I’m not talking about how Pixar run social media campaigns, to be honest I don’t know if they do (I suppose I’d know if they did ), however what struck me from the programme was a comment by Chief Creative Officer – John Lasseter. He referred to his first pitch to Disney for a fully CGI animation and his boss (or similar position) replied – “how much is this going to cost?” Lasseter replied “the same as a normal film!”. He was then released from Disney shortly afterwards.
Now the lesson I learned and if you have watched any Pixar film you will know they are utterly amazing and will blow you away with how realistic the animation is – Water in the Incredibles and Finding Nemo, Complex environments in Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Cars and A Bugs Life, Body Hair in Monster’s Inc, 25,000 balloons in Up!!, the list really does go on….. They really have pushed animation forward and in my opinion film making in general.
Anyway on to my lesson….(can you tell I’m a big Pixar fan)
Just because they used advanced technology techniques and embraced innovation and creativity, it didn’t mean that they could cut corners or deliver things faster, because what mattered was the output – in this case Excellence in Animation.
Now I know the current climate in Public Sector won’t really support this kind of approach, however my issue is that in order to deliver the changes and culture we need to move toward a more efficient public service, we need “time” and social technology will NOT fast track us to this end game, just like animation it requires hard work, knowledgeable people who can multi-task and the biggest thing a strong commitment from all parts of the organisation that you are doing what is right – not just for the business, but for your customers, service users etc.
Pixar has in my humble opinion never released a bad film, I’ve watched all their movies with my kids and on my own…Pixar’s key focus is to NOT separate the Adults from the Kids when making films. This focus on the audience and user is critical and is another lesson the public service could learn from.
I know life is probably simpler in Pixar and it is far more complicated in the Public Service, but the lessons are there – we just need to look for them.
I thought i’d share some pilot innovation work that I have been involved in with a guy called Bill Wells from 2 dot 0.
This all started from a conversation over lunch we had earlier this year.
The basic idea was that in my previous role as Corporate Web Manager, we always had conversations with people about video hosting options along side a video player tailored specifically for the local authority. Not a unique problem, in fact quite a common one i imagine. However the issue for me was that i couldn’t justify the costs associated with video storage solutions when sites like youtube, vimeo, blip etc offer pretty good solutions either free or very low cost. The other issue was that as a local authority it is unlikely that we are going to spend thousands of pounds on the creation of new video content regardless of the quality due to capacity and skills.
So the conversation went on for a good hour or so and ended up with me basically asking for a solution that did the following:
What i’d like is a player which has the ability to pull content from any source, youtube or vimeo or a traditional video storage platform – I’d also like to add value by providing a feature that allowed me to layer content, questions etc over the top to gain additional benefit from the original content. I’d like to be in a position to reuse our existing video archives and repurpose them, or use other public material from either central government or other local authorities providing the content was reusable”
I was keen early on to see how this could benefit and enhance the digital engagement offering as we could reuse community created content and layer questions over the top to gain some additional targeted feedback whilst someone was watching the video itself, instead of after the event.
So let me share what the early beta product looks like and how it might fit within a local authority situation.
Firstly it is worth checking out the original video offering that i suggested – a video created by our road safety team on biker safety called “a day out in Devon”. The original youtube video is below:
NB: if you can’t watch youtube on your machine or via your network you will not be able to view either video.
Now as this is in beta, it isn’t yet available for embedding in other sites (to my knowledge). But this is the version which contains a number of questions at particular points as well as a scrolling “news” item which could be fed dynamically from the corporate site. It is important to remember that this player is pulling the content directly from youtube when viewed and is simply providing a container for questions and feedback collection.
Below i a couple of screen shots of the video with a question displayed over the original video. (click on image to enlarge)
The following image explains the concept visually – it is also available as click through on the video at 1minute 17seconds in. (click on image to enlarge)
To see the video and questions in action, check out the link below.
What we get at this point time is the data submitted by those who watch the video – This is complimentary to the “comments” section within youtube which could contain generic feedback and observations which could in fact drive the questions in the first place.
What is also interesting and in my opinion probably the killer application, is the statistics side – What we are able to see is the actual behaviour of the viewer. So we can identify whether or not someone watched the whole video, part of it or none of it. We are also able to tell whether or not they paused the video and when and layered with the questions, we can start to understand when in a video a good time to ask questions might actually be.
The following image is a graph from a single film view (click to enlarge).
Green – 45 degree lines – normal play
Yellow – vertical – fast forward
Blue – horizontal – pause
Horizontal axis – real time
Vertical axis – time within the film.
Content watched summary on the right – green = watched
The opportunities and intelligence this presents in terms of use and take up of video content is quite huge and the potential to reuse video content across the public sector means that we can start to see some content as shared services.
