That’s about all I can say for now. There will be more to share soon, but in the meantime there’s the work. Will report back soon.

Originally published on Forbes.com.

Before I start, let me just state for the record: I like Malcolm Gladwell. I am a fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve read practically everything Malcolm Gladwell has written since he made the transition from science writer at The Washington Post to social science maven for The New Yorker. And it makes sense that I like him. During that time, I’ve grown up in the professional world of marketing, communications, and social movements in part by repackaging and reimagining the ideas that folks like Gladwell have popularized. Malcolm Gladwell is to my generation what Marshall McLuhan was to the Mad Men generation. Wickedly smart Canadians who have been able to reframe the conversation about marketing and media in America. I kinda owe him.

I’m only being somewhat facetious when I note that both Marshall and Malcolm come from Canada. In a later blog post, I’ll go deeper on that topic, pulling back the loose intellectual lineage that brought us both. It might have begun with McLuhan’s teacher, Harold Innis, the great professor from the University of Toronto who gave us, in the 1930s and 40s, a number of models for interpreting modern media (note: Gladwell is also a graduate of the University of Toronto). Innis, the story goes, excelled in his calling because he was Canadian. As a young man, he rode the Canadian railway — traversing the vast, cold, empty landscape — thinking about how Canadians have invented so many clever ways to overcome the tyranny of distance (the railway was just one of many gems). At the risk of acceding to a cultural stereotype — at least it’s a nice stereotype — I would argue that Canadians, who are at once outsiders and our closest cultural companions, are natural media mavens. Which might explain why they out-perform so many other people in the adoption of social media.

Good segueway perhaps to the subject of this post — the mess that Gladwell has gotten himself into with his readers — his admirers — since the Fall of 2010, just weeks before the midterm US elections. That’s when he published the now legendary piece on how social media plays an insignificant role in social movements.

The article appeared well before the uprisings in the Middle East, the Midwest, and elsewhere, but he continued to defend his position in a blog post in February. More recently, he appeared on television and again defended his position. On a Sunday show, he told CNN host Fareed Zakaria, “in cases where there are no tools of communication, people still get together…. I don’t see the absence of efficient tools of communication as being a limiting factor on the ability people to socially organize.”

When Gladwell published his first piece about Twitter, way back in October, the rap was that he was being disrespectful of the role that social media was seen to play in social movements. When he wrote the follow-up blog post in February — after the uprisings in Egypt — the rap was that he was being stubborn. After the CNN piece — in which Gladwell stumbled, paused, and pivoted to redirect the conversation after a tough question — a lot of folks might have started asking, “what the hell is really going on?” I wrote about the CNN spot a week ago, and I got a surprisingly big response — surprising because it was such a short piece (250 words) and posted on a Friday afternoon. It encouraged me to look more closely at the stubbornness of our Canadian friend, as well as the nature of our obsession with this story that won’t go away.

The strawman

First, it might help to look at the nature of Gladwell’s argument, as he laid it out in his original article (titled, “Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted”). The article starts out the way most Gladwell pieces do — not with an insight, but rather with the data for the insight, which always comes later. He tells the story of the 1960 Woolworths lunch counter protest in Greensboro, North Carolina — the Woolworths staff refused to serve blacks — one of the greatest episodes of the civil rights movement. He shows how the protest grew from four people on a Monday, to 27 people the next morning, to 80 the next day, to 600 by the end of the week. “By the following Monday,” writes Gladwell, “sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away.” It was a real movement, and it was executed without the benefit of anything resembling the communication tools we have today.

It’s an easy argument: the absence of a tool does not prevent people from getting together to do things, a line of argument that Gladwell repeated in his spot on CNN. He then goes on to show that two of the then-most talked about social media-assisted movements — the uprisings in Moldova and Iran — had little to do with social media at all. That’s a tougher argument — that social media, so far, has not played a big role in social movements. And in the hands of another writer, the article might have ended there. But Gladwell’s stock in trade is not in reporting that something works, but in describing how it works … or doesn’t work — the science behind the phenomenon. Act II of his article is a long and curious discussion of why social media is ill suited for the work of social movements.

