Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Earlier this year, Ryan Seacrest partnered with Ford for its “Random Acts of Fusion Campaign,” a transmedia effort to promote the 2013 Ford Fusion. Now with the recent acquisition of New York-based marketing services agency Civic Entertainment Group (CEG) through his company Seacrest Global Group (SGG), the multi-hyphenate magnate aims to connect brands with Hollywood and perhaps create original branded content.

Dick Clark & Ryan Seacrest

Like the late Dick Clark, whose career he makes no secret of emulating, Seacrest is an entertainer who wears many hats–American Idol host; NBC News’ Today show correspondent; and, of course, host of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, which he also executive produces. Through Ryan Seacrest Productions, Seacrest produces Keeping Up with the Kardashians as well as its various spin-offs, and other reality series, such as Bravo’s Shahs of Sunset and E!’s Married to Jonas.

Seacrest also has several projects at various stages of development, including Food Fight with Paramount Pictures, a TV version of the book Nanny Diaries, and a game show based on the popular Zynga game Draw Something.

When the television and radio personality initially approached CEG, the company’s co-founders/CEOs Stuart Ruderfer and David Cohn were “immediately intrigued,” according to Ruderfer. “Ryan has this unique vision for building the new model, the next generation media and entertainment brand business,” says Ruderfer. “What it means for us is we can have a combination of Hollywood access with first-class marketing services.”

For his part, Seacrest says he was attracted to CEG because of its “consistent track record of business success.” Specifically, CEG was responsible for overseeing the marketing campaign for the launch of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, including a series of 1920s-era events, as well as other creative marketing services for brands such as A&E, CNN, ESPN, History, NFL, and Southwest Airlines. The 12-year-old company specializes in experiential marketing campaigns that blur the line between marketing and entertainment.

“For History, the cable channel, we had the world’s largest smoker and grill cooking 2,000 hot dogs around the country,” Ruderfer says, as an example of one of their experiential marketing campaigns. “The idea was to help History reach out to its audience and provide a live experience with the brand that hopefully adds to their viewing experience.”

The company has also created restaurant spaces for CNN, the CNN Grill, and a bar and lounge, the Southwest Porch, for Southwest Airlines.

Although Ruderfer and Cohn will continue to head up the day-to-day operations at CEG, Ruderfer said they would rely on Seacrest’s “advice and counsel and access to resources.”

Since both SGG and CEG have expertise in live events, there will likely be an increased focus on them going forward.

“Live events are exciting television, and they repeatedly draw big audiences year-after-year,” says Seacrest. “My production company is interested in stepping up its capabilities in this aspect of the business, which I think is also an area that Civic could potentially be involved with given their expertise with marketing large-scale events.”

Entertainment and marketing will continue to converge, according to Seacrest, and creating entertaining content is key. “There is so much noise in the marketplace for both content creators and marketers that it increasingly makes sense for these two disciplines to dovetail in interesting ways,” says Seacrest.

Crowd Image: Flickr user Haags Uitburo

Ezra Stoller was an architecture student at New York University when he bought his first camera, sometime in the late 1930s. But that purchase marked a significant shift in the trajectory of his career. Over the course of the next several decades, Stoller would become known for photographing buildings, not designing them. His shots of modern masterpieces like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Guggenheim Museum often helped those structures attain their iconic status. Now, his work is being collected in a new book, Ezra Stoller: Photographer, that includes many of those famous photographs as well as much of his lesser-known work.

Stoller was a meticulous photographer. According to Nina Rappaport, a professor of architecture and the editor of the new book, it was common to see Stoller “exploring every angle, spending a day on site to understand the passage of the sun on the building.” Of course, with a career that coincided with the golden age of modern architecture, Stoller had plenty of good subjects to shoot. But he had a way of composing and framing shots, Rappaport says, that brought out the formal and structural qualities of those buildings.

“He was an artist,” she contends, “but never considered himself as one.”

In the preface to the book, Erica Stoller, Ezra’s daughter, offers an anecdote that transpired when he was shooting Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute, illustrating the photographer’s exacting eye:

I recall hearing about a problem at the Salk and his fearing that the equipment had been damaged; even with the tilts and shifts of the view camera, he couldn’t get the lines straight. Finally, he realized that the camera was okay–it was the building that was the problem. In construction, some of the concrete pours had bellied, creating vertical lines that were not exactly straight.

While Stoller’s architectural photography has proven to be his most enduring work, Rappaport points out that his oeuvre is a bit more diverse. In addition to photographing interiors for publications like Ladies’ Home Journal, he also had a great deal of personal interest in industrial subjects, shooting factories, machines, and equipment “in a time of a postwar optimism, focusing on the idea of production and progress,” Rappaport explains.

The new book, published by Yale University Press, is the first complete survey of Stoller’s career, during which he took nearly 50,000 photographs. It’s currently on Amazon for just over $40.

Isn’t it time we started telling bigger stories than this?

When Julien Smith and I wrote The Impact Equation, we had a very specific goal in mind: help people get attention, understanding, and eventually a relationship of value. We built the book around the premise that well-defined goals were needed to craft ready-to-understand ideas, and that people could build a platform to spread those ideas to a network of people who cared enough to share those ideas with others. That’s the simplest possible summary of the book.

What people maybe thought they were getting was a book about social media and social networks, about marketing and campaigns. Some people believe that’s what Julien and I do. Social media are a set of tools. They’re not all that interesting to talk about in and of themselves. The “gee whiz” has left the station. We want to talk about action– or if you’ll pardon the self-reference, impact.

There are details and technologies you must master if you want to succeed. But that’s the keyboard-level and tactical part of what you’ll do. We wanted to give you something more encompassing.

