Crowd-Sourced Pay Raise

Today I spotted this link in @faris’s Twitter feed. It’s a homegrown report comparing the current salaries of account planners in large advertising agencies. Now salary comparison reports are nothing new, and I have zero interest in what account planners are paid, but the way this report seems to have come into existence is pretty incredible.

According to the foreword in the report, the author ( Heather LeFevre ) found herself in a pretty normal predicament; she felt she was underpaid, but couldn’t prove it. So instead of sitting on her hands, she put together an anonymous survey and sent it out to her network inquiring about their skill level and pay scale. She promised to share out the results and she’s been conducting this experiment for a few years. So, with a cheap web survey and a decent address book, she completely turned an age old process on it’s head.

This is pretty inspiring for me for a few reasons. First, instead of wringing her hands that she didn’t have the information to figure out her problem, she just went after the data. Instead of reinventing the wheel, she used simple tools she had at her disposal- an anonymous survey and an email. The data we don’t have often seems to be the first roadblock to progress; we don’t start because we’re not sure. This is such a great example of how to keep it simple and get it going.

Second, she solved for her problem, not all the world’s problems. If she would have stepped back and thought to herself “this is a big idea, how can create a salary report for the entire industry” she probably would have failed. Even limiting to the industry, she probably wouldn’t have gotten enough responses to complete the first report. By keeping the effort small, she could actually engage her audience. There are salary comparison websites all over the web (Glassdoor.com, Salary.com). These sites promise to share salary data, but they never seem to get enough scale to be useful. The idea behind the concept is so big people don’t know where they fit in the process. I love how she used technology to amplify her effort and didn’t make building the tool the object of her project.

There’s a big idea here for me. It’s the same thing that drove the success of Facebook (and social media in general). How can you use technology to amplify the network, connect people and then get the hell out of the way. The Internet isn’t much different than a good house party- if you can set the stage for people to interact, the party will usually take care of itself.

Selective Amplification

Henry Jenkin’s article on Harvard’s Web Ecology project just blew me out of my chair. The study charts the Twitter activity related to Michael Jackson’s death, how people reported to each other, how fast, etc. You should check out the graph behind that link, 471 thousand people tweeted about his death over a four hour period (1.8M over 10 days). By the way, this was the same event that fooled Google as a spam event, so they blocked all requests.

Beyond the volume of people tweeting around MJ’s death, there is this graph that compares the Iran controversy to MJ, which is far more interesting to me. Roughly the same number of tweet over a 10 day period, distributed over a different area. You can see the difference between breaking news and a complex conversation, which os pretty cool. All this from 140 characters across millions of people…that just blows my mind.

Gaming Inspiration

(warning: heavy nerding ahead)

I usually find lots of inspiration from video games. I’m not a big gamer, but I’m fascinated with the space. Usually it’s less about the graphics or the game content, and more about the interactions that have been designed into the game. As games go, there seems to be a lot of really interesting things going on in massive-multiplayer games and web and phone-based games lately. Console games are sort of pushing each other deeper into this better graphics/extra gore niche. That’s mostly games for hardcore gamers. I’m more interested in what happens when there’s a wider cross-section of people just screwing around entertaining themselves.

I’ve seen a couple of interesting design/stratgey things lately, here’s my take on a few things I’ve seen. Hopefully you find some inspiration along the way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Celebrating vs. Selling

Do you ever notice how much more meaningful advertising can be when they celebrate the human experience vs. sell you products? Celebrating the human experience removes the psychological barrier of “you just want to sell me something. You have nothing to lose by letting down your guard, stepping back and appreciating how lucky we all are, (some violin strings in the background don’t hurt either). If businesses can find a higher level of alignment than ‘buy my stuff, that’s a massive change. The catch is you have to mean it – it has to go beyond the commercial…that sort of higher purpose takes lost of vision and guts.

It’s potential over features.
It’s experience over function.

Inspiration: The World is Just Awesome (campaign by 72andSunny)

The Discovery Channel just extended it’s “the World is Awesome” campaign. The original spot was so popular, it’s even got a wikipedia entry. They could have made feature level claims around their content – we’re all in HD, most adventurous programming ever, 20% more shark week, etc. They used to have a whole campaign around ‘explore your world,’ putting the viewer more in the aggressor or adventurer postion. I love how they’ve taken a step back and decided to celebrate the world they cover with their viewer instead selling their viewer on the ‘value’ of their content.