Talk with us at alwaysinbeta.criticalmass.com
Next week is Forrester's Consumer Forum in Chicago. I'll be moderating a panel with Manish Mehta of Dell and Stan Joosten from P&G. We're going to be talking about what it means to be "beta"—and how it's shaping our view of the way we connect with customers. Here's how the panel is billed:
"Innovation isn’t limited to R+D rooms anymore. The Web 2.0 movement—powered by scrappy start-ups such as Twitter, Malhalo and even YouTube have proven that innovation often happens in iterations. Build, launch, tweak, measure, and repeat. Techniques like Mash-ups enable faster development and more experimentation with a range of tools from mapping to community to data feeds. Digital experiences seem to be “always in beta”—learning and evolving along the way."
In addition to the panel, I've been working behind the scenes with a small team to launch our "Always In Beta" site. The site will contain a live video stream from the Critical Mass booth which will be broadcast from our booth on October 11th. Anyone from anywhere in the world can chat with us in real time. The chat feature is live now so feel free to stop by—you never know when someone will be there to talk to you.
In addition to the site, we're going to try something a bit different for the panel format. I will be inviting the audience to text messages to a visible screen during our discussion. Halfway through the discussion, I will start to address questions and thoughts from the screen which will be aggregated as they come in. (See below)
(visual by Kevin Schnabel)
The point of both these experiments is just that—we're willing to
try some new things. We don't know how the formats will go down—if the
video will work properly, what people will say in the chat or through SMS on the
panel. But this is awfully similar to what's happening in the real
world right? People are going to talk about you and your brand in ways
you can't always predict. It then becomes our choice to either help
facilitate these conversations, or put our heads in the sand and
pretend that the world isn't spinning. Plus, we think it's just a good opportunity to try something out and learn from it.