At this point, a sensitive reader might feel that something odd has happened. In fact, something has. Gladwell has constructed a strawman — no one serious would argue that social media is the driver of social movements (that the revolution will be tweeted). It’s a lot more complex than that. But he subjects the strawman to the Gladwellian “how it works” treatment, and, surprise, social media comes up short.

The crux of the argument is this: social movements are based on strong ties — close relationships with people with deep, shared interests. Strong ties, Gladwell shows, is what made the Greensboro protest happen. Same for other movements (Moldova, Iran, East Berlin, before the wall came down). Social media, on the other hand, is about weak ties — relationships with friends of friends. We cannot hope to do the serious work of organizing with people we don’t really know. At best, they can only connect us with new ideas, new people, and help us distribute our own ideas to people outside our immediate reach.

But note: in social networking, “weak ties” is not a perjorative term, and Gladwell admits that. But by making social media alone the strawman in his argument — and not the entire movement in which social media only plays a part — Gladwell positions weak ties as the Achille’s heel in an online social movement. That’s like arguing that a gas-pedal can’t start a car because it doesn’t have an ignition. Gladwell is such a good writer that you may not notice. But this subtle intellectual sleight-of-hand obscures not only the rules that govern the world of social media (a digital, virtual world), but also the role that it plays in the world where strong ties rule — the physical world of late-night planning sessions, door-to-door canvassing, and picket lines).

And that’s the problem. By segregating the virtual world from the physical world, Gladwell risks losing the insight required to explain either very well. You don’t have to be a social-media guru to know how the two worlds are joined. On the lighter side of the spectrum there’s Internet dating, where weak ties may in fact bring the right people together and later establish the strongest of ties (marriage). On the other side, there are any number of social movements that have developed, and continue to develop, on the same principle.

I’ve had first-hand experience with this. About 18 months ago, I first made contact — online — with a Latino non-profit that has a huge digital presence. I attended one of their live conferences just a few months later. Soon after I joined their board, and began organizing conferences with them. Today I regard some of my LATISM compadres as friends — real friends. They are among my strongest ties. If I had not met them online, I would never have met them offline so quickly and start doing the work of planning a movement. And yes, the work required to start a movement demands special attention. Gladwell is right about that.

Malcolm in the middle

But what do we make of Gladwell’s strawman-making — his refusal to give social media the credit it’s due? I believe there are two good explanations.

1. “It’s not that interesting.” First it’s important to understand what Gladwell does for a living. Yes, he is a thinker who has a deep, abiding interest in the social sciences, but he is not a social scientist. He is a reporter, and reporters thrive on their ability to describe not only what’s relevant — the stuff that helps us understand the world around us — but also what’s new. Gladwell’s particular gift is to make his beat accessible to the masses, while framing the material so that it is almost always surprising. It’s not just educational to read Gladwell; it’s also fun. As I’ve noted before, he is the master of the counter-intuitive, and that mastery has made Gladwell very popular.

In the end, Gladwell’s duty to us — as a reporter — is not only to inform us, but to entertain us as well. When he wrote the blog post in February, defending his article back in October, he concluded, “[p]eople with a grievance will always find ways to communicate with each other. How they choose to do it is less interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to do it in the first place.”

Emphasis on interesting. Is it possible that social media — a topic that inspires countless opinions every single day and that has spawned at least a hundred books — does not cut it as a serious topic? If yes, that might help explain why Gladwell has never written much on the subject, with the few notable exceptions. He is far more interested in the real world, though it’s one that is too neatly detached from the virtual world that complements it.

