Knowing where to start
The internet guarantees that I’ll see at least one thing a day that’ll blow my mind.
After recovering from the joy of being shown something new and exciting (normally via the peeps on Twitter), I’ll often feel a little frustration. Frustration born out of a feeling of inadequacy: “I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t know where to start”.
But I had a realisation today: that at some time or other, the creators of great things wouldn’t have known where to start either.
“No sh*t, Sherlock” you might say, and I wouldn’t blame you…
For me though, it’s a moment of clarity; instead of worrying about knowing where to start, I’m now going to start where I know.
Practically-speaking, it means pursuing opportunities that are within my grasp but are also ambitious enough so that I learn.
Thanks for listening to my ramble. Hat tip to Andy for the mind-blowing vid.
Do something everyday, regardless.
Most of the images I like end up here.
But I think that these words are too good not to share with you here.
By David Horvitz. Found with FFFFOUND!
Learning from whitehouse.gov
Obama’s use of technology in his election has been well-documented, e.g. here.
The burning question since the election has been: how will Obama continue to use such tools whilst in power to keep the dialogue with the world both open and two-way, if at all?
Updates on whitehouse.gov minutes after his inauguration gives us some indication, and it’s looking very promising.
Macon Phillips, the White House’s New Media Director, and (formerly?) the Director of Strategy & Communications at Blue State Digital wrote a post with the following title:
“Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov”
Encouragingly, he re-affirms the fact that the online program is about “put[ing] citizens first”.
Specifically, he talks about three key priorities for new media in the White House:
1. Communication
2. Transparency
3. Participation
He goes into more detail about each of these priorities and how they’ll manifest themselves. There’ll also be a weekly video address by the President on Saturday mornings (hat tip Andrew Grill).
This combination of three solid principles of openness and the effective use of the right tools has the potential to change government forever.
And beyond government, it looks as though Obama will continue to be the inspiration for anyone looking to start and, most importantly, maintain a movement for positive change.
Phillips affirms towards the end of his post that the community will continue to be “a work in progress”.
I’ll be watching and learning.
Marketing ideas that create value
The best marketing ideas have multiple dimensions of value. The best ideas create value for the company AND the customer. It’s entirely possible [to] create value beyond even these two audiences. Great marketing ideas also create value for shareholders, communities and potentially, the planet.
Adrian Ho at Zeus Jones wrote this in a thought-provoking piece at the beginning of the year.
He uses Apple’s electronic receipts as an example of a marketing idea that manages to create different value streams for the customer, the planet, and Apple.
He also questions why ideas like this aren’t being celebrated when, to paraphrase, expensive communications activities with a single value stream are showered with praise.
It’s very difficult to disagree with this challenge.
Marketing has often struggled to attain a seat at the top table. As an organisational function, it doesn’t always succeed at demonstrating its real-life contribution to the bottom line. This can mean that it is excluded from the more ‘grown-up’, strategic conversations that go on.
What Adrian’s thinking does is to remind, and no doubt for some, redefine what marketing exists to do.
Marketing is not simply the creation of clever pieces of film or funky facebook apps.
Marketing is the creation of value for organisations and its stakeholders; where value is defined by the specific context in which it is being created.
It’s a broader definition that lifts marketing above tactics into the far more interesting realm of how organisations interact with the world at every single juncture – not just the consumption one.
What sparked this particular post was a sighting of another example of this type of multiple value creation in action; and when an award is established that recognises these types of ideas (maybe the “Everybody Wins Award”?), here is my nomination for Insure & Go:
Everybody Wins:
- I win because I receive my policy number and an emergency phone number almost instantaneously and having my this information on my mobile phone is the ultimate convenience if I get into trouble when travelling – particularly if I manage to injure myself on the slopes at the end of this month…
- The environment wins because less paper and ink is used
- Insure & Go win because they have my mobile phone number, it’s cheaper for them to text me this information than posting it to me, and they’re featured on this blog
And there are potentially even more winners:
- The foreign emergency services win if anything happens whilst I’m abroad because I’ll have my insurance details immediately to hand (and not at the bottom of my suitcase back at the hotel)
Some questions for you:
Do you agree that the creation of multiple value streams should be marketing’s ultimate objective?
What do you think about the idea of nominating these types of ideas for an official award?
Who would you nominate?
What do you think of the name, the “Everybody Wins Award”?
