Exhibit A: January 25, 2012

I’ve written previously about what you can learn by stripping things down to the bare minimum. So, as my business partner @deziner often asks, what are the learnings from this particular instance?

Whether it’s a status update or a tweet, you are essentially telling a micro-story. When you edit it all the way down to one word, it invites everyone to imagine and create the rest of the story. They must fill in the blanks. So, when I posted “Wings,” John Sprecher scribed “Buffalo or Paul McCartney and…?”

At it’s heart, this is what social media is all about—shared storytelling. A user shares an experience that friends and followers then participate in based on their own experience.

From a brand perspective, this is one of the most overlooked, misunderstood, and underutilized aspects of social media. Shared storytelling has been going on since humans gathered around a fire. Stories are retold (The Odyssey), re-imagined (Romeo & Juliet becomes West Side Story) and repurposed (Petroglyphs as done by Paul Klee).

I often wonder why so many in marketing still cling to the hope that they alone should control the story. The only reason I can see is if your brand story never held any truth in the first place.

If you wake up in the middle of the night, what do you do? If you’re still tired—like any normal human being—you’ll try to fall back asleep.

And there’s the catch—you’ll concentrate on trying to fall asleep. In other words, you attempt to return to the previous state you were in.

I learned a trick awhile back. Instead of trying to fall asleep, concentrate on staying awake. In most cases, you’ll be asleep again in five minutes.

There’s a business lesson here of course. When the going gets rough—when sleepless nights set in—most companies concentrate on the wrong things. Cutting costs. Trying to maintain profit margins. Basically mortgaging the future to try to return to a past performance level.

Instead, I’d suggest focusing on vision, talent, and culture. Hopefully, the business was built around a belief system—rather than a bunch of outputs that generate revenue.

If you are guided by a belief system, your sleepless nights will be minimal. If all you’re capable of is fixating on the bottom line, you’re likely to be staring at the alarm clock all night long.

The railroad tycoons thought they were in the business of railroads when they were really in the business of transport—they were myopically product focused instead of being customer focused.

I’ve heard this before, but it’s a good reminder to think about. What is your business really in the business of? Not the item you make, and not what people say they bought. What do you really deliver? Because ultimately, that is what people are buying.

Have you defined what business you are in?

Nope. Not talking about this kind of Pinking.

I just sat through a live webinar hosted by FEI – Front End of Innovation titled “Womenomic Meet Design: A Female Innovation Strategy.” It was a presentation about the findings of a 3 year research project titled “Female Interaction,” a multidisciplinary research project focusing on female interaction design for advanced electronic products. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s quite fascinating. You can check out more information on their site.

While the information was great, my key takeaway wasn’t an insight or idea, but rather a term: Pinking.

“Pinking” refers to the redesign tenets of “for female” products being based in stereotypical color, feel or visual implementations. You know the phenomenon well. There are cameras–and pink cameras for women. There are watches–and watches with flowers for women. There are earphones–and earphones with bling for women. (Not to mention, most often pink bling to be clear.) I know that I have been acutely aware of such narrowmindedness in product design for quite some time now, especially after the #littlemen arrived. I am forced to walk down segregated toy isles and have conversations that include instruction on things like: “no, just because that ball is pink does not not mean that it is a ‘girl toy,’ it means it is a ball that is the color pink.”

Perfect example of "Pinking." Why wouldn't legos for girls include pink shoes?

But more and more people are taking notice, and being vocal about just how silly (on the lighthearted side,) or detrimental (on the serious side) the effects of this fundamental lack of effort or thinking is. A recent post on Sociological Images entitled “Beauty and the New Lego Line for Girls.” points out how the company is terming the focus of introducing new girl themed legos to be on furthering interest in “science.” The goal: get more girls engaged with legos as a foray into engineering and the sciences. Obviously the only way to entice young girls to be interested in building things is to pretty the pieces up.

Sigh.

There were always legos for girls… they’re called legos.

I am thankful for research projects like the Female Interaction project, and for people who are making an effort to be aware of and point out examples of this lack of understanding on the part of product designers, and the companies that produce, promote and stand behind them. And now, we all have a word too. Which will make spreading awareness even simpler, and the discussions more focused. I challenge you to pay attention. What products have you encountered that have been “pinked” to reach the female audience? How could that product have been designed and developed to truly serve a woman audience?

And the uncomfortable question for the day… have you engaged in “pinking” for any of your own products or services? It’s worth the examination.

"Whirling Room of Light" photo by Jon Mueller.

The headline of this post is actually a tweet I favorited by my friend Jon Mueller.

I think it’s worthy of being a principle you tape to your bathroom mirror or laptop screen so you can see it every morning.

How many days do we regret watching too many Sunday afternoon games and not engaging with our children? Or when we twitter and fritter time away instead of working on our art?

I’ll make this post brief, so you can get back to that great thing you can’t wait to bring to life.

After all, this will be yesterday soon.