The real differentiation occurs when co-creation is opened up on a product or service design level. While there are numerous examples of co-creation fuelling product design, incorporating it into service design is often exponentially more complex. Unless you are Subway with an intentionally modular product/service, it can be difficult to scale personalized service. As a result, this is where most companies draw the line in their attempts to socialize their offerings. However, it is often forgotten that there are two parties in most service relationships. By not empowering employees to co-create within the service and brand context, organizations are missing an opportunity to provide exceptional consumer experiences and cost-effectively spur organization wide innovation through ground level explorations.

The video below (ZOMG so old) is an example of the type of experiences can emerge when organizations empower their employees to creatively deliver (for the record, I am not entirely convinced this video isn’t the machination of some clever marketing people, but let’s assume it is legit). Have you ever seen faces like that during or after the pre-flight safety announcements? The passengers were provided with not only a unique experience, but a story (and a branded one at that). Those unique customer experiences cannot be driven from the top down. Even if this video had not appeared on YouTube, it would have been an inherently social experience, driving positive word of mouth.

Common Understanding of Strategic Intent
In order for employees to proactively innovate the brand experience, they need to have a clear understanding of the organization’s strategic intent, which is not the organizational goals (sell more burgers, sell more electronics, sell more coffee), but an understanding of how the organization intends to arrive at those goals. However, there is a careful balance required where enough direction is provided to ensure strategic alignment while allowing enough flexibility to adapt to scenarios. For example, take a basketball team. Assuming they understand the game, the goal is clear, score more baskets than the other team, but how do you go about that? As the coach, you could map out plays and call them out for the bench. However, this approach becomes limited when the other team makes adjustments or a play breaks down. Alternatively, you could teach players to understand spacing and movement on the floor, which would enable them to function within the system, but still react appropriately to the variables. The latter is what is required in order to successfully co-create at a service level.

Hackability
In order to empower employees to operate with strategic intent, it is necessary to allow freedom within procedure to allow for hacking. A great example of this would be a waitress confronted with a patron with severe food allergies who before making a recommendation to a patron asks several questions and leverages their understanding of the preparation of items on the menu to suggest a mash-up of two entrees (a la the McGangBang, more on that to come in a later video post).

Collaborators, Not Minions
While everybody is capable of creativity, some are certainly better than others. Those are the people you want to hire. However, you will have to be prepared to provide them with a level of autonomy sufficient to not only allow them to integrate their creativity into their function, but also to keep them engaged.

Celebration and Sharing
One of the keys to driving creativity is inspiration. Organizations need to develop platforms and mechanisms to allow examples of extraordinary service experiences to be shared, celebrated and discussed. How can a San Francisco Hilton front desk employee learn and be inspired by their counterpart in Boston? Front line employees are rarely, if ever, given the opportunity to share and discuss their experiences beyond their immediate co-workers. By allowing and incenting large scale cross-pollination, the best experience innovations will proliferate across the organization and those that are able to continually innovate will have the opportunity to be recognized as thought leaders within their function.

The Social Purchasing Portal is a program whose primary goal is to create social value through the supply chain. They do this primarily through helping those with employment barriers (single mothers, at-risk youth, people with disabilities, etc.) find work with suppliers and then in exchange promoting those suppliers to socially conscious buyers. As we delved deeper into their issues it became apparent that their true problem was sustainability. While their model had proven its ability to have a profound impact on the local community, it was not able to sustain itself in absence of government funding. The issues leading to this lack of sustainability that manifested itself in the following ways:

• Revenue – As mentioned previously, the SPP relies on grants without consistent channels for revenue.
• Resources – There is currently considerable overlap in resources allocation among the local centres. The local managers are spread incredibly thin, helping with placements as well as performing business development for a plethora of vendors.
• Program Engagement – There is little opportunity for the SPP to provide value past the initial transaction. From the buyer perspective, the impact they are making through their purchases is often invisible.
• Service Value – Given the employment practices of the suppliers, buyers are often concerned about quality. In addition, there can be high switching costs to change suppliers on a personal and organizational level.
• Branding – The name Social Purchasing Portal connotes a function quite different from their organizational purpose. In addition, there is considerable variance between the branding of the local SPPs.

Basically, the crux of their problem was that they were excellent at creating partnerships that benefitted the community, but were unable to derive any revenue from the value they were creating. As Patrick observed, their situation was a little bit like setting up two of your best friends, only to see them run fall in love, get married, live happily ever after… and never talk to you again. This became the key insight to drive our solution.

The Social Purchasing Portal was essentially operating as a dating service, but without any membership fees or advertising revenue. They needed a new metaphor. Since they were facilitating transactions, the logical decision was for them to move to a market metaphor.

Revenue
The key to creating a consistent revenue stream for the Social Purchasing Portal is to become a facilitator of transactions, which is something the Internet does quite well (see PayPal, eBay, Craigslist, Amazon). Since the users of the Social Purchasing Portal have opted into the program in the hopes of making a difference, it makes sense to empower them to help rathern than force them to so instead of simply charging transaction fees, which may present a barrier for some buyers, upon registration, all buyers are given the option of donating a percentage of each purchase they make to the SPP, which can be increased or decreased on a transaction to transaction basis during the checkout process.

