Author Archives: Braden Kelley

About Braden Kelley

Braden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, and creator of the FutureHacking™ and Human-Centered Change™ methodologies. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change (Second Edition) from Palgrave Macmillan. Braden is a US Navy veteran and earned his MBA from top-rated London Business School. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

Growing Demand for a Third Place

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Growing Demand for a Third PlaceI’ve been meaning to write this post for some time, and am finally getting around to it, so hear goes…

As I look around the economic landscape in the United States and see a climate where not only home prices but also rents are falling in many geographies, especially as the results of an all-advised rental property construction boom become available. I find myself thinking that we are in the middle of a profound shift in the American reality.

I think we are in the middle of an unexpected regression back to more multi-generational housing and a return to increasing levels of co-habitation amongst the young. Now when I speak about co-habitation here, I’m not talking about couples living out of wedlock, but instead I’m talking about more people living with roommates – and not just the young. In the future I believer we’ll see not just the young co-habitating, but older people too.

So, two housing demand destroying events coming together at the same time. But besides a decline in home prices and rents, there is another important impact of this changing American reality that I don’t see being addressed…

As more people live with roommates or in multi-generational housing situations and seek to get to get out more for some thinking and breathing room, there is going to be an increasing demand for more third places.

Starbucks and the Third PlaceFor those of you not familiar with the third place concept, coffee shops like Starbucks are one of the most famous examples, but there are other third places in the United States. There is the shopping mall (you know it’s true), the convenience store (see Bill & Ted’s Excellence Adventure), the YMCA, the Boys and Girls Clubs, and the Public Library. It seems like the latchkey kid phenomenon has become the library kid phenomenon. Kids leave school and go to the library and hang out there until their parents get off work and come by to pick them up.

Some shopping malls have installed free wifi, giant chess boards, and tables for people to use laptops or play games. Cities and YMCA’s have created teen centers. But one thing I have yet to see that I am waiting to see is a transformation in the mindset of the companies that run fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and others. When you go into a Starbucks it is very inviting and it is a happening place with old friends meeting up, kids sitting around doing homework, small business people working, and job interviews taking place. But when you go into a McDonald’s or other fast food chain, most of the time they are empty places designed purposely with uncomfortable seating, harsh lighting and other touches to make people get in and out as fast as possible. Most fast food chains do a booming drive-thru and carryout business, but not a lot of people stay and sit down. Nobody wants to hang out in an uncomfortable place.

But what would happen if McDonald’s or some other fast food retailer changed their thinking to create a third place environment to fill their empty seats?

How many more customers would they attract and engage?

How much more loyalty would they build?

How much more of their customers’ fast food spend would they achieve?

In my mind these are questions worth asking, and the biggest one is which major chain will move first?

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Innovation Passing Lane Ahead

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Innovation Passing Lane Ahead

I noticed an interesting phenomenon the other day on a 200 mile drive back from the Oregon coast to Seattle that I would like to share with you and then discuss the potential implications for innovation success.

Now let me first say that I am not a trained human psychologist, but I am a student of human behavior, and I believe that if we watch and listen in other contexts, we can learn amazing things about human behavior that have profound implications for the innovation context. So without further delay, here’s the situation I encountered:

I was driving back along the Columbia River on the Oregon side on a road that was predominantly a two lane road (one lane of traffic in each direction) with passing lanes at various points, typically for the direction of traffic going uphill to give cars a chance to pass slower moving vehicles. Nothing too interesting in that description. Here is where things get interesting…

I noticed that every time I was following a car or truck and approached a passing lane, without exception, the car or truck I was following instantly sped up a minimum of 10mph AND when we reach the end of the passing lane area, they pretty quickly slowed down 10mph.

Now, why would every driver I encountered in front of me (without exception) speed up when the passing lane approached and slow down when it ended, even though the speed limit was unchanged? What’s the psychology behind this behavior?

Here are my observations:

  1. On a two lane road there are leaders and there are followers. When you are a leader the whole road is before you and you set the speed, when you are a follower you are at the mercy of the person in front of you to set the speed and all you see is the back of the vehicle in front of you. People enjoy having the open road in front of them and even if they are not fast drivers, they are willing to drive a little bit faster to try and retain this privilege (about 10mph faster).

