Open up your mind and say, ahh...

I am not much of a fan of Will.i.am ‘s music. He’s the guy behind the Black Eyed Peas and several other bits of dance magic. I appreciate that he hits his target perfectly. I’m just not his audience. But I now respect the man immensely.

Thanks to this article in Fortune, I’ve come to realize just how bright a lad he is. He’s not only doing great work in marketing his own products and services, but he’s helping corporate America figure out some of their challenges as well. What’s most interesting to me, however, is that what he’s doing is coming to the picnic with ideas.

Most times, when someone famous is brought in to help a company, they are usually used as a kind of proxy. So, when Michael Jackson did the big deal with Pepsi, he just kept on Michael Jacksoning, and there was some Pepsi logo stuff behind him. By comparison, Will.i.am brought the idea of Ekocycle to Coca Cola, and he fleshed out the entire vision. It’s his project that Coke totally understands and supports, because of how Will.i.am laid it all out.

That’s the lesson to us. You can offer to help or you can bring an idea of great value to your prospective client or customer. One will get you a little bit of business. The other will lead to partnerships of great value.

Cheers to you, Will. And thanks for getting that Britney song stuck in my head. Argh.

With the presidential election only a few months away, presidential candidates Barak Obama and Mitt Romney are in that final stretch of trying to get the public’s votes.

It’s true that voting in America is on the lower end when compared to other countries, so my question is who actually votes in America? Who should the presidential candidates be reaching out to? Today’s infographic lists what kind of people actually get out to the ballots and vote. Turns out the very people you would expect to vote are the ones that do. I’m talking about people who are middle aged, educated and married.

America needs to devise new ways to reach out to those who do not vote. Whether it be through pledge cards, or bringing the voting to the home. Americans need to do a better job at practicing their right to vote.

Legendary art critic Robert Hughes died Monday at age 74. It is a tremendous loss, not least because the former Time columnist counted among the few critics who could break through the practiced esoterism of the art world–all that cultish mystification that gets thrown over Great Works like a thousand-pound dung blanket–and make art matter to everyone. His best weapon? Anger. Raw, pungent, beautifully worded anger. And nowhere was this more evident than in his laser-eyed takedowns of the messy collision of art, celebrity, and money.

Here he is on Jeff Koons:

He has the slimy assurance, the gross patter about transcendence through art, of a blow-dried Baptist selling swamp acres in Florida. And the result is that you can’t imagine America’s singularly depraved culture without him.

On Julian Schnabel:

Schnabel’s work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting–a lurching display of oily pectorals.

On Alex Katz:

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

On Jean-Michel Basquiat:

Far from being the Charlie Parker of SoHo (as his promoters claimed) he became its Jessica Savitch.

Hughes’s rage wasn’t just nasty good fun (though there was definitely some of that). It was in service of a higher calling. Embedded in every dig at Damien Hirst’s talent and barb against Jeff Koons’s famewhoring was the notion that art is about more than pretty pictures; it’s a sort of cultural town hall where our values and mores all mingle. In Jean-Michel Basquiat: Requiem for a Featherweight, the essay from which the quote above is excerpted, Hughes lays Basquiat’s unimpressive career squarely at the feet of the “mania for instant reputation that so grotesquely afflicts American taste.” Here’s more:

It was a tale of a small untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of art-world promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, critics and, not least, himself. This was partly because Basquiat was black; the otherwise monochrome Late American Art Industry felt a need to refresh itself with a touch of the “primitive.” Far better black artists than Basquiat, such as the sculptor Martin Puryear, did not have to contend with this kind of boom-and-bust success. Its very nature forced Basquiat to repeat himself without a chance of development.

The sense you get from Hughes’s best writing is that something greater than fame and aesthetics is at stake. He brought moral outrage to art criticism, and in so doing he reminded you that art is something worthy of moral outrage.

Image: Ted Thai/Time-Life Pictures/Getty Images

Cities like Omaha, Des Moines, and Kansas City have long been great places for American business and agricultural and commodities fortunes to be built, but today’s entrepreneurs are working with software and digital tech, not cattle and corn.

