One of our favorite traditions at My City Lives, is our once a week meet-up with someone new to throw down ideas and generally just connect. One of the biggest benefits to “Stranger Whiteboards” is that it encourages us to refine or rethink our ideas once we begin discussing them. This week was no different when we were asked by a Stranger about our strategy for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For those of you unfamiliar, a good SEO means you’re close to the top of Google’s search results and theoretically in a good position for success.

Our answer was fairly standard: we’ve done all the usual things and “SEO is important to us”. That’s kind of a lie. In fact, that’s a lie.

Sure we’ve taken some steps to be SEO friendly but the truth is, we’ve been far more concerned on how we can be Social Media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) friendly rather than SEO. Nabeel Hyatt from Conduit Labs just wrote a piece which in many ways encapsulates our thinking, but here are some key reasons why we think more and more people are going to consider going Social over Search:

• Social Networking looks poised to take over Search in overall visits. In December, Facebook had more traffic than all of Google’s properties Combined.
• Not surprising, we read, watch, buy what our friends read, watch and buy. Mainstream news sites are seeing for the first time more hits coming from Facebook than from Google
• Google’s algorithm rewards inherently ranks older links higher than new ones so if I was looking for bars in Toronto, its far more likely that I would be directed to one of Toronto.com’s rudimentary web pages than a far more new and compelling one. Ergo, newer companies are at an immediate disadvantage trying to compete in the search game no matter how great their product or offering is. Unless, of course, you’re willing to pay a lot of money for Ad Sense. A lot.

So more people are visiting and spending time in social networks and are following the information shared with them in there at an increasing rate. Perhaps most important, however, is that the difference between Search and Social is that Search is powered by an algorithm, Social by people. With that in mind, we’ve always felt far more passionate about being great in Social rather than Search as a strategy for growth.

It might be risky, but risk runs strong through the veins of anyone who starts a new business and this is one we’re willing to take.

To continue with that analogy, here’s what we have on so far:

To ensure compatibility with multiple browsers, almost all websites are created with purposeful whitespace (typically on the sides) to ensure that all content is visible. The decision to not follow this convention on My City Lives was in part symbolic of our relationship with space, while simply also possible given that our sizing and content is always dynamic due to the nature of the application. The result: a living, growing and good looking map.

The slider was one of those things that when the gents from Jet Cooper first explained their vision for, we didn’t fully understand. This wasn’t surprising since our experience was with a more horizontal form of navigation where you select a link and get taken to a new page. As you’ll notice from the image below, the slider performs vertical navigation by ‘sliding’ down to take you to a new page or video. The advantage to doing this is that the user never has to leave the map (indeed, you can see it still in the bottom portion) and thus remains always connected to the reason why they’re there. The slider, therefore, validates one of the reasons why we chose to work with Jet Cooper as it leverages the concept that great design can concurrently have great purpose.

Now zoom out, all the way out. Toronto is our starting point, but boy do I get excited about the possibilities when I see this image (i.e. imagine if our default view was the most popular video at the time from each continent?)

It’s taken me two days to write this piece which, given its brevity and rather simplicity, should leave you scratching your head as to what took me so long. Since we’ve launched live, we’ve been identifying and swatting bugs while slowly rolling out the content, so I’ve been working perhaps inefficiently in a dozen tabs at once (the platform itself, the admin section, email, twitter, docs, fantasy basketball, etc). The majority of our content to begin is in-house, primarily created by our StoryCatchers who you’re going to be hearing a lot about soon but scroll below to see one of their videos (this particular one was created by doc maker Aliyyah Fazil).

In the meantime, please bear with us as we get things working properly and know that as happy as we are for reaching our launch milestone, it’s not without deep appreciation for the help you provided*.

A & A

*Don’t think you’ve helped yet? That’s cool, you probably already have without knowing it.  But if you’re really eager, just share MCL in about a week and then tell us to receive our “refer a friend” kickback: a virtual fist pump.

Clearly both approaches work, but there are also parallels between how these communities grew and what the communities themselves are like. Facebook by nature is closed compared to Twitter. In Facebook you generally have to except people/friends before they can see your profile but you certainly need to be a Facebook member; whereas most of Twitter is open to anyone with a web connection, member or not. One’s content is restrictive by nature while the other is open by nature and this is similar to their community building philosophies as well as developers’ ability to create applications for the platform.

