The weekend started with the presentation of our greater challenge: solving for Wicked Problems.

Usually, when we have a problem of the ordinary variety, there’s a clear goal or solution that we can direct ourselves and other people towards. Take a light bulb burning out: we know how to frame that problem; we can quickly design and implement a solution. We can make jokes about how many people it takes.

At the other end of the spectrum are Wicked Problems. Think about how to solve for a problem like cleaning Lake Michigan, childhood obesity, poverty, national health care, or moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. Or in the case of our clients: how to design a brand experience across a continent, or many continents; how to design a communications system for a brand that employs tens of thousand of people, and has tens of millions of customers. How to tackle social media.

These are Wicked Problems: problems that are so wide, and so deep, so deeply cultural and systematic that there is no single answer or single goal that you can adequately articulate — no single end-state that you can really wrap your mind around and call it solved.

I was reminded again of a corporate Wicked Problem when Jared Spool put together this list of airline redesigns. When you look at the Websites as design problems without the organization, the solutions are often self-evident, unfolding before you in a “Why didn’t they think of this?!” way.

But once you put the problems in the context of that global corporation, you see there’s a Wicked Problem that needs solving for the brand first because the Website can only ever truly be a representation of the blend between that culture’s operations, communications, and technology. The Website becomes an output from the organization’s machination rather than an attempt to communicate effectively with the people using it. It is the product of people trying to frame something Wickedly large and organic and living into a single-light bulb solution.

So what do we do with these Wicked Problems? How do we solve for them? This was the purpose of the Overlap, and the topic of the next article.

And as always, let’s continue the conversation here in the comments section or on Twitter @mleis.

[This was originally posted on the DRAFTFCBlog]

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1. Big Web brands are accelerating targeting, and now content creation that is hyper-local. From location-based services to ad buys, everyone wants to help you know what’s happening right around you.
2. Brands really want to find ways to make every experience more “personally relevant.”

What’s resulting is large-scale messages that focus on what’s similar, most familiar, and/or closest to you. I love creating consensus as much as the next guy. And concepts like the Big Sort indicate we’re wanting that: moving into ideologically homogeneous neighborhoods, safe in our sameness.

But think about the really big trends, especially in very responsive programmatic content channels like radio, and there’s a good two-decade long example of how much people want to be exposed to local perspectives on a national or global level. What is the music that describes life in Los Angeles (gangsta-rap)? Atlanta (hip-hop/ATL)? Philadelphia (soul)? Chicago (Kanye)?

Brands like Whole Foods have made a killing off this exact premise: National brand and distribution network built upon stories of local farmers and product sourcing.

Curious what you think. Add your perspective in the comments below or on Twitter @mleis.

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Seeing Andy Baio at SXSW give his game mechanics talk led a chain of learning to look more seriously into cognitive psychology, variable reward structures, and creating flow state. This in-turn lead to seeing Amy Jo Kim’s incredible presentation on what game mechanics contribute to, and learn from the social web.

That’s when I started to look at the ways game mechanics seem inexorably tied with narrative to create immersive experiences in a range of settings: from the very literal (game shows, card games); to places you wouldn’t expect: doll houses, Lego sets, Progressive TV spots. It’s amazing to think that Progressive has transformed the cumbersome process of applying for insurance online to feel easier by making the on-ramp ads feel like a game users are just a form away from winning.

Below is my collection of Baio and Kim’s ideas, with a few of my own, presented to a lot of really great DraftFCB folks who opted out of the Blackhawks parade to join me (and free pizza) to discuss gaming.

Looking forward to your comments and feedback, either below or @mleis to continue exploring these ideas.

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I feel like every time a new technology product starts to gain mass attention, we also must pay homage, in words, to the bright shiny object debate. Can’t we just assume that it’s part of our jobs as marketers to take the shiny objects that captivate any segment, experiment with them, and understand where brands can capitalize on this technology? Isn’t this the R&D we all need to do?

