[Jake McKee, a Lego community pioneer. Photo from his file.]
If
any of you have ever been to a Maker's Faire--an activity I highly
recommend--there is usually a room dedicated to Lego, the little bricks
that are supposed to be for children at play. It is much more than
that. On a recent visit to the event in San Mateo, CA, I met a kid of
14, who must have been a dead-ringer for Bill Gates at that age in
looks, brilliance and geekiness. The young man had built, not just a
train, but an entire model rail system out of Lego. The trains moved on
sensors and the complexity of the model was startling.
Nearby,
was a model of a robotic crane that could be used for nighttime site
surveillance, for example,to examine hazardous area without endangering a
human resource. The number of sensor-powered robots, prototypes and
bizarre and innovative creations was startling.
The
Lego company is now more than a billion-dollar company and it is no
longer just kid stuff. It is estimated that as much as 10 % of it's
revenue is for adult projects, many of which are the works of
hobbyists, while a good deal are now the bricks of more serios
endeavors. These adults have formed there own community, called Adult
Friends of Lego (AFOL). This is an active and exuberant community.
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff wrote in their recent book, Groundswell, "
Some products develop such enthusiastic supporters that communities
spring up naturally."
Jake
McKee, now "principal and Chief Ant Wrangler" at Ant's Eye View,
a
Dallas-based customer collaboration strategy practice spent five years
at Lego as the Global Community Relations Specialist. His job was to
make sure the company allowed the natural fundamentals of community to
pervade and transfor the company over time.
Here, Jake describes his experience.
1. What years were you at Lego? What were your primary responsibilities? Why did you leave?
I
joined Lego Direct, then newly minted Direct-to-Consumer business unit
of the Lego Company, in 2000. Our group was created to help bring the
voice of the consumer back to the company in a significant way. I was
originally hired as a Senior Web Producer, and starting working on our
community efforts nearly immediately. I was at the company for more
than 5 years, and the Global Community Development Manager for most of
my time there.
Primarily my duties focused on
building the relationship between the company and the adult Lego
hobbyists - people who had chosen the Lego brick as their creative
medium of choice. When I joined the company, I had a nearly impossible
time even getting meetings with colleagues to talk about the adult
fans. After all, the thinking went, why bother with 5% of the market
when there's work to do with the 95%. My task was to help them
understand the benefits for the business overall of connecting with the
adult fans.
A week before I left the company,
one of the projects my team worked on was a Wired cover story. In the
week after I left, the CEO announced a restructuring of the company
that put adult and kid's communities as a major focuses of the company's
structure. More than five hard-fought, difficult, fun, and painful
years had started showing return. I'm a challenge challenge junkie, and this was a
clear sign I needed to find new challenges.
2.
Tell me about Adult Fans of Lego (AFOL). How many members are there and in how
many companies do they reside? What percentage of them are hobbyists v.
professionals?
AFOLs are adults who have
chosen Lego bricks as their creative medium of choice. There are a few
who make a living by making Lego creations for clients, but a
vast majority are hobbyists who love the bricks. Males in technical
specialties, such as science, math and computers are the most
significant demographic, but AFOL is comprised of people in a diversity
of fields and from all walks of life.
It's been interesting to watch over the years how things have moved
from a fairly heavy percentage of "tech nerds" when the communities
were first forming to a fairly mainstream representation.
It's
nearly impossible to say for sure how many AFOLs there are worldwide
today,
but when I was there, we estimated there were tens of
thousands of active participants who make themselves known as adult
LEGO enthusiasts. Of course, there are countless "sleepers,"
people who build here and there, but haven't thought,
"I wonder if there are other adult Lego lover out there--like me." The
internet has created an incredible rise to Lego fans looking to
connect and discover. The internet allows then to connect across time
and
distance in a way previously inconceivable.
3. What are some of the most interesting creations by adult hobbyists?
Wow,
it's hard to pick just one. AFOLs have created (and continue to create
daily) some of the most amazing things. On
Brickshelf ,
a very old school image sharing site focused on Lego images, there are
2.3 million images. There are countless blogs, discussion forums and
personal sites that also share images. And of course Flickr and the
other photo sharing sites have their fair share as well.
4.
Tell me about Lego prototypes for professional purposes, such as
robotics and prosthetics. How did this get started? Why use Lego for
modeling? is there a community built around professional modeling?
While
I'm not sure specifically about prosthetics, the LEGO product has been
used in countless ways beyond a simple child's toy. From
corporate
strategy brainstorming to teaching special needs kids various concepts, and tons of things in
between. Lego is a creative medium, not a toy. Just like painting
or sculpture can be used for a variety of purposes, so can Lego.
