Interview with Tim Thomas @imstarboard of Local Motors @localmotors about Community and Real Products
I had the chance to ask a few questions of Tim Thomas, CIO of Local Motors Inc., a fascinating company at the edge of crowdsourcing, design and real production products. There is a thriving community of designers and car enthusiasts involved with the company.
The Rally Fighter Tour stopped off in San Francisco and I had a chance to see CEO Jay Rogers on a panel speaking on how the new social technologies can lead to real world products for Social Media Week 2010.
According to Tim, the beginnings of a community started with a placeholder website that interested people could join an email list and be notified when the site officially launched. The community started to build on its own when the website launched and members could enter a series of competitions- they could upload images and share ideas. Now Local Motors Website is now a community of transportation designers and enthusiasts can gather, share ideas and get feedback. With approximately 5000 active members, there is a vibrant community that gather online and offline.
Local motors invited other car and design communities to participate in competitions. They have sent representatives to American transportation design schools, brought the Rally Fighter and involved the students. In addition, they also have other offline events where they invite local enthusiasts from Rhode Island, Connecticut to the shop for "Burgers and Welding".
In my experience, these real life events are key to creating a more significant community. Add that key component to YouTube, Flickr, website, Facebook and Twitter presence, this is one company that is doing it right.
Here's the interview with Tim:
1. Tell us a little about the philosophy behind Local Motors.
Local Motors' mission is to lead the next generation of automotive manufacturing, design, and technology in order to revolutionize the industry with game-changing efficient vehicles and an unprecedented standard of customer service. In order to accomplish this, we have a high degree of interaction and integration with our community. It is our philosophy to provide an open, collaborative environment where there is mutual symbiosis between Local Motors and our community. In our open source model, transportation designers, engineers and enthusiasts can share their concepts and designs for feedback, for collaborating on designs with other members, and for the opportunity for selected designs to be built by Local Motors. Conversely, Local Motors makes our our technical vehicle specifications and open-source chassis data available to specialty equipment manufacturers so they can manufacture and sell custom parts to spec for our vehicles.
Our product development process is also open, displaying revisions and milestones as they occur on our website. This is the absolute opposite of traditional automotive manufacturers that "take a few high-profile designers behind locked doors, and 5 years later pull off the sheet to show the public what they can all buy". We are as involved with our community as they are with us. We educate them and celebrate their progress and their successes both on and off of our website, and they contribute their perspectives and ideas with each other, and with our product. Beyond that, future customers contribute their ideas and suggestions in the vehicle development process, helping shape the product they are going to buy. It's a win-win situation all around.
2. How much of this came out of the DIY movement?
The Local Motors Vehicle Build experience is one huge differentiator that Local Motors provides our customers, however Local Motors did not come out of a DIY movement. DIY is not new - I watched my father build a heathkit stereo in the 1960s. That said, DIY has recently significantly increased in popularity, partially due to the emergence of businesses that make small-scale customized manufacturing available to individuals and small businesses. Local Motors in particular does have significant domain knowledge of DIY. Our engineers have designed and manufactured vehicles at Factory Five Racing, a very successful DIY-racecar manufacturer that engineers their vehicles from the ground up.
The DIY movement is a huge inspiration. Whether you're building cars, airplanes, computers or radios - if you build it yourself, you care more. You learn more. This experience is essential to building not only relationships but a sustainable process; if you build a Rally Fighter with your children, chances are you will want to keep it forever.
3. How many people were involved initially? Now?
The idea began to foster while Jay Rogers, CEO, was a Marine in Iraq. Jay had always loved cars and was hugely influenced by his grandfather who was owner of Indian Motorcycles. It started with one person wanting to impact the American car industry in a positive way; cars are one of the largest end uses of oil, and if Jay could reduce our need for foreign oil, reduce the need for military solutions, while building cars he loved - that's what he wanted to do. So he went to Harvard Business School, met his co-founder Jeff Jones and set the business plan for Local Motors.
