Social Judgement - Servant of Chaos

Say Yes to Twitter

Audience 2.0, Crowdsourcing, Digital Strategy, Future of Your Brand, Memes, Social Judgement, Social Media

I was watching this video from the Kaiser’s Toilet on Twitter and Google’s new Buzz – and it got me thinking. Much of the discussion that we see around social media, marketing and new technologies relates to yes/no decisions. The conversations are framed in terms of scarcity – of time, resources, budget and so on. But one of the fundamental transformations that the social web has driven is that of abundance. Of information, knowledge and connection.

So we are seeing a fundamental disconnect between the way that we VIEW this emerging world and the way that it OPERATES.

Say yes to Twitter from Marcus Brown on Vimeo.

The idea of VIEWING a website or social platform is a behaviour that has created a world view. It comes from 50 years of broadcast TV. It places us, “a user” (and therefore a dependent) in a passive mode. The newer, social web places us, the PARTICIPANT at the centre of a hub. It requires choice, it engenders responsibility, and presupposes action. It PLAYS to the concept of abundance and see scarcity as outmoded, traditional, passe.

But as Mark Earl’s Herd has taught us, it is behaviour which changes thinking, not thinking that changes behaviour. So perhaps, surreptitiously, our engagement with the social web may have wider implications. Or maybe the social web is more chaotic, playful and unpredicatable than our marketing and IT “use cases” would suggest.

This interesting article by Alan Wolk shows how the #thuglife meme has made Twitter into a purely experiential platform. More importantly for marketers, perhaps, is the scale of this type of participation – which far exceeds the early adopter circles that characterise much of the social media debate:

It's an interesting use of the medium, and the people participating in these hashtags seem to be getting as much value out of them as the Twitter-Is-a-Serious-Business-Tool types who busily append words like "Genius!" to their retweets of a fellow blogger's "Top 10 Reasons Location-Based Services Are the New Twitter."

What we are seeing is the logical extension of YES. We are seeing the “crowd” embracing abundance and participating in a way which is consciously unselfconscious.

What would happen if we did the same? What if we said YES to Twitter? What would happen if we followed everyone? Would our world change? Maybe not. But maybe WE would.

Australian Consumer Online Experience: Earned Media Wins

Digital Strategy, earned media, Facts & Figures, Social Judgement, Social Media, Strategy

Right about now, most marketers will be starting to set their budgets for next year. We are looking at what worked this year, what didn’t, and thinking about how we can capitalise on the positive momentum and new product/feature launches that are planned for 2010. For some this means buying media. For others it means looking at earned media.

One of the very first things I do is to look at where my customers are playing. And by “playing”, I mean, where do they spend their time. How do they break down their days? I am looking for an understanding of their BEHAVIOUR. I am looking for opportunities to ENGAGE, not chances to interrupt. I’m seeking participation.

For me, it starts with data. I feed this into my continuous digital strategy process (regardless of whether it is digital or not). I look at the Google Trends data and I cross pollinate it with my own web analytics information. What do I see? I see the phenomenon that Ian Lyons is seeing. On the Datalicious blog, Ian suggests that Australian Brand Sites are Losing to the Social Web:

We are hanging out in social sites where relevant content finds us through our friends rather than searching out brands
Content is being pushed off-site through mechanisms such as RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels and Facebook Fan pages

Ian shares a number of graphs to to demonstrate (take a good look at the post for more), but this one above clearly shows a significant fall in the number of daily unique visitors to all Australian online media properties. The most dramatic fall belongs to NineMSN.com.au. The important thing to remember with this, is that consumers haven’t suddenly lost half of their time or attention – they are shifting attention (their precious resource) to other places. And clearly consumer behaviour is not shifting to brands or even brand websites – it’s shifting to our friends, connections and family – online.

Facebook is the big winner. It’s winning because the future of your brand is social. It is winning because the decisions we make are now social. And as consumer behaviour and action continues to shift, as people continue to rely on social judgement as a means of filtering the thousands of advertising and branded messages they encounter each day, brands are going to struggle to remain relevant or even interesting.

It’s time to think about what I call the Auchterlonie Effect. It’s time, as Ian suggests, for brands to think of themselves as (niche) publishers. And it’s time to think about shifting that media budget of yours away from SPENDING and into INVESTMENT. Remember, on the web, content lasts forever. Use that insight to your advantage!

