Aaron Strout:                             

We have a special guest on our WeShow today.  He is the principle owner at Ant's Eye View.  He's also a community evangelist and strategist.  I met him at our Community 2.0 conference earlier this year.  His name is Jake McKee.  Welcome, Jake.

Jake McKee:                               

Thanks.  Thanks for having me on.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, today, Jake, I'd love to find out a little bit more about you and talk about your now famous case study that you did with Mindstorms with Lego, something I believe that a pretty well known magazine named Wired wrote about.  Give us a little bit about your background.  Tell us how you got to be a community evangelist and strategist.

Jake McKee:                               

Yeah, sure.  I'm sort of formally trained, I suppose, in traditional product design.  I went to college for traditional 3D product design and got out of college right about the time the web was really starting to take off.  I'd been tinkering around with different things for a couple years, my own campus jobs and just my own spare time and thought, "Wow, this is pretty fascinating.  This is product design in an industry nobody's actually spent much time on," versus going into an industry, the traditional 3D product design where maybe I could work five years to work up to a junior position.

So, I think, "Well, I'll give it a shot."  I could always fall back on traditional product design and found that I loved the web and thought it was a fantastic way to connect with users.  I was always one of those guys that was trying to convince clients that we should do crazy things that we should put email addresses on your website so people could contact you and had to explain to them it's okay if they actually contact you.  Because they'd freak out and say, "What happens if we get emailed?"  Well, that's the point.

Aaron Strout:                             

It's crazy to think of that.  That's a good point because I remember those days.  You think about now how people would die to have people contacting them via email, right?

Jake McKee:                               

Yeah, exactly.  At the time it was just more of a – it was always a resource question, right.  So, nobody was really starting to think about how you divide those pieces out.  So, they were just sort of saying, "If we get email we'll have exactly the same call volume, but now we'll just have all the emails we have to deal with."  The discussion even back in 1996 was, "That's okay because now you have conversation that starts."

Of course, that was the early days of my community process, so to speak, if you can call it that.  Out comes the clue train.  I just happened to get a job due to some brilliant timing and great luck at the Lego Company and joined Lego in 2000 and was hired as a senior web producer and came in to do various web projects.  Over time, maybe the first two weeks or so, people realized, "Wait a minute; you have some connections to the adult fan community.  Can you go ask them this question, or can you give them this piece of information, or can you pass along these answers or whatever?"  Before you know it, I had two full-time jobs.  So, at one point I went to the VP of our business unit and say, "Imagine if I had dedicated time to do this stuff what we could do.  We could really blow this thing out."  He said, "Well, I've been thinking about that, and there's a bunch of different community-type activities we're doing for kids and adults alike.  I think it's time to try and put some focus on pulling all this stuff into one group and really blowing off the seals of now just this but on everything we're doing community-wise."

So, I helped establish our community development team for the company, which was about 10 or 15 of us, maybe 20 at the largest, and that was a range of activities across a range of countries.  But it was a great group to be in because at any time we had no fewer than five or six countries represented on our team, which was really fun.

Aaron Strout:                             

Can I ask you a quick question?  So, Lego is a Scandinavian-based company, correct?

Jake McKee:                               

Right, Danish.

Aaron Strout:                             

How much of a role do you think that played in them being – because they really were more of an early adopter.  I think a lot of companies that are starting to get religion I'll say started in '05, but it's really been the last year, 18 months that a lot of U.S.-based companies have started to push into this space.  Would you say that's a fair statement?

Jake McKee:                               

Yeah.  I would say it's absolutely correct.  The vibe I'm getting is that it's only recently that a majority or not even a majority, but a larger percentage of companies, especially in the U.S., are starting to try these things.  I'm not sure they're really doing it full blown yet, but they're starting to reach out and see what happens. 

