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

The Boston Celtics know how to win. And while the team is now preparing for the next NBA season, Peter Stringer, Senior Director of Interactive Media is on the court every day. With 6.5 million fans on Facebook and 600k followers on Twitter, Peter’s work is just getting started. Serving customers in today’s hottest networks is one thing. Catering to a worldwide community of rabid sports fans requires in a series always-on digital arenas takes a different level of engagement altogether.

As part of an ongoing series that celebrates the experiences, vision, and strategy of those leading transformation, Peter shares with us how the Celtics approach social and digital strategies to compete for attention and affinity before, during and after each season.

What is the prevailing mission and purpose for the Boston Celtic’s social media strategy?

Fans have an insatiable appetite for news, information and inside access to the team, and we try to provide that across as many platforms as possible where we’ve established an audience. For the Boston Celtics, that currently means Celtics.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. If our fans are congregating on these platforms and discussing our team, we want to be the dominant voice in that conversation.

From a business standpoint, we want to learn as much about our fan base as possible, and turn those passionate fans into customers. To achieve that, we are actively collecting data from them in exchange for opportunities to win tickets, merchandise and unique Celtics experiences. We want to know where they live, what other brands they like, if they already buy tickets, etc. We have a product that our fans are incredibly passionate about, and therefore, they’re willing to make that value exchange.

What are some of the unique challenges you face as a sports franchise?

Social media and sports dovetail very nicely, so in some ways my job is actually easy. But the challenges I face are much more practical in nature. For instance, when you’ve got a massive audience like we do, you can’t afford to make a mistake. That toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube. You want to be sure that the message you send out is on brand, not only from a marketing perspective, but also from a basketball operations perspective.

I take great care in managing our social media properties to be sure that they reflect our team and brand in the right way. The Boston Celtics have a reputation built on 17 championships and 60 years of history. I don’t want to tarnish that with one poor tweet that doesn’t hit the mark or sends the wrong message. It can be tempting to try to be funny, sarcastic, or irreverent, but risk usually far outweighs the reward.

Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but that’s the lens through which I see our social channels. I look at every tweet, Facebook post and Instagram photo as an official statement from the Boston Celtics. And at the end of the day, the social media channels should reflect the team’s brand as a whole, and not attempt to create it’s own identity. After all, our product is our players, head coach, and the team’s incredible legacy. So I try to channel their voices, their thoughts and their moods and deliver them to our fans.

What is the current size of the communities you manage and what has overall growth and size of your social media footprint evolved?

Facebook is obviously our biggest channel, with over 6.5 million followers. That makes us the second biggest Facebook fan page in North American team sports. We were growing by about 15-20,000 fans a day until last year’s F8, when changes to the News Feed throttled our growth dramatically. That seems to be true for most teams and brands, and our reach rate per post has been decimated by the Edge Rank revisions. Given how frequently Facebook tweaks their platform, it was bound to happen, but I think Facebook has really hurt brands in this regard. These days, only photo galleries really seem to get any penetration into News Feeds thanks to heavy sharing by fans.

We’re at about 580,000 on Twitter, and that number continues to grow. During the postseason it’s been escalating at much faster rate than normal, which is to be expected. The quotes, pictures and notes we’re tweeting are getting a lot more attention the further we progress in the NBA Playoffs.

As for Instagram, we just passed 200,000 followers today, and that growth has been driven by taking a unique, more artistic look at the team. The credit for that goes largely to our team’s creative director, Keith Sliney (@pantone356). I snap a few photos here and there from the road, or if I see something at practice that warrants sharing, but by and large, he’s the driving force behind that platform and I believe we’re the #1 or #2 sports property on the service, and among the biggest brands globally as well.

We’ve been dabbling in Pinterest this season with merchandise and photos from our Instagram feed, and that’s picked up some steam. We were also the first team to my knowledge to try running a “Pin It To Win It” contest based on Pinterest to promote our Celtics web store.

What are the expectations of fans and how are they engaged as customers and as stakeholders?