2. “It’s not my beat.” But what about this real world, and what is Gladwell’s attachment to it? I suspect that there might be something personal here; it would be very human for Gladwell to protect a beat that has brought him fame and recognition. From The Tipping Point (his first book) to What the Dog Saw (his latest), he has almost always written about remarkable people and their ability to beat the odds — in marketing, in sports, in life. Across the wide range of things that social-science writers cover, Malcolm Gladwell clearly comes down on the side of humans. And I suspect that he is not only defending the particular beat he has carved out but the unique place he occupies on that beat. And perhaps this is why he appears to be defensive when talking about social media. For Gladwell, it could be personal.

But why then do we care so much about what one man thinks? When talking about Gladwell in public forums, I sometimes quip that he has been caught in the middle — Malcolm in the middle — of the virtual world and the physical world, and left alone defending one of them. That might be true, but I think that this might be less of a problem for him than it is for us. I spent some time collecting and sifting through the hundreds of articles and blog posts about Gladwell since the article in October. Many of them are angry and disappointed, as if Gladwell, somehow, has let the world down (argument = with influence comes responsibility). At a time when so many people around the world are making their voices heard and practicing the hard work of social organization, the idea that one person could stand in the way and let the world down seems antiquated (perhaps a topic for a future discussion that even Gladwell would find interesting). Gladwell is not a 2011 Middle Eastern despot standing in the way of intellectual expression. Yet we’re acting as if he were. That is so one-dot-oh. If someone is truly bothered that our favorite social science maven is not doing the work of explaining the world we’ve inherited, let him or her stand up and do something about it. The problem is that we become too attached to our leaders, especially if we feel we owe them (my note at the top of this article). Yet every generation brings a new crop of leaders, and perhaps the time has come for a new kind of book. Just don’t be surprised if it comes Canada.

***

Anyone who has spent any time in the enterprise 2.0 business – for me, it’s been five years – will admit this, if pressured: by far the greatest challenge for the market is not corporate fear, cluelessness, or laziness – the usual scapegoats. The challenge is something far more elusive: getting people in the company to adopt the program meaningfully, persistently, and scalably. The truth is that many enterprise 2.0 programs fail to gain traction because they actually require work. In the enterprise, culture matters, and culture is not something you can easily add, game, or integrate, like the latest 2.0 widget.

But that’s where the consensus ends. A large number of businesses have not been able to move forward with their enterprise 2.0 programs for lack of confidence on the right way to approach culture. One side of the consulting world has spoken up rather aggressively, with the message that culture can be addressed with something called “change management.” But the phrase alone is enough to scare off most of the market. It sounds too expensive – and it often is – and in many cases it just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to a smaller set of things that can be done.

Here are a few things that I observed work well, sometimes with the support of people in the consulting community who see the need for a leaner, meaner approach.

The Audit

It might seem like a rather obvious place to start. But many businesses jump on enterprise 2.0 projects without first asking what their constituents are actually doing. What tools do employees, partners, and customers use? What are they using them for? Think broadly about these two questions before conducting your “audit” – a fancy word for listening – because we tend to think narrowly about social media.

First, we tend to exclude services and tools that de facto are social, but because they originated in an earlier era, they do not enter our minds in this context. Second, we tend to exclude activities that are not directly related to communications and collaboration, but yet might have value to the enterprise social network.

Several years ago, when I was in the consulting business, a large telecommunications company asked my agency for general recommendations on their social strategy. In our audit, we discovered that while an overwhelming number of people inside their ecosystem were loath to contribute or comment on blogs and social networks, a great number spent time networking with peers on LinkedIn groups. Neither the tool – LinkedIn – nor the activity – professional development – made the initial list of things to examine in our audit. But after this small discovery, the project moved on a faster track for the company.
The Mirror

If the insights from the audit are good, an effective next step is to share them with managers in the company. Done right, this exchange of information does several things at once. First, it makes visible to the top of the organization what’s happening at the grassroots. Second, it educates managers on the range of immediate tools and ideas it has at its disposal (recall the little epiphany we had at the telecommunications company). Third, it helps stimulate conversation about how the company might support a promising trend.

