The Genius of the Tinkerer

I just got around to reading a riveting essay that appeared in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago titled "The Genius of the Tinkerer." 

The essay is adapted from author Steven Johnson's book "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation" and expounds the notion that innovation, of all sizes and levels of impact, comes from tinkering with existing systems and platforms.  Or put another way: great ideas are usually not the result of eureka moments, but of recycling and combining old ideas.

Invention, innovation and, ultimately, change are based on "the adjacent possible",  a famous scientist's phrase that captures the essence of how ideas are intermingled to create great new things.

"The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.  The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven't visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn't have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you'll have built a palace."

The essay goes on to provide some familiar and not so familiar examples of great innovation such as the Gutenberg Press which co opted the technology of a wine-making press to bring the printed word to the masses and Willis Carrier's redesign of a heating system in the early 1900s to facilitate air conditioning.

In the present, there is no industry being more shaken to it's core by tinkerers exploring the adjacent possible than the media industry.   And judging from the chatter at the Annual Advertising Week conference in NY last week, the pace of change is increasing at such a rapid pace, media companies big and small, old and new,  have no idea what is coming next or which aspect of their business will be permanently altered by some new innovation tomorrow.

It was particularly fascinating to see the tinkerers and the incumbents on the same stage together.

One panel I sat through featured an investor in Twitter and a top exec from NBC jousting with each other and appearing in many ways to be from two different worlds.

When Twitter was conceived just a few years ago, did the founders imagine it would become the primary news and information source for a growing swath of the population, a role companies like NBC served for generations?

Google’s towering position over the advertising industry was evident throughout the conference, yet is now well known that Google had no plans for advertising in it’s initial business plan. 

Seems quite true, particularly in the media business, that boundaries grow as you explore them, but it creates one confusing landscape.

The Common Denominator of Success

Engaging with new technology does not come naturally to me.  Adding new features to this blog, moving from hand-written notebooks to Evernote, experimenting with a new contact management platform like Gist - all things that younger generations and the more technically literate from my generation find as easy as programming their DVR - are things I have to really push myself to do.

I am still more comfortable sitting back and reading the print edition of the NY Times, yet I know it is critical that I become comfortable reading it on my smartphone or Kindle, along with live feeds from all my other news and information sources.

I clearly recognize that at this point in my life and career, too many analog media habits can cast me as “behind the times” in the fast moving media industry.  I hope I am really following  - and not just giving lip service to - the advice of Albert Grey in his essay "The Common Denominator of Success" which is referenced in Steven Covey’s “The Seven Habits Of Successful People.”

“The successful person has the habit of doing things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily.  But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose….we've got to realize right from the start that success is something which is achieved by the minority of people, and is therefore unnatural and not to be achieved by following our natural likes and dislikes nor by being guided by our natural preferences and prejudices."

The same theory of success can be applied to businesses, and in particular, two magazines I have been following that are realizing vastly different fates based on their responses to the digital media revolution.

Newsweek, once on of the most powerful brands in media, was woefully slow to adapt to new consumer media habits and was ultimately rendered valueless in its recent mercy sale to a philanthropic-oriented billionaire.  Like most print businesses, Newsweek stayed in it’s comfort zone too long, guided by it’s natural likes and preferences.  It made stylistic and content changes with the hopes of adjusting it’s demographic profile, but never went deeper, enacting a wholesale reinvention that the changing landscape called for.

Entertainment Weekly, another iconic American magazine, forced to deal with the same booming land shifts shaking every print entity in the world, is actually thriving in a multi-platform media world and appears to be more valuable to it’s parent company Time Warner than ever.  In a recent article that actually paints EW more as a full-on digital media company than a magazine making smart digital moves, a spokesperson describes them as “obsessed with technology.”

The article highlights a series of initiatives that clearly reflect this mindset:

• A partnership with YouTube that will proved sneak peeks at the new TV season
• An iPad app featuring the week’s top 10 books, movies, TV shows and songs
• Video ads in the print version of the magazine featuring a wafer thin video technology
• 2D bar codes in the print magazine that link to web content

Seems they are experimenting with every conceivable application, from the usual suspects (YouTube, iPad) to imaginative technologies that can perhaps keep their legacy print platform relevant and valuable.

The message for companies and the people that run them and work there is clear ... embrace and experiment with new technologies or be left behind.

Building Your Network

I find myself spending more and more time on LinkedIn lately.  Not because I am looking for a job, which is one of main uses of the platform by it’s 50+ million subscribers, but because of a book I recently read, "Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship At A Time."   Although it was written in 2005 when Linkedin was just a glimmer of it’s future self, (and barely registers a mention in any of the chapters) today there is no better tool to act on the book’s powerful message.

