We needed a way to talk directly with our customers that was better than saving emails describing bugs they encountered or features they want to encounter. Our solution was Get Satisfaction, a place where anyone can go and “talk” about their favorite product. (“talk” includes complaints, ideas, requests, and props)
We love our Get Satisfaction. We are using it to interface directly with our customers. It’s my favorite price: free (though I suspect they will want some money from us at some point). We have already implemented a change to our software based on feedback from one of our customers via the site. (Side note, the GS team was EXTREMELY helpful in assisting in our setup)
On Monday at SxSW I watched Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson from Adaptive Path discuss the 10 tips for managing in a creative environment. This post focuses only on two tips. Don’t worry, At the end of this, I will list the other eight tips for those of you who absolutely MUST look under the bandage.
What I love about the adaptive path research was how they took a cross disciplinary slice. They spent time studying diverse, creative groups including restaurants, theater troupes, and professional writers among others.
Tip #1: Actively turn the corner
This diagram is of the creative process:
The first half of creating anything involves a divergence of ideas. You start with a single idea and then everyone starts throwing in different ideas that diverge from the original. No idea is eliminated at this stage and often experiments and mini-models are created. Then you turn the corner. At some explicitly defined point, you stop taking in new ideas and start converging towards a single point by eliminating what is unnecessary. This reduces scope creep, release slippage and the dreaded moving target. Eliminated ideas aren’t trashed, simply put into a “future creation/release” bucket.
Tip #2: Kill your darlings
Eliminate the ideas you LOVE that don’t get you closer to the goal first. Don’t eliminate the low hanging fruit or easy choices first. Choose instead to go after eliminating the tough choices from the beginning. By biting the bullet and eliminating the difficult choices first, the low-hanging fruit (those ideas to which you are not attached) becomes easy.
The eight other tips: 3. Cross-train the entire team
4. Rotate leadership
5. Know your roles
6. Practice, practice practice
7. Make the mission explicit to the entire team
8. Leadership is a service
9. Generate the creative projects around the group’s interests
10. Remember the audience BONUS: Celebrate Failure (after all, it’s part of the creative process)
I must post today. There will not be another February 29 post on the Market7 blog until 2012 at the earliest. I’m reclining on the floor, computer on my lap, staring up at halftime report of Golden State Warriors vs. Philadelphia 76ers.
Not sure what I should write about this Leap day. The Warriors? They just had a beautiful half, connecting on 28 of 47 shot attempts, and passing for assists on 21 of those 28 baskets.
I do sometimes consider similarities between the Warriors and Market7. Really.
The captains of the Warriors are Matt Barnes who drifted through something like six NBA franchises before settling in at the team’s training camp before last season, Baron Davis who was considered damaged goods from frequent injuries before being traded to the Ws two years ago, and Stephen Jackson who had a few occasions of news-making, startlingly bad behavior before his trade to Golden State last year.
I don’t mean to imply that any of myself, Curtis, Pat or Shannon were mediocre contributors to our prior organizations or delinquents. But like the Dubs and their captains, I like thinking we’re an eclectic crew particularly able to thrive in our loose culture with enjoyment of each other’s distinctive personality.
One other business analogy from basketball. It’s a unique sport in that each player can make each kind of play. In football an offensive lineman can’t catch a pass (unless specially designated “eligible” before the play) and in baseball a centerfielder pretty much never assists on a groundout, but in hoops a point guard can block a shot and a big man can sink a three pointer.
Earlier today, I had a meeting in which someone pointed out my relishing of our building a versatile team, each member a contributor across aspects of our business. Go Warriors.
I am amazed by how fast things are happening for Market7. My prior company makes routers for cable and telecom operators which required years of engineering and qualification and mind-numbing progression through various other obstacles encountered before we had our customers using our work. This go-round, it seems our time is now.
Two video.market7.com modules are pretty much ready to be used. One focuses on preparation of materials for a video shoot, including some of the scripting concepts Shannon’s included in blogposts. The other relates to the review of footage and management of the editorial / post-production processes. It’s the source of the screen shot on our home page. We are ready for professional producers to try these modules in cooperation with actual clients to execute real-world projects.
We’re fortunate in the influence we’ve received getting where we are. This now extends through direct interaction with our own users. Will you have a project over the next couple of months which could use a better approach to working together on writing a script and planning how to shoot it? or to reaching consensus on what’s the best footage and how it should transform to final deliverable? Do you promise to talk to us about your experience during and afterwards? Please let us know – you can reach us via the contact info on the right of this page (scroll down a little), or indicate your interest in the comments & questions part at the bottom of our feedback form. We look forward to it.