The strategies around and behind The Impact Equation boil down to 5 Cs.

Communication

If you can’t convey your ideas in a way that stands out (Contrast), that are simple (Articulation), and that resonate with an audience (Echo), the game is over before you begin. So, The Impact Equation is a book about communication.

Content

If you don’t start building a platform of value around ideas that are easy to share (Reach), those ideas won’t get around and get a lot of attention (Exposure). The Impact Equation is a book that talks about how to tell bigger stories.

Community

Where people have the most ground to make up is in nurturing a network of people who care about what you choose to share. Without relationship-minded effort (Trust and Echo), you won’t likely get beyond capturing people’s attention for a little while. Meaning, people won’t be inclined to share. The Impact Equation is definitely a book about community.

Commerce

We don’t write much about how to make money in this book. Both Julien and I have ben successful in our businesses, and we’ve both helped other companies succeed with a lot of the tactics and strategies covered in this book. But this is a book about business and leadership and value-generation and extraction. Make no mistake, The Impact Equation is a book about commerce.

Customer Service

I believe in the principle of Service Craftsmanship, that service begins before a prospect has even become a customer. We talk a lot about how to nurture relationships (Trust) and how that sets you apart from people who don’t treat every touchpoint as a chance for service excellence (Contrast). There’s also the realization that if we treat people the way we want to be treated (Echo), we will earn more of an opportunity to serve. The Impact Equation is most definitely a book about customer service.

Why Talking About Social Media Got Boring

It’s boring to talk simply about the tools because the tools are just a way to reach people. We can argue the details endlessly (I don’t believe much in Klout, for instance), and we can announce the premature death of Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook and whoever. But it doesn’t matter. When we talk about restaurants (the tools), we mostly talk about the food (the content). When we talk about bands (tools), we talk about whether the music resonates (the content). When we talk about a good book (the content), we never ask what type of computer it was written on (the tools).

Should you put ads on Facebook? If that’s the worry point, you’ve got bigger worries. Is Pinterest worth your time? Who knows? Should you schedule your tweets? (Some of them!) What’s the company comment policy? Well, okay, that last one has some merit, but put it to rest and move on.

How I Apply The Five Cs and The Impact Equation Mindset to My Business

In all I do, I use these five concepts above as guideposts to approach success. When I’m working on a new product, like a course on writing, I think about how to communicate about the course before, during, and after the experience. I consider what kind of content will be involved. I determine how to build a community around each product experience, especially because Human Business Works believes that we need to deliver a vision, a plan, and a community of support for you to be successful. I consider how this product or service I’m creating should be priced and what value is reasonable to extract for the amount of value I’m creating. And I have very strong principles around how we go about customer service for each project.

When approaching business-making, I’d say these are the five aspects I work on the most. I look at marketing, sales, and service as a shared/hybrid role, where everyone has a part to play in the experience. I’d also say that these are the business aspects that we’ve tucked into The Impact Equation underneath it all.

How You Apply That Mindset to Your Business

From figuring out how to better articulate a contrasting idea that encourages trust and echoes the feelings of your prospective buyer to understanding how to get more exposure and reach from the platforms you choose to create or utilize, our premises line up nicely to marketing, sales, and service. Is it easy for people to contact you? Do you make it easy for them to buy from you? What have you missed in the process of shaping your ideas to fit their language and mindset? Do you have a plan for when and what and where to share your information? Whether you’re pinning or tweeting or poking or just putting a chalk sign out on a street corner, the attributes that make up The Impact Equation, are about delivering value.

Oh, and We Believe in Recipes

Both Julien and I set out to write a book full of actionable takeaways. We believe that there are lots of great books that stop right after the ideas and theories come out, but that don’t push you to take some actionable steps. Given Julien’s work on The Flinch, a book dedicated to getting us to take action, we both felt strongly that The Impact Equation should be written with a strong eye towards encouraging you to make something happen.

You can get the book in hardcover and digital formats, and the audiobook is almost ready to come out (really any day now), and I should let you know that the majority of my 2013 plan involves helping professionals from companies of all sizes to get more leads, sales, and satisfied customers via the principles in this book (and a few other concepts that make up the Human Business Way). If you want a head start on your success in the coming year, consider picking up The Impact Equation.

I have a lot to say about the future of publishing. Having published 4 books (so far) with mainstream publishing, I’ve also done my share of self-publishing, alternative publishing, and more. I believe the landscape of publishing and media making is as fascinating as it’s ever been, and that there are so many new ways to make publishing work for both authors and readers.

I’m really excited to be partnering with NetMinds in an advisory role. With bright stars like Tim Sanders (pictured here at left) and Alan Baker behind it, I know that this company has a real shot at taking on the challenges and opportunities of a whole new model for getting a book made.

The concept takes a bit of unpacking, but I’ll let you check out NetMinds for details. The press release that went out today says, “Net Minds leverages a digital networking and publishing platform to build invested teams around book projects. The company is solving the quality/autonomy problem present in book publishing. There are currently over a dozen Net Minds Select book projects in production, including works by Nolan Bushnell (Atari) and Robert Tercek (MTV and Oprah Digital).”

I forgot to ask Tim if I can talk about my other project with them, so I won’t just yet.

But What About Traditional Publishing?

I must be really clear: I don’t intend to trash traditional publishing. One of my friends is the head of business publishing at Wiley. I have a new edition of a book coming out from Que (once I get my head around a million changes), and I love my editor there. I have a new book coming out with Penguin Portfolio in a month, and I’ve appreciated working with our editor there. I’m not going to trash them. I think there’s a spot for mainstream publishing and that disruptive models like the one we’re pursuing at NetMinds will somewhat be grafted onto the traditional players at some point (if all goes well).

