I submitted a strategic brief to Planning For Good to help Idea Village recruit and retain young professional and entrepreneurial talent in the New Orleans area.
First, the excuses - I think the central strategic idea is sound, but the brief is poorly written. I had done a bunch of research over the two weeks in late August and early September using every article I could find on the internet (I'm so used to finding my research on the internet, the possibility of one day having a research budget sounds like a distant and futile dream). Then work got super busy writing a major Point of View, doing some researching a new business pitch, an important side project that I can't talk about, and working at the PSFK LA conference. By the time the September 21st deadline rolled around, I had a good understanding of the problem but no ideas on how to solve it and no brief. So I felt guilty and gave up.
Then I avoided any news on PFG because I didn't want to feel any worse than I already did from my failure to turn in any work. It wasn't until the 26th, when I read Ed Cotton's blog post that they had extended the deadline to the 28th and that we only had 24 hours to turn it in, that I realized that I still had a chance to alleviate my guilt. I then sat myself down in front of the computer and hammered out a strategic brief in two hours (maybe less). I had to fly to Nashville the next day, so it was either get it done right then or don't do it at all.
The brief is poorly written, for sure. I'm afraid to even look at it again because I did it with such haste, but I think that the idea behind it is sound.
I won't post the whole thing because I'm chicken, but here are the basic points of the brief:
1) Recruiting won't be nearly as much of an issue as retention, because New Orleans is a great place to start out your life (a vibrant art scene and nightlife, a desperate need for talent and new business ideas makes it easy for young bright people to make their marks, and a reasonable cost of living) but an unwelcoming place to stay. How can you expect people to want to settle down, get married, and raise children in a place with a poor school system, corrupt government leaders, a high crime rate, and a lack of quick response to glaring infrastructure issues?
2) Idea Village should start a lobbying arm to influence legal, governmental, and social change in New Orleans. This is because there is only so much change that business and economics can bring to the area. There are a lot of glaring issues that can only be dealt with through good city management and social programs. Make New Orleans a place not only for young idealistic entrepreneurs, but also a place for young idealistic politicians to affect the changes they want to see.
That's it in a nutshell. The brief had a lot more to it, like ten expectations should the strategy be implemented, but they weren't really well thought out and therefore not worth repeating. I'm sure another participant came up with something much better and thoroughly thought out.
Good luck Idea Village and New Orleans, and as for PFG, I expect to be scrambling for solutions to non-profit problems again soon.
This is Tom:
LikeMind loves Tom. Why does LikeMind love Tom? Because Tom was the only non-female who showed up to the last gathering of interesting minds, so Tom is tops in our book!
Don't get us wrong. We love the ladies too. The ladies are great at showing up and kick intellectual ass. We just enjoy a little gender diversity with our coffee, tasty pastries, and heady discussions.
This month's LikeMind Coffee Morning will be on Friday September 21st at 8am.
Susina Bakery
7122 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
LikeMind.us
Upcoming.org
Facebook.com
Get out of bed, join Tom, and you too can feel the love!
I have to give a presentation on Monday covering the basics of interactive trends. Mostly, it will be an introduction to web 2.0 that closes with a few fun videos on how Jonathan Harris is making sense of the mess and Will Wright discussing games vs. toys while showing off Spore. My presentation will be followed by an hour of just fooling around on the web with participants showing the group the sites that they get excited about.
If all goes well, the presentation will be nothing compared to what everyone gets out of the free playtime. This may be unorthodox, but I sincerely believe that the web is something you have to participate in to understand. You can't be a tourist here and expect to be effective or not completely ruin the whole thing because you didn't fully understand what made it special in the first place. I think a lot of poorly strategized and executed interactive campaigns come from tourists and that if planners, marketers, and creatives actually made an effort to be a part of the community then we would see a lot less crap. Why? Because people don't sh*t where they live. I live here. My friends live here. Don't screw up our community by only thinking of how to exploit it. (Rant mode off. Sorry about that.)
Anyways, here are the slides. I used a lot of slides from Lynette Webb because they're so great, and I tried to make my own sides as visually appealing as possible by ignoring templates for once.
1) Imagine a Super Computer made of 6 billion human brains
-- Not literally, that's gross, but on a figurative level that's amazing. Every time you plug into the internet you are tapping into a hard drive of infinite knowledge and opinion. Web 2.0 has made it possible for anyone with internet access to share their expertise, passions, and opinions by blogging, tagging, and commenting. Information is not longer the domain of the exalted experts, by tagging and reinterpreting with blogs, wikis, and social bookmarks jargon has given way to popular semantics. Even the most obscure fragments of knowledge are a few search terms away.
