The Vine

There was a time when my purchases were influenced, even triggered, by reviews on Amazon—wisdom of crowds, and all that—until I realized just how easy it is for PR machines to game the ratings (positively and negatively, and I’ve seen plenty of examples of both). If twenty “people” give a book five stars and write fawning reviews, but haven’t rated any other item, something’s hinky.

When you create a set of rules—or, in the case of Amazon, a fixed system—people will find and exploit the loopholes. And, like it or not, they’re perfectly within their rights to do so. The system is in charge, and users are simply playing by the letter (if not the spirit) of it. And so you find yourself layering rules on top of rules, eventually arriving at the kind of circular absurdity depicted here.

But when you create a set of guiding principles, you put the community in charge. When you can effectively communicate, “Here’s what it means to be a member of this tribe,” the terms of participation become, paradoxically, vaguer and yet easier to enforce. The community collectively polices acceptable vs. unacceptable behavior. (For a great example of this, see Flickr’s community guidelines. My favorite: “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.”)

This holds true in any social construct, online or offline—families, businesses, churches, knitting clubs, MMOs. I’m thinking in particular of neighborhoods, of course, where we create homeowner associations to govern acceptable conduct. But what if, rather than nitpicking the colors people might choose to paint their garage doors, we instead gave them a thoughtful, inspiring, human set of guidelines for how to behave more neighborly? (Yes, it requires us to define, and defend, what constitutes neighborliness. Yes, it will polarize some people.)

Stand for something aspirational, not against something negative.

This idea has been advanced by many others, much more eloquently than I will here, but it still bears repeating.

People don’t buy square footage. Or floorplans or elevations or parks or schools or real estate values. (And they certainly don’t think of homes as “units.” Can we strike that from our industry’s vocabulary?) Those things are the rational factors we cite to justify an emotional decision we’ve already made.

We buy a home because of what it helps us become. A safer neighborhood (perceived or real) helps a mom or dad feel like a better parent. A LEED-certified building near transit helps the environmentally conscious feel redeemed for reducing their carbon footprint. A community designed around urban farming helps a foodie feel affirmed about her localvore lifestyle, and gives her another means of telling that story to others.

As our friends at Strada are fond of saying, “This is not a toaster.” I don’t want to hear how much extra storage space I’ll get. I want to be part of something that I can believe in. (And that goes beyond the product, by the way. YOU have to embody that something too.)

The auto industry is really good at creating badges of identity—and their raw materials are steel and rubber.

Why can’t we, working with wood and glass and stone and landscaping, do even better?

NB: A framed print of Hugh’s cartoon above hangs in my home office. You can get one here if you’re so inclined.

One of the defining characteristics of a community is that it establishes and enforces a set of social norms…as I recently experienced.

I was in San Francisco for a lunch meeting at Slanted Door, the über popular restaurant that anchors the Ferry Building, a marketplace for local farmers and artisan producers. When ordering food, we deferred to the connoisseur among us, a regular who seemed to know the menu by heart. When ordering drinks, we went solo, and I asked for a Diet Coke.

Oops. I might as well have ordered the baby seal appetizer.

After a pregnant pause, our waitress coolly informed me, “We don’t serve soda here.” And the italics are hers, not mine. She spat the word out, as though it left a vile taste in her mouth.

(In my defense, a guy at the next table had a plastic bottle of Diet Coke sitting out in plain view—smuggled-in contraband, I now realize. No matter. His heresy did nothing to mitigate my own.)

Awkward as that moment was, I love that they have a deeply held set of beliefs and values—and that they’re not shy about telling you when you’ve stepped on them. The waitress was saying, in effect, “Go get your fucking Diet Coke at McDonald’s. We stand for something here.”

I didn’t do an exhaustive search, but I’m guessing you can’t buy a Diet Coke anywhere in the Ferry Building. To do so would be an affront to their community of independently owned producers, suppliers and retailers, and to the like-minded customers who flock there.

I had the iced tea. It was exceptional.

Photo credit: mulmatsherm

For people wondering what The Vine is all about, our website and other materials will tell you the (carefully crafted) story with background, characters, who-what-why, beliefs, purpose statements, etc. etc.

