Month: December 2011

Best posts of 2011: In praise of open systems

Note: During the final week of 2011, I’m revisiting some of my favorite posts of the year. Here’s the second installment. – AC

In praise of open systems

Originally published Feb. 20, 2011

Photo by Melanie Cook, http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiccked/133164205/
Photo by Melanie Cook, http://www.flickr.com/photos/wiccked/133164205/
I first started thinking seriously about open systems back in 2002, after I heard a conference speaker talk about the advantages of open-source software development versus a proprietary, closed approach. Taking an open approach in a business that has traditionally been a closed system, this speaker said, would be to our advantage in the future.

The speaker wasn’t a educational technologist or a marketing expert, and the conference wasn’t about computing, the Internet or higher ed marketing and PR. It was a ministry conference, and the speaker was theologian Leonard Sweet.

The fact that a higher ed PR/marketing guy like me got psyched about open-system theory from a theologian while sitting in on a ministry conference underscores my thoughts about the virtues of openness and, by extension, about connectivity, creativity and the genesis of good ideas. (I’m also a youth minister on the side, and that’s actually why I attended the 2002 event. But I also picked up some ideas of value to my day job and other pursuits.)

We never know when or where we’re going to find our inspiration or our next great idea, so we should try to stay open to as many possible channels as we can. Even more, I think we ought to actively seek out diverse viewpoints and perspectives in order to improve and innovate in our own narrow niche of higher ed marketing. We ought to look beyond our areas of expertise and our communities of practice in higher ed for inspiration from other disciplines — even if they seem far-fetched or irrelevant to our own.

But I’m troubled by what I see as a trend among many of us in the higher ed marketing field. We seem to prefer our closed systems, even in the wide-open ecosystem of the Internet. We tend to focus on our narrow areas of expertise — higher ed marketing and PR, for instance, or higher ed web, graphic design or whatever our field happens to be.

Inadvertently (or maybe intentionally for some?), we sometimes wall ourselves off from resources that could benefit our institutions, our faculty and staff, our marketing programs and ultimately, our students.

We do so at our peril.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for communities of practice, and I see the value in focus. I often seek guidance from experts in higher ed, and the very title of this blog — higher ed marketing — tends to pigeonhole me into a particular niche that I try hard not to stray from, much.

But I also look for inspiration and guidance from people and resources beyond the narrow straits of higher ed marketing and PR. I try to connect with a variety of viewpoints in my online interactions.

As you can see from my blogroll, I attempt to connect with a lot of people in the higher ed world and beyond. My blogroll includes links to some very good marketing, PR, news and tech sites outside of higher ed. (Admittedly, I don’t read all of those sites on a regular basis, although I should. I also list them in hopes that you might serendipitously discover a great read outside of your own field.)

The same goes for my RSS feed and my 1,200-plus Twitter connections, which includes musicians, branding and marketing people in and out of higher ed, techies, entrepreneurs, writers (fiction and non-fiction), artists, theologians (@lensweet is there) and sundry other categories of people. Also, some of my favorite higher ed tweeps post about life beyond college and university life. Some of these things are of mutual interest: music, baseball and bacon. Some post about topics that aren’t really in my wheelhouse — like NASCAR, fashion and child-rearing — but sometimes I learn from those posts, too.

* * * * *

steve-johnsonWhat really rebooted my thinking about open systems recently was Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (affiliate link). I really enjoyed Johnson’s book, so much so that I included it in my list of five good reads for 2010. As I wrote in that post, I find Johnson to be “[a] master of the art of lateral and cross-disciplinary thinking” who “brilliantly threads together ideas and patterns from a variety of fields.” In other words, he has a knack for examining a lot of discrete fields and disciplines — evolutionary biology, urban planning, computer science, entrepreneurship and astronomy, to name just a few — and uncovering the patterns and commonalities in them that offer clues to what enables the creation of good ideas.

Johnson talks about seven fertile “environments” that are needed to grow good ideas. Each of these seven areas — the adjacent possible, liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, error, exaptation and platforms — interconnect and overlap to form an ecosystem of sorts in which good ideas may thrive.

But at the core of each of these areas, I believe, is a reliance more on openness than on closed or walled-off systems. Openness is where good ideas can take root and grow.

Regarding liquid networks, for example, the question arises: Does the web hinder serendipitous discovery or foster it?

We can point out how the web can easily reinforce narrow thinking. It’s easy to find like-minded people online who share your perspectives, and if you choose to interact only with those who reinforce your perspectives and biases, you’re less likely to run across any new ways of thinking that will spur you to think differently about a situation or a problem. That’s the closed-system approach to using the web.

But if you view the web as an open system, you’ll find that the Internet does in fact foster serendipitous discovery. Recent favorites I’ve saved from my Twitter stream reinforce this. Without Twitter, I doubt I’d have found out these gems:

As Johnson points out, “… the web is an unrivaled medium for serendipity if you are actively seeking it out” (p. 121).

Granted, we all use filters to screen out noise. But are we in the higher ed marketing and PR field — or any other field — in danger of filtering out too much? Again, Johnson points out that along with serendipity, error and noise play a vital part in discovering good ideas. “[G]ood ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error” (p. 142).

