Unintended consequences
Posted: September 21, 2009 Filed under: marketing, twitter Comments OffI’m facinated by unintended consequences.
Tiny, or apparently unrelated acts, can hugely impact people’s lives.
The introduction of rabbits in Austalia is a good example. One expatriate British landowner wanted a little of his home country and so brought out 24 rabbits for hunting to Australia. Within ten years, millions of rabbits plagued Austalia, destroyed the top soil and led to widespread desertification.
Password complexity is another great example of a process which gets so lost in implementation that the original goal is lost. By insisting that passwords are changed monthly, aren’t re-used within 7 months, contain various sorts of characters etc, you are pretty much guaranteeing that users will write them down. They are unlikely, conversely to make them any more secure, chosing instead, a less memorable version of what they were going to have in the first place, i.e. ‘Password1234‘.
Or take the example of Russian car crime quoted in the Register. Concerned by increases in car thefts, Russians took to installing car alarms. The result was that thieves would lie in wait until the owner arrived, shoot them and take the keys.
The last couple of weeks, I’ve been involved in what must surely be an example of ‘unintended consequence’ closer to home. And I think this is something with which probably an increasing number of people can identify.
Having had a pretty sketchy experience with both BT and Paypal, with different levels of unsatisfactory customer service, I mentioned my puzzlement on Twitter.
Now I’d never done this before, so I didn’t know what to expect. To be honest I didn’t really expect very much at all, perhaps a few of my pitifully small band of followers would say ‘yep, I’ve had problems with Paypal too’ or ‘BT are shit’ or whatever. Perhaps they’d even pick up on it themselves and offer to resolve it, but both organisations seemed unlikely to be this switched on.
So, imagine my suprise, when within the hour, both sevices were basically mugging me on Twitter. Ostensibly they were trying to help. Although, of course, help they did not.
Paypal were the calmer of the two, trying to switch almost immediately to a non twitter public channel and find out what had happened. Within a day I was escalated to ‘executive escalations’, who gave me a piece of advice I’d be very suprised to hear on Twitter – that I should charge goods back to Paypal, because their own policy didn’t cover the eventuality of the product I had bought with them not working. Very polite throughout, and frankly wise enough not to battle it out in public, although I continue to believe they mis-sell their buyer protection abilities substantially.
BT on the other hand were like a group of mad relatives. And mad relatives that don’t talk to each other. I’d already had different advice from two different customer service reps about the issue (which was that I failed their credit check, despite being an existing customer and having passed it numerous times – this is something BT can do ‘nothing’ about!). They just kept firing @messages at me, as well as a few directs. They asked me to email them, to phone them (all of these done already) and seemed quite narky about the whole thing. It did nothing to resolve my issue and certainly nothing to make me think more highly of BT customer services.
This raises a couple of questions. Why pay people to sit and watch Twitter unless they stand a chance in hell of helping people. If they’re just there to say ‘phone customer services’ then what, frankly, is the point; except for an unwanted invasion into social media.
Secondly, and more importantly, is it possible that we are teaching customers that the best way to complain about a product or service is loudly and publicly. If I get screwed over again by either of these companies then I know that on Twitter I’ll get a faster response, a generally brighter respondent, and it also feels like – while it remains public – I’ve got a bit more chance of getting a result.
The moral here is – as often – beware oversimple advice from social media gurus. An excellent definition of unintended consequences is the failure of an attempt to model a complex problem with a simple solution.
If your consultants are telling you to be on Twitter to answer customer queries, then remember the prerequisites: am I providing the best possible customer service elsewhere?, and will the poor twits I’m hiring to track the conversation acutally be able to do anything other than produce hot twitter-flavoured air. If not, you’re likely to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. And, what you get for your ‘customer service’ investment may be a lot more flack you couldn’t deal with in the first place, but this time it’s there for ever and out in the open for customers to see your problems.
Got me to thinking
Posted: September 12, 2009 Filed under: interesting 2009, thinking about thinking, truth, words Comments Off
Another excellent Interesting today. Since then my head has been bursting with many of the ideas presented there, particularly the concept of being able to see radio waves, the Indian superheroes, frivolity, and what you might learn about yourself from collecting in depth data describing your thoughts and emotions.
As last year, I’m in awe of the speakers. It’s a difficult and potentially hugely embarrassing thing to do, to stand up and say ‘this is interesting’. What if the audience disagrees?
I’ve been considering for weeks about what I would do if I were speaking at an Interesting.
Most of the ideas get kicked out quickly, would require a huge amount of work, or refused to be put in a coherent shape.
The main (or perhaps remaining) one is an idea (touched on today) about modes of thinking, and how they relate to one another.
I don’t mean the thinking that sort of rattles around your head (or mine at least) all day – the ‘I’ve left the oven on’, ‘isn’t Johnny Marr brilliant’, ‘she’s cute’ type of chatter. Instead I mean, the sort of thinking you’re about to do when you say ‘I’ll have a cup of tea and think about that’.
