Is Crowdsourcing Disrupting the Design Industry?

"This is an issue that I simply cannot wrap my head around. Spec work appears in the design field infinitely more times than any other industry. It absolutely floors me that people think that it is even remotely ethical to build their businesses by tearing down ours."

- Mark Hemmis' comment on AIGA policy statement on spec work


by Hutch Carpenter

The past couple years have seen an increase in the use of crowdsourcing by companies to procure design assets. It works like this:

1. Requesting organization posts a request for submissions to a design crowdsourcing site (e.g. 99designs, crowdSPRING, MycroBurst, etc.)
   
2. Interested designers review the request, and create their entry
   
3. They submit their entry to the site
   
4. Requesting organization selects its favorite, pays the winning designer the announced fee

These design requests are often for logos, but for a number of other types of initiatives as well. For example, 99designs' list of requests (to the right) gives some sense of the types of projects.

So far, so good, right? Well, a lot of designers think not. As Mark Hemmis' comment above shows, these open spec work contests have been raising the ire of the designer community.

Is crowdsourcing ripping their industry asunder?


Designers' Beefs with Crowdsourcing

Three aspects of crowdsourcing design raise concern for many in the design industry:

1. Lack of compensation for designers whose entries are not selected
   
2. Diminishes the design profession
   
3. Not sustainable in the long term

Compensation: To be competitive, individuals will need to invest some time in designing a submission for a company. With a good number of entries, this equates to a decent number of hours invested. According to Pamela Pfiffner:


"The problem is, spec and crowdsourcing can lower your value and hourly rates so far that minimum wage looks like a fat paycheck."


Her statement takes things to a logical extreme - someone would have to do nothing but spend their time entering contests. But she does a good job framing the issue.

Diminishing the profession: The issue with crowdsourcing is that it says, "this stuff is easy!" A commenter on this post, How NOT to Design a Logo, baldly gives this concern legitimacy:


"Logo design contests are great, its the only way I go. I get my pick of 5-10 designs for less then $20. Designers these days are a dime a dozen, be happy you get the work."


The design industry has characteristics of being craftsman, as well as strategists. At least the higher end firms do. Sentiments like that are grating.

Not sustainable: The concern here is that over the long term, the economics of crowdsourcing will cause existing designers to exit the industry, and potential designers will opt for different careers. According to Jacob Cass:


"Design contest sites are not the future of graphic design... nor do I see a time when it ever will be, however, in the long term I believe spec work is going to be detrimental to the design industry... both devaluing design and designers as a whole."


The argument here is that rather than expand the pool of talent for design, crowdsourcing will ultimately reduce the industry.

So designers themselves are lining up against these types of crowdsourcing design contests. Which begs the question...


Why Are Crowdsourcing Design Contests Growing?

Jason Aiken has this to say:


"Truth is - 99designs is growing by leaps and bounds. We have record numbers of projects being launched and have needed to hire new staff to help us keep up with the growth.


The motivation of organizations seeking design work seem clear enough - tap a large network of creativity, manage expenses within budget. But what are those designers doing there?

It seems that not all designers are of the same mind about these crowdsourcing design contests. Some actually embrace them. Why?

Build your portfolio: Not all designers in the world have 10 years experience and a roster of paying clients. For those starting out in the business, the competitions provide great fuel for creating designs. If you want prospective clients to see what you're capable of, the design competitions seem to offer a chance to create that portfolio.

Benefits include:

• You need to think not abstractly about design principles, but concretely about how a design project relates to a business
  
• Competitions are great for elevating one's focus and creativity
  
• You can benchmark yourself against other submissions, including those selected if yours is not

Personal interest: Some projects just pique the interest of a person. Maybe there's a day job with a paying company, and then a chance at night to do things "your way" on a project of interest. The project taps some areas you want to pursue, or maybe allows you to try something out without concern as to whether the client will ultimately want the design.

Extra business: Everyone is hustling in a weak economy. If your design business has some slack in demand, why not apply the available creative resources toward an occasional crowdsourcing project? If you're a professional shop, presumably your odds are better than most.

Access to high-end ad agencies: This was the case when Porter Crispin + Bogusky solicited logo designs for their start-up client Brammo, maker of electric motorcycles. They ran the contest through crowdSPRING. The contest sparked plenty of debate, but also saw 700 entries. One reason was that young up-n-coming designers wanted the chance to impress a firm of the caliber of PC+B, who can send many paying clients their way.

That's the designer participation set of motivations. I guess the best way to think about companies' motivation is this - Do they get results?

Since the number of requests from companies is growing, design crowdsourcing sites are working at some level. If they weren't, word would spread pretty quickly and companies would stop using them. This comment from designer Morgan Stone on Alex Bogusky's blog post about PC+B's use of crowdSPRING is illuminating:


"As a designer... crowdsourcing scares me. I think it has to do with the harsh reality that sometimes it doesn't take experience or a big title to design something truly amazing."


What's the staying power of the crowdsourced design contest approach? And will it disrupt the industry, in the Clayton Christensen sense?


Sustainability and Reach of Crowdsourcing Design Contests

Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang wrote last year, "Without a doubt, Specwork (like crowdspring or 99 designers) is here to stay - economics will drive this forward." For the buyers, yes. But the supply side of the equation - the designers - is that here to stay?

I believe it is. The numbers say it is. Here's what I mean:


In a 2009 article, Forbes noted that there are 80,000 free lance designers in the U.S. alone. Add in the talent from around the world, and you can see that there is a large of pool of creativity. Maybe 200,000 designers globally? 99designs claims to have roughly 54,000 designers on its site.

Designers have some motivation to participate in crowdsourcing design contests, as noted for the reasons above. It's not like every designer will submit regularly. But every project reaches some new set of designers, and occasionally gets a repeat one as well.

All it takes is for a business seeking design work is maybe 30, 40, 50 submissions? As a percent of the global number of designers, that's not much.

40 / 200,000 = 0.02%

Here's what designer David Airey said about getting clients from crowdsourcing sites:


"I've had direct clients and also have been one of those in the crowd. Surprisingly, some of my best clients are the ones that followed me from these crowd sourcing sites. That's probably because they've already been through a working process with me, and they like what they've experienced, so there's no mismatch of expectations like a new client."


I do see the sustainability of the business. It's complex, but there are enough people who do see advantages to participating. Even if only for certain periods of their lives or only on occasion. I don't see entering crowdsourcing design contests as a full-time pursuit for someone.

Next question: how much can crowdsourcing chip away at the traditional areas of the design industry? Is there a gap that crowdsourcing addresses? (Erica's post, Bokardo's post):


Many designers in the debate note the importance of establishing a rapport with clients, and understanding their clients more deeply than a set of colors and fonts. A firm such as Nocturnal Graphic Design Studio appears to deliver value through deeper relationships and more strategic approaches with its clients.