  2. Passing lanes represent a limited window of opportunity for people seeking to pass, and a limited duration of resistance for those looking not to be passed. Because the duration is limited, the leader perceives a threat and a scarcity that they would not perceive on a road that was always two lanes in their direction. As a result, their behavior is different.

  3. If you want to pass someone as a passing lane approaches, you must be prepared to drive 20mph faster to execute the pass before the end of the passing lane, knowing that the person in front of you is not going to stay constant, but will actually speed up.

What are the implications for innovation?

  1. There are always going to be people coming up behind you, seeking to pass you. Innovation is one way to stay ahead of the competition. Incremental innovation can be your 10mph acceleration that reduces the chance of being passed when the passing lanes appear.

  2. You must be aware when the passing lanes will appear. This is often when new technology makes things possible that weren’t possible before or when customer priorities and value assignment changes. Market leaders must recognize the conditions that create passing lanes and form a plan for how to protect themselves, while new entrants must recognize when their opportunity is greatest and move quickly and decisively before the passing lane comes to an end.

  3. You must provide the conditions necessary to make people want to rush into the widening road and seek to accelerate innovation and overtake the other drivers, instead of embracing the safety of the shoulder of the road as others rush by.

  4. People won’t push harder forever. This is the psychology around creating a burning platform. People will fight the fire on a burning platform, but if they feel that the whole house is on fire, then they will look for a new house. As a result a burning-platform approach to innovation is not sustainable, you must instead be much more systemic in your approach to innovation if you are going to use it to help protect your market leadership position.

  5. When a passing lane appears, market leaders must take a careful measurement of the situation and identify how best to react to the factors that have created it. At the same time, market leaders must also identify how long they must push to kill off potential new entrants.

  6. If you’re trying to innovate your way into first place, you must expect the leader to react, and anticipate the way in which they will react and account for that. You must know that the market leaders will look for how to starve you of your oxygen, and will look to accelerate away from you. This is why the most successful passers are those organizations that recognize the passing lane first, are mobilized to accelerate when it appears, and choose to react to the passing lane in a way that will be difficult for the market leaders to react to given their position and psychology.

Competition in a free market economy is not fair, and the playing field is not level, and the road ahead is not an open highway but a two lane road with occasional passing lanes. The organizations that do the best job at identifying when the passing lanes are going to appear and the factors that are going to allow them to accelerate are the ones that will either leapfrog the existing leaders, or maintain their ongoing market leadership.

What kind of organization are you going to be?

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Think ‘Out of Four Walls’

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Think 'Out of Four Walls'I had coffee with a clever marketing and sales consultant recently and one of the topics we discussed was the impact of location on a group’s ability to innovate. At the time we spoke about getting people to think in new ways by getting people to think in new places. That is to say that if you always meet in the same places to try and be creative as a team, don’t you ultimately get the same types of thinking? In other words, do you hit a creativity plateau by meeting in the same places all the time?

That of course is part of the reason that companies have off-sites, but I would argue further that the “same places” includes the typical locations for off-sites. I would argue that if you are trying to get people to think differently that you have to take people to an unusual, unexpected location. I would argue that you announce one location for the meeting that you have no intention of going to, get everybody to assemble there, and then go somewhere else. What this achieves is that in the time leading up to the meeting people start preparing mentally for what to expect and how things will go, but then when they show up and you announce you are going somewhere else, you will generate buzz and excitement, the walls of expectation will come tumbling down and you will get people to begin thinking in a different way than they were prepared to think.

That is only half the battle though. My next recommendation would be to pre-arrange for people to bring portable seating with them or bring it for everyone yourself. Then if you are trying to get new thinking, get radical but relevant. For the approach I am to suggest, you must keep the groups small, tailored to the venue you select (you don’t want to be asked to leave, or at least not too quickly).

