Entertainment in the Social Age: Get Your Crowd Involved!

It is no secret that I am somewhat obsessed with pop culture.  Everything from tv to movies to music… I absolutely enjoy the entertainment experience.  The digital age has greatly disrupted the way entertainment companies create and deliver content to their consumers.  The entertainment industry including broadcast, cinematic, music, and interactive entertainment is in the midst of this revolution. New technologies have forever changed the way in which consumers access and consume entertainment content. These results have been due to advances in technology, content, processes and the overall business from budgets to box office revenues.

There is a convergence happening among traditional entertainment sectors which allows for the potential of unlimited new ideas. For example, in the overlapping areas of broadcast and interactive entertainment, television, which was primarily a passive viewing activity is using interactive features and causing a shift towards “Social TV.” This shift opens up secondary channels that allow for television viewers to interact with each other. By using social media utilities like Facebook and Twitter, viewers can provide real time exchanges while a program is being viewed. Similarly, the cinematic and broadcast sectors along with others like interactive and mobile, are also converging.  Although there are huge leaps in technological advancement, from a content standpoint, the front-end processes of how ideas are sourced and subsequently developed has had minimal change.  In an age where consumers are able to react and respond to content so quickly, there is an opportunity for changing the way ideas are sourced, selected, and developed.  Changing the way consumers are engaged in the holistic process creates opportunities for a better consumer experience, greater adoption and consumption.

The opportunity for  how ideas are sourced, selected, and developed has been adopted by many industries and sectors over the past decade. Leveraging the crowd both inside and outside of organizational walls provides a way to access new and fresh thinking.  By sourcing, selecting, and developing ideas with the crowd along the way will yield greater opportunities for cost savings, revenue potential, and brand enhancement.  In the entertainment industry, acceleration of an initial concept to the consumption by the consumers is critical to satisfying customer needs and realizing value.  In film and television, the pipeline from idea to a released film or program can be long and costly.

Film studios and independent film production companies have the challenge of receiving a lot of ideas for films, but can take risks in funding only certain projects. Ideas or concepts, whether they be original or adapted, are pitched. But what if we were to find new and exciting ways to accelerate the pace of the pipeline, better develop ideas in their initial form, and limit risks and exposures by having a greater understanding of consumer preferences?  Using crowdsourcing as an effective technique as part of the pipeline process is an effective way to create new opportunities in a space that is ripe for disruption.

Crowdsourcing:  The Crowd Is There, Are You?

Leveraging the crowd presents an opportunity to get to know your consumer by engaging them through the process of idea creation.  I believe there is a new model of sourcing ideas for film and television content emerging where the potential audience has the opportunity to be engaged from idea conception.   Crowdsourcing offers many benefits that may compliment traditional development. There is a need for new and fresh thinking as the current process is sometimes “by chance” or by “who you know” as to which ideas move forward and is limited only by the few minds in the position to make a decision. Specifically, crowdsourcing offers three distinct benefits to the entertainment business:  ideation, validation, and collaboration.

1)     Ideation: Generate Fresh and New Concepts

2)     Validation: Gain Insights and Knowledge

3)     Collaboration: Accelerate the Development Process 

What if you could use the wisdom of crowds in combination with in-house expertise to evaluate the best ideas? Or better yet, what if you were to ask consumers directly to get involved? What if you could turn the film development and production funnel on its head and involve your movie-going customers from the start?

Having the tools and capabilities to engage the crowd in the process of innovation is integral to accelerating the pace of innovation and having the insights to make informed decisions.  Competitors are never far behind so the ability to innovate.  Speed is key to being relevant among competition and distinguishing yourself as a leader or a fast follower. In the entertainment industry, timing is everything.  The right timing could be better predicted if social techniques were leveraged to include crowd insights, right? Right.

Teams Matter: Find and Create the Right Team, Fast

Ideas are the life blood of every company and of our world.  Ideas can come from anywhere, and through social innovation technologies and processes such as Spigit, global companies around the world empower crowds of people to do just that, innovate.   Many companies have made drastic changes in terms of the leaps and bounds that have been made in really changing the culture of the organization to be one that is collaborative and open.