Paid or Earned Media – Making Gravity is Hard Work

Branding, Digital Strategy, earned media, Media, Old Media, Social Judgement, Social Media, Storytelling

Whether you are walking down the street, watching the TV, surfing the net or even driving a car, you are the subject of some form of advertising. From the branded cap on the boy walking down the street to the billboard behind him – marketing is hard at work trying to capture your attention. Constance Hill and Bruce Henry suggest that we see around 3000 marketing messages each day. But no matter whether we see 100 or 10,000 messages – clearly we are exposed to a significant number. But how many do you recall? How many seep into your unconscious, adding a negative or positive neuron to your thoughts around these brands?

Now, add into this mix the dozens or even hundreds of blogs that you read and the tweets that you view on Twitter each day. Combine this with podcasts, music streams via blip.fm, videos on YouTube and email – and suddenly you have an abundant media stream that can appear overwhelming. As Sean Howard says, “In today's world everyone is a publisher, everyone has some level of influence, and everyone has a network of influence that is difficult to define let alone measure”. It makes the life of the media consumer rather complex.

As a marketer, however, you do have a specific objective. What you are aiming for is MAKING GRAVITY. With paid media you are using your marketing budget to have your content inserted into spaces that your audience inhabit. It is an expense which you measure in terms of how many people you have reached with your communication.

Earned media (or what Craig Wilson calls engagement marketing), on the other hand, is both different in nature and in measurement. Rather than being an expense, it is an investment. Its effectiveness is directly related to what you DO rather than what you SAY, and the value that is exchanged is not currency, but trust. As I have explained previously – it is about changing behaviours:

Every time we forward on a link, retweet a message read on Twitter or any other type of social network interaction, we are CHOOSING to act. We are not just using our network of connections to FILTER the noise, we are using it to SHAPE our experience. It is a choice. And understanding this distinction places us in a context where STORYTELLING emerges as vitally important?

Paid media has been an effective marketing approach for hundreds of years (if not longer). But it thrived in a time where attention was abundant and our media consumption choices were limited to a set number of channels. These days, media is abundant but our attention (and maybe more importantly, our respect) is scarce. Graham Brown has an excellent five minute piece on the challenges presented by these changes.

But the fundamental difference with paid vs earned media is the refocusing of effort. No longer do you spend your creative energies (and budgets) on producing executions that gain attention – you spend it on building trust and creating Auchterlonie Effects (stories that can be easily shared). Indeed, in the best traditions of storytelling, earned media propagates itself – becoming promiscuous in the process.

The reason that promiscuous ideas are important to your brand is that you WANT them to be shared. In social media, every shared idea, link or concept creates an exchange of value within a PERSONAL network – so the act of sharing is a recommendation of sorts. Over time the person who “adds value” to their network builds an abundant store of social capital. It is like branding – we can’t necessarily point to a PARTICULAR item – but to the recurring and ongoing sense of positive exchange relating to that person.

When YOUR brand story or content is the subject of that exchange, you are effectively providing a reason for connection between people in a network. And as these connections grow, as they are passed from person to person, you are creating points of gravity around your brand ecosystem. Your challenge then is to work with a continuous digital strategy to “share the message” but “own the destination”. The thing is, gravity can only be earned. And while you can employ paid media to complement your earned media – you need to make sure you have a compelling story to tell and to share.

Books, Sex and Why Publishing Still Matters

Books, Old Media, Smart Bloggers, Social Judgement, Social Media

I remember reading John Naisbitt’s Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives years ago and being struck by the concept of high tech/high touch. That is, the more high tech our lives became, the greater our demand for high touch elements. This could account for everything from office design through to the interest in gadgets, and surprisingly, books. And everywhere I looked I could see evidence.

Then, as eBooks began their steady march forward, there were many who suggested that the book publishing industry was on the brink of collapse. We now know this is not true – and that book publishing may well be in the healthiest shape that it has been in for decades. BookExpo America indicates that there were over 130,000 active publishers in 2008 – an increase of 27%. And virtually all this growth occurs in the small publisher category. Clearly it would take something seismic to destroy a $40.3 billion industry.

BookExpo America — Book Industry TRENDS 2009

View more presentations from bisg.

But despite the growth of blogs and other forms of social communication, books continue to hold a prominent position in our culture. Think about the recent conferences you have attended – how many of the keynote speakers are authors? Think about the way we still continue to revere books. Perhaps it is the lure of storytelling or something more primal. Bruce Temkin suggests that part of our biological makeup, fundamental to evolutionary success, is the way that stories transform our brain’s responses:

People relate to stories because it is part of their evolutionary makeup. Stories cause our mirror neurons to fire at similar experiences, helping us remember and relate.

