When I was a young girl, I loved watching the marquis sign at the McDonald’s restaurant in my hometown. On this massive sign, the owner dutifully notched the total number of hamburgers served by the entire franchise across the US. At the tender age of 5, I remember McDonald’s hamburger totals ran in the millions. It seemed an impossibly galactic sum.
But my astonishment reached new limits in 1963, when our local McDonald’s posted on its sign ”1 billion served.” McDonald’s hamburger tallies continued to escalate during my teen years, climbing to 20 billion in 1976. When McDonald’s entered Russia, and the Moscow franchise yielded the (then) largest hamburger sales globally, total burgers sold reached 99 billion in 1994.
That same year, senior executives at headquarters sent word out to franchisees that they were simply to post ”billions and billions served” on their marquis. Today, McDonald’s hamburger unit sales exceed 240 billion.
SHIFTING TO NEW THRESHOLDS: BILLIONS VERSUS MILLIONS
Any shift from millions to billions represents a daunting tipping point. And yet, when we think about such a shift in terms of counting billions of hamburgers, it somehow seems less challenging than when we think about it in terms of powerfully reaching billions of people.
In the next decade, the planet will hit two crucial milestones. First, according to the World Bank, 1 billion young people will come of working age by 2020, meaning young minds which are impressionable and open to new thinking will begin emerging in unprecedented numbers, globally. And second, the planet will become home to an additional 1 billion people by 2020 if current estimates by the US Census and the United Nations hold true.
Whether you are a marketer, a strategist, or an innovator, these figures herald a new communications reality. What tools can we use to reach greater and greater numbers of people, effectively? What new core competencies will we require? What strategies do you have for engaging, as pundits term it, ”the next billion?”
We already have some tools in hand via social media, digital networks, and mobile devices. Notably, Technology World estimates that over 5.6 billion cellular phones are operating on the planet today with a growing chunk of them being smart phones.
But this next era will not be characterized solely by ”marketing outreach” but rather by the development of meaningful content that impacts large communities and drives deeper engagement via core questions that matter. I call it the era of the metalogue.
ENGAGING IN METALOGUE
Metalogue is a term I first heard via a 3M colleague, former senior R&D executive Wayne Lindholm, during a 2009 innovation conference. He described metalogue as ”a method of inquiry for exploring diverse conversations and the context around those conversations.” Specifically, Lindholm had noticed that groups engaged best in innovation initiatives when they felt they were part of a massive, content rich dialogue.
Metalogue is characterized by the posing of a big meaty question, or series of related meaty questions, and the engagement in them by passionately interested clusters of people. These clusters can be geographically separated or locally based. Metalogue takes place when a small group of folks ask (i.e., curate) these pithy questions by putting them out to a large body of people – many of whom they do not know. Metalogue can last for hours, days, or even weeks.
For readers who are familiar with the pioneering ”innovation jams” held by IBM as early as 2001 and later its ”values jam” in 2003, this structure offers an excellent example of a metalogue – albeit a complex one. Then CEO Sam Palmisano felt an organization with 346,000 capable employees was capable of metalogue as a means to move faster in developing new products and bringing them to market. Likened to a ”massively parallel conference online,” a metalogue becomes a vehicle for sharing content and generating solutions – not just marketing products or services.
THE FOUR ZONES OF METALOGUE
To engage in metalogue that is constructive, it’s important to align the complexity of the question(s) being posed with the type of technology platform used. To illustrate, we can consider parsing metalogue into four segments which I call Zones.
Consider that these Zones lie in a 2×2 matrix with one axis representing the ”complexity of the question” and the other ”the degree of skill level required by the participants.” While the following explanation of the Zones represents a thumbnail summary, I offer it to reveal how metalogue can progress from the simple use of social media as a form of conversation to a more complex network of solutions by an engaged and passionate audience.
