This was my first AIGA conference. My first professional conference of any kind, really. Even so, I couldn’t avoid making this sweeping generalization: No matter the sponsoring organization—TED, Gel, AIGA, you name it—conference attendees bring their own agendas to these experiences. You know how you can hold an idea in your head, open any book at random, and find something on that page which seems to speak to your idea? It’s kind of like that.

In the days leading up to Make/Think, I’d been thinking a lot about the power of social media, crowdsourcing, and what it all means to the work we do. I left Memphis with even more to think about.

In the affinity session “Facebook Design: An Inside Look,” Ben Blumenfeld, Communications Design Manager for Facebook outlined three principles that guide design decisions inside social networking’s pacesetter.
1)  Ship and iterate. Facebook doesn’t build wire frames. There’s no time. They don’t optimize for perfection; they optimize for feedback. They design new features and put them out there to let users react, then they iterate on them.
2) Be data-informed (not just data-driven). A simple change in the Facebook deactivation page helped retain more than 1 million accounts every year.
3) Use existing tools for huge impact (or create new ones). Blumenfeld talked about Oscar Morales and his wildly successful Facebook group, “1 Million Voices Against the FARC,” which tapped into Facebook’s power to build a worldwide protest against terrorism in Colombia. Inside Facebook, Blumenfeld’s team created a tool that allows them to share screen grabs of projects they’re working on. (Online tools you can use to do similar sharing include Skitch.com.)

The most enlightening moment during Blumenfeld’s Q&A: Danny DeVito’s Facebook fan page was the best example Blumenfeld could come up with when asked how designers might help clients use social media more effectively. It’s all about authenticity, and DeVito’s fan page reveals an authentic (sometimes even shirtless) glimpse into the daily life of the actor/director/producer.

Actively extending the community theme, I selected another affinity session titled “Wisdom of Communities.” This Liz Danzico-facilitated discussion featured a panel of individuals (Jim Coudal, Jane Mount, and Derek Powazek) dedicated to building/inspiring online communities. The conversation illuminated some important truths:
· Communities excel at sorting.
· Access what people know. Local knowledge is especially valuable.
· Treat people like experts and they’ll act like experts.
· People will vote on stuff they don’t necessarily want to buy.
· The community owns the community. You don’t own the community, even if you built it.
· You can’t “use” communities. You can only ask them for things, and they will either help you out or not.

The community theme carried into the general sessions as well, which on the afternoon of Day 2 opened with memorable performance by a musical community—the Colonial Middle School CAPA choir. My recording of this performance accidentally went off in my pocket during Marissa Mayer’s Q&A later that afternoon (sorry, Marissa). So in a fit of embarrassment, I accidentally deleted it. No harm done, however. It lives online here.

Mayer spoke about Google users as a community—a powerful community that the search giant leveraged to translate the Google interface into more than 125 languages (including Bork, Bork, Bork, the dialect spoken by the Swedish Chef).

Google’s reputation for continuously testing new features comes from a belief that Google users have preferences they either don’t or can’t articulate. So Google regularly makes subtle changes to their home page, like the shade of blue used for links or the size of the search box, then observes how the community responds. Mayer pins Google’s success largely on the company’s commitment to observing and responding to the crowd.

On another level, I also was struck by the power of the AIGA community, its established and rising stars, its mission, its future. I half expected to feel a little like an outsider, coming from a different discipline. (“Who let the writer in?”) That expectation was not met. Writers, designers, creative directors, strategists, managers: We are all makers and thinkers, working together to solve the same communications problems for our clients and improve the experiences of their customers.

The ArtPrize attempts to connect three very different audiences. A global audience of artists, a local audience of venues and an interested community of art lovers. Three audiences with different ambitions.

The logo we created for the ArtPrize strives to reach all these audiences. Calder’s La Grande Vitesse is a familiar symbol of Grand Rapids, a city that values public sculpture as an important part of its civic identity. Turned on its side and coupled with the letter form of a large A, the two create a symbolic equivalence. The abstract shape is a communicative form equivalent to the letter. To the Grand Rapids audience, this symbolizes not just the Calder, but the city turned on its side. A new perspective. To a global audience unfamiliar with La Grande Vitesse, the logo may represents a desire to transcend language. A code. A cipher. A key.

Barack Obama speaking in Calder Plaza, October 2008

A public vote is a core component of the ArtPrize. This attempts to couple the power of the internet to disseminate information with the cultural value of the artwork. An internet-enabled art must survive the cultural filter of such rapid communications. The work must market its value to an ongoing discussion or spark a new one. Controversy is one means to accomplish this. Cultural relevance is another.

The strength of internet communication is the ability of the audience to redistribute content. Linking, Digg-ing, Facebook-ing, etc. allows a message to disseminate fluidly. Each access point re-distributes a subtle interpretation of the narrative event. Each online venue exposes a new audience. A community quickly formulates dominant interpretations and reforms itself around the narrative. When we speak though this medium, we engage in a dialogue.

The problem with internet communications is that they are short lived. As long as a narrative has presence within the stream of information, it stays relevant to our cultural awareness. We form a communal memory that is very short. A Twitter post is good for a couple hours before it passes out of twitter consciousness. A Facebook post can stay relevant for a few days depending on the reach of the communicant’s network. The narrative must be continually reinforced to stay relevant. It happens over time. The ArtPrize is busily juggling the many streams of internet-enabled attention to keep focus on the project as it evolves.

The careful staging of a narrative online depends upon timing. When and where is the receptive audience interested in paying attention? What etiquette is appropriate to provoke the desired response? These considerations give the narrative the best chance to reach the desired audience intact. This is true for any online marketing, but should these become considerations for the artist?