Sports fans expect scores, news and information instantaneously on their phone during every waking hour. They no longer want to surf to ESPN.com, Celtics.com or anywhere else. They just expect it to show up in their Twitter feed. And so for us, that means tweeting our news as soon as we can effectively (or realistically) break it. Running social media for a sports team is an around the clock job, because this type of news can break at any time.

The challenge here is that some of the news fans really want will never be able to come directly from the teams or leagues first. When it comes to trades, for instance, that news never breaks on a team’s official feed first, because we’re not allowed to announce anything until it’s actually official and approved by the NBA league office. By that time, players’ agents, league employees or even team executives have already leaked the story to reporters. So connected journalists have a huge edge in that regard, when it comes to breaking news first. However, we still have a massive advantage in audience size. A beat writer who covers us probably only has 10-20,000 followers, so it may take them time to get their tweet circulated. Our tweets, on the other hand, get a lot more amplification and tend to circulate quicker, especially when we have big news.

That said, we do spend a lot of time mobilizing and orchestrating our fan base. We were the first NBA team (and to my knowledge, pro sports team) to put our @Celtics twitter handle on our court, and we’ve been promoting #CelticsChat throughout our local TV broadcasts throughout the season. We curate the conversation from #CelticsChat into GameTime Live, our live stats and game-blogging application on Celtics.com that allows fans from all over the globe to follow the action and join in a conversation around the game.

But I think the biggest thing we can provide through our social channels is an inside look at the organization. For instance, last night’s Eastern Conference Finals Game 6 vs. Miami is a perfect example. I snapped a photo of a simple message on the dry erase board in our locker room that was authentic and symbolic. It said, “12:30 Flight – Pack for a Week.” The implication was simple for fans in the know; it was a message to our players that after we win Game 7 vs. Miami, we’re flying directly to Oklahoma City for the NBA Finals. It was a motivational message from the coaching staff to our players, and by sharing that picture with 200,000 fans on Instagram, and 500,000 on Twitter, we sent a message of hope to a fan base still reeling from a disappointing loss. It helped turn the page from the past to the future. It was simple, raw and powerful; the perfect combination of insider access and emotional marketing. We just shared our coaches’ marketing to our players with our fan base. It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever shared with our fan base, and I really think it struck a chord with them.

What were some of the challenges you faced to get here? What challenges do you still face?

Staffing and bandwidth remain a challenge for us. When I started with the Celtics in 2005, I was a one-man show and my job was simply managing Celtics.com, a site that had little-to-no basketball content and was simply a ticket sales driven property. Given my journalism background and existing passion for the team since childhood, once I got my feet wet, I started overhauling the site, revamping the design and emphasis into a content driven site. Then we started dabbling in video and production in the 2008 season when we won our 17th NBA championship.

In the following seasons as Twitter and Facebook emerged, to me they were obvious extrapolations of what I was already doing with Celtics.com. But every time you add a platform or distribution channel, you add additional work. We’ve yet to launch a mobile app, and part of the challenge is simply a resource issue. Professional sports teams spend millions of dollars on world class athletes, but our technology and staffing budgets aren’t anywhere near what outsiders would imagine.

How did you get buy in?

Buy-in on social wasn’t really an issue here at the Celtics; I’ve been given a lot of freedom to drive the direction of our digital and social media platforms by our CMO and Team President and they’re very much sold on the importance of social media. As our Facebook and Twitter grew to become some of the biggest of the biggest in pro sports, and the audiences wildly outgrew our email database, it became clear that these channels would evolve into a large marketing channel and that’s exactly what’s happened. I’ve certainly done some evangelism internally, and I’ve done quite a bit of speaking around the country talking about what we do as a brand in the social space, so that helps as well.

What are some of the prime metrics that you use to define success?

From a success standpoint, I keep my eyes on how many tickets we’re selling via our social channels, and database growth. I look at the number of names we acquire for our database from each promotion we run, the best of example of which would be Celtics 3-Point Play, our first-of-its-kind Facebook application. On a more granular level, I look a News Feed reach and post sharing; ‘Likes’ and comments on posts are far less important in my view. Most comments are garbage anyway, and a ‘Like’ is almost meaningless unless the numbers are well above or below the norm. Sharing is far more relevant – if someone is willing to share your content with their friends, that’s a far better indication that you’re hitting the mark.

