In light of Internet Week and Walkabout NYC, Undercurrent’s office has been buzzing about local startups. The roster of tech startups that are opening their doors on 5/18 are a familiar ilk: SaaS companies, apps, and e-commerce sites.

It’s not surprising, especially if you look at the recent YC list: the reigning model for entrepreneurs seems to be (1) make software-based (predominately, web-based) tools and (2) scale it up.

We see few entrepreneurs pursuing hardware startups, and for good reason. Challenging the Samsungs, Apples, and GEs of the world seems onerous without generous capital, long lead times, IP, and research budgets. While I’m bullish on hardware companies like Nest and Jawbone, they face far more challenges than the average software startup (ignoring the daunting competition that both received from incumbents Honeywell and Nike, respectively).

Thankfully, there’s an opportunity for the next ebb and flow of startups to be far more successful in hardware. The next startup bubble, perhaps in 7-10 years, could be a hardware bubble. It’s fueled by the thriving maker movement, a return to making physical stuff by a growing population of hobbyists and engineers.

Today, software is an easier course of action for entrepreneurs. The barriers to entry are low, with frameworks (Rails, Jquery) and services (Heroku, AWS) making it dead simple for anyone to take on the technical burden of building an app. Equipment is easy: a laptop and server. Combine this with the lean startup ideology and a small, young team can build just about anything within a reasonable timeframe. It’s no surprise that Instagram can pull off an amazing app with eight people and an insane tech stack, all impossible five years ago.

What’s interesting is that the same dynamics are beginning to shape hardware too. The forces that made software so alluring to entrepreneurs are finally permeating to hardware: open source platforms, lower capital requirements, and easier development.

Open Source Hardware

While open source software platforms have been commonplace for decades, we’re finally seeing significant progress in hardware. It’s allowing for amateurs to build and manufacture products without significant professional expertise, akin to emergence of web frameworks that democratized web development over the past decade. Recent estimates approximate 350 open source hardware projects, the most significant including Arduino (physical computing platform), Makerbot (3D printing), and Sparkfun (electronics).

It’s fueled by the thriving maker movement, a return to making physical stuff by a growing population of hobbyists and engineers.

Many hardware developers are opening up their designs (e.g., CAD files) and firmware to allow for a sort of remix culture for hardware. We’re not at the point of “APIs” for hardware, but small communities are quickly building amazing open source projects. Wikispeed, an open-source car, and Open-source Ecology, industrial machinery, are great examples of this.

Personal fabrication

Hardware startups can operate on the same principles as lean software startups, quickly iterating and operating with only a few thousands of dollars in capital. Prototyping was always problematic—a one-batch run of a product can be incredibly costly to fabricate, yet it’s a necessity to secure funding. While traditional manufacturing requires labor-intensive tooling and setup, new technologies such as additive manufacturing and CNC tools operate like desktop printers, taking in files and outputting physical objects. Every garage is a potential high tech factory, making it much easier for an entrepreneur to move from hardware idea to finished product.

Makerbot, a $2,000 3D plastic printer, democratizes manufacturing at the consumer level. The company has managed to drop materials costs down to pennies per cubic centimeter, a big difference from the industrial printers running at $300,000 per machine and $100 per cubic centimeter of plastic. Mid-tier priced equipment allows for “Kinko’s of manufacturing.” Techshop, Fablab, and 100K Garages are all examples of small, decentralized manufacturing operations where individuals can fabricate prototypes and end products without approaching traditional factories.

Long Tail Manufacturing

As with software, lower costs and easier manufacturing will allow access to new markets for hardware. We’re predicting a long tail of manufacturing—niche hardware products made possible by low volume fabrication, on-demand manufacturing (and consequently, no inventory), and a shorter learning curve. Economies of scale is no longer an issue.

This is substantiated by the numerous hardware projects on Kickstarter without mass appeal, but sustainable at lower volumes due to greatly reduced costs. The Pebble Watch project on Kickstarter is a great example of this new breed of hardware startups, prototyping and producing a first run with relatively lower capital to a market that wouldn’t be valuable to large manufactures.

Realizing this future and its potential has a lot to do with the maker movement. Education seems to be the biggest hurdle, as technology is finally at a place where cost and capability are not barriers to entry. The Maker Faire, just a few days away on 5/19 in SF, will be a hotbed for discussion on how to raise awareness for new technologies and educate the next wave of entrepreneurs on opportunities in hardware.

