Last month, we published an excerpt from the first chapter of the upcoming book from our co-founders Thor Muller and Lane Becker, Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business. This week we feature a portion of chapter 6, on the Skill of Activation. Don’t miss their book signing at SxSW! (available for pre-order now)

We talk a lot about being “social” these days, but our ability to express ourselves effectively varies greatly depending on the circumstances. We might be shy as mice in one environment and as gregarious as puppies in another. What pushes us in one direction or the other?

The answer is that our openness largely depends upon the constraints in our environment. For instance, consider a recurring meeting we once had at Get Satisfaction with the audacious title “The Most Interesting Meeting in the World.” It was the brainchild of Keith Messick, our then Vice President of Marketing, who would place a red velvet rope in front of the door as a sign of exclusivity to the invite-only affair. The meeting started with a sing-a-long of the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.” What followed was modeled on a high-paced pitch meeting, more like TV writers brainstorming than high-tech marketing planning. Keith brought sound effects—sad trombones, laugh tracks, and applause that his colleague Jessie Young would trigger throughout the meeting—to emphasize others’ contributions. The meeting was raucous fun, but more importantly, the strict conventions silenced everyone’s inner critics and got people to open up and share their ideas.

This is the skill of activation. It means designing experiences that trigger openness, engagement and creativity, prompting people to respond to the world differently. Activation is how we create serendipity-friendly social norms.

This was our main goal when we set out to create a new kind of online customer community with Get Satisfaction.

Our activation challenge was this: How could we get mainstream customers of everyday products and services to express themselves, and to reach out to others with questions about a product or to resolve a problem in a public, Web-based environment, when they had never done something like this before?

We weren’t the only ones experimenting with this kind of activation. Twitter and Facebook were working on building their own all-purpose social networks at the same time, both of which were quickly adopted by brands that wanted more interaction with their customers. These three services got companies and their customers talking to each other on the Web in a new, more casual, more social way, but each approached the problem of how to draw people out and get them to express themselves quite differently.

Despite the top-level similarities between the three services, their distinct approaches elicit wildly different behaviors from people. Each service plays on idiosyncrasies in our personalities that drive us to express varying aspects of ourselves online.

• Twitter. Twitter’s approach is defined by several distinct features. First, by limiting posts—or as they call them, tweets—to 140 characters, people are freed from having to write much at all, especially compared to the daunting task of writing a full-length blog post. A simple one-line thought is enough for a tweet. This takes all the social pressure away from having to come up with justification, evidence, or depth for whatever you post.

Regular users post more frequently on Twitter than on other social systems, often dozens of times per day. The impulsive nature of the service often makes it the best way to express immediacy, passing thoughts, or post real-time updates from an event. The brevity it enforces also makes Twitter an ideal place to share interesting links or content, rather than e-mailing them, because the limit of 140 characters requires little or no additional explanation.

Twitter’s users view it not only as a means of public expression but also as a way of communicating directly with anybody else, including any brand on the network. People casually and frequently broadcast their opinions, secure in the knowledge that their intended audience will receive them. This makes Twitter a phenomenally open and accessible environment that collapses the distance between individuals and the people and companies that matter to them.

The combination of all these features activates an uninhibited, performative instinct in Twitter users, making Twitter an ideal tool for serendipitous discovery between large groups of people. It’s easy to scan hundreds of tweets for something that catches your eye—something unexpectedly valuable that somebody just tossed out that inadvertently changes the course of your own work. What any given tweet lacks in depth, it makes up for by being easy to read at a glance, and further exploration on the subject is just a link or Google search away. Twitter is an unending stream of raw material for serendipity.

• Facebook. By contrast, Facebook requires every user to use their real identity; the company is known for summarily closing an account if they discover that a person isn’t using her real name. The strong bonds that Facebook has been able to build between groups of people who’ve known each other their entire lives is a direct result of this commitment to enforcing real identity.

Facebook allows childhood friends to find each other and business colleagues to stay in touch. This desire to connect with old friends and new creates a motivation for individuals to add personal details to their Facebook profiles, sharing information about themselves like relationship status, job history, and college affiliation to make themselves easier to discover. “Friending” other people generally requires their explicit permission, which creates a much stronger and reciprocal set of relationships than is the norm on a service like Twitter.

The experience of using Facebook revolves around the news feed. This is a stream of content shared by the people that you have friended, but instead of an unedited feed of everything that others post, Facebook uses a complex algorithm to determine what content to show you. People generally post less often to Facebook, since since they aren’t limited to 140 characters length and it’s considered bad form to dominate the news feed. But those items that do get posted are usually more personal in nature and result in more robust conversations, since more closely connected
people end up reading and reacting to the same items.

Facebook does have some of the same lightweight, serendipitous benefits as Twitter, especially with the advent of their ticker feature, which is a scrolling feed of all your friends’ activity down the side of the user interface. But at its core, Facebook activates intimacy, even among mere acquaintances, and this intimacy allows for a more interactive kind of serendipitous discovery, granting us the ability to see and make connections between the things and people that matter to us most. If the broadcast nature of Twitter provides more raw material for serendipity, the intimacy of Facebook allows us to mine for the gold.

• Get Satisfaction. When we started Get Satisfaction we knew that almost anybody was willing to send an e-mail to a company if they were motivated by curiosity or frustration about a product. Yet even though sending the e-mail was easy, getting a useful response—or sometimes even an acknowledgement—wasn’t. So we set out to make posting to a public community feel as simple as sending an e-mail.

We did this by creating widgets that could be easily embedded into a company’s “Contact Us” page, intercepting the traditional “send us an e-mail” request common on these pages with a newer, more public approach. Our widgets not only collected feedback and problems from customers but also displayed them right there on the page, showing at any given moment both the latest customer concerns as well as the most common ones—a far cry from the opaque e-mail queue that customer feedback had previously been condemned to.

By making the experience of posting a public message feel second nature, we activated people’s willingness to express and share a wider range of feedback and ideas on products and services than e-mail alone was able to. Knowing that other people as well as company employees were going to see and respond publicly changed the nature and the quality of the feedback customers shared.

Every message that a customer posts to a company’s Get Satisfaction site is associated with a desired activity—a question, problem, idea, or praise. Each of these is associated with a specific outcome—once a question is answered, a problem solved, or an idea implemented by the company it is publicly declared “completed.” This focus on outcomes, as opposed to open-ended discussion as was the case on traditional customer forums, activates a collaborative attitude on the part of the people using the site. It makes both for a more positive experience for everybody involved, but also encourages other employees and even other customers to get involved in reaching a resolution. In fact, the best and most relevant answers are often those that come from other customers—makes sense when you think about it, since they’re the ones who use the products the most!

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Each of these three online social services enables communication between customers and companies, but by adopting specific design features like limiting posts to 140 characters (Twitter) or requiring every post to be categorized as a question, problem, idea or praise (Get Satisfaction), each activates slightly different social triggers in their users. Creating the conditions for serendipity isn’t just about opening up information flows and tearing down conventions—rather, activating self-expression is about designing “just-right” limitations that free us to be more of ourselves.

This isn’t to say that all constraints are helpful, but if we do the work to determine the right constraints, we can unlock the potential for entirely new ways of seeing and acting. Constraints allow us to see what we couldn’t see, do what we couldn’t do, and feel what we couldn’t feel before—exactly the kinds of behaviors and responses we need to get lucky.

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