How does strategy materialize in the organization?

We revisit strategy mostly during the offseason, because during the season, there’s not much time to be plotting this stuff out. There’s always another game or practice to cover, corporate partner to satisfy or internal fire to extinguish. But on the whole, our strategy is simple: Our fan database is at the center of everything we do, and all of our digital platforms should be geared at building our database, which in turn gets us in front of more potential customers. “Engagement” is a great buzzword for social media, and it has its place, but monetization is the leader in the clubhouse for me.

How have you organized around social media to manage an extensive and engaged network? What does the social media organization look like?

I oversee our digital marketing and social media, and have a full-time direct report who generates a most of the written content we distribute. We also have a part time video producer, a full-time video host, and another part-timer who helps out on our game nights. We’re looking to add a technical developer this summer, and may potentially add additional staff as we continue to bite off more initiatives and create more content in the digital space.

Any special practices for internal coordination?

– Social CMS?

– Style Guide?

– Best practices?

– Training?

Given how small our organization is, a lot of this stuff isn’t formalized. As we grow, we’ll need to put more processes in place. For now we’re small and agile, but we certainly aim for consistency in our approach in terms of how we deliver against our digital and social media platforms.

Any final advice, tips, or cautionary tales to leave us with as we put your experiences into action?

I think to do social media right, you have to appeal to your fans’ passion points, even if your brand isn’t something they’re are organically passionate about. The only way to do that is to understand your audience and your customers. That’s easy for the Boston Celtics to sense, but probably a lot harder for consumer brands to decipher. I would advise figuring out who they are and what they want before you formulate your strategy. That means collecting data, surveying fans, keeping up with your competitors and studying leaders in the social media space.

In September 2011 at its f8 Developer Conference, Facebook introduced the social world to frictionless sharing and Action Verbs. With the rollout of its Open Graph, the 900 million strong social network declared that the future of engagement would be driven by both implicit and explicit actions. Explicit actions require the user to click a button such as “Like,” “Share,” “Recommend,” or “Comment.” Implicit actions on the other hand only require that the user run an app designed using the Open Graph platform where updates (or Action Verbs) are sent to the timeline automagically depending on what the app is designed to do.

But, this frictionless experience is not without its friction.

As Open Graph apps such as Washington Posts’ Social Reader or Spotify send updates into user Newsfeeds, such as “Brian Solis is reading…” or “…is listening to…,” what happens next is where friction is at risk of sparking. As I warned in earlier this year developers who don’t think through the end-to-end user experience or the “click to action” from engagement to the Newsfeed to the desired social effect may not only lose momentum, they may reverse adoption.

The goal of an Open Graph strategy is not to just send an interesting Action Verb into the timeline to entice a click, it must unlock a microcosm of fellowship. The Action Verb is just the hook, but it is what unfolds next that influences whether or not a new user installs the app and continues to use it as part of their everyday Facebook routine. Indeed, the Open Graph is an open invitation to creativity and innovation. At the same time, it’s also an opportunity to introduce ways to expand relevant shares and app-generated engagement from social graph to social graph.

Automatic status updates using Action Verbs are just the beginning. Now Facebook is introducing Action Links. If Action Verbs are designed to trigger the social effect, Action Links are intended to drive intended outcomes or “clicks to action.”

Here we see a couple of difference examples where an automatic update now included a link at the bottom for friends to take action. In the Fab example, the Action Verb is “faved” and the Action Link lets friends “Fave this Product.”

Like Action Verbs, no pun intended, the success of Action Links is dependent on the experience as designed by your UX or dev team. The click must, in the very least do one or more of the following…

1. Serve a purpose

2. Offer entertainment

3. Deliver engagement

4. Contribute to self expression or personal branding

5. Enable commerce

Don’t rule out F-commerce just yet. 8thBridge developed an entire platform on Facebook’s Open Graph that demonstrates what’s possible with Action Verbs and Action Links. In the example below, you see the introduction of three new buttons, “I Want,” “Love,” and “Own” on the TOMS e-commerce site. Upon the click, an Action Verb update is sent to the user’s Facebook Newsfeed expressing the sentiment tied to each button. At the bottom of the update, friends are invited to add the item into their own bag trying social and e-commerce together through peer-to-peer influence.

