Lately we’ve been working with the public sector on some community building efforts. In a recent session we introduced a team to open source principles, general use of collaborative web technologies, and the latest on-line civic participation work. Then, we asked them to do some searching on their own for public sector platforms or campaigns for participation.

Here’s what they came up with during the short span of time. You may have seen most of these sites, and many more are out there. The team was quick to point out that some organizations are definitely doing it better than others. If you have stellar, or not-so-stellar, examples share them.

Open Government Innovations Gallery
Santa Cruz Budget
Wikified Army Field Guide
CDC IdeaLab
Regulations.gov
Apps for Democracy
Massachusetts Open Data Initiative
Data.gov
Kansas Transportation Online Community

Clearly, it’s no longer groundbreaking. And, as people make that necessary switch from evangelist to practitioner, the question should be: Are we paying attention and doing things as effectively as we can?

Not all these efforts have the same aim, and with the ever-maturing taxonomy of all things open it’s important to know what model is best suited for the situation. But, what we’re interested in is community building. The most basic distinction we can make is the difference between the two often-thrown around terms crowdsourcing and open source, as David and Chris each wrote here and here, respectively.

This is where the real work and next frontier for practitioners exists. It’s not just technology, press releases, or prize money. Rather, it’s the overall strategy, design, and message of the platform (loosely defined) constructed and carried out as a coherent method for creating and engaging a community.

There are some things to pay attention to here. They might be brushed off as questions and challenges, but more importantly they’re opportunities to do things well.

-Is what we’re asking of the community in line with interest and ability?

-Are there clear goals; ones either agreed to or developed by the community?

-Is this platform reinforcing or improving a representative democracy and all that comes with it, rather than replacing or detracting from it?

-How sustainable is the community, should it be a short-term or a long-term effort?

-Do we have a way to measure the health of the community and the know-how and tools to guide it when needed?

-Are the legal and technical dimensions set appropriately so that innovation happens within and external to the community?

-Do we bring the right physical world characteristics, attitudes, and norms that we want and maybe discourage the ones we don’t want?

-Do we have an idea of even what this “we” means and where that “we” should fall on the spectrum from free-for-all to facilitator to despot?

These are just a handful of the things we work on and pay attention to daily (along with my collaborators at Georgia Tech). Anyone embarking on a community building or participation project, especially in the public sector, needs to be, too. Community building like many things will always be more of an art than a science, but with the growing examples out there we need to do a better job generalizing knowledge from both successes and failures.

Tinkering with a brand, whether public or private, and requesting the participation and precious time of others, is not something where you just roll out a platform and hope. We can and should get to the point where there is a degree of certainty in practice. And, of course, share the knowledge.

When I first entered the corporate world five years ago after nearly twenty years of running my own business, I was definitely a fish out of water. As a direct report to the CEO, I participated in many of the most important conversations taking place in the company. Being a designer, I often had points of view rather different from the other executives sitting around the table. Sometimes, after offering such a point, I would find them looking at me like I was insane.

The last two days I’ve posted blogs based on articles in recent editions of MITSloan Management Review and the Harvard Business Review. I thought I would share a sample of the best quotes from these magazines— today I’ll focus on HBR (JULY/AUG 2009); tomorrow I’ll look at the MITSloan. While these thoughts and research-based ideas may be new to the business world, they are not to the design world.

The Big Shift— Measuring the Forces of Change

“One of the easiest but most powerful ways firms can achieve the performance improvements promised by technology is to jettison management’s distinction between “creative talent” and the rest of the organization. All workers can continually improve the performance by engaging in creative problems solving, often by connecting with peers inside and outside the firm.”

from HBR; July/Aug 2009; “Leadership in the New World”

“An executive team on its own can’t find the best solutions. But leadership can generate more leadership deep in the organization.”

“Embrace disequilibrium— keeping people in a state that creates enough discomfort to induce change, but not so much that they fight, flee, or freeze.”

from HBR; July/Aug 2009; “Strategy in the New World: The 10 Trends You Have to Watch”

“Corporate leaders need to demonstrate to civil society that they understand popular and political concerns related to executive compensation, risk management, board oversight, and the treatment of employees facing layoffs.”