But Erica's point above is well-taken. Sometimes, you're not in the market for that level of involvement. Small and mid-sized businesses do not need the full horsepower of high-end design firms. As one designer (snootily) commented on the PC+B blog post about using crowdSPRING:

"99 designs and their nefarious brethren have a client roster whose market recognition for the most part is similar to that of Joe's Morgue & Jerky Outlet."

Of course, this may not be contained to SMBs.


The Disruptive Potential

Have you checked out what Mountain Dew is doing with crowdsourcing (aka "DEWmocracy")? As Wired notes in a January article:


"Mountain Dew is asking consumers to choose three new sodas, from selecting the flavors to naming them, designing the cans and choosing the ad agency to promoting the product."


Not all of this is crowdsourcing design, but it is an edgy experiment in leaving the professional firms behind.

Right now, as Steve Douglas of the Logo Factory notes, the biggest chunk of business is for logos. Which you can see at the start of this post in the 99designs project list.

The U.S. Census Bureau had the graphic design industry generating $2.8 billion in revenue in 2002. It is a large, diverse, complex industry. My expectation is that design contest crowdsourcing will encroach more into large enterprises for tactical projects, as the smaller businesses continue to use them and get good results. Large companies' efforts, such Mountain Dew's DEWmocracy, Unilever's crowdsourcing contest for a TV campaign for its Peperami snack food, and Doritos' crowdsourced Super Bowl ads, add fuel to this.

Two things are needed for the crowdsourcing model to encroach further into the design industry:

• Leaderboards/reputation
  
• Smartsourcing

Leaderboards let prospective buyers know who the best are. We see them on Topcoder for programming contests. It's a way to establish visibility and credibility far beyond the recommendations you maintain on your own site. It will take some changes by the crowdsourcing sites, enabling recognition for designers who do well in contests, even if they are not picked. It also would need to have different bases for identifying top designers.

The other wrinkle is to allow a form of smartsourcing. Once the top designers are identified, they are invited for larger companies' design projects. This is pretty similar to the current state of things, except the basis for access changes somewhat. It's not just business relationships a designer/firm has established with the big ad/marketing/brand agencies. It's based on performance.

With these two elements, I can see how crowdsourcing becomes more important, more disruptive, in the world of business design.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Distributed Idea Generation Outperforms Team Brainstorming

by Hutch Carpenter


"This has significant managerial implications: if the interactive build-up [of team brainstorming] is not leading to better ideas, an organization might be better off relying on asynchronous idea generation by individuals using, for example, web-based idea management systems."


That quote is from a report by three researchers from the INSEAD and Wharton business schools. They published a study, "Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea", that analyzes a mainstay of corporate life: the brainstorming session.

Is it effective in generating quality ideas?

To find out, the researchers conducted a field experiment in which they compared two models of generating ideas:

• Team structure: Group works together at the same time together in a room to generate ideas.


• Hybrid structure: Individuals generate their ideas independently, then meet together in a group.

Their objective was to determine which of those two structures generated more ideas, ideas of higher quality and is better able to discern the quality of ideas. They found in all cases that the hybrid structure outperformed the team structure.

Extreme Value Theory

The success of idea generation in innovation usually depends on the quality of the best opportunity identified. For most innovation challenges, an organization would prefer 99 bad ideas and 1 outstanding idea to 100 merely good ideas. In the world of innovation, the extremes are what matter, not the average or the norm.

The researchers - Karan Girotra, Christian Terwiesch, Karl T. Ulrich - were interested in determining what methods generate the best ideas. They distinguish their approach from previous research which analyzed the quantity or average quality of ideas generated.

They use extreme value theory to understand the factors impacting the quality of ideas. Extreme value theory shows that the maximum value of an idea from a set of ideas is based on:

1. The sheer volume of ideas generated
   
2. Average quality of all ideas generated
   
3. The level of variance in the quality of generated ideas

These concepts are put together nicely in this graphic:



Once you understand this framework for innovation, it becomes a matter of maximizing the values for each component. Watching, of course, for correlative impacts between them.

Field Research Experiment

The three researchers conducted an exhaustive experiment to determine which of the two methods - team structure or hybrid structure - generated the highest quality ideas at the top end of the scale. Here is the summary of their experiment.

Subjects: 44 juniors, seniors and grad students at the University of Pennsylvania

Challenges: They generated 443 ideas around two challenges.

• You have been retained by a manufacturer of sports and fitness products to identify new product concepts for the student market. The manufacturer is interested in any product that might be sold to students in a sporting goods retailer.
  
• You have been retained by a manufacturer of dorm and apartment products to identify new product concepts for the student market. The manufacturer is interested in any product that might be sold to students in a home-products retailer.

Idea generation formats: Subjects were split into four clusters. Half the clusters did the team structure first, half did the hybrid structure first. The clusters then switched structures for the different ideation challenges.

Idea quality: The quality of the ideas was assessed in two ways.

1. Business value: Panel of 41 Wharton MBA students each assessed the business value of the ideas on a 1 - 10 scale
   
2. Purchase intent: Panel of 88 college students (the target market for the ideas) each assessed their own likelihood of buying a given product proposal on a 1-10 scale

Experiment format: Subjects conducted idea generation exercises as follows.

• Team structure: 30 minutes together in a room to generate ideas together. Then 5 minutes of assessing and selecting the best 5 ideas.
  
• Hybrid structure: 10 minutes of generating ideas on their own. Then 20 minutes of discussing these and new ideas. Finally, 5 minutes of assessing and selecting the best 5 ideas.

Results: Hybrid Structure Tops Team Brainstorming

The results of the experiment are eye-opening. The researchers analyzed the two approaches on the three components of extreme value theory. They find hybrid is better on the individual components of the theory, and in the ultimate test: quality of the top ideas produced.

Number of ideas generated. Hybrid structure generates three times more ideas than does the team structure. Researchers attribute this result to three dynamics:

1. Free riding: it's easy enough to ride the idea coattails of the group
   
2. Evaluation apprehension: the fear of negative reaction when proposing an idea in front of a group
   
3. Production blocking: participants have to wait while one person is speaking, limiting idea generation throughput

Idea quality: The average quality of the hybrid structure ideas was higher than that of the team structure. Specifically, 0.25 points better in business value, 0.35 points better in purchase intent. To put this in perspective, these differences translate into roughly a 30 point differential in percentile rankings. In other words, the difference between the 1st and 30th idea in a pool of 100 ideas.

Researchers attribute the decrease in idea quality for team structures to the same free riding dynamic that reduces the quantity of ideas.