In my own experience, as the author of The Dialup Guide to Blogging, and more notably, publisher and contributor to The Age of Conversation, extreme care is taken whenever a word is laid out in print. We take more care with words when they are perceived as more PERMANENT than the digital variety, and we pay more attention to their context when they are given physical presence. Yes, a potential employer may Google your name before an interview, but they may throw a quote back in your face. Words really can eat you.

But on the consumption side – as a reader – books are also becoming status symbols. Up until recently, our book collections or libraries signalled our own tastes, follies and predilections to a private audience – those who are invited into the inner sanctums of our homes. (I don’t know about you, but when I visit a friend’s house, I scour their bookshelves for insight and maybe even scandal.) These days, however, we wear our libraries as badges of social honour – with sites such as BookTagger.com, Amazon and Shelfari bringing our reading list into the social networking space.

Nowadays, books are indicators of our conscious attention decisions – when we choose to read a book, we choose to immerse ourselves in its world and the imaginings of the author. Kyle Mitchell, agrees:

But books go beyond this too. When we read a book, we are making a statement to others as well as to ourselves. We invest in an unwritten contract where the rewards on offer can only be reached via our own commitment. As readers, we delay our gratification until the very last page. It’s like a slow dance with an uncertain ending. It’s like sex – or more precisely – like seduction.

There is much that marketers can learn from publishing in this regard. How do we capture the inbuilt Auchterlonie Effect provided by books (allowing others to tell their story about OUR story)? How do we mimetically reproduce that high tech/high touch aspect that is bound up in hundreds of years of publishing history? I think Jeremy Lebard, creator of BookTagger.com points us in the right direction:

Reading provides a quiet solitude seldom found in our busy world. It invokes in me a quiet chamber of the mind that shuts out external distractions and focuses on the story at hand. From that quiet room I get the best view of the world no matter where I am. The view is like no other; I watch a story unfold through the eyes of the author. The author’s words become the script and I the producer and out springs a living breathing story within the walls of my imagination. I am forced to interpret that with which I am unfamiliar. Every story I read takes my imagination for a workout. Reading forces you to become a producer that even with the merest budget it takes to buy a book you can compete with the latest commercially produced multi-million dollar production. Don’t believe me? Just listen next time a book is turned into a movie. More often than not you’ll hear “It’s not as good as the book”.

It’s Not About Influence – It’s About Trust

Influence, Smart Bloggers, Social Judgement, Social Media

If you are involved in creating digital strategy or working with social media from a professional point of view, you are bound to hear the word “influence” bandied about. Maybe you have been asked to work up an influencer outreach program for a new product. Perhaps you are thinking about commissioning an influencer engagement strategy to help you tap into the pot of gold that the social graph represents. Whatever your reasons, consider this first …

What if "Influencers" don’t even exist?

Instead, what if we have confused celebrities in this WoM induced hysteria around Influencers?

In F*ck Influencers (or Influencing Conversations), Sean Howard teases out some interesting questions in relation to influencers and their perceived role in spreading a message or story. It starts with a focus around blogs and outreach, but quickly moves beyond that. Take a few minutes to read his post if you have not seen it yet. He rounds it out with a number of questions:

Why do people share links or retweet on platforms like Twitter?
What types of things do people share and for what benefit?
How does how people see their networks affect their decisions on what to share?

To me, some of the questions pointed towards the Auchterlonie Effect, but on second thought, I realised that what needs to be understood is not the effect (or transmission) of story but the underlying behaviour which triggers its contagion across a network.

It is not necessarily about connecting to the most people, but connecting to the most people who can derive benefit by interacting with you. You see, it is not about YOU creating value for people (by creating content, linking etc), but people FINDING value in what you do create …

Every time we forward on a link, retweet a message read on Twitter or any other type of social network interaction, we are CHOOSING to act. We are not just using our network of connections to FILTER the noise, we are using it to SHAPE our experience. It is a choice. And understanding this distinction places us in a context where STORYTELLING emerges as vitally important?

Fundamentally, my view is that ideas don’t spread through networks but through people. And, anyway, it seems we are just substituting the word “publisher” with the word “influencer” – without clearly understanding the fundamental changes that have already taken place in the socially networked world. The challenge for marketers is to find those who are open to sharing the message, the idea or story that they receive from someone that they are connected to. This is where the Auchterlonie Effect does have a role.

Of course, this would all make more sense if there was hard data available!

Mark Earls comes to the rescue by highlighting this lecture by Stanford’s Eric Sun, whose new research on influence is investigated with particular reference to Facebook. Far from confirming the idea of the importance of single point influencers in the instigation of “viral” or contagious content (as per Gladwell’s Tipping Point), the data indicates instead that these effects occur much more closely in line with the theories of Duncan Watts.

