There’s no single benefit Twitter gives me that’s important enough alone to make me use it. But there are lots of different smaller benefits. Combined, they make me a happy and enthusiastic Twitter user. Examples:

• It’s a news feed. Interesting news, I wouldn’t necessarily find in my RSS feeds, finds me. Automatically. Thanks to the people I choose to follow.
  But: I still read RSS feeds.
• It’s a search engine. I can find stuff. Especially stuff that’s hot right now.
  But: I still use Google.
• It’s a recommendation engine. Which technology is better? Which product should I buy? I can ask my followers for help.
  But: I still ask other people as well.
• It’s a social network. I can stay in touch with those I was able to talk into it. And I can easily start conversations with people I never met before.
  But: I still use other networks.
• It’s a messaging system. Drop me a line. Send a short note to a friend. Quick and easy. No need to start my email client.
  But: I still read and send emails.
• It shares my links. Have you seen this? If you’re interested in the same things I am, just follow me, and you will receive interesting links.
  But: I still occasionally forward interesting links to friends.
• It organizes my bookmarks. I tweet an interesting link, and it’s saved for reference. With a good description and hashtags, I can easily find it again later.
  But: I still have quite a big local bookmarks collection.
• It’s a micro blog. It’s so easy to put a tweet out into the net. Especially if I’m on the move.
  But: I still have a blog which allows me to be 140+.

So, yes, everything I do with Twitter, I can do with other services.
And probably even better with them.

If Twitter would give me only one of these features alone, I wouldn’t use it.
And I probably wouldn’t get it, why other people rave about it.
But it gives me all of them. Combined. That’s why it’s useful to me.

Most people look for the one clear benefit that alone makes using a service valuable. If you find it, you can replace something good with something better. Easy decision.

But that’s not the way Twitter works. Twitter is not better in any of the use cases I listed. Twitter is better in combining all these use cases into a single service.
And that’s a completely different dimension of benefit.

1. kompaktes Format: nach einem halben Tag gibt es greifbare Ergebnisse
2. transparente Kosten: einfache Preisstruktur durch Festpreis
3. individuelle Inhalte: Wir analysieren die Leistung vor Ort im echten Meeting und geben dann gezielt Feedback – keine fiktive Trainingsumgebung, sondern direkt da, wo es drauf ankommt.

Ich mag den Ansatz, direkt vor Ort beim Kunden an der richtigen Stelle anzusetzen. Daraus erhoffe ich mir wesentlich schnellere und bessere Ergebnisse, als das was man so in herkömmlichen Trainings mühsam transferiert bekommt. Bin gespannt, ob unsere Kunden das auch so sehen.
Das ist unser erster Versuch, so ein eng definiertes Produkt auf dem Markt zu platzieren. Ich bin sehr gespannt, wie es aufgenommen wird. Feedback ist herzlich willkommen!

1. Ein klares Ziel
   Stelle sicher, dass alle Beteiligten das Ziel genau kennen. Nicht nur, dass sie wissen, was erreicht werden soll, sondern auch warum.
   Die beste Motivation ist, einen eigenen guten Grund zu haben, ein Ziel zu erreichen. Jedes Projektmitglied sollte zumindest die Chance haben, den eigenen guten Grund zu erkennen. Dazu nehme ich mir gerne am Anfang des Projektes etwas Zeit und suche mit dem Team nach solchen Gründen.
2. Zugriff auf Information
   Stelle sicher, dass allen Beteiligten die Informationen zur Verfügung stehen, die ihnen nützlich sein könnten, um das Ziel zu erreichen.
   Als Projektleiter bin ich Dienstleister für das Team. Wann immer eine Frage auftaucht, sorge ich dafür, dass die Antwort gefunden werden kann. Nicht unbedingt, indem ich selbst nach der Antwort suche. Sondern indem ich dafür sorge, dass die richtigen Personen miteinander reden.
3. Informationen verteilen
   Sorge dafür, dass jeder zu jedem Zeitpunkt die Informationen hat, die er braucht, oder die ihm helfen könnten, um das Ziel zu erreichen.
   Es reicht nicht, nur den Zugriff auf wichtige Informationen bereitzustellen. Sobald ich erkenne, wo welche Information fehlt, schließe ich diese Lücke sofort. Und wenn ich erkenne, dass Dinge unklar sind, stelle ich die dummen Fragen, die sich sonst keiner traut zu fragen. Auch wenn ich selbst die Antwort kenne.

An diesen drei Prinzipien orientiere ich mich in meinen Projekten.
Alles andere – zum Beispiel Methoden – ist Beiwerk, was die Umsetzung dieser Prinzipien optimieren oder aber auch behindern kann.