So what kind of platform is My City Lives going to be, exclusive or open?  Well we hope it will be as open as Twitter and that the community will create all the game changing apps that Twitters community has spawned.  So how do we ensure this? We keep it as simple as possible while allowing our users to find useful information. But how will it grow?

Once you’ve decided on the inclusive or exclusive community part, then there comes the actual building and growing of the community. Do you send out press releases? Do you connect with bloggers in your area? Do you buy adds on Facebook (god no)? Do you speak at events/hang out where early adopters hang out? Do you SEO the %*@# out of your site? Do you focus on word of mouth? Do you take the age old inventors angle and just make something that you would use and hope that you’re solving a problem that many people have? Or maybe you just sit back and let Twitter do what it does best.

Well I can comfortably tell you that we are “focused” on most of these options.  But what we really want to do, is build this sucker from the inside out. My City Lives is about recommendations and exploration, so we’re hoping our community will recommend it to friends and recommend through exploration. This is exactly why we are adding 10 StoryCatchers to our team.  In no particular order, Ambreen, Emily, Bill, Gabby, Lu Anne, My Ahn, Simon, Mahmoud, Aliyyah and Grace will be joining our team officially this Saturday.  These StoryCatchers will be responsible for helping to seed the early stage content on My City Lives and will help define what the site is all about by infusing the site with their talent and creativity.  We have also been in contact with quite a few bloggers who write about Toronto as well as conventional media in order to reach the non-techies. There are many things we have on the go and hopefully some will even surprise you.  But for now, please welcome our new StoryCatchers.

Until recently, my thoughts on company culture have been an extension of personal preferences and values, be it something simple like having a library to facilitate continuous development or ensuring that My City Lives will create social value because of a strong belief in the economy of good. Although aware that one day I’d have to gather years of ideas and notes and hack together a manifesto of sorts, I hadn’t really felt as compelled until we made the decision to start hiring. At that point, motivated by the belief that community is paramount, it was clear that creating culture had become our most important priority.

Culture cannot be forced, however, and it’s an evolving entity. As such, to say that one is ‘creating culture’ is not as accurate as saying that we need to ‘facilitate culture’. The distinction is an important recognition of the value that your community brings (i.e. culture collaboration) and that there are simply too many variables that exist in a start-up environment to plan for something which should ideally organically develop.

Accordingly, I thought it would be valuable to share some things which we’ve learned or practiced while considering company culture. In every interview, we’ve said that our salient priority is to “recruit, retain and inspire great people”. Here are four approaches that we’re either learning or practicing that ultimately will ensure that we know exactly how to do that:

Studying the best: This one’s a given and accordingly, I won’t make a case for why it makes sense to do. While there a number of companies I studied, Zappos and I love Rewards stand out to because each is a young company that attributes its success to its strong focus on culture. Here’s a good story about each:

Zappos (source: Wikipedia): All employees that are hired for their corporate office, regardless of position, are required to undergo a 4-week customer loyalty training course, which includes at least 2 weeks of talking on the phone with customers in the call center at full salary. After a week of training, the new employees are offered $2,000 to leave the company immediately, no strings attached. This is to ensure people are there for the love of the job and not the money. Over 97% turn down the buyout.

ILR (source: Metro): Using the “A-players know A-players” strategy, I love Rewards motivated staff to spread the word about recruiting through their social networks by offering points that are redeemable for rewards. The company invited applicants to a wine-and-cheese open house. Resumes were not read but the company still guaranteed interviews that day and the ability to meet the senior leadership team and experience our office. The company estimates that it cut recruiting costs by 99.3%

Create a Philosophical Foundation: While a young company can avoid developing an exact document that outlines its guiding philosophy, it’s not excused from building a foundation of ideas to leverage from. For example, if you want your employees to value passion over their paycheck – you need to give them something to be passionate about. This requires the founders to consider for themselves why they’re doing what they’re doing.  Are you motivated primarily by passion or paycheck? Do you believe that great ideas inspire great people or the other way around? Ask yourself these questions as they’ll help you develop where you want to go while the next two points will help you get there (by the way, an example of laying the foundation is our belief that life is too short to work with jerks).