19/1/2009 Update: to be more accurate about the nature of the documents sent to my mobile. Originally, what I’d written suggested that I’d received all of them in a text message. In fact, I received the policy number and a phone number for 24-hour medical assistance. The documents themselves were sent to me by email.
Some ‘What ifs’ re: web/marketing/life…
- What if two million people signed up to read the 140-character stream of consciousness of a 38-year old teacher and mother from Lima (e.g. as followers on Twitter)?
- What if, in order to recruit the best people, organisations set creative challenges instead of asking for CV’s or cover letters?
- What if, as a way of nudging people to do something en masse (like voting, buying something, recycling or filling in your tax return), we turned it into one big game? (Inspired by Alfie‘s pres. at jMac‘s Every Single One Of Us event last night).
- What if ‘digital’ wasn’t a thing that happened on screens but was embedded into all physical objects? (Inspired by these two posts by Russell Davies).
- What if we had access to data on every single ‘mundane’ thing that makes us who we are – from the number of times we’ve pressed the number 7 on a keyboard to the band we listen to most often on a Tuesday – and could then visualise all of this data as a frequency and map it on to the frequencies of others in order to find the closest match to our own? (Inspired by daytum and Dominic Travers at jMac‘s Every Single One Of Us event last night).
- What if I could make anything I wanted just by drawing it in the air? (Inspired by FRONT).
What are your What ifs?
Image thanks to Macarena C.
Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent
There’s so much in this that speaks to my soul:
Q & A with Joel Hagan, CEO of Onzo
Onzo, led by Joel Hagan, is aiming to change your personal relationship with energy for good.
Whether you’re into social ideas, behaviour change, people-friendly data visualisation, product service system design, cleantech or starting up, Onzo is an excellent case study.
Without further ado, here are his answers to some questions I posed him:
1. Using layman’s terms, what is Onzo?
Onzo is a company that designs domestic energy management systems. Onzo puts people in charge of their energy use. “Utility” has become synonymous with universal, invisible and boring. But these days, with the cost of energy being high and now we appreciate the harm we’ve being doing to the planet by burning fossil fuels, our individual relationship with energy needs to change. We all need to see it, understand it, and get help with it.
2. What makes Onzo different from other personal energy meters, e.g. the Wattson?
What’s personal about them? Onzo’s energy display is genuinely personal – it adapts to your home. Look, there are so many differences between Onzo and others that a list would be boring. So I’ll pick on a few things that I think are illustrative:
· The display is part of a product service system that includes a personalized web service
· The system is designed to help you change behaviour not just present you with meaningless data
· You won’t need to change the batteries in the sensor
· The display is designed to go anywhere in your home
I could go on. My point overall is that we have looked at every aspect of the system from ordering to disposal and designed it to be easy, engaging, and useful. Many other products never even make it out of the box.
3. Why is access to better information so important for transforming our behaviour regarding energy usage?
Feedback loops. If I do something and I perceive its consequence in a timely fashion then I have one of the key building blocks for behaviour change. Imagine a car without a dashboard – however would you drive it? How many speeding tickets, over-heated engines, indicators left on, would there be? There’s more to changing behaviour than timely feedback of course – for example, people need to be disposed to change before they make a change (whether they are compelled, cajoled, or enlightened). We’ve taken a lot of time to understand human behavior and considered comparable challenges to inform our design.
4. Onzo has been dubbed the ‘iPod of Cleantech’. What are your plans for turning Onzo into a household name?
I’m glad someone said that about us – it would be altogether more hollow if we’d said it about ourselves! But I think it’s a really useful way to think about Onzo. The main parallels are that we have a product service system, place a lot of value on aesthetic design, and aspire to take significant market share globally. However, there’s no evidence so far that there is a retail market for home energy management in any form, so our initial focus is on distribution through utility companies as they want to use our offering to attract and retain customers and improve their service to them. As the investment by Scottish & Southern Energy in Onzo (alongside Sigma Capital) and the £7m order they have placed gives them exclusivity among UK energy suppliers for Onzo’s products and services we will be launching a retail play here during 2009 to enable everyone to get their hands on Onzo stuff.
5. How important are social media tools for the launch and growth of Onzo?
The power of community is one of the tools that improves engagement, another foundation for behaviour change. Look what Nike Plus has done for running. So we’re keen to harness the power of community, although it would probably not be right for us to try to be a community ourselves. Which leads into the answer to the next question:
6. What role do you see Onzo playing in existing online communities? For example, Pachube?
As I say, Onzo doesn’t expect to be a community site in its own right. On the other hand we expect to enable people to share their information with others through communities that they are already part of. So I guess we’re philosophically aligned with Pachube in allowing people to share environmental data. This functionality lies down the road for us so we haven’t decided yet exactly how we’ll do this. But one of the things that we’d like to do is open up the Onzo system so that people can find their own ways of improving its usefulness. It would be arrogant to assume that we have thought of everything and simply wrong-headed to believe that “mass-tailoring” is much more than an unachievable goal.