As far as whether or not – and it's a good point, actually.  We started doing community interaction when we couldn’t find other companies that were doing it on the scale we were – the scale of company we were.  Sure, there was a lot of people who were reaching out to their customers from a startup standpoint or even from a mid-level company standpoint, but big companies at that point were just not really doing that much.  There were a few here and there, but by and large there wasn't that many doing it. 

The reality was it wasn't because the company was a Danish-based company.  In fact, it was in spite of it being a Danish-based company.  The Danish culture is one that's driven off the "tall poppy syndrome" mindset.  The tall poppy gets its head chopped off, right.  So, the Danes have a real hard time promoting themselves as "I'm better than you" or "You're better than me" or whatever.  Because at their root they're a socialist country.  It's hard to get them to stand up and say for themselves, "Hey, we're doing something really cool.  We're doing something really great." 

That worked for them for a number of years, but as the market started to change the expectations of their community changed.  In some ways, we had a very tenacious group that decided this is how it needed to happen and just continued to get beat around until we got our way, basically.  If not for that, they'd probably be where most companies are today, which is maybe just now starting to dip their toes in.  We had the advantage of having some people that really were either immersed in the community already – I had some connection with the adult community beforehand – or they had been doing community work and now that we had a group together that was sort of the power of a larger team, they could say, "Fine, we haven't talked about this for five years now and nobody has listened, but now there's a whole team of 15 people that can help support me and help get that message out around the company and that sort of thing."

Aaron Strout:                             

Right.  So, talk a little bit about – I think it's interesting that you had a formal training, at least went to school for product design.  Certainly, that makes sense for Lego.  Talk a little bit about what they did that I would say was really pretty revolutionary in involving their community in changing their product and taking it to the next level, if you wouldn’t mind.

Jake McKee:                               

Yeah.  I'm assuming you're referring to the Mindstorms project, which was one of my all-time favorite things that I was able to work on, and not just because it showed up on the cover of Wired two days before I left the company.

Aaron Strout:                             

That was a nice benefit, but yes, you are correct.

Jake McKee:                               

It was a nice, tidy little bow on my Lego employment, that's for sure.  It was a wonderful project, actually, that we had– I worked with the product manager and a couple other folks on the product development team for Mindstorms 2, the Mindstorms NXT.  This was a new version, relaunch version of Mindstorms, which came out in '98, I believe, but it'd been out seven or eight years at that point when the new product launched.  It was built on technology, right.  It was a technology product.  It's a gadget-type product.  It – imagine using the iPod that was seven or eight years old.  Wait, it didn’t exist, right.

So, it was much older technology, and it was much more simplistic.  It didn’t have a lot of the benefits that some of the newer tech and the newer cost abilities allowed for.  But when the first version launched it didn’t really have – it didn’t really have much consumer involvement, right.  It was a brand new product.  It was all super top secret until it came out, and there wasn't really much formal adult community built up at that point.  So, it would have been nearly impossible to reach out to a lot of people and say, "What are you interested in?  Can you hack this?"  More importantly, they just didn’t think about the scope in which this thing would be hacked.  So, hundreds of books later, three or four operating systems later, hundreds, thousands probably hacks of different software things, different homemade sensors, all kinds of stuff that had created this device kind of like the iPod.  It'd created this whole ecosystem of other stuff that surrounded it. 

When we went into the version 2 we knew that we couldn’t design in a vacuum.  It was just not wise because if we came out and said, "Hey, guess what?  Here's this thing we created all by ourselves," the community would go nuts, and the community was tens of thousands of people at this point.  And so, we started talking about six months before we actually got anybody involved about what's the right way to do it?  Should we even get consumers involved and at what stage?  I really had to work on the product developers to do that fairly early.  To their credit, once that agreement was made they really wholeheartedly jumped onboard with it.

About a year before we even announced the product, before we even – before the world even knew about it and a year and a half before it actually started hitting shelves we brought people into the company from the adult fan community.  One was more of a software guy, one was more of a hardware guy, one was an events guy, and one was an author and programmer and all around Mindstorms user. 