Create Opportunities for Culture to Develop: A city can point to its playhouses, performance centers and galleries as proof that culture exists – what are your organization’s equivalents?  Where and when can your team collaborate and create with one another? A community cannot develop without interaction and accordingly, leadership must find opportunities for this to occur. One approach that we’re adopting is having a monthly team meeting at a different location each time that will fuse together the company update, personal development and team collaboration concepts into a unique day of community and culture building. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Ask your community: During our interviews, we asked each applicant what they least liked about a previous job.  Asking this gave us some insight of one’s character but additionally helped us understand how previous employers failed to notice what they valued most. Knowing what your employees value is important in the culture development because you can works backwards on how to ensure that you’re a rock star at this. To do this though, you need to ask.

Speaking of which, what do you think? How would you facilitate culture? Do you have any examples of really great company culture to share?

With the end of 2009 here, the team at My City Lives wanted to take this opportunity to update you on our achievements to date and what to expect in the coming year.

It was only January of this year when we founded Creativity Killed the Recession, a grassroots organization that provided a forum for dynamic city builders to incubate ideas at a time when they were greatly needed. Charged with the task of how to ‘kill the recession’, the group collaboratively worked over the subsequent months to help one another and help our city with a bold project. Not too long after, the tangible manifestation of our creativity and collaboration was born in My City Lives.

The goal of My City Lives is to be at the forefront of today’s movement to reinvent our relationships with spaces, communities and each other. Our method to accomplishing this is by providing an online platform for anyone to share their experiences in their city using the most compelling and growing medium – online video.  Our unique technology associates their story with the location where it was recorded on an interactive map so others can visually explore communities through the stories of others.

Concurrent to our platform development, we’ve engaged with a broad spectrum of stakeholders (which may have included you) to properly determine how My City Lives would be of value to them whether it was a small business, an artist or even our local government. The product of this process was a forward thinking business model which would ensure that we could be a self-sustaining enterprise that was focused on ‘purpose’ in addition to profits.

As our friends and early followers, you will have the exclusive first peak at how we intend to do exactly this in the latter part of January. At that time, we will be launching in beta form for you to explore and experience. In the meantime, if you wish to read in greater detail about our people, philosophy and product, we have updated our blog with a comprehensive company update.

As always, we welcome your feedback and are humbled by the levels of support and interest we have already received from you. For a company which has yet to actually launch its product, it’s been a warming response and great validation that we are creating something that people can believe in.

So again, we thank you for your continuing support and wish you the very best holiday season.

Adil & Adam

This being the pilot, I think there are plans to do it again so if you’re interested in learning about how your city operates and meeting like-minded others, there will be more chances. In the meantime, I’ve written some relfections pieces which you can find on the 101 Blog here. Below is my final piece, more of a ‘what’s next’ rather than straight reporting. For more on that, again check the blog or the 101 official site.

One last thought: Our city is great. Civics 101’s existence validates this.

Adil “Toronto Fan Boy” Dhalla

Civics 101 Final Session: Grassroots

Do you demand more from our government?

I do and I have often felt that by demanding more, I was doing my leaders somewhat of a service. Having high expectations, after all, may be considered foolish by some but it can also be a flattering indication of one’s perceived potential. I know my city is consistently ranked among the world’s best but like many, I have this prevailing feeling that we can be better. It’s for this reason why I originally applied for Civics 101 – to determine whether or not my expectations were flattering or in fact foolish. It turns out that they were indeed flattering but rather than finding myself demanding more from City Hall, I’m now demanding more from us.

I thought that Civics 101 would provide me with the answers I sought about how my government worked so I could ostensibly derive some comfort from my newfound information base. But in reality, I completed 101 feeling slightly less comfortable about our prospects, because I now fully understand the full gambit of the activities and challenges City Hall faces. It’s not as if I was fully ignorant to these things before but where 101 was most successful was in encouraging me to truly consider the challenges our local leaders face. This left me with a new understanding of the difficulty to create change especially when it involves many stakeholders. Thus, while I might have begun 101 thinking tax raises were bad for me, I left wondering if they were in fact a needed reality for us.

The reason for this, of course, is related to our fiscal imbalance and that is merely one area (albeit a very big one), where I’m now convinced that the city requires help from those in the grass roots. Not only can our elected leaders not be everywhere, but it’s inconceivable to think that but we need to demand more from ourselves to pick up the slack where they cannot. This is the only way that it can work.

At the last 101 session, the word engagement came up a lot and for good reason. The purpose of this initiative was not just to inform, it was to activate.  It was hammer down the idea that our shared vision could only be accomplished if change was coming from both sides. Certainly, part of this involves communicating with and demand more from our leadership, but a large part of this starts with us.

So the question is, what are you going to do now?

