Hacking the Good days…

Jake McKee’s presentation made my day, thanks to Jeremy for flagging it up. Jake is a ‘revolutionist’ that led the Lego Mindstorm Programme involving 20 core fans, and literally drove a cultural reform in Lego. From some random marketing handouts I found that mindstorm outsold its predecessors by more than 2 fold and generated significant word-of-mouth (correct me if I am wrong). I have been running around in our company pointing out how ‘cool’ the Lego programme was, but of course, there are usually an avalanches of ‘ROIs’ questions where I’m still trying to deal with.

Flickr image by jurvetson

His personal trajectory gave a hearty account on how he dealt with Lego’s corporate membrane. For those who are working at the forefront on community management in the corp world while still believe in what they are doing (with ’symptoms’ such as strong squeamish reaction towards the word ‘customers’ – well we know that it’s key to view users as as clever, if not more intelligent than the corporate dudes, right?). I filtered the 45 mins presentation and put together my favourite three key points:

1. Org chart is hyperlinked, not hierarchical

If you have the critical understanding of the market and know what it takes to move your company’s needle, don’t shy from it and make it happen. If you do add value to the business, the chances that key stake-holders will endorse you are really high – but bear in mind that medium-level marketers are the hardest to sell – they have the numbers to sale, which makes them the hardest parties to convince – and the only way you can convince them is to first convince the senior management like VPs and CEOs so that they can do the corporate-membrane breakthrough for you.

Good news for shit-stirrers!

2. There is no secret

‘Tell me why we can’t release it?’ Jake explained how he pushed his colleagues to explain why things are kept secret, while fans are creating the most amazing derivatives from their products and needed their support. The chances is that most people who claim they things should be kept secret can’t articulate why! So – challenge them *grin* (that actually reminded me of my primary-secondary school years asking all the ‘why’ questions, can totally imagine that both Jake and I would be the classic nightmare for oldschool teachers!)

3. Don’t force-build a new community, support and nurture the current ones

This is particularly insightful a lot of business leaders, who randomly decided that communities are the new key and have their company ‘building’ their own. If you are a long-standing company, what is the odd that fans around the world are already involved and engaged in their own means?

The key is to work with what you have, and respect who they are (and are not).

Exciting, now I just need to think of how to break the ice with the figure-driven people…