Idea quality variance: The researchers found no discernible difference in idea quality variance between the hybrid and team structures.

What this means is that from extreme value theory, the quantity and average quality of ideas are the key drivers of generating the highest-ranked ideas.

Best ideas: Here's where the rubber meets the road. Which approach had the highest ranked ideas? Hybrid structure, by a landslide.

The researchers looked at the top 5 ideas, by quality scores, that emerged from the two approaches. The hybrid structure ideas were of much higher quality than those generated from the team structure. This finding held for looking at the top 3, 4 and 6 ideas as well.

To recap:

The hybrid structure produced:

• More ideas
  
• Ideas of better quality on average
  
• Highest rated ideas

Ability to Select Best Ideas

Perhaps the one down note from the study is the ability of the group to select the best ideas. Remember that in both the team and hybrid structures, the group did a consensus selection of the top ideas. Participants weren't asked to select the top ideas individually.

The researchers found a small advantage in the hybrid structure group's ability to select the top 5 ideas resulting from their ideation exercises. But it wasn't material. Indeed, they note:


"The hybrid process may generate better ideas, but that due to the noisy selection process, its relative advantage is much diminished, to the point of becoming statistically insignificant for one of our quality metrics."


"Noisy selection process", indeed. Ever been in a brainstorming session where you're supposed to rank the ideas at the end? Imagine the dynamics of resolving differences of opinion, time constraints and the extraordinary influence of certain individuals that drowns out other opinions. This is not an optimal way to determine the ideas that define innovation for your organization.

What This Means for Companies Seeking Innovation

As we described previously in "Crowdsourcing Is the New Collaboration", there are many benefits to taking a new approach to idea generation, peer collaboration and integrating innovation more deeply into an organization's culture. Advanced innovation management platforms are ideal for this approach.

As this study confirms, distributing the idea generation process, as well as the idea selection process, results in higher quality ideas for organizations. This study dovetails well with another study by Professor Ron Burt, that found that employees with access to a wider range of viewpoints and feedback generate higher quality ideas.

Brainstorming does have its benefits in terms of face-to-face interactions. Perhaps the nature of what is brainstormed needs to change. Brainstorming can be valuable for project-oriented tasks and problem-solving. But don't consider it your go-to activity for the best ideas.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Harsh Reality of Innovation

by Hutch Carpenter

Nothing like putting your heart and soul into innovation, and then getting this:


Man, tough audience. But very much in keeping with some the best advice on innovation. Which is, you can't have innovation without some failure along the way. It's inevitable.

That advice is both true, and glib. Innovation consultant Jeffrey Phillips catches the right spirit when he says:


"Another thing about 'failure' is that we try to kid ourselves that failure is a 'good thing' a learning opportunity. Well, not in most cultures.


This is the reality of innovation. It's tough. The more disruptive an innovation, the tougher it gets. And we're in the middle of seeing how it plays right now with Apple iPad and Google Buzz.

Let me ask you this: Do you personally think either the iPad or Buzz will be guaranteed successes for their respective companies? Be honest now.

My guess is you're like most of us: I don't know.

Well, truth be known, neither do Apple and Google. But they've got a history you'd bet on.


Apple and Google: Big Time Failures, Big Time Innovations

Both Apple and Google have had their share of duds in the market:


Obviously, these companies do not have a perfect record of successful innovations.

But they do have a record of pressing through failures and continuing to roll out innovations. In fact, they're consistently ranked the best in the world:


It pays to stick-to-it in trying out innovations. But can everyone?


Does Your Company Really Want Radical Innovation?

In Psychology Today, a professor at the University of Michigan gets to the issue:


From vaccines to Velcro, many inventions were spawned from accidents, seeming failures. But when Fiona Lee, psychology and business professor at the University of Michigan, explored which conditions help people experiment with novel ideas, she uncovered an interesting phenomenon: "Managers talk a lot about innovation and being on the cutting edge, but on an individual level, many people are not willing to try new things."


What's holding us back? A fear of failure.

Think about your own reaction to the question of whether the iPad and Google Buzz will be successful. It's easy enough to be uncertain as an observer. But imagine if you have to put shareholder capital in to it, affect your brand in the market and risk some career trajectories?

I will often read of the importance of taking risks and accepting some level of failure for companies to be innovative. This is very true. But it can be glib to summarily dismiss companies for not 'getting it'. When they're made up of people like you and me who possess ordinary... well, human characteristics.

Because how do you know when you're iterating toward a true high-value innovation, or you're just spinning your wheels? I'll turn again to Jeffrey Phillips:


"As Edison and countless others have demonstrated, you rarely get it right the first time, and if you are stymied by early failure, then you'll never find and implement the best ideas. Innovation, as has been pointed out by individuals with far more to say about it than me, will create some failures. Your job isn't to avoid the failures, since you can't predict them in advance, but to reduce the cost and impact of the inevitable failures. In other words, keep moving."


As I said before, I can't know for sure whether the Apple iPad or Google Buzz will be successful. But kudos to those companies for rolling out innovations that might fail. And in case you're wondering whether allowing employees some latitude to fail is worth it, check out the 5-year stock performance of Apple and Google versus the S&P 500:



Let's take this one out with the great speech from Teddy Roosevelt:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Indeed.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Four Models for Competitive Crowdsourcing

by Hutch Carpenter

Crowdsourcing is heating up in terms of corporate interest. Pepsi's decision to skip the Super Bowl in favor of a crowdsourced ideas initiative - Pepsi Refresh - is an example of the interest in the market. Digital strategy, marketing and design firm Last Exit called crowdsourcing a top digital marketing trend for 2010.

Contests are a particular form of crowdsourcing that are proving to be beneficial in a number of areas. Contests allow people from around the world to compete with one another on a specific challenge put forth by an organization. Participation is motivated by incentives commensurate with the level of the challenge.

The contest version of crowdsourcing has its own activities for gathering, filtering and selecting among the submissions of people. These activities are:

Crowdsourcing starts with the contributions of people from around the globe. These submissions are aggregated into a common site. Submissions are provided in the format matching the contest objectives.

People provide their feedback on the submissions of others. This feedback can be up-down votes, star ratings, comments and buying into ideas with virtual currency. This process can be collaborative, helping refine submissions.

Organizations establish panels of experts who review the crowdsourced submissions, and select those best meeting their requirements. Experts possess distinct domain knowledge to make the final decision in the contest.

The winners of the contest are determined by people's votes and other measures. This selection process is a mix of overall crowd sentiment, weighted for higher reputed members, and the power of individuals to leverage word-of-mouth marketing.

