Open up your mind and say, ahh...

We’ve all suffered through a lunch, date, or meeting with a monologist–you know, a person who, oblivious to social cues, dominates the conversation, shows little interest in others around the table, and, when someone tries to shove in one’s oar, raises his voice to drown out the hope of a dialogue.

The question is, how to call out the offender on his obnoxious behavior when you can’t get a word in edgewise? One way is to throw his words back at him. Two Japanese researchers have created a gunlike instrument that does just that. Using the principle of delayed audio feedback, their SpeechJammer records speech and plays it back with a split-second pause, effectively stupefying and silencing the speaker.

Kazutaka Kurihara, a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, thought up the idea after participating in a demonstration of delayed audio feedback at a local museum. “When I spoke to a microphone, my voice came back to me after a few hundred millisecond delay, then I could not continue to speak anymore,” Kurihara tells Co.Design. “Around that time, my research interest was about developing a system that controls appropriate turn-taking at discussions and was looking for technologies to enforce some discussion rules for participants. Then I came up with the gun type SpeechJammer idea utilizing DAF. That’s the destiny.” He recruited his friend, Koji Tsukada, a “gadget master” at Ochanomizu University, to help him realize the concept, consisting of a direction-sensitive mic and speaker, a distance sensor, a laser pointer, and a microcontroller.

Kurihara stresses that the intent isn’t only to shut up blabbermouths but to allow space for the less vocal to join the conversation. “Fair discussions are essential for resolving conflicts through communication,” he and Tsukada write in their paper. “However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions.” SpeechJammer was conceived to correct such abuses and allow all participants to have an equal say in proceedings.

The technology behind the idea might be overkill: Under ordinary circumstances, thrusting a mic-equipped gun into a person’s face should be enough to throw anyone off his game. But in the case of, say, the upcoming presidential debates, we can imagine it being an entirely effective (and somewhat hilarious) way to impose time restrictions.

Image: Everett Collection/Shutterstock

When it comes to content creation–even in short bits and blasts on Twitter—the human touch is what will keep marketers relevant and real. A look at J.Crew, Wegmans, NASCAR, and other brands that are getting it right.

Last weekend I snagged a lounge chair at our community pool next to a friend and fellow marketer I haven’t seen in weeks. We’re both managing the demands of family and careers and rarely get a chance to catch up with each other or with our reading. I pulled out Runner’s World from my bag, she pulled out J.Crew. Before long we were swapping magazines, and, as like-minded marketers, our conversation quickly shifted gears to how J.Crew had snagged us (cynical shoppers that we are) to become advocates for its brand.

Consider the catalog–a source of poolside perusing–that is now called the J.Crew style guide. It’s less about the specs and more about the style. I had the opportunity to share a stage recently with Diego Scott, the company’s CMO. Our panel discussion was all about “moving beyond the ‘like’” to more engagement with stakeholders. He shared the story of J.Crew’s evolved thinking in this area and its recognition that the catalog is a catalyst for the brand to offer a point of view. The J.Crew created content, online and in print, shares ideas from in-the-know fashion and jewelry designers on current fabrics, cuts and fashion trends while remaining unmistakably J. Crew: polished and fresh and conversely, appropriately classic. The revamped catalog–disguised as a style guide–is an example of company-created content done right.

When it comes to generating compelling content, fashion companies may have it easy. But, every marketer can take a page from J.Crew’s guide on how to create and manage a lot of content while maintaining a consistent voice across multiple channels. And, oh yes, to generate interest in your content in ways that drive actions that benefit your company. It’s that new nuance of paid, owned and earned media singing Kumbaya together.

Help is available. At a time when it is imperative for brands to communicate 24/7, a growing number of tech and media companies make it possible to automate content creation and curation. A few keywords typed in here and there and—voila!–content. The Huffington Post, for one, offers to create web sites for brands and use algorithms to repurpose relevant HuffPo content. Meanwhile, there are tech companies that can generate articles that look as if they were penned by real writers.

Like many of my peers, we’re exploring these tools and doing so with an eye toward simplifying content management while maintaining an authentic and engaging brand voice. Algorithms can do amazing things, including suggesting topics of discussion and identifying popular issues that will resonate with a target audience. But they can’t put together a style guide, say, that motivates customers to engage regularly and meaningfully with the brand. When it comes to content creation–even in short bits and blasts on Twitter—the human touch is what will keep marketers relevant and real.

The companies that are truly winning over audiences and driving consumers are the ones that are experimenting with a balance of automated aggregation and human-directed curation. It’s a process of out-sourcing and in-sourcing.