For example, salespeople for BestBuy who are trying to figure out how to do things differently might go meet in an auto dealership, or a Nordstrom’s, or a 7-eleven. Find a place out of the way and start your meeting. If asked to leave, have your meeting on the sidewalk outside or in the parking lot (going back inside as needed). The site you choose should be related to your business but not directly related – notice Circuit City was not an example.

The site could also however be related to your topic. A meeting to talk about how to better understand what customers want could be held at a busy intersection with stop lights in case you wanted to ask real people what they think. Just please make sure to be careful and not get yourself run over when trying to ask people questions(stay on the sidewalk).

If you meet at someone else’s business, please try to choose a slow time of day and stay off to the side and out of the way. If you’re looking for more “natural” thinking, then meeting in the woods, by a river, or on a hill can also be good. Regardless of where you choose to meet, just be sure to debrief at the site, or literally just outside your own building before returning to work.

If you try this approach to uncovering new thinking I think you will be pleasantly surprised, and I would love it if you send in your stories and photographs of different unusual places you meet and what the topic for the meeting was. I look forward to seeing your “Out of Four Walls” thinking!

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Unlocking the Inner Child for Innovation

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Unlocking the Inner Child for Innovation

In the quest to unlock innovation in organizations, it may be beneficial or even mandatory to learn how to unlock the internal children in our employees.

I’m sure we can all remember as children being told “don’t” do this or you “can’t” do that, and the result growing up was to reinforce the idea that there is one “right” way to do anything. It has also led to the creation of a national psychosis of believing that many actions that would create positive change are too difficult to try.

How else would you explain the decline in electoral participation or in labor union membership? The majority of our nation believes that their ideas and their voice are too small to make things better. If it weren’t for those “crazy” entrepreneurs, our country would not continue to grow and dominate new markets.

So how could we create a whole nation of entrepreneurial thinking (or at least a whole organization)?

Well, by reducing the prevalence of “don’t” and “can’t” in our organizational vocabulary and replacing it with “how” and “when”. Here is how it works:

Currently we might say things like:

“Don’t be silly. We can’t build a spaceship that will go faster than the speed of light.”

When if we seek to innovate, we must say:

“How could we build something to travel faster than the speed of light? We can improve upon current methods of propulsion when we achieve the following advances to build upon:”

We must also always ask:

“How could we approach this in a different way?”

Innovation Guidelines Cartoon

This problem of believing there is only one “right” way is compounded by our organization’s inherent intolerance for risk and the accompanying preference to identify reasons not to do something or not to fund an effort. There are lots of ways to overcome this negative management reinforcement, but that is a topic for another day.

For now, we must stop treating employees like children and instead help them unlock and channel their inner child to uncover new “right” ways. Are you ready to democratize innovation?

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Checkbox Hiring Doesn’t Lead to Innovation

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Checkbox Hiring Doesn't Lead to InnovationWhen looking for a new job, it seems like 95% of the time people will only hire you to do the job you just did, and the other 5% of the time will provide an equal mix of once in a lifetime opportunities and jobs you shouldn’t take.

So why aren’t organizations more innovative in their hiring processes?

First, recruiters are tasked with providing candidates for interviews who meet certain education and experience requirements set out by the hiring manager. It quickly becomes a case of “you get what you ask for, not what you need.”

Recruiters provide a set of potential recruits that tick the boxes and look very similar on paper. Time constrained hiring managers then interview the people they are provided with and figure they are a “smart” hire because they have the education and experience. This generally means hiring the guy or gal that has done the same job before, preferably at a larger or more respected company.

Need a JobFor example, a restaurant will hire a waiter who has been a waiter before, even if the only reason he is available is that he was a crap waiter every other place he worked. In our hiring system, someone who has experience almost always gets the job, regardless of ability and capacity for growth. Meanwhile the gal who dreams of being a waitress, whose passion for the profession would make her an amazing waitress as she strives to create the perfect customer experience, never gets hired. Where does this leave the person with amazing potential but no direct experience in the position they seek?

They are confined to finding that desperate manager with an entry level opening who just had three people turn down their offer and has nobody left in their pipeline.