These components can be integrated in different ways to provide four different models for running crowdsourced contests. These four models are described below.


Model #1: Crowd Sentiment, Expert Decision


The Crowd Sentiment, Expert Decision model allows organizations to include the sentiment of the crowd as part of their decision-making process. This is valuable input for contests where the selected submissions will ultimately be put in front of the market. The crowdsourced feedback provides an early read on the potential market reaction.

This model is also ideal for cases where a collaborative spirit can refine and improve submissions. Especially for more complex contests, feedback from interested collaborators is valuable for fully understanding the opportunity in the submission and its weaknesses.

Two organizations are using our tools for this model of crowdsourcing contest. Cisco is seeking $1 billion ideas through its I-Prize contest. And the Enterprise 2.0 Conference is managing its competitive speaker proposal process with this model. Both are utilizing crowdsourced feedback as part of the decision-making process.


Model #2: Crowd Decision


The Crowd Decision model leverages the crowd for all parts of the contest. This model provides a great platform for organizations to better understand the meaning that is associated to their products and services. The submissions reflect the creativity of customers and interested parties. The feedback on a submission signals the intensity of feeling for someone's particular interpretation of meaning. Winners are determined by how the community rates their submissions.

This model is ideal for marketing purposes. It becomes a strategic engagement model, particularly where customers are talking about your organization in social media. It's a fun way to increase company awareness.


Model #3: Expert Decision


The Expert Decision model engages the global community to find solutions to complex problems. Experts review the submissions, identifying those best addressing the objective of the contest. The sentiment of the crowd is not an element in these contests, as they typically address more technical challenges.

This model also prevents theft by competitors of people's ideas. The submissions are only visible to designated experts associated with the sponsoring organization. The closed nature of submissions is important for generating interest from people with the technical competence to address a challenge.


Model #4: American Idol


The American Idol model is so-named because it reflects the selection process of that show. The community ultimately selects the winners of the contest. But the candidates in the contest are first selected by experts.

This model is good when the quality of submissions will fluctuate significantly. The experts act as a filter before the community votes. It's also appropriate when the sponsoring organization has a specific direction it wants for the winning submission. The experts identify candidate submissions consistent with the direction desired.

Four different models for running a competitive crowdsourcing initiative, each with its own characteristics and business objectives. The biggest takeaway for anyone considering such an initiative is the flexibility of approaches to accomplish different objectives.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Ideas Are Core to Enterprise 2.0

by Hutch Carpenter

Brian Solis spoke recently on what the future of social networks will be. Ideas, it turns out. As I wrote on another blog post:


"Solis, leading thinker in the integration of social media and PR, recently spoke on an intriguing concept: ideas connect us more than relationships. The premise of his argument is that ideas are what elicit passion in people. They animate us, and if we find someone with a similar interest in a given idea, we connect."


Then there was this observation by Intel's Enterprise 2.0 lead Laurie Buczek on the only quantifiable value they found in their Enterprise 2.0 efforts:


"Where we did quickly find quantifiable business value during an ideation proof of concept. Ideas that are discovered and turned into action have produced dollarized return of business value."


Both Brian and Laurie are pointing to the unique nature of ideas. Brian talks of ideas as connectors. Laurie talks of ideas being 'discovered'. If Enterprise 2.0 rests on delivering value through collaborative, emergent and social means, ideas are the top basis for leveraging these qualities.

Of course, from a pragmatic, what-do-businesses-care-about perspective, innovation is a top priority.

The top-down, Board-level importance of innovation is not a surprise. As I've seen repeatedly with our enterprise innovation work at Spigit, ideas are an excellent bottom-up basis for Enterprise 2.0.


Ideas Are Me

Perhaps the most important aspect of social is the ability to express what you're thinking. Ideas fit this dynamic quite well. Ideas are...

• Expressions of my creativity, ingenuity and problem-solving

Inside companies, we see things that we know can be improved. We see opportunities that need to be explored. We know a good answer for a particular challenge put forth by managers.

Every time you have an idea, a bit of you bonds to it. Your way of thinking, your understanding of context, the experiences you've had, the expertise you bring to bear, the work aspirations you have.

Ideas can be small, giving you satisfaction in fixing something obvious to you. They can be big, offering the possibility of work that elicits your passions.

This is powerful stuff. It is a unique intersection of something that helps the company with something that personally satisfies you.


Ideas Are the Basis for Finding Like-Minded Colleagues

When I post an idea, I create the basis for finding others. That because when I post an idea, I'm making...

• A call for your interest

Think about that. The act of publishing an idea is a broadcast across the organization. It's a tentative query to see who else feels the same way. Or if not the same way, who has an interest that overlaps mine.

This is unique to ideas. Ideas are potential. They are a change from the status quo. There are others who share at least some aspect of your idea. In large, distributed organizations, where are these people?!!

My idea is my call to form my own virtual team, to see who can help me accomplish something of value to me and the organization. I contrast this with other types of activities one might do under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella: status updates, project tasks, writing a common document, adding content to knowledge wiki. Those aren't calls to form virtual teams.

Ideas have a unique quality in team and community forming, consistent with the emergent nature of Enterprise 2.0.


Ideas Are Social Objects

A key consideration of any framework for interaction is, "what are we going to talk about?" Within the enterprise environment, an idea is...

• A social object for our interaction

The concept of social objects is powerful. It illuminates the core basis for why two or more people interact. They share an interest in some thing. We are complex beings, with multiple different interests. We won't ever match up with someone else exactly in terms of what animates. But social objects allow a sort of miniature Venn Diagram of our common interests to flourish.

Hugh MacLeod pragmatically notes, "The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else."

Leading designer Joshua Porter, also known as Bokardo. In his post, Finding Innovation in Design, he describes the AOF method of social experience design:

• A = activity you want to support
  
• O = social objects that define the activity
  
• F = features are actions people take upon social objects

You build social-oriented sites around a core set of objects and activities which attract people.

Ideas, because they represent something new, something that can affect your daily work, are terrific social objects. An idea is a proposal, and a natural basis for interacting. Contrast this with posting a document, or a page of knowledge, or a status update. Those are lower wattage, more ephemeral social objects.


Ideas Become Projects

Ideas get attention. They propose to change things, and they will need work. An idea is...

• The basis of a future project for us

What makes ideas so powerful is they are changes to the status quo. This means:

• They're going to affect people's daily work
  
• They require some work to make happen

This imbue ideas with a certain vitality. It gives them a power not seen with with other types of social computing activities, save projects themselves.

Another important aspect is that ideas will elicit passion in certain users, those we talked about earlier. If there is a chance to become part of a project team working on the idea, that is exciting. Consider times in your life you got to be part of a team, working on something that excited you.