But finally, a sign that someone is coming around. Sports Illustrated seems to have found a modern way to get people back into paying for premium content (not to say what we’re doing here isn’t premium). Please check out that Sports Illustrated link and enjoy the fact that not everyone in the news industry is completely stupid.

The turning point, however, was my introduction to Business Model Generation (http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com) - a book for innovators, visionaries and game changers that is unlike anything I’ve seen before. Sure that sounds like hyperbolic-fan-boy-rhetoric, but its worth noting that we have yet to recommend a book in the history of this blog. Whether that’s enough or not, download or view the sample provided on the site to see for yourself.

When doing so, you’ll immediately see the value and uniqueness of the book ’s design, collaborative thought and creativity (another reason why its a good fit to discuss here). You’re also provided an introduction to The Canvass, a sophisticated yet simple structure created by the authors to map out your business model and the determine your resulting strategy. As you can see from the image, The Canvas is simple and visual which is part intended for easy digestion and part recognition of the importance of the space where design and business meet. The overall product is more than just your average book on business model generation – this is an atypical handbook for a generation who are using business models to create change. The lack of anything remotely similar to this helps explain my own issues with developing a Value Proposition – the books and paradigms that I had studied were created before the movement for ‘profit with a purpose’ really gained steam.

I’ve seen the impact of book manifest in a number of interesting ways, one of which I was spoiled with last night at a Meetup for practitioners of the the book. Think Bible camp meets Business Models. Held at Toronto’s Center for Social Innovation (where else), a group of highly motivated business thinkers assembled to skype-meet the book’s co-author Alex Osterwalder (pictured to the left with event co-organizer Satish Kanwar from JetCooper), learn from some experts on how the Canvas could be used and most importantly, workshop in sub groups  to create new and disruptive business models using the Canvas as our facilitator. I expect there will be a stream of dialog in the next few days  (I’d say the Twitter stream was not as useful as normal because of the hands-on approach to the evening) but I wanted to touch on something that popped up when we were wrapping up at the end of the night.

A couple of groups joked that one of the challenges to the Canvas exercise was unifying all the intelligent minds in each group. As we get more educated and sophisticated in our thinking, a critical challenge for tomorrow’s companies will be how to ensure collaboration trumps competition. To be fair, I think competition can be healthy but when it comes to determining your company’s strategy and executing it, cohesion is essential. I’ve thought of this challenge often but more from a sports perspective – i.e. logically you want a team of superstars but if everyone is used to being ‘the man’, how do you keep everyone happy? Certainly, there are elements of culture and individual personality to consider here, but a large among of this cohesion will be formed when everyone feels like they’ve contributed to arriving at the decision. Again, this precisely is what makes the case for trying the collaborative Canvas approach even stronger.

What do you have to lose by not trying…well, other than your company of course.

The Huffingston Post summarizes the campaign including some of the leading thoughts on it pretty well here so I’ll provide you with a 140 character explanation: “Hit the Bitch” is an interactive website that encourages you to continue hitting a virtual female until she is too beat up to take anymore.

Its easy to understand why the PSA caused an uproar, but its worth noting that as bizarre as it might seem, it didn’t fail in its intentions. In fact, it excelled. The target of any awareness campaign is to get people talking about the issue, which is an increasingly hard task in our information overloaded world especially if your issue is one that the public is already familiar with. Remember acid rain? People don’t talk about that anymore either and yet when I was growing up, I was lead to believe that our entire environment was at severe risk because of it (as an aside, I’ve always wondered if the silence had to do with the lobbying efforts of those behind bottled water products). Domestic abuse is important, don’t get me wrong, but without personal experience with it, I can’t recall the last time I found myself discussing it. Of course, that’s now all changed.

Hit the Bitch, although crude and ugly, was effective and quite creative. Interestingly, very few people have used the word creative when describing the campaign but that’s exactly what it is. Knee jerk aside, do we celebrate it as successful marketing or is there a line that even creativity cannot cross and if so, where is it?

I sympathize with the creators. Sure they were a little bit misguided and lost their legitimacy, but if millions of people are talking about your issue today – and they were not yesterday – then maybe it was worth it. Or maybe, thinking too freely is not so good after all.

______

If you really want to see it, someone put a screen cast of it up on Youtube but I really don’t want to share it here.

Oops, did you click on this entry? Sorry, that “Read More” thing is misleading. Nothing to see here folks but plenty more on the rest of the blog.