Gesundheit! Modeling Contagion
Through Facebook News Feed
Eric Sun

The research was structured around “dispersion chains” – the length of connections through which a message, story etc would travel across a cluster of connections. Sun’s research started with a number of expectations regarding the length of dispersion. It was expected that the following would produce longer dispersion chains:

Those with more experience using Facebook
Those with more activity on Facebook
Those with more Friends on Facebook

Interestingly when we think of “influencers” within a social networking context, we do think in terms of sheer numbers. We think of activity and engagement. And we think of those with “rankings” which generally indicate longevity, not necessarily velocity. Sun’s research indicated that “the user’s number of friends is not really meaningful”.

When Sun’s data was clustered by activity it was shown that almost 75% of Fans of a particular Fan page sit within an initial grouping – that they are already connected. Importantly, the instigators account for about 15% of this cluster. That is, contagion starts not with one, but with multiple points of connection – indicating again that “influence” is more closely related to action – with “doing” or “participation” than “telling” and dispersion. It’s more about behaviour – and for behaviour to become contagious, it has to operate within a trusted environment.

This is what really fascinates me. If influence does not influence, then the focus for marketers must necessarily shift. We need to be thinking networks of trust – and this is not something we can “break into” or “interrupt”. We need to be invited in. And that is a whole new ball game – that we may not yet be ready for.

For more thinking on this, take a look at Andreas Weigend’s open wiki on data mining and ecommerce – especially the section on Facebook and trust.

Making Influence Valuable

Influence, Smart Bloggers, Social Judgement, Social Media

I have written previously about the strength of social media’s weak ties, but I would like to also broaden this discussion into a conversation about the particulars of personal influence, about social judgement and about the way in which the nature of influence and trust is transforming the way that we interact and engage with brands and the people behind them.

Clearly we are all comfortable working with convenient fictions – we regularly invent stories and work within “roles” to allow us to behave as if the world we live in is anything other than chaos. Think about the roles that we take on as parents, lovers, soccer players, good girls, bad boys (and thousands of others). Think about the way these overlap and how we switch between them on-demand. But we are not made up of these roles – they do not define us.

Now, think for a moment about our roles as marketers. We:

Superimpose definitions on the “audience”
Harangue these audience “members” with questions about their intentions, preferences or past choices
Interrogate the resulting sea of half-mumbled data for insight
Transform this insight into something resembling strategy

The problem is, that the further we get away from the initial impulse – that is, to understand the complex way that we humans behave – the weaker the signal becomes. We subject this weak signal to repeated bouts of interpretation and analysis. We box it and strain it through frameworks and end up, somewhere down the line with a profile which we are comfortable to work with.

Now, before you fire up the Bunsen burner, I must hold up my hand to these very same crimes. But there is a deeper, more fundamental error that lies at the heart of this problem – and that is that we have convinced ourselves that we need to think big. We need to think on a mass scale. And we need a BIG idea to match.

My view is that this is also a convenient fiction, for all we need is to understand the nature of influence and tailor our marketing efforts accordingly. How does this work?

Seth Godin suggests that marketers are either scientists or artists, and that we change hats according to the situation. It is this shifting that we must become comfortable with – we need to analytically identify those people whose behaviours match the profile of our products or services and then creatively engage these folks with a range of communications and experiences that generate the type of behaviour that, for us, constitutes success.

Notice the words “range of communications and experiences”.

As Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield and Andrew Shimberg explain in the MITsloan article How to Have Influence:

If you want to confront persistent problem behavior, you need to combine multiple influences into an overwhelming strategy. In management and in their personal lives, influencers succeed where others fail because they “overdetermine” success.1 Instead of looking for the minimum it will take to accomplish a change, they combine a critical mass of different kinds of influence strategies.

Our challenge is to influence the influencers. This is where the FOOTPRINT part of your digital strategy comes into play. After all, we are not always on the same online networks at the same time. And we don’t all listen to, or interact with, the same people, sites or networks. Furthermore, we also play different roles in different spaces. One person might have a substantial network on LinkedIn, yet have only a small number of followers on Twitter. Another may have thousands of blog subscribers but only half a dozen Facebook friends.

It is only by understanding the granularity of influence in this way that you can craft the different kinds of influence strategies that will deliver your outcomes. And this means throwing out the convenient fictions and embracing complexity and chaos. But it also means focusing in on real people. Find a way to make their influence valuable and you will create the type of win-win situations that social media has always promised.