Ideas have these qualities: possibilities, change to work routines, chance to be part of an exciting initiative. Projects have a certain aspirational quality for us employees, and ideas tap this aspect well.

There are many types of content and activities - social objects - that are part of a social computing initiative. I'd argue ideas, for a host of reasons, should be considered top amongst those social objects.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Radical Innovation of Meaning - Apple iPad

by Hutch Carpenter


"Ultimately, the iPad is a large iPod touch: a great device to draw your inspiration from, but perhaps not the seismic shift in technology that we were expecting."

- Claudine Beaumont, Apple iPad review, The Telegraph


The much anticipated announcement of Apple's iPad tablet was met with a resounding... "ho hum" or worse from much of the technology crowd. The biggest criticisms were its lack of key features (no Adobe Flash, lack of USB ports, where's the camera?, etc.). The Apple iPad as a technology innovation is a disappointment.

But with Apple, and Steve Jobs, that's not really the point now, is it?

Sure, Apple has had plenty of technological innovations along the way. But then, so has its competitors. Yes, Steve Jobs is a showman, but that effect only lasts for MacWorld presentations.

No, what Apple does well is put forth "radical innovations of meaning". That term is from Roberto Verganti, who wrote about the concept in his excellent book "Design-Driven Innovation".

Apple's skills with design-driven innovation are what will make the iPad a success.


Design-Driven Innovation: Innovation of Meaning


"Market? What market! We do not look at market needs. We make proposals to people."

- Ernesto Gismondi, Chairman, Artemide, Design-Driven Innovation


Verganti's books builds the case for a different form of innovation. One in which companies tap the undercurrents of societal changes early, and create products addressing them. As Artemide chairman Gismondi puts it, these products are so different, they are akin to "making a proposal" to a market. They are not linear updates to existing products.

As Julian Bleeker notes in his review of the book, design-driven innovation is not a "follow the trends" approach. "Trends" are what any company can do. Rather, it's deciding that conditions are right to introduce a product that plumbs changes previously unexplored in your industry.

Verganti describes this work as the radical innovation of meaning. Many purchases are based as much on meaning as they are on features. Innovation of features is an ongoing process for companies. But innovation of meaning is a stunted process for many firms.

Take a product that has an accepted use, a common set of features, and provide something new that turns the traditional meaning of the product on its head. In the book, he describes multiple examples of this, drawn mostly from Italy, his home country. For example, Alessi, a manufacturer of household items, successfully innovated the meaning of many common items. It introduced a series of playful characters that represented everyday kitchen items:

• Mandarin: citrus squeezer stylized as a Chinese mandarin
  
• Nutty the Cracker: squirrel that cracks nuts

While it may sound trivial as you read this, this product line was an absolute gangbuster in sales. Alessi figured out that people still enjoyed playful experiences, even as adults. No one else was thinking this way in the industry at the time. But now the kitchenware actively pursues emotional design. It was no accident either. Alessi spent time researching changes in societal norms. That we still like to be kids was a change they saw (and one that many of us today take for granted).

Companies that do this well are both influencers and participants in what Verganti describes as the "design discourse". This is an ongoing conversation with thinkers, tinkerers, researchers and companies who target the same evolving changes in societal context. Often, these are people outside your industry who are studying the same changes you are interested in.

It is by accessing these networks where companies can "see" evolutions of societal norms that offer opportunity. These are opportunities not driven by expressed consumer desires, but by shifts in cultural norms. Done well, companies that successfully innovate the meaning of products enjoy significant growth and profits.

Oh, and early on, these innovations of meaning can be slow to gain acceptance by the market. Explains the early iPod and Nintendo Wii reactions.


Apple iPad: What Is Its Radical Innovation of Meaning?


OK, if iPad is innovating meaning even more than it is technology, what meaning might that be? Here's my best guess:

• iPad is tapping into an emerging dynamic of a more interactive, tactile experience with digital technology and information. These interactions make technology less of an interface, and more of an extension of ourselves and our environment.

The tweets above are a couple that show the natural way children engage with technology. Given the iPhone experience, they turn around and want to apply it to other devices. Buttons on devices, our traditional form of interaction, are divorced from the screen. They provide a measure of distance from the digital experience.

Touch, however, represents a new level of intimacy in the digital experience. In technology terms, it's just an alternative form of interface. Touch, mouse, tab, whatever. But touch is a vital human sense, and a core part of experience. It's how we interact with others, how we shop, experience textures and so much more.

In terms of the "design discourse", there are pointers of changes ahead in terms of integrating touch more deeply into our digital engagement.


Digital Wellbeing Labs: Responsive Feedback Behaviors

Designer Alexander Grunsteidl noted the impact of both the iPod and the Wii on our perception of how to interact with technology:

The Wii and iPhone, and before the iPod click wheel, have created a popular introduction to gesture based interfaces, demonstrating responsive feedback behaviours, applying "natural" physical effects like flipping and inertia, similar to the ones we are accustomed to in the real world, to improve usability expectations of an interface.

As new "cultures of use" emerge we are creating opportunities to form a language of gestures, similar to the conventions of "right-clicking" and standardised keyboard shortcuts.

Note the term "culture of use". Not industry trends. Because the dominant form of interaction for computers and video games is still mouse and buttons. And consumers aren't asking for touch.

But there is an underlying change in thinking about how people interact with technology and information.


Architectural Design: Digital Intimacy

University of Nottingham Nottingham UK student Stephen Townsend received a commendation in the recent President's Medal competition in the U.K. His entry, Digital Intimacy, depicts a concept where interaction is built into the architecture.

If you notice the graphic to the right, you will see people reaching out their hands and interacting through touch. Townsend calls it the "kinesthetic interaction space". Kinesthetic refers to a style of learning based on physical activities.

He designed this kinesthetic interaction space as a therapeutic solution for children with special needs. Here's how he describes it:


"The 'Kinesthetic Interaction Space' is conceived as an interactive architectonic intervention aimed at children with autism, providing sensory stimulation to assist with intervention methods and aid interaction with other children through shared kinesthetic experience. The focus of the thesis is on the development of dynamic material systems that could enable new forms of interactive environment. Architecture is conceptualised as an embodied interface and physical space has been fused with digital media in order to stimulate the imagination of inhabitants. K.I.S. is intended to facilitate playful explorations and fluid dialogues between people. The user learns to interact with their environment through an intuitive process, engaging the physical presence of inhabitants and forming spatial narratives."


While Townsend's concept addresses children with autism, the underlying design is consistent with greater digital intimacy overall.


TEDEx Talk: Phones That Touch Us

PhD student Fabian Hemmert presented at a recent TEDx talk. He is working on a concept where phones include physical movements that better connote actions to people using them. In the video below, you'll see him describe how the phone would shift weight in relation to changes in movement on a map.



