John Winsor

Victors & Spoils Guide to Successful Collaboration (part 1: Empowerment)

NOTE: From time to time, I invite folks to write guest posts. Koert Bakker is our Director of Strategy here at Victors & Spoils. He's our big brain. And, he's been doing some great thinking about the future of brands in our new collaborative world. Enjoy the post and look for more great stuff from Koert.

I’m excited by how new technology empowers social change – and marketing in the slipstream of that. When the ability to control production and distribution of information was a scarce resource, it was easy for brands to influence the way people perceived them. Those days are gone. Production and distribution of information have become abundant. Fueled by cognitive surplus and digital tools, people demand access to brands. For instance, Coca-Cola’s original Facebook page was created by two fans, Dusty and Michael. When Coca-Cola found out how popular the page was, they had to contact Dusty and Michael and ask permission if they could please participate in their own brand! Which they gracefully allowed. I admire brands that embrace collaboration instead of fight it. At Victors & Spoils we recently analyzed over 200 brands and five categories of brands emerged thatsuccessfully empower people with collaborative tools:

1. Social Media Engagement

This is basically collaboration 101; brands engaging with people in online conversations. Think of Old Spice, Best BuyTwelpforce and Strip To Your SmartWool.

2. Crowdsourcing

These are brands that tap into people’s collective brainpower and invite them to submit ideas that deliver against a setof rules - a brief. Think of Pepsi Max & Doritos Crash the Superbowl or Virgin America’s Toronto Provocateur. 

3. Co-creation

Co-creation involves working on new product and service ideas together with the customers who are going to buy them. An obvious example is My Starbuck, but I’m also really struck by Nike 6.0 ID Nation StyleLab, which effectively turns Nike ID’s original mass customization (people designing their own shoe) into co-creation (people being ableto buy shoes that other people designed).

4. Collaborative Consumption

With crowdsourcing and co-creation people help brands produce better products. But the other side of the coin, collaborative consumption, is also getting more popular, from car-sharing (Zip Car, Greenwheels) and bike-sharing (Vélib, B-Cycle) to group buying power (Groupon,Walmart CrowdSaver).

5. Collaborative System

Finally, new business models are emerging that place collaboration at their core. The brand is shaped by an ecosystem of participants. Successful recent examples are Threadless, AirBnB and American Express OPEN.

(Next week Part 2: Common Ground)

Progression

One of the things I love in the sports of surfing and climbing is the idea of progression. An athlete does something new, approaches an unclimbed rock in a new way or surfs a wave that seemed impossible, and all of a sudden everyone can see the possibility. The culture as a whole can imagine climbing the new climb or surfing the wave. All of a sudden dozens of people can do what was unthinkable only a few months before. New stars are made in an instant and old icons are put out to pasture.

This weekend I was fascinated by Adam Sternbergh’s article, Around the World in One Day, in The New York Times Magazine about Ridley and Tony Scott’s crowdsourced documentary, Life in a Day:

The film aims to tell the story of a planet, but it’s the vulnerability of these individual moments, contributed as part of a larger project, that lingers. If the knock against the Internet in general, and YouTube in particular, is that it stokes our collective narcissism, this film, in its best moments, proves the opposite: not a global craving for exposure but a surprising universal willingness to allow ourselves to be exposed.

The worlds of collaboration, co-creation and crowdsourcing are progressing fast. They’ve gone from a wild west of too many confusing voices and lot’s of amateur, low-production, solutions to highly curated creations, like Life in a Day, that can rival the best of traditional productions.

The progression is happening at various speeds in different corners of the creative world. Music and photography have been leading the charge in this change for a while now while film and advertising are just starting their radical transformation.

In advertising, it feels like the progression has hit a tipping point. Hold on. The speed of change will only accelerate.

Love Love, Love Hate

Nobody likes conflict. I don’t. I’ve been especially sensitive to it my whole life. I’ve never been very good at taking criticism. I’ve been known to not fully listen to my friends and colleagues. I was horrible at listening to my parents. And, I have tortured my amazing wife with my insecurities around any kind of criticism or even positive suggestion (sorry, Bridget). Honestly, I was scared. Scared to be vulnerable. Scared to be wrong. Scared to fail. It’s certainly a journey.