I’ve been following Intel’s approach. It recently launched iQ, an employee-curated digital magazine created to connect with a younger audience and share with them the bigger, living brand story. Not only does the site provide original stories about tech, it also aggregates top tech stories from other sites that Intel’s audience will find interesting. Readers and employees dictate much of the moment-to-moment interaction on the site, but it is all closely watched by editor-in-chief Bryan Rhoades, who spurs conversations by judiciously placing some stories on the iQ homepage.

NASCAR, too, is experimenting in this space. A partnership with Twitter includes a site that compiles #NASCAR-related tweets from popular drivers, who send 140-character blasts from the track or wherever they may be– along with those from sports writers and other industry folks. They pull it off by using a search algorithm and human editors who understand narrative—and appropriate content.

My friends over at Wegmans (I call them my “friends” hoping the Wegman family will open a store in Fairfield County, Conn.), were among the first to the table in using relevant content to connect with consumers. In 2001, way before Twitter and Facebook and before actor Alec Baldwin proclaimed his mom’s love of Wegmans on the Late Show, the company created Menu magazine. It’s a “tuck-in-your-pool bag” food guide that is sent to consumers free of charge and features practical, balanced yet appetizing meal ideas that even the most harried of parents (that would be me) can make with the help of a Wegmans’ shopping list, of course. The company is connecting shoppers with relevant content–among the many reasons Wegmans was recently named one of 16 brands with fanatical cult followings.

Bill Gates was right in noting that content is king. Today, we are all publishers. It’s a daunting prospect. New content curation tools make automating the job easier–but easy may not always be as effective. It would be a mistake to let algorithms do the entire job for you. No one knows your audience like you do. And, keeping the human touch in the process is more real, which is really important to today’s info-overloaded consumer. This begs the question, which brands are serving up content to you poolside?

Image: Flickr user Gwen Vanhee

In his great keynote speech at IMS 2012 in San Francisco, Rick Bakas said, “We have to think mobile first, desktop second.” (I admit that I heard absolutely zero percent of the rest of the speech, because that little seed was enough to plant a forest in my head.) But in case that wasn’t enough, I had an experience a few hours later that fertilized the point and forced the issue.

It turns out that in San Francisco, getting a taxi to actually stop and pick you up is a bit of a chore. I met one cab driver who told me that he’d met several mayors and heads of government, simply because he’s a role model because he picks up more passengers than most drivers. (Now, before some union or other association wants to complain that I’m misrepresenting drivers in SF, I have no idea of the details. This is my experience + what I was told.)

Thank goodness another cab driver told me about Cabulous, this mobile app that lets you notify a driver that you need a pick-up without having to call the dispatcher at all. This saved Jacq and me a bunch of time, and just generally made travel work better for us in SF. Plus, it gave the driver more fares without having to wait for his dispatcher or guess where people were waiting. It worked well (in San Francisco, mind you- a very high tech area).

But this is just the story that leads me to the conversation.

A Mobile First World

I’m planning a new event that takes an even bigger, more innovative swing at how mid-sized to larger businesses will function around this digital channel. In putting it all together, I’m paying more attention to how businesses of all sizes utilize the various tools at their disposal to conduct business. For instance, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to how mobile changes the game.

For instance, this cab driver doesn’t need to have a blog. He doesn’t need a board on Pinterest. Cabulous is a mobile-first solution that gives him more buyers. Because his business is built on a simple transaction, why should he bother with all the frills? He shouldn’t.

But what about you? Are your business interactions as simple? And are you built around a mobile-first mindset? I’m guessing you’re not. I know that I’m not. My sites are all mobile-ready and mobile-enhanced, partly because I use a mobile-friendly theme from Studiopress (affiliate link), and also because I use a mobile-formatting plugin for chrisbrogan.com (called wptouch). We need to think even more about this.

The Mobile-First World and You

Look from your side of the equation first: you sleep with your smartphone right beside the bed, don’t you? You reach for it first thing in the morning. You never leave the house without it. You put it on the table at breakfast like a gunslinger. You’re even starting to do some business functions via your mobile devices.

So, that’s you as the user. What about you as the business owner, as the collaborator, as the face of interactions between others and your company? What do you have to do to prepare? What steps will you take?

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My business partners at Citrix Online (makers of GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToSleep, and similar) have sponsored a conversation between myself and Chuck Martin, CEO of the Mobile Future Institute and author of the bestseller, The Third Screen: Marketing to Your Customers in a World Gone Mobile (amazon affiliate link).

We’ll talk about marketing, but also about collaboration, internal business functions, and whatever else I can wring out of Chuck’s brilliant mind. This conversation isn’t one to miss, as I have a lot to ask him, after hearing from Rick Bakas and observing Cabulous in action.