Some time after staffers at Best Buy began demonstrating the power of employee-driven communications – best evidenced in the now famous Blue Shirt Nation – my former agency prepared a number of documents, videos and other artifacts that essentially held a mirror to the organization (see Charlene Li’s “Open Leadership” for more color and detail). This exercise helped pave the way for other projects at Best Buy that had the support of management. As many early thought leaders in the Enterprise 2.0 world have noted, the most successful projects start at the bottom but meet at the middle, with support from the top of the organization.
The Metatribe

Sometimes, the mirror takes the conversation to another place: how the programs that a company strategically decides to support might have a catalyzing effect on the entire company and its ecosystem. In the world of political marketing, we’ve learned how a few very diverse groups – e.g., women, Latinos, progressives, conservatives – can rally to a cause, despite their differences.

Recent, I looked at how the 2010 elections inspired a number of operatives – on the Left and the Right – to court the big unwieldy Latino metatribe. Similar opportunities exist for large companies with diverse constituents who might come together if only they understood their part in the company’s social agenda. Best Buy’s Twelpforce – a big part of the company’s public brand – comes to mind, and there are perhaps a few others that demonstrate this principle.

But a company may not even need to go there to enjoy the benefits of 2.0, nor will it need to spend much time to get something meaningful started. Best Buy and other companies that are featured at industry conferences as case studies all got started by listening, thinking and supporting.

That’s the fastest path to adoption today, and I don’t see anything better on the horizon.

Gustavo suggested a really neat twist to the panel format — he asked each of us to tweet four comments before the event so that Rick could grab the screen shots and prepare them as slides. Rick then mixed the order of the slides, so as to ensure a fun and lively conversation. Gotta say, I have served on many panels, and this by far was the best one yet. Credit goes not only to Rick — a masterful, funny, energetic moderator — but to Carlos as well. As producer of the event, Carlos was wise enough to give more time to this panel than others might have. Both the panelists and the audience benefited.

So here are my slides — I mean tweets — from the panel session. To see Gustavo Razzetti’s tweets and comments on the event, go here.

<--This was a context-setter for some of our talk on the panel. For too many companies, social media is a channel -- simply another avenue for communications. But social is becoming much more than that. In many ways it’s the new UI/UE -- user interface/user experience -- for all communications. All interaction with media -- whether it's on TV, the computer, the mobile device -- is becoming social. Understanding this broader trend can help organizations plan their marketing strategies more thoughtfully, more strategically.

<--This is the foundation of my new "stump speech" at Latin-American marketing and communication conferences, and I previewed it not too long ago at the kickoff for the LATISM’s Latino2 event series. The thesis is that the Latinosphere — the world of Latin-American online influence — is vast, diverse, and complex, and organizations hoping to engage with Latinos online need to think about these complexities.

<--But here's the rub -- despite the complexity and diversity of interests in the Latinosphere, many Latinos tend to rally together around core issues. The panel briefly discussed how the contestants in the California Governor's race are now experiencing this as a result of the so-called nannygate scandal. I cite one of my favorite Ruben Blades songs, “Todos Vuelven” (”todos vuelven a la tierra en que nacieron”). Given the right mood and the right moment, we all return to the homeland, though the homeland today is just as likely as it is to be virtual as it is physical. (And by the way, Ruben has a virtual home in the Latinosphere, as does his long time collaborator, Willie Colon).