In its simplest form it adds value to existing content as it allows the owner to obtain additional statistics and seek specific feedback about particular parts of a given video.
I’m not a sales person, nor do i have any personal or vested interest in this succeeding, however I do personally see many opportunities within the public sector for this and i’m not going to pretend i know your business and tell you how you could gain value, but what i will say is, if you have video stored somewhere and you want to know how to gain extra value out of it now, this is something you should explore.
I’m probably not doing this any justice at all, but it isn’t my role to sell this, i am simply sharing something which i am personally quite excited about and can see this transforming how local government and the public sector use video content online to gain feedback and engage with people.
I’m going to continue to look at how this can be integrated into some of our digital engagement offering, but at the moment we are still in the early stages and as such don’t have any real life “live” examples. Fingers crossed.
In the meantime, i’d be interested to hear what you think of this idea.
You have just got to love it, i guess what this really means is that we aren’t listening to what people really want anymore – enter social media or am i just biased!!
A extract:
Unfortunately, much of what our economy produces today isn’t innovative — it’s unnovative. The evidence is hard to dispute: we merely need to note how deep the global decline is, how consistently 20th Century business fails to do stuff that matters — or just how many industries are caught simultaneously in deep crisis.
Here are some examples of unnovation.
The Hummer was a product unnovation, which destroyed value for both society and Detroit.
The views and position it highlights in the post is one of the reasons why i enjoy doing my job as it essentially challenges this position and tries to encourage the organisation to understand risk better and to become more creative and innovative.
The work i have been doing over the last 9 months i believe has been challenging the risk adverse culture that exists.
However i feel the tide is shifting faster than i had anticipated, I was having lunch on Wednesday when a colleague from a Directorate who was in the audience of one of my awareness sessions told me that the problem they have now is managing expectation as to what people can do and how that can be managed in terms of resources and capacity. Great result but it now identifies a new challenge, which is understanding and promoting good use as well as progressing the online participation and social media policy. The other challenge is making sure people are using the right tools for the right job and are not just jumping in any tool expecting an audience or customer base to be there.
No doubt i’ll post more on how we tackle this but it almost feels like we have overcome the hard part and are now moving toward a wave of adoption. Or i maybe over optimistic…
The rules or general approach that Stef highlights are brilliant, however i thought i would try and add to or even compliment them with perhaps some overlap, which i make no apology for.
Start thinking
Probably the hardest thing to do really whilst seeming like the easiest. Henry Ford said “thinking is the hardest job there is which is probably why so few people do it”
The challenge is to try and find conditions which make thinking easier to do. This is something you will need to ask yourself. I find walking and being in water, either a bath, shower, swimming or surfing as long as i am water a great place to think.
So get out an about and try new things and find out what conditions enable you think clearly.
Use and recognise laziness as an asset
Now i don’t mean the traits that make people fat and overweight, i mean the desire people have to achieve more by doing less. I wouldn’t say i was lazy as such, but there are certain task that i dread doing and therefore have a lazy attitude towards them, but in recent times social media tools have enabled me to reduce the burden of these tasks, researching online and looking at other websites, RSS saved me huge amounts of time.
Laziness should be harnessed, i have often wanted to get a project going but felt other people would be better at doing it than me so adopted the cuckoo approach (which lays its eggs in other nests for them to manage) this approach not only gets an idea developed but also allows others to take credit for ideas and innovation so increases their willingness to support other new and exciting ideas in the future.
Accept what you’ve got and get on with it
We always hear people complain about lack of this and lack of that, we need to accept what we have and prioritise, and make the best use of the skills and resources we do have. Nearly everyone else is in the same position but yet they deliver innovation.
Social media tools are a great opportunity here, we could do so much without doing anything more than what is already there, now why aren’t more things being done?
Bend the rules to breaking point or cheat
Understand the rules of the game we all play and push the boundaries until they nearly break and if they do, so what you may well have invented a new game. Many successful companies broke rules or did things outside of the rules and found new niche markets to explore and benefit from. Low cost airlines are a classic example
But the biggest thing i agree with in Stef’s post is allowing yourself to fail and fail yourself to success.
Now with these rules or guidelines, i will start to approach social media opportunities in the same way and see where it gets me, it seems that this is a lower cost strategy because the cost to set up, trial and fail is so low. After all, we won’t get it right every time but a t least i won’t be wasting huge amounts of pubic money on the process.
I think i was doing this to some degree but now i have a framework which i have accepted it may make it easier.
Please share your experiences and or failures so others can benefit from your learning.
), however what struck me from the programme was a comment by Chief Creative Officer – John Lasseter. He referred to his first pitch to Disney for a fully CGI animation and his boss (or similar position) replied – “how much is this going to cost?” Lasseter replied “the same as a normal film!”. He was then released from Disney shortly afterwards.
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