Connecting people and ideas through improvisation

A mysterious red button – do you push it?

April 1, 2011 By 1 Comment

An ominous black box with a small red button sits in a public square in France. First, watch what happens…

There are three reasons I adore this idea.

It’s fun. This is the most obvious thing about it, but what happens is far beyond just bells and whistles. Dancing lips? Super hugging hands? This is whimsical and silly, right out of the unbounded imagination of a child. Fantastic.

It’s risky. “Let’s take a giant box, put a big red button on it, and… are you with me so far?” I would love to meet the people who came up with this promotion, then the people who approved it and funded it. They didn’t take the 10,000th Fan from their Facebook page and give them a prize in a drab giveaway, they rolled some pretty crazy dice.

Companies seek viral buzz and word of mouth, but reward only comes from risk. This fantastic risk taking that not only makes for an incredibly creative way to get your name out (even to people who don’t speak your language), but says a lot about the company behind it. Any company able to create an idea like this has a fun streak somewhere in their corporate soul.

It rewards the bold. The people who stepped forward, gave into their curiosity, and pushed that button not only received a free trip but an incredible story to tell. The company pushed a figurative mystery button in trying this idea, while the people pushed a literal button.

If you want interesting stories to tell, if you want some adventure in your life, you have to be willing to take some risks and push some buttons buttons – even if you don’t know what the heck they’ll do.

 

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The Domino Project

February 27, 2011 By 2 Comments
Reading Poke the Box

Reading Poke the Box - eye goggling may vary

I love to create stories, and I’ve always been fascinated with how ideas wind their way from the people who come up with them into the people who want to hear them. From having a single oral tradition for our myths and legends, we can now use methods that our ancestors would have thought so magical they belonged in those very myths they passed along. Sadly, all this technology at our disposal hasn’t always resulted in simplification, and the world of storytelling – especially publishing – needs some cleanup.

The Domino Project

I initially heard about The Domino Project as Seth Godin taking on publishing, and that was enough to get me nosing around. I’m a fan of people who like to rock the boat, and Seth is definitely an upsetter of seagoing vessels. Their web site added a bit of clarification:

The Domino Project is named after the domino effect—one powerful idea spreads down the line, pushing from person to person. The Project represents a fundamental shift in the way books (and digital media based on books) have always been published. Eventually consisting of a small cadre of stellar authors, this is a publishing house organized around a new distribution channel, one that wasn’t even a fantasy when most publishers began.

I still had (and have) questions, but they were looking for people to help out, so I filled out an application and was selected as one of their global Street Team to help spread the word on both The Domino Project and the books that come out of it.

This Street Team is an interesting crew, with a wide range of personalities and interests. Arizona gets double rep with Tyler Hurst also on the team, along with marketers, authors, publishers, and idea-junkies from all over the globe. Everyone seems to have a different reason for signing up for this, which should make it a fun ride.

Connecting Authors to Readers

My reason for signing up is my personal fascination for the (r)evolution going on in media. For books, giant monolothic publishers sit between the people who want to create the content – the authors – and the people who want to consume it. They control what gets published, narrowing a flood of great ideas down to a trickle, and make a lot of money from these middleman activities. Fortunately, the days of the middle man are ending. Like the music and movie industries before it, online technology is making the middleman obsolete. Self-publishing, ebooks, and audiobooks are just a few of the ways content creators are circumventing the publishing giants to get their ideas out.

Poking the Box

The first book in this project is Seth Godin’s Poke the Box. One of the things The Domino Project is already playing around with is pricing, reducing the pre-order Kindle version of Poke the Box to $1. If you want to get in on the deal you need to buy it before March 1st.  If you prefer the dead-tree version, or want to hear what people think about it before committing 100 pennies, I’ve already read an advance copy and can start talking about it after March 1st.

Writer’s Meetup

We’re also leveraging this whole little effort to see if there is interest in a Writer’s Camp / Meetup / Conference thingy. We’re getting together to talk about it at Gangplank in Chandler on March 1st at 7:30pm. We’ll be talking about Poke the Box as well, so stop on by with any questions, answers, or ideas you want to share.

This whole little effort has poked my own box, forcing me to get this blog back on the air and prioritize some other aspects of my overly chaotic life. It’s been an interested few weeks, and I’m really looking forward to seeing where it leads.

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Pandora and The Whiz Dumb of Crowds

August 31, 2010 By 2 Comments

I’m a big Pandora fan, and many moons ago I had an idea to make a spiffy new station – I’d crowdsource it.

I put a tweet out asking for what song could you not resist getting up out of your chair and dancing to, and fed them all into a new Pandora station. The goal was the greatest high-energy, must-dance, spazz-inducing station I had yet laid eardrums on.  So that was the goal.

What I got was two things. First was the most infuriatingly annoying station in my entire Pandora collection, and the second was a lesson on the serious limitations of the crowd.

The Crowdsource Dance Throwdown

The Pandora Station ended up with a lot of good songs going in, but ranged across such a wilderness of styles and formats I spent more time laughing than dancing.  Plus, Pandora takes your addition of a single rocking song from an artist as a reason to add every lame ballad that artist ever belched forth.

I thumbed down some very obvious misses, but generally left the station as it came to me.  I’m going to leave it that way until the end of September, then start editing it to suit my own tastes.  You’re welcome to give Crowdsource Dance Throwdown a listen and chime in.

Crowds know data, but not value

What I realized on a larger scale is that crowds are great for sourcing lots of general knowledge but there still must be someone curating it, like Wikipedia Editors do for Wikipedia. When you ask for opinions without any guiding hand you just get a disorganized pile.

Each individual idea might have merit, but the ideas don’t all have the same value when mooshed together.  It’s like a salad. When a salad is in a bowl you can pick around the bits you don’t like (tomatoes) or add the things you really want (like bacon bits).  If you drop it into a blender and make a single smoothie out of it… well, you’ll get something very colorful but not so popular on the menu. This has not been my most appetizing metaphor ever, but you get the idea.

Be careful when you get input from crowds on yourself and your ideas. Listen to their input (if you want) but only let it advise you; never let it replace your own judgment.

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