And, I’ve found there are normally two good ways to solve an intellectual problem of this sort (aside from tea, which is required for both).
If I’ve got a topic that’s going round and round my head, and I want to figure it out, I can either try to forget about it entirely and wait for the answer to pop in to my subconconscious (this can take a while, so it’s not good if you’ve got a deadline), or I can start trying to write a half-arsed blog about it, and the process forces me to a conclusion. Often that conclusion isn’t the end of the whole thing, but it normally moves it forward. (Right now, I’m doing the later!)
Of course, these are solo methods. One of the great advantages of blogging is that someone random from Tennessee can jump in and supply the answer. Or, more accurately, an answer which can push you in the right direction. And a similar thing can happen in brainstorms (although I do remain quite skeptical about this particular activity) or just by going over-and-over it with others until you get somewhere. We could describe this as the ‘Rolling Stones’ method (Richards and Jagger having famously been locked in a room by their manager until they came up with an original song).
But- and here’s my thesis – there are fundamentally different types of thinking. And if they can be managed at all, they need to be managed in different ways.
This probably seems a trivial observation. But I’m not sure it is. Over the years, many perfectly rational philosophers (and some not so rational ones) seem to have driven themselves mad trying to achieve the sort of certainty, for example, which comes from mathematics. Trying to derive the equivalent of Pythagoras’ theorem for meaning or observation is a very short trip to the nut house.
Pythagoras’ theorem and things like it are great. A quick trip over to Wikipedia and you can see just how elegant the whole thing is:
In fact, Wikipedia shows 8 different proofs of the theorem (including one from a future US president). If you understand the symbols used and a couple of concepts of geometry and arithmetic, you can understand the proof. You cannot argue with it. Not just that, it is relatively easy for us to understand that the proof applies to all right angle triangle however extreme, even though we will help ourselves understand the proof with a particular drawing.
And then consider that there are three different (non-scalar) examples of Pythagorean triangles which work with whole numbers under 25 (3,4,5 and 5,12,13, 7,24,25). (Does that seem unsuprising? There are no whole numbers at all that satisfy a3+b3=c3).
This is the sort of thing that people want truth to be like. Absolutely certain, simple and with the sort of ‘elegance’ that makes you feel there is order to the universe and you are just decoding it.
And so much of maths is like this: neat Ikea-style building blocks that continue to yield satisfying results. Pythagoras’ theorem sits on top of some neat geometrical ideas. And it is then used to derive equally satisfying ideas including (elements of differential) calculus. Calculus tells us that the gradient on a curve described by y=x2 is always 2x. And so on.
Not all mathematics is cuddly. You can keep going and prove statements that could hardly be described as intuitive, for example that the size of the natural numbers is the same as the size of the natural numbers squared or to prove that there are statements that are true but that cannot be proved.
But I don’t believe philosophy is like this. Descartes (another mathematician) was famous for ‘I think therefore I am’. A lot of Plato’s writings echo the same desire to believe in perfect objects and reference. These are attempts to put philosophy on as secure a rational footing.
But philosophy is about the meaning of concepts and their inter-relation. It is about the inside of our brains. It does not measure the world itself, and it doesn’t derive from a simple set of axioms, like mathematics. Searching for absolute certainty rather than seeking to understand inter-relations is like trying to find a yellow fantasy or a happy number, it is simply a misclassification of what is going on.
But the two do share something in common: they are both analytic. When thinking in such analytical areas, the thinker must understand the whole question, and must exhaustively run through all of the options that may contribute to the answer.
Science is different again, although many scientists have been drawn to the allure of mathematical (or philosophical analytic thinking). There are a potentially infinite set of sciences that could be brought to bear on explaining any particular set of observations. They are not true or false, rather useful or non-useful.
And then we get to creative thinking. This is not the same thing at all.
With creative thinking, it seems we are often trying to break down meaning, language, or concepts in a way which is deliberately non-sensical. We seek to remove the context of these thoughts, and to look at them through different belief and understanding systems. This is why social media can be creative when it is on a huge scale but less so when it’s focussed on consensus-orientated groups.
Of course, thinking about philosophy or science can be creative, because it can be about re-framing questions or crossing idea paradigms. The most creative thinking however, does not need to be useful – or at least it does not need to be immediately useful. We can play with ideas to our heart’s content, and only need take away what we find interesting or useful. It can be the most powerful skill and it really requires the opposite of philosophical or mathematical thinking, it requires the ability to remove restraint from the thought process.
A type of creative thinking is trying to derive ideas which will motivate others. These are ideas which need to have a particular use. Here we’re trying to use our brains not to examine rational paths but instead treating our own brains like a petri dish for any sort of idea which can inspire a certain emotion.