Many companies had the stigma of sticking to the status quo, but with the rapid pace of innovation and competition today, companies can’t afford status quo.  Finding ways to enable and accelerate innovation of new products and services is the key.  By way of social innovation, companies are harnessing the power of people to gather insights, perspectives, and solutions to take ideas to market at a pace that is much faster than ever before.  Crowds of people are representing themselves amongst a sea of others to showcase their skills and passions, but how can you bring them to work together in ways that takes advantage of those skills and passions?

Even though there is an “I” in Innovation, there is also a “T” – and it stands for “Team”.   Individuals emerge from the crowd helping to identify and develop their ideas in a way that showcases themselves, but the real power of innovation is never about the individuals, it is about the various individuals who touch that ideas from development to eventually implementation.  Teams are critical to moving ideas forward and accelerating innovation.  We now have the power to share and collaborate like never before, but as our technology and opportunities for collaboration have expanded, many times we still concentrate on the individual that contributes. The new world of social has been able to give us a gift , the ability to find the passionate and skilled individuals to form the right teams.

Many people associate brilliant ideas with a brilliant individuals, and we have done this as a society since, well, forever!  This is a common misconception.   You have Thomas Edison with the light bulb, Henry Ford with the car, and current pop culture suggests the late Steve Jobs is the innovator of all things that are cool, right??  But if you think about these innovators and the inventions they are associated with, there were many people that were critical contributors to how these innovations were developed and shaped. Apple would have never been what it was without other co-founders such as Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, or Tim Cook and others at the helm today.   The reality is that in innovation there is never just one individual, it’s always the team of individuals.

Teams have a vast capacity to drive an organization beyond its boundaries. When managed well, teams stimulate creativity and innovation, make an organization more adaptive, and tap into a company’s intellectual resources to drive results.  Innovating takes teamwork, but how do you create the “dream team” to drive innovation?  How can we better identify and enable the right individuals to come together to accelerate innovation?   The Spigit technology and processes take advantage of the very notion of a “team”.  Just by way of participation and activity, we can identify and form the right teams to accelerate the development and eventual implementation of ideas.  I believe there are four fundamentals to establishing an effective team for innovation:

• Passion – Will keep the motivation, the stamina, the momentum up – Dynamic, Energetic, Fun,  Motivational
• Knowledge – Will have the analytical mind, critical thinking skills, knowledge of the subject matter, market ability
• Influence – Will have the funding, the clout, the ability to enable
• Mindset – Will have an open frame of mind, risk tolerance, and open-minded will keep possibilities possible

All in all, building a team can be quite a bit like dating. You can spend your time looking in the places where you’re “supposed” to find someone compatible, and then get into a fender-bender on the freeway with the person who turns out to be the world’s most ideal fit.  Now with technology, you don’t need a fender-bender or some random event to make it happen.  You can leverage the power of technology, process, and collaboration to find ideal fits.   You can’t ever predict where these people will come from, but now you can detect who they are and what type of role they could play.  Using technology such as Spigit to help identify the most passionate, active people to help carry the ball forward could be the differentiator in developing that next break through opportunity or beating competitors to market.

But there is increased value in having crowds actually execute and take action at scale.  We’re allowing people to sponsor ideas or fund ideas through crowd sourcing.  Successful ideas are not born in secret: they emerge from open and vigorous dialog around new information, and then they are actively pulled into the market by a commercialization team rather than being pushed by an ideation team.  Through this open dialogue, Spigit technology can identify people’s passion, knowledge, influence, and mindset just by way of their participation in the activity.  All of the variables that play into the discussion will begin to show emergence of a person’s talent, expertise, and perspective that will start to make them as an individual standout.  This is the opportunity to then connect individuals based on these different characteristics to identify individuals that together can build the right team to take a certain idea forward.