The ArtPrize is very buzz-worthy. But what about the artist? Can the internet serve as the medium to bring art to the foreground in our culture? Can a local audience find a voice on the world stage? Does the public vote create a Lowest Common Denominator art?

Would the city of Grand Rapids have voted for La Grande Vitesse as its symbol? Perhaps. That Alexander Calder chose this form a public sculpture in Grand Rapids was his prerogative as an artist. Within his aesthetic, this form seemed most appropriate to its venue. Subjected to a public vote, would he have crafted a different form, one more appropriate to the broader aesthetic judgement of the public? It seems unlikely. Alexander Calder was an artist. He made his art to his own standards. The city entrusted aesthetic considerations to him alone. The public vote should have no impact on the character of the work.

Calder was already an international success when he was commissioned to create the first public sculpture to be funded by the National Endowment for the Arts through their Works of Art in Public Places Program. Before he began his design, Calder studied the architectural plans, scale, and materials of the buildings that were adjacent to the site. He designed a sculpture that responded precisely to the color, size, and shape of the plaza and the city and county buildings. That work, La Grande Vitesse, was dedicated to the City of Grand Rapids on June 14, 1969.
from www.sculpturesitesgr.org

To transform the city of Grand Rapids into a gallery for the world’s artists to express themselves is an exciting proposition. I suspect the works that resonate the most with me will not be the ones that the city’s population will choose to award the prizes to. That’s cool with me. As in the national election, the determination of the prize will depend as much on the charisma of the artist in presenting herself as on the character of her work. I hope to be shocked, surprised, awed and inspired by the result.

As an artist and writer myself, I am most interested in being inspired by the works. I hope to see political controversy. I hope to be subjected to bizarre aesthetics. And I hope the enduring result is to foster a flourishing local art scene enriched by such inspiration. I hope that the artists who come to present their works find Grand Rapids to be a receptive audience. I hope they stay to teach and continue to inspire local artists through exhibitions in local galleries. I hope to see local artists among those awarded national recognition and much needed encouragement. I hope that Grand Rapids can prove itself a worthy stage for the world’s expression while not losing sight of the many talented local artists whose work has been here all along.

Regardless of the merits of a public vote, regardless of the size of the prize, I hope to see art, in all its glory, telling its story in my city.

The first presentation (sponsored by the local AAF chapter (formerly the Ad Club) was given by Shari Short, Director of Strategic Research at Aloysius Butler & Clark (AB&C!) in Delaware, who talked about social marketing principles and techniques. Short could have been singing right from our songbook, particularly the verses about getting to know your audience through deeper, qualitative means rather than relying on straight data and demographics – too often the approach for marketing efforts. She emphasized behavioral change as a goal worth measuring, over information exchange alone. Here are the principles she advocates for social marketing:

1. Know your audience. Dig deeper.

2. Awareness is not the same as action. Think education.

3. What’s in it for them? Think benefits.

Social Marketing (not to be confused with social media) is more process than event.

We were glad to see that Short, too, uses Prochaska’s Stages of Change model (a subject of a future blog post, I think) as a way to describe the process of helping an unaware customer become a loyal customer.

Her psychology background showed as she focused on key emotional drivers for their customer work: attitudes, socials norms, facts, fear. Campaigns that do this well Short cites (not done by AB&C!) are these wonderful anti-smoking PSAs from the California Department of Health Services.

While Short brushed upon infrastructure changes within an organization to address more holistic needs of the customer – the problem we aspire to solve for our clients – she mostly showed ad campaign work as solutions. I wish she had gotten deeper into the meat of solving organizational problems.

Short also cited focus groups as the primary source of qualitative audience research, as opposed to the contextual and generative research methods we are persuing. Our Empathy work is focused on uncovering not only expressed customer needs, but also unarticulated needs that can lead to bigger product/service innovations.

A few days later I was invited to attend a Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing workshop at a client’s headquarters with Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking and CEO of Gaspedal, a WOM consulting firm in Chicago.

Sernovitz is a great advocate and educator for the WOM philosophy and techniques. WOM is all about scale and the multiplier effect, how to use the human network to get your message across. The most important metric is: How many people will one person tell?

He too presented several ideas that helped us feel our work was on track:  The medium for WOM is people, Sernovitz emphasized that the cost of customer service is much higher than the cost of providing a good customer experience (by a factor of 100:1)… making the ROI of a good Customer Experience Strategy self evident.

Sernovitz’s three-step WOM practice goes like this:

1. It’s about your value: Give people a reason to talk (in a Purple Cow kind of way), be remarkable

2. It’s about their desire to belong: Make it easy for the conversation to take place and continue

3. It’s about them feeling good: Make them feel good, smart, proud, and have fun

Other ideas he presented that we encourage:

1. Work smart and fail fast

2. Regularly listen and respond to customers

3. Commit to being part of the conversation about your company

An interesting point about WOM work is that while we have an increasing dependency on talkers who create buzz, the talkers aren’t necessarily buyers. We learned this in a hands-on way in our work with Spout.com, and it has big implications for defining target audiences and influencers.

Sernovitz encouraged our group to think outside of the typical marketing “value” mindset. He showed several YouTube movies that were mostly stunts intended to get people talking – about what, sometimes I wasn’t sure. I suppose this fits the entertainment PR mantra that any news is good news, but I wonder if too much of this kind of thinking can distract us from providing great customer experiences.

Sernovitz was great, but while I found the workshop informative and inspiring, I wondered about the bridge between designing stunts simply to get people talking and doing something genuinely worth talking about.

Both Short and Sernovitz rightly focus on the habits and uniqueness of people, and how a greater awareness of their emotional and social needs help companies better get the word out and serve their customers.

Sernovitz says that “happy customers are the best ads,” to which I’d add that great customer experiences make happy customers.