Historically, technology leaps that force us to rethink our world leave us temporarily overwhelmed and lost. Without something familiar to hold onto, we end-up acting like artists who are standing in front of large empty canvases, trying to figure out what to do with our infinite palate of colors.

The way to beak such creative logjams is to focus on solving specific problems. Why must we rely on the government to monitor the radiation from a nuclear power plant? What exactly is the water quality in my home town? If we could put accelerometers into every high school football helmet or mouthpiece, could we reduce the number of concussion injuries? The new innovators must focus on solving specific problems that have personal meaning to them.

2012 is shaping up to be the year of the engineer. I’m not just talking just about classically trained engineers who hold engineering degrees. I’m talking about the fact that advances in open source hardware, interchangeable modules, the Internet of Things, and the DIY movement are making engineers out of all of us.

We just need to focus on solving problems that are more important to us than to a company who is looking to solve a problem for the generic marketplace. Why does our street seem to get more potholes than those around it? Does our city have a traffic problem that could be solved by aggregating and studying live congestion data? Are there things at home or work that would better served through automation?

We also need to crank the innovation handle backward by examining the possibilities of the absurd. What if we put a sensor in every blade of grass on a baseball field? What if you could put a microprocessor in your favorite sweater? What if our local high school could launch its own satellite?

The future is either ours to invent, or ours to stare at aimlessly.

What’s it going to be?

Before World War II, most innovation came from the toils of sole inventors with well-known names such as Davinci, Copernicus, Curie, Bell, Edison, Bohr, Maxwell, Newton, Einstein, Faraday and many more. However, the role of the individual innovator changed during WWII, when a need to increase the pace of innovation outstripped the individual’s production capabilities.

The United States responded to the challenge by forming the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) “…to coordinate, supervise, and conduct scientific research on the problems underlying the development, production, and use of mechanisms and devices of warfare.” As a result of the NDRC and other organizations like it, the roots of innovation shifted from the individual inventor to the process of Organized Research and Development (OR&D).

Leading and Trailing Technologies

Organized Research and Development is expensive. It produces leading technologies that require even more resources to commercialize. But with the pace of innovation accelerating, leading technologies don’t hold that spot very long. As new technologies are invented, once-leading technologies eventually become trailing technologies–innovations that may lack their original luster, yet fill a new role. Trailing technologies meet the affordability and functionality requirements of individual inventors.

Many examples of the leading-to-trailing technology exchange show how the innovation cycle has been affected. For example, when transistors replaced vacuum tubes, individual innovators built circuits out of cheap tubes. When integrated circuits (ICs) replaced transistors, individual inventors started building things with transistors. And as Moore’s Law compounded the advances in integrated circuits, trailing IC technologies were scooped up by individual inventors such as Steve Wozniak to build things like personal computers.

For the past sixty years, the differences between leading and trailing technologies were large enough to limit the effectiveness of individual inventors. Not anymore. With trailing technology microprocessors powerful enough to perform real-time processing, standardized protocols that allow ubiquitous communications, cloud-based storage and processing services that offer scale, and access to pools of other inventors via social networks, the individual innovator is making a comeback. The day has come where millions of individual innovators now have the capacity to solve problems more efficiently than their deep-pocketed OR&D counterparts.

So, what are they going to invent? My next post will cover the things that these new innovators must do to take advantage of their new-found bounty.

Portrait of Alexander Graham Bell: Courtesy Smithsonian on Flickr

Yet, to be blunt, no matter how much I write, lecture, or consult on this concept, most folks still look at me as if I have two heads. “That’s a nice thought, Ron, but what do I tell my boss when asked about ROI?” Unfortunately, I’ve come to understand that as long as social media budgets are controlled by those afflicted with Communications Myopia, the value of investments in social media activities will remain underestimated–that is, right up until some event forces some of those assumptions to be revisited.

This morning, I read about such an event in the New York Times article: A Dispute Over Who Owns a Twitter Account Goes to Court. The article describes how a company (PhoneDog.com) is suing a former employee (Noah Kravitz) for control over the Twitter audience that he built while working for them.

