It’s right there on Clockwork Active Media Systems’ home page: “The Web has always been social.”
In a sense, the Internet is catching up with Clockwork. Or maybe it’s business that’s now getting on its time zone.
Cofounder Nancy Lyons calls Clockwork “an un-agency.” It’s a rather self-effacing enterprise: It’s not out to win big design awards, and doesn’t mind quietly engineering, designing, and strategizing for its clients behind the scenes. Nondisclosure agreements? They can live with them.
The 38–employee company’s home page summarizes its practice areas, and does so very clearly. Nancy also calls Clockwork a “user experience company.” To my non-geek mind, that means a focus on sites that are easy to navigate and (where appropriate) playful. And (if it’s a business site), not hard sell.
It’s a methodology tightly wound into the Clockwork culture. The company grew out of a legendary local online pioneer—Bitstream Underground, an Internet service provider that started out as an online bulletin board way back in 1994. Bitstream founders Chuck Hermes and Michael Koppelman hired Nancy a year later.
Back in those wild and wooly days, the Internet was profoundly social, with virtual communities like Bitstream’s and the WELL setting the scene. “The Web was fluid,” Nancy recalls, “before we were pushing commerce down everyone’s throat.”
During the pre-Y2K era—and this is your humble scribe speaking, though influenced by Nancy’s ideas—the Internet realm was dominated by people who made the online world into a mysterious realm that the great unwashed couldn’t possibly “get.” Hey, it’s technology. It’s supposed to be complicated. Techies were a higher level of being. You people just sit passively and giggle at the sock puppet. The Great Oz has spoken!
When Bitstream was acquired by Gage Marketing in 2002, the threesome started Clockwork to recreate something of that the intimate, innovative, down-to-earth approach to interactive that Bitstream embodied in the ’90s.
Now (as Nancy paraphrases Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg), the Web has become a utility. It’s becoming an essential part of daily life. It’s not just on your big old computer—it’s on your laptop, it’s in the palm of your hand. And fewer people are willing to wait for a Web site’s fancy Flash stuff to download. That’s one reason why Twitter has become a big deal—it’s simple. But a sophisticated simple.
(A quick plug here for a Clockwork side project called the Geek Girls Guide, which “seeks to demystify technology for non-technical audiences.” Check it.)
Clockwork recently created a social-Web tool of its own called Tweetwally. Typically, it ain’t rocket surgery. It’s just an easy, unflashily stylish platform for events to let them show what’s being tweeted about them on a wall or screen. Simple—and spreading worldwide.
A lot of companies are, understandably, still uncertain where to go with this social stuff. (Not that all of them have to jump in.) It doesn’t seem like real, grown-up business somehow.
The Clockwork people insist that the social Web isn’t a toybox. Done right, online can solve business problems and generate bottom-line results. One of Clockwork’s focuses is gathering and managing online data in order to help clients better dig what their customers seek.
But this new realm is kind of complicated, in this sense: The easy, familiar old model of pushing messages onto a silent, pliant herd of “consumers” is being booted off its long-held throne in the interactive age. Consumers are less interested in being passive. And in this strange new world, Clockwork—in its appropriately hipster-industrial workspace in Nordeast, which it moved into in February—has been growing fast the past couple of years.
Business is getting that “commerce,” as Nancy put it, “is a product of relationships.”
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember to follow: @clockwork_tweet, @geekgirlsguide, @TCBmag, @generebeck.
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