How much is a touch screen button worth? If you’re a New York City cabbie who was forced to install a credit card reader in your taxi, it’d better be worth a lot, because those damn things were expensive. Well, according to the New York Times, those credit card readers increased tips from 10% to 22%, on average. Designer Joshua Gross did some arithmetic and it turns out that the touch-screen buttons were worth an extra $144,146,165 in tips.

Defaults require less thinking, and we view them as implicit recommendations.

So how could three buttons on a screen bump tips by over a hundred million bucks? Such is the power of user experience design–specifically, the power of the default option. A taxi rider paying her fare by credit card is presented with three buttons for adding a tip: 20%, 25%, and 30%. You can enter whatever tip you like manually, but you’re probably just going to hit one of those buttons. Since the average tip increased to 22%, that implies that most people hit the middle or lower option.

I asked behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of the new book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, why default options are powerful enough to turn even hard-boiled New Yorkers into generous tippers. “One reason is that they’re the path of least resistance,” he says. “Defaults always require less thinking, which is very tempting. But we also view default options as implicit recommendations–we assume that whoever designed the system thought about it and came up with this set of the ‘right’ responses.”

So buttons make us tip better because we’re lazy and we don’t want to be wrong. Could cabbies have made even more money if the UI designers had presented higher percentages on the tip buttons? “I think the answer is absolutely yes,” says Ariely.

But before you go thinking that UI designers could Jedi-mindtrick us all into emptying our wallets just because the buttons say so, Ariely says that even our laziness has limits. “If the options were 21, 26, and 31, i think the average tip would have gone higher. But the range has to reflect some possibility of normal behavior. No one is going to leave a 100% tip.” Not unless you’re Jay-Z, anyway.

And remember that the highest default option was 30%, but average tips only increased to 22%. This “middle to low” behavior emerges from the system presenting three buttons instead of two, or one. “When you present three options, people think this is the range of acceptable possibilities,” Ariely explains. “They don’t want to be too high or too low, so they tend toward the middle option. But this is money, so they’re still motivated to save and go lower as well. This might explain why the average tip reflects an amount in between the lower and middle default options.” Still, $144,146,165 isn’t chump change. So the next time you have to explain (or justify) the vaporous concept of “user experience” in design, just drop that figure into the conversation. It should make things clear as day.

via Joshua Gross; Top image by Nadirco/Shutterstock

Urban-farming innovators such as Detroit and Cleveland offer an object lesson in how cities can transform disused land into tomorrow’s (healthy) dinner.

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 read about unexpected pockets of innovation in other cities.

Consider this paradox: 49 million Americans live with daily food insecurity, 23 million live in urban food deserts, and collectively we’re all getting fatter. Simultaneously vacant lots, concrete grooves, and other desolate, empty spots dot urban landscapes, while a quarter of traditional agricultural land is severely degraded according to the UN.

Enter the urban farm: a fast, smart, cheap way to bring healthy food closer to those who need it, transform ugly vacant spaces into lush gardens, and promote a healthier, greener, more connected urban community.

A recently released video by the American Society of Landscape Architects uses case studies from edible-city innovators, such as Cleveland and Detroit, to offer practical advice for bringing urban farms to your backyard (or corner lot or rooftop). Here are four helpful tips:

Plant a garden in your own yard (or farm the job out to someone else).

Acres of perfect green grass are both a hassle to maintain and, nutritionally speaking, useless. Inhabitants with yards in D.C. and Portland can even lease their yard to those with greener thumbs–and take a cut of the produce they yield.

Populate empty lots with crops.

Cities like Cleveland and Detroit are leasing abandoned lots to urban farmers for practically nothing–provided the lessees are committed to filling those spots with edible greenery.

If your lot’s soil is poisoned with lead or other contaminants, simply truck in new soil in raised beds. Even cheaper: Plant your veggies in burlap bags filled with clean soil. Roll the sacks up and fill with more soil as the plants grow, and you can transport them indoors when winter hits.

Use your roof.

ASLA’s video suggests restaurants harness their roofs to grow ingredients for their own meals. Big-box stores can lease or farm their own vast roofs and sell the proceeds in-store or via local greenmarkets. Rooftop farms use wasted space and lower your utility bill, too.

Fill up your food trucks.

Mobile trucks sell prepared foods–often unhealthy at that. Why not use them as fresh-fruit stands? Food truck legislation in many cities has relaxed in recent years. Opportunity knocks, suburban farmers: Coordinate with a food truck owner to sell your produce wherever there’s a need in your city–not just at the Saturday greenmarket. Hook the kids on juicy berries or watermelon in summer, and you may make a confirmed veggie fan year-round.

