Minnov8

Showcasing Minnesota Technology Innovation

MinneWebCon

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minnewebcon1

Yesterday’s MinneWebCon was a surprisingly packed event at my rough estimate of 400-450 people. The event was a full-day, three-track, continuing education conference for web professionals with the express intent of providing a venue to deliver “…technical and creative information from industry practitioners and educators directly to University of Minnesota staff, students, and web professionals from ad and design agencies, corporations, non-profit organizations, and other higher education institutions.“

The event was led off with a keynote by a key technology thought leader, Doc Searls, who famously was one of the authors of the seminal work, “The Cluetrain Manifesto“, required reading for anyone interested in the essence of conversational marketing, social media, and the shifts that were just beginning to occur when this thing called the Web was fairly new and the object of unrealistic expectations by too many chasing “eyeballs” instead of people.

At a high level, Doc discussed the progression from Cluetrain to today, telling stories which highlighted what many of us know as obvious truths when it comes to being a web participant. He spent time on a very interesting initiative, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as a much needed, power balance between we “customers” (managed within CRM or Customer Relationship Management software) and the vendors who’d like to sell us their stuff.

Sessions on tools, design, technologies, social media and much more were delivered to an audience of people who primarily make their living creating and building Web sites, assets and applications.

The second keynote, Web Culture & Privacy, was by security expert Bruce Schneier. With such quotable gems as, “Security does not equal privacy. Ephemeral is dead” and “Eventually we will have a president who sends LOLcats to other world leaders,” he really brought significantly more awareness to the audience about privacy and was clear that the only way to ensure privacy “…is to legislate it,” making the point that we need to become aware, pressure lawmakers, and drive legislation that makes it possible to retain privacy in an age where digital bits of ourselves are everywhere.

Hats off to Kris Layon and the team at the University of Minnesota for pulling off such a successful event and for opening it up to outside-the-university attendees.

Interview with Josh Bernoff of Groundswell

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bernoffGroundswell is my playbook for understanding social media and how it integrates with people and business. In it, co-Author Josh Bernoff, provides frameworks for understanding social media and best practices from proven exercises, like Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation. Groundswell defines the POST method, introduces the concept of technographics, and outlines the varying levels of social media complexity, from listening to co-creation. Groundswell transformed my perspectives on social media and inspired me to move ahead in my sabbatical quest. I am a big fan of Josh’s. When I found out that I had a chance to meet him, I was charmed.

On March 18th, I had the delight of lunching with Josh and his colleague Jocelyn Walters, both of Forrester Research. We met at the Cambridge Legal Sea Foods and shared stories and insights collected from our professional and personal experiences. Here is a snapshot of the insights I collected from our conversation.  …  [Read More…]

Bigger ideas. Faster.

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generalmillsLarge and small companies around the world are using open Connected Innovation strategies to re-invigorate and accelerate their innovation capacity. This movement goes one step beyond the “submit your idea” generation and allows participants to engage in the product development experience.  Here are three examples of Connected Innovation commercially at work:

  • Starbucks built an on-line consumer community called MyStarbucks.com that facilitates open discussion of how to improve the Starbucks experience. Howard Schultz, CEO, claims that MyStarbucks.com has re-invigorated his innovation program by focusing business priorities on customer needs, like free Wi-Fi in all stores
  • Threadless.com won Inc. Magazine’s most innovative company award for 2008 for their “customer as company” business model. Threadless has never had a product intro bomb; they only produce what their customers want to buy
  • Dell Idea Storm is an example of a social media execution. Idea Storm was launched by Michael Dell with the goal of repairing its customer service credentials, but it changed the way Dell does business.  On Idea Storm, customers, programmers, and the like post their ideas for improvement or enhancement.  Due to the successful use of Connected Innovation strategy, Dell has been able to reduce their product development cycle time by 6 months.

