Anyone who’s  been to London, knows the phrase “Mind the Gap” which warns people riding the Underground to watch their step as they go from platform to train.

As I watched The Gap’s logo “update” unfold last week,  “mind the gap” seemed apropos as a caution for businesses: watch your step or you might get hurt.  In this case, The Gap has taken some steps with their logo that may hurt their brand.  It’s too early to tell how their brand will be impacted, but one thing is for sure, other brands can and must learn from it.

If you’ve been watching, you’ve seen how the story has been shaped by the public on platforms like Twitter and The Gap’s Facebook page:  The Gap introduced a new logo last week that received overwhelmingly bad reaction from both their customers and from the design community.   The overall reaction can be summed up as “how could they?”  How could Gap change their logo without getting approval from their market place?   Those in the brand world know this is reminiscent of another similar incident with Tropicana.   The good news for Gap – people have grown up with the Gap logo and have developed a very strong connection to it.  The bad news -the masses aren’t happy and that puts The Gap at risk of losing loyalty and brand respect.

There are three lessons that all brands can stand to learn from what The Gap is going through.

Lesson #1 – Don’t change your brand in a vacuum

Like it or not, the days of companies independently crafting and broadcasting their brands are over.  As more companies open themselves up, consumers are now empowered and increasingly expect to be involved in the brands and products they feel strongly about.  The silver lining is that crowd-powered insight and rich market understanding represents a great untapped asset for brands and can bring them closer to their marketplace. This direct input can dramatically lower the risk of backlash, and enhance the probability of a successful rollout for new products, ad campaigns, and yes, logos.

Lesson #2 – React quickly, get involved

Kudos to The Gap for getting this part right.  They were watching and very quickly saw that market reaction to their new logo was not positive.   They immediately recognized the misstep and embraced it as an opportunity.    This is a key skill all brand managers need to develop:  reacting quickly and getting involved with both positive and negative threads in the social media world.  Done well, negatives can be turned into positives, but you have to act fast.

Lesson #3 – Get it right the second time

Here’s where the jury is still out for The Gap.  When you trip, people will scrutinize your next steps closely.    In my opinion, they have already stumbled a bit by announcing last week that they would open themselves up to crowd input for a new logo, but today announced they’re just going to stick with the old logo.   I believe they are passing up on a tremendous opportunity.   Rather than turn this episode into a positive, they are condemning it  go down  in history as just another highly visible marketing failure, a la New Coke.  The Gap  had the world’s attention, and probably hundreds of thousands of people ready to get involved.   Instead, they are just walking away from the opportunity of  using it as a springboard for greater market interaction and involvement.

Today brands are a two-way relationship. Take advantage of the crowd’s desire to contribute and keep you relevant to the market and your brand will benefit.   If you still think you can steer your brand without market participation, well… mind the gap.

Originally posted at SimonMainwaring.com.   Follow Simon on twitter

As more brands embrace social media as a marketing strategy, many are racing to establish a sizable social footprint. For their marketers, that translates to creative briefs like, “How can you get me to a million Facebook fans fast?’ or “What bots can I use to fast-track my followers on twitter?” This inevitably begs the question: “What good are a million Facebook fans if they are not engaged and won’t do anything for the brand?’

Brands must work to inspire fan action, not merely seek fan acquisition. A thousand fans that share the same core values, that find a brand’s communications meaningful and that are willing to do, say or buy something for the brand are far more valuable than one hundred thousand passive members. In fact, if a brand is only after numbers, they are not only wasting their marketing dollars but the dynamics of social media will work against them. Consumers now look to brands for transparency, authenticity and accountability . That means a brand must show genuine interest in their community as Zappos, Ford, Dell, Nike, Pepsi, Old Spice and Starbucks have done. If they treat Facebook as yet another broadcast medium and twitter like direct mail, the only thing they will demonstrate is their total lack of understanding of social media dynamics.

The reason a brand builds a social community is to provide a fair exchange of value. The company offers something meaningful whether it’s product, service or cause related, and that generates goodwill and loyalty that effectively puts the community to work for the brand through word of mouth advertising. Yet if a brand is simply rushing to hit a “magic number” and has no intention of genuinely engaging with their community, that’s what consumers will share with their friends and peers doing more harm than good.