Traveling across America, running sales and marketing for Truist, a social responsibility-powering tech company, Jeff Slobotski regularly visited the country’s startup hubs. Slobotski, intrigued by his experiences, began chronicling his travels on a personal blog. But in 2008, he took another look his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, and the surrounding Midwestern region. He was impressed by the burgeoning startup scene in his own backyard. “It is this incredible hidden gem,” Slobotski says with joy. Inspired, he created a new site to exclusively cover startups in Omaha and the Midwest–Silicon Prairie News was born.

Slobotski wanted people to pay more attention to the region and come to see it as a credible crescent for startups.

“If individuals know who or what is happening in a region there is tremendous power,” he says. “Businesses can launch, funding can be found, and networks can be built.”

Initially the site published just a few stories each week, usually short profiles of Omaha-based companies. Four years later, Slobotski, now 34, has built the site into a robust platform with constantly updated content, has developed a webcast, hired a team of 8 full-time employees, and opened additional offices in Des Moines and soon to be in Kansas City.

While the real Silicon Valley, of course, continues to dominate startup culture nationally, numerous other centers have begun to increase the size of their dot on the map. The early success of Groupon in Chicago and Living Social in Washington stirred mini-entrepreneurial booms in those cities. Then came a wave of media stories about those cities as “new Silicon Valleys.” Such stories, in turn, helped attract even more companies to those cities. Slobotski is betting that that can happen in Omaha, too.  

Cities like Omaha, Des Moines, and Kansas City have long been great places for American business and agricultural and commodities fortunes to be built, but today’s entrepreneurs are working with software and digital tech, not cattle and corn.

Fast Company profiles the personalities behind the ideas that shake up business as usual. Discover more about these pioneers here.

But you can’t create a technology center by wishing or hoping for it–you need at least a great company or two to get started. One of the biggest successes to come out of the Midwest is the Des-Moines based Dwolla, a low-cost online and mobile payment and money transfer system. Late last year Dwolla received major funding from New York-based Union Square Ventures and Ashton Kutcher among others. When Dwolla announced Kutcher’s investment, Silicon Prairie News hosted an exclusive webcast with the celebrity entrepreneur and Dwolla’s CEO Ben Milne. The brand-name investments in Dwolla, winning national recognition for a service produced almost entirely in the Midwest, advanced the Silicon Prairie narrative and created real benefit for a Midwest-based company. The Prairie has also produced companies including: Mindmixer, a local civic problem-solving platform based in Omaha, and Hudl, a software company that provides digital tools for college athletes and coaches, which is based in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Following his online success, in 2009, Slobotski launched the Big Omaha conference with a bold premise: “Let’s bring in entrepreneurs from across the country to share their knowledge, push us to think bigger, and get rid of the excuse that you need to be located in a certain city to push your ideas forward.”

“Let’s get rid of the excuse that you need to be located in a certain city to push your ideas forward.”

Like many of the “big idea” conferences around the country, the event gathers thinkers, entrepreneurs, and changemakers for conversation, mingling, and inspiration. Over the past few years Big Omaha has attracted an impressive roster of entrepreneurs including: Ben Lerer, Scott Harrison, Gary Vaynerchuk, Dennis Crowley, and Tony Hsieh. The event has become a real force in the entrepreneurial push across the prairie. It is consistently sold out, and this year the conference boasted 650 attendees from 27 states.

The Midwest is no stranger to entrepreneurship and business success stories. Omaha is famously home to Warren Buffett, and Berkshire Hathaway. Buffet is noted for his involvement in the local community and Slobotski says it is fairly easy for entrepreneurs in the region to get their pitches in front of top Berkshire executives, if they have a good idea or solid start. Omaha is also home to several Fortune 1000 companies, including ConAgra, First National Bank, Mutual of Omaha, Union Pacific, and Kiewit, one of the largest construction companies in the world.

New skills in the area need to be honed and new networks need to be built. That story is being written right now. And while Slobotski doesn’t view himself as a journalist, he is a storyteller who believes that a big story can change how the world views the cities on the prairie: “People around the country and even in the region don’t realize everything that exists here in Omaha. A lot of people think of beef, steak or Corn Husker football. That’s starting to change.”