Connected Innovation is the business process of using on-line tools like user communities, blogs, innovation portals and social media to mine, connect, and route ideas, employees, consumers, customers, vendors, brands, and technologies. More specifically, on-line communities, innovation portals, and social media strategies not only create new connections, but also allow the extraction of value from these connections.

My employer, General Mills, has given me the opportunity to explore the Connected Innovation concept. Over the course of the next six months, I will benchmark and research the best practices of leading organizations engaged in building connections to evolve their innovation capacity. My research will also provide a framework for building successful Connected Innovation web sites, both inside the corporate firewall and external to customers in a B-C relationship. I will also be a contributor for Minnov8, sharing insights collected along my journey.  I look forward to the opportunity to interview and collaborate with Fortune 500 companies, social media and innovation thought leaders, and the broader digital community.

During the coming months, you can connect with me here at Minnov8, at my personal blog “Perspectives on Connected Innovation and Collaboration”, and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/djsmith4. I am very interested in engaging in dialogue with you on this subject and look forward to connecting with the broader Minnov8 community.

Meet and Tweet at Twestival!

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logo_twestival-w-dateTwestival moved into Uptown on Thursday night attracting local tweeps looking to help bring clean water to the world. Organized by charity: water, the gathering at Moto-i was part of 200+ city effort world-wide. From Hamburg to Hong Kong, Dubai to Dublin, and Madrid to Minneapolis the organization’s goal was to raise $1 million dollars to aid in its mission to bring clean drinking water to the 1.1 billion people (one in six) who don’t have access to it.

As I entered last Thursday’s event I was pleasantly surprised to see many people I hadn’t seen before at the many social media industry gatherings in the Twin Cities. Wow, real people using Twitter! As I wound my way through the crowd to hang with the tweeps I knew, I noted many laptops open with their users either tweeting or live blogging the event. A video display showed Twitter activity regarding the Minneapolis gathering scrolling up the wall via spy and, in the corner. the hosts of SpaceVidcast hosted their weekly vidcast.

As the sake flowed and the sounds of Air Supply (really…Air Supply…no, really) wafted from the speakers, for the Twitter faithful who weren’t glued to their screens or phones, they mingled and got to meet the people that they had probably only tweeted to on line. There was no shortage of conversation as the 140 character limit used on Twitter had been lifted from the relationships.

As of this writing, the final numbers of money raised at the event were not available. According to Minneapolis Twestival organizer, Andrew Korf (@andrewkorf) nearly $700 in cash was raised at the event with more to come from online donations. On a more global level, charity: water, faced with the need to collect money from around the world and a Monday bank holiday, hopes to have final numbers by Tuesday or Wednesday. (Look for an update here.) According to charity: water Communication and Media representative Nicky Yates, “A million dollar donation would mean clean drinking water for 50,000 people for 20 years.”

Update 2/20/09: According to the Twestival website, $250,000 has been collected so far.

Beyond aiding fundraising efforts, Twestival is another example of what social media can do to raise the awareness of a cause or organization. The planning of Twestival, put together over a 3 month to 3 week period of time, depending on the city, brought new awareness to charity: water on a gobal scale. Yates says, “We’re very excited by this entirely volunteer organized event. There are now more than 50,000 people around the world who are aware of charity: water that weren’t before this event.”

Why You Need a Social Hub

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wdc1925

Any business today can’t function without technology like a telephone, fax machine or email. But when you think about how relatively unchanged office work was from the earliest part of the last century until the advent of personal computers in the late 1970’s, much of the technology used in offices evolved incrementally.

In less than fifteen years, however, there has been a leap. An acceleration of the global internet — and an increasing number of humans connected to it — has made the internet network effect one of the most profound shifts in how we currently connect with people, perform our work and even socialize.