For a long time, I wasn’t sure what it was about these individuals that made them more compelling than their peers. Recently though, it became clear.

Magnetic people share three somewhat counterintuitive traits.

Passion

These people know what they care about. They have a calling. They are deeply involved in their area and they celebrate it. You don’t have to wonder if they’re in it for the Benjamins. Without passion, successful people come across as empty, even though they have it all.

Earnestness

These people wear their heart on their sleeve. They don’t have a filter. They genuinely care, in an era where caring is uncool. And that makes them extremely rare. You don’t have to wonder if they’re playing you, or putting on a show. Without earnestness, successful people come across as callous, even if they donate millions to charity.

Levity

These people don’t take themselves too seriously. For all their passion and earnestness, they seem to know that they aren’t irreplaceable or untouchable. They know that laughter is the ultimate affirmation of life. You don’t have to wonder if you’ll offend them with a casual remark or awkward conversation. Without levity, successful people come across as pretentious, even if they’re polite.

These traits create a wonderful tension in a successful individual. They help create drive in their craft, empathy and true emotion in the search for something more, and the awareness that being serious doesn’t mean that you can’t laugh at the futility of it all.

If any of your friends are on a meteoric rise, keep an eye on them, and help them stay this course. The world needs more leaders that embody our best traits, not just the ones that make us famous.

Fewer Feedback Loops

We didn’t ask for any input during the first iteration of this project. Few people in the office knew it was being created, unless they happen to peer over our desks. Working alone allowed us to build momentum, move fast, and stay focussed and excited on the initial vision we crafted. We were working on creating a minimum viable project; had we invited feedback early on, a ton of solid ideas would have came our way, but with them, a ton of meetings to toil over what feedback we’d accept and what the timelines were for implementing them. We had already decided to launch first, iterate, and accept feedback later. The lesson here is don’t try to build v2 when v1 will do, especially in low-risk environments.

Small Victories

By keeping the entire operation lean and only making small, incremental changes to the tool, everything started to feel like a small victory. Added a new line of CSS? Win. Informal, but frequent meetings no longer than a couple minutes? Win. Revised the structure of a multi-dimensional array? Win. With only small pockets of time to work on this project, we were forced to be focussed on clear outputs. This made small achievements appear as clear victories, meaning every incremental change increased our momentum and drove the project forward.

Define Boundaries You’re Comfortable Working In

Identifying a specific problem to solve for and finding the right people to solve for it is key to a quick success. We never explicitly outlined boundaries when it came to our roles on the project, but given our familiarity with each other, and pre-existing working relationships, we didn’t have to. We knew what our strong suits were and played to our strengths without needing to discuss it. That might sound obvious, but as team size grows and varying degrees of expertise start to overlap, selecting the right person to champion a specific role gets tricky.

Beyond roles, the boundaries of the project were defined by the data provided by Tumblr’s API and the narrative we were trying to craft. Having used the platform for a few years, and having poked around the API once or twice beforehand, it took little time to decide which metrics we could accurately depict, which ones we couldn’t, and how sophisticated we could make our visualization of them for a v1 launch.

Use The Right Existing Assets

Existing assets can help you move fast, but they’re only helpful if you understand them well enough. We used Twitter’s Bootstrap framework, for example, because it’s well documented and we had previous experience with it when we built M.E.C.E. Maker, another Undercurrent project. The same wasn’t true for the charts we wanted to make, though. Despite the dozens of charting libraries out there, we could’t find one that we could quickly learn the ins and outs of, so we built ours from scratch. As a result, making changes to them is easy-peasy.

This project was only born because of the mission and freedom we’re given at Undercurrent to explore the internet and create new knowledge. Without it, we wouldn’t know as much as we do, nor have the time to dedicate to a project like this. Come check out Numblr and give us your feedback. It’s buggy, but who gives a shit.

I don’t have any aspirations to enter into the Games myself — several years of long distance running has left me with back pain and a bill from the chiropractor that is as long as my right leg, thank-you-very-much. There are however Olympic traits that speak to discipline, rigor and focus that I would like to adopt.

Here are some thoughts, about what a digital strategist has to learn from an Olympic Athlete:

BEGIN WITH AN END IN MIND

Most people I know work hard. Many of them enjoy what they do, are committed to doing it well and generally strive for success in their lives. The challenge they face, is that they don’t know what success looks like, they can’t write it down, or speak it, they’ll just know it when they feel it. For an Olympian, the greatest success to be had, is a gold medal. They know it, they can articulate it, and therefore they can focus on it.