Originally tweeting under the Twitter handle @Phonedog_Noah, Kravitz had successfully built an audience of over 17,000 followers. Since Twitter allows a user to change their handle without jeopardizing that audience, after leaving Phonedog.com, Kravitz changed his handle to @NoahKravitz. Eight months later, Phonedog.com filed a lawsuit against Kravitz, claiming $340,000 in damages [(17,000 followers) x ($2.50/follower/month) x (8 months)].

Phonedog.com released the following statement to the Times:

“The costs and resources invested by PhoneDog Media into growing its followers, fans and general brand awareness through social media are substantial and are considered property of PhoneDog Media L.L.C. We intend to aggressively protect our customer lists and confidential information, intellectual property, trademark and brands.”

In a nutshell, Phonedog.com isn’t suing him for the handle, which has their brand in it, but instead is seeking to “aggressively protect” its assets (property, fans, followers, lists, trademark). Sound familiar?

There’s an old saying that says: “You don’t appreciate what you have ’til it’s gone.” Phonedog.com now has a new appreciation for its social media assets. What about your company? Is it still trying to figure out the ROI of a blog post, tweet, or YouTube video? Or has it come to the conclusion that its investments in social media are compounding into long-term marketable assets?

Technology and Management

Successful businesses are built upon efficiencies. The most competitive companies solve problems faster, cheaper, or deliver higher quality products and services than their competition. Technology has played a pivotal role in the quest for efficiencies. For example, innovations in water-power and automation led to the Industrial Revolution, which in turn established the basis of the modern corporation. For the past two-hundred years, management decisions surrounding technological advances have been driven by the premise that efficiency is attained through centrally locating resources such as capital, matériel, and labor.

Until recently.

New technologies are chipping away at this premise and opening a new field of thought. Is it possible that the road to corporate efficiency may actually run through the decentralization of corporate resources instead?

Many Hands Make Light Work

For two centuries, management’s role has been to steward centrally located resources. Good managers distribute work among employees, monitor their progress, and ultimately ensure that the work product is completed optimally. During this era, automation squeezed inefficiencies from centrally-located corporate resources, in turn obsoleting employee jobs (the resource) while sparing managerial jobs (the resource stewards).

The emergence of social technologies, however, has changed the rules. Not only have they opened access to distributed labor forces, but network technologies have introduced automation into tasks once reserved for managers. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for example, divides large projects into small tasks, distributes those tasks to a networked labor force, and then assembles the completed tasks into a final work product.

But, what if we took the concept of distributed labor to the next level? What if we combined rapidly dropping hardware costs, popular social networking technologies, and automation to create an application-specific network? Might such a system give companies the ability to tackle problems that were once considered impossible through resource centralization?

Networked Hands Make Even Lighter Work

The moment that the Fukushima nuclear power plant released radiation into the air last March, Japanese citizens were forced to deal with the worst type of terror–an invisible, tasteless, odorless, and potentially deadly foe. They immediately wanted to know the answer to three questions:

1. How much radiation was released?
2. How far did the radiation travel?
3. What were the health risks associated with a particular level of exposure?

Simple questions, yet who could they turn to for reliable answers?

Typically, the responsibility to build a country-wide radiation detection network falls to large, centralized organizations…like a government.  Unfortunately, while governments posses the resources required to build such networks, historically, they’re rarely the best arbiters of sensitive information. So, that’s when a worldwide group of concerned individuals considered using modern technologies to build their own. Just one week after the tsunami hit, a newly formed nonprofit organization called Safecast took on the challenge. Their goal was to gather radiation data and place it into the hands of the people who needed it most.

The organization’s top priority was gaining access to cheap, portable, radiation sensors. After creating a design based on an open source hardware platform, Safecast turned to Kickstarter to fund its manufacture. In the project’s Kickstarter Video, David Ewald explains, “The long-term goal of this project is to create a network of radiation sensors that can provide real-time data both in times of crisis and beyond.”

