This week, Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey joined forces to support a new initiative, Code.org to encourage young people to code.While it makes sense for any tech company to invest in the next generation of engineers, the real challenge will not be in attracting professional talent to the company. It will be in winning the hearts and minds of the amateur developers.

1. A!lied Storytelling in Marketing
Facebook:
Beyond Hackathons
T here are over 1 billion potential young coders in the world today.
Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google need to focus on winning
this cognitive surplus of young creators.
This week, Bill Gates, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-
founder Jack Dorsey joined forces to support a new initiative, Code.org to
encourage young people to code.
While it makes sense for any tech company to invest in the next generation of
engineers, the real challenge will not be in attracting professional talent to the
company. It will be in winning the hearts and minds of the amateur
developers.
We’re shifting from a consumer economy to a creator economy. A lot of the
code creation is done by individuals outside of the company, outside of the
company’s control. Where previous IT battles were won and lost in the drive
to get people onto a specific platform, the new battleground will be in getting
1 billion people to create for that platform.
Personal storytelling drives Facebook’s marketing
No one joins Facebook to listen Facebook’s brand story. People join
Facebook to listen to the friends’ stories.
To remain relevant, Facebook needs to develop better ways to help its users
tell their own stories. But the mobile experience is too big and Facebook can’t
cover all bases. You can’t just write a piece of code to add a feature and then
leave it alone. Coders need to commit and maintain the piece of code they
Find articles, case studies and podcast on the role of storytelling in marketing: http://GhaniKunto.me

2. write. The rule in Facebook is: “If you are checking in code, you have to
maintain your code.”
The tools the next generation are using to tell their own stories already vary
widely. Some instances of social interactions call for a status update while
others call for picture sharing. As the number of users grow and they become
more educated in social media, the default Facebook toolset becomes
increasingly irrelevant. If the company only depends on internal innovation to
provide the customized experience users demand, the company accelerates
its race to obsolescence.
While Facebook’s hacker culture enables employees to work on the features
that are important to them, the next step in growth will be in enabling users to
do the same. In one interview, Zuckerberg have said, “What resonates with a
lot of people is that you are building stuff for your friends and family.”
Facebook’s marketing challenge is in extending this beyond the confines of
its company into the hands of everyday users.
The natural limits of Hackathons
While Facebook’s use hackathons to provide a low-risk, high-reward setting
that encourages coders and engineers to bring ideas to life has yielded plenty
of great features (Facebook Chat, the type-ahead feature in search, the friend
suggester, among many) the approach has its limits.
One of them is in who it attracts. Most hackathons attendees are male (90%)
and between the age of 25 - 34 years old (61%). In other words, the usual
suspects. But how about the female side of the market? How about the
younger age groups?
"We used to think that inviting students as young as 18 years old was great,"
said Apple's marketing chief, Phil Schiller, in an interview last week. But he
said Apple's iPhone and iPad software has lately attracted interest from an
even younger group of developers.
"We would get emails after the developer conference from students, 16, 15,
14 years old, saying I already have X number of apps in the app store. I'm a
developer. Can I take part in this too?" he said.
Our research shows that youth are the most prolific creators online: 80% of
youth aged 15-21 create original content online compared to only 34% of
people aged 30 and above.
Find articles, case studies and podcast on the role of storytelling in marketing: http://GhaniKunto.me

3. How can Facebook capture innovations generated in these underserved
markets? Organizing a hackathons-for-girls or hackathon-for-kids seems
forced and a generally bad idea.
Hackathons may be a useful way of structuring that interaction today but
Facebook needs to be wary of relying on these tools the same way brands
should be wary of relying on focus groups for insights.
***
Discussion points:
1. Companies today are increasingly becoming like Facebook: customers
don’t get on board to listen to the brand story but to share their own stories.
How is your brand enabling your customers to do this?
2. What should Facebook do to enable and curate the tools generated by its
underserved coders (female and teens?
3. Which segments in your company are underserved and how can you
involve them in your marketing and innovation process?
Find articles, case studies and podcast on the role of storytelling in marketing: http://GhaniKunto.me