As Hemmert notes, humans live in a physical world, one "which tastes good, feels good smells good". He wants to design products that better integrate that experience.


iPad: The Future of Computing

Those three examples I just gave are part of a larger design discourse about the nature of digital engagement in our future. Are we "locked in" to the mouse and keyboard? Or will we continue to evolve the interaction experience?

In Wired, Brian X. Chen sees things similarly:


"If you think about how a computer like this will impact people sociologically, suddenly the iPad is far more than a larger iPod Touch, as many have described it. It's the computer for everyone: an idea Apple has been working toward for years.

That doesn't mean the iPad will be the only computer for everyone and destroy every PC on the market, because that's not even remotely likely. But it will introduce a significant new category."


Bold pronouncement for sure. But entirely consistent with a radical innovation of meaning. Henry Blodget sees an outcome of this drive for digital intimacy: pervasiveness.


They won't live on desks, the way desktops do, and they won't be carried everywhere, the way mobile phones are. They'll just be there, around the house, on tables and counters, the way today's books, magazines, games, and newspapers are, booted up, ready to use.


Keep in mind student Stephen Townsend's kinesthetic interaction space, built into the house. How about an iPad in every room of the house, ready to go? You can see thinking evolving on similar lines here.

I can see people becoming quite attached to their iPads. Their little units of digital intimacy.

Once you see where this is going, it should come as no surprise that Apple may be working on a larger version of its iPad, as a full computer. Steve Jobs is placing his chips on this radical innovation of meaning.

Related Posts:

• Apple's Hidden Disruptive Innovation


• Insights to Drive Apple iPad Success


• Will Apple Introduce the Innovation Expected from Google?

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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Internet Future Driven by User Reputation Scores

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent interview with EMC's Stu Miniman about the future of the web, I predicted that in 20 years, we'll all have online reputation scores. Little badges, numbers that communicate our level of authority, this sort of thing. And these reputations will have tangible impact.

Three different trends come together at some point in the future to make this happen. These trends have been underway for a while, but come together at some tipping point in the years ahead. Here's a visualization of the trends:


It's helpful to discuss each one, in the context of online reputations.


Rate performance of businesses

eBay, which went public back in 1998, played an important role in socializing the concept of people providing online ratings for online sellers. After we receive our purchase, we rate the seller. The collective wisdom identifies top sellers. Got your eye in that Donkey Kong game? Who are you most likely to trust...?


Amazon picked up on this, once it introduced third party sellers into the mix. You can see the percentage of positive ratings for the different sellers. Personally, I have paid premiums (i.e. higher prices) for the assurance that comes from a higher rated seller.

Yelp has taken this concept of rating a seller, and applied to offline consumer experiences. Want to get a burrito in San Francisco? You're likely to go with the highest rated restaurants.

These ratings make up for our lack of information about various providers of services. One could do a lot of online research, and asking friends, before buying. But these ratings do quite well as shorthand ways of assessing quality. They've made it easy to transact, without knowing someone ahead of time.

The rating ethos is expanding. On Facebook, you can 'like' people's entries. We 'love' music on Last.fm. We 'favorite' tweets. We 'digg' and 'buzz up' stories. Implicitly, we provide ratings when we share content via different social networks. Online engagement allows for this.


Migration of transparent work and information online

I found this recent Kaiser Family Foundation study fascinating. The amount of time kids spend online - smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device - is now at an all-time high. There's no denying this: future workers are going to be more accustomed to online engagement and information-seeking than any generation before. It's their lifestyle:


More generally, an important distinction from the web of the 1990s and early 2000s is that we aren't just reading and transacting. Individuals are providing the content. More every day, in fact. We have transferred some of the engagement and contributions from the offline world online. Actually, we're probably creating more content than we ever have,

For workers, the growth of Enterprise 2.0 continues. A key outcome of that? More and more work is making its way online. When it's available there, and not just in a Word document on the hard drive or email in an inbox, it's findable and usable by everyone. Your colleagues know quite well what the quality of your work and contributions are.

Do you think all of this stops, and we go back to message-relaying marathoners, smoke signals and carrier pigeons? No. Enterprise 2.0 and social media will continue their growth apace. And increasingly, this time spent online is through social media.

More and more people will be publishing their work, their ideas, their knowledge, their conversational bits, their creativity... online. It's just going to keep increasing.


Rely on social media for information

An emerging trend is the transition of where we seek information. Remember libraries, magazines and microfiche? Then the 1.0 websites where we got information? Then the portals that aggregated information from major media sites? Then search augmented all this information consumption?

Well, the next wave is to rely on our social connections to deliver interesting, relevant information to us. As was famously said by a college student in 2008:


"If the news is important, it will find me."


A recent Nielsen study confirms this growing tendency to use social media as a first stop to find information:


Admittedly, the leading social sites of today - blogs, Facebook, Twitter - have a ways to go before they become a large percentage of the population's first choice. And it'd help if Twitter could get their search working further back than a week or two.

But this survey and anecdotal evidence points toward an increased reliance on others to provide information to us.


Putting this all together

It's that last trend, still early in its cycle, that really points toward the development of formal, online reputations. When we started transacting online with complete strangers or small businesses we never knew, we needed a basis for understanding their credibility. It turns out, crowdsourced ratings are excellent indicators of quality. It also causes small businesses to be aware of the quality of their products and services.

In the years ahead, expect increased usage of social media for getting information and sourcing people, products and services. As an example, research firm IDC just released these survey results:


"57% of U.S. workers use social media for business purposes at least once per week. The number one reason cited by U.S. workers for using social tools for business purposes was to acquire knowledge and ask questions from a community."


As reliance on people for information increases, expect an increased need for knowing which strangers provide the top quality information. Note I said "strangers" there. One thing we will continue to do is to rely on our "friends" (social media sense of the word) for ongoing daily information. The people we connect with on the various social sites.

But that's the only way we will get information. Or make decisions. Great case in point? Google's real-time search results:


If innovation is the focus of your work, wouldn't you want to be included in those Google results? Here's the thing. Google doesn't just put any old tweet or other form of real-time content in there. As Google's Amit Singhal stated:


"You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone - then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers, his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely," Singhal says. "It is definitely, definitely more than a popularity contest," he adds.


Note his words: "You earn reputation."

PR agency Edelman created a ranking algorithm called Tweetlevel, which analyzes people on the basis of influence, popularity, engagement and trust. Tweetlevel was recently used to create a list of the top analysts on Twitter. As the author of that post noted, one purpose for the list was to answer the question: "Should they spend their limited time interacting with analysts via twitter?" Presumably if you're an analyst in the Top 50, 'yes'.