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

Some of America’s most compelling brands are harnessing the conversational aspect of social media by setting up “listening command centers” to capture, monitor and utilize social media conversations. In doing so, they are monitoring online conversations about their brands, reacting instantly to viral buzz, and creating companies that consumers feel involved in–and in some cases, even bringing in bigger profits as a direct result.

One of the first to introduce this technology was Gatorade, which launched its mission control center in its Chicago offices in June 2010. The technology allows the company to monitor social media conversations about the company through a range of visualisations and data-streams.

It also enables fans to participate in the company on a new level. During the Super Bowl, Gatorade enabled fans to interact with NFL starts through Ustream, and they’re now running regular live social media events, such as having sports stars answer questions using Twitter and Ustream.

And this command center technology isn’t just for big companies–it can benefit public services and charities as well. The American Red Cross believes social media will play an increasing role in disaster response, as it can provide real-time information and give relief workers a direct line to affected individuals. Its new digital command center launched in March, just in time to respond to the thousands affected by dozens of tornadoes that ripped through 10 states.

Dell played a major part in helping the Red Cross launch its command center, modelling it after its own social media listening center and providing equipment and funding. Dell’s center launched in 2010 and has since been at the forefront of its marketing and customer response strategies. Said Dell’s VP of social media and community, Manish Mehta, “Ground Control is about tracking the largest number of possible conversations across the web and making sure we ‘internalize’ that feedback, good or bad … It’s also about tracking what you might call the ‘long tail’–those smaller matters that might not bubble to the surface today, but are out there, and deserve to be heard.”

Dell’s ground control center tracks around 22,000 daily posts about the company across a wide range of social media, and enables Dell to participate in online dialogue about their brand and use social media insights to improve their products and marketing.

The technologies that makes this listening possible come from multiple different monitoring platforms like Salesforce Radian6, Sysomos, Nielson BuzzMetrics, and others–the platforms capture millions of social media conversations from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs, and presents them in a graphic display showing trend information, sentiment, geographical data, and share of voice.

Clemson University has also built a listening center with support from Dell and Radian6. Chief officer Jim Bottum believes Clemson may be the first academic environment to adapt listening command center technology. Students monitor the six large display screens and conduct research projects based on the data, including a recent project aimed at conversations about emergencies to help law enforcement agencies deliver better service in their communities.

Brands are not the only ones that realize the amazing benefits of command centers. Progressive agencies also get on board with the concept.

David Armano, executive VP of global innovation and integration at Edelman Digital, and his team just launched their first social intelligence command center (SICC) in its Chicago office. It combines four listening and engagement stations, a briefing workspace with cable television newsfeed, Polycom, and a content production section. The room is self contained and designed for real time monitoring, analytics, engagement and ultimately content production informed by the data coming in. It also has a full whiteboard wall where teams can actively work and plan.

“It’s essentially ground zero for real time communications,” says Armano. “Social intelligence or the insights we can gain from real time data is nothing without the ability to act upon it. Our SICC initiative is designed to not only master real time data, but act intelligently upon it.”

Taulbee Jackson, president and CEO of Radius and a member of the Super Bowl XLVI host committee, talked to me about the Super Bowl’s first-ever social media command center and his experience in managing the host committee’s interactive communications hub. “We had staff of about 50 people who worked two shifts for two weeks for fifteen hours a day. Our team was comprised of senior level social media managers, content developers, analysts, strategists and tech-savvy volunteers.”

Working out of a 2,800-square-foot space in downtown Indianapolis just blocks from the event, team’s objectives were clear. One: hospitality. “We are known for our friendliness, we wanted to make sure everyone had great experience at the Super Bowl coming from different parts of the country (whether it was on the aiplane, airport, street, cab, online)”, said Jackson. Two: safety. The team not only moderated conversations, it also was connected to other command centers in town that housed logistics and public safety teams so that in the event of the emergency their combined response would be instant. Three: create content and capture the experience to share with those who weren’t able to attend in person. Four: amplification. The team’s role was to amplify the positive experience fans had at the event.