Finally, maybe opening up your filters just a bit will help you with your career path, creativity or quest for entrepreneurial independence. Johnson cites a study of Stanford University grad students from the late 1990s that seems to support this idea. “Diverse, horizontal social networks … were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. In groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity, conformity and convention tended to dampen any potential creative sparks” (p. 166).

In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the power of open networks in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. Revolution 2.0, as it’s being called, is helping to topple regimes that were presumed secure.

Opening your network a little bit more might not lead to a revolutionary idea, but it might. And how will you know until you try?

So go ahead. Add some more diverse perspectives to your Twitter feed. Open up that blogroll beyond the usual higher ed suspects. Listen to some different music. Watch a silent movie. Read outside of your discipline. Maybe you’ll gain a new perspective.

If this post has inspired you to open your networks a bit more, please let me know how it goes.

Best posts of 2011: Your logo vs. your brand

Note: During the final week of 2011, I’m revisiting some of my favorite posts of the year. Below is the first installment. These posts are not necessarily your favorites, or the ones that brought the most traffic. No, these are those posts where I actually had something relevant to say, and said it fairly well. Or so I think. – AC

Your logo vs. your brand

Originally published Jan. 6, 2011

There’s a wonderful chapter in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (affiliate link) called “We Are Not the Poem.” It’s my favorite chapter of the book, and it’s one I’ve gone back to many times in my professional and personal life, for many reasons.

I’ve shared with writers and designers when they’ve had to deal with particularly trying edits or critiques — or what was perceived as personal attacks disguised as edits or critiques.

I’ve handed out copies of the chapter to a journalism class right before I handed back their first assignments, covered in my red-ink edits and remarks.

I’ve read and reread that chapter to remind myself that whatever I create — a blog post, an article, a book, a song — is not me, but merely a reflection of an aspect of me and my thoughts at a particular time and space, and that I should not interpret reactions (positive or negative) to my creations as critiques of me as a person.

And now I’m about to use it to talk about branding and logos.

“Sometimes when I read poems at a reading to strangers,” Goldberg writes, “I realize they think those poems are me.”

It is important to remember we are not the poem. People will react however they want; and if you write poetry, get used to no reaction at all. But that’s okay. … Don’t get caught in the admiration for your poems. It’s fun. But then the public makes you read their favorites over and over until you get sick of those poems. Write good poems and let go of them. Publish them, read them, go on writing.

We are not the poem. It’s a good way to think of ourselves and the work we create.

We are not the award-winning articles we’ve written, or the rough drafts we’ve wadded and tossed into the wastebasket. We are not the deck we built last summer, or the garden we tended, the marvelous magazine cover we created, the website we redesigned, the blog post we published.

Which brings me back to branding and logos.

Our brand is not the logo. Right?

On Wednesday, Twitter and the marketing/branding blogs (including this one) were blowing up with chatter about the new Starbucks logo. (Here’s my contribution.) In the wake of that news, several of us higher ed marketing types spent about 20 minutes exchanging a flurry of thoughts on the topic of branding and logo design. It began when Paul Prewitt tossed this morsel to me and Seth Odell:

Why do people equate brand to graphic identity? The graphic elements are only a small part of a strong brand. @andrewcareaga @sethodell

Seth and I responded, as did Travis Brock (via @EMGonline) and Eric Hodgson. Due to Twitter’s 140-character limit, none of us could very easily respond to Paul’s question, but I believe we all agreed with the second half of his tweet, that “graphic elements are only a small part of a strong brand.”

At one point, Seth tweeted, “I think graphic identity may be the strongest point of brand connection for low level stakeholders.” And he’s probably right — especially when it comes to big brands, such as Starbucks, that spend truckloads of money to get their logos, slogans, taglines and other more tangible brand elements out into the media space.

But back to Natalie Goldberg and poetry. I think people assume that an organization’s visual identity — i.e., its logos — is in fact the brand.

Because, despite what Natalie Goldberg says about the differences between the poet and the poem, what people see and react to is not necessarily the poet, but the poem — the tangible creation.

Let’s do a little word association. Let me toss out a name to you — Robert Frost. Now, what do you associate with that name? Perhaps one of his more famous poems, like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” or maybe one of the passages from that poem, like “But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep.”

Now, why would those associations come about? Because you’ve read or heard them so many times. They’ve become what you associate with the “brand” of the poet Robert Frost.

Maybe poetry isn’t your thing. So let’s try Baha Men. What comes to mind? (I’m not going to type the song title here, but if you listened to the radio or went to a club at all in the early 2000s, I’m sure you and I associate the same tune with this band.)

But I’m supposed to be talking about logos here — visual things. If logos are supposed to embody and communicate the essence of an institution’s brand in a visual sense, then the best ones should be associated strongly with the institution they represent. Just like a Picasso looks like a Picasso, and a Dali looks like a Dali.

So, your brand is more than the visual identity. But these days, in our highly visual culture, the visual identity is a crucial component.

Also, creating a brand isn’t writing poetry. It’s more like alchemy. That’s the way Scott Bedbury, the guy who helped create the Starbucks brand, describes the process it in his book A New Brand World (another affiliate link).

The alchemical process … — the transmutation of “base” materials into gold — occurs in the deepest recesses of the human brain as a memory. This memory may be sharp, or it may be out of focus; it is of everything that the consumer in question has seen, heard, or felt about that particular brand. The products themselves are just one contributing factor among many in this mental construct.