.

Of course while all of that is nice, it doesn’t make for much of a business model. But that doesn’t mean the two ambitious 20- somethings who run TNGG aren’t working on it. In fact they’re about to close their first distribution deal as they slowly develop a model that will create new outlets for their content, generate more traffic, collect fees from media properties and provide pay for the contributors.

If we’d demanded that such goals be achieved in the first month, quarter or even year TNGG would be long gone. Instead this little experiment has yielded numerous lessons, gathered a valuable community, jump-started a good number of careers – at least 30 of the student writers who’ve come and gone attribute their first jobs in part to their bylined articles — and kept the possibility of that Huffington Post dream alive. It’s a slow hunch. But you never know, it may turn out to be a good one.

Working on something that’s long and slow but you hope might turn into something? Please share.

Submission to Open Ideo in response to getting kids to eat healthier: a smarter shopping card

Perhaps the coolest thing about the web, social media and the multi-billion dollar infrastructure (Google, the Cloud, 3G, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Skype) that is now available to all of us isn’t that we can simply connect with one another in more ways than ever, posting status updates, sharing funny videos, and uploading photos.

Nor is it the new power we have to generate content, hi-jack brands, or even become brands ourselves.

Rather it’s that we can actually do things of value. We can effect positive social change and make the world just a little bit better (or at least try) by uniting like-minded people, inviting participation, understanding the appeal of extrinsic rewards and leveraging the communities we join and build.

Here are four really great examples worth paying attention to. Note that I’m involved with two of them now, the Uniform Project to which I’ve been asked to be on an advisory board, and No Right Brain Left Behind, which I just signed up to support.

Open Ideo

Ideo is a one of the world’s great design companies, taking on monumental challenges — access to safe drinking water, immunization delivery –from the perspective of design thinking, an approach that considers the needs of people, the possibilities of technology and the criteria for success. But in the last year they’ve launched Open Ideo, an invitation to all of us to join together and design for the community.

Their first challenge, in partnership with Chef Jamie Oliver, was to raise kids’ awareness of the benefits of fresh food so they can make better choices. The idea is that rather than talk about obesity perhaps we can do something about it with ideas and solutions generated by those who have the most at stake — parents, families and even the establishments that grow, distribute and sell us our food.

What can we learn from Open Ideo?

• Ideas can come from anyone and anywhere
• You don’t need to be a professional designer to think like one
• Extrinsic rewards are as important as intrinsic rewards when it comes to motivation

The Uniform Project

Sheena Matheiken launched her social initiative last year as a fundraiser. She wore the same dress every day for year to make a statement about the value of simplifying your life and wardrobe. In the process she raised over $100,000 to send kids to school in India and learned that her fans and followers would help in a variety of ways — buying dresses, donating to causes, providing accessories, offering to spread the word. The support she encountered gave her the confidence to leave her day job and turn her passion into a new company with a model that proves, “You can do business while doing good.”

TEDxDubai 2010| Sheena Matheiken from Giorgio Ungania on Vimeo.

Now she is designing and manufacturing dresses using sustainable materials and techniques with a real focus on helping women both simplify their wardrobe and express their individuality. She’s found a new way to raise money for worthy causes, by inviting emerging “celebrities” to wear the same dress for 30 consecutive days in support of a charity. And she’s allowing customers to get involved by creating their own Uniform Project with a do-it-yourself program that includes everything you need to make a dress, host a site and get the word out.

What can we learn from Uniform Project

• Business motives and social good can co-exist
• There are multiple ways to involve your community — they can be customers, donors, participants
• The content you create is as important as the product you make

The Common

This is the latest from Alex Bogusky, Rob Schuham and their Fearless Revolution. After having spent a good chunk of his career selling burgers, fries and pizza, Alex has shifted his focus onto creating a new kind of relationship between consumers and corporations.

To his credit, he’s not simply talking about it or applying pressure to current companies to change their ways, he’s instead attempting to incubate future brands and companies that will embrace social responsibility as part of their core mission.

The Common intends to assemble a new kind of capitalist community, populated by all kinds of creative people. It will charge its members and participants with identifying problems, collaborating on solutions, “out-cubating” new companies, funding the new initiatives and spreading the word.

The Common is about transitioning from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage. In some ways a little like Open Ideo but in this case the desired outcomes are actually new companies.

Knowing Alex and his determination, this could succeed.

What we can learn from The Common (even in its idea phase)

• there are alternative ways to define a brand
• the web gives us new ways to collaborate
• there’s life after advertising

No Right Brain Left Behind

This very well might be The Common model in the works, also not unlike what Open Ideo strives to do. A bunch of creative types get together, perhaps inspired by the likes of Sir Ken Robinson, to overcome the “creativity crisis” in our public schools. Given that our schools have put all their emphasis on narrow definitions of intelligence and standardized test scores, neglecting to identify and develop all the other intelligence that are equally important, it’s time to come to the rescue.

So as part of Social Media Week 2011, NRBLB is asking the creative community — advertising agencies, innovation companies, design consultancies, and communication schools to submit ideas in the form of tools, applications, or products that might help school’s better prepare kids to solve 21st century problems.

The program (here’s the plan) already has media partners lined up and funding to pilot the best ideas. Whether we end up with a list of great ideas, or programs that actually get implemented remains to be seen. (Anyone who’s taken on teachers and education in America knows it’s an uphill battle.) But it’s a great idea on many fronts.

What we can learn from NRBLB

• people are willing to come together for good cause
• it’s easier than ever to organize and unite a community
• inclusiveness is the best invitation you can issue

Hope you’ll find a way to participate in some, if not all, of the above projects.  Or better yet, create your own.  Thoughts?