Additional revenue streams will occur through providing escrow services (which could help mitigate some of the perceived risks) and certifying suppliers who aren’t operating in any of the current centres as well as certifying national-level suppliers (we are recommending the addition of a national business development person to deal with national organizations).

Resources
In addition to consolidating under a singular technical platform, eliminating parallel efforts on behalf of the local development teams, the implementation of the marketplace will remove the burden on the local SPP managers of trying to learn and sell a series of individual suppliers to potential. Instead, they can focus on selling the marketplace.

Program Engagement
In order to keep buyers engaged, reward them and incent them to continue to transact through the SPP, a form of social currency based on community impact was introduced, allowing buyers to track their impact on an ongoing basis and incorporate it into their marketing messaging or CSR programs. In addition, suppliers will be able to update their profile pages and by extension their buyers with the first hand stories of the people that are being impacted by the program. In addition, the platform merchandises the various suppliers and provides a frictionless browsing and search experience.

Branding
The Social Purchasing Portal was open to us taking a stab at developing a new brand that could help unify the organization on a national level and better represent their mission. We felt the brand needed to fulfill four criteria:

• Connote the mission of creating social value
• Communicate competitive prices and quality from the suppliers
• Provide something that can act as a seal for suppliers and buyers to communicate their values and involvement.
• An easily obtainable and memorable URL

With that in mind, our recommendation was Third Win. Ideally, every transaction should be a win-win situation. However, what differentiates the SPP is that the community wins, hence the “Third Win.” Also, thirdwin.com was shockingly available.

Service Value
By incorporating user feedback and supplier ratings, buyers can better evaluate suppliers. In addition, the option of escrow can provide a greater feeling of security. Also, by participating in the program, buyers are able to use the Third Win seal to communicate their values to their customers with a variety of tiers available depending on their achievement based on the social currency.

With these strategies implemented, Third Win will not only have the opportunity to sustain itself, but also to grow and help transform the national business landscape through a mutually beneficial ecosystem.

Moving forward we see several options for future expansion for Third Win:

Broaden the certification system -Currently, suppliers are only evaluated on their hiring practices, there is a great opportunity to create a more multi-faceted ranking system to include environmental factors, community leadership and others to allow buyers to shop not just based on product, but on the impact of the suppliers.

• Consumer purchases – Currently, many of the suppliers already operate in both B2B and B2C contexts, why not invite another segment in to enrich the marketplace?
• Co-operative bulk buying – Often local and socially conscious products and services have difficulty competing due to their lack of scale. However, if the Third Win platform could be leveraged to allow for bulk buying, the competitiveness of businesses could be increased in a radical way.
• Allow buyers to request proposals – This would be a feature that could help attract buyers to the marketplace as well as increase platform engagement with both buyers and suppliers.
• Extend the certification – Given the proposed nature of the Third Win seal, certification could be extended from beyond just companies to products.

“This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline. I manipulating the post-it notes to do pixel-like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post-its.”

I couldn’t find one online playlist service with all these tracks so if you want to give a listen, you are going to have to go through them link by link. Here is the playlist (roughly in the order I received them):

1. Never Going to Give You Up – Rick Astley (via @richterj)
2. Just the Way I Planned It – Phillip Michael Thomas (via @exlee)
3. Mountain Jam (Live at the Fillmore) – Allman Brothers (via @mikekasprow) – At 33 minutes long, you may want to leave this for last.
4. Comfortable Up Here – Lil Wayne vs. Royksopp by The Hood Internet (via @lucascarlisle)
5. Beat It – Michael Jackson (via @cavacas)
6. Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant (via @aralph)
7. You Know I’m No Good – Amy Winehouse & Ghostface Killah (via @ellaportyrala)
8. N.A.S.A. – Spacious Thoughts Featuring Tom Waits & Kool Keith  (via @ellaportyrala)
9. Take on Me – A-Ha (via @jackiesiddall) – Login required for the link. This one was tough to hunt down.
10. Highway to the Dangerzone – Kenny Loggins (via @CtrlAltRicky)
11. Crazy Logic – Gnarls Barkley vs. Supertramp (via @aralph)
12. Poker Her Face – Kid Cudi Featuring Kanye West, Common and Lady Gaga (via @bhoyaknow)
13. Take Me to the River - Talking Heads (via @natearcher)
14. No Parents Allowed – Chester French Featuring Kardinal Offishall and N.O.R.E. (via @extraandrew) – Sound is a little rough, if you like it, you can download the mixtape here.
15. Your Ex-Lover is Dead – Stars (via @ejbrooks)
16. When a Man Loves a Woman – Michael Bolton (via @glinskiii)
17. As – Stevie Wonder (via @modholly)

I didn’t provide a theme (in retrospect I should’ve, next time I will), but two dominant genres did emerge – popular videos from the eighties and hip-hop mash-ups. Thanks to everyone who tweeted me a song.

I do wonder if agencies and brands co-opting this experience will taint and perhaps bring an end to the authentic community initiated experiences. Maybe instead of organizing amazing events like the light sabre battle at the ROM, Newmindspace becomes highly paid consultants to ad agencies trying to sell their clients “experiential” or “viral” campaigns (pretentious quotation marks FTW).

Rant aside, I did enjoy the video.