Group Publishing, which is the NetMinds model, is fascinating because it works on the concept that everyone has a stake in the book’s success. At NetMinds, you get a ton more of your royalties, which you then share with the team you bring together to build your book. Thus, if you have an editor, you might give her 10% of your royalties on the book. Ditto the designer, etc. So, you start with 70 or 80% of the royalties, and you dispense them as you see fit. Co-author? No problem. I think that’s part of what makes it cool. The other part is distribution.

Traditional publishers have built very long and meaningful relationships with distributors. But we all know that the landscape for book distribution has changed a great deal. Borders is gone. Barnes is still reworking their model. Books-a-Million is working on growing into some of the gaps. Hudson has a near lock on the US Airports. But there’s so much more going on. Digital publishing is huge. Bundled SKUs is huge. There’s a lot to look at. But I’m sure I’m losing some of you at this point, so I’ll shut up about the guts of it all.

Part of the Plan

In my post, Where I’m Headed, I talked about working on human business. What’s more human than group publishing? I talked about bravery. You’ll see that reflected in what I do with NetMinds. I talked about storytellers. Well, that’s self-explanatory.

Again, I’m an advisor here. They’re letting me play with the toys. But this isn’t a full time job. It’s a passion that fits well with what Human Business Works is out to promote: sustainable, relationship-minded business.

And that, as they say, is all he wrote. I’m in. Check out NetMinds

Reading this, you may have just clicked away from Yammer, NationalField, or another enterprise social network. All those status updates are creating major shifts in the way we work, say Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim in Social Business by Design, available now from Jossey-Bass. Fast Company talked with Hinchcliffe about how social media is blurring the line between company and customer, killing off status reports, and making the activity steam the new center of work–and why that’s a good thing.

FAST COMPANY: Why do businesses need to become social businesses?

DION HINCHCLIFFE: Because their customers have moved: Where they used to be visiting their website, watching TV, or reading the newspaper, they don’t do those things so much anymore. The developed world primarily uses social media, and it’s been that way since 2009. A billion and a half people, and they use it more intensely than anything else that they do.

What does a highly functional social workplace look like?

One in which people narrate their work. The organization finally has visibility into what people are really working on, and it also enables the process to be open and participative. We’re talking about a natural and open process of collaborating that looks just like a Facebook feed: You see what’s going on in your company, in your department, or with your team all the time. You gather information that you need and you share the information that others need.

What are the other elements of the enterprise social ecosystem?

A fully social ecosystem has the marketplace, everyone out there that you potentially want to connect with, the customers that you already have and need to support, or want to sell to, or need to communicate with;  your business suppliers in your entire supply chain; the whole B2B story around social; and it’s of course your workers themselves. The ecosystem consists of all the connections and all the conversations happening between all those constituent pieces.

I imagine that this creates a ton of data.

This is the famous thing that Clay Shirky said, “Information overload is not the problem; you want all the information. It’s filter failure.” You can’t listen to everything that’s going on in your company all the time. You want to filter it down to what matters to you at the moment and help you get your job done. You want to be able to find it all when it does matter. Later on, you say “I know they were working on this last week and I just realized I need to know what they were doing because it affects my work.” You can go find that. You can go find that conversation, that collaborative scenario, catch up on how its going, and maybe even join in on it, or start it back up if it’s not going.

If I’m a manager of company that’s not the most technologically nimble, what should I do to move toward becoming a social business?

The farther you are away from the technology industry, the less likely you’ll find social networking to be a natural thing for you to do. There’s more work you have to do.

You can try and find out what others in the organization are doing, because I guarantee you, if you’re a medium-sized business, or a large business, your organization is already doing social in some way. Don’t duplicate it, go and find out what’s going on, and see if you can join in and adapt your part of the organization.

Other than that, you can start looking at doing something locally. We know there’s really good tools for social CRM–customer support and care. It’s a really good scenario: high value, easy to do, and it’s something you can pilot without involving the whole organization.

Involved in this is a dissolving of the barrier between business and customer, is that right?

The customer wants more control. I think companies are uncomfortable with that, but if the customers really like something, they want to tell you how to improve it and change it.

For customer care, we find a bunch of examples in the book of companies that allow customers to talk to each other, the customer ends up being the best support people. They usually know more about the product collectively than the company does.

We see a blurring of when does the company end and when does it start, because customers are actually providing many of the most valuable functions, not the company itself, in this new model.

What’s the next trend?

We’re really seeing social moving to the center of work–right now it hangs around the edges, it forms the narrative fabric of what we do, but more and more we see evidence that over the next five years, with more companies, it will be the center of work.

You can wire in all the systems you use and have one activity stream, where all your collaborations are happening, all your records that you’re working on are right there, and they’re kept in the right place. You have this place that you’re working in that also involves everyone that you need to work with, wherever they are in the world, inside or outside the company. That seems to be the grand unified vision.

Why’s that such a good thing for managers?

They could keep track of what’s going on better than they ever could before. Often managers have to ask for status reports–can you imagine status reports going away? A lot of the traditional processes we have are highly duplicative: You do the work, and then you’ve got to describe it again in a status report, and then your manager has to look at it again–all that process goes away, you eliminate that duplication. You just acknowledge the work and the conversation. You don’t need those extra pieces. It will simplify what we do and improve the cycle times.

If I’m an entrepreneur, what’s the most important thing for me to keep in mind regarding social business?

We open the book with forward from Jeff Dachis, “everything that can be social will be,” and we also say that “everything that can be mobile will be, too.” I would really look at the hot areas as those that enable that vision, and we have a long way to go of making it simple, easy, and delivered the right way in terms of user experience on the right devices. There’s a lot of work left to be done.