<--Finally, I noted some of the big numbers that characterize the Latino online market. Spanish is now the number-three language on the Web, trailing only English and Chinese. Latinos are joining social networks faster than any other ethnic group. Latinos are graying slower than many other ethnic groups. But it's not just the young-uns that are joining the Latinosphere, but "abuela" and "abuelo," too. There was a time not long ago when businesses were writing off social media as a generational trend that would fade soon. I always felt that this perspective was short-sighted. Not only does it ignore the obvious fact that today's youth is tomorrow's leadership, it also fails to appreciate the current trends in social-media adoption. Everyone is beginning to join online networks, and the Latinosphere — one of the most vibrant meta-communities online — is emerging as one of the most interesting case studies: a complex, diverse, mostly virtual world that somehow — sometimes — manages to come together when it matters most.

genus = notebook; species = HP

genus = notebook; species = Apple

I think we’re witnessing a similar kind of evolution with the word “site” — as in Web site. Consider: what we have been calling Web sites, for oh say 16 years – aren’t really “sites” — in the full sense of the word. From the Latin, situs: “place or position occupied by something.” The standard Web site is not a “place,” and it certainly is not occupied, certainly not by people. But in fact that’s how sites are evolving in the post-Web 2.0 world. The site has evolved into the social network, and networks, as anyone who has spent a lot of time in them will attest, are very much like places. Even their names sometimes evoke a sense of physical place (MySpace, Farmville, many others). And while they are not like real places, they are clearly an advance on the original concept. Once again, technology has evolved to meet the hype of a marketing metaphor (the “site”), in a way that more closely resembles what we have in “real” life. And that, I believe, is the most remarkable thing about online communication and computing. There is an irreversible march toward evolving the objects and tools we use to navigate the virtual world so that they better match the way we navigate the real world.

But unlike the notebook, the evolution of the Web site has implications for anyone in business (i.e., it’s not just HP and Dell’s problem). There was a time when it was understood that every company needed a Web site — it was one’s place on the “World Wide Web.” An entire industry was spawned at the dawn of that insight. No such thing has happened yet in the post-2.0 age, unless you look at the corporate blog as an evolutionary advance on the corporate Web site. Perhaps that’s true, but it’s only a small advance compared to the social network. And while practically every company now at least understands the value of a blog (or blogs), very few in comparison understand the value of an enterprise social network. But if you trust the consensus of the market makers in this particular world (I do), it won’t be long before that changes, too. In the meantime, here’s what’s confusing businesses from seeing the horizon ahead:

genus = real estate; species = Trump

genus = real estate; species = Facebook

–The good news: the emerging world of networks is just that … emerging. The world is changing. We are moving from a site-centric world (”site” in the Web 1.0 sense of the word) to a network-centric world. But it’s a new world with lots of uncertainty. How does a business deal with the fact that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn have such a great presence in the network-centric world? Ignore them? That would be wrong — just as wrong, in fact, as it would be to ignore the largest players in the real world of real estate. So much has been written about how companies should make their static sites more compelling and relevant by integrating with social networks and other services (again Jeremiah). I agree — in fact, this point of view informed a big part of my consulting practice over the last few years. But a safe bet would be for businesses — and non-profits — to also invest in a little real-estate of their own, create their own networks, and grab a piece of the American dream. There’s a nascent market of “enterprise 2.0″ companies (I am with one of them) ready to respond to the market, and already the market is beginning to see the value. I’ll share more as I move along — I’ve been on the job (officially) less than one week. But it’s one of the most interesting and exciting markets that I’ve competed in for quite some time. It’s a great place to be, literally and metaphorically.

Source: InnoCentive

It’s not often I can point to a trend in social technology and get truly excited. The business benefits of social tech have long been established (the effectiveness and efficiency of networked communications), but so have the human costs (distraction and dependency on networked devices). But there’s a trend that’s (a) just beginning to mature and (b) shows real promise to benefit both business and the human condition — really. I’m talking about the many systems and platforms that have been used to “crowdsource creative” — that is, to tap human networks to create new ideas, products, and services. These platforms have been used to create everything ranging from t-shirts, corporate logos, to earnest solutions for world peace. Regarding world peace, that’s not exactly the kind of human benefit I’m thinking about (more about that in a moment). But the range of things that can be crowdsourced — both mundane and sublime — is worth considering. I like to bunch these things in three general groups:

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of products and services. Perhaps the best known example of this is Dell IdeaStorm, an initiative that’s enabled the company to tap its most avid customers for ideas that contribute to product and service development.