Whether your goal is short term, or long term, you need to be able to identify and articulate what it is. At Undercurrent we’ve begun to share a single weekly goal with each other first thing on a Monday morning. The goal needs to be something achievable and actionable. Then the following Monday we tell the rest of the team whether we achieved it or not. Writing it on a sticky note and placing it on a board forces us to write a short, succinct summary of what we plan to achieve.

Everybody should try this out. Not just on a weekly basis, but also daily, monthly and annually. New Year’s resolutions should become less about what you aim to give up, and more about what you’d like to achieve over the course of the year. The exercise is simple but it can be challenging: identify a goal, write it down and set a deadline, ensuring it’s clearly written in a way that you can definitively say you did or did not do (hint: be realistic).

DESIGN A PLAN

For Olympians the first hurdle (excuse the pun) is to decide whether they’re going to enter. The second is figuring out how to get there. Every athlete has a plan that is designed with respect to conditions and constraints (e.g. how much time there is and their individual fitness level), and aims to make the individual stronger, fitter, and ultimately get them closer to their goal: a gold medal.

Not many people have a plan for their careers. If they do it’s rarely fleshed out to the level of detail outlined in a fitness plan. People seldom identify the suite of skills they need to acquire, refine or sharpen, the means in which to get them, or the time it’s likely to take. At Undercurrent we’ve been collectively working on a Skills & Capabilities Maturity Matrix that is designed to help strategists become gold medal winners (if only there were an Olympic event for us). With the support of the Matrix, every strategist at Undercurrent has the ability to design their own bespoke training plan.

Anyone can do this. Once you’ve identified your goal, whether it’s to have the best flow of all your rapper friends, or swimming as far as you can under-water, you need to figure out what skills and capabilities you’re going to need to improve upon. Then how you’re going to improve them and how much time it’s going to take.

FOCUS, LIKE NOTHING ELSE MATTERS

I recently re-watched a video that was popular last year, called ‘How Bad Do You Want It?’. It’s a motivational video that is reminiscent of something you’d expect to see from Nike (short, emotive vignette of a footballer in training). The message is that you’ll achieve success when you want it as much as you need to breathe. It has to matter more than anything else.

Our Olympian friends want it pretty bad. Every waking moment, every meal, every decision for four years is geared towards achieving their goal. It’s not a job that they show up to at 9am, do some training and leave around 5pm. It’s a lifestyle choice. Their meals are carefully planned to provide their body with the right type of nutrition. They ensure they get enough sleep and rest to allow their muscles to recover. They invest in the right tools and gain access to the appropriate resources.

At Undercurrent, our Operations and Management teams have come up with a lot of ways to ensure we’re able to focus on being the best we can be. From flexible working hours, to scrapping the vacation policy and supplying us with healthy, nutritious food. They’re committed to ensuring we can focus. Our space is even designed to align with and facilitate the types of activities we undertake. Our responsibility as strategists, is to use these things to our advantage of these things to do the best job we can do.

Once you’ve got your plan in place, commit to it. Focus on it. Create a way of living that supports it. Look for feedback loops or markers that demonstrate the progress you’re making. Then feed all your positive (and negative) energy into fueling what you’re doing.

IN SUMMARY

Mediocrity is not good enough for many of us. We want better. We want to be better. Getting better isn’t easy, but it’s a simple equation that works for Olympians and mere mortals alike. First identify what better is, what you goal is. Second figure out how to get there. And finally, work as hard as you can to make it a reality. Whether your goal is something you want to achieve in a week, or a long life ambition, if you understand what it is, design a plan to get there and work really really hard, eventually you will.

Find More Things

The first interesting new project is tōd, a Kickstarter project raising funds to develop a system that enables your smartphone to keep track of small Bluetooth-enabled “Smart Beacons.” These little gadgets can be placed nearly anywhere or affixed  to nearly anything you like – such as on your pet’s collar, to a piece of furniture, in your child’s clothing. With a range of between 3-and-500 feet, the beacons are built to respond to their physical proximity to your smartphone and report three core pieces of data – whether they are ‘in range,’ ‘out of range,’ or if something is ‘scheduled’ to take place (such as someone arriving home).

