Social Judgement - Servant of Chaos

It’s Not About the Eyeballs, It’s About the Glasses

The changes that we are experiencing in the global economy are clearly challenging the way that we go about the business of branding. Funding is drying up, consumers are driving a range of new approaches to the content we produce and the manner in which we consume it, and agencies struggle to clearly plan and execute engagement strategies that generate tangible returns to their clients.

Even the social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo and so on continue to frame their conversations around eyeballs, traffic and reach. This myopia seems to have come out of the publishing industry – where social networks have taken and tweaked a publishing business model – but not taken the time to reinvent a market from the ground up.

At the Ad:Tech Sydney social media panel discussion featuring representatives from Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Bebo, I asked whether the social networks will continue to aim to be all things to all people, or begin to build their own niches. And while there was no clear answer here – my view is that the challenge for the platforms is to act as a FRAME of reference for their audiences.

I suggested in It’s Not a Filter, It’s a Choice, we are increasingly turning to the people in our social graphs to help us determine the relevance of all types of data circulating around us. In support of this self-segmenting approach, we are also seeking out tools that can augment and extend our social networks in meaningful ways – see Twitter + TweetDeck as one example.

Unfortunately, the real value in these social networks seems to be unrealised by those who own and operate the platforms. As time goes on they all seem destined to morph into Web 2.0 enabled publishers aiming to sell eyeballs to advertisers without a whiff of deeper engagement. But really, what WE need is not another platform being thrown at a broken business model – we need a platform that will help us FRAME and re-frame the vast sea of knowledge / ideas / innovation and dross that inundates our social graph every day. We need help dealing with the friends, acquaintances, contacts, connections and colleagues who are now intimately aware of our thoughts, activities, actions and reactions. We need help with the complex world of interactions that social networks have created.As Jeff Dachis, founder of Razorfish said at a discussion hosted by David Armano at SXSW:

"I know who my friends are. What's confusing us is how the Web is strengthening our loose ties"

Providing cross-platform identity management, however, means relinquishing the prized user and trend data that the social networks hope will turn into a new river of gold. In my opinion, the time of a classified-driven river of gold has now passed – and will never be again. The new river of riches lies buried there in the conversations, just waiting for the right platform to sieve it the right way.

It’s not the eyeballs, perhaps it’s not even the glasses – but social media is challenging us all to look at this world in a new way. And that can’t be a bad thing.

On Your Path of Desire

Smart Bloggers, Social Judgement, Social Media

Thinking about the places and ways in which people’s lives intersect with various brands, products and services can get rather messy. We are, after all, subject to serendipity – which often borders on chaos. Think about your most prized possession, and then think about how it came to you. Now, tell me, was it planned or was there an accident involved? Was it an unexpected gift?

My bet, is that for many of you, the item that you most love has come to you thanks to a series of apparently random events.

The thing is, however, that we often mistake chaos for randomness. It isn’t. Underlying random events is Desire as an organising principle. What this means is that we seek out, attract and are attracted to things that gratify our desires. And in the process we unconsciously order our world and make decisions and choices that obey the laws of desire – not the laws of logic. It’s why we buy things like Alfa Romeo cars and Ducati motorbikes – not because we are smart, but because we feel compelled to.

When we step onto the web, this is amplified in sometimes surprising ways.

Mike Arauz has put together a great deck that shows how this can play out. Called Desire Paths, Mike talks about the way that brands need to be begin connecting with their audiences in ways that align with an individual’s passion. He points out that these paths are OUR paths – and that they cannot be made by institutions – and therefore that brands can be invited on our journey along these paths on the condition that they are useful to the person travelling this path.

View more presentations from Mike Arauz. (tags: advertising marketing)

Desire paths tie-in nicely to social judgement. Certainly there is a great incentive for brands to tap into the collective power of a desire path; after all, we do not walk these desire paths alone – and technology is making it ever easier for us to find like-minded travellers all around the world. As Apple has found, good design is not just appreciated by “me” but also by “people like me” – or perhaps as Mike would term it, “people who walk with me”.