So whether we like it or don’t, buy it or not, let’s agree that it is significant and think about what we can learn now. Here’s what I’m seeing:

Rent the long tail, or own the aggregation of all the long tails

To buy into the apple brand as a content creator or advertiser (in the case of new iAds), you must believe in the long tail, that all the incremental revenue you get from having content accessible through iTunes, App store, etc., will eventually add up to a lot. This makes sense to a lot of people because it is mimics the dissonance of the American Dream: keep saving and you can own the house of your dreams. A few will win, well timed, well positioned, and well publicized to further the myth. Who really wins here is Apple by collecting a piece of everything along the way.

Build a platform, experiment with the distribution

I sense that a lot of what frustrates agencies is the feeling of having to start all over again with brands every time a new shiny object comes along. But look at the path Apple took to get to iPads: First, introducing the dashboard and widgets into the operating system. Once that audience and developer community matured, widgets became easily adapted to be iPhone Safari sites and native applications. Once iPhone had gone through three iterations, the iPad is introduced.

In other words, the shiny new thing of widgets was built on to become the iPhone, which was built on to become the iPad. Same core engine in terms of iTunes and multiple ways to access the content. With every new device is a lower organizational cost on addition, or in the case of complete failure, subtraction. There is a base, and it is built to handle the attrition of shiny objects with one-click purchasing.

Brands need to start understanding this model and executing on it. There will only be more avenues to distribute information, and there will always be attrition among those channels. The brands that can quickly distribute through these emerging channels; whether it’s the next Facebook or iPad, it will be something that sits on a foundation of SOAP (Standard Open Architecture Protocols).

Maybe it’s only supposed to be for a few people

The great problem today is the battle between the obvious successes of niche marketing and the tried-and-true equations of scale. Instead of thinking that apps or iAds or Safari-formatted Websites are only effective if they reach a large scale, what if you flipped it completely? What might happen if you built a captivating experience for a small, lucrative segment of an audience, and used that information to influence decisions made in other products or marketing channels? What if you made an application only for your employees and clients? What if you made an application only for kids who listen to the radio together?

What do you think? Leave a comment below or continue the conversation on Twitter @mleis.

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All of social media is a game

Like it or not, make it explicit or not, but every social network (and to me, every interface), is a game. Even if you’re not designing it to be a game, the people in the network make it a meta game.

Games are great for teaching complex tasks

Huge underestimation of games right now in terms of just how well they teach people complex task sets. I’ve noticed this for some time as my kids have grown up: console games all have the challenge of teaching a completely new set of rules and operations. The best games make that process fun and rewarding.

A great example of this is Office Lab’s Ribbon Hero that Baio presented. It turns office into a series of game-based tasks, like formatting a paragraph, etc — gives you rewards when you achieve proficiency, and updates you on your friends’ scores. The MS Office suite is an incredibly complex, bloated system. Ribbon Hero makes it fun.

Create Completion Sets

Really good games provide players with clear, small sets of tasks to be completed in exchange for rewards. In the presentation, he used Farmville as an example of this in every level of gameplay — right down to how the farm gets divided into cubes that are very small completion sets. The faster, easier your completion sets, the more involving the game is.

Since seeing him discuss completion sets, the more I see them, and the more vital I think they are to any kind of digital strategy and design across the board. Take the case of a casino: what game doesn’t operate on small completion sets? Or look at how popular social networks create completion sets like “You’re X% away from a complete profile.”

Don’t use leaderboards*

Leaderboards are often the death of any site that uses them. In the strategy phase they seem like a great idea: incent people to use the site or service more by displaying their level of use. But in reality, leaderboards only attract people who need to be on top of the leaderboard — and the result is that it de-motivates the users who you really want to encourage, because they all end up being touched by the people who are trying to get atop the leaderboard.

*Unless you manage scope or reward specific activities

There are places where leaderboards can help. One is where you manage scope. One example of managing leaderboard scope is FourSquare, where you can only see point totals of local friends. In this case the scope is managed by friend group and location.