2) What is a wiki?
-- You may only be familiar with Wikipedia and the controversy over its accuracy or inaccuracy, but wikis are so much more. Wikis are places to coordinate information. Take for example the wiki for hacking the iPhone. Every time there was a new finding on unlocking or programming the iPhone, someone put it up, other people edited it for updates and accuracy, and it is all there for anyone to access and use. The group is smarter than the individual when resources can be coordinated.
3) What is RSS?
-- Deep internet users rarely go to web pages anymore. The wait for updates to their RSS feed on their customized homepage or feed reader and read the content from there. RSS also feeds news widgets, like a weather widget or top stories from CNN and the like.
4) What is Social Bookmarking?
-- The most important feature of social bookmarking is tagging. By attaching your own key words to certain sites you label it with how it is significant to you and you share that significance with the rest of the world because now search engines recognize the association between that label and that site.
5) Web Trend Subway Map
-- This is the social web. It is messy, it's rarely ever linear, and its never polar, evenly distributed, or constant. Populations don't just take one route, they take many. Certain countries have preferences for different social sites - the US loves MySpace, the UK adores Bebo, and India thinks that Orkut is the shiznit. The best part is that a year from now, this will completely change. How do you keep your content accessible to the current Social Networking Sites (SNS) and the sites where the conversation will be taking place in the future? Keep your code simple, stupid. Let web standards be your guide.
Who uses social networks? Why are they there?
6) Attitude
-- Gen Yers and younger Xers take the fact that parts of their lives are documented online for granted. That's just life and if you're not sharing then how does anyone know that you're even living? Their parents meanwhile find this to be a severe invasion of privacy. Having your diary entries and your thoughts on the VMAs online is the equivalent of some stranger seeing you naked. That's the difference. Why should a stranger know I'm here vs. why shouldn't everyone know I'm here.
7) Community
-- Today's generation is found questioning traditional community ties more often than not because of the universality of technology. Why should their friends be isolated to the geographic location of where they go to school, or where their parents choose to worship, or where the mall is when their best friend Beth has a friend in Indiana who is really cool and reads the same blogs you do and writes these great posts on her MySpace page. Deeper connections can be formed by like-mindedness over geography.
8) MySpace vs. Facebook
-- MySpace may be bigger than Facebook, but that based more on historical presence than anything else. The real different is in who uses which service. A recent study by Danah Boyd, probably the best known researcher and expert on interactive social networks, summed up the differences in users like this - Facebook is for the kids voted most likely to succeed. They have or will have a college degree, they come from good families, and they're career minded. MySpace is for the outsiders, the art freaks, and the dropouts. A lot of MySpace users see Facebook as The Man (clean cut and organized) and MySpace as the upstart rebel (wacky and wearing all kinds of crazy colors at once).
Another interesting and true way to look at it is through the military. Enlistees use MySpace while officers use Facebook. Access to MySpace was banned on military bases while Facebook is still unrestricted.
9) Profile Pages and Widgets
-- A profile page is the users identity. It is the face they choose to show to their friends and potential friends with their status, their likes and dislikes, their history or where they went to school or where they've worked. Widgets are like the clothes you wear. They facilitate your identity. They say in demonstrative ways - I am a Mac user, these are the countries I've been to, here are the shows I'm looking forward to seeing, here is the music I listen to and you might enjoy it too. When building a widget for a web or profile page, always keep in mind - how does this help the user differentiate their identity?
10) Microblogging
-- Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc. allow users to write missives of about 140 characters that gives all their connections a superficial but good general idea of how they're doing. Why call to catch up when you always know? The contact is constant.
11) Ambient Intimacy
-- It's hard to loose touch with friends when you were never really out of touch in the first place. It's like always having your finger on the pulse of your circle of friends.
12) Branded Utility
-- They make your MySpace page look better. They remind you that it's your turn to clean the coffee pot at the office. They show your friends where they can meet you that night. They show the world who you are and what you're interested in. If you expect people to use something everyday, then you better give them a good reason to do so. Reminders, countdown clocks, and news feeds are a good place to start.
13) Jonathan Harris and We Feel Fine
14) Will Wright and Spore
19) Everything is Miscellaneous
-- Yes, the internet is disorganized. It is a mess, but the semantic web has brought common meaning to what was formerly the property of experts and made it accessible to the common user. A universe of knowledge and people are only a WiFi connection away.