The problem with most books in the motivation/self-improvement aisle is they feel great while reading, but rarely have any real long-term impact.  Reading them, I tend to say to myself, “yeah – I do all that already.” Invariably, the book’s core messages “go in one ear and out the other,” as my mother used to say.

"Never Eat Alone” is different.  The book is based on a simple message: our network of friends, family, colleagues, associates, mentors and mentees are the foundation of all our success and happiness in life.  And the more we build and nurture this network through genuine relationship building and mutually beneficial interactions, the more happy and successful we will be.  The author emphasizes that our approach has to be in a spirit of generosity, not "what’s in it for me."

(Although I highly recommend the book, it is a bit marred by celebrity name dropping including an almost deal-breaking, reverential reference to Donald Trump.)

Some of the tactics:

• Look for mentors: Link up with people who can help guide your career and can introduce you to the people you need to know. Then become a mentor yourself.

•  Be interesting: Develop the style, knowledge, and expertise that will draw others to you.

• Build it before you need it: Create lists of people you know—and those you want to know—and maintain ongoing contacts with them throughout your life and career—not just when you need a favor.

•  Never eat alone: Avoid the fate of "invisibility"—use potential social settings to constantly reach out to colleagues and future contacts.

So after zipping through the book last month, I was inspired to find some digital tools to act on the book’s message and better grow and tie my network together.  (As mentioned earlier, the book was written 5 years ago before the explosive growth of social media, leaving current readers on their own to find the best tools and platforms.)

LinkedIn immediately fit the bill.  They have done a great job powering the platform with tools that provide much of the real time immediacy of Facebook.  Status updating, commenting and liking, forming groups and linking to Twitter and blog feeds are now standard features, along with an increasingly intuitive "People You May Know" engine.  

With a little exploring, I found additional features that immediately enabled me to to accomplish my goals.  (All included in the free version.) 

The first thing I did was go through my Outlook address book and invite everyone I was not yet connected to on LinkedIn to connect. More often than not, I replaced the generic LinkedIn message with a more personal one. (For the few people who don’t have an account yet, LinkedIn invites them to join the service.)

It quickly became apparent how irrelevant contact software like Outlook is becoming. With people changing jobs and positions so frequently, their contact information is often out-of-date, and the task of cutting and pasting new updated information seems archaic with so much now stored in the cloud.  And people are quite diligent about keeping their info on LinkedIn current.

Next I used LinkedIn’s tagging tool to categorize all my contacts - Friend, Colleague, City, Type of Business, etc.

Finally, I made sure my personal information was up-to-date and interesting, including new tools to link to this blog and my Twitter feed.

I am sure there is a lot more I can do.  I will keep you posted on my progress.

It was recently reported that LinkedIn is valued at over $2 billion.  Seems justified if they can become the hub for everyone's network.

Thoughts From Someone Who is "Crushing It"

I joined an organization called NY Video last year and attend their Meetups in NYC every couple of months. The organization's founder, Yorin Samis, has done a great job building a community of over 3,000 media entrepreneurs and execs in NY who gather to share information about their online video-based businesses.

Last week's Meetup featured a Q&A session with Gary Vaynerchuk, who took over his Dad's liquor store when in he was in his early 20s and built it into a $60 million business. Along the way, he mastered every new media platform from online video to Facebook to Twitter,  just as they were moving into the mainstream. 

His daily online video show is one of the most viewed original web series of all time and he is approaching one-million followers on Twitter.  Since he became a web video sensation a few years back, he has moved well beyond selling wine and many people now follow him based on his well-informed thoughts on new media tools, branding, and entrepreneurship.

He has a written a best-selling book titled "Crushing It",  launched a marketing agency and has an unabashed plan to buy the NY Jets.  And while most of his success can be tied to new media, he has also mastered traditional media appearing on practically every major media outlet from Conan O'Brien to Jimmy Fallon to ABC News. 

His path from Russian emigrant to wine store owner to media maven and celebrity is inspiring.  He also appears to be a good dude.  More importantly, he is uniquely qualified to riff on the future of media and advertising, which he did in response to some great questions from Yaron and members of the audience last week.

When asked which media tool he would choose if he could only keep one, he was torn between between Twitter and Facebook, before choosing Facebook.  Like many others in the media industry he questions why Twitter, despite its enormous success,  has been unable to catch on with the younger demos.

He said that Facebook and Twitter are currently being used at less than 15% of their potential and the best way to imagine their future is too look at them as utilities, much like the railroads and electric companies at early stages in their history before their enormous impact on society was realized.

He was less enthusiastic about Google's future opining that Facebook could dominate search one day as recommendations from friends become more valuable and relevant than random search results from across the web that are based on monetization strategies and search engine manipulation. 