Over six-hundred people from around the world responded to the request, donating $36,900 to build these sensors. So far, the organization reports that it has collected over 1.25 million pieces of data.

But there’s a difference between collecting data and making it useful for the people who need it. Safecast publishes a page that contains six different radiation maps, each created from various (distributed) sources. For example, blogger and OpenIdeo founder, Haiyan Zhang, took the live streaming data coming out of data aggregator Pachube and piped it into Google Maps to create a real-time view of the radiation cloud over Japan. Similarly, other third-parties created maps that mixed and matched data from not only Safecast’s mobile and fixed readings, but also data from the Japanese government, non-government organizations, and activist citizens. The diversity of these maps creates a validation; if you don’t believe the data from a specific source, it’s easy to compare its readings with those from other sources. The net result is information that Japanese citizens can use to make life decisions.

To Decentralize or Not to Decentralize?

The Safecast story offers a new lens for companies to view their businesses through.

• The organization was formed in one week to solve a problem that probably would have been impossible to solve just a few years ago.
• It raised $36,900 in start-up capital through distributed funding.*
• It used the data aggregation services of Pachube to harness the power of distributed data sources.
• It welcomed the distributed labor services of concerned global citizens, who in turn used their talents to translate raw data into a human-readable form.
• It proved that the solution to this type of problem is best served by a decentralized as opposed to a centralized approach.

Companies should consider these lessons by asking the following question:

Can social networking technologies help us create new products and services, or at least help us deliver our existing ones much more efficiently?

Perhaps this question will help lead your company to its next 10X solution.

Photo Credits: Mill Girl: Library of Congress, Interpolation Map: Lionel Bergeret

* Five months later, The Knight Foundation added $250,000 to the cause.

In between our games of one-on-one (Mike beat me two out of three games, BTW) we discussed my recent decision to expand the focus of RonAmok! beyond “social media for marketing and PR” to include new advances in hardware, software, and networking technologies that allow individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and governments to accomplish things that couldn’t have been conceived of just few short years ago. In between dribbles, we discussed the ramifications of crowd-sourcing, machine-to-machine communication, and the Internet of Things.

That’s when Mike, stopped, held the ball for a moment and asked, “But, what’s the link between social media and your new direction?”

“They are one in the same,” I answered, realizing that at first blush, the statement sounded crazy.

All communications require three things: a message, a recipient, and a method to connect the two. A medium carries messages to intended recipients. It doesn’t matter if that medium comes in the form of a traditional broadcast, the press, the Internet, a social networking site, drums or even smoke signals. The ramifications of easily digitized content delivered through cheap distribution networks has blurred the media lines. Therefore, rather than caring about how the message is delivered (the medium), communicators should care more about accomplishing a specific goal by matching medium with message.

The economies of scale resulting from our ability to cheaply digitize, distribute and present messages to the right audiences have opened exciting new possibilities. However, in order to take advantage of this scale, we must determine the optimum connection between medium, message, and purpose.

Communications decisions must be driven by purpose first, followed by message and medium. Ask not what Facebook, Twitter, or crowd-sourcing can do for you. Ask how they can help fulfill your company’s purpose.

The most successful business entrepreneurs solve problems through non-linear thinking, meaning that they don’t look for incremental solutions. Instead of squeezing twenty-percent more efficiency out of a process, they either radically alter the productivity of it, or eliminate the process entirely. Successful entrepreneurs don’t take baby steps to solve problems; they take quantum leaps, seeking solutions that are orders of magnitude more effective, by changing the rules and applying knowledge from seemingly unrelated sources. They ask themselves questions such as, “Why do we need this process at all?” If the process is required, they ask, “How can we make this process ten-times more efficient?” or  ”How can we equip our employees with tools and ideas that’ll make them one-hundred times more effective?”

After reading the passage, I couldn’t help but ask the following question: “Have businesses sought the 10X solutions offered by their new ability to digitize, distribute, and present content cheaply?”