After a desire path and a brand collide in this way, the outcome is transformative – for everyone involved. For the paths that we take, and the choices we make either unconsciously or deliberately, also mark us as belonging to this tribe, or that – and this is perhaps, the heart of social judgement, and why understanding its mechanisms remains elusive.

Social Judgement: The Auchterlonie Effect

Social Judgement, Social Media, Storytelling

The playground was a swarm. To my left there are legions of boys running to and fro; to my right whole classes seem to be moving steadily across the playground. In front of me, our shared destination – the canteen – sits alone like a giant weatherboard pimple rising up out of the summer asphalt.

But there is a commotion on the grass on the far side of the building. There is a ring of boys bubbling across the lawn and spilling into the playground. Every now and then, one boy shoots off like a meteor to the far side of the playground. Minutes later, the gravity draws him back into orbit. But it is not one boy who returns – but three or four at a time.

Eventually I relent and go to see what is happening. By now the crowd is two or three deep and I struggle to see who is caught at the centre of the crowd. It is Grant Auchterlonie and he is in my class. After some time and after many of the other boys have left I finally get to see what the fuss is about. And there it is … on his arm. It is the first digital watch that I have ever seen – complete with stopwatch to 1/100th of a second.

I can remember it like it was yesterday. The excitement and buzz in the playground is palpable. But it is not just this story that has stuck with me. There were many other stories created that day.

As I discussed yesterday, influence is not just about the number of people that you have in your social network. There is a much more complex dynamic in effect where your personal store of social capital is used and accrued based on your interactions with those in your network. For example, in this diagram, it is easy for Katie to reach a large number of people. She is at the centre of the network with 1st degree connections to most people. When she chooses to push out into this network, she uses up a unit of accrued social capital. But to reach beyond the 1st degree network to Stan, Katie must go “through” either Ian or Gav. That means that she must use up two units of social capital. Interestingly, Ian and Gav must also use up one unit of social capital in this process as well. So reaching to the 2nd degree network requires not TWO but THREE units of social capital. As you can see, with every ADDITIONAL degree that you move through your network, an exponential amount of social capital is consumed.

BUT one of the most fascinating aspects of this is that the process can also be easily reversed. That is, social capital is ACCRUED when this process is reversed, driven by the power of a personal story. How? This is the Auchterlonie effect in action.

The Auchterlonie Effect

When a remarkable event takes place we play multiple roles. We are observers – watching from a distance. We are participants interacting with the other players. We may be the subject of the event itself (such as the ‘birthday girl/boy’). But as the temporal moment of the event passes, we become STORYTELLERS – crystallising the events in a narrative that involves us, encompasses the range of other participants and provides emotional drive to bring others into the loop of this story. The Auchterlonie Effect is the impetus that drives the ongoing story of YOUR personal engagement with the initial event – and it is, essentially, being able to bask in the reflected credibility of another.

In the playground, I accrued an enormous amount of social capital because I knew the “guy who had the digital watch”. And the people who knew me were able to proudly say that they “knew the guy who knew the guy who had the digital watch”.

How does this work outside the playground?

Say, Katie gets a new iPhone. It is the first in the country. No one has seen one before. And when she comes to coffee morning on Friday, she brings her new treasure along. A crowd gathers. As the person sitting next to her, I am in close proximity to this new device and am able to try it out. I am interested. And while Sue casts her envious eye over the prize, I move to a table nearby where my friend, Stan, is sitting. I relate the story of the iPhone. I explain how my 1st degree friend has a highly desired iPhone and talk to him about the things that I discovered while using it a few minutes ago. I suggest that, if he is interested, that I could get him a closer look at the said, iPhone. Meanwhile, Stan’s young friend, Jules, arrives for his morning ritual of coffee and muesli and listens into my story. Picking up on the vibe and the opportunity, Jules asks to tag along. So together, the three of us return to get a closer glimpse of the iPhone.

In this example, the flow of social capital is reversed. By creating, driving and owning this story, I accrue a unit of social capital from Stan. I also accrue a unit of social capital from Jules, as does Stan. And when I bring this story back to its source (Katie), she accrues THREE units of social capital – that is, she benefits from the network effect of my story. Importantly, the most important element in this whole process is NOT the object – the iPhone – but the STORY. And at the heart of this is a series of SOCIAL JUDGEMENTS that have unlocked value for each and every participant.

