collaboration

Showing 2 posts tagged collaboration

When will we have smarter books?

The day the Amazon Fire phone came out I just finished “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone. In the last chapter Stone mentions that a phone may be next for Amazon, perhaps even before the book is published. It took a bit longer than that for the phone but it got me thinking about the static nature of books, especially non-fiction. 

We’ve moved into this wave of building and collaboration. Yesterday, I wrote about the rise of collaboration KPIs and some of it’s challenges. Today, it’s thinking about how collaboration as a product could move forward or significantly alter some of the industries that haven’t been exposed to it yet. The first one I’d like to take a look at are books. 

When thinking about the shifts in social and mobile, there are a few trends that have emerged: 

Social v1 : Relationships online
Connecting people to people around content.

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Kik (more of a utility but social v1)

Social v2 : Publish to the people
Connecting people creating content to people consuming it. 

  • Soundcloud (music)
  • Wattpad (stories)
  • Tumblr (blog)
  • Youtube (video)

Social v3 : Build together
Connecting people creating content to people creating content.

  • Splice (music)
  • GitHub (code)
  • Medium (blog posts)
  • Google docs (documents and worksheets)

Social Books: Getting content into the community

Most publishers have only used Social v1, having other people spread the word about their books, as their entrance into social. They don’t do much to socialize a lot of the content inside of the book. 

Kindle has tried to build in sharing features within it’s digital books but it’s still a closed platform. I think they’ve missed the mark on making a book truly social. It’s not easy to share a snippet of a book with your community. The content is locked up, which means people hack around the system: taking screenshots, retyping portions of the book or going through their Amazon Kindle account online to see what they highlighted. There is too much friction to share. 

Super Books: Having the community contribute content back

And sharing isn’t just a one way street, that also means those books don’t link out to provide the reader more context about what they’re reading. If you wanted to learn more about a historical event or see a map, you’d have to leave the digital book to find out. There seems like a large opportunity to have the book readers provide links back into the book that make the reading experience greater. Just like Wikipedia allows contributions to make media rich pages. 

They also haven’t leveraged the opportunities in Social v2, having authors closely connect with the readers. Wattpad, though more focused on stories than books gets this. Writers publish stories to Wattpad, sometimes even once a week, so that they can connect directly with their readers. Readers can then give instant feedback to the writers on the stories. Traditional publishers leave that to the author to connect off platform with readers. 

Iterative Books: Ever evolving content

Book collaborations often happen before the book gets published. Editors work with an author to clean it up or search for errors. But a few eyes aren’t likely as good as the crowd. If I were a reader and I found a typo in a book, there isn’t a way to push that change back to the author so that the next person who downloads that book doesn’t see it. 

“The Everything Store” is a great book on Amazon but their history is still being written. I wish the story would continue as new information becomes available, like the release of the Kindle Fire phone that was just mentioned at the end. I’d love to hear about what Stone learned since publishing the book without having to wait until he publishes an entirely new book.

Even if Stone doesn’t have the time to write in new details about Amazon, it’d be great if the author could collaborate with a collective of writers to publish additional chapters to the book over time.

Instead of a single tomb in my kindle app, creating an evolving book that reflects what new information emerges. This is asking a lot of the author and questions the traditional way books are priced, but that’s why it’s ripe for disruption. 

Where will this happen

The capability of technology means it’s possible, but the industry hasn’t adopted those ideas. Wikipedia has shown that multi-authored histories or non-fiction entries are possible. Unfortunately, the publishing world sees it as a threat, not as the social innovation that’s missing. 

There are innovations happening in this space. Gitbook has taken Github’s collaborative text capabilities and used it to create a platform for authors to sell books. There are some early non-fiction books on the platform but many aren’t charging money. That’s when more publishers take notice, when the revenue makes sense. Hopefully that won’t happen after they stop publishing new books.

Have you ever contributed to a book or thought about writing a book as a collective? Any good tools you’ve seen?

Rise of Collaboration KPIs

(Photo: Splice in action, source: Billboard.)