8thBridge also visualizes how Action Verbs and Action Links tie into a user-centric social commerce ecosystem where Facebook services as the epicenter for personal experiences and engagement.

As AllFacebook shared, the 8thBridge Graphite launch included several ecommerce partners that connect people, experiences and brands through what I refer to as the A.R.T. of engagement (Actions, Reactions and Transactions). While primary Action Verbs were based on Want, Own, and Love, other unique examples include:

Deb: I want, Ask a friend, I’m wearing

Guitar Center: Play

Hallmark: Tearing up, Smile, LOL

Nasty Gal: Neeed (yes, 3 “e’s”), Gimme, and Three hearts

Oscar de la Renta: Wore

Aside from the fact that GM abandoned Facebook advertising for the time being, it’s time to see Facebook as a vibrant and connected community, not as a stockade of eyeballs. The Open Graph opens the door to an entirely new egosystem of user-centered experiences that have yet to be fully defined or harnessed. And, that’s the point. Action Verbs and Action Links are only as meaningful as the outcomes and journeys they create.

Image Credit (edited): Shutterstock

Vancouver startup FlyingFlips wants to build a community of socially conscious graphic designers.

The ecommerce platform lets shoppers vote for their favorite sandal designs, which they’d like to see become available for retail. The most-popular options will be manufactured and the artists will receive a portion of the sale proceeds.

“We’re trying to build a really good social network of graphic designers,” FlyingFlips designer co-founder Trevor Broad told Mashable. “We call it open source flip flops.”

The site, which is hoping to receive funding from Kickstarter, says its flip flops are eco-friendly, made from 20% to 30% recycled materials, and lets you trade in used pairs.

Once designers have submitted designs to the FlyingFlips community, the startup encourages them to share their submissions with their social networks to vote.

For each purchase made, FlyingFlips donates one pair of flip flops to a person in need in the developing world, through Soles4Souls and Fundacion A. Jean Brugger.

The Kickstarter campaign, which runs until the end of May, will fund the first run of flip flops and the creation of the online store. The store will launch one week into June, right after the Kickstarter ends.

FlyingFlips hopes to make eight pairs available by June — the two pairs advertised as Kickstarter rewards, five pairs crowd sourced by designers and one blank pair. Though the team was initially split on creating blank flip flops, lacking a crowdsourced design, they ultimately decided more people could join the buy one give one movement, if they offered a blank slate option.

Would you buy a pair of FlyingFlips? Let us know if you would back this project.

Bonus: Crazy Kickstarter Projects

This is the second part in a series by Scott Anthony, author of The Little Black Book Of Innovation.

It sounds so seductive: a “culture of innovation.” The three words immediately conjure up images of innovation savants like 3M, Pixar, Apple, and Google—the sorts of places where innovation isn’t an unnatural act, but part of the very fabric of a company. It seems a panacea to many companies that struggle with innovation. But what exactly is a culture of innovation, and how does a company build it?

While culture is a complicated cocktail, four ingredients propel an organization forward: the right people, appropriate rewards and incentives, a common language, and leadership role-modeling.

If you ask most people what makes a great innovator, the most common response is innate gifts from parents or a higher power. Great innovators are undoubtedly different from the general population. However, pioneering research by Hal Gregersen at INSEAD, Jeffrey Dyer and BYU, and Clayton Christensen at Harvard shows that the critical difference is actually learned behaviors.

At the core is what the professors call “associational thinking.” That is the ability to make connections between seemingly unconnected things. A classic example of this is how a calligraphy class inspired Apple legend Steve Jobs’s emphasis on typography on early computers. The professors then detail what they call the “Innovator’s DNA,” four time-tested approaches successful innovators follow to gather stimuli that spur these connections:

• Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
• Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
• Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
• Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places.

Aliens don’t quite fit in, and that’s exactly what you want.