In discussing the problem of leaderboards with Bastian Unterberg, his company Jovoto uses a really interesting two-pronged approach. First is to work with sociologists and mathematicians to create algorithms to understand, and get ahead of the ways that leaderboard junkies will try to game a system. Second, frequently reward the behavior that you want to encourage, which makes a leaderboard truly reflective of the people who use the system “the best,” instead of valuing all system interactions as similar absolute point values.

In the SXSW talk, Baio gave a great example illustrating the problem with assigning absolute values to social network identity: Tumblarity. Since killed by Tumblr, Tumblarity was an absolute number assigned to your use of the platform. The metrics behind it were vague at best, and it encouraged negative use cases where people would try to achieve a higher Tumblarity number just for the sake of having a better number.

What metrics add up to identity?

Whatever metrics you assign to the individual profile level make up a vital part of that person’s identity in that platform, even if that’s not your intention. Twitter is a great example. Users get very few statistics: how many people you follow, how many follow you, how many tweets you’ve entered in the system, how many lists you follow.

All of these metrics are hot topics of discussion, because without clarification or a larger breadth of identity data, people project a lot of themselves and their personal meanings on those metrics, simply because they’re presented in the interface. There are many, many other metrics that Twitter is looking at, but it has decided to show individual users these numbers, thus forcing people to use them to create meaning for their identity in that context.

How much can the system talk back?

What I was left with as much as anything from this talk was what we always strive for in digital design: how and when should the system you’re using communicate with you based on your actions (or non actions, or patterns, or anti-patterns)? Should the system wait to tell you that you’ve filled out a form field wrong until the end of the process? At the end of that state? As soon as the error is made?

That’s one classic example of systematic feedback. But flip it over and ask how often the system can give users a message or icon or reward for a positive action? If a Website has a 1:15 average time on site metric, should the site time each visit, and offer a free icon or coupon at 1:10?

Ultimately, this is where I think we need to start heading in digital strategy overall. We need to recognize the discourse with a person for what it is, be clear about what they (and we) want them to achieve, and reward frequently with tokens that people can use as social or real currency.

Well, you got down this far. What do you think? Leave a comment here or on Twitter @mleis and let’s talk more about it.

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Though our wide-ranging crepe-based discussion panel on Saturday morning was a highlight, I’m seated in the cavernous ballroom A for Brynn “No relation to Will or Bob” Evans is sitting on this panel, so I really wanted to hear it.

Brynn is kicking things off. She is concerned with the interaction design of search and how to integrate social networks and search.

We want to frame this problem as not making search as relying on google, but how can our friends help us? You have to think of search as a process over time. If you can reframe how you think of search is done, you could make use of friends at any time during that path, it’s not just google.

There is no one definition of social search but three distinct types:

1) collective
gathering trends from a crowd. Looking at many people’s activities and how can we make sense of that
2) friend-filtered
3) Collaborative
Like aardvark does.

What are people’s social strategies? How do people want to interact with friends when they search?

Two main strategies: ask the network, or embark alone. People ask their networks first, they’re kind of scared of venturing into google without help from their network.

People sometimes want to embark alone on google first, can’t find what they want or get confused, and then go back to their social networks for help.

Now it’s Max Ventilla from Aardvark.

They started Aardvard from a opp they saw in queries — subjective questions about how people spend their time and money — this is the biggest source of searches.

People are still turning to friends and co-workers for info, but it’s generally unreliable. It’s hard to keep up with what they know about, and unreliable to tap all your friends. There’s also a social cost to it. Generally, you don’t want to bother someone by asking.

At Aardvark, you ask a question, Aardvark identifies the people in your network that can best answer that question, and connects you to them. It connects you with information that isn’t published anywhere.

Social intimacy makes information actionable. They now answer 85% of questions asked to the system in the last year. 45% of questions lead to crosstalk.