Like RFID, the system employs a low-powered device that can passively monitor the status of objects and will work with or without an internet connection. Unlike RFID, however, Bluetooth provides a wider-range of potential activities to be programmed into the devices themselves. In addition to monitoring the status of the beacon, the beacons can be programmed to report a wide range of data to the network. Acceleration, temperature, and altitude data, for instance, could be returned from a beacon affixed to either a person or an object, providing crucial information about its movements. tōd promotes itself as a system to be extended through an App network, SDK, and API.

 Make Those Things Smarter

The second development is Touché, a system developed by researchers from Disney and Carnegie Mellon. Touche enables everyday objects with capacitative technology like that found in smartphones. As Mary Brown explains at Ars Technica, the system “measures a wide range of signal frequencies to derive more information” than regular multitouch systems which tend to be binary (on/off, touched/not touched).

Watch this video on YouTube.

A system like Touché promises a more responsive set of objects that don’t just know that you’re interacting with them but can respond to specific types of interactions. Touché means doorknobs, for instance, will know the way they have been touched (grabbed with a full palm or just a few fingers, turned quickly or slowly) and can respond appropriately.

Together, these two new systems could move us closer to a smarter, more responsive world. Recognizing and tracking physical objects remains the key challenge to realizing the vision of the Internet of Things. tōd could bring us one step closer by not only making things easier to find but enabling them to tell us more about where they are. Touché broadens the range of responses possible from the object we interact with, effectively making the objects around us smarter. With both in place, we’d be looking at a more awesome future.

This triumph of digital means more than knowing how to make the most out of social media or whether to let personal devices onto your IT system. As Aaron points out in his letter commemorating Undercurrent’s fifth anniversary, digital has moved beyond status as a set of tools or platform-specific solutions to problems. “Digital isn’t a place,” he writes, “It’s not even a pace. It’s an operating system. A method of dealing with the most complex and rapidly changing dynamics we’ve ever experienced.” Approaching problems from a digital worldview requires more than creating new tools to solve problems. It requires designing systems that respond to the ways our assumptions, behaviors, practices, sensibilities, expectations, and processes of meaning making have changed.

As much as connectivity and computerization provide us with devices, modes of access and methods of publishing that outstrip what was previously possible, they also give rise to a new set of cultural assumptions about what our interactions with each other should be.

• Applying a digital world view means approaching problems in a manner responsive to these assumptions, which, at the very least, encourage empowerment and agency at the individual level (people expect to solve problems themselves and struggle when they are unable to take action to resolve issues) and ongoing processes of improvement (regular experimentation, regular refinement).
• It means designing for a world defined increasingly by individualism, globalization, and postnationalism, to steal from Indiana University’s Mark Deuze.
• It means creating systems primed for people who are used to porous boundaries between categories and roles and fluid hierarchies of participation (shifting between consumer and producer almost simultaneously).
• It means designing for people who are used to writing as much as they are reading. Indeed, as David Weinberger notes, the way we come to understand things in the digital era is different because “our information technologies are precisely the same as our communication technologies,” the effect being that the process of learning something and the process of publishing that thing are one in the same (see Too Big To Know, p.35).

This is the beginning of a larger project I have been thinking about for a while that speaks to the principles that comprise digital culture and the role they play in shaping our approach to problems and recognizing success. I am hardly the first to ponder this problem, and I expect this project to morph in contradictory ways before it is resolved. Nevertheless, I want to introduce the first core principle that is fundamental to designing systems that are responsive to digital culture – iterative change.

Principle 1: Iterative change

Iterative has become the de rigueur model of development for much of the software world, and most of the most successful companies developed in the wake of Web 2.0 live in a status of “permanent beta.” Indeed, when Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle reflected up on the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 in 2009, they highlighted the end of the software release cycle as a defining development, resulting as it had, in “fundamental changes” in the business model for successful internet companies. Moving away from a determined release cycle and into a state of constant, regular improvement brings with it an apparent set of advantages – a drive to create smaller changes, and enlisting users as co-developers in the process of refining and developing as tool or service. It means putting less at risk, and allows smaller, leaner teams to develop products that evolve with use and respond to the environment around them. Fail early and often, is the moniker, but make those failures survivable. Successful digital systems are built not only to tolerate a degree of failure but also to use that failure for evolutionary benefit.