Most organizations have people who follow these behaviors—even if they aren’t immediately obvious to senior leadership. Frequently they are what software entrepreneur Donna Auguste affectionately dubs “aliens.” They don’t quite fit the establishment, and that’s exactly what you want. But importantly these behaviors are skills that can be built through disciplined practice. Companies like Syngenta, Citigroup, Johnson & Johnson, and many more have made substantial investments in innovation training programs, which are critical ways to build an organization’s innovation competencies.

Sometimes the injection of a choice outsider helps shape a company’s culture. Ask for example why Hulu.com serves as almost the singular example of a successful disruptive venture launched by media incumbents (backers include News Corp, Disney and NBC Universal). At least one explanation is the hiring of a CEO from outside the media industry (CEO Jason Kilar previously worked at Amazon.com). If you are trying to transform your company or your industry you likely need to bring in at least a handful of outsiders who will look at the world in new ways.

One of the most common complaints of executives inside large companies is the challenge of recognizing and rewarding successful innovators. It seems like a Herculean task, as the best innovators can choose to work for startups and receive unbounded rewards. How can a large company—especially a publicly traded one—compete? The key is to thoughtfully blend the unique rewards at their disposal with a failure-tolerant culture.

An essential read on rewards in Daniel Pink’s Drive: The surprising science of what motivates us. In that book, Pink details how performance on creative tasks actually decreases with monetary incentives. And people who have chosen to work for larger, more established companies have already chosen to tradeoff financial upside for stability and the opportunity work with a larger group. Pay people fairly, of course, but Pink suggests that other incentives provide people with a sense of autonomy, allow them to master their trade, and give them a sense of purpose.

Every asset has a claim against it. Every strength has a corresponding weakness.

There are plenty of opportunities for companies to follow Pink’s playbook. What about creating unique career paths for innovators? Maybe someone who brings a great idea forward can stick with it as it winds through the organization. Or get a chance to work on an exciting new product launch. Public recognition matters, too. One media company holds an innovation awards ceremony that they treat as seriously as the Oscar’s—people get decked out and fete internal success stories. Winning is a big deal. It’s just one way for companies to shine a spotlight on success.

Of course, it is important to make sure you are rewarding the right people. How do you identify successful innovators? It seems like a simple question. But the realities of innovation make it complicated. Innovation is akin to baseball, blackjack, or investing stock. That is, success comes from a mix of skill and luck. Legg Mason Chief Innovation Strategist Michael Mauboussin argues that instead of looking at someone’s results, you have to look at the process they follow they achieve those results. Look for innovators that invest time to understand their target market, think holistically, design and execute smart experiments, and demonstrate a willingness to change course. Even if an individual effort doesn’t succeed, innovators who follow these behaviors are more likely to succeed in the long term.

Encouraging innovation isn’t just about what companies reward—it is what they choose to punish. In my book The Little Black Book of Innovation, I suggest that companies need to be more tolerant of failure. The most successful businesses come out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation. Failure and false steps are natural parts of that process. What kind of message does it send if you punish people who take well-thought-out risks that don’t pan out?

In a recent column at HBR.org, I detailed a heated debate between me and my colleague Piyush about one of the portfolio companies in which Innosight’s venture investing arm had invested. At one point I said Piyush’s argument was “utter baloney.” That drew a blank stare. I thought the brilliance of my argument had stunned him into silence. Then I thought perhaps it was because he is a vegetarian and didn’t appreciate the meat reference.

Understanding what innovation is, and is not, is critical for culture change.

Then it dawned on me. “Baloney” as a shorthand way of saying “that’s not correct” was vernacular that hadn’t made it to Singapore. It’s a lesson I’ve learned painfully over the past two years as I’ve had to slowly remove sports metaphors that just don’t translate globally from my speech. These seemingly trivial examples of how things can get lost in translation even when people appear to speak the same language serve as an important reminder of how subtle miscommunications can impair a company’s effort to move in a common direction.

Start with innovation itself. Next time you are in a group meeting, ask everyone to write down how they define innovation. Odds are you will have as many different definitions as meeting attendees. Having everyone understand what innovation is—and what it is not—is critical for culture change.