Social media is not a numbers game. It’s a relationships game. If you’re not interested in your community, they won’t be interested in you. So work out what’s meaningful to your brand and share it with your community. What consumers want is an emotional connection. Once they get that, they’ll build a community for you.

Do you think most brands are building communities the right way? Of are they simply managing perceptions?

(Chaordix editor’s note: We believe that crowdsourcing is one of the best ways to invite fan action from your community members.)

We often talk about what we call the “1-9-90” rule. This is the basic rule of thumb for most online communities:

• 1% of your community are people who will become highly active in your online site – they will make new submissions, comment on a ton of others, vote and just generally be so active you won’t know when they have time to eat, sleep and work. You’d love to have more of them.  I’m going to call them your “Magic 1%”.
• 9% will be moderately active, checking in regularly, commenting and voting and they contribute a significant part of the content that is created.
• 90% of your community will be infrequent participants, coming back only when they remember, or are reminded to, and many of them coming once or twice and never coming back again.

The 1-9-90 rule applies to almost every social network or online community site out there. For businesses, being able to identify their magic 1% is worth its weight in gold (yes, even at $1300 an ounce). These are the people, for whatever reason, who feel so strongly about your brand or product that they are willing to sacrifice their involvement in other areas of their lives for you. They have the personality type that makes them comfortable in offering up new ideas for review, comment and even critique from other community members, and they are likely your brand’s best ambassadors who aren’t on your payroll.

So, how to you find that “magic 1%”? Crowdsourcing, in my mind, is perhaps the best way. Traditional market research techniques like surveys and focus groups just don’t give you the combination of the richness of interaction and the chance to observe participation over time that is essential to identifying those highest value participants. Crowdsourcing is typically conducted as an ongoing initiative, so it provides the perfect stage for those folks to come out and be seen. The discourse on a crowdsourcing site helps you identify not only the quantity of participation but the quality as well. We further encourage, award and highlight participation by using a number of different incentive systems, including badges, which the 1% personality types just love to earn for their profiles.

Many crowdsourcing implementations include a community aspect, where people can build their profiles, upload a picture or avatar, and optionally tell a little something about themselves. By cross-tabulating the participation data that is generated from an enterprise-class crowdsourcing site, and the profile data, you can start to see trends and draw conclusions about the types of people who are most attracted to your product and brand. Then you are well on your way to finding more of them!

Most people think the result of crowdsourcing is the winning idea.    But equally valuable, if not more so, is what the sponsoring organization can learn from a well designed crowdsourcing campaign about their brand, their perception in the market and their market “sweet spot” by identifying their magic 1%.

Originally posted at 15inno on August 9th, 2010.

One thing that defines a strong, innovative company in the future is the interaction it has with its stakeholders and in particular with its customers.

Not many companies do this as well as Lego as you can tell from the below impressive list of fan communities, market places and more.

Dive in and get inspired…

Communities:

Lugnet.org: 3,844 Lego User Group members in 53 different groups.

1000steine.de: The biggest German fan site with 969.000 hits on Google. This community holds the annual 1000steineland exhibition that draws more than 10,000 Lego fans.

Brickshelf.com: A community concentrated on MOC’s (My Own Creations) with 3.2 million files.

Brickish.co.uk: A paid membership with their own magazines and special events.

Magazines and Clubs:

Lego Club: Three million kids that receive the Lego Magazine and participate in local events.

Brickmaster: A subscription-based club where members receive six magazines and six Lego sets a year and get discounts on other Lego buys.

Brickjournal.com: A fan-driven magazine with 8 annual issues at $8.95 each.

Enthusiasts:

MasterBuilders: 10-15 employees who build models for exhibitions and Legoland.

Lego-certified professionals: 9 Lego certified brick artists who do not work for Lego, but has created their own Lego-based businesses.

Fans: AFOL’s of ALE’s stands for Adult Fans of Lego or Adult Lego Enthusiasts. KFOL is the same for kids. AFOL Lego results in 387,000 hits on Google.

Lego Ambassadors: The current program has 42 adult volunteers from 26 countries. They help test and develop products.

Lego Education Centers: In the US, Spain, China, Korea, Japan and Australia.

FirstLegoLeague.org: A partnership with FIRST, a technology-promoting and charity organization with more than 140.000 kids in 56 countries.

Lego Learning Institute: Virtual research lab that focuses on children’s play, creativity and development.