Sadly, the answer is no, as companies continue to seek incremental solutions to their tired old problems. But why?

Seeking the 10X business solution is a risky proposition. It requires special skills that typically don’t manifest themselves within the ranks of those who are frequently tasked with adopting new technologies. Middle managers, for example, are trained to mitigate risk, as opposed to embracing it. They’re compensated to seek incremental solutions, such as squeezing an extra 20% out of a process that perhaps should have been reevaluated years ago.

If your company wants to find the 10X solutions to its problems, it needs to place these new communications technologies into the hands of its entrepreneurial thinkers. Then, after your non-linear thinkers have solved some of the company’s most important problems, the high-priests of process and best practices can be tasked with squeezing an extra 20% out of them.

Although it’s tempting to dogpile, instead of commenting on the commentary, I wanted to read the bill myself. So, I slogged my way through all 78 pages of H.R. 3261 to arrive at my own conclusions.

Although most of the bill’s criticism comes from a civil liberties perspective, I have a more fundamental problem with it–the bill’s details, or specifically the lack thereof. The bill describes a detailed process–from the moment a property rights holder makes a copyright claim all the way through how to stop the offense–yet it does nothing to clarify what an infraction is. Therefore, with a clearly defined punitive process and no clear definition of a violation, a deep-pockets plaintiff can wreak havoc on a shallow-pockets defendant. Considering the present economic climate, where advances in digital media technologies have allowed David to go toe-to-toe Goliath, this bill–as written–opens dark new competitive options for Goliath.

I’m a staunch supporter of the intellectual rights of content creators. I’m also a staunch supporter of innovation. If the goal of this bill is truly “To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the the theft of US Property…” then shouldn’t it be able to define what constitutes an actual theft? The bill references our present copyright laws as a start, but those still do nothing to clear up the murky issue of fair use.

Let’s take two very simple cases:

1) A website owner rips a copy of “Star Wars” from their DVD and puts it on their server for anyone to download.

2) One author quotes another author, with full attribution according the the Chicago Manual of Style.

Most people will agree that case #1 is a clear violation. By the same token, case #2 demonstrates a generally accepted writing practice.

But case #2 gets foggy when we step out of the text domain and into that of rich media, where no concept of an acceptable excerpt exists. For example, what constitutes fair use for a song? A few notes? A phrase? A hook? The entire chorus? Or what about a feature length film?

A 90 minute film shot at 24 fps consists of 129,600 frames. Is it acceptable to use one frame with full attribution, without asking for permission, or could the film’s copyright owner claim a violation through the Stop Online Piracy Act? For the sake of argument, let’s assume that a single frame is acceptable. If so, at what point do we cross the violation line?

Take this example. If one book author attributes 100 words of another book author’s 75,000 word work, 0.13% of that book is being used under fair use. If 0.13% is an acceptable for a text-based work, couldn’t an argument be made that 7.14 seconds of a feature length movie could be used in a similar way?

The problem is that H.R. 3261 contains a long list of punishments for a crime that the government has still yet to define.

Or can it?

The last few pages of the bill describes a responsibility to train property attachés, those agents who are tasked with defending U.S. intellectual property rights abroad.

“The Secretary of State and the Secretary of Commerce shall ensure that each intellectual property attaché appointed…is fully trained for the responsibilities of the position before assuming the duties at the United States embassy or diplomatic mission to which the attache is assigned.” (74:13-18)

“Such training and technical assistance programs shall be carried out in consultation with the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator.” (75:11-14)

So, if I’m reading this correctly, the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator is responsible to train these property right defenders. If so, shouldn’t training guidelines exist? What are they? Where are they? Is this training available to the public? If not, why not? Content creators would fill these classes in droves.

My problem with H.R. 3261 is that it can’t “…protect the creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation…” of new works without defining what parts of the old works are allowed to be used legally.