The next step is to identify the specific categories of innovation that matter to your company. For example, in 2011 financial services leader Citi decided its innovation portfolio would balance core innovations that involve improving existing offerings and processes, adjacencies that extend Citi products to new markets or leverage current capabilities to create new-to-Citi solutions, and disruptive innovations that create entirely new markets.

These definitions matter because different forms of innovation should be measured and managed in distinct ways. As an analogy, think about how you evaluate an investment in emerging market equities versus a real estate transaction versus buying a car. You approach each transaction very differently.

If you approach all innovations in the same way, odds are you are either sub-optimizing vital efforts to strengthen your core business or bungling efforts to create tomorrow’s core business.

Organizations take substantial cues from senior leaders. They carefully listen to what those leaders say, but, more importantly, watch what those leaders do. The most senior leaders seeking to make their culture more tolerant of innovation need to regularly demonstrate that intent with their words and actions.

One great example of this is the work A.G. Lafley did to change Procter & Gamble’s culture during his reign from 2000 to 2009. During various discussions related to the launch of his 2008 book The Game-Changer (with consultant Ram Charan) Lafley alternatively described his role within P&G as P&G’s co-chief innovation officer (with his chief technology officer), P&G’s chief “external” officer (“selling” the importance of innovation externally), Dr. No (helping to make prudent decisions to shut project downs), and an innovation cheerleader.

From work I did advising P&G during that time period, I know this wasn’t lip service. While serving as CEO, Lafley actively participated on the board of P&G’s internal innovation fund, and regularly conducted innovation and strategy reviews with each of P&G’s business units. He frequently proselytized about the importance of innovation and worked hard to select and nurture leaders that had the right stuff for innovation.

Studying leaders driving innovation in their organization, such as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com, Ernset Cu at Globe Telecom, and Clark Gilbert at Deseret Digital, reveals similar patterns. These aren’t lean-back leaders that wait for change to happen. They roll up their sleeves and lean forward into specific innovation efforts. Active participation helps them spot inflection points that team members might otherwise miss—and gives them deeper intuition that helps when it is decision time. Active participation also speeds decision-making. Many companies review critical innovation initiatives at quarterly or biannual meetings. But key strategic decisions can’t always be scheduled. Finding ways to interact with teams more frequently can help to expedite the iterative process that so often typifies innovation.

Sometimes only senior leaders can remove the roadblocks that constrain success.

Leaders also help shape the context in which innovation occurs by making clear strategic choices. Specifically, they identify areas that are of strategic interest to the company, and areas that are not of strategic interest to the company. Many organizations waste tremendous time and money exploring ideas that, when push comes to shove, are destined to get shut down by senior leadership. Making explicit choices is a critical part of leadership.

Finally, lean-forward leaders break dysfunctional processes. A couple of years ago, a team was reviewing its progress with a key senior stakeholder. The team mentioned that their progress would be accelerated as soon as the company’s usual assignment process provided them with a critical scientific resource. No one was doing anything but following standard procedures, but the team was paralyzed. The senior stakeholder left the room, made two phone calls, and got the team the resource it needed. Sometimes only senior leaders can remove the roadblocks that constrain success.

Every company’s culture is different—that’s what makes them so interesting, and what makes paint-by-numbers recommendations painfully insufficient. Start by building what I call an “innovation balance sheet” detailing your innovation strengths and weaknesses. When building this balance sheet, remember the dual-aspect concept that has served as the cornerstone of accounting since its development in 16th-century Italy. Every debit has a corresponding credit. Every asset has a claim against it. Every strength has a corresponding weakness.

An honest understanding of organizational capabilities and disabilities helps to determine the right mix of people, rewards, common language, and lean-forward leaders that can help make innovation an everyday occurrence at your organization.

Images: svkv, woaiss, Junial Enterprises, and maridav via Shutterstock

With a looming $10 billion IPO on the horizon and a community that’s estimated to hit 1 billion users this Fall, Facebook seems unstoppable. Yet on one important front, the store front that is, Facebook has exposed an imperfection. People are not proving ready to actually buy goods and services in Facebook – at least not at the scale retailers are used to seeing through traditional e-commerce. And suddenly, many question the role Facebook actually plays in the monetization strategy of any business.