And then we have creative thinking which is not about utility at all, but about beauty. This is the creative thinking of art and music. Where ideas are generated just because they are ideas, and if other people like them then even better.
We saw a lot of examples of all of these types of thinking at Conway Hall today. One of the speakers said they’d come to the conclusion that creative imagination was a muscle that could be exercised, rather than a well that could be drained. Late in the day, I overheard one attendee saying they were ‘interestinged out’. It certainly was a (very lovely) work out for the brain.
So many conferences seem to train a particular mental muscle. Russell’s ideas fest certainly gave us an all-over full body work out, and reminded us that we need all the bits of our brain (not just the ones that we use to talk about social media) to keep thinking about things in interesting and useful ways.
Thinking inside the box
Posted: August 27, 2009 Filed under: music, packaging Comments OffI don’t very often get to start blog posts with ‘when I was a lad’. Merciful perhaps. But something caught my eye in the flat today that got me thinking just that.
Between the age of maybe 15 and 17, I spent an absolutely indecent amount of time in places like this:
(fantastic Vinyl Exchange pic courtesy of tootdood)
Manchester was going through the whole Stone Roses thing, which was great, but what I was searching for were the hidden gems of another couple of Manchester bands: The Smiths, of course and one of the first Factory bands The Durutti Column. The Smiths may well have been the best British group of a generation, but Durutti Column had other things going for them. First off, amazing music, of course. But they were also prolific, relatively unheard of, and you stood a reasonably good chance of actually bumping in to them (or rather him, the group’s driving force, Vini Reilly) in a record shop, or Dry bar – a particularly stylish Hacienda spin off-, or even, bizarrely, in the lumpen every-town mall of the Arnedale centre (as I once did).
But bumping into the band was by no means the main thing. The obsession was searching through thousands and thousands of albums in places like Vinyl Exchange, hoping to chance on an obscure rarity or dodgy bootleg. You would then take this hidden gem to the counter, full of thoroughly unjustified fear that the staff would spot that it was, in fact, a hugely undervalued collectible.
I vividly remember finding an old, and heavily scratched ‘Amigos in Portugal’, once of the quasi-lost recordings Vini had done with another label; and an original of Factory Quartet, both in the store above. Both fantastic recordings. Both great proof of my devotion to this somewhat esoteric musician. The quest was without end, as no one really seemed to have ever worked out what was in the Durutti Column back catalogue. And even then, there was the next group, that weird dance record Johnny Marr had produced.
It was (like Chirky’s concept of an cognitive heat sink) a thoroughly pointless way to explore Manchester and fill up adolescent afternoons.
And now I work in a company where a big part of what we do, is make this aimless collecting impossible. Go to a modern music download site, type in the name of your favourite band and you will immediately be able to access every last piece of their history and have it delivered, brand new (or ‘mint’ as we sad geeks used to say) to your door the next day. Or, fuck it, don’t worry about all the carefully crafted packaging, just download it to your iPod and stick on random with everything else.
Or perhaps not.
I predicted a while back that artists and labels might try and re-invent packaging. I’d actually thought this would be more radical: Boyzone teddy bears with three free tracks or Girls Aloud Smirnoff Ice with a b-side stapled to the bottom of the bottle. Apple is clearly thinking very hard about electronic packaging alternatives for it’s new tablet and iTunes.
And below are the three amazing box sets that started off this reverie.
If I’d known about all this when I was 16, I could have saved myself an enormous amount of time and legwork. One is from today – a fantastic recording of Elbow playing the entirety of Seldom Seen Kid live at Abbey Road. The other two are a remastered set of the first four Durutti Column albums, with extra notes, postcards, interviews and some very nice packaging (re-released because the original tapes were found after Antony Wilson’s death); and all of those Smiths singles I spent my adolescence trying to track down.
Yes, I know, what would Morrissey say? ‘Reissue, Repackage, Reevaluate…’ But this stuff is great. It’s so much nicer to actually get something beautifully crafted along with the music itself. Even if it goes in a drawer, and the tracks go on the iPod, there is a real pleasure to the tactile elements and content of these packages. The only thing that would have made them better is if I’d found them languishing at the bottom of a bargain bin at Woolworths.
7 reasons
Posted: August 16, 2009 Filed under: microsoft, usability, windows Comments OffSo Windows 7 is now winding its way through to be on the PCs your average users. It’s virtually impossible to know how they’ll like it.
Certainly the development community has been very impressed. A lot of my colleagues have been using it as their primary OS for many months. I’ve had it running since the first public beta. It was very good then, and it’s got better through the releases.
But, as everyone knows. Developers aren’t normal people! Their impressions of the software could prove to be the exception. Developers can see why things are screwy, and their conceptual models are far more developed, enabling them to much more quickly understand how something works functionally.
More importantly, developers are much more rarely out of their comfort zone. And, in my experience of user tests, most consumers are out of their comfort zone most of the time.