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of ideas. The idea here is to organize groups of people to innovate, develop new ideas, and solve problems that have eluded organizations that have attempted these things on their own. There are lots of examples of this, from the famed InnoCentive site (most recent challenge: clever solutions for responding to recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico); to the $1 million Netflix competition (which enabled the company to develop a superior recommendations system); to the very recent $1 million Edmunds Toyota Prius challenge (“re-create unintended acceleration in a car and then solve that problem and prove the whole thing to us”), to the many experiments that are being conducted at Ideascale, a platform that “empowers communities to drive innovation” by enabling them to collect ideas from “customers, give them a platform to vote, the most important ideas bubble to the top.”

*Platforms that crowdsource the creation of professional-class content. Of the three general classes of crowdsourcing creative, I find this to be the most interesting, for three reasons. First, most of these platforms tap communities of professional-class (or near professional-class) participants. No longer do businesses need to limit themselves to consumer-driven user-generated content (USG); they can avail themselves to professional-generated content (PGC) as well. Second, because of the professional standing of many participants, they are generally more Web savvy and better connected; a brand that engages one of these communities might get instant marketing at the start of a competition because so many members of the community are likely to publicize their participation. Third, the very fact that businesses have begun to crowdsource actual “creative” — the term that the advertising industry has given to any and all artifacts (design, images, video) — from the creative disciplines has serious implications for traditional business models in the world of marketing, communications, and, yes, advertising. Examples of PGC platforms are Logoworks (acquired by HP) and 99designs, which crowdsource the creation of logos and Web design; MOFILM, which helps brands crowdsource the creation of film and video; Aniboom, a global community of professional-class animators; and Talenthouse, perhaps the most audacious of all platforms, attempting to create a virtual marketplace for the entire “creative” community (art, fashion, film, music, design — and that’s just to start).

These many experiments have given us something else to think about — the use of the word “creative,” which, as I noted, is a term that the advertising community has branded and defined too narrowly. As the entire universe of crowdsourcing has demonstrated, the work that people can be tapped to do is the most important stuff there is. For the essence of “creative” is creating, the making of things, without which there’d be nothing (literally). And, as companies like MOFILM, Aniboom, and Talenthouse are demonstrating, the things we are talking about are potentially great things — this is not the world of amateurs, but a newly organized world of professionals — and people on their way up (e.g., MOFILM has done a great job connecting with students in film school) — who are motivated to work in environments that are less hierarchical and more network-centric. That, of course, has long been one of the promises of the Social Web, but I believe that “crowdsourcing creative” is pushing the outer edges of social technology design and that we can all learn a lot from it. I’ve been watching this market for quite some time (disclosure = Aniboom was a client of my agency a while back), and these are three things I’ve observed.

(1) The best platforms have defined value from the start. As I said, many of these platforms are looking to create important things for which there is a clear and compelling market need (from a cheaper logo for starting a new business, to breakthrough technology that can transform a business).

(2) The best platforms are driven by social design. It’s no accident that many platforms connect with their participants through contests and games. The challenge, always, is to devise the right kinds of incentives for the creative community in question (to put the “centive,” for example, in InnoCentive), and this is where innovators in social technology are spending most of their time. But the bigger lesson for all is just how important “game logic” has become for so many experiments on the Social Web (for a smart look at this opportunity, check out the recent Business Week article by John Hagel and John Seely Brown examining what businesses can learn from multi-player games like World of Warcraft).

