Much of the research I am doing for nGenera’s Marketing & Sales 2.0 program is focused on what we call prosumerism. While I’m sure some eyes will roll in reference to yet another buzzword, I find it to be a useful one. It describes the process by which customers are becoming actively involved in the innovation and communication around the products and services they consume (i.e. producer + consumer  = prosumer). Once you really start digging in, it is an extremely rich and interesting topic - but it can often get a little confusing.

Because of this when I speak about prosumerism, I like to start by looking at some questions around a very special Dilbert cartoon. Dilbert cartoons, as most people know, poke fun at society and particularly workplace culture, usually highlighting some absurdity that people can relate to. But in this case what I’m saying is that, for perhaps the first time in history, we can argue that companies need to start acting more like Dilbert cartoons, rather than less.

The reason I can say this (and long time wikinomics readers certainly already know this) is because last year, Scott Adams made a major change to the Dilbert.com site - they turned it into a Dilbert Mash up platform. Every day when Scott publishes his new cartoon, an alternate version goes up. In this alternate version,  the images are present in each of the three boxes, but the text in only the first two. Anyone could then login and add their own punchline to the cartoon (it’s since evolved to include Group mash ups and other things I’ll talk about later).To tie it back to the opening lingo, the site is now a prosumer platform.

I was participating in this quite a bit last year, so effectively Scott Adams and I were co-creating cartoons, such as this one:

Please, hold the applause… and the laughter is becoming overwhelming :).

Back to the story. So this looks like a cute, fun little example - what could the possible business implications be? Well, let’s start by looking at the perspective of Scott Adams and United Media - why would he/they do this? And would you do the same thing in their place? Would your company - and how would the decision get made?

Read the rest of this post here.

For those of you that might not be up-to-date on your Miocene knowledge, Aquitanian is the first age of the Miocene Epoch, which dates back something like 23 million years ago. If you think I wouldn’t have known that without wikipedia, you would be correct.

As always, you can compare this to the original at www.dilbert.com… and see the rest of my Dilbert Mashups here. They’re positively Messinian!

To understand the wikinomics connection here, you may have to read what wikipedia has to say about termites. Notably:

The termites are a group of social insects usually classified at the taxonomic rank of order Isoptera (but see also taxonomy below). As truly social animals, they are termed eusocial along with the ants and some bees and wasps which are all placed in the separate order Hymenoptera. Termites mostly feed on dead plant material, generally in the form of wood, leaf litter, soil, or animal dung…

As eusocial insects, termites live in colonies that, at maturity, number from several hundred to several million individuals. They are a prime example of decentralised, self-organised systems using swarm intelligence and use this cooperation to exploit food sources and environments that could not be available to any single insect acting alone.

As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com, and see all my other mashups here.

As I noted a little while back, the majority of my Dilbert mash ups are now being posted on a different site - you can check them all out here. However, if there’s a direct application to the principles of wikinomics they’ll be posted here, and there’s something about jury duty that speaks to either the wisdom or madness of crowds (depending on your perspective), so this seems to fit quite well with the ‘mass collaboration’ theme. It’s also interesting to note that we recently found out that the Dilbert mash ups are one of the prime conduits to the wikinomics blog for our Google reader subscribers - hopefully this will continue, and those that don’t like them can just look past them!

As always, you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com.

Coles notes version: if you like(d) my Dilbert mash ups, please visit them at their new home: Denis’ Dilbert Mashups.

Regular readers of the blog may notice something different about today’s Dilbert mashup: such as the lack of a visible comic, or “mashup” if you will. The reason for this ties back to some fellow named “Rob”, who clearly has no sense of humour and spoiled the fun for the rest of us made an interesting comment on the July 18th mashup. In short, he found the Dilbert mashup to be a distraction not worthy of his attention, and indicated he would likely unsubscribe from the wikinomics blog, even though he really likes the rest of it, if my Dilberts continued messing up his techo-babble /noise. I’m also fairly sure he didn’t want my autograph.

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As always, you’re invited to throw your hat into the ring and make your own at dilbert.com.

Thanks to Nicholas for this post - it’s refreshing to be called an exception in a good way - and to Luke for commenting on the post and directing people to the site. There is a 96.3% chance your life will improve if you follow their lead and send readers my way (you mean you don’t remember my first mash up?)

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. Click on the Dilbert tag below to see all 52 of my mash ups (and counting…).

You can check out the original, and all the other mash ups, at www.dilbert.com.

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. To celebrate my 50th mash up on the Dilbert platform, I thought that it was about time that I started branching out into a new genre - action films. The graphic below is not for the faint of heart, but it was recently revealed that Hellboy overpowered Hancock in the US, so somebody had to take a stand north of the border…

Continue reading…

As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. If these themes keep up I’m going to have to add “random violence” to the tag cloud.