Adding Value to Your Community

Patricia Martin – CEO Litlamp Communications

Presentation

Author of Renaissance Generation: the Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What it means to your Business

Ren/Gen – Renaissance Generation

3 indicators of a renaissance:

1. Death comes first (demise of the financial markets maybe?)
   
2. Facilitating medium – the Internet
   
3. Age of enlightenment
   

Psychographics of the population

• people who believe that Knowledge is Power
  
• learn baby, learn
  

The Ren/Gen is ready for this Renaissance:

• Embrace diversity – they are creative
  
• Idealists – they are self expressive
  
• Collaborators – they are sensualists – the only know what they can experience (with others)
  
• Fusionists – the bring together the diverse elements of who they are – engineer/attorney/poet
  

There has been an explosion of blogs (self-expression) and ebooks (non-traditional media), etc.

Depth of the shift – the impact is huge given the global economy

Businesses can capitalize through branding and getting buy-in and loyalty to their brand.

• Move from Me to We – give people a sense of belonging to the group, the tribe
  
• Empower creativity – give people the space to think for themselves
  
• Manage the human interface – remember that in the end customers are still people
  

Examples:

Launch of the new Ford Fiesta

Reached out to bloggers – chance to win a new car for 6 months – all expense by proposing a trip to take and then blog about it. Response came from a group of bloggers who weren’t interested so much in the car.

• Old Universe – Brand is the center of the Universe
  
• New Universe – the user is the center of the Universe
  

Outcome – let the bloggers share the car – led to shared financing.
Benefit – people gained a sense of belonging to a community.

Google – New products and improvements

They wanted to improve the users’ experience of Google so they identified their Superusers and asked them.
Best users are the ones who collaborate on building the rules

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs


The Human Interface

Jonathan Harris – artist and computer scientist

Stop the nonsense in the Internet – take the power to create a new world on the Internet.

What are people yearning for? The want to be wanted. (MoMA commission).
Curate the human interface
 
We have to come up with the story about the future!

The future – there will be screens everywhere – at the barbershop, the grocery store –
Return on Time will replace Return on Investment (because Time is Money after all)

The power of the story is the killer app!

Being able to engage our patrons to be a part of the shared story – is the ultimate human interface.

This Renaissance is an Uber-enlightenment – and the pre-cognitive folks - the visualization people

And why is the library so important in all this? The Library is the only reliable source for neutral information in most areas.

FINRA is trying to get public libraries active in the area of financial literacy – precisely because people trust that they will get neutral information from the library.

To sum up:

Add value to your community:

1. Put the User at the Center of the Universe
   
2. Let Users collaborate on the rules
   
3. Curate the human interface