On Feedback, Web Technology, Culture and the Individual

I have been alerting myself (!) and our clients about the impending age of feedback for some time. In my professional opinion it is still coming and not quite here; rumbling and ruminating in the foothills, but boy is it coming. I wonder who’s ready for it? And how?

What I want to play with here is not just standard stuff like ratings and reviews (which in its mature form I still believe will be incredibly disruptive and powerful), but also the changing expectations around feedback in the organisation and in interpersonal relationships.

So the kinda intro which you are no doubt familiar with is that in the digital age we have an exploding universe of information, a decentralised empowering infrastructure (easy to use web tools, basically) enabling the creation and sharing of that information, a changing society where trust and influence are re-balancing away from the centre (big organisations, authorities, ‘professionals’) to the edges (that is, to individuals or smaller groups, where context, relevance and ‘people like me’ win out over size, scale and tradition), a more sophisticated relationship between the media and the people, and some other shizzle.

What we also have is data contrails – the traces we leave in our wake as we click and scroll our way across the web. So everything is generating data all of the time:

Wattson plugs into your home electricity supply.
Nike Plus plugs into your shoe.
Polar watches plug into your heart beat.
Last.fm plugs into your listening habits.
And Tescos clubcard plugs into your purchasing patterns.

Accruing, aggregating and interpreting this kind of passive data has become massively easier thanks to technology.

Together, all of these factors combine.
The result is increasingly feedback everywhere.

I regularly ask groups how many people use Amazon in the last 2 months. 75% of hands usually go up (this is in groups of marketing professionals at major brand organisations). I ask of those how many read the ratings and reviews on Amazon? – nearly all the hands stay up. I then quickly ask how many people use TripAdvisor. Interestingly often some of the non-hands-up then start extolling the virtues: ‘I’d never go away without…’ la la la. This normally prompts an immediate discussion about TripAdvisor but what I steer it towards is what they look for: I ask what they look for and how it influences their buying decisions.

And when you ask that you get sophistication, nuance, experience and subtlety from a bunch of smart normal people that have usually not even previously heard the terminology ‘ratings and reviews’.

They say, ‘it’s not the average view that matters to me, I look for the things I care about and what the polarised views are’. They interpret and analyse – they don’t wholesale swallow it all down as nutritious must-be-trues.

So what next?
Well I reckon it’s:

Ratemydoctor (and these exist)
Ratemyteacher (as above)
Ratemysocialmediaagency (coming soon, no doubt)
Ratemyselfopinionatedsocialmediaselfproclaimedexperttwat
Ratemycourse (these exist)
Ratemybreakfast (yada yada)
UserVoice, GetSatisfaction, Beerintheevening, TopTable, MTBR

This is coming to a place near all of us. To our schools, to our workplaces, to our CVs, to our volunteer organisations, to bus drivers (god, I hope so) and sausage shops (why not?). MO’ FEEDBACK.

There’s more to this. Still more.
There’s the increasing trend for twitter questions to panels at events, the twitterfalls and back-channels at gigs and conferences, the social networking features coming to a TV near you, the stimulation addiction and always-on-ness and ‘let me have my say’ all cooked into the same spicy feedbacky jambalaya. The network is powering and unlocking and opening up the appetite for feedback, information and transparency. What’s that word Umair uses? Unbundling! Everything you wanted to know about the word, all that previously latent locked-down feedback is being unbundled.

Also, let’s be brave and put aside these stationary repositories of feedback like ratings sites and other ‘feedback buckets’ to one side and address the real elephant in the feedback closet: the statusphere – that is, the gigantic ever-tick-tocking lists of micro-updates in people’s Facebook statuses and Twitter updates. Feedback-a-go-go. Feedback at large and all up in your face. FEEEEEEDBAAAAAACCCCK.

I want to add more thing before moving onto the implications. Mobile. In a mobile world this feedback becomes more immediate, more instant, more on-the-spot and therefore more terrifying as a problem and more awesome as an opportunity.

ENUFFF. So that’s the rumbling in the feedback foothills. So what does it all mean?

Many clever people way before me have asked what happens in a world where feedback (or market information, described more purely) is instantaneous, discoverable and underpinned by trust mechanisms? And they have largely described a world where quality wins. Which has led to helpful and catchy phrases like ‘Product is the new Marketing’ or ‘Customer service is the new Marketing’.

Well how ready are you or we for that?
Leaving the mechanics to one side – the websites or apps that permit this, the widgets, e-munchkins and various digital shizzingtons that grab and distribute this feedback – what else needs to change?

How about *you*?
How ready is the average human for constant, merciless, public feedback?
Not very ready (or ‘not many Benny’ as my dad would say).

At NixonMcInnes we have been trying to create a feedback culture since our inception 6 or 7 years ago. I deliberately use the word ‘trying’ because it’s really fricking hard. I believe we’re making progress, because newcomers describe things like ‘it’s like the honesty setting on everyone is turned right up and permanently’, or ‘it’s very adult…’.

But it’s very very difficult. We are British – not Dutch or American or other great cultures where people tend to just tell it how it is. Here we have hurt feelings and thickening skins. We have very uncomfortable conversations. We have workshops to practice and learn new skills: listening; giving feedback. We try and learn about our personalities and preferences and share those as a team to understand how and where we fit and clash. We find it hard. Still, many times we hide, swerve, obfuscate or skitter away from the TRUTH.

And yet still it looms. Still those dark swirling clouds laced with truth and realness loom. The feedback is out there.

What I believe is that just as we now expect to see what MP’s expenses were, we also crave – in a kind of unstoppable way – to know everything else about everything else.

So how do you not only prepare your marketing formula and embrace ratings and reviews and twitter feedback, but how do you change your organisational DNA to embrace feedback on the fly and build it in rapidly? How do you reengineer your business or NFP to go through the OODA loop quicker than anyone else? How do you win in the age of feedback and iterate like a karate kid robot machine virus? (Hmmmm).

Where does this leave you?
And where does it leave Art? Where does it leave family relationships, wet holidays and stale bread and the nuance and romance of averageness?

Where does it leave the ‘meh’ in everyday life – the friends that bore you, the designs that leave you feeling flat, the non-delight, the non-highlights?

How do we contain this stuff as individuals, not just as organisations (recognising that we can’t of course)? Or do we just run with it – abandon self-moderation and instead just splurge it out there like uncontrolled emotionally incontinent therapees, just letting it all hang out?

‘Had lunch with Mum – was bored to death and thought her hair looked manky’

‘Annual appraisal with boss. Yucky man’

‘Just presented my portfolio to new client – I lied and I cheated and did that fake laugh I do’

I think I lost my thread. Any feedback? Anyone? Nah, thought not. I’m off…

Will McInnes wrote this on 30.07.09 – 1 comment
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