- Zone 1: SIMPLE QUESTIONS / Few Technical Skills Required by Participants
Zone 1 is where most social networking activity lies today. Metalogue in Zone 1 often comes in the form of a single basic query (think Mashable’s question of the day) and accesses low-cost or no-cost technologies such as Twitter’s # groups, LinkedIn exchanges, or Facebook communities that can be used to pose a particular question. Zone 1 provides a baseline for resonance around the question and its prospective responses with metalogue curators noting where these responses hail from and how they interconnect.
- Zone 2: SIMPLE QUESTIONS / More Technical Skills Required by Participants
Zone 2 moves higher along the spectrum of skill and effort required for a user to engage in metalogue but still accesses low-cost or no-cost tools. Crowdsourcing is a great example. Specific websites or microsites can be constructed for broad communities of people to respond to a question or series of related questions. If you are hosting a Zone 2 metalogue, you can pose your question(s) via LinkedIn Groups or Google+ Hangouts. President Obama held a public Google+ Hangouts session in January 2012 following his State of the Union speech to tap feedback from young voters. He appeared ”live” online for a portion of the metalogue. Importantly, in Zone 2, it’s often crucial to allocate resources for drilling into the results of your metalogue to visualize and cluster the data into meaningful pods. The results can help you refine your questions – or add to them – for use in Zones 3 or 4.
- Zone 3: More Complex Questions / Few Technical Skills Required by Participants
Zone 3 allows you to combine relatively easy-to-use digital technology platforms with more complex question sets. It offers excellent applications for metalogue once you have refined your questions and understand how to pose them most effectively to prospective participants. Metalogue in this Zone can help you engage with specific participants who can help you test or experiment with a prospective solution you’re still developing.
Market research online communities (MROCs) represent one fascinating application of metalogue in Zone 3. An MROC functions like a pop-up community of users who will pursue specific questions and specific tasks you assign. They generally consist of prescreened participants with diverse backgrounds. Using smart devices and daily check-in periods, you can monitor how your questions are faring within the group. Participants operate in a virtual space and can upload pictures or videos of whatever they’re doing as part of your exercise. MROCs are gaining popularity as an inexpensive testing forum for new ideas that require hands-on engagement. They also offer the opportunity to monitor progress in real time by the group sponsoring the metalogue.
- Zone 4: More Complex Questions / More Technical Skills Required by Participants
Zone 4 is the place where complex questions and complex technologies meet. Zone 4 embraces collaborative forums for metalogue involving massive amounts of data and huge computing power like the IBM Innovation Jams noted earlier. This zone is best to access when you want a broad array of collaborators to respond either in real time or within a set period of time. Metalogue in Zone 4 may involve a very specific question which is also accompanied by data or a small cluster of questions (paired with data) of deep interest to a particular community. These sessions can require extensive preparation and can be costly to administer and analyze. However, the output is often laser focused, offering a big ”return on network” for your effort.
The Ford Motor Company employed a Zone 4 metalogue when war gaming its response for rejecting government bailout money in 2008. Although Ford used a custom developed system, other virtual platforms for metalogue, such as Brightidea’s enterprise software, help a single organization address very targeted questions in a condensed, preset time period. Brightidea’s software organizes massive information sets for each metalogue, including quantitative data, trend data, blogs, images, user posts, and user comments which can be seen by every participant either in real time or at staggered intervals. Brightidea’s online metalogues have been used for major product development efforts such as GE’s Ecomagination plus projects at Motorola, Kraft, Hewlett Packard, and Bosch.
THOMAS EDISON USED METALOGUE TO ADDRESS KEY CHALLENGES
Although Thomas Edison didn’t have the benefit of computers to aid his world-changing innovation efforts, he did use
metalogue to engage the passions – and the best thinking – of his workers. When responding to an unexpected competitive threat, or when a breakthrough technology was needed ASAP, Edison staged what became known as ”lock-ins.”
These lock-ins stretched for days at a time. Edison would pose a question, put it out to his entire laboratory team, and they would tackle it full bore. In 1888, hearing of a new phonograph technology in the works by Alexander Graham Bell, Edison’s engineers and prototypers slept at the West Orange Laboratory for five days ”until the group could boast of the