From ideas about the future to everyday action 2: A shared language for ideas

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February 25th, 2013

International Communications 101: Stop.

A couple of months ago I facilitated some digital strategy sessions at a smaller organisation. Everything was going well and participants debated energetically with each other. After a while, however, it became apparent to me that every discussion, every game, every assignment resulted in the same two groups discussing a variation of the same theme. Although the group explored lots of options, they continued to disagree on the same thing, all the time.

Taking a step back, I realised it all came down to two different ideas about the word ‘digital’. Although participants thought they were talking about the same thing, in reality they could as well have been speaking different languages. I paused the session, had a little debate about the meaning of ‘digital’ and together we decided on a shared language to use for the different ideas within the group. After that, the sessions really got going.

A shared language for ideas is key to turning your ideas into action. Even when people have the same mother tongue and have been working in the same office for years, it doesn’t mean they define words in the same way.

“Shared language refers to people developing understanding amongst themselves based on language (e.g. spoken, text) to help them communicate more effectively.” (source)

A simple exercise to see to what extend your organisation has a shared language for ideas, take the 3 to 5 central words in your mission statement (“open”, “platform”, “network”, etc.) and ask your direct colleagues to define them in the context of your organisation. If you want ideas about the future to become reality, people should understand what others mean when they use one of these words.  (Read more »)

From ideas about the future to everyday action 1: An introduction

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February 20th, 2013

change!

How can you help an organisation transform to be better adjusted to the 21st century?

Last week after a lively guest lecture at the Reinwardt Academy about transformations in technology, society and the role of culture, a student asked me this enticing question, one that will likely trigger a set of blogposts. How do we turn ideas about the future into successful day-to-day action?

Change has been a constant in most of my life, studies and work. As far as humanly possible, I like change, which means I hate losing my wallet or moving houses, but love tinkering and improving systems, processes and products until they are – well – better. At Inspired by Coffee we deal in change, especially in its most exiting form: innovation. Innovation is change for the better.

Building on our professional experience and the work we do for clients, centuries of books and the conversations I’ve had with many innovators, change agents, project managers and others, I’m going to do something many have done before: answer the student’s question. In doing so over a series of blog posts, I hope to empower you to successfully change as well as start a discussion about the do’s and don’ts of change. Feel free to comment and ask questions as we go along. This is not a predefined story, but something we can do together.

To kick off, some introductory thoughts: (Read more »)

Spirits of Africa, A personal experience of giving and receiving in the social media age

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February 14th, 2013

Mama Africa

Last year I wrote an essay for Schreef, the magazine of the Dutch Foundation for Literature where I am on the advisory board, about new business models for writers. This article sparked a journey that reached a new highpoint last night and which, to some extend, serves as a personal poster child for the value of giving and receiving in the social media age, as well as how this can be more beneficial to anyone involved than traditional models. Plus, the story contains buzzwords such as crowdfunding and spiritual heritage.

After the publication of the essay I was approached by Ton van der Lee, a well-known Dutch author with a big heart for Africa. Not too long ago, Ton started making documentaries about the disappearing spiritual heritage of Africa. Selflessly, as I later discovered Ton to be in most aspects of life, he decided to put these documentaries online for free, without any intention of financial gain.

On a nice spring day in Amsterdam a pigeon committed suicide by flying into the back wheel of my bike and I met Ton in a café in the city centre. We talked about the nature of sharing online and business models based on trust and reciprocity rather than profit margins. After our meeting I prepared a simple document to help Ton navigate the online world and give him some suggestions as to how to reach more people with his documentaries. (Read more »)

To 2013 and beyond!

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February 10th, 2013

Birds

It’s been a bit quiet around Inspired by Coffee lately. After a really successful first year, in which we worked with (at least) 27 different organisations in 12 different countries on diverse and exciting assignments, we have taken the past weeks to look at our own future.