The hottest area right now is social analytics. The data explosion has happened. We have the collective intelligence of the company out on display–now we have to do something with it, so there’s literally hundreds of startups focusing on mining that so we can get better decisions made faster than the competition.

And avoid that filter failure.

Yes, exactly.

To get a bigger glimpse of social-to-come, read our excerpt from Social Business by Design.

Image: Flickr user Andreas Levers

India is already known as one of the world’s IT powerhouses. Angela Saini, author of the new book, Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over the World, believes the country is also becoming one of the world’s hubs for innovation and scientific ingenuity.

Over the past few years, BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) has become a buzzy acronym for technology- and finance-watchers. India is already known for call centers, IT development, and expatriate coders. The country is also home to one of the world’s fastest-growing middle classes. Angela Saini, the British author of the new Geek Nation: How Indian Science is Taking Over The World, believes that India is also becoming an innovation center to be reckoned with, and a world leader in tech.

Fast Company recently spoke with Saini about India’s tech industry, the growth of Indian startups, and what the future holds for Indian innovators. Geek Nation is being released in the U.S. on May 1.

FAST COMPANY: Why do you consider India to be a “Geek Nation”?

ANGELA SAINI: I grew up in London, and it’s difficult to grow up in this city and not notice that every school has at least one geeky Indian kid. I was the geeky Indian kid in my class. My dad is a geek, many of my cousins are geeks, and more generally, India is famous for producing doctors, university professors, and engineers who work all over the world. India itself is not a world leader in science and technology yet but it does have a culture that strongly favors these things, above anything else. So Geek Nation was my journey to figure out why, and also where that ambition is taking it.

I have to admit, as a science journalist, I started out with a big measure of skepticism–I mean, India has a weak scientific publication record compared to the U.S. and Europe–but the trajectory it’s on is just incredible. I think the rest of the world underestimates just what hundreds of thousands of committed young scientists and engineers can achieve. Then again, President Obama gets it. If you look at his speeches on science and education, he often mentions the growth of India as one reason that the U.S. needs to stay competitive.

The subtitle of my book is a bit bombastic, but the contents are more balanced. I look at scientific research and technologies that are having a big effect on ordinary people’s lives–the good as well as the bad–and the ambitious projects that the government hopes will help secure India’s future superpower status. At the end of the day, I’m just a journalist. I’m not trying to argue a point, but rather to take an honest picture of a country through my geeky lens.

What was the most surprising thing you uncovered while researching your book?

There wasn’t a day in my research that I wasn’t surprised by something. I traveled the length of India, north to south, and met such fascinating characters. What impressed me most is that so many Indian researchers have such a social aspect to their work. They want to help India’s poor and vulnerable, as well as to do good science.

One interviewee, Sujatha Narayanan, was a tuberculosis researcher I met in Chennai. A few years ago, when she didn’t have enough healthy volunteers for her work, she started running tests on herself. One day she found some TB bacteria in a tube that had been in her throat, which meant she may have accidentally infected herself. She had to undertake a grueling drug treatment for months, which she believes triggered her diabetes. She put her life on the line for her work, but it has not diminished her passion or her commitment to science.

What role are ethnic Indian immigrants/returnees from the West playing in India’s tech industry? Are they a major factor?

The success of India’s tech industry has encouraged a lot of young engineers and scientists who left the country, in the big brain drain, to return. And they’re playing a big part in shaping the future of the industry. Not only are they bringing their expertise and experience, but they are also bringing the culture of places like Silicon Valley. In Bangalore these days there are meetups and cool conferences for young techies and designers, just like you get in San Francisco. There’s this buzz about the big cities, which is making them an exciting environment to be in. But it’s not just in IT–I met scientists in all kinds of fields who had chosen to come back to India because they felt the opportunities were improving and that they could make a difference to the country.

Can you explain why you compared India’s current situation to Japan in the early 1970s?

When you read academic studies about the attitudes that people had toward Japan’s technology industry in its early days, it’s very similar to what people have been saying about India recently–that scientists and engineers are hardworking and educated, but not particularly creative or original. In Japan’s case of course that all changed, giving rise to a truly powerful scientific nation. I think similar stirrings are happening in India now. There are shoots of creativity all over the country, particularly in areas like biotechnology, life sciences, and computing. I don’t want to forecast what might happen, because I don’t think anyone can know for sure, but India does at least have the ambition and willpower to want to be the next scientific superpower.

You wrote about jugaad–the power of improvising to solve problems–in a recent article. How do you think that has influenced India’s tech industry?

I didn’t write about jugaad in my book. But yeah, I wrote an article about it recently, because it is such a fascinating phenomenon. Jugaad is a very broad-brush word, meaning something like getting things done by hook or by crook. So for example, in rural areas, people will throw together tractor engines and bits of wood to make trucks, and in the urban slums, people will recycle old newspapers and rework appliances to make new ones. It’s really driven by poverty, but it has inspired some Indian companies to look at frugal, mass innovation for India’s domestic market–for example, the TATA Nano car. But I don’t think it’s had a big impact on India’s mainstream technology industry, which is focused on creating high-quality products and services that can sell overseas.

What do you see as the strong points and weak points of India’s tech industry?

India’s tech industry is great at business innovation. India’s outsourcing model for IT work has been incredibly successful and, on the back of this, it’s managed to build a profitable industry that is globally competitive. But it’s less good at genuine technological innovation. India simply hasn’t yet produced a company of the caliber of IBM or Microsoft. But that isn’t to say it will never do it. It certainly wants to, but I have a feeling it may come from the younger generation, which is more free in its thinking and creative.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and readability.

Geek Nation was released this past March in the United Kingdom and is currently awaiting U.S. release.

