Creator Economies: Could the call come from inside the house?

Let's try this one again...and again...and again

So you know how do to a thing that’s useful for your company? You do that thing and word spreads and pretty soon you’re doing that thing as much as you’re doing your day job. Then this little internal side hustle, it becomes your main job. That’s how Kat Norton, also known as Miss Excel, got started. After a while though, Kat started making TikToK videos under the Miss Excel handle and that took off. Now she has 1.1 million followers on Instagram, 962K followers on TikTok, 14K subscribers on YouTube, her own company that hosts e-learning courses, does custom development and more.

Am I telling you to quit your job to become Mr Powerpoint? No. I mean not unless you want to, then go for it. Do I think everyone could duplicate Miss Excel’s success? Probably not. Here’s what I do know - the tools to create really amazing content have never been more accessible to more people than they are right now. Everything from video to images to audio to whole online courses - the tools to create are free or next to it. I mean look at this list from Jane Hart’s Top Tools for Learning for 2024.

Those are the top 15 for this year and I don’t see an LMS or a content authoring tool among them (unless you could PowerPoint). So if people aren’t using those tools for learning, maybe you can think about teaching a different way.

So we have tools, and we tell ourselves that we’re hiring the very best people. What do we do with those people as soon as they get in? Of course we put them to work in the roles they were hired into - that just makes sense - but that’s often all we do. Back in the heyday of Twitter, I took a new job and as I was meeting my new colleagues, I got intro’d to someone I knew from his Twitter work. He had something like 12,000 followers on Twitter, back when that was a lot. He also hosted a weekly podcast WAAAY before that was a thing. When I met him, I was kinda star struck and I looked around and said - “do they know who is working here”? He chuckled and said no - like of course they don’t. Obviously that stayed with me. We design “internal mobility” programs so that employees can move to new jobs but we never let them build their own new jobs. We don’t have any systems or mechanisms organizationally or financial to allow for this. Why not?

What are we afraid of? Well, one knock on spending money on training, is that we’re just making people stronger for their next jobs. Kind of pathetic isn’t it? Either we think that little of the people we hire or at some level, we realize that we are hiring some folks who may be exceptional round pegs but we are so calcified and hardened in our own thinking and systems that we cannot see beyond the limited inventory of square holes we have.

Don’t we all know those people on our team who are always willing to help and teach you how to do something? Don’t we all know those people who are natural facilitators or the ones who always seems to be able to explain even the most complex of ideas in a simple and understandable way? Why do we always tell them to get back to their “real” work?

If we wanted to, we could deploy the most feature-rich and yet cheapest set of content creation tools ever available. If we wanted to, we could quickly create an internal site to host content on. We could provide aspiring content creators with a ready-made network and a darn near captive audience. So what’s stopping us? If I was guessing, I’d say systems (inertia) and imagination. I mean I don’t wanna dig too deep a hole but if we wanted to, we could also change the GAAP that says we can only account for employees as liabilities or costs but that’s another story.

If you’re wondering, and you’re allowed to wonder, what set me off this time? It was this article > > Twitch just added another path to become Partner. Will it let established streamers help up-and-comers? Now I used to work at Twitch Prime - that wasn’t Twitch but it was Twitch adjacent. Anyway, it just hit me that Twitch, You Tube, Tik Tok, Instagram, literally any social media platform that relies on user-generated content are all exploring ways to reward and incentivize creators. So how are these companies making realizations that no one else in the corporate world can seem to?

The easy answer is that their whole business model depends on it. That realization actually gives the corporate space an advantage. The tools are cheap, hiring and keeping the best people is hard but if you actually engineer this to happen internally, you may discover the hidden talents in your org. The advantage you have over social media companies is that you don’t have to care about revenue. You don’t have to care about ads. You can let people and their talents develop organically. If they do hit, and get big, then all is gravy. I never believed in the NFT rush around dumb pictures or whatever but I do believe that NFTs and specifically their ability to facilitate fractional ownership could be the financial key here. Imagine if you run an internal innovation program like I did. What’s the motivation for someone to submit their idea and possibly gift the org a huge windfall and they get a paperweight award of some kind? Now imagine we have an innovator, a content creator, and using an NFT and fractionalized ownership, you can let people own parts of their success in ways that weren’t possible before. You can do this with low/no code app development as well - what if someone builds an internal app that saves the company millions of dollars? What if they could get a portion of that as a financial reward ? We haven’t reinvented the GAAP like we should but we did create new internal, income streams for people. We already have fractional CMOs and CFOs…is the leap that big?

One final note on the practical side of things. I’ve worked in a training and certification org. We kept trying to own the training/content side of the equation and the certification side as well. The problem was that we were kind of getting our butts kicked by other content companies out there that were better, faster, and produced more engaging content than we did. An internal creator economy could have prevented that (if we wanted to). I know there were people across the org who were better at explaining the concepts in our content than our instructional designers were. I see a couple of reasons there and we can talk more about those later but typically instructional design shops are geared to produce a kind of kind of content - maybe in a couple formats but they are bound by their org metrics and the tools they have to use (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a course). Internal creators from across the org could have explored a huge variety of modalities and formats and the market could have picked the winners. But we don’t do that. Systems and lack of imagination.

So I’ll leave it there. I truly think the first company to crack this and implement an internal creator economy will unlock huge potential for creative output, productivity increases, retention of talent and happiness and motivation of employees. But who wants that as long as we get that RTO going right? ;-)