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Tag Archives: Rick Levine

What if Giving up Control were not a Threat, but an Opportunity?

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by herr dennehy in experiences, Ideas, Storytrain

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Bob Dylan, brand journalism, brand storytelling, Business, business storytelling, change, Christopher Locke, cluetrain manifesto, Co-creation, conversations, corporate storytelling, David Weinberger., Deep Space Nine, Doc Searls, Edgar Allen Poe, Human, listening, loss of control, Rick Levine, social media, Star Trek, Truth

Copyright: article.wn.com

 

Let’s admit it: We’re all losing control.

First of all, in the part of life that we call private life.

Where the day starts with an always-charged, smart-ass smart phone coldly grinning at me, relentlessly turning Beethoven’s wonderful “Klavierkonzert Nr. 5 Es-Dur” into my own personal groundhog-day experience. Gladly, this hasn’t spoilt my love for this concerto yet: For years now, I prefer being carried from the land of peaceful sommeil et rêves to the gates of daylight by Ludwig’s silent power than by Steve’s awful ringtone selection or distressingly well-tempered radio hosts.

Still, Beethoven aside, that’s the first loss of control of the day. Over my morning. A control (I thought) I used to have, at least before my own school days when there was just me and eternity. And also after school’s early-bird-my-ass 13 years, at university, when I could freely decide whether to get up for some early-morning lecture, or not. Probably that was an illusion, too … Aaah, whatever!

But now control’s definitely gone, along with the good-night’s sleep from pre-children days that used to precede the alarm bell’s toll.

The rest of an average day just goes with a flow that doesn’t seem to be mine (or ours, more correctly) anymore: Shower, tooth-brush, razor. Wardrobe, kitchen, espresso machinetta. Wake up kids, dress up kids, breakfast kids. School, kindergarten, metro. First mails, social channel check, maybe a little Spotify or FM4 on the train, blocking the rest of the underground world with my on-ears. Then it’s on to the office with its own very special affluent of Outlook, multiple phones, meetings, inter-desk chats, occasional join lunch breaks and … social channel checks.  Metro back home, social channel check, more in a rush than in the morning. Dinner, kids to bed, cleaning up. 2100 hrs sharp: time for twosomeness, music, movies or … maybe writing a blog post?

But then: Swoosh! In comes this invisible force from out of nowhere, hangs leaden weights to my eye lids, message clear: Don’t fight it! You’re tired! Go to sleep … maybe last chance for a social channel check, then … zzzzzz.

OK, I may be overegging the pudding a little, but the point is clear: Life has taken control of me, not visa versa. But it’s never too late to fight back!

If only I weren’t so tired … 🙂

TIRED

 

Then there is this other part of life that we call business life.

And I’m not speaking work-life balance here, that’s an outdated, unrealistic concept anyway in the age of smart iDevices (not “i” as in internet, but “i” as in “i am the device and the device is me”).

I’m talking about the life of a business, of a company, of a cooperation, call it what you like.

Whereas I personally admit to the fact that I’m losing control and maybe have slight hope of escaping as time goes by, (most) enterprises actually still believe they are in control – a control they have literally already lost, and will never get back. In control of the products they produce and sell (Henry Ford’s many heirs still alive, producing cars in various shades of black: Shut up, eat your spinach, it’s good for you!). In control of the people they can hire, retain, or fire. And (this is most obviously the biggest heretic belief) in control of their brands, their reputation, their communication efforts.

Will anybody out there please wake up, open your eyes, put an oversized espresso machinetta on the stove, extra strong, and realize that the times they are a-changing, or better: have already a-changed???

Read a brief history of the Internet, then come again. It’s been a long time coming …

… So: What does this mean?

“Companies that don’t realize their markets are now networked person-to-person, getting smarter as a result and deeply joined in conversation are missing their best opportunity.” (cluetrain.com, Thesis 18)

Opportunity is the right word. Not threat, as many still see it. Challenge maybe, yet a threat only for companies who decide to remain lonely regents of Shannon-Weaver Island. But opportunity for those who recognize that the sender-recipient model has served it’s time.

In private-life situations where networked kids are getting smarter, no longer just say “SIR, YES, SIR!” when you tell them what to do, but – like it or not – want to understand, want discourse, want dialogue, want to be taken seriously, and embark on a life-long conversation journey with their parents. And this is quite admirable, actually.

And in business-life situations all the same holds true for companies and their “kids”, which they disparagingly call stakeholders, users, target groups. But they’re actually people, human beings. Employees, customers, investors, journalists, bloggers, talents, politicians, etc.etc.etc. And as my kids are getting smarter by the day with their own real-life Internet (still very offline, gladly), so are a company’s kids, aided by the powerful global conversation that has begun through the Internet, “getting smarter – and getting smarter faster than most companies.” (cluetrain.com)

Whereas the Cluetrain Manifesto was at the time (very far-sighted, considering it was 1999) describing what was going on in a (compared to nowadays limited) community of Internet users and how this would need to impact the way corporations talk and act towards these networked, conversation-driven markets, I would like to take this notion a step further:

What if the future of companies, corporations and brands is a future, in which their brand story and their image no longer belongs to them?