The response rate of the command center staff was less than 3 minutes. Jackson says the event received over 64 million social impressions in one month from organic social amplification, which he estimates are worth $3.2 million. The main metric was the sentiment analysis, though. Real-time response and conversations moved the sentiment measure from 3.2 before the start of the event to 3.6 at the kick off (for every time someone said something negative online, 3.6 people said something positive).

Benefits of Listening Command Centers

So what benefits could a social media command center bring to a company or organization? The command centers enable brands to respond rapidly to trending topics in social media. For example, after Gatorade launched the “Gatorade has Evolved” campaign–which featured a song by rap artist David Banner–it was heavily talked up in social media, Gatorade was able to work with Banner to have a full-length version of the song ready to distribute to its Facebook and Twitter followers within 24 hours.

Listening command centers also allow consumers to participate in brand activities and shape their own experiences with the company. Thanks to its listening command center, Dell is able to provide almost instantaneous assistance to customers, and thanks to conversations and insights gained from social media, they’ve launched the (RED) line of products and FastTrack PC shipment, and redesigned the keyboard on their highest selling laptop after feedback that the apostrophe was positioned awkwardly.

The technology is being used for the more mundane day-to-day tasks of optimising landing pages and sending followers to the most high performing pages of the company’s website. Gatorade says it has been able to reduce exit rates from 25% to 9%, and has increased views of its product videos and other education material by 250%.

At Edelman, Armano says the company has used its SICC to train and act as a model to help several clients plan, design, and staff their own. “Not only that; internally for Edelman, the SICC initiative helps to break down traditional silos,” Armano says. “When analysts, strategists, content developers and media relations teams all see real time data in action–the silos melt away.”

Talking about companies and brands on social media is increasingly a two-way conversation, with listening command centers at the heart of marketing and customer interaction strategies. With application across a variety of industries, from Fortune 500 companies to the public service to education, it won’t be long before listening command centers are standard practice for engaging and monitoring customers.

Image: Flickr user Ludovic Bertron

With 71% of New Orleans schoolchildren attending charter schools, the atmosphere is ripe for testing new educational ideas. Enter 4.0 Schools, a nonprofit incubator that helps turn teachers into entrepreneurs.

UNITED STATES
OF INNOVATION

New Ideas, New Markets, New Insights

All around the country, Americans are dreaming big. Their boldest ideas are changing their communities–and having a ripple effect throughout the world.

CLICK HERE to see how innovation takes many forms

Seventy-one percent of New Orleans’s schoolchildren attend charter schools, a legacy of Katrina. While charters’ performance as measured by student test scores both nationwide and in the city has been mixed, they undeniably increase the local appetite for trying new educational ideas. “If you’re an edtech entrepreneur who wants to pilot an idea, you have the most efficient and smartest market in the country here,” says Matt Candler, CEO of 4.0 Schools. That’s because instead of a centralized bureaucracy, there are more than 40 schools making independent decisions on both hiring and procurement. Organizations like KIPP, Teach for America, and the Gates Foundation have established beachheads, drawing top teachers and fresh blood from all over the country. These are intersecting with a nascent startup scene dubbed “Silicon Bayou” to produce a hothouse of ideas to change education: for-profit and non-profit, from school redesigns to apps, often from younger, female entrepreneurs.

As Silicon Valley capital becomes increasingly interested in education—witness ur-angel investor Jason Calcanis holding his first ever LAUNCH event focusing on education, and Benchmark making its biggest ever seed investment in startup university Minerva—it’s a fair bet that a surprising number of successful companies will come from the Big Easy. “This is a place where you can do entrepreneurship AND do some amazing things for kids who really need it,” says Candler, who knows a bit about both. He opened schools all over the country for KIPP, did similar work for Joel Klein in New York City, and founded New Schools New Orleans, a program for aspiring school leaders.

Unique in the country, 4.0 Schools is a nonprofit incubator founded in December of 2010 that runs four-day intensives, book clubs, unconferences and other programs to turn teachers and others with a passion for education into for-profit or nonprofit entrepreneurs with solutions. In February, four participants went up to Startup Weekend – Edu in New York City, where they swept first, second, and third place in the competition. The winners were Jess Bialecki’s Classroom Blueprint, a social network for teachers to compare classroom design ideas; Aliya Bhatia’s Dash, a mobile app that helps teachers keep in touch with parents; and Chapman Snowden’s Kinobi, which uses the Microsoft Kinect to help train teachers in classroom management.