Image: Angela Saini

Via Mashable: http://www.mashable.com

The publishing industry has a problem. The old guard haven’t innovated. And neither their business models nor their products embrace the digital books revolution.

Take the ongoing and complicated spat between Apple and the Justice Department over the agency pricing model and alleged collusion which ended up with consumers being forced to spend more than they needed to. The battle may expand internationally, in fact. Apple tried to expand its 30% revenue share model, which has done very well in the billion-dollar app economy, into books. It also pushed publishers to agree to a very different way of selling their products: Instead of buying books traditionally, at a pre-agreed wholesale price and then pricing them as Apple saw fit in the iBookstore, it would let the publishers set their own price and extract its usual fixed share of the income … as long as the publishers wouldn’t sell e-books elsewhere.

It was a bold move, and one that could and did shake up the industry a bit. Amazon, the publishers contend, had established a monopoly on e-books, and was selling their wares at overly discounted prices. With Apple’s model they could choose to price e-books lower than physical books cost (appeasing consumers who expect to pay less for a non-physical product), and yet extract more money due to the cost-savings of e-publishing.

The DOJ disagreed, and says Apple’s deal meant consumers ended up spending much more than they needed to, hence its action against Apple and a laundry list of the bigger U.S. publishers. Amazon is now free to renegotiate deals with these publishers and push cover prices lower, which will save consumers cash but may both eat into publisher’s profits and, ultimately, author’s payments.

As such, it’s not a wholly well-received decision as Scott Turow, president of the Author’s Guild, recently noted: “Today’s low Kindle book prices will last only as long as it takes Amazon to re-establish its monopoly. It is hard to believe that the Justice Department has somehow persuaded itself that this solution fosters competition or is good for readers in the long run.” Because when Amazon does re-establish its monopoly, and nudges prices upward, it’ll be operating on the wholesale model–with the extra money sunk into its coffers, not the author’s or the publisher’s.

But as novelist Barry Eisler notes in the Guardian newspaper, there is actually a glimmer of hope in the DOJ’s decision. Amazon could, by sheer pressure of business, force a breakup of the old guard of publishers in the U.S., and make them adapt to the new digital realities or face extinction. In short, they’ll have to radically adjust their business models, and also embrace writers who can deliver new rich-media books, if they’re to keep the book-buying public enthralled and thus make money. Amazon’s quick-growing self-publishing enterprise is an example of how the publishing business may evolve without them if they don’t do this.

And what do we, the book-buying public, want? Cheaper prices, as ever, but we’re also all expecting books to move beyond dead text and into something much more dynamic, something loaded with rich media, something that makes use of the color and graphics of our tablet screens, and perhaps the social networking powers they also sport as apps. Because those kinds of books sure as heck aren’t in Amazon’s top-selling Kindle list right now.

Image: Flickr user dno1967b , and Isriya Paireepairit

Marketers, educators, parents, it seems that almost anyone in the Generation X or Boomer demographic is scratching their heads trying to figure out Generation Y aka the Millennial. After all, it’s the first generation to seemingly possess digital prowess as part of their DNA. And, it’s the first generation to receive both a birth certificate and a social profile or presence upon delivery into this world.

A study published in 2011 by security company AVG and Research Now surveyed  2,200 mothers from around the world and found that 81% of children under the age of two currently have some type of digital footprint. 92% of U.S. children have an online presence created for them by the time they are 2 years old. In many cases, a digital presence is born before the child, with sonograms (23%) actively published and shared on social networks and blogs.

With every day that passes, Gen Y becomes far more important to the economy than we can realize. Yet the gap between how Gen Y communicates and connects and how businesses, educators, governments, et al. approach them is only widening. I often wonder whether or not we are simply trying to talk to ourselves in our approach when in reality, we are talking to strangers. This is important as without understanding what’s important to them and why, without learning their behavior or decision making cycles, or without empathy, we cannot reverse engineer nor create a meaningful and engaging journey. We cannot create bridges from where they are to us nor can we expect them to use them.

How well do you know Gen Y?

Here are some interesting points for discovery that get us thinking beyond what we think we know today:

59% update their social status in class.

29% find love through Facebook while 33% are dumped via TXT or Wall posts (SRS) – abbreviation for seriously

Millennials watch TV with two or more electronic devices

Only 11% define having a lot of money as a definition of success

Gen-Y will form 75% of the workforce by 2025 and are actively shaping corporate culture and expectations.

Only 7% of Gen-Y works for a Fortune 500 company as startups dominate the workforce for this demographic. Gen-Y expects larger organizations to hear their voice and recognize their contributions…increasing the need for an intrapreneurial culture.

Millennials trust strangers over friends and family. They lean on UGC for purchases.

They are 3x as likely to follow a brand over a family member in social networks

66% will look up a store if they see a friend check-in

73% have earned and used virtual currency

Gen-Y believes that other consumers care more about their opinions than companies do – that’s why they share their opinions online.

Gen-Y’ers are more connected on Facebook than average users managing a social graph of 696 Facebook friends versus 140.

If knowledge is the key to enlightenment, then perception and imagination are windows to engagement and relevance. We can learn all we want about Millennials, but if we can’t translate that into meaning or substance, we will continue to miss opportunities to build lasting relationships.

The gap isn’t just widening because of the growing pervasiveness of Millennials in our economy. As I introduced in The End of Business as Usual, anyone who places increasing emphasis on technology as part of their daily routine, in many ways, their behavior mimics that of Millennials and as a result, they prove elusive or immune to traditional marketing and service. In the book, I refer to this class of consumer as “the Connected Customer” and their behavior is noticeably dissimilar to that of their traditional counterparts. The connected customer is the stranger you must get to know as in comparison to the customers of the past, this group is only growing and it’s traversing demographics. As such, the connected customer becomes what we can or should now refer to as Generation C where the “C” represents connectedness.