About 50% of users answer a question at some point. This is incredible participation rate.

Intimacy is more valuable than trust

Social context is more important than social graph

Speakers know who they’re addressing

You don’t need a leaderboard or metric counts — people continue to participate regardless.

Ash Rust now up from OneRiot — ranks and delivers search results from social networks

Realtime search – they help people find what people are talking about now

Realtime ads

Realtime API – to make it movable

Now Scott Pridle from CPB who leads innovation talking about the money side of the equation.

Everything that CPB does factors in social. Now a few cases showing work that uses aardvark and one riot models.

Give customers something good to talk about in social media and they will talk.

Right now with Old Navy, you go online and create a mannequin like yourself, get people to vote on it. The winner gets 100,000 and a mannequin that looks like them.

What happens is that people pass it on Twitter, then picked up by One Riot. If you search OR for Old Navy, you won’t get the store site, you’ll see all the conversation. And that seeds the virality. Also has a facebook app/page.

Where it related to aarvark model, large brands are trying to figure out how they talk to people. With Best Buy, they made a platform for in-store experts to communicate with people. There was an opportunoity to pull all 2000 blueshirts together and give people responses customized, and quickly.

It used to be that agencies would create TV and then create interactive around that. With Best Buy, it was create the interactive platform first and then develop TV around that ability as a brand value add with consumers — even if they’re not on Twitter. They using it as social proof.

Now going to discussion time….

Brynn going after Rust to try and understand how they look at social graphs, relevance, and their methodologies to evaluate value, and he did a good job of stepping around it. But he did say that they’re breaking it down into smaller groups of value to try and return value.

Brynn has found that it’s not about retraining people on querying, but about how to include their friends. They pick the experts in their community to turn to. But how do you index that? How do you return good information?

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Regardless of the background of the agency, leadership understands that clients want one company to serve their integrated communications needs. They want a company that can do all of it: get press, transform them into a publisher, or programmer, and make all the channels that they’re engaged in have a responsive flow across all channels.

Then you meet with the practice leads, which is akin to visiting the information work equivalent of a field hospital. No matter how many people are currently employed in that tent, they’ve got more clients waiting for immediate critical care than they can handle. And they’re burning out. I hear a lot of, “I love all of these clients and their work is great and challenging, but I haven’t slept in weeks and I can’t possibly get to them all.”

So, like any good (or in my case hack) writer would do, I want to solve this problem by first envisioning the ending: when the agency is throwing the big dance party scene at the end of the movie and the credits begin to roll, what does that look like?

Hello, Ma Bell

It looks like a nightmare to anyone with a solid senior corporate track record at anytime over the last 30 years. It’s hideously bloated, inefficient, and a large majority of the workforce is only 70% billable. But it’s necessary, and it will drive far more total revenue than any other approach. It will win the race for the middle. This is what it takes to weave so many nodes of the vast data network into a valuable resource. I know this because we’ve done it before as a country when we integrated the phone.

Sure, no one gives the phone a second thought now. But it is our nation’s most solid and complete communications infrastructure. When I was a kid, you still needed certain skills just to operate one. If I wanted to call someone in another state, you might have to talk to two or three telephone operators: at least one regional operator and one state operator. It wasn’t cheap, and it was kinda special. You also needed to know your name exchange. Ours was MOhawk and I thought that was really tough and cool.

Anyway, people needed a single network to make this experience of switching between exchanges seamless, and they have done it. As a phone user now, you have only the smallest of chances to have to deal with a real live person in connecting a call across the country or the world. But do you remember how truly large Bell Telephone was? How specialized the positions were? Those people were part of the workforce transitioning the country from phone 1.0 to phone 2.0.

Of course this didn’t last. As integration and innovation evolved, so did the industry. Ma bell was broken back down into many regional corporate business units, which of course reformed into an oligopoly, just because the work is just that big. It’s a huge job and it takes an incredibly large structure to operate this much integrated communication. And many of the jobs shifted. The telephone operators became customer service agents, as the new frontier became integrating communications between the companies and the public instead of the operations itself.