Management models “need to incorporate more-realistic version of human behavior— most likely by drawing on behavior economics, becoming more dynamic, and integrating real-world feedback— and… business leaders need to get better at using them.”

Regulation in the New World: Government in Your Business

“The changes afoot have been on the horizon for some time, thanks to long-term trends such as deepening public distrust of business.”

Shareholders First? Not So Fast…

“Why should past labor (capital) receive so much preference over current labor (employees)?”

“Consider that there are literally scores of recent studies showing the gains in profitability and productivity that companies have made— not by putting investors’ interests first but by implementing high-commitment work practices. These include investing in training, decentralizing decision making, and having pay contingent on organizational, not just individual, performance. Other sources show the benefits companies reap from customer loyalty and high levels of customer satisfaction.”

[DB NOTE: I was struck by the use of "high-commitment" rather that "accountability" in the paragraph above. Machine parts need to be "accountable" but innovative organizations thrive via deep personal commitment. Fodder for a future blog]

Restoring America’s Competitiveness

“Corporate management must overhaul its practices and governance structures so the no longer exaggerate the payoffs and discount the dangers of outsourcing production and cutting investments in R&D.”

“Stop blaming Wall Street for short-term behavior… When companies promise to increase returns quarter after quarter, that’s what Wall Street expects. But when they articulate a credible long-term strategy and demonstrate a capacity to execute that strategy, the capital markets have given them the necessary room to achieve it.”

“Managers would serve their companies more wisely by recognizing that informed judgment is a better guide to making such decisions than an analytical model loaded with arbitrary assumptions. There is no way to take the guesswork out of the process.

“Only be rejuvenating its innovative capabilities can America return to a path of sustainable growth.”

Sane or insane? You decide. More tomorrow…

For too long, advertising firms and marketing groups have misbranded branding. In an effort to make it sound mysterious, they’ve added “TM” symbols and acted like they had some incredible process that the rest of the world missed. Too often, they overcharged and under delivered, and even more often, a lot of smart business leaders fell for it.

At face value, branding promises control and cash, both of which are openly worshipped by said business leaders, many of whom continue to pay top dollar for access to this “mysterious” formula for measuring a company’s worth.

The simple truth is that branding an organization isn’t really much different from building a reputation for an individual. You build a great brand by doing the right things, authentically, over and over again. It takes time. There are no short cuts, no secret ingredients. And there never were.

In the July/August issue of the Harvard Business Review, there’s an interesting article identifying “The 10 Trends You Have To Watch.” Honestly, I love the HBR, but these “trends” do make me smile a bit.

Like the final words of the intro:

“We also see signs of new forces emerging… The overall picture is of an altered business landscape. It does seem there will be no going back to the pre-crisis world.”

You don’t say.

Honestly, I’ll be quoting that line often. Seems a lot of smart, successful business leaders think they can continue to compete like they have for the past 20 years. It shouldn’t shock anyone that our world is changing by the minute, but I’m continually surprised by how many people think the old way will continue to serve their needs.

Maybe they’ll listen to the HBR. Maybe not. But, if they want to compete and innovation is fundamental to their ability to do so, well, they have a lot of changing ahead of them.

And with change on the menu, HBR provides evidence of another trend you might have heard about: Trust in business is running out. And here I found these revolutionary words:

“Regaining trust also means dispensing with the view that the only objective of management is to increase shareholder value.”

They note that 62 percent of adults in 20 countries trusted corporations less in December 2008 than they had the year before. This should concern strategists because “a low-trust environment makes everything about doing business more difficult… Loss of trust leads to higher transaction cost, lower brand value, and greater difficulty attracting, retaining and managing talent.”

News flash: this is not a trend.

This is how it has always been. Marketing gurus and their business cohorts may have confused matters over the past several decades. While their pockets are full, they’ve played a huge part in today’s business crisis environment.

Once and for all, branding is NOT marketing. Marketing is a brand tactic. It’s past time for all of us to get back to the fundamentals of branding. Authenticity. Value. Reputation. Credibility. Trust.