Living a life in permanent beta, or a life organized around tools forever in beta, has contributed to a culture where users expect to provide feedback regularly and see that feedback acted upon. Now is a moment where end-users – be they consumers, customers, partners, vendors, or strangers – recognize they are frequently not the end-point in a design cycle but participants in the revision and redesign of a better service, tool, or products. Designing for iterative change also, then, means designing for participation (another of the core principles of digital culture). It is no earth-shattering revelation to proclaim that dialogical modes rule now given the ease with which people publish, the value that comes from projects leveraging collective intelligence and collaboration, and the extent to which increased access to the tools of creation have disrupted traditional business practices in multiple industries.

But incorporating participation in meaningful ways means more than just providing users with a contact form or developing a user-generated content campaign. As Deuze points out, there is a political dimension to participation – not only have people”become increasingly willing and able to voice their concerns and claim their place in society,” but participation as we understand it within digital culture “has its roots in ‘DIY’ (do-it-yourself) culture…with people increasingly claiming the right to be heard rather than spoken to” (p67-68). As such, designing for a world built around expectations of iterative change and participation means not only providing ways to hear the feedback people provide, but ways to act upon it. And a truly responsive digital system should not be surprised when these demands for participation  come from within an organization as well as from outside. Employees are as much a source of innovation as customers are, and the expectations of personal agency of digital culture don’t subside when the workday begins. Successful digital systems empower their employees to solve problems rather than closely circumscribing the limits of their responsibilities.

Designing for iterative change and participation also involves recognizing that few things are seen as finished artifacts now. A third core principle of digital culture is the practice of remediation – the repurposing, re-use, adaptation and building upon of existing artifacts, elements, and processes to build new things. Australian media studies scholar John Hartley has argued the principal mode of meaning making in the digital era is editing– the creating of meaning out of the combination (not the reduction) of existing elements. Editing as meaning making refers not only to the creative practices of amateur producers disrupting the media industries or the impact bloggers have had on the news industry; it refers just as much to the creation of new work practices by the adoption of processes from external industries or the production of new products by the appropriation of new functionalities. A culture with remediation and editing at its heart is a culture that looks for intrinsically looks for ways to build on existing elements.

Nothing trivial here

Designing for iterative change is no trivial matter. It requires both agile systems capable of making small changes, and regular performance monitoring. Neither of these requirements are insignificant– misalignment of internal development processes and systems, ineffective measurement processes or vendor relationships, hulking infrastructure and approval processes, and rigid, top-down hierarchies can all make it much harder to respond in small ways. Any service not built to respond in incremental ways to feedback, use-patterns, and changes in the market is one that will be quickly surprised by complaints, ravaged by dissatisfied users, and surpassed by competitors.

“The Economist” is a trite answer to a separate question – “Who’s killing it with content?” – but it’s worth noting that their $130 annual subscription ends up in the hands of only around 1.5 million people. In spite of that relatively small number, the magazine makes money. £60MM every year. And that figure is growing.

Cook’s Illustrated is a less-cited example, but they continue to impress. They’re private, so they’re not quite as easy to assess as a business, but they seem to be growing, making money off a model that doesn’t include advertising, and experimenting effectively in the digital space. They publish 6 issues each year, do not discount their subscription rates, and charge for the digital version even if you get the magazine in the mail. And remarkably, somewhere near 80% of their one million subscribers re-up annually. Gangster.

Note to the reader: I am a paid subscriber to the digital edition of Cook’s Illustrated. My parents are longtime subs to the print edition.

But beyond their business success (the most important metric in my book), my case for them being awesome, effective publishers of content worth emulating by brands and other folks in the content game revolves around three key things:

1. They’re committed to a unique, obsessive perspective, and everything they make flows from there
2. They’re using digital channels in effective ways to drive people toward their moneymaker
3. As far as I can tell, they’re organized around efficient content creation

Obsessive perspective

Cook’s is famously obsessive. Its founder Christopher Kimball believes there’s a single right way to do things, and the magazine feels like it grows from that perspective, rather than one that’s about a love of food. Which to me is a good thing. There are probably thousands of places you can go to express or indulge your love for food, and I’d argue fewer than a handful that really scratch the perfection/process itch. Being obsessive and having an uncommonly held position allows you to be different, to compete with fewer people, and unlocks the ability to thrive off scarcity. I’ll pay for Cook’s because there are no good, free substitutes. And because I want Cook’s to continue to to exist.

Importantly, the perfection “thing” extends to how they make their core, stock content:

“Kimball’s idea is simple. So simple that he’s amazed it’s not how every publisher does it. The reason the others don’t is because it’s crazy expensive. Every recipe that appears in his publications and on his TV shows must represent the single best way to make a dish — and they are forged in the fires of the Mother of All Test Kitchens.