(3) The best platforms have found a way to connect with the “out crowd,” the most talented professionals that are too remote, too invisible, too shy to rise inside the traditional enterprise. A colleague of mine recently pointed out that one of the cooler things about “crowdsourcing creative” is the opportunity to engage with someone who for any reason — too shy, too far away, invisible behind the corporate lens — to get noticed otherwise. This, I believe, can have a profoundly healthy effect on both the businesses that recruit talent and the people who have it. Healthy for business, because there’s nothing so vulnerable as a company that depends on a small “in crowd” mentality; better to tap the best talent there is, wherever it is. Healthy for the person who has creative talent, because the making of things is the bedrock of a happy life. Put the two together, and you’d have the kind of organizational culture that’s required to compete in the new digital/social economy. But whether or not that’s too idealistic, engaging and supporting “the out crowd” might make for a happier corporate life. As Freud said, “love and work are the two cornerstones of our humanness.” Solving for at least one of these challenges — shall we start a contest? — sounds like a good thing to do.

[Acknowledgement: Big thanks to Tatiana Josephy and Chris Advansun for their research and insights on companies featured in this post.]

Touch is not a new technology. It’s been around many years, but mostly as a labs-and future-of-technology showcase. Of course, the iPod/iPhone changed all that, and it’s fair to say that Apple and its many device-manufacturer followers have been teaching the world to touch for several years now. I got a good reminder of this about a year ago when I picked up a magazine and unconsciously spread my fingers over the print, attempting to make the type bigger; the iPhone had already trained me to use a computer UI to navigate the world of physical media (a creepy but enlightening moment). But what many people are discovering this month is that touch is a much more compelling modality when the form factor — the size, weight, and field of play of the device — is right. Many things that worked OK on the iPhone work even better on the iPad. If the iPhone was the first device to begin to teach the world to touch, the iPad may usher in a bigger wave of education. And if that happens, all the hype surrounding Apple’s magical device will be deserved. Because of if the world learns to touch, computing may in fact change forever.

But what’s all the fuss about touch? If you have a touch-screen phone, iPod or iPad, some of the benefits should be obvious. For example, with a number of computing tasks — e.g., sorting through photos — touch makes for a far more efficient experience that the mouse. For things like reading, it makes for a more intimate, natural experience (note how the turning-the-pages feature in iBooks mimics the physical-world experience of reading books). But perhaps the most profound thing about touch is — duh — the sensory component. Computing used to be only about seeing and hearing. Now that it’s also about touching, we can begin reimagining how computing will further enable us to traverse the physical and virtual worlds, which increasingly compete for our time. Hard to clearly imagine where this is all going, but the immediate horizon is beginning to become visible. To me, the most interesting experiments in augmented reality anticipate a new wave of innovation in device design where the motion of our wrist, hands, and fingers can help us bridge the physical and virtual worlds. (E.g., the “Sixth Sense” project, prominently featured at TED (see below)).

This is only the beginning, of course. But it won’t be long, I think, before a cunning marketeer catches and exploits the sad irony in all of this. For among all the senses, “touch” is the one we most associate with human intimacy, and our technology experiments with touch are happening at a time when so much of the world has lost its ability to touch — in part because of the increasing amount of time we spend behind screens. This is not entirely new — we’ve been moving in this direction for quite some time, enough to inspire an AT&T marketing team back in 1979 to exhort the world to “reach out and touch someone.” It was the dawn of the PC age, but already the world was losing its ability to touch. Expect innovation and surprise on both the technology and marketing fronts now that touch has a compelling virtual analog.

So what is it about southern accents that make them contagious, if in fact they are contagious? I’ve decided to crowdsource this question, here on this blog and through several social networks. But to get things started, here are a few pet theories of mine, developed at different times over the years, reflecting the different stages of evolution of my cynical self, which leans neither North, South, but probably East:

–Southern accents demand that we slow down our conversations … and slowing down has a natural, positive, sedative effect. That’s especially true if you are a fast-talking Yankee on vacation. You want to slow down. “Set a spell. Take your shoes off. Y’all come back now, y’hear?”

