Monetizing Passion

Blog Post Update (January 15, 2010)

SEND A MESSAGE & SAVE A LIFE

DONATE $10 TO RED CROSS HAITI RELIEF

TEXT HAITI TO 90999

And with those 83 characters, mGive mobilized thousands of people in less than 48 hours to give over $5 million via text message to Haitian relief via the Red Cross.

The tragedy in Haiti is truly overwhelming, as is our collective will to help.  This outpouring of immediate response is not something I initially envisioned when I wrote the post below about passion and how it can be monetized. But certainly, we as a society are passionate about helping those in need. The immediacy of our response via SMS will be remembered as a watershed event not only in its capacity to help, but in our capability to immediately monetize response to causes which touch our hearts.

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This is not a post about porn.  But, it is a post about passion.  And some thoughts about how to monetize it in an age of digital immediacy.

 “All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual”

–  Honore De Balzac          French novelist (1799-1850)

 

 “Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach, we are never satisfied”

–  Niccolo Machiavelli       Italian philosopher (1469-1527)

For most of us, passion is a driver behind some aspect of our life. Whether it is what we do in our work or what we do in our life, passion is relentlessly present and often, universally consuming. 

Passion is powerful.  Passion is intense.  Passion is immediate. 

The ability to digitally provide the immediacy of satisfying passion is one of the greatest opportunities for purveyors of digital commerce and practitioners of digital marketing.

You don’t agree?  Check out Zynga Game Network, the maker of Farmville, part of the recent social gaming phenomenon where companies capitalize upon the player’s passion for the game (and passion for social validation and stature) by offering them the ability to “buy” virtual currency” to improve their performance and experience.  This is the same company that sold more virtual tractors per day than real tractors are sold in the U.S. in a year.  They just received $180 million from Digital Sky Technologies in December giving it a valuation likely to be at least $1.5 billion and possibly upwards of $3 billion. Not bad for a company that has only been around 2 ½ years with an estimated $250 million in revenues and over 100 million players per month.

Oh by the way, one of Zynga’s competitors, Playfish, was purchased by Electronic Arts in November for $275 million in cash plus $25 million in equity and $100 million in earn-outs.

Flirtomatic generates approximately $12 ARPU per month from predominantly working class people who have a passion for flirting on their mobile phone. And, even more interesting, the site is not about dating or actually being set up to meet people, the activity is all about the passion for repartee between the sexes – the back and forth, the interaction and the joy of flirting.

How do you jump on the monetizing passion bandwagon?  Identify the passions that drive your brand, product or service, target the audience that craves the experience that feeds their passion, stoke the fires of that passion, and above all, take advantage of interactive digital media to provide those with passion the information they crave, and the ability to act and receive some degree of immediate satisfaction. Especially on that very personal, highly interactive, communication ecosystem that is with us all the time and gives us the ability to immediately respond and engage wherever we are – the mobile phone.  

Your brand, product or service doesn’t lend itself to a revenue model like Zynga, Playfish, or Flirtomatic?  No problem.  Your passion play doesn’t have to be a direct revenue channel like those companies.  It can be a marketing vehicle to drive those with passion to you.

Trendwatching recently released its “Ten Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010”.  What was #7 on the list?  Tracking and Alerting. It is part of a mega trend they identified as InfoLust or ‘consumers lusting after relevant information’ (That’s their definition – how could I not include the word ‘lust’ in a post about passion?).

Trendwatching identifies a great example of using passion to literally drive business – Curtis Kimball’s mobile Crème Brûlée Cart. Launched in San Francisco in early August 2009, the mobile crème brûlée cart has attracted more than 8,000 Twitter followers, who rely on his tweets to find out exactly where he’ll be, and what flavors are on the menu, so they can satisfy their passions for crème brûlée. The same type of concept can easily be applied to SMS.

The Long Tail was a wakeup call, in part, to the effects of the digital and virtual elimination of the geographical limitations of space.  With the mobile phone’s omnipresence in our lives, we now have a further reduction in the limitations of time.  And for those of us who feel the ‘right now’ urgency to satisfy our passions, the mobile phone is always with us, wherever we go.

French novelist George Sand once wrote “the capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.”  At least now, we have a more immediate way to seek satisfaction.

Innovate or Die!

In the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen laments to Diane Keaton about the sorry state of their stale relationship.  “A relationship is like a shark”, he says. “It has to constantly move forward or it dies.  And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.”

With the mobile ecosystem changing so rapidly, if a company is not continually moving forward, it too will become a dead shark.  A client of mine was talking to a potential customer in China who remarked that six months ago China not only did not have the Android phone, it also didn’t even have 3G! 

The crux of a mobile company’s proactive efforts to stay in front of the change curve, and its response to the inevitable change that comes, is largely a result of the company’s culture of innovation. Professors from Harvard Business School and Brigham Young University just completed a six-year study of more than 3,000 executives and 500 innovative entrepreneurs which identified the five skills that enable the best innovators to soar above everyone else. 

Published in December’s Harvard Business Review, the article posits that what innovators have in common is their ability to actively observe the world around them and put  ideas and information together in unique combinations .  This ability to connect disparate qualitative and quantitative input is key to innovators’ ability to think outside the box and develop the paradigm changing innovation we have seen in the technology and mobile space.

Here are the five skills that the study says drives innovation.  How many of them are actively encouraged as part of your company’s culture?

•  Associating: The ability to connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields.
• Questioning: Innovators constantly ask questions that challenge the common wisdom. They ask “why?”, “why not?” and “what if?”
• Observing: Discovery-driven executives scrutinize common phenomena, particularly the behavior of potential customers.
• Experimenting: Innovative entrepreneurs actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes and launching pilots.
• Networking: innovators go out of their way to meet people with different ideas and perspectives.

What are the consequences of failing to innovate and adapt to changes in the ecosystem? 

Well, we only need to look back to 19^th century Manchester, England for inspiration.  That is where the light-colored peppered moths used their coloration to blend in with the white-barked trees as camouflage to protect them from hungry birds.

However, due to the intense pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution, Manchester’s trees became discolored with soot, and the light-colored moths began to stick out and get eaten, while the newly hatched dark-colored moths blended in. Now, in the past few decades, pollution controls have helped clean up the environment, and the trees are returning to their original color. Hence, the now newer lighter moths are once again thriving while the darker cousins are becoming dinner.

Scientists now believe it was the adaptive power of natural selection that caused the moths to change color.  In other words, if the moth population didn’t evolve, mutate or otherwise change color over time, their prognosis for longevity didn’t look good.  In fact, before 1848, there were no dark-colored peppered moths.  In 1896, 98% of the pepper moths were dark.

In mobile, the innovation and resulting evolution needs to occur in months, not years, to ensure survival. Without that innovation, your company ceases to move forward and dies like a shark, or ceases to evolve as its ecosystem evolves and gets plucked off of its perch by hungry competitors.

Innovate or die?  I think I’ll take another look at those five skills that drive innovation again.