Social Media and Collaboration.
Social Media offers a huge opportunity for collaboration, for synergy, for output that is far greater than might be suggested by an examination of the individual components. Let’s look at an example from an era before Social Media and examine the lessons we can learn from it.
In pre-music download days, it was usual for a recording artist to bring out a single to accompany the release of an album. It was also common practice for the ‘B’ side to feature a track that did not appear on the album as added value for the fans.
In 1988, ex-Beatle George Harrison had an album coming out and wanted to release a song from it, “This is Love”, as a single. The problem was, he had no B-Side. However, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty were all spending time with him in LA and they quickly put together a song called “Handle With Care” and recorded it in a casual, no-pressure manner.
When Harrison played the track to key people at Warner Brothers Records, everyone realized that this was far too good a track to be a ‘B’-side. They wondered if the same team could create an album of similar quality.
The challenge was that Dylan was due to set off on a long tour in two weeks time! Nevertheless, using a borrowed studio, they wrote and recorded all of the tracks in those two weeks. No time to worry about polishing it, about doing lots of takes. Instead, they just went for it!
They collaborated ideas, arrangements, lyrics, pushing each other hard and just had a great time. The result? An album, “The Traveling Wilburys”, that Rolling Stone Album named one of the “100 Best Albums of All Time”. It’s a mixture of creative genius, distinctive musical voices and relaxed delivery. It’s certainly not over-engineered or polished so much as to lose any distinctiveness!
The lessons for Social Media.
1. When people come together in the same place, they can inspire and feed off each other to produce new and exciting solutions. Social Media can be used to circumvent problems of location, creating virtual groupings.
2. People who are the ‘rockstars’ of their niches can be brought together without ego clashes if a common goal, and a common desire to achieve the goal, can be agreed.
3. You can be really creative and produce wonderful results in a short time without having to over-engineer the solution.
4. There are several Cloud-based applications that allow documents to be shared so that they can evolve organically as people collaborate, bounce ideas off each other and push each other in the way that the Wilbury’s did.
If you use the Cloud for spontaneous creativity, what tips and tricks can you share with others?
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