(Credit:
Unconfirmedsources.com)
I just read Ellen McGirt's poignant feature story on "The Brand Called Obama" in Fast Company, and my marketing head is spinning. "The fact that Obama has taken what we thought we knew about politics and turned it into a different game for a different generation is no longer news," she writes, "but what has hardly been examined is the degree to which his success indicates a seismic shift on the business horizon as well." Indeed, Obama has introduced a new brand of politics, and he has caused a paradigm shift that goes beyond politics and marketing and may alter the very fabric of the American society: democratization with the means of the democratized web.
Big impact in small worlds
Many pundits have pointed out that while the Obama campaign has employed traditional one-to-many tactics, spending, for instance, hefty sums on broad TV ads, its more remarkable achievement has been to translate the concept of web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it), with its collaborative formats, micro-crowds, public deliberation, and social aggregation, into the realm of political communication.
Obama has grasped the nature of the "Distributed Internet" and sent his messages to those (online) venues that are already populated with the audiences he wants to reach. The "Yes We Can" mash-up video by the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am was a free gift for Obama and became a viral hit. The campaign's daily email blasts are smart, to the point, and written in a genuine voice that is credible and non-intrusive. Obama's Facebook group is blossoming. The BarackObama.com site offers widgets, ring tones, photos, and other social media assets that supporters can use to spread the word beyond the site itself and into the self-reinforcing orbit of the social web. And MyBarackObama.com offers fully customizable tools for blogs, mini-social networks, mini-fundraising, and events, etc. At campaign rallies, Obama's team hands out lists to the people waiting in line, asking them to call undecided voters from their cell phones. All of that illustrates the marketing genius at work here: Obama's impact has been so big because the campaign has managed scaling down to the smallest possible level of offline and online engagement.
When your brand's essence is a vector, your base becomes a movement.
The web 2.0 analogy does not end with content production and viral distribution. The "product" Obama itself is a mash-up, a (hyper)-text, a rich media (re)-mix of statements, tunes, vibes, opinions, and facts. Obama embodies what Manuel Castells calls the "networked society," and he not so much taps into the aggregated "wisdom of the crowd" but the collective intelligence of engaged and enlightened citizens. In the Fast Company story, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, another poster boy of the networked society, describes Obama's "adaptive leadership" style: "A leader gets people to do things on their own, through inspiration, respect, and trust. A boss can order you to do things, sure, but you do them because it's part of the contract."
It seems logical then that Obama, in his speeches, has been using the pronoun "we" far more often than "I." This is emblematic of the open-source nature of the Obama conversation. Alan Moore and Tomi T. Ahonen elaborate on Henry Jenkins' comment that "Obama has constructed not so much a campaign as a movement:" "Movements engage people around higher order ideals and beliefs, they ask people to become self-motivated. Barack Obama understands that people want to be part of the process. It's the end of retail politics and the green shoots of networked politics premised upon engagement. Obama says: Yes, you can write your own profile. Yes, you can meet supporters near you. Yes, you can plan and attend events. Yes, you can network with your friends. Yes, you can become a fundraiser. Yes, you can write your own blog. Barack Obama is saying: yes, you can be part of this, you can be part of history. You see people embrace what they create." And who doesn't want to be part of something larger than oneself -- a cause, a network, a movement of like-minded and yet diverse voices? It is this inherent transcendence that lends Obama his power. It is a lesson in how to build brands in the age of hyper-fragmentation: When your brand's essence -- in this case: aspiration -- is a vector, your base becomes a movement.
When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.
The Obama brand is all software and only a little hardware, and it comes with an open SDK (software developer kit) -- a dynamic, modular platform that both individual campaigners and institutional networks can plug into. Obama's entire campaign is based on the principle of "picture-in-picture web," as Steve Rubel coins it. Or, to borrow another one of Rubel's lines: Obama is a web service, not a web site. He is the "blue ocean" and not the (little) rock. He is, in the dictum of advertising agency Resource Interactive, an "open (on-demand, personal, engaging, and networked) brand" -- a franchise brand that anyone can hijack, re-shape, and remix a la carte. That makes him vulnerable and volatile (think of the "I got a crush on..." video or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright videos on YouTube ) but at the same time powerful and unstoppable. When your greatest weakness is your biggest strength, you are very hard to beat.
It's a remix culture, stupid!
Henry Jenkins argued in his keynote at SXSW Interactive two weeks ago that accusing Obama of plagiarism (as the Clinton camp did when it brought forward that Obama had borrowed words from past speeches of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick) misses the point: It's a remix culture, stupid!
It is thus no coincidence that Norman Lear just announced his initiative Remix America, co-sponsored by the USC Norman Lear Center, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kaltura.org, and the American University Center for Social Media. In the spirit of Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody," Remix America is a "multi-partisan" forum that invites Internet users to take clips from the site's "American Playlist" and add other clips and audio to produce their own remix/mash-up vision of America -- as a new platform for patriotic dissent and political commentary.
From Norman Lear's speech at the Take Back America conference: "This country has always been a remix, yesterday's 'melting pot' is today's remix. What did Jefferson and Paine and Adams do but mash up history. Take a little from the Magna Carta, a little from John Locke, and a whole lot of rebellion. Now, thanks to the web and digital technology at Remix America everyone can join in. (....) I see a viral explosion of Born Again Americans, Americans of all ages and ethnicities, conditions and backgrounds, awakening to their power as free citizens in a free society. I see them doing it in 3-4 minute bursts, mixing and mashing their stories and hopes and dreams with the words, images and music from the American Playlist, to give us all a glimpse of the America they wish for."