I recently spent a couple of hours watching a user who was setting up their (XP) machine. I asked him how he accessed the internet. He showed me that he would log into messenger (because it was set to pop up automatically), click on the ‘unread messages’ icon which would open Hotmail, and then he would enter ‘Google’ into the (Bing) search panel (in IE). He refered to the browser (IE) as ‘Google’. He was very annoyed that he had to keep seeing (optional) Windows Live Today. He was absolutely delighted when I set it so he could launch ‘Google’ directly from a link on the desktop (and a change of homepage). The only ‘advanced’ feature he seemed to be aware of what ‘clear browsing history’ 
These tales are not exceptional. They are the norm.
So it’s remains a big question how Win7 will fare in the ‘my mum’ test.
I think it’s got several things going for it. All of which are testament to a strong focus by Microsoft on what actually matters to consumers, and – as I’ve said before – some very sophisticated research and evaluation techniques to back that focus up. For no reason at all, I’ve picked out 7 of them.
1. The number 1 element of user experience is performance
I sat in a Microsoft presentation a few weeks ago. The guy presenting was flipping between a number of decks. I remember thinking, ‘Windows 7′ certainly looks better than it’s predecessors. Then I realised he was using Vista. On the surface of it, Vista looked pretty good and had loads more features. But it was slow at some key things, and it was sort of randomly sluggish.
Everyone knows those pop-stats like ‘the average person spends three years of their life at traffic lights’. How long did we spend watching the blue hoop of maybe-death in Vista? Far too much.
Windows 7 is simply a lot faster than Vista (and even XP) at most common tasks
But this is not just about how long you actually wait.
I think the neatest bit of design I’ve seen in the last two years is the favourites screen (new tab page) on Google Chrome browser. By loading instaneously, it makes you feel like the app is instantly ready to go, even though it could be another 30 seconds till you’ve got your first page loaded.
We know that the Windows 7 team spent a lot of time on this sort of thing, for example making sure the start menu would pop up quickly no matter what. I’m sure it’s faked some of the time. But it works. It makes you feel like you’ve got a snappier computer.
And then they’ve picked out the key performance things – that people actually notice – like sleeping and waking up, and they’ve made sure Windows 7 is way ahead of the pack.
2. Less clutter works towards ‘ feeling of mastery’
For all UI issues, I think rule 1 is that users don’t customize. Remember that over-inflated services bar in XP (the one on the bottom right)? How many people (outside of developers) did you ever meet who had managed to reduce it down to a manageable set?
So quite a lot of the UI in Windows 7 is about reducing clutter. And making things nice, big and clickable when appropriate. Simples!
There is a chance now that an average user might be able to look at their desktop, and scan the start menu, and have some reasonable idea what everything does. Again, this sounds obvious, but it’s been lacking in any other OS I’ve come across.
3. Copy
Windows has always had a fondness for incomprehensible text and excessive dialogue boxes. It’s a small tweak but the UI text in Windows 7 is easier to read and understand, and improved UAC gives you less you have to deal with.
All of these little ‘exceptions’, the times when the user leaves the ‘happy path’, are often paid too little attention in the design process. They are in fact the times of maximum stress for the user, as they stray the furthest from their comfort zone. How on earth do we expect a normal user to deal with ‘host process for windows has terminated unexpectedly’. I don’t even know what to do with that one and I know what it means.
4. A bit of taste
Obviously this one’s subjective, but certainly the backgrounds, themes and login screen in the release candidate are significantly more interesting and creative than anything we’ve seen before from Microsoft. It’s not trying to be too funky, but it feels for the first time in a long time that someone with a bit of taste has been involved in the visual (and interaction) design of the interface.
5. Dealing with third parties
Clearly integration with everyone and their aunt has long been both the key weakness, and key strength of PCs and Windows. The horror show of Vista driver compatibility was arguably its single biggest problem. Win 7 won’t repeat that, since we’ve been through it already (and there’s been a lot of advanced prep with partners). And, a real effort has also been made on the ‘device stage’ functionality to try and make the whole thing feel like one computer experience.
6. Integration of Office apps
I hope the European Commission aren’t listening, but some of the neatest features of Win7 are integration with the UI and features of the apps that run on top of it, and principally the Office suite. The ability to peak into subwindows with Aero Peak is brilliant. Part toy / part useful function, it is very compelling, again building the sense of mastery over everything runnning on the machine. For the first time, the search (from start bar) really works, indexing everything and presenting categorized lists (by source). There are about ten small features like this that add up to real feeling of integration and control. Very neat.
7. Never mind the hype
Arguably the most important distinction between the Vista launch and the Windows 7 launch has been the approach to hype.
What’s worse than suffering at the hands of a dysfunctional operating system? Being told how great it is while you do it.
