Enterprise Storytelling for Networks

Enterprise Storytelling for Networks
Designing content and communications for the social enterprise

2012 Social Enterprise Boot Camp

My name is Ian Fitzpatrick.
I come from Boston.
I lead the research team at Almighty.
I work with groups like MassChallenge.
I used to work at places like Euro RSCG and Mattel.
@ianﬁtzpatrick


Before we get started: Thank You.
Making things is what binds us to one another.


Storytelling for networks is not new.
Things have just become a lot faster and cheaper.


Faster and cheaper are physical changes, not
chemical changes.
This is important because it means we’re not starting from scratch.


But, if networks inherently lend us scale and
ampliﬁcation, then our storytelling had better be
tight.


5 provocations* for the social enterprise
1. Let’s rethink the ways in which we view our organizations
2. Design for networks
3. Understand the value of currency
4. Do awesome things, and then tell their stories
5. Place a lot of small bets

* tip of the hat to danah boyd for the inspiration here


1. Let’s rethink the ways in which we view our
organizations


Before we can effectively
design for networks, we
need to understand the
implications of the ways
we talk about ourselves.


How do you answer when someone asks you:
‘what does your organization do?’


This is not a question about your brand.
It’s not about positioning or differentiating, either. Networks are made of people, and
people don’t talk like that.


DO THIS:

Write down what your
organization does.
A. Use complete sentences
B. Keep it to 2-3 sentences, max
C. Write it as if you’re telling someone at a
party


Before we look at what you wrote down, let’s talk
about friction.


Friction means two things to us, and they’re both
important.


1
Friction is a useful force
because it gives us
something to latch on to.
When we tell stories, we want to maximize
this kind of friction, because it’s what helps
our audiences relate to them.


We can maximize this property of friction by making
our stories relevant, compelling and easy to
understand.


2
Friction can be troubling
because it impedes our
momentum.
When we want to reach networks, we work to
minimize this property.


To speed the ﬂow of our stories through networks,
we need to remove barriers to their re-telling.


DO THIS:

Try revising your
description to optimize
for friction.
A. Focus on amplifying the compelling
parts
B. Think about making it easier to re-tell


You will ﬁnd that road-testing your stories with users
is inﬁnitely more-valuable than circulating it within
your own community.


2. Design for networks


If your social enterprise serves as middleware in a
supply chain, please ignore this next section.
Also: you have the most unique business model ever.


“For over 80 years the adidas Group has been part of
the world of sports on every level, delivering state-of-
the-art sports footwear, apparel and accessories. Today,
the adidas Group is a global leader in the sporting
goods industry and offers a broad portfolio of
products.”

Is that a story you’d re-tell?


“Our mission: to inspire and nurture the human spirit
– one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”

This one is self-evident, right?


It’s very difﬁcult to tell
stories to networks
without ﬁrst making them
relevant to other people.


The constant pursuit of markets encourages us to
talk about how we ﬁt into them, not how we ﬁt into
people’s lives.


Consider the signal to noise ratio that the people
who will use your product or service are faced with.


Most of the things we make are for the beneﬁt of
people or systems (or both).


Why, then, are people so-often absent from
explanations of what organizations do?


The concurrent rise of the social enterprise and
interest in user experience is not coincidental.
Social design is, by deﬁnition, Human Centered Design.


DO THIS:

Try re-framing what you
do in more-human terms.
A. If you run into problems, try ﬁnding a
spot for the phrase ‘for people’ in your
description.


3. Understand the value of currency


Great storytellers
understand that some
stories travel better than
others.


So let’s talk about baked
goods.
Speciﬁcally, let’s talk about fresh, hot baked
goods.


This is the Albion Cafe in
Shoreditch, London.
When people ask me about organizations
that design for networks well, this is where I
start.

Stories designed for networks require currency.
Like friction, currency comes in a few ﬂavors:
1. The value derived from access to content & information that people want.
2. The value derived from the opportunity to propagate content and information


This is BakerTweet.
It lives in the kitchens at Albion, right next to
the ovens.