Shifting from efficiency to capability

This is the hardest to swallow: letting go of efficiency and billables as measures as important as building capability. Especially with stockholders demanding instant accountability, it’s incredibly hard to say that you absolutely plan on being inefficient so that you can grow big enough to take the largest business, where no one else is competing: to be the first monopoly for truly integrated brand communication. But it does happen. The iPod wasn’t born with 80% market share, it took 4 redesigns to get there.

Does it ultimately look like a bond purchase?

Agencies who are truly committed to winning this race towards the middle need to pick up specialists at an incredible rate. Probably beyond what any internal HR staff can realistically handle: in sheer logistics, but also in having a depth of knowledge in one of these specializations.

The only way to do this effectively may be to absorb smaller shops, whether they be in UX, or visual thinking, or mobile metrics, integrate them physically (as much as possible), and get them to spend time, real time (like 30%), sharing knowledge with other departments, especially account service. And look at this transaction not as a pure revenue generator, but a capability investment almost like a muni bond, giving the company a smaller, consistent dividend over a longer period of time after an initial large investment.

What do you think? Please leave your take on who will win the race to the middle, and how, in the comments section below or on Twitter @mleis.

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What Value Do You Attribute To Your Personality?

My comment:

All excellent points worth calling out. There is a significantly broken premise going on in social right now because people don’t know what to do when faced with so many choices, and so many of which are either corporate and overpackaged or consumer-driven and hardly accountable.

To me, it’s about the fact that we’re headed right into ubiquitous computing and everyone above college age is losing their minds. They throw out words like honesty and authenticity and transparency and social because they’re not sure what the right word is, or how to wrap their minds around what it means to be investing in contexts instead of messaging, outlines instead of scripts.

But the more real brand people I hear from (this post as one), and along with advances in User-centered design practices, the more I start to see the forest for the trees. Be proud of what the brand is and does, allow people to be advocates, give them a platform to do so.

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Many companies right now, especially those that tout themselves as eminently “open” and “transparent” are playing a shell game based on cognitive dissonance that is truly troubling, and creating a culture where people will give up an incredible amount of information in exchange for just a peek at some number that may or may not be valuable to them.

But before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story:

So what is cognitive dissonance?

You can see all kinds of explanations, definitions, and examples on Wikipedia. In short, cognitive dissonance is what happens when people are presented with two or more unpleasant factors — and then reconcile them with something completely irrational to lessen the cognitive pain.

My favorite examples of cognitive dissonance are the ones we see every day at work. There is the cognitive dissonance that paying someone less will result in them doing more, better work. Especially today, the explanation is “the economy,” is why they work 70 hour workweeks and don’t get a raise. But the economy has little to do with it — it’s their way of rationalizing unrealistic pay and work demands.

Another great one is what I call “The President’s New Car.” I’ve seen this play out multiple times. One of the senior people at the office will roll in a bit late in the morning, this morning because they were picking up their new car. The office is abuzz with a mix of jealous-tinged excitement. The car is generally worth 3-5 times the average salary of the people buzzing about it. Why? Because of the cognitive dissonance of the american dream. The office works harder when they see someone achieving a clear signal of the american dream: a car, a house. The reality is that none of us will afford that car. But we can’t deal with that. So we work harder, thinking we might, one day, be rewarded with such a luxury for our work. We will “work our way up” in the organization.

When talking about “Viral marketing,” or “Website features like Amazon,” with clients, we’re not engaging at all in realistically building business, we’re engaged in negotiating the perceptions and realities of cognitive dissonance. Only 1% of videos on YouTube will get the lion’s share of the hits. Only one salesman will take home the Cadillac. But everyone wants to assuage the realities by diving headlong into irrational decision making.

