Part 3: Activating users, and using Agile-Adaptive techniques to respond to their behavior
SHAHAR: Yes it does. Now from a behavioral point of view, how do you see this consumer today? Like you said you track and every two weeks or so if necessary you make change, but you say that they are not just consumers anymore. So give me an overview on how do you see today this kind of audience?
JIM: Well, I guess the first thing that comes to mind when you say that is that the audience doesn’t know what they want. I mean they do on certain levels, but they don’t on other levels. So certain things like market level research don’t really work, or at least it’s not definitive like in the old days like when somebody does an “exit poll” or a survey ahead of time before a product goes out there or etc… I’ll caveat that in a second, but for example, if you look at the top ten, top 100 for that matter, web engines out there on the web—say Ebay. If you did market research [prior to their launch] and asked the “consumer,” if you will, “Hey, what do you think of an auction site on the web?” There’s no way you would have gotten the data back saying “Yeah, there’s pent up demand here.” The same thing for Facebook and myspace and go down the list. Or even YouTube. There was no pent-up demand. There was no demonstrative pent up demand. The traditional techniques of looking at the marketplace and looking at the consumer out there, you just can’t prove it. And that’s why agile adaptive is so important. You just have to put something out there in the world and see what really happens and then start optimizing that and harnessing that. I would say the successes of the last 10 or 12 years have not been proven or even had any huge indicators that they would be a huge success. Google—if you asked people if their search engine was good enough, Yahoo or AltaVista, or go down the list of those that were out there, Google would have never gotten off the ground.
The second thing is that there is some histogram of behavior around user behavior—around activating them into roles beyond that of a consumer. That is—not everybody thinks they want to be a producer. Not everyone necessarily thinks they want to be a a marketer or distributor. But everybody will take on each of those roles in some unique, individual profile… if you build the engine properly. They all want to be able to tell people about something, they all want to put their comments in or post a picture or do a user generated comment or something. So they’re all—not a one of them are just a consumer when we’re talking about networked media. Not a one of them. So it’s just a matter of in what engines they decide to participate; and how far they want to climb up that value chain and [activate into other roles]. So I don’t know if that’s helpful or not, but those are the first things that come to mind.
SHAHAR: Yeah. I’m always thinking from the perspective of a small business owner and a lot of people still think that a website is enough, and I just wonder how you see the future online?
JIM: Oh I see, I gotcha. Well a website is enough for what it is. A website is like a brochure. It’s information. It’s interactive, but it’s not networked. You can ask somebody to fill out a survey, and you can ask somebody to put in their email address or get on a mailing list or all those things. But a website, per se, will never become a self-perpetuating engine. It is enough for what it is, but a website is what I would describe as a very weak engine of engagement, a weak networked engine. It’s not tapping into those dynamics that the facebooks and the MySpaces benefit from—oh and by the way, every time I mention one of those, I only mention them because everybody knows them, but there are hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of thousands of web destinations out there—web engines—that are making real dough that aren’t making the cover of Time magazine. So, there is a literacy emerging… albeit organically. It’s just that it isn’t being taught in the schools and taught in extension classes or books being written about actually “how to”. But it can be.
So to go back to your original last comment: You don’t have to spend a lot of money. There are a lot of people out there that would take your money to build a quarter of a million dollar website that doesn’t do much more than serve as a clickable brochure. But there are ways – teachable ways – you can actually build something that’s more than a website. And I’ve been through this by the way, I’ve actually taught classes for graduate level designers, for example, that were really, really good at building websites—beautiful clickable html and flash, but not much more than an animated brochure. But then you tear it down for them and you create a framework around how to design engines of engagement and these guys came up with some amazing ideas. So if I’m a small business owner, I can pretty much guarantee that I could teach them how to build an engine instead of a website, and soon any small business owner will be able to come up with an idea that attracts the kind of people that they want to come to their business. It’s a very small shift in your thinking. It’s “Okay I have a website for my business, but how do I get somebody who wants to come to my website ten times a day, stay there for an hour” so that I have a reach that far exceeds my grasp as a small business owner. And there are ways to do that very, very cheaply. It’s a literacy issue not an economic issue. Not an efficiency or expediency issue, it is literacy issue. Does that make any sense?
SHAHAR: It does. And what it also shows is that companies need to be flexible and make changes constantly.
JIM: That is the hardest thing. You have to structure your organization to be able to adapt to change. And if I may be so bold, I’ll give you an analog to it. It’s that most people are really, really good—everybody can drive a car. You know, under any conditions you can pretty much get in it, you can turn a key and start the engine. And as long as there is fuel, you can drive the thing. But there are very few people that know how to sail a sailboat. A sailboat is this mess of ropes and pulleys and canvasses. It’s this non-linear thing that most people go “I don’t know what to do with that.” And a sail rig has to be constantly tended it if you want to move forward, especially if you’re in a race. The goal is capture this capricious thing called “the wind.” It’s moving all the time and it’s changing all the time and you have to optimize your engine—the sail system—to capture that. That’s a better analog to what you have to do in networked media. You’re going to be sitting out there stalled somewhere if you’re not prepared to engage in this feedback loop which is “I’m watching what’s happening to this engine, I’m changing it, I’m optimizing it, I’m fueling it” and the only difference in the metaphor of sailing is that if you do it right in the networked media, the wind starts generating itself, because these users start creating this community that you don’t have to put as much energy in anymore but instead just keep the engine up and running. Does that make any sense?
SHAHAR: Actually that’s beautiful, because it’s so exciting to know that you reach a point and then the engine starts going by itself.
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