Every Tech Company Needs a Dennis Crowley

Ad Age’s Edmund Lee wrote an absorbing profile of Dennis Crowley, co-founder and chief executive of Foursquare, that attributed his company’s success largely to his media and marketing-savvy rather than his technological prowess.

While it may be curious that advertisers, investors, and Foursquare’s ever-growing horde of users continue to maintain faith in the company’s fortunes, this allegiance has almost entirely to do with the enchantments of a single person: Mr. Crowley. He is part of this late generation of entrepreneurs — showmen and polymaths, ringleaders of a geeky, sometimes awkward sort who dominate whatever conversation they’re having. But unlike other internet celebrity founder-CEOs — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Google’s Larry Page — Mr. Crowley isn’t a master of computer science or an impresario of technology. His particular talent, according to those who know him, lies in his awareness of something his more highly remunerated contemporaries are often criticized for lacking: how media works.

“I’m not an engineer,” he says. “I tell the story. That’s what I do.”

His early boss in the ad business agrees. “He’s one of the best storytellers of his generation,” Michael Duda, the ad exec and entrepreneur, tells me. “He comes from a marketing-journalism background, and he knows how to tell a story and killer products tell a great story.”

It’s easy to forget that the principle responsibility of any CEO is to be their company’s Chief Story Teller or Chief Evangelist. So many tech start-ups are led by engineering geniuses, not storytelling ones. The skill can certainly be taught — as a communications consultant, I can attest to that — but just ask Apple what it means to have a natural storytelling talent at the helm of a technology company.

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- Matthew DiGirolamo

A Comment on Comments

The Huffington Post celebrated its 100 millionth comment this week and, as a measure of audience engagement, it’s an arresting statistic and a remarkable achievement. There’s no question that comment sections and website forums can, if moderated based on clear policies and strict guidelines, create satisfying conversations and a sense of community around content. The sheer number of people who feel empowered to opine, preach, expound, rebut and respond on any given article and topic area across the social web proves that people are getting something meaningful out of the experience.

But let’s face it: many website comment boards are among the scariest places on earth. When not littered with spam and trolls, a downward mouse scroll often feels like a descent into Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where the majority of comments are, at their best, uncivil and, at their worst, sociopathic.

How can a social technology so often lead to such anti-social behavior?

The Observer’s Tim Adams, who dubbed the times we are living in as the “age of rage,” offered up an answer recently:

The psychologists call it “deindividuation”. It’s what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed. The classic deindividuation experiment concerned American children at Halloween. Trick-or-treaters were invited to take sweets left in the hall of a house on a table on which there was also a sum of money. When children arrived singly, and not wearing masks, only 8% of them stole any of the money. When they were in larger groups, with their identities concealed by fancy dress, that number rose to 80%. The combination of a faceless crowd and personal anonymity provoked individuals into breaking rules that under “normal” circumstances they would not have considered.

Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it’s why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don’t like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it. The implications of those liberties, of the ubiquity of anonymity and the language of the crowd, are only beginning to be felt.

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- Matthew DiGirolamo

Twitter: Much Ado About 140 Characters

Ezra Klein shared an interesting insight today into Twitter’s success.

Forget the 140-character limit: it’s not the platform’s forced brevity that has led to its popularity. Klein suggests that Twitter’s key differentiation (from Facebook, at least) was putting this insight into practice: that the “circle of people you want to follow and the circle of people who want to follow you are not necessarily the same.”

Yes, I buy that. And I think he’s right that Google+ can overtake Twitter at some point in the future because it incorporates this useful asymmetry, but it’s not “hindered by the 140-character limit.”

I was optimistic about Google+ from the beginning, but mostly because I thought it would offer a chance to create the sort of private social network that Facebook originally was, but eventually evolved away from. But it turns out that Google+ retains Twitter’s appreciation of asymmetrical social networks: people can follow you without you following them, and you can choose to broadcast messages to them, and they can reply, and so on. I’ve been experimenting with this over the last few days and have been really surprised and impressed by how rich the resulting discussions are. It’s really highlighted the drawbacks of the 140-character limit and made Twitter a lot less appealing to me.

That’s been a surprise. I thought Google+ would be a better private social network than Facebook, and that’s proven true, at least for me. But I didn’t expect it to be a better public social network than Twitter. At this point, however, Twitter seems good for posting links, making jokes about live events that everyone is watching at once, and, on my private account, informing friends which bar I’m at. Google+ is better for posting interesting quotations, actual thoughts, and having real conversations. That’s a much more engaging set of activities, and so my guess is I’ll end up spending more of social-network energy on Google+.