The role of teachers in improving schools is a subject of surprising controversy. The reform agenda popularized by high-profile chancellors like Joel Klein in NYC and Michelle Rhee in DC has been criticized for  scapegoating, sanctioning, and making it easier to fire teachers. Others might argue that being with kids in the classroom is more than a full-time job without asking teachers to wear the entrepreneur hat. Candler and others in New Orleans look to teachers as an undertapped resource for school transformation.

“As they were racing to catch a plane, because they had to teach the next day, VCs were chasing them out the door,” says Candler. “This is our vision of success: to encourage classroom teachers who work their butts off already so that they believe in themselves and investors think they can have an impact.”

Candler has a more roundabout connection to the current star of the local edtech startup scene. Jen Medbery is a TFA alum with a CS degree from Columbia who originally came to New Orleans to teach at a New Schools New Orleans startup. Her application, Kickboard, is a dashboard that aims to help teachers make better use of data on students’ performance and behavior–information that’s now scattered in gradebooks and post-it notes. They’re marketing directly to teachers who are turning around and convincing their colleagues and entire schools to adopt the platform—it’s now in use in 11 states. “”As we head into the summer and the start of our second sales cycle we’re on track to double our national customer base of schools,” says Medbery. “We’ve taken this not only as evidence of the demand for a product like Kickboard, but of the eagerness of teachers and school leaders to adopt a more analytical approach to teaching and learning.”

Image: Orange Line Media via ShutterStock

Disruptive technology is the bearer of tremendous opportunity and equally a harbinger of obsolescence. Technology’s impact on society and business is substantial, if not underestimated. As technology continues to become part of everyday life, it becomes disruptive in how people communicate, work, and connect. The evolution of society and technology happens with or without adaptation or understanding. And, it’s contributing to a very real phenomenon of Digital Darwinism, a situation where organizations are faced with a need to adapt to markets and customer behavior or risk a loss in favor, competitive advantage or worse, irrelevance.

To keep up is a perpetual investment as innovation is constant and it’s only increasing. We are becoming a culture rife with ingenuity. Entrepreneurialism is contagious. The startup way, or the “hacker life” is introducing new mindsets and models and it inspiring all who taste it to code, design, build, invest, and take risks. Even President Obama is calling for attention and support for startups to revive America’s fragile economy. And this is just the beginning. Innovation is a global movement and it’s gaining momentum.

This is a time to take a step back, recognize where we are and where we need to be, examine our strategies and current initiatives, review our investments and opportunities, and consider new areas for change or new pursuits.

The truth is that innovation works for and against us and investing in it with purpose and design is our responsibility. Whether you’re an entrepreneur leading the latest or the next hot startup, a business executive seeking solutions or a competitive edge, a decision maker or a champion for change in any industry, this is the time to see through the chaos of features, trends, IPOs, investments, ballooning valuations, et al. to clear a path for meaningful progress.

Part of the challenge is knowing when to recognize opportunities. While it’s easy to get caught up in the hype, there is a gap that exists between current needs, evolving pains, and the myriad of solutions hitting desktops, smartphones, tablets and digital appliances every day. The problem is that many organizations aren’t designed to be adaptive. They’re designed to optimize efficiencies and processes. But, times have changed and disruptive technology isn’t as easy to recognize nor capitalize on without a greater mission and purpose or an infrastructure to identify trends, experiment, learn, and scale.

For example, businesses around the world are jumping on Facebook and Twitter as each have demonstrated an ability to disrupt the standard fair in how connected consumers communicate, discover, and share. Yet, studying how they attempt to engage with customers reveals that they’re missing an opportunity to improve experiences and overall business opportunities. And, if we look at how organizations experiment with emerging platforms such as Instagram, Foursquare, Google+, Klout, and Pinterest, we’re left to wonder whether a divide and conquer strategy really isn’t just another guise where businesses become a jack of all trades but a master of none.