Those four really became part of the project team.  They had access to absolutely every bit of information that was existing, and for the first few months my task really was to make sure everybody was playing nice together and the product designers were sharing appropriately and the fans were behaving themselves in front of that information and those sort of things. 

Fairly quickly, within three or four months, they – both teams were working together where I didn't have to do a whole lot of back and forth, and there was a lot of skepticism up front about, well these were people outside the company.  They don’t have the same resources or the same training that we do.  They couldn’t possibly deliver any tangible, real stuff.  They give us feedback, sure, and we need that, so that's good.  That's really kind of the mindset I think the Lego team went into it from the beginning, but after a few months when the software guys were delivering new code, when the hardware guy was delivering electrical engineering diagrams for new sensors these were the things that made the product team say, "Maybe this is significant after all.  Maybe we do need to pay attention to this."

Aaron Strout:                             

Let me ask you a quick question about that because I think this is going to spill over into my next question.  I'll let you finish this piece up, but what we find is we build communities for companies, and one of the first questions we get when you talk about someone being a professional moderator or outsourcing a community endeavor to another company is, "Well, they can't possibly know what we know.,"  I think what we find is that a lot of the skills that are required are really sort of facilitator skills, and it's a process in understanding how to maximize community versus knowing about electrical systems or all of the product design or if it's a financial services company all the ins and outs.

Certainly, domain expertise doesn’t hurt, but it sounds like that's what you're saying is that Mindstorms was particularly helpful, and I think you find in helping the businesses that you consult with now that a lot of times it's really about understanding how communities work and how to build teams and foster trust, not so much about, "Do I understand every small piece about what your business does."

Jake McKee:                               

Exactly.  And the bigger question too is what are you actually trying to achieve, right?  We didn’t – we purposely didn’t bring in 400 people.  We brought in four people, and it took us three months to pick just the right four people, not only from their own skill level and their own interests, but also when we went back to the larger community and said, "We got these guys involved so early we couldn’t involve all of you like we wanted to."  We did that later on of course, but we needed to make sure those four people the rest of the community looked at and went, "I'm jealous, but yeah, that does make sense.  They are a better choice than me."  Instead of saying, "Why the hell didn’t I get asked?”

But at the end of the day, what is the thing that you need, right?  Why are you getting people involved?  There's sort of a rush in some circles to assume that getting anybody involved is to turn over the entire process to that group of outsiders, and that's entirely not the point.  The point is to get help where it makes sense to get feedback where it makes sense, to get participation where it makes sense.  If your task is simply to get beta testing type end of the rung feedback, then great.  That's a certain group of people and a certain direction for how you go about that, and if you're trying to get up-front ideas before you even get started, then it's probably a different group of people and a different type of project and a different direction with that.

I get a lot of questions, and I'm sure you hear similar things, but I get a lot of questions from especially brand people when I talk to them who say, "Well, I don't want to turn over my entire brand to somebody else," and my point is you're not turning over the whole thing.  You're just getting – you're not giving up the steering wheel, you're just stopping to ask for directions every once in a while.  Where you stop is dependent on what it is you actually need.  When you're confused, you pull over.  When you're not, you keep driving, right.

Just doing some gut check of what the reality is; those are all relevant things to get audience involvement or consumer involvement on, but it's not just giving up the reigns to a group of people and saying, "All right, cool.  Have fun.  When you're done we'll talk to you later."  I think something that gets forgotten a lot in this discussion is for bringing people in from outside the company to participate in something like this you think about it as work as the brand employee or the company employee, and you should because you get paid eight-plus hours a day to do exactly that task.  You should know more about certain things than the outside world.  You should be thinking about them more than the outside world because you get paid; they don’t.

But at the same time, you have to figure out what's interesting to them, what's fun about it, what's enjoyable about it, what's the emotionally satisfying experience that will actually make them excited about coming in and helping out.  That's I think a lot of times where companies get into trouble with this stuff is they say – it's no fun for somebody to participate, and then hey go, "Why didn’t anybody participate?  Why didn’t they make our TV commercials for us?"  You say, "What was the experience?"  They say, "I don't know, make a TV commercial and upload it.  What more experience does there need to be?"

