Brian Solis, leading thinker in the integration of social media and PR, recently spoke on an intriguing concept: ideas connect us more than relationships. The premise of his argument is that ideas are what elicit passion in people. They animate us, and if we find someone with a similar interest in a given idea, we connect. You can see him describe this in the video below:
When ideas are stronger connectors than pre-existing relationships, Solis notes that our connections will expand, shrink and shift. The fluidity of connections reflects the ideas that capture our attention at any given time. And at any point, we will have multiple ideas that engage us.
This thinking dovetails well with a concept from leading designer Joshua Porter, also known as Bokardo. In his post, Finding Innovation in Design, he describes the AOF method of social experience design:
A = activity you want to support
O = social objects that define the activity
F = features are actions people take upon social objects
You build social-oriented sites around a core set of objects and activities which attract people. Brian Solis's concept about ideas being the basis of connections manifests itself well into Porter's social objects. Ideas are the social objects around which people connect.
For companies seeking to leverage social software, communities and crowdsourcing to tap new sources of innovation, these are critical principles. Design people's experiences with an eye toward driving interactions around ideas.
When ideas are the basis of a social network, a more advanced system of innovation management is possible. Relative to alternative social objects that are not specific to innovation (e.g. tweets), ideas offer superior capabilities in several areas: content, analytics, presentation, milestone tracking, workflow.
As Porter writes:
The idea is that your features are nothing more than the actions people take on accepted, agreed-upon social objects. They are not pie-in-the-sky features that may or may not be valuable. By modeling your software on existing behavior you can be sure that the features you add will be valuable…after all…people are already doing them.
Designing ideas as the social objects significantly improves the ability of the community to find ideas of interest, collaborate around them, provide feedback and share them with others. And since innovation management shares aspects of project portfolio management, social objects that can support workflow is an important consideration.
As Solis says, what's exciting in all this is that people - employees, customers, partners - have a natural affinity to connect over ideas. Proper design can tap this affinity to help organizations find new innovation opportunities.
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