RonAmok!

Adopting new technologies is like a good-news/bad-news joke. The good news is that we have a new way of doing things. The bad news is that we have a new way of doing things.

While innovators and early adopters love to play with new technologies, companies who’ve built their businesses upon the limitations of old technologies will try valiantly to fend them off. It’s inevitable. Whenever their livelihoods are threatened by new technologies, industries will argue for the status quo.

But, there’s an odd flip-side to this self-centered view of new-tech adoption.  Just as established industries will fight to hold onto their competitive advantage, it’s common for some early adopters to fight to hold onto theirs.

It’s like the story of David vs. Goliath. David’s slingshot gives him a competitive advantage over the size and strength of Goliath. But what happens if Goliath decides to adopt the slingshot for himself? Is that unfair to David? Forgetting that technologies are free to be used by anyone, some early adopters seem to think so.

We’ve seen this situation play itself out many times in social media. When the main stream media started adopting podcasting, some early adopters cried foul. When Ashton Kutcher saw an opportunity to converse with his fans via Twitter, many early adopters started sounding like cranky old men screaming at the neighborhood kids to get off their lawns.

And, as it always does, history has repeated itself again. No longer an obscure little crowdfunding site, Kickstarter has hit critical mass as everyone and their grandma can see it as a viable way to fund a project. While Kickstarter remained an obscure website that funded little indie-art films, early adopters could place their projects in front of small, dedicated audiences of other early adopters. However, once Kickstarter projects entered the big leagues, producing millions of dollars for ideas such as the Elevator Dock, DoubleFine Adventure, Pebble, or OUYA, that’s when it drew the attention of others…such as celebrities.

Coming on of the heels of the successful Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign, producer/actor Zach Braff decided to launch his own Kickstarter campaign called Wish I Was Here. Braff exceeded his $2 million goal in four days and with nine days left in the campaign, 38,000 people have already pledged $2.6 million.

It didn’t take too long for the Davids to start complaining that Goliath had dared to use a slingshot, thus giving the actor unfair advantage over less-famous competitors.

Putting aside the hypocrisy of the argument, the Davids don’t understand that the more people that are exposed to Kickstarter, the larger the potential base is to market new projects to. Sure celebrities have larger audiences to draw from, but at the same time, they draw large numbers of new members into a growing crowdfunding ecosystem. Paraphrasing one of my favorite authors, Paul Zane Pilzer, celebrities aren’t taking a large slice of a fixed pie. By their very involvement, they are helping the crowdfunding community “…grow a bigger pie.”

Innovators and early adopters bring new technologies into the world. But at a certain point, they must act like parents and let their children go, thus allowing new technologies to finish the creative destruction for which they were born. And whether early adopters like it or not, that creative destruction must change everyone, not just a select few.

And that’s a good thing.

Image Credit: PuddlesMcGee under Creative Commons

Four years ago, I wrote Read This First to help executives understand the role of social media in their businesses. And while much has changed over the past few years, more has stayed the same.  Marketing success in the age of social networks requires a different approach to content creation.

I’ve spent the past few years trying to distill “different approach” into a compact, yet powerful statement–an elevator speech if you will. I found it last month in one of the most unlikely places.

Pigskin Storytelling

The father and son team of Ed and Steve Sabol founded NFL Films in the early 1960s. Their work changed not only the way football games were recorded, but probably influenced the way all sporting events were memorialized. An NFL Film tells the story of the gridiron, where infinite forces clash with immovable objects, resulting in serious consequences for the game’s battle-hardened warriors. Rather than mounting a single camera at the 50-yard line to view the game as a spectator, they used cinematography techniques including multiple cameras and camera-angles to cover a game. But the magic of an NFL Film story occurred in post production, when they added the velvety baritone voice of John Facenda reading perfectly-written voice-over narratives. 

We lost Steve Sabol in September of last year. But it was while I was watching one of his works that I found my elusive elevator pitch. Steve said:

Tell me a fact and I’ll learn.
Tell me the truth and I’ll believe.
But, tell me a story, and it’ll live in my heart forever.