5.
You were the Community Guy responsible for the LEGO Ambassador program.
How many members are there? How are they selected? How many apply? What
does Lego gain by the Ambassador Community?
The
Lego Ambassador program was a program I kicked off about a year before
I left the company, and was primarily meant to help further the
connection between company and community. At that time, we'd finally
begun seeing the internal support momentum for working with AFOLs pick
up steam and we needed a more scalable way to connect with the broader
community. In the early days of our AFOL interactions, you could nearly
talk to every fan interested in talking to you. But by that point,
AFOLs were joining the community increasingly faster and more and more
colleagues were getting interested in connecting with them. The
Ambassador program was meant to create a more formalize structure for
our interaction to a smaller group of fans who then could help to
represent the larger community into the company, and distribute answers
and content out to the larger loose knit community of fans.
When
we started, we had a fixed 15 "seats" and the program ran in 6 month
cycles. Every 6 months, every Ambassador re-applied. In our first cycle
we had about 75 apply, which was impressive considering how minimal the
information about the program was at that time. I've heard in recent
cycles, the LEGO Community Team has increased the number of seats, and
has also had a steady growth of overall applications.
Overall
the program seems to work pretty effectively, helping to give the
community a better, more focused voice inside the company. After all,
the LEGO Community Team is relatively small and the community is huge.
Ambassadors acted as a "congress", for lack of a better term. They
represent the voice of the community into the company, as well as
delivering news, asking questions from the company, and giving instant
feedback to the company.
6. What do Lego users gain in general from the Ambassador program? How do the Ambassadors interact with The fan-created LUGNET (Lego User-Generated Network)?
The company gets great feedback and an instant connection to the community through the Ambassador program. Ambassadors
are just like any other fan, although they have a designation of
"Ambassador." Many Ambassadors use the program icon as profile images
or post footers on the various community sites like LUGNET or
Classic-Castle.
7.
Back in 2005, Lego product development got hacked by some adult Lego
enthusiasts. Instead of freaking out, Lego embraced the hackers. Why?
That was in the early days of
Lego Factory,
a project
that allows users to build a model on their computer, upload the model,
then order it as a kit, arriving a short time later in a custom box.
Lego
Factory has many unique aspects, not least of which is
that I can design something myself and have every Lego element
pulled specifically for my model.
n the
early days, however, we just didn't have the logistics down for
fulfilling these custom orders. While the system has been refined and
runs smoothly, at the outset, we settled on using the pre-packed bags
from existing sets to deliver the custom orders. It
was inefficient and turned out to be expensive for users, who had to
purchase the entire bags.
The
community rightfully decided to figure out how the pre-pack bag dynamic
worked, so they could make more efficient designs, thus reducing costs.
Despite press reports, in my view, it was less
about "hacking", and more about crowd-source collaboration. Community
members started digging into how the design
software worked and how the site calculated costs and shared those
results with other community members.
We
were excited to see this level of engagement. Our customers helped us
solve--or at least provide a better band-aid--to an inelegant
implementation. Considering that they weren't doing any harm and were
simply opening files on their computer that our
software had installed or watching the website, we figured, "why try to
stop it?"
8. How have the Lego online communities changed the company?
Significantly, and from top to bottom.
Of course, my view is biased view may be biased. The company I joined in 2000 was a much different one than when I
left in 2006. It is even more different, from an outsider's view in
2008. Today, every product line shows some community influence; a stark
contrast from 2000 when we didn't have any real connection to adult
customers.
Generally, the company is showing
the affects of remembering that there are real people doing real (and
amazing) things with the product that is developed inside the four
walls. The adult fans, while still representing a small percentage of
overall sales, help to remind everyone from product designers to
marketing folks to manufacturing line workers that the product they're
creating and selling isn't a toy but a creative medium.
9.
How did your experience at Lego change you personally and
professionally? What are you doing now and why do you call it 'Ant's
Eye View?'
As a kid my two career
choices were astronaut and/or Lego product designer. Getting the job at
Lego, quite literally, fulfilled a life-long dream. This taught me two important lessons:
1. You don't get anything unless you ask, and
2. When you ask, you better be ready to respond.
Beyond that, by working with the Lego and its communities, I
witnessed first-hand that great products can bring people together.
They can change
lives for the better, and they can change the world. I've seen so many
hugs and handshakes exchanged between people who have known each other
for years but were only just meeting. I've seen events that light up a
child's eyes run by volunteers who work hard to provide that sparkle.
My
time at LEGO proved to me that your work can and should be significant.
If you can't delight your customers and improve the world, why bother?
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