No longer can we blame it on the youth. We must blame, if anything, the disruption of technology. Nowadays, age ain’t nothing but a number. It is how people embrace technology, from social networks to smartphones to intelligent appliances, that contributes to the digital lifestyle that is now synonymous with Gen-C.

A recent study published by Nielsen brings Generation C into light. In just one image, we can begin to comprehend the disruption of digital revolution on society. Call it the social economy. Call it the mobile or the app economy. Call it the connected economy. Whatever we call it, this incredible transformation that we’re witnessing, is indeed nothing short of a digital revolution.

The Last 10 Years

274 million American have Internet Access, which is more than double that of 2000.

81 billion minutes spent on social networks and blogs

64% of all mobile phone time is spent on apps.

42% of tablet owners use them daily while watching TV.

For the first time, the numbers of laptops have surpassed desktops within TV homes.

Women Rule Gen-C

In 2009, I discovered that in social media, women rule. As you can see in Nielsen’s report, women too rule Gen-C.  Specifically, they rule social media and online video and TV viewership. With smartphones, men and women are tied in adoption. With tablets however, men rule.

Gen-C, By the Numbers

If you compare Nielsen’s graphic with that of IBM’s research on Social CRM, you can appreciate the full dimension of Gen-C as every demographic, in their own way, is adopting disruptive technology. And, it’s only becoming greater.

Platforms for Digital Access

Every digital experience has its springboard. Whether it’s a PC, tablet, smartphone, and soon, a connected TV, our ability to every platform unifies the 5-C’s of engagement, create, connect, consume, communicate, and contribute.

274.2 million Americans have Internet access

169.6 million visit social networks and blogs

165.9 million people watch video on a PC

70% of time using tablets is spent while at home versus 30% on the go

Content accessed on tablets is 1) News at 39%, 2) Sports at 34%, and Books at 31%

On smartphones, 117.6 million visit the Internet

App usage peaks at 5 p.m. among adults

Smartphones are used by 44% of all mobile subscribers in the U.S.

Video Continues to Kill the Radio Star: Engagement is Cross Platform

Nielsen found that consumers increased their online video consumption by 7% from Q3 2010 to Q3 2011. As you can see in theimage below, online and mobile video consumption is significant.

Younger demographics watch less TV and watch video more online and on mobile devices.

With each generation, TV viewership rises with age.

Connected Customers are Multitaskers

Nielsen also shared the engagement habits and online activity of connected customers. As consumers watch a program, they are online with 1) 57% checking email, 2) 44% surfing the web, and 3) another 44% social networking.

When asked what they were doing while online during TV, some very interesting answers emerged. 29% looked up programming information related to the show. 19% looked up product information related to an ad. And, 16% looked up coupons or deals related to the ad.

The Top 5 Sites Visited While Watching TV

1. Facebook

2. Youtube

3. Zynga

4. Google

How Gen-C Spends their Connected Time

On PC’s and mobile devices, Gen-C is always on. Nielsen found that during October 2011, Youtube was the top destination for all online video content, accounting for nearly half (45%) of American’s total streaming time.

Social networking represents 21.3% of all time spent online using PCs.

Online gaming accounts for 7.7%

Email, in many ways still the largest social network in the world, represents 6.5%

55.8% of mobile phone time is spent in miscellaneous apps, with Angry Birds most likely accounting for a notable share of that time (just kidding).

Text messaging continues to test the limits of thumb dexterity and the ability to find new ways to abbreviate our vocabulary at 13.4%

Browser usage represents 11.1%

Social networking equals 5.5%

Interesting that email and IM are among the bottom of all mobile functions at 5.3%.

From e-commerce to Mobile Commerce

As Nielsen and so many other research reports herald, mobile commerce is influencing transactions and decisions. Mobile is just one of the many channels for emerging commerce including social, F-commerce, and more importantly, syndicated commerce. 29% of of mobile consumers use their phone for shopping-related activities and more than 50% visit daily deal sites daily.

Mobile shopping activities include:

38% compare prices online while in shopping in a store.

38% browse products through websites or apps.

32% read online reviews of products.

24% search for or use online coupons.

22% have purchased a product.

22% scan barcodes for product or price information.

18% use location-based services to find retail locations.

My favorite state isn’t related to what people are doing, but what they would do if businesses innovated in their approach to commerce.

27% of male and 22% of female consumers would use their mobile phone to make payments in restaurants and shops if they could.

This is an EmerGen-C

Connected customers or Gen-C is only becoming more pervasive in society and ultimately your economy. If you look back at the Gen-Y behavior list and replace the words “Millennial” or “Gen-Y” with “Connected Customer” or “Gen-C,” the similarities are uncanny. Now’s the time to recognize how your customer landscape is shifting and to what extent traditional and connected consumers discover and make decisions differently. The customer journey is far more complex than ever before, where new touchpoints not only emerge, they introduce a new customer journey.

With connected customers, decision making is no longer signified by a simple funnel, nor can business models support decision making before, during, and post transaction across these distributed, but connected platforms. This is a time for augmented engagement strategies to cater to different types of customers differently not only based on behavior, but also based on their expectations, needs, and also the platform they use to connect, communicate, and make decisions.

If you take a close look at Facebook’s S-1 registration statement, you’ll notice something striking: Designers are called out as key to the company’s longterm strategic success.

