Fun Not Fear… A Very Cool and Important Social Experiment

If millions of people recycled the fear gripping our world economy into something more positive, who knows what we could create?

I am working on a very cool social experiment on Facebook called Fun Not Fear, which can be found at http://www.tinyurl.com/funnotfear.  This social experiment is the brain child of Phil Terry, CEO of Creative Good.  You can read more about Phil’s impressive bio at http://tinyurl.com/PhilTerry.

I will tell you more about Fun Not Fear in a moment, but let me give you a bit of background on how it got started.  Phil, the crazy ideator that he is, decided to start a social experiment on Facebook to celebrate the birthday of the 150th birthday of Charles Darwin on February 12th.  Leveraging the power of viral marketing and the network effect, Phil and his team were able to grow members of this social experiment from a mere 400 people on January 29 to 200,000 members on February 12th, Darwin’s birthday.  Since that time, the membership has continued to grow and a new goal has been set to reach 1 million members by November 24.  Talk about the art of the possible.

The Darwin experiment, http://tinyurl.com/DarwinExperiment,  led to an even bigger idea, which is Fun Not Fear.  The goal for this experiment is much more aggressive than the Darwin experiment – 123,456 members by April 1, 2009, which is a mere week away.  Just like the Darwin experiment, Fun Not Fear will achieve its goals through the efforts of its members spreading the word serving as connectors and boundary expanders.

The Fun Not Fear experiment has a very simple premise…  Creating a playful campaign to combat fear.  This is a particularly relevant topic in these difficult economic times where people are concerned about their livelihoods, from their jobs to their homes, retirement and so much more.

As stated on the Fan page for Fun Not Fear on Facebook:

With the broad economic crisis, there’s a lot to be fearful about in our world today – yet neuroscientists teach us that chronic fear clouds the mind making it difficult to think and act wisely. So, can we take the energy from fear and turn it around into something positive – something that can bring people together in these difficult times?

To date, we have been able to grow our membership to just over 4200, which is well short of our goal of 123,456 by next Wednesday, April 1.  I am hoping you will help by joining yourself and forwarding on this blog post to your friends and family.  We are not stopping at 123,456 as our goal, we have set an even greater stretch goal to achieve 128 Million members by January 30, 2010.  Be part of what could be one of the coolest and most amazing social experiments happening today.

Please use the power of your network to help us, this is an incredibly worthy cause.  The volunteers working on this campaign have incredible life stories.  One of our volunteers is a cancer survivor and attributes the power of laughter and fun to her continued recovery.  She even signs her emails with “Have a Fun-nominal Day”

As part of this social experiment, we are posting a Book of the Day, Good News of the Day and a Quote of the Day on Facebook to share with the Fun Not Fear community and all those indirectly connected as part of our Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.  In addition to these posts, there are numerous other submissions made by members of this experiment.  We invite you to be a content contributor as well.  I have learned a lot over the past few weeks by reading many of the posts.

We are not just looking for warm bodies, but rather advocates who believe is the spirit of fun and want to do their part to help others to overcome their fears, while also letting the submissions of others help you with yours.  If you are a parent, there is some great stuff to share with your children.  If you are an educator, there is great content to use in the classroom.  If you are a mere passenger on this spaceship earth (wow… where did that come from, stream of consciousness, but I am going to leave it as I am on a roll), we can all benefit from participating in this social experiment.  This is not something just for a day or a week, but something to think about in your everyday life.

Don’t let stress and fear have a grip on your life, learn to have fun in all that you do.  Learn to laugh in the face of adversity and learn how to share that new gained knowledge with others.

If you are still with me through my rambles, we have a special event coming up on April 1 which all our members are invited and encouraged to attend.  Phil Terry has been able to set up a very cool webinar for April 1 at 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.  One of the special guests for this webinar will be Bob Mankoff. Bob is the cartoon editor of The New Yorker and an expert on the serious business of humor and play.  There will be some great conversation during this webinar, to be sure!