But if I distill it all down to its core, the raison d’etre for creating these gatherings (and now this online forum), it comes to this:

Inspired people create inspired places. And vice versa.

Very few businesses or entities, including the government, will influence people’s quality of life (for better or for worse) quite like community development. The places we create will either enhance or diminish the innate human desire for a sense of community and interconnectedness—to one another, to the built environment, and to the natural environment. Place affects people. People affect place. And so on.

From what people tell me (maybe they’re just being nice), The Vine has inspired quite a few of you over the years. The Pumpkin Festival collaboration between Newland Communities and Life is Good has raised nearly $1 million for children in need. The Ratkovich Company, moved by Dave Eggers’ unforgettable talk in 2007, built the 826 LA tutoring center in Echo Park. Actress/playwright Claytie Mason and musician/performer Rebecca Jackson have joined forces to create “The Wind and Rain,” a theatre piece hailed as “lovely, lethal and lyrical” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

And yet as much as The Vine may have given its members over the years, I can safely say you’ve given us more in return.

The circle continues.

Good music sounds even better through headphones.

It’s richer and fuller, it has more texture, and you pick up subtleties that you might not hear through speakers. And oftentimes it’s those subtleties that evoke a deeper, more emotional response to the music, beyond just ‘It has a nice beat and I can dance to it.’

The same holds true for many other types of encounters, particularly highly experiential retail ones. When people interact with your product or your brand — that is, when they try on your headphones — will they notice the texture and subtlety beneath the surface?

You experience this in landscaping that appeals to multiple senses and feels, somehow, like a garden. Or in a streetscape that makes you want to take a stroll, even if you can’t put your finger on precisely the reason why.

In a model home complex, I want to see books on the bedstand that tell me I belong here, not just whatever the merchandiser picked up from a used bookstore. With all due respect to Ernie Hemingway, Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius send very different signals than For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Let’s bring this back to music. The tunes piped through the model home sound system could be a generic satellite feed (or, worse, a local radio station). Or they could be personalized to my taste by Pandora. Or even curated by an audio architect from Muzak.

You could argue these are toppings on the sundae and what matters most is the ice cream.

And I would say you’re right, sort of.

But what is it you’re marketing…a rich, gooey chocolate sundae…or a bowl of vanilla ice cream?

[ NB: For readers who don't know me by sight, no, that's not me dancing. I'm nowhere near that hip. ]

Our organization recently lost a dear colleague and friend.

Don Oliver, pictured here with his wife and daughter, passed away after a courageous six-month battle with cancer. He was a kind and gracious man who gave far more than he took. We miss him, and the world is poorer for his loss.

We try to draw a measure of comfort in the knowledge that he’s no longer suffering, and in the belief that he’s now in a better place. Honestly, though, I’m not sure there’s any perspective—not that we’ll see on this side of the divide anyway—that can make us feel okay about a father leaving behind his young child, or parents outliving their son.

I don’t pretend to have answers that make sense of this, but I’m convinced the solace and healing we’re looking for begins in relationship and community.

We experience pain and loss because we form attachments. And we form attachments because the alternative is far, far worse.

Singer-songwriter Regina Spektor, whose lyrics often explore matters of life and death and the search for deeper significance, expresses this more poetically than I can:

This is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some…
Someone else’s heart
Pumping someone else’s blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don’t get harmed
But even if it does
You’ll just do it all again

Life is fleeting. People are precious. Relationships are everything. So keep forming them and keep feeding them. When your friends mourn, mourn with them. When your friends dance, dance with them. Be in community with the people around you.

And even when you’re harmed, do it all again.

Wishing you a peaceful and rejuvenating holiday. See you in the New Year.

At the Urban Land Institute’s Fall Meeting a couple of weeks ago, I attended a dinner for one of the councils, a group of 100 or so homebuilding executives.

The conversations, for the most part, went something like this:

“How you doing?”

“Hanging in there. This market’s just brutal. You?”

“Yeah, brutal.”

“Yeah.”

I commented to one colleague that in times like this, my work actually gets more interesting. That’s not to say I enjoy the plunging revenues, slashed budgets and layoffs. But we’re now trying new things and moving in new directions that we never would have risked when the money was pouring in. And that’s a lot more interesting than simply riding the wave.