A clear move in this direction was Facebook's new partnership with Amazon last week.  Amazon.com now offers a personalized Facebook-powered page that offers birthday and gift suggestions as well as specific products that are popular with your friends.  (I signed up immediately and discovered that "The Hangover" and "The Bible" are popular items among my diverse network.)

Social Beat goes so far as to call the partnership Facebook's most important integration to date:

"A deep Amazon.com-Facebook partnership could help corner Google in the e-commerce market. One of Google’s most lucrative use cases is when consumers search to decide which products to buy. Costs-per-click on product keywords like refrigerators, TVs and books are often easily more than $1. But if consumers start looking toward their friends to find out what to buy, they could be able to bypass Google altogether."

So it's obvious Gary has a great feel for the new media landscape.  I always find it valuable to spend time with successful entrepreneurs who are willing to share their stories and opinions.

Moving Towards An App World

Google brought app development to the masses last week with the introduction of a free software tool call App Inventor.  I haven't played around with it yet, but from the reviews it sounds like Google is making it as easy to create an Android smartphone app as it to create a blog using their enormously popular Blogger platform.

And believe me, designing and launching a blog on Blogger is easy, rivaling in technical complexity, say, Microsoft Power Point.  App Inventor even uses the same drag and drop blocks of code featured on Blogger.

The initiative is another example of the free, open source environment Google is enabling in general, and specifically in the smartphone market as it competes head-to-head with Apple and it's more tightly controlled app development approach.

But how many apps do we need?  There are already 225,000 iPhone apps and 65,000 Android apps, with hundreds more being introduced every week.  New York Times tech and media columnist David Pogue challenged his Twitter followers to invent new iPhone and Android apps, featuring the more creative ones in his column last Thursday.  Ironically, the most compelling (and timely) app was not in David's column, but featured in another section on the Times called Gadgetwise.  This app tells you how much sun you should have and saves you from sunburn.

A column in Ad Age last week went as far as to describe the "end of the web as we know it."  The columnist, Steve Rubel, refers to a Morgan Stanley study predicting that within 5 years Internet consumption on mobile devices will surpass the same activity on PCs.

He writes, " mobile devices, by their nature, force users to become more mission-oriented.  As more Internet consumption shifts to gadgets, it's increasingly becoming an app world and we just live in it.
Innovation, fun, simplicity and single-purpose utility will rule while grandiose design and complexity will fall by the wayside."

This seems to make sense.  Last year I downloaded the Pandora app to my iPod Touch and plugged it into my stereo.  This simple app quickly became the central hub for all my family's music consumption.

Just as media companies and advertisers are finally figuring out how to effectively present their content and information on the web, they will need to reinvent again for entirely new consumption patterns.

Shooting From The Hip With Social Media

Big news everywhere we turn this week and last from the world of social media.  Early last week Nielsen reported that 22 percent of all time spent on the Internet is social.  According to a study by the big research company, web users spend one in every four and a half minutes they are online on social networks and blogs.

Some equally compelling data from another research firm, as reported in eMarketer, shows that 50% of Facebook users click on Facebook ads to "like" a brand and 33% of Twitter users share opinions about companies or products.

It seems as social media permeates our lives and  new levels of connectivity are added through mobile devices, entirely new consumer behaviors are developing.

Up until recently it was rare for me to see friends on Facebook mention specific products other than those associated with pop culture such as TV Shows, Movies, Music and Books.   But in the last couple of weeks I have seen friends speak glowingly of experiences with consumer brands that exceeded their expectations in one way or another like Netflix, ZipCar, GroupOn and Trader Joes.

Companies are being forced to react to all this on multiple levels.  Never has the pressure been greater for a business to absolutely delight their customers and tap into an ever growing pool of potential evangelists who will share their experiences on one of their preferred social networks. (Disappointing and frustrating them carries too much downside - witness the AT&T/iPhone debacle last week.)

So at the highest level, companies need to weave social media considerations into their entire operating mentality. And, on a more granular level, they need to be dedicating more and more resources and strategic thinking to intimately managing specific social media platforms and channels.

For most companies this is not proving easy.  According to another piece of research released this week,  as reported in Media Post, more than half of companies say they are using social media with absolutely no strategy.

"... most companies appear to be shooting from the hip, with no cohesive game plan or measurement systems in place. Even among those with a plan, few have written policies and communications protocols in place, leaving the organization exposed to problems arising out of employees communicating in ways that inadvertently hurt -- rather than help -- their company brands."

Shocking, but not surprising in such fast-fracturing media landscape.  Seems companies are barely able to keep up with their traditional and online media executions, and when they do develop a clever social media idea, it comes out of nowhere and doesn't seem to be connected to a broader marketing strategy.

Is Virgin America's offer this week to offer free flights to Twitter influencers "shooting from the hip" or smart marketing?