The defining moments of any OS are not the big numbers, the length of the feature lists or the coolness of the loading animations (whilst important). They are the moments when the user feels ease or disease.
There are lots of parallels in the real world for this. But when a user can’t see how to do something, they feel stressed and they blame themselves. They feel stupid. Not being certain is as bad as not knowing at all. Will what I’m doing really erase all my files? Am I actually in the ladies’ section, because I quite like those trainers? When users are agitated or nervous, they are not building happy memories.
Incidentally, the most misjudged result of this misunderstanding came from a Microsoft marketing campaign, Project Mojave where Microsoft suggested that users were ‘wrong’ about Vista, which is essentially like telling your four-year old that he’s NOT afraid of the dentist.
Instead what we see in Win7 is an absolute acknowledgement that the consumer has the right to misunderstand and make snap and shallow judgements, a fact that many other industries have known for a while.
The story goes that Fiat has a design shop looking at door handles, stearing wheels and ignitions, because these are the only bits most punters will come into contact with in the showroom or on a test drive.
It appears that Win 7 designers and engineers are thinking the same way. They have smoothed the edges, and picked out the occassions when performance matters most, and tuned it up just a bit. Bugger what’s going to make the OS appeal more to devs, what does the consumer care about – a bit less gloss there, a bit more gloss there, a bit faster here, a bit less cluttered there, and the 100 things will make the user feel confident and in control. It may be on an industrial level but it is experience design of the highest order.
Certainly we won’t know until it’s had it’s mass market mauling at the hands of my mum and millions like her who don’t do this for a living. But if I had to bet, I’d say ‘average user’ will like it more than the beta audience. And even better, they won’t know why.
Catch it, kill it
Posted: August 16, 2009 Filed under: spam, twitter, viral marketing Comments OffThinking about the behaviors of Habitat and Moonfruit over the last week begs the question about what we mean by SPAM. Clearly, inserting marketing messages into randomly trending topics is corrosive and shows no respect for the community. Doing that when the topics were the first voices of dissent from Iran was just plain dumb.
But what about creating a trending topic with an incentive? If giving away three laptops may get you millions of mentions, then you can certainly imagine why moonfruit might think they want to do it. But noise doesn’t mean interest or relevance, and is this the sort of noise you want anyway, entirely free of content or motivation?
We used to do this back in the day with ‘viral’ competitions – invite five of your friends to watch our video and you’ll get five times as many chances to win. It didn’t really work then either, although for a while, it was the only real idea in town.
There are two reasons that member-get-member died out as a method to spread messages:
- The message itself got lost in the mechanic. All anyone cared about was winning the laptop, they didn’t want to know about making their own website with moonfruit
- People’s propensity to forward this crap would decrease over time as they realized that they had become the SPAMers themselves, devaluing their personal reputation in their own networks. Remember how we all pitied our contacts that would send around out-of-date or hopelessly commercial messages.
Surely the same will happen with Twitter and the rest. Who amongst us wants to be seen as being tricked into doing a marketers job for them? Or for failing to spot what are commercial messages.
It’s a bit like swine flu. You don’t want to get it yourself and you certainly don’t want to be seen to be the one forwarding it on. Catch it, kill it, bin it.
And it becomes more complex too when we think about ‘personal brands’. Just as twitter – and all that – mark the rise of the citizen journalist, citizen marketer etc, they also seem to mark the rise of the citizen SPAMer. Where does the line lie? Let’s say I’ve got a room to rent out. If I mention it once on twitter or facebook, then I am being useful. How about if I ask friends to retweet it? That’s reasonable. What about if I keep mentioning it and asking friends to retweet slight variants of the message. Haven’t I then crossed the line? What about if I’m asking for attention for my blog posts? What about if I’m talking about an ad or campaign I made at work? Even with our friends, I think the level of tollerance is low.
But it’s a line a lot more of us are going to have to recognize. People like Hugh MacLeod, brilliant though he is, are flirting with this all the time. Needing to make sure the commercial-esque messages make up the right-proportion overall, staying useful, not trying to hide the commercial messages in the ‘editorial’ ones.
It’s a line which is about how closely you are connected to the network in which you are communicating, and how well you stay in touch with what they care about.
Can brands make these approaches work today? I’d say Habitat’s approach is a definite no, Moonfruit’s a probable no, and certainly one with a limited shelf life.
Of course, this is not really new information. There is little substitute for actually doing the work of getting involved in the market as a collection of human beings:
‘Markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked. (Cluetrain, 1999)
Hierachy of feeds
Posted: April 4, 2009 Filed under: marketing, psychology, twitter 1 Comment »I’ve gotten into a bad habbit. Recently, I’ve found myself only wanting to write about topics when I can think of a good headline. Which reminds me, a new high-watermark was set by a genius in the copy-editing team at the Sun this week. A front-page banner headline relating the Jacqui Smith expenses furore (over her husband claiming for some dodgy movies on a hotel bill) reads ‘The Porn Ultimatum’. The Sun has always had great headline writers (e.g. two previous corkers associated with the John Darwin story: ‘Canoe accompany us to the station’ and ‘The liar, the witch and the wardrobe’) but I thought this was real ‘stunna’.