Again, reputation being used for a defined purpose.

Ross Dawson wrote a good piece about the changes coming due to the increasing visibility of "people's actions and character." He notes the impact of reputation on seeking professionals for work:


"Many professionals will be greatly impacted by these shifts. The search for professional advice is often still highly unstructured, based on anecdotal recommendations or simple searches. As importantly, clients of large professional firms may start to be more selective on who they wish to work with at the firm, creating a more streamlined meritocracy.

The mechanisms for measuring professional reputation are still very crude, yet over the coming decade we can expect to see substantial changes in how professionals are found. This will impact many facets of the industry."


And Bertrand Dupperin sees a similar dynamic playing out internally:


"Use internal social networks to build a kind of marketplace that would put work capacity and competence on a given subject in relation with needs and allow those who can apply for an assignment instead of blind assignments to those who can't."


In a world where individuals emerge as important sources of information, products and services, people will need a way to break through the limited knowledge they'll have on any one person. Look for online reputations to emerge as a way to fill that gap.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Small Business Needs Social Software

by Hutch Carpenter

A general observation of collaborative work is this:


"The larger and more diverse are your personal network of contacts, the higher the quality of your ideas and project work."


In the enterprise market, the opportunity being seized by companies is to better connect employees. The sheer size of these firms makes it obvious that they are not optimizing collaborative activities. Social software plays an important role in helping that. SunGard's CEO has a great take on this issue in the New York Times.

But what about small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)? Do they have issues with maintaining connections? We'll tackle that issue in a second. First, however...

The Challenge of Growth: Traditional Collaboration Modes Don't Scale

When a small company starts out, it's rather easy to stay on top of what colleagues are doing. There just aren't too many of them. You easily banter, bounce ideas off one another and contribute your part to projects.

It's natural human interactions.

The problem is that small businesses continue to rely exclusively on the tried-and-true methods of collaborative work as they grow. Keep on with the emails, the desk meetings, the lunches. Sure, it's fun to keep with those who sit essentially in your visual perimeter. But it means you're missing out on a lot of valuable ideas and insight from colleagues.

The graphic below shows the challenge of scale in collaborative work:



The easy interactions of old are now replaced by the departmental exchanges, and the daily work inherent in those micro environments. The small firm mentality that employees enjoyed with fewer employees is no longer applicable as the company expands.

Yet as research has shown, employees who are able to break out of departmental silos and leverage a diversity of connections perform better in terms of innovation.

So how does this fit SMBs?

Metcalfe's Law Hits Dunbar's Number

Metcalfe's Law. Initially addressing fax machines, it speaks to the value of networks. Specifically:


"The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected participants."


For those who study the value of information networks, this law makes sense. You increase your number of information sources. And all things being equal, the person with greater information has a decided advantage in term of:

• Awareness of key issues
  
• Long tail knowledge of different issues
  
• Access to information that will solidify an idea
  
• Identification of colleagues who can help advance an idea or a project
  
• Different points of view and information that make up for the knowledge limitations we all have

Every new connection inside a company increases these information advantages, for all members of the network. The problem occurs when employees are only using traditional methods for making and accessing these connections: email, desk conversations, departmental meetings.

They run into Dunbar's Number. I use Dunbar's Number here as a heuristic, describing the mental limit we each have to stay in top of what others are working on. With traditional means of engaging in collaborative work, the Metcalfe's Law advantages of information diversity are limited by our Dunbar's Number ability to keep up with the new connections.

This graph describes the issue, and SMBs' opportunity:



Up to a certain point, employees can stay on top of what their colleagues are working on, and interact relatively easily. Is this up to 150 employees? Maybe. As Danah Boyd noted about Dunbar's Number:


"He found that the MAXIMUM number of people that a person could keep up with socially at any given time, gossip maintenance, was 150. This doesn't mean that people don't have 150 people in their social network, but that they only keep tabs on 150 people max at any given point."


150 is a maximum number. Meaning for many of us it's less. And I'd argue, in a work context, where we're busy delivering on the daily tasks that define our jobs, it's an even lower theoretical maximum.

Which means at some point, small businesses begin to lose out on those information advantages when they rely only on traditional collaborative work modes. In the graph above, that's the part of the graph where Dunbar's Number crosses over Metcalfe's Law.

Call it the Metcalfe's Law Opportunity Gap.

At that point, companies need to look at systems that allow employees to share and filter information, and to interact with others outside their daily sphere of contacts. To access non-redundant information and points of view.

This is a problem well-known to large organizations. It also applies to SMBs as well. It's why they need social software at a certain point in their growth trajectory.

This is an important issue for innovation. So many of these employees will have front line customer and supplier experience, and ideas for the business. But visibility on these ideas will get harder and harder as the firm grows.


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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Basically Anything Can Be Innovated

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent post, Four Quadrants of Innovation, I described one type of innovation as leveraging existing technologies, serving existing customers. In popular culture, this type of innovation is... well, frankly it's boring. No cool new advances, no new stuff you haven't tried before.

But what is compelling about this type of innovation is how well it fits Clayton Christensen's focus on understanding the "job" your product has been hired to do. Companies need to stay on top of their products, and changes in customer behaviors. Sometimes that's sexy new technology advances. Mostly, it's not. Rather, it's good old roll-up-the-sleeves and innovate to meet changing customer needs and expectations.

SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha wrote a great post recently where she asked Is it time to reimagine your product or service? She makes the point that many web services reflect their vintage year. They fail to evolve as the market does, ultimately falling further behind the curve of customer expectations.

Rashmi Sinha's post very much reminds me of Clayton's Christensen's point of view. Your customers have:

• Requirements you have not yet discovered at any given point in time


• Changing requirements over time that you need to decide whether to meet

On top of that, there's something deeper in the Sinha's post. There are times you need to push need innovations, even if your customers aren't yet asking for them. Let your customers catch up to you.

These points don't just apply to web services. They apply to all manner of products and services. Everything can be innovated. One key is to understand that sometimes innovation comes in service delivery or business models, not just product features.

Even things you wouldn't expect to be innovated, can indeed be innovated.

In line with this, I came across a great post by Jake Kuramoto of Oracle AppsLab. In Unexpected Innovation, Jake notes two recent innovations he has seen with...

...traffic lights. Of all things.

Yes, Traffic Lights Can Be Innovated

The first innovation is actually not all that surprising, and really is the application of existing technology. New lights use energy efficient LED bulbs. They have some issues to be worked out in terms of their ability to melt accumulated snow. But they make a lot of sense.