“The Cook’s Illustrated recipes follow the most rigorous journey. First, each recipe idea is pre-surveyed to see if readers are even interested in it. Then, based on research in the company’s cookbook library, a test-kitchen cook comes up with several versions of the dish and submits them to a staff taste test. She is then pummeled with questions about why she didn’t try this ingredient or that sauteing method or a different type of sugar. She goes back to the kitchen for more experimentation, and more critiques follow. Only when all hands believe the recipe is the best it can be is it sent to a handful of readers, who make it and report whether they’d make it again. If a recipe – even after all that time and testing, and even after more revisions – doesn’t score well with the readers, it ends up on the kitchen floor. Surviving recipes are published with the story of their journey in the test kitchen. There’s even a science guy on call to conduct more technically challenging experiments and add explanation to the articles so readers can learn why, say, on a molecular level, cream of tartar does what it does (and I have no idea what that is, but it is apparently very important).”
– Perfection, Inc. Boston Globe, 2009

Content as advertising
The success of Cook’s and its parent America’s Test Kitchen as money-making products/services subsidizes the creation of content and the support of channels, which effectively operate as marketing for the paid channels. And because they’re organized around making content and have been for some time, they’re much more likely to be successful at making content for the internet than other similar organizations.

For example:

A diagnostic infographic found its way to Lifehacker…

Where they’ve posted this and a couple more infographics, including this one about cakes throughout history. The profile links back to what looks like a new digital property, “Feed”…

And it’s a site that offers Cook’s-like instructions and recipes, though certainly not in the same, incredibly analytical, detailed and sometimes obnoxiously complicated style as the magazine. It also provides a view behind the curtain at the Test Kitchen, and provides individual authors not only a byline, but fully developed pages that they might use to grow their personal brands.

This is a significant strategic move, but it’s one that feels sustainable. It doesn’t appear that there are new staff members that are expressly dedicated to the new site: instead, it seems that the site is populated by content generated by more junior/digitally savvy staffers of ATK. And if they’re going to blog about food anyway – because they’re people who love food and love the internet – why not give them a brand-positive place to put it? Your content costs are effectively zero (nobody new to hire, small negative changes in productivity, perhaps), and your brand spreads through the efforts of many. Makes sense to me. Get your flow for cheap.

This only works if you’re organized for creation

So this is fascinating. I did a little poking around on LinkedIn to see how a few different organizations are structured. I had a hunch that companies that do better at the internet have more people making stuff for it.

I’ve listed GILT, Net-A-Porter, Coach, Gap, Ralph Lauren, Bon Appetít, and Cook’s Illustrated, and I used the “insightful statistics” section of LinkedIn to pull the top ten most common skills of employees at each of the companies. Highlighted in the image above are skills that in my estimation relate to content creation. Compare GILT and Net-A-Porter to their suppliers/rivals/supplier-rivals. Do the same for Cook’s versus Bon Appetit. Granted, these are self-reported skills. And they’re not comprehensive. And each of these companies makes money in a different way.

But on the internet, competing for attention, they’re all being judged the same way. And the companies with more content-creation skills are winning. So if you want to compete on the internet, up your skills. Hire people that can make content, not just people that know how to pay for content. Easy, right?

So, content makers, get to it.

This post was originally published at Exit Creative

But there is a subtlety to leaderboards which is often forgotten by the gamefiers of the world. When done well, a leaderboard can increase engagement – the sense of competition they bring can encourage users to get better at things they care about. The mass-adoption of leaderboards comes with many pitfalls, however, that not only disincentivize users but irritate the hell out of them as well.

Relevancy is the name of the game when it comes to feedback, the more relevant your leaderboard is to a specific user the more engaging it will be. Here are 3 things you can do to make better, more relevant leaderboards:

Think Small

Leaderboards have been around as long as games like Chess and Go, but they reached general notoriety via the arcade. Durning the boom of pinball machines and on through arcade video games, leaderboards served as a mechanic to not only encourage players to pony up extra quarters, but as a way to connect players as a community. Playing your local Donkey Kong machine was a test of your skill against your peers. Highscorers on an arcade machines were big fish in little ponds, since the number of people attempting the highscores were limited by location of the arcade and community foot-traffic. The leaderboard is relevant since players are likely to see and know their competition; it tracks the drama of wins and losses in the local community.