(Credit:
xperthr)
...or just a workaholic?
In a poignant post, Seth Godin explains the difference:
"A workaholic lives on fear. It's fear that drives him to show up all the time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.
A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.
The passionate worker doesn't show up because she's afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it's a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation... because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design after dinner because, hey, it's a lot more fun than watching TV.
It was hard to imagine someone being passionate about mining coal or scrubbing dishes. But the new face of work, at least for some people, opens up the possibility that work is the thing (much of the time) that you'd most like to do. Designing jobs like that is obviously smart. Finding one is brilliant."
That sounds good and reminds me of the "four-hour work week," as laid out in Tim Ferris' best-selling book: "How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent mini-retirements?" Ferris' book is a manifesto for the mobile lifestyle, and a detailed manual for outsourcing your work and disassembling a cohesive, consistent work life into ultra-flexible and ever-changing roles and tasks. This allows him to live a nomadic and excessive private life in many microverses: "I race motorcycles in Europe," "I ski in the Andes," "I scuba dive in Panama," and "I dance tango in Buenos Aires."
A similar concept is the "slash lifestyle," a term to describe the identity concepts of people who are no longer satisfied with just one professional identity and instead mash up professions and hobbies into a hybrid work/life fulfillment that unleashes their true ever-changing self: "Doctor/author," "Mom/consultant," and "Bellydancer/Scientist" are just some of the possible combinations.
Yet slash-lifestyle and passionate worker attitude have some ramifications. There is a dark side to all the Kumbaya freedom of the new passionate entrepreneurial self. More and more A-list bloggers (i.e. Steve Rubel and David Armano) are admitting a certain blogging fatigue. "Blogging is an addiction," a friend (and avid blogger) told me the other day, "it is a passion that can kill you." So does passion not equal happiness? And how do you draw the line? In a Fast Company cover story, Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs" offers some good advice: "Never follow your passion but by all means bring it with you."
(Credit:
Marginal Revolution)
According to a McKinsey & Company study of US economic activity, "Raising the productivity of employees whose jobs can't be automated is the next big performance challenge." The study argues that "as more companies come to specialize in core activities and outsource the rest, they have greater need for workers who can interact with co-workers, partners, and vendors," supported by highly personalized organizing and communication tools. 40 percent of labor activity, says McKinsey, comes not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what the consultancy calls the "Interaction Economy," which it defines as the "searching, coordinating, and monitoring required to exchange goods or services." This interaction economy emphasizes collaboration, social intelligence, tacit knowledge, and ambiguity, as much as it values workers' ability to make individual decisions quickly and organize tasks and time efficiently -- in a nutshell: it puts a much stronger focus on the non-formalized, individual productivity or "micro-productivity" of employees. McKinsey says that this area of productivity involves the highest-priced labor of the most valued knowledge workers and yet remains the hardest to measure and manage.
It is also the least commoditized part of the economy, for a good reason: it would be counter-productive to decrease the level of entrepreneurial freedom at the micro-level by trying to implement streamlined de rigueur organizing tools. More companies are starting to realize that it might be a better alternative to provide a vast array of tools and leave it up to the workers to tailor them creatively to their specific needs - the human being and not the application as the meta-organizer. "You're not trying to automate the task a human does; you're trying to complement what the human is doing," says James M. Manyika, a senior partner at McKinsey, who co-authored the study, in a recent New York Times article about personal organizing tools and company mash-ups. Micro-productivity applications such as Scrybe or 37 Signals may indeed lead to more productivity gains than big companywide applications such as enterprise resource planning or arcane knowledge management portals, which because of their rigidity too often limit innovation and creativity. And BusinessWeek reports that E*Trade, Siemens, JDS Uniphase, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Coldwell Banker Commercial are all using enterprise mashups in some capacity. Just as personal computers released the gridlock of corporate information to employees, personal organizers and mash-ups are empowering the individual worker to effectively engage in the soft yet critical tasks of collaboration, organizing, communications, and interaction -- and let them choose themselves how to best accomplish that.
This is an interesting premise as this new "tacit technology" combines seemingly antagonistic convergent and divergent elements (as so many innovations do these days). The demand for a meta-organizer which combines myriad schedules and calendar applications is contrasted by the demand for personalized and individualistic organizing options that are divergent because they consider the differences in the user's preferences." David Weinberger, author of the book "Everything is Miscellaneous," argues: "What we need is the ability to associate the people and the times and the places of our lives with the broad messy context of our lives." He adds that these new productivity tools are "an early but important step toward giving individuals at companies a better way to manage their increasingly complicated existence."
The recognition of micro-productivity is part of a broader trend -- the renaissance of a human-centered economy that introduces new organizational and business models to re-cast the old Man vs. Machine story. Consumers want it real and human -- post-industrial, excellent, unique, provocative, sentimental, opinionated, boutique, artisan, (eco-) epicurean, handcrafted, hand-wrought, warm, attentive, devoted. And companies are getting it. From user-centered design (Apple, Cisco, HP, etc.), user-generated content (Blogs, Wikis, Slideshare, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) to human-powered search (ChaCha, Mahalo), crowdsourcing, GeekSquad (call 1-800-GEEK-SQUAD - of all places, a technology company - and hear how the use of a real human voice and humorous options helps render the company real), to the new social and green responsibilities of the "high-purpose company," and a new quest for "authenticity" -- the human is, once again, back at the center of attention and the economic value chain.
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