Anyhow, I digress. And in fact, today’s headline is acutally more of a polish than an invention. The Innovations Diaries’ post is called ‘Hieracy of Tweets’, and it came along just as I was thinking about precisely the same issue: what have a 1940s psychologist and a 21 century microblogging service got in common?
What Innovation Diaries were talking about is the psychology of twittering. If we look at the bizarre range of stuff that comes up on the trendy microblogging site, it maps across base human desires and needs – hunger, tiredness etc – through higher-order needs such as love and belonging to the grandly named ‘self-actualisation’, relating directly to the concepts to Maslow’s famous hierachy of needs.
This connection is a very interesting one, although I think there’s actually more juice to it than you might get from the examples given in the diagram or in the post.
At the base of it, the needs themselves are real. It is not enough to talk about eating cake – people must actually eat it. Twitter’s not a lot of use for that (although let’s not rule it out: ‘CAKEIFY: just twitter with #blackforrestgateaux…’), but it can be of help at the other end of the spectrum where we’re talking about morality, creativity and problem soliving. So we can think about how people can directly meet the ‘esteem’ need or the ‘self-actualisation’ need through twitter rather than just reflect upon it.
This is an approach to planning and design in digital which we’ve been talking about for a while now, and there are some good examples of it in the wild. In a very real sense, people who are generating content for places like YouTube, or doing work with mashups in technology are squarely exercising their right to self-actualise (and, isn’t that a charmless phrase).
It’s also worth noting (as Innovation Diaries do), that not all of the base instincts are strictly physical, psyiological needs. We’ve talked here in the past about Intermittent Variable Reinforcement, the addictive property which comes from plugging yourself into a unpredicatable but constant stream of updates. Modern relationships are moving towards placing a hugely increased value on ‘ambient intimacy’ in the emotional rhomboid.
People like Forrester talk about a ‘ladder of participation‘ for social media Just like the government and parents think cannabis leads to harder drug use, the analysts believe that the internet people are weaned on a diet of commenting and rating, before eventually picking up blogging and twittering. Certainly we know from building sites and things that participation does seem to drop off in accordance with required sophistication and effort.
To mix metaphors, Twitter has arrived on the ladder at an odd time. Or perhaps blogs did. I’m certainly not saying that Twitter is low-brow, although it can be. But it requires a weird mix of low involvement and high sophistication. Twitter may be the new black, or the second coming of the messiah, but its use would appear ‘lower’ down our hierachy of needs than many more expressive and creative formats. If the conservative party weren’t so busy jumping on bandwagons, or the Daily Mail knew what it was, they’d both be criticizing it for ‘dumbing down’ social media.
A revolution that started with the highest of brows (endless blogs about politics, philosophy, (marketing) and (ahem) blogs) appears to be descending towards our more reptilian insticts.
I think the reason is that Twitter has no antecedant at all. Blogs are like articles, Facebook is like an address book (or facebook), Myspace is the teenager’s bedroom wall. But we’ve had nothing like twitter before.Were any of us taught at school to communicate in single thoughts?
Hopefully with mainstreaming of Twitter will come a rebirth of blogs and other, richer social media – a chance to get people thinking about more than one idea at time, and in more depth.
You can’t say that in 140 characters.
Managing to grow
Posted: March 29, 2009 Filed under: management Comments OffAntony at Open has been digging into some interesting questions about the changing nature of management and providing environments for leadership in a new world. The first post deals with the concept of ‘command and control’ being dead. The second talks Shona Brown’s contribution in exactly that area to how Google organises and manages itself.
The same issue is at the heart of Ken Robinson’s excellent new book The Element which I’m half way through at the moment.
Here perhaps is the best way to phrase it: If you were going to build a company tomorrow, which had to deal with both the current economic climate, and one which would be ready to take advantage of the growth that will undoubtedly follow our current worries, how would you do it? How would you structure it, what sort of market would you want to be in and so on.
At some point, the market will pick up. God knows when that will be, but when it does I think it’s reasonable to assume we will again experience rapid and transformational expansion with some big winners and big losers (althought the losers may not have to pay the price until the next bust).
Given this position, clearly most people would pick the right ingredients to cook with: the best and brightest staff, the latest technology, perhaps a nice office in a cool part of London or New York. The finance orientated would want to find some funding that wasn’t too immediately tied to results. And cetainly, we’d want to be in a market that wasn’t too subject to regulation, and perhaps – at first at least – not too subject to competition.
There are some other important details of course: nice corner office for yourself, and lets not forget the company jet (hopefully that will come back into fashion sooner rather than later).