Now, multiply this out across the rest of the network and you can see that the power of the story can easily build very quickly. This is what we would commonly call “viral” – as in the case of a “viral video”.

The power of the story

In The Future of Your Brand is Play, I discussed how you can begin to build “infatuations” into your marketing. It is these infatuations which create the conditions for the Auchterlonie Effect. But by understanding this effect, you can help facilitate social judgement – for at every point of connection across the network, each person must make a decision about whether to bring another person into the gravitational pull of the story. When Stan introduced Jules into the story above, he had evaluated the situation and realised that he could accrue a unit of social capital based on his proximity to the story.

The strength of weak ties

Before something DOES “go viral” it needs to spread beyond the echo chamber of 1st degree connections. Without this vital step, a story will just circulate upon itself until it collapses under the collective weight of retelling.

But, you see, social judgement is incredibly tenuous. Often it has only one strand
, as shown here. If the one link breaks, then the story will not spread into adjacent social networks. It is why, as Valdis Krebs suggests, influence needs many connected people to spread – not just the highly connected.

This is precisely why it is difficult to predict when a video or a meme will “go viral”. It can only succeed when the MARGINAL cost of trusting is LESS than the risk of losing a person’s trust – where social capital continues to accumulate towards the centre of the experience.

But understanding the Auchterlonie Effect and the way in which social capital accrues is essential in achieving your marketing outcomes in a social context. By allowing social judgement to be exercised around your brand’s story, you are producing social capital as a by-product. And this can only be a good thing for brands (if they get it right).

Oh, and in case you are wondering – unfortunately, Grant’s claim to fame was fleeting. But even though I later purchased my own digital watch, I still recall the day when his watch made me famous too.

It’s Not a Filter, It’s a Choice

Social Judgement, Social Media

Sometimes the internet feels overwhelming. Each day when I logon to my work email I know that there are going to be dozens of emails requiring some form of attention. Where I can, I scan for the most urgent items and attend to those – responding or perhaps delegating. Emails that require a more considered or detailed response are left open while I research an answer, make calls or pull together my response. Then, of course, there are the daily tasks of working – meetings, phone calls – and the DOING part, which should take up most of the day.

But a proportion of my DOING work revolves around the Internet as well. So I scan blogs and RSS feeds, check various systems for facts, reportage, responses and conversations. There may be a hundred or so blogs and feeds to keep up with.

And after work, with my blog and my reading and my areas of interest, I can easily add another 100-150 RSS feeds and a similar amount of email. Then there is Twitter, which alone generates a substantial amount of email (follower requests, direct messages and so on), as well as well over a thousand messages a day. No wonder I have little time for the interruption of advertising.

But while it can APPEAR overwhelming, I have made very clear choices about how I manage this glut of information. As I began to think about the stages of Twitter Commitment, I realised that there are fundamental building blocks which underpin our use of new social network technologies. Some time ago I thought it looked like this:

View more presentations from Gavin Heaton. (tags: social media)

But this was too simplistic. It was missing the essential human element that drives our interactions – trust. But trust in a social network is dynamic – it constantly shifts, changes shape and transforms itself as the context changes. So rather than “trusting” – we are exercising what I call “social judgement”.

Basically, social judgement allows us to make decisions based not only on our who we trust, but on how much trust we place in certain other individuals. For example, this is how I use Facebook:

If I receive a Friend Request from someone I don’t know personally on Facebook, I look to see who we know in common. I then make a VALUE judgement about HOW judicious (or dare I say, “promiscuous”) each of our mutual friends are in terms of their social networks. Sometimes I look at the first one or two mutual friends – sometimes I evaluate all of the mutual friendships before making a decision. Where I feel that I can trust the web of connections between us, I will confirm friendship.

This is at least partly why influence in social networks is not just about numbers, but about the trust or “social judgement” which lubricates them. 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.