If you would like to participate in the Webinar next Wednesday evening, you can click on the link below.  Citrix has donated all of the webinar facilities for this and future webinars.

Sign-up for the Fun Not Fear webinar featuring Bob Mankoff:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/409237164

I will leave you with this closing thought from our Fun Not Fear Fan page:

Fun, play, humor, creativity, and foolishness are seriously important and, if millions of people recycled the fear gripping our world economy into something more positive, who knows what we could create?

Sign up today and tell your friends…  so they can tell their friends, who will tell their friends and so on and so on…

Join Us Today:  http://www.tinyurl.com/funnotfear

Please Sir, how do you re-tweet? – Twitter to be taught in UK primary schools

Please Sir, how do you re-tweet? – Twitter to be taught in UK primary schools .

A brilliant move by the British government to consider making online communication and social media a permanent part of the U.K.’s education system.

We are living in an always on, connected global society today in which connectivity plays a critical role in human and social interaction, as well as commerce and government for that matter.

Children should start at a young age to appreciate this and understand it.  They should be taught the importance and power of social media, as well as how to best go about crafting their personal brand.  Most of what we do today is searchable on Google.  There has been a lot of intentional and unintentional misuse of the medium which has caused people to lose their jobs or make retractions of embarrassing statements or actions.

Teaching children, from an early age, how this works and how it will impact their lives is an important step.

This is lead to more social interaction, better communication skills and a much needed proficiency in technology.  Embracing this rather than trivializing it will go a long way.

I look forward to following this development and hope it comes to the U.S. soon!

My 30,000 Foot View of Web x.0

I have been having many conversations of late with clients and friends about the evolution of web commerce.  I have been on the multi-channel marketing scene for over 20 years now and have watched the evolution.  When I was a teen or in my early twenties, I often heard from my parents about all the things I have which I take for granted that were not even on anybodies radar screen when they were younger.  The young rock stars of Web 2.o are doing some cool stuff which was not even imaginable 20 years ago or longer.  The reality is Moore’s Law is being challenged and new technologies are advancing more quickly.  Innovation is the key driver, along with an insatiable desire more content and control.

It is no longer about either push or pull marketing, but rather about collaboration, transparency and user generated content.  If you are not giving your customer what they want, someone else is waiting in the wings to steal them away.  Customer Loyalty is defined by stickiness.  Stickiness is defined by a transparent customer experience which makes customers want to engage with your product or service and telling their friends.  With great companies like BazaarVoice, customer reviews are becoming an ante for being seated at the big kids table.  Today we see a proliferation of social searches on Twitter and Facebook where people are asking close personal friends, Facebook friends and Twitter followers for advice and information.  Just yesterday, Robert Scoble said he was in the market for a new mini van for his wife and asked people on Twitter to tweet their opinions on a few different mini vans.  This is the future of social search.  Consumers will give you and others their opinions about your brand, good or bad, whether you want it or not.  The key is what you do with it.  Ignoring customers is a sure bet to share erosion in the future.  It is essential you embrace the two way connectedness being created on the web.  Whether you think you are a participant or not, you are, both personally and professionally.  I love the way Best Buys CMO uses both his blog and Twitter to engage with customers.  He has people tweeting him about stuff they like, as well as things they are not happy about.  He is transparent in his replies and ignores no one.  This is also done very effectively by the CEO of Zappos.  In web 3.0, this will be the rule rather than the exception so you better get some people assigned to following these guys and figuring out your own strategy.