We hire people the same way we hire an office chair:

  • Four wheels? – check
  • Tilt? – check
  • Height adjustment? – no
  • …and on to the candidate who might have a height adjustment built-in

Consequently we end up with amazing consumer marketers working as engineering firm accountants because they started out in accounting for an engineering firm straight out of university and now can only get accounting jobs. How much stronger would our economy be if we could find an innovative way to allocate our human resources to those places where their star potential would be unleashed?

Now granted, some companies will allow someone from accounting to move to marketing within the company, but even in those companies that do facilitate this type of movement, the great majority really occurs at the managerial level with individuals the organization views as skilled managers with the potential to move up in the organization. So where does this leave the staff accountant whose real talent is not management but something else like consumer marketing?

Frustrated Hiring ManagerUsually this person is doomed to remain an unhappy accountant, potentially seeking an MBA that may or may not successfully allow them to transition over to the world of marketing.

So why don’t we change the hiring process?

Well, change is hard, and checklists are easy. “I don’t have time to interview as it is, I’ve got work to do! I certainly don’t have time to think about creating a better way to hire. My list of questions works pretty well.”

The problem is that people can only look at how candidates perform that have actually been hired in terms of how long they stay, and similar metrics. We cannot measure how much more we would have benefited if we had hired someone else that we didn’t even consider.

But, if we continue to hire the same type of people that we’ve always hired in the same way that our competitors continue to hire, then we will never achieve a business strategy innovation.

So what’s the answer?

There is no magic answer, but here are some guidelines to consider:

  1. Have recruiters identify and provide at least one or two candidates who show passion but don’t have the experience or education tick boxes checked
  2. Don’t focus on what someone has done, have them show you what they can do
  3. Think about the key tasks and challenges of the position
    • Have the candidate tell you, or even better, show you how they would approach them (remember lingo and document formatting can be learned – do they understand what’s involved?)
  4. Ask them what job they would really like to do in the organization
    • Regardless of what job they’ve applied for
    • Maybe even go so far as telling them that the job they applied for has been filled and see how they react (What job would they choose to interview for?)
  5. Ask them if they think they are qualified to do that other job and if not why not
  6. Movie producers don’t interview actors, they have them audition
    • Use appropriate role plays
    • Have candidates present if doing presentations are part of their role
    • Give them a small piece of real world work to do to see both how they approach it and how well they execute it
    • Have candidates pitch you your product as if you were a potential customer (even if it is not a sales role)

Click here to download my new white paper on ‘Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation’

Final Thought: There is one other side benefit to hiring people with the passion and capability for the job, but not the experience, they’ll usually take less money upfront and won’t be turned off by probationary periods.

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Join Braden Kelley in London for an Innovation Masterclass

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Join Braden Kelley in London for a 3-Day Innovation MasterclassPlease join me March 14-16, 2012 in London, England for a three day innovation masterclass based on my popular book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.

This Three Day Innovation Event with Braden Kelley will help you learn how to create a common language of innovation in your organization, how to identify your unique barriers to innovation, and how to create innovation excellence in the same way that you strive for operational excellence or quality. We will explore innovation investment strategy and how to create a sustainable culture of innovation.

We will look at how to craft an effective innovation portfolio, the importance of insights and organizational psychology to innovation success, and much, much more.

Come join me for this interactive innovation masterclass in London at the Park Plaza Hotel from March 14-16, 2012. Space is limited, so act now.

For More Information Click Here

Why Seattle Needs Double-Decker Buses

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Why Seattle Needs Double-Decker BusesTraffic is a problem for drivers and bus riders alike. When traffic gets bad, it gets even worse for buses downtown. Here is why:

Transit agencies, in their quest to put more capacity on popular routes, have added long “bendy” buses to their fleets. The problem is that these buses require twice the available space before an intersection to be able to move from one block to another. They also have more difficulty changing lanes and negotiating corners than standard buses. During periods of heavy traffic this often results in “bendy” buses being unable to move to the next block for more than one light cycle, backing up traffic behind them and delaying other, shorter buses that might have fit into the smaller space in front of them. The answer?