It creates content with real currency for a small,
highly-localized population.
(__________ is fresh and hot right now, and if you get here quickly, you can have access to
it.)


If you think about it, BakerTweet also creates
currency for its followers, who get to be the owners
and distributors of this information through human
networks (i.e. ofﬁces).
Don’t ever under-estimate the value of that.


DO THIS:

Start a quick list of things
you make that have social
currency.
1. Start with a list of things that you make
that provide value in the form of access
to information.
2. Move on to a list of things you make that
provide currency in the form of
opportunity to propagate information.


If 50% of Facebook users left the site tomorrow, two
groups of people would lose a ton of value:
1. Facebook shareholders
2. The remaining 50% of Facebook’s users


This is called Metcalfe’s
Law, and it’s really
important to you.


It’s a big part of the
reason that you’re hearing
so much about Waze right
now.


Adding scale to a network should create value for
each user, not just each shareholder.


DO THIS:

Make a note of ways in
which your customers &
users would
(meaningfully) beneﬁt as
your organization scales.
A. This is really hard, but don’t give up.
B. Great organizations might have only a
handful of meaningful answers to this
question.


4. Do awesome things, and then tell their stories


You started something because you thought you
could make something that people wanted.
There’s a story there worth telling.


Stories of how we make things have resonance
because they reveal decisions and intent.
They’re proof that we don’t make arbitrary choices (and ask that our customers live with
them).


Stories of how we make things are different from
stories of why we make things.
Do not cross the streams.


“We have found the choices we
make have a profound effect on
creating the ﬂatbread experience”


DO THIS:

Note a story behind
something you’ve made
that would reveal the
decisions behind it.
1. Consider how resonant the story would
be.
2. What would it reveal about your
organization?
3. Who would you tell the story to?
4. Could they re-tell it?

Make stuff people want > Making people want stuff.
This might be the most important idea in the marketplace right now. Credit to John
Willshire.


When you make something, you almost always make
something else.
We usually talk about byproducts as bad things. We’re usually wrong.


Uber makes it easier to get from point A to point B.
They also make it easier for car operators to move
‘distressed inventory’.
That’s not all that the service does, though.


Uber users generate a ton of data about places that
we are, and the places we want to get to.
Through the proper lens, this data can be turned into highly-spreadable content.


“The parts of San Francisco that
have the most prostitution, alcohol,
theft and burglary also have the
most Uber rides! Party hard but be
safe, Uberites!”

OK Cupid is a dating site. The data it generates is
astonishing.
Again, this data has inherent social currency.


“Beyond the words the interesting
thing is how men’s and women’s
preferences change with age.”


In both cases, the data is well-suited to networks not
because the stories are inherently compelling, but
rather because they’re inherently about us.


DO THIS:

Start a list of byproducts
of the things you deliver.
1. This is hard, take your time
2. How are they about people — speciﬁcally
the people you want to carry your story?


5. Place a lot of small bets


Most of us have to make room in our lives for the
things that are important* to us.
* Your organization, however amazing and unique, is probably not one of these things


For a long time, communications were predicated on
the sequential consumption of messages, hence the
phrase ‘communications stream’.


In an ecosystem deﬁned increasingly by search and
word of mouth (social), sequence is a lot less relevant
to the way we process things.


Design communications
around matrices, not
linear timelines.


“Be useful,
entertaining, interesting
and playful in service
of people”
- Gareth Kay


Does it matter where you
jump in?


What about here?


An ongoing series of lightweight interactions is going
to be more effective than betting heavily on people
engaging with rich experiences.


DO THIS:

Start a list of small
experiments that you
could try. Pick one to do
ﬁrst.
1. These should be designed to express
part of your story, not the totality of THE
BRAND.
2. Pro tip: make them either useful or
delightful to people. Even better, make
them both.

Did the provocations provoke?
The point here is to ask questions that lead to a more-mindful approach to telling the story
of your organization. The mechanics of how and when and where you do things are
important, but subordinate to an understanding and clear articulation of what you do and
why people might care.

I sincerely hope that this was helpful.


Question time
bit.ly/ZNLHym
@ianﬁtzpatrick


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