In the early days of the web, Web 1.0, there were many retailers who wondered what they should do.  When should I get in, what should I be doing, how much should I spend.  Many companies figured out that Wall Street was rewarding those with a web presence, thus they began to shift spend and attention away from brick and mortar to web commerce.  Companies were splitting off their web divisions as different companies and the dotcom era of Foosball, pool, beer and pizza was created.  It was the cool place to be.  The dotcom crash occurred and things began to come back to normal, but it was a new normal.  Multi-channel retailing was part of the new normal and companies needed to figure out how the various channels, be it dual or tri, could and should best co-exist.   There is not a best practices guide, per se, however what has evolved is the need for companies to be channel agnostic, always on and provide a seamless, consistent experience for your customers.  Not many are getting this right yet, but they are moving in that direction.  The other thing that evolved with web 1.0 is the pure plays like Amazon who have been able to not only break rules, but create new rules where non previously existed.  Amazon is all about putting the customer first and using rich customer data to improve the customer experience.  Another winner in this arena has been Zappos.  These are two companies that have achieved annual sales in excess of $1 billion+ through a retail channel that did not even exist 20 years ago and they got there faster than any other traditional retailer.  What sets them apart, and makes them both a model to follow, is their commitment to customers, innovation, transparency and collaboration.  Their business models are different, to be sure, but the drive, passion and commitment to be category leaders and innovators is unmatched.

Web 2.o was in large part started by the likes of Facebook, Digg and other social media business models which have made participation and user generated content mainstream.  People have been freaking out of late about the newly launched site design of Facebook, but the jury is still out.  For the most part, I am a fan.  It is taking a bit of time to adjust to the increased noise from the various feeds, but that will settle itself in time.  Facebook did the right thing, however, in the next step of innovating and shaping its business model which will become a powerful commerce engine and source of rich social content, reviews, opinions and so much more.  Nobody understood what blogging was all about, outside of Silicon Valley, just a few short years ago.  Now we have powerhouse blogs like TechCrunch and Mashable to name a few, as well as the newest entrant to the party, Twitter in the form of micro-blogging.  Twitter is being embraced by celebrities, news anchors, professional bloggers and now every day people.  It was just announced today that SalesForce.com is partnering with Twitter to incorporate relevant tweet streams into their enterprise client solutions in an effort to monitor customer views, opinions and feedback.  This will be very powerful and a key point of differentiation for companies that rightfully embrace the notion of listening and engaging with their customers.  I read recently, in my tweet feeds, that people are starting to think in terms of 140 character thoughts and phrases.  This is a good thing, as it forces us to get to the point crisply and succinctly.  Isn’t that what it is all about.  We have a few precious seconds to get the attention of our audience.  How do you say something impactful in 140 characters, many have or are figuring it out.  To me, Web 2.0, is about the conversation.  It is about transparency.  It is about giving people control of what and how they receive content.  It is about user generated, user throttled and user filtered content.  We decide WHO we want, WHAT we want, Where we want it, When we want it and How we want it.   This is brilliant.  We see great new web companies by web experts being created to give us just that.  A few examples are Alltop.com by Guy Kawasaki and SocialMedian.com by Jason Goldberg.  Both have been successful with previous web ventures and are sure to be on the forefront of creating even more new brilliant business models and ideas in the future.  In web 1.0, it was about being channel agnostic.  In web 2.o, it is about being device agnostic.  Mobile commerce and communication will be ubiquitous in web 3.0.  You will need to figure out how to be there for your impatient customers when and where they want you or someone else will.

Web 3.0 is going to be about bringing it all back together again; introducing two key elements which are just now being dabbled with in Web 2.0 – measurement and monetization.  The who, what, where, when and how need to be understood and analyzed, ultimately resulting in insights which create a path to monetization, whether it be products, services or ad revenue. But, as in web 2.0, unlike  web 1.0, the customer must be at the center of the decision-making process.  Chat groups, Twitter, Facebook and other have made it unavoidable to be part of the conversation, engaging, transparent and on your game 24/7.

In another 20 years when my kids are my age and potentially pondering these same types of issues with an entirely different innovators dilemma’s, it will be fun to sit back and say to them, well you know when I was …

I hope you enjoyed my post from 30,000 feet, I welcome your comments.