‘Digital strategy’ is only a small part of the puzzle of running a successful organisation in the 21st century. Regularly, our solutions touched upon internal organisation, training, hiring and other areas of organisations. Also, strategy alone doesn’t get you far. Quite some of our clients called on us to help them navigate the often confusing world of implementing these strategies, making online strategies work, and creating high-quality websites and other online products. So, we’ve decided to broaden our scope in both directions, and to do so in two separate flexible companies. (Read more »)

Reaching audiences with heritage content via digital media

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February 8th, 2013

General Electric TV, 1950's

This is an excerpt from a chapter I wrote for a EU supported Heritage revival handbook, due later in 2013.×

All heritage content, in one way or another, is about stories. Grand histories, personal anecdotes and everything in between. Making a connection between heritage content and audiences either via outreach or engagement on traditional or new media is then an act of storytelling. In a lightning talk on the popular website TED in 2012 Kevin Allocca, a YouTube trend manager, explains succinctly what is needed to tell successful stories online that reach many people: “Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness; these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture.”

To these characteristics I’d like to add ‘generous’: be generous with the stories you share. All ‘cease and desist strategies’ to digital content have turned out to be ‘crash and burn’ certainties, as the music industry with its million-dollar claims to filesharing individuals have proven beyond doubt.

Tastemakers, active communities and generous, unexpected content are the ingredients for projects that will reach and engage people. Of these, unexpected content is easiest for heritage institutions: the heritage itself is often unexpected, although it might need to be presented differently. For instance, instead of by period and geographical location, objects may be presented by their physical size such as in the online collection of Museum Boerhaave in Leiden, or their primary colours as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has recently started doing. Not entirely unsurprisingly the Nightwatch is mostly made up of brownish and yellowish colours. Content and stories can also be unexpected if they have an extraordinary relation to an individual member of the audience, resonate well with contemporary discussions and themes, or a variety of other reasons. I’ve worked on a project where we turned cheap Chinese replicas of historical Dutch objects into unexpected content by accompanying them with funny animations. (Read more »)

Museums as curators of information and experiences in the digital age

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February 7th, 2013

Domesday Books

This is an excerpt from an upcoming article I wrote for a publication by the Learning Museum Network.×

In his book The Long Tail, former Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson makes a compelling case for the large number of things that don’t happen in the ‘head’ or most popular part of any distribution. For example, when given the opportunity and a virtually unlimited audience, much more books of the 99.99% not in the average top-10 dominated bookstore  will be sold that of the 0.01% (both numbers are made-up stats) on regular display, although the number of sales per book in the latter case will be considerably higher. Physical bookstores have finite space, unfortunately, so they are limited to selling books that sell often and in great quantities. The internet has infinite space and can sell all the others. Hence the success of Amazon cs.

When it comes to finding a meaningful and relevant place in the digital revolution, in the past decade most museums seem to have been focused on the long tail. (As opposed to the physical realm, where blockbuster exhibitions clearly aim at the head of our audience distribution.) If only enough of a collection is digitised and put online, if only enough apps are produced with enough content and if only enough tweets are sent, more people will interact with the museum. I sincerely doubt this is the right approach. If I Google “Rembrandt van Rijn” on a computer in Amsterdam, only the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis are in the top-10 results (number 8 and 10, respectively). The Rembrandthuis, where the painter lived and which is literally around the corner from where I conducted the experiment, doesn’t even show up in the first 50 results. It’s the same for almost everything. Others win in the competition for number 1 positions in Google and get all the traffic. What works well for Amazon doesn’t necessarily work for museums. (Read more »)

Building a crowdsourcing platform with 75 euros and some spare time

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October 9th, 2012

luwak coffee

Recently we launched Coffee for Culture, a new award competition for the best cultural venue to drink a coffee. It gained quite some traction in its first week (although we still need your votes and nominations!). We didn’t just start the award to compete with Tripadvisor though. It’s also our proof that crowdsourcing on your own platform doesn’t have to be rocket science. It can be cheap and accessible to everyone, if you use existing tools and know a little bit of coding, which in turn you can learn at Codecademy.

Here’s how we build our Coffee for Culture fully crowdsourced competition platform:

  1. Launch page (free)
    The simplest way to involve people even before you launch is with a ‘launch page’. Such a page serves as a placeholder and gathers email addresses of people interested.  Launchrock helps you build such a page for free and takes care of all the hassle.
  2. Platform: WordPress (free)
    We’ve been blogging on WordPress for years, so we know the system pretty well. It’s a flexible, free CMS you can use for virtually any website. We also considered Tumblr and Posterous as platform, but these have less options for including forms, trending lists, etc.
  3. Template: iA3 for WordPress (€ 20)
    WordPress works with themes. There are a lot of free ones available online, but we chose to modify a paid theme by Information Architects we’ve used before and know well. It’s a minimalistic theme which unfortunately lost some of its responsiveness because of our makeshift coding:-)
  4. Nominations: Gravity forms (€ 25)
    To allow our visitors to nominate their favourite venue and show them on the website directly we used Gravity forms, a WordPress plugin. It also emails us when you nominate a venue. We also considered Wufoo for this option, but that would have meant we had to enter nomination manually. (Read more »)