I’d like to share my Keynote presentation with you under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. But beware: If you didn’t attend the conference, they might not be very useful for you, as I tend to be a minimalist and use my slides only to support my spoken words (for which by the way I earned some really positive remarks – thank you).
I had to remove some pictures from the presentation which have not been compatible with the license I use for the presentation.
Many attendees asked me how I did the presentation. From a technical point of view, it is nothing special, just some text and a bit of creativity. Most pictures I used in there come from a symbol font which is called Webdings. You don’t even need a Mac to do such a presentation.
If you are an Imagine 2007 attendee and you ended up here on my blog (great!), let me recommend the following blog entries to you, which are more compatible with the themes from Imagine 2007 than all the other weird technical things here:
* The Seven Faces of Effective Innovation
* 3 Truths about Numbers
* 5 Steps to Defeat
If you liked my presentation style, see who inspired me.

This is Lawrence’s speech from 23C3 about the differences and similarities of code and culture (75 min). Part of it is a very good introduction to the various Creative Commons licenses, and an explanation why they exist. You will also have a good laugh at some demo videos he presented to “strengthen” his points.
Lawrence recently also gave an interview to the “Elektrischer Reporter”, a great German video blog / podcast produced by Mario Sixtus. This is a two-part interview with a short introduction in German. The interview itself is English audio with German subtitles.
In the first part Lawrence gives a very insightful explanation of why current copyright law is problematic for the way we consume and create culture today (15 min):

In the second part Lawrence explains the changes big media have to face due to the fact that more and more content creators start publishing their own content (15 min):

If you use current technology like the internet to consume culture (read blogs, download music or videos) or if you even publish your own material, these videos are for you. After watching them, you will have a good understanding of what’s the problem with copyright, and what options are available today for you to fix it.

Sender

We need experts who take care of this. Experts who stop coding and start communicating. Who could that be? Well, there is more than one group that can benefit from professional marketing. Open Source Software needs it. Creative Commons, too. And even for the whole bunch of people out there, commonly referred to as ‘hackers’, a better definition of what a hacker is and does would come in handy. Somewhere in these groups, we have to find our communicators, to start broadcasting the message. But wait? What message?

Message

On the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3), I learned about Valerie Hoh’s vision in her lecture Why OpenSource Needs Professional Marketing:

We would [Open Source Software] to be recognized by everyone and make sure that those who are concerned – computer users of this world – at least have an idea, what FOSS is, what free operating systems and free desktops are, and what advantages that kind of software can give them. We want everybody to see what good FOSS can do for them.

That’s the big picture. A big picture is good for us to better understand what we’d like to achieve. But the people we want to address don’t care about a big picture. They need small, tangible pieces of information. Or even better: emotion. Just like good marketing works (as far as I know). Great, this leaves us with two problems:
First, we’re all tech people. Tech people don’t care about marketing. And marketing people don’t care about tech. If you know exceptions from this rule (or if you even consider yourself to BE one), you should start acting now and get in touch!
Second, if we had a gun, who should we start at shooting? Good marketing always carefully defines a target. If the target is large, you hardly miss, but there won’t be any effect. If the target is small, you can affect it adversely, but hitting it becomes really hard. So who’s our target?

Receiver

If we want to influence, we need to better understand who we want to influence. We have to put our source code away for a moment and start listening. What are your requirements? What would you like to achieve? How do you think, customer? We have to understand our users. And this time it’s not your coding colleague, you’re talking to. It’s the kind of guy that asks questions like “What is a ‘[server|operating system|browser]‘?” (Better prepare for worst case)
There is hope! Something’s happening: Corinna Habets aka palas brought usability to the hacker crowd in her 23C3 lecture How To Design A Decent User Interface. One of her key arguments is:

For average users the UI practically _is_ the application (i.e. as much as we may wish to, they don’t care whether it’s programmed well, only if they can use it)

Although usability is not marketing, it is an important change in the mindset of how to treat the average user. And good marketing can join in right where usability gets focused.
The main challenge for our communicators will be leaving the comfort zone and start to build rapport with the average user. With those people who in general don’t read our blogs, don’t attend our conferences but still use our products. So how can we reach them?

Medium

Do we need lots of money to get open source software into television or big newspapers (or pick any other expensive media here)? Well, there certainly is an opportunity in this approach. But I don’t think it’s necessary. Even the marketing sector has a slight feeling of uncertainty, if above-the-line media is the best tool to do marketing with. They’re not telling anyone, but they’re looking for something more effective.
Have you heard what’s going on in the marketing space, recently? I read about blog marketing, viral marketing, guerrilla marketing. Hey, they’re using our tools and technologies! Maybe they’re not that far away from our thoughts and principles? Is there a common ground, we can start from?
If there’s one industry which I believe comes next in the evolution of free culture to turn free, it probably is – considering the conversion of journalism as already completed – marketing. Individuals create their own blogs, podcasts and videos. Popular platforms like YouTube provide the infrastructure to distribute that content. This can and already is used for marketing purposes.