The advent of the web expanded leaderboards globally. Where it might have once been difficult to hold the top spot in your local arcade it became nearly impossible to become the best in the world. While increasing competition, global leaderboards can serve as a disincentive by setting the bar for success too high. Thinking of your leaderboards as small communities rather than global ones can help make your board more relevant and engaging. An easy place to start is by using Facebook to keep communities small and relevant, encouraging players to ask “how do I rank within my group of friend?” Facebook is just the beginning, however. There are always other interesting options for creating small and relevant communities.

Think Diverse

Any site, experience or game possesses a myriad of different trackable elements. Games by their very nature assign different points to different actions. In Donkey Kong, to keep our arcade examples coming, a player receives points for jumping over barrels, smashing barrels, and finishing a level (among other actions). These points add up to a total score which in turn gives a player a spot on the leaderboard.

Leaderboards are a popular way for offering feedback since they incorporate a performance measure (“how am I doing?”) and make it social by allowing easy comparison with others (“how do I stack up against the competition?”).

Today’s more complex games and web experiences offer a greater range of trackable actions. Players can be ranked not only by their total score but their time spent playing, the number of contests they’ve played, and myriad other metrics. Rather than having a single board, imagine leaderboards that track users across multiple relevant metrics. This allows for more users to appear on the leaderboard, encouraging and rewarding multiple styles of play and reaching out to a variety of players.

Think Meaningful

Having small and diverse leaderboards are not enough on their own. A leaderboard is not motivational unless the metrics are meaningful and desirable for players. Besides cutting data in different ways to create multiple leaderboards, it’s important to remember that a leaderboard can take many forms, shapes, and sizes. Custom metrics need to be created to engage specific types of motivational behaviors. User and players engage with your game or experience for a many different reasons. By understanding these reasons you can motivate them to explore and try harder at the things which they care about. A Donkey Kong player could be motivated by finishing a specific level or beating their last score, but not care about how many barrels they have smashed. Not all players are driven to play or compete in the same times of ways and by giving them a meaningful mirror to hold up to their performance they will continue to engage and grow at your system.

Leaderboards like all forms of feedback work best when they provide hyper-relevant information to the user. Discovering what users are looking for allows custom feedback systems to be created and increase engagement, participation and playtime.

As the production director at Undercurrent, at least once a week I receive a request for the names and numbers of the best companies that make shiny things. This too is understandable; the great digital products we see from stalwarts like Nike and Domino’s, and the fantastic innovations from start-ups like Fab and Spotify, make it seem so easy. And logic dictates that you should be able to hire the vendor who created one of their digital things to enjoy the same results.

But outsourcing to a vendor doesn’t account for the collaborative, iterative nature of digital. Digital is rooted in technology. A bunch of relatively nascent technologies at that. As marketing increasingly moves toward product and content development, attention becomes an increasingly scarce commodity and the goal shifts to engagement. The landscape becomes much more complex – it requires flexibility, good planning, quick action, and quite often an iron stomach. In short, the best work requires true partnership, not a turnkey solution.

Fast, Cheap, Awesome, Committed – Choose Three (But Really Choose One)

The age-old Production Triangle (aka Triple Constraint) dictates that between fast, cheap and awesome, you can choose two. Since without awesome you can’t really get attention, there’s only ever been one choice – fast or cheap. In the new digital paradigm, which we’ll call The Digital Production Quadrangle, there’s a fourth factor – commitment. And since engagement implies a deeper relationship with a brand, it requires commitment from the brand itself. So we’re back to one choice again: fast or cheap.

Click to embiggen

Production choices aside, the very notion of commitment and partnership also implies a deeper relationship than a vendor. Vendors can sell you literal or figurative widgets, but can they take the time to truly understand your target? Are they willing to sell you platforms for sustainable engagement instead of an endless stream of shiny objects?

The best work requires true partnership, not a turnkey solution.

Erin Matts, Chief Digital Marketing Officer at Glam Media, who has been a pioneering digital collaborator from both sides of the table since her days as Chief Digital Officer at OMD, sums it up nicely:

“Vendors are selling goods and services that more often than not seem to solve superficial issues,” she says. “A partner has more than just their own interests – selling – in mind. As an industry, we’re starting to move beyond solving surface problems, like an advertising problem or a media problem, and getting to the roots of solving a business problem.”

In other words, marketing is business.