Tech company filings often call out certain job functions—like engineering—and the organization’s ability ability to fill those position as crucial to its success. But designers? That’s almost unheard of. And yet, there they are. In the section titled “Factors Affecting Our Performance,” Facebook’s filing reads: “We have also made and intend to make acquisitions with the primary objective of adding software engineers, product designers, and other personnel with certain technology expertise.” And in the section titled “Competition,” it says, “We compete to attract and retain highly talented individuals, especially software engineers, designers, and product managers.” (Emphasis added in both cases.)

Facebook says they’ve only scratched the surface of their roadmap.

The mentions underline the importance (little-noticed until now) that Facebook places on its design team. In a story on that team, which ran in the April issue of Fast Company, VP of product Chris Cox and others told the magazine how the company is looking to its right-brainers to help them do something that’s essentially never been done in software before: Design interfaces that catalyze emotions, rather than simply enable users to accomplish tasks.

Chris Cox

Designing for Facebook, Cox said, gets at “the science of things you can’t reason about, that you just feel.” He added: “That’s why, when we’re trying to accomplish something that’s pretty new, it’s important to be iterating in that design mindset.”

That mindset is only going to become increasingly important. Facebook executives say they’ve only scratched the surface of their roadmap. As a result, the company’s been on a hiring tear, tracking down and convincing some of the tech world’s brightest design talent to join the company, including, most recently, the team at Gowalla (brought in via an acquisition) and Elizabeth Windram, a former staff designer at Google who was snatched away from Quora just months after she joined that company.

CLICK ABOVE FOR OUR SLIDESHOW OF FACEBOOK’S NOTABLE DESIGN HIRES

Notably, tracking down the right people and persuading them to join the team is so important that Facebook doesn’t leave the job to HR alone. “We started keeping a dream team list about two-and-a-half years ago,” Director of Design Kate Aronowitz tells Co.Design. “We thought, ‘What if we could assemble all these people in one room?’”

Nicholas Felton and Kate Aronowitz, Facebook’s Director of Design.

The design team themselves maintain Facebook Group called Design Recruiting (yes, the company uses the site as one of its core productivity tools) that team members fill up with the names and portfolios of designers they admire. And Aronowitz says she herself regularly cuddles up with an iPhone or iPad before bed, surfing through a series of apps, looking for flashes of genius.

Members of the design team reach out to targets themselves, meeting up with them at conferences or inviting them out for dinner or drinks, both to test for fit (“see if our values line up and see if we get excited about the same things,” Aronowitz says) and to make the case for joining Facebook.

The design team reaches out to targets themselves. For some, Facebook brings out the big guns.

For some targets, Facebook even brings out the big guns. Both Nicholas Felton, the information designer behind the wildly popular Feltron Annual Reports, and Mike Matas, who worked on the original iPhone and then cofounded Push Pop Press, which created the Apple Award-winning tablet book version of Our Choice, Al Gore’s follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, got personal invitations from the main man himself, CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (The email Felton saw in his inbox was so casual that at first, he tells Co.Design, he thought it was just a message from Zuckerberg to all Facebook users.)

That email led to a visit to Facebook headquarters for then-New York-based Felton and his partner Ryan Case. Zuckerberg took them on a a walk through the leafy Palo Alto neighborhood where the company was located at the time. He asked them what they were hoping to do with Daytum and talked about his own visions for Facebook. (Matas tells a similar story, of how an initial invitation from Zuckerberg to come talk about Push Pop Press led, several months later, to a formal offer to join the company.)

For all the outreach Facebook does, the bar to actually getting in the door remains high. “I only hire about one out of every hundred portfolios I look at,” Aronowitz told a group of designers at an event at Dave McClure’s 500 Startups last winter.

Facebook isn’t looking for your run-of-the-mill “pixel pusher.” When we meet at Facebook headquarters, Aronowitz ticks off three qualities she looks for: A personal vision (about what the world needs or where design is going), a sense of ownership over the projects they work on, and a “builder” mindset. “We’re looking for people who can say, ‘I have a product idea, I can think through a need, I can think through a customer base, build something, ship it, and then iterate based on how it’s being used.’”

I only hire about one out of every hundred portfolios I look at.

That’s because once they get to Facebook, designers don’t sit in a corner and wait for people to toss requirements at them. Rather, they enjoy an unusually high level of involvement in the product, starting at the very beginning as executives and product leads discuss what they should build. “Here, the designers will be in almost every conversation about their product,” Aronowitz says.

The designers’ involvement is so deep that they often partner with product managers to lead feature teams. Sometimes they even take the lead on their own.

Sofa, the firm that created ingenious apps like this one, was bought outright by Facebook. The team now works on polishing the site’s icons and visual elements.

Last year, for example, we wrote about how Rob Mason, a fresh-faced young graduate from England, with little more than a few Facebook apps under his belt, was handed responsibility for the Skype integration barely moments after he’d walked in the door. “Go figure out what the experience of doing video calls on Facebook should be,” he was told. He spent a few months tinkering around with it and eventually threw out the book on historical video chat conventions, coming up instead with something simple, straightforward, and so easy to use that, as one of the designers said at the time, even his mom could figure it out.

When the designers they hire are particularly good–when the company believes in their own unique genius–the company gives them free reign to come up with their own portfolio. When Matas joined Facebook last year with his Push Pop cofounder Kimon Tsinteris, for example, the two were given an office and told to think about what new features and products they thought Facebook should be doing next.

“If you can hire people that are good,” Cox explains, “you’re crazy to not give them the chance to set up the definition of what they’re doing.”

And not to keep them close. Both Zuckerberg and Cox spend the bulk their days in product meetings, working cheek-by-jowl with designers and product managers, hammering out the company’s next feature sets.

