Community Guy – Jake McKee

A little misty…

In late 2002, 10 LEGO colleagues, me included, came together to develop the Community Strategy moving into the future. This group, the “Launch Crew” (we had a whole Mars theme) met for 10 weeks, putting our jobs on hold in the busiest time of the year to develop plans, ideas, strategies and teams. Out of the Launch Crew came the LEGO Community Development team, my full-time community role, and some goals.

At the end of the 10 weeks, we all sat around at the end of the last day and chatted about our personal goals. These were the things that when they happened, we would say “Yep, we’ve done it… we’ve done good work”. My goal?

To have the adult fan community grace the cover of a major publication.

It’s happened. As of a few days ago, The Mindstorms Users Panel (MUP) and the Mindstorms NXT project made the cover story for Wired magazine.

Here’s the opening from the article:

The email from Denmark was only a few lines long. “It basically said, ‘We have an opportunity for you here, but we can’t tell you anything until you sign a nondisclosure agreement,” says Steve Hassenplug, a soft-spoken software engineer from Lafayette, Indiana. The cryptic tone of the email from Lego headquarters hinted at something more than a simple customer survey, but Hassenplug didn’t know what.

Actually it wasn’t quite Denmark, but from the US… my computer actually! It’s been an amazing process to see the MUPs work side by side with the Billund design team. It’s amazing to see them get the credit they so rightly deserve … and in one of the coolest magazines on the planet.

Last night I went to the bookstore and bought three copies of this issue. I have to tell you, I’ve never been more proud of the adult fan community. Steve, John, David, and Ralph, you did something amazing with this project – your humility and professionalism has opened the doors for more projects like this in the future.

On top of that, you’ve shown the world that working together with consumers is a great idea.

Wow.

Another Jake Interview

Thought some of you might be interested to know that I was interviewed on another podcast, this time for the Architectonic blog.



I’ve not listened to it yet, so I can’t make any claims about how good the interview went! The podcast feed can be found here.



Thanks to Christopher for the fun time and all his work in putting this together (and tracking me down to actually talk).

I'm in another book

I’m in another book… well, sorta. I’m in the acknowledgements at least.

Yun Mi Antorini has been working on her PhD for a while and has just published a book with  her findings (as well as a few other colleagues). Yun Mi and I have been talking about community concepts for years now, and it’s great to see some of the discussions make it into print, at least in some form.

Check out Corparate Branding: Purpose/People/Process.

Congrats to Yun Mi!

Excerpt from Spark

John has a short snippet from my interview with him for his book Spark. It’s a really interesting book, and well worth a read.



Check out the snippet here, or read below:

In Chapter 13 of Spark, Build a Community , I interviewed Jake McKee from LEGO. Jake’s ideas about building a realtionship are important:

What we really have here – when I talk about the relationship that I have with the fan groups (customers) and they have with me – is a dating relationship. If you show up on a date and you’re absolutely perfect, the person doesn’t think, ‘Wow, this is so great – he’s perfect!’

They think, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ Their defenses immediately go up and they assume you’re hiding something. When companies do that same thing you immediately think they’re just spinning it, that it’s just marketing crap and you don’t need to pay attention to it. But when you actually start to have an interaction with them, that back and forth, then you have a relationship.

Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s good, but at the end of the day, as long as it’s more positive than negative, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what people really believe; that you’re not just messing with them, trying to get them to buy something.

I’ll be blogging more about this dating relationship concept more in the coming months. Stay tuned.

BusinessWeek – The Power of Us

I’m a few weeks behind on posting about this, but several months back i was interviewed by BusinessWeek for an article that came out in a recent issue. The article, The Power of Us, was pretty good. Best part was the group of fans that I’d hooked up with the reporter on this story who were featured as the first page photo of the article. Sure, there were a few liberties taken with my quotes, but overall it covers the basic premise of what the Participation Culture is all about.



Here’s a quote from my part:

I'm an ourmedia.org moderator!

I volunteered to be a guest moderator over at ourmedia.org. Pretty fun go to through the archives to find my featured item suggestions. My favorite, by far is Pearl Harbor II: Pearlmageddon. Hilarious and well done.

So head over to ourmedia and check things out! (You can even see my mug on the home page)