Aaron Strout:                             

Right. 

Jake McKee:                               

Of course it's not going to be well used.  All they're thinking is you're trying to outsource to them instead of get them involved in something fun.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, my final question – thank you for sharing that, and I love your analogy of it's about stopping and asking for directions.  Certainly, the traditional convention is you stop at a fairly respectable looking gas station because they're the ones, for whatever reason, that normally know, and you wouldn’t necessarily stop at someone that was maybe a hat maker or something along those lines.

So, my final question this is something I started asking folks, Jake, is if you were to – I'm sure you read a lot of blogs, and I see you on Twitter pointing to a lot of different people's posts, and I know you do a lot of blogging yourself, and I love to read your posts.  If you were restricted to being able to only read one blog for the next year to get your information whose blog would that be and why?

Jake McKee:                               

Well, I'll give you – I know this isn't the question, but I'll give you two answers.  The one that I've been reading and just been fascinated by lately from a culture standpoint is one called One Man's Blog.  He has the greatest collection of random stuff, random videos, random web content, random reviews of hotels he's been staying at, but it's a fun site generally. 

So, he's definitely my desert island blog, right.  But from a business standpoint I find myself constantly getting linked back to or finding really great content Jeremiah Owyang's blog.

Aaron Strout:                             

Owyang, yeah.  That's funny.  All directions point to Jeremiah it seems like.

Jake McKee:                               

Yeah.  So, he's got a great blog, no question about it.  But it's just one of those things you can't help but stumble across his at some point.  So, if I was choosing one out my many, many list of places I go that would probably be at the top up there.

Aaron Strout:                             

That's a good recommendation.  I actually like the dual answer, and why I'm sort of chuckling is Jeremiah joined us for a podcast we did this morning.  Two of my colleagues and I do a new series called "Three Media Walks," which we can also find on the We Are Smarter site.  What we're actually doing, and actually, I'd love to have you join in on one of these, the last ten minutes of the call we talk about three items that each of us picks a topic.  Today we talked about sort of Facebook, social networks in general, who owns the content and should you be able to monetize it.  The content of liberating digital content, the New York Times select model and LinkedIn's announcement that they're going to become more like a Facebook open model with more developers collaborating in their API, news feeds, things like that. 

So, it's just funny you mention him, and he did a post today on Twitter, and I started following a number of new folks based on the comments.  He is really sort of becoming his own platform and does – is a great pulse for the industry.

Jake McKee:                               

Jeremiah's a platform, I like it.  I'm sure he will too.

Aaron Strout:                             

Yeah.  I threw that out there as a Tweet on Twitter.  Just couldn’t resist and said, "Never mind Facebook and LinkedIn, we've got J Owyang with a capital J, capital Y platform," and a few people got a chuckle out of that.

Jake McKee:                               

That's great.

Aaron Strout:                             

Yes.  So, Jake – sorry, go ahead.

Jake McKee:                               

I was just going to say two of my other favorites are Josh Hallett's Hyku Blog, which is always a great read, and the Brains on Fire blog.  I don't know if you know the Brains on Fire folks.

Aaron Strout:                             

That one I've not heard.  I'll have to check it out.  Jake, thank you for joining us today.  Thank you for giving us your back-story, telling us how you sort of took the journey, some of the best practices and certainly your recommendations for blogs.  So, look forward to having you maybe join us on one of our subsequent podcasts.  In the meantime, good look with Ant's Eye View.

Jake McKee:                               

Thank you.  Thanks again for having me.

Aaron Strout:                             

We appreciate you listening in to this series of the WeShow podcasts.  To find other podcasts like this you can check out WeAreSmarter.org, Mzinga.com and also iTunes under "We Are Smarter."  Thanks so much for joining us.  We look forward to seeing you next week.