The initial efforts of the business were to create a product plan for the first vehicle while simultaneously building out our website in order to grow our community. At that point there was Jay, the CEO, Karin Ostebo Finance/HR/Office Manger, me and a developer named Andy Cronk building the website, 2 vehicle engineers Mike Pisani and Dave Riha and one Community Evangelist, Ariel Ferreira. The community grew slowly and has since grown to over 5,000 members from around the globe. When the Rally Fighter was chosen for development we hired full time designers and now work with two, Aurel Francois and Nyko De Peyer. Both Aurel and Nyko were hired from the community. We also work with an excellent team of contractors who help with everything from fabrication and modeling to video production.
4. What do you think was the turning point (if there was one), where you, as an organization realized "Wow, this community sourced design for real world products is working!"
We have always been confident that it would work. The turning point you ask about came for other people - the press, skeptics, our community members who wanted to participate in designing a car that would actually be built... they mostly seemed to be cautiously optimistic. The biggest turning point has been the physical proof - that we actually did build exactly what we promised, on target and on budget. That and about 60 Rally Fighters have been reserved to date!
5. You have a great social media presence, I've found you on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, your own website- could you tell us a little more about the goals of putting all this great content out and how you chose the tools?
Really we want to share as much as possible to increase involvement and feedback from our community. We look at community in a holistic way; Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube all help to direct traffic and participation to local-motors.com where people can vote and help design the cars they love.
As you point out, it is our strategy to maintain a presence where our community and fans can be found. This is especially important these days, because we now live in a world where people are often likely to seek product advice from each other rather than base purchasing decisions on brand loyalty. Sites like Facebook and Youtube provide access to both trusted peers and consensus opinions of "the masses", two important sources of influence over present day consumers. As a result, this is one reason we are committed to providing content on sites like Facebook, Youtube and Flickr. Another reason is that with the increasing viewership and viral nature of these sites, this is a great way to introduce our products and company to untapped audiences. Ultimately, those who are interested in learning more, want to get involved with our collaborative experience or who want to become customers will come to our website or visit us in person.
The bulk of our exposure, however, seems to be growing outside of these types of social media sites. We are getting an increasing amount of great media coverage by sources like Wired (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/) and Jalopnik (http://jalopnik.com/5398864/local-motors-rally-fighter-the-first+ever-creative-commons-car) for example. Our CEO, Jay Rogers, is also regularly asked to participate in highly visible business and social media conferences as a panelist. Additionally, a significant amount of exposure comes from physical exposure. Our Rally Fighter debuted at the SEMA auto show in Las Vegas, and we have taken it to several off-road rally races, and are currently taking it to the community on a national tour (http://www.local-motors.com/static.php?p=RFTour) so that people can kick the tires and talk to us in person, something we feel is even more powerful than on-line exposure in building excitement and trust.
But to finish your answer, we are always exploring new tools, usually free, that will simplify the dissemination of content. We use free tools like Seesmic desktop, Tweetdeck and CoTweet to make sure we keep up with Twitter. We are now using Pingg to schedule events because if it's integration to many resources such as Facebook and Google Calendar. Shortly we will release Facebook Connect on our website in order to leverage Facebook's social graph and to empower our members to flow content in both directions between Facebook and our website.
We also build some of what we need. For example, we use Google Apps because it works for us (and it's also free). As a result, we can build a tour calendar for the Rally Fighter in Google, entering locations and times into the calendar, but then we built an interface between them so that the calendar automatically feeds Google Maps, pinpointing the locations of the events. We have also integrated the conversation on our website into a twitter account @lm_car_chat, and we have integrated this into bit.ly so that each tweet links back to that discussion on our website, and we display #rallyfighter tweets on the tour page. Any fresh content that we can automate like this is a huge time and cost savings.
6. How many people do you have creating content for the social media/community sites?
Internally, I would say that 5 of us are actively contributing content to our website and social media sites, and we also have 4 people from a partner firm called Kinetic Fin that contributes as well. There are 3 people who are tasked with updating each of the sites, but this only amounts to a relatively small portion of their day. Everyone on our team can be reached via Local Motors, and several via Facebook & Twitter.
Lucky for us, our story is one that people want to tell, and as a result, most of the content is created by bloggers, reporters and our community members.