Double Decker BusSeattle and other communities should take a second look at double-decker buses for popular routes that traverse the city center or look to banish “bendy” buses from downtown routes altogether. Double-decker buses are only slightly taller than most standard buses, have a smaller footprint than bendy buses, and give riders a nice view of the city.

Now I must say that I did one time see a double-decker public bus cruising through downtown Seattle the other day. It was a route 417 on its way to Mukilteo and it effortlessly cruised through a yellow light to get the last spot in the bus zone (one a bendy bus wouldn’t have fit in).

I don’t know if the regional transit bureau serving areas north of Seattle has more than one double-decker bus in their fleet or whether this is a test bus for a future purchase, but it sure looked better cruising through downtown Seattle than a bendy bus bouncing up and down. There is nothing quite like the view from the upper-deck of a double-decker bus as you cruise through a city. I hope this is the sign of more to come. Bendy buses may be a newer concept, but double-decker buses are a better one. Oh yeah, and keep the WiFi coming, people love their WiFi on the buses. 🙂

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Everybody Deserves a Little Design

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Everybody Deserves a Little DesignI was flipping through the throwaway coupon circular the other day to see if there were any coupons for anything that I buy anyways, and I came across a couple of items that for me it wasn’t immediately obvious what they were. At the bottom you have an item that looks like a cross between a milk bottle and a flower, but is in fact a room freshener spray, and at the top you have an item that almost looks like a night light but is a room freshener. Both of these are part of the new Glade Expressions line from SC Johnson. I love it that more companies are paying more attention to not just the function of their products, but the form too. And after all, doesn’t everybody deserve a little design in their life?

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Are you good enough?

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Are you good enough?Unless you have invented a completely new product or service, it is very likely that there are large competitors already in your marketplace, established competitors that you will be trying to outwit and outmaneuver. Even if you do have a completely new product or service, customers still have alternatives. For example, the Segway entered the marketplace with a “revolutionary product with no competition”, but the truth is that it entered a marketplace with a smorgasbord of alternative competition (walking, bicycling, roller-skating, skateboarding, etc.). This alternative or substitute competition has proven far stronger than any direct competitor ever could. So what can a small firm do to outmaneuver the big guys or outwit the sneaky substitute competition that is easy to overlook in the passion of the startup process?

The key to any startup outwitting or outmaneuvering the established players begins with strategic innovation. To create a strategic innovation you must first truly understand competition in your industry. Competition amongst firms in any marketplace is typically defined by a few key product or service features (value dimensions). In microprocessors the defining competitive feature in the minds of 90′s consumers was megahertz, while in assembled computers the keys were megahertz and megabytes. These two industries had yet to be fully commoditized so the arms race was along these dimensions of value. In a fully commoditized industry however, firms end up competing mostly on the value dimension of price. Why is this true?

The answer is that in a fully commoditized industry, consumers find the alternatives to be “good enough” on the value dimensions that matter to them and so the consumer generally selects the alternative with the lowest price. This behavior drives price competition and lower margins, and makes commodity industries generally not a nice place to be. So how do you avoid product commoditization or how do you create a strategic innovation in a commoditized industry?

Strategic innovations allow your organization to avoid or rise above commoditization. In addition to an in-depth understanding of your industry’s competitive environment, strategic innovation requires an intimate understanding of the customers. From this intimate understanding you are hoping to identify a value dimension that is incredibly important to the customer but woefully under served. This value dimension could be price, as Southwest Airlines proved in the airline industry, but most likely will be something else. Starbucks‘ strategic innovation was developed along the value dimensions of:

  1. A consistent and repeatable exceptional coffee experience
  2. A network of convenient locations

Strategic innovation requires that your product or service is “good enough” across the value dimensions that currently matter to customers, and creates “customer delight” on a value dimension that you identify through your extensive customer research as being incredibly important but woefully underserved (see Figure 1). Once you identify such a value dimension the difficult work truly begins. Now you must ask yourself how easy would it be for my competition (direct or substitute) to begin competing on this value dimension instead?

If it would be relatively easy for your competition to replicate your insights and the resulting product or service, then you have discovered a sustaining innovation – an innovation that takes the product or service to a higher level of value for the customer, but not capable of transforming your position in the industry. A true strategic innovation is powerful precisely because it will be incredibly difficult for the established competition to replicate. How did Southwest Airlines succeed by competing on price?

