First of all, to make any sense of #Menshn and/or this blogpost, I suggest you read this superb blogpost by @scrapperduncan.
Let’s face it, Menshn is hardly the easiest word to spell correctly. Actually, I spelt it incorrectly, expecting it to be Mensch-n after one of its creators, Louise Mensch. Luke Bozier, whom I actually like as a person, is the other co-creator. Googling it provides suboptimal PR for its creators, with an article entitled, “Why I won’t be using Menshn, and you shouldn’t either” by Bobbie Johnson coming very high on the search. Whoever programmed Menshn should be reminded that when creating the html you do not include a description advertising the faults of your product. This is how Menshn appears, albeit at No. 1, on Google:
This is, however, the worst PR gaffe on the homepage of Menshn, which would make Craig Oliver reach for his rag doll model of Norman Smith. For all the detoxification of the Conservative brand, this is perhaps an unhelpful contribution.
Do I think corporate lawyers will be rushing to launch an initial public offering for #Menshn? In a nutshell, no. Armed with my copy of the seminal textbook of Tidd and Bessant’s “Managing innovation: Integrating technological, market and organisational change” which we had to read for our MBA, I wished to see whether Menshn is likely to succeed as an “innovation”.
Almost by definition the only people who can determine the success of an innovation are its users. The platform has,to be likeable, and easy-to-use. I’ve now been reliably told by very many people who’ve used #Menshn that it is ‘very buggy’, and it was most unwise for #Menshn to have been launched if that is true. For this innovation to succeed, it would have had to have organic support. However, it is the substance not the form which is important here. You can’t call it a ‘community forum’ (rule 3), if you are allocated friends (rule 5), you’ll be allocated an avatar if you don’t get round to it (rule 6), you can only select one of five topics.
Perhaps the most authoritarian edict will be, worded as rule 10, that ‘Menshn will grow and change’. This is a cardinal sin in innovation. It is not up to Louise or Luke as to whether it grows – for all they know it might go the opposite of viral, and instead become extinct. It is, rather, the diffusion of the concept and the rate of uptake of the concept which will determine the success of the innovation. Diffusion of the concept depends much on how easy it is to use, and how likeable the platform; Menshn I feel fails on both arms of this test (bearing in mind how ‘buggy’ it is). The only possible thing which could accelerate early adoption of Menshn if there are well-liked and well-respected ‘users’ who take it to like a duck to water. Therefore, it is going to be crucial whether David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) likes it, and it seems that @charonqc has formed an opinion thus,
If these two hugely popular tweeters really ‘took to’ Menshn, because they wanted to, this would make a critical difference. This is where rule 1 comes in – Bozier and Mensch would like you to ‘talk about it’, but of course any social media practitioner will tell you that criticisms can go viral too. Do Bozier and Mensch really wish criticisms of Menshn to go viral on Facebook or Twitter, such that #Menshn is trending for all the wrong reasons? Promisingly John Rentoul seems to have been recruited as an ‘early adopter’, but there is so much John can do on his own.
So believe-it-or I am relatively open-minded about it. I like Luke and Louise, and politically I think it is analogous to the ‘illusion of choice’ or the Tory definition of ‘organic’ – i.e. a top-down edict masquerading as ‘community action’, such as venture philanthropists “picking winners” in the disturbingly unlucky ‘Big Society’, or the new NHS Commissioning Board deciding what to do in a “GP-led NHS”. It’s not even that – I feel it fails on the basic criteria of innovation as the industry analysts understand it. I hope for the sake of Luke and Louise that I am proved wrong, and this time next year they’ll be millionaires!