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- Matthew DiGirolamo

More Social, Less Self?

Are we becoming so “social” that we are losing our selves?

Zadie Smith seems to think so (an oldie but goodie):

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

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- Matthew DiGirolamo

Pepsi’s Social Vending: Consumer Mousetrap?

In its apparent quest to exceed every company in the world at being “social,” PepsiCo announced that it has designed a social component into its vending machines. What was once just a mundane, transactional and (better yet) anonymous experience has now been made social by the ability to give away your friend’s valuable contact information while you “gift” them a drink.

A prototype of the “Social Vending System” debuted this week at an incredibly wonky-sounding trade show — the National Automatic Merchandising Association’s One Show in Chicago. I’m kicking myself for not requesting a media credential.

While I applaud companies for doing something truly innovative in this space (and the Pepsi Refresh Project was just that), what this vending technology seems to really be about is how to take a consumer touch-point, apply social wrapping and a piece of social cheese, and turn it into a consumer mousetrap.

At its heart, I think being a “social company” is about transforming customers into better citizens, not better consumers.

I have a different standard for what constitutes a social technology. And “Social Vending” just doesn’t meet that standard.

What do you think?

-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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- Matthew DiGirolamo

Videogame-Changers

Jane McGonigal is a breathless evangelist for using gaming to help solve the major social challenges of our time. Her TED Talk above, presented last year, is already one of my all-time favorites. She penned a piece recently in the Wall Street Journal — Be a Gamer, Change the World — where she argued persuasively that gamers could collectively be called to redirect some of the millions of hours they spend solving problems in virtual worlds to coming up with practical solutions for the real world.

These gamers aren’t rejecting reality entirely, of course. They have careers, goals, schoolwork, families and real lives that they care about. But as they devote more of their free time to game worlds, they often feel that the real world is missing something. Gamers want to know: Where in the real world is the gamer’s sense of being fully alive, focused and engaged in every moment? The real world just doesn’t offer up the same sort of carefully designed pleasures, thrilling challenges and powerful social bonding that the gamer finds in virtual environments. Reality doesn’t motivate us as effectively. Reality isn’t engineered to maximize our potential or to make us happy. Those who continue to dismiss games as merely escapist entertainment will find themselves at a major disadvantage in the years ahead, as more gamers start to harness this power for real good. My research over the past decade at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Institute for the Future has shown that games consistently provide us with the four ingredients that make for a happy and meaningful life: satisfying work, real hope for success, strong social connections and the chance to become a part of something bigger than ourselves.

I agree with McGonigal that games are not “merely” escapist, and I buy into her premise that gamers are a huge untapped resource for social action and social change, but I believe the escapist qualities of gaming need to be mitigated even further.

The ideal scenario would be two-sided — to create games that engage people online with an epic, world-saving mission in a satisfying, hermetically-sealed environment and that also force gamers to engage with the messy, challenging and often painful and ugly real (offline) world.

At the same time that you are making gaming more purposeful, why not also see if we can make reality more game-like?

Continue reading…

Groupon: Get to Selfless Ends By Selfish Means

The Wall Street Journal’s Bari Weiss spent some time with Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason and wrote a flattering profile on the company.

Two key takeaways for all social marketers and entrepreneurs:

1. Build a business model, an organizational culture, and customer relationships — in other words, a brand — around one clear, essential organizing principle. For Apple, one could easily say that the company stands for revolutionary design. I was impressed by how well Andrew Mason was able to articulate what Groupon was fundamentally about at such an early stage: surprise. It’s the sign of a visionary leader.

Irreverence is part of daily life in the downtown office. Last Wednesday, someone brought a monkey dressed in a Santa suit. This past summer, Mr. Mason paid a male actor to strut around the office in a tutu for a week—totally mute. Less outrageously, the company has no dress code and no vacation policy, which Mr. Mason credits to Netflix.

“The way people think about jobs, the nine to five . . . it’s the same routine over and over again,” he says. “Groupon as a company—it’s built into the business model—is about surprise. A new deal that surprises you every day. We’ve carried that over to our brand, in the writing and the marketing that we do, and in the internal corporate culture.”

2. Groupon started — and failed — as a social action platform. It was a big idea, but it was too big, too abstract, too idealistic. Groupon caught fire once it focused on satisfying a basic “selfish” need that people already had (to save money on things they want to buy) in a social way. Because it has become a powerful business platform that enables “collective buying power” among millions of users, Groupon can now be used as a powerful change-making platform. In Andrew Mason’s words, “the world-changing ends up being a side-effect.” Groupon’s $15 for a $25 Kiva loan deal was a notable example of its potential to be a force for good.