New Goals, New Process

Solving these deeper issues and achieving more ambitious business goals also requires a different process. The increasing popularity of Lean UX and agile development practices does indicate a sea change on the horizon. But these approaches simply can’t succeed in the vacuum of a vendor mindset. Collaboration is a must from the start; defining a strategy that allows for pivoting later is key to creating successful products and spreadable content.

Michael Piliero, Partner and Creative Director at Brooklyn digital agency FreeAssociation, specifically builds in time at the beginning of scopes to workshop with clients and leave room for collaboration and exploration.

“We’ve realized that the more flexibility we can infuse in our agreements, the better the results,” Piliero explains. “Most of the time, firms receive an RFP, articulate the primary strategy and design concept in the proposal, lock into numbers and timing, and then (if they win), execute against the proposal. There are so many problems with that approach. Sadly, this process has yielded a tremendous amount of low-quality, low-traffic, and ultimately, low-value web products. ”

Erin Matts echoes the approach.

“Get it 80% there, get it out the door, show it to consumers and see if you can improve it. Or kill it,” says Matts. “This is not to suggest that whatever you’re putting out there at 70% – 80% is without a strategy.”

Caveat: The Collaboration Conundrum 

When it comes to collaboration and determining exactly who needs to be in the trenches creating digital awesomeness, it is a bit of a slippery slope. Frequent, active involvement and face-to-face time between the key stakeholders (clients, strategists, designers, developers) is essential. Without that temporal and intellectual investment, progress is difficult. Err in the other direction with too many cooks in the kitchen and you seriously risk spoiling the digital broth. This is what we call the Collaboration Conundrum.

Click to embiggen

No Magic Tricks

In the end, there’s no magic wand you can wave or secret bat phone you can pick up that leads to creating great digital stuff. Sometimes the solutions to complex business problems don’t even take the form of a website, media buy or mobile app. But when you build a solid base of trust, collaboration and commitment to forge a true partnership, that’s when the magic does happen.

Traditional media needs to adapt to a digital climate by learning from brands that were born this way – like Buzzfeed. Last week Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti told Charlie Rose that he wants to build the “defining social publishing site.” Business Week also ran a great article on their advertising model in March. The hype is justified.  Buzzfeed is a great example of a brand that is changing the way we create and consume content online. Buzzfeed’s innovation is to prioritize the way we consume media over the content itself. Here are six things we can learn from our favorite source of LOLs. Graydon Carter, Jann Wenner, Anna Wintour, I’m talking to you.

1. No more banner ads
Buzzfeed has zero banner ads on their site. Not one. According to Peretti: “Banner ads don’t work. That’s from the portal era, one step before the search era.” Instead, the site’s revenue relies on branded content collaborations.

2. Do it yourself
Buzzfeed uses a custom advertising model, custom CMS, and proprietary data set. They also organize their content with a branded set of badges, so readers can filter material in a uniquely Buzzfeedy way, searching by: “LOL, win, OMG, cute, reeky, trashy” and “fail.” “We’re in a new market,” says Peretti, “which means we need to invent all this stuff.”

3. Content for consumption behaviors
Buzzfeed represents a new type of social publication that doesn’t give a damn about search engine optimization. Says Felix Gilette in an article for Business Week, “they’re pioneering social network optimization: sites designed technologically and editorially to cater directly to the growing number of people who organize their media consumption though a social network’s news feed.”

4. It matters how people find your content
After running a series of GE sponsored content, Buzzfeed hired analytics company Vizu to measure consumer sentiment towards the the series. Vizu found that people had a higher opinion of the content if they were referred to it by a friend than if they had stumbled upon it directly or via advertising.

5. Be the authority, invent your own lingo
Combat douchey internet-speak with your own vocabulary. Here are a few terms birthed from casa Buzzfeed:

Social Brand Life: Branded content that results in greater brand affinity than traditional banner ads.

Supersharer: Someone who has a high activity level. They see stuff, share it and pass it around.

Viral Lift: Metric comparing paid impressions to views of the branded content generated by social sharing. “For the social world, Viral Lift is a better metric than something like click-through rates,” says Peretti.

6. Time spent on site is an outdated metric
Banner ads are only effective when viewed 100 million times. Branded content, on the other hand, adapts to the social reader’s behaviors. Buzzfeed understands that their readers are finding Buzzfeed content in their social feeds; they will leave to consume content elsewhere, but then return to their social homebase.