My colleague gave me a funny look and said, “You must be comfortable with ambiguity.”

I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment. But I sure took it as one.

Hugh MacLeod is a brilliant, unorthodox, provocative thinker on brands and relevance and creating meaningful interactions with customers.

Hugh nails it yet again with this recent post. He writes:

“Too many brand managers ask the question, ‘What message do I have to craft in order to get people to buy my product?’ It’s a dead end. A far more useful and profitable question would be, ‘What can I do to make my customers’ lives more interesting and meaningful?’

And ‘Meaningful’ always has a social dynamic. We find meaning via our relationships with our fellow creatures. ‘People matter. Objects don’t.’

A bottle of barbecue sauce isn’t going to instantly change anyone’s life for the better. But that 4-hour-long conversation with an old friend, sharing a plate of ribs and brisket, with some Shiner Bock… Well, that might. So you want your product to be there when it happens; you want your product to be around during your customers’ significant moments.”

If you’re a builder or developer, good news, your product already is around during your customers’ significant moments. But walls and windows (and patios and parks and plazas) are just objects. It’s not until human beings animate them that they become places of significance.

Okay, duh, that’s stating the obvious. Then why is real estate so often marketed on the basis of objects, and so rarely as a story of people and relationships? As Lisa Kalmbach recently commented to me, “no homebuyer thinks in terms of price per square foot.”

One last thought. A lot of marketers now get this, and all kinds of brands are rushing into the “significance” space. It’s the sophisticated ones, however, that understand how and when (and when not) to insert themselves into the picture.

Last week I had the pleasure of spending a day here, AT&T Park in San Francisco.

I went with a friend, and we were joined by 40,000 others with a shared a connection — whether that be a love for baseball or simply a desire to be outdoors playing hooky on a workday.

It was a Ferris Bueller-esque sort of day (minus the foul ball…although we came close). Gorgeous weather. Indulgent eating. The relaxed banter of conversation with a good friend. And, oh yeah, the Giants pulled out a dramatic victory in extra innings.

As the winning run crossed home plate, we were a large, loud, euphoric crowd. But we were not a community.

What distinguishes one from the other? Plenty of theories abound (here are three). But the most significant difference imho is this:

A crowd absorbs an experience. A community actively shapes it.

Whatever business you’re in, you can attract a crowd or you can create a community. There’s value in both.

Just be sure you know which you’re after.

Ann Oliveri has previously blogged about get2human.com, a web service that provides shortcuts for reaching a live person at hundreds of different customer support call centers. (Sometimes it’s dialing 0, sometimes it’s saying “support,” sometimes it’s saying nothing at all.)

If I may tag on, what I love most about this story is that the shortcuts are provided from within. The organizers of get2human don’t spend all their time hacking phone systems trying to find the magic code at each one. Instead, call center employees—whistleblowers, if you will—voluntarily offer it up. If the company switches its system (“please listen closely, as our menu options have changed”), the new shortcut will be posted within a day or two.

A business builds a fortress to keep people out; its citizenry lowers the drawbridge to let them in.

There’s an interesting parallel to community development. It has nothing to do with your phone system, and everything to do with the places you make.

Your communities are full of whistleblowers. When you create (or better yet, co-create) delightful places that make it easier for people to “get human,” they will tell others about it. Conversely, if you build this, someone will take a picture, post it online and condemn it. And they’re doing you a favor (hear me out).

Why do call center employees post their shortcuts on the web? Well, I’m sure there’s some satisfaction in undercutting convoluted corporate systems. But the larger motivation, I believe, is the same as people who rave about (or rail against) their community—we enjoy helping one another. We want to share with others the pleasurable things of this world, and steer them clear of the painful.

The mission of get2human is not to stick it to The Man. They simply—and genuinely—want to help businesses provide better service. And so it is with your constituency, fans and detractors alike. They want to make your communities better (read: more human). In the process, they’re helping you become better (read: more human).

[Disclaimer: I realize there will always be unreasonable hotheads, serial complainers who cannot be placated. They are miserable curs. I'm not talking about them.]

Yes, empowered consumers and citizen journalists can be a pain. Business was much easier when we made stuff and they purchased it.

But this is a different time. A (hopefully) more human one.