Well, a lot’s changed in the past year since we’ve started Victors & Spoils. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing partners at V&S. I’ve been honored to team up with so many inspiring clients who want to change the way things work. I’ve learned and built ideas with some of the smartest collaborators in the industry who are not only unafraid of change but want to get in and lead it. I’ve had the good fortune of jumping into this crazy torrent of change that is besieging our industry and am learning so much so fast. I’m having a blast.

I’ve even learned to love the haters.

While I was traveling yesterday, I received this email from my blog that made me reflect on just how much things have changed for me and on my journey to overcome my own insecurities.

Dear John,

Congratulations on selling a desperate ... company some snake oil.  Always great to book new biz.

If your approach works (which it won't) you send me some raw squirrel meat and I'll eat every bite.

Regards and laughing like a maniac,

Steve Fisher
Owner
Goldfish Public Relations
818-688-1502
<http://www.goldfishpr.com/>

Thanks, Steve. I do understand these are scary times. A lot of things we’ve taken for granted have been pulled out from underneath us. It’s created a lot of insecurity and anger for a lot of people.

Emails like this remind me to let go. Let go of my insecurities. Let go of my ego. Let go of myself. And, jump into the cultural revolution we are in the midst of.

Thank you, everyone. Thank you for your support, your criticism and your input.

Love love, love hate.

The Acceptance Cycle of Innovation

I've been thinking a lot lately about how legacy institutions always seem to be dramatically effected by innovation that comes out of nowhere. The cycle seems pretty typical if it's the fall of an Empire like Rome, or the fall of an industry like Music. It seems to apply to companies, as well.

1. Ignore

2. Discount

3. Fear

4. Sue

5. Accept

Why do legacy companies, industries and cultures all seem to follow the same pattern? What can they do to escape it?

 

Is Your Customer Service Ready for the New World of Openness?

In a great example of how companies need evolve their customer service in the new world of openness, I wanted to share this story with you. My 8 year old son, Harry, loves to draw planes. In fact, that's all he likes to draw. After drawing a couple of hundred pictures over the last six months, Harry had a great idea. He'd send one of his favorite drawings to Boeing and ask them if they'd like to build his new jet he designed. He was so passionate about it and must have rewritten the letter a dozen times. We sent it off. You can only imagine what happened.

Yep. We got the form letter, above. It's the standard fare that most legal departments send out to make sure they aren't at risk of any IP infringement issues. As a business owner, I get it. It is logical. But, my sense is that companies who don't figure out how to do customer service and innovation in the world of openness will, in the short-run, stunt their growth and, in the long-run cease to exist. And, if you don't ave any customers you certainly don't need customer service.

Some brave companies are venturing into the deep end to figure this out. Zappos, Best Buy, Nokia, Starbucks and Dell have all set up web sites to accept customer input in new and open ways. These are the leaders of the revolution. They are the early winners in the first days of the age of openness.

Now, I have a moral dilemma. Do I show the letter to Harry and kill his dream of being an airplane designer or throw it away and tell him I didn't receive anything so he keeps his artistic passion alive.

What would you do?

From Scarcity to Abundance, Part 2

I had a great conversation with Shaun Abrahamson from Mutopo today about the emergence of abundance. Shaun is a really interesting guy and it was so much fun to hang with him. Enjoy:

Watch live streaming video from socialmediaweek at livestream.com

Paying Attention to the Small Stuff

As many of you know, I had the opportunity to give the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for CU's Journalism School. Since giving the speech, I've been thinking a lot about what failure can teach you.

 

On New Year's Day I was reminded how little mistakes multiply quickly to create the potential for disastrous consequences. After a great day of skiing at Vail with the family at Vail, my good friend, Mike Alkaitas and I decided to ski the East Vail Chutes for the last run. We thought it would be a great way to kick off 2010.

 

While the avalanche forecast wasn't good, we both have a lot of experience in the backcountry and had all of the right equipment, training and experience to navigate the terrain safely. In such conditions, it’s about finding the safest line to ski, staying out of harms way. We knew where the safe lines were and thought we'd at least skin up out of China Bowl to check the conditions. One of the joys of skiing in the backcountry is going uphill. It’s all about earning your turns.

 

Our goal was to ski a line called Marvin’s, a line that is usually a safe bet as it gets skied almost every day. Instead, the ski soon turned into a bit of an epic. As we went out the traverse to Marvin’s I suggested that we drop into what I thought was Marvin’s but which was 100 yards short of the run. What seemed like a little mistake became big. Fast.