–Southern accents demand that we speak more poetically. If you are a fast-talking yankee on vacation in a Southern city — particularly an elegant Southern City like Savannah — chances are you need to act more civilized, want to act more civilized. Nothing more civilized, you notice, than adding a little lilt in your voice when you ask for something. “A bit more foam in that latte? Much obliged.”

–Southern accents are like forbidden fruit — you cannot, will not resist them. Imagine you are a teenage girl in the 50’s, and your parents warn you to stay away from the dangerous, brooding Fonzie type who hangs out with his even more dangerous friends outside the corner drugstore. He was interesting before your parents spoke up. But he’s even more interesting now. Same goes for Southern accents. You know they are contagious — people have warned you — and you know you are too smart, too disciplined to give in. Which is why you give in. For there’s nothing stronger than the time-stopping, poetic, song of the people whom we fought and parted with so long ago that the whole thing seems like a myth. In the end, what makes Southern accents so contagious is the desire that we have to connect with the unconnectable. Especially, again, if you’re a Yankee on vacation. You are more than happy to forget your busy, fast-talking, prosaic life — for a spell – and imagine you’re at home with long-lost relatives.

User-centered innovation has helped conduct us into an unsustainable world. The reason is sustainability is not embedded in the anthropology of our existing culture, society, and economy. Yes, people are starting to be concerned about the environment. But their concerns about many other things — their budgets, health, safety, well-being, and emotional fulfillment — are increasing, too.

It’s an interesting perspective, and one that might add depth to the discussions many businesses are having today about the design and implementation of social media. The bias in this world — and it’s a good one — is for user experience. But our rational obsession with the user can easily obscure the difference between the work that UE/UI professionals do and the work that social-media innovators do. Both are important, but it’s important to see them on different horizons, to borrow from the old McKinsey model for corporate growth. Even Facebook — the company that has developed the gold standard for user experience in social media today — will sometimes ignore the crowd and bet on a feature, a functionality, a concept that will play big in the future (i.e., across a later time horizon).

I suspect the reason we get tripped up on this distinction — between user-experience and user-centered design — is the overwhelming egalitarian vibe in the social media world. We like to think of this world as one where practically everything can be crowdsourced. But the vibe distracts how innovation happens, whether it is crowdsourced or not. It rarely comes from the crowd en masse, but it can come from the crowd on the edge. Says Verganti:

It is only within the framework of a vision-centered process that users can provide precious insights. There are indeed some people who are already adopting sustainable behaviors. However, they are rare exceptions. Only leaders and designers who are driven by a vision and who explicitly search a priori for those sustainable behaviors can tune out the unsustainable needs of 99% of users and focus on the few exceptions.

One such person is Ezio Manzini, a respected scholar in the field of sustainable design who has conducted significant research on how local communities have developed clever sustainable solutions to everyday problems. Ezio is not at all user centered in his approach. He does not look at what users want and need. He is one of the most visionary and design-driven innovators I can think of. He wants to find sustainable behaviors. Therefore, he refuses to look at dominant consumption. Rather, he explicitly searches for the needle in the haystack: local fringe communities that have already found sustainable solutions for everyday living. He then engineers these solutions and proposes them at a larger scale.

It’s great that Verganti uses the word fringe to describe those outlier communities where innovative ideas are first surfaced, tried, practiced. It may be the wrong word. Coincidentally, yesterday, on the same HBR blog, John Hagel and John Seely Brown explored the difference between (a) fringe communities, which may never enter the mainstream, and (b) edge communities, which may someday lead the mainstream. In any case, the folks in these communities are often on the outside, and it’s not so easy to fit them into the fabric of ordinary user-centered design. Perhaps, of course, that’s just another way of stating the requirements for leadership. Leaders don’t ignore what the crowd needs today. But leaders do focus on where the crowd will want to go, and they will go there with their customers before their competitors do.