The real question and the one which Antony and Ken Robinson are talking about is how you would manage your team to enable both operational efficiency and innovation.
I believe the natural inclination is still to go for a model with several heads-of things, reporting lines, lots of objective setting, reporting and all that.
Are Cisco crazy when they say they are running their business through social networks? Are Google crazy when Shona Brown says the way to proceed is ‘is to avoid creating too much structure.’
Well let’s go back to the question ‘If you were going to build a company tomorrow…’ and now you can assume that no member of staff will ever make a mistake or come into the office feeling a bit lazy, or stop acting in the best interests of the company.
The idea of the ‘heads-of’ starts to look not just a bit like overkill, but also like it will stiffle the innovation which could be the difference between long-term success and failure (even as it enables the operational efficiency that delivers short-term success).
I know what you’re thinking: that’s just not realistic; our ‘top down’ methods are tried and tested.
In this post Mary Poppendieck talks about how we got to our current ‘tried and tested’ methods. These are the ‘tried and tested’ methods of Enron, of Lehman, of RBS. These are the command and control structures that will document, but not resolve, the demise of the major record labels and many national newspapers. Not a single person will be to blame but those companies will go out of business nevertheless.
We’ve seen these more loose and responsible methods already work in the most diverse of industries. In software manufacture (Agile) in product innovaton (3M) and in killing the US auto industry (Toyota).
What is the number one requirement to implement these more progressive, more responsive, more dynamic team structure? It’s not technology or infrastructure or even smart management teams. It’s the ability to have faith in (and to inspire conviction in) the whole team. It’s leadership by sharing responsibility, rather than leadership by detail.
Just because you can
Posted: March 28, 2009 Filed under: agencies, marketing, twitter 2 Comments »
I’m not a twitter expert. This seems to put me in the minority. And it’s a great thing that so many people have a view on what the microblogging service is doing in communications and how people, and companies, should be interacting with it.
Over at e-consultancy there’s been a couple of recent interesting outbreaks of expertise. The first was the victim of poor research. John Gaffney went about a critique of Walmart and Best Buy’s social media strategy. His assertion was that the brands ought to be on Twitter and were not. I’m guessing the author was probably more suprised than anyone when the first comment came from the Best Buy community editor themselves and talking about the amazing work they are actually doing. Other commentors pointed out the author himself had only been on the service 1 month and had posted 14 times. The author apologized, the editor delivered a half-hearted apology, Ashely Friedlin jumped in with something more closely resembling attrition, and the post itself was updated to recognise the error.
So far, so much schadenfreude. I’m sure Gaffney will not repeat that mistake, and I’m sure e-consultancy will in general continue to be the broadly respectable rag for news, opinion and social media that it has been to date.
The post was then followed up by e-consultancy editor Chris Lake carrying out a sort of half-arsed audit of what the biggest agencies in the UK are doing about twitter. Essentially he had taken the NMA top 50 agencies (overall) and looked to see whether they had a twitter feed under their own name. I think it would be fair to describe the research in this case as brief, consisting of how many followers and posts each account has and so on.
Without wanting to repeat the debate which became lengthy, the point emerged fairly quickly that agencies (like mine which is in the list) have often started out with a company feed, only to move to individuals twittering under their own names fairly quickly. I think it’s also fair to say that the mere presence or absence of a twitter stream does not confirm or deny a reasonable approach to the medium – just as the presence of a brain does not imply brain activity.
I sort of pointed this out on the post (and to be fair, unlike the e-consultancy twitter feed, the author was all over the replies). It has taken me a couple of days to spot the gotcha in this part of the author’s response to me:
I’ve seen thought-leadership work wonders for agencies and Twitter enables that quite brilliantly. No longer do you have to release a white paper, or in-depth blog posts, but you can communicate at a micro level on a platform that is targeted to people’s interests.
I’m sorry it’s taken me a little while to realise what is was that was jarring in the author’s response but isn’t ‘thought leadership’ something that PR people invented in the late 90s. I don’t mean promoting yourself through good ideas. I mean the concept that a single thought-leading idea will be used in marketing or PR. Isn’t is an idea precisely oriented to single-track mass media of which Twitter is the antithesis?
For me, the benefit of Twitter in terms of promoting our agency is that people can see that there is a great deal of (leading) thought going on, and they can get involved in those thoughts and start a debate. But EMC Conchango as an entity doesn’t have a single view on anything. It’s got 400 views. Some are about technology, some about society, some about e-commerce, and on and on. We’re a pretty engaged bunch and we talk about stuff a lot, so we’re often broadly in agreement on certain points but the suggestion that there is an EMC Conchango view point on anything (or indeed an e-consultancy view on anything) seems wrong to me. That would be a denail of thought, and certainly wouldn’t be an indication of our leadership position. Unless we were following the North Korea model.