Until such a definition exists, the bill will hang like the sword of Damocles over those who seek to innovate through legally building upon the works of others.

Photo Credit (CC): bulletproofbra

• Facebook had ~30 million users; today it has over 800 million
• Twitter had ~340 thousand users; today it has over 200 million
• Linkedin had ~12 million users, today it has over 100 million
• The iPhone was just 22 days old
• Tweetdeck and Foursquare didn’t even exist yet.
• There was no Amazon Kindle, iPad, or Android operating system
• And although Google hit a homerun with their YouTube acquisition, Google Wave came and went, Google Buzz is on its way out, and Google Plus is putting up a spunky fight.

Yet, although these technological advances have forever altered the playing field of business, why have only a few companies accepted them wholeheartedly into their business plans? I mean, it’s not for a shortage of opinions. The great game of social media has enjoyed an influx of new players over the past 50 months. They’ve blogged, tweeted, LinkedIn, checked-in, liked, commented, shared, and written books on every conceivable angle of the subject. Or have they?

The answer is no. The “social media for business” conversation has been co-opted by the communications-centric. If businesses are to enjoy the optimum benefits of these new technologies, executives must extend their social media gaze beyond public relations, marketing, and customer support to consider how significant advances in the digitization, distribution, and presentation of content also impacts the rest of their businesses.

It’s time to pry these new technologies from the stranglehold of professional communicators and free them to run amok within the organization. It’s time to introduce the concept of crowd-sourcing to research and development as demonstrated through services like as Innocentive. It’s time to determine how social media can impact finance through studying businesses such as Kickstarter. It’s time to consider the competitive advantages that companies may enjoy by joining the open source movement, from the well-known open source software, to the lesser-known open source hardware movement that brought us platforms such as Arduino. It’s time for companies to evaluate the Internet of Things, considering the business advantages offered through real-time data gathering services such as Pachube. And yes, let’s not forget communications. It’s time to shake them up a little by redistributing their budgets from boilerplate outbound activities to other innovative concepts, such as philanthrotizing, as demonstrated by programs such as Pepsi’s Refresh Everything and Kohl’s Cares.

The technologies are just waiting to be used. Advances in the digitization, distribution, and presentation of content offer benefits for all branches of the corporation. But in order to see them, we must break ourselves out of the zombie-like state of that we’ve fallen into. Social media isn’t just for professional communicators.

To be fair, I too have contributed to this communications-centric funk. A quick re-read of my very first RonAmok! post, New Media Hyperventilation, illustrates just how far my vision has become communications myopic.

“…everyone is working so hard to scoop the next person in finding the next big thing, that we aren’t taking time to master the last great thing.”

It’s important “…to not lose site of the goal of these new tools — for people to actually use ‘em.”

So, it’s time to get back to my roots. It’s time to change the prescription on my business glasses. It’s time to start applying these technologies to tackle the really big problems faced by businesses, nonprofits, and society.

Are you with me?

Photo credit: Haglundc

As General Manager of the smaller-market Oakland Athletics, Billy Beane didn’t have the financial resources to pick from the top of that list. So, rather than following the herd, he created his own. Rather than agonizing over RBIs and batting averages, he looked at a player’s ability to get on base. He theorized that a team stacked with such players would statistically score more runs and as a result, they’d likely win more games than their competition. And the best part of Beane’s ranking system? Since the players that he desired were ranked so low by the herd, he could sign them at bargain basement prices.

When Beane fielded his team of “misfits” for $40 million, the herd laughed at him. But at the end of the regular season, he had the last laugh. You see, the New York Yankees had spent $125 million to win their 103 games. The Oakland Athletics spent less than one-third as much to do the very same thing.

While watching the movie, Moneyball, this past weekend, I was struck by the similarities between the baseball herd and the social media herd. When it comes to evaluating the value of social media investments, companies rely on the same herd-like tendencies.

• Those from the advertising side of the herd see the value of social media as measured in impressions and click-through rates.
• Those from the marketing side of the herd see the value in terms of “brand messaging/awareness.”
• Those from the public relations side of the herd see the value in terms of influence.