In the old Palo Alto campus, the company’s designers were parked in the same giant, open-plan room where Zuckerberg, Cox, and the company’s other top executives sat. The new Menlo Park campus has nine buildings and room for 3,200 people. And still, the designers were put not just in the same building, but on the same floor—just one open-plan space over—as Zuckerberg and Cox, all of which facilitates the impromptu executive-designer desk-side conversations and hallway conferences that employees say is one of the keys to the company moving fast and generating breakthrough ideas.

“Design is more strategic than ever,” Aronowitz says. “Designers who come to Facebook have a massive scale of audience and a pretty big impact.”

Portraits by Jake Stangel for Fast Company.

Designers spend a lot of time giving advice to each other. There has been a litany of books by designers for designers. There have been a few by business people on how design can benefit business. But there have not been many about the process of design and creativity at the most fundamental level of all–the human brain. Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine is that book. Released a few weeks ago, it’s the most important book to hit design in many years, because it goes to the heart of how the mind works and offers surprising and immediately useful ideas on the neurological origins of creative insight.

Through a series of stories about some of history’s greatest creative breakthroughs, Lehrer takes the reader into how those ‘aha’ moments happen. By starting at the level of the individual and scaling up to communities, corporations, and even cities, Lehrer presents a measured and invigorating view of how our brains imagine new things. The book contains an endless array of helpful ways to think about creativity, but here are a few that struck me as most relevant to designers.

The Key to a Breakthrough: Daydreaming

We often feel guilty daydreaming. The time spent in an extra long shower or staring out the window feels wasted. But daydreaming is a critical component on the path to a creative breakthrough. The activity that takes place inside of our brains while we believe we’re daydreaming is unique and activates a part of our brain associated with insight. Lehrer describes the ‘3M attention policy’ that has been credited with several innovations over the course of that company’s history. The policy was based on an intuitive understanding of creativity that has since been validated by modern brain research:

The science of insight supports the 3M attention policy. Joydeep Bhattacharya, a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, has used EEG to help explain why interrupting one’s focus–perhaps with a walk outside or a game of Ping-Pong–can be so helpful. Interestingly, Bhattacharya has found that it’s possible to predict that a person will solve an insight puzzle up to eight seconds before the insight actually arrives. …What is the predictive brain signal? The essential element is a steady rhythm of alpha waves emanating from the right hemisphere. While the precise function of alpha waves remains mysterious, they’re closely associated with relaxing activities, such as taking a warm shower. In fact, the waves are so crucial for insight that, according to Bhattacharya, subjects with insufficient alpha-wave activity are unable to utilize hints provided by the researchers.

Successful Teams Are Never Too Familiar With Each Other

We live in an increasingly complex world with increasingly complex problems that require teams of people working together. But sometimes what seems like a great team fails. Why? How do we best work together? How do we build creative teams with a greater likelihood of success?

To answer this question, Lehrer describes the work of Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern University who sought to identify a model for successful group creativity. He analyzed what can often be a complex creative group endeavor: the Broadway musical.

He found that the success of musicals like West Side Story, one of the most critically and financially successful Broadway plays of the 20th century, can be understood by the nature of the social relationships of the creative team involved. Uzzi invented a designation called Q. Groups with high levels of Q are closely knit teams. Groups with lower levels of Q are essentially strangers. It’s the teams with the right mix of unfamiliarity and intimacy that are the best performers. West Side Story had the right mix of Broadway stars and virtual unknowns. And there is a clear pattern, Lehrer writes

Uzzi’s data clearly demonstrates that the best Broadway shows were produced with intermediate levels of social intimacy. A musical produced at the ideal level of Q was two and a half times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced with a low Q or high Q.

Lehrer speaking at PopTech on the power of outside intelligence.

Bring in an Outside Perspective

We have a saying at Bruce Mau Design: “Amateurs going in, experts going out.” For a long time, we struggled to articulate the benefit of being a “nonexpert” in a field. We often talk about “fresh eyes” in design. When you’re working too long with anything, by definition, you can’t “see” it anymore. It helps to get a person unfamiliar with the work to give a fresh perspective. Well, it turns out that this is a fundamental pillar of innovation: Our habits form what’s called a ventral route. It’s like a rut in a road. It gets so deep that you simply can’t get out without outside help. Using a story about InnoCentive as a starting point, Lehrer describes the paradox of expertise in that it can sometimes become an obstacle to creative problem solving:

There is something deeply counterintuitive about the success of InnoCentive. We assume that technical problems can be solved by people with technical expertise; the researcher most likely to find the answer is the one most familiar with the terms of the question. But that assumption is wrong. The people deep inside a domain–the chemists trying to solve a chemistry problem–often suffer from a kind of intellectual handicap. As a result, the impossible problem stays possible. It’s not until the challenge is shared with motivated outsiders that the solution can be found.

Those few stories are really just the beginning. The book also talks about the reason why Shakespeare was so prolific (your social scene has a whole lot to do with your chances of a creative breakthrough), how an autistic surfer has revolutionized surfing because he is predisposed to obsessive even debilitating attention to his craft (something all good designers are familiar with), and how the human friction we experience in cities is the key to their constant flourishing.

Lehrer’s book works well because it tells deeply human stories to illustrate the underlying science that drives the creativity of the subjects he describes. It’s for that reason that this book is so important for designers. It helps us understand what’s driving our creative impulses and thought processes at the most fundamental level. Lehrer, the science writer, may have been an amateur going in, but he’s an expert now. And we’re all the beneficiaries.

Buy Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine for $15 here.

Image: Sylverarts/Shutterstock

Paddy Harrington

Paddy Harrington is executive creative director for Bruce Mau Design (BMD), a member of the MDC Partners network. Since joining the Studio in 2003, Mr. … Continued