HP’s recent research would suggest that friends are more important than followers – and it seems that Julian Cole agrees. However, as Granovetter’s research on the strength of weak ties showed, people are more likely to take action where there is a weak tie connection between parties.

And this means that there is a choice involved. 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?

To explain this, tomorrow, I will share with you one of the important elements of Social Judgement – the Auchterlonie Principle.

Planning for Context over Planning for Placement

Future of Your Brand, FutureVisions, Measurement, Smart Bloggers, Social Judgement, Social Media, Strategy

When we are looking to plan and execute a digital campaign, increasingly there is a need to look at not just WHERE we place our campaigns, but the context into which we place them. This is not just being driven by the rise of the “social web”, but by a transformation in the way that we view the relationships between agencies, clients and consumers.

In this interesting presentation by Don Epperson from Havas, he looks at the way in which their agency is transforming. In effect, they are following the model that has worked so well for Google.

By working from a single source of analytical data, Havas is able to aggregate a a whole lot of data based on actual behaviour. The trick is, rather than collecting data on a campaign level, the data warehouse captures information at a cookie level; meaning that the micro-transactions can be measured, tracked and aggregated. Then, by using an online advertising marketplace, the individual preferences of the people interacting with the system (banners/placements etc) can be auctioned to advertisers in a very granular way. This is what Don claims, is the agency of the future:

The agency of the future is going to act very much like the large ad networks today … we have to have scale in terms of reach, we have to be able to turn … data into knowledge …

All this, in turn (I am sure), feeds into their planning process – meaning that campaigns and activations become more targeted, more valuable to the consumer, and more meaningful to the client. It’s much like the potential on offer with Pure Profile.

As Matthew Mantey explains in this excellent post, Banners – Do They Work?, there is a mountain of data and insight to be found in even the simplest digital advertising campaign – so imagine what happens when you magnify this by a factor of 10, or 100, or 100,000:

Run one with even cursory tracking and analytics and you can find a mountain of insights. Obviously click-based conversions is the unrealistic grail you'll see, but if you set a cookie window, you'll see all of the view-based actions as well. You'll know the optimal exposure frequency level. You'll see the search patterns, branded and unbranded. You'll see format and message trends. You'll see geographic detail. And you'll probably find out that who you were targeting aren't the same demo that are interested in your stuff and coming to your site.

Is this the agency model of the future? Using technology to combine insight and targeted content within a permissible context sounds like the holy grail. The challenge would be putting the right pieces and partnerships together.

However, as I delve more into the concept of social judgement, I have a feeling that this sort of opportunity is just the tip of the iceberg. After all, taking this insight and opening it up to a social component during campaign activation could be where the REAL opportunity lies.

Community, Trust and Social Judgement

Age of Conversation, Authenticity, Co-creation, Community, Smart Bloggers, Social Judgement, Social Media

7 things you can learn from hip hop – Ignite Sydney

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: networking social)

Mark Pollard shares this excellent presentation given to the IgniteSydney crowd recently. In it, Mark talks about his experience of running a large, interesting, and influential website, Stealth Magazine … well, it started out as a magazine, but is really a meeting place – a community – for hip hop. Since 2002 there have been 128,000 posts, 11,000 topics and almost 2000 members. Clearly this is a vibrant (and viable) website – and in this presentation, he shares his Seven Things to be Learned from Hip Hop. You can read through the background notes here.

What was particularly interesting to me was Mark’s conception of community – and his point that “anonymity is the antithesis of community”. This,in turn, generated some debate with Julian Cole and Matt Moore driving alternative points of view. Of course, like any definition, “community” is also hard to pin down.

My interest in community is mostly around the way that communities move (and can be moved) in relation to human behaviour. Whether we know it or not, almost every interaction we have with another person leaves a trace of our identity. Think Gattaca on a physical level and think language/nuance on an emotional level. Think style in terms of our visual footprint. The thing is, we are pre-programmed to be social – so we betray ourselves even with our best attempts at subterfuge. And for all the chaos and noise of our daily lives, it is remarkably easy to find the holes in “fake identities” only because it is incredibly difficult to be consistently somebody else. And this was made abundantly clear to me recently when I was the subject of an experiment in chaos, courtesy of Marcus Brown.