Disruptive technology requires much more than visibility and activity. To master these platforms requires presence and a commitment to steer thoughtful activity within value networks to the benefit of your organization as well as the experiences of those who define it.

For the purpose of this article, let’s define disruptive technology as the innovations that emerge without expectation to introduce a new market and value network at the expense of an existing market and value network. The reason this is an important discussion right now is that many organizations are investing in emerging technology for customer engagement, metrics, marketing and advertising, internal collaboration and education, HR, product develop, etc., without the clearest picture into overall direction, long term strategy, or even a deep understanding of the expectations and obstacles that exist among customers and employees.

To compete for the future, requires a full assessment of how some of the biggest trends in technology impact your business or markets today and how they will influence behavior in the future. While this list may alter, expand or contract based on your industry, the image below should provide a glimpse of just how expansive the landscape is, and while not every technology is affecting the bottom line today, elements are beginning to change the way decisions are made and how people work with one another. At the very least, the golden triangle of cloud, mobile, and social provides a hub to begin the evaluation of both technology and human behavior.

To chart a new course toward relevance, here are five initial steps to consider…

1. Assume that there is a surplus of confusion among users and decision makers within organizations and customers on which technology is trending versus technology that is showing signs of becoming or already is disruptive. Discovering the difference and prioritizing what’s important is critical.

2. Understand that the role of CMO and CIO is becoming closer than ever before. With marketing investing a significant percentage of the overall technology budget now and over time, the “I” in CIO may need to represent innovation to help lead more informed decisions from the inside.

3. Task an existing organization, external partner or develop a new task force to evaluate technology to improve the infrastructure of how your business works, cultivates relationships with customers, employees, and stakeholders, designs better products and services, and demonstrates competitive advantages.

4. Deploy this team to measure technology against a myriad of factors that are important to your business and assess which technologies are worthy of implementation, financial investment, acquisition or experimentation.

5. Re-align the team against a renewed vision, mission and purpose and train employees to use these technologies to achieve desired objectives at the enterprise, LoB, and functional levels…to meet customer and employee expectations and steer delightful experiences.

These are the times when getting caught up in technology, value, and new technology is often mistaken for innovation that inflates the dreaded bubble. What we don’t need is to invest in the wrong technologies simply because posts are constantly written with the “top 10″ ways to grow our business with said platform. While we can watch them grow, the real focus should be on the development of a formal system that measures impact and prioritizes resources around it accordingly.

Step through the brick arches at Fenway Park and you turn back the clock to an era when men wore fedoras and watched a young, pudgy-faced Babe Ruth hit epic home runs for the Boston Red Sox.

For generations of baseball fans, Fenway has been baseball Mecca. You don’t just watch a baseball game there, you experience it, with sights, sounds and smells unlike any other sporting venue. (If you sit behind home plate you’re close enough to hear the whizzzz of a fastball on its way to the catcher’s mitt.)

Fenway Park turns 100 on April 20, and if you haven’t heard about it yet, you will. Sports Illustrated and USA Today have published special editions. PBS is airing a National Geographic-produced documentary. A Green Monster-green coffee table book just hit the shelves. An official website chronicles Fenway’s history. And that’s just the start.

The Red Sox marketing machine is cranking out a season’s worth of promos, events, and extravaganzas as part of the “Fenway Park 100” campaign. We’re tempted to say it’s a campaign as finely orchestrated as any symphony, but they have that one covered, too: Conductor John Williams and the Boston Pops have recorded “Fanfare to Fenway,” a musical tribute. Heavy on the trumpets.

“Our goal is to differentiate the ballpark from all others in sports. We believe Fenway…is an iconic facility that transcends sports,” Red Sox senior vice president of Marketing and Brand Development Adam Grossman said during a talk to the Ad Club of Boston on March 27.

The Balancing Act

Grossman, a Cleveland native who started as a Red Sox intern 10 years ago, has adopted the immutable Boston stance that Fenway is a sports cathedral. Quite literally–the mission statement for the Fenway Park 100 campaign calls it a “true baseball cathedral.” He also compares it to the world’s finest museums.