Which format? Once we decided to add a script editor to our services we had to determine which format it should be in. The entire purpose of the script editor was to allow collaboration between the enterprise-client and the video producer. If we chose the wrong format and one or both parties didn’t want to use it, our efforts would be wasted.
There are basically two formats video scriptwriters employ, single-column and dual-column format. The dual column format evolved from the single-column format specifically for video productions into the current audio-visual (AV) format.
The major difference is that in a single-column script, the visual elements and audio elements (such as spoken dialogue) follow one another. The dual-column script separates these so all visual elements are on one side and all audio elements on the other.
The dual column is the standard for commercial video production because of the ability to communicate the story very quickly as well as the convenience of converting the script into a storyboard-like tool for shooting. This is necessary on video productions because of both the compressed time frame of video productions as well as the need to communicate the idea very quickly to a wide variety of people.
For me, I use A/V when I am doing commercial work. It helps me get the idea across easily (even if it takes the client’s eyes a minute to adjust to the format. Once they do, I find it very useful for them). When I am writing a screenplay for a movie idea, I stay with single column as it helps my linear storytelling intuition.
Bottom line: AV format is better for collaboration, Single column is better for yourself.
I’ve had some family stuff out of town during the last few days, but moments of wistful longing for the utopian Market7 environs (I sort of kid) have been tempered by glances at this sunset photo I took last week before leaving. Do you like the view? Want to see it live? Check out our new Jobs page and please let us know if any of the listed positions excite you. What happens inside our office is even cooler.
The script drives everything that relates to the story. With the WGA strike persisting and the corresponding lack of entertaining content (I have taken to watching reruns of ‘Seinfeld‘…George is sadly more like me than i care to admit), it’s plain to see the importance of a good script. A solid script leads to a solid production. Most unhappy customers and frustrated producers can point to the script where the problems began. It is the roadmap behind which all wagons follow.
With something so important, why is it so hard to lock a good script?
First, we tried to identify what makes up a good script. We found that for enterprise customer video, a good script must be three things:
Accurate (reflects the Client’s message)
Clearly understandable
Compelling
What keeps a script from becoming good?
Accuracysuffers when there is not effective communication between the client and the producer. Many times our producers think everything is fine until the day of production when the client complains that the message is off point. This often leads to a breakneck patch job to save the day.
Clarity suffers when the script isn’t reviewed by the right people who should have a say in the story. The dreaded ‘Huh?’ from those responsible for translated the script onto screen (such as the Director or the Marketing Communication Manager) is a death sentence for the production.
Compelling Interest is lost when the script becomes too long, difficult to follow, unfocused or offensive. This happens when too much information is shoved into the script for the audience to digest. Soon, the script is bulging at the seams with extraneous information. On the other hand, a story that starts uninteresting will stay that way when too few of the people who care about it (and who would say the story is not good) don’t read the script.
As a result of what we learned, we next started building a script editor that would break down and eliminate some of these problems by helping the right people review the right story at the right time to produce the best possible script.
Check out how we are trying to solve this problem…
Enterprise Customers and Video Producers don’t work well together.
Why? And how can we help fix this? These are the core questions we are looking to answer. Producing video is a struggle for most enterprise organizations that don’t have a full-time staff. Dealing with enterprise customers is a struggle for most producers. There must be a better way.
As we talk to Producers and Enterprise Customers, we are going to journal our adventure. Hopefully, if we do our job well, there just might be something of value in there for you.
You can’t be the only one facing your problem…
hw It’s been just over a year since I was last a blogger, and I’m glad to be back to it. This time I’m not alone, with teammates who will join me sharing our perspectives on what we’re doing at Market7. As a company dedicated to rich media development by enterprises, you can surely expect to see various types of content. I’m most looking forward to the comments we get back. That sort of engagement is a foundation of the company we’re building.
Market7 started as a few notions of some cool features that could help specific aspects of video production projects for enterprises. A broader, bolder vision emerged through sharing those thoughts with both producers and other providers of video development services, as well as the corporate customers who hire them. We have benefited from their generosity with ideas of how we can round out our offering to construct a strategic platform for the entire lifecycle of rich media projects.
There is much to share on this blog and elsewhere about our work at Market7. We are thrilled by what we’re building and we encourage you help us make it even better. So please comment here.