Designbyme.lego.com: Here you can download Lego’s own design program, build a Lego model online, design your own box and have it send to mailed. It has more than 1500 unique design creations made by Lego fans.

Market places:

BrickLink: An unofficial Lego market place with more than 131.000 and more than 42 million visitors.

eBay: More than 41.000 Lego articles are on sale at eBay.

We need to give lots of credit to Tage Otkjer, who first created this list in Berlingske Nyhedsmagasin, a Danish business weekly. Thanks for your work…

Tage Otkjer also did some Google searches. Lego came up 41,1 million times, Barbie came up 53,4 million times and Coca-Cola came up 37 million times.

Lego is a very impressive company. Now the question is:

How can your company get closer to your stakeholders?

photo by Andrew Becraft

While many businesses are excited about opportunities to reach their customers on the social web, few actually believe they have done so successfully. According to a recent Social Media and Online PR Report from Econsultancy, 86% of companies surveyed planned to spend more on social media marketing in 2010, but only 25% say they have gained “real, tangible value” from the medium.

While the willingness to invest indicates that businesses recognize the potential to develop deeper connections with their consumers in the social sphere, many are still uncertain as to how to best join the conversation. To improve performance, firms may benefit from looking at the medium through a broader lens, recognizing that expanding their influence by enabling customers to connect with one another may be as effective, if not more so, than interacting with them directly.

Building Long Term Relationships

While it’s true that the web has made building individual relationships cheaper and easier than it used to be, this doesn’t mean that businesses can necessarily expect to build deep connections with their entire customer base; in many cases, this is neither feasible nor cost effective. However, if a firm focuses on building brand loyalty with a small subset of customers, they may find that it has an exponential impact.

Let’s look at a few examples of companies that have done this successfully:

Yelp’s Elite Squad: Yelp operates a social networking, user review, and local search website for members to post reviews and get user feedback on local businesses and restaurants. The Elite Program is a way for the Yelp to reward its most passionate users for making their site “funny, useful and cool” by providing them with exclusive offers and members only events. This allows Yelp to strengthen loyalty among Elite Squad members, offers an impetus for wanna-be-members to post additional reviews; and, makes the site content stronger – keeping the broader community active and engaged.

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team In Training (TNT) Program: The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is a charitable organization focused on fighting blood cancers. To raise funding, they developed a variety of programs to expand their outreach, including The Team in Training Program, which offers group training to those interesting in running a marathon to raise money for the cause. TNT encourages trainees to leverage the power of their personal networks, by providing participants with a personal, customizable microsite for reaching their fundraising goals by getting donations from friends and family. The microsite functions much like a Facebook Page – marathon participants can share their goals, visitors are able offer supportive messaging on the participant’s wall, and donations can happen directly on site.

Lion Brand’s Lion Brand Notebook: Lion Brand is a yarn company that has been in business for over a century. To build their online presence and appeal to passionate knitters, Lion Brand developed a bi-weekly podcast and corporate blog, They also helped to facilitate offline “knit-alongs” (shared knitting projects), by helping interested parties to find others in their local area looking to get involved. Lion Brand Yarn found that their customer outreach strategy drove impressive e-commerce results – those who visited the company’s blog were 41% more likely to buy at the Web site.

Securing The Commitment

You may have noticed that these three companies have very different business models: the first seeks a passionate and active user base, the second is looking to increase in donations and the third wishes to stimulate sales volume. Yet, despite the variance in their goals, they still share a number of similarities in their approach to the social web.

Each firm:

Inspires Their Most Passionate Customers – Then Puts Them to Work: By building strong connections with the most passionate segment of their customer base, firms such as Yelp, Lion Brand and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society can create strong individual connections that can lead to exponential results – ideally, as customers spread the word through their personal networks, they inspire additional customers, who, in turn, pass the message along and begin a powerful ripple effect.

Does More Than Test the Social Waters: Like all long term relationships, building real connections with customers requires a certain level of commitment, and each of the three businesses above are clearly willing make the investment. Similarly, the Social Media and Online PR Report indicates that there may be a baseline level of social media involvement necessary for a generating tangible return: more than half (52%) of firms that were ‘heavily involved’ with the medium believed they had gained tangible results from their marketing efforts, while, in comparison, only 13% of those “experimenting” believed they had gained real value from the channel.