The Monty Hall problem

Another wonderfully fascinating aspect of cognitive dissonance is in creating explanations for decisions that are completely irrational to make us feel better about making that decision. This ties into what’s referred to as “the Monty Hall Problem.” Some say it’s debunking cognitive dissonance, but I think it strengthens the case.

If you’ve ever seen the show, you know the problem: three doors, all closed. Each one has a prize behind it of varying worth, and you have to choose which one you want first. Say you choose door #1. The next step is not to show you door #1 but to show you one of the doors you did not choose, like door #3, where there’s a pile of tires. Now Monty asks, “do you still want what’s behind door #1, or would you rather switch to door #2?

The gut reaction is to stick with door #1. You chose it, and there fore it must be better than door #2. Besides, it’s a 50-50 shot at this point. Of course this couldn’t be a worse decision statistically. In reality, the choice you made has been reduced to having a 33% chance of success against switching, which now carries a 66% chance of being the right door.

These two videos do a much better job of explaining it than I do:

What does cognitive dissonance have to do with Web metrics?

Now I can tell you this story. Let’s finish the Let’s Make a Deal scenario. You stick with door #1 for whatever reason you’ve cooked up, and they show you door #2: the new car you wanted. You get the transistor radio valued at $2.98.

Right now, from Google Analytics to Bit.ly, Radian6 to Twitter, we’re getting the $2.98 radio and calling it intelligence. These companies aren’t transparent at all. They allow users to see a very, very small data set and see if that’s enough motivation for us to keep using their link shortners and putting their javascript on our site. They never, ever, for a second, show what’s behind door number two. In the marketing cycle we’re asked to compare their service with that of their competition. In the Monty Hall Problem, this would be door #3, the service that we don’t want — because it’s not meeting our perceived need.

This is mostly because we started our consideration set with that company — our door #1. They understand that simply by being first to demonstrate, they already have a huge advantage. We will do our best to convince ourselves that the first context was the best one because we chose it first. But we’ll find any number of reasons to justify that gut feeling. See Progressive.com for a great example of this with their comparisons.

So what is behind door number two? Only the people who work at these companies know. Do most people care? No. They are spending so much time making WebTrends or Omniture work right for their business that they’re miles away from calling their first decision a bad one.

All the while, these companies are hording the true gold: what I’ve been calling the metrics of the metrics. I don’t just want to know the data you’ve decided to provide, or the methodology that led to the interface you’re selling me. I want to know what the entire data set is and create a methodology that selects from that data set based on what the business needs to make good decisions. I want to see what all the people using this tool are doing. I want to see what all the sources of origination are for visitors to my Twitter or Facebook page.

So while I love my social networking and my link tracking and everything I can glean for myself and for clients, with every link I wonder why I give so much up and get so little in return. And I wonder if cognitive dissonance alone is enough to keep society from knowing who is really doing what in the social graph, and why.

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Email as a problem space goes so deep and so wide, it’s difficult for most people to articulate. Even though much of their job is centered around the operation of email, and passing information from one entity to another through it, people have a hard time getting past the “necessary evil,” descriptor.

Yet entire organizations, almost as a function of cognitive dissonance, continue shoveling coal (read: dollars and workplace efficiency), into this steam engine that is fundamentally broken.

This dawned on me recently as a large agency (who’s name will be withheld to protect the innocent), announced it was switching from Outlook to LotusNotes. Say there’s 1000 employees there using Outlook (there are many more, but just to have a nice number).

Is it too far fetched to say that simply by making this switch and having to adjust to a new email interface, and new email-capable phones, each employee loses 1 hour of work time in the year? What about 4 hours? Ten hours? At a blended rate of $150 per hour and net revenue of $60, the agency decision just lost $1,500,000 in billables and $600,000 of net revenue. For each employee to spend two extra minutes a day fidgeting with a device or interface. That’s completely outside any of the actual client work.

So what can we do to make email work in today’s workplace?