Of course, one size will not fit all, and it will make sense for some organisations (especially one-man agencies – or two-man agencies where one man doesn’t have any opinions) to blog as an enttity. I for one am delighted to know that more big agencies are prefering to let staff think (and communicate) for themselves in such a personal new medium.
Switch off, tune in and chill out
Posted: March 26, 2009 Filed under: charity, environment 1 Comment »UPDATE: two days after writing this (and after the event itself) I came up with a much better headline. Seems a shame not to mention it:
An hour, at a time
I don’t know about you but the things I love about London is the rare few occasions that we do something together, even if it tends to be in a slightly half-arsed way.
New Year’s Eve is like that, or being on streets of central London on Christmas day. Or the day that we all got snowed in. Or the day that the city was incredibly brave, and together and defiant of terrorists, and all those people who’d been ignoring each other on the tube for the rest of the year, walked home across the bridges and parks.
Well our friends at We are Social are asking people to talk about a similar event on Saturday, when I hope the city will do it’s kooky thing one more time for just an hour and turn off all our lights. The idea is to make the point that we know the trappings of modern life – which we take for granted – are not sustainable and we know that we willing to take action to make them so.
So please check it out, and hopefully enjoy an hour in the dark, feeling part of the solution.
(Thanks to Nic Spic for the Pic)
Status anxiety
Posted: March 23, 2009 Filed under: stephenfry, twitter, UGC Comments Off
I imagine I was not the only person struck by the media collision around the coverage of the death of Jade Goody. The last few weeks of her life were marked by a quite depressing co-dependency with a media at once uncomfortable with their proximity to the unfolding real-life anguish, and delighted by it. For everything else she was, Goody was a media phenomenon; a byproduct of an culture of instant fame and circular celebrity. Without media attention she ceased to exist and so her death, as her life, became dependent upon the publicity that made it – at times – distasteful. Like Schrödinger’s cat, the fact of her observation was thoroughly part of her entire being.
Equally, her death brought a simultaneous low point and high point for the role of things like twitter in the news media. The BBC’s official report, takes much of its content directly from Stephen Fry’s twitter feed, that many of us will have seen (as followers) many hours before. Perhaps the BBC cleared the comments for reuse. Perhaps he intended them for this very purpose, or perhaps they were idle ramblings as he tromps around the globe, but we have certainly moved away from the point where journalists would refuse to publish content which had appeared before. With over 300,000 followers, Fry practically is another media outlet in his own right.
Is Twitter itself a sea change in media?
Certainly its recent growth has been surprising. The influx of users is reminiscent of the period 18 months ago when everyone and their aunt joined up to Facebook.
It’s worth considering why it is really more than a glorified status.
First and foremost, Twitter takes more from blogging than it does from social network thinking. It is much more public. It is much more permanent (and it can be indexed by search engines). And it is being used to convey a much wider range of information. Each 140 character entry may be whimsical and often vacuous but it has the potential of being remembered and useful long after its posting.
Like blogging, Twitter is asymmetrical. Not all Twitterers are created equal. 12,000 people are following Hugh McLeod, as compared to the list he is following of just over a thousand. He may have two brains, but you have to wonder how Robert Scobble can possibly understand the stream of consciousness that comes from over 50,000 people he is following. And his audience is just as big. At this scale, Scobble’s twitter feed has at least as much influence as my local paper. And that’s just the first order influence. Twinfluence (twinfluence.com) looks at extended reach (1st and 2nd generation connections) to estimate that twitterers such as Apple evangelist and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki can reach up to 18m people.
No wonder then that it was seized as a tool by the Obama campaign. And no wonder that so many brands are attempting to hitch themselves to the bandwagon. For both marketers and politicians the question is oddly simple: not ‘what message should I broadcast to the network?’ but ‘how can I get the network to follow me?’ – what can brands and individuals do to interest, entertain or provide utility in such a setting. For a cause like the American primary contest, this was simple (if not easy) – tapping into a huge latent demand. For manufacturers of mid-size family sedans, it will prove a little more difficult. Twitter is just another example of marketers needing to learn about the power and significance of networks. And we can certainly expect many of the same missteps. Brands will need to be prepared to listen and well as speak.
But the real question about brands in Twitter is one of personal identity formation. As Clay Shirky has noted, attention amongst (traditional) bloggers is anything but evenly spread. Rather there is a ‘power law’ distribution, with a small number of top bloggers receiving the vast majority of attention.
As a Twitter elite establishes itself, the site will continue to operate and grow dramatically on two distinct levels – as an efficient if limited social utility, and as the blogging platform of choice for fast ideas. Such thoughts may be half-cooked but they are much more accessible than multi-page blog entries (it is no coincidence that they are the right length for a single thought or link). And we now know from experience than users will at times radically reconsider their use of technology if they find it interesting or useful enough.
Would Goody approve? I think she would.
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