Taking a lead from this speech by Heath Ledger as the Joker, flipped a coin and decided to unleash a little chaos. On me/my site. It appeared that he had learned of some flaw in Feedburner that opened a door … or so he claimed, and I was being singled out as “Mr Age of Conversation” – yet another . But he paused before moving ahead. He published a poll asking whether chaos should be directed at me, or at his own site. He gave us a choice. By coincidence, this all happened during a week when I was disconnected – on holiday and with very limited Internet access … so I did not really know what would happen and what the outcome would be.

I waited for the votes to come in. I checked my email each couple of days, but could not see much action. I visited Marcus’ site a couple of times but the voting looked pretty close. Eventually, the votes were counted. I had received an enormous number of votes – and I thank everyone who supported me. As Marcus explains:

People will do anything to save Gavin Heaton. What surprised me most was how devious they were about doing it. I know for a fact that most of the people (there were about 700 of them) came into vote off the back of an email. It was brilliant to watch because they were keeping so quiet. There were only a couple of tweets about it and the volume was very low. It was fascinating to watch.

What Marcus was watching via voting patterns combined with web analytics, was the activation of a community. But more interestingly, it was a swift and directed course of action set in train by a single request (as Marcus explains, most voting was triggered off the back of a single email – sent not by me). And this is where community comes into play. While the “network” could have been used – such as Twitter or a blog post – that sort of open dynamic can also invite additional chaos and randomness into the mix. That means, that for every positive response (on my behalf), there could well have been additional random responses which could go either way.

In my view, community is about belonging. It is about the actions and interactions over time which build a web of mutually reinforcing reputations. These repeated patterns of micro interactions allow us to create a “social judgement” about the people with whom we interact – even if we don’t know their names, we know them by the traces left in the consistency of their actions, in-actions and communications. I was “saved” from chaos by the orchestrated mobilising of a community to which I belonged – by the people in whom I had established a bond. And at the heart of this, at the very centre, was trust. As Valdis Krebs explains:

… people are loyal to what they are connected to and what provides them benefits. People stick with established ties they trust. Interacting with those we know and trust brings a sense of warmth and belonging to the virtual communities we visit via our computer screens.

By activating a community (rather than a network), response could be directed.

As I have said before, Marcus is one of the foremost practitioners of social media creation. He inhabits and creates a storyline like no one else I know, and activates it with an intensity that turns our gaze around on ourselves – making us ask the question – will he do it … or will I? That is, he forces us into a state where non-participation is also an act of engagement.

When I read the lead-up posts on Marcus’ blog, I was wondering who he was targeting. But by the end of the first post, I had an inkling that he was talking about me. There were clues scattered throughout that were pointing in my direction. And yet, even when he did announce that I was the target, it still sent a shiver down my spine. My intuition had read the signs, but I had not yet comprehended this – I was caught by the story, and had not yet brought it into my real world. But I was reading superficially. I was reading what was SAID, not what was MEANT. I was ignoring the mind reader’s toolkit.

What does this all mean?

Clearly “authenticity” is hard to fake – but we ARE easily swayed by a compelling story. It’s why headlines work so well – they set the parameters for the narrative that follows. For in the story – and in this case - a live unfolding of events, we are in-effect practising SOCIAL JUDGEMENT. And while, in real life, we are able to use a variety of cues to determine the trustworthiness of certain situations and/or individuals, in an online environment, we are still finding our way. As David Armano asks, do you know who you are talking to?

The thing to remember, however, is that trust trumps story.

On reflection, I realise that over the last few years I had followed, almost to the letter, each of Mark Pollard’s seven steps … but it was the last THREE steps (pass the mic, let the community self-regulate, get off the computer) that were the catalysts for action. And this is important – because my interest is in driving behaviour and creating the conditions for participation.

And as we move into the meat of 2009, and your marketing plans firm (or shrink), I want you to consider this. Think about how “social” your media plans will be. Think about the directions you want to move and how you want to get there. Determine the conditions through which you can create social judgement. And most importantly, ask yourself – who do you trust – and who trusts you?