What if these networked communities would not only co-create campaigns or isolated contents for companies (as they already do increasingly often today), but co-create and co-develop entire brands, communicatively manipulate a brand’s genes, its DNA? Co-write their history, story and stories?

What if reputation management wasn’t a thing a company could do by itself or have an expensive agency do, but something that is taken over by its “stakeholders”?

And now, while this still sounds like a threat, like a mob raging outside my fortress walls, here’s another thought:

What if … the above were all things a corporation would DELIBERATELY do?
Meaning: Go from telling “Who We Are!” to asking “Who Are We?” or “Who Should We Be?”

Imagine the outcome!

Imagine the level of relevance, content (as in “Zufriedenheit”), and respect you could harvest!

Imagine that you couldn’t imagine who you would be as a brand in, say, 50 years!

Imagine you could build a business not on ROI (Return on Invest), but on ROT (Return on Trust) or ROL (Return on Love)!

“And in the end, the love you get is equal to the love you give.” (The Beatles, “The End”)

Gee, scary thought.

The recipient would become the sender, the sender the recipient. The crowd would become part of the communications, marketing and brand department, and corporate comms would diffuse in the crowd. True emancipation, the foundation stone for every lasting relationship that makes love and trust its pillars.

Taking Poe’s “Man of the Crowd” to the next level: The follower doesn’t simply watch his target vanish into the crowd, but would actually follow. Dive into a kind of Great Link like DS9’s Odo and his fellow shape-shifters, a place where sender and recipient, comms department and target groups, brands and stakeholders amalgamate, for the benefit of both …

Copyright: treknews.net

Freakin’ esoteric stuff!

So let’s better round this off with something more down-to-earth.

With the famous words of Robert Zimmerman:

“Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown

And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin’

Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'”

 

Thank you, Bob! Right on!

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Markets are Conversations are Storytelling

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by herr dennehy in Ideas

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Christopher Locke, cluetrain, conversations, David Weinberger., Doc Searls, markets, Rick Levine, social media, social web, Storytelling, target groups

It’s already a couple of years ago that I was taking my kids to the „Deutsches Museum“ in Munich, Germany. Of course, the attraction for little girls is less the impressive planes or ships, let alone any technical innovations of the past or present. The burner: The interactive technology experience playground down in the basement. After hours of deafening children’s screeching and soaking wet from these lovely water games, I announced: “Now it’s time for some REAL culture!” taking them up to a special exhibition about life in the 1950’s.

Old cars, vespas, vacuum cleaners and washing machines, strange dresses and shoes and sun glasses … all nice, my girls giggling, me becoming Mr. Nostalgia. BUT the following scene from that day is what made this exhibition so rememberable for me: A roughly 12-year-old boy standing on front of this ancient TV screen, massive with a greenish screen and classic wooden shells, when I overheard the following dialogue:
Boy: “Wow, they surfed the Internet with these things?”
Mother: “That’s a TV, back then, there was no Internet.”
Boy: “What do you mean: There was no Internet???”

Interesting. A generation that was born when the Internet was already mainstream standard. A generation that can’t remember having to walk to distant telephone boxes in the freezing cold to speak to your girlfriend, back then when there was no Skype, no What’s App, no Facebook or phone flats. Only 20 years ago. A generation that was born just before the 2001 .com bubble crash, around the time when four fare-sighted guys /Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger) from the U.S. hammered their 95 commandments to a digital wall named www.cluetrain.com.

cluetrain.com

What this has to do with storytelling? Everything. Let me mark out just a couple of Cluetrain theses which I believe significantly direct business humans working in and for corporations and especially in marketing and communication departments in the right cardinal point, directly to the power and inevitability of story in the social web age:

“Markets are conversations.” (Thesis 1)
The boiled-down essence of The Cluetrain. Meaning: “Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.” (Thesis 2) Meaning: Target groups, clients, users, readers, viewers are humans. Not some alien, abstract mass of lemmings waiting for a message to follow. And these markets (or humans) are constantly engaged in conversations, with each other, with other corporations – and conversations are meta level of stories, or vice versa: stories are the molecules of conversations.

“People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.” (Thesis 5)
If that is so – and it is –, then corporations can’t talk, can’t tell stories, can comment, can’t post, chat, respond or share information, only their employees can. And no products, no solutions, no services, no companies can be heroes, only people can – and in the sharing web that finally really helps Kant’s Aufklärung blossom, corporate fake will be unmasked in the tweet of an eye. And “as a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.” (Thesis 10)

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.” (Thesis 75)
There’s nothing to add here, they wrote this in 1999, and look at many companies, especially in the B2B area: They’re still lagging behind on the smartness front like ever before.

Last but not least, the bulls-eye thesis for the importance of storytelling in the technically interconnected world:
“If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.” (Thesis 75)

And this “something interesting” is an interesting, relevant, credible, authentic, true story.

And what IS a real, true story? And what ISN’T?

The story goes on … here … soon.

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