The second innovation is one that really speaks to a deeper understanding of what's going with traffic lights. See the pictures at the top of this post? Designer Damjan Stankovic came up with a concept where a timer is added to stoplights. Stankovic posits these benefits of such a timer:

• Less pollution. Drivers can turn their engines off and cut carbon emissions while waiting for the green light.


• Less fuel consumption. Turning off your vehicle while waiting on the traffic light can lower fuel consumption in the long run.


• Less stress. Since you know exactly how long you have to wait you can sit back and clear your head for a while.


• Safer driving. With the Eko light both drivers and pedestrians can be fully aware of how much time they have left before the light changes and that way reduce the chance for potential traffic accidents.

That last bullet is the benefit that intrigues me most, in terms of the job I want a stoplight to do: safer driving. Here in San Francisco, we have walk signals at intersections that include countdowns. When the WALK signals appears, you can see how many seconds are left to cross the street.

Both Jake Kuramoto use these walk signal countdowns in a different way. When you are driving, you can see the countdowns. If you're, say 50 meters out, this gives you something of an advantage in how you approach the intersection. When there are only a few seconds left, you know the light will be yellow well before you get to the intersection. With kids in the car, I slow down to be ready to stop for what will be a late yellow light by the time I reach the intersection.

Now if someone had asked me, I wouldn't have come up with a requirement for traffic lights to have timers. But because someone put those countdowns on the walk signals, I've found myself using them in my driving when they are available. And Stankovic's design makes me realize that, "hey, I want those timers on traffic lights."

Which goes to show you. Everything can be innovated upon. Even the most... uh... pedestrian of products and services.

Finally, I love this quote from Amazon's Jeff Bezos in a Newsweek interview:


"There's a tendency, I think, for executives to think that the right course of action is to stick to the knitting - stick with what you're good at. That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes out from under you if you're not constantly adding to your skill set."


Markets are always shifting. Don't think that anything is immune from innovation.

Image Credits: John Chuckman, Damjan Stankovic

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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Presenting Twitter in Search Results

by Hutch Carpenter

In a recent post, I described some ways in which tweets should be ranked in search results. A good follow-on question is...

How should tweets be presented in search results?

It's an interesting question - how exactly would you want to see tweets in your Google and Bing search results? And it's an important question, as searches are critical bases for discovering information and huge drivers of traffic.

Tweets are different from web pages. They are more ephemeral, but also much more current. They're short nature means we can consume them much more quickly than fuller web pages. In many ways, their brevity reduces their "burden of interestingness". Read, move on. Read, move on. Read, move on.

Tweets are small nuggets of insight, and pointers to good content. Web pages are the foundational information components. The value of the two digital forms is different. Thus, it makes sense to consider options for presenting these different types of information to people.

Three different designs for presenting tweets in Google and Bing search results come to mind:

• Separate tweets-only search page
  
• Tweets displayed in a box on the same page with web pages
  
• Tweets integrated into the overall search results

Let's take a look at the options. For added context, I've included appropriate musical selections.

At the bottom of this post, I've set up a poll asking which approach you'd prefer.

Tweets-only search results

Musical theme: Gotta keep 'em separated.

This is the Bing way. A separate URL for tweets. It's an acknowledgment that tweets really are different from web pages. The graphic below conceptualizes this approach, with a search on 'Madrid':


The graphic above puts tweets searches more in line with overall searches. Right now Bing has no link to tweet searches on its home page. You just have to know the URL exists. Of course, the Microsoft Bing team is working on incorporating the firehose into its search experience, so that may change.

Positives

• Dedicated page allows for much more creativity with presenting tweets, as Bing has shown
  
• Visible link/tab keeps tweet searches more in-the-flow of searchers' actions
  
• Users could easily toggle between the tabs for different types of information
  
• Minimizes risk of disruption to current "golden egg" of web searches

Negatives

• Forces an extra step to see potentially relevant information - click the tweets tab
  
• Somewhat diminishes the awareness of tweets' real-time, up-to-date nature by using same tab structure applied to more static web pages

Tweets in same-page box

Musical theme: Man in the box.

The presentation of real-time tweets on the same page is something Google is experimenting with currently. The philosophy here is that you're looking for multiple types of information in a search. Google already displays web page links, images, YouTube videos, maps, PDFs and other types of content. Tweets are just another type of content.

Something I'd like to see is a separate box of the tweets on the search results page, as shown below:


This design effectively distinguishes tweets from other types of content, while preserving the "all information on one page" philosophy. This is important for Google and Bing advertising, making the search results page even more engaging.

Open question: what's better for ad click volumes? Multiple pages of different content (e.g. separate tabs described previously)? Or a single page with more engaging content?

Aside from the information aspect of tweets, there is also a people aspect. Tweets are as much about the person as they are the content. The separate presentation of tweets distinguishes them from web pages, PDFs, videos and the like.

Positives

• Relevant, up-to-date content improves value of searches
  
• In-the-flow of existing search behavior
  
• Real-time nature is engaging
  
• Find people as well as content

Negatives

• Smaller space constrains presentation options
  
• Potential for a too-crowded visual presentation

Because of the volume of searches run through Google and Bing, there will be a premium on ensuring the quality of the tweets presented. This is important regardless, but even more so here with the number of times people will see the tweets. See Search Engine Tweet Ranking Algorithms for thoughts on how to do this.

Tweets integrated with overall search results

Musical theme: Happy Together

There is a third design option. Why not put the tweets right in the mix of overall search results? Treat them less as exotic new forms of content, and more as just another type for searchers to click on. The graphic below conceptualizes this:


A tweet is just another URL that can point searchers to relevant content. The challenge is that Google and Bing need to alter their ranking algorithms to allow tweets to be served up high in search results. Something like a pagerank for the twitter account itself. If it has relevant content and a high "Twitter pagerank", it gets served up higher in the search results.

Positives

• Searchers get tweets in a highly familiar way
  
• Minimizes risk of disruption to current "golden egg" of web searches

Negatives

• Undermines the fresh, up-to-date nature of tweets
  
• Will limit presentation of relevant tweets due to inadequate "Twitter pagerank"
  
• Reduces the people aspect of the tweets
  
• Lack of real-time flow diminishes engagement of the results page

Of course, tweets are served up in search results today. But that generally happens with very specific multi-word searches that match the tweet, or including the word "twitter" in the search. The design above brings tweets more fully into the pantheon of content, displaying them highly in search results for basic keywords.

I imagine smart folks can come up with other designs for displaying tweets. Leave a comment on these three or any other designs you think might be interesting.

Also, take a second and vote in the poll below. I'm curious what people think about the different possibilities for displaying tweets.

Thanks.

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Hutch Carpenter is the Vice President of Product at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.