 

As we started to pick our way through the trees, going one by one, I traversed the first opening and kicked off a small slide. It took me for a thirty-foot ride, over a few rocks. Mike yelled as it cut loose and I was able to stay on top and jump behind a tree to avoid the worst of it.

 

We then, got rimmed out with some 20-30 ft cliffs. After some time searching for a place to exit the cliff band we finally found a 15-foot spot to jump. While it was rocky, it was the safest way to get off the rim.

 

After the cliff, Mike started to ski down to some trees when three separate slides cut out behind him. I yelled as thirty-foot high powder plumes rumbled toward him. Luckily, he heard me and was able to get into the trees as the slides stopped just short. From there it was an uneventful ski out.

 

It was pretty damn scary. It made me think about how failures of judgment, which seemed so small at the time, can lead to big consequences in business and in life, as well.

 

It’s all about paying attention to the small stuff.

Welcome to Victors & Spoils

The news is out. Another adventure begins. I love the start of a new adventure. So much anticipation. So much excitement. It always comes down to the team. Standing at the beginning of this adventure, Victors & Spoils, is especially exciting with the amazing team that’s come together. My partners Evan Fry, Claudia Batten, Scott Beck, Chris Marks, Dana Vallely and you (That’s right, you. More on this later.) comprise a crew that I’ve always dreamed about having on a big adventure.

Victors & Spoils is the world’s first creative (ad) agency built on crowdsourcing principles. Our goal is to provide businesses with creative solutions to their marketing, advertising and product-design problems, by engaging the world’s most talented creatives.  

Brands need an alternative to current ad agencies and crowdsourcing platforms. One that offers the strategic direction, engagement and relationship management that agencies deliver today but one that also delivers engagement, connectivity, creativity, and ROI that crowdsourcing platforms have the potential to deliver.

It’s time for a new agency model. One built to address some of the biggest forces changing the face of business today. Radical transparency, the consumer’s demand to be more involved and a growing cost consciousness regarding clients’ budgets have all made crowdsourcing especially timely for today’s marketers. However, the crowdsourcing paradigm is a bit unruly for most clients. The number of possible solutions created and the effort to keep things on strategy for a brand can be overwhelming.

At the core of Victors & Spoils is our creative department. It’s not a typical creative department made up of art directors and copywriters but one in which everyone from art directors and copywriters to strategists and producers come together to solve a brand’s strategic problems. Our creative department is a global digital community where anyone who wants to participate can.  People will not only be rewarded by the solutions they develop both individually and as a group but also for participating in the community, itself, and helping others develop their skills and talent. In an effort to guide this participation, members of the creative department will earn a reputation ranking that will help determine a share of the revenue from each project.

As on any journey, things will change and develop new paths. I’ve been blown away already by how fast things are moving and the amazing excitement that clients have expressed. This is going to be a wild ride.

We look forward to figuring this new paradigm out with you.

A Blast From the Past: In-Security

Jessica Rosenberg pointed me to a very nice post on her blog today. It inspired me to repost this post that I wrote 3 1/2 years ago. With all of the uncertainty that seems to be surrounding us these days, these words seem to still hold true.

Thanks, Jessica.

A friend, Pete Takeda, just passed along the Preface to his upcoming book about a recent trip he did the Indian Himalayan mountains to retrace the steps of a CIA covert operation in the 1950's above 20,000 feet. It's destined to be a great story.

To begin the Preface Pete used a Helen Keller quote to set the tone:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of man as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is a daring adventure or nothing.

Keller's words reminded me of the security we try to find in our relationships, whether it's someone we live with, work with or even a customer. Many times we gloss over the signs of change or danger, lured by a false sense of security. Every once and a while, before we realize that something is wrong, the paradigm has shifted. The relationship has soured.

Isn't it better to realize that a relationship with anyone is tenuous, at best. Any relationship needs to be tended to regularly. Instead of taking it for granted, it needs to be explored constantly. When thinking about this need to explore a relationship in a deeper way I am often taken back to the words of the poet Ranier Marie Rilke:

Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.

In this way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us.

We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us.

If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence’ something helpless that needs our love.

Can we all act with more beauty and courage?

Viva Diego!

When Bridget and I started hanging out in Sayulita 11 years ago there was a very cool little grom, Diego Cardenas, hanging out on the beach. His family is the soul of Sayulita. Now, he's the three time Mexican National surf champ (following in his brother, Tigre's, footsteps) and on the cover of Surfing this month. Diego is the soul of surfing and the soul of Mexico.

Viva Diego!