Two weeks ago we kicked off the first Product Management Summit of 2014. It’s an event we hold twice a year for a full day to bring together all of the Product managers from the USV Portfolio. The goal of these summits is to provide portfolio peers a place to share best practices, lessons learned and tools that make the biggest impact. Given the diversity of perspectives, I always learn a ton from these events. 

As a way to give more insight about each company, we always start the day with introductions and a question. At this event we asked each Product Manager to share one of the KPIs that they are currently focused on.

As you would imagine, most product KPIs revolve around user growth, downloads, content consumed, and revenue growth. Now one KPI that surprised me was from Splice, it was “number of collaborations”.

This makes sense, Splice is a platform that allows music creators to share pieces of music in order to collaborate to make a final song, but it’s the first time I’ve had a company mention collaboration as a KPI.

Now, collaboration is a not a new thing, especially not in music. Many songs on Soundcloud were collaborations between multiple people, they just didn’t happen on the platform. Since Soundcloud isn’t a tool for creation, they wouldn’t measure number of collaborations, only completed songs. Shared works in progress and final products have a home on SoundCloud, but not the process in between. 

Building a platform focused on multiple people working together brings up some interesting challenges: 

1. Collaboration already happens, why is it a problem to solve?

Most collaborations happen offline. Co-creating in the open is challenging and there aren’t many tools that help make it easier (yet). The Postal Service got their band’s namesake from sending files to each other by mail. Now with digital file sharing, files can be shared in an instant but usually aren’t shared publicly. And even if they are, it requires a purchase of closed software like Abelton on both sides to open or change the file. 

2. Collaboration as a digital workflow can be clunky.

If you work on a team of more than 5 people you’ve probably used a tool to collaborate on a project. Whether it was Google docs, Asana or Pivotal Tracker, members of your team likely had to make adjustments to their regular workflows to participate in the collaborative workflow. If everyone isn’t using the same tools, it’s harder to work together than defaulting back to email. 

3. Roles and responsibilities are undefined and changing. 

If you’ve used a digital collaboration tool with your team there is usually a clear definition of who’s on the team, what they will work on and what the end goal is. With an open collaboration platform, people can collaborate with people they’ve never met. The only unifying incentive would be the final product, but that can be largely undefined until work begins. 

4. A social network built on differences.

Facebook and Linkedin, are social networks based on people you know. SoundCloud, Twitter and Wattpad are a social network for people with shared interests.  On a collaboration platform, it’s a social network of strangers who have different, but complimentary, skill sets. If everyone was the same, it may not create interesting collaborations. It’s the fact that individuals find people who are different than them that makes it work. 

5. User acquisition should come in twos. 

For most social networks user acquisition is very much a single player. If you acquire one customer and they start using the product, that is a win. With a collaboration network, you need at least two people. If people were able to collaborate without the platform, why wouldn’t they do that? There isn’t really a ‘single player mode’. You need two people working together to consider it a win. 

6. Convert teams but encourage side projects. 

There will be existing teams that use a collaboration tool. It might be harder to get those team collaborations on platform because they probably already have an offline workflow to complete tasks together. Github is a great example of a collaborative tool that teams love. Developers get hooked on the tool at work and then expand to use it for themselves to work on personal or open source projects. 

7. Skills make the team, acquire talent to fill gaps. 

The ideal customer for a collaboration network is someone that has an underutilized skill and wants to collaborate with other people. Or someone who has a project they started that is missing something. They key is to help surface these skills or projects to the network to encourage collaboration. A customer must know what they are good at and how they can contribute. That can be a harder target to hit with user acquisition since it could be very open ended. If the person who started the project already knew someone who could help complete it, they could’ve brought them on. 

Closing thoughts:

I’ll be curious to watch as more collaborative companies figure out the best way to grow their collaboration KPIs. From Splice to Scratch, Github to Assembly, the next wave of social is emerging. This time it’s about bringing together strangers with complimentary skill sets, not just shared interests. Where else have you seen this happen?