Equip employees with a second monitor

This is the thing you can do right now to jump how efficient people are in the workplace. Lifehacker had an article from years ago imploring office workers to upgrade from 17″ to 19″ monitors, citing research that showed an 11% increase in productivity just by adding those two inches.

Today I see it all the time. Much of people’s jobs, especially account leads and managers, is about correctly, efficiently relaying and presenting information in email. Or comparing documents. Or comparing emails and documents to Websites. Casually watching them work on a single screen is more frustrating than any user test.

With every new email or comparison, the constant switching of screens is a cacophony of inefficiency. With every application that needs to be brought to the front, the employees concentration is broken. Then the inevitable, “Wait, what was I looking for?” comes in, and a task that should take 15 seconds is now stretching into 2-3 minutes.

When you have two monitors, these tasks across applications flow with relative ease. Personally, I like to put all communications windows in one monitor and have the other dedicated to workspace. In this scenario, where you have one screen dedicated to email, IM, Twitter, Yammer, etc., new information takes only a glance instead of a small application-flipping process.

Again, this is a quick, get-IT-to-install-it-today kinda fix. The total cost to the organization is less than $1000, and you’re buying into at least 200 new billable hours and better quality for everyone that gets upgraded.

Make a new email interface for your business

Seriously. You’d never think to just roll out a default WordPress installation, or a default CRM, yet everyone in the organization is working from the default design of Outlook, a program little changed from a decade ago. How can this work well for you? It can’t. So everyone tries a workaround. From Yammer to Basecamp to Wikis, people are tacking on anything they can get funding for and alleviate their email barrage.

We need to accept that email isn’t dead; that it will evolve into something else over the next decade as boomers retire. With this acceptance, we need to start looking at how much email people get, how they use it, and the best ways to present it: on the devices the people in the organization use, and for the amount and varying levels of importance email carries. We keep the technical structure, but reformat the interface to better suit our users.

One particular interface design I’ve thought applies well to email use today is TweetDeck. While it’s built to deliver filtered information from Twitter to the desktop, think for a moment about how well it would handle email challenges.

Most emails require nothing more than a cursory glance at the first few lines to update some small bit of information: like a scheduling change, project progress, even a “thanks.” And most replies are friendly ways of saying, “I see this.”

At the same time, most heavy email users employ filters to automatically put emails into folders. But that’s not “flat,” in the sense that you can see what’s in that folder without losing the information you’re currently looking at.

Here’s a quick sketch on what such an email client, built in a platform like AIR, would look like:

Having shown this interface model to a few project lead friends, the early, highly qualitative and unanimous response is “Wow, this would be awesome.” In essence, it treats emails the way people process them: allowing them to scan first, and read selected items in more depth second.

BYO communications app ecosystem

I’ve grown into a big fan of building application ecosystems on top of Apple’s distribution infrastructure. But the bottom line is that the way your organizations runs projects has a core of repeated activities that today we spend a lot of time working around. Getting clients to review content like copy, images, and movies. Milestone and deadline awareness on different project aspects.

Let’s bring these tasks and objects into the enterprise environment: so that companies can gain not only efficiency, but control over the brand, interaction design, and ultimately the complete presentation of the deliverables that make such a valuable part of the relationship.

And this doesn’t even account for workflow that needs to extend all the way out to an external audience. These days, companies are starting to grasp that brands need to leverage social networking to atomize the brand into smaller more personal relationships with the audience.

Building a communications system that accounts for this channel, whether it’s talking directly to an audience, or flagging assets for a community manager to promote is just one of the key differentiators both agencies and brands need to embrace fully before they get left behind over the next decade.

Ultimately Social Media should be teaching companies how to be scalable and nimble enough to transact communications on any platform quickly: wherever and however the internal and external audiences want.

We’re right on the cusp of communications infrastructure being a selling point for employers and agency selection. The question is: who will be the first to tap into this next computing goldmine?

And Kudos to you for hanging with me through all 1100-some words! If you’re still with me, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comment section below, or on Twitter @mleis.

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