F-commerce emerged only three years ago, offering the ability to buy and sell on Faceboook. Early adopters such as 1800FLOWERS and Delta Airlines opened capable and impressive initial Facebook storefronts. Once retailers saw what was possible, waves of F-commerce shops crashed over the social network one-by-one eventually transforming brand pages into digital malls. While initial reports painted promising future for introducing transactional relationships, Bloomberg stuck a pin in the balloons of idealistic social commerce strategists everywhere. In just the past year alone, Gamestop, Gap, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, Banana Republic, Old Navy among others have opened and closed storefronts on Facebook. Now many wonder what the future holds for F-commerce and whether or not retailers will ever Like it again.

I mean F-commerce only makes sense right? If the attention of almost one billion potential shoppers is fixated in one place then opening a Facebook storefront must be the answer! While only 7% of brands with a brand page experimented with F-commerce strategies, many struggled to justify the costs of designing and supporting customized boutiques on an evolving platform that’s far less standardized than the much more stable and proven foundation of e-commerce.

F-Commerce is the Failed Execution of the Uninspired

The problem is as much the platform as it is the vision of many of the F-commerce strategies we’ve seen in play to date. I believe that in new media, social, mobile, and disruptive, that brands tend to assume a mediumalistic approach. This is a phenomenon where architects and strategists place inordinate weight on the technology of any medium rather than amplifying platform strengths and the unique possibilities to deliver desired experiences and outcomes. It has less to do with the the ability to make a purchase than it has to do with the dynamic of Facebook, the overall UX, and psychology of social commerce.

As an analyst, I’ve studied the design, execution, and performance of many Facebook storefronts. As a strategist, I’ve also designed stores for global brands. With certainty, I can attest that the sky isn’t falling on F-commerce, but it is early. What’s missing is balance between creativity and capability and the desire or sense of need that unites them. Essentially, F-commerce only gets an “F” because brands used Facebook as yet another digital catalog for selling products and not as a platform for activating new experiences based on the nature and the psychology of the relationships that define the network.

As my fellow Pando Daily collaborator Erin Griffith recently observed, businesses need to, “Stop trying to make F-commerce happen.” She’s right. It seems forced, narrow or uninventive.

There are certainly examples of companies that take a test and learn perspective and in those cases, we see what’s possible when we re-image storefronts and social commerce overall. P&G for example, proved that with the right timing, the right interface, and the right product, companies can move product on Facebook. When the company launched a store for its new Pampers Cruisers line of diapers, 1,000 packs were sold at $9.99 in under an hour. I also think back to the Walmart Crowdsaver trial and the power of Likes to create a sense of urgency or exclusivity and eventually influence decisions. At one point the company offered a Groupon-like deal on a 42-inch plasma TV that unlocked after it earned 5,000 Likes.

As in any commerce strategy, the customer journey must be defined. This isn’t just about Facebook. It’s about all emerging channels where customer attention becomes increasingly distributed. Moving forward, businesses must look beyond mere distributed commerce plays and design a syndicated commerce program where commerce is designed for each channel, taking into account the needs, expectations and behavior within each. Channels can of course point to a common hub, but what’s most important is that they’re holistic in the experience the deliver and that the outcomes are defined at the platform and at the overall commerce levels.

To define the future of F-commerce, social commerce or syndicated commerce overall, it takes thoughtful UX and design, not just technology that facilitates sales and marketing. As IBM noted last year in its study, “From social media to Social CRM: What customers want,” customers have expressed that they do indeed wish to purchase within social networks. But, we can’t take that for face value. That’s the mistake many F-tailers make, they didn’t think through the experience nor did they seek inspiration from social customers to think through a new journey or transaction. Naturally, people want discounts and promotions. And if you dig deeper, they’re looking for exclusive opportunities that they can’t get anywhere else. And, by exclusive, these offers are also tied to deadlines and interactivity to make people feel vested in the transaction or that the transaction has a sense of urgency around it. It’s also the introduction of game mechanics to promote sharing around transactions to help engage the community beyond a sale.