Southwest Airlines achieved strategic innovation not because they recognized that price was important to customers, but because they created an organization from the ground up that was capable of delivering low fares with great service. Their ground up organizational focus on people and cost ensured success where previous low fare carriers had failed. Established competitors have been unable to replicate their success. Delta with Song and United with Ted both crashed and burned in dramatic fashion. To get a better idea of what goes into a strategic innovation, look at Figure 2 to see a few of the key components of Southwest’s success:

Let’s shift back to you now. Once you’ve got that great product or service idea and possibly even a value dimension to build your company’s strategic innovation around, how do you get traction on that steep road to success?

Even if you have the greatest widget known to mankind, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before, you can’t just open a storefront and wait for the customers to walk in. You have to go out and effectively market your widget by first selecting who to sell to. Refuse to make this decision and you are doomed. Make the wrong decision and you will burn through valuable cash and potentially burn up any chance of creating success (no matter how good your product or service is). The key to gaining traction is identifying where the greatest customer pain solvable by you is, and for which customers are willing to pay a relative unknown to solve the pain for them (see Figure 3).

Encountering companies or consumers not willing to buy from an unknown is a key hurdle that some entrepreneurs never overcome, sentiment embodied in the popular phrase “Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM.” This resistance may require you to seed your market by entering less than ideal arrangements with leading influencers in your target market. Being first is daunting for buyers and may require financial encouragement and hand holding, so that you have the opportunity to turn them into passionate advocates for your product or service in the future.

If you have created a truly valuable product or service, and ideally some level of strategic innovation to go with it, now hopefully you will have the time and opportunity to gain a foothold in your market and expand into other niches before the established competitors are able to replicate your success.

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How Not to Do Social Media

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How Not to Do Social MediaDespite the fact that Twitter has been around since 2006 and Facebook has been around since 2004, social media is still the bright shiny object in the room (it’s still the current marketing fad). People still think they are being innovative if they use it, and unfortunately many people still approach it as something separate and scary instead of treating it as just one tool in the toolbox of anyone working in marketing or innovation. Yes, I linked social media to innovation in the last sentence and that’s because in the same way that social media is a tool that all marketers must learn how to use as part of an integrated marketing campaign, innovation managers must also learn how to use social media properly as part of their innovation efforts.

So let’s get to our latest case study of how not to do social media by taking a look at a poorly run Facebook contest.

Back in July I wrote an article about the effect of social media on contests called – Does Social Media Corrupt Contests?

This article was written from an outsider’s perspective looking in. Well, in December I decided to dive into the Facebook contesting world and enter a contest for an energy-efficient big screen television hosted by the NEEA in hopes of winning a 55″ Samsung LED TV. Here is a quote from their Energy Efficient Electronics micro-site about what they do:

The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance (NEEA) is a private non-profit organization funded by Northwest utilities, the Energy Trust of Oregon and the Bonneville Power Administration. NEEA works in collaboration with its stakeholders and strategic market partners to accelerate the sustained market adoption of energy-efficient products, technologies and practices. NEEA’s market transformation efforts address energy efficiency in homes, businesses and industry. Its mission is to mobilize the Northwest to become increasingly energy efficient for a sustainable future.

My local utility, Puget Sound Energy, is a member of this organization.

Now let’s get to why my experience with this contest makes this an example of how not to do social media.

Background: The contest organizers – MartketShift Strategies (on behalf of NEEA) – operated the contest on Facebook. It was only open to people living in a handful of states and involved submitting captions for up to five photos provided by the contest organizers for public voting and judging of the finalists. Five televisions were up for grabs as prizes. There were two example captioned pictures – one using humor, and one focused on energy-efficiency. I decided to focus on humor. The rules stated that the five entries for each picture receiving the most votes would then be considered the finalists and would be judged, and that nobody could win more than one prize.

