Wednesday, October 28, 2009

What's Fun Got To Do With It?

If someone told me piano stairs or flooring of any kind could be funny outside of the 1988 movie "Big" starring Tom Hanks, I'd be surprised. But Volkswagon caught people's attention with its piano stairs viral campaign.



I only relate this to enterprise 2.0 because the video was mentioned in a recent blog post, "Maximizing Business Value from Enterprise 2.0 through Fun & Motivation" by Rex Lee. He highlights:
"Fun, as a design principle shouldn't be overlooked as it impacts the application design from look and feel, through context, content and process. It also should be addressed when designing events leveraging social computing technologies."

Clearly, Volkswagon is taking a fun approach to impact people and communicate its message. I wonder how many other companies actually practice that kind of approach?

It seems that fun is more often reserved for business-to-consumer type businesses - and then, often only those with big budgets AND you're not really sure how much fun they're having. But I don't notice as many FUN approaches in B2B environments. Perhaps fun doesn't equal serious in many minds and serious is key.

Consultant and writer Bill Ives chimed in with his own post and reports that he's had success integrating this (gasp!) fun concept:
"I have often been involved in knowledge management implementations where we introduced fun as part of the awareness campaign. This approach succeeds even more if it makes the work more fun, such as meeting new interesting people to collaborate with and finding out more about your colleagues."

Wikis and some other other enterprise 2.0 solutions are easy to make fun because they involve collaboration and focus on fostering creativity. So fun can be brought in at the employee-relations level or with external audiences.

"The power of fun is often forgotten," opines Rex. Hear, hear!

Have you ever focused on making sure that fun is part of a KM or other type of campaign? Tell me about it.

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