Avoids Getting Mired in Tactics, Metrics or Technology: The successful firms above recognize that social media should be used as a tool for achieving business goals. Recognizing that a social strategy is a means, rather than an end, they don’t waste time counting their Facebook fans, instead, the focus is on creating social communities that delivers a value add to their users, allows them to connect with one another, and, ultimately, increases brand engagement.

Blurs the Lines Between Online and Offline: Understanding that the customer exists both online and offline, these firms are finding intelligent ways to deliver an experience that incorpates the best of both worlds. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training helps participants to solicit donations from offline connections online, Yelp rewards Elite members with exclusive access to offline events and The Lion Brand’s Brand Notebook allows community members to connect with others in their neighborhood to participate in “knit-alongs”.

Do you know of other companies that are leveraging their customers to grow their businesses exponentially?

Yael Davidowitz-Neu is a Sales Strategy Analyst at Google responsible for analyzing consumer behavior, search trends and market dynamics. She is deeply curious, loves all things marketing and blogs less frequently than she would like at Stickystimuli.com.

Just over two months ago, Jeff Howe tweeted an idea out. What if everyone on Twitter read the same book? The idea immediately took off and One Book, One Twitter was born. Why is it that some crowdsourced ventures seem to take very little effort and end up being very sticky? Here are a few reasons this one is working:

It is something everyone can do

The only barrier to participating would be not being able to read. However, everyone involved is on Twitter, so “being able to read” is already a given (and really, not that high a bar to set). You don’t need a fancy degree, or an ability to write code. You just need a book and some time, whether it’s on the commute every day, in the backyard on the weekends, or before you go to sleep in the evenings. One Book, One Twitter is an equal opportunity project.

It is something everyone can share

Sometimes, you just don’t have anything to say. However, if you know everyone is reading the same book as you, you’ve got an instant topic of conversation. “What did you think about page 73?” “I just got to the part where…happens and I couldn’t believe it!” If you love the book and can’t wait to get home and read more, you’ll want to talk about it. If you hate the book and can’t believe so many people are talking about it, you’ll want to talk about that too. Howe wrote, “What happens is that a lot of people with absolutely nothing in common suddenly have at least one thing in common. This builds what academics call social capital. Social capital is the WD-40 in our lives, the connections that result in new jobs, new spouses, and new friends.”

It is something people are actively interested in

After tweeting about it, Howe expanded the idea on his blog. Laying the initial groundwork, he said, “I love books. So do you. Let’s love one book together, our actual geographical location be damned.” What’s great about this is that is all he needed to do. People wanted to be involved, to share, read and give their opinions. If you’re looking to involve the crowd, make sure it is something the crowd is interested in.

The time and effort invested equals the reward

Sometimes, organizations get caught up with how much *THEY* are interested in participating on a project, forgetting that people are busy and don’t often have enough time to contribute, even if the interest is there. The only way to get around a large amount of heavy lifting is serious cash. With One Book, One Twitter, this isn’t the case – there’s no heavy lifting. You don’t need to commit your life to it, there really isn’t even a tight schedule. You get to read a book, you get to share that experience with people all over the world and that’s it.

It remembers the cardinal rule

“Ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community – replace community with readers, and you have what could be a blueprint for a book publishing strategy.” wise words from Howe, who gets it. He conceded any ownership over the project as soon as it began to take shape. You never know what people will be interested in, or come up with, so don’t try to force things on them. People have been buying books, creating a soundtrack to go along with the book, making Google map mashups showing where in the world people are reading the book and creating logos to be displayed in bookstores. That’s cool.

We had a great call this morning with some people working Mozilla’s Drumbeat project, including Matt Thompson and Mark Surman. We tried to share some insights from the Cambrian House community and hope they were helpful to the Drumbeat crew.

Not everyone contributes in the same way -The Cambrian House community had a pretty complex system to award points to community members, as not everyone contributes in the same way. For any project, you’ve got passionate founding members who are incented by potential reward, interested contributors who are incented by cold hard cash and helpful community members who are happy with a little recognition.

You need a project champion – People are busy. Unless there’s someone around driving the project forward, organizing what needs to happen next, it is very slow going. While nobody likes a drill sergeant, having someone with a vision of where the project is going and a good list of what needs to get done is invaluable.

