Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Article Idea:

Size Does Matter: Striving for smaller wins in business

suggested by Alexander Chung on 2010/07/13

Our article celebrates the self organization of people into groups that are smaller, harder to find, and harder to communicate with, but ultimately more valuable to business.

We’ll examine lessons from biology, politics and popular culture to show that networks inexorably trend smaller and more specific.

Three recommendations are proposed to harness these patterns:

Forget scale – It seems that everything is growing online except for trust in marketers. We’ve been obsessed with collecting more fans, gaining more views and bombarding more people. We want a new strategy for the next billion people to migrate online, one that is more about quality than quantity.

Design for one – Here, we challenge people to think about concept first and audience second. Also, to break away from the comfort of large caricatures of society like “millenials” and “baby-boomers.”

Segment for value – Using the Gini Coefficient (and the Lorenz Curve) we show how a small world view can help segmentation.

The article would be co-written by @clayparkerjones and @alexanderchung who work at Undercurrent, a digital strategy firm. We will be talking about the topic in the upcoming Web2.0Expo in New York. The intended category is ‘Business Design’.

Thanks!