Image: Flickr user Joel Carranza

Time to cut someone loose? Even if it’s long past time for them to go, firing an employee can be difficult. Follow these five tips and you’ll be on the road to happiness again.

Parting is such sweet sorrow–unless you’re saying goodbye to an employee who should have been gone a long time ago. Here are five tips to make firing someone easier on the both of you.

Get to the point. Long goodbyes are painful, so be brief. This isn’t the time to remind the employee about every conversation you had regarding his performance, nor is it the time to tell the employee how talented he is as you are showing him the door.

Prepare a brief statement and stick to your script. It’s those who veer off course that find themselves driving over a cliff.

Expect the worse. This isn’t going to be one of those situations where you come together and sing “Kumbaya.” This is going to be a tough conversation, even if you suspect the employee knows it’s coming. Be prepared. If you think there is a chance the employee will go crazy, then have someone from HR sitting by your side or another manager who can help diffuse what may be a hot situation.

Terminations are fairly standard. Anticipate questions that may be asked and have an answer ready. This will prevent you from having to get back in touch with an employee who may try to pull you back into the conversation you just had.

Don’t try and have the last word. Okay, so you wanted to say the words, “You’re fired,” and you’ve finally gotten the nerve. You may be thinking that you aren’t going to let anyone take this satisfaction away from you. Be open to the possibility that an employee may ask to resign.

Consider this request carefully and if asked, say yes. The objective is to remove this employee from the organization. It’s better for all, if the employee leaves with his dignity in hand and it may save your organization from having to go through a nasty unemployment hearing or worse yet, a wrongful discharge suit.

Find a quiet place. In workplaces where everyone works in the open, this may sound easier than it is. Look for a conference room with shades so you can shield the employee from having others observe his last hour at the office.

If no such place exists, look for a quiet table in a coffee shop where you can have a conversation. Or, wait until others have left the office so you can take care of the business at hand.

Just do it! I know business owners who are still talking about people they should have fired years ago, yet these employees are still with the firm. Pick a date and move forward.

If things haven’t gotten any better in a year’s time or more, they certainly aren’t going to improve anytime soon. Do yourself and your employee a favor. Say sayonara so you both can get on with your lives.

Image: Flickr user Vicente Villamón

I was at a live performance the other night where Jacq sang and played with Girish, and I had a great conversation with Reggie, the drummer for the night. (I am SO sorry that I don’t know your last name, Reggie.) We talked about the fact that his typical drum kit for events is usually like 30 or so pieces, but that he decided to go minimal for the event. He had a kick drum, a snare, a tom, two cymbals, and a cowbell.

What Reggie said was something like this, “I really enjoy this, because it means I really have to use what I have to get the expression I’m aiming for. I can’t just lean on all the gadgetry. I’m using my skills and coaxing that expression out of these few tools.” That’s my translation of what Reggie said. He actually said it better. This isn’t the real conversation. This is just a tribute. (If you just smirked a bit, thank you. If you have no idea what I just said, move along. It’s okay.)

Work Within Constraints

With many things we do in life, there’s this little continuum. We start with something smallish or nothing, we then adapt and develop newer or bigger or more (or some mix). You start with a point and shoot camera and then you need a digital SLR camera. And then you need this amazing $3000 lens. And then, somewhere, at some point, oddly, you decide to go 180 degrees in the other direction. You think, “I bet I could get amazing photos out of one of those crazy cardboard box kit cameras.”

Constraints are magic, if you learn to embrace them. Learning how to write within 500 words is powerful. Learning how to take just one great photo with a simple point and shoot camera is wonderful. Learning how to get music out of two sticks and a bucket is wonderful. You can do a lot by learning how to embrace a lesser set of tools. You can learn a lot by saying, “This is all I have to work with, and I’m going to do that.” Jason Fried wrote a great book about that, by the way. Rework.Read also A Lesser Photographer manifesto. (Thanks to Michael Schechter for sharing this with me.)

What Are Your Constraints?

Are you working within a very tight budget? Do you not have enough time? Are you a cruddy writer? Bad on video? What’s your set of constraints? For instance, in music, I’m constrained by my lack of knowledge and ability with my use of Logic Pro and Abelton Live. Knowing this, I sometimes come up with hackish ways of creating a sound I want, because I don’t know how all the cool kids do it.

Where are YOUR constraints? And let’s think about this: there are constraints you just have (like my lack of knowledge) and then there are constraints you can choose for yourself: I like to write sub-500 word posts.

And what will those DO for you?

That’s the conversation.