A musical approach to leadership with Giuliano Carmignola

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August 13th, 2012

Old Violin for Rhi~ (HDR)

Giuliano Carmignola is a celebrated violinist. During my recent holiday I saw him play alongside the Venice Baroque Orchestra in the beautiful old town of Dubrovnik. Or, rather said, I saw him lead the other musicians through two hours of energetic baroque and three encores. I was blown away, not only by the music but also by the powerful presence of Carmignola. The concert gave me a unique insight in what I believe are some of the traits of a true leader.

  1. Control. Carmignola did not just conduct the orchestra, he also conducted the audience. He made everybody a part of the experience, realizing you can’t have a great show without a great audience (quiet, concentrated).
  2. Excellence through hard work. There was no room for anything less than the best. Carmignola clearly gave everything he had and he demanded likewise from the orchestra. Their lifelong dedication to the music was as apparent as the long years of practice that went into it.
  3. Eye for detail. Near the end of the show a young boy and his mother had to leave, but fearing disruption they did not dare to cross the intimate concert hall. Carmignola noticed this and created a moment for them to go, briskly ordering them out with his bow when they hesitated.
  4. Fearless. Never throughout the show did Carmignola hide behind the orchestra, the stage or even his violin. He played his music in a very personal way while flirting with the audience and challenging and confronting us. He claimed the room every second he was in it and proved it belonged to him by his incredible mastery of the music and emotions of the audience, apparently fearless.
  5. Team. It’s a cliche, yet without a team there’s no leader. In Carmignola’s team (in this case the VBO) there were others who took on important support roles. The first violinist for instance was busy throughout the concert to make his colleagues feel safe and supported, a job that could not also have been done by Carmignola. (Read more »)

Introducing the Digital Engagement Framework (and an app to improve your stay at hotels)

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June 4th, 2012

Detail of a DEF masterclass in Barcelona
Feedback from participants on the Digital Engagement Workshop at MuseumNext.

The Digital Engagement Framework is a set of questions that help organisations come up with a sustainable and consistent digital strategy. The framework, which we developed together with Jim from Sumo, structures the thinking about what you’ll do with digital media, how you will implement it and especially why you will use digital media in the first place. We’ve been creating the tool behind closed doors, finetuning it together with clients, in discussions with experts and through comments on our blogs.

Two weeks ago at MuseumNext we ran the first public (short) Digital Engagement Framework workshop, aptly named “a crash course in digital strategy”. In only two hours and together with 50+ participants we went through the framework. The objective was to start the strategic thinking among the participants, but also to come up with tangible, hands-on digital activities. I’ll use of of these, an app to make your stay in hotels more artistically pleasing, to introduce the DEF and explain its primary elements.

Digital Engagement Framework

The Digital Engagement Framework (above) can be divided in three parts: why, what and how (see figure below). These three parts are about three different levels of your digital strategy: the strategy itself, activities that engage and reach out to audiences, and your day-to-day operational planning. (Read more »)

Assets and audiences: the primary building blocks of your digital strategy

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May 14th, 2012

Assets and audiences in Brussels

To structure our thinking about digital strategy we are developing a framework together with Jim Richardson of Sumo. The framework, which we soft launch at MuseumNext in Barcelona next week and of which a rough sketch is shown below, is supposed to help organisations develop successful digital strategies. I believe there are some fresh ideas in the framework, such as how we oppose digital outreach and engagement, but it’s also based on the tried and true ideas of thinkers like Jim Collins.

One of the most interesting points of debate we’ve come across in our workshops around the framework and in other work we’ve done on digital strategy, is the question: What are the main ingredients of a successful digital strategy? What are the building blocks that determine success? How do we start our thinking about digital outreach or engagement activities?

I believe we should start with a focus on our key assets and target audiences.

The key building blocks of a digital strategy are the assets you can use and the specific audiences you want to engage or reach out to. Between assets and audiences are activities: either those that engage existing audiences with specific assets, or those that use assets to reach out to new target groups. (Read more »)