A slew of analytics companies have stepped up to feed the herd. Their pretty little dashboards serve tasty, herd-favorite morsels such as impressions, click-through rates, fans, and page views. They’ve even invented new measurements such as “klout” and “engagement.”

But here’s the problem. Generic measurements mean nothing without considering the reason for them in the first place. The goal of a MLB General Manager is to field a team that wins more games than the competition. The role of corporate communications is to support a customer’s entire journey to, through, and beyond their purchasing decisions. If the metrics that your company measures don’t support that goal, then why measure them at all?

It’s time to bust away from the social media herd. If your company has been investing in social media this past year, you have a responsibility to analyze it. All of it! Look underneath the pretty dashboard data. Start at January 1st and look at every tweet, every Facebook update, and every blog post. Study every retweet, comment, and “like” that a specific piece of digital content sparked. Look for patterns. What content resonated most with customers? What content did they ignore? What was the single most valuable piece of content that helped the most customers in their moment of truth? The answers to such questions will reveal two things: the value of your efforts and a digital program road map for next year.

But let’s face it. Most companies won’t do this. Analysis is hard work, which is why so few do it. Add the fact that running with the herd is less risky, and most communicators will continue throwing more money at meaningless things.

Billy Beane could have accepted his fate as a small market GM. Instead, he changed the rules. Are you willing to change the rules? Are you willing to dig deep into YOUR data and find out what YOUR CUSTOMERS need to support their journeys to, through, and beyond their purchasing decisions? Or will you acquiesce and continue to run with the herd?

The MLB herd scoffed at Billy Beane…well…that’s right up until he won all those games.

Photo Credit: freefotouk

This is what the screen is supposed to look like:

This is what it looks like on my Sony HDTV:

The smudge started out small and has expanded over the past few weeks. A quick Google search directed me to Sony LCD Rear Projection TV Problems–a very detailed page that described a good news/bad news situation.

• The good news: a known “optical block” issue caused my blue smudge.
• The bad news: The problem has no permanent fix. Not only is the optical block problem costly to repair, but the problem will likely recur due to a design flaw.

The article lead me to the I have a Defective Sony TV Facebook page, where I learned that Sony was offering discounts on new televisions to replace those with the optical block problem. I made contact and got a quick email response from Amanda of Sony’s “Social Media Advanced Resolution Team.” The email suggested that I call a special number where I could purchase a new television at a “significant discount.”

That sounded fair to me. A “significant discount” on a new TV to replace an out-of-warranty defective one. I called and was offered 25% off a 46″ (smaller) TV and 30% off of a 55″ (larger) TV. The offer had two stipulations:

1. it was only valid for one week
2. in consideration for accepting this “significant discount,” I had to sign a “…release and hold harmless…” waiver.

The math didn’t make sense to me. If I needed to spend that much money to replace my HDTV anyways, shouldn’t I also consider Sony competitors?  I found many competitive choices within that price range, so I explained my dilemma to Amanda in an email. Her politely worded response officially ended my multiple decade love affair with the Sony brand: “…the prices aren’t negotiable…”

Game over. Thanks for playing.

I get it. From a business perspective, what is Sony supposed to do? According to the Sony LCD Rear Projection TV Problems article, the company had sold over 3.5 million of these sets, generating approximately $8 billion in revenues. Since most of these sets are out of warranty, I totally understand its decision. Sony doesn’t have to do anything.

So, I’m going to watch my defective Sony HDTV set until I’m blue in the face. During this period, I’ll likely develop a deepening distaste for Sony televisions. When I can’t take it anymore, I’ll replace it with a competitor’s. Will my actions affect Sony? Probably not. Will I feel better? Probably not. But we all have choices to make. Sony made its and I’ve made mine. And without upper management’s support, there’s nothing that the company’s “social media” team can do about it.

BTW, anyone have suggestions for my new, non-Sony TV?