The network effect is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people. The telephone is the best example: if you had a telephone but no one else did, the usefulness of that device would be zero. As more and more people obtain telephones and connect to the telephony network, you can call them, they can call you, both of you can call businesses, schools or the firehouse, and a dizzying array of uses are found to harness this connection and making the tool what it is today: indispensable.  …  [Read More…]

Mayo Accelerates Their Online Presence

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sharingmayoMayo Clinic today announced the launch of what they’re calling its “culture blog”, Sharing Mayo Clinic, which provides an online site for patients and employees to share their stories about what makes Mayo Clinic unique. This WordPressMU delivered blog is clearly focusing on uplifting stories of individual patient and employee experiences. While initially interesting, I started to poke around since I wasn’t sure how this fit into their overall mission or why they’d want to have a showcase for patient and employee stories.

According to Mayo’s about page positioning this new blog, Each year over 500,000 unique patients from every U.S. state and nearly 150 countries come to Mayo Clinic for diagnosis and treatment. These patients and their families and friends, and 50,000 employees and students are part of a global Mayo Clinic community.

The goal for the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog is to provide a virtual place for this community to connect and share their experiences. It’s the online companion to the new newsletter for patients, also called Sharing Mayo Clinic, and is a hub that links to Mayo Clinic’s pages on other social networking sites, such as Facebook and YouTube.

Unless you’re a constant observer of Mayo Clinic, you may be as surprised as I was to learn how truly significant and holistic the Mayo online presence has become, and how its online initiatives actually spring forth from the innovation DNA of the Mayo Clinic. This premiere healthcare organization is leveraging social tools to extend their reach and to ensure they’re at the points online where people are increasingly focusing their attention: the internet and web with a primary focus on social media applications….  [Read More…]

A New Chapter for MN Stories

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mnstories1Video, Video, Video. Open your browser and you open a world of video access….or is that excess? From in-depth news coverage to roller-skating parrots, the world offers an unlimited supply of video. That’s a lot of video! How could one possibly discover what’s being produced here in Minnesota, maybe right up the street? Enter MN Stories, a video sharing site founded by Chuck Olsen.

You might know Chuck from any number of video and web related projects in and around the Twin Cities. Most recently, the always in motion Mr. Olsen dedicates heart and soul to the Uptake, a nationally acclaimed citizen journalism outlet that was launched to cover the 2008 election process (One that has stretched into 2009 as we Minnesotans patiently(?), at least as of this writing, await the seating of our 2nd Senator.).

The first iteration of Chuck’s MN Stories, launched in 2005, more closely resembled a video blog showcasing mostly Chuck’s work. “I always had a vision of a video sharing site.” says Chuck. “The Uptake just took over so much time.” Now, as the election hustle and bustle fades, Chuck has time to relaunch his video community vision. A relaunch we happily herald here as part of his first interview on the topic.

The newly rethought and redesigned MN Stories offers easy access to Minnesota video as well as providing a community for the producers and viewers of that video. “I can post video on YouTube but who’s gonna find me?” was Chuck’s driving question. So, think YouTube for Minnesota.
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Why Executives Don’t “Get” Social Media

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boss-newYour boss, executive client or any other leader with whom you’re dealing (or perhaps even you, yourself) may not intuitively understand social media. This is not because of a lack of understanding or the technical acumen to use some internet connected device and hosted software, but more likely because they don’t feel the need to put forth the effort or energy to embrace it (or why anyone else would goof with social media, for that matter).

As social media continues to accelerate as a method of connecting people to one another as well as to news, information and other snippets of value, I keep thinking about people who aren’t all that social, are not inherently “connectors,” or are folks who are simply not all that interested in connecting with other people in some virtual way.

Years ago I always thought not being social was, well, being antisocial. Being one of the weirdos who smell bad and can’t be trusted around small animals or children. The guys you see leaving Blockbuster on a Friday night with 10 videos…for the weekend. The hermits whom I always seem to stumble upon when hiking in the Superior National Forest and who abhor bumping in to anyone.

Then I became enlightened….  [Read More…]