Communicate!

Looks like all we need for professional marketing is available for reasonable cost: little money and a lot of work. Just as we’re used to in the Open Source world.
So if you’re…

• a software developer, creating open source software
• a content creator, believing in free culture
• a marketing professional, interested in open source

there’s an opportunity for you to take: Get in touch with each other and tell this world something about freedom!

1. Numbers remove detail, irrelevant how detailed they are.

   Numbers are an abstraction. Abstraction means you remove detail. You can’t restore all details by just providing more numbers. More detail doesn’t simply mean more numbers! Numbers remove all those things that can’t be put into numbers: people, their feelings, their opinions. And aren’t these the really important things after all?

   You’re always up to your own interpretation of these numbers. With other people’s opinions removed, you’re essentially drawing your own picture. You might use the same colors, but you’re certainly going to create your very own piece of art.

2. Numbers always tell about the past, never about the future.

   Reports, statistics, business cases. Some numbers obviously like to tell you something about the future. The truth is simple: they can’t.

   Numbers are created from experience. Experience from the past. And whenever they appear with a time-stamp from the future, they essentially are based on the simple assumption that things which happened in a certain way in the past are going to happen in exactly the same way in the future.

   This plain assumption is often obfuscated with factors, probabilities and even more numbers. This makes the whole thing look a lot more complex. But it doesn’t make the whole thing more or less true. Mathematically or statistically projecting numbers from the past into the future doesn’t remove any uncertainty about the future.

   Hardly anyone calls this technique by its proper name: predicting the future. Face the facts: this is exactly the same business fortune-tellers are in. It’s just the manager-compatible business flavor.

3. Numbers offer a feeling of correctness, not correctness itself.

   Numbers successfully managed to become the manifestation of correctness. Numbers are considered pure facts, plain truth. If you can just offer some numbers to ponder with, you’re already going to convince 97% of your audience. It isn’t even that important, where your numbers come from, if your numbers are only loosely connected to the subject, or even not at all.

   You’d like to know what research I got the 97% from? Welcome to the other 3%!

So why do we need numbers?

People don’t really need numbers for their decisions. Decisions are emotional: Either you’re emotionally involved – so your opinion is more likely to be based on your feelings than on numbers. Or you’re not involved, which would make you a great factual decision maker. But if you’re not involved, why should you decide? You’re certainly going to let others decide. Others more involved…

Now what remains as the perfect use case for numbers after all?

Justification.

Numbers are the perfect weapon for justification. You can use them to make people believe why your idea is a good one. Or why someone else’s idea is a bad one. And that’s what numbers are used for.

Eventually some people are going to realize that and start putting their resources into something more valuable than justifications.

Conclusion.

Handle numbers with care! They’re not even close to efficient communication because they offer a lot of space for (mis)interpretation (1). For predictions they’re as helpful as a crystal ball on your desk (2) and even if they appear to be correct, they needn’t be (3).

I picked the following seven presentations because they all have style. All of the presenters do an incredibly good job of getting their message across. After you’ve watched all these presentations, you’ll have learned a lot about topics that are important for innovation. And you’ll also get a feeling how to give great presentations. So if you have some time, get some popcorn, grab a beer and have fun! I promise you, you won’t be bored.

1. Guy Kawasaki: The Art of the Start (TiECon 2006)

If you want to change the world, Guy tells you how to start. His presentation structure is as simple and effective as his slides are. Perfect combination of lots of information flavoured with the right amount of humor. (40 minutes)

2. Malcolm Gladwell: Spaghetti Sauce (TED 2004)

Creating a great product means understanding the customer. Malcolm tells you that this might be harder than you think – with tomatoe sauce. He uses no slides. And you won’t miss a single one. (20 minutes)

3. Seth Godin: Marketing (Google 2006)

A great product needs great marketing. Seth explains how great marketing works. (50 minutes)

4. Steve Jobs: Status Report (MacWorld 1997)

Steve is the incarnation of an innovator. See him setting the stage for Apple’s comeback in this presentation. (40 minutes)

5. Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture (Open Source Conference 2002)

We can only be innovative, if the rules around us are properly set up. Listen to Lawrence how we systematically destroy our freedom to innovate. He’s known for his slides, which are “reduced to the max”. (30 minutes)

6. Sir Ken Robinson: Educational Creativity (TED 2006)

Ken tells us what’s wrong with the educational system and what needs to be changed to encourage creativity. In an incredibly funny way. (20 minutes)

7. Dick Hardt: Identity 2.0 (OSCON 2005)

Although this topic is not directly related to innovation, Dick’s presentation style alone is innovative enough to list him here. (15 minutes)