7. Following a career in law and management consultancy, how did you end up running a cleantech start-up?
How was it that the man whose pocket was picked on Oliver Twist’s first sortie was his dead father’s best friend and executor? Preposterous plots make good stories. The answer actually is brand and marketing guru John Grant. I worked with him when I was Director of Strategy & Planning at Arthur Andersen and enjoyed his intellect, his provocative thinking, and his communication skills. We kept in touch over the years. He and I found ourselves in a meeting together kicking the tyres of someone’s business plan as a favour. I mentioned that I was looking around for an entrepreneurial opportunity to build and run. And a few days later, John emailed me to say that he knew a few guys who had done some great work in energy visualisation and wanted to turn it into a commercial proposition. I met them – More Associates; they had met Lightweight Medical, a young and successful sustainable product design house, in The Hub workspace in Angel; they had raised £250k of funding from the DTI. I developed a business plan and we set up Onzo; we raised £250k in seed funding; and we went on to raise a further £2m and rolled most of More Associates and all of Lightweight Medical’s resources into Onzo. I’m very happy doing what I’m doing. I love to hire teams, to build and adapt structures, to do something meaningful, and to be in charge!
8. What’s been your greatest success with Onzo so far?
Office accommodation – I’ve found two great central London office spaces in succession where the rent is low. Still being in business after more than 2 years. No, seriously, it’s a hard question to answer. Basically it’s been hiring great people. Onzo is a high quality team through and through. And so Onzo is their success as much as it is mine.
9. What’s been your biggest mistake?
Fixing a contract price in £sterling in early 2008 when our manufacture costs are in US$ and not hedging against currency movements. In all other respects, a global downturn is good for Onzo so I shouldn’t grumble..
10. What other brands do you admire, within the cleantech sector and beyond? Why?
I admire Gridpoint, the smart grid pioneer, for the fact it has raised so much money with a great vision. Outside cleantech there are a dozen businesses I particularly admire for various different reasons. The top 5 would be:
· Microsoft, for a successful strategy based on pervasive software. People like to hate Microsoft but I don’t think they get the credit they deserve.
· Apple, for its design achievements, brand loyalty and general ability to wow.
· Google, for the effectiveness of its core function and for some amazing tools like Google Earth.
· Tesco, for pulling ahead of a previously undifferentiated pack in large part by using its knowledge of customers to great effect.
· Topshop, for the democratization of fashion.
11. Finally, what would a successful 2009 look like for Onzo?
Global orders secured. Successful further fund raise. Three times as many people as today (30×3=90). And most important of all, for the first time in history people feeling in charge of their energy use thanks to Onzo’s products and services.
8/2/2009 Update: Really happy to report that this Q & A prompted the guys at Nudge blog to invite Joel to write a guest post.
Crafting something of value
Hat tip to my new favourite blog, letsbehumanbeings.
“Make things prettier”: A resolution ’09 wordle
How will you keep your ’09 resolutions?
Apparently, the best way is to share them with as many people as you can.
Then you’ll have an army of individuals prodding, cajoling and helping you to make them happen.
I invite you to share yours in the comments section. Then we can help each other out and, as a group, check back in the Spring to see how we’re getting on…
Just to kick things off, I call on Giles, Amelia, Emily, Phil, Whirlo, Faris, Will, Matt, Charles, jMac and of course Windo, to share theirs with the world!
Here are mine:
1. Make more meaningful things.
I have a lot of ideas. 99.99% of them are poor. But whatever, this year I want to be better at doing something with the .01%.
Specifically those ideas that might make some sort of positive difference to the world.
2. Speak up for young people
Despite the rich complexity of today’s youth, they’re all too often tarred with the same negative brush. This year, I want to understand the lives of young people better so that I can make a modest contribution to dispelling the detrimental stereotypes.
3. Learn enough Gujarati to be able to hold a reasonable conversation
Last year, I said I’d learn Spanish. That didn’t happen. I’m hoping that this blog post will force me to do better with everyone’s favourite Indian language (!)
Over to you…