We at Spigit are continuing to innovate on the next generation of innovation science focused on things that will change the way people think about how to drive innovation in organizations and social algorithms that continue to make sure all of the right people are collaborating at the right time.  Crowds can spot opportunities, generate ideas and help you choose the best ones, at scale.  But teams, they are the differentiator in taking ideas to reality.  To innovate well, teams must be permeable, inviting the outside in and engaging the broader community to transform an idea into a new product or service in the marketplace.  Finding the right mix of people to take ideas forward is how to accelerate innovation, and we now are just beginning to scratch the surface on how to more effective identify those “right” people.

Join in on the SOCIAL train: Innovating in a Social Age

“Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.” – Bill Gates

The promise of so much to so many in so short a time is essentially what social media has given to the world.  And this promise offers so much. By enabling us to think differently about how we approach not only conversations and connections, we have also been able to think differently about how we innovate.  Being able to harness the ability to engage crowds to share ideas and perspective in a dynamic, collaborative environment is a real opportunity.  But how do you leverage social media to innovate?  Through the use of social media tools and platforms, the opportunity is to reach everyone, include everybody, and fundamentally convert these real conversations and dialogues into value for the organization.  Using social innovation technologies like the Spigit platform, organizations have been able to transform social dialogue and conversations into actionable ideas.

Innovation is constantly highlighted as a fundamental priority to every organization’s business, but the question still remains on how to do it and on how to do it right.  Many books have been written and processes born, but no matter how many books you read or processes you implement, there is no one-size-fits-all innovation prescription.  Creating opportunities through social media to generate conversations and to also derive value through idea generation is a real opportunity that is still in its infancy.   It is about generating engagement and value through social media to connect communities of employees, customers, and partners to drive innovation and increase productivity, while turning data and discussions into actionable intelligence. Companies are just starting to realize the true value in developing a social innovation capability within the organization, and now is the time to create that competitive advantage.

Social innovation, through the use of social media and social technologies, is really about creating a 21^st century organization that engages crowds, drives value, and defines the brand through innovation.  Leveraging the power of Web 2.0 and enterprise social networking technology, the Spigit platform creates opportunities for people to share and collaborate on real issues and opportunities to participate in the process of innovation.  Being able to generate ideas that lead to new products and services is just one of the many benefits organizations experience when enabling social innovation inside and outside the enterprise.  Creating a program to enable the social innovation experience in the enterprise is where your competitive advantage starts. But where should you focus your efforts?  Here are 10 suggestions to get you started on your social innovation journey…

1. Engage Everyone
2. Create Options and Opportunities
3. Recognize Uniquely Talented Individuals
4. Create Perspective
5. Make It a Fun Experience
6. Know Where Your Best Ideas Come From
7. Flatten Hierarchy
8. Focus on Value-Driven Collaboration
9. Make Everyone Feel Like a Superhero
10. Take Action on Ideas

As you can see, it is about engagement and value.  Creating engagement is about enabling a holistic and exciting experience, not another task or check-the-box item.  Generating value is proving that through engagement, we have the ability to glean insights and ideas that will take the company further.  With the Spigit platform, we’ve been able to create an experience that not only is engaging for the person that’s participating, but also insightful for the organization. It is what we call the 360° experience. This 360° experience is about looking at all ways a person engages.  Understanding behaviors and motivators is the most important element in creating a truly engaging and valuable social experience. It also helps to accelerate and evolve the process of innovation within the enterprise.

Social media and social enterprise technologies have created a new way of approaching innovation. It’s not about implementing an overnight process, but it is about enabling organizations to fundamentally change the way they work over time to inspire creativity, to encourage participation and involvement, and to enable processes that will help to nurture and develop ideas from inception through to implementation.  Social media has created the opportunity to leverage the power of people in ways that accelerate, develop, and push conversations to actionable ideas.  Creating those new and exciting experiences to engage people is important to driving a social innovation program.   The real question is, how will you harness the power of your social media programs to create valuable opportunities for your company?

The Innovation Lady has arrived….

it’s true….  I am starting my new blog!  Stay tuned for some new posts in the coming days.  In the meantime, you can follow me on twitter @michelemcconomy … Looking forward to sharing and collaborating!