The statement hit me with the force of blitzing linebacker, because most companies are great at telling facts and truths, yet fall short at telling stories. Therefore, the role of a content marketer is to transform company facts and truths into in stories.

Rule #5 from Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman’s seminal book, Content Rules says: “Reimagine; don’t recycle.”

Therefore, applying some Sabolization to their rule, we get:

“Content marketers need to reimagine a company’s facts and truths into stories as opposed to recycling them into more facts and truths.”

Give it a try. The next time someone asks what your role is, just give them a little Steve Sabol.

For the past year, I’ve wanted to visit a hackerspace–a physical location where inventors of all ages gather to share equipment, knowledge, and experience. I got my opportunity two Saturdays ago when I visited Crashspace in Los Angeles.  I attended the eLeCTRONiC WeAraBLes Meetup as a member of Epson America to help product manager, Eric Mizufuka, demonstrate Epson’s Moverio BT-100 transparent display glasses to those who might want to incorporate the platform into their own projects.

Crashspace-LA consists of a small storefront located on Venice Boulevard in Culver City, California. Its meeting room held about fifty people, who had self-organized themselves into three groups: those who sat on folding chairs, those who sat on an old couch, and those who stood along the walls. Latecomers peered into the room through two open doors that lead to the sidewalk.

The attendees included parents, teachers, students, entrepreneurs, recent college grads and old, crusty engineers like myself. And although our interests varied wildly, the reason for our attendance remained the same–something that Annika O’Brien, founder of the LA Robotics group, explained perfectly.

“I need other nerds to nerd-out with.”

After quick introductions, attendees were encouraged to demonstrate projects. One-by-one,they showed their work. Rich demonstrated his “hug-o-meter,” a jacket lined with conductive sensors that sent signals to multi-colored LEDs. Others had stitched Arduino microcontrollers into swaths of fabric…and in one case, a hat. A representative from Illuminode raised the bar by demonstrating commercially-available, LED-laced garments, that were programmed to interact with each other, changing colors based upon variables such as proximity and the relationships.

At this point in the meeting, my expectations had been met. I was among inventors demonstrating whimsical applications. But my experience changed when Frank took the floor to demonstrate his latest wearable technology project.

Sleepless in Los Angeles

Frank explained that he hadn’t slept much since he heard about the tragic death of Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III, who died of injuries inflicted when he was rammed by a suspected drug-running boat.  Although Frank had never met the Chief Petty Officer, he felt the loss personally, leading to many long nights trying to find a way to avoid this type of death in the future.

Dressed in sweatpants and a white T-shirt, Frank stood in front of the crowd revealing material after material that he was testing to build a new type of helmet. Frank’s interest in safety didn’t just begin in December. He was issued US Patent in September 2011 for a Damage Resistant Aircraft.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at the intensity of Frank’s motivation. The night vision demo brought by Epson was also inspired by a tragic news story. Conceived while watching news footage of rescuers trying to find Hurricane Sandy victims, its inventor set out to develop a wearable device that switched between night vision and clear glass depending upon whether a rescuer was looking into dark or light spaces. The inventor achieved his goal by mounting an infrared camera with infrared transmitters onto the Moverio BT-100 platform.

As Eric demonstrated the night vision application, Annika O’Brien recognized a potential solution to a problem that she had been thinking about for a while. She told the group about a friend who suffered from Face Blindness, a condition that inhibits sufferers from being able to recognize other people’s faces. Annika asked if a combination camera+Moverio+facial recognition software might be able to help those with Face Blindness identify people as they approached.

The Makerati

I sat there admiring these fascinating people who represented a new breed of inventor: The Makerati. Rather than toiling individually in dank garages and basements, the Makerati work collaboratively through websites, chat rooms, coffee shops and hackerspaces.  Driven by interest, desire, and caring, they willingly invest their own time, money, and deprive themselves of sleep in order to make a difference in the world.

I’m looking forward to spending a little more time with them.