“Our goal is that nobody gets used to Fenway, because it’s not a common facility,” Grossman said.

But, when it comes to packaging, selling, and–let’s be frank here–profiting from nostalgia and history, how much is too much? How do the Red Sox avoid crossing into foul territory as they simultaneously celebrate and glorify their iconic 1912 ballpark (and invite their fans and sponsors to take part) and leverage it to the hilt as a once-a-century marketing opportunity?

Is it possible to over-romanticize the most classic ballpark in America? We’re pretty sure the answer is yes.

A bigger question for marketers everywhere: Is it possible for authentic and desirable customer experiences to peacefully coexist with a highly profitable, marketing-driven machine? Or does all the effort at pointing out the specialness risk hollowing out the sincerity, leaving behind a Disney World-like shell of an experience that looks great, but loses the soul that made it special?

The marketer in me says this is all great for the Red Sox. Let’s all celebrate the 100th year of a landmark that carries meaning and memories across generations. The team is erecting 100 brass plaques around the stadium highlighting bits of history, a nice touch.

Let’s thank the owners, who’ve kept their promise to preserve Fenway from the wrecking ball, investing nearly $300 million in repairs over the past decade for expanded seating, new ballpark features, and creature comforts. And let’s remember the team’s involvement in local charities and the community. Not to mention the two World Series the Sox have won in the past decade.

Burnishing the Fenway Brand

There’s a business angle to all of this, of course. Burnishing the Fenway Park brand can only boost the long-term value of the franchise. Based on the recent sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers for $2 billion, you’ve got to believe the sky’s the limit for the Red Sox.

Because baseball is faced with the long-term challenge of attracting young fans due to its slow pace and other factors, making the ballpark the star may, in years to come, be an ace in the hole. It’s a respectable alternative to the diversions at other ballparks, such as swimming pools in the bleachers and hot dog races between innings.

The fan in me can’t help but acknowledge today’s Fenway isn’t what it used to be (and I don’t mean the old leaky roof, the bad food, or the gruff ushers who used to shoo everyone out of the place quickly after games) and it leaves me with mixed feelings.

It costs a small fortune today to take your family to a game, if you can get your hands on tickets. That shouldn’t be surprising; that’s the nature of big league sports now. Fenway commands a premium. It has one of the smallest seating capacities in the major leagues, ticket prices have skyrocketed, games have been selling out for years, and exclusive clubs and seating sections have separated Everyman from the 1 percent, lending to the air of exclusivity and, yes, spurring more demand for tickets.

The Fenway “experience” that came by default with the price of admission now feels like an embedded surcharge on the high price of tickets. And as far as recollecting that happy Fenway feeling so you can tell stories to future generations? The pressure’s off. Official photographers are there to take your picture and sell you a permanent visual keepsake.

Seeking authentic inspiration

At the Ad Club meeting, Grossman admitted that keeping Fenway accessible, so Everyman can enjoy it, is one of the things that keeps him and other execs up at night.

It’s hard to find any great inspiration for customer engagement on the official Fenway Park 100 website. The site is a mishmash of historical information, photos, videos (albeit expertly produced), and event schedules, but the overall experience lacks cohesion and a sane navigation scheme.

It also swings and misses at the biggest opportunity of all to connect Fenway Park 100 to what it’s all about: fan memories, personal stories, and nostalgia. User-contributed photos, videos, and testimonials from fans young and old should take center stage and drive the effort’s digital content strategy. Old Kodachrome snapshots from the ’50s and home movies of family outings to the ballpark, or stories of meeting Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky out in the street after a game are what I’d be after. Memories handed down through the generations, from grandfathers to fathers to grandchildren, available nowhere else.

These rich personal histories carry 10 times the weight of a pile of old bricks. One can only hope this type of stuff surfaces. As for now, a handful of simple fan submissions are buried deep on the Fenway Park 100 site. My advice to the Red Sox: Don’t blow this chance. Make it less about “you” and more about “the fans.”