Like so many other successful tech ventures, Groupon grew out of an earlier, less successful idea. ThePoint.org was a website for organizing campaigns like protests or fund-raising drives. And, like Groupon, it was built around the tipping point concept: The campaign was only carried out if enough people committed.

But ThePoint never took off. “The big problem with ThePoint is that it’s this huge, abstract idea. You can use this platform to do anything from boycotting a multinational company to getting 20% off a subscription to the Economist,” says Mr. Mason, who dropped out of the University of Chicago’s master’s program in public policy to build ThePoint with $1 million investment from Eric Lefkofsky, a former boss and serial investor who later helped found Groupon.

One lesson Mr. Mason learned is that for a site to be successful, it needs to be simple and easy to use. ThePoint, says Mr. Mason “was overly complex and we needed to pick . . . one application of the larger abstract idea and execute it really, really well.”

Another was a broader lesson about the nature of do-gooder ventures. “One of the things I realized . . . is how few success stories there are in websites or products or businesses that exist primarily for an altruistic purpose. Most of the time, the things that really change the world exist for something fundamentally selfish and then the world-changing ends up being a side-effect of that. Whether its Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or Twitter, all those things have made the world better by the way that they allow people to share information. But that’s not why they were created. It was so they could share pictures and videos of scantily clad women or kittens or whatever. And Groupon’s the same way. And it caught me by surprise.”

Full article here.

-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Is Apple Anti-Social?

In the days leading up to Apple’s press conference last week, this video of a shorts and sandals-wearing Steve Jobs (circa ’97) introducing the Think Different campaign went viral. Perhaps the appropriate term is that it went bacterial. It was a fairly local outbreak. In a span of three days, I saw it appear on at least six different blogs I read regularly.

It really is a terrific look back at a company on the verge of reinventing itself — and a valuable primer on branding from a natural marketer. Jobs make three key points in this video:

1. “Marketing is about values…”

2. “Apple, at the core – its core value — is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better…”

3. “Values, core values, shouldn’t change…”

And so I ask: Has Apple changed its core values since this remarkable moment?

In 1997, Jobs articulated a radically progressive worldview. Under his leadership, Apple’s “soul” would be about empowering bold, creative, revolutionary people to “change things” and “push the human race forward”.

It seems to me, Jobs wanted to position Apple as a brand that offered a positive definition of freedom — a freedom to. To create. To take risks. To change the status quo. To mix it up. To blaze a trail. To be yourself. It was all about positive freedom.  All outward looking.

Success hasn’t been kind to this early vision, though.

The now infamous late night email exchange between Gawker’s Ryan Tate and an unfiltered Steve Jobs revealed how much of the CEO’s worldview has shifted since Apple’s underdog days.

Continue reading…

GQ Finds A Better Man; Take That, Pearl Jam!

As it turns out, it is possible to find a better man. Many, in fact.

GQ’s The Gentlemen’s Fund got the better of Eddie Vedder today as it named the five finalists of its annual Better Men Better World Search.

GQ received hundreds of nominations from across the country in its search for men who “dedicate their time and energy for the betterment of society through charitable work, volunteerism, and community involvement.”

You can view a slideshow of all the men who were nominated and meet the five finalists. It’s an impressive list of change-makers.

The winner will be determined by popular vote, and all votes must be in by September 30.

My vote goes to Jimmie Briggs. A former journalist, he started an initiative I admire, The Man Up Campaign, which is  dedicated to bringing men together and putting an end to violence against women in all its forms, from domestic violence to sex trafficking.

So, who’s getting your vote? May the best man win.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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Jimmy Fallon Is A Social Media Artist

One of my All Time Favorite Movies is A River Runs Through It.

There’s a terrific scene in the movie where Norman, the lead character played by Craig Sheffer, returns to his home in Montana after years away at college and discovers that his younger brother, Paul, has become a master fly fisherman in his absence. Norman is in awe of him — and it’s not just because he looks like Brad Pitt. Paul has become a true artist, breaking away from the formal conventions taught to them by their father.

That’s how I feel about Jimmy Fallon and the way he integrates social media and other technology into his show to bring warmth and humor and joyful audience engagement.

When he was first learning, it often came off as awkward and herky-jerky. But now it’s become his signature brand of entertainment. And it just looks like art. Or, rather #itlookslikeart
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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