Break everything down, sum everything up – The idea of joining a project that is entirely crowdsourced is overwhelming. However, the idea of taking on creating copy for an about page, or writing code for a join page isn’t nearly as intimidating. Bit-sized chunks of work are easier for people to grab, depending on their skill-set. Once a week, summarize the high-level view – where projects are at, what projects are doing really well, what’s new – this gives your community members the chance to explore new thing, to know their contributions are making an impact and to stay motivated.

Everybody is good at something – Are your community members contributing to this project as experts pushing a field forward, or are they using the project to work on improving some skills? It is great ot have a mix of both – learners are easily overwhelmed, but can end up being great at QA, or smaller tasks…the same things that experts get really annoyed at having to deal with.

If anyone has anything to add from their experience as a Cambrian House community member, we’d love to hear your advice.

A broadly influential thought leader, Dr. Mark Drapeau’s ideas carry weight in numerous communities. He is a sought-after speaker for events whose topics encompass everything from local and state government operations, to science and technology advances, to public relations and marketing innovation, to federal government, international relations, and military issues. The captivating and witty Drapeau is currently Program Co-chair of the O’Reilly Media / TechWeb Gov 2.0 Expo, held May in Washinton DC and is available for speaking engagements, collaborations, and advice. His unique way of looking at problems and explaining complex topics using stories and metaphors is a breath of fresh air in a world of boring consultants and cookie-cutter public speaking. If you are interested in anything gov2.0, he’s the guy you’ll want to keep an eye on.

Citizens are Conversations – Mark Drapeau

Post-inauguration Washington, D.C has been very interesting from the standpoint of the technology community.  From the top down, all indications are that within their limitations, leadership in the new administration is moving forward on a platform of more transparent and collaborative government.  And from the bottom up, a group of people dubbed the “Goverati” are using their knowledge of government and social technologies to influence the overall Government 2.0 movement.

Social technologies like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter used to be collectively termed “new media” – but that adjective isn’t accurate any longer.  Rapid, online, multimedia information flow about conflicts in Mumbai and Gaza, a dramatic plane crash in the Hudson river, the presidential inauguration and more have made it clear that new media is now more aptly called “now media,” as I remarked on January 20th.

But it would be misleading to suggest that social technologies are simple merely because they are prevalent – they’re anything but. Social media is a rapidly evolving ecosystem.  The experts debate constantly at conferences and in the blogosphere.  There’s no rule book.  Social media is a giant, chaotic experiment.

So, for a newcomer to using these tools, everything can seem overwhelming.  Many people ask me how to use social software to communicate what their office or agency is doing.  There is no one, simple answer, but perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that social media is social – it is about the conversation that people are having now, about you or your interests, whether or not you’re a part of it.

Here, I want to advance the notion that citizens are not mere receiving vessels for press releases and whatever you put on your government website.  They’re not a captive audience.  They are groups of individuals having conversations with their families, at the proverbial water cooler, and on popular social media sites like the blog ReadWriteWeb, the microsharing site Twitter, and the video conversation platform Seesmic.  Social networks people form online are becoming an increasingly important and powerful force in their lives and one need only look to the election of President Obama to see the effects that they can have.

Once you acknowledge that citizens are conversations, what do you do next? Generally, you want to find people talking about your topic of interest, listen to what they’re saying, participate in the conversation, and then start new topics of conversation.  Tip-toe into the chaos in the order outlined above.  As a DC-based communications consultant once wrote:blog last.  Below, I briefly outline some other tips to guide you into the world of citizen social media.

It’s good to be a RAT: Unless you’re a computer programmer, social media isn’t really about technology.  It’s about people talking to people. Social interactions have a lot to do with personality and trust.  As wine entrepreneur and social media maven Gary Vaynerchuk suggests, try as much as possible to be a social RAT: real, authentic, and transparent.

Street smarts count more than book smarts: A lot of social media is learned by doing, and more importantly through trial-and-error experimentation.  Speaking in a transparent manner with a human voice can’t be taught easily in a book or at a conference.  The same is true for building and maintaining trusted relationships with people.  Useful metaphors can be found in organizations as diverse as old-school journalists and the mafia or other crime organizations.

Citizens are talking about your brand: Traditional public relations unidirectional, and has been called things like “outbox only” and “fire and forget.”  Government entities need to pay more attention to their brands, and who is talking about them.  Organizations should talk to the people with whom they hope to create relationships, because word of mouth is still the most powerful force for spreading trusted information.  If you don’t know who’s out there talking about your brand, how to you know who to influence when the time comes?