But like it or not, the Red Sox’s brilliant owners have maximized every chance to turn Fenway Park into a money machine, with new restaurants and luxury clubs, guided tours, and pricey “Monster Seats” sold each year to fans lucky enough to win a lottery for the right to purchase them. At the same time, they’ve opened up the venue for charity events, and the team involves retired players in Red Sox events in dignified ways. It is what it is: a well-loved public space in the hands of private owners.

As a fan it’s hard not to feel that in its service to nostalgia, the preservation and celebration of Fenway really just makes it another platform for marketing and promotions from corporate sponsorship packages to discarded seats for your man cave.

At Fenway, fans become players in the Fenway Park game-day pageant, just like the guy walking on stilts outside the park, the peanut-throwing vendors, and the legions who belt out “Sweet Caroline” in unison late in the game without really knowing why they’re doing it.

The chance of serendipity creeping into your personal experiences on a visit there is likely to be overshadowed by a guided, planned experience tied to a profit center: sitting in the Budweiser Right Field Roof Deck or the Coca-Cola Corner Seats. In the economics of today’s Fenway, “customer service,” like better food selections and bigger T-shirt kiosks, trumps old-school customer experience.

Maybe then this is the lesson that Fenway Park 100 will teach us: The owners bought a beloved ballpark that just happened to come with a baseball team.

Image: Flickr user Mike Burton, Stewart Dawson

There’s work that makes you jealous, and work that inspires you, and sometimes both at the same time. This simple-yet-over-the-top corporate promo, by Swedish creative agency House of Radon, falls into that third category. The brief they got from Ericsson would make even an actuary’s eyes glaze over: “Show how a multi-purpose, multi-technology network node enables operators to meet their three priorities in relation to data traffic explosion: differentiation, control and monetization.” Radon’s solution? Go big: They designed three dozen touchscreen UI concepts to visualize Ericsson’s message and filmed them in 30 different locations in just three days. The result:

The designers here know that, sometimes, “too much” is just enough.

This video is a great example of the changing nature of what advertising clients like Ericsson need, and how agencies like House of Radon deliver it. The big companies who make our ubiquitous digital infrastructure work, like Ericsson (or Google, or GE) aren’t peddling products so much as ideas. That gobbledegook brief that House of Radon got isn’t describing a thing that can be lit nicely and filmed, like a car; it’s outlining a (barely intelligible) concept about how Ericsson moves data around, and why it matters. House of Radon’s job isn’t to make sales out of that concept; it’s to make sense out of it. Much like the Eames Office used to do for behemoths like Westinghouse and IBM back in the mid-20th century.

And the key to “making sense,” as Charles and Ray Eames understood and House of Radon clearly does too, is in that second word: sense. As in, “appeal to the senses.” Data, nodes, operators, differentiation–all of these ideas in Ericsson’s brief are just so much insubstantial vapor. House of Radon’s video translates them into snappy factoids, which helps. But the idea of embedding them into physically appealing touchscreen interfaces–and then embedding those into a series of viscerally evocative first-person live-action scenelets, where just a hint of sound effects and out-of-focus background action instantly tells your five senses everything they need to know about what’s happening outside the edges of the frame–that’s what makes Ericsson’s brief make sense.

Data is everywhere now, and these zillion interfaces make you feel that in your bones.

This creative concept could have worked fine even if House of Radon didn’t go overboard with it. But the fact that they did makes sense, too. Data is everywhere now–and watching this video, with its zillion interfaces in a zillion different (but vividly rendered) places, makes you feel that in your very bones. Just like the Eames’s multiscreen propaganda film “Glimpses of the U.S.A.” won Nikita Kruschev over by showing America’s industrial prowess from seven viewpoints at once, House of Radon’s relentless cutting from new interface/location to new interface/location, three dozen times, is an essential part of getting the message across.

As more and more innovative companies find themselves “selling” invisible-but-essential ideas, this kind of advertising-as-sensemaking becomes more valuable than any glib “Got Milk?”-style product campaign ever could be. Does every spot need to cram in 30-odd interfaces and locations to make its point? Of course not. But the designers behind this House of Radon spot know that, sometimes, “too much” is just enough.

Watch House of Radon’s promo for Ericsson

Via FastCoDesign: http://www.fastcodesign.com/