Here is a quick chronology of my experience highlighting some of the strategic failure points:

  1. I never saw the contest mentioned anywhere – including in my utility bill – a friend of mine who enters contests as a hobby suggested that I enter – so I did

  2. In order to enter the contest I had to “like” the Energy Forward page (and allow the contest app access to my Facebook account) – which I was hesitant to do

  3. Anyone who I asked to vote for my entries would have to also “like” the Energy Forward page and then also allow the contest app access to THEIR Facebook account. This is a big hurdle, and in fact most contest entries ended up with ZERO votes or one vote – including some of the ultimate ‘winners’ – but more on that later.

  4. I’m assuming the contest was run to support of some sort of educational goal or action goal around some televisions being more energy efficient than others, but the benefits of one TV over another were not immediately clear or integrated into the contest

  5. My wife and I each voted for my entries ONCE PER DAY and I picked up a few votes from other people. Meanwhile, apparently there was a hole in the application that allowed some individuals to cheat and vote for themselves lots of times per day by refreshing the page and voting again or whatever. The end result was that on the leaderboard you could clearly see that most of the leaders had many more ‘votes’ than ‘views’ (a legitimate vote registered both a view and a vote while a page refresh vote did not increment the view counter).

  6. When the votes versus views issue was brought to the attention of the contest organizers, instead of disqualifying the offending entries they chose to hide the number of votes entries had received

  7. Tweets to @nwalliance with concerns about the contest went unanswered

  8. The gaming behavior was allowed to stand and so three of my entries did not qualify as finalists, but even with the gaming behavior two of my entries did qualify as finalists

  9. The contest organizers then chose to not even follow their own rules, and when the winners were announced there were two ‘winners’ who were not even finalists – in fact one of the ‘winners’ was not even in the Top 14 vote getters – meaning that their entry probably did not even receive any votes (most entries had zero votes). This of course caused a huge uproar.

  10. Then probably most shockingly, the contest organizers in response to the public outcry responded “NEEA has full discretion…to change the rules at any time if needed for the best interests of the Contest and the participants.”

  11. In the end the contest organizers decided to award two more televisions, but ended up awarding them to people who gamed the contest (more votes than views), so the end result was that of the seven televisions awarded, five went to people who gamed the system (more votes than views) and two to non-finalists.

So what can we learn?

The most important thing to learn from this example of how not to do social media is that when utilizing social media as a tool to help you achieve your innovation or marketing campaign goals, you must keep those goals front and center in everything you do and ask if each campaign component supports your goals and your strategy. This is also a great example of how lots of people will tell you they are social media experts, and not really know the first thing about how to utilize the tools properly to support innovation or marketing campaign goals.

You can also see from this example that contests can be a hornets nest and that more often than not people try to game the system. This is why some people who provide idea management software solutions have chosen not to have badges and other similar elements (or to allow for those components to be turned off). This is also why if you choose to have any kind of voting component, particularly where any kind of prize is involved, that you set very clear guidelines for voting and do so in a way that maximizes the chance that the voting ends up being about the quality of the submission and not about the size of the entrants’ network.

‘Viral’ doesn’t come for free. Social media experts will try and convince you to use the tool to go ‘viral’ and get the crowd involved, but when you choose get the crowd involved and let them vote, you need to be ready and willing to let their votes count, otherwise you’ll destroy trust (and even brand equity). If you choose to engage the crowd in a public way you need to use their input, otherwise you’ll suffer very public consequences. If you’re looking for a higher level of quality in your submissions from a large number of people, consider using a more expert crowd instead (Innocentive, Hypios, Idea Connection, Nine Sigma, 99 Designs, TopCoder, etc.).

And last, but probably most important in my mind is that you need to walk the experience and look for potholes. The Marketshift Strategies folks definitely fell down on the job here. There were far too many barriers to participation in this contest, very little strategic integration, they should have anticipated the gaming of the system and written the rules better, and they should have actually followed their rules and the spirit of the contest a little better so that the people who didn’t game the contest and instead legitimately gathered votes were rewarded. The good thing is that without examples to dissect of how not to do social media, we wouldn’t all be able to learn how to use this powerful but dangerous tool in our innovator’s and marketer’s toolbox.

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