Famed social ecologist and the “father of modern management,” Peter Drucker once advised that the only purpose of a business is to create customers. That type of thinking lead companies to conduct marketing research, determine who their customers are and what their customer want to hear. They created positioning platforms, messaging, advertising— the whole nine yards— in an effort to create customers. For the second half of the 20th century, that model kicked ass. At least for the advertising and marketing firms who did it well. Or could convince their clients they did it well.

Today’s world is different. Duh. Customers are in control. They don’t believe authoritative voices. They don’t trust their messages. They no longer trust the media such companies employ. They don’t have to; they now connect to more authentic voices that they trust via the internet and other social media. It’s second nature.

The broad and rapidly growing consumer preference for networked media means that traditional advertising is now suspect.  The media of advertising comes with an underlying meaning— an agreed upon contract that the advertiser may bullshit you if that helps them make a sale.  That’s the meaning. We all know it. The medium is the message.

So what’s a company to do? Branding is about building credibility. About establishing and scaling your reputation. So, why use social or networked media— such trendy media— to build brand?

Networked media isn’t important because it’s trendy. It’s important because it creates customer-driven innovation. It creates brand evangelists. It can help build a collaborative internal culture and engaged work force. It demands authenticity— especially in the form of customer experience.

So can Twitter really save brands that don’t provide good experiences? That’s the question asked by Fast Company blogger Rupa Chaturvedi, who cautions companies against relying on social media to influence customer behavior when the brand doesn’t live up to the hype they’re trying to create.

These networks can be a highly effective way to build your brand externally. But there’s a catch. It only works when the messages are true. You know they’re true when they’re open. And transparent. And valuable. You know they’re successful when the network grows organically.

But Twitter, Facebook, etc. are the media. They are not the strategy. The strategy is community building. Community building is the ‘new’ marketing.

A few years ago while returning home from a trip to San Francisco I had a short lay over in the Salt Lake City airport. I browsed through the airport book store and picked up a copy of “Made To Stick.” I had read some very positive reviews and I loved the design of the cover. Glancing over a few pages, I  found the writing simple and strong. I bought a copy and finished it on the flight. When I landed I purchased copies for everyone in my office; all storytellers can benefit from the Heath brothers explanations of what we do.

At the time, my team at Red Hat has just finished the first of many short animations we created in-house that we titled “Real Technology Lessons.” As part of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 launch, we wanted to show that Red Hat understood the most basic problems our customers faced every day. Red Hat was the leading Linux provider in the world. Which meant we worked closely with the open source community to develop software for the Linux operating system. We delivered enterprise-ready, open source solutions. We supported and serviced these solutions using a subscription model. Very abstract and unfamiliar ideas for most IT purchasers.

We began by locking in a room one our brightest technical marketing guys— Joel Berman— with Jonathan Opp, a wonderful writer who I have longed referred to as Red Hat’s poet laureate. Together, they began to create the basic idea of a series of very simple stories. The team quickly grew as additional writers, designers and animators (Tim Kiernan, Rebecca Fernandez, Bascha Harris, Josh Gajownik, Adrienne Yancey, Chris Grams, Greg deKoenigsburg) joined in the open collaborative process. Soon ’servers’ became characters with personalities. Everything— the design, animations, voice overs, soundtrack— created internally. We kept it simple, true to the KISS principle.

One of the earliest lesson I learned in design school (thank you again, Michael Pause) was the KISS principle— Keep It Simple, Stupid. It works, of course. Made to Stick does a wonderful job explaining why. In their terms, we at Red Hat turned our large, complex, abstract stories into parables— simple, accessible and memorable stories easy for others to repeat. That’s how an idea passes from one person to another. In this case, we made our videos ’sticky’ so people would want to watch it. And share it.

That’s the simplest storytelling— and branding— there is…

I continue to recommend Made to Stick— one of the best books I’ve ever read on the power and practice of storytelling. If you want to see great examples of great storytelling, take a look at Real Technology Lessons. I’m still proud of this work.