Deploy ambassadors on a lethal generosity mission: Organizations should belong to a community and allow some employees to be individually empowerful.  By being the most generous member of a community, they may become the most trusted. Ambassadors should have knowledge but also great personalities, exhibiting openness, transparency, accuracy, honesty, and respect.  They can build valuable new relationships, cheaply.

Engage minds with indirect, intimate influence: Return-on-investment (ROI) is quickly becoming return-on-engagement, or ROE, because personal engagements with people and their word-of-mouth are the new ‘reach” of messages.  Use indirect, intimate influence to get that ROE.  Influence people through being a valuable member of their community.

Seek out government role models: Colleen Graffy from the State Department successfully used Twitter to connect with overseas journalists as part of her public diplomacy mission.  The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) uses a public blog called Evolution of Security to listen to travelers and their complaints – and overtly discuss policies and problems with them.  Representative John Culberson from Texas uses live-video service Qik to better communicate with his constituents.  What these three people, and others, have in common is that each one of them is a RAT (in a good way) and that they have learned, through trial and error and experimentation, the lessons above.

As top-down decisions trickle throughout government and grassroots efforts propagate upward, are you prepared to join the conversation? It’s happening with or without you.

Business researchers remain baffled on the “not just yet” phenomena of enterprise declaring the desire to embrace social technology when surveyed, but making no progress a year later. For many the concern is being thrust into a conversation where the crowd will hurl insults about how their products or services or policies fall short. So how can an enterprise dip a toe in and get started on the path to open innovation? Here are some ideas.

Monitor the crowd in conversation

First step – see what people are saying. People are talking about your brand whether you like it or not. Get out into that big, open world and eavesdrop on what people think about you.

This may prove much less painful than a trip to the dentist. You might find out people are saying great things. If they aren’t, you now have the opportunity to hear it, and improve in the direction the crowd wants.

Useful tools: Google alerts, Collecta, Radian6

Host your community – Invite the crowd in

Bring the discussion to you. You’ve learned that people have things to say about you, now create a community and evolve the one way chatter into a live interaction between you and the people who care about you.

Being the roof over the community provides an easy-to-find destination for dialogue on your brand, including for potential new customers. Hosting this dialogue gives your employees opportunity to hear from the crowd first hand, and gives you the means to amplify the positives about you and share how you are fixing the negatives.

Useful tools: Forums, Blogs, Ning

Pilot Open Innovation – Trust the crowd to contribute on one business need

Ask the crowd to help you. You’ve got the crowd interacting with you, now ask for their ideas to solve a problem or suggest how you can perform better. Add crowdsourcing capabilities to your community site, and invite the crowd to submit, discuss, refine and rank solutions that can pay off big for you.

You’re not handing over the reigns for your whole business, you can start off small! Ask the crowd to suggest refinements to a product you know isn’t selling well. Ask for research breakthroughs to problems stumping your internal team. Get suggestions on what service would make your crowd happy if you know that what you are doing has them grumbling. You know… it’s like talking to the spouse. That grumbling can be a gift if you have the courage to ask “how would you like it to work?”

Useful tools: Salesforce, IdeaScale, Chaordix

Photo by: tasteful_tn

The silence on David Rohde’s kidnapping has made a considerable amount of noise on the internet this week. The New York Times asked Wikipedia to keep news of Rohde’s kidnapping off the site. After printing an article explaining why, the rest of the blogosphere chimed in.

Stan Schroder, from Mashable, weighed in with his thoughts, including pointing out this is exactly the opposite of what Wikipedia stands for. He also raises an important question, “who judges what news is dangerous and what’s OK to publish?”

Mathew Ingram posted his view that it was wrong of the NYT to conceal the kidnapping. Judging by the comments, this hasn’t made Ingram popular, but he raises important questions.

Does transparency trump lifesaving privacy? What is the role of the editor in crowdsourced journalism? How does a community manager know where that line is in social media? We often talk in the office about whether citizen reporting makes people more accountable, or just always “on,” but what’s the other side of it? Is transparency as harmful in some situations as it is it beneficial in others?

We’re actively exploring answers on these, and other questions, but for now, we’ll take a moment to appreciate Rohde’s driver, Asadullah Mangal, who did not escape, something everyone else seems to be less interested in discussing.