IBM’s perception gap above exists within every company. What people want and what we think they want are often on opposite ends of the spectrum. Late last year, I ran a research project for the Pivot Conference where we asked marketers and brand managers if they knew the needs and wants of their social consumer. An astounding 77% said yes. But it is the next question that revealed the truth. We then asked if they ever asked customers directly what they wanted, preferred, or disliked from brands in social networks. The answer reflects the problem with F-commerce and social commerce overall, 53% said no and another 12% didn’t know.

Building a Bridge Between e-Commerce and Social Commerce

The lesson in the current state of F-commerce comes down to acting first rather than designing experiences that trigger desirable network effects and outcomes. By embedding the Like and Share buttons on e-commerce sites feeds customer desire or actions back into the Facebook News Feed. Brands must develop an experiential bridge that connects commerce and emotion to entice people to share AND take action. Data already shows that sharing or the ability to share contributes to customer discovery and ultimately to customer influence. For example, Ticketmaster and Eventbrite can tell you the value of a Like or Share as it converts into a sale that leads from Facebook to the website. And Levi’s can tell you the value of a Like sourced from the website, back into Facebook. Additionally, we know that revenue per click sourced in social networks is of greater value than that of traditional email. CelearSaleing minted that number at $5.24 versus $3.18 respectively.

With the rise of the Open Graph and “frictionless sharing,” brands are now presented with an opportunity to influence customer actions by empowering them to think beyond the Like. What those buttons and experiences look like, the language shared through the social graph and the resulting reactions are yours to define. And, as such, experiences and the customer journey require definition and not just a programmatic reaction to new technology.

Businesses must now think about a distributed commerce strategy that accounts not only for social commerce, but also all forms of commerce ranging from mobile commerce (m-commerce), e-commerce, Facebook commerce (F-commerce), social commerce, real world (in-store) commerce, e-mail commerce, and every other form of commerce that matters.

The future of commerce is not simply social. The future of commerce takes a holistic approach in the form of syndicated commerce where each channel’s strengths are played to create meaningful and shareable experiences. Customer deals, offers, promotions, and experiences must be one with the brand and the brand experience. To achieve oneness across syndicated commerce, business leaders must define the experience, desired outcomes, and mutual benefits along the way. Without an integrated approach to syndicated commerce, it’s impossible to grade any platform as a failure when it is in fact the strategy that’s under performing against the opportunity.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

As a species, we’ve sure put a lot of work into designing strange, noise-making implements that we pretend are perfectly normal by labeling them as “musical instruments.” Consider a tuba or a sitar–these are oddities by any aesthetic standard. We’re addicted to not just a wide variety of notes, but the unique flavors of each tone.

So maybe, when you think about it, there is nothing more strange about playing Jell-O than a cello.

Noisy Jelly is a project by Raphaël Pluvinage and Marianne Cauvard, two students at L’Ensci Les Ateliers. They experiment with agar agar jellies, placed upon sensors that convert their vibrations into music with the help of arduino processing.

“The signal has specific properties which are inherent to the jelly material,” Pluvinage tells Co.Design. “When you touch a jelly shape, maybe because it’s wiggling and the pressure of your finger is also not fixed, it produces a really small variation.” These minutiae add up–the wiggling, the jelly’s natural pressure sensitivity, the trembling of your own fingers–to create what, for lack of a better description, sounds like you’d imagine Jell-O to sound like.

But beyond that sound itself, Noisy Jelly is really about the experience of playing for the musician, an experience like no other instrument in the world. “The thing we find the most exciting is the relation between the tactual property of the jelly and the sound produced. It’s difficult to feel it in the video, but touching the jelly (which is really strange and unusual … and cold) is really surprising,” writes Pluvinage. “It’s enabling to have really ‘rich’ interaction. You have a lot of ways to influence the sound, and the tactile sensation you have is incomparable to any button or tactile surface.”

Because of this whimsical interaction between a famous dessert and musical creation, or maybe chemistry class and art class, the team considers Noisy Jelly to be a packageable game for kids. And while it probably is, really, who doesn’t